“is the community around a product more important than the product itself?”
Oh yeah. This is one of my two main considerations in evaluating software tools. As for the other…
All things other being equal, Open Source Software wins. Why? Because there are a million reasons why the maintainers of a software product might one day suddenly decide to stop doing so. However, if users have access to the sources, this isn’t a fatal situation.
Even if that never happens, we can still fix bugs ourself when the maintainers are reluctant to do so. Note that I say “when”, not “if”. It will happen eventually with any product.
Straevaras, those are your personal opinions, if youa ctually look at the number of serious flaws Fierfox have had it’s share as well.
I don’t know what pages you load but saying Firefox loads pages faster is just ridicolous, in fact if I compare a random page it feels slightly slower in Firefox than in IE7 but that is my personal opinion as well.
Also, dont know what you mean with “kept some of it’s users”, well, firefox took a few percent but more than 90% was still using IE and I would say that firgure will grow now again.
This can easily turn into a browser war but it annoys me when Firefox supporters just tell people lies, it isn’t more secure, it doesn’t load faster, it has no features that IE7 does not have.
In fact IE7 now has more security features such as for example the phishing filter and the fact it automatically blocks sites with invalid SSL certs with a page instead of just showing a prompt. Just two small things.
T.E.D, there have been cases where serious bugs in open source software has been around for 20+ years (BIND) without anyone discovering it, the idea that open source means someone is constantly reviewing the software is ridicolous, it just doesn’t work like that.
I’ll have to disagree with you, probably based on our implicit definitions of “product”. Certainly a default Firefox install is nothing to write home about: it’s plain and feature-light, and the cookie manager in 1.5 is a train wreck. However, I consider the huge array of extensions, many of them high quality, a major feature of the product. It’s because of all the design and infrastructure support for them, and the nurturing of the community that writes them.
While the Firefox, IE and Opera renderers may be essentially equivalent, the browsers as a whole most definitely are not.
My biggest reason for preferring Firefox over the others is precisely the availability of Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G Updater. They blow the pants off of something like Privoxy in speed and flexibility and put Opera’s built-in solution to shame in functionality, and make browsing today’s flashing-ad-infested web enjoyable instead of painful.
No other browser comes close in usability for me because of those two extensions. And I believe that their existence is a direct result of the design decisions that went into Firefox-the-product.
As far as I know, only Konqueror as a real adblock-alike plugin, but that one was late to the game and also feature-light, largely because Konqueror plugins have to be written in C++ and have a much larger learning curve than Firefox extensions.
…and there aren’t cases where serious bugs have been around in closed source software for years? Look into SourceSafe, and get back to me.
My point really didn’t have anything to do with bugs though, at least not directly. Its about support, and being left high and dry. Call it “vendor lock-in”, if you need it in business-eese. As long as you have legal access to sources, you can’t be totally and completely hosed by the untimely demise of some person or vendor. You don’t have to worry about your vendor getting bought by your chief competitor and deciding to quit selling to you, or jacking up your unit prices to make you less competitive.
If you ever deal in hardware, think of it in terms of using a PCI solution, versus using a solution targeted to some nonstandard vendor bus. If we need to upgrade our system in 5 years, there will probably be multiple new PCI systems around. If not, the standard is published and unencumbered, so I could at least have our hardware guys develop something. If I go with the nonstandard vendor bus, I’m totally at the mercy of the one vendor. No thanks.
I didn’t know about the flashblock plugin until today. I installed it then went to Yahoo’s news section to see if that incredibly annoying ad showing the dancing silhouettes was still working. Well, to my delight, it’s blocked! Thank you Firefox!
“Main new features are built in spelling, anti-phish, and improved tabs.”
I’d also note the VASTLY IMPROVED Javascript engine. It’s amazingly fast, especially when compared to IE6/7 and Firefox 1.5. I haven’t compared it to Opera or Safari. It almost makes the dream of web apps behaving like desktop apps via Javascript seem not so far fetched.
To me, it just means you have to perform two clicks to get to a running instance rather than one: First click to get to the browser task, and then a second click to get to the correct tab.
Maybe I’m insane, but I feel that “group similar tasks” is the devil, and it’s the first option I disable on a new windows install. Why would I want to add that feature to a web browser? Give me a double-row taskbar littered with tasks any day - I might not be able to read them, but at least they’re all one click away.
Protection against the untimely demise of the owners of a propietary product is a very strong reason to use Open Source products.
But the converse also holds. The more of a securely monopolistic death-grip a proprietary interest holds dominance in any usage or market arena, the worse for everybody involved for a lot of reasons. Pricing, architecting for user lock-in rather than functionality or support (sound like somebody we know?), the obligation to use undisputably inferior software.
