Thursday, May 19, 2005

mozilla or IE

which browser do you use? Mozilla or IE. What features of either do you like?
yeah the good 'ol wordy hazy jargon (a sort of gobbledegook) on speed, vulverability, usability and ultimately a matter of personal choice.

I personally use Mozilla. Why? I really thought about it -
Mozilla is fast (when it was in its infancy, it was light too) - nowadays with its increased share of the market (that it wrested out of IE's vice like grip) it has run into a few issues. The recent holes found in its (until now) infallible security and I find that it has slowed a bit and weighs a tad more than it used to. I like its usability, its live bookmarks and tabs! Some features might end up becoming matters of personal choice such as the tabs opening up with a blank page (customazibale to open up with your home page). The new window in IE opens up with the exact same page you are on - sometimes can be helpful and at others a pain. As I said, its a matter of preference. The interface per se is much the same as IE with the various menus, home, back, forward, refresh. What is different (and what I like) is that you can have some oft used bookmarks on your toolbar, a sort of clickable bookmark.
On the flip side, many a site use VBScript or some plugins that are tied to some MS feature and Mozilla is not able to interpret those scripts forcing you to navigate those websites with IE. But, since the community has developed so many plugins and extensions, I have seen a lot less of this problem.

IE, owing to the constant updates, has become more secure, stable and reasonably fast. Don't you find that updates have become a part of your life? (I think this is so even for Mac users - the updates may not necessarily pertain to critical security updates) Is it better than Mozilla? I am not really sure though. I definitely think that IE is improving, but Mozilla still has an edge. IE 7 is rumored to have tabs and a whole host of other features (maybe I'll post some on this in a later post). The point I want to make is that its part of MS's well established strategy - I really don't care if I didn't invent it or wasn't the first to do something but if I can do whatever you are doing a whole lot better than you are then I am giving you a run for your money/life. Yes, I am excited to see if IE7 is a whole lot better than the existing standard of browsers.

I know this isn't the last that can be said about this debate but my patience is running out and I have to end somewhere. An interested reader can enlighten me on all the other points that I am missing out or haven't discussed enough in detail.

My Verdict: Mozilla is my choice but IE7, I think, may spring a surprise and pull the rug from under Mozilla's feet.

Enough said!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since I haven't used many other browsers this is going to be a FireFox Vs IE . I was attracted to firefox because of the pop-up blocking , tab browsing features but found more fancy features as I started using such as tools for web developer , password/cookie manager, function for frames, java script enabling and disabling function, forcast, adblock, blogthis and many more. I feel its high time MS comes up with a better browser to cover its legacy failures. But it still remains to be seen if they wuld get it right ! And I'm sure the new browser would be integrated with MSN search as firefox is with google. But the new IE would be more effective if it would be a standalone application , not completely integrated with the OS. Imagine the pain to install an update or a patch to your operating system everytime an upgrade is made. Another issue is how what protection IE 7 would provide aganst the security holes and viruses ? How compliant will be the new IE with W3C standards ? If the missing CSS standards would be added to to the new release. Not that FireFox is completely not vulnerable, mozilla developers recently acknowledged flaws in the browser and they ahve come up with few fixes to it and hope it improves a lot better to stand out from its competeitors. Again with enormous popularity of IE, marketing and financing power of microsoft IE still could pull out majority of market shares back with this release.

And for the question "who is going to win the Browser War" ? We'll have to wait and watch!

~Smitha

EmperorFrost said...

Interesting mention of pop up blockers! I had completely forgotten about it. But pop ups are blocked fastidiously nowadays even in IE. They don't even allow you the native web page to open up another window without you clicking on Ctrl first.

Updating has become a way of life.