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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.""
I hate to say it, but there's a definate kernel of truth in that. I know that I periodically have to close all of my firefox windows and start fresh -- after a day or two they start consuming way more resources than they should be. Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.
Being standards compliant is one of the most important factors indeed. However, there can be a little more to it than that.
-Security. That alone is a reason to NOT use IE. Worst piece of unsecure code Microsoft EVER made. See the newest Javacript exploit for it? Affects fully patched browsers.... Just like we had one not long ago using IFrames instead. It seems like there's always a way to get past all the "security" of fully updated/fully locked-down IE no matter what. It's by FAR the main reason why spyware is an issue at all (the users are also partially to blame though). They can keep updating it or copy features like tabs, I truly don't care, I'll never use it! (If it didn't break other stuff, I'd remove it completely)
-Features. Firefox may have high memory usage, but the extensions... I only wish something like that would exist for other browsers (although I also wish some of those were built-into Firefox/didn't need an extension for it). It's addictive. The Web developer toolbar, AdBlock (with a good list), Bugmenot, FlashBlock, gestures, Forecastfox, Foxytunes, SwitchProxy, LiveHTTPHeaders, GreaseMonkey (and some scripts), JS debugger, Checky, ColorZilla, XForms, EditCSS, Copy Plain Text, LoremIpsum Generator, StumbleUpon, DictionarySearch, Cookie Culler, etc. Not to mention other niceties like XUL apps (like the totally wicked DevEdge MultiBar and several others), usercontent.css, bookmark management/sync utils, the about:config page and other such things. I wish Opera (or another decent browser) would support them too...
Anyways. I prefer Firefox based on the features/extensions, but really, as long as it's NOT the blue E... Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Galeon, Safari, etc... They're all good browsers.
///<sig
German, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several other European languanges differ from English in the way that nouns are joined into one word. This often makes for very long words.
Example: "Noun joining example" in Norwegian is "Substantivsammensettingseksempel". True, this is a very long word, but the effect happens all the time.
We are preparing a new version of several big-brand European online stores using the same technological foundation. For these stores, many of whom are market leaders in their respective countries, we wish to use a layout where 3 products are shown side by side, with teaser text to the right of a teaser image. This demands that text columns are no more than 80 pixels wide, and this, again, demands soft hyphenation. IE, Safari and Opera supports this, but alas, Firefox does not.
A pity really. Firefox is our default development browser because of an otherwise acceptable standards implementation.
shouldn't they concentrate on finding and squashing out all the major bugs before adding new features?
By all means. Parent poster wasn't even the kind of guy that could help with that... it's ok. Seriously. Not everyone is a code monkey. The firefox team strikes me as the kind of people who are doing their damnedest to accomplish this. I'm as impatient as anyone too... it takes twice as long as the most patient person ever wants to wait. Sorry.
But not all bugs are Firefox. Firefox on windows involves two components, firefox *AND* windows. If I have to blame one or the other for some firefox-related bug, who do you think I'm going to pick? Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Isn't the whole point of Open Source is to let other examine your code, test and find bugs, report them directly to the creators, and let them fix the bugs ASAP (or, if desire, fix them yourself)?
Of course. But he's not reporting a bug, he's complaining about some loosely-related problem that he's simply too technically incompetent to describe adequately. He's using a platform for which it is notoriously hard to use any debugging tools. For which no useful error messages are ever displayed. Hell, he doesn't even have any debugging tools, unless he spent god knows how much on Visual Studio.NET.
And for him to compare a web browser to something that was testified in a federal courtroom to be an "OS component/subsystem", well, it's just disingenous at best. Microsoft makes no web browser... ask them why they make it so tough for others to write web browsers that don't crash, when they aren't even willing to make one themselves.
If he really just *HAS TO* make a comparison, ask him to compare camino with IE5 on a mac for us, to let us really know which one is better.
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 problem with supporting "extensions" is that people (who don't know any better) will use them. They then become a defacto standard which makes browsers that don't implement it render the page incorrectly and appear "buggy" to the layman.
We have already seen this problem with IE's non-standard extensions resulting in pages not rendering correctly in FireFox, Opera, etc. You wouldn't believe the number of times people tell me they don't use FireFox because it's buggy since it won't even render a website they regularly use (it doesn't matter to most users that the website was coded by a moron - if it works in IE and doesn't work in FireFox then as far as they are concerned that's a bug in FireFox).
Happilly, with the increase in use of non-IE browsers and mobile devices it seems that many webmasters are getting a clue. But we don't want to reverse that trend by promoting extensions.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Why cant we have real true resizing of webpage,if I show page at 60%, all images etc... should scale accordingly... or
is that just too hard for a multiplatform? bitmap scaling in software is trivial btw, go google it FF-devs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.