Thread: FireFox vs IE

Originally posted by kimpossible
My support people are trained to respond that we don't support firefox, and point them to the IE download.

The "blame other people because I'm too lazy to support more than one browser" card is alright to play on personal websites, blogs, etc, but it is a bit sad [and childish] when commercial entities start pulling it out.... especially considering when given reasons are purely personal and not based in any sound business or technological decisions or knowledge. [instead of pointing them to download IE you could just as easily point them to download Flash. Hell you could do it right in the product using automatic player detection.]

*points to previous post, just in case y'all missed it*



[Kiss and] make up or shut up.

Chicken vs. Egg, Kirk vs. Picard, FF vs. IE, the definitive square root of Pi...all frivolous, all doing nothing but driving people up walls and against each other.

Just be happy you're alive in the so-called "net age".

http://www.caminobrowser.org/

I've spent more than three million dollars in my extremely complex Active-X controls.

Supporting the two people that actually use firefox exclusively is not worth the millions of dollars it would cost to re-engineer them.

That's good business.

Okay let's look at this.

WHERE YOU WENT WRONG:
-> WRONG: Spend 3 million $ on ActiveX when it can probably be done with this new "Web 2.0" thingy. And most people say "no" to ActiveX cause it's supposedly unsafe. and microsoft recommend you click no if you dunno what it is. Okay, so we have web newbs clicking no and disabling it anyway.
-> RIGHT: Do it with php and javascript, free.

-> WRONG: Support only one browser
-> RIGHT: If I phoned up tech support and they said "f off and use ie," or any other phrase of the same general meaning, i'd hang up, and tell everybody I knew not to go near them. what you do is write it in some semi-compatible way. it's called LOOKING AHEAD.

oh, and more. but i'm tired now. yay.

Originally posted by Techboy
-> WRONG: Support only one browser.

That's what I've been trying to tell everybody! You can have FF and IE and probably any of the other ones, and when one isn't working, use the other, and so forth. The world's not black and white, you know!

Kim, can I ask what these activeX controls do?
just pick one, and provide a brief description

thanks

It's 960fps hardware-enabled video monitoring, archiving, alarm interface, POS interface, RS422 interface, etc. from remote.

It couldn't have been done with PHP/Javascript as there's no good access into Direct-X or directly to the hardware through COM/DCOM.

Ah right fair enough. However, my advice then would be "dont use a frigging web browser." It's probably alot easier just to have it in an executable program.

Oh, and, don't say that "programs might be blocked," because if they are ActiveX will be too, hmm?

I appreciate your advice, thanks. I'll keep it in mind. Yes, we also have stand-alone DCOM application. Unfortunately, that's not what users want. It's not about how techie you are. It's about how many hundreds (or thousands) of millions of dollars you make for your shareholders. I do that by answering what the client wants, and by solving client problems. Not by dancing up and down for the tech-geeks. Frankly, they are completely and totally unimportant in the corporate world. They're not the ones that sign the checks...

If the tech-geek gets in the way of what the CEO and/or COO and/or CFO wants - they'll be replaced by a new tech-geek.

If the tech-geek wets all over themselves because the solution supports a browser that the CEO couldn't care less about, but the CEO can't use the application from home - it means no check and no continued business to me. It's yet-another-problem-in-a-catchy-wrapper, not a 'solution'... The counter is also true. If the CEO is happy because he can watch it from home, but the tech-geek hates it because it doesn't support a browser that no one cares about: I get paid, and I get repeat business. And this business has 100% client satisfaction to-date with thousands of units in production.

Back in "the day" we had a saying in corporate america (when I was SVP of IS&T for a Fortune 50 company): "You can't get fired for buying Blue". If you bought genuine IBM and something went wrong, everyone would say "wow! Better call IBM. They'll know what to do!" If you bought a clone and something went wrong - it was your ass on the line.

