IE7 From a Firefox User's Perspective

Buertio writes, "A week with IE takes a look at IE7 from the perspective of a long-time Firefox user. The verdict? Microsoft has come a long way but still has some way to go before taking on Firefox and Opera."

ie better than firefox and opera in xml/ xsl

[circletimessquare]

firefox has a dtd bug in xml it hasn't fixed for years: it doesn't reference external entities

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69799 [mozilla.org]

and opera flat out just doesn't support xsl formatting

http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#xml [opera.com]

nevermind ie7, ie6 does both, just fine

in my book, as an xml/ xsl programmer, ie is light years ahead of firefox and opera

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called ClearType, and can be enabled somewhere in the desktop properties, there's a button called Effects on one tab. Can't check exactly where as I'm running Vista where it's on by default, and those dialog boxes have changed.

Re:Well....

[the_rev_matt]

I would dispute this, I'm running firefox on OS X, Windows, and SUSE Linux across a half dozen machines and have been since the beta releases of firefox. I have had three linksys routers (still using 2) and a linksys NSLU2 'storage server'. Firefox has had no problems doing anything including the firmware updates.

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[rnelsonee]

Yeah, that's ClearType - a very nice Microsoft innovation that uses subpixels of LCD displays to make smoother text (basically it will address each R, G, and B segment of each LCD pixel rather than just giving the pixel a color value). For some inane reason, it's off by default on XP, and IE7 is the first app to use it by default. If you can take advantage of ClearType that means that a) you're running XP, and b) you've got an LCD monitor. To use ClearType in all applications (including Office and Firefox), right-click the desktop -> Properties -> Appearance -> Effects..., then select ClearType under the "... smooth fonts" item.

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[Zildy]

Yes, it really is ClearType [msdn.com], and the setting isn't system-wide, it's in IE's "Advanced" options screen.

Re:Opportunity? For what else?

[Barsteward]

"Firefox is the only single browser that runs everwhere. " eh? Does it run my phone like Opera?

Re:IE7 Text Rendering

[NullProg]

Yeah, that's ClearType - a very nice Microsoft innovation that uses subpixels of LCD displays to make smoother text

Minor correction, your sentence should say assimilation not innovation .
Microsoft did not invent ClearType.

http://www.grc.com/ctwho.htm [grc.com]

Enjoy,

Minimo

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it does. [mozilla.org]

Statistics From My Website are Scary.

[Web Goddess]

Well this is pretty scary. My website [darwinawards.com] usage? Out of 150,000 cgi hits in October... rounded to one sig digit...

126,000 Windows NT
9,000 Mac OS X
2,000 Yahoo! Slurp
3,000 Windows 98 (or Win98)
2,000 Linux
600 Windows CE
400 Mac_PowerPC
200 Windows 95
200 Windows ME
70 Windows CE
40 Blackberry
and approx 162 misc entries.

I had no idea the world was so overwhelmingly Windows! Grrr.

I can do this also for the 7,000,000 monthly "regular" page hits (as opposed to cgi) but I assume I'd get about the same results.

I remember some of the tricks MS did to gain market share, back when, such as beefing up the logs with their bogus 404 requests for favicon.ico... few webmasters weed out these spurious hits when compiling stats.

Re:ie better than firefox and opera in xml/ xsl

[jsebrech]

And it has unbelievably poor support for CSS. It won't even do tables. Not even in IE 7...

Make sure your page loads in standards mode instead of quirks mode by defining an appropriate doctype. If you don't have a doctype, or have an incorrect doctype, it will behave like IE 5 for backwards compatibility reasons.