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.....

[Kelson]

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.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[audi100quattro]

amaya, a web browser which is ONLY w3c compliant, and made by w3c people will crash on 90% of the sites out there on the web, if not more. it crashes on msn.com...

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Nik13]

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.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[VagaStorm]

You expected msn.com to be w3c compliant? *sight* I can almost remember when I was that young and naive.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[masklinn]

ECMAScript is an ECMA standard, not a W3C standard.

DOM and Javascript DOM bindings, on the other hand, are W3C standards.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[masklinn]

amaya, a web browser which is ONLY w3c compliant, and made by w3c people will crash on 90% of the sites out there on the web, if not more. it crashes on msn.com...

Amaya is a piece of dung, 90% of the CSS specs ain't implemented, it isn't even able to render reliably a perfectly valid HTML4/CSS1 website.

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.....

[sulam]

No offense, but which would you rather have, standards that outpace implementation, or implementations that help define standards?

You can't have both, there's no free lunch here, and the fact is that standards implemented in a vacuum have had significantly less success than standards which follow actual implementations (OSI anyone?)...

I have nothing against calling a spade a spade, Microsoft's business practices leave a lot to be desired. But you can't knock them or anyone else for trying to innovate in their implementations. It's those innovations that help pave the way for the standards you obviously appreciate. Once the innovations show up, content developers take advantage of them, and help further the case that the standards bodies should take a look at how to add this to Web++...

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.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the fact that the W3C is a standards body and Microsoft, as much as they like to think they are, isn't.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[jrumney]

The spec only says "it must be in ASCII". Fine. I feed it UTF

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.

Re:Regardless of which.....

[Espen Skoglund]

You mention security as being an important factor for not choosing IE. Then you mention features, and in particular the possibility of extensions, as a important factor for choosing FF. This doesn't add up. If anything, the extension mechanism in FF should prompt you not to use FF (or at least not use its extensions) if you care about secturity.

You touch upon your problems with high memory usage in FF. Other people around here have complained about this as well, including stories about memory leakage and crashes. The general consensus seems to be that the cause of these problems are the extensions, and not FF itself. It's been said that if you just turn off the extensions everything works fine. Sure, you could do this, but then you take away perhaps the major feature that makes people like FF so much.

So, what does all this tell you? What it should tell you is that the extension mechanism in FF is flawed. Since the FF extenstions can not be properly confined you will always run the risk of malfunctional or malicious extensions accessing and consuming browser resources that it shouldn't.

The good news is that since (to my knowledge) FF extensions are written in XML and ECMAScript rather than, e.g., C, it should in theory be possible to control to a better extent which and how many resources an extenstion has access to. I have too little knowledge about the extension mechanism in FF to say whether such a solution is really feasible, though. All I can say is that if FF is going to take security, stability, and robustness seriously, more effort must be put into properly designing the extension architecture.

And as for Opera not having the same possibilities for extensions as FF, this is IMHO a wise move. Yes, I know that Opera has the User JS stuff, but for some reason this has never caused me any troubles whatsoever. Not that I have much experience with the User JS design or have played around with many User JS extensions, mind you.

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

[Cyberllama]

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.

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

[Dachannien]

I almost never have to restart Firefox, except on rare occasions when some third-party plugin (Acrobat, WMP) hoses things up. Something else on your machine must be borken.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I would probably get flame for saying this.

MS DOS is more stable than DR DOS.

Seriously, I use them both equally and, frankly, MS DOS crashes once per day while DR DOS crashes _at least_ twice a day. Compare to MS DOS, where Windows 3.11 loads perfectly on it, DR DOS takes forever to load it _and still reqiuires config.sys gymnastics_, AND squeeze every last bit of ram out of my machine.

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

Yes this is a rant, so please, Digital Research, do something about your horrible WFW incompatibilities that existed for as long as I could remember.

*Burn karma burn baby*

PS. Use a non-shit OS, retard.

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

[Dr.Syshalt]

By default FF decides itself how much RAM it uses. You can limit the RAM cache either in user.js - add the following string

user_pref("browser.cache.memory.capacity", 10240);

...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.

Re:Whatever

[ArwynH]

You know, I hate it when post like the parent and grand-parent get modded insightful, because well, they are not. Since when has it been the browser's fault when 3rd party plugins fail to work?

