in other news, there is no evil microsoft conspiracy

July 1, 2004 1:55 PM

What the heck? Now even Slate is saying that you should ditch IE and switch to Firefox. But, as they say in the article, Slate is owned by Microsoft...
posted by reklaw (62 comments total)

Business Week and also the United States Government say you should switch to Firefox.

If you are suspicious of backdoors, just look at the source code.
posted by the fire you left me at 2:03 PM on July 1, 2004

I absolutely agree with Mr. Boutin. It's strange that slate published the article, I wonder if they keep it online. Thanks, reklaw
posted by tcp at 2:11 PM on July 1, 2004

Reminds me of the AOL Time Warner/Nullsoft/Gnutella farrago.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 2:32 PM on July 1, 2004

Firefox is incredible. You should switch.
posted by Satapher at 2:35 PM on July 1, 2004

Whatever... I'll be happy to switch when the crap doesn't crash all the time... till then I'm sticking with IE... it works.

PS - the anti-Microsoft stuff is just soooo 1999...
posted by wfrgms at 2:41 PM on July 1, 2004

I'm not that surprised. When Slate launched Kinsley said that Microsoft would not censor content that it doesn't like. Then again, no one has actually said "don't use our product" before.

Firefox is incredible. You should switch.
posted by Satapher at 4:35 PM CST on July 1

Firefox is just OK. It is no Safari which is insanely great.
posted by birdherder at 2:42 PM on July 1, 2004

It's a sneaky trick. They're hoping IE users will switch over to the buggy, crash-prone foetal Firefox, and ... have it crash on them, lose their bookmarks and so on, and realise that IE isn't so bad, after all. *And never venture outside the bounds of Internet Explorer again.*

Now if they suggested a switch to the stable Mozilla suite ...
posted by Blue Stone at 2:51 PM on July 1, 2004

Crashy and bug-ridden? I've been using Firefox, and Firebird before that, for a while now without any problems, and it's been beautiful. Maybe I'm just really lucky?
posted by truex at 2:55 PM on July 1, 2004

I've been running firefox since .5 and it has only crashed 4 or 5 times and I know it was crappy coding on the part of a website the majority of the time (the other times I had too many tabs of porn open).
posted by Mick at 3:00 PM on July 1, 2004

I'll be happy to switch when the crap doesn't crash all the time

That would be now. Really. They're being overly conservative in calling it 0.9.1. If it were a Microsoft product, they'd be calling it 2.1 already. The version of Firefox the most ready-for-primetime browser I've ever used.
posted by 4easypayments at 3:01 PM on July 1, 2004

This version of Firefox is the most ready-for-primetime browser I've ever used.
posted by 4easypayments at 3:02 PM on July 1, 2004

MS doesn't give a crap if someone in its organization writes a pro-Firefox article. They care about the business user, not the at-home surfer. They know that there are a billion IT managers out there who would veto any switch away from IE before you could say "ActiveX."
posted by PrinceValium at 3:09 PM on July 1, 2004

Safari kicks innernet ass...
posted by i_cola at 3:10 PM on July 1, 2004

Whatever... I'll be happy to switch when the crap doesn't crash all the time... till then I'm sticking with IE... it works.

I've been using various incarnations of Firefox off and on since very early, and almost exclusively since .5 or so. I haven't had a crash since .7. Not once. However, I still have IE regularly crash on me when I'm forced to use it for the stupid webapps at work (though that could easily be explained by the webapps themselves, given our IT department). If you don't like it, that's fine, but it's not any more bug-ridden than IE. I like Firefox a lot. It's not revolutionary, but it is progress.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 3:14 PM on July 1, 2004

just to add my voice to the 'it doesn't crash much' camp. i've been using firefox since... well, pretty much since it was first announced, and it's become a really rock solid browser. the *only* time i see it crash now is when it's running a flash movie, and that only happens once in a blue moon. (i think i've seen one crash since i moved up to 0.9)
posted by christy at 3:32 PM on July 1, 2004

why isn't it firebird anymore? Did the fox eat the bird?
posted by leotrotsky at 3:37 PM on July 1, 2004

IE on my work PC crashes way more than Firefox.
posted by strangeleftydoublethink at 3:40 PM on July 1, 2004

What is Firefox, anyway? And why are there dozens of web browsers suddenly?
posted by Mars Saxman at 3:50 PM on July 1, 2004

I've been using Firefox at home, and on all my work PCs and if it's *ever* crashed, I don't remember it.

