A Browser War Preview 205
"Browsers are lousy in terms of supporting the various specifications people have published that define useful things web developers want and need to do. This has numerous effects:
- It slows down and frustrates web developers.
- It raises the costs of web development.
- It makes some things impossible.
"All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?"
"The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them."
The more browsers that pass the Acid2 test, the better support there is for web developers. The better support there is for web developers, the higher the quality of the work they put out. And you, as an end-user of that work, benefit."
Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing
"I like Opera. I use Opera. I read the comparison, and Opera looks to come out favorably. Then I read the comments. Firefox compared to IE, again and again. Reasons why Firefox is better. Reasons why IE is better. Reasons why more people use IE. But there are fewer comments on Opera. I can't understand why. It has lots of things that Firefox needs extensions for built right in (and without significant differences in resources), and some things, like bittorrent support, that aren't available in any extension. It has better standards compliance than the other two. It has Widgets (like extensions) if you want to expand it more. But yet, a 3-way comparison is treated as a 2-way comparison. I thought this would be more of an eye opener, 'Wow, I didn't know Opera did all that and did it better than the other browsers!' But instead, the comments read like the posters glanced at the IE and Firefox pages of the article (if they read it at all) and hopped right back on the IE vs Firefox war. I find it sad that a competitive browser receives to little consideration, especially from a group that is supposedly early adopters.""
"Me, too," wrote reader lee1. "I think there is a reflex to ignore Opera because for so long it was pay- or ad-ware."
Reader bartkusa also spoke up for Opera
"Opera's UI is extremely customizable [opera.com]. Skinnable interface and lots of flexibility with toolbar and button placement, on the output side. On the input side, you can set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures if you don't like the default ones."
Dan East pointed out a glitch in the linked story as originally displayed:
"Their memory usage charts cannot possibly be right:
- Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
- Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
- Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
- Opera 9.0: 52K
- IE 6.0: 155K
- Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K
A single image on one of those pages could require more RAM than what the entire program is consuming. That's way, way off. What's even more amazing is, going by their charts, Opera actually consumes LESS ram with 6 pages loaded than when it first starts up! 53k -> 52k"
Reader dtfinch had another complaint: "The "Features at a Glance" table is very inaccurate with respect to Opera. For one, Opera has very good theme support."
Several readers offered rationales for the continued popularity of Internet Explorer; among these, according to reader chiller2, is better printing support compared to Firefox.
"e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.
"Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print."
Reader fuzzandwater complained "It's ridiculous that [the linked review's authors] defend IE by claiming 'no pages seem horribly messed up,'" writing "Clearly the author is not a web developer. If he were, he would know that the reason the pages display correctly in IE is javascript hacks, css workarounds, web developer headaches, Dean's IE7 javascript library, a separate stylesheet for IE, etc... It's not that IE is inherently displaying the sites correctly, it's that the site developers were forced to make them play nice with IE."
LWATCDR piles on the Explorer complaints, writing "It seems like a good number of people use Firefox now. So unless you want to exclude 1 out of 10 users from your site can not support just IE. I will not due business with a company that has an IE only site. Now the rub is this. IE doesn't support current standards. Yes, web developers have every right to complain about Microsoft ignoring standards and making their life more complicated. Because of IE I can not use PNG files with an alpha channel on websites I design.
"Just because most people use junk that is no reason to
a. Not tell them that is junk.
b. Try to get the producers of said junk to make it better.
c. Try to get people to use a better product."
Yvan256 raises the interesting point that as Windows changes, whether a browser is backward compatible makes a difference:
"Will Internet Explorer 7 run on Windows 95/98/ME/NT4? If not, then MSIE7 won't be ... And with Nintendo going with Opera for both the Nintendo DS and the Wii, Opera's marketshare might soon explode beyond 1-2%. Just keep that in mind before jumping into the 'MSIE7 has nice proprietary features' train."
Reader El_Muerte_TDS asks just what a "Favorites button" is, asking "Is it like a bookmark button?" To this, readers responded that "favorites" (in Internet Explorer) are equivalent to "Bookmarks" in most other browsers.
