It seems to me there are 3 kinds of people on the net these days:
1) Those who shun everything Microsoft, hate IE, and embrace wholeheartedly alternative browsers like Firefox, mostly for all the wrong reasons: e.g. tabbed browsing and different skins!
2) Those who don’t even know what browser they are using – and don’t care
3) Those who have no problems with MS IE and have plenty of problems with Firefox and Netscape and opera.
Gee, guess where I belong! If you said #3 you’ve got it!
I have been having umpteen problems with all those alternative browsers. I use them to test my web pages. Well, there are so many things they either don’t do at all or do poorly, it’s not even funny any more. I have to put in patches over patches of code just to satisfy each one of them.
My latest problems revolve around the inability of Firefox and Netscape to render an embedded PDF file. The code is correct as given in all references, even up to including hacks to make Netscape work. It doesn’t work. The problem is that just about everything in Firefox and Netscape needs a plugin. And they can never find the blasted plugin though it’s been installed umpteen times.
The Firefox forum has no answer for this problem.
Members of other forums where I’ve asked have had typical reactions like: Ugh, embedded stuff! I hate that! You shouldn’t use that!
Heck, embedded media, like zucchinis and okra, exist. The construct exists. It has to be supported properly, like it or not. If not the failure should be acknowledged as a bug and not relegated to the dubious pile of “deprecated” constructs.
Naturally the culprit in all this is the w3c who have pretty much decreed that if IE supports something it must be immediately not supported by the others. At least this is in a nutshell what I’ve been observing.
Logic, reasoning have not worked with any of the FF diehards. They will defend their beloved browser while openly despising anything MS for no better reason than just because MS is so big and powerful. Well, duh! How about they got to be so because they worked hard at making it so?
I don’t know, I have a big problem with open source anything. I simply cannot trust that security issues will be well taken care of and not in fact sabotaged by one ultra smart hacker with his own agenda. If things go bad, whose fault is it? Nobody’s as it’s all a huge team effort.
Ok, this is my rant for today. I won’t change my mind so easily, don’t even try to make me. I need more than tabbed browsing and hacks to undo other hacks.
Oh, yeah. Just remembered. New feature in FF, the ability to disable the blocks web pages may have tried using to prevent their code or images from being ripped off. Also ways to get into sites and forums that require signing in. And I’m supposed to trust that such a browser, while breaking through the security placed by web masters, will be secure against nasty web tricks I run into while surfing? What is this? you plug a security flaw with a security breach?
