Firefox or ie

mikeblas said:
...and renders sites that FF breaks because they don't hate their users quite as much.
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Historically, I've found the exact opposite. I can't stand coding for IE because it always breaks something that should work perfectly fine otherwise. I have to end up making a special code section JUST for IE to render the page properly. Case in point: simple GIF that had a javascript attached to it. In order to display what otherwise is a simple image command, I had to compose that into an IEframe because IE had caching issues with the javascript command. :rolleyes: That took me over an hour to figure out. It worked great in FF from the beginning.
 
Been giving Opera, FF3, and IE7 all a good, equal shot lately.

Opera... Loved the features. On paper, a great browser. Just too incompatible with too many things... Couldn't make it a whole week.

FF3... Week 2 now. Works ton better than Opera. Too many incompatibilities as well... If it weren't for IETab, I'd have ditched it as well.

IE7- works with everything. I don't have any issues with any websites I have visited.


FF3 rocks because of addons (AdBlock Plus anyone???). IE7 rocks for compatibility.


On Vista, you must also consider Protected Mode in IE7, does not exist in FF.
 
I only use Firefox. I think it's great! FF3 is definitely the best version yet. It's very fast and very secure.

Speaking of special code for IE, my personal website has problems with IE! I can;t, no matter what I do, get my drop down menu's to align properly. In Firefox and Opera it works like a charm.
 
FF3 and Opera...I pretty much refuse to touch IE. if a website cant work it doesnt deserve my time...

that said - at work were stuck on ie6 for all of the funky trashy webapps that depend on it :(
 
TechieSooner said:
FF3 rocks because of addons (AdBlock Plus anyone???). IE7 rocks for compatibility.
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The only reason IE7 displays more sites correctly is because there are too many web developers who use Microsoft's non-standards instead of sticking to universal standards for html code. If they used the correct standards then every page would display in FF correctly, probably Opera too. If a site doesn't display in FF correctly (rare) then I just deep six it and move on. I have no patience for bad coding.
 
milkweg said:
The only reason IE7 displays more sites correctly is because there are too many web developers who use Microsoft's non-standards instead of sticking to universal standards for html code. If they used the correct standards then every page would display in FF correctly, probably Opera too. If a site doesn't display in FF correctly (rare) then I just deep six it and move on. I have no patience for bad coding.
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Ditto. They have the nerve to call it "quirk mode" and "non-quirk mode". :rolleyes: WTF is that supposed to be? It's wrong or it's right, not "quirky". :eek:
 
milkweg said:
The only reason IE7 displays more sites correctly is because there are too many web developers who use Microsoft's non-standards instead of sticking to universal standards for html code. If they used the correct standards then every page would display in FF correctly, probably Opera too. If a site doesn't display in FF correctly (rare) then I just deep six it and move on. I have no patience for bad coding.
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I don't care who is at fault.... IE works, FF doesn't. From a business standpoint- you have to use what works.
 
Firefox + NoScript.

One plus is that I can use this on my work + home machines since it's cross platform.
 
milkweg said:
The only reason IE7 displays more sites correctly is because there are too many web developers who use Microsoft's non-standards instead of sticking to universal standards for html code.
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In actuality, it's because IE's parser and rendering engine are more forgiving of errors. Sure, there are outright bugs, but most of the differences are actually in FF failing to be lenient.

Naively, it's true that HTML or CSS syntax is either correct or not. But sites are coded by people, and people make mistakes. Software that is more tolerant of mistakes is, by definition, more robust.

FireFox, because it is too strict, punishes end users when it's actualy the web developers that are making the mistakes. When you find a broken website and report it to the FF devs, they'll tell you that the problem is the website and they won't fix FF. The user is left to pursue a fix with the web site provider--who may or may not care, may or may not listen, may or may not be reachable, and may or may not act. Meanwhile, the user has no choice; the site they want to use doesn't work.

The end user does not care about the bleating of syntax and correctness rules or any of that. It's easiest for them just to switch to a browser that does work.

This situation--and the responses from the FF dev team--make it pretty clear to me that they don't care about the end-user experience of their product and have mistakenly prioritized technical correctness (which, in the eyes of those end users, is arbitrary and meaningless).
 
I work for an online streaming company, IE is the most problem free, firefox doesnt do DRM as reliably
 
My FF3 started crashing ever 2 minutes, went back to FF2 and all is good.
 
mikeblas said:
In actuality, it's because IE's parser and rendering engine are more forgiving of errors. Sure, there are outright bugs, but most of the differences are actually in FF failing to be lenient.

Naively, it's true that HTML or CSS syntax is either correct or not. But sites are coded by people, and people make mistakes. Software that is more tolerant of mistakes is, by definition, more robust.

