[LennonCook]

Originally posted by Bungleau: 1. Most people developing nastiness (viruses and the like) are developing them to attack IE, and not FF. So by using FF, I'm using something they're not trying to attack. That's just safer, period.

It also helps that Firefox's vulnerabilities are generally NOT linked straight to the Operating System. There has been one that was, ofcourse, (the Shell vulnerability that led to 0.9.2) and it's turnover time was under 24 hours, and it was only a problem on certain systems: WinNT, Win2k, WinXP...

2. I've not noticed a speed difference between them. The only thing I've noticed are a few graphics differences in how they display info. They display it at the end, but FF gives me a little more flicker (for example, in the "Hop To" box at the bottom of this page).

You might also notice that some animated GIFs play faster in Firefox. This is because IE sets any GIF with a delay less than 100 milliseconds between frames to that (or is it 50? These things change without notice, and aren't even consistant between different MS Apps: in Word, it's reported to be 10), while Firefox (and Opera, and Mozilla, and Konquerer, and Nautipolis, and Safari) does exactly what the GIF tells it to do. And alot are set to 0 delay between frames...

3. I've used other open-source initiatives, and while they can suffer from bloatware (the addition of thousands of useful and useless things), it's not a major concern with FF. Yet... [img]smile.gif[/img]

Not a matter of "yet", realy. Firerox is designed to be a small, standalone, browser. Just like they've built the Mozilla Suite's browsing and email components into new standalone apps (Firefox and Thunderbird), other things are being done too. The calandar from the suite is being developed now as Sunbird, Composer is NVu. Chatzilla is available as an extension to Firefox, and unfortunately I haven't seen any attempts to convert it to standalone yet.
But with the poer of extensions letting you add functionality you need rather than remove functions you don't, I think we're safe from bloatware for a good while yet. [img]smile.gif[/img]

That being said, there are a couple of things I can't access with FF. Some sites require your browser to be at least IE 5.5, and based on the checks they do, FF doesn't match up. You can argue for a poorly designed site (and probably win), but I'd also look to the browser for an easy way to pretend to be IE 5.5 and higher.

Get a user agent spoofer. I know there's plenty of extensions that can do it, but I can't think of any specific ones off the to of my head. ActiveX will never be implemented into Firefox, though, because it's non-portable, and has security problems. This will stop things like Windows Update, the MSN Zone, and some online stores with 'shopping carts'.

[ 09-27-2004, 11:15 PM: Message edited by: LennonCook ]