LAST OT POST: Sorry to continue the off topicness, but this is too much to resist!
You see, from the commercial user's point of view, IE seems fine. It actually isn't that much slower than firefox, though the speed is more noticable VS google's chrome, with page catching, things speed up, so the major way to speed browsing up is to use ONE browser for a while so that all the sites you visit have images, etc; stored on your computer, thus an IE user that switches to firefox may find it a bit slower at first since it must load all the images that IE had already catched (but don't worry, next time its faster).
The biggest Firefox advantage is that it has add-ons, and TONS of them too, as well as the biggest community for developing them (I once gave it a shot, it worked, but the finer points eluded me, and I was out of ideas...). The add-ons do various things, from simplifying tabs, to easy browsing, to speeding up downloads, to letting you skip waiting pages, to letting you read things offline later, to blocking adds, to getting email notifications (unneccessary with THUNDERBIRD!), to handling file formats, to downloading youtube, etc, and that's only a handful of the non-design related add-ons I have!
Firefox has the bookmark toolbar, something that is growing popular in many browsers, which is (IMO) a great asset. I never liked IE's bookmark side panel, and this lets me put my most important links (like this site) right at the top! There's also the smart suggestions of search box, the fact you can theme the browser (I prefer personas myself, but you need a good high speed connection, or it slows you down to load the entire list), and firefox has an improvised 'save webpage' dialogue that DOESN'T stop you from doing anything (only problem: has trouble with stylesheets included by other stylesheets, but rarely a problem).
Now, that's just what the average joe can see on the outside. Tech experienced users know that Firefox's open source platform is its reign, since that lets more people use it and allows bug fixes and feature addons, as well as beta releases, come swiftly and easily. By disabling ipv6, you can speed up FF even more, a feature that I'm not sure IE has (never know
). Firefox complies with W3C standards, which is the organization (World Wide Web Consortium) which standardizes the internet. This is crucial, and being up to date is a selling point for a browser. The Acid3 test allows you to see the browsers performance with the latest standards. FF scores up to 96. Opera and safari are without doubt the most uptodate browsers, acing the test with flying colours, and google chrome takes a 100 too. IE has a miserable 20 (32 on IE9 that nobody has yet).
As a web developer, I can tell you that trying to make portions of the GG work on IE was a FRIGGIN' PAIN IN THE ASS! In the end, I had to disabled the feature as good as I could in IE and issue a big warning! The acid test is another good example, seeing how it looks on IE 7!
Now the fun part: A couple of months ago (3?) I had an alternative IE warning for the start page of the GG that was never used. It is aggressive and TRUTHFUL, and a fun read for those not easily insulted! I made it during a spout of rage a while having IE troubles, but here it is:
http://glest.110mb.com/anti_ie/index.phpi still dont get what is so good about fire fox anyways.
Does that answer your question?
Ok, off topic done, I'd say something ontopic, but I'm at a loss for words...
