I quite enjoyed the last week in Vancouver / Seattle. People should now be fully aware of the fact that I have a slightly off-kilter sense of humour. I can sometimes say odd things at odd times. Generally it gets a laugh, but sometimes it doesn’t.

Then there are times when I quite enjoy intentionally killing a conversation.

This week, a fantastic way to do this was with “I refuse to use FireFox.”

This statement was often made in a room-full of FireFox users. In fact, I only found one other IE-only user at the whole conference.

Now, obviously I toss that out there for a reaction. Because there are far too many people who take these things too seriously. I don’t, for the record, refuse to switch to FireFox for any religious reasons.

I won’t switch to FireFox because I have no reason to do the switch. Let me repeat that: there is absolutely no reason for me to switch from Internet Explorer. And there is absolutely no reason for me to switch to FireFox.

I can hear people running to the comment forms and to Thunderbird to send me nasty emails already. So, no I won’t end this post right there.

FireFox has some distinct advantages over IE. Among them, from my perspective, are:

- Tabs
- Gestures
- Developer toolkit
- Download manager
- Better standards support
- Better security

I’m sure there are others. These are simply the ones I’ve found. You see, every 3 months for the last 2+ years, I’ve given the “latest, greatest OS browser” a full week of my time as my default browser. Obviously, for the last year, this has been FireFox. So, I’ve given FireFox a fair amount of time, and everytime I switch back to IE.

I switch back, because while I see the value in each of the above features, I have no use for them personally.

I don’t use tabs. I don’t use gestures. I do so little web development, I don’t need the toolkit. The download manager’s nice, but I don’t miss it. The standards support doesn’t matter either, as the number of sites which show up wrong in IE is minuscule compared to FireFox. And security doesn’t matter, because I have 10 years experience locking down IE.

Now, that said, I’d never try and convince anyone to stay on IE. Most people love at least 2 of these things. And I could see myself using them in the future. But, basically, at the end of each week of FireFox usage, I ask myself if anything is costing me more time to do than on IE. If it is, I switch back.

I say this, knowing that in about 2 weeks, I am going to give FireFox another week of my time. Maybe this time will be different.

But, the reality is that until there is actually something I am either missing in IE, or hating about my experience, I (as an untypical user) won’t switch.

Feel free to convince me otherwise. Lots of folk at the conference tried and ultimately gave up, because if you don’t need the features, don’t need the standards, and don’t need the security then there aren’t many reasons left.

But, yes, feel free to try. As I said, I have another period coming up, so I’m happy to try anything :)