Blog ie7

In a recent post, Lee Robertson of Epiblogger gave us seven reasons for why Firefox is better for blogging than Internet Explorer. Actually it’s got nothing to do with Firefox at all, but more to do with the add-ons that are available for it.

Why Firefox should have such a glut of add-ons in comparison to IE I’m not sure - and please don’t mention it’s because it’s open source: Firefox is cool because it’s written by nice people who make their code available for everyone to break, and IE is horrible because it’s written by Microsoft who are all fascists. I digress. I do that sometimes.

I really like Lee and Rhett’s work: Rhett has critiqued my friend Kev’s blog and is a regular listener to, and critic of my podcast. They’re both good writers with good ideas, and this latest post by Lee is no exception: i just don’t agree with the argument.

To demonstrate that, I thought I’d look into each of Lee’s points and try to rebut them, if only for the sake of balance. It’s got nothing to do with fairness, I just think IE7 is a better browser than Firefox. So to point 1:

1. “Firefox might not have been the first browser to offer tabbed browsing, but it is one of the greatest features for bloggers to have.” Agreed, and it’s implemented into the core of IE7.
2. “Firefox add-ons extend Firefox to make it much more than a web browser...” I used to be a desktop software developer and find the continuing blurring of the lines between desktop and web apps unsettling. I don’t like the idea that soon everything from watching IPTV to listening to Internet radio will be done through a web browser. I think web browsers should stick to being web browsers. Lee then goes on to look at the add-ins that make Firefox a great blogging platform.
   1. CoLT is a plugin that allows you to copy and paste the text and URL of a link so you can easily paste it into your post editor. Can I not do that already? I highlight the link text then hit CTRL+C to copy, or right-click the link and select Copy Shortcut. Or am I missing something?
   2. ScribeFire is an alternative post editor, so if you don’t like your WordPress/Blogger/etc interface you can use this. Windows Live Writer does this already, is browser-independent and is surprisingly good. I’ve used it before and was impressed at how well it worked with a standard blogging platform or - I imagine - anything that implements XML-RPC.
   3. FireFTP is an FTP client for Firefox. IE has supported FTP since version 5 (and in stable form since 6), or you can just use Windows Explorer. When Dreamweaver fails to connect I go straight to Windows Explorer for my FTP, and have never needed any third-party software.
   4. Zemanta suggests pictures and links related to your blog post. This sounds really cool, and according to the FAQ they’re testing an IE version. Either way, one point to Firefox.
   5. Web Developer gives you a massive set of tools to help test your web pages’ functionality and appearance. A brilliant add-on and another point to Firefox. If you develop for the Web and use Firefox but don’t have this add-on, get it. Chalk up another one to the mighty ’fox.
   6. Twitterfox is a Twitter client for Firefox. There are a whole glut of these and they’re very useful but I found that - as I documented in Adventures in Browserland - being too closely connected with such a vibrant community was distracting. Nevertheless, it’s something IE doesn’t have.
   7. Dictionaries and language packs What Lee’s referring to here is, not a dictionary but a spell checker. Some blogging platforms include their own but are often horrible (WordPress is no exception), but as I mentioned in How to Make Sense of your Blog, ieSpell is a great add-on for IE that gives you multi-lingual spell checking support that works really well.
3. “Multiple Home Pages - This goes along with tabbed browsing. You can open several pages as your home page.” Very true, but another feature that was implemented at the same time as tabbed browsing into IE7.

Obviously some of the features I’ve documented here are very much in the “me too” vein, where Microsoft have been trying to play catch-up with the rest of the online community, but whether a development camp thought of an idea first or whether they’re implementing something that has gone missed for ages is by the by.

In all of this I’m completely discounting IE6 and all those who have gone before. IE6 is a dreadful browser with more bugs than a dung heap in Mexico - see, I do jokes too - but its successor far surpasses even Firefox in my opinion. I still think there’s no reason to use anything other than IE7 on a Windows machine unless you need to use some of the tools I’ve mentioned that IE doesn’t have (mainly the Web Developer toolbar).

So that’s my rebuttal. If you think there’s something I’ve missed or you just want to call me Microsoft’s bitch or a capitalist pig-dog please be my guest! I am a capitalist pig-dog but no, I have never suckled at the mighty Gates teat, and never will.

