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.

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: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.