FWIW, Windows XP SP2 (currently available as a RC) includes a version of IE with a pop-up blocker. That version also disables MIME sniffing, goes some way to preventing windows popping up in silly places off the screen, and has some improvements to the security side of things. Trident's still a POS compared to Gecko (especially as far as CSS goes), but it's only fair to mention that *some* work is going on on the FE.

Heh, I know exactly what you mean. We have to use IE at school and its actually painful. If you made everyone in the world try Firefox for just 10 minutes then gave them the option - switch or stay with IE - Mozilla's market share would increase overnight to about, oh, 95% ?!

Actually, 10min with firefox wont make 95% of users switch. It'll probably make only 5% switch.

If you read san jose mercury news, there was a full page article on alternative browsers. Granted, the author is an idiot who believes that being open source is the reason mozilla sucks. However he does make a valid point:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/8246846.htm

Quote:
I'm comfortable with IE and the relatively small benefits of switching to ... aren't enough to overcome my inertia.

That's the killer. For most users, the benefits on switching to an alternative browser are minimal.

Reason? Google toolbar does popup blocking. Most sites work well with IE. They've never used tabbed browsing. Firefox does NOT block ads out-of-the-box. It does NOT play flash/java out-of-the-box.

What is needed is a marketing strategy. It should include a 'distribution' with all the useful extras bundled.

I personally consider adblock (adblock.mozdev.org) to be one of the killer features of firefox. Its insanely powerful, and insanely underrated.

IE has excellent bookmark management: open the favorites folder in Windows Explorer. I like that method more than I like Firefox's bookmark manager, but I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because the "icons" view lets me have a bunch of bookmarks on the screen at once. Maybe Windows Explorer is just more familiar than Firefox's bookmark manager. Maybe it's because clicking bookmarks in Firefox's bookmark manager opens the bookmark in a "random" Firefox window instead of in a new window.

But using the file manager to arrange bookmarks in IE isn't the most obvious method is it and how many inexperienced (or even those who've never used IE before) users will know they can use the file manager to arrange bookmarks?

So on the face of it Mozilla's bookmark manager is many times better.

Anyway, a few things we need to do to ensure Mozilla gets better press:
- Emphasize the free ways users can get support and after that mention the paid support options
- Stop promoting beta releases in more prominent positions than final releases (that normal end users should be using)
- Get bundling deals with major plugins sorted out as soon as possible and make them part of the standard install
- Find someone with the skills to write a demonstration/tutorial (maybe in Flash) of all the features in Mozilla that are likely to attract new users
- Aim for all this before the pop up blocking service pack for IE is released ;)

The ad content comparisons aren't entirely fair - comparing a default install of IE to a Firefox install with a custom userContent.css (which is definitely a "geek feature"). Most Firefox users will have all the inline content stuff (including flash popups), and IE users with half a clue will have the Google toolbar, or one of the numerous other ad/pop-up blocking programs (and as someone already mentioned, IE is getting pop-up blocking in the next XP version which will be out soon).

But there really isn't much that IE is better at - the customisation of toolbars is still better, plugin handling/installation is still better, print preview works better, integration with email (OE/Outlook) works better, the help was better (I haven't really looked at the Firefox help stuff that's in the nightlies) and of course IE works on those pesky written-for-IE-only sites.

Here's an idea to combat the "IE only" sites: Build into Firefox a list of these sites and then have it automatically spoof the user agent where appropriate. This list could be maintained by the community, with Firefox downloading an updated list on (say) a weekly basis.

Of course, this hardly helps with the advocacy side of things. It would also increase bandwidth costs for mozilla.org, but it would certainly help lower the bar for acceptance by regular users.

All that being said, I've hardly ever come across sites that bar Mozilla browsers.

> Here's an idea to combat the "IE only" sites

The main problem are not the sites blocking Mozilla because of the user-agent, but the sites using proprietary JavaScript etc. that doesn't work with Mozilla no matter what user-agent you have.

>I personally consider adblock (adblock.mozdev.org) to be one of the killer features of firefox. Its insanely powerful, and insanely underrated.

Then why not make it built-in into Firefox?
It's too cool that I think it's reasonable to be an built-in Firefox extension!

michaell:

The built-in Firefox Help is still being improved, and the version that's in the nightlies is pretty out-of-date. There's a bug to get a more recent version in the source code soon from Mozdev, and that should be substantially better. It will include info on the Download Manager, newer features such as Import (although not as much info as could be useful because Import is still only half-working), and all screenshots will be accurate (some of the old ones were from the era of 0.6.1 with the old Options window). If there's anything else you see wrong with it, feel free to file a bug on the Mozdev project site:

http://firebirdhelp.mozdev.org/

Jeff - great stuff. I was trying hard not to criticise your work with my wording, which is why I said it "was" better in IE (as compared to FF0.8). Aside from a few minutes playing around with the help stuff when it first went into the nightlies, I've not really looked at it yet.

