Pankaj Kumar's Weblog

Why am I using Firefox much more often

Like most of us, I have been a IE only user for a very long time. But this is changing. It started with a Firefox download few months ago out of curiosity -- there was so much buzz around it that I just had to check it out. It was good but not compelling enough, at least for me, to force a switch from IE. I realize that a complete switch is impossible even now, but what I noticed that I have been firing up Firefox more and more often because there are things that I cannot do with IE.

1. Last week I was dabbling with some DHTML, CSS and JavaScript programming and was particularly annoyed with IE's lame error reporting. Tried Firefox and just fell in love with its JavaScript Console. It not only gave a list of meaningful error messages but also allowed the source file to be opened with a simple mouse click!


2. While trying to figure out the page layout created by an AJAX app., I felt the need for a tool that could show me the underlying DOM tree. And I found mention of Firefox DOM Inspector on the Web. Though I had to do a re-install of Firefox with custom install option, it was worth it. Don't know how I lived without it for so long!


3. I tried to submit a Book Review yesterday to Slashdot. failed with IE, but succeeded with Firefox. Looks like their new CSS doesn't play very nice with IE. In fact, today also I saw overlapped and at places, missing text in certain Slashdot stories. There was no problem with Firefox. Good to see the same trick that MS used to promote IE be used against it (though, perhaps unintentionally).

At first sight the last experience appears to be unrelated to the previous two. Though I think there is a deep link -- because Firefox has so much better support for Web developers, developers are more likely to use FireFox for developing rich interactive sites and come back to IE only later. This is what seems to be happening with Slashdot and is likely to happen many more sites as they move towards DHTML, CSS and AJAX.