Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Excellent blog entry. Sadly there's very little good scientific/technical reporting out there. The best one can hope for is to know the bias/flaws of whatever newsource your reading before going in.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good scientific/technical reporting? Besides mozillazine.org of course. ;-)

That is about my favourite web blog entry for 2005, brilliant in it's brutal, to the point and valid points.

Its amazing that even many Firefox users dont realise these many facts about IE7, its delays and more factors surrounding it and MS browsers, its all been kept very suppressed.

When Mozilla announced that Firefox 1.1 will become 1.5, and be released 6 or so weeks later, the press immediately covered this as if it was a serious delay.

MS haven't even so much announced that IE7 will now be out with this much of a delay, due to these reasons, with a sorry to the web, and 660+ million users of the internet with many problems online. Where are the articles on that?

The question is, what action should Mozilla and the community take? If journalists, sites, the general press are comparing products in a seriously unfair manner such as mixing present on the one half and future on the other, and not considering all the other factors many outlined here, then as with all press related things, the public should complain, educate, apply pressure and even the balance.

The Press teams need to be revived at SFx plus more projects/teams to do just this.

Asa,

Of course they don't care. Haven't you figured this out yet? All the care about is their own bottom dollar. It's a well known strategy to roll out a vaporware "product" to hold off people from leaving your platform by enticing them with a future offering. Part of the problem is people! It is people who buy into it! It is people who hate upgrading and changing software so much, that as long as they're fed a promise, they're willing to forego better software for a very long time.

Are companies being jerks by taking advantage of this? Sure. But people are jerks too, and that's why it works. If all the people were really bright and not too lazy, this scheme wouldn't work, would it? They need to be bright enough to know about the alternative, and they need to be interested enough to try it.

It takes two to tango. The corps are jerks, but so are people who support them financially.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and as I see it, while I do think that some people in the position of power bear more responsibility to do the right thing, in the end, everyone is responsible. If you really, really want the world to change, you have to work to change the culture itself, and not merely bang on the people at the top. The people at the top could do a lot better, for sure, but without their audience of fools, they couldn't be where they are either.

Would you please post some of the reviews you are talking about (FF1.5 vs IE7)? We can all try to post comments there, pointing out that they should compared it with IE6. If this sort of "mass protest" works, maybe those sites at least would be aware of what FF users think...

In the mean time I'll see if I can find a review of a 2006 Honda Civic compared with a 2015 Chevy Cobalt.... ;-)

Yeah, and why doesn't anyone compare Firefox to Opera - final versions or not? Opera would beat Firefox. :) Apparently most journalists are tricked into thinking there are no other browsers, or that all other browsers somehow are "automatically" inferior. (Some articles mention there are other browsers, giving some names, and that's it).

So be happy Firefox at least gets some kind of publicity.

Great blog entry. Unfortnately the way it reads to me is that you are trying to excuse Firefox from if IE 7 is rather good. I am sure that IE will be way behind Firefox for some years to come in usability and security. I think you know this too. So what is wrong with comparing IE 7 to Firefox? Firefox still wins.

A little too much coffee today?

Oh, and if you think this article is useful, please add your diggs over at digg.com.

- A

Hi Asa,

I think you'll enjoy this recent article in the Chicago Sun Times titled, "Latest Firefox way too good to pass up." http://www.suntimes.com/output/worktech/cst-fin-andy08.html

I have yet to see any indication that IE7 will support Windows versions below XP, and last I heard, more people don't use XP than do (please correct me if I am wrong, with appropriate documentation of course). So, what good does IE7 do all of them?

Asa, dugg! :) Good luck. I do think that the culture is changing, but it's changing slowly and sometimes (or always?) unpredictably. Firefox may yet become a leader in popularity as well as technology.

My other thought is that being too popular can actually hurt Firefox in the same way that business ethics start hurting when the companies go public. Keeping it small helps to keep the integrity level high. So maybe it's time to count blessings? I don't know.

