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.