Good technical reasons to use Mozilla

Others have commented on the recent goings-on with Mozilla and browsers in the larger scheme of things (see Tim Bray, Jon Udell, and Dave Winer), but recently I've had three interesting problems with browsers and I'm glad that I had Mozilla on my machine to help me get out of the jam.  (I use Mozilla as my regular mail client, though I will admit that I use IE as my browser.)

SITUATION #1: This is a relatively minor thing, but I was installing a CGI-based application on a development Apache server that listens on an odd port, 9003 in this case.  After I configured the app, the first and second pages seemed to work ok, but the third page gave me the dreaded generic "This page cannot be displayed" IE 404 page.  The Address bar in IE still contained the same URL I was already using successfully (only with different query string values) so the "Cannot find server of DNS error" on the IE error page was really confusing. After searching Google, various FAQs, and the appropriate mailing lists, I decided to load the app in Mozilla, and bingo!  Mozilla said "The connection was refused when attempting to contact my.server.com:9002".  Ah ha!  Where the IE page gave me no real information, Mozilla pointed me directly to the cause of the failure.  The CGI code had required that I specify the hostname and port on the Apache server so that it could write out redirected URLs properly, and I had inadvertantly entered "9002" in the CGI code.  I changed it to 9003 and everything worked.  Small (and perhaps careless) error, but things like that happen when you're mucking around with systems and Mozilla saved me from myself.

SITUATION #2: In a story like Jon Udell's just-posted "The best way to can spam," we have an in-line graphic thumbnail that leads to a larger graphic.   After the story posted on Friday afternoon, one of our few Safari users noted that the thumbnail image didn't appear in the browser, and when the larger image was clicked on, a bunch of binary garbage flooded the browser window, but with a tell-tale "GIF89" header visible.  I confirmed the same behavior in Mozilla on Windows XP.  The cause was upstream in our production process -- some of our Mac users along the way didn't add the .gif extension to the file (you don't have to with a Mac) and both Safari (ironically) and Mozilla choked.  I couldn't find anything in the W3C's documents on HTML/XHTML to suggest that providing file extensions to image objects was required or even recommended, but Mozilla broke the tie and helped me decide whether Safari or IE was the oddball.

SITUATION #3: If you've ever worked with elaborate redirection schemes or mod_rewrite, the error messages in Mozilla are extremely helpful.  Mozilla has a nice error message that lets you know when you've created an infinite loop, while IE just hangs.  I haven't done that in a while so I don't have the specific error message in front of me, but it's saved me a few times.