Brettia

Must…resist…urge…to shoot/poison/burn/infect/feed to sharks/murder…Internet Explorer Development Team….

I wrote a PHP program for a theatre awards organization. I won’t say which. It looks so pretty in Firefox. It validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. The CSS is generated by PHP and is also valid. The application has no known bugs, only some small usability problems. I open Firefox, navigate to the right page, test a few features…all is well. But I open Internet Explorer, navigate to the same page…my beautiful code has been rearranged and coughed up onto the screen in a horrible mess. The divs are out of alignment, the buttons on all the forms have too much horizontal padding, a few things, such as background images and gradients, just aren’t showing up until the user scrolls up and down the page a bit. I check another page. Same problem. Everything looks horrible.

Why am I cursed with the wretched heap of shit that is Internet Explorer? Why must the web development community contend with its lack of CSS2 support, its poor implementation of CSS1, the stupid DOCTYPE mode switch thing, and the fact that it almost seems to render pages randomly, sometimes putting something where it should be, and then putting it somewhere else at other times? Why does Microsoft taunt me so, forcing me to use its operating system (which I don’t much care for anyway), and then, when I try to at least not have to put up with its browser, it bundles it with the OS so that everyone in the world has it. Why are most computer users too stupid to realize that when they click the Internet Explorer icon, they are not “opening the Internet”, they’re contributing to the technological nightmare that all web designers must live with? Why can’t they see that there is a better alternative?

And you wonder, why do I care so much about getting people to stop using Internet Explorer? Put yourself in my shoes. You’ve just spent the last two weeks coding/designing this application. You’re not being paid for it; it’s more of a thing you put on your resume. And now, after the dozens of hours invested in the coding and design of this project, the only thing standing in the way of it being stable, successful, and ready for use is the fact that Microsoft can’t seem to figure out that their browser is the worse piece of software ever invented. I read the Internet Explorer development blog not long ago, and I was shocked to find that the devs actually like Internet Explorer! They say that it provides the best “browsing experience” out there! What the f**k? Exactly how much are they being paid to say that? And how could Microsoft think that web developers are going to be stupid and gullible enough to believe it? They act like we’re all little toddlers, hitting a keyboard with a plastic hammer to create the code for our websites. And when you view a standards-compliant site in IE, that’s what it looks like.

You would think that the IE programmers would realize, being programmers themselves, the frustration that a designer goes through upon finding that IE breaks their site. But then again, anyone who contributed to the mass of bug-ridden code that makes up IE must not be much of a programmer.

At this point, I’m just not going to try to fix the problem. It’s not worth spending an entire day just to find that, though the page finally renders correctly in IE 6, it is now broken in IE 5.5. I don’t even think hell can be worse than hacking a page to bits for IE, only to find that it still doesn’t work right. I can imagine some fiery cave, with lava all around, and Bill Gates wielding a red pitchfork and dressed in animal skins, commanding thousands of poor programmers and designers to make their pages work in IE. And because of IE’s crappiness, they just keep on working for eternity.

From now on, anyone who wants to view a page of mine in IE might as well get used to seeing either a page full of HTML-vomit or simple, unstyled content. That’s all you deserve. If you reject the evil that is IE and move to Firefox, like I’ve been telling you for the last year, you’ll make Firefox one user stronger and IE one user weaker. And someday, whether one year or ten years from now, Firefox will suddenly be the most popular browser in the world, and Microsoft will see the error of their ways, though I doubt they’ll do anything about it.

Reasons to Switch to Firefox

1. Preserve my sanity!
2. Tabbed browsing, no more trying to find the right window.
3. Skinnable, fast interface. Hundreds of themes for Firefox are available for free.
4. Extensions to change browser functionality. These included enhanced tabbed browsing, web developer toolbar, smooth scrolling…if you need Firefox to do something, there’s probably an extension for it.
5. Real popup blocking. Firefox has a much better popup-blocker than IE 6 SP2 or any of those external popup blocking programs.
6. Integrated Google support. You don’t need the Google toolbar, it’s already built in.
7. The fastest and most accurate rendering engine. Gecko renders pages faster and better than MSHTML, IEs rendering engine.
8. Large developer/user community. This means bugs are caught quickly, and releases happen often. Compare this to the 80 million bugs that IE has and the fact that it hasn’t had an update for two years, and probably won’t have one until 2006 or 2007, when Longhorn (the next version of Windows) is released.
9. Cross-platform. You can use Firefox on any version of Windows, on Linux, and on a Mac. Mozilla also has Camino, a browser built specifically for Mac OS X.
10. No fear of being hacked. Virus writers don’t write their viruses for Firefox because it has such a small user base. They would much rather target IE because of the amount of people that an IE virus would affect.

Is that not enough? Download it and try it. You can always uninstall later. And you can find a better feature listing with more accurate data, along with the link to download, at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. The latest version is 0.9.2.

Computer Update

I’m on step 4 of 8. It’s being assembled. I got really lucky because I was able to get the last Athlon 64 3200+ processor that they had in stock.

Second Computer Update

I’m on step 6 of 8: “Final Quality Control”, which I suppose means testing and stuff. Meaning that assembly and stuff is done, so it might ship tomorrow if I’m lucky.

Third Computer Update

I’m on step 8 of 8! The system has shipped via FedEx Express and should be here by Thursday or Friday! Yay!