Despite all appearances, Microsoft insists it hasn’t lost interest in Web browsers.
IE–embraced, extended, extinct?
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
tabbed browsing? Irrelevant, considering the lack of basic minimum standards compliance with HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, and CSS2
I consider it FAR FAR more likely Microsoft will merely add-on to IE with ‘new technology’ rather than bring it into standards compliance.
Considering the fact that these standards go back as far as 1997, all this ‘modern’ technology hype PALES in comparison with the fact that the browser STILL cannot correctly display compliant HTML/CSS from a standard that goes back 5-7 years, which in terms of the rapid pace of technology in general is roughly the equivalent of Cretacous era fossils.
Is how much popularity IE has maintained despite being on maintenance for at least the last three years. Two years is an eternity in the software market to do absolutely nothing. In that time, Mozilla has become stable, FireFox has become usable, and they both (by virtue of their shared codebase) have recently surpassed IE in features. Yet, they have hardly made a dent in IE usage. I understand IE has a lot of momentum being pre-installed, but I mean – COME ON! It didn’t even have pop-up blocking until a few months ago, a feature that is CRITICAL for browsing half of the internet.
I think we should be asking ourselves, what is so wrong with Mozilla and FireFox that people would rather use a browser that doesn’t even block pop-ups than use a completely free alternative? Why didn’t PC magazines that come with CDs (like PC World, Computer Shopper) ship CDs with those browsers and encourage users to install them? Until we can answer these questions, these alternative browsers may never be successful.
…that I used to be very pro-IE, but MS has not really maintained it to my satisfaction. For example, where’s IE 7 or 8 or…? I mean Windows Media Player is up to version 10 now.
I’ve switched to Firefox (for now). If MS suddenly releases IE 7 or 8 or… *AND* they fix the problems I will definitely switch back, but I have to say MS really dropped the ball on this one.
Inertia + illiteracy!
I’ve switched to Firefox (for now).
What aspects of IE give you this feeling of wanting to go backk to it.
I doubt there will ever be a reason to switch back. In the time since IE 6 came out, Mozilla and Firefox have grown from buggy and obscure to polished, praised and superior – all while IE has remained virtually unchanged. At the pace Mozilla and its derivatives improve, I doubt IE (without a massive effort by MS) can reclaim its superiority as far as quality goes. No doubt, it will have the lion’s share of the market for some time to come. But as far as stability, useability and security goes, it will remain a bottom-feeder.
I’ve never been a big fan of IE. I’ve been a fan of Netscape since 3.0 but when Netscape went to AOL, I switched to Mozilla and never looked back.
IE has lost it completely. Version 6 has been the same for three years. Mozilla and Firefox have changed in that time to become stable. Now Microsoft refuses to give older operating systems a new IE.
I’ve stripped IE out of my Win2000 box and will keep it stripped out. I prefer Mozilla and Firefox because they are standards compliant. Unless Microsoft has something to convince me otherwise, IE will be nothing more to me than a figment of history.
If the main reason is illiteracy, than perhaps the world does not need a better browser, and the Mozilla and Firefox people have misjudged the market. I can market the most awesomest booger picker in the world, but if everyone is happy with their current booger extraction devices that occasionally poke you in the eye, then my product is destined to fail. I think the Mozilla folks should consider this.
Most people don’t care, and most people don’t buy computing magazines. It’s the sad truth. Unless windows comes without a browser, people will continue to use IE.
Well, I don’t think MS is too concerned about tabbed browsing and such because there are many number of shell browsers that have these features and if you use one of those, you’re still technically using IE.
I know the Firefox team must be feeling proud that they are finally taking some marketshare away from IE. But when you stop and think about it, it’s not really that impressive of a feat, considering that IE has basically been stagnant for the past 5 years .. it’s taken the Mozilla team this long to build momentum. If IE had been developed at the same rate as it had from, say .. 95 to 99, we’d all be going “Mozilla what?” But just wait … when Longhorn is released, I predict that whatever MS has up its sleeve is going to blow the competition out of the water.
Sometimes, when I read about IE vs. Firefox, I see the term “standards” or “standards compliant” tossed around, usually at the derision of IE.
Truth be told, Firefox/mozilla and darn near every browser out there takes liberties (or has a bug) that is a problem. For some people this is a sticking point, some people don’t care.
Take a look at Firefox, the way it handles vendor neutral CSS is a little but broken–ever see graphics slide down off a page? That only happens to me when I use Firefox, I have never seen that happen with IE. It’s a bug, a known one, and it’s even still there in the newest Firefox.
“Standards” or “Standards compliant” are not acceptible reasons for assault. Ease of use and speed are. And for me, IE and Firefox are about equal in speed, and ease of use is not a concern because at one point or another a browser is a browser… It comes down to one thing: does the page display the way it’s supposed to?
For IE, the answer is yes, for Firefox it’s “not always.”
For me, IE still wins unless I’m on a *nix system, then hand me a good ol’ Mozilla over Konqueror or any of that crud. One real browser. That’s what I need.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
I think this article is a good analysis of the reason why MS is not developping the browser. Because it a few years time, with standards and all, the browser could become the only application needed. That would be a threat to the Windows API, which is the base for MS success.
I’m afraid that the new IE might have nice features that are MS only, so not based on standards, just like the .hta filetype ‘standard’.
“when Longhorn is released, I predict that whatever MS has up its sleeve is going to blow the competition out of the water.”
Are you serious? YOu couldn’t be. With the way they’re stripping features out of Longhorn and with all their security woes, it’s less a fact of blowing the competition out of the water than trying not to be the laughingstock of the computer industry. No, Longhorn will merely be a matter of catching up with those folks in Cuppertino if all goes well for MS. Meanwhile, the *nixes continue to spread…
> Sometimes, when I read about IE vs. Firefox, I see the term “standards” or “standards compliant” tossed around, usually at the derision of IE.
And that’s right!
– IE can’t handle application/xhtml+xml, neither does IE send appropriate Accept: headers
– IE replaces the 300 Multiple Choices message with its own, thereby removing all links to the choices
– IE doesn’t understand position: fixed
All of which are perfectly supported by mozilla.
