IE7 vs Firefox vs Opera..........

[Deleted 2]

BCI said:
You cannot make a page that is 100% according to standards.

Yes, you can. You just have to limit yourself in what features of those standards you use. And sometimes you have to restrict the kind of content you offer. For example, you can't use Flash animations or video--but Flash animations or video can't be seen by everyone to begin with.

 

[TimelessTrek]

My code is super simple. I put a link to an anchor tag at the top of a page and then an anchor near the bottom. Then at the bottom I put an anchor link pointing to an anchor at the top of the page.


There is absolutely NO reason why the anchor links at the top work but the one at the bottom doesn't.


My only guess is that IE7 has issues with anchor tags since I have no problems whatsoever in any other browser.

So if the biggest problem I've encountered is that IE7 users can only jump down the page but have to scroll back up then I think I'm doing good. The page is still functional, just not 100% perfect on IE.



And TRUST me - I try to avoid using CSS as much as humanly possible!!!

 

[ialfan]

Opera for sure.

 

[BCI]

That you cannot embed flash with simple and valid code, that's stupidity on part of the W3C, and not my fault. But what's more important: Flash and MPG 1 are the only formats for video that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without installing any third-party program. Don't want to see video, don't come to my page.

And Mr. Timeless, you should use CSS as much as possible. It gives lighter HTML and is generally a very elegant solution. And why create links for bottom and top in the first place? Pressing "Pos1" or "End" on my keyboard is faster than aiming with the mouse for some link on your page.

 

[Deleted 2]

BCI said:
But what's more important: Flash and MPG 1 are the only formats for video that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without installing any third-party program. Don't want to see video, don't come to my page.

You don't consider the Adobe flash plugin third-party software? It's closed source, doesn't work on 64 bit platforms, and Adobe's license forbids people to use it on other platforms than Windows, Mac OS and Linux, even in emulation.

Since I generally can't stand embedded video, I'm more or less okay with that

And Mr. Timeless, you should use CSS as much as possible. It gives lighter HTML and is generally a very elegant solution.

It does give lighter HTML, but elegant? Only if you stick to very limited designs indeed. Browser compatibility, like it or not, is a very real issue, and CSS is designed in a way so that certain browsers (i.e. the text-based ones) will never be able to support it according to the standard.

 

[Ariadne]

Cicero said:

BCI said:

TimelessTrek said:
Instead of wasting time trying to find some assinine unknown solution, I just created a "Best Viewed With Firefox" graphic and stuck it at the bottom of the pages

Not good. You have to make a page that works with all browers equally. Keep the HTML and CSS simple, and use the HTML validator to check for errors. Things that work in one browser only must be avoided.

No, you don't. I really don't care whether IE users can view a web page properly in Microsoft's browser, and would feel no compunction in checking a page against only Firefox, Netscape, Opera, and Safari. If Microsoft can't be bothered to comply with standards, then I'll not worry about anyone who can't be bothered to not use their browser.

It doesn't matter so much if it's just your blog, but if you were designing a webpage for a company, they might care about the majority of people who use IE.

 

[Paxil]

TimelessTrek said:
Instead of wasting time trying to find some assinine unknown solution, I just created a "Best Viewed With Firefox" graphic and stuck it at the bottom of the pages

If you don't mind 85% of the viewing audience not being able to read your page, then fine.

 

[TimelessTrek]

BCI said:And Mr. Timeless, you should use CSS as much as possible. It gives lighter HTML and is generally a very elegant solution. And why create links for bottom and top in the first place? Pressing "Pos1" or "End" on my keyboard is faster than aiming with the mouse for some link on your page.

It's a web-version of a newspaer section. So at the top you have say links to 3 stories on that page and each link takes you directly to a different point on the page where that story starts. The "bottom" anchor link I referred to is found at the end of each story area and should return you to the top list of article links.

It's a very common thing, which is why I have no idea why the new IE7 doesn't work with it. And like I said, the page still works fine in IE7 when you link DOWN to an article, you just can't return to the top list. It's weird folks - makes NO sense.



And CSS sucks for designing whole sites. It takes FOREVER to setup and is only useful if you are building a site that is going to be constently resized/edited/altered in some major way (say you decide to change all the links to 12pt instead of 10pt or have a column width be 500 pixels instead of 400).

But for me, when I do web design, I design for a specific, unchanging size because I don't want my site distorted by browsers stretching my content to fit or anything like that.

 

[BCI]

Zero Hour said:

BCI said:
But what's more important: Flash and MPG 1 are the only formats for video that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux without installing any third-party program. Don't want to see video, don't come to my page.

