Browser Discussion

[aspnetguy]

My setup is fine for now sinceI only use it for testing. I do have a standalone FF1.5 with FF2.0 on the same machine though

[vchris]

Is there really a difference between ff1.5 and ff2?

[Anders Moen]

Of course I haven't uninstalled it. I don't think it works?And if I install, it'll be a little hard to make my sites work in IE too.

[boen_robot]

Is there really a difference between ff1.5 and ff2?

Yes. A lot of rendering engine improvements. Of course, if you want a cross browser site, this won't be much scince IE's little progress.

[smiles]

18 pages for discussing, it 's hard for me to read ... so maybe you have many reasons about why Web pages look different with browser If yes, tell me shortly about them thanks !!!

[justsomeguy]

Because web browsers do different things. Microsoft beat Netscape by essentially bundling the browser with the OS and introducing features which IE supported and the other browsers did not. Eventually, people started using those features, and you get sites that work with one browser and not with another. That is starting to change as Microsoft is getting more competition from vendors interested in working with the standards groups instead of against them.

[jah-dev]

It doesn't look like this has been mentioned here so thought I would point you all to...http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IEAn excellent install that puts IE versions 3-6 in a folder on your start menu. Very useful for testing purposes. Especially as IE5 still accounts for up to 5% of users...Also good if you want to laugh at how badly IE4 renders some modern websites

[Skemcin]

for an interesting, somewhat controversial side bar discussion, you might interested in this post:http://w3schools.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=11917

[falcifer]

Personally, when I did loads of HTML and JS for blogs, I had IE (since it was un-removable), Firefox and Opera. Just so I could test in each browser.But now I'm on Linux, which actually comes with Firefox 2... not really pre-installed, but you can choose to install it when you install the OS.But I don't do much HTML and JS. Not recently anyway.I think, with serious web development, you should test on a few different browsers. And probably a few different versions, to account for older versions.Which can be a problem, since it means having a load of browsers on your computer.Firefox 2 is my favourite browsers, though. Decent debugging console thing. Wonderful amount of themes and add-ons.I think the fact that it's open-source, too, it what makes it better.Updates and improvements can be made as and when they need to be. So you can always get a decent stable version. Whereas IE either installs separate updates, and then puts them into the next release, which takes a while to come around.Not to mention that given Firefox's open-source nature, finding and exploiting security holes is more of an issue, so more attention is paid to making it more secure, I would think.IE is closed, so security holes aren't found until after they've been exploited, and then MS releases updates and patches. I'm not absolutely certain about that, but it seems like that's what makes Firefox more stable and secure.

[justsomeguy]

One of the theories why open source is better is that thousands of eyes can look at the code, find problems, and fix them. In theory anyway. That's probably one of the reasons why Firefox is more secure then IE, but another reason is just because of the design goals in IE. IE is driven by a major corporation that has certain marketing goals, and that brings about things like ActiveX which make the browser inherently unsecured. The design goals for Firefox were to make a browser that is fast, lightweight, and standards-compliant. They have sacrificed some of the lightweightness since version 1 in favor of increased security and features, but it's still a good browser. The versions of Firebird and Phoenix before it was renamed were lightning fast and had a very small memory footprint, but that has since "normalized" once some more features were added.

[ste]

I think, with serious web development, you should test on a few different browsers. And probably a few different versions, to account for older versions.

sure, you have to test in all. but one point that i think is really important is for people to develop in a complient browser like FF or Opera and then hack for IE. its so much more logical than when people get things as they like in IE and then struggle to get their uncomplient code to work in FF. ive seen it so many times

[falcifer]

sure, you have to test in all. but one point that i think is really important is for people to develop in a complient browser like FF or Opera and then hack for IE. its so much more logical than when people get things as they like in IE and then struggle to get their uncomplient code to work in FF. ive seen it so many times

That's a good point, Ste.Of course, people can always develop ONLY in and for Firefox, and force everyone else to move away from IE... (The last time I used Opera, I had the option to view pages using the IE engine or the Firefox engine, so I don't think that'd be a problem.)

[justsomeguy]

(The last time I used Opera, I had the option to view pages using the IE engine or the Firefox engine, so I don't think that'd be a problem.)

It doesn't do that, Opera uses its own engine, but you can set Opera to identify or mask itself as either IE or Firefox, so that when Javascript code on a web page tries to determine which browser it is it would think that you were using IE or something. It does that by just exposing some of the same Javascript objects and bugs that the other browsers have, so that when they test for them in Javascript they can find them, and it also changes the user agent string it sends to servers.

