Interesting article in PC Magazine reviewing 15 Firefox extensions, but it leads off with this bizarre claim: “By itself, Firefox is a lean and fast browser, but it lacks some of the functions that we’ve come to take for granted from Microsoft Internet Explorer.”
Easy way to lead off an article, but as someone who uses Firefox at home and IE at work, the only functions that I’ve noticed are “missing” have to do with being hacked and the privacy function that doesn’t work correctly. Firefox comes standard with functions that were only added to IE in the Service Pack 2 update, such as a popup blocker.
The primary reason I use IE at work is because I work on our site all day, and the site has an ActiveX component to allow WYSIWYG editing on pages. Our audience uses IE, so it’s also always nice to know if I’ve accidentally broken anything in IE’s reality.
A few months ago I would have said that Firefox was a good browser for the technically oriented, but since it hit its 1.0 release, it has become a better, much-easier browser to use on 95% of the Web than even the latest IE. (The other 5% have some problems with their HTML that they’re going to have to fix, if Microsoft is going to start delaying work on their browser as they’ve said.) I’d recommend it to my mom, if she were online.