After hearing a few horror stories about Very Bad Things taking over Internet Explorer, I decided to try an alternative browser. I’ve never had any of these kinds of problems myself, as I have the amazing Google Toolbar to kill popups and I never click “yes” when a webpage asks permission to install a plugin or other object. And of course I virus scan all my downloads and don’t do anything stupid with e-mail attachments.
Still, it only takes one mistake to completely ruin everything and I had heard that Firefox (the browser formerly known as Mozilla) was pretty keen. So I’m giving it a test run. I’m using it right now, in fact.
The first thing I noticed was that I had an “error” in jmadigan.net’s stylesheets that involved specifying font sizes in pixel heights rather then font points. I put “error” in quotes because Internet Explorer was smart enough to know what I was trying to say and displayed the text correctly. Firefox, on the other hand, is apparently a stickler for this kind of thing and some of the text on the site was being super-sized. After a bit of research I determined that the way I had been doing it was indeed non-standard, and thus technically a mistake. I fixed it, along with a couple of other minor bugs that you probably didn’t even notice unless you’re anal like me.
So points go to IE for being smart enough to ignore my mistake, but points to Firefox for not letting me get away with it. So it’s a wash so far. I’m going to keep evaluating Firefox, though. Maybe I’ll go download some pr0n or warez to see how well it protects me from the land mines of the Internet.
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