[PLUG] Mozilla v. Firefox

[Carla Schroder]

On Tuesday 25 January 2005 6:58 pm, AthlonRob wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 18:42 -0800, Carla Schroder wrote:
> > If you were tasked with selecting a cross-platform Web browser to 
standardize 
> > on for developing Web apps, would you choose Mozilla or Firefox? Or 
something 
> > else entirely?  Firefox is all fashionable now, but how do they compare 
for 
> > developers?
> 
> What kind of web apps?  Why would they require a specific browser,
> period, or be coded such that two cousin browsers like Moz/FF couldn't
> both work?
> 

In my experience, and I've probably been hanging out with the wrong crowd, web 
app developers target a single browser. (Usually IE. :P) 

Every Web browser has its own idiosyncracies, extensions, and quirks, which is 
another reason developers like to choose one as their main target, instead of 
going insane trying make everything work perfectly in all of them. For 
example javascript handling is notoriously non-uniform. Mozilla and Firefox 
each support extensions, pretty much the same set, but these don't work in 
other browsers.

So another way of asking the question is how do you avoid getting locked-in to 
a particular platform? Obviously Aieee is the king of lockin, and migrating 
away from it is going to cause pain and expense. Suppose you wake up one fine 
day, decide Firefox sucks, and want to move your Web apps to something else- 
how painful would it be? Can you really design complex Web applications to be 
browser-agnostic?

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Carla Schroder
http://www.tuxcomputing.com
check out my new book, the "Linux Cookbook", the ultimate Linux user's 
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