Day One: Firefox as My Default Browser (Dammit!)

I have just set Firefox 3.06 as my default brows­er on Windows. This is day one of see­ing if it’s up to the task of being my every task, all the time brows­er. Previously Maxthon ful­filled that role.

I love Maxthon–the 1.6x, Classic ver­sion, not the 2.x ver­sion. Long before Firefox offered such favorite fea­tures as tabbed brows­ing, inte­grat­ed RSS feed read­ing, exten­si­ble func­tion and UI through easy to write plu­g­ins, high­light­ing of search or in-page find terms, and a whole lot more, Maxthon had them. In fact, many of the fea­tures that users love most about Firefox (and Camino, for the record) were pio­neered years before by Maxthon and anoth­er brows­er, Opera.

Opera is a very cool browser–quite inno­v­a­tive, as I’ve stated–but failed to secure major mar­ket share because it was kept pro­pri­etary for too long. Currently at ver­sion 9.6, it was­n’t until the end of the ver­sion 7 prod­uct cycle that Opera became free. Before that, users had to buy it for $19.95. Competing in the mar­ket against Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple’s Safari (among oth­ers), all of them free to users, not enough peo­ple bought Opera. Although Opera is stan­dards com­pli­ant, was the first to have tabbed brows­ing ses­sions, inte­grat­ed chat abil­i­ty, and the “quick dial” inter­face, and despite the fact that Opera is much faster than Firefox, Opera’s tar­di­ness to the give­away doomed it.

Speaking of fast, Apple’s Safari 3 and the new beta 4 are sleek, light, and so much faster than Firefox. On my Macs I’ve always pre­ferred using Safari to any oth­er brows­er. Even on Windows I love Safari’s sim­ple, clean user inter­face and light­ning fast start up, shut down, and page loads. Unfortunately, Safari does­n’t have a frac­tion of the fea­tures I need as an online pub­lish­er, avid social media user, and Internet pow­er user. Neither has Opera, regret­tably. Thus, though I love major aspects of both browsers, they’ve nev­er been able to become my work­horse browser.

Maxthon was that work­horse. Maxthon isn’t a brows­er unto itself per se. Rather, it’s a lay­er that sits atop Internet Explorer, con­vert­ing Internet Explorer from, well, Internet Explorer into a mas­sive pow­er­house brows­er with vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and usabil­i­ty poten­tial. If Internet Explorer can be equat­ed to MS Paint or Mac Paint, then com­par­a­tive­ly Maxthon is Photoshop.

So, why am I leav­ing Maxthon? Because Firefox is what my sites’ vis­i­tors use.

Way back in 1994, when I first began my career as a Web design pro­fes­sion­al and B2B online ser­vice entre­pre­neur, I was using Mosaic. In short order I switched to Netscape. I was hap­py with Netscape, as were the major­i­ty of oth­er ear­ly Web adopters. Quickly I learned that dif­fer­ent browsers ren­dered HTML code dif­fer­ent­ly; what looked great in Netscape often looked ter­ri­ble in the new Internet Explorer, in the ear­ly Opera, and so on. Building a site that worked for all vis­i­tors, regard­less of their brows­er choic­es, required spe­cial cod­ing (hacks), brows­er snif­fers, and/or sig­nif­i­cant cre­ative com­pro­mis­es. Like many of my peers I wrote the hacks, employed brows­er snif­fers to serve dif­fer­ent, opti­mized ver­sions of pages to each brows­er, and com­pro­mised the design when all else failed. But I always did so with an eye toward the major­i­ty of each site’s visitors.

If the major­i­ty of a site’s vis­i­tors came to it through Netscape, then I need­ed to be using Netscape, to see not only my sites but also the rest of the Web as they did. When Microsoft Internet Explorer ver­sion 4.0 leapt out ahead of Netscape as the major­i­ty brows­er by a large mar­gin, I switched to Internet Explorer. There I stayed through the last near­ly ten years because my sites’ logs report­ed year after year a large major­i­ty of hits from Internet Explorer above all com­peti­tors. In the last few months, my logs have shown that Firefox is con­sis­tent­ly the major­i­ty brows­er. Thus, despite my hatred for Firefox, I must now switch to it so that I can see my sites and the Web as my vis­i­tors do (bugs and all).

