Firefox v Internet Explorer

22 October 2009

Firefox

Pros:
- Makes you write CSS/HTML to high standards
- Very fast
- More secure
- Built in RSS Reader
- Works on lots of different operating systems
- Very compatible and easy to customise

Cons
- Not standard on a PC; must go to website and install
- The favourites list doesn't always show all of the favourites/bookmarks

Internet Explorer

Pros:
- Ease of use
- Pre-installed with Microsoft Windows
- IE has 90% of market share
- Quick tabs feature showing an overview of all the tabs you have opened

Cons:
- Assumes way too much with HTML and CSS
- Slow keeping up with technology and then "copies" other browsers. Do you know the tab thing on IE? That was on Firefox before!
- Cannot use on any other operating system apart from Windows

One of the biggest problems with IE for technical users is that IE doesn't abide by any rules, allowing users to write code with the system guessing what should be there instead of creating an error which I can understand as you don't want potential customers to see an error if you've just forgot to close one tag do you? Well no - but at the same time IE assumes a lot of things, you can code websites with missing tags and it will just assume that you forgot to put a closing tag, or forgot to open a tag. This just creates a very lazy way of coding and it's surprising how many companies simply don't care how their website looks in other browsers. Along with this IE sometimes doesn't seem to care what you put in the HTML or CSS; it just guesses things or displays things incorrectly.

What I don't understand is that European Anti-trust Regulators said that Windows Media Player shouldn't be bundled into Microsoft Windows. They even made Microsoft give out their source code to rivals, to help competing programmes work smoothly with Microsoft Windows - why does the same not apply to browsers? Microsoft seems to be abusing the privileges and I think it's about time they gave some of the competitors a chance.

What I also found very interesting with a bit of research was that IE had reported 2.57 million crashes while Firefox only reported 218,000 (source: search results)

Some advice if you're using IE... pick up Firefox and see if you like it, it will take a bit of getting used to but you'll be a lot happier in the long run as it doesn't crash as much and in my opinion it has a better GUI (Graphic User Interface). If you are a website designer or web developer, you should really be designing your websites in Firefox and then "fixing" them for IE.

To summarise...Firefox clearly wins this fight - most people are only using IE because it is pre-installed on their machine. I would say that IE has to catch up in technology and start making their browser more easy to use for web developers as I find it much harder coding a website in IE then I would in Firefox. If there was a standard that had to be adhered to it would make things easier or even if Firefox and IE joined forces and became Foxplorer! Somehow I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon unfortunately.

If I still haven't convinced you yet, watch the video below!