Power Sellers Unite

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 16923 Location: Texas

Microsoft issued an official blog posting March 2 detailing its engineers’ thinking process behind the build of Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of its Web browser, and how it chooses to render certain Websites. According to the blog posting, some 19 percent of high-traffic Websites currently render in IE 8 standards. Microsoft is working to reduce the list of Websites that IE 8 needs a feature called Compatibility View in order to render all elements properly.

As part of its drive to have as many Websites compatible with Internet Explorer 8 as possible, Microsoft in a blog posting March 2 describes the thinking that went into how the browser chooses to render Websites. For some sites, IE 8 needs a feature known as Compatibility View to render all elements properly. The current list of those sites is something that Microsoft has been working to reduce for some time.

more.. link to news article

Brandr · Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 137

Internet Explorer needs to catch up

When designing a website, the web developer must make the site cross compatible with all of the major browsers; fortunately, this really means compatible with Explorer and Firefox, because these are by far the two predominating internet browsers. IE holds about 60% of the market largely due to the fact all windows operating systems come with IE hard wired into the OS. You cannot remove IE from your windows computer, but you 'can' use other browsers to surf the web. IEs only real competitor is the open source Firefox by the ostensibly non-profit Mozilla consortium. Savvy internet users prefer Firefox because it is non proprietary, lightweight and lightening fast, due to the fact it is not bloated with built in *spyware as is IE. Firefox holds about 30% of the browser market.

Google's Chrome browser has been taking a bite out of the browser market growing to about an 8 to 10% user base since it's release. Chrome is the web browser equivalent of the Google toolbar. A big piece of spyware which monitors a user's web surfing activity and sends regular reports back to a Google server. Of course Google might deny this, but since Google permanently caches every search through it's search engine including the associated IP, should I believe them? As a privacy loving libertarian, I wouldn't touch it.

When I am designing a website, it is always IE which presents me the most bugs to work out. Whilst Firefox is almost always completely compliant with W3C html and CSS standards, IE frequently is not. For instance, to center an object in Firefox with CSS one would use the following CSS selector:

margin:0 auto;

This does not work in Internet Explorer.

You have to include the css:

text-align:center;

even though you are not centering text but an object: image, flash script etc.

When testing my final website design, everything always looks exactly as I planned in Firefox, but there are always bugs in IE I need to identify and work out by tweaking the CSS or html. It would be nice if all browsers strictly followed W3C standards and rendered html, CSS, and java script exactly the same. However, Microsoft doesn't like playing ball with outsiders and likes maintaining its own proprietary standards, and if the IT giant had it's way, there would be one browser, its own. Fortunately Microsoft realises web developers do not design websites with only IE in mind, and if IE were to continue maintaining it's bug laden browser, they may continue losing ground to Firefox. I will be doing some testing of the New Internet Explorer 8, and will report if the Browser has improved in it's ability to properly render a W3C standards compliant website as well it should.

But I truly recommend downloading and using the 100% cost and spyware-free Firefox. You'll love it. Download site here

Brandr

AtomicMall.com · Joined: 20 Jun 2008 Posts: 967 Location: Yakima, WA

elgato wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote")Microsoft issued an official blog posting March 2 detailing its engineers’ thinking process behind the build of Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of its Web browser, and how it chooses to render certain Websites. According to the blog posting, some 19 percent of high-traffic Websites currently render in IE 8 standards. Microsoft is working to reduce the list of Websites that IE 8 needs a feature called Compatibility View in order to render all elements properly.

As part of its drive to have as many Websites compatible with Internet Explorer 8 as possible, Microsoft in a blog posting March 2 describes the thinking that went into how the browser chooses to render Websites. For some sites, IE 8 needs a feature known as Compatibility View to render all elements properly. The current list of those sites is something that Microsoft has been working to reduce for some time.

more.. link to news article

Essentially what this means is that coders will now have to account for FOUR variations of IE when designing a site instead of THREE.

As it stands now, programmers have to install custom CSS and JS tweaks to correctly render pages for IE6, IE7 and IE8, as each one displays html differently than the other. (Simply brilliant Microsoft - thank you)

Don't ever believe Microsoft when they tell you they are designing with compliance in mind. By "industry compliance", they are referring to how closely their products comply with the architectural constructs developed by their engineers. A move toward "compliance" by MS has always translated into more work for coders. As developers, we would be much better off if they would have simply created ONE non-compliant platform (IE7) and stuck with it.

IE is a complete joke with its industry non-compliance, proprietary rendering models and security vulnerabilites. I wish more end users would realize this and use real (read: secure, stable and compliant) browsers like Firefox and Seamonkey.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Sorry for the vent, but it felt good. 8)

Brandr · Joined: 07 Mar 2010 Posts: 137

AtomicMall.com wrote (View Post): › docWrite("quote")
Sorry for the vent, but it felt good. 8)

Thanks for the highly articulate hi-tech venting. It does feel good doesn't it? Yes, having to include this fix or that jog in the CSS to compensate for the horribly non-standards compliant IE is incredibly annoying. Alignment and line height in IE is a nightmare. Remember the older version of IE which didn't render PNG transparencies correctly, displaying the transparent field in the PNG image as an ugly blue green mess? Firefox is by far the superior browser, but unfortunately, the average web surfer is going to use the browser pre-packaged with their MS OS PC