Jump to content

Browser Discussion


Jonas

Recommended Posts

how is opera coming along with CSS3? From what I have read Safari got an early jump on CSS3 and Firefox is doing okay too.

Safari 3 / WebKit has implemented 18 of the 19 CSS 3.0 styles so far tackled by any of the major browsers. Firefox is next with 9 of 19.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Opera is doing very well. In addition to the screenshot boen posted of the CSS3 test, here is a link to the desktop version developers' blog:http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/

...Within a few weeks we will publish 9.5 weeklies on this blog so everyone can start playing with it......As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year of improvements on the rendering engine. This includes improved CSS3 support (text-shadow anyone ), superior SVG support and a brand new javascript engine with support for ECMAScript 4 'getters' and 'setters'. Apart from being the best standard compliant browser, Opera 9.5 will also display even more webpages with bad coding...
There's also a download available for Opera 9.2 which includes a speed dial feature where you can put your most popular bookmarks, with page thumbnails, all on one page to choose from. It sounds like they are adding a bunch of cool features in addition to the rendering engine improvements.And even though this probably won't affect me for a long time, this is really cool:
We're working full speed on porting Opera 9 to mobile phones and our internal build just passed the very advanced ACID2 test. Congratulations to our Symbian team for their hard work! screenshot
ACID2 on a mobile phone.. IE can't do it on a Pentium 4 with a gig of ram.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Issues on Safari for Vista reported earlier by me seem to be resolved. Assuming youEDIT: funny... I was just writing 'assuming you're using the current standards and the correct doctype, Safari is a pretty safe bet for your day to day browsing and testing your websites'.On Submit, this line broke at the apostrophe in "you're". Might have something to do with my keyboard settings. But that doesn't break away too much off my point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

as said earlier, ie will remain on top cus it comes with windowshowever, wat else do most people want in a pc, apart from windows? they want it to come completely ready made, so they can start using it straight away. so if the makers of these sorts of pc's (eg: dell, hp etc.) included firefox in there systems, perhaps the world would be different. so wat we (the web developers) need 2 do is convince companies like these 2 use firefox instead. but how?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

For any Opera fans out there, there is an alpha preview release of Opera 9.5 available here:http://my.opera.com/community/blog/2007/09...se-of-opera-9-5You can get from the comments on that page, and definately from my own experience, that it is really really really fast. I actually didn't think a browser could be this fast (it sounds cheesy), but I click on a link, I see in the progress bar that X number of bytes get transferred and then the page just appears. It doesn't get "built", it just appears, like the previous page was just a div that got hidden. It's pretty impressive. There are also some pretty impressive benchmarks here:http://nontroppo.org/timer/kestrel_tests/In those tests, Kestrel is Opera 9.50 and Merlin is Opera 9.23. It's a little surprising actually how slow Firefox 3 is, IE7 beats it in some areas. I also had to run through the CSS3 selectors test, and it's true!

From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)
ACID2 is also perfect. But sadly they removed the Display toolbar, I'll need to find out what I can do about that.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There is a "post-alpha" build of Opera available via the desktop team blog:http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/Thankfully they added the View (Display) toolbar back, so my web developer toolbar setup is back. The list of issues fixed is on the blog page. I'm going to keep posting updates about Opera 9.5 just because it's a major update, both in terms of speed and standards support. But I figured I would keep everything here instead of starting an Opera topic in case no one cares.Also, if any Opera users have not upgraded to at least 9.23 yet, you should. It includes a feature called Speed Dial where you can organize your 9 most-visited sites, or whatever you want. When you open a blank page it shows the 9 speed dial page thumbnails on the page for you to click on. Makes it very easy and quick to get to your most-used sites without needing to keep them all open or use more then one click. Loading one of those pages is as easy as doing the mouse gesture for a new page (hold down right button, move mouse down) and clicking on the speed dial. The speed dial page also includes a search box for whatever search engine you want to use (configured in the options).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

