
There was a time when I told everyone I knew (who used Windows) that they needed to switch to Firefox. Needed. Those days have been over for a while, though I still tend to include it when helping people set up their windows boxes, it is just no longer such a necessity. Internet Explorer though I may be reluctant to admit it has become a much stronger browser. There were the days, back when Fire*bird* & Mozilla existed as two distinct products, when I would use both and thought the dinosaur was silly, when some days I would switch to Opera just to check it out play with the zooming and switch back, and when IE was simply intolerable.
Then Safari happened. And I was really excited and life was great except Safari wasn’t. I mean, it was alright, tolerable, it had tabs – right? But it needed some time. Safari 2 was better. Safari 3 is pretty amazing. I have used it consistently since the first beta I could get, and haven’t even thought about switching. Which is what I did back in the Safari 1 & 2 days, every few months, Safari, Camino, Opera, Firefox, it was a carousel of browsers that changed like the seasons, except faster.
Well the carousel is still spinning and Firefox 3 came out at 1pm Tuesday. And for the next 24 hours they promoted Download Day — and as part of the new hype published this chart (which can be viewed at firefox.com with safari):

And so this made me mad. Real mad actually so this is where the hate comes on. The thing is though, it made other people mad too, and some of them say it better than I can. The short version here, is that this chart is … well a lie, or huge slant at best. I know that this was probably put together by some marketing people to make the browser look amazing (infact they really only made one chart – the only difference between the v. safari chart with the v. internet explorer chart is “Battle-tested …” is changed to simply “Superior speed and performance”) but could they not have filled the obviously one-sided chart with things that Firefox is actually better at … like sean here did.
And the features I actually care about, such as maybe say web standards, maybe CSS3 functionality. How are they doing with that? Not well. (again said better – and this is really worth the read) (for those of you who aren’t going to read that whole link Safari & Opera both passed the Acid3 test – web standards – almost immediately, racing to finish, while Mozilla complained they were too busy with their product cycle(!) to deal with … web standards).
Well, when I start choosing my browser based on the number of downloads it gets (which PS is not a measure of usage, if I was a cult follower I would dl it fifty times too) and certainly not by if it has an entry in the guinness book of world records (doesn’t that pair it with some sort of deformed child and some extremely obese man) but possibly by the features and support it has. Firefox, I had thought was at one point about making the best web browser (or at least taking on the monopoly … Safari with its no more than five percent marketshare really a glowing target now?) and it just seems like they have left that behind and are now all about the publicity. Then again, maybe if they make the back button a little bigger, I will be won over.