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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.""
it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.
Firefox still has major performance bugs affecting the display of Flash, memory consumption, and others. They don't get fixed because they aren't ego-boosters like other pet projects. Wish there was a commercial interest in charge of fixing bugs over there.
How does opera keep getting in the headlines?
I know 1 person that uses it, seriously.
I check my weblogs all the time and never see anyone of my visitors using it..
MABASPLOOM!
Merely because a product is used for a simple task does not make it any less important than anything else. The reason people care so much about the security features in their cars is, shockingly, because it's important. While moving from one place to another is simple, it's very important. Actually, by the nature of things, the more often a task is performed, the more important it is. Without very advanced browsers, one of the most common tasks of today's world for anyone - using websites - would become dangerous for nearly all computers.
I can see it being overrated, but a troll?
That said, Opera 8 on Linux is IMO comparable in performance to Firefox or Seamonkey, and sometimes better. I've been using it occasionally since 5.0 (well, since 3.6 if you go back to my pre-Linux days), and I think 8.0 was the first Linux version of Opera to achieve parity with the Windows version. I've tried out the Mac version from time to time, but it doesn't seem to have caught up yet.
I would define a W3C compliant browser as a broswer that correctly displays all webpages that pass the W3C validator. If any possible compliant page does not correctly display in the browser, the browser is not 100% compliant. Any broswer that can't correctly display any possible compliant page should only be called partially compliant. Why should it be more complicated than that?
That probably means that no broswer will ever be 100% compliant, but so what? Just call the browsers what they are so nobody gets misled into thinking they are gauranteed to always see a page correctly if that page passes the validator.
As far as browsers that implement features outside the standard, I don't understand why the purists would want to count that against the browser's compliancy status. The purpose of a standard is to help maintain interoperability between two independently managed operations. To accomplish this, all a standard has to do is specify a feature set that assures the minimum amount of functionality needed for correct interoperability. Assuming that additional features do not conflict with the specified design parameters of the standard, there is no way that including the extra features would prevent the browser from successfully displaying a validated page. With browser/page interoperability gauranteed, the standard has served its stated purpose, thus additional restrictions would accomplish nothing.
Anybody see standards as having a different purpose?
Why would anybody (aside from the developer trying to make a product seem better than it is) want to call a browser compliant if it only correctly displays a subset of all possible validated pages?
Why would anybody insist on the noncompliant label for a browser that implemented extra features that had no effect on a validated page?
"Humanity lives and dies by its capabilities of communication, or lack thereof."
Come on man, you're willing to miss a great piece of software just because it's not OSS? The Opera developers are now focusing on mobile devices, and they're (effectively) giving it away for free for desktop users. No ads, no strings attached.
I really like Firefox, but i find Opera to be a much more polished browser (like i said earlier, specially in the UI department). Their Linux support is excellent aswell. It's cool, and it's free. No OSS, but *free*. What's to hate here? And this is from an OSS advocate...
Opera has done well by selling browsers. It's a company, after all, so they have to make money and can't rely on donations from others.
Today the company is growing at an incredible pace, and rather than losing that momentum on the desktop because they could have been huge and losing users, they are now tiny instead, and are gaining users. Firefox was there at the right time and people started switching. All Opera has to do now is to offer a free alternative, which it does, and market it properly.
Opera has been around for ten years and has always experienced growth. I would hardly call that "messed itself up".
Clever signature text goes here.
Guess we'll find out soon enough!
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I'd like to know is why no one has written a Ghostzilla extension for Firefox. That is, something that makes Firefox do what Ghostzilla does, except without the bugs and old rendering engine and separate installation and stuff.
Please? Someone?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It seems odd that no european has ever submitted a bug fix for this don't you think?
Anyway wasn't the whole point of HTML that the browser decides how to render the tags and that the publisher should not expect pixel level layout wasn't it?
evil is as evil does
60% of what?
The idea is that the layout changes to suit the viewer. If I view a page on a 200 inch screen at a resolution of 102400x76800 I expect that it's not going to look the same as when I view it on a 6 inch screen at 400x400. The point is not to write the page so that it forces the client to show it in one particular way, it's to design a layout that can stand to be streched and skewed and still be readable.
There is no right way to view a standards compliant web page, however viewing it in a non-standards compliant browser is a wrong way to do it.
How is a browser supposed to know what size you want to scale images to if you resize the window? 60% of what? 60% of your screen size? 60% of the size the window was when you first loaded the page? 60% of 800x600? 60% of the smallest screen that's phisically possible? 60% of the largest screen? what if I projected a web page onto the moon? how big should the images scale to then?
Don't overload the Reload and Stop buttons! I read about MS doing that in IE7, and it's one of the most stupid ideas I've heard. Then I tried Opera, and saw that they've done it too! The tabs being ABOVE the toolbar (ugly ugly ugly) is the main reason I don't use Opera, but the combined Stop/Reload button is another reason.
You can use the Session Saver extension to restore your current browser state (i.e. the open tabs).
The reason why Firefox seems to be crashing for you could be twofold: 1) bugs in the 3rd-party closed-source plugins that you are using, and 2) cruft in your Firefox profile which eats memory and causes browser instability.
The sad truth is that bugs in plugins and bugs in extensions are one of the fastest ways to wreck a user's experience of Firefox - all the more so because the program itself is perfectly fine; it's the data the program is using which is broken...
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
You first make something simple that works, and then you can add features to it (preferably in a modular way, so that people who don't want the features can choose not to have them). What they did was first add all the features, and then try to make it simple. That doesn't work. I was saying this in the early days, and I'm still saying it now.
:P.
Ah yes. Do you program at all? From my limited experience, it's almost IMPOSSIBLE for that NOT to happen somewhere down the line in your project. Upon which you have to spend a lot of time fixing your current code base. The mozilla project inherited this massive, broken project that had been rewritten from scratch recently and that almost no one else would be touching (Netscape). Nothing is more frustrating than reading someone else's code when you could be writing your own.
All things considered, Firefox is probably the single most popular piece of open source software today - which is absolutely incredible. And I think you might be doing something odd for it to be the slowest, most memory hungry and crashy browser: it's main feature is the fact that it sucks less than IE. It has so, in my mind, ever since version 0.5, which is when I began to use it as my main browser
Granted, that shows lack of clue, but we already know they're somewhat low on that particular resource...
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
So, once again, we compare something freely available and available now, to something not available. And /. is all over it like white on paper. Can anyone spell "Longhorn"?
If the PC World editors want to hang onto the hype train and pretend anyone cares about Microsoft's promises, let them. And ignore them. Because by the time their vaporware materializes, it'll be competing against Firefox 2.0 and 2.5.