Saturday, March 21, 2009

Firefox

Readers of this blog seem to be great Firefox users. Only 34% use IE, according to my tracker. I myself have always used IE on the grounds that around three quarters of all internet users do so and I like to see my pages as others see them. Additionally, when someone complains that one of my pages looks funny, I always say "You must be a Firefox user" -- and that mostly hits the target.

Both IE and Firefox have their advantages but one big disadvantage of Firefox is that it handles out-of-range sizes very erratically. If I upload a graphic or some such that is too big for the space allowed, Firefox does strange things, whereas IE mostly handles that problem seamlessly -- by expanding the space or some such. And when I goof in that way is when I get complaints from Firefox users.

I have however been having a lot of trouble with IE7 lately. It keeps freezing up my screen. I have done all the things that MS recommends to solve the problem, including a big virus check, but the problem has persisted. So I have just changed to Firefox -- and the freezeup problem has vanished!

One thing I found very soon after loading Firefox was however something that was both no surprise and yet also very vexing. I found that the sidebar in most of my blogs was empty. Why? The usual problem. I had put a graphic there (the Israeli flag) that was too big for the space allocated. As an IE user, I had never realized that was a problem. So I have now loaded a smaller version of the graphic and all my sidebars should once again be "live". I hope that they are also worth reading.

I now run the risk that some things which look OK in Firefox will look funny in IE. So if that happens, please tell me. I noted that sort of thing when I was an IE user looking at a blog done by a Firefox user. You can't win 'em all!

For the record, there are a lot of Firefox features that I love and I expect that I will eventually find my way around some other features that bug me.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You could always use Safari!

Anonymous said...

Are you aware that IE8 has just been released? I've been using it since the second beta and even then it was plenty better than IE7.

Anonymous said...

Usually when IE is freezing like that it is caused by the Activex add-on for Flash. The flash code for firefox is different and seems to have fewer issues. Sometimes, but not always, you can uninstall flash and re-install, and IE is happy again.

JR said...

Yes. I did suspect Active X was part of the problem

I got a lot of prompts about it

I think I will wait for IE8 to settle down before I try it

Thanks for the comments

Anonymous said...

I use google chrome as my browser. It's super-fast!

Anonymous said...

Firefox allows use of custom personal CSS sheets (cascading style sheets). So I'm viewing you on a micro Acer One laptop with 1-2mm high text in VGA mode (1024 X 600), using a screen (pixels chosen carefully) font, running a tiny version of XP Pro, lacking all bloat. To make up for the mere 12GB solid state drive, I velcro a 500GB back-pocket drive to it as needed. No ads appear (Firefox plug-in zaps them). My tabs are multicolored down the left side (plug-in). Etc. An invisible folder contains Firefox's userContent.css or something like that. I wrote a style sheet that only screws up artsy sites that put transparent GIFs over images to futility stop me from downloading them. A couple right clicks and I have my personal copy for personal use of their image. They try to hide it further? Boom. Plug-ins to the rescue etc. In 30 years, when they are long gone, I still have a copy for my archive.

In other words, what I see on your site, and most of the kids are running circles around me as I speed type on this mini-keyboard, is fully under my control.

-=NYC=-