My Microsoft career left me a heavy user of Internet Explorer rather than Firefox or one of the other browsers.  But not surprisingly Firefox seems to be the preferred browser among the open source community, and at times I need to use it to test or debug content on.  One would think these two products would be pretty similar, especially given the anti-IE campaign waged by some Firefox users.  I was prepared to abandon IE for a better alternative if that’s what Firefox proved to be.

But I found there are substantial differences in the user experience between the two products.  Here’s my initial reaction to the strengths and failings of each of the products:

1. Cleartype rocks.  The antialiasing, especially on small fonts, makes reading content in Internet Explorer a far better experience than in Firefox.  Especially if you switch between the two, you get an unpleasant shock at the jaggies in Firefox, and breathe a sign of relief returning to comfort of IE.  Score 1 for IE.
2. Incremental find rocks.  IE7’s find (searching for text within a web page) is sluggish to bring up and primitive.  I often type control-F, start typing the search term, and then have to wait around for the find dialog to come up - and retype my search term that has fallen into the gap.  By contrast, Firefox’s find is snappy, unobtrusive, doesn’t obscure the page (it’s a toolbar on the page bottom), and the incremental behavior means it usually finds things before you even finish typing the phrase - like it’s mind-reading!  Again, it’s a hard jolt returning to IE after using this capability.  Firefox wins round 2 handily.
3. XML browsing support.  For most users browsing XML is a secondary or tertiary feature.  For me, it’s a crucial development tool.  And although I’ve been somewhat disappointed in IE for not advancing the state of the art there since what we shipped in IE5 way back in 1999, I’m even more disappointed that Firefox is still significantly behind.  For instance, IE does a much better job of displaying a raw XML file using the default stylesheet I wrote for it.  Firefox’s rather sluggish XSLT implementation doesn’t support namespace nodes and thus namespace declarations aren’t there, stylesheets that manipulate QNames in content fail, and so forth.  Imagine my surprise that Microsoft’s "proprietary" product supports open standards better than the "open" product!  This makes Firefox completely unusable as an XML development tool.  IE wins round 3 handily.
4. Integrated favorites and typeahead.  IE has a really convenient feature I use all the time.  When you add a page as a favorite (bookmark), it will appear in the typeahead list in the address bar.  This is my main navigational metaphor for my favorites, since once you get beyond 20 or 30 the menu approach breaks down.  One nit though - only top-level favorites work - ones grouped into folders don’t appear.  So you do have to choose between maintaining a navigable hierarchy and having a flat list with typeahead.  Firefox probably has it’s own navigational metaphors, but for my money IE wins round 4.

Many people love the extensibility features of Firefox, but although I installed GreaseMonkey, I haven’t taken advantage of it much to date, so I can’t give Firefox any props for that.  I’m going to have to leave the totally subjective score at:

IE 3 - Firefox 1

So for now I’m not planning to switch.  And I’m not going to give as much credence to those who badmouth IE as a an inferior product until there’s one that exceeds it for my personal productivity.