The Fox Blog

I’ve been reading lately a lot of complaints related to “Firefox Sucks” on the net. I’m taking a look closer at that issue to see if Firefox really does sucks or not.

In order to have an idea of the position of Firefox among the browsers that suck, I ran simple searches on Google (which I must admit is extremely objective search engine, just try “google sucks” on it and you’ll find stuff that doesn’t seem to bother at all the Google people). The browser-related results come as follow:

“firefox sucks” 845 pages
“opera sucks” 2370 pages
“netscape sucks” 5300 pages
“internet explorer sucks” 9610 pages

At this point, there’s no big surprise since Internet Explorer seems to annoy quite a few (being bundled with Windows and more specifically developed by Microsoft, the big brother as some would say). Firefox ranks last but still, some people really believe that Firefox sucks.

The system administrator of an academic network mentions on his “Remove Firefox Re-Rediscover the web” page that as soon as he installed Firefox on his network, he started receiving complaints from tons of users. People (especially non-techies) found the interface difficult to handle. He also states several problems such as the browser displaying defaced or empty pages, the browser freezing when PDF files are opened so on… An interesting point mentioned is that although Firefox is perfect when browsing validated pages (with perfect XHTML or HTML syntax), it becomes useless once browsing any other page on the net. According to the administrator, 90 % of the internet pages are not validated. I must admit he has a point.

Elsewhere, some Firefox haters state that the distribution sucks but once you get the grip at it and add some useful extensions (KGet for managing downloads…) it becomes a great browser. Others mentioned that with Firefox you can’t edit hidden browser preferences.

Let’s be clear about it, Firefox is not perfect in every way. Any frequent user has already experienced a page loading failure, a defaced page (that would appear correctly in Internet Explorer) or even the browser freezing completely. When I face a similar problem, I just switch to Internet Explorer, get the job done and come back to Firefox. The general performance of the browser is worth switching every now and then. Now that more and more people are using Firefox, webmasters will think twice before publishing their content; they’ll make sure that the page displays correctly in Firefox. On the long term, Firefox is contributing in making web pages abide by specific standards readable on any platform and by any browser.

Firefox was not written by a holy programmer but by a bunch of Open-Source people who had the guts to compete with Internet Explorer, the giant among browsers for more than a decade (I still have a copy of Internet Explorer 3.01 for Windows 3.11).

The success behind Firefox’s is related to two facts:
- It has included in its first release helpful features that people usually have to download as extra components: popup blocker, cookies controller… It also introduced before any other browser the extensions and the themes which allowed people to create their own component and totally customize their browser.

- It was released by Mozilla which already had an important market share with its Mozilla browser used by techies worldwide mainly on Linux distribution. Firefox just made the browser more accessible to just anyone.

Yesterday, Friday the 22nd of July 2005, a powerful explosion targeted a busy restaurants and bar street in Beirut. Monot Street, the place in question especially crowded on Friday and Saturday nights, was stunned at 10 pm Beirut Time by the intensity of the explosion. National television reports that one person was killed and at least four people wounded (CNN reported 0 dead people, what a lame!!). Located meters away from the downtown district, the street is an important late-night life location. Rumors say that the bomb was planted underneath a car in a garage; although the car was almost value-less, it is told that the owner had a heart attack (he survived) when he saw a piece of junk instead.

International media insists that the explosion’s was targeting the Christian population since the street is located in Achrafieh, a region largely inhabited by the Christian community. I’ve been going to Monot Street for ages now (I wasn’t there yesterday) and I’ll still be going there. It’s a place where everyone meets up regardless of religion, race or T-Shirt color (I would be amazed to see that).

This explosion doesn’t come as a surprise for the Lebanese people. It completes a series of other explosion blasting for the last months mainly in Beirut and its suburbs. It all started with the assassination of PM Rafic Hariri on the 14th of February and ever since the country has been living important political and social changes (Retreat of the Syrian army of Lebanon, Democratic Elections taking place, Return of General Michel Aoun from exile, the planned release on July the 26th of Dr. Samir Geagea after 11 years of imprisonment…). You could write a big dusty book about all those recent changes in Lebanon! The latest explosion has hit Elias El Murr, the ex-minister of interior and current minister of defense. He miraculously survived and is currently in a state of healing from his numerous injuries. His family, politically very influent in Lebanon, holds his current location a secret (for security reasons obviously…).

I’ve lived several of the explosions live on the terrain. I was located 300 meters away from the place where PM Rafic Hariri was assassinated. In another explosion which killed an anti-Syrian journalist called Samir Kassir, I was able to get on location at the same moment as the press and took that day a couple of photos (I want a Pulitzer!) of the toasted car, I’ll tell you everything about it some other day.

After several days, which turn out to be several weeks of planning of updating The Fox Hole, I finally decided to do so. Well yes, the site doesn’t seem so full at this time, but you got to start somewhere don’t you?
I’m going to try to keep it up-to-date as often as possible. Except new stuff posted every day or so.