Not only is Flash a 3rd party plugin, so it has nothing to do with the Firefox team, but it is also Proprietary and close source, which means even if the Firefox developer wanted to fix it, they couldn't.

Quite frankly your arguments sound alot like those people who blame windows for running slowly and having adverts pop-up when they install a 'cool new search bar'. Place your blame where it lies, not on the first thing you see

In other words if you want your Firefox to stop crashing you may a) uninstall flash, b) install flashblock(not sure if that'll work. it might) or c) Bitch loudly at macromedia until they release a version that doesn't.

On the question of memory usage, there you have a valid point and it is being addressed. Firefox 1.5RC3 seems to play alot nicer with my memory on my system (linux), than 1.0 did.

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:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You're sort of right. I was only meaning to be funny, and the comparison is only in the most basic sense. Microsoft sabotages all software that runs on it. Anything other than a clean install with all the latest sp's and insanely firewalled... it's just asking for trouble. You want to install Office? Sure thing. Autocad? Great. Dreamweaver... uh oh, you just exceeded the magical third-party software limit, where things start sucking ass...

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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.

Re:Whatever

[TheoGB]

But I think this comment:

Everytime someone points out a flaw, even a well known one, the zealots rush to mock the person. And you think why people still stay away from FF.

Is the key one. "Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use. Personally I don't even know if the software I have on Windows exists on (say) Macs - I've so far known two Mac fanboys who can't do the things with music that I can do with Cool Edit Pro.

But I digress,

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.

But don't you get kind of bored of assuming Microsoft are the reason? I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability. Yes, it's possible they are trying to undermine Firefox but why would they bother? IE isn't making them money in the way MS-DOS was when they sabotaged DR-DOS for Windows. And I still need to use IE to access my work's online MS Exchange email, for example.

I would say it's more logical to blame Firefox for the problems or possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it, which I consider pretty stupid.

Re:Whatever

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

"Use a different O/S, retard" is about the most pointless remark you can make, unless you're about to stump up the £1000's of pounds it's going to take to replace all the software they use.

It's not a pointless remark. The ship is sinking... he's worried he'll get wet if he jumps into the ocean. He will get wet... there's no other way. It's going to cost him... sad, but there's no way out of it. If it helps, I'll gladly concede that the lost money was swindled from him.

I mean, other people seem to be able to get software to run on Microsoft machines with good stability.

Yes, gamers say that. But their games crap out on them, and they refuse to admit the culprit, or even own up to the constant os rebuilding they have to do. Corporate environments do it too... on compaq/dell/hp machines with standardized systems, and with aggressive policing of all the machines. SPs are up to date. Only applications that are carefully tested are allowed on them. A minimum of shareware software, and or vertical market software on them. A minimum number of third-party apps on any single machine. The home user that wants to download a canasta card shareware game, this simply doesn't apply to them.

And yet, when windows isn't the software on the machine, it can have any number of apps (even if you don't get the selection you'd like).

It really is windows. Everyone refuses to see it.

Do I think they intentionally sabotage firefox? I doubt it very much. Do they put together such a shitty system that anything past an empty MFC template app will have weird problems? Yes, without a doubt.

r possibly the user's machine which could be utterly borked. To turn round and claim "Oh it'll be Microsoft" is simply to put the problem into a big black hole and ignore it

It is the users machine. But is it a hardware problem? Maybe 3 out of 100 times, it's bad ram. Or a CPU whose fan is failing, and the temperature has been too high for too long. Or a hd that is in borderline failure. But those cases, eventually you realize something is up, you fix it. Hardware problems very rarely go unrealized forever. That leaves alot of software problems.

The biggest piece of software is *always* windows. Is it a big black hole? Hell yes. But it's not my fault. I'm not an idiot, I'm capable of nuanced perception of problems. But I give up on it. There will be people here having this guy check dll build versions, and running regmon and lord knows a million other things, all trying desperately to understand what really happens in windows. For some of them, it will be voodoo that they think they know, but their comprehension is nil... others will come as close as anyone ever does to understanding it, but they'll still fail. And that last 5% that is unknowable will bite them in the ass. Over and over. Screw that.

