In recent days/weeks (seems more like it’s taken years) I’ve been having an extremely intermittent dialogue with a reader of my site who has been imploring me to make the site Firefox-friendly. Actually, while I appreciated the initial input, I was already working on that (hence the gradual changeover to WordPress and modified versions of WordPress in areas such as news and my work section). But ironically, it was during the slow process of looking through WordPress theme templates that my distaste intensified dramatically.
I cannot stand self-appointed Firefox “evangelists.”
I have no problem with Firefox or the people who use it. It’s a nice browser, and has some useful features. I’m not completely sold on the whole tabbed browsing experience – it just doesn’t do much for me – though I can see where a lot of folks believe it is equivalent to the knees, if not the erogenous zones, of any number of species of bee. And I’ll acknowledge that it’s got a security advantage over Microsoft Explorer in that, unlike Explorer, not everybody who codes virii is targeting it. (Yet.) That’s all well and good. (I’m remarkably un-paranoid about my continued Explorer use because I’m responsible and aware when it comes to security upgrades (such as the recent security flaw that can be exploited through a simple freakin’ JPEG – see here for the details and here for the patch).
To put it another way, I have as much time for the small but vocal group of ‘fox fanatics as I have for people who respond to message board threads thusly:
Dude #1: My PC is giving me a Windows error and shutting down every 5 minutes. How can I fix this?
Dude #2: Get a Mac! / Uninstall Windows and load Linux! / [other unhelpful and unrealistic replies here] / STFU n00b!
I bring up the WordPress element in this because, with a few themes I looked at, the layout was completely mangled and there was a browser-detect-triggered script that said “I see you’re running Microsoft Internet Explorer. This theme only displays correctly with…”
Well then, let me tell you where you can put your theme. When so much of the Firefox “movement”‘s beef with Explorer is that Microsoft is forcing the world to accept its own version of web standards, what the hell is that if it isn’t the same damn thing? (Sorry for the language. Not much gets me going like blatant, out-in-the-light-of-day-and-not-even-caring-about-it hypocrisy.)
Could my own site be coded better? Of course it could. If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be making a switch and committing myself to what’ll probably be at least two years’ worth of work to switch 3,000-odd pages of HTML over to a database-driven structure (while also having to make updates and add new content which will itself have to be converted over.) You have to keep in mind, my web coding certification dates back to 1996…when it really didn’t matter how your nested commands were closed out (at least not according to the college instructor I had at the time). I’ve tried to be better about that in recent years, but let’s face it, the site’s been “on the air” in HTML format for 10 years. A few problems have cropped up, and so I’m working on setting up a system that will let me do what I’ve wanted to do all along: concentrate on content, not code.
Trying to get me to switch to Firefox with all the fervor of someone trying to get me to change what flavor of Christianity I happen to be isn’t making the process go any faster. As the process goes along, I’m having my friends and a few theLogBook.com cohorts check what I’m doing in Firefox to make sure it all works. It’ll take time. That’s the best I can do for now.
Please understand, if you’re reading this with Firefox, my beef isn’t with you or your browser. It’s with a small but pesky minority of people who are, even if they’re well-intentioned, giving your browser a bad name. Their mindset isn’t that of someone trying to find an alternative to Microsoft. They come across instead as wanting everyone to do things their way. In short, they’re trying to be Microsoft. And I thought this whole Firefox thing was about providing a viable alternative, not merely doing a swap-out of monopolies.
If you know someone like that…you might want to say something to them about it. Because surely I’m not the only one who’s getting damned sick of it.
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