Same thing with Microsoft today: If you support their product lines, it's their ass. If you support a nothing-browser and not Microsoft - it's your ass. A couple disgruntled Nutscrape[sic] employees in a garage "does not a revolution make". Microsoft can't piss cash into a hole fast enough. Every day they pay a penalty to the IRS just for the CASH on-hand. More than $40,000,000,000 yesterday. They could pay to have not only every FireFox engineer killed, but every extended family member and everyone that had ever met or even HEARD OF every family member, and then pay for any bad publicity from it to go away. At their current valuation, they could buy controlling interest in the debt the US owes and call the markers, thereby owning the entire country. Do I like all their products? Definitely not. Do I accept the reality that they are the 800lb gorilla and if you want a piece of the action you get into bed with said 800lb gorilla? Absolutely. We've already established _what_ I am. Now we're negotiating price... That's why my shareholders give me money. Because I turn it into more than they could simply by knowing which side my proverbial bread is buttered on.


It's like people yelling about not support the Mac. When I've saturated the other 95+% of the market that is PC-based, I'll come back and look at the Mac. If it still exists...

Thus endeth the sermon.

Well said (aside from being indirectly called a techy geek )
True for business anyway.

For my personal use, I prefer FireFox, but if FF fails me, there's always IE to fall back on.
Netscape isn't necessary in my world.

*sigh* I remember the days of trying to make everything cross-browser safe..... quite a thing back then (and probably today too)

Now I've got Opera too! Just another option; another way out of a browser-bind.

Firefox does this:



But I like it better that way.

funny, mine doesnt do that,
anyway i agree with Rakkantekimusouka, i have both

For me it's Firefox all the way. Never ran into any trouble, works like a charm (that means none of the above mentioned 'errors'. Make sure you have the latest version of FF)

However, some webdesigners tend to use a lot of IE specific HTML tags and/or attributes. They are the only reason I haven't uninstalled IE yet.

so, wait a minute...i can download firefox, and still have Internet explorer running on my computer?
How does that work? I've been dabbling with the idea of firefox for about six months...

Originally posted by irishcream
so, wait a minute...i can download firefox, and still have Internet explorer running on my computer?
How does that work? I've been dabbling with the idea of firefox for about six months...

Yes. You just install it,. and when you want to use Firefox, you just click the Firefox icon instead of the Internet Explorer icon.

Originally posted by Techboy
-> WRONG: Support only one browser
-> RIGHT: If I phoned up tech support and they said \"f off and use ie,\" or any other phrase of the same general meaning, i'd hang up, and tell everybody I knew not to go near them. what you do is write it in some semi-compatible way. it's called LOOKING AHEAD.

<stops for a moment and wonders if it's really a good idea to jump into this conversation>

I'm in the minority, but since Internet Explorer isn't available for my computer's operating system, period, using it, even for some sites, isn't possible. So in my case, if a company only supports IE, I'll simply take my business elsewhere, as that's really my only option.

And no, I have no plans to switch operating systems; my computer and software work just fine, thank you.

Yeah, I can apperciate that. Of course, in the multi-billion dollar organizations we service that isn't an issue. Ever...

Hey, i downloaded firefox!! I can have all my favourite websites on one toolbar! I'll never have to hit 'back' ever again!!

Congrats, Irish!

I'd also like to add that the newest version of Netscape allows you to choose either the Firefox or the IE engine for each site that you visit, so there's really no reason to ever switch browsers.

Originally posted by irishcream
Hey, i downloaded firefox!! *I can have all my favourite websites on one toolbar! *I'll never have to hit 'back' ever again!!

Hey, I can do that in IE too! Cool, huh?

some tips on firefox:
download a neat looking theme. can get from the firefox site. same goes for extensions.
download extensions. the following extensions simply make my life easier:

-All In One Mouse Gestures- you can perform things- undo closing a tab and such- by moving the mouse in a certain way. revulotiounary.
-IE tab- got a site that only supports ie? press a little symbol and it will open it in a firefox tab, using the ie engine!
-BugMeNot- connect yourself to a database of users on most sites that require registration.
-StumbleUpon- Amazing. get exposed to the greatest sites on the net. (thats how i got here).
-Gache- a site you need is offline? get it directly from the google chache!

Woah. nice extensions - thanks a lot
Up to now I only used extensions for remembering my last tabs