ms ie6 hijacked?

[woodturner]

I've used firefox almost exclusively for at least the last year. ... Other than that I've had 0 problems.

I've had two primary kinds of issues with Firefox:

1. It doesn't work correctly with many or most online banking sites, which are written for IE. I can't do online billpay with Firefox with any of my banks.

2. Firefox is very slow. Might well not notice that as a casual user, but as a developer using the browser to display graphs and engineering graphics, it is extremely slow and cannot handle larger graphics and graphs as all.

[woodturner]

So, IE8 finally got there and (OMG) we need to run Vista which has been a total bust for Gates and Co?

Sounds like you have been reading the internet hate sites ;-)

IE8 has been out for a while. Vista is hardly "a bust" - it's a good operating system and when most people try it, they really like it. Far better than XP, which is now in it's twilight years with limited support. In spite of all the MS hating and claims of problems with Vista, the reality is that it has been a good and stable operating system essentially since its inception.

No company provides updates for their obsolete products - you won't find current security updates for obsolete versions of Firefox, IE or any other software.

[rjwaldren]

After using Vista a bit more lately, I like it more than I thought I would...Once you disable the new "features" it's okay. Though they yet again have dumbed down and obfuscated the names of tools especially in Control Panel making it difficult at first to get setup how I like.

MS hating aside, you really should fix your original problem with IE6. Saying firefox is safe is foolish advice and continuing with a possible problem on your system would be more so. Get a good free spyware scanner like MalwareBytes and be sure your system is clean. Then I would still upgrade IE and any other windows updates and service packs you are likely missing.

[crokett]

I've had two primary kinds of issues with Firefox:

1. It doesn't work correctly with many or most online banking sites, which are written for IE. I can't do online billpay with Firefox with any of my banks.

2. Firefox is very slow. Might well not notice that as a casual user, but as a developer using the browser to display graphs and engineering graphics, it is extremely slow and cannot handle larger graphics and graphs as all.

1. I do online bill pay at my bank and CC accounts with no issues. Always have.

2. IE is very slow. Might well not notice that as a casual user, but as a developer using the browser to display my wife's website and 2 others I play with, it is slower than Firefox. Plus it has the annoying habit of showing me what it thinks I want to see rather than what I told it to display. I had to play some games with my wife's site to display properly in IE. Firefox, Chrome and even Safari did just fine.

YMMV I guess. I use Firefox for everything I can, which is about 99% of stuff. I also haven't mentioned all the add-ons it supports that IE doesn't. Cool ones like automatically synching my bookmarks acroos multiple machines. Or the profile backup app that is available for it.

[Rich P]

David

I'm with you on this one. I frankly have not found a financial site (like Citibank, Chase, AMEX, etc.) where Firefox does not work. Hopefully these outfits consider themselves part of the "most". One place it does not seem to work well is in downloading patches from the MS support site...wonder why.

As for speed, unless you are a web developer most of us mere mortals would not notice unless the difference was an order of magnitude.

But, back to the original start of this thread, if you are way down rev on MS then in my experience you are SOL in getting any sort of help or support (not a MS only issue).

Unfortunately, getting current on IE usually involves installing the latest XP (or Vista) patches and service packs which can be a big deal (it can break other apps), not to mention time consuming.

To get a Firefox patch release takes about 2 minutes to download and install and it even tries to reopen all tabs when it has to restart. At least you don't have to bounce the OS 2 or 3 times...

I have seen applications (versions Peoplesoft for one) that would not work well with the latest IE version, which I guess is probably since some developer wrote to an IE (MS) (mis-)interpretation of a W3C standard.

Rich

[woodturner]

1. I do online bill pay at my bank and CC accounts with no issues. Always have.

Some banks do work with Firefox, many do not - especially the larger banks, strangely enough.

2. IE is very slow.

Not sure why you would do that - as I said, as a developer the speed difference is very obvious. If you check benchmark tests (available on the web), Firefox is at least 10X slower than IE. If you are just browsing web sites, you probably won't notice, but it becomes an issue with denser graphics. For example, to display a medium size call graph, Firefox takes about 45 seconds, IE8 about 1 second.

I also haven't mentioned all the add-ons it supports that IE doesn't. Cool ones like automatically synching my bookmarks acroos multiple machines. Or the profile backup app that is available for it.

Um, don't think there are any. Both items you mentioned are available in IE - pm me if you need details on how to do it.

[rcp612]

and just last night I discovered the Grizzly shop planner won't save a room in Firefox.