It sounds like with the updates, help will be off the list of points where IE might be better than us.

Mostly the only times can stand to use MSIE these days is if I need to test one of my own sites in it, particularly something new and different in CSS.

... or if a site uses some plugin that I haven't set up in mozilla yet.

One nice thing in MSIE vs mozilla... you can add a toolbar button to change font sizes, though few probably know this.

You can also add a toolbar button, even one with multiple pulldown choices, to pop that page into your favorite HTML editor. That's nice. It's been requested in mozilla, but I don't think it's ever shown up.

You're certainly right about the popups. I get pelted so much on some sites that I give up and fire up mozilla if I'd accidentally used MSIE. It's like people throwing rocks at you when you go outside... argh! stop that! go away! ;-)

>How do they cope?
I think one reason is that IE's dominance has meant 3rd party vendors such as Google have stepped in adding extra functionality. This also means plugin and web service providers need to make their services very smoothly with IE.
From user's perspective, they very often will give anything for a quiet life' and the work primarally of 3rd party vendors offer this, users don't want to trade this for compatability and configuration hassles.

I think most users just don't realise how much easier browsing the web is in mozilla-derived browsers. They might try firefox, but only use it to emulate their IE behavior, and never realise how much more efficient firefox could be for them. That's why they talk about "marginal benefits."

Also, IE has a tendency to work easier out of the box. Plugins always install correctly and easily, sites always work.

I've also noticed with my sister that the groupthink is very powerful. I have a prominent firefox shortcut on my taskbar, and ie is hidden deep in the start menu. I've made her use firefox, she realises it blocks popup windows, and is faster. And yet she still launches IE by default, because "it feels right." Her instincts tell her to use IE, so she does, regardless of the actual experience.

michaell:

No problem! I actually didn't think you were criticizing, just saying that its lack in Firefox 0.8 (and possible incompleteness in 0.9, depending on how well everything's been documented) was a Bad Thing.

As things are, I'm sure we're still missing documentation that we really should have, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. I've stared at it so much it's hard to see in the blind spots - whether it's insufficient or overcomplete, whether it's too advanced or not advanced enough, etc. When 0.9 comes out and a bunch of new eyes are on it, we'll really have a good idea of what needs work, what needs to be added, and what is redundant. I'm actually glad we can still claim Firefox is a tech preview, because it lets us explain away some of the more nagging problems still existent in Firefox.

Joeri:

>I have a prominent firefox shortcut on my taskbar, and ie is hidden deep
>in the start menu. I've made her use firefox, she realises it blocks
>popup windows, and is faster. And yet she still launches IE by default,
>because "it feels right." Her instincts tell her to use IE, so she does,
>regardless of the actual experience.

There's a simple solution to that - let the instinct do its work, but remove the IE shortcuts and replace them with Firefox ones. This is what I initially tend to do - simply replace IE and a lot of users barely even notice the difference. When they encounter one of the good features of Firefox over IE, that's when I explain to them what's happened, and they never go back because they realize they've been doing just fine with it and can even appreciate its good features.

I've been having some success bringing people over to the mozilla based browsers. Some are real worried about all the security issues, others are just curious as to why I don't use any other browser.

I'm always careful to tell them that they will face some issues, and that everything might not work at once, but I assure them that once they've taken the time to get used to Mozilla or Firefox they'll never, ever want to go back. And they're always suprised to find out I was right :)

oops, that was supposed to say "security issues with IE". Sorry :)

Here's why Mozilla sucks
1. I can't play Java. I could fix it, but I won't.
2. Even though most pages work in Firefox, a lot are ugly.
3. Did you know that w3 has http://www.w3schools.com/vbscript/default.asp
4. onload popups and onclick popups are sometimes confused

I am a Firefox user. Those are the big annoying problems for me.

I'm alex and I like to go around flaming people at their weblogs.

I think the major thing about IE 6 and even if its updated in SP2 for XP is that I find myself much more productive with things like the tabs, with the speed, with the beauty of the interface. I have deployed a few tools for work which are limited to IE and when I have to go there, its a joy to get back to FireFox again.

As far as turning up the dial, I think IE is stuck at a relatively low point on the dial. Even if they turned it up, it would top out at a number lower than the beginning point for mozilla.

Firefox has altered the way you browse, but that doesn't make it a better browser, it's just a different way of working.

In IE, people don't open pages in the background so much - average people don't understand that, anyway. Instead, they follow a link, read the page, then click 'Back'... They probably have a button on their mouse for doing 'Back' actions.

