Valhalla Island

Having a chat to my Dad over the weekend about web browsers, he asked “Why should I use Firefox?” My Dad isn’t a technical user, I am and I know why I use Firefox (well.. Camino, sort of).

But the reasons I use Firefox are the kind of reasons that a non-technical user doesn’t care about. They’re not going to use the Web Developer toolbar or Firebug, they probably don’t want to bother with extensions at all or themes or greasemonkey or any of the bells and whistles technical users love.

You can try to explain tabs and a UI search box but they’re things that, if you haven’t experienced them, don’t strike you as ground breaking features that you’re really missing out on with Internet Explorer . You can try to explain that they’ll be seeing pages “how they’re meant to be seen”, they’re rendered according to the markup and styles, they get it right but this is almost a non-issue with people still hacking their way to support for IE. Personally, on personal websites, I don’t bother supporting IE, I haven’t ever seen this site in IE and I don’t care how it looks. If a jimwhimpey.com reader was to switch to a non-IE browser, it’d look much nicer.

Is there a compelling reason for IE users, that’s easily explained to a non-technical user, to switch  to Firefox? Or should they just upgrade to IE 7 and be done with it? Is IE 7 (or 6) more suited to non-technical users?