You don't consider the Adobe flash plugin third-party software? It's closed source, doesn't work on 64 bit platforms, and Adobe's license forbids people to use it on other platforms than Windows, Mac OS and Linux, even in emulation.

Since I generally can't stand embedded video, I'm more or less okay with that

Sure it's third party, but it comes preinstalled. Biggest reach right out of the box, that's my point. But since you don't like video, let's skip this...

And Mr. Timeless, you should use CSS as much as possible. It gives lighter HTML and is generally a very elegant solution.

It does give lighter HTML, but elegant? Only if you stick to very limited designs indeed. Browser compatibility, like it or not, is a very real issue, and CSS is designed in a way so that certain browsers (i.e. the text-based ones) will never be able to support it according to the standard.

That's the beauty. Browsers that cannot display CSS just ignore it. And since you can put all styles in one file, it means faster loading pages for the rest.

It does not mean simple layout or limited design. Only if you don't know how.

 

[BriGuy]

Opera seems like a fine browser, and it seems to work well, but I came on to Firefox first from IE, and so Firefox just has a better "feel" to me. Opera is setup a little differently, not as badly as IE7 is, but I like the "classic" presentation in Firefox.

I also make use of Firefox extensions, which I find to be better to get and use than the corresponding widgets in Opera.

In the end, you can use only one browser at a time. I've stuck with Firefox. But either FF or Opera is a good alternative to IE7, which I only have to use for Windows updates anymore.

 

[TimelessTrek]

LOL - figured out that funky Anchor tag browser issue I was having.

*APARRENTLY* - In Internet Explorer, you need to have a character inbetween the <A NAME></A> tags. I had to do some 'net research to figure that out.

And what's weird is usually Firefox is MORE particular about coding than IE (Like, you need to have the '#' in front of a hex value to make it work right in FF, but not in IE).


Anyways, the site 100% IE/FF compatible now.

 

[BCI]

TimelessTrek said:
LOL - figured out that funky Anchor tag browser issue I was having.

*APARRENTLY* - In Internet Explorer, you need to have a character inbetween the <A NAME></A> tags. I had to do some 'net research to figure that out.

And what's weird is usually Firefox is MORE particular about coding than IE (Like, you need to have the '#' in front of a hex value to make it work right in FF, but not in IE).


Anyways, the site 100% IE/FF compatible now.

Now what I'm to say is the robot answer of the HTML-must-always-be-according-to-standards folk: The two issues you describe are clearly errors on your part and violations of offical HTML standards. You cannot just depend on browsers to guess around and correct your errors, you have to test your pages with as many different browsers and computers as possible and validate your code in the W3C validator to find all errors. A page compatible with just two browsers out of a much larger number, that's not good enough...

I see your blog uses CSS extensivly, that's good.

 

[HellTrek]

Firefox is all-around better than IE7 but it strangely it casues problems with my internet.

 

[USS Mariner]

HellTrek said:
Firefox is all-around better than IE7 but it strangely it casues problems with my internet.

You stole my interweb tubes! Now my browser is leaking!



Seriously, what are the problems? Don't forget to check your firewall settings if possible (especially Norton a.k.a. Yellow Shitpiece.)

 

[USS Mariner]

As for the topic at hand, my only qualm with FF is the booting speed and the lack of being able to easy delete certain tabs.

I'm sure that's on the list of fixes for the next version, and I know the booting speed is because it's not literally part of the fucking OS like IE is, but meh, it works fine for my uses.

 

[BCI]

To delete a tab you click on it with your mouse-wheel.

 

[Daedalus12]

I have to say Firefox 3.0 is a bit strange. I've been using it for the last 6 months (basically the developmental version of firefox) and it has some useless features like the ability for the users to drag around any arbitrarily selected portion of a webpage and move it around. If I haven't explain that clear enough then see the picture below. I've noticed that Opera is faster in javascript and startup. It's a very good browser and you can't go wrong with it. I also like Konqueror as well because of it's the swiss army knife of browsers.

 

[BriGuy]

One quibble I have with FF is the search function, which doesn't seem to work well, if at all. I can be looking right at a word on a page, and do a search for it that won't find it.

Why is that?

 

[Daedalus12]

The find function works fine here. You might have checked the Match case box.

 

[TimelessTrek]

It's weird - because I want to like IE7...but the thing is, I don't FEEL safe with IE compared to Firefox.

I'ms ure technically they're just as vulnerable but if I do online banking or something like that, Firefox seems better suited for it.

I still think IE7 is light years ahead of Safari though.