Once you factor in the availability of extensions (I like opening stuff in new tabs with Single Window, RadialContext, et cetera) there's just no comparison.
posted by littlegreenlights at 3:51 PM on July 1, 2004

Mars: Firefox.
posted by littlegreenlights at 3:57 PM on July 1, 2004

Arent there like literally 100s of browsers to choose from? Based on the kudos here I'm going to check into Safari.. currently using Firefox and happy never crashed.
posted by stbalbach at 4:02 PM on July 1, 2004

The last line's the kicker. The reason hackers aren't attacking firefox is because only 5% of people are using it. In a years time, when firefox has decent market share, it'll become a target. I guess that'll be when I switch to Opera.
posted by seanyboy at 4:03 PM on July 1, 2004

If you are suspicious of backdoors, just look at the source code.
Because we're all capable of working through a million lines of code to find that one line which "accidently" allows a buffer overrun vulnerability. puh-Lease.
posted by seanyboy at 4:06 PM on July 1, 2004

I switched to firefox after reading about all this the other day.
I hate this fucking thing, and jerkoffs who have forced me into using it. By which I mean Microsoft.
posted by dong_resin at 4:09 PM on July 1, 2004

Whatever... I'll be happy to switch when the crap doesn't crash all the time... till then I'm sticking with IE... it works.

PS - the anti-Microsoft stuff is just soooo 1999...

Shilling for Microsoft is so 1995.

Kidding asside, Firefox is a good competitor for IE. Mozilla is a good competitor for IE and Outlook. It doesn't matter what your experience is.

Why would I make such a purposefully ignorant statement? Major web sites running IIS are being successfully infected with a piece of Javascript that silently installs a malicious piece of software onto Windows machines. Microsoft has only mentioned that this problem is not experienced with it's Windows XP SP2 beta. As far as I understand, they don't intend to make a patch available for other OS. (I believe they will, but who knows when.)

This little security problem can get by AV software (as many things do because definition updates aren't automatic or mandatory in most cases). This little security problem gets by hardware and software firewalls. This little security problem is, for many, the straw that broke the camels back.

If you have a complaint about Firefox, I hope you have Talkback installed and filled out bug report. None of your complaints remotely match the severity of the problems with IE.

Go ahead, tell me you never had a problem with IE and you don't have AV software installed. Tell me it's some random persons fault who simply visited http://ebay.com who had their computer raped by the lastest bit of malware. Tell me they should just turn Javascript off. Make whatever ridiculous elitist computer user remark you want. Letting your friends and family members that are not well above the average computer literacy rate use IE is irresponsible. And suggesting they buy $50 AV software which requires regular manual maintenance (and is itself ridden with cross marketing product ads that tell you your comptuer is still unsafe) and a $100 hardware firewall is above and beyond unrealistic.

Ignoring the severity of the problems within Windows, IE and Outlook and simply making light of the issue by framing it as anti-Microsoft FUD takes away from your credibility. I am regularly, in fact daily for the past two weeks, asked to help people remove worms, spyware, trojans and the like from peoples computer. Having done this a number of times, I have come to realize the people I help aren't doing anything wrong. Their computer is literally being attacked.

(Firefox isn't a perfect solution either. Don't get me wrong. I am noone's shill. It isn't nearly as good of a solution as Opera, but Opera costs money and is relatively obscure. It's not nearly as good as Safari (from a Mac user perspective), but these little problems don't seem to be affecting Mac users. On the other hand, losing your HDD or any irreplacable files is far more destructive than having to deal with an occassional page that doesn't work in Firefox.)

(And for what it's worth, I'm not angry at any single poster on this thread. I'm venting some frustration. I'm not selling you anything. I'm not telling you to install Linux or buy a Mac. The Windows, IE and Outlook problems are an epidemic and it disgusts me thoroughly.
posted by sequential at 4:20 PM on July 1, 2004

Firefox is beautiful. But it is too minimalist in its deployment. If several extensions -- noteably Adblock, Text/Plain, Dictionary search, and tabbrowser preferences, were included in the default install, I can't imagine anyone complaining. I even got my GF to switch by simply hiding IE from her on my computer. She was stuck using firefox whenever she used my machine and, within a week, ordered me to install it on her's. I'm not usually a fanboy, but Firefox kicks ass.
posted by Grod at 4:24 PM on July 1, 2004

I've rarely ever seen firefox crash. What I have seen is entire computers become completely unusable, slow, spam zombie, porn-spam popping doorstops from viruses and spyware for which IE was the vector. On a recent visit to my aunt, I removed over 900 pieces of malware from her machine, almost all vectored in via IE. And she was relatively cautious - got all the MS update automatically and ran Norton and Spybot regularly, but the virus folks are smarter, and disabled this software so it looked like it ran but never reported finding anything.