There /are/ areas in which IE is better... you just had your eyes shut. The main area is laptop usage. On a laptop, tabbed browsing and what-have-you isn't useful. I just want a streamlined interface. Firefox unnacceptably slow compared to IE - and this is on a top-of-the-range Centrino system bought last October. Actually, I only use Firefox on my dual 2.8GHz workstation, but even then, if I open sixty tabs (say, half the links on theinquirer.net's front page), window resizing slows to a grind. If I open more than that, pages stop loading properly.

The P3P and cookie handling in IE is far better. The browser is more stable. It's much less quirksome. It's compatible with more pages, and I don't care why that is - nor should anyone who isn't a web developer. If I can't use my online banking service and others, there will always be a place for IE.

How many IE bugs affect users? Page rendering issues don't (people make sites compatible with IE). The number of usability issues in Firefox is astronomical by comparison.

>Firefox is unacceptably slow compared to IE

Huh? It's slow on a 2.8GHz system? That's odd. I use Firefox comfortably (tho maybe half a second or so slower on startup) on a PII 450MHz system with 384MB RAM, and I've never had problems.

Oh, with respect to the comment a few above, Asa: there will always be a few naysayers no matter how you do things. I happen to think Asa's doing fine. Just take a look at the Bugzilla charts every time a BugDay (that he runs) rolls around and we further clean up the Bugzilla database (and thus make it easier to find the bugs that need fixing):

http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~udex/bugzillacharts/

Yep, every one of the sudden, massive drops is because of a BugDay. Pretty amazing, isn't it?

The "half a second slower" is in comparison to a fully-patched IE6, by way of clarification.

I'm alex and I like to go around flaming people at their weblogs.

Alex, this is his personal blog. He can write whatever he wishes on his personal blog. If he wants to advertise Firefox on his personal blog, he has every right to do so. Also, since this is his personal blog, it is pretty obvious that his opinions here don't necessarily reflect that of the Mozilla Foundation.

If you have a personal grudge against him and want to insult him, may be you should just say so and insult him in a more direct manner. Accusing him of being unprofessional and lazy while offering no hard evidence to support them only makes you look foolish. How do you know he does not contribute any serious work to the project? When did he insult IE users as shit? Where is the evidence that suggests Mozilla Foundation is trying to abandon development on the Windows platform?

On the other hand, what did you contribute to the Mozilla project? May be you should tell people what you have done before going around accusing people being unprofessional and all that.

Geez, I don't know Asa personally. I only come here to check out some Mozilla related news. I'm not in the business of defending someone I don't even know. But I'll make this a one time exception because going over to someone's blog spouting crap like you did is just low.

Apologies to Asa for to waste the space here to comment on his nonsense. I'm going to add my 2 cents about firefox here as well:

- I agree with other posters that Flash/Java needs to be included in the default distribution. At least Flash since including Java will make the download much bigger.

- Besides pop-up blocking right out of the box, how about some default rules to block ads? Including Adblock in the default distribution with some default rules is a possibility, but right now Adblock doesn't not work well with Java. The problem seems to be resolved with Java 1.5b, but 1.5b itself is buggy and introduces its own compatibility issues with many sites that uses Java.

- Flash on Firefox can be buggy. (eg ESPN) I'm not sure if it is Firefox's problem or Flash itself.

- I'm pretty happy with the current features of Firefox but its footprint needs to improve. The download is small, but the system resources required isn't.

Jeff Walden:
I wasn't talking about startup time - it's quick here too. I'm talking about the rendering performance of anything with translucancy, a lot of floating div's, etc. Just open a large webpage in both IE and Firefox, and compare performance. Here's a copy of something I look at a lot:
http://www.zib.de/benger/C++/clause14.html

Now, spend a while resizing that window... just drag the bottom corner arround a bit. Sure, I don't flap about resizing windows like that much, but it's a quick demo of the abysmal Mozilla performance. There's nothing complicated on that page. Now, compare that to IE. Or Opera, if you prefer. See? Zooming with the scroll-wheel is another thing to try.

Sure, Firefox is fast enough for everything I do on this machine - but it's a dual-processor 2.8GHz Xeon system with a gig of memory, a 9800XT and a pair of 15k RPM SCSI disks. I shouldn't notice any slow down between that page and, say, www.google.co.uk :) I don't in the other browsers.

So, the layout is slow, which is noticable if there are lots of tabs, and the render speed isn't brilliant at the best of times... what about the rest of the browser? Compare IE6 and Mozilla in these tables:
http://www.umsu.de/jsperf/

That said, I like Firefox. It suits fast desktop environments.

I'm alex and I like to go around flaming people at their weblogs.

Totally agree with what you've said, Asa. FYI, you couldn't resize text on a lot of websites in IE for a simple reason. IE will simply not be able to resize a page's font if the font size is specified in pixels in the CSS. It's either a short sighted implementation of their font sizing, a bug, or both. It's pretty well known in the web design community, and the woes of consistent font sizing are a topic of much debate.