Well put. It reminds me of OS 10.4 v. Vista comparisons that came out last summer when Tiger was released. How in the world can they possibly compare something that just came out against something that *may* be released to the public in over a year?

Same goes for FF v. IE7. Who knows when it's going to be out, and even then it's going to be a 'public beta'.

IE6 isn't news (except for each new security flaw that's found). Firefox 1.x vs IE6 comparisons have been done before. They were doing comparisons of Deer park alpha 1 with IE 7. Chuck a bunch of unfinished and broken features and release an alpha for Firefox 2, and they'll probably compare that (I'm not suggesting the Mozilla should actually do that, but the tactic clearly works...)

The press isn't covering Internet Exploer 7 inapprpriately in the articles I've read. When the article is focused on Firefox 1.5, it does compair it to IE6. Compairisons to IE7 come when the article is focused on that in particular, which is valid, considering the current release date means that FF 1.5 will be the competition.

Also, at the same time, IE7 is big news because of Firefox. The world is watching Microsoft react to the greatest percieved threat in a long time. The undertone to everything I read is "Microsoft got it's nose bloodied, what will they do?", and everyone is waiting to see if the biggest kid on the block will pound the new upstart or not.

IE 7 makes me nervous, and perhaps that's the reason you and others are really concerned with how it's portrayed, and how Firefox is protrayed. IE doesn't have to be better than Firefox to stunt the latter's growth, it just has to be good enough to inspire indifference.

comments = tl;dr

its about money, if microsoft wants users to stay with ie, they want users to look forward to ie7. users dont want to switch to firefox and learn a whole new thing (even though its not really, its not clear) if they can just wait a little longer (keep people thinking its soon) and upgrade to the same thing, but new.

i blame the microsoft kickbacks, they have to exist.

Allow me to draw a more fair comparison:

Firefox 2 vs Internet Explorer 7

Firefox 2:

* Faster.
* Safer.
* Has two tails like Sonic's sidekick.

Internet Explorer 7:

* Is five more 'web units' than Firefox.
* The color blue is pretty.
* Bill Gates is our friend; he told me so.

Did I miss anything? ;-)

The battle against IE6 has already been won. Microsoft has clearly lost the battle. So, I guess the press does not see any point in comparing Firefox with IE6.

The IE7 announcement that happened was clearly because of Firefox. I am sure that Firefox 2 or 3 will beat IE7 hands down. No doubt about that!

BTW, you guys ROCK!

I agree, it is time to throw together a barely functional prototype of Firefox 3.0 and start hyping it a few years in advance.

Excellent points, all of them.

Your comment about "5 years" just reminded me of when I switched to Mozilla from the then-new IE6. Hard to believe it's been that long since I used IE regularly. But you know what? I never NEEDED to go back. I've been casually browsing the web for years, without IE. They (Microsoft) are not the accepted norm that they THINK they are. Their complacency will be their undoing. If not their shoddy programming, that is.

Asa,

Grow up and realize that competition in the browser market is a _good_ thing.

Articles comparing Firefox 1.5 with IE7? That I would dearly like to see. I've never ever seen an article comparing Firefox 1.5 to IE7 before. The only thing that puts them both in the same sentence is generally people posting comments on websites saying that IE7 will win when it comes out; But never as a bono-fide article.

And users suffering?? Com'mon. What, they haven't met Jesus yet? Stop saying it like Firefox is going to save the world from destruction. They're both just damn browsers. The last time I checked, Firefox has it's fair share of usability problems, security problems, lack of feature support, an over-reliance on the unpredictable behavior of extension writers and the like.

At least IE6 is shit enough to admit that it is a piece of shit. No comparison necessary.

Yoshi beat me to it. This is pure demagogics.

Yoshi beat me to it. This is pure demagogics.

Hm, I didn't see reviews of FF1.5 against IE 7 either, just general articles on browser development. I'd like to see the comparisons between Opera 8.5, Firefox 1.5, Safari 2.0 and IE 6. An article comparing the next generation Opera 9, Firefox 2.0 and IE 7 would also be nice, but I haven't seen it either.