> Take a look at Firefox, the way it handles vendor neutral CSS is a little but broken–ever see graphics slide down off a page?
No, never.
> That only happens to me when I use Firefox, I have never seen that happen with IE.
Not surprising, if you know what browser most “web-designers” use… 🙂
The interent was supposed to make your OS irrelevant, which was a significant threat to MS. That obviously has not materialized. So why should they care what browser you use?? Why spend tons of money to give you a free browser when the FOSS is taking care of that for them..they loose nothing…you are still running the alternative browsers on MS OSes and serving web pages on MS IIS, so what have they lost really? spending money for nothing?.I’m sure they will provide enhancements/new versions over time, but where is the urgency for them? When there is money to be made, I am sure they will be back with a vengenace.
> Considering the fact that these standards go back as far as 1997
And have not been adopted by the browser that >85% of people browsing the web use – I hate to break it to you, but that does not make a ‘standard’. It makes an ‘extinct’ standard like Micro Channel or Betamax.
I’m kinda wierd in my views on web design, as I object to XHTML and a hefty portion of HTML 4 on general principals. I see little in the way of added functionality, while putting more workload on the site coder, increasing the bandwidth chewed up by sites, and removing any responsability for error handling away from those who code browsers.
Doctype and encoding tags – other than an excuse for browsers to all behave differently unless you tell them otherwise (oh, that’s brilliant) what does this actually do besides chew up 120-160 bytes?
Former “standalones” have to be closed with / – What the hell is this? two bytes for nothing? It’s not like you need to put content inside a HR tag.
While 160 bytes in every file and 2 extra bytes on a few tags (and 4-5 bytes on others) totalling say… 256 bytes per html may not sound that bad in the age of broadband, imagine the effect on the poor server that sees a 12 million html files actually served a month (a realistic number for a ISP’s shared server). 2.8 gigs? Hello.
This increasing tendency towards bloated html ‘just so it validates with the W3C’ bull is getting rather idiotic, especially since it seems to come from the very people who complain loudest about bloated software like IE. The mere fact that they put an ad for their website in every document tag under the excuse of “that’s where the standard is printed” should be big enough a warning sign that something is VERY wrong with how they go about daily affairs. We know who the W3C is, we don’t need the url to their site that the user NEVER SEES on each and every web page in existance.
In a way, it is like the classic “IE doesn’t render standards compliant code well” while the same people complain “But it renders malformed code without error”. Since most tracking sites say >85% of the world is using IE, this means could mean three things: Their definition of what a standard means is warped, IE has better error correction… Or both.
IE is the standard whether we like it or not, being on 85%+ of the machines out there. If these other browsers were serious about making a dent in IE’s share they should be bending over backwards to render content JUST like IE, not wasting their time trying to support a future ‘standard’ a hefty majority of users cannot even access properly.
A working standard is set by what the majority of people use – NOT what some highbrow elitist group tries to force down their throats…
The article itself is a grand example of XHTML at it’s worst, and poor coding at it’s best. I bet it validates too.
Let’s see.. Declares content type TWICE, Correction.. Three times… Gah, got enough carriage returns in there? Oooh, I just love the comment tags around nothing… Wow, by dumping XHTML compliance and losing NO functionality I could shave 10k off that page EASY (Search/replace).
XHTML… What a load of…..
“For IE, the answer is yes, for Firefox it’s not always.”
Well, YOUR answer is yes for IE, but the problem is that web designer’s are not designing to STANDARD, they are designing to make their pages work in IE, which is a non-standards compliant browser. So, IE is broken and crumby designers are perpetuating it by pumping out non-compliant design.
I love OS News – This site is clean, lean and non-XHTML compliant… And I have YET to see it not render right in anything from NS 4.x on Alpha to Firefox on Zeta, with everything in-between. In fact, go ahead and run OSNEWS through the W3C’s validator.
Just needed to add that.
I was wrong, the article doesn’t validate either (LOL).
I think the key here is control. MS wants all the control they can get, and people using IE certainly gives them a lot of control, it also let them make the browser part of the eXPerience. They want to offer a complete solution and they want all the control over it. Otherwise, they wouldn’t need windows at all, they could just do like in the old days, sell software for other platforms.
Although I don’t think their lack of respect for standards is a strategy move it does give them an advantage. It ties a lot of people to IE, especially companies who might have web interfaces that doesn’t work in other browsers.
So yes, in the long run I think it matters to them. But not at the moment.
The best thing in FireFox is that there’s no ActiveX support (as far as I know). Witch means no Spyware, no software installed on your PC from the backdoor, no popup windows wanting you to install those dialer for wathever reason. Most people don’t read and click yes and hoppss! It’s installed.
Anyways… I think Firefox fills my need!
I think size optimizations have more to do with the coding style of the developer then the technology.
I recently change my website to xhtml+css and it has cut my bandwidth usage in half. The xhtml that the server outputs is small since it is pretty much just the data wrapped in simple heading/div/list tags. The separate css file contains most of the weight, and it is cached by the browser. So visits to my site generally consist of downloading (small xhtml + larger css), (small xhtml), (small xhtml), (small xhtml), … Even the combined size of the xhtml file and the css file was less than the html file was before. The reduced formatting information redundancy was more than equal to the cost of adding a few “/” characters. I will concede that my site has a lot of things like forums that lend themselves to repetitive formatting.
This does not include how much simpler it was to make. The scripts just had to worry about dumping data, which simplified that code. The look of the site was much easier to create since I could is tools like the firefox web developer extension to edit the css live. It is so much easier to get something artistic looking just right when your changes are instantly applied. I can supply different style sheets for different browsers so I can support all of the cool stuff in mozilla without breaking the basic stuff in ie. I can make it display differently when it is printed. I can make it display sanely on embedded devices. All without touching the server code.
