Ok, this may sound mean, but it’s not meant that way, it’s meant to start some discussion. Many of you may not agree with my opinions here, and that’s fine, feel free to state your own opinion here in a respectful way (not that I have seen any disrespectful posts anyway, but some people may feel very strongly about the subject matter that follows)

I feel that the Firefox browser is not good at all (that is the polite and respectful way of putting it!) I have been designing websites for almost 8 years now, and I can remember when Internet Explorer went up against Netscape Navigator (or Composer, whatever they want to call their browser). Netscape ended up losing that “war” and to this day, IE is installed by default on almost all PC’s. and even some Mac’s. (I don’t know the percentages on the Mac’s)

I have always made my sites to display properly in IE. Even when tableless web design/development got more and more popular, all I heard from other designers is how much of a problem it was to get a web page to display properly in IE. Then out of nowhere, FireFox appears on the “web scene” and all I kept hearing is how FF displays tableless CSS web pages perfectly, and how much of a pain it is to make it display the same thing with IE. They needed hacks in their CSS, they had to play around with the positioning, and it’s just a hassle to get IE to display the same way that FF does.

Now I know a lot of you are FF supporters, even Adobe shows their examples with the FF browser, because everyone claims that FF displays things more proper than IE. I have been watching the statistics on who has been using FF and who has been using IE, and it’s at a point where it’s about equal for both.

Here is my point of discussion, and I may be way off base here, and if I am, please point this out to me. This is not said as a challenge to all of you, I REALLY WANT TO KNOW WHY I’M WRONG! I’m not writing this to create an argument, or even a debate, I’ll just write my experiences and what I have found, and how I feel about FF and IE based on my experiences, and if I am incorrect about something, please reply to this and explain it to me.

My most recent experience is with a Chiropractor’s website. It’s tableless with CSS working out the design aspect and the web page itself plugging in the text. I got done with the whole thing and the code on the page was only 97 lines long, including carriage returns to separate the code for easier reading. I checked the page in IE, and it displayed perfectly, and worked perfectly. I then brought up the FF browser, and the menu was overlapping the content in the middle of the page. So I went back to the Style sheet to fix this problem for FF and checked it, it looked good in FF but then IE was not displaying it properly. (same basic thing that FF was doing)

I wasn’t checking the sites in too many other browsers before FF because there was no need to, most people at the time were using IE, and very few others (5% or less) were using other browsers. There was no need to adjust the stylesheet for FF before it existed, or any other browsers out there because so few people used them anyway. Now we have FF and it has about the same amount of people using it as IE, and it has made my life crazy trying to cater to FF. I say that I have been catering to FF because I have always made my sites with IE in mind, but now I have to change my ways because of FF and the way it renders CSS vs. the way IE renders it.

To make a site work in IE, I don’t need to do anything special for it, I have no extra code in the web page, I have no extra code in the CSS. It’s only when you throw in FF that I have to add or subtract or modify the order of the code in either the web page or CSS. Everyone says that FF displays CSS better, but all I see is that I have to add EXTRA code for positioning of the div tags etc, that I didn’t have to do before FF. Bottom line, I don’t like it. If I have to put extra code to get things to display in one browser vs. the other, the only person that is effected in the end is the web developer. Granted, FF does have some cool features about it, and Microsoft will probably add more of the FF good features into IE to make it competitive with FF.

This thing between FF and IE is strangely familiar, ask the Netscape folks (who renders pages with the IE engine by default but gives the option of rendering with the FF engine, although on my machine, it’s “grayed out” so I can’t select it, and this was not my choice!)

My feelings are this, FF is an infant compared to IE. IE has been around almost since the internet was made available to the public 13 or 14 years ago. Firefox was released sometime in November or December of 2004, making this browser less than 3 years old at the time of this post.

I’m not saying that FF is a bad browser, what I am saying is that I prefer IE at this moment in time, and I have preferred it for more than a decade now. With that all being said, please explain to me how FF is better than IE. I’m asking this because I want to be the best web designer I can be.