Care to post any refernce links? I just did a google search and didn't find anything significant. Mostly firefox 1.0 reviews and a few older Beta vs Beta type reviews (mostly favorable to Firefox).

So what? How long have you been bragging about Fx 1.5, ASA?

Hey look on the bright side. If they continue comparing with an unreleased, future version of IE with the CURRENT firefox, shows how advanced Firefox is and in due time you guys would make the IE7 launch sound like a lazy sunday afternoon.

I've seen a number of articles comparing the currently available Firefox 1.5 with the still not available and probably not released for some time Internet Explorer 7.

Asa using straw man arguments in order to get some media attention. Where are the links to the articles?.

Oh, and if you think this article is useful, please add your diggs over at digg.com.

This is lame. :-\

Will IE7 run on Linux?

This isn't intended as a MS-sucks point, for me at least it's a valid question. I prefer to run the same tools across the machines I use wherever possible, and one of them will be running Linux for the foreseeable future. So unless IE7 is runnable there (it potentially could be, think Mono) for me it's a non-starter, even if it has better features than FireFox.

> There are hundreds of millions of users out there suffering with IE 6

I can't say I'm suffering when I'm using IE6. I was actually suffering whenever I tried Firefox (1.0.7 and 1.5). And I love open source (which is why I gave FF a try). Unexplainable 100% CPU load for ff.exe, random crashes, web pages rendered in an ugly way, bloat, takes hours to start up, and again bloat (and no, I had no extensions installed). Opera is great, however, 99% of web sites are compatible and nicely rendered (the way they were intended to) by IE. I'm staying with IE, because it just doesn't suck as much as Firefox does. I'm afraid IE7 and Opera will bury the bloatware called Firefox.

(Comparing to IE7 betas is just ok, because they take a look whether it pays to migrate from IE to Firefox in the long run.)

> I'm afraid IE7 and Opera will bury the bloatware called Firefox.

I understand why you would be afraid of such a scenario.

Oh, I don't know Asa...

Could it be that it's the same as in the case of Minimo?

http://stuff.techwhack.com/archives/2004/12/10/opera-vs-mozilla-minimo/

That you hype an unfinished product as if it's revolutionary in any way, when the fact is that better products already exists?

Sucks to be on the receiving end doesn't it, Asa? Sucks when suddenly someone else gets the kind of press you've been getting for ages?

Sigh.

I'd consider it a complement. IE6 isn't even considered competition now.

Firefox has to compete against a mythological IE release.

Your trackback does not seem to work, but my trackback is at http://donsingleton.blogspot.com/2005/12/firefox-15-versus-ie-6.html

Maybe it would help if you released a version that actually looked half decent on non-Luna (that's a significant minority of XP users and all non-XP Windows users)

hang on i'll do it:

IE(6, 7, 8 or whatever) = ):

Firefox(whatever) = (:

there ya go

Well maybe people expect MSFT-IE to just work when it comes, and not have to put up with loading buggy extensions just to get the browser to work effectively, and not put up with crashes and loading problems, not to mention rendering issues. By and large they'll be right; of course if they can't wait there's always Opera which is available now and has been refined over years so usability bugs are sorted.

W.

Maybe somebody tried to give IE some advantage. That's why they compare a strong existing browser against a non existing one.
Even in that scenario, Firefox is a clear winner (did somebody say "CSS standards support"?)
;-)

Maybe Microsoft's press are Opera fanboys? Both groups of people sound the same: loud and obnoxious.

Scott Finnie from Internet Week has a article on why he feels FF 1.5 is not ready for prime time. He does make some points there. URL:

http://internetweek.cmp.com/handson/174907404

- Mayuresh

Scott Finnie from Internet Week has a article on why he feels FF 1.5 is not ready for prime time. He does make some points there. URL:

http://internetweek.cmp.com/handson/174907404

- Mayuresh

A very passionate and forceful article I must say. Good job writing that.
I'm just going to point out 3 things to you:

1. Do your research. Look up the number of exploits for firefox vs IE6 (SP2) in the last 6 months. Then apologize to your readers for lying to them.
2. Your article itself gives the reason why firefox being delayed by 6 weeks should be criticized, while IE can get away with some leeway: the SIZE OF THE USER BASE.