Blimey85 asks "What about extensions?," arguing that "Comparing stock Firefox with anything [isn't] very relevant. You need to compare Firefox loaded with some extensions to show the true power of the platform. Same with the other browsers and their add-ons or widgets."
"One example of not doing this is in the feature comparison table where it says that Firefox can't remember open tabs for the next session. My copy of Firefox not only does that when I want it to, it also has crash recovery so when I restart I can choose to reopen all of the tabs or not."
Yvan256, among others, thinks this is a double-edged sword: "The problem with Firefox is the extensions. People want a good browser, not fiddle around hunting for what exists. Power users do that, sure, but not regular users."
Reader Tet took issue with the reviewer's assertion that "the address bar is for URLs, not searches."
"I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unnecessary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it."
Reader GigsVT explained the appeal that a separate search bar has for him, though:
"If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search. We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be."
Thanks to all the readersa who took part in this conversation, especially those quoted above.
What everyone seems to be forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What everyone seems to be forgetting... (Score:5, Funny)
This is why we are anticipating shortly the release of TELNET 2.0 for the Web 2.0 generation. It includes such amazing new technology features as:
Renders Flash into meaningless symbols.
Decodes Java into meaningless binary.
Turns javascript powered websites into impossible to understand hex clusters that don't do anything when you click on them.
Dumps MP3 data to beep()
In this way we feel that all the key features of Web 2.0 are adequately recreated for an authentic experience as the website creators intend and TELNET 2.0 is a whole new competative browser platform for the 21st century.
Re:What everyone seems to be forgetting... (Score:2)
Decodes Java into meaningless binary.
Turns javascript powered websites into impossible to understand hex clusters that don't do anything when you click on them.
Dumps MP3 data to beep()
Neo : Is that...
Cypher : The Matrix? Yeah.
Neo : Do you always look at it encoded?
Cypher : Well, you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it... I don't even see the code. All I se
Re:What everyone seems to be forgetting... (Score:2, Interesting)
LUXURY! (Score:2, Funny)
In my day, we had to carry the bits by hand to the server and back (betcha didn't know that's where the term 'carry bit' originally came from, didja??), uphill, BOTH WAYS, in 10 feet of snow! And we LIKED it! Packet loss meant you'd been trampled by a horse.
IE7 (Score:4, Interesting)
As a browser it was ok, nothing really special but not too bad.
And Yet... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And Yet... (Score:2)
Now, that doesn't mean that they are ALL fixed, but there are just enough to make all the expert webpage creators learn all new hacks to make pages work in IE.
Read my lips: no new CSS property support. (Score:2, Informative)
There are no CSS properties supported in IE7 beta 2/3 which were not supported in prior versions. I ran them through the entire CSS2 test suite.
That's it. No corrections to mistakes like text-align:center aligning block elements instead of their child inline elements, and ZERO behavior change between DOCTYPEs. Still absolutely no recognition for the XHTML MIME
Re:IE7 (Score:2, Insightful)
My guess is the CSS problems you're seeing is people using IE CSS hacks, without targeting them for IE <= 6. Sure, there are definitely still missing stuffs in IE7, but most of the problem is when the developers essentially do an:
instead ofbut still I want to know (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:3, Informative)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
position:fixed
work right?
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:3, Informative)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
This is true of IE6 as well. It's really stunning how many "developers" out there still do not know about DOCTYPE rendering modes.
For the curious: Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration [hsivonen.iki.fi]
Re:but still I want to know (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you honestly believe that everyone in the world will suddenly stop using IE6 and upgrade to IE7.
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
Browser sniffing is usually a bad idea, regardless. 99% of the time, capability detection can accomplish the same objective, and do it in a manner that's cross platform and forwards-compatible with your favorite browsers too.
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
Re:but still I want to know (Score:2)
2. Oh one thing I am happy about in Fire Fox that is a long time coming for me is the spell check,
We noticed.