There are all kinds of features in IE that make it inherently more vulnerable, market share aside. The ability to easily install DLLs to intercept standard browser features from a web page, ActiveX, etc. Even the security zone feature is actually a flaw, as I found. You need to have a trusted zone (allow all scripts, ActiveX, etc) in IE to run Windows Update. But what do the virus and spyware folks do? They edit your registry to add their sites to the most trusted zone, then edit your hosts file to redirect requests for common search engines to their pages, at which point they can do whatever they want. This, btw, is something none of the AV and anti-spyware programs found or removed. Pure evil.
posted by bradhill at 4:33 PM on July 1, 2004

I'll second, third and fourth the pro-Firefox sentiments here. The only issue I have with it (and even more so with Thunderbird, the Mozilla mail client) is that it seems to load *very* slowly. My work machine is just a little slow (Celeron 366) and Firefox runs very nicely on it, but it takes about 15-20 seconds to fire up in the morning. IE by comparison is quite speedy. I often wonder if this is due to some sleight-of-hand by MS, since I would guess that Windows loads most components of IE at startup, and all it has to do to "launch" the browser is draw a new window. But kudos to those behind Firefox, I'm using it for the forseeable future.
posted by deadcowdan at 4:43 PM on July 1, 2004

It isn't nearly as good of a solution as Opera, but Opera costs money and is relatively obscure

So a friend has been trying to get me to get Opera for at least a year now. He loves it. Can anyone else recommend it highly? It's only $39 and you don't even have to buy it.
posted by jacobsee at 4:56 PM on July 1, 2004

My fiancee, who is very indifferent to computers, initally used Mozilla as a favor to me. Now she's a Firefox evanglical just for the tabbed browsing and, more importantly, pop-up control.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:59 PM on July 1, 2004

I often wonder if this is due to some sleight-of-hand by MS, since I would guess that Windows loads most components of IE at startup, and all it has to do to "launch" the browser is draw a new window.

That would be crafty, but a quick look at the Windows task manager shows that IE dumps around 19 megs of information into your RAM in the time it takes to start Internet Explorer.
Firefox does this in the same amount of time, and only takes up about 15 megs. These are on my computer though, I don't know about anyone else's.
posted by whoshotwho at 5:02 PM on July 1, 2004

yep. i'm still using Firebird 0.7, but it's awesome.

the reason it's better than Safari is the customizable search boxes. my pull-down menu has 25-30 of my most common searches (IMDB, AllMusic, BugMeNot, content management systems at work, Slashdot, etc.) that i can access from any window, anytime.

show me that, safari! (i know you can do it (kinda) with keyword shortcuts, but it's much more of a hassle.)

for curiosity sake, why is Safari so much better? simply b/c it's on a Mac, it loses a lot of appeal for me (switching between tabs is kludgier, you can resize windows only from the bottom right corner, etc. etc., ad nauseam).

on preview: Opera is an excellent browser, as well, and completely original. it's the other big one, after Mozilla/Firebird/fox. it's supposed to be the fastest, but i can't differentiate at that level. Firebird is plenty fast for me.

the only downside to Firebird/fox is Shockwave installation can be very tricky. i'm still not sure i did it right, cuz sometimes it don't work.
posted by mrgrimm at 5:06 PM on July 1, 2004

jacobsee, I'll recommend Opera. I haven't tried every browser out there but of the ones I have tried, it's hands-down the fastest. It's insane. And it has this mouse gesture feature that makes it possible to complete tasks usually made through the buttons on one toolbar or another with simple hand motions (while holding the mouse, of course). Very speedy. I think that feature can be put into certain other browsers with plug-ins but I'm not entirely sure. Nevertheless, Opera's quite quick, clean, and pretty stable. Earlier 7.x versions of it would crash on me somewhat frequently but the latest version seems nice and stable so far. I've yet to see a browser beat Mozilla in terms of stability but Opera is definitely loads better than IE.

