Although people would like to convince you it doesn’t ->
example 1
example 2
example 3
I could go on forever… 
To be honest, I don’t think it sucks. It’s a perfectly decent browser but I just don’t see a good enough reason to switch from IE.
This whole geek crusade against IE reminds me of the endless Mac vs. PC debate. Macs are nice but there’s no way I’d make the switch. Even if I got one for free I’d sell it.
Back to the Firefox issue…. Tabs are a matter of taste, it doesn’t work noticeably faster, Live Bookmarks leave a lot to be desired (with Sage it is a moderate improvement but still worse than a decent stand alone aggregator), extensions are more or less useless.
Better security, no spyware, no pop-ups, better support for standards… you’re kidding right?
Every single argument against IE fails miserably or is simply a non issue.
I have yet to find a website that IE can’t digest. I come across such examples daily with Firefox. I don’t care what is going on in the background. Standards, hacks or whatever. I don’t care. IE works, FF frequently doesn’t. Standards or no standards. It’s that simple.
The simple fact is that standards only work when the majority follows them.
If Microsoft decides to make their own rules then that’s the standard everyone has to follow. There is no if or but. Microsoft has a 90% market share (give or take a few %)! Pause the crusade for a moment and wrap your thoughts around that bit of info for a moment.
Again – who makes the rules?
People visiting websites don’t care if there are standards involved or not. They have to work regardless. And 90% of them want sites to work in IE. What’s the standard again?
Believe me, I know all the arguments, pro and contra, and in principle I’m in favor of some form of standardization but only when it makes sense to implement them and someone actually decides to support everything from the start. Without an industry wide adoption none of it ever matters.
And I didn’t even mention that the “standards” themselves are sometimes quite ridiculous and rigid beyond reason. Box Model “problem” is one such example. What exactly is the point of padding according to the standards definition? Padding on a box acts the same way as margins do. You end up with two parameters for the same thing.
Quirks mode uses the only logical approach in this case. Padding on the inside, margins on the outside.
You know it makes sense.
No proper equal height attribute? Why the fuck not? Almost every website these days requires some sort of a “hack” to make the columns stretch the same distance.
And even if you make a HTML 4.01 strict valid site (here’s one example you might end up with completely different results in various browsers. My experience so far indicates that FF doesn’t handle stuff like that very well. Opera works, IE works, FF… nope.
I end up doing the silly faux column routine just to make FF happy.
A quick note though – I’m 100% behind separation of content and styling, well formed XHTML and all that. It makes perfect sense. I just think that current standards often get in the way of doing things the way you want them for no particular reason. They limit creativity and quite simply don’t work.
It’s all very similar to Open Document Format. As long as 99% of word processing users have no idea that such a things exists there isn’t much you can do about it. You can cry all day long how M$ is bad, how DOC format is bad etc. but nobody gives a fuck.
In the past I’ve been told to use LaTeX instead of Word, PostScript instead of PDF. Why exactly? Because someone decided both were ultimately superior to anything else on the market. Simply because they were/are the de facto standard in the field yet it made absolutely no sense to use either for that particular assignment and the end result would have been the same.
Here are a few more “standards”.
JPEG 2000 – the new bitmap image standard…. supposedly much, much better than regular JPEG but hardly anyone knows it exists and nobody supports it.
Adobe DNG(Digital Negative Format) is another shining example of a proposed non-proprietary standard.
When, and only when, Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax. etc. decide to adopt it as their RAW format of choice it will become something to worry about. No matter how many advantages you can come up with. Other than a few niche camera/digital back makers nobody cares at the moment.
The Four Thirds image sensor format (and all that goes with it). An evolutionary dead end only Olympus is pushing forward. Sometime in the future it might be adopted as the standard size for advanced compact cameras and rangefinders. And it might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened in that segment (I’d want one) but it is facing a downward spiral in dSLR segment and a very minor, hardly profitable market share.
It takes a couple of things to make a standard valid in real life:
– you need support from the biggest players in a particular industry
– you need to make it the obvious/only choice for most users.
– you need to make it accessible for most users.
– it has to make sense and be of some use.
(I’m sure there are more but these are the basics):
W3C standards don’t really have any of the above in my opinion.
But then again… I might be wrong and I’d be delighted if anyone can prove it
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