I haven't read all the posts, so I don't know if this has been answered yet.Does anyone has up-to-date statistics of what percent of the world uses-Mozilla FireFox-IE 5,6 and 7-Opera-Netscape-Safari

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Um, this may seem appropiate her?Is anyone having some freezing problems with firefox, I certainly am. :) I'm using an up to date version, and I was browsing on news.com, part of cent.co.uk. And, when I tried to open another window it wasn't responding or even right clicking was in fade. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

If you want to view pages in Firefox as if they were loaded with the IE engine download this FF extensionhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419Now all they need is to create an opera engine extension for FF and there will be no need to use anything else.On a side note, since this thread applies to browsers: I just wanted to add that although IE7 has greatly improved support for CSS2, they have killed the auto dimension feature. Using margin: 0 auto; no longer centers which forces me to use the deprecated <table align="center"><tr><td>Content</td></tr></table>. I don't know where to report this to M$, but I'm not a fan of using browser hacks and deprecated code.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If you want to view pages in Firefox as if they were loaded with the IE engine download this FF extensionhttps://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419Now all they need is to create an opera engine extension for FF and there will be no need to use anything else.On a side note, since this thread applies to browsers: I just wanted to add that although IE7 has greatly improved support for CSS2, they have killed the auto dimension feature. Using margin: 0 auto; no longer centers which forces me to use the deprecated <table align="center"><tr><td>Content</td></tr></table>. I don't know where to report this to M$, but I'm not a fan of using browser hacks and deprecated code.
To center something you don't have to do that, this solution works to center everything cross-browser:
<div style="text-align: center"><!-- IE centers with the above code --><div style="margin: 0 auto; text-align: left"><!-- Other standard browsers center with "margin: 0 auto", I use "text-align: left" because the "text-align: center" from the parent is passed down to all the descendant nodes inInternet Explorer --></div></div>

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now all they need is to create an opera engine extension for FF and there will be no need to use anything else.
If they created an extension to emulate the Opera engine it would probably be better then the Gecko engine already used by Firefox. Besides, the engine isn't the only reason people use Opera.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

My feelings are pretty mixed as well. I believe the Bush administration prefers the term "cautiously optimistic".First - it's very encouraging for me to see the IE platform architect on the official IE blog simply acknowledge many of the problems that we've experienced over the years. Some quotes:

...in late 2006, roughly half of the top 200 US web sites were in "standards mode". Many of those sites had been "opted in" to standards mode by a tool that generated their content; many of them had probably been hand-coded by someone who was trying to do the right thing, and make their HTML code valid according to the W3C.
Right there, an IE developer is acknowledging that developing according to standards is the right thing (and he didn't even use quotes). That's encouraging.
With this painful and unexpected lesson under our belt, we worked together with The Web Standards Project (in the WaSP-Microsoft Task Force) on this problem.
Microsoft working with WaSP is definately encouraging. WaSP is behind the ACID series of compliance tests.
We realized that the model for web development was really "write to the standard, then test against and fix problems in the most popular browsers."
Again, it's encouraging to see Microsoft acknowledge this because that's exactly what I, and most other web developers, do.The main reason I'm mixed about this is because by default pages will fall back into IE6/IE7 mode, instead of defaulting to IE8 mode. I understand why they did this, because they don't break any compatibility, sites coded for IE6 or IE7 don't have to change anything to work the same in IE8. However - I would like to see them forced to change. I would like to see the default be IE8 mode with the option for older sites to "opt out" of IE8 mode and fall back to an earlier version with a meta tag like they describe. So that's my main reservation, that websites will require extra markup to make use of IE8 advantages. This might mean that people just starting out will learn IE6 and IE7 standards, I would love to see new web developers learn the W3C standards instead. Hopefully new web developers will take it upon themselves to use the IE8 meta tag if they choose to develop in IE and make sure their pages play nice with everyone.That being said, there's one major unstated thing about this that is probably the most encouraging. With this blog post and the rationale behind their decisions, plus the previous ACID2 announcement, it looks like Microsoft is genuinely interested in creating a compliant browser. Through version 6 (and probably 7), it seemed to me that the only, single reason why Microsoft developed a web browser is to lock out every other vendor and make sure people use Microsoft products. With these types of announcements it looks like Microsoft is seriously gearing up towards playing on a level playing field with everyone else and competing right alongside Firefox and Opera, as opposed to using IE as strictly a platform lock-in device. This is the most significant thing about this post from my point of view.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