Yeah, I said I hate Firefox. It’s true. I’m out of the clos­et now. Why do I hate it? Oh, there are quite a few rea­sons. I’m sick of writ­ing non-standards com­pli­ant hacks into my CSS code just to work around Firefox’s bugs and quirks. Moz-this and moz-that break CSS val­i­da­tion. The float drop bug in par­tic­u­lar is a giant pain in my ass.

Yes, I know the major­i­ty of the Web design com­mu­ni­ty counts Firefox as the most stan­dards com­pli­ant, con­sis­tent brows­er. My per­son­al expe­ri­ence with it, how­ev­er, does not match that opin­ion. To make Firefox ren­der pages the way IE, Opera, Safari, Chrome, iCab, and oth­er browsers ren­der pages I have to write an aver­age of four times the num­ber of CSS hacks as I do for any oth­er brows­er. Examine the CSS of any of my sites; you’ll see only a handful–if any–of hacks or dif­fer­ent CSS attrib­ut­es for Safari, Opera, and even Internet Explorer. By con­trast, you’ll find tons of lines con­tain­ing a “moz” hack or an attribute required only by Firefox (e.g. “dis­play: table” on so many con­tain­ers just so they force their out­er con­tain­ers to resize cor­rect­ly). Every site I pub­lish has a Firefox-only–well, Mozilla engine: Firefox, Camino, and Flock–stylesheet con­tain­ing those hacks that, if includ­ed in the main CSS, would alter the page ren­der­ing in oth­er browsers.

Yeah, I know I’ll get flamed, but, man, I hate Firefox.

Still, it’s what the major­i­ty of my site vis­i­tors are using, and it has enough third-party exten­sions and add-ons that it might be up to being my main brows­er; I’ve always used all major browsers con­cur­rent­ly regard­less of my main, day-to-day, most-tasks brows­er. And, I’m try­ing to go at it with an open mind.

Yes, Firefox has bugs and lim­i­ta­tions. So does Maxthon, but I either nul­li­fied those by alter­ing Maxthon direct­ly or by using an add-on, or I just learned to workaround the flaw or lim­i­ta­tion. Hopefully I can do that with Firefox as well, over­come or workaround its flaws and lim­i­ta­tions. Hell, I spent two decades get­ting work done in QuarkXPress, so I should be able to get work done in Firefox.

And I’m excit­ed about a few things unique to Firefox (again, and Camino and Flock). For instance ScribeFire, which I’m using to write this post. ScribeFire is a blog edit­ing inter­face direct­ly with­in Firefox. It gives me a full main body post writ­ing UI with rich text and (my pre­ferred) HTML text edit­ing and even a live pre­view (I haven’t tried that yet). My blog cat­e­gories are eas­i­ly acces­si­ble, which, so far, makes the free ScribeFire bet­ter than Adobe Contribute CS4 and numer­ous oth­er stand­alone blog editors.

Another add-on, the Web dev tool­bar, also has me excit­ed. I’ve used that for years, of course, to trou­bleshoot Firefox ren­der­ing of sites dur­ing devel­op­ment, but it was­n’t a dai­ly tool for me because Firefox was­n’t my every­where brows­er. The Web dev tool­bar in Firefox is far supe­ri­or to the sim­i­lar add-ons avail­able for Maxthon, so I’m look­ing for­ward to being able to exam­ine oth­er Websites more deeply, to learn by exam­ple with more indepth information.

For those sites that just suck ([cough]MySpace[cough]), well, Firefox’s abil­i­ty to com­plete­ly alter them accord­ing a client-side user stylesheet is divine.

So, here I go. Day one of using Firefox as my default brows­er. I want it to be a good experience–really, I do–because I’m a Web design­er, and I firm­ly believe that Web design­ers should always expe­ri­ence their cre­ations exact­ly as the major­i­ty of their read­ers do (that also means no ad block­ing, JavaScript and Flash turned on, etc.). The major­i­ty of my sites’ read­ers use Firefox, and so shall I.

Wish me luck.

In case it does suck, though, would any­one vol­un­teer to spend a few hours auto-refreshing my sites in Safari 4 or Google Chrome to alter the user-agent reports in my serv­er logs? (Just kidding.)