<p>I am by no means a computer expert, although I have a son who is.</p>
<p>I use both at the same time. I have one open for the things I like in IE and another for the things I like in Firefox. </p>
<p>For example, I like the way CC looks in IE. I can’t explain how it looks in firefox that I don’t like. I have one of my email addresses open in IE with another open in Firefox so I can both open at once. </p>
<p>So…like others have said. You don’t have to choose. Or at least you don’t have to choose permanently.</p>
As stated, I agree that it’s best to to develop web services that will work in at least these two most popular browsers. Regarding Macs, Apple still has a small segment of the marketplace and they have even less of the business marketplace. A lot of apps are designed for businesses (i.e. intranets) where they know they can target IE without regard to Firefox or others - along the lines of what ‘jmmom’ stated. While this is true, it’s still poor programming practice IMO and it frustrates me whenever I come across a web service that works for one but not the other. Even worse, I’ve come across apps that work in one version of IE (like IE6) but not a different version (like IE7). </p>
<p>We’re in agreement that web apps should work in both as well as in any other browser that might end up with significant share of the target audience. Beyond that people might have their own preferences but again, the vast majority of people will do fine with either. Also as jmmom stated, they’re not mutually exclusive - it’s easy to have both (I do).</p>
I ran into this recently. I was having a problem with my son’s FAFSA and wanted to use the ‘live chat’ facility on the FAFSA web site. It was not supported by either IE or Foxfire - both recent versions. Sooo frustrating.</p>
<p>“As stated, I agree that it’s best to to develop web services that will
work in at least these two most popular browsers. Regarding Macs,
Apple still has a small segment of the marketplace and they have even
less of the business marketplace.”</p>
<p>What do college kids want? At the moment, Microsoft’s OS missteps
leave a pretty big hole that Apple is driving through. Apple, in the
conference call of their recent quarterly report, indicated that they
have some low priced products coming out in Q3 and that gross margins
will drop in the current quarter. The market initially interpreted
this very negatively but seems to be taking it positively. They don’t
even bother in the business marketplace as they’re making nice bank
with what they are doing.</p>
<p>“A lot of apps are designed for businesses (i.e. intranets) where they
know they can target IE without regard to Firefox or others - along
the lines of what ‘jmmom’ stated. While this is true, it’s still poor
programming practice IMO and it frustrates me whenever I come across a
web service that works for one but not the other. Even worse, I’ve
come across apps that work in one version of IE (like IE6) but not a
different version (like IE7).”</p>
<p>I’ve taken a secure coding standards course and these are probably
pretty common these days in software companies. One of the points in
the course was that you shouldn’t code to a particular browser. Of
course the course was delivered in an application that would only run
in IE. This was probably a problem for those with Solaris
workstations.</p>
<p>Yes, bad coding practices are a pain. But they do happen.</p>
<p>“I ran into this recently. I was having a problem with my son’s FAFSA and wanted to use the ‘live chat’ facility on the FAFSA web site. It was not supported by either IE or Foxfire - both recent versions. Sooo frustrating.”</p>
<p>Firefox allows you to have multiple versions of the software at the same time. You can just copy the Firefox program files to a directory and run them from there and then install the newer version. And you can run either version.</p>
<p>There’s also a command line switch that allows you to run two versions of Firefox at the same time too.</p>
<p>Overall, and taking the performance of the beta versions into consideration, the browser performance rankings are as follows: Firefox and Safari in a clear lead ahead of Opera and finally Internet Explorer. Firefox 3, due in June, promises very good performance and efficient memory usage. No browser used less memory to open multiple sites than the Beta 5 version of Firefox 3, and only a few sites failed to display correctly. Safari and Opera, however, are more likely to exhibit incompatibilities.</p>
<p>I don’t even understand most of what’s been written here but I couldn’t agree more with swimcatsmom. My computer was virtually frozen by pop-ups and fatal errors back when I used Internet Explorer. Since switching to Mozilla four years ago, I have removed the IE icon from my desktop and forbidden anyone in this household to ever open that application.</p>
<p>Worrywart, I’m with you about Firefox being so much less prone to unexplained “freezes” (and not understanding why as I am virtually clueless when it comes to the technical stuff). However, you should know that there are some websites that are incompatible with Firefox and require IE for viewing. The cases that I have found are mostly government sites (cities, state agencies) or sites that have video clips or interactive maps.</p>
<p>I started using Firefox three years ago. But it seems that it has become so ubiquitous that the do-badders have turned their attention to it as well. For example, the pop-up blocker feature has been compromised.</p>
<p>“That’s kind of funny. I wonder how much negative feeback the course writers received on that one.”</p>
<p>The IE piece was in recording your progress. So you could work on the course but the part that recorded the progress and granted credit didn’t work. Once someone told you that, you had to go over the course again using IE but at least you could answer the questions more quickly.</p>
<p>Everyone got new systems out of the course though. The required system specs to take the course were higher than what we were using. We just had cheap Windows clients to get to our real development machines and performance wasn’t really a necessity until the course.</p>
<p>I’m using IE, even though son installed Firefox on my computer (not because I asked him to, either…). I know I should probably use it, but my needs are unsophisticated and IE works for me- plus since arrogant college son likes Firefox I feel like being ornery and sticking with my IE. Eventually H will probably show me a good reason to switch.</p>
<p>^^^^ lol !!! I know exactly what you mean!! My son also installed Firefox on my computer without my asking him to and just told me to use Firefox because it’s “better”, except in my case, DH is even less computer savvy than I am! I am skeptical of “changes” especially if I’m doing fine without them. I’ve had situations where things were working just fine but after I installed the “update” or the “new version”, things started to act up and cause problems for me. BTW, the fact that I’m using Norton 360 to protect my computer shouldn’t really matter as to which browser I’m using, right?</p>
<p>I’ve been using FireFox for year and prefers it over IE. I keep IE for those programs that seem to require it.
One issue though…I haven’t been able to open Acrobat PDFs in FF for a few weeks now. I have to go over to IE. Very frustrating. No time to figure out what’s wrong. If anyone else has had this problem and fixed it, let me know!</p>
<p>^ Go to [url=<a href=“http://www.adobe.com%5DAdobe%5B/url”>http://www.adobe.com]Adobe[/url</a>] and download the latest updates to Adobe Reader plus the various Flash players.</p>
<p>I also have problems with Adobe Acrobat (I have full Acrobat, not just the Reader) and Firefox. If I open a pdf while Firefox is open, my whole computer freezes. Thus, I’m still using Internet Explorer.</p>