[falcifer]

It doesn't do that, Opera uses its own engine, but you can set Opera to identify or mask itself as either IE or Firefox, so that when Javascript code on a web page tries to determine which browser it is it would think that you were using IE or something. It does that by just exposing some of the same Javascript objects and bugs that the other browsers have, so that when they test for them in Javascript they can find them, and it also changes the user agent string it sends to servers.

I'm sure that I had an option to render pages using the IE engine or the Mozilla engine. Perhaps it was a different browser. It was definitely different from just identifying itself as one browser or the other.It might even have been a version of IE...

[justsomeguy]

One of the more recent versions of Netscrape had that ability.

[Jonas]

One of the more recent versions of Netscrape had that ability.

Also an extension in Firefox, for IE Tab at least:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419

[Nim199]

Here is my reason for using IE.It is possible the least capable browser, so I can only use code which everyone can view.eg.If I used FF, then something I could view at home, someone using IE in some cases coundn't.But I have to say, IE7 looks dreadful.

[Skemcin]

Here is my reason for using IE.It is possible the least capable browser, so I can only use code which everyone can view.eg.If I used FF, then something I could view at home, someone using IE in some cases coundn't.But I have to say, IE7 looks dreadful.

I understand your perspective here but I think this approach only contributes to the problem - and in fact is part of why there is a problem.Essentially you are saying that you code for IE trusting that things will look good in other browsers. Thats not a very good approach and is frankly rather presumptuous. You should be writing good, standard compliant code, point blank. If everyone wrote good code than the users would realize IE is crap and they would choose a standard compliant browser so their user experience is consistent (the whole purpose for having standards). Then, maybe (lol) Microsoft would get their heads out of the clouds long enough to re-engineer their browser from the ground up to be standard compliant. But, as evident with IE7, they still try to take it for granted that their browser is still the most popular one (a whole other discussion there). But the web user is more savvy, and will only become more savvy with each passing year. So they will be using a more standard compliant browser and your code and your habits will be more frowned upon accordingly.I'd really suggest that you revisit your reasons for using IE. You may still have other legitimate reasons that I simply could not dispute - personal or functional preferences. But coding, alone, as you describe is not a good reason to be using IE from my experience.

[justsomeguy]

Right. To add to that, this statement:

It is possible the least capable browser, so I can only use code which everyone can view.

assumes that code that works in IE works in all other browsers, and that is not even remotely true. The fact is that IE renders broken code or noncompliant code in a forgiving way, so your broken code may look fine in IE (because IE is broken too), but it's going to look terrible everywhere else.Testing with IE is fine, most people test with IE to make sure their site looks reasonably the same in IE as it does in everything else. But developing for IE is the reason we are in this trouble in the first place. I develop my sites using a browser that renders standard code well, and I know that other standard-compliant browsers will do the same, and once I'm done I go back through it in IE and fix all the little bugs that IE has. That way I end up with standard-compliant code that IE happens to render well.

[reportingsjr]

What if our community went and made our own browser? Then we could try and make it as nice for programmers and users as possible. I say it wouldnt be that hard, the hardest by far would be the parsing engine!

[boen_robot]

What if our community went and made our own browser? Then we could try and make it as nice for programmers and users as possible. I say it wouldnt be that hard, the hardest by far would be the parsing engine!

Well, without that engine, there's not a point in creating another browser. And creating such an engine in the presence of Gecko is not exactly a good idea. Not only it won't be popular, but it's never going to be better then Gecko. Even if hypothetically, we were all very good C++ programmers (I don't mean to only "know" C++... be good at it).If you're good with C++, it would be better to improve Gecko then to create a new engine from scratch.

[Jonas]

What if our community went and made our own browser? Then we could try and make it as nice for programmers and users as possible. I say it wouldnt be that hard, the hardest by far would be the parsing engine!

Are you serious? We could never compete with Firefox or Opera. I think you're a bit too ambitious boy.

[justsomeguy]

What if our community went and made our own browser? Then we could try and make it as nice for programmers and users as possible. I say it wouldnt be that hard, the hardest by far would be the parsing engine!

The parsing engine would be the easy part, text parsing is pretty straightforward. The hard part would be the rendering and layout engine, that's the part that actually draws the content to the screen, and that's the part that Microsoft has been having so much trouble with. IE can parse HTML just fine, maybe even better then other browsers, but its rendering engine is going down the tubes.

[boen_robot]

Did you saw the screenshot from the upcoming Opera 9.5? God, that's the first time I see a browser passing ALL of those tests.

[justsomeguy]

That's impressive. It looks like Konqueror was the first browser to pass all those tests. Why is it that the best browsers around have the least market share?