Really? I'm running FireFox exclusively at home and have 3 different rooms saved at the Grizzly site.
At work I have to run IE for access to some "worldwide" vendor sites. I've asked them about Firefox and they told me "their system was set up to run with the internationally used IE"??

[Rand]

Have you tried looking here: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/807

BTW: Firefox works fine with Wells Fargo online banking and with Vanguard.

[BobSch]

Have you tried looking here: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/807

BTW: Firefox works fine with Wells Fargo online banking and with Vanguard.

And with USBank.

[crokett]

Um, don't think there are any. Both items you mentioned are available in IE - pm me if you need details on how to do it.

Well I have a developer toolbar installed on Firefox that lets me examine among other things the .css values for a page, lets me control which graphics on a given page are loaded and lets me look at actual source for a page, not the source generated by, say, a PHP script. Very useful for tinkering with my wife's website and learning how other things are done. I haven't found an equivalent in IE, but I admit I haven't looked much either. There is also Mozilla's Ubiquity that I love that AFIK is not supported in IE.

As for the 'large banks' I haven't had any problems with FF and Suntrust, BofA, BB&T, Chase, Citibank Wamu, RBC or Capital One. I only have accounts at a few of those now, but used all at one time or another.

This is very much a you say potato, I say potahto argument.


RCP, yeah. I could open the shop planner and create a room but when I went to save it, I got a message back saying there was an error saving it. This happened on my laptop and desktop at home. It worked fine in IE. I've used the shop planner before with no problems but can't remember which browser I was using.

[herb fellows]

After using Vista a bit more lately, I like it more than I thought I would...Once you disable the new "features" it's okay. Though they yet again have dumbed down and obfuscated the names of tools especially in Control Panel making it difficult at first to get setup how I like.

MS hating aside, you really should fix your original problem with IE6. Saying firefox is safe is foolish advice and continuing with a possible problem on your system would be more so. Get a good free spyware scanner like MalwareBytes and be sure your system is clean. Then I would still upgrade IE and any other windows updates and service packs you are likely missing.

I was on automatic updates, so i had sp3.

[herb fellows]

Have you tried looking here: http://support.microsoft.com/ph/807

BTW: Firefox works fine with Wells Fargo online banking and with Vanguard.

Yeah, i did online support. Their answer? You need to buy bit defender for $60!

Other than not knowing what I'm doing, the only problems I'm having so far are that I can't get a gmail icon on the toolbar (as of 3.5), and it takes 6-7 minutes to load, where Ie took 3-4 minutes, when it was working.

[Jim Frye]

FireFox 3.5...

and it takes 6-7 minutes to load, where Ie took 3-4 minutes, when it was working.

Wow! You must have a really old computer or a serious problem with it. FireFox 3.5 loads in less than two seconds on my system running XP/Pro with Service Pack 3. IE6 will load in about 6 seconds. Of course this is a 2.7 GHz, dual processor with 2 Gb of memory. Even if your system is really old and slow, either one of your load times are excessive. My old 300 MHz system with 384 Mb of memory would load IE in less than a minute.

[jonmulzer]

Not sure why you would do that - as I said, as a developer the speed difference is very obvious. If you check benchmark tests (available on the web), Firefox is at least 10X slower than IE. If you are just browsing web sites, you probably won't notice, but it becomes an issue with denser graphics. For example, to display a medium size call graph, Firefox takes about 45 seconds, IE8 about 1 second.

Show these benchmarks tests that show Firefox as slower than IE. Every single one that I have ever seen shows Firefox as the clear winner whether in just rendering graphics or a more real world showing of how well it also utilizes TCP/IP. That is also with all the stock settings. If you go into about:config and do some tweaking in there it REALLY screams. I spend hours a day online dealing with massive graphs and tables, huge .tif images, large documents, etc and I cannot stand to do it with IE. I installed FF on the computers I use at the office and hate working from other locations where IE is the only option. In reality FF is about a thousand times faster than IE in real world scenarios.

The only reason I use IE, is to update Windows. On my Linux machines it doesn't get used at all!

[woodturner]

FireFox 3.5 loads in less than two seconds on my system running XP/Pro with Service Pack 3.

That's unusual - Firefox is usually much slower than that to load. I'm guessing you probably aren't using the tabs and having it load multiple pages on startup? That's probably the difference - Firefox can take a minute or more to load even just a few pages on startup if you are using the tabs.

That's one example of the difference in design that demonstrate the speed advantage of IE. With multiple tabs on startup, Firefox loads all the pages before you can access any of them. IE loads the one that is showing first, then fills in the others in the background, so the first page is available and accessible quickly.