Microsoft Wins Browser War, Abandons 'Innovation'

rocketjam writes "Web developers are expressing frustration with Microsoft's apparent abandonment of its 'operating-system-integrated' Internet Explorer web browser. An article on C-Net points up the efforts of the Web Standards Project as well as Adobe Systems to prompt Microsoft to fix long-standing Cascading Style Sheet bugs in IE as well as continuing to add other improvements which have virtually ceased since Microsoft won the browser war. While alternatives such as the Mozilla Project and the Opera browser still exist, their marketshare is miniscule." In a related story, an anonymous reader points out that the bugs aren't just in rendering, they're security holes as well: "iDefense and eEye have basically said that Internet Explorer is full of holes and just surfing the Web using it is "unsafe". There's 31 un-patched holes in IE, but MS won't talk about it... It took them nearly a month to roll out a new patch after this one was found to be more or less useless."

Comments

the big mo

[sstory]

I switched to Mozilla a few months ago. Not out of zeal, but because Mozilla's better software. And it's hard to beat that native pop-up blocking. Using Mozilla, I forget that the web is infested with pop-up ads. When I have to use IE for some reason, I'm quickly reminded.

Stupid IE tricks

[kurosawdust]

my personal favorite is when you send a form request via a submit button that uses a specified image (instead of the ubiquitous grey button), IE for some reason will totally ignore the "submit" POST request. I have long since stopped trying to understand why, and thus chalk it up to a master plan that will not be fulfilled until my pants are running Windows CE.

(PS - you can still get your page to work with IE if that situatioin applies to you, you just have to get the submit button title from the x and y click coordinates titles [which IE is so thoughtful not to ignore])

For partial improvements:

[mblase]

Try Avant Browser if you must use IE. It adds a shell around the browser for tab integration, popup blocking, and all those other goodies you like best about Opera and Mozilla.

Sadly, it can't do anything for IE's HTML or CSS support....

Re:Safari

[tangent3]

Safari is based on the KHTML engine, so the closest I've see to getting Safari ported to Win32 is the khtml-win32 project. Another possibility is kde-cygwin for the whole kde package...

Re:While we're on the topic: IE and PNG

[Bishop923]

Actually you can use a IE only CSS Kludge to get Full Alpha-Transparency Support. I agree though it should be completely integrated.

Something else about PNGs that I have found rather odd is that IE will render the colors a shade or two darker than Photoshop and even other browsers. I can make a PNG with a color like #3366CC and IE will render it closer to #0066CC. Very subtle difference but noticeable.

Re:While we're on the topic: IE and PNG

[_xeno_]

I can make a PNG with a color like #3366CC and IE will render it closer to #0066CC. Very subtle difference but noticeable.

First of all, I think the difference between #3366CC and #0066CC is quite noticible, but that's beside the point. The reality is that IE is actually operating the way it's supposed to - the PNG standard includes a feature called "gamma correction" where a gamma number is stored into the PNG image and the given viewer is supposed to correct for the gamma on their system.

Obviously, something's wrong with the gamma support in one of the applications - either Photoshop is saving an incorrect gamma value, or IE is using an incorrect gamma correction routine and is making the image darker than it really is.

For web use, you should disable gamma correction by not saving it to the PNG file - this will prevent gamma correction from taking place and make a #3366CC color come out as #3366CC in any viewer so that it matches an HTML #3366CC. It's a simple checkbox in the Gimp (where I do most of my simple PNG editing - I'm a programmer, not a graphic artist), but I don't know how to do it through Photoshop. I'd imagine it's possible, though.

Re:the little mo

[asa]

I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.

How so? It's the exact same technology. In fact, Mozilla is going to split up into Firebird and Thunderbird soon. So, Firebird is simply Mozilla without the e-mail client.

No it's not. Firebird is a completely different application based the Mozilla Gecko core technologies. It shares much of the Mozilla backend but it is not "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client." If you want to use "simply Mozilla without the e-mail client," then select Navigator only in the Mozilla installer. Compare that to firebird and you'll see how they're quite different applications.

--Asa