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.....

[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.....

[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.

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.

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]

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

[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

[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.

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!

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

[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/

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)

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: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: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.

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: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...)

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.

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.

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: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).

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?

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...

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: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.

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 ;)