Firefox or Internet Explorer? [poll]

Laplie · League Staff Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 528

I have tried both, and Internet Explorer is the better browser.

-- Internet Explorer is FASTER (yes there are optimizations to Firefox to make it run faster, but who wants to go through all that trouble?).

-- Internet Explorer has LESS known open security vulnerabilities than Firefox. (I know this might be hard to believe)

-- Many websites cater specifically to IE6 and its idiosyncrisies

-- IE is more customizable in terms of settings built in to the browser, and by that I mean tools->internet options.

-- IE is built into the operating system and has many other connections to microsoft products. Yes this is a benefit because it allows for a lot of things to work together well. I can open an excel spreadsheet and have it displayed directly in the browser without having to save the file to my computer and open up excel seperately. I can type in a web address in the address bar of a folder I'm looking at, and Windows Explorer changes into Internet Explorer seamlessly.

Supposed benefits of Firefox:
-- Tabbed Browsing: I don't really see how this is much different from the taskbar. With IE, I just open a new window and use the taskbar to switch between "tabs"
-- More secure: NOT TRUE
-- More standards complient: True, but it still doesn't pass the Acid2 test. And many website designers design for the non-standard based behavior of IE.
-- Open Soure: not a benefit in my opinion. For the most part, CLOSED SOURCE IS BETTER THAN ITS OPEN SOURCE COUNTERPARTS. Lets look at this in terms of a table:

Closed Source ..... Open Source
Vector graphics/animation:
Macromedia Flash, Adobe Illustrator ..... Inkscape (not even close to being enterprise ready)--- WINNER CS

Raster graphics:
Adobe Photoshop .... Gimp ---- TIE . While Photoshop is better, Gimp is close enough

Office Suites:
Microsoft Office .... OpenOffice/StarOffice ---- WINNER CS. Will OpenOffice has made many strides in recent years, Office is still the BEST out there in terms of interoperability and functionality.

Games:
HalfLife, WoW, Halo, etc .... N/A --- Winner CS. Are there even any mass distributed production quality F/OSS games?

E-Mail Clients:
Outlook, Eudora .... Thunderbird, Pine ---- Winner CS. Outlook 2003 is THE BEST e-mail client out there. And please don't argue if you haven't used it, or used an earlier version.

Operating Systems:
Windows XP, OS X.3 .... Linux, Unix ---- TIE. While I prefer XP for various reasons, this could be a discussion in of itself. So I'll just call it a tie.

As you can see, closed source generally beats open source. I can go into many more categories, but I feel that suffices.

So in conclusion of a rather long post, IE > FireFox

brottor · Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 442

FYI

nico · Administrator Joined: 28 Oct 2003 Posts: 708

The outcome of the comparisons also depends on the choice of operating system. The second you chose for linuix, the winners in your specific situation are all open sources.
The outcome of the examples is therefore very specific to the situation you are in.

Greetz Nico

brottor · Joined: 01 Oct 2004 Posts: 442

so Nico whats your pick? im just curious

TomB · Joined: 01 Feb 2005 Posts: 104

Are we going to edit the poll for people who use neither?