Which broswer do you use?

[Oliver]

A previous thread got me thinking about what web browsers people use.

When designing this site, I quickly came to the conclusion that Internet Explorer sucks, because it's not standards compliant. I couldn't understand why pages weren't displaying as the coding was telling them they should.

So I tried Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org) and haven't looked back. It displays the pages exactly as it should. Opera (http://www.opera.com) is also great, I found. They're both fairly small downloads, and very quick browsers.

I use Firefox for day-to-day browsing. I also use Mozilla's email client, Thunderbird.

As well as being much more standards compliant than IE, they are more secure. Opera is ad-supported unless you register. Firefox is quickly eating into IE's market share. As it's open-source, many people write "extensions" to enhance the browser. If you find that Firefox doesn't do something you'd like it to, there's probably an extension you can download and install.

And neither will try and take over your system, which means you can safely install them without having to worry about IE no longer being your default browser.

Give one of them a go. You will probably wonder why you stuck with IE for so long.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Dogger Dan]

Will try it out tomorrow,

Having issues doing it with 1 eye

Dogger

[Clintsc9]

I find that a bit unusual.

To say that IE isn't standards compliant isn't exactly right. It complies with all the standards of W3C then does some stuff of its own on top of that. So with IE you can write HTML to make it do stuff that FF and the other Mozilla-based W3C compliant browsers cannot do.
A simple example is coloured slider bars. Purely an embellishment, but an example anyway.

I'd be interested to see what FF can do as far as page rendering that IE cannot. Can you direct me to a site that shows this?

I'll show another example. Use IE to open this site. It is one I did using frames to have a permanent left-side menu. I used some style trickery so the menu items are in a visible table, the cells of which are fully highlighted when the pointer hovers over them. Then take a look in FF and see how messy it renders.

Maybe someone can point out my faults.

Security is becoming a problem with FF as well. Now it is becoming popular, the hackers are looking to it to cause the same mischief as they have always done with the most used browser. It has been shown that FF now actually has more security problems unearthed per month than IE.
A difference here is with open-source it can be fixed quickly so we don't have to wait for the mighty MicroSoft to get their collective bums into gear. But do you know how to do it? Does Joe Average?

[goatsby]

Internet expolrer 4 its complety farked
and windows 95

[NTRabbit]

I find that a bit unusual.

To say that IE isn't standards compliant isn't exactly right. It complies with all the standards of W3C then does some stuff of its own on top of that. So with IE you can write HTML to make it do stuff that FF and the other Mozilla-based W3C compliant browsers cannot do.
A simple example is coloured slider bars. Purely an embellishment, but an example anyway.

Actually no, IE is not standards compliant and Microsoft seems to be of the opinion that whatever IE does should be the real standard, so for the most part ignores them. Thats why many pages are still unable to be properly accessed by other browsers - the pages must be designed so as to run properly in IE, which is still the most used browser in the world thanks to anti-competitive bundling. If those particular pages were designed according to standards, then they would display correctly in everything but IE.

Further, Opera is now ad free as of September 20

I personally have used Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird for a couple of years, and used the full Mozilla suite for about 6 months before that.

[Dogger Dan]

Clintsc9

Could have given me the heads up I was going to a Gold Wing site. More of a Harley man myself.

If anyone finds out I will be out of the club

Dogger

[Oliver]

To say that IE isn't standards compliant isn't exactly right. It complies with all the standards of W3C then does some stuff of its own on top of that. So with IE you can write HTML to make it do stuff that FF and the other Mozilla-based W3C compliant browsers cannot do.
A simple example is coloured slider bars. Purely an embellishment, but an example anyway.

From experience, I'd disagree with the assertion that IE renders pages in compliance with W3C. (See http://www.google.com.au/search?q=inter ... dering+bug). The "extras" are a different argument altogether.

W3C is the web standard! Sure, if IE can do extra stuff, great. But you shouldn't rely on the "extra stuff" to make a web page accessible to all visitors, regardless of their browser. As you point out, IE's features are an "embellishment", but using them shouldn't mean that you can't view the page as intended in other browsers.

I'd be interested to see what FF can do as far as page rendering that IE cannot. Can you direct me to a site that shows this?

I'm not saying that. What I'm, saying is that Firefox should render (and render the same) any page written for IE, which it can't do, because IE renders pages differently than how the W3C says they should be rendered. (I had to fudge http://www.homebrewandbeer.com so that it looks good in IE. Previously the spacing of the menu was all over the shop in IE, but fine in FF and Opera.)

I'll show another example. Use IE to open this site. It is one I did using frames to have a permanent left-side menu. I used some style trickery so the menu items are in a visible table, the cells of which are fully highlighted when the pointer hovers over them. Then take a look in FF and see how messy it renders.

