Mozilla Firefox: what a chuffin' great browser!

[white rabbit]

Only problem I have with it is that from version 112 a bug has crept in that means you sometimes have to click links twice. Grrr. I've reported it.

I've noticed that in Firebird/fox. Not all the time but it does happen.

 

[Sunray]

If by "correctly" you mean, "as it does in IE" then that's hardly surprising.

If by "correctly" you mean "as the standards state", have a look at http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html and see if it displays everything "correctly".

I ponder as to who sets the web standard, Microsoft or the WWW Standards committe?

My thinking is this, if your going to design a site, where do you look 1st, to the standard or to the most common browser?

The problem with the HTML standard is that it has never been thoroughly implemented by any browser, err ever. They have all had their quirks to a greater or lesser degree.

People can rant about MS in all sorts of ways, but it is the 'standard' browser, it therefore sets the 'standard'. People will write HTML to the IE 'standard' otherwise you could limit your site to a small fraction of internet users.

The WWW standard is for all the runners up in the browser war. Proof positive that near unlimited resources will win every time.

 

[Lazy Llama]

Sure, people can and will write code to get around the bugs in IE, but if they write code which ONLY works on IE (i.e. following the "standards" that MS sets, rather than those accepted by the community), they're making a mistake and limiting their user base (my site gets 86% of hits from IE of some sort, but 25% are using Win95/98 on older machines).

Surely it's better to code to the standards which will work basically on all browsers, and then fix it up for IE, or any other buggy browsers? That way, when MS start to fix IE (in 2006!), your pages will still work.

Maybe the next two years of IE stagnation ( they've said no more features until Longhorn) will encourage people to try other, more standards-compliant browsers.

 

[Sunray]

Website designers are not going to get it to work ONLY on IE are they? IE will be the default platform, then they will tweak till it works on a wide range of browsers.

But tell me which browser is 100% WWW standard compliant. None are are they.

To a person using the web which is more important, WWW standards or their web pages displaying correctly?

 

[Lazy Llama]

Website designers are not going to get it to work ONLY on IE are they?

Sadly, yes. Ever tried using NatWest or RBS online banking with Opera? Or Mozilla? Or Safari? Or Konqueror? Or Firefox? Or OmniWeb? Or even IE on a Mac? Even if you fake the user agent, the site doesn't work.

Ever used a site which uses MS-specific Jscript and doesn't work on another browser? If you only ever use IE, then you won't have noticed.

Ever seen a "marquee" or "bgsound" tag? IE only (and the work of the devil). That is, if you use it on your page, it will not work as you expected on any other browser.

But tell me which browser is 100% WWW standard compliant. None are are they.

No, but some are more so than others. If you don't care about web standards, go ahead and make your entire website in Flash, or as an ActiveX object (as many people do) and don't bother testing with any other browser. They'll be just fine in the latest IE, and it's everyone elses fault if they choose not to use IE. It does not make them accessible though.

To a person using the web which is more important, WWW standards or their web pages displaying correctly?

But IE doesn't display every page on the web as originally intended by the author, which is what you said in your post. That list of bugs in my earlier post isn't some artificial thing that people found by pushing IE, it's a list of things that they found when creating real websites which they bothered to test on IE and found that it didn't render properly.

All I'm saying is that IE doesn't have a perfect renderer but in your earlier post you say it does...

 

[white rabbit]

I ponder as to who sets the web standard, Microsoft or the WWW Standards committe?

It's a bit of both, I'm afraid. It's what the w3c are there for but very often these things become a de facto standard simply because of the predominance of Internet Explorer.

If you have 99% of the users of your site using IE, it makes more sense to give more weight to the way it works. It'd be nice if your code works across the board but that's often not possible.

It's not a sufficient reponse when someone complains your site doesn't work properly, that it follows the standards and that they should get a decent browser. They'll probably think "Fuck you, then." and go somewhere else.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I foresee that web standards will start to become more of an issue over the next year or two, as web-capable mobile devices start to take off. It won't just be a question of little display bugs - it'll be more about getting the semantics right so pages can be rendered on widely different gadgets. A lot of commercial sites are going to find they're in trouble if people start expecting to be able to shop from their phone.

 

[Kid_Eternity]

I foresee that web standards will start to become more of an issue over the next year or two, as web-capable mobile devices start to take off. It won't just be a question of little display bugs - it'll be more about getting the semantics right so pages can be rendered on widely different gadgets. A lot of commercial sites are going to find they're in trouble if people start expecting to be able to shop from their phone.

I'd agree with this. To add to the devices you mentioned i'd include handheld gaming devices such Sony's PSP and the next generation of consoles...

 

[Lazy Llama]

The nice thing about XHTML and CSS is that you can write the XHTML code once and use different style sheets to display it differently on different devices. That depends on the device's browser being able to handle stylsheets properly

You can do much the same thing at the server end using XML and XSL. A company I worked for did that, using XML content (news etc) and different XSL templates to produce HTML and WML output for various Palm browsers, PocketPC and umpteen WAP devices. Only trouble is, we were about 4 years ahead of any revenue-generating market, and device manufacturers and telco's just didn't deliver on the infrastructure/pricing.

