(Whoo alliteration!)
A couple of weeks ago, I was in the midst of cleaning up this blog after the transfer to Wordpress. I had imported the old posts, installed a new theme, and had even tweaked the theme to make it look as it does now. Everything appeared to be fine, or at least it did in Firefox. I decided to open my long-neglected Internet Explorer 6 and view the blog.
Well, lo and behold, a Javascript error pops up. Great. Now, I know even less about Javascript than I do about CSS. Tired from hours of working on the blog, I thought to myself, "Screw it. If someone is backward enough to use IE then they'll have to deal with the error."
I shut off my computer and didn't give it a second thought.
Today, as I was looking through some Wordpress themes for a friend who is switching over from Movable Type, I came upon an upgrade for my current theme, one that would fix the Javascript error and stop the error messages in Internet Explorer. I sighed, knowing that I'll probably be installing the new theme later today and spending a few more hours changing it to my liking. Then, a new thought came into my mind.
Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser out there today. My parents would still be using it if it weren't for me installing Firefox on their computer. Even though IE is pretty terrible, and I personally dislike it, doesn't mean I should discriminate against people who use it. OK, "discriminate" might be too harsh of a adjective, but you get the point. If people are trying to access my blog, then I shouldn't allow anything to get in the way of it, even if it's just a little pop-up message. Access to information shouldn't be blocked, and even little nuisances like browser incompatibility can begin to add up like so many strips of red tape. Ever given up on viewing a site just because some fancy plug-in wouldn't load, or half the links led to 404 pages?
Of course, this doesn't mean I'm going to jump off the Firefox ship anytime soon, and I certainly wouldn't want to be anything like this guy.
Firefox ain't the holy grail. It gets along badly with a lot of sites that IE handles just fine.
I keep IE around as a back up, and mainly because Firefox trims the alt-text on Achewood strips.
No, I agree, it ain't, and nowadays there are more pop-up ads that are designed to bypass Firefox's pop-up blocker. At least I've had fewer crashes using FF.
FF's add-ons can be plenty useful, though. I've found this FF add-on for long alt/title texts.
I've relly enjoed Firefoxsrelatively new spellchekr.
Ooh, add-ons! I often forget about those.
Also, I'll note that the sites that clash with Firefox have an odd tendency to be affiliated with Microsoft. Just sayin'. Yeah, spell checker, saying is sometimes spelled that way. Cope.
Cool add-on — the only thing I have used Safari for in the last year is to read Achewood tooltips. PROBLEM SOLVED.
The one thing I find really crappy about IE is that there are no tabs. I love tabs, and I can never use them at work. Sniff.
Tabs are so excellent. I believe IE 7.0 has tabs, but I ain't downloading it to test it out.