Firefox Needs To Get Over Itself

I, for one, am getting more than a little tired of having the supporters of Firefox scream at me about how good their product is. I use it part of the time, for testing, and it is indeed a browser. Not a bad one, either. It is self-demeaning for them, though, to have to resort to that much hype just to get people to use a product that they are giving away for free. If they think it’s so great, they should try charging for it. In 30 days, virtually no one would be using it.

I’m not saying that it is a bad browser. It is a perfectly valid browser. But it is not the second coming that its shrill advocates profess. It is the only browser that I have ever had significant problems with, except for a bad patch with Opera that was probably my fault, but that does not make it a bad browser. Then again, I have never had a significant problem with IE, and I use it much more that I have ever used Firefox. Generally speaking, both of them work fine, with an occasional small difference in rendering.

The proponents of Firefox remind me, perhaps on purpose, philosophically, of the supporters of Islam. They use exactly the same techniques, which pretty much means shouting as loud as you can that you are the best. The only real difference seems to be that Firefox folks are united behind a very specific hate of everything Microsoft, while Islamists appear to hate everything non-Islamic. I don’t know that being more specific with your hate makes you a better person or group. It just makes you hateful.

The people that are the most vociferous about Firefox also act just like the radical proponents of Unix-like operating systems, Apple computers, and the flat Earth component of humanity. All of them are convinced that they are better than everyone else because they are different. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Being different just makes you, well, different.

If the Firefox folks, had a better mousetrap, they would have won the game and would be in control of more desktops. UNIX and its clones are strictly for geeks, not for getting useful work done on a personal computer. Apple has never made it because they insist on being totally proprietary. In a similar vein, oh by the way, the Earth is round.

One of the points that needs to be made is that if it were not for Microsoft Windows, Firefox would pretty much have no place to run. They bray endlessly about being “cross-platform” but all that really means is that their product will also run on that lonely couple of percent of desktops that are not powered by Microsoft. < shrug >

I’m not a large proponent of the people from Redmond, either. But the Firefox people conveniently ignore the fact that they would not exist without Microsoft. Gates and company made the software half of the computer revolution possible, teamed with Intel on the hardware side. If it were not for those two companies, there is an excellent chance that we would still be running dozens of computer brands and type that would not even talk to each other.

So get off your high horse. You make a nice browser. Thanks. Now, go make it better and quit bitching about the folks at Microsoft, without whom you would have no place to bitch. Firefox is a browser, not a cure for cancer.


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