I can't vouch for Opera's mail client though as I've hardly ever used it. Not because it sucks (I don't know), just, for various reasons, don't have much experience with it.
posted by DyRE at 5:16 PM on July 1, 2004

It is no Safari which is insanely great.

does safari let you edit html via notepad, or some other text editor...? this is the one thing that keeps me from switching from ie6 to any other browser. when im just reading various websites i use firefox for the tabbing, but if i want to build a site on the fly i'm still using ie. also way too many websites look off kilter in firefox. even mefi looks wrong... it has a small horizontal scroll going on that freaking drives me nuts.

firefox has crashed just once in the month i've been using it, and it was my fault for not uninstalling a previous version of it before installing the new. ie6 has never crashed on my current (1.5 year old) home computer.
posted by t r a c y at 5:20 PM on July 1, 2004

I use Opera as my main browser - It feels faster to me - snappier. Pages seem to appear quicker, while both Firefox and IE seem to spend some time thinking about pages before they display, which results in a lesser user experience in my opinion. Also, the "Back Button" works more sensibly in Opera - clicking back pulls back the previous page immediately, while FireFox still seems to retain some of that ol' Netscape cache constipation.
Funny how little things like this can influence you so much! Opera also has a lot of extra functionality that can only be added to IE / Firefox with 3rd party extensions

Reasons not to try Opera: While general CSS and HTML rendering is great, it is slightly behind the other browsers on the Javascript / DHTML front. Pages with particularly fancy HTML tricks might cause some problems in Opera. Indeed, I have to admit to using Opera less since getting onto Gmail, as it isn't supported.
posted by Jimbob at 5:24 PM on July 1, 2004

Best features of Firefox:

Tabbed browsing
Customizable address bar shortcuts (e.g. "g something" in address bar automatically searches Google for 'something')

Firefox extensions that rock:

Bookmark backup
Word highlighter
Dictionary in right-click context menu
posted by linux at 5:35 PM on July 1, 2004

t r a c y : Unless you've got a Mac -- and a Mac running a newish version of OS X -- you can forget about Safari. (It won't even run on my PowerBook, because I'm still using OS X 10.1.x.)
posted by macrone at 5:43 PM on July 1, 2004

well said sequential.

I love Firefox, but plenty of the extensions I have DL'd don't work. That is all right though, because the mouse-jestures extension kicks ass. Is there something like this for the rest of Windows.
posted by Quartermass at 5:43 PM on July 1, 2004

Firefox is extremely average. I keep trying, it keeps underwhelming me. I've got geek credentials out the ying-yang, by golly, but I'll stick with the MyIE2 wrapper for shdocvw.dll for now, in tandem with Admuncher.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:45 PM on July 1, 2004

*hopes that he namedropped the right filename for the IE renderer, or he'll be very embarrassed. It's been a while.*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:46 PM on July 1, 2004

PS - the anti-Microsoft stuff is just soooo 1999...

no. it's sooo 1985. and we STILL have them around. talk about your bad penny.
posted by quonsar at 6:06 PM on July 1, 2004

I'll recommend Opera too, but the feature bloat is getting cumbersome as of the latest version, 7.5.x. I've written up a guide on how to get it back to working as just a browser; Google for "make opera look like a browser again" and you'll see it. (Bwah, too lazy to look for it in my archives myself. Talk about "bloat.")
posted by brownpau at 6:28 PM on July 1, 2004

Ah yeah, forgot about the javascript issues. Jimbob's right, Opera's not as up-to-date with its javascript support as its contemporaries and every once in a while there will be a site that might need to be looked at in another browser to see properly.
posted by DyRE at 7:01 PM on July 1, 2004

as soon as FireFox gets a Safari-style bookmark management system, I'll consider a switch.
posted by Kwantsar at 7:25 PM on July 1, 2004

t r a c y: check out the Launchy extension for firefox. It has, among other things, view page in IE, and view source in Notepad.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:45 PM on July 1, 2004

I am always mystified when I see talk of Pheonix/Firebird/Firefox being buggy. I have been using it as my main windows browser since Pheonix .3 and every machine I work on I install it. Not one complaint since it began to play nicely with Real around .7 or so. I can't imagine going back to IE.

All that being said, on my Mac I use Safari and only installed FireFox when gmail didn't work with safari.
posted by spartacusroosevelt at 7:47 PM on July 1, 2004

Opera's nifty but there are some Firefoxisms that I just can't seem to find in opera.

1: "find while you type." One of the things I love about Firefox is that typing a string of characters like "Home" moves the cursor to that link. While opera does have a quick search functionality mapped to the backslash key, it searches for any text on the page.

