Firefox vs Internet Explorer in Jazz 4.0.5
Accepted answer
Hi Eric,
That is an age-old question, and one that will continue to be asked for web-based applications for years to come. Of course for CLM 4.0.5, both Firefox (version 24 ESR) and Internet Explorer 9 are fully supported, but as far as pros and cons go that question gets a bit subjective ... So please take the following as my opinion, and definitely not as the official word from IBM.
Personally, I would take Firefox over Internet Explorer for a few different reasons. Although IE9 has definitely taken large strides since IE8 as far a performance goes, I think you would still find from experience that IE is still slower in comparison to FF. I also like FF over IE for the wealth of browser add-ons available, specifically Firebug which is invaluable from a Support perspective for debugging requests, inspecting HTML elements, etc. The built-in "developer tools" in IE are a joke, in my opinion ...
But I think the indicator that holds the greatest weight for me is, "What browser do the actual web developers use??" Actually, I think you'll find that the answer to that question is Google Chrome :-) However #2 on that list would be Firefox ESR, with IE bringing up the rear as more of a "testing tool" than an actual functional web browser. Because of this, you'll typically find that the we identify many more functional defects when using the CLM tools with IE, as opposed to FF or Chrome.
Here's a link to the CLM 4.0.5 System Requirements page, which will show you the versions of the browsers we support in our products:
Also, here are a couple of external sites I got from our performance team lead which compare the leading browsers on the market right now. You should look through and see if anything strikes you as interesting:
Hope this helps,
Mike Jaworski
One other answer
The 2 things I would consider would be
- Performance
- Productivity
For performance you will need to do some comparisons on your own system, perform the same action on both and see the difference. My personal experience has been that IE9 has significant performance improvements over IE8 but Firefox is my browser of choice as it has for me the performance edge.
In regards to productivity, I personally use a lot of tabs, and drag and drop of screenshot images from my desktop to artifacts when I work and I prefer to use Firefox for that but others I know use Chrome.
Now this jazz.net article https://jazz.net/library/article/1323 on using browser tab support might help in your decision especially with the capability summary table at the end.