AP reports on renewed "Browser War"

An anonymous reader writes "CNN and others are reporting an Associated Press story on "the revived browser war" with Mozilla paired against Microsoft. It seems the 1.0 release is creating some waves out there. " Considering most people consider the war long since over, I can't imagine this mattering much.

Comments

Re:Not objective

[tswinzig]

Keep in mind that it's an AP article, not written by CNN.

Washington Post has a story too

[peterdaly]

The Washington Post has a favorable review of Mozilla 1.0 as well, with I though was interesting because a) it's read by politicians among others, and b) it is a review of Mozilla and not Nutscrape.

Anyway, here is the link. One of his favorite features was the ability to block ads. He even tells people how to turn that feature on.

-Pete

Favorite Quote

[Selanit]

Microsoft declined comment on how much of a threat it considers Mozilla, saying it cannot speak on rival products.

Eh? What's that? Is this the same company that called the GPL "pac-man like" and Linux "unamerican?" How is it that all of a sudden that can't speak on rival products?

<snort>

Re:War is over unless AOL changes default

[msaavedra]

This is mostly true, but it is still possible to come up with theoretically (if not practically) excellent designs that adhere precisely to the standards, but don't render correctly. For instance, it is widely considered a good practice to use HTML only to mark up the logical structure of a page (avoiding using tables for layout, tags, etc) and use CSS to handle layout and style. This ensures a good separation between content and presentation. However, both IE and Mozilla have some quirks with their interpretation of the CSS2 box model and positioning properties. At this stage, it is impossible to design a page that:

1. Uses a complex CSS-based layout (though simple ones work pretty well)
2. Renders correctly in IE5, IE6, and Mozilla
3. Adheres strictly to the standards (XHTML 1.1, CSS2)
4. Doesn't use any browser detection tricks

Things are getting very close, but the browsers are not quite ready for well-designed, browser-agnostic pages using the latest standards.

You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[PhxBlue]

Turn off all of those unrequested popups with a couple of mouse clicks, or you can go back to using IE and have to close a bazillion windows every time you are done surfing.

Actually, that's all it takes for IE, too--just use the highest possible security settings, including "Disable Active Scripting," for your "Internet" zone. Probably 90% of the websites I surf render just fine without it. And if I think I'm ever going to come back to one of the 10% that don't, I can add it to my "trusted" sites list, which uses "Internet"-level security settings.

Re:You can browse annoyance-free with IE, too. . .

[cybermage]

Probably 90% of the websites I surf render just fine without it.

That means 1 in 10 don't render fine. Would you buy a car if it didn't start 1 in 10 times?

Having "toggle JavaScript On and Off" as your only option isn't an option. Deciding what Javascript can/cannot do is better. In Mozilla, you can tell it, specifically, no unsolicited pop-up windows. Yes, it even differentiates between click-generated pop-ups and automatic pop-ups.

Re:IE7 and CSS

[msaavedra]

Actually, IE6 already has doctype sniffing. Unfortunately, it has a glitch so that if you put <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> or something similar as your first line, which is standard for XHTML, IE becomes confused, even if you specify the proper doctype on the second line. The result is that this puts the browser into "quirks" mode, which is probably exactly what you don't want if you're writing XHTML.

Of course, even in its "strict" mode, IE6's CSS layout is far from perfect, so the changes in IE7 will be great. And finally being able to use PNG's properly will ROCK!