When you compare two objects, you always want to make sure one of them exists, right? Comparing my left foot with Big Foot wouldn’t be much fun, because nobody has easy access to the big hairy guy. So if this is the case, why are people comparing Firefox 1.5 to Internet Explorer 7? That just doesn’t seem to right or too fair at all.

Asa Dotzler makes one of the best arguments about this that I have seen in a long time. Take your fan boy hats off on both sides and read his thoughts with an open mind. He does make a lot of sense.

I’ve seen a number of articles comparing the currently available Firefox 1.5 with the still not available and probably not released for some time Internet Explorer 7. What’s wrong with this picture? Firefox 1.5 should be compared against the competition, not against something that may or may not be released sometime in the future.

Where are all the Firefox 1.5 versus IE 6 articles? It does no service to users to tell them how Firefox stacks up against some future offering from Microsoft. How about telling users how Firefox 1.5 stacks up against the outdated, insecure, and difficult browser they’re using today? (or if they just have to report about IE 7, then how about comparing it to the equally unreleased Firefox 2 or Firefox 3?)

I guess the browser reviewing press really don’t care about actual users who are suffering an increasingly painful and dangerous web. Microsoft announced IE 7 in February of 2005, very nearly a year ago. They claimed at the time that it would be available in the Summer of 2005 and here we are about to enter 2006 with nothing close to a finished browser from Microsoft.

Why isn’t this being reported properly? Why the preferential treatment for Microsoft and such an unwillingness to point out the obvious — that while Firefox continues to ship high-quality, secure, and usable browsers on a regular basis, Microsoft has left its user base of hundreds of millions of people helpless against a deteriorating web for nearly 5 years.

[Read the Rest of Asa's Thoughts!]

[tags]firefox,internet explorer,browser wars,asa[/tags]