It's not worth it anymore.

Get an OS where it's 100% knowable. My choice is linux. Yours can be anything, I'm not a snob. But it can't be windows. Sure, it's difficult. Knowable doesn't mean easily knowable, or instantly knowable. But it does mean the end of voodoo, if that's something you desire.

Re:Whatever

[LiquidCoooled]

Flashblock doesn't actually stop flash, its the same as all the other extensions. They occur AFTER the page is loaded.

Have you even noticed that the page loads and sometimes a flash of the first frame of flash is loaded before its replaced by the flash nobble?

I uninstalled flash because of this little niceness.
In IE on Windows, I could do the same with a quick simple reg fix (on or off by a double click when needed - it just modified the killbits on the activex).

In FF its a bit more complicated, its either on or its off.

I would like to see a generic ObjectBlock code implimented within firefox itself which will block *any* content right at the core. It should only actively create the documeent after you click it (or whitelist the site/content type)

Re:Whatever

[RoLi]

Microsoft has a commercial interest in Internet Explorer

Actually, Microsoft has a lot of commercial interest in the Win32-platform (Windows-licenses, MSDN-subscriptions, courses, etc.) which is of course endangered by the Web.

That is why they wanted to establish their own network (MSN) with their own proprietary protocols and their own proprietary formats. They failed miserably and now MSN is just a normal ISP and uses Unix protocols and formats like anybody else. Microsoft did not "win" the Browser war, the whole Internet Explorer thing was damage control. After Netscape was dead, Microsoft was stuck with something they didn't really want. (An IE that was dominating but was running with open protocols and formats.) The better IE is, the more attractive the web becomes in comparison to Win32. So of course they let it rot, making IE better would have been counterproductive.

After Firefox started to destroy domination by becoming so big that it can no longer be ignored (over 10% and rising is too much to ignore, even if it's still a minority) therefore Microsoft fell back to damage control mode.

However, there are several reasons why IE will NEVER regain total domination:

• IE is de-facto dead (or dying) on the Mac
• While the IE to Firefox transition is quite easy (bookmarks get copied, etc.) the reverse is actually quite troublesome as Microsoft is quite arrogant and probably won't import FF bookmarks. Also of course FF-extensions don't run on IE, therefore IE7 might be able to slow further losses to FF, but it most likely won't be able to get back many users already lost.
• Smartphones and other wireless devices are slowly getting more important and most of them don't run IE and never will. Even those few windows mobile users will run some browser that might be called IE but will not have much in common with the PC-version.
• Embedded devices will become more important in browsing, especially the PS3.
• Also, Linux adoption on the desktop is progressing. Many governments all around the world are adopting Linux, especially in South America and Europe.
• IE has already lost domination and IE-only websites are becoming rarer already. Just one or 2 years ago, many people tried out Mozilla or Firefox, but were put off with IE-only websites. Quite a lot of those will try 1.5 and later 2.0 and even though the product is pretty much the same, there are much fewer IE-only sites around and therefore they are much more likely to stay with FF. Also, once a webmaster has established a standard-compliant website, it's unlikely that he reprograms it to be IE-only again, that just doesn't make any sense.

All these factors combined will prevent IE from regaining significant marketshare and will cause further decline for IE in the long term that might be slowed but not stopped by Microsoft.

Re:Whatever

[TotoLeFoobar]

I use Firefox for most of my work, which also includes web development stuff. I run it on a laptop which I put to sleep at night. I currently have an uptime of 38 days (does that include sleep time?), and for the past 38 days, I have not restarted Firefox.

I know that I am probably also not the average Web user (who is?), and surely Firefox has space for improvement, but I find it amusing that you make such a strong statement based only on your experience. :-)

In general, though, I have been installing Firefox on the computers of my friends and colleagues, and the vast majority of them have been very happy about it. I even know a few typical secretaries who cannot stop promoting it to their friends, which, from my geeky point of view, is a wonderful phenomenon to witness.

Re:Whatever

[darkmeridian]

Once in a while, on a website with a flash banner ad, I'll firefox taking up 35% of my cpu.

One word: Flashblock

Here endeth the lesson.

