I personally love FireFox but due to the huge numbers of people using IE6 it would be great if MS could fix just a few tiny little problems like the box model issue, non scaling of pixel fonts and things like that.

What annoys me is that I’ve heard that they’ll only be releasing new versions of IE with new versions of Windows and the next version won’t be released until Longhorn! That means that we’ll *always* be stuck having to put the box model hack into our code to compensate for IE even when it’s long out of date, just because not everyone upgrades to the latest version of windows. (I still know loads of people using Win98!).

MS could do with updating IE for the Mac as well because it’s starting to feel a bit tired now, especially when compared to the likes of Safari.

Coders must adapt or die…

[ New Nature ]
Consider this: The solution isn’t so much what Microsoft can do to make their browser more compliant to the Standards, it’s a matter of making the code universally compliant to both species of browser, one albeit a mutant.  Mutants in the web?  Yes.  It is very important to understand that mutants have a necessary role in the Web, just like in Nature.

There shall always exist mutants in the Web.  Just as in Nature, they eternally manifest themselves amongst our creations, despite our very best efforts and universal notions of what is proper.  But, just like in Nature, they serve a purpose of often brash experimentation.  They represent either revolutionary, bulldozerish success or spectacularly quick failure, rarely anything in the middle.  And from mutants better adapted standards are born, often with an explosion no body of standards could hope to control.  Just like in Nature, we’re once again learning that you can only guide standards.  They cannot be absolutely controlled, despite your best walls and legislation.  The web, like Nature, is chaotic, too.  Embrace it: Don’t build square houses—Build round houses.

[ Those that adapt last longest ]
Coding things like CSS and JavaScript to perform identically in both browser camps (Mozilla vs Microsoft) can sometimes be a little tricky.  But, the coder must take a haiku-esque approach, reducing your spellbook of properties, methods, events, and (yes, i admit) avoiding those otherwise standard things in the W3C Liturgy that IE (that apostate heresy coming from an usurping Rome), chooses not to correctly use.

Code with compromises.
Code to be universally agile
Those that adapt become stronger and survive.

[ Adapt or Die ]
A webpage that properly appears, and is identically drawn in both browser camps can be done, and done efficiently and easily with little practice.  It just takes an adaptation of one’s skills; But, that’s what humans are good at doing and what got us to the level of re-creating Nature, of creating the Web.  And, in that New Nature there shall exist those who learn to adapt to the chaos, and they’ll thrive and propagate.  Those who do not shall surely perish.

once believed in coding just for IE, but it’s just as efficient to be Universal

Just when I think Rob is starting to make sense he picks that damned crack pipe up again…

Which is a factitious way of saying that I respectfully disagree.

Coding for both browsers certainly can be done, but I don’t agree that it is either efficient or easy and I’ve been practicing at it for a long time. While I’m no Standards-Nazi by any stretch of the imagination, I still contend that Internet Explorer goes beyond having mere “mutations” of the W3C standards to full-blown cancerous growths. It is highly aggravating to find that a feature in the W3C standards can’t be used because Microsoft either didn’t bother to add it to IE or screwed it up so badly that any hope of getting it to work the way it should will involve an additional 10 to 20 lines of code that still won’t necessarily render properly with every page display.

Mozilla isn’t perfect, but it’s much closer to the standards than IE and is being improved all the time.

I switched to Mozilla 1.6 about six months ago, and I really like it.  Is there any reason why I might want to swith to FireFox?

Not necessarily, but maybe. Depends on what you do with it. Not much of an answer, I know, so allow me to elaborate.

Mozilla is basically the same suite of programs that Netscape was known for. It has a browser, mail client, IRC client, and WYSIWYG HTML editor. A sort of all-in-one solution. This is great if you need/want all those things, but this also means it can be on the slow-side in loading up and if you don’t use all those things then why have them slowing things down?

Firefox is essentially the browser component of Mozilla stripped down to its skivvies that you can dress up with any additional clothes you might want via the Extensions option. Because it’s just the browser it tends to load and run a lot faster than the Mozilla suite and because it’s extensible you can add in most any feature it doesn’t already have that you might want. If you don’t need all the extra stuff that comes in Mozilla Suite then Firefox is where you should be looking.

This same idea is being applied to Thunderbird, which is the stand-alone mail client based off of the client in the Mozilla Suite. Seeing as the only two parts of Mozilla Suite I use are the mail client and the browser I find that using Firefox and Thunderbird makes more sense than using the full suite. YMMV.

I gave up my IE when something hijacked it a few months ago, switched to Firefox and haven’t looked back.  Can’t imagine what took me so damn long.

I dunno if you FireFox fans know abou this, but heres a little snip that speeds up the load times under WinXP… (and makes it even faster than the

Firefox is slow to load initially on Windows XP. You can speed this up a bit by using XP’s built in prefetcher. Simply right-click on the Firefox icon you use to start the browser. Add the text “ /Prefetch:1” to the end of the line in the target field.

The whole line should look something like the following:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” /Prefetch:1

I’ve tried it and it certainly helps!

Shouldn’t the ftp address for RC1 be:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0rc1/

Just wondering.

Probably. I think I ended up grabbing the one for the different language options or something.

Actually, I just went through an adventure with RC1 today. I followed the upgrade directions here:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/qa/softwareupdate.html

This is supposed to utilize the automatic updating feature in PR1 to automatically download and upgrade PR1 to RC1. So, I went ahead and did it and it wouldn’t restart. So, I fired up the Mozilla browser and went back to the FAQ page above and noticed this:

WARNING

Firefox Preview Release users on Windows may encounter a crash on startup after restarting once the RC1 has been installed. This is related to the Java plugin. If you find yourself being unable to start you will have to reinstall the browser from a self extracting archive.

*sigh*

So, it was back to the RC1 ftp directory to download the self-extracting setup file here:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/1.0rc1/Firefox Setup (1.0rc1, en-US).exe

I ran it and Firefox 1.0RC1 started right up with no trouble whatsoever except that two of my extensions quit working. But they were ones that I didn’t use very often anyway, so all is good.

My advice is this; download the self-extracting setup file first and save yourself some heartache.

I DESPISE the way IE mangles my site.  I still have yet to figure out how to use those filter thingies so for now I just suck it up and try to avoid looking at my site on IE.  I also DESPISE the lack of tabbed browsing.
Firefox is teh r0x0r!

What makes me laugh is that when I go back into IE to test sites and stuff I constantly find myself middle clicking on links to open them in a new tab!

Come in Microsoft, Your time is up!