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What's New With IE, Firefox, Opera
prostoalex writes "The Web browser market hasn't seen the competition heat up for a while, but things are getting quite exciting, PC World reports. The magazine looks into the latest features that are incorporated into Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla Foundation's Firefox and Opera Software's Opera. From the article: "We took Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1 out for a spin. Both the Firefox beta and the Opera beta are available for download, although Opera isn't publicizing this early testing version; the browsers' final editions should be out around the time you read this. On the other hand, the IE 7 beta will not be available for downloading until early next year.""
it really doesn't matter to me, just as long as it's w3c compliant.
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.
Both Opera and Firefox are rolling native SVG support into their browser. If you are unfamiliar with SVG, this site.
http://svg.codebot.org/
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)
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.
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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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
They are only browsers! A piece of software where you can check out websites with! They are not that important, you see. Dude.
My photo's.
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.
Actually, with Opera's "wand" feature, you can fill in the blanks much easier than with firefox's comparable feature.
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.
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.
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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
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?
"Humanity lives and dies by its capabilities of communication, or lack thereof."
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.
Why cant we have real true resizing of webpage,if I show page at 60%, all images etc... should scale accordingly... or
is that just too hard for a multiplatform? bitmap scaling in software is trivial btw, go google it FF-devs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You know, ANSI C had holes in its standard too, but most of the weird, compiler-dependent stuff was covered by a #pragma directive, especially for that purpose. The rest of the compiler-specific stuff was generally an extension to the standard, rather than an interpretation of it.
(X)HTML has plenty of space for browser-specific extensions, without breaking the standard. And that's generally where extensions go, too.
The funny thing is: companies like MS still don't bother to implement things properly. Take PNG. In IE, PNG transparency took forever (I'm only vaguely recalling that it might have been fixed recently). But it's been in the PNG standard from day 1 -- an open standard, with no reason not to implement it, except laziness and lack of due import.
SVG is similar: a well-defined standard, with LOTS of potential for the web, but yet Microsoft ignore it. Hell, Mozilla has ignored it, too. It's available for Mozilla as an add-on, but why isn't it IN there now? What about Konqueror and Safari?
Where is support for the phone:// protocol? That's been around for years, too.
EVERY effort should be made to implement things, according to best practices for that particular standard.
Maybe what we need is not a better w3c standard, or a better PNG standard, or more marketing of SVG. Maybe what we need is more like a business practices standard, so that all browsers are certified as making continuous, ongoing efforts to keep up with new features, completely and accurately implement standards, and to resolve ambiguities in a community process before proceeding.
THEN, we need to market. But NOT a browser; we need to market that certification. That certification mark, say, "FUTURE Browser", or something, should be what people look for in a browser, not feature X, or feature Y. As much as the marketing and word-of-mouth process should extoll the virtues of FUTURE browsers, they should also shame any browser that doesn't comply, and old, and worthless.
That shame DOES work. It worked to take market share from IE, and give it to Firefox. It can work much more, when different browser organisations, and users of many platforms, all speak with one voice, and say that a browser is not a browser, if it doesn't have a FUTURE browser certification.