OK, at first I didn't wanted to say how I feel about it, as I didn't had a clear thought about it. justsomeguy pretty much said everything I was thinking at that point.But after reading over the blog post, and the two ALA articles a few times, and sleeping it over, I think the idea may not be that bad after all.What turned me over was the fact that we're talking about an "http-equiv" type of meta element, and in essence, we could also set up web servers to serve the appropriate header while keeping the markup untouched. Also, as they say, the past is easier to predict (and work around) than the future. We'd only indicate the maximum version of a UA we have tested the page against, not all versions. Once we select a version, we'd only cater for that version and lower.No need to worry the browser (well... IE) of tomorrow will break your content. With the meta thing you lock yourself, and thus make the site immune to this change. The end user doesn't suffer, and you have time to update the site to work for the new browser without being constantly pushed by disappointed people (including bosses and end users alike) or you can abandon the site altogether. And if anyone is so masochistic to want to suffer and fear from the browsers of tomorrow, we always have the "edge" keyword.I still have once concern though. If this model was to be implemented in other browsers, exactly what would happen at the point when "everybody's doing it"? I mean, what if we wanted to "edge" all browsers? Return the masochistic glory of today? Is there a reserved keyword or wildcard to denote all UAs, which we could then (try to) "edge"?All in all, this does go against what we've been learning all those years - that standards are a way to be forwards compatible, and that we should prepare our sites to be forwards compatible, progressively enhanced and whatever. But in reality, a site is either maintained or not maintained. A maintained site will be fixed as browsers are released and non-maintain sites will break, period. This header will attempt to solve that issue.I do believe the masochistic way should be default though. Still, I won't mind it if it's not, as when HTML 5 comes, and XHTML support in IE appears, IE will be by default locked in the earliest version implementing the respective (X)HTML version.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I heard that MS will be forcing IE7 in another automatic update. Although there is an opt-out and some don't have updates turned on this should help get rid of some more IE6. I can't wait for IE6 to be gone forever!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

In past day, IE was my primary browser whenever I browsed the websites. Now I'm trying to use Firefox be my primary. And I think I love Firefox more than IE6 & IE7.The reasons to support I like Firefox more than other:1. Efficient performance:The performance of my meaning is speed of manipulation (CPU and memory consumption) rather than the speed of website opening. I feel Firefox is smoother than IE.2. Multiple page / Tab control:The tab control for multiple pages is feeling good in Firefox. If the plug-in: Tab Mix Plus is installed, the function of this objective becomes more powerful.3. Download management:Firefox has a download management. It contains all download section into a one window instance.4. Download speed:I'm not pretty sure the speed of download file of Firefox is faster than IE. But once I met a case, in the same computer and same environment. I tried to download a file. When I used IE, it needed 30 minutes to complete. Then I changed the browser to Firefox and download the file again, it only needed 10 minutes. I also wonder why the download speed is different of the same bandwidth and same file but different browser.Conclusion:I don't favor Firefox. I just found some advantages in Firefox the IE hasn't. I don't 100% use Firefox anytime, I would change to IE when the some web pages are not supported by Firefox only for IE.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

