Every now and then I hear people talk about the dumbest things, but they keep spewing it out as if it were gospel. It must be true, they conclude, because everybody else says so. It hurts me more when it comes to technology, because it’s something that I know a bit about.

Overrated means something is given more credit than it’s due. You’ll notice that some of the things I’m going to list may be something you believed to be true. By listing it here I don’t mean that it’s a bad thing, as many of them are great for people. I just mean it’s not as much of a Good Thing as you’ll be led to think.

1. Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is completely overrated.

You hear about it in news all the time. Why is this? It is because the developers of Firefox are in it for the fame and tech-savvy chicks. They collected donations from thousands of people to produce a full page advertisement in the New York Times featuring the names of the donators. They spend more time on promoting Firefox than on working on the features that make it a better browser. It’s cool for teenage girls to have a “GET FIREFOX” button on their Xanga site.
As for the features of Firefox? Let’s explore some of these:

• Firefox is faster: This is untrue. Firefox may be a smaller install, but at its heart it is only a web page viewer, with none of the features found other browsers. Page loading speed won’t be any faster, since you are limited by your Internet connection. The Gecko engine (no, Mr. Zealot, it’s not the Firefox engine) is also used in AOL’s Netscape browser, but do you hear about it as much? Firefox’s extensions also pose a huge problem when they conflict with each other.
• Firefox is more secure than Internet Explorer: Not really. There are more problems for Internet Explorer because of its use of ActiveX, which gives more access to a computer, but IE6 has come a long way towards warning users. Also, more malware is targeted at Internet Explorer since 90% of computer users use it, giving it a huge user base compared to Firefox’s. With Firefox gaining some users, more exploits have been found in Firefox. At the end of the day, problems are usually caused by uninformed users who navigate to pages featuring “FREE XXX” and “DOWNLOAD WAREZ!!!”
• Firefox has tabs: Some people even think that Firefox invented tabbed browsing! Opera made it popular with their browser (Opera is also faster and slicker, IMO), but the first tabbed browser was Internetworks (I can’t find a link).
• Firefox is free: Cool. So are STDs.
• Firefox is open-source software: Guess what? Firefox is based on Mozilla, which is based on (gasp!) Netscape! Furthermore, open-source doesn’t always mean the software is better, just that anybody can mess with it. I’ll discuss Open-Source in another Overrated article some other rainy day.

This ClashBang.com article was written by Chris Chu. Tired of privately venting his frustration in vain, Chris decided to share his discontent with the rest of the world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 1:42 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.