Re:Whatever

[radish]

So your suggested fix for a browser which can't display a certain kind of content reliably is to not try to display that kind of content? Genius. It works in other browsers, it should work in firefox. There's no excuse.

I wonder...

[FF8Jake]

how many ultimately cool creative proprietary new filters they can pack into IE7 instead of getting standards support right. I can see it now, along with the usual "glow" and "shadow" filters, we will also have "rainbow animation" effects!

Re:I wonder...

[pomo monster]

Drop shadows are terribly overused nowadays, but they can be enormously helpful sometimes to emphasize elements or set them apart from busy backgrounds, e.g. captions over a photo. text-shadow is already a property in CSS2, and they're considering adding a "glow" or "outline" to the next recommendation.

Firefox doesn't support text-shadow (or, totally apropos nothing, display: inline-block for that matter), but Safari does, and tastefully applied, it's great to have around. Why IE doesn't pair its proprietary filters to standard CSS properties like these is beyond me.

Opera

[roman_mir]

Just a couple of months ago I remember a story here, on /., about Opera giving away free serial numbers for their browser to anyone who wanted one (or more.) I must admit, I got myself one of those numbers and tried the browser and hated it. So I am stuck with FF for now because there is no way in hell I will use IE ever again in my life (haven't used it except in corporate environment for IE based intranet apps that someone wrote for over 3 years now.)

But I am getting disappointed with FF - it crashes badly, processes get stuck, memory is an issue. There are problems. I hope these problems will be fixed quickly because this is getting annoying, and even though I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.

Re:Opera

[cryptoz]

Why did you hate it? I've been an Opera user for coming up on three years now, and I admit I disliked it at first. I'll even go so far as to say that it's one of those applications that just flat out doesn't feel right at first...but seriously, I can't go back to anything else. Not FF, not IE, not Konqueror, nothing, just because Opera is so wonderful. Are you sure that you didn't allow yourself time to get the feel of it? Did you customize it at all? I also admit that by default Opera's interface is awful, but in the end it's all about the customization, isn't it?

I suggest you give Opera another chance, since it sounds like you gave up on it rather quickly.

Re:Opera

[John_Booty]

I told DarkSin here that I am not about to port LeetKey to Opera because I am not using it at the moment, I may just have to do that if I decide to switch to that browser if I feel that FF is just not what I want to see as a browser.

Okay. Fair enough. Let's see what "LeetKey" is...

LeetKey is similar to Russ Key... this extension allows typing and transliterating English into 1337 and other encoding schemes such as ROT13, Base64, HEX, URL etc. For some encodings this extension will translate the text back into English

Wow. What a blow it will be to Firefox if you drop active development of that. Christ.

Re:Opera

[roman_mir]

You are right, it's not a big deal. It is only loss of mindshare. I am not silly to think that anyone cares, I am saying that I will move and I am not the only one.

Re:Opera

[hkmwbz]

"I hated it because it felt awkward and unnatural."

Wow, that's really specific!

That's like saying "I don't like Firefox because I don't like it".

It seems to me,

[BattleRat]

that the most compelling argument to NOT use Firefox in favor of IE died when the "IE Tab" extension came out. Everything you need is now within your reach with Firefox. You have no excuse now...

Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[sysrpl]

Both Opera and Firefox are rolling native SVG support into their browser. If you are unfamiliar with SVG, this site.

http://svg.codebot.org/

Re:Both Opera And Firefox Support SVG

[Kelson]

They're both subsets so far -- and unfortunately they're not the same subsets. Opera 8 supports SVG Tiny. Mozilla intends to implement SVG Full eventually, but the current SVG support in Firefox 1.5 is still missing quite a bit.

So some features work in both browsers, some only work in Opera, and some only work in Firefox.

Completely non-informative article

[AcidArrow]

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)

Re:Completely non-informative article

[trezor]

I've tried IE7 Beta 1 and let me tell you. They fucked up the UI in every single way possible. Rearranged everything known, and basicly implemented tabs in the poorest way I've ever seen it implemented.

Even people complaining about Opera's "untraditional" default UI, would praise Opera after seeing this mess. The best part? It can't be configured to work in a sane or usable way.

In short, from top and down: Tabs on top. Then the URL-bar. Then the toolbar and finally the menu-bar. In all honesty, you can rearrenge the toolbar and menubar, but the tabs and URL-bar has to remain on top.