Face the facts my friend. FF is used by a tech-savy niche, who KNOW how to defend their pcs, by having the common sense to have an antivirus, and firewall. No I didnt mention Antispyware deliberately, because you really dont need one. I've been using IE6 SP2 since it came out, and I haven't had a SINGLE piece of spyware. I can report the same for my brothers PC and my dads PC (who btw just started using a computer 3 years ago, and had never used one before that, so is quite a newbie).

IE on the other hand, is used by a few hundred million people, who DEPEND ON IT BEHAVING IN A CERTAIN WAY. I'm not saying that way is right. But simply because people RELY on it to work in a certain why (enterprises), it is very very hard to make changes. And any changes that are made, need to be tested for compatibility with at least 5 times that of firefox, even if you count only Windows XP, and exclude all previous Windows versions. Firefox on the other hand, has hardly any presence in the enterprise. Its tech-savy users can easily accomodate any behvaiour-chaning developments.

3. Finally, FF 1.5 is quite the buggy my friend. In fact the situation is quite ironic here. MSFT, lashed out by everyone for releasing buggy products, is taking its time testing IE7 to make sure its a stable and secure product. Whereas everyones 'hero' FF, is rushed out by Mozilla, with quite a few wrinkles not yet ironed out.

Cheers

Firefox may run on older pc's and whatnot running windows 98, but it only takes a few minutes for the memory leak in 1.5 to strangle the computer to death. It's not that firefox is safer, it's just that far fewer people use it as opposed to IE. Think about it, IE comes bundled with windows, which means grandpa bob and auntie etna who are about 3 generations behind use it. Firefox is an alternative that doesn't come bundled with windows, which requires the end user to know where to download it from and what it does. So who do hackers/phishers have a better chance with? people who know about alternatives; the 2 million or so firefox users or the rest of the general internet population? In the end it translates to the end user. Firefox or IE, if you make bad descisions online, it will comeback to bite you in the ass. Hackers always want to target the most number of people in the least time possible...so they focus on the browser with 70%+ market share, IE. If the tables were turned and Firefox came installed with Windows and IE was a standalone browser that you download, I guarantee you, firefox in it's current state (1.5) will be just as bad, if not worse than IE6. Ofcourse you can say "but omg firefox can stall all the crap that phishers throw at IE" Yes that's true, but that's because the phishers had IE in mind when they made their spyware, if Firefox were in IE's place, they would've written it to abuse Firefox vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities exist everywhere; all software, all code can be exploited, it just takes time and effort. Why spend time trying to affect 2 million when you can spend the same amount of time and affect 10 million? If you've noticed, Firefox vulnerabilities have greatly increased in the past few months? Why? because as I said, more popularity = more users = more clone machines for phishers.Anyhow...I shall stop, but not before saying IE7 is coming along rather nicely and doesn't have all the memory leak problems as firefox does. Sure it may not be standards compliant, but if I were a user on an old computer running xp, I'd want a browser that runs but doesn't display some elements as it should over a browser that works for about 5 minutes and then quits :P

The comparison isnt fair because Firefox 1.5 is released now while IE 6 was relesed four years ago .. While most updates are for security vulnerabilities (like ActiveX blocker or Popup control), new features werent added ...

> They claimed at the time that it would be available in the Summer of 2005

This isn't true. They claimed *THE FIRST BETA* would be available in the Summer of 2005. And it was.

As far as I'm aware, they haven't claimed anything about the final release date.

> Who will step up and write about the real state of browsers today and what
> users can do to improve their web experience now.

Well, I want to do a little comparison Opera 8.5 and Firefox 1.5.

Why do I want to do that:
1. A very annoying autocomplete bug is still not fixed in FF 1.5.

