Firefox vs Internet Explorer

 description of Firefox Internet browser.

Article: "Real World Switch from IE to Firefox" - Firefox vs Internet Explorer

 

Upon advice, one of my clients switched their business practice from Internet Explorer to the Firefox web browser.The switch has been highly beneficial, and I will summarize the results here.

Setting

The setting for this migration is a busy medical office where six staff members use a web-based practice management software to do their work. About five additional staff members will soon be migrating from their current DOS-based billing program and paper schedule to using the web-based software. The operating systems are a mix of Windows XP Home and Windows XP. The Windows XP machines will soon be replaced, possibly with Mac Minis running OS X Panther.

The staff use the web browser continuously throughout the day, so reliability is critical. Even a small glitch causes them great consternation. Due to the high-availability requirement, any bugs in the practice management application (written by myself) are logged and quickly corrected. Therefore, problems with the client applications (in this case, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox or Internet Explorer) rise to the surface and are readily apparent.

Prerequisites to Switching

The web-based practice management software is built to the web standards. It does not require proprietary technologies that lock it into a specific web browser. In this case, care was taken to avoid using ActiveX controls and Microsoft-specific Javascript and HTML. The software is just as functional, but not tied into one company's product. There are many practice management applications that lock an office into one vendor, thereby increasing costs in the long run. Use of a standards-based application allowed the office to reap the advantages of switching to another internet browser.

Installation

Installing Firefox on all the computers was a cinch. Since the Firefox installer is under 5 MB, downloading it over the office DSL line took under a minute. The installer worked perfectly every time. The Firefox program was installed to the default directory and Internet Explorer settings were imported. There are no spyware, adware, or extra desktop shortcuts that must be uninstalled later, saving even more time.

Next, we installed Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0. Acrobat Reader runs embedded in a Firefox frame, just as it does in Internet Explorer. Once Acrobat Reader was installed, we customized Firefox. All that was needed was to set up links to the office web server so the staff could log in to their application. Firefox conveniently supports drag-n-drop creation of bookmarks. So, we simply typed the URL into the location bar, and then dragged the page icon to the bookmarks toolbar. Finally, we renamed the buttons as needed by right-clicking on them and accessing properties. All of this setup could have been scripted if there were more PCs.

The office web server traffic is SSL encrypted with a self-signed certificate attached to its private domain (server.domain.local). For all the PCs, we added that domain to the hosts file. The first advantage of Firefox vs Internet Explorer is that Firefox does not require a cumbersome configuration process to trust the certificate. All we had to do is check the "always trust this certificate" option the first time the web site was accessed. Previously with Internet Explorer, we had to find and read several Microsoft support documents in order to learn the dozen or so steps needed to add a trusted certificate. One great pain is already eliminated by switching to Firefox. continue Firefox vs Internet Explorer on page 2

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Firefox vs Internet Explorer - Article "Real World Switch from IE to Firefox" source: somacon.com