Maybe there are fixes, but if an advanced user can't figure it out in 5 minutes, I call it "broken". Which seems to be the most fitting word I can think of for IE7.

what about galeon?

[larry bagina]

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.

Re:what about galeon?

[MaskedSlacker]

Its a fine browser, but like FF is based on mozilla, lacks extensions, or even the nifty features of opera. All in all, opera and FF are hands down the two best across all platforms, and if FF didn't have extensions, Opera would win. Opera > FF w/o extensions, FF w/ extensions >> Opera.

Re:Opera?

[Al Dimond]

I think Opera makes headlines not necessarily because lots of people use it but because people writing articles about web browsers care about web browsing and thus are quite likely to have tried Opera. Most people I know that have tried Opera are quite impressed by it, even if they don't use it every day. I use Firefox on the machine I'm posting from (a GNU/Linux box with a GB of RAM) but on machines without the RAM or processing power I almost always install Opera instead. There are a few things I prefer about the look'n'feel of FF, and how much it can be customized, but Opera's performance on otherwise slow computers is really impressive.

So I guess it's kind of like why many web sites discussing operating systems discuss desktop Unixes when for most people their OS decision is "XP Home or XP Pro?" More that the author is interested than the readers.

Re:Opera?

[Aranth Brainfire]

You obviously don't know the right sorts of people. I know a couple of people who use it, and I'm a user myself. It's more common on mobile devices I believe, but it's still a more mature browser than Firefox on desktops, in my opinion. A web browser is, to me, something that should "just work", not something that should be customized all to hell with extensions and stuff. Opera does that, and has most of the features of an extension-enriched Firefox. The main thing it's missing is the ideological "Open source is better than EVERYTHING" component, which means that (in my experience), you don't run into as many evangelical Opera users. I honestly don't give much of a damn who uses Opera, as long as the production team keeps making a good, responsive browser that I personally can use without problems. Firefox, however, by design encourages the spreading of itself, as it is in the user's best interest that more people get involved and contribute code or extensions.

Nice site graphics, by the way. Should be at least one record of Opera in your logs now, or they're doing it wrong :p

Re:Opera?

[croddy]

No.

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.

Re:Avant Browser

[P0ldy]

Can't say I've ever used "Avant" before, but...everything you've said is available in most other browsers, AFAIK.

You're wrong there. Avant has some features only available in IE, which makes it pretty special. From their FAQ:

Is Avant Browser a secure browser?

Yes, Avant Browser is secure. Since it's based on Internet Explorer, Avant Browser is as secure as Internet Explorer.

Re:Opera UI

[cryptoz]

I can't configure it to use larger fonts.

Actually, you can. Look under Tools / Preferences / Advanced.

can't change the layout to be what I like.

Ah, this is interesting. You see, I can't get FF to make it the layout I like (one of my main reasons for using Opera.) I have the address bar and the tab bar at the bottom of the screen, and no File Edit etc menus at the top. Last time I checked, it was either impossible or nearly so to get FF to do this. So, I understand what you mean about interface being a big deal, but it's not Opera's fault that it doesn't work just the way you specifically want it to. I'm not blaming FF for it's configuration problems, even though I believe it has some.

I'm getting tired of this

[yootje]

They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[cryptoz]

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.

Re:I'm getting tired of this

[Phroggy]

They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.

What percentage of your time using a computer is spent using a browser? For most of us, it's a pretty significant percentage. That's what makes it important.

The Article is a Bit Misleading

[nant]

It mentions a new widgets feature. Most chances are that the author is confusing the AJAX SDK opera released not too long ago (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2005/11/15) to be a new Desktop feature.

Aside of the above, it is a pretty good article. Kudos to my fav. browser maker ;)
/me eagerly awaits Preview 2/Beta 1/votevah!

Re:Avant Browser

[aconbere]

I'm afraid cryptoz is right, what you're talking about is mouse gestures, and as suprising as this may be to you this feature has been available for some time in firefox as an extension and default in opera for ages. *gasp*

If you are however content to use a IE based browser that fails in all the same ways that IE fails (security and standards compliant rendering being my main to beefs) then by all means go right ahead. But be forewarned your avant browser, is nothing but an IE skin, and in my opinion it's not even a very good one.

