Slashdot Mirror
A Browser War Preview
"Browsers are lousy in terms of supporting the various specifications people have published that define useful things web developers want and need to do. This has numerous effects:
- It slows down and frustrates web developers.
- It raises the costs of web development.
- It makes some things impossible.
"All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?"
"The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them."
The more browsers that pass the Acid2 test, the better support there is for web developers. The better support there is for web developers, the higher the quality of the work they put out. And you, as an end-user of that work, benefit."
Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing
"I like Opera. I use Opera. I read the comparison, and Opera looks to come out favorably. Then I read the comments. Firefox compared to IE, again and again. Reasons why Firefox is better. Reasons why IE is better. Reasons why more people use IE. But there are fewer comments on Opera. I can't understand why. It has lots of things that Firefox needs extensions for built right in (and without significant differences in resources), and some things, like bittorrent support, that aren't available in any extension. It has better standards compliance than the other two. It has Widgets (like extensions) if you want to expand it more. But yet, a 3-way comparison is treated as a 2-way comparison. I thought this would be more of an eye opener, 'Wow, I didn't know Opera did all that and did it better than the other browsers!' But instead, the comments read like the posters glanced at the IE and Firefox pages of the article (if they read it at all) and hopped right back on the IE vs Firefox war. I find it sad that a competitive browser receives to little consideration, especially from a group that is supposedly early adopters.""
"Me, too," wrote reader lee1. "I think there is a reflex to ignore Opera because for so long it was pay- or ad-ware."
Reader bartkusa also spoke up for Opera
"Opera's UI is extremely customizable [opera.com]. Skinnable interface and lots of flexibility with toolbar and button placement, on the output side. On the input side, you can set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures if you don't like the default ones."
Dan East pointed out a glitch in the linked story as originally displayed:
"Their memory usage charts cannot possibly be right:
- Memory Usage Loading Six Tabs
- Firefox 2 Beta 1: 73K
- Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3: 70K
- Opera 9.0: 52K
- IE 6.0: 155K
- Firefox 1.5.0.4: 56K
A single image on one of those pages could require more RAM than what the entire program is consuming. That's way, way off. What's even more amazing is, going by their charts, Opera actually consumes LESS ram with 6 pages loaded than when it first starts up! 53k -> 52k"
Reader dtfinch had another complaint: "The "Features at a Glance" table is very inaccurate with respect to Opera. For one, Opera has very good theme support."
Several readers offered rationales for the continued popularity of Internet Explorer; among these, according to reader chiller2, is better printing support compared to Firefox.
"e.g. In Firefox the scaling to fit the page just squeezes the content between wider margins rather than actually scaling the pages.
"Just yesterday a work colleague was trying to print off a page that was split horizontally into two frames. The top one had a company logo, and the lower one the table of figures she actually wanted. Printing normally just output the first bit of the lower frame. I had to view that frame only to get the full table in the frame to print."
Reader fuzzandwater complained "It's ridiculous that [the linked review's authors] defend IE by claiming 'no pages seem horribly messed up,'" writing "Clearly the author is not a web developer. If he were, he would know that the reason the pages display correctly in IE is javascript hacks, css workarounds, web developer headaches, Dean's IE7 javascript library, a separate stylesheet for IE, etc... It's not that IE is inherently displaying the sites correctly, it's that the site developers were forced to make them play nice with IE."
LWATCDR piles on the Explorer complaints, writing "It seems like a good number of people use Firefox now. So unless you want to exclude 1 out of 10 users from your site can not support just IE. I will not due business with a company that has an IE only site. Now the rub is this. IE doesn't support current standards. Yes, web developers have every right to complain about Microsoft ignoring standards and making their life more complicated. Because of IE I can not use PNG files with an alpha channel on websites I design.
"Just because most people use junk that is no reason to
a. Not tell them that is junk.
b. Try to get the producers of said junk to make it better.
c. Try to get people to use a better product."
