Best Browser For Using Complex Web Applications?

yanyan writes "I'm fairly new to the field of web application development. Currently I'm working on a big online ticketing system for passage and freight for a local shipping company. It's a one-man show and the system is written in Ruby and uses Rails. Aside from the requisite functionality of creating bookings the system must also print reports and tickets, and this is where I've discovered (the hard way) that most, if not all, browsers fall short. I've had to switch from Firefox 3.6.3 to Opera 10.53 because of a major printing bug in Firefox, but the latest stable Opera is also giving me its own share of problems. To complicate things, an earlier version of Opera (10.10) doesn't appear to have 10.53's printing problems, but I'm wary. What browsers and specific versions do you end up deploying for use with big, complex web apps that include printing? Also consider CSS accuracy and consistency."

Comments

Re:but I thought HTML was supposed to fix all that

[FuckingNickName]

Maturity isn't defined by the number of years since conception, but by its origins and the development and engineering which has gone into it since. HTML/Javascript has only comparatively recently been considered as a serious app development platform to contend with native apps, still building on the hypertext + scripting language paradigm. Even Google knows what a pain it is to work with HTML/Javascript directly and has developed a translator from Java to implement their web apps.

What's more, there are very few use cases where an offline application (I assume by that you mean "not HTML/Javascript" - I'm not sure what's "offline" about Java) isn't an option. The basic selling point with HTML apps is that you don't have to spend 30 seconds downloading and installing a small binary. When you're writing for a corporation, that's reduced to insignificance because it'd be installed as part of the deployment procedure.

For printing use PDF via LaTeX

[corsec67]

I also develop for Ruby on Rails, and we have to support IE 6-8. (Of course the developers all use Firefox for Firebug)
For printing, I switched to using LaTeX, and returning the PDFs.

HTML just doesn't give you the kind of control that you need on a piece of paper.(Try having custom page headers/footers, for example) I ran into the bug in firefox where it would skip rows of a table going over a page boundry, and then there was other issues with it dropping images on other pages.

Plus, LaTeX just looks better. HTML is great if you don't know what it is going to be displayed on, but when you do know what kind of paper it is going to be displayed on, HTML isn't the best choice.

(Specifically, I used the rTeX plugin, with pdflatex)