Following up on my comments on Opera, Firefox supporters have a major blind spot as well. It has to do largely with the heavy emphasis on web standards among the developers and the early adopters, and the ideals of the open source/free software community. There are a lot of websites out there that don’t look quite right on anything but Internet Explorer, and there are sites out there that just plain don’t work in anything but IE. This is largely due to three facts:
- There is a lot of broken HTML out there that has only been tested on IE, and the designers relied on IE’s particular error-recovery behavior.
- There are sites that rely on ActiveX or other IE-specific code without providing an alternative.
- There are sites with bad browser-detection logic that deliberately exclude other browsers, regardless of whether they would otherwise handle the site.
In each case you can either change the browser to handle the websites, or you can change the web to handle the browser. Both approaches are difficult, and while the former often yields more immediate results, the latter is more ideal, because it benefits users of all web browsers. In most cases Opera has chosen to adapt the browser, while Mozilla has chosen to promote standards for web development. Continue reading
