Rrg.
While many FF proponents tout how Firefox can work with anything (except for M$’s evil Windows Update site), and thus they never use IE, I am not nearly so lucky. IE is our company standard, and any number of applications we have require its use, either explicitly or because they don’t display correctly otherwise.
I don’t necessarily blame FF for this — I’m sure the majority of it is a matter of either IE-“standards”-specific coding (ActiveX or not), or, in some cases, just goofines. For an example of the latter, we use an aging version of eRoom for some document collaboration projects. It does not (at that version) support Firefox — and it confirms that to you by not letting you even try. Click on an eRoom link, and it routes you to a “this only use IE version xyz or Netscape 4.7” page. Now, I suspect that if it supports NS 4.7, it will support FF, but the program doesn’t even give you a chance.
Now, ieview extension. If I go to a page that doesn’t work with FF, I right-click and choose ieview from the context menu and the page is opened up in IE. Nice. Alas, that doesn’t work with eRoom, since you’re not on a malformed page, but on the error page.
So if someone sends me a link to an eRoom page (again, this is an older version of the ap), I have to cut and paste the link into IE, since I have (like all truly sane people) FF as my default browser. And Outlook doesn’t support a “Send To” context item for links (I wonder why …).
Rrg.
Anyway, I am used to having apps (our payroll system, our expense report system, various specialized HR apps) not working under FF. And that’s vaguely annoying, but okay, since I still like FF enough to want to use it all the rest of the time, and on the vast majority of the sites that I visit.
Interestingly, the next version of ieview will let you configure a list of IE-always sites, so you can still open stuff up from inside of FF and have it open up IE automatically. That’ll be convenient.
Just wanted to gripe. Sorry. Go on about your business.
I often have a problem where Firefox hogs 100% of CPU cycles – it seems to be related to how FF handles Flash content. Also FF is far from bulletproof as we’ve had a couple systems pretty badly infected with spyware when the user swears they never touched the blue e. My bank also rejects FF, saying it doesn’t have encryption (???).
Security and system issues aside, FF is just so much more efficient in use (especially when you’re searching for something) that I become visibly annoyed when using a machine that does not have it.
I’ve heard about the Flash problem, but haven’t seen it myself. I don’t know if it’s related to some of the Flash-blockers or managers that are available for FF.
Spyware can certainly hit through any browser; FF tends to be *more* secure (fewer system hooks, better defaults), but it’s not bulletproof by any means (nor is it touted that way).
Your bank has a screw loose. 🙂