FireFox, because it is too strict, punishes end users when it's actualy the web developers that are making the mistakes. When you find a broken website and report it to the FF devs, they'll tell you that the problem is the website and they won't fix FF. The user is left to pursue a fix with the web site provider--who may or may not care, may or may not listen, may or may not be reachable, and may or may not act. Meanwhile, the user has no choice; the site they want to use doesn't work.

The end user does not care about the bleating of syntax and correctness rules or any of that. It's easiest for them just to switch to a browser that does work.

This situation--and the responses from the FF dev team--make it pretty clear to me that they don't care about the end-user experience of their product and have mistakenly prioritized technical correctness (which, in the eyes of those end users, is arbitrary and meaningless).
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Be careful there, mikeblas. That's a slippery slope argument that you're making and precisely how standards are eroded. Someone decides that it's OK to cut corners on a technical specification, and if they manage to get enough people to use their product, then there's no way to fix the problem, since everyone has now adapted to incorrect standards and making the standards correct would break something somewhere in the dependency chain.

For the sake of long-term benefit, standards are important, and should not be discarded that easily for the sake of business reasons.
 
Argument? What I'm observing is that FireFox is stead-fastly trying to adhere to the written standard at the expense of their own users.

Standards erosion isn't something I've intended to discuss. It happens because vendors who implement bugs and then don't fix them directly because of legacy compatibility issues for their customers; ambiguity in the standards, and sometimes even malicious decisions to extend the standard to bind more users to it. Both IE and FF have done these things for all the different reasons.

The FireFox team has decided something like the contrapositive of what you describe. They see a strong, established de facto standard that differs from the black letter standard. They didn't like that, so steadfastly adhere to the written standard. The net effect of this decision is that they're punishing their users--the overwhelming majority of whom don't give a darn about the standard, not to mention even know that it might exist.

If FF wanted to help web developers, they'd provide compatilbe and strict modes. They'd default to the compatible mode so more people would use thier product and have a good experience doing so instead of having problems, then blaming someone neither they nor their users can control directly. FireFox didn't do this because in reality, very few people care about the standards. Even web designers just want a site that just works in front as many users as possible with as little meddling as possible.

Standards wars have happened in many procedural languages over history, like C, C++, Fortran, and COBOL. After a while, the market realizes that very few people want to write portable code across platforms and those that do have the tools they need to do so. Those tools are unavoidable, since even benign bugs or fundamental platform differences will cause differences in the code shown to the different platforms. At the end of the day, standards compliance is properly just a marketing bullet and is of minimal value to real customers. Bug compatibility, or switchable conformance levels, are actually more useful.

The standards issue has also happened with non-procedural languages, like SQL, with the same result.

What makes HTML/CSS different is that so many more projects are cross-platform. A public website may be visited by clients with any number of browser implementations on lots of different platforms. I think this makes the compliance with the de facto standard among installed users far more important than the black letter standards.

Whatever the cause of the erosion of the standard, it's inevitable. Even the almighty FireFox is non-conforming in certain areas, just because of bugs or misinterpretations of the inperfect standards documentation. It's silly to be so strictly conforming, in the end, particularly when the structure of the architecture puts the discomfort of that non-conformance in front of the end user rather than someone who can actually do something about it.
 
mikeblas said:
If FF wanted to help web developers, they'd provide compatilbe and strict modes.
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They do:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla's_Quirks_Mode

Quirks mode is used if no specific standard is specified, otherwise the browser renders as compliant as it can to that standard.

This is a feature of Mozilla Gecko, not Firefox itself, incidentally. I don't know if Firefox displays it, but the Page Info in SeaMonkey says whether it's rendering in quirks mode or standards compliant mode; interestingly, Google uses quirks mode. [H]ard|OCP uses standards compliant mode.
 
Mithent said:
They do:
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla's_Quirks_Mode
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Unless you have other info to say otherwise- this isn't something your end-user can change. This is all done automatically:
For documents sent as text/html, Mozilla must decide whether to handle them in quirks mode or standards mode. (Content sent as text/xml or other XML or XHTML MIME types is always handled in strict mode.) Currently Mozilla does this through DOCTYPE sniffing.
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It doesn't do a decent job of switching between full-standards mode and quirks mode obviously...


Edit- and isn't switching between all these modes a little, well... ridiculous?
In Strict mode: you break websites with bugs, and display webpages written perfectly.
In "Compatibility" Mode: you display websites with bugs, and display webpages written perfectly.

See the difference? Just kindof stupid to be doing any of this switching around, when you can have a "single mode to rule them all".
 
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