While 160 bytes in every file and 2 extra bytes on a few tags (and 4-5 bytes on others) totalling say… 256 bytes per html may not sound that bad in the age of broadband, imagine the effect on the poor server that sees a 12 million html files actually served a month (a realistic number for a ISP’s shared server). 2.8 gigs? Hello.
[…]
Let’s see.. Declares content type TWICE, Correction.. Three times… Gah, got enough carriage returns in there? Oooh, I just love the comment tags around nothing… Wow, by dumping XHTML compliance and losing NO functionality I could shave 10k off that page EASY (Search/replace).
XHTML is a load of bullshit if you code like a retard with a broom up the ass. If you know how to code, you could save gigabytes per day.
Here is an example on how Microsoft could save terabytes (that’s 1k+ gigabytes) of bandwidth every year if they were following standards:
http://www.stopdesign.com/articles/throwing_tables/
A working standard is set by what the majority of people use – NOT what some highbrow elitist group tries to force down their throats…
And what Microsoft did with HTML? What did they tried with Java? Kerberos? You don’t know what you are talking of.
De facto standards (like MSIE HTML) are not durable. Without strict standards, what we wrote yesterday might not be readable tomorrow. Of course, that kind of inefficiency create jobs… I guess that’s why so many people simply don’t care.
The article itself is a grand example of XHTML at it’s worst, and poor coding at it’s best. I bet it validates too.
Yeah, because we all know that following standards leads to poor code. ANSI-C? Gimme unportable Borland/Microsoft-C any day!
XHTML… What a load of…..
I guess it is for those who don’t care of the future.
I love OS News – This site is clean, lean and non-XHTML compliant… And I have YET to see it not render right in anything from NS 4.x on Alpha to Firefox on Zeta, with everything in-between. In fact, go ahead and run OSNEWS through the W3C’s validator.
And imagine how much time Eugenia spent on making OSNews operable on all these browser. If these browsers were all following standards, I bet she would only have spent 20% of that time.
“I’m kinda wierd in my views on web design, as I object to XHTML and a hefty portion of HTML 4 on general principals.”
You’re very weird indeed. Are you a webdesigner yourself? I recently switched a big site from html loaded with tables, image-maps etc. etc. to an xhtml compliant markup, it was a lot of work, but 200% worth it! The pages are much smaller, less code, and much easier to maintain. The pages also render faster, and now work well in all browsers on multiple platforms.
And have not been adopted by the browser that >85% of people browsing the web use – I hate to break it to you, but that does not make a ‘standard’. It makes an ‘extinct’ standard like Micro Channel or Betamax.
I’m kinda wierd in my views on web design, as I object to XHTML and a hefty portion of HTML 4 on general principals. I see little in the way of added functionality, while putting more workload on the site coder, increasing the bandwidth chewed up by sites, and removing any responsability for error handling away from those who code browsers.
OOh bandwidth I like this approach, let’s investigate
Doctype and encoding tags – other than an excuse for browsers to all behave differently unless you tell them otherwise (oh, that’s brilliant) what does this actually do besides chew up 120-160 bytes?
check
Former “standalones” have to be closed with / – What the hell is this? two bytes for nothing? It’s not like you need to put content inside a HR tag.
While 160 bytes in every file and 2 extra bytes on a few tags (and 4-5 bytes on others) totalling say… 256 bytes per html may not sound that bad in the age of broadband, imagine the effect on the poor server that sees a 12 million html files actually served a month (a realistic number for a ISP’s shared server). 2.8 gigs? Hello.
Well let’s consider two things here:
1) that closing / makes your page xml compliant and allows you to run it through any xml parser and do whatever you want with it. I like that extra functionality for those few bytes.
2) in your case you have font and align and whatever tags in your html file. All your layout code is repeated at length across all your tags. I’m using a css file where I declare a class *once* and then use it in my xhtml file. Now what were you saying about those extra bytes?
Oh hang on, we’ll add some hover code too. Oopsy, IE doesn’t support it for divs, we’ll have to use a bloody javascript function to do it. cha ching: more bytes for your page.
This increasing tendency towards bloated html ‘just so it validates with the W3C’ bull is getting rather idiotic, especially since it seems to come from the very people who complain loudest about bloated software like IE. The mere fact that they put an ad for their website in every document tag under the excuse of “that’s where the standard is printed” should be big enough a warning sign that something is VERY wrong with how they go about daily affairs. We know who the W3C is, we don’t need the url to their site that the user NEVER SEES on each and every web page in existance.
Ah yes, standards are so overrated. Why the heck do we use TCP/IP or HTTP, hell, let’s just drop all standards and send random data to eachother and try to figure it all out when we receive it.
In a way, it is like the classic “IE doesn’t render standards compliant code well” while the same people complain “But it renders malformed code without error”. Since most tracking sites say >85% of the world is using IE, this means could mean three things: Their definition of what a standard means is
warped, IE has better error correction… Or both.
No it’s a case of a monopoly being able to use its marketposition to force its own view on things onto the world. In your view people in the middle east are right for trampeling all over women’s right, just because the majority there thinks it’s the correct thing to do?
Just because the majority thinks it’s right, doesn’t make it right.
IE is the standard whether we like it or not, being on 85%+ of the machines out there. If these other browsers were serious about making a dent in IE’s share they should be bending over backwards to render content JUST like IE, not wasting their time trying to support a future ‘standard’ a hefty majority of users cannot even access properly.
A working standard is set by what the majority of people use – NOT what some highbrow elitist group tries to force down their throats…
The article itself is a grand example of XHTML at it’s worst, and poor coding at it’s best. I bet it validates too.
Let’s see.. Declares content type TWICE, Correction.. Three times… Gah, got enough carriage returns in there? Oooh, I just love the comment tags around nothing… Wow, by dumping XHTML compliance and losing NO functionality I could shave 10k off that page EASY (Search/replace).
Add in all your font and align tags again and see how fast you loose that extra few K again. Oh hang on, drop the divs, put in tables again to create your layout. So instead of 3 DIV tags you have a table tag with cellpadding, cellspacing, border and a shitload of td and tr tags. Woot!! Teh Win!
