I'd use Firefox if I didn't fucking hate it. Every new version they release, I check to see if they've fixed the problems I have with it. I download it and test drive it for a few days. I keep going back to IE.

I had one friend who agreed with me once, but most of the time I feel very alone.

I'm a computer guy through and through. I went to school for computers, I keep up on industry trends, I keep my antivirus and spyware sweepers up to date, and I still hate Firefox in the same way as listed above. For me, there's Too many incompatabilities with embedded media, too many small annoyances. IE has always worked well for me. No need to download plugin after plugin that may or may not work.

EDIT: and tabbed browsing is way WAY overrated...

[Edited on Jun 09, 2006 10:25PM]

You and me both.

Posh is so hot.

See what I mean? She's rad.

[Edited on Jun 09, 2006 by elicit77]

Okay, with you so far...

Yeah, it... wait, what the fuck?!

Gopher rules!

yeah IE is a security hole, hell any MS product is. But I think the big thing going for Firefox & Apple is they haven't pissed off the hacker types yet. If they do.....

Yeah it was so overrated when in doing my computer work, 5 years ago I found it necessary to install 780 megs of ram after being unable to function with 30+ I.E. windows open.

Yeah, really. I use the tab browsing constantly

Firefox - IE Tab

I have no brand loyalties. There are definitely cool things about Firefox that I wish IE had. But the things that IE offers that Firefox falls short on are a much bigger annoyance to me. And sure, there may be a plugin somewhere to address all my concerns, but IE, out of the box, gives me nearly everything I want. I think IE gets a lot of undue shit from critics. When the Firefox boom first hit, a common criticism launched at IE was it's lack of a pop-up blocker, which IE immediately got (and it's behaved for me every bit as well as the Firefox one did).

It's true, IE does not have tabbed browsing. I can't argue with that. It is, however, not a feature I have any interrest in. I guess that makes me the weirdo.

Completely off topic from any geeky discussion of compatibility and memory use, here is the straw that breaks the camel's back for me with every version of Firefox I've installed on my computers: The drop down menu of recently typed in URLs stores them in order of which was typed first. Why on earth would anyone want that as a default? It's been a huge hurtle to overcome for me, as minor as it may seem to others.

edit: while that last criticism was true of older versions, I just downloaded the most recent one from their website, and that appears to have been fixed to more closely match my prefference. good job mozilla.

[Edited on Jun 10, 2006 by not_jason]

about 80 percent of internet users use IE. so, that's who's using it. whether you like it or not, ignoring that as a web designer, and scorning those people is bad practice. fuck with your audience at your peril. telling them to download another browser to view your content is more or less telling a large quantity of those people that you don't care for their business, and that they shouldn't care about your content. IE still opens faster, and doesn't hemorhage memory like crazy. firefox also bones me on java exploits more often than IE does. IE7 is a superior browser to the current version of firefox. however, the next version of firefox is adding something that even IE7 doesn't have, which is spell check. this is a good thing. i prefer IE, but seeing competitive feature addition between browsers is excellent. now if IE or firefox would just add dragable fucking tabs, then i'd be set. if opera can do it, i know IE or firefox should be able to.

editted to add: microsoft didn't want to change the activex control scripts. they were forced to by a legal decision.

[Edited on Jun 10, 2006 12:10AM]

thank you. i've never understood why this is one of the first things mentioned as a plus out of the mouths of those converted...

It grows on you, and then when you try to go back to IE you realize how empty and hollow life was before you could make all those tabs.