Yvan256 raises the interesting point that as Windows changes, whether a browser is backward compatible makes a difference:
"Will Internet Explorer 7 run on Windows 95/98/ME/NT4? If not, then MSIE7 won't be ... And with Nintendo going with Opera for both the Nintendo DS and the Wii, Opera's marketshare might soon explode beyond 1-2%. Just keep that in mind before jumping into the 'MSIE7 has nice proprietary features' train."
Reader El_Muerte_TDS asks just what a "Favorites button" is, asking "Is it like a bookmark button?" To this, readers responded that "favorites" (in Internet Explorer) are equivalent to "Bookmarks" in most other browsers.
Blimey85 asks "What about extensions?," arguing that "Comparing stock Firefox with anything [isn't] very relevant. You need to compare Firefox loaded with some extensions to show the true power of the platform. Same with the other browsers and their add-ons or widgets."
"One example of not doing this is in the feature comparison table where it says that Firefox can't remember open tabs for the next session. My copy of Firefox not only does that when I want it to, it also has crash recovery so when I restart I can choose to reopen all of the tabs or not."
Yvan256, among others, thinks this is a double-edged sword: "The problem with Firefox is the extensions. People want a good browser, not fiddle around hunting for what exists. Power users do that, sure, but not regular users."
Reader Tet took issue with the reviewer's assertion that "the address bar is for URLs, not searches."
"I couldn't disagree more. One of the things that kept me with the original Mozilla suite for so long, rather than switching to Firefox was the ability to trigger a search from the address bar. Now that Firefox can do the same (and not waste screen real estate with an unnecessary extra box), I've switched. What do you possibly gain by having a separate search box? I just don't get it."
Reader GigsVT explained the appeal that a separate search bar has for him, though:
"If I have a host named "porn" on my network, and I type "porn" into the address bar, I better damn well get the host I want and not some search. We have a host named "pegasus" and I can't tell you how many times I've been to the pegasus mail web site and didn't want to be."
Thanks to all the readersa who took part in this conversation, especially those quoted above.
- Will IE 7 handle PNG's with alpaha channel transparency like every body else. As in no Active x controls and proprietary scripting methods in the html. Can I drop my browser detecting code and separate servings of markup or css based on the browser?
- The Box Model, is the math 9in IE finally not backwards from every one else, does it now make sense? Will 'Border' not be full scree when I just set them to '30px'?
- Oh one thing I am happy about in Fire Fox that is a long time coming for me is the spell check, I wonder how it will work with online WYSIWIG editors?
Anyone Know?I'll admit that like most people here on /., I find that the comments people make are more interesting than the articles themselves. However, do we need the recent proliferation in Slashback articles? Usually the /backs are for discussions that have already been disscussed to death. Someone once described /backs as 'the dupe that isn't a dupe'. I feel that he's right.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
are great
Am I the only one who doesn't see any need whatsoever for a bit torrent client built in to a web browser? There are a million free bit torrent clients out there that are way better than Opera's. Not only that, but its surprisingly difficult to turn it off. I personally lost intererst and opened the torrent from firefox before I figured it out.
That said Opera is my favorite web browser by far.
See, Slashdot is funded by these things called "advertisements." The more traffic they can generate, the more advertisements they can serve up. My guess is that by taking the most popular story of the previous day and rehashing it, Slashdot is assuming they will get another burst of traffic from the rehash, and generate more money. Judging by how many comments these Backslash things usually get, I'd say they're on to something.
It's like when studios make a remake of a popular movie: They're trying to capitalize on an existing popular property.
Anyone figured out how to turn off these silly backslash articles?
/.. I can't find that in my preferences any more...
If I want to read an article, I will read an article. I don't need it summarized so idiots can comment on comments that comment on a some silly web page.
For that matter, I thought we once were able to selectively choose what topics we want to read on
Also, how do I turn off that silly tagging deal? It just clutters the page.
Finally, could someone help me print out my email? HA.
