Mozilla, (which will soon be released as Netscape 6.1), currently takes about 600ms more time to render a webpage than Internet Explorer. It also uses 10-20MB more memory. So why do I use it? Because at least it fucking renders things properly.

I redesigned my last-n page today. I figured that I'd test it in IE5.5, Mozilla and lynx, and tell everyone else to get stuffed. In my opinion, if you're using any IE older than the current release, you're open to all sorts of security exploits, if you're still using Netscape 4.x, you're just a masochist, but every site should still be friendly to text-mode browsers.

The resulting code for the front page was pure elegance. There was no table code at all (you should only ever use tables for tabular data), all the various blocks were done with styled DIV tags. I wrote the page with the W3C specifications in front of me, and aside from one place where it turned out to be me misinterpreting the CSS2 specification[1], Mozilla displayed the resulting page perfectly.

Internet Explorer 5.5, on the other hand:

• Didn't understand position: fixed at all.
  
• Couldn't draw within the lines - text was drawn over the borders of the surrounding divs.
  
• Borders on either side of the div randomly vanish.
  

Mozilla has been the victim of an enormous amount of criticism because of its bugs, despite the fact that it's not even out of beta yet. Any of these bugs would be a milestone-stopper in Mozilla, and certainly a release stopper, but they managed to make it to a release version of IE5.5. I wondered if the problem was fixed in IE6, so I asked Lonita (who has IE6 beta installed) to check the page for me. The results were even worse (the screenshots she sent me are at http://www.pastiche.org/~cmiller/s1.jpg and http://www.pastiche.org/~cmiller/s2.jpg )

So sure, the browser I use is slower, uses up more memory, and has a few quirks left. But at least it does what it says it'll do - it draws webpages properly.