XHTML… What a load of…..
You just sound like someone who tried to create an XHTML compliant page once but failed miserably and now you’re looking for reasons to diss it. I should have been smarter and just ignored your reply since it’s a plain troll, but I could do with some fun.
I’ve seen that page about switching from tables to CSS before, and will say now what I said about it then – It is a wonderful example of a lot of words with no actual data to support it. It quotes numbers without references or examples of the optimizations claimed, nor does it explain said optimizations making it little more than a fluff piece.
I often chuckle at these pages when they miss the point. With little effort M$.com is backwards compatable to Nyetscape 4.x and IE 4.x to the point you can use them with no coding changes. They do this with TABLES.
There is nothing wrong with the table for one simple reason – it handles dynamically sized content properly. I switch my desktop to large fonts I don’t want every web page I visit to be screwed up. Half of these .CSS+DIV instead of tables pages do NOT render properly with that simple change – all because the coder used pt instead of px. You might say, fine – use px… Which basically ends up with pages like hotmail which are next to USELESS on a machine that relies on large fonts (like a 19″ 1600×1200 desktop).
Hell, you want fun – set a windows machine to large fonts and go to the official themes page for firefox – it doesn’t render properly BECAUSE of .CSS instead of tables.
It is like the “In english please” complaint I hear about tables… like CSS positioned content is any better? The jumbled horde of numbers and values is so much simpler than open tag, close tag. Sure it is… In the same way C++ is simpler than C.
I like CSS for FaC, I find it useful for creating dynamic content, but using it to render a static page that is fully cross-browser compatable? I’m just not sold on the concept, as it falls WAY short in that department even when it works “Correctly”
Please – file a bug with a URL to a site where that happens. Im sure the mozilla people will fix that for firefox v1.0. Or post a URL here i’ll open a bugtrack for you. Its important we help improve firefox, because its a community effort,.
And yes, IE is the browser people design for, but that does not mean firefox renders it “wrong” the developers code it wrong, the sad truth is that IE is too forgiving a browser. Which deteriorates the quality of the offering on the web, and i do not think firefox should start rendering bastard pages, because it will decreate the overall standard compliance of the web, which in the long term is a Bad Think ™ – for other browsers than firefox/mozilla like KHTML based ones, opera, and whatabout handheld devices etc.
I only run Linux, but i havent bumped into many pages that dont work on Firefox – i had a problem with my homebanking, but after alot of complaining they switched from MS “java” to SUN Java, which solved all the trouble for me and their Apple userbase. It helps to open other peoples eyes, rather than just complaining anonymously in some forum.
CSS is NOT XHTML exclusive, making your arguements kinda moot. CSS predates XHTML, originating about the same time as HTML. The two were first combined circa ’96-97, long before XHTML even had a name.
I’m thinking some of you should read http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/ so you actually know what XHTML is. It is not using <DIV> or CSS – You can do that in “non-standard” HTML3 or HTML4.
“It is a wonderful example of a lot of words with no actual data to support it.”
Apply this to your own comments as well.
[quote]
I’ve seen that page about switching from tables to CSS before, and will say now what I said about it then – It is a wonderful example of a lot of words with no actual data to support it. It quotes numbers without references or examples of the optimizations claimed, nor does it explain said optimizations making it little more than a fluff piece.
[/quote]
If you want examples with statistics you can check out the “Eric Meyer on CSS” by Eric Meyer and “Designing with Web Standards” by Jeffrey Zeldman. It is documented. Not only you save time and space in sending less code in your HTML files, but you also save time because you can handle a lot less requests.
[quote]
I often chuckle at these pages when they miss the point. With little effort M$.com is backwards compatable to Nyetscape 4.x and IE 4.x to the point you can use them with no coding changes. They do this with TABLES.
[/quote]
At the expense of having to play around every single browsers quirks and creating code that is syntactically incorrect.
You are the one who is missing the point. The point is that what should not be missed is the content. With properly structured XHTML and CSS, a web browser that does not support it is likely to display the content in plain text, but the content is still there, and accessible. With tables, you can easiliy lose the order of things or the content itself when the document is structured according to presentation, which is the case of most table-based layouts.
[quote]
There is nothing wrong with the table for one simple reason – it handles dynamically sized content properly. I switch my desktop to large fonts I don’t want every web page I visit to be screwed up. Half of these .CSS+DIV instead of tables pages do NOT render properly with that simple change – all because the coder used pt instead of px. You might say, fine – use px… Which basically ends up with pages like hotmail which are next to USELESS on a machine that relies on large fonts (like a 19″ 1600×1200 desktop).
Hell, you want fun – set a windows machine to large fonts and go to the official themes page for firefox – it doesn’t render properly BECAUSE of .CSS instead of tables.
[/quote]
Because the solution is not in pt or px. If you want the size of a box to adapt to the size of the text, you use em. If you want a column to take some percentage of the page, you use percentage values – exactly the same if you want dynamically sized tables.
[quote]
It is like the “In english please” complaint I hear about tables… like CSS positioned content is any better? The jumbled horde of numbers and values is so much simpler than open tag, close tag. Sure it is… In the same way C++ is simpler than C.
[/quote]
In other words, CSS is to blame because you are lazy to learn a different way to do things? The problem here is not that CSS is bad positioning, the problem here is that you are stuck in your “ME, ME” mentality and you are not willing to understand it.
[quote]
I like CSS for FaC, I find it useful for creating dynamic content, but using it to render a static page that is fully cross-browser compatable? I’m just not sold on the concept, as it falls WAY short in that department even when it works “Correctly”
[/quote]
Cross-browser does not mean that it should be rendered exactly the same way on every browser. It means that it should be usable on every browser. Structured XHTML and CSS can do that – tables don’t. If the browser can understand CSS well, it will render exactly as it was intended. If it can’t the user will get a regression, but without missing the content.
Ideally, if a browser supports CSS, it should do it well, or not do it at all. The effort right now is to get rid of those browsers that don’t do it well, or to have the vendors fix them. If Microsoft won’t fix IE, then its better that IE gets forgotten.
