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Firefox finally passes IE6

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#31
post #27
post #25

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated. Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE. The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy. I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

due to lack of adblock in chrome.

http://www.mychromeaddons.com/chrome-addon-adsweep-a-chrome-...

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#32
post #11

That second graph is horrendously misleading. It does a pretty bad job of comparing the numbers between browsers.

All the graphs are hilariously bad for a site with tech-geek audience.

They only just stopped using a translucent 3D pie-chart. But it's still tilted, drop-shadowed, single colored and, most importantly of all, a friggin pie chart in which we need to eyeball differences between several items less than 5%.

Just give us a table of figures and a bar chart for love of tufte. If you want to be trendy make it sortable with javascript.

And it's the trends that actually count anyway! I truly dispair every month when they wheel this out.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#33
post #25

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated. Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE. The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy. I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

Exactly the same here! Except I hate it where flash is slower in Chrome than it is in FF, but I can live with that.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#34
post #25

i switched to chrome a couple of months ago and have not looked back. Firefox was starting to feel seriously bloated. Chrome starts up quickly, runs much faster than FF let alone IE. The only reason I fire up FF is to use firebug as the web developer tools in chrome are still a bit buggy. I'm surprised that more tech people don't use chrome.

I've been making the transition myself, doing much the same thing--starting FF to use Firebug, but otherwise leaving it be. Sometimes I miss a few of the plugins, but otherwise, I appreciate the speed and smaller memory footprint.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#35
post #11

That second graph is horrendously misleading. It does a pretty bad job of comparing the numbers between browsers.

Tufte calls it the "Lie factor": size of graphic / size in data.

For graph 2, the lie factor for each bar graph is:

IE: .25 / .62 = .403

FF: .25 / .2383 = 1.04

Safari: .25 / .0417 = ~6

Chrome: .25 / .034 = 7.35

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#36
Just to be clear...

Firefox passed IE6. It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage.

Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#37

I like the arstechnica pie chart at the bottom. I'm guessing a large percentage of their IE users are in fact tied in by office systems and such. I suppose it's a credence to a tech site that its readers are overwhelmingly tech-orientated compared to the widespread market.

There is an important lesson for web devs in that 2nd pie chart. Browser usage is enormously variable depending on demographics. When you weigh the cost/benefit tradeoffs of cross-browser compatibility for your site it is critical that you understand the actual browser usage for your site, not just the internet at large. On a mass-appeal website that pulls in a wide cross-section of worldwide internet users IE may be…

I agree but would add that, in my experience, getting your site to work in Opera is easy, so sites usually do work there. Getting a modern site to work in IE6 takes a lot of testing and hackery.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#38

Just to be clear... Firefox passed IE6 . It did not pass IE in general, which enjoys a huge advantage. Or did I read something wrong? Because at first blush, the version number "6" didn't seem that important in the headline. I'm a little confused, though. Why is every version of FF compared to just one version of IE?

Because every version of FF is more standards-compliant than IE6. This is an important milestone in the adoption of web standards.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

due to lack of adblock in chrome.

I agree - I really like Chrome (and Opera, for what it's worth) and I can generally cope with the normal ads on most sane web sites these days. But some sites go over the top and a few minutes of looking at flashing, flickering, CPU-hogging dross like one British forum I regularly visit (two large Flash banners at the top of the page, one down the side and one large square Flash ad, often an auto-playing video, in th…

I normally unblock the ads on sites I use regularly

Ditto, but I had to use Vista yesterday and tried out IE8 (again) and was so suprised to find 2 popups on the dilbert website. I don't disable popup blocking for anyone. I thought IE8 had it enabled so it was a little strange ... first unwanted popups in years. Blah blah blah, ... as you were.

Re: Firefox finally passes IE6

#40
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the things Firefox supports between versions, it supports them infinitely more consistently than IE. That matters.

I agree. There is certainly far less hassle going between Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.5 than there is between IE6 and IE7 or IE8. That said, this is not really the substance of the article or the article's headline. The headline and the comparison don't really make much sense, unless you're basically trying to promote Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Firefox user and evangelist. But making flimsy comparisons isn't wh…

Not a web developer by the sounds of it?
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