Maybe someone can point out my faults.

Maybe fix up the 20 HTML markup errors for a start. Use the W3C validator at http://validator.w3.org to make sure your HTML is correct.

To view the errors on that particular page, go to http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http% ... ers.com%2F

Opera renders the page exactly as Firefox does: probably exactly as the markup tells the browser it should be!

There are small differences in rendering between Firefox and Opera, but the difference between those two and IE is, relatively, a chasm.

Security is becoming a problem with FF as well. Now it is becoming popular, the hackers are looking to it to cause the same mischief as they have always done with the most used browser. It has been shown that FF now actually has more security problems unearthed per month than IE.

You're right, but the severity of Firefox security holes is not as high as IE's ... twice as many security holes (or however many it is) isn't necessarily bad if each hole is far less severe than each of Internet Explorer's.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm having a go. I'm not. All I'm saying is that a page that is viewed in IE should be, more or less, the same as it is in Firefox, or Opera, or ... whatever browser.

Imagine if a brand new browser had the rendering problems of IE ... no one would put up with it and it would die a very, very short death.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Clintsc9]

Thanks Oliver for some ideas. That site was written long before W3C standardisation became popular (or FF arrived on the scene) and has since been handed over to others to worry about.
I was just curious as to how the different browsers rendered that menu.
BTW, the actual menu page only has 4 errors.

Looks to me like it is all in the DTD file. Maybe I need to make up my own. Or maybe just use a different menu system that all browsers can render alike.

[Tyberious Funk]

A few years ago, I came to the realisation that surfing the net with Windows + IE was not much fun. Now I use Linux + Firefox. I haven't had any bugs, crashes, pop-ups, viruses or spyware for several years. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to reboot in the past two years (mostly due to power outages!)

I don't care what the reasons are... I just know what works for me.

(Sadly, at work I still have to use Windows )

[NTRabbit]

Im a heavy gamer, so i still use Windows XP on my home machine. Linux may be great for a lot of things, but its just not capable of being a gaming OS.

[anti-fsck]

Maybe someone can point out my faults.

The site's a bit like the Gold Wing: way too heavy (on HTML) and a bit too much bling.
What ever happened to nice, clean pages?
Oh, and I use Opera (because I got a free licence before all licences were free) and Firefox (for the exceptional plug-in support) in equal measures. And links when I'm on a shell.
The site renders nicely under links :)

[Beerpig]

What is a browser?

[Dogger Dan]

Someone who has no intention of buying anything, much like me and some nice eye candy, just a browser.

Dogger

[Lebowski]

I had to do an assignment which involved CSS and making sites xhtml 1.0 valid and it was a pain in the ass, mainly because ie doesnt seem to support all the html 4.0 stuff properly and firefox likes to render some css things weirdly

[yardglass]

while we're talking about all things web, i'm going to go slightly off topic here , can someone please point me in the direction of a free music site.

dose such a thing exist even ? i dunno, that's why i'm asking you blokes.

cheers.
just having a nice pale ale, finished a 12hr night shift at 6am.
beer in the morning, breakfast of champions.

the glass

[anti-fsck]

while we're talking about all things web, i'm going to go slightly off topic here :roll: , can someone please point me in the direction of a free music site.
dose such a thing exist even ? i dunno, that's why i'm asking you blokes.

Does exist, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was called. You picked certain genres of music, and the server sends you 10 random artists trying to make their big break. You rate the music once you've heard it, and based on that the server shapes your next lot of music it sends.
Sourceforge.net/Freshmeat.net are your friends ...

[Balls]

Yardy, free music site: Limewire.com is the go. Cheers

[NTRabbit]

Free music sites dont exist anymore, they cant. Best bet to download music is to try one of the remaining Gnutella Network programs like Limewire if you want individual pieces. The Bit Torrent system can also be used for music, but for the most part music is released in Albums, and it take a capable client to be able to selectively download one song from within an entire albums torrent.

This is of course if you want to break the law, and for the sake of the forum I suggest that nobody advocates comitting copyright infringement - piracy is a misnomer, an incorrect title for the action - because advocating it and linking to places that do it is enough to be on the receiving end of a legal notice, even here in Australia.

[Dogger Dan]

In Canada it is still considered copyright infringment but they can't charge anyone.

See a long time ago, they put a tarriff on recording media primarily blank cassette tapes at the time. This tarriff was to compensate the artists for all the people who would be copying their work.

Anyway this has stuck into CD's to so when you buy a blank CD/DVD you are still paying for the fact that everyone knows you are going to copy something onto that CD so the artists guild gets their cut. I can copy to the nines and it would be a difficult issue to charge me as I have paid for the right to copy when I bought the media.

Distributing it ofcourse is a different matter

Dogger

[yardglass]

thanks.
whygee