Favorite browser?
Yesterday I furled a CNET article which declared Mozilla Firefox victorious. Ok, ok, firefox won from contenders like IE, Opera & Netscape (8). All of which I didn’t suit me.
Here’s the real story. I’ve been using IE ever since IE3. Why? Well, I’ve won a cd-rom with IE3 along with a videotape of ‘The Net‘. Really! Well IE4 beat NS4 hands down… Ancient history.
Nowadays I’m a webdesigner and somewhat of a webdeveloper and I could use some no-name, obscure, backwards browser. But then I would be cutting myself in my fingers wouldn’t I? Who needs CSS anyway…
As a webdesigner you have to follow the flock. And if the herd is using IE as their preferred browser, you have to design accordingly. I would be happy to design for Konqueror if 90% of the population had installed it. But it’s IE. So? No problem. That’s what they are using, that’s what i’ll design/develop for.
Well a few months ago I did something bold. I had phoenix/firebird or what it was called back then. Nevermind, I had this option in the ‘Tools’ > ‘Options…’ > ‘General’ section with a checkbox to make Firefox my default browser. So I clicked it. Just to see if my Outlook would open links in Firefox instead of IE. It did. Having grown to IE I turned back to it to make IE my default browser again, who wants a beta version of a browser as their default? But… someone please, NOT, show me where the option is hidden… I couldn’t find the damn checkbox to make IE default again. 
Having being stuck with Firefox wasn’t that bad. 
I found that when there’s a javascript error, Firefox could show me the EXACT line of code that was bad. In IE times it was just guess and trackback. How sweet the alert(”over here”); was. 
It showed me what kind of HTML I was missing, or at least put in the wrong place (HTMLTidy). Where that &*(#&*$-div went, or didn’t went. What Google & Co could make of my pages. Well as a developer, I’m happy.
I’ll think I make a series of the goodness that came with firefox. But later…
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One Response to “Favorite browser?”
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ThinkLemon » Blog Archive » Firefox webdeveloper survival kit Says:
July 26th, 2005 at 5:14 pm[…] Under ‘Tools‘ > ‘Options‘ … ‘General’-section: Check ‘Default browser‘ and set my proxy. ‘Download’-section: Check ‘Download folder’ > ‘Ask anytime’. I don’t like cluttering up the desktop just yet. ‘Advanced’-section: Check ‘Accessibility‘ > ‘Begin finding as you type‘. It’s the killer, especially when going through source. Just type what you want to find and the cursor will jump to the spot. […]