~Anders

Re:Opera UI

[Aranth Brainfire]

"I can't configure it to use larger fonts."

You mean like the option, "minimum font size (in pixels)"? Or the options that allow you (in the same part of preferences, "fonts") to define the default fonts and sizes for websites? Or perhaps do you mean the option to zoom in on any webpage (although that increases the size of images too...)

You've gotta check out IE Tab!

[thecampbeln]

This is an extension I found a few days ago, and though YMMV in the few days I've been using it it works pretty damned well (in the latest 1.5 RC to boot!) Enjoy!

Re:Avant Browser

[Farrell]

Avant Browser is actually an alternative version, if it's not the direct descendant of, an IE browser called, I believe, IEOpera, who's goal, quite amusingly, was to bring Opera's features to IE. Everything you listed on there is an Opera feature, and some of the more basic ones. It's definately worth trying Opera out itself, if just because it's now completely free.

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:What competition?

[theapodan]

Actually, with Opera's "wand" feature, you can fill in the blanks much easier than with firefox's comparable feature.

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.

Stupid mods

[ajdlinux]

Just a few minutes ago this was rated 4 or 5, it's now 0!

Perfectly valid point, Opera is one of the smallest browsers. I would rather use seamonkey than opera for several reasons:
* it's free and Free (FSF)
* it looks better
* runs better on linux
* XUL
* etc.

Re:Stupid mods

[Kelson]

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.

Re:Stupid mods

[Lisandro]

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 beats out Gecko

[Bitsy Boffin]

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.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[patro]

some I miss particularly - ... the flash click to play thingee

Try this.

Re:Opera beats out Gecko

[moonbender]

FWIW since either Opera 8.5 or Opera 9, Ctrl-T works by default. Pissed me off to no end because Ctrl-N stopped working, the key combo Opera has been using since before there even was a Firefox. But it was simple enough to add it in, now both Ctrl-T and Ctrl-N work. I also use Gmail with it without any showstopping bugs, although I'm not sure if the address autocompletion works.

take what you can get

[wardk]

On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""

good to see microsoft is upgrading the internet soon, we get to read about firefox and opera in a mainstream rag

Agreed - major performance problems with Firefox

[mrawl]

I love Firefox, but it's obviously pretty poorly written in parts (yes, I could do a lot better given some resources). The way it slows down and becomes unresponsive with a large number of tabs indicates severe internal locking conflict. I believe they use spinlocks too, hence the cpu piggishness. Once it gets bogged down it's truly hosed. Now, the thing is, why on earth would different tabs have major locking conflicts? Shared data structures, cache, etc. I'm sorry but this was just not well thought out. I can't see any reason for this level of extreme contention. They've added more and more synchronization to fix bugs to the point where it's just a lumbering pig, instead of freeing up the design. Different tabs, different threads, minimal conflict - any other design can not work. I bet IE 7 doesn't behave like this.

Second point. The Flash thing is truly nauseating, but it's not a firefox cpu issue, what it seems to be is the XUL UI not having any priority on events. It's not that the browser won't switch tabs when flash is running, it just needs to be shaken awake. For example, flash is doing its thing (soaking up unused cpu), you click a tab, firefox simply does not respond, for minutes sometimes, it's infuriating, an absolute usability nightmare - but now bring forward another window, return firefox to the top - bingo it switches tabs. It's XUL event handling (or lack of events) that's the problem, not flash.

Ok, some educated guess work there, but it can't be far wrong. If they concentrated on a few of these issues, the improvements could be truly staggering. God I hope I get a chance to help - and you guys should all help too if you can.

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:Shouldn't be that complicated

[Kelson]

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.

You haven't read many arguments over ActiveX, have you?

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[FireFury03]

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.

Re:Shouldn't be that complicated

[abbamouse]

It gets worse. Many sites appear broken to Opera because they detect the user agent and send different code to non-IE browsers, even though Opera can display the "IE" code just fine. As a consequence, sites appear "broken" because they ARE broken -- they send alternate buggy HTML that hasn't been updated in ages to non-IE browsers.

Re:safari!!!

