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A Mozilla Plugin to Help Overcome IE Rendering Flaw
least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."
What's the advantage over just installing Firefox? Do people who don't have permission to install software have permission to install plugins like this?
Great idea... but if someone would have the wits and knowledge to look for this plugin, wouldn't they be using FF already? If websites prevented stuff from working without this plugin, wouldn't that just turn off viewers? Not sure how this is going to help, people have been harping at Microsoft about standards for years and all they've done is move towards them at the pace of a snail.
I run Firefox for NoScript and AdBlock...I could care less about rendering a page .002 picoseconds faster.
What is not native about the SVG handling in recent versions of Firefox?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
He's probably grousing about the incomplete support for certain features, like SVG animation.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
M$ didn't leave it broken so users had to deal with it, they left it broken so developers continued to support IE. If we have to code differently for IE, because it doesn't follow standards and many users use IE, it makes us constantly concerned with what M$ does.
It's like the ex who keeps you as a friend on facebook and makes sure you see all those new pictures with her new bf. Except with IE you just can't defriend it.
can design on a sane model with sane tools, deploy the plugin when the users are IE.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Any person "clever" enough to click Yes on an activeX installation prompt, you mean?
> What bothers me is how security is somehow pushed to the forefront as the most important issue, even more important than functionality.
You can't bolt on security as an afterthought. It has to be part of the design.
I'd rather have a protocol designed with security in mind than one that makes it easy to steal my passwords and personal information, but where the widgets are 10% flashier.
Of course, I also know that my PC is under constant attack from botnets and such (and I can get logs to prove that), being secure only because I have more sense than to install insecure software.
The average home PC I have repaired is replete with spyware because people don't patch and don't know better than to install crappy software that has the shiny widgets they want.
You can't use <img src="foo.svg" alt="..."> yet.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I wonder why people think that "high" memory usage is related to leaks. Old firefox leaked memory. It's the same ignorance that sees "5 MB Free" in Vista and thinks it's really using up 2 Gigs (it's not, go read up on "SuperFetch", and caching, among other things). Three questions for you:
1) What version of Firefox are you running?
2) Does your memory usage change if you open a bunch more tabs? My guess would be "not much", which means it's hardly a leak (it's how it works, mhmm).
My copy of Firefox has been open for days, with three tabs open, one with pretty hefty rendering and two of slashdot - 131 MB of ram.
There had better be an easy way for web designers to tell if IE has that plugin installed or I'm going to be really pissed.
It's hard enough dealing with IE's crappy rendering... it will be so much more painful if the rendering engine in IE isn't *consistently* broken and we have no way to tell the difference in our code.
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
I don't know about the parent, but I do work professionally as a web developer and code to standards. It doesn't hurt me at all, in fact I've had clients come to me specifically because of the high quality of standards based work that I churn out.
Granted, not all clients are going to be aware of standards and their affect on accessibility and search engine optimization, but it doesn't make standards based web development the veritable money-pit that some make it out to be.
Did anyone think about pages that detect user agent strings? A lot of devs use the UA string to "fix" these rendering problems on a per browser basis.
The solution is for the web devs to stop coding to a browser, and do what they should have been doing all along: code to the standards.
You don't take advantage of browser-specific bugs when designing a site, and you'll have no problems when the bugs get fixed by Microsoft or by a third-party plugin.
I would look first to fix FF's rending flaws. I'm not going to list the dozens of bugs and out-of-compliance standards FF has,
Why don't you list the hundreds of major rendering flaws IE has in implementation of each standard, rather than the dozen or so minor flaws FF has overall, in the implementation of all the standards?
IE is not to ignored, but it's not to be catered to either.
IE6 users are to be warned about the severe bugs their browser has and how much their experience will improve if they switch to a standards-based browser such as Firefox or Opera.