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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

> It was such a relief to move away from IE and all the arcane levels of details I had to remember ...

Why hadn't you moved on to Firefox?

Back when Phoenix launched it was not a reliable alternative to IE or Opera, it was more like a sign of protest. You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

I remember developing web pages with the purpose of ensuring they would work in both, so Phoenix was my main driver, but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE, it was always a monumental effort. Sites with buttons for “go here for pheonix/go here for ie” where common. My friends who worked in the windows ecosystem mostly saw Phoenix as some “crazy hipster trend” and didn’t have a care as to if anything they made worked in it or not.

There was half a decade between the Mozilla Browser stopped being called Phoenix and the launch of Chrome. Firefox usage peaked at some 30% of desktops the year after Chrome was released.

It's not like Firefox wasn't a "viable" browser at the time. It was quite mainstream.

Moving from IE to Firefox was a much more memorable experience than going from Firefox to Chrome. But yeah, first Chrome was fast. I’m quite sure any of the today’s browsers would be fast if running in the pre-react world though.

> You’d use it to tell the world that you didn’t care if most of the internet didn’t work for you, as longs as you where “sticking it to the man”.

This is eerily similar to how I feel about using Firefox today. Not that I am sticking it to the man - I just want there to be diversity in the market and not have every viable option be a way for a megacorp to have presence on my computers.

>but whenever anything was “done” the real work started of also getting it to work in IE

due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

As others noted, Firefox was around for a long time before Chrome and was not called Phoenix all that time, so it sort of seems like you looked at a piece of technology a month after launch, didn't like it, and refused to took at it again for 10 years? I mean that right there is at the level of moral complaints, not just performance or rendering.

> due to IE not being a standards compliant browser.

Yes, but unless you wanted to exclude >90% of users, you could still not ignore it...

I never said one should ignore them, I just implied the post seemed to slam Firefox ("Phoenix") for a situation that was IE's fault.

I’m still using Firefox, I was adding the perspective from back in the start of “why didn’t you just move over from IE” like everyone would just move because an alternative existed. Most didn’t and i get it. I am not the norm. I also ran gentoo back then which is not an option for most computer users.

Also being “technically most standard compliant” doesn’t mean anything to the average user who’s just angry that their browser isn’t showing their MySpace page correctly.

Calm down. Not every bit of real perspective on software short of “Firefox is perfect” is an existential criticism of it existing.

It absolutely was. Phoenix became immediately superior to IE.

Never fell for the Chrome trap.

Seriously never used Chrome?

I never used it as my main browser

I've been using Firefox since I think basically its 0.1 release as Phoenix in 2022 and it already worked great at the time, no need to keep IE around (which I couldn't after switching to Linux in 2003). In fact, for years it was my "always works" fallback because I was using Konqueror otherwise. Firefox had two name changes in quick succession - Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, but it was already over in 2004 so it's weird to keep calling it Phoenix for the more important time after that. In response to the name changes, there was a funny extension to randomize the name so you got "Firechameleon" and "Hypnodinosaur": https://github.com/miraleung/firesomething-2/blame/master/de...

Phoenix launched right at the peak of IE’s market dominance and that name lasted about a year, so if you are remembering it that way, it was very early. By 2005, Firefox had ~10% global market share; by the time of the first Chrome release in 2008, Firefox had ~25% global market share[0]. So the OP had plenty of time to switch away from IE before Chrome showed up.

In any case, nobody got to quit dealing with the misery of IE6 until some YouTube engineers did a little caper[1] that gave everyone else an excuse that their big brain business bosses would finally listen to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars#/media/File:Brows...

[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Because your clients used IE by default, relied on ActiveX controls, or were forced to by corporate IT policies.

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