Of the most popular browsers IE is the most stubborn when it comes to creating layouts according to standards and i’m not talking about mobile IE, do a little research and you will see IE for windows wasn’t created by MS and neither was IE for Mac, they bought them from other companies and started making improvements, let’s be fair, why blame Mozilla for improving NS code ?

About Safari and Konqueror, did you know Safari’s engine WebKit was created using Konqueror’s engine written by TrollTech ? They did it because the Gecko interfacing was more complicated than Konqueror’s but that doesn’t mean Gecko is a poor rendering engine or a slow one.

Firefox is slower when loading because of the XUL that is NOT based on wxWidgets as you claim and there are other browsers using Gecko that are faster when loading, why blame Gecko for that ?

Firefox is fast when loading web pages sometimes even faster than IE and more than 10 times faster when running JavaScript, not even Opera is that fast with JS.

Should i tell you that FF, Safari and others apply filtering when resizing images (and text) to make them less ugly, well guess what … IE doesn’t. Still think IE is faster ? But you can use filtering through DirectX and even make PNGs transparent in IE6 (still the most popular browser today) but let’s talk about speed then, it becomes extremely slow.

Developers don’t like this kind of “optimizations” and it’s not about opening someone’s eyes, FF is at the moment the best browser on the market supported on most platforms as is Opera, his biggest advantage is the huge community, just look at how many extensions are out there before you start making claims that just teenagers use it.

Until someone starts making a good OpenSource browser based on another engine, WebKit or something totally new, FF will still be “king of the browsers” with Opera having 2′nd place and always carrying the “black box” feeling that comes with any commercial product.

I hate to say but IE is technologically behind popular browsers such as FF, Opera or Safari and others that build on their foundation.

1) cross-platform. like being able to use my browser on virtually any system, w/ same configuration and bookmarks.

2) fast page loading. oh yeah, firefox is slow to load and the fast page loading is an illusion caused by the rendering engine. i still have to disagree with your article though: my friends and I have used IE since Windows 9.x days and modern IE 7 is nowhere near as fast as u claim. IT’s not that much faster than firefox. It *used* to be and I loved it for its extremely quick load time and surf time. Not today.

3) standards compliance. standards can be a buzzword, but i’m a developer and most web standards are good enough to accomplish whatever needs done. firefox and opera support them, but Microsoft always does their own thing and breaks compatibility. Even with their own products: COM, COM+, DCOM. Constantly forcing upgrades and redesigns. The pages Firefox 1.0 could use can be loaded in 3.5. Business’s are cheated when they support IE.

4) features. Firefox supports more standards, more scripting (and with Tamarin, even more to come), had tabs before internet explorer (IE buddies were jealous), supports a real-time find feature, and more. While IE 7 doesn’t offer much in way of new features, each major firefox release really ups the ante. This whole situation is going to bite IE users in the ass, as new IE will have separate modes for IE- and standards-compatibility. This is cuz IE’s approach was flawed from beginning, and now we all (yes, me too) pay for it.

5)plugins. IE has some good plugins/addons, and i use them. However, Firefox has many more. And don’t give me that teen-only crap: that’s just prejudice. Plugins like AdBlock, NoScript, FlashBlock, and Auto-cache clearing give me a level of security IE can’t match. Heck, when i got firefox, only it and opera could block popups. Many others are quite useful, but i didn’t need them.

6) security. speaking of security, firefox is a bit more secure. no. of exploits not good measure, cuz IE has hardly improved its features over past few years, while firefox added tons of them. with complexity comes new flaws, and by that measure it does good. plus, it’s open-source which allows security researchers like me to look at the code and fix it. i made some mods and ran it through StackGuard compiler, now it’s mostly immune to buffer overflows. do that with IE! Plus, linux support allows me to use linux-only security enhancements like SELinux and grsecurity. I can also use it in virtual machines, giving me one-click fix in event of viruses, without paying an extra license fee for virtual Windows copy. Finally, a new windows vista flaw makes IE more dangerous than ever:http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1324395,00.html
Have fun fixing that proprietary code.

These are just a few of the reasons i use firefox. Notice i didn’t include hype, fad, etc. IE is nice, and I keep it around for sites firefox won’t load. Otherwise, Firefox has always allowed me to do more than IE, albeit sometimes a bit slower or more memory use. I also like being more in control of my browsing experience and having more potential for security. Some say firefox is all just potential, but IE doesn’t even have that.