To me, Firefox is the best browser out there. It's much faster than Internet Explorer, that's one very solid fact. Usually, it takes 3 seconds to open a tab in Internet Explorer 7, in Firefox it takes less than a second. Download speeds for me is the same in IE7 and Firefox, so no differentiation there. Because Firefox is open source, there are unique styles for it as well as plug-ins, rather not for IE7, and less for Opera. At the end of the day, Firefox suits me, and because I need quite a lot of plug-ins, I cannot afford to change to different Web browsers, for a simple fact when making Web templates, or general surfing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Firefox, simply because it's both Open Source and high quality. The plugins are big boosts as well.I have my eye on Konqueror which does have a very nice rendering engine in KHTML (which was I think first to get full CSS1/2/3 support), and it looks like KHTML and WebKit will be becoming much closer again since the split (but there are no plans to merge the codebases fully), so improvements in one should filter across to the other before long. Plus, since Qt 4.4 will have webkit integrated it won't be long before a KPart for webkit appears making Konqueror able to easily switch between the two rendering engines.If the web browsing profile was a bit nicer, I would use Konqueror, but as it stands there are still fairly minor flaws which hold me back (such as not being able to have multiple home pages in tabs).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Attention: we are now entering the twilight zone.

The main reason I'm mixed about this is because by default pages will fall back into IE6/IE7 mode, instead of defaulting to IE8 mode. I understand why they did this, because they don't break any compatibility, sites coded for IE6 or IE7 don't have to change anything to work the same in IE8. However - I would like to see them forced to change. I would like to see the default be IE8 mode with the option for older sites to "opt out" of IE8 mode and fall back to an earlier version with a meta tag like they describe.
This quote is from Slashdot:
A number of readers wrote in to make sure we know about Microsoft's change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/03/0...es-and-ie8.aspxI'm not exactly throwing a party yet, I'll believe it when I see it, but this is another encouraging sign that we are moving towards a standard web.Also, I just saw this above:
Because Firefox is open source, there are unique styles for it as well as plug-ins, rather not for IE7, and less for Opera.
There are quite a few skins and plugins for Opera (they call them widgets), in fact I find the default skin and layout to be almost unusable for what I do. The web developer layout is much better for my tastes, and the breeze micro skin makes things small and light.opera.jpg
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know about you, but this news made my day. As I said before, I wouldn't mind if IE had the IE7 mode by default, but having the IE8 one by default is certainly something I welcome. It actually starts to feel like there are a lot of new people at Microsoft.I think PPK put it best:

Microsoft has decided to put the interests of web standards above the interests of the Intranets of its corporate clients.I advise you to read the previous paragraph again. Even two years ago I had never expected to be able to write such a statement.
Yeah, I wouldn't have expected to be able to even think this until now.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

FYI, IE8 Beta 1 is available for download. It is available for XP SP2. And, yes, it will replace your existing version of IE, which you can revert to by uninstalling the beta.http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/...ess/Install.htmI don't want to install this on my laptop at work but if someone installs it and wants to report back on a few things before I get home I would be interested to see the results.http://acid2.acidtests.org/http://acid3.acidtests.org/http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess I'll reply to myself:I'm running XP SP 2 here with IE8 beta 1. My CPU is Intel E6850 Core 2 Duo @ 3GHz, 2GB of RAM @ 1GHz FSB.Acid2: really close; worse then Opera and Safari, better then Firefox 2, but still not perfectAcid3: 17/100; better then other reports I've seen online for IE, but still far behind Webkit, Opera, Firefox, Safari, et al.CSS3 selectors: Passed 334 out of 578 tests; improvement over other IE versions, still leaves a lot to be desired. For reference, the current version of Opera passes all tests.SunSpider (lower is better):IE8: 6235.0msFirefox 2.0.0.12: 11908.6msSafari 3.0.4: 6419.0msOpera 9.5 beta hung on Crypto-AES (cmon Opera!) Opera 9.26 did well, but since I already overwrote it I don't have numbers at this time.In conclusion, IE8 looks to be still behind the other majors but it's a massive improvement over earlier versions, especially with regard to Javascript and CSS. Anyone with other results are welcome to add them. Make sure to give your CPU and RAM numbers if you run the SunSpider benchmarks, the other tests shouldn't rely on those.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...