2. My FF 1.5 eats up over 100 MB at my current installation, constantly consuming more the longer its up - until it eventually crashes at over 140 MB (multiple tabs and ~20 extensions). Opera gives me almost the same functionality with about 80 MB, stable.

What I have to say is that Firefox won due to unbelievable regular page rendering faults on Opera's part (Quote: Damn, there was a drop-down, usually...). Firefox has decreased in correctness here as well, but at a random, irreproducable level. But like IE for some sites, it's getting more a questing of necessity than fun to use.

BottomLine:
> ...that while Firefox continues to ship _high-quality_,[...] browsers on a
> regular basis...

I'd like to find some more truth in this...

Could it be that it's the same as in the case of Minimo?

Yeah, how ironic. Asa whining about inexistent articles and the Minimo guy is comparing his unfinished application with REAL mobile browsers.

Sadly, double standards are very common in Mozilla.corp.

From a trackback, to support my quarrels: ;-)
http://news.com.com/Unpatched+Firefox+1.5+exploit+made+public/2100-1002_3-5987401.html?part=rss&tag=5987401&subj=news

Not a leak, but a quality insufficiency.

Do you really want to hear another opinion?

Serious users who have been on IE6 for a while know what the limitations are and have some idea what FireFox offers. Another article about that doesn't serve any purpose. But it would be foolish not to consider what IE7 will offer before making a switch and risk switching back again.

Sure, it may not be here for a while, but I'm not as unhappy with IE as you seem to think. I'm not very excited about learning a new product with new foibles just to get tabbed browsing. BFD. It also doesn't have resizable dropdown lists for history and autocomplete options. Advantage IE in my book.

And already there is the history.dat issue, which is being downplayed as just a DoS attack, but it sounds like a buffer overrun to me, and they have a good track record of turning into more serious vectors.

So let's talk about security. I think the apps per se are both pretty reliable. FF has to be more suspect in this regard because it's just been released, but you'll work that out. The real dangers lie in the extensions. I browse as non-admin, so I really don't worry much about most of the viruses that attempt to install new code or alter system code. IE can be a pain as a non-admin, but FF doesn't seem to address that. I got several chrome installation errors, which I assume were related to that.

The advantage FireFox has is that it doesn't load ActiveX controls, so it bypasses most of the vectors that have plagued IE running controls that are part of windows and not intended for IE. But it also won't load my Flash ActiveX control that I've already installed and trust, so I have to load something else. Nor will it load the tool I use to remotely access other machines, which I rely on heavily. And it puts extensions in it's Local App settings rather than a protected directory, so they are now potential vectors for viruses that modify them.

Here FF goes off into ideology. ActiveX is bad, MS is bad. Nevermind that ActiveX controls are also very useful. Why not just support them and control which ones can be scripted? True, they are Windows-only, but like most of the world I am Windows-only.

So basically, FireFox is a classic not-invented-here project that doesn't seem to offer much but will doubtless expose me to lots of confusing "better" ways to do things and inevitable bugs. But I choose a browser based on usefulness for my tasks, not as a bumper sticker to support your ideology.

Your rant about the world not rushing in to recognize you just strikes me as naive whining.

Java applets can do everything that ActiveX controls can, and don't have proprietary lock-in issues. If you can't do something without ActiveX, maybe you should look at why you're doing it in a web browser to begin with.

"last I heard, more people don't use XP than do"
Wrong.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-jun04.html
Look at the "Operating Systems Used to Access Google" stats. I bet there are even more people that use XP now than in June 2004.

Asa, people have been comparing Firefox with IE6 forever.

Read, for example, Firefox Soapbox, an article I wrote a long time ago. It applied, yes, to Firefox 1.0, but not much has changed (from a user's POV) in Firefox 1.5.

No, ant, they can't. That's why Flash and PDF aren't applets. That's why Microsoft wanted to extend Java.

I think I can decide for myself whether to use a browser or not, and which browser to use if one thinks it should tell me what's good for me.