...I'm viewing this with Opera. I have all 3 of the browsers on my computer. Previously, I was a dedicated firefox user. However, I've come to find that Opera uses less than half the RAM of Firefox and that Firefox and IE use about the same amount of RAM as one another when idling on a page (e.g. Google). If your RAM and speed are important to you, go Opera. If your extensions are critical, go Firefox. IE is only worth using if you need to go to an IE only page. To do my own little backlash: Opera is the most efficient. Firefox has the most utilities. IE has the most pages catering to it.
Because Slashdot isn't about the stories, it's abou the comments. And by doing a Backslash, they can get a new crop of comments about a previous topic without A)Duping or B) finding a tangentially related story.
I like it.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
I think Opera has long ago passed the Slashdot threshhold so as to deserve its own category or icon! IE, Netscape, Mozilla, AND FireFox each have one, even though the latter three are all branches of one entity; Is there some deep-seated reason why, despite all the Opera news, there is not even one Opera category?
I do searches a whole lot more than I browse to single word domains without any periods in them. Is it that much harder typing in the http://porn/ on the off chance that you need to browse to a single word domain rather than clog up the top of the screen with yet another bar?
I used to care. Now I don't any more. I consider the whole batch of so called standards collectively known as the web pretty primitive and backwards. CSS is a horrible standard not suitable for defining moderately complicated layouts (or even certain trivial ones). It's not the best we've got it's just something put together in a hurry independently from the (surprise!) independently evolving implementations, ten years ago. Attempts to steer browser development through forward defining new revisions of this standards have largely failed. And browser developers after spending most of the last decade interpreting CSS 2 seem to slowly settle on an interpretation of a significant subset of this standard from 1999 (or was it even earlier)?. CSS3 can now safely considered to be as dead as a doornail with browser developers cherry picking the little bitts and pieces that are more or less finalized.
:-).
Acid2 is not about CSS compliance but about supporting the documented ambiguities in the standard correctly (many undocumented ones remain). These ambiguities include weird parser behaviour, browser quirksmode hacks for non standard pages etc. In short, it test the browsers ability to fuck up the rendering in a consistent way. Of course the biggest fuck up of them all (IE) fails the test so the test is pretty much worthless in practice. It even fails rendering incorrectly
Then there is HTML which evolved from a naive attempt to capture semantics of certain documents by Tim Berners Lee to a slightly worse specification (HTML 4.x) which isn't really good for anything it is designed to do (ranging from layout features to representing document semantics). The successors in the form of XHTML 1.x and 2.x drop the layout stuff (which sucked anyway) and tried to preserve most of the flawed semantics whilst adding new constructs and increasing complexity so much nobody really understands it. Market apathy has ensured that these xhtml standards never moved out of the lab. XHTML documents actually served up as application/xml (alledgedly the correct way to serve them up) are extremely rare although well formed versions of html 4.x are now commonly served up as xhtml 1.0 transitional (or even strict). Other than forcing the browser into a somewhat better defined way of rendering, this has little effect in terms of layout features compared to html 4.x.
Let me see what else have we got? There's crappy SVG which slowly seems to replace gifs for sclable icons on some systems and also leads a double life as a poor mans graphics exchange format. There's the hopelessly underpowered javascript language and the accompanying APIs (DOM *shudder*). There's MATHML which remains ever popular in very small niches. Most of the mentioned technologies lead a double life in the form of how they are supposed to work and how they actually work in practice. Pragmatic web developers just copy paste and adapt what works and ignore the rest. The smarter ones build up some knowledge of how things are supposed to work and where the bugs are for each implementation. All the graphics designers seem to have standardized on non standard flash. With standards nazis mainly telling them not to use flash, instead of providing an alternative, this is unlikely to change in the forseeable future.
But as said, I no longer care that much. Increasingly tools take care of generating the exotic hacks to make it all work. Handcoding something like gmail would probably drive programmers mad, which is why the nice google people embedded the difficult stuff in a nice library so they can focus on application functionality.