[ajdlinux]

Safari is based on the KDE projects KHTML engine. I find KHTML and Konqueror work quite well for most web browsing needs, but try something like loading the full manual of PHP in there. It's 10MB that firefox handles brilliantly, but Konqueror has trouble. It takes ages to load in KHTML browsers, then ages to browse through the document. Firefox takes a while to load at first, but then document navigation is done in less than a second.

Re:safari!!!

[JonJ]

I think you are confusing "PCs" with "Windows", a common mistake amongst Mac fanatics.

Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"I think Opera messed itself up by selling their web browser at first."

I disagree.

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".

Re:Nice "messup" for a rapidly growing company!

[hkmwbz]

"Opera has never made much profit"

What is "much profit", and what does this have to do with your initial claims that "Opera has messed up" and that they have never made money on the desktop? They've been expanding a lot the last few years to keep up with demand, and that costs money of course. That doesn't mean that the income has been going up too.

Opera has made plenty enough profit to survive and experience constant growth for many years.

"Internet devices are their niche, and that's what brings in the larger percentage of revenue. And that percentage is increasing. (over 80% now)"

Now, yes, because they just eleased the desktop version for free without ads. I've already told you about that. Please pay attention.

"And how would that work?"

You get lots of users searching through Google (a huge part of the desktop revenues in the past), even more now that Opera is free without ads, and combined with a better search deal with Google, you have the potential of a lot of money flowing in.

"What they are doing is basically recognizing that they are not going to make money from the desktop browser (while the biggest competitors give it away for free). So they release it for free and get a lot of good PR. And leverage that PR for the internet device markets."

You are wrong, as I have already told you. They expect to make a lot more money on the desktop side now. They get better PR and they make more money.

Firefox 1.5 comes out today.

[DroopyStonx]

Guess we'll find out soon enough!

Re:safari!!!

[PitaBred]

And this is what happens to your children when they use Macs... please, parents, don't allow your kids to become like this.

Mac. Just say NO(tm).

A more useful extension: Ghostzilla?

[Atario]

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?

Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[bjornte]

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.

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?

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[GauteL]

I would recommend adding to the bug and actually listing the web sites that are going to break. These sites are the equivalent of Dixons or Best Buy in their respective countries and are mainstream sites with lots of visitors.

Re:Firefox unfriendly to European languages

[Bacon Bits]

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?

Of HTML, yes. Of XHTML with full CSS support, no. CSS is designed to enforce pixel-level layout.

Has firefox fixed updates?

[Nightspirit]

In my experience, users never upgrade anything unless it is automatic or they are prompted, which is why I prefer to install Opera on computers I fix (it automatically shows a popup when an upgrade is ready).

I know firefox has the icon change near the upper-right of the screen, but for me it never worked (the upgrade would always freeze, on 3 different machines), and I always had to install a fresh copy from the firefox website.

Is this common for other people, or has anyone else experienced this problem?

Re:Has firefox fixed updates?

[Hieronymus Howard]

Yes, software updates in 1.5 are vastly improved. It automatically downloads the update and then asks you if you want to use it the next time you start Firefox. I've had no trouble with this on the release candidates.

When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[cheekyboy]

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.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[StarkRG]

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?

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[nick8325]

Opera's had that for ages, can't remember when it first appeared though...

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[cgenman]

Opera recently added "fit to window width" under the view tab, which intelligently downsizes pages to avoid horizontal scrolling on smaller windows, but keeps everything as-is if there is sufficient width. As a last resort on very, very small screens it degrades to a custom CSS file. It's really quite nifty.

Re:When do we get REAL RESIZING like acrobat

[Wildclaw]

Yes, there are two types of zooms when it comes to web browsers. One zoom changes relative percentages while the other doesn't. Since changing relative percentages just makes it so you have to side scroll when zooming in, that version isn't that useful.

That leaves the version that doesn't change relative percentages. Note, that text wrapping also uses relative percentages, so text should usually wrap inside the browser borders. This basically means the following, assuming 150% zoom:

* Images will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Text will take 150% of their base pixel size.
* Pixel offsets should be multiplied by 150% (1.5)
* Relative percentages should remain the same.
* Text should wrap as it currently does.

