Dipping a toe into the browser war

I've always been an IE user (well, ever since Netscape essentially bit the dust), but I've also had an installation of Firefox knocking around just in case I came across a website that didn't work with whichever version of IE I was running. And most of those were internal bureaucratic systems at work, which are never compatible with the most recent versions of any browsers, for reasons I choose not to delve into.

But anyway, the story got more complicated a couple of weeks ago when Facebook stopped loading on IE, so I dusted off Firefox, updated it a little (the version I had was really really old), and saw that that did load facebook correctly. Not only that, but it did a better job of Slashdot and a couple of other sites, and once I turned off the stupid tabbed browsing setup that I hate (regardless of which browser is trying to do it to me, I choose to disable it), it seemed fairly well behaved. So, a couple of weeks later, I now find myself typing this post in Firefox, and using it for most of my regular daily browsing needs. However, given my propensity for giving opinions regarding almost everything, here are a few comments on the direct comparison between IE8 and Firefox 3.5... and if anyone knows a trick or two to get around any of my complaints, please let me know, I'm keen to learn.

* I do very much like the concept of Free Software - not as militantly as some from a philosophical point of view, but I do enjoy the open-source principles (and I like not having to pay for stuff). Having said that, I'm not anti-Microsoft by any stretch of the imagination - I like Windows much more than Linux, and run MS Office in preference to OpenOffice because it does a bunch of extra stuff.

* The tendency of Firefox to always ask to remember passwords is sometimes handy and sometimes annoying. Handy because there are a million different sites I need to log in to with different passwords (most reviewer/author login pages for different scientific journals, each of which assigns me a different user name and a different randomly generated password, even though most of them are published by Elsevier - some of the other publishers do have their act together and run a unified system, particularly the American Chemical Society, but I must have 20 or 30 different usernames for different elsevier journals, which is maddening). However, also annoying because it isn't always good at remembering when I've told it not to remember passwords for a particular site, and keeps asking me again.

* I miss the big 'Home' button in IE, which I had located down underneath the Google toolbar so I could get to it easily. The Firefox home button is tiny.

* The 'restore last session' features in Firefox, for recovery after a crash, are also better. I haven't noticed much difference in the propensity to either crash or leak memory, though - they both seem about as bad as each other.

* I'm far too lazy to go searching for add-ons or extensions for any browser, and frankly don't know what extra value any of them would add to my life. So, no major advantages one way or the other there.

* Firefox always spawns a new window when opening a link from Outlook, whereas IE would sometimes (randomly?) do this, or sometimes recycle an old window. Sometimes I like this, sometimes it navigates away from something I wanted to keep. The tendency of Firefox to end up with too many windows (or tabs, same difference) does sometimes bug me, though.

* IE has a nice feature where, when you spawn a new window with Crtl+N, it opens with the same contents and you can use the back button to go into the history of the window that spawned it. Firefox seems to come up with the home page every time instead, which I'm less excited by.

* However, on the flip-side, Firefox is better at remembering the fact that I'm logged in to the University's library proxy server to get to different journal publisher websites and search databases - IE asks for authentication in each new window, Firefox seems to be more generous with me.

* Firefox also doesn't make that faint (but infuriating) clicking noise that IE does every time anything happens.

* The drop-down previously-visited-sites listing in Firefox is much cleverer (uses keywords as well as the start of the URL), but IE gives more options in the drop-down list. I'd like a combination of the two, I think...

* The Firefox download manager isn't as slick as IE, and the 'always do this for this type of file' setting doesn't seem to work at all. And no, I don't want it to drop all the files on my desktop, thankyou very much! (I've got it to not do that now)

* And finally: the Firefox name is much better suited to cute pictures like these (stolen shamelessly from icanhascheezburger.com):




So, after all that: the verdict is a slight win to Firefox, but I'll still keep running IE for some stuff in the background I think.