Image via CrunchBase
Update: Poll at bottom of post.
We have all heard people say Firefox is the best browser ever, but never really heard why. In response here is a list of 5 ways in which Firefox is better than Internet Explorer.
1. It’s not included with Windows.
How is that a good thing? Well most users use Internet Explorer because it comes with windows. The problem is IE has a large market share because of that. As a result IE is the most targeted to malware. Since the more people use it the more people will want to harm it. (Same goes for Mac). So you are at a less of a security risk.
2. It’s customizable.
Sure IE can have add-ons, and bookmarks, but its add-on library is smaller than Firefox. With Firefox you can change the look, what displays, the order of buttons, and the functionality. That way the browser is tailored for you, and not Microsoft’s general audience.
3. It’s Open Source.
(Open Source is free as in freedom). The value of Firefox being Open Source is that you can change it any way you want, if there is a bug you can report it, if you want to fix a bug you can, and you can help integrate new things into Firefox. This means it’s not tailored for just one environment, but all of them.
4. It’s Muti-platform.
It doesn’t matter if you are on Windows, or Mac, or Linux as Firefox will look the same for each, and will act exactly the same. That way you don’t have to change anything if you want to use a different OS.
5. Not a resource hog.
Thankfully IE9 is now HTML5 friendly…but sadly its still a huge memory hog. On my personal tests IE9 still uses 1-2GB of memory (eek!) when you have 10 or more tabs open. Firefox 4? Only 330mb…even with 20 tabs its outstanding.
So that’s the 5 reasons why you should use Firefox instead of IE.
Poll: Why do you use Firefox.
FF is better than IE, no question. But when you have to keep FF backlevel on your PC because an addon that you like a lot — which was one of the reasons you went to FF — doesn’t work on the newest FF release — well, it takes some of the charm off. (And no, its not one of those that can be modded by just overtyping the release level — its an XPI).
Nothing is free of compatibility problems.