The beat goes on, the list goes on… and on… and on…
We (me included) in the tech industry somehow allowed an inferior product to take get de-facto monopoly control (or near-monopoly, for nit-pickers and MS apologists) over the desktops and notebooks and clients in our workplaces. Thank God we are holding the line at servers.
– The browser situation is an important one. Like Grant Johnson said, we can use Firefox much more easily across platforms.
The Open-Source philosophy also automatically overthrows would-be dictators and would-be monopolists, and those who would otherwise force inferiority onto us.
For example, some writers say that Linus’ personality is what helped Linux grow ahead of other open-source operating systems.
I might actually use IE7 now since it has tabs but there are still a few hurdles that I run into from time to time.
Yes occasionally FF can be slow to load, but I have issues with IE just randomly not doing anything. Every time I get to a site that I HAVE to open in IE, because it only works there, I cringe (oddly I still come across several for my work).
I’ve also become very used to the middle-click function of FF to open and close tabs. I believe IE supports this to open links in a tab, but not to close them. It really all comes down to what I’m used to, and FF did it first, so I got used to their functionality first. I use FF’s ‘Recently Closed Tabs’ feature almost constantly.
But recently as I’ve taken on a lot more CSS/HTML work and the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug have sealed the deal for me with FF, there’s just nothing on par with those tools for IE. I feel bad for my friend who as to use IE as his default browser because of the .NET coding he does. He constantly complains about it crashing and locking up.
Beyond that, no, there’s not a vast difference in surfing in IE, Opera, FF or Safari. I will comment though that I just haven’t found what people love about Safari. I don’t like the way it uses Mac-Like UI elements for forms/etc. It constantly thwarts my efforts to browse in a quick fashion do to differences in the way Ctrl,Alt, etc are used between PC/Mac. And well, it still has a bit of a stigma for me from a few years ago when I would often try to use it on a friends Mac and it just didn’t work very well yet.
As far as community goes, I don’t know if anything Microsoft ever puts out will gain the type of community a product like Firefox has. Tech-savy powerusers with the ability to contribute to, add to and define the way a product will evolve. Some of it is the stigma around Microsoft, some of it comes from the multi-platform availablility of Open Source software and some of it is people just wanting to choose the underdog. I half wonder if FF ever gains 33-50% of the market share if some of those people won’t jump ship and try and find some other obscure browser to endorse and improve.
I’ve tried over and over to upgrade to 7.0 on my Windows machine. I get some stupid, seemingly obscure error message about how I must tweak the registry, do the dishes, take out the garbage, learn calculus, get a Ph.D. from Stanford, learn how to code in Ruby and six other competing languages, brush up on Cobalt, and learn every version of Oracle in order to resolve this small, little problem with IE 7.0.
Crazy, I think to myself–and then I click on the link and am taken to a HUGE knowledge base article on Microsoft’s site that pretty much says the same thing–AND THEY’RE SERIOUS.
10 inches away on my desk sits a MacBook Pro running Leopard that upgrades 99% of all its software flawlessly without a hitch. Browsers, the OS, even apps like Logic Pro 8 that take 3 hours to install.
Buying into the community is most certainly the way to go. This occurs in the gaming industry all the time. Very few companies seem to embrace the community in positive ways, EA being a massive culprit.
Some games survive well beyond their years via community (HalfLife being the best example, Total Annihilation as well and of course one of the originals Doom). Some games win out a clone war via ease of modding. (Red Alert 2, while a good game, would have been put to rest long before it was if it wasn’t so easy to modify for online play) And some games explode well beyond their normal userbase size (World Of Warcraft anyone) because of it.
Heck… even being socially involved with your community is a massive boon. (City of Heroes is an excellent example of an involved development team)
Why companies don’t get that fact I do not understand. Is it too much effort to foster community? Is it the lawsuit madness America is involved in causing businesses to take a “it’s our way or the highway” stance?
As far as FFox versus IE, I generally use FireFox primarily because of flash blocking addons. I don’t like the design of IE in general, and FFox is much kinder to common html design problems. (weird div structures, unclosed elements, etc)
Of course you’re right: the websites I’m viewing are more important than the browser I’m using. But when one browser makes things a pain in the ass, and the other lets me view websites easily and use a bunch of tools to help me do so, I’m going to go with the non-painful browser, which happens to be called Firefox.
I use Firefox too, but for a different reason. I swap off between operating systems.I have some Windows, some Linux, some Solaris. Firefox is available everywhere. I can switch to the platform I need for a particular application, and keep my browser.
