Incoherent Babble

Welp, I found Babz through my new WordPress.com Dashboard, and just read her Firefox Review. I have to say, it’s one of the best I’ve seen yet.

I know, I know… before you beat me to death with an extension, let me explain why!

The beauty comes in its simplicity. Most of the Firefox reviews I’ve read have been horribly in-depth (for the average layman), going into details about the better CSS and W3C standards support and how great and easy the extension programming interface is… Now that’s all well and good if we want to attract the geek community, but programmers and other IT professionals aren’t the ones you usually have to convince to use something like this, now are they? How about we write a review highlighting the features (and problems) that will get your grandmother to use (or not use) Firefox?

Well, that’s what this review is about… The things ordinary people who surf the web casually for business and pleasure are going to give a shit about… Not how cool it is for them to be standards compliant, and not how easy it would be for some nerd somewhere to write a plugin to support their toaster as a web-app. They don’t know what these “standards” people keep talking about, and they don’t want their toaster to turn on every time they visit a page that isn’t valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. All they care about is how easy it is to use on a daily basis, and what the effort to install it will buy them in the end.

Babz does a good job of explaining these points. Yes, it will take longer for Firefox to start up than IE. IE is mostly memory-resident because, as Microsoft said during their anti-trust litigation, it’s so intertwined with Windows that neither cound function on its own without the other. Firefox has nothing to do with Windows. It’s not dependent on Windows (and in fact runs on virtually any other operating system you could come up with), and Windows doesn’t lean on it for functionality either (although it would be pretty cool if it did).

The extensions system is incredibly easy to use, and allows for virtually endless capabilities and customization, but at a cost: time. I can easily spend several hours configuring a virgin Firefox install to my likings. After installing a dozen or more extensions and plugins, I have to go back and set the preferences for all these plugins. Some of them have export / import utilities, most don’t. Then there are several hacks I have to manually do using the “config:” commands that also aren’t easily done otherwise (if at all). Sure most people aren’t going to do all this, so what do they care how extensible Firefox is? If it’s going to take them an hour to setup and then force them to check for more updates on a regular basis, it’s not worth the hassel.

So really, what does Firefox gain the regular user? Well, tabbed browsing is a firm plus in my book. Windows XP natively supports something pretty similar when it groups up all your like-minded windows together in the taskbar. For those of us running Linux, we certainly appreciate tabbed browsing in Firefox, because Gnome doesn’t support anything like this (something I find very lacking… at least group all my program windows next to each other on the taskbar!). For the casual web-browser at work or checking the weather and sports scores at home, this still probably isn’t a big deal. They only have 2 or 3 windows open at a time, so there’s not a lot of clutter going on.

After that, we’ve got the link toolbar Babz mentions, which actually exists in IE as well, so we can’t really count it, it’s just something we expect to be there. Oh, it just happens to be visible by default in Firefox, whereas IE 6 (which ships with Windows XP) dumps it off to the right of the address bar, making it hidden and useless (right next to that big green “Go” button you probably have never used or noticed).

The last thing Babz mentions is the display differences for webpages when viewed in Firefox versus IE. This one is the big catcher. Most geeks won’t mind a little visual imperfection here and there in the name of hard-core standards support. Unfortunately, we’ve already established that we’re not targeting them, haven’t we? For everyone else who doesn’t have a clue about standards compliance and doesn’t particularly feel negligent in their ignorance, visual imperfections and functional incompatibilities in their favorite webpages are going to be a big problem. Personally, I haven’t used IE in years, and really don’t notice many pages that have problems. The ocassional banking site may have a problem here or there with some funky Javascript or ActiveX control, but mine works just fine in Firefox, so I’m quite happy to remain there. Unfortunately, most “common people” won’t be. If their favorite flash-based game site doesn’t work properly, they’re out of here. If their favorite porn site doesn’t work properly, they’re out of here (incidentally, I can virtually guarantee you they all do. I mean, these sites are targeting geeks, right? Besides, I’ve personally tested more than my fair share of them…)…

So what’s my point through all of this? Well, I guess it’s the unfortunate truth that Firefox really doesn’t have all that much to offer the common person. Sure it has some rudimentary popup blocking that I’m pretty happy with, but everybody and his brother has that these days, including IE in Windows XP SP2. Tack on a Google or Yahoo! toolbar with popup blocking and you’ve eliminated one of the few pluses we have for the everyday user. If the Firefox developers want to really take over the market from IE, they’re going to have to come up with something much better than this. I realize one of the goals of the project is to create a light-weight browser, but maybe we need to consider integrating some of the more popular extensions into core functionality. Maybe even a sidebar that allowed easy one-click installs of some of the most popular plugins (without the annoying “unsigned code” box that makes you wait 5 bloody seconds) would make the barrier for enterance low enough for real adoption.

Overall, I give Babz’s review of Firefox flying colors for her (unique) view from the perspective of the common user. Take that all you Firefox nerds!