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.""

Comments

Regardless of which.....

[xystren]

it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Crayon Kid]

"W3C Compliant" is much easier to define for a website than for a web browser.

So true. That's true actually for any standard. Furthermore, it's incredible how many small spots are left uncovered by specifics, and result in browsers implementing their own interpretation. Quite often, you've guessed it, they turn out different behavior.

Take the HTTP header that specifies the name of the file to be downloaded. The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF, Explorer treats it as garbage, Mozilla et al. interprets it as UTF. That's one case. I urlencode it, Explorer decodes it and shows the UTF chars, Mozilla et al. presents it with the % codes still in place. Again, bummer.

Both cases, one of them did something wrong and the other something good. Actually, it's not even a case of absolute "good or bad", it's more about taking the liberty to expand upon the specs. What's not explicitly forbidden is allowed, right?

Re:Regardless of which.....

[hunterx11]

There's a difference between pushing the envelope, and purposely making it a different size so only your letters will fit, which is more like what Microsoft is doing with things like ActiveX.

Whatever

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Whatever

[Comics]

Arguably, Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer and look at how that has worked out...

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

I would probably get flame for saying this.

IE is more stable than FireFox.

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, IE crashes once per day while FireFox crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to IE, where as it takes 300mb of ram for the same contents, FireFox takes _1.00gb virtural memory plus ~300mb of ram_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my windows box.

I have to close FireFox once per hour or else my comp freezes like a banana in the mid-winter Arctic.

Yes this is a rant, so please, FF developers, do something about that leak that existed for as long as I could remember.

*Burn karma burn baby*

PS. Image/flash processing mostly.

Re:Whatever

[McCarrum]

I just looked at my Task Manager, and 42,538k .. I have (counts) 15 tabs open, a handful of addons loaded like adblock, fasterfox, tabprefs .. using a custom theme .. four of the tabs have rather active flash animations, one of the pages is littered with them.

This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!" ...

Re:Whatever

[guardiangod]

Disclaimer- I love FireFox, that's why I am using it as my main browser with IE as compatibility checker.

Try going through 500 +150kb jpg/gif files and ~10 +1mb flashes _per hour_.

Seriously, it's so freaking fun it's amazing.

Yes I know my case is probably one of the "extreme user" type, but frankly, I am not the only one complaining about this, if the Mozilla bug forum is any indication.

Re:Whatever

[DigitumDei]

I'd say that arguably, after netscape died, they had no commercial interest in IE. It was the only browser, they could do what they wanted (or in this case do nothing).

It is only recently that the renewed competition, and the addition of more complex web apps, that has brought IE back into the MS managers sights, and thus back as a commercial interest. I think we will see over the next year, just how much commercial interest in IE will speed up it's development.

Re:Opera?

[Kelson]

Opera stays in the web browser headlines for the same reason that Apple stays in the PC headlines: They keep pushing the envelope. Opera's pioneered a lot of browser UI -- mouse gestures, MDI, integrated search boxes. Back in 2000 you could take two Opera subwindows, link them together, and have all links from one window open in the other. There's probably a Firefox extension somewhere, but I can't think of another browser that does that. And while they weren't the first to implement CSS, the main author of the original spec, Håkon Wium Lie, has been an Opera exec for 5 or 6 years.

So sure, they don't have the marketshare, particularly not in the web audience as a whole -- but they've got a large chunk of mindshare within the browser community.

Re:Opera?

[Lisandro]

Because it's a heck of a browser. The fact that it identifies itself as Explorer (to avoid issues with pages that deliver broken HTML) doesn't allow to have accurate usage statistics, but i know quite a lot of people that use and love Opera, me included. Hands down, the best UI in any software i've used as of lately, never mind in browsers, and a sleek, lightweight, fast piece of software.

    Opera gets a lot of (undeserved) flak arround here because it's not open source. They gave away a free, ad supported, 100% functional version and it wasn't enough. Now they gave away registration keys, and i guess that's isn't enough either.

Shouldn't be that complicated

[Blue Mushroom]

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?

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[killjoe]

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?