Oh, and if you think this article is useful, please add your diggs over at digg.com.

And don´t forget to digg this one too: http://digg.com/software/Firefox_1.5%3A_Not_Ready_For_Prime_Time_

Alexander,
> What I have to say is that Firefox won due to unbelievable regular page
> rendering faults on Opera's part (Quote: Damn, there was a drop-down,
> usually...).

It would be nice if you could supply some links. Don't be like Asa and his non-existant reviews and comparisons.

I can assure you, as someone who has used Opera for several years and as a professional web developer, that Opera doesn't have any "regular page rendering faults". What you were probably seeing is something that's not even a HTML page, but an antique tag soup created in Frontpage, with added browser sniffing JavaScript from last century. If anything, it's Gecko that gets things wrong most of the time, pushed by non-standards, wrong HTML and CSS that rely on rendering engine bugs and "hey, if it works, it must be correct" thinking (Gmail and inline-table, anyone?). I'm not saying that Opera doesn't have any rendering bugs, of course, but 99% of the time, it's the fault of the web page authors, not Opera's. You can't expect Opera to emulate every IE and Gecko quirk/bug. Sadly, with the spreading of Firefox, we're going to see more and more buggy pages and people who scream "Opera sux" just because some things work differently by default and some proprietary things aren't implemented. We've had those before - it eventually ended up as IE6.

Opera's Hallvard has an interesting blog about "regular page rendering faults", and it can be a nice read: http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/

Well, the regular problems which annoyed the most seem to be linked with Operas page resizing option (I found out after a while of investigation). I turned it on and had grave problems with ODP editing (options and text input fields regularly missing). Sorry, but thats members only ;-)

Seems to occur elsewhere from time to time, so I can't give any specific free URL. I switched it of now since I want to edit ;-)

Well, but after hours of continuing Opera usage, it suddenly also ends up using 140 MB of RAM, crashing once. Sad that...

What? You were overjoyed whenever a review came out comparing IE6 to betas or pre-release versions of FireFox. Now the opposite is somehow unfair? Please. There are over 250K people using IE7 right now.

Trash it if it's insecure. Trash it if it doesn't fix anything. Trash it if its tabs suck. Trash if it if isn't standards compliant.

But don't just trash it because it isn't out yet. Because in a few months it will be, and then this post'll just look childish.

Too quick, GC seems to have reduced Operas RAM usage to below 60 MB. When will we be seeing this at Firefox...?

OMG can we talk about firefox and go without mentioning opera for a second, opera is just as good as firefox. but! firefox is much better with all the available extensions. firefox is the king, king, king, king, king. how's that gloat you one internet exploiferettershitterpieceofshit browser, users? still using crappy software from money hungry officials? die ie.

firefox rules!

really interesting point. but i have one question... is there really a firefox 2 and 3 in the making?

Åsmund Æsfuktson, if you're looking for a biased comparison, you can have one: The behaviour and maturity of Opera users vs. Fx users.

miscblogger: see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.html FF2 is due in 2006. IE7 is supposed to be released mid-2006, but we'll see...

I guess this test was conducted by immature Opera users: http://www.chip.de/artikel/c1_artikel_16742561.html

Maybe Asa was thinking about that article? ;)

Windows XP is the most used desktop OS out there right now. Remember, every new Wintel PC sold for the past 4 years has come with Windows XP. Unless you're building a machine from components or deliberately buying a Mac or a pre-installed Linux box, that's what you're going to start with.

That said, there are lots of older machines running Windows 2000, Windows Me, even Windows 98 and Windows 95. Just going off of my own websites stats (sorry, they're not public, but I'll paste them in here):

All Windows: 92.7%
Windows XP: 79.3 %
Windows 2000: 6.4 %
Windows 98: 4.5 %
Windows Me: 1.7 %
Windows NT: 0.2 %
Windows Server 2003: 0.2 %
Windows 95: 0.1 %

These figures will probably shift in favor of XP by the time IE7 is out, but not by much. So figure 80% of computer users will be able to run IE7, leaving 20% who won't -- either they're still on Windows 2000, or they're running another OS.

