Firefox, IE and the legacy problems

To continue the debate on IE versus Firefox, Eduardo Shanahan has an interesting point of view, worth to read.

I agree when he said this:

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Talking about the problems of Firefox using pages designed for IE reminds me the problems caused by Unicode, and a common question: why use Unicode, if ASCII works fine and there is a huge number of applications tweaked around it? I had many problems with my programs making funny things because hacks around sorting and comparison algorithms to gain some performance in old computers (which was irrelevant when finally the old computers were renewed), which keep me undoing hacks for weeks until have everything checked and running fine again.

In practical terms IE has the browser market captured for years. A huge amount of websites are made using the best and worst features that IE allows to use, some of them being really bugs but still used and abused to have cool efects on pages. Now, with Firefox the bugs and features are different, and many things completelly legal under IE turned up as problems while browsing. Most, the community around Firefox encourage the use of CSS and to concentrate in content for pages (may be leaving the hacks for the CSS :-), so I think that it's less probable that somebody would take the time to make the hacks for IE work under Firefox, leaving the programmer with a big load of applications that magically started failing. It's logical to think that the previous situation was best than the actual.

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