IE7, meet Firefox
10 Mar 2006
I have now had quite enough of all this “what will IE7 have?” or “why on earth have the IE7 dev guys done that?” business. Please, stop. A few months ago there was a screenshot released with lots of ugly buttons on the toolbar, and many complained. (I’m too lazy to find the link myself, but have you met my good friend Google?) Have these people not heard of Firefox? You see, with Firefox, you can customise it to look, behave an feel exactly as you like. Loads and loads of icons. Or only one. It’s up to you. You don’t have to rely on some guy at Microsoft to decide what goes where (though I dare say that a good UI designer would be better at deciding that sort of thing than most of IE’s users).
Next you have the people wondering what features will be available. Well with Firefox, you get to choose exactly what features you get (they call these extensions). Web developer toolbar? Sure. Gmail notifier? Sure. Del.icio.us integration for all your bookmarking needs? You’ve got it.
But you know what the best feature of Firefox is? Not the standards-compliancy, or the great extensions people have made for it. It’s the fact that it’s free software. If you want to change something, you can. And if you don’t know how to change something, you don’t have to wait or hope for Microsoft to do something about it; you can hire any friendly programmer chap to fix stuff for you.
Now, there is one concern that lots of people have (mainly developers), that is obviously quite justified: its standards support. Sure, in my ideal world everyone would just switch to Firefox (due to the unique way this site is funded, other browsers are available) and make things so much simpler for everyone. But in the real world Microsoft is going to be putting IE7 into Vista and many thousands of people are going to end up using it as their main browser. Many people will not realise that other browsers are available, and will think that “the little blue e” is the internet.
So, complain all you like about how IE7 is going to affect the websites you’ve spent hours messing with so that they look identical in all major browsers. But please, do not keep complaining about what features it does or does not have. There are other options available for your daily browsing. Take them.
So… is this advice geared towards normal users, who probably don’t even know about IE7, so don’t complain. Or to developers, who have the full right to complain if IE7 breaks stuff, and who usuallly complain about anything?
Anyone, and everyone Mark. Normal users who do know about IE7 and are complaining about what features etc. it will and won’t have, should switch to Firefox. Developers who are concerned about what it’ll do to their beautifully-created pages with all their nice little hacks are quite justified to be concerned, but I see no reason why they should be complaining about the UI or features, as they probably will be already using Firefox, Opera, Camino, etc. already.
There’s a lot of hype about what IE7 will and won’t have, or will and won’t do, and it doesn’t really matter. Just as long as they support more of the standards, and keep it working as nicely as possible with IE6-designed sites.
What is annoying about all this whining is that IE7 is not even out yet. If you thing its bad now wait until it is fully released.
Eddie: totally agree.
I downloaded the Beta version of IE7 over a month ago and i only ever use it when i open Hotmail. It’s not very impressive. IE7 only exists because of Firefox. Microsoft originally shut down the team developing IE7 as they thought IE6 was as good as it got.
The only differing feature is Anti-Phishing but this has already been integrated into Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1. Everything else in IE7 is a poor mockery of Firefox. Woo for Firefox!!!
A good bayesian spam filter should be able to spot phishing a mile away, given a good enough implementation.
Hear hear. Listen to the man and act on it. Excellent writing. And I do complain about the poor standards support! More than ever.