Alex, quit being a prick. Seriously.

Hehe, nicely done.

People like Alex are a burden on the society.

I still have to use IE to use the Google toolbar to see page ranks. Hopefully Google will make a Firefox version someday.

I also like IE's ability to open the current page in my favorite html editor.

And some sites look terrible in Firefox compared to IE. One example is news.yahoo.com. The actual stories seem to have no leading (line-height) in Firefox. It seems to be a CSS issue. Probably a Yahoo bug.

Actually, I find webbrowsing on my laptop much easier with Firefox. My laptop has a trackpad, and with the radial context extention navigation is a lot easier as I just need to hold the right button and make a quick, simple gesture.

Plus, once shown how to use it, my girlfriend has found tabbed browsing invaluable for her seemingly nightly trips round the Argos, Index etc web sites (though she doesn't tend to use the context menu much).

I don't know how to not be a prick. Sorry.

I've had a really awful track record trying to convert people to Firefox for some reason. I have a couple friends who simply refuse to try Firefox. These aren't "Joe User" type people either, one is a computer science major and the other is a former CS major. I'll show it to them on my system, show how it blocks popups out of the box, has tabbed browsing, lets you do type-ahead-find, has a nifty customizable search bar, is insusceptible to the IE exploit of the month, etc.

And they just don't care. They respond that they already have the Google bar to block pop ups and act like Firefox's search bar, IE is faster (not shocking, since it's part of the OS nowadays) and the other features aren't compelling enough to download, install and configure a new browser. This is despite the fact that we're on a university connection so the entire process from starting IE to launching the installer would probably take under one minute.

I think the point is that, unfortunately, for a large number of people IE with the Google bar (I think *everyone* has either installed that themselves or had their geek friend install it) is good enough. Not even good, just far enough from terrible that they don't care to do something about it. With XP SP2's update, I'll have an even harder time selling people on Firefox. To me this is one of the worst examples of Microsoft's monopoly hurting competition; even a vastly superior FREE product can't compete because IE is already there and is what people are used to.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, since I love Firefox and more and more people do switch to Mozilla products every day. I just wanted to vent a bit of frustration about my particular situation :) Anyone got any bright ideas on how to sell smart but stubborn people on Mozilla?

I personally like it that the renderer has a persistent vertical scrollbar. That's about it...

Jesse, in Explorer, how do I drag and drop reorder favorites? Do I have to enable some special pref to be able to order bookmarks in Explorer? It's damn confusing to me to have an interface for managing favorites (Explorer) that doesn't match the order of my bookmarks and folders as they appear in my Favorites menu. Also, where's the "Last Visited" column and the "URL/address" columns? Explorer seems like a completely useless organizer (beyond just moving them between different folders). Maybe I'm missing the magic "Make it better" switch or something.

How do they cope? By using a wrapper like MyIE2 round the basic IE engine. There are others too.

MyIE2 does tabs, blocking pop-ups, skins and so forth.

W.

Asa - you can drag and drop right on the bookmarks menu in IE. The fact that you don't know this stuff doesn't make Firefox better, it just shows that you're clueless about IE.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world isn't starting from zero - they already know something about IE, and nothing about Firefox...

michaell, I'm not that clueless. Don't make assumptions. I know how to drag and drop reorder bookmarks in the menu. (firefox can do this too). I complained about the _favorites_manager_, that wimpy little useless window, and Jesse said that Explorer was the better place to manage favorites. I tried that and Explorer seemed to suck to me too so I asked about that.

michaell, in case it wasn't obvious I was talking about Windows Explorer. Scroll up to Jesse's comment for context if you need it.

Yeah, sorry, I missed the context. Comes of having comments in a little pop-up window :)

michaell, so don't use the popup. Instead of clicking on the "comment" link, click on the timestamp link (for this post it's 11:35 PM) That'll load up the full post, all of the comments, and a commenting box (I think I'll make that commenting box larger, what's a good width?)

Or, assuming you're using Mozilla, you can open the comments window in a new tab.

Hi
Just to add to the debate, I think it's most certinally true people will use Firefox how they used IE...and that's OK, Firefox needs to make the switch easy.
However, it also needs to improve 'learnability' of features like Find As You Type, there's no way a new user would find out about how to use features such as this. It's even hidden in the new documentation, and provides only an external hyperlink to mozilla.org when eventually found. Context sensitive F1 would help...

>>I personally consider adblock (adblock.mozdev.org) to be one of the killer features of firefox. Its insanely powerful, and insanely underrated.
>
>Then why not make it built-in into Firefox?

This is really a good idea. Adblock is really a very useful feature and it could profit a lot from being built-in into Firefox. Especially this should improve the quality of it's code and user interface.