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What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera
prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""
Both Opera and Firefox are rolling native SVG support into their browser. If you are unfamiliar with SVG, this site.
http://svg.codebot.org/
To sum it up: IE7 gets tabs and better security (supposedly) (wow, we already knew that for quite a while) FF gets autoupdates that work (well, we all know that already) and Opera gets a variety of new features (but they were unable to test them for the article)
Galeon recently released v 2.0. Considering that most /. users claim to hate windows and love linux, it saddens me that such a feature rich browser gets completely ignored.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It sends a user-agent string that is enough to persuade most browser detection that it's IE, but it includes the word Opera -- and web log analysis tools are designed to recognize that.
This is Opera's default user-agent (from the page you linked):
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; OS) Opera X.Y
People do, in fact, understand that this user-agent refers to Opera, and they develop their log analysis tools to report that fact. I have never seen a web log analysis tool that didn't understand Opera's user-agent.
The traffic on the webservers I maintain shows Opera at around 0.09% of total hits, just behind Lynx.
it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.
Heh. Hah. HA HAHA HAHAHA!
*ahem*
Sorry about that.
"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser. Why? A compliant website uses only features defined in the W3C specs, or only uses other features in ways that will gracefully degrade in compliant browsers (though some purists will object to the latter definition).
For a browser, does it mean something that implements every part of a W3C standard? Or one that implements part of a standard but makes sure not to contradict it anywhere? Is it OK if it implements nonstandard features like those used in AJAX? And which standards? HTML, CSS and JavaScript/ECMAScript are a good start, but what about SVG? XHTML? XForms?
The specs are complex enough that there still is no web browser that implements all of even the current versions of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. At best, you can measure relative compliance, in which case Firefox and company, Opera, and Safari are all well ahead of even IE7. But waiting for a "W3C Compliant" browser is going to take a while.
For a long time I was a big advocate of gecko based browsers. Then firefox started to suck a bit, ok, it started to suck memory and CPU a LOT, not all the time, but enough to be incredibly annoying.
A few months ago I started using Opera again (I've used it since Windows 3.1 days, but not seriously since then) full time, it took some configuring, I changed some keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-T to open a new tab for a start), added a web developer type toolbar, rearranged some stuff, and got a nice skin for it. But man, it's just so much faster and more responsive than Firefox.
There are only three things I miss.. the abundance of plugins (some I miss particularly - live headers , url navigator and the flash click to play thingee), Venkman, and a designMode/contentEditable API (rich text (html) editing in the browser). Opera 9 implements designMode now, so that just leaves 2 before Gecko browsers earn the "browser of 2nd to last resort" badge from me.
People really should give Opera a fair try, it really is better than Gecko IMHO. And now it's free (beer), there's not much of a reason not to give it a shot.
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ECMAScript is an ECMA standard, not a W3C standard.
DOM and Javascript DOM bindings, on the other hand, are W3C standards.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
By default FF decides itself how much RAM it uses. You can limit the RAM cache either in user.js - add the following string
...or just install FasterFox extension - it will allow you to modify RAM amount it uses for cache. I run FF 1.5RC here for several hours (yes, on Windows XP - I didn't even check it memory footprint on Linux since it simply doesn't bother me) - it uses 44MB of RAM which, I guess, is ok for me.
user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 10240);
In both cases you did something wrong, and the browsers either did something to try and salvage things, or followed the spec and gave you garbage. If anything, I'd expect non-ASCII text in headers to be encoded as per RFC-2047, but I doubt any browsers implement that.
What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?
Non-ASCII text in headers is explicitly forbidden.