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Browser Wars 2004
J. Hobbs writes "Recent posts on David Hyatt's site describing the new technology he's working on for Dashboard, coupled with recent announcements from the newly formed WHAT-WG alliance (Apple, Mozilla, and Opera) could add up to a potentially new kind of application development and deployment that I explore in this highly speculative essay. See if you don't agree..."
It didn't? Let me check. Nope, seems to still work. All my network monitoring pages are still on my desktop.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
See PRGoogleBar. It's not yet up to speed with the new FireFox extension format, but it does work.
- A ~4Mb download
- Much faster at rendering and downloading pages (especially with user-defined speed improvements)
- Less of a memory-hog than IE (IE is only any good because of it's integration with Windows)
Mozilla is slower than Firefox, but it is a full, feature-rich browser suite.Check out Googlebar.Mozdev.Org which is a Googlebar emulation thingie that some non-Google people are doing.
its called
Display Properties
-> Customize Desktop...
->-> Web
omg! active desktop settings!
SVG is a W3C recommendation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
while MS does not respect W3C standards, the only way to compete with IE is being able to render the pages exactly like IE does.
The jargon for this: "bug-compatible". You want to make a browser that is so compatible with IE that it's even broken in the same ways, so that pages render the same.
The problem with this is that you are trying to shoot a moving target. If the spec is "do whatever IE does", then you spend all your time tracking changes to IE. (Microsoft has been letting dust pile up on IE, but that's about to change anyway. And any strategy that relies on Microsoft to just lie back and not interfere is doomed.)
IE has been ruling the world, but there are several cracks in its armor.
0) Mac users have Safari, and they will scream at any web site that breaks it. They tend to be rather vocal. Alas they are a small group as a percentage, but they are vocal out of proportion. Safari has much better standards compliance than IE, so this is pressure in the right direction.
1) IE has so many security holes that people are actually getting annoyed at it. As long as IE "just works" it meets the Good Enough test and people will continue to use it. But now that people are getting more annoyed with it, browsers like Firefox get their chance. I just tonight put Firefox on a friend's computer, and he's so fed up with spyware that he was eager to switch.
Rather than testing IE so much you understand it better than Microsoft does, it would be better to just insist on web browsers that actually follow the standards. Besides, testing IE and coding bug-compatible features aren't as much fun as adding cool new stuff to Mozilla. Unless you are volunteering to lead the IE cloning effort, there probably won't be many people working on this.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Opensource is not about putting commercial companies out of business.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If you want to be a coder speaking the truth, you could try to be informed first.
The philosophy of only coding for what browsers can handle is a noble one... and one that, as far as I know, every sane web developer has been doing as long as the field has existed... who wants to code for non-existent clients?
As for your description of that as "Just HTML", that's Just Wrong. The W3C standards are, currently, XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0.
The W3C has long been advocating HTML/XHTML for markup and CSS for layout/design, pretty much since that paradigm was invented (or reinvented) by them. The W3C standards have evolved a bit since you've last checked. Your assumption was:
W3C standard: HTML 4.0
Browser Proprietary Stuff: everything else
However, there's a very different story today:
W3C standards: XHTML 1.0-1.1, CSS 1.0-2.0, SVG
Used by browsers commonly, but not W3C compliant: JavaScript (or JScript), DHTML, Java (not so much anymore)... I think that's about it.
The only designers not following your advice are those coding for Internet Explorer and not for Mozilla or for W3C standards.
And DHTML is just a wank term composed of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and whatever else the person wants it to mean at the time they say it. It has no features in and of itself.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
When stocks are high growth, the shareholders don't expect or want dividends. The return comes from the increasing stock price and profits are better spent increasing the size of the business than giving out a dividend.
When stocks are high yield, they are good stready businesses that don't really grow much but turn out decent profits. The investor gets the return from the divi, and doesn't expect the share price to grow very much.Tech stocks were high growth through the 80's and 90's, but are now making the transition into being high yield. So they are starting to pay dividends (even MSFT) but they are still small so far.
(1) side-by-side viewing of different parts of a page: Since one has tabbed browsing, just open a new window with two tabs of the same page (or just one, and "Duplicate" -- it retains the other ones history as well). Now click "Window->Tile vertically" (or press Shift+F6). Firefox probably has this feature, as well. 2 shortcuts, or two menu items. quick! Not 100% sure if this is what you were thinking of.
(2) Side-by-side viewing of different pages. Can do the same as one, but don't duplicate -- open new page. As a bonus, if you are thinking of having links from one page always open in the second window, you can do this in opera as well (play with Window->create linked). Instead of always appearing in either the same page or in a NEW background page, links appear in the specified second page.
(3) To open all links, click on the "links" icon to open your links panel. This displays all links in the page. Now press shift+left mouse button to select all the links you want to open. In other words, two clicks+drag (with shift) -- all on items appearing in the main interface -- will do it. About the same effort as opening a file or saving a new file.
If you define "painless" as running the script thrugh regexps, replacing parts of it with stuff that works outside of IE, yes. Note that you probably have to do this individually for every single script.
It's possible to use some IE-specific sites in another browser via the Proxomitron, but you basically have to rewrite all of the scripts from within a regexp-based search-and-replace program, which can be quite a hassle.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Concerning CSS: This site should be a good example. With modern browsers you can have content and presentation separate and implement some cool effects (see "Complexspiral"). Gecko even allows you to build menus using nothing but CSS.
With IE, most of this just doesn't work. And it won't until at least 2006.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
So many new and fancy acronyms/tech. They will make web developement only even more complicated, code even more bloated with workarounds and versions for a gozillion new browsers ...
... and let's not talk Java either.
.NET will kill the browser completely and create an easier way to create webenabled application - proper applications - instead of that stupid static web page metaphor - truely ONLINE instead of 'what you saw on the server ten seconds ago'.
... if your Amazon Client can talk directly to their database, you won't need an HTML-Page as 'in between' translator/wrapper for tthe information.
...
If choice means so much chaos and so little truely working 'standards' then please give me a working monopoly! I don't care if the steering wheel in a car is on the left or right side - as long as it works.
So far nothing really works as it should in all browsers - so I will simply follow where the money comes from: IE.
And please spare me the 'develop with web standards speach' - neither Moz, Firesomething nor Opera fully and properly support all CSS versions, DOM etc.
So far almost each new technology for the web has made things more complicated and less 'standard'.
IMHO I hope that a technology like
With real apps we could have proper and speedy shopping tools, better online forums, cool chat apps without bloated Java behind it
Instead of wasting gazillion of Terrabytes for sending html, java and css codes and workarounds lets focus on sending and communicating the truely wanted data as direct, speedy and interactive as possible - without any unnecessary wrappers.
HyperText is/was a great idea, but it should only be used for documents/news etc. - it was never meant for (web) applications. All that crap has been put on top later - and it never worked properly.
Let the server application/database and client talk directly
Actually, Internet Explorer 6 gets CSS 1 almost completely right. I agree with the "haphazard" description of CSS 2 support though.
Actually, it passed off protocols (shell: in this instance) it didn't recognize to the OS and let the OS deal with it as it saw fit.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.