2: in previous versions I found printing to be a bit annoying under freebsd.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:52 PM on July 1, 2004

linux, opera has tabbed browsing and customizable address bar whatevers too.

with the mouse gestures, the tabbed browsing is a lot easier to use too. they're not on by default, which is handy in case you accidentily gesture close all windows or something, and i still do stuff like that every now and then, but it's so handy. Hold down right click and drag down a little. new window. down and right, close tab, down and left, last tab.

I downloaded firefox a month or so ago, found it couldn't display most of the sites i frequent, and all the features that i could apprently get through extension were dissapointing, non existed, or just a pain in the ass.

the thing that annoyed me most about opera was that it didn't show things properly. it's probably more likely that the sites were all wrong, but in IE that was fine because IE was wrong too. Opera got better, but i still don't have those little bold, underline and link buttons when writing comments. Crashes occasisionally, seems to be whenever i have multiple flash animations in different tabs, which is probably a result of flash not being designed with tabbed browsing in mind more than a fault in opera.

Although IE hasn't made a new version, for those of you that use msn (and I know there will be very few here) the latest version included an MSN toolbar for IE, which added pop up blocking, some searching stuff, and delete private info/ history, among other things. But it doesn't like my computer. MS haven't been sitting on their ass, I guess they are just trying to work in their browser to their overall strategy, while still trying to work out their strategy.

I feel sorry for them sometimes. They have all the money, sure, but linux has all the talent, and yet everyone still views the linux/open source community as the underdogs.
The talent and man power is what really matters in creating a quality piece of software. Money just means marketing, flashy things, tie ins, and all the other superflous crap.

A mcdonalds minimum wage worker and a chef from your favourite restaurant have some sort of cooking competition. Who do you support?
posted by Dillonlikescookies at 8:07 PM on July 1, 2004

I'd been meaning to switch over to mozilla, but I kept on loading IE windows on accident. The latest version of Moz put itself in as the "default" web browser, so I almost never see IE. It's great.

The only problem is, as a web designer, not seeing your page the way most people do. Oddly, though, the majority of visitors to my website use Moz.
posted by delmoi at 8:23 PM on July 1, 2004

MS haven't been sitting on their ass, I guess they are just trying to work in their browser to their overall strategy, while still trying to work out their strategy.

Joel would say that MS has stopped working on their browser purposefully because web-apps are getting too good (long but interesting article):

"So the Web user interface is about 80% there, and even without new web browsers we can probably get 95% there. This is Good Enough for most people and it's certainly good enough for developers, who have voted to develop almost every significant new application as a web application.

Which means, suddenly, Microsoft's API doesn't matter so much. Web applications don't require Windows.

It's not that Microsoft didn't notice this was happening. Of course they did, and when the implications became clear, they slammed on the brakes. Promising new technologies like HTAs and DHTML were stopped in their tracks. The Internet Explorer team seems to have disappeared; they have been completely missing in action for several years. There's no way Microsoft is going to allow DHTML to get any better than it already is: it's just too dangerous to their core business, the rich client. The big meme at Microsoft these days is: "Microsoft is betting the company on the rich client." You'll see that somewhere in every slide presentation about Longhorn. Joe Beda, from the Avalon team, says that 'Avalon, and Longhorn in general, is Microsoft's stake in the ground, saying that we believe power on your desktop, locally sitting there doing cool stuff, is here to stay. We're investing on the desktop, we think it's a good place to be, and we hope we're going to start a wave of excitement...'

The trouble is: it's too late."

He also recommends Firefox

(Thanks for all the Opera reviews everyone)
posted by jacobsee at 8:39 PM on July 1, 2004

t r a c y: check out the Launchy extension for firefox.

*bounce* thank you Space Coyote...! it seems to work very nicely, even if it is one extra click than in ie. /fleeting nitpick

Oddly, though, the majority of visitors to my website use Moz.

91% of my visitors use IE, 3.5% use Netscape, 1.5% use Webtv, 1.3% use Unknown, 0.9% use Mozilla, 0.5% use Webcollage, 0.4% use libWWW, and 0.3% use Safari. the breakdown of IE users includes 85% using version 6, and 0.1% using IE7.01... i guess that's either some spoofing or traffic from people alpha testing... (way back i alpha tested win97 and the versions of ie & oe included blew up my puter real good)
posted by t r a c y at 9:39 PM on July 1, 2004

I don't understand the cries of 'Opera! Opera!' that mentioning Firefox seems to attract. Opera is dire. Whenever I design something, I dread looking at it in Opera. Things can look absolutely identical in IE and Firefox but be completely broken in Opera. Add in that Opera's UI seems to change every six months or so and it includes all sorts of useless stuff that most people don't want or need, and that Firefox has its 'killer feature' (mouse gestures) available as an extension, AND -- to top it all off -- that you have to pay for this crap unless you want to look at ads all the time you're browsing, and... well... I'll stay far, far away from it, thank you.