 

[sufilala]

Bug 233525 - Background of Download Manager looks like one-finger-salute

Description:
"When the download manager is on screen, the background image of that window (folder with arrow pointing down) looks like distractingly like a hand with middle finger up."

 

[bruise]

some people need to get a life

 

[boha]

Proof positive that near unlimited resources will win every time.

thats the most depressing thing i've heard today. you're bang on though

 

[Kid_Eternity]

some people need to get a life

Tell me about it...

 

[dlx1]

yep I use Firebird so some time now, FireFOX crap name were clint westwood.

My backbuttion don't work and the drop arrow don't show my history... but the down is cool don't rember seeing that on Firebird could be wrong tho.

need so new theams to

 

[Loki]

I installed Firefox after reading the review in the latest Internet Magazine (you wrote the review Mike!) And I can't see myself going back to IE. Pages download MUCH faster.

 

[miss minnie]

still my default browser, although it does flake out (redraw prob as mentioned earlier) after a number of hours (like 6-7) continual use - only reboot can rescue it.

was chuffed today when i visited my online bank. they recommend, in fact insist on ie, but there was a great big warning about a security flaw caused by one of the window's updates. i found that firefox worked fine there. of course if there were a problem i wouldn't know about it because my bank is not testing vulnerabilities in other browsers - they're covered by insisting on ie. it's a risk whichever one you choose, i suppose.

 

[sufilala]

firefox can't scroll from right to left - which is a serious accessibility issue for languages like arabic, urdu ....

 

[Kid_Eternity]

Suggest it to the Mozilla community and perhaps someone might build a plug in?

 

[Buddy Bradley]

I've now replaced IE as my default browser with Firefox (for any site designers, the cover disk on this month's PC Plus has every single browser on it - saves on downloading them all for testing), and installed the Web Developer extension - hours of fun turning stylesheets on and off and seeing where the block-level elements are...

 

[Loki]

I'm still finding features I like. The tabs go without saying, a big improvement over having about eight things cluttering the task bar. And I've just found out how good the "view source" option is.

 

[laptop]

do you use the email facility in opera? is it better than Outlook (anything has got to be better, but...)

I used Opera Mail very briefly. It looked nice - simple, fewer options, none that I could see missing that I wanted.

I only gave it up for a deeply geeky reason - it keeps all mail in the same file, and I have scripts set up to import form responses into a database that require them to be in a folder that is a file by itself.

So I'm using full-fat Mozilla. Yes, it needs to be restarted every several hundred page visits to stop it running away with my RAM. Less often if I visit only work-related pages, for some reason...

and do you know how to block sender if you do (a question from chio)?

A quick look in Opera 7.2 doesn't reveal the answer to me. Anyone else?

 

[vanilabean4]

I've used Opera for a little over a year (basically as soon as I found out about it), and i love it. IE is not code compliant, but Opera is and when I have to make web pages I make it so it looks good in Opera.

It's way faster than IE - but what isn't!

And I love having my session open up with my 6 or so web sites automatically come up!

in fact, any browser is better than IE - they all seem to be based on Mozilla, so why should anyone limit themselves to garbage like IE?

 

[pinched_nerve]

Just another voice to add to to the chorus, been using Mozilla for more than a year, moved to Firbird (now Firefox of course) and I still think it's the dog's bollocks, the only problem I have is that I can't check my bank account online using Mozilla, meaning I have to keep bloody IE on my system

 

[stupid kid]

Been using firefox a few weeks, and it's now my default browser. hooray!

 

[Jangla]

Got one major issue with Firefox - can't get java to install. Go through the installation process and it completes without error but closing the browser down and going back to the page requiring java still tells me to install the plug-in

 

[the B]

Mac user here - use IE, Safari, Camino, occassionally use Mozilla browsers. Amount os use is not in that order.

I'm generally cheesed with the fact it's better to have 4, FOUR, four browsers on my computer rather than one. Depending on whether or not I want to be posting here, using java, online banking, browsing other favourite sites...pisses me off to no end.

Generally, I use Camino or Safari.

 

[FridgeMagnet]

I've just switched back to Camino nightlies, actually. Firebird was good but Camino pips it at the moment IMO.

Safari has pissed me off no end. It's nice and fast and slick, but it's crashed my machine loads of times - and it takes the whole lot down with it, which is a Windows sort of thing to do. It just beachballs away, nothing works and I have to turn it off and on. It's not like I'm underpowered either, 800mhz G3 with 640mb RAM. Fucking thing. Even when it's not crashing, it sometimes beachballs and slows everything down for a bit.

 

[the B]

I find Safari is alright...my machine isn't that fast either, or RAM loaded, maybe my browsing isn't as intensive

It doesn't take stuff if it dies either. Which isn't that often (though it often dies while other stuff does) when I'm low on memory due to p2p stuff running for toooooo long.

 

[Shippou-Sensei]

ohhh very nice plug in ... gets it to auto-sig

 

[Kid_Eternity]

It stopped working due to something about xbl binding (whatever that means!), just downloaded Ver 0.9 and it works fine again!