I’m a sucker for change. I like to shake things up, and I get bored very easily, so I’m always interested by new browsers, search engines, social networking sites, gadgets and other assorted whatnots. Now Flock is hardly new: I tried it back in 2005 and enjoyed the experience, but it was pretty much useless if you weren’t using del.icio.us... which I wasn’t. However, something spurred me to try it again and see how far it’d come. But first, to give you a bit of background:

Flock is a web browser based on Firefox, but with a much more attractive interface and a whole raft of social features. In fact it is this feature set that fuels its marketing as a “social web browser”.

Now let me get one thing straight. I’ve never liked Firefox, and I don’t like the assertion that it is God’s gift to web browsing. Certainly there’s a hell of a lot to be said for the Gecko engine on which it’s built, but the interface is dull and unfriendly and it’s less flexible than IE6. And why? Even IE6 supports liquid layouts without the use of tables, but which the Gecko engine never did. (I won’t go into the whys and wherefores of that, but it is true).

I wholeheartedly invite someone to supply a link to a site that successfully uses liquid layouts in CSS: I would genuinely like to be proven wrong because it’ll save me a whole bunch of time in the future!

Also the argument that people constantly trot out about it being open source is, for the 95% of people who use it (mostly web professionals because no-one else cares enough) frankly, bollocks. It matters not one jot whether you can download the source code if you’re not a programmer. Unless you’re a developer who wants to get his hands dirty, open source does not matter. There, I said it.

All of the above applies to Windows users only, by the way. For Linux and OSX it’s the best browser available, it’s just that for Windows, IE7 is better.

So, why Flock and not Firefox? Well for one the interface is much better. The dialog boxes are still too clinical and unfriendly for my liking, the scrolling isn’t as smooth and intelligent as in IE and editing in WordPress has some weird side effects. But all of these petty little issues were overridden by the rich feature set. For example:

The People Sidebar shows you an at-a-glance view of your social network identities. You can update your Twitter status, read through your Facebook minifeed, browse your Flickr library and go straight to YouTube...and more besides.

The Media Bar gives you a river of images and videos from sites to which you subscribe, using something they call media feeds, a bit of black magic I still haven’t managed to figure out (it’s not based on RSS, so I’m not entirely sure what is, in fact, the deuce.)

The Feeds Sidebar shows you a folder-based list of all your RSS feeds, marking out those which have unread items. You can read through them, marking off the ones that you’ve read (it’s supposed to happen automatically but rarely works) or easily sharing them via your blog.

If you’re a Google or Yahoo! Mail user you can check your inbox and compose a new message with a mere two clicks. You can share your favourite links via del.ici.ous, keep clippings of web pages and write new blog posts directly from your browser window. The search facility is great too (it defaults to Yahoo! but we all make mistakes).

And it is precisely because of all of these features that I’m getting rid of it. My small but ever-growing RSS list coupled with my subscription to a constantly changing Flickr photo stream means I’m forever seeing little red icons that demand my immediate attention.

This is not Flock’s fault. Of course this behaviour is by design and it’s great, not to mention being what I thought I wanted, but now I realise that these features simply distract me from work. I thought I wanted to be updated when someone published something new, but at the moment it feels like I’m being notified every time someone farts and it’s all too much!

There are a few other issues aswell, like not being able to sync all my accounts, settings and feeds with my laptop or even my Pocket PC, but the real reason is that all these fantastic connectivity tools are just far too tempting. You can’t have a Media Bar and not fill it: that would be a hideous waste of the developers’ precious time!

Plus you could say “why don’t you just ignore the red icons until you’re ready?” but you’re crediting me with self-control that I just don’t have. I want to know what’s going on right now, but my conscience tells me there’s work to be done.

So it’s been a fun few weeks playing with Flock and spending the time getting it just the way I like it - including installing the English rather than American dictionary for the excellent spell checker - and if you can control the urge to press the big red buttons that say “do not press” then check it out for yourself: it is of course free!

And if you feel like berating me for my earlier rant on open source web browsers please feel free to leave a comment: I’m all about debate!

Right then. Start, Control Panel, Uninstall a Program...