Firefox!

By Jerry Pournelle

December 26, 2005

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"Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor yet the last to lay the old aside." I encountered that line from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism back in high school, and it struck me as great advice. When I began writing about the Computer Revolution back in 1979 I had to experiment with a lot of bleeding edge equipment, but I kept at least one machine conservatively configured so that I would always be able to turn out pay copy.

When the Internet became important, I started with Netscape, and although Alex and I attended the Microsoft launch of Internet Explorer 3.0, and we installed it on some machines, I didn't switch over on my main machines for some time. Eventually I did, and we've relied on Internet Explorer ever since. This is in part because Internet Explorer is easy to use if you're running Windows XP. Moreover, some web sites are unreadable without IE, while others look better if viewed with Explorer; and despite complaints about vulnerabilities to spyware and pop-up ads, I found Microsoft IE "good enough".

From time to time we'd try alternatives, but I never liked one of them enough to switch over. I kept IE up to date, installed plug-ins to deal with pop-up ads, and while I had some complaints, it was still good enough. I have the IE 7 Beta on a few machines, but it hasn't impressed me yet.

Last night, on Dan Spisak's advice, we switched my main machines from Internet Explorer to Firefox, installed some extensions, and the experience was so good that I am rapidly installing Firefox on all the machines in Chaos Manor. Firefox is faster than Internet Explorer, and by a lot. IE, with all the security updates, runs as if someone had poured cold molasses into your machine. There are long delays before text appears on screen even on text-based web sites. It doesn't feel crisp. And while Internet Explorer will resize text on some web sites--my own included--on others setting it to maximum text size still won't get text large enough for me to read without getting close and squinting.

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