Jilles
Why does everything have to be a "war"? Can't it be a browser competition?
Let the indoctrination to the culture of war end.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Maybe I'll grab the latest Opera and try it out this weekend, but how is it's page compatibility with the greater web out there when compared to Firefox and IE? I know it's touted as having the "most" standards support, but I tried Opera way back when and it hosed up or just plain wouldn't render correctly a number of sites I went to. Does it work on bank sites? Most popular websites? You can say it's a problem with the web designers, but if everything works on Firefox with the IETab extension, but doesn't render right on Opera, where does the problem lie?
My guess is the CSS problems you're seeing is people using IE CSS hacks, without targeting them for IE <= 6. Sure, there are definitely still missing stuffs in IE7, but most of the problem is when the developers essentially do an:
instead of"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
I don't use Opera for the following reasons:
1. I am lazy when it comes to browsers.
2. Up until last year, Opera had the attached stigma of being a "for pay" or "advertising-supported" browser. For years, it also lacked solid features supported by many mainstream browsers, (like javascript). Only now is it feature-complete AND free.
So, let's address the lazy part (my background):
First browser: Netscape 3.
Used until: Communicator 4.7
Reason for switch: was tired of putting up with increased crashes, which had been bugging me since Communicator 4.
Finally gave in and tried IE 5.0, which was faster and hardly crashed at all.
Second browser: IE 5
Used until: IE 6
Reason for switch: reduced stability over IE 5, increased pop-ups and pop-unders, more security holes every day, random site redirects bugging me to install spyware without my asking.
Finally gave in and tried Phoenix just for the pop-up blocking and improved stability and security. Got hooked on the tabbed-browsing and extensions.
Third browser: Phoenix 0.6
Used until: present day (Firefox 1.5)
Reason to consider switching: not much. 1.5 isn't as stable as 1.0, but it's not bad enough yet to consider a switch.
See my point yet? Most people are stuck in their ways - a favorite browser is like a favorite chair or pen: when it's really good, it's REALLY good. When it starts to suck, you make due until it really starts to bug you.
Let's now come back to reason #2:
Opera has just been badly marketed, so lazy people havn't considered it.
Opera made a bad move charging money for their browser because it meant I never seriously considered it as an option. I couldn't stand the idea of having an ad-supported browser, so I threw it out of consideration. Same goes for many people I know.
Then Opera missed the boat last year: they only made their software free AFTER the big Firefox advertising campaign. This was very stupid, because with the limelight on Firefox, nobody cared. If it had been announced before or polssibly a few months after the big Firefox hodown, it would have made a bigger splash.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
I think separating appearance configuration out is a good thing, rather than cluttering up a single window. I guess it's a matter of opinion. Are there some options you wouldn't be sure in which of the two they would be kept in?
Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
I don't know if I'm misunderstanding you, but middle click for new window works fine here. Preferences->Advanced->Shortcuts->Middle Click Options.
I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
Well mine are at the bottom. And this is a subjective thing, not a "bad UI" issue. (Er, try rightclick on tab->Customize->Placement.)
You forgot it also allows people who missed the first topic to continue the discussion and still see their posts modded.
One problem with Slashdot is after a few hours no one mods a story, so if they can make it fresh again 24 hours later we get fresh modding and debate continues beyond the usual level.
I like muppets.
I've succeeded in getting only one friend of mine to use Opera, and thats because I fixed his computer and told him that from now on, he was going to "use a grown-up browser". I remember using Firefox on another friend's computer. I thought to myself, "Wow, this looks and feels just like Internet Explorer, but with a download manager and some room for extensions. Meh, I'll stick with Opera." I'm starting to be able to back up my incredible smugness. And as for people complaining about earlier versions which had ads, they took up very little space, were easily ignored, and could be configure to display generic rather than targeted ads. And when it was set to that, it pretty much just advertised Opera.