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but I can’t think of another application off hand where an MS product needs more configuration than its ‘free’ equivalent. Or even I.E plugin management versus that in firefox.
Just have a look at firefox’s security management, versus that in IE.
Of course, there is still one major Internet investment that firefox can’t crack…Active X. Companies hate migrating, and unfortunately, I still end up visiting a few sites that use ActiveX.
I would like to add just two things:
1) Microsoft is a part of the organization that makes the standards, and those standards have been approved by MS (but it is know that they don’t even implement correctly their own propositions).
2) XHTML + CSS is not just for browsers.
I’m using firefox, no reason to use IE now (unless it gets me chicks which is doubtful).
“My team, which is very large, has been working very hard the last three and a half years….We have not blown off IE at all. We care deeply about this market. It’s supercritical.”
They have been working hard for 3.5 years and they still don’t have PNG support.
Because Microsoft doesn’t care about PNG. Everything at Microsoft these days is pure NIH syndrome.
Tell what is wrong in this and why is IE doing it right and why Mozilla based are doing it wrong …
It is imposbile to undertand.
I dont want to use tricks to make it work on mozilla even though this is an unproffesional point.
It is not that … but when i create more that 3000 web pages/month this is really embarasing.
It kills the nobrainer … but i am a hungry man … i need money and to have money i need to jump to the next project and not stick to shits that appear both in IE or mozilla.
And i am fair play.
I ask the clients to make a study of who will be their target users, but when i get a reply that is indeed a NOBRAIN point of view.
Usually they have nothing to do with the internet side of their company.
And if they dont care why should i care more than i need to get my work done.
It would be a lot to say about why some web content creators like me choose either to do the job perfect or just do the job.
Sometimes I do it, some times i dont, it all depends on who i am talking to.
Maybe is just me doing dirty work … but i am young .. i hit life now at my age probably at the highest impact size.
I am in a rush … and i dont want anyone to stand in my way.
Period.
This is the incriminating page : http://www.3elfsolutions.co.uk
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
IE supports PNG. IE does not support one optional part of PNG, notably alpha-transparency. Repeat: IE support PNG.
Microsoft is disappointing at best. XP is yesterday’s OS(2001) compared to Linux and OS X. I’m ready to ditch IE on this computer for Firefox like I did on my other pc.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
One wrong would have been enough.
Thanks for that info about the alpha-transparency.
Friends dont let friend use IE. Using IE is like sleeping with a crackhead whom you know has aids and you dont use protection. Microsoft has damn well abandoned its user base and the Internet. I can understand not producing IE updates for Windows 9.x/ME because of the difference in the code base and the difficulty in maintaining a seperate code base. But Windows 2000 users should get the update, W2K is still under active support and a lot of corporations use it and the cor of W2K and WXP are basically the same with not much difference at all. I consider this an extremely gross cop out for MS. I have already suggested we push Firefox for all our internal use and I make the same reccomendation to clients. Alot of my clients use Netscape 7 but we still have a few that are on IE and i am working with them to migrate over to either Netscape 7 or Firefox. I do believe when Firefox hits 1.0 final we will see tons of migrations and Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves.
but it’s funny how the Mozilla marketing folks are pretending that Firefox is going to become some sort of standard browser. Unfortunatly, that’s a pipedream at best as long as Microsoft keeps IE ubiqutious by using Windows’ ubquitity.
The Mozilla Foundation is not pretending that Firefox will become one just because its Firefox.
They are marketing Firefox so it will have a chance of becoming one.
>> Tell what is wrong in this and why is IE doing it right and why Mozilla based are doing it wrong …
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.3elf…
IE may support PNG, but it doesn’t even do HTML properly. One I noticed a while back: If you have multiple submit <button> elements, they will all be treated as successful when the for submits. And they don’t submit their value property, like a good little user agent, no, they submit the text on them.
That’s just one tiny thing… Microsoft *could* have fixed this. They’ve certainly been told about it – it’s hardly *that* subtle. But they simply can’t be bothered doing anything about it.
Frankly I’m not interested in whatever wonderful new features this guy and his team are going to put in IE7. I haven’t wanted most of the features that have gone into the last few versions – not the media sidebar, or a built-in search if it’s not Google, and definately not the security holes.
It is sad that so many users remain with IE, because it’s truly inferior to it’s competition. I guess most people can’t be bothered changing.
And Mozilla is wrong because..?
CSS is NOT XHTML exclusive, making your arguements kinda moot. CSS predates XHTML, originating about the same time as HTML. The two were first combined circa ’96-97, long before XHTML even had a name.
Ok, so you are advocating xhtml design techniques but with random close tags removed?
I think if web designers would stop designing for IE and put a link to say mozilla/firefox’s site then it would force people to download them and they would find out they like them
>Doctype and encoding tags – other than an excuse for browsers >to all behave differently unless you tell them otherwise (oh, >that’s brilliant) what does this actually do besides chew up >120-160 bytes?
Umm… Tell the browser what encoding you are using? The web is not just English, and not just Latin based languages. Telling the browser what encoding your page is the only way to ensure that your non-English page is viewed properly. Hell, it is the only way to ensure that your ENGLISH page is viewed properly when the default set at the browser is not English (making sure that your nice qutes come out as quets and not some other character).
And haveing the browser default to non-English is basicly the default for non-English users, which also surf English pages.
http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2003/espn-interview/01/
“When it unveiled Longhorn at a developer conference last October, the company had Amazon.com demonstrate how such a program might work, offering a prototype camera store that could use Amazon’s database, but offer a far more interactive and visually exciting way of navigating the store.”
This is supposed to be something new?? If you use Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox , please check out
http://www.faser.net/mab/remote.cfm
(sorry IE users, this uses Gecko XUL engine)
The Mozilla Amazon Browser. Perhaps not as spiffy as that MS store mentioned above, but the thing has been up for ages and it works great!
I don’t know how this will match other peoples’ experience,
but it seems to me that (aside from MS and MS update), for the most part, the only major sites that make much use of ActiveX are those of companies that are in some manner beholden to MicroSoft’s good will, (eg. hardware manufacturers and the like).
Call me paranoid or cynical if you will. But I can’t off-hand recall a non-IT oriented web-site that has in the last couple of years required me to switch over to IE just to access as intended.
(the exception maybe; some DRM focused places, which promptly lost my business as a result).
Thank you anonymous for that link. I especially like how the EM sized “Savings that add up” doesn’t display right with large fonts turned on it either IE or Mozilla. Classic… The LI’s don’t even come close to lining up, and push outside the box under IE.
Oh, and let’s not forget ESPN.com with the classic USELESS fixed size fonts that are so small you cannot even READ them on a decent computer without windows magnifier running, or that leaves you with half your screen blank if you are running anything higher than 1024 pixels across. The site looks like @#$% on anything other than 800×600 at small fonts… oh, but let’s all hold them up as a shining example of how to do it right. This raging chodo web designers have for fixed size fonts too small to be read, that if you ‘increase size’ in firefox just run into eachother because the site DEPENDS on the fixed font size… GAH. I shouldn’t have to drop my desktop resolution just to read a malfin web page, be it ESPN, Hotmail or PhpBB based message boards – especially when it is only those that USE said techniques (em and px) that are the problem.
After all, we all know 8 pixel high text is so attractive and easy to read… Which is why we all still use 640×200 CGA text mode.
@VManOfMana
> You are the one who is missing the point. The point is
> that what should not be missed is the content. With
> properly structured XHTML and CSS, a web browser that
> does not support it is likely to display the content in
> plain text
Sorry if I hold myself to a “higher standard” than backwards support being a crappy looking watered down version of the site, when using older ‘non-standard’ can deliver identical content to all browsers with minimal effort and testing.
> At the expense of having to play around every single
> browsers quirks and creating code that is syntactically
> incorrect.
Syntatically incorrect? How so? Just because the W3C says it’s wrong doesn’t make it wrong, no matter how people try to paint it. A new standard of syntax does not reduce errors, it just turns valid code into errors… Sheesh, sounds like passing a new law: New laws do not reduce crime, they just turn law abiding citizens into criminals…
@troubadour
> Apply this to your own comments as well.
Read my post – Delete the XHTML required tags back down to HTML3 (search replace ” /” with “”, kill the doctype tags), then clean up the extremely poor coding by simply deleting the unneeded carriage returns and leading spaces/tabs. Ten K, easy. Boom, done. My point was an article arguing about standards was poorly coded, which I find extremely amusing since it was little more than plaintext on a gray background.
@Gabriel Ebner
>Not surprising, if you know what browser most “web-designers” use… 🙂
Which is why I advocate that anyone SERIOUS about web design should have as many browsers installed on their machine as possible for testing – Using one browser and saying “ok” is NOT a professional attitude, especially with the volume of browsers out there and the fact they are free. I currently test using IE6, Mozilla 1.7, 1.3 and Firefox 0.8 and 1 Preview, Opera 6, 7 and 3.62, and Netscape 4.8 under XP. I use virtual PC to boot Win98 for IE5.x testing, Knoppix to test for Konqueror, which I had HOPED would cover the Safari bases… it does not, so on goes PearPC (bless those guys) and OSX letting me test Safari and also IE 5.x for Mac as well (which I used to test for with Basalisk II).
@Maltaq
> And yes, IE is the browser people design for, but that does
> not mean firefox renders it “wrong” the developers code it
> wrong, the sad truth is that IE is too forgiving a browser.
Too forgiving? God forbid you code error correction in. My only complaint is it does not generate a list of any corrections it makes. Mozilla wants to Wow me I’d love to see them code a simple ‘error on line’ list for HTML rendering for stupid errors like forgetting to do a /TD or /TR before it encounters a /TABLE, etc. The DOM inspector is pathetic for this, since it cannot even separate the objects properly if you do skip one. There is no good reason for a browser to not catch something like that and correct for it like IE does… On the same note, there is no good reason for the browser NOT to tell you it did that, which is where IE falls flat on it’s face making it useless for debugging. I suppose that in that way Mozilla is superior, something simple like that the page does render wrong – It just doesn’t give you the slightest clue as to WHY…
> You just sound like someone who tried to create an XHTML
> compliant page once but failed miserably and now you’re
> looking for reasons to diss it.
No, I’m someone who took over a website that sees >90 gigs of traffic a month that was coded in valid XHTML, that I shaved the bandwidth down 30% by reducing it to XHTML, and got it down to 50% by resorting to DHTML for a lot of it. The site has a lot of tables for actual TABLE data, passing it as CSV inside an array in Javascript, doling out the TABLE tags inside the jscript really leaned it down… Especially since I could share the javascript between pages letting it cache… JUST LIKE CSS positioning (LOL)
The classic “Oh, it takes longer to render tables because they don’t finish until all the content is downloaded”… OH POOR BABY. No offense to those of you who jumped on this bandwagon, but in the age of machines faster than a P150 if this is a worry of yours… I dunno. I lack the words for polite company. I could really give a @#$% about how long it takes to render. If once all the data has downloaded it takes <2 seconds, I’m happy. I’m more concerned with making the site smaller so it downloads faster reducing the load on the server. If that means unloading some of the work on the viewers browser, so be it. A site that downloads quickly is going to be faster than any site that is large but ‘renders’ quickly.
YES CSS can be used to make pages smaller, but it is not the be all and end-all of positioning content and is certainly not a cache all tool. It also is NOT exclusive to XHTML no matter how many people claim it is. XHTML is a change to the proper formatting of HTML adding a handful of tags like Doctype (also in HTML4), makes all ‘depreciated’ HTML codes invalid, and requires all tags to be closed… That’s it. That is ALL XHTML IS.
Well, does anyone dispute the fact that Microsoft drove its browser competitors into the ground back in the day? And looking back, has that led to the consumer benefits that Microsoft promised?
The only people benefitting from IE’s current dominance are anti-virus and anti-spyware/adware vendors. IE is still cr*p, and now the world is stuck with a poorly written, extra-crufty application that lives in the core of the OS with a monopoly position.
What’s amusing is that IE’s tight integration into the OS will be the eventual downfall of MS. They did exactly what they said they were going to: they integrated their browser into the OS. Now the fetid stench of poor code will contaminate the entrails of Microsoft OSs for decades to come. Fifty years from now they’ll be patching GDI vulnerabilities, while prasing the advanced features of Windows Even Newer Technology.
The only hope is they didn’t use IE core code in their WinCE/embedded product line. If they did, then hackers’ll be attacking all our appliances in 20 years….
Okay it’s not the best browser out there, Safari that is, but if Apple ported it to Windows and put it on the CD with all those iPods then people may install it and use a Mozilla based web browser with popup blocker and tabbed browsing, they would have a wider audience than mozilla is getting right now and it would look pretty, i suppose.
Isn’t Safari KHTML-based rather than Gecko-based? No Mozilla in Safari AFAIK.
It’s also about name. Every one knows that Internet Explorer has something to do with the Internet even if she/he has never used it. What about Mozilla? It wouldn’t be bad idea to rename (once again) the Mozilla Firefox to something like “Internet Enhancer”…
> What about Mozilla? It wouldn’t be bad idea to rename
> (once again) the Mozilla Firefox to something
> like “Internet Enhancer”…
Again, where open source falters – marketing. Key phrase in marketing… Appearance, Appearance, Appearance. Despite the phrase mozilla dating back so far, it is not a word and the average shmoe on the street would draw a blank to it.
I think working the word “Navigator” back into the title would be sufficient… Although working the word internet into the title would be the ideal. It may seem a minor thing, but when it comes to the average person form is often more important than substance (see IE)
Oh, and let’s not forget ESPN.com with the classic USELESS fixed size fonts that are so small you cannot even READ them on a decent computer without windows magnifier
can read them fine, just because IE doesn’t let you set a minimum font size for if you have a larger screen resolution than average doesn’t stop other browsers from being used.
running, or that leaves you with half your screen blank if you are running anything higher than 1024 pixels across. The
Anyone who runs a browser window larger than that is just silly. I run in 1920×1440 here, my browser window is usually in between 800×600 and 1024×768. Anything else is just uncomfortable to read on ANY site. Why? because IE doesn’t follow the standards so max-widths can’t be applied to text columns for example.
site looks like @#$% on anything other than 800×600 at small fonts… oh, but let’s all hold them up as a shining example of how to do it right. This raging chodo web
looks fine to me, at my screensize + min font size setting. It is an example of how standards based markup is not huge and bloated, whether it is an example of good design practices is a different topic which you are trying to switch to.
designers have for fixed size fonts too small to be read, that if you ‘increase size’ in firefox just run into eachother because the site DEPENDS on the fixed font size… GAH. I shouldn’t have to drop my desktop resolution just to
read a malfin web page, be it ESPN, Hotmail or PhpBB based message boards – especially when it is only those that USE said techniques (em and px) that are the problem.
em isn’t a fixed font size though, it is based off the parent element font size, or the browser default for the first element. Hence 1em == 100% 0.5em == 50%
IE is broken with its font-size inhertance though so using it properly ends up with miniscule fonts in Firefox / Opera, if the page was written only look in IE.
Get rid of Explorer !
Once upon a time IE was a leader in supporting CSS and other standards. They had basic PNG support before Netscape and IE4 had far more CSS support than Netscape. After about IE5.5 useful improvements have largely gone to the wayside. Around 1999 it became clear that IE had won the browser war and the IE team largely began resting on their laurels. IE6 is only a marginal improvement in standards support and has long since been past by Mozilla and Opera in standards support. Who cares about tabbed browsing for IE? Microsoft is right in noting that third parties can easily do that for them. Third parties can’t fix the core security problems and nor can they add native support for alpha transparency for PNGs or better CSS2 support. Professional webmasters want more stuff that they can do with their websites and IE is simply holding them back. As long as IE hold ~90% of the market share the webmaster can’t easily create a more CSS based page without alienating IE users. Is IE extinct? No. That was simply a provocative news headline, but whereas development it seems that Macintosh isn’t the only platform that MS has abandoned IE development for because IE for Windows is looking increasing dead except for security patch developers. Here is to the hope that Mozilla and Opera can force IE to improve their CSS support so that web designers have a bigger set of common CSS2 selectors that are comonly supported by Gecko, IE, Opera, and maybe Konqueror.
>Sorry if I hold myself to a “higher standard” than
>backwards support being a crappy looking watered down
>version of the site, when using older ‘non-standard’ can
>deliver identical content to all browsers with minimal
>effort and testing.
Your ‘non-standard’ is not guaranteed to look the same on all browsers either. You might be able to pull it off eventually, but only after applying a certain amount of hacks.
Minimal? You are kidding. Having to put 1×1 transparent pixels so browsers can display an “empty” table cell is ridiculous. Having to deal with several levels of nested tables is ridiculous. Been there, done that. My websites now have a logical meaning in their HTML code.
Users of websites go there for the contents, no for the looks. A good CSS regression guarantees the user being able to see everything in a logical order. Not with hack-based layouts.
>Syntatically incorrect? How so? Just because the W3C says
>it’s wrong doesn’t make it wrong, no matter how people try
>to paint it. A new standard of syntax does not reduce
>errors, it just turns valid code into errors…
Prove me, with adequate documentation, why your code is ‘valid’. The fact that a browser’s ‘quirks mode’ is able to display how you want is not a valid proof, by the way.
You are just blinded. You are so stuck at doing websites in one way that you are so unwilling of doing things differently that you don’t even bother to try. The fact tht you are used to things in one way does not mean its easier or better, its just that you are used to it. No more. It took me a good while to get used to make layouts without tables, but at the end it really pays off. Now I can change a website’s appearance without having to touch a site’s code given that it is properly structured. Of course, that also means I can no longer hack a website out of nothing, but developers are not supposed to do things that way anyways.
Are there still quirks in each browser’s implementation of CSS? Yes. But that’s why a lot of the current effort is to have browsers either fix those problems or simply have them displaced.
Tabled based website is heavy and unreadable in other browser like lynx. Major problem using table as layout is they are very hard to maintain. The reason why browser like Firefox cannot properly display some website are mainly due to bad coding.
Its all been covered in this mini “debate” but i just want to say that i use firefox. I havent used IE for a long time, before firefox it was opera.
If web designers coded all there stuff according to the standards there would be no problem. It would either force Microsoft to pull there finger out and bring IE up to standards or it would force people to use a third party standards compatible browser. I dont really mind which.
Having said that i will never go back to using IE , the main reason being i use *nix 97% of the time and i doubt they will port IE to *nix and i really seriousley doubt they will be bringing it up to standards and making it as bug and security hole free as Firefox.
KDE
“Again, where open source falters – marketing.”
Then by your reasoning, Microsoft falters at marketing because the name “Powerpoint” doesn’t suggest any relations to presentations. How about “Outlook”? “Excel”? Or even… “Windows”! To someone who has never used a computer before, a window is that glass thing. He’ll never associate “Windows” with computers unless he knows computer jargon.
Two years is an eternity in the software market to do absolutely nothing. In that time, Mozilla has become stable, FireFox has become usable, and they both (by virtue of their shared codebase) have recently surpassed IE in features.
Firefox has really only become usable as a full replacement (from the layman’s perspective) in the last 6 months (if that) – and it *still* has incredibly annoying bugs in basic functionality like copy & paste and rendering (Slashdot renders incorrectly about 50% of the time – although multiple refreshes usually fixes it eventually – something I find hilariously ironic).
Yet, they have hardly made a dent in IE usage. I understand IE has a lot of momentum being pre-installed, but I mean – COME ON! It didn’t even have pop-up blocking until a few months ago, a feature that is CRITICAL for browsing half of the internet.
Last I heard IE was starting to lose marketshare. Given that the competitors have really only been viable to the layment for about 12 months, I’d say that’s reasonable. Let us not forget that even with all the supposedly unfair davantages IE had back in the day it still took them ~2 years after Navigator and IE were competitive to knock Netscape’s crown off.
Firefox has really only become usable as a full replacement (from the layman’s perspective) in the last 6 months (if that) – and it *still* has incredibly annoying bugs in basic functionality like copy & paste and rendering (Slashdot renders incorrectly about 50% of the time – although multiple refreshes usually fixes it eventually – something I find hilariously ironic).
Which version of Firefox do you talk about? I verified your claim and got no such issue using Firefox 1.0pr. You are way behind.
Last I heard IE was starting to lose marketshare. Given that the competitors have really only been viable to the layment for about 12 months, I’d say that’s reasonable. Let us not forget that even with all the supposedly unfair davantages IE had back in the day it still took them ~2 years after Navigator and IE were competitive to knock Netscape’s crown off.
Frankly, do you expect that IE will suddenly go down from 90% to 0 in a year? It takes time to educate people that IE is not the only browser. A local PC store and I gradually swichted IE to either Firefox and Opera, guess what? It didn’t bother the clients. Do not forget that Microsoft deliberately included IE as a part of the OS which gradually killed the competition such as Navigator. Despite the fact Microsoft were caught using that method, they still continue to include them in Windows. Now that users figured that IE is very bloated, they will change and will ask webdesigned to properly design the website. Ak any Canadian about Bell fate when they were a monopole.
Another thing is every softwares has bug no matter the design. The big difference is how fast these bugs are fixed.
Which version of Firefox do you talk about? I verified your claim and got no such issue using Firefox 1.0pr. You are way behind.
I’m using 1.0PR on about 6 different machines and they all exhibit this behaviour. Probably that have, I might add, been present since I started using Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix/whatever full time back at version 0.6.
Eventually, copy & paste stops working consistently (if at all). Sometimes it happens in less than an hour, sometimes it takes a few days – but eventually, hitting Ctrl+C (or right-click, copy) doesn’t copy the selected text into the clipboard (but does wipe out whatever’s there, just to make this bug worse) consistently. Dragging & droppping, at least, remains functional. It most noticably breaks copy & paste from the URL bar, but text from web pages themselves often doesn’t work as well. It’s quite a well known bug and I’ve certainly been experiencing it basically since I started using Phoenix.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220900
As for the rendering problems, I only really notice it on /., but I’ve seen it affect similar styled sites as well like kuro5hin. Instead of the page rendering properly, the comments section and the article summary either don’t render at all, or end up on top of the “contents” links on the left hand side. A page refresh or two (or sometimes three or four) will eventually fix it, but that it happens at all with a site as popular as slashdot is disconcerting.
The latter problem isn’t such a big issue but the first, as far as I’m concerned, is a show stopper. Copy & paste is fundamental functionality. That it breaks destructively (clearing the clipboard buffer regardless) makes it even worse.
Frankly, do you expect that IE will suddenly go down from 90% to 0 in a year?
No. I’d expect it to take 3 – 4 years (from now), assuming Microsoft don’t make IE a more attractive product.
Do not forget that Microsoft deliberately included IE as a part of the OS which gradually killed the competition such as Navigator.
Navigator was killed because it sucked. If Netscape had put as much effort into their software development as they did their whining, IE would never have even come close to the marketshare it has today.
Despite the fact Microsoft were caught using that method, they still continue to include them in Windows.
Most people consider a web browser to be a basic piece of functionality. As such, it *should* be included by default.
Now that users figured that IE is very bloated, they will change and will ask webdesigned to properly design the website.
IE isn’t bloated.
Another thing is every softwares has bug no matter the design. The big difference is how fast these bugs are fixed.
These two have been hanging around for at least a year without being fixed. No-one has even figured out what causes the copy & paste breakage yet (ie: no test cases, so it’s very difficult to fix). Not to mention that little hoo-ha a couple of months back about a fairly serious security problem with Mozilla that had been swept under the carpet and left to fester for a year or more.