I use Mozilla FireFox as my primary web browser. Not, mind you, my only web browser. Why? Because some stuff just doesn't work. I would love to live in an IE-free world, but that's just not feasible right now.
I used to work in the I.T. department at my college, and I would dream of uninstalling IE from everyone's PC and installing FF instead, but that would cause---chaos. Not that it would be worse than the chaos IE causes, but it would be different---when IE breaks their computers, users can (and usually do) see it as MS breaking their computers, whereas if I were to remove IE and force FF on them, it would be I.T. breaking their computers. See? Because they would try to do things?not just stupid things that they shouldn?t be doing anyway, but normal things, sometimes essential-to-job things, and it wouldn't work. And you'd be amazed at the kind of things I.T. gets blamed for when stuff doesn't work just so.
Things like viewing PDFs. Which, sad to say, FF does very poorly. I?ve crashed it countless times just by, for example, clicking the back button on my mouse to go from a pdf to the page I was on before. Thank God for Windows XP, I can?t imagine what would happen if I did that on a Win98 machine (though why I'd be using one of those---anyway, that's beside the point). I can deal with slow-to-open, I mean, IE wasn?t much better in that respect, but the crashing upon closing a pdf page is really annoying.
But this is not the only way in which my beloved FireFox has failed me. The post office has this nifty service where you can print postage labels and request pickups online. Problem? It uses a java applet. And it just. didn't. work. when I tried to print my label. I tried the same operation in IE, worked beautifully, quickly, and the first time. Wonderful. FF uses Sun's java runtime environment, which I hate like poison. It's slow, buggy, and slow and buggy. Which is plenty bad enough. IE works waaaay better, using MS's java runtime. Well, and equally badly using Sun's, but the point is that you don't have to use Sun's with IE.
I really want to love FireFox, and I almost do, but I'm compelled to cheat on it with my old browser, because the new one is just lacking in some really important areas.
Of course, if anyone (haha like I have a huge, technically savvy community reading these entries) knows a better way to accomplish the two above tasks, by all means, lay it on me.
Um, until then, I guess I'll just continue seeing IE behind FireFox's back for the foreseeable future, and recommending it to others only with reservations.