In some cases, there will be problems when text/images are forced outside of the width of the page, but that is nothing different than if you resized your current browser and made it really small. A good browser should be able to handle those cases.

It isn't brain surgery. Opera has done it for a long long time. Unfortunally, firefox/mozilla hasn't come closer to a solution since the feature suggestion was added to bugzilla in the year 1999 (bug #4821).

what we need for compliant browsers

[CarpetShark]

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.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[jeff_schiller]

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?

Microsoft proposed their own graphical markup language (VML) that they also use in Office - but it was rejected. I guess they feel spurned.

But Mozilla has ignored SVG?!? Firefox supports SVG natively since Firefox 1.5 Alpha - it is NOT supported as an add-on. Furthermore, the SVG spec is a very complex one - it's not something that can be trivially implemented.

FYI, Safari is currently working on updating WebKit to support SVG based on Konqueror's KSVG plugin.

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[Cereal Box]

They are actually in compliance with PNG standards with respect to transparency -- I quote from the W3 PNG spec which Slashdotters hold near and dear to their hearts but have probably never read:


13.16 Alpha channel processing
The alpha channel can be used to composite a foreground image against a background image. The PNG datastream defines the foreground image and the transparency mask, but not the background image. PNG decoders are not required to support this most general case. It is expected that most will be able to support compositing against a single background colour.


This is the funny thing about standards. They're generally not as black and white as people think they are! They contain lots of passages that say implentors "should" do this or "are not required" to do that. In this case, IE simply composites against a single background color (gray, IIRC).

Another Slashdot myth busted...

Re:what we need for compliant browsers

[powermacx]

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?

SVG support in Safari? here. Still rather unstable and lacking features, but full support will be there eventually.

Wrong Methods

[RAMMS EIN]

``They don't get fixed because they aren't ego-boosters like other pet projects.''

I don't think that's the reason. I think the FF devs would love to fix these issues, but haven't been able to. Furthermore, I think that this is because they built the beast the wrong way.

In the early days of the Mozilla project, they were building one big Communicator with lots of features and workarounds for broken sites and dog knows what else, all built upon a cross-platform framework with lots of abstractions and all. It was horribly slow. It was a memory hog. It was a huge download. It was buggy.

When Mozilla was about feature complete, they started working on speedups. The results were quite impressive. They got it to a usable speed. Then they finally got smart and created a separate project just for the browser. This browser would be very light-weight and fast. The developers started stripping out code, removing features, speeding things up, and reducing the size of the download.

After several years, we now have Firefox. It's the slowest, most memory hungry, and most crash-prone browser I've ever used. Looking at the history of the project, I am not surprised. It's the wrong way to develop things. 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.

Re:Wrong Methods

[typicallyterrific]

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.

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 :P.

A plea to Firefox developers...

[PhilHibbs]

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.

Re:Shut FF down once a day

[The One KEA]

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...

FF vs Fx

[trollable]

There is at least one thing wrong with Firefox. According to the releases notes, "The preferred abbreviation is 'Fx' or 'fx'.". But almost every one uses 'FF'. They should listen the users ;)

Re:is there an extension....

[Yer Mom]

...or the message text would get added to the company's spam filters in fairly short order once somebody receives 50 identical messages from different addresses.

Granted, that shows lack of clue, but we already know they're somewhat low on that particular resource...

another vaporware evaluation

[LordActon]

On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year

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.

Oversimplification

[DrIdiot]

In a recent study, security analysis and software company Secunia found that Firefox had 3 unpatched security risks out of 25 discovered problems, compared with 20 unpatched risks for IE out of 86 found. Opera had them both beat, with no unpatched holes out of 8 detected. Of course, as browsers become more popular, they also become more attractive targets.

That's only part of the picture. Currently, Secunia's most critical bug in IE is rated "extremely critical" (the highest rating). Then, looking at IE's records, we see that 15% of its bugs are "extremely critical" and 29% are "highly critical." Compared to Firefox's 4% "extremely critical" (which ends up being only one - and that one only affected *nix) and 24% "highly critical" (which sounds awful close, but IE has about triple the vulnerabilities that Firefox has).

And that doesn't even take into account that Firefox is an open source application whereas IE is not. How many bugs in IE are just temporarily hidden because it's closed source?