Of the remaining 20%, roughly 4.5% is running Mac OS X and can run Safari. 0.8% are on Linux and have Konqueror as an option. So roughly 15% of people who want a modern web browser are going to have to go for a Mozilla offering (of which Firefox is the flagship) or Opera.

That's 15% of necessity. They have to stick with old tech or go third-party. That doesn't even count the people who choose a third-party web browser. Of course, a lot of them are still on an old OS because they don't want to upgrade, but the ones who are stuck there for monetary or policy reasons are going to be a big market when IE7 comes out surrounded by hype.

Excellent post Asa!

It reminds me of all the Tiger vs Vista reviews. Tiger was released many months ago, while Vista is still an early beta. Why don't they compare Tiger to Windows XP? Some of them even had the never to say that Tiger did not have all the features of Vista(!).

In response to Alexander Kober at 12:24 PM

> ActiveX is bad, MS is bad. Nevermind that ActiveX controls are also
> very useful. Why not just support them and control which ones can be
> scripted? True, they are Windows-only, but like most of the world
> I am Windows-only.

That is the problem I have with people like you. You choose Microsoft and, worse, you apparently trust them. If MS could just manage to force 95% of the world to use it's browser, OS and proprietary (ie. "embraced and extended") ActiveX controls then there simply would be no choice left anywhere. If Microsoft had their way , you wouldn't be able to choose Firefox, Opera, Mac OS X or Linux even if you WANTED TO!

I got news for you. The internet was supposed to be cross-browser and cross-platform. You dismiss the alternatives and pander to the enemy of free choice all because you are "windows-only". Bury your head in the sand and see where your 'choice' takes you. If Microsoft wins you wil be so happy using the locked-in internet on your locked-in computer (complete with locked-in upgrades) and locked-in ...(ad nauseum). But wait...you already are, aren't you?

> or if they just have to report about IE 7, then how about comparing it to the
> equally unreleased Firefox 2 or Firefox 3?)

IE7 exists as beta version and available on MSDN (test release for XP and as part of frequently updated Vista community previews). Firefox 2 does not exist entirely. So, who's unreleased here?

> They claimed at the time that it would be available in the Summer of 2005

The claims were about first beta, not about final release. I remember early Firefox roadmaps - according to such roadmaps we'd already use Firefox 2.0 (so you aren't in the position to talk about delays).

> Why the preferential treatment for Microsoft

There is no preferential treatment for Microsoft here - it is just that they are not Firefox zealots, they are normal people.

> while Firefox continues to ship high-quality, secure, and usable browsers
> on a regular basis

Yeah, with delays, drowning usability, decreases in speed and version renaming (idea! let's make it 1.5, so nobody will notice that we are so late in making even 1.1).

> Microsoft has left its user base of hundreds of millions of people helpless against a deteriorating web for nearly 5 years.

LOL! Left? Left? With regular patches? (how many *days* ago your own patch system went live?)

And 2005 - 2001 = 4
(not to mention IE6 SP2 in 2004 with some real new *features*)

> There are hundreds of millions of users out there suffering with IE 6

Suffering, helpless...
Oh my, it's like talking with telemarketer! What other word you will use next? Don't you think you've come too far in your "war of the words"?

"Each time you use IE6 - God kills a kitten. Please think of the kittens (and use Firefox)." ???

> and then only to a fraction of Windows users

90+ % (as of December 2005)

Asa, Microsoft did not promise IE7 "would be available [shipped] in the Summer of 2005." We promised to ship a beta release of IE7 in summer of 2005 - which we did.

As for preferential treatment, cast your mind back to oh, 1999 or so - when the Web Standards Project issued a review of IE5's CSS bugs, but refused to review Netscape 4/5 because "Gecko will be out any day now." Reviewers simply aren't always even-handed.