I'd quite like to try out Safari, though, but unfortunately I don't like paying ridiculous premiums for my hardware and operating system upgrades, and Apple haven't released a version of Safari for Windows or Linux. Such is life, I guess.
posted by reklaw at 9:52 PM on July 1, 2004

I started using firefox the other day (had been using mozilla for a while), but it has crashed several times in the past two days.
posted by drezdn at 10:50 PM on July 1, 2004

we installed it on our secondary machine, which has a heck of a lot more resources available because it isn't used as much as our primary machine, and the thing bogged down so badly once it was running. When going to certain websites it would just lock up.. IE doesn't lock up like that on that machine. So... I suppose we will have to stay with IE.

Shame though because I really liked the feel of the browser itself. It just wouldn't work right..
posted by dawna at 12:20 AM on July 2, 2004

MetaFilter: My browser can beat up your browser.
posted by spazzm at 2:26 AM on July 2, 2004

At work I have a 350MHz Pentium II running Linux. I have the following browsers:

Firefox:
The best browser out there, period. It needs the right extensions installed to be any use though, and the average user is given no idea which extensions they should install.

Also, I have to use the GTK2 build if I want anti-aliased fonts, and on this PC, GTK2 is just too damned slow.

Firefox would be the perfect browser if it used Qt instead of GTK2.

Opera:
Much much faster than Firefox on a slow PC. The biggest complaint I have with it is the lack of ad-blocking. Now I run the Proxomitron (Windows only, but works perfectly under wine) that annoyance is gone.

The M2 mail client is fantastic. I've switched to using that over Evolution.

Konqueror:
Works adequately as a browser, but seems more suited as a file manager. As with Opera, there is no ad blocking, so the Proxomitron helps. Someone really needs to make a dedicated KDE browser based on khtml, like Safari.
posted by salmacis at 2:53 AM on July 2, 2004

t r a c y:

Beware using browser statistics like that. Many non-IE users (such as myslef) send a fake user-agent string for those stupid sites which try to lock out non-IE browsers. I'm currently using Opera, but identifying as IE6.0.
posted by salmacis at 2:55 AM on July 2, 2004

Safari is based on Konquerer/KDE which accounts for each having no ad blocking.
posted by nofundy at 5:21 AM on July 2, 2004

Thank you, reklaw-- I want to be an Opera fan, but it's CSS rendering isn't very good (and that's painful for me to say, since I learned most everything from this book, whose authors-- I think-- still work at Opera) compared to Firefox or IE. The fact it emulates some of IE's mistakes (i.e., float handling) feels like they've given up just want to avoid comments about how sites don't render "right" (like IE).

I downloaded firefox a month or so ago, found it couldn't display most of the sites i frequent

I understand this complaint, but it's hard to blame a browser when the sites you frequent are built incorrectly. I know it doesn't matter to the average web user, but accepting Microsoft's HTML rendering as The Way means giving up on independent specs and standards. Which means giving up on things getting even coller than they are already. I use Firefox because it's the closest thing I can get to some Platonic ideal of web rendering, then I hack back to make things look right in anything else I have to support.

As an aside, my only experience with Safari is on the test station at work where we have a copy of 0.9 or 1.0 on a machine that can barely run OSX. Since we're not going to upgrade the OS further, we seem to be stuck with older versions. Have they cleaned up a lot of the rendering bugs in the newer versions?
posted by yerfatma at 7:29 AM on July 2, 2004

I switched to firefox just yesterday. So far so good.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 7:40 AM on July 2, 2004

Beware using browser statistics like that.

oh it's ok salmacis, it's not like i would use the data to determine how i build my sites... as long as things look fine to me that's all i worry about. also, i have overwhelming evidence that none of my visitors would know how to fake their user-agent string 8-)
posted by t r a c y at 10:50 AM on July 2, 2004

Please point your Internet Explorer to the following URL:

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/

And at least install the following update:

Critical Update for ADODB.stream (KB870669)

This is a fix for the bug talked about in the linked article.
posted by sequential at 12:30 PM on July 2, 2004