Kent Newsome on technology, music and life

9/07/2006


Down to 999,999

Ed Bott says there's one less reason to use Firefox, now that someone has made an add-on that replicates Firefox's find box.

That's a neat feature, but the fact remains that Firefox has left IE in the dust.  From time to time, IE might close the gap a little, but barring some radical open source move from Microsoft, the race for the power user is over.

One add-on to replicate one feature is simply not going to matter in the long run.  In the time it took to write that one add-on, hundreds of Firefox plugins were likely written, updated, etc.  There is too much developer support behind Firefox for IE to regain the momentum.

There are, of course, millions and millions of Windows users who don't know anything about Firefox.  So it's not like IE is going to fade into oblivion.

But I can't think of a legitimate reason why a tech savvy power user would prefer IE over Firefox.

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Posted by Kent @ 9/07/2006 01:03:00 PM | Permalink

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4 Comment(s):

This tech-savvy power user got sick of Firefox crashing, consuming 600 megs of RAM, and hanging while saving the smallest of files. 1.0.x? Great. Everything since has been a pig. Greasemonkey, Web Developer Toolbar, Google Notebook, and Gmail Skins are the only extensions I bother installing anymore, and that number's going to drop since Gmail Skins has been broken since the latest Gmail update.

Firefox was left in the dust by its own performance problems, I don't know how anyone considering themself a power user can accept browsing so slowly all the time.

-n00b

By Blogger c, at 9/07/2006 4:25 PM  
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I always amazed when I hear the performance argument. Firefox hardly ever crashes on me. Like maybe once every couple months. Firefox very rarely has a memory "leak" on me unless I forget and open way too many tabs. If I opened up that many IE windows it would take up too much memory, too.

I always wonder what kind of things people are doing with Firefox to make it cause problems. I'm guessing that they are installing an extension that is causing the problems and if they got rid of the bad extension it would fix the problem.

By Anonymous Mike, at 9/07/2006 4:56 PM  
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I don't have any problems with Firefox either.

Now Audacity, which I use to record podcasts and music- that's another story. Want to see an application crash? Record some music with Audacity, add some labels to one of the tracks, try to backspace within a label to fix a type and, presto, crash city. Recording gone. Get to start over.

By Blogger Kent, at 9/07/2006 5:01 PM  
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I use about half and half. When I work in Firefox, I absolutely love the tabs and the mouse gestures, but I hate that about half of the web apps I use for work don't work right. When I work in IE, I absolutely love the speed and compatibility, but I hate that gestures don't work and I have to do "open in new window."

Get firefox to work as cleanly with my applications and to open as quick as IE, then we'll talk.

PS. Dear Firefox...make it easy to control the update process and things like proxy settings so us IT folks will respect your product.

By Blogger RJ, at 9/07/2006 7:25 PM  
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