matthearn.com

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Mozilla Firefox, and how it’s the greatest thing to happen to the intarweb since badgerbadgerbadger.com. (If many of the nouns in the previous sentence confuse you, congratulations, you are not a geek. Also, you may be mildly stupid. But that’s neither here nor there.) If you haven’t, here’s the lowdown: Mozilla, who developed one of the earliest world-wide-web browsers, has come out with a totally new and updated version called Firefox. It, like the Clint Eastwood movie of the same name, shoots missiles at its enemies via Russian voice commands is supposedly an extremely good web browser.

Maybe the movie comparison was inapt. Anyway, it’s this badass new browser that apparently resolves a large number of the issues with Microsoft Internet Explorer, particularly in the areas of security and spyware and spam-killing and whatnot. So geeks around the world are migrating to it like swallows to San Juan Capistrano.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a few problems. The nyerds agree that it’s not entirely what it COULD be, although they insist that much of the problem is that people haven’t developed plug-in tools for it yet, like the Google toolbar. Whatever. Not having a search toolbar is the least of the issues:

• It doesn’t handle HTML code exactly the same way IE does. Many compudorks will insist that Firefox handles it BETTER, and in closer form to what the original RFC (Request For Comments; basically everything on the internet is defined via RFCs) specifies. That’s great. Except that when I open my own website in Firefox, it looks like unlaundered skidmarks, because Firefox doesn’t handle comments like IE does, and I built my site with IE in mind. Things that in IE are commented out, appear on the page in full glory in Firefox, such as the comment I had in there at one time that read something along the lines of <!–REMEMBER TO PUT THE PICTURE OF KYLE’S GIRLFRIEND IN THIS SPOT YOU #*&$ING #*&$–>. I think I fixed it, but it’s frustrating to deal with the dual standards.
• If you set Firefox as your default browser, and you click a link in AIM, it opens the link in an existing window. So I hope you weren’t updating your website through Blogger! ‘Cause it may have been cleared out when you absent mindedly clicked on the “Paris Hilton Naked” link your buddy sent you. More frustratingly, Firefox has built-in window tabs (in which you can have multiple browsers that appear as only one browser on your explorer taskbar, but you can tab back and forth between the windows within it), but it doesn’t open a new tab for the link you clicked on. It just wipes out what you might have had open. I almost had a seizure when I discovered this.
• It automatically makes itself the default browser. Of course, IE does this as well, and Opera, and every other browser, but it’s frustrating to have to cut and paste links into IE because I don’t want to open firefox.
• Worst of all, it doesn’t work with my webmail very well. Every time I try to do something, it conveniently forgets it has a “cookie” (the small stored data on your computer that helps your computer remind a website of who you are, which is how Amazon always recognizes you, and all your favorite webcam strippers can call you by name) for the site, and forces me to enter my password again. Open a mail? Enter your password. Go back to the inbox? Enter your password. It gets rather frustrating.

Firefox is reasonably cool, but I just don’t have the memory on my little laptop to run both IE (for emails) and Firefox (for everything else). So, I uninstalled firefox, and I’m feeling much better about myself.

So who else has tried Firefox? Anybody else unhappy with it? I haven’t talked to any geek yet that doesn’t think it’s the bee’s knees.