-Chris Wilson

alex (d) wrote: "IE7 exists as beta version and available on MSDN (test release for XP and as part of frequently updated Vista community previews). Firefox 2 does not exist entirely. So, who's unreleased here?"

What about the Firefox nightlies? I'd say those are probably as close to FF2 as the IE7 beta is to IE7.

...when the Web Standards Project issued a review of IE5's CSS bugs, but refused to review Netscape 4/5 because "Gecko will be out any day now."

Wait, I thought they refused to review Netscape 4's CSS because it was too buggy to bother with:

We do not plan on reviewing any Netscape browsers until Communicator 5.0 begins to approach its final form. Netscape does not claim that Communicator 4.0 or 4.5 is CSS compliant. Trying to list the important bugs would be an exercise in writing long documents, one we do not have the patience to do. Running Netscape 4.x through the tests we use to document bugs in Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer will provide a clear demonstration of Netscape's current shortcomings to anyone who doubts them. Of about 40 test pages in our first two reviews, there are only two that don't demonstrate problems in Netscape Communicator (and we weren't even looking for bugs in Netscape Communicator when we wrote those tests). However, we expect to be able to hold Netscape Communicator 5.0 to the same standards (no pun intended) as the other two browsers.

And by 2000, they were lambasting Netscape for taking too long to release a standards-compliant browser and demanded that Netscape 4 be taken off the market even if the new version wasn't ready.

You call this preferential treatment for Netscape? The mind boggles...

In response to Hambone (by the way, don't blame Alexander Kober for my post... he's innocent!)

I do choose Microsoft and I do pretty much trust them.. I don't think that's "pandering to the enemy of free choice" as much as getting the most for my money (and/or effort in the case of Linux).

My point to Asa is that he's got a quick 10% market share and that's very impressive. He's also woken up the giant, which is good for me, at least. Maybe not him. And he's thumbing his nose at 85% on Windows by not creating the best platform he could for them. That's badly hurting his chances to increase that 10%. So whose head is in the sand?

Unfortunately, "while Firefox continues to ship high-quality, secure, and usable browsers on a regular basis" is not true. Repeatedly, I've downloaded version after version of Firefox which failed to find the plug-ins I knew existed on my system and misdirected me to find only the Quicktime plug-in to handle any media file. Netscape 8 (with its Firefox rendering) is a working alternative that I used merely to test pages. Opera has nice toys too.

The basic flaw in the whole the argument is THE SKY IS NOT FALLING - IE 6 is not a more seriously flawed browser and as more users flock to Firefox, its security issues appear to grow ... because more hackers target it.

Hi Asa, I translate this article into Chinese and put it on my blog: http://www.ideawu.net/Bo-Blog/index.php?job=art&articleid=a_20051214_154025
Is this annoying you? Then tell me, email to ideawu@163.com
I'm sorry.

Can't say after trying Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP yesterday that I like it. On my Windows 98 400 mhz computer it works wonderfully, no crashes, no memory or cycles leaks that I can tell and a bunch of extensions. I had recommended it to all my friends. Now I try it for myself on my son's brand new XP installation and it can barely load up my personalized Google.com/ig homepage without crashing! And then when it does it leaves behind a 50% CPU load that I may or may not be able to get rid of from task manager.

I am going to go back to IE6 on this machine and download Opera at the first opportunity (before MSoft buys them). I'll stick with Firefox for my Win98 machine.

fprintf: Try to reinstall Firefox, but remeber to erase your profile directory before install again (Many people reports excessive CPU loads under XP, but most people forget this step). Update Flash, Java and any other Firefox plugins: Your initial Firefox Memory usage should be 20 MB approx. and 0% CPU usage when idle: It's my initial Firefox usage and for me Firefox works fine under WinXP. Good luck!

I want's firefox

Want to see some good coverage of the issues? Well just checkout the following resources:
bent.user = a direct comparison of the two betas Firefox 1.5 and IE7 from a bent view
keep an open eye ==1==> Comparison IE and Firefox with back up resources
keep an open eye ==2==> A review of Kid Glove treatment