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What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the battle-of-the-bloat dept.

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.""

1 of 542 comments (clear)

  1. Firefox unfriendly to European languages by bjornte · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Starting in Q3 2006, Firefox is likely to break on the following sites:
    Norway: http://www.elkjop.no/
    Finland: http://www.gigantti.fi/
    Denmark: http://www.elgiganten.dk/
    Iceland: http://www.elko.is/
    Norway: http://www.lefdal.com/
    Poland: http://www.electroworld.pl/
    Czech R: http://www.electroworld.cz/
    Hungary: http://www.electroworld.hu/
    Sweden: http://www.pccity.se/
    This is because Firefox does not support soft hyphenation, a six year old bug that breaks the HTML 4.0 specification.

    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.