My Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 face off

Simple, IE7 wins. I share a home computer with a family memeber with weak eye sight. I set resolution to high (on XP, resolution is a machine wide setting), and zoom in IE7. Firefox's only choice is to increase the font size, which screws up web pages' layouts, everybody knows mixing scalable and non-scalable elements is disastrous.

Resizing fonts is not an accessibility choice in Firefox because most web pages won't layout correctly as a result , IE7's page zoom solves the problem

Now that that's settled, let's move on to talk about the 1,000,000 reviews out there that place Firefox as the winner, for the wrong reasons, it's amazing what idiots are giving advices out there; take CNET's for example:

Installation: CNET complains about lengthy download time of IE, without taking into account that IE installation includes system files upgrade. And I'd like to know what browser they use to download Firefox when you don't have Firefox in the first place.

Look and community: Apparently Peter didn't know middle click closes a tab on previous versions Firefox, that tells you how much these folks know about browsers. But that aside, while IE has 95% browser market share, it's baffling Elsa thinks Firefox has a community edge.

Tabbed browsing: If this in itself is a category, where are the talks about the more important components, like rendering engine? And read Peter's review, he gave Firefox higher score because he thinks something can be done with add-on on Firefox, but not on IE. The fact is, everything can be done (with or without add-on), it's software!

Cool new features: Rafe, page zoom is not some fancy little flourishes, it's called accessibility, it's paramount for people with weak eyes. On the other hand, I am confused by the need of a spell checker.

Security and performance: Again, it's sickening that Tabbed browsing is its own category, while security and performance are lumped together. Security is my day job so I know alittle about it. My advise to Peter and Elsa is: if you don't know security, shut up, don't embarrase yourself (Rafe actually has the good sense to admit ignorance) Elsa placed bets on reputation, hello? While praising IE about choice of phishing filters, still ended up giving higher score for Firefox. Phishing is all these people talk about, apparently they all lack fundamental knowledge of security.

My turn on security: If you think Firefox is more secure, ask yourself if you ever noticed Firefox download page is not https (no authentication)? Sure the install binary is signed, but did you ever check? And if you ask me what's the difference right there and then I know you don't know much about security: Because installing a downloaded Firefox without checking the installer's digital signature means you may be installing a hacked version of Firefox (it's easy to hack because it is open source, after all), which jepardizes all your online purchases and e-bankings. IE does not have the same problem becuase IE uses the system's certificate store and those ceritificates and IE itself come from physical media. In all fairness, IE did have more exploited vulnerabilities recorded in the past; but my point is, most (not all) people who think Firefox is more secure don't know what they are talking about.

My turn on performance: On my laptop (a 2GHz machine) the 2 browsers have no difference in performance. But on my home machine, which is a Pentium III 550MHz, IE is consistently 20% faster than Firefox. So for those who say Firefox performs better, I'd like to see a demo.

My turn to vent: My grief is about how people with no domain knowledge on a certain topic, blindly make assertions and accusations base solely on hearsay or baseless personal preferences; in otherwords, because it appears geeky to support open source and feels good to bash Microsoft. It's fine to be a novice if you want to comment on usability of a piece of software; but if you are to give plausible advice about something, say security aspects of a browser, you better know something about https, social engineering, malware vulnerability exploits etc; otherwise you just come off lame and repulsive.

I was going to go into the "Linux is better" myth, but I guess I am just too tired from this whole nonsense...