Actually, "scree" is a perfectly valid word, and OpenOffice doesn't flag "9in" (or "30px" for that matter). And it's sure not going to tell you that "Firefox" is one word.
But really, you're right: a spell check will probably prevent a
Transparent PNG in IE (Score:2)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bobosola/ [ntlworld.com]
I know it isn't perfect, and is a hack, but it is useful for using PNG graphics on sites displated in IE.
/. Navel Gazing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Re:/. Navel Gazing (Score:2)
Opera bit torrent support (Score:4, Insightful)
That said Opera is my favorite web browser by far.
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2)
The only merit I can see is for people who arn't normally BT users who might want to grab a torrent once in a great while. it would save them from having to seek out, and install a client for just one file.
At the same time anyone using an alternative browser like Opera probably already has a BT client installe
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:5, Insightful)
Five years ago, people said the same thing about integrated download managers. If you wanted to download more than one or two things at a time, or you wanted support for resuming downlaods, you installed GetRight, or similar. But, it turned out, most people just want to click on things and have them download.
If you are a heavy BitTorrent user, then the integrated support in Opera may not be for you. If, however, you just want to be able to click on links and have things download, without having to worry about whether they are HTTP, FTP, or BitTorrent, then the Opera BitTorrent client might be the right tool for you.
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2)
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2)
When I click on a torrent link in Konqueror, it loads KTorrent which is a "standalone" client in some respects, but also is happy to take a URL and start downloa
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2, Insightful)
There was a time when browers didnt include any FTP support, but all mainstream browsers include simple FTP support since its easy to include. Since bit torrent is just a protocol, the Opera team found a way to include a simple version for only a few KBs of "bloat".
Power users will of course need a seperate client, the same way they due with FTP.
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2)
For being a unique idea behind decentralized protocols, I can definitely see the use for it.
;-)
That there are dedicated and more feature rich third party clients doesn't really excuse it IMHO, as the same could then be said about FTP, another totally non-web protocol.
The only complaint I'd see valid here would be bloat, but check Opera's install footprint and come again.
With that one out of the way, no,
Re:Opera bit torrent support (Score:2)
Turn off backslash (Score:2, Insightful)
If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.
For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on
Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.
Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
Thank you so very much! You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Leave it up to some CS nerds to make a totally non-intuitive interface. Why would personal preferences not be in your personal preferences section? And what is up with the heiroglifics in the little section window? Did they really think that was comprehensible? Insane.
Now for bonus points, how do I get rid of tagging? And what the heck is that garbage? Back in my day we had html, and we liked it! vi or emacs was all you needed to make pages w
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
I haven't been reading as much lately and the slashback's are generally put together well.
So I catch up on an article I missed and get some of the higher rated comments.
It's slashdot for the lazy! (or very busy)
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2, Troll)
Yes. When the word 'Slashback' appears, press down-arrow a few times. The 'Reply to this' link won't navigate you into any helpful configuration options.
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
I, for one, feel there should be more of this sort of actual editing going on in slashdotland.
Re:Turn off backslash (Score:2)
Why not just browse at 4+ or 3+? I have been doing that recently and it cuts things down to about 5-15 responses. Or use alterslash.org.
Posting a summary is just a officially sanctioned dupe.
Separate search bar (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree that you need a seperate search bar.
Now all you need to type is "g Jessica Alba
Right now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Right now... (Score:2)
Re:Right now... (Score:2)
Re:Right now... (Score:2)
And on windows you get things like this:
http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screensh ots/bittorrent.jpg [opera.com]
Sorry, but that is not
Re:Right now... (Score:2)
Why Opera won't cut it for me. (Score:2)
To address the thread-starter's comment in this /. thread, Opera isn't being ignored by just people in discussions like this. It's ignored by users as well; Opera is remarkably unpopular.
I'll offer some reasons why I ignore Opera:
Re:Why Opera won't cut it for me. (Score:2)
I have a rather strange reason that took me a while to put my finger on it. I made a concerted effort to give Opera a shot. It had a lot of nice features including passing itself automatically as IE or even using the IE rendering engine on certain pages. It was fast and worked pretty well, but I always felt uncomfortable when I used it. I found myself stumbling again and again when trying to use the tabs, and my productivity was reduced. Then I figured it out... the navigation bar is underneath the tab
That's not the real reason Opera is shunned. (Score:3, Insightful)
1. I am lazy when it comes to browsers.
2. Up until last year, Opera had the attached stigma of being a "for pay" or "advertising-supported" browser. For years, it also lacked solid features supported by many mainstream browsers, (like javascript). Only now is it feature-complete AND free.
So, let's address the lazy part (my background):
First browser: Netscape 3.
Used until: Communicator 4.7
Reason for switch: was tired of putting up with increased crashes, which ha
Re:That's not the real reason Opera is shunned. (Score:2)
The ads werent that bad, and they were certainly much better than all the pop-ups that other browsers kept passing through.
The point being, yes, they did have a small banner, and in conjunction with the net-zero or k-mart free internet software banner they did eat a lot of screen real estate, but their built-in advancements were literally years a
Re:Right now... (Score:2)
Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.4, preconfigured with 8 RSS feeds.
Flock 0.7.1, no RSS feeds.
Opera 9.01, 13 RSS feeds.
Opera boots the fastest, but once the RSS feeds get active, right away, older computers need a minute or two to get them downloaded on dialup, before the browser is responsive again. Best way to do it is to click on a link right away, and let the whole mess download, RSS feeds (with small pictures) and the web page. Also, E-Trade won't work in Oper
No more browser wars! (Score:3)
Re:No more browser wars! (Score:2)
IE v Firefox (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:IE v Firefox (Score:2)
I like the way IE7 handles tabs and news feeds.
Zooming test and images with a mouse click sure beats Firefox's default Ctrl + and -.
IE7 and Windows are mostly about choosing sensible defaults for the non-technical end-user. The fun in Firefox is playing with extensions. But I discovered rather quickly that I was reac
Firefox V Opera (Score:2)
I love Firefox, but don't pretend it's any more innovative than IE.
Why no Opera Category/Icon? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why no Opera Category/Icon? (Score:2)
You'd be more than glad to hit it, but don't wanna talk to your friends about it.
Come on, you all know the feeling.
Re:Why no Opera Category/Icon? (Score:2)
what's so hard about typing http://? (Score:2, Insightful)
Opera couldn't be used in enterprise (Score:2)
Opera may support a lot of tech standards, but that was a pretty big business standard they didn't support.
Re:Opera couldn't be used in enterprise (Score:2)
I used to care (Score:3, Insightful)
Acid2 is not about CSS compliance but about supporting the documented ambiguities in the standard correctly (many undocumented ones remain). These ambiguities include weird parser behaviour, browser quirksmode hacks for non standard pages etc. In short, it test the browsers ability to fuck up the rendering in a consistent way. Of course the biggest fuck up of them all (IE) fails the test so the test is pretty much worthless in practice. It even fails rendering incorrectly
Then there is HTML which evolved from a naive attempt to capture semantics of certain documents by Tim Berners Lee to a slightly worse specification (HTML 4.x) which isn't really good for anything it is designed to do (ranging from layout features to representing document semantics). The successors in the form of XHTML 1.x and 2.x drop the layout stuff (which sucked anyway) and tried to preserve most of the flawed semantics whilst adding new constructs and increasing complexity so much nobody really understands it. Market apathy has ensured that these xhtml standards never moved out of the lab. XHTML documents actually served up as application/xml (alledgedly the correct way to serve them up) are extremely rare although well formed versions of html 4.x are now commonly served up as xhtml 1.0 transitional (or even strict). Other than forcing the browser into a somewhat better defined way of rendering, this has little effect in terms of layout features compared to html 4.x.
Let me see what else have we got? There's crappy SVG which slowly seems to replace gifs for sclable icons on some systems and also leads a double life as a poor mans graphics exchange format. There's the hopelessly underpowered javascript language and the accompanying APIs (DOM *shudder*). There's MATHML which remains ever popular in very small niches. Most of the mentioned technologies lead a double life in the form of how they are supposed to work and how they actually work in practice. Pragmatic web developers just copy paste and adapt what works and ignore the rest. The smarter ones build up some knowledge of how things are supposed to work and where the bugs are for each implementation. All the graphics designers seem to have standardized on non standard flash. With standards nazis mainly telling them not to use flash, instead of providing an alternative, this is unlikely to change in the forseeable future.
But as said, I no longer care that much. Increasingly tools take care of generating the exotic hacks to make it all work. Handcoding something like gmail would probably drive programmers mad, which is why the nice google people embedded the difficult stuff in a nice library so they can focus on application functionality.
Re:I used to care (Score:2)
I'm not claiming web sites use flash a lot, just that it is the technology of choice for graphics designers. Reality forces them to downgrade to CSS+javascript+html in most real life situations but in terms of layout flexibility flash (or something similarly capable) is what they really want to use.
Re:I used to care (Score:2)
OSX firefox tab preview broken? (Score:2)
Can anyone here help with this? Yes, it's a bit offtopic, but I can't be the only one with this problem!
Thanks!
what about safari? konqueror? camino? seamonkey? (Score:2)
Interestingly enough, there is no mention of browsers such as Konqueror, Safari, Camino, SeaMonkey... Yes, this is a relevant point, because most of the discussion focuses on attributes such as bookmarks management, style, extensions, and the like, and not on the underlying rendering engine. Camino and SeaMonkey each take different approaches to the user interface but still use the same rendering engine as Firefox. And then we have both Konqueror and Safari, good web browsers that get very little mention
Sigh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Let the indoctrination to the culture of war end.
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
But eventually you reach a point in the competition where getting better also hurts the other guys.
Just like war. It is far more fitting.
Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:2)
Re:Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:2)
Re:Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:2, Interesting)
User JS to the rescue!
Re:Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:2)
Re:Opera compatibility vs the other two? (Score:2)
(OT) Backslash (Score:2)
Congratulations to whoever renamed Slashback; the new term makes much more sense, as it can invoke a similar, appropriate word. It is also confusing for those that vaguely recall what to type a few years ago. Even better!
Plus, what goodies can the millionth Slashdot username expect, a free T-shirt? I seem to recall that the millionth post [slashdot.org] said something appropriate for a lot of the people here.
I tried telling them (Score:2, Insightful)
The browser that'll win the war... (Score:3, Interesting)
Opera isn't open source (Score:2)
I like Opera, and I hope they succeed, but I will never want to rely on them because in the end they are closed source, and if their company should die Opera would die
Re:w00t (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:2, Insightful)
It's like when studios make a remake of a popular movie: They're trying to ca
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:2)
My adblock, too, as i havent seen any ad on slashdot since i use firefox...
Seeing that the population here might be a bit more tech-savy than on myspace, maybe
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:2)
Usually, they just take the most popular story of the day, and re-release it with a slightly different description. Sometimes twice!
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:2)
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:5, Insightful)
I like it.
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:4, Insightful)
One problem with Slashdot is after a few hours no one mods a story, so if they can make it fresh again 24 hours later we get fresh modding and debate continues beyond the usual level.
Re:I don't get backslash (Score:2)
Re:Quick firefox help please... (Score:2)
That does bring up a very god point though; while Firefox does have extensions to give it almost any functon or feture at least half of them tend to break when you update to the latest offical version and somtimes they are never repaired.
Re:Quick firefox help please... (Score:3, Informative)
Then you don't destroy your bookmarks, extensions, settings, etc.
Re:Quick firefox help please... (Score:2)
Re:Why I won't use Opera (Score:2)
Re:In regard to Opera (Score:2, Insightful)
I think separating appearance configuration out is a good thing, rather than cluttering up a single window. I guess it's a matter of opinion. Are there some options you wouldn't be sure in which of the two they would be kept in?
Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new t
Re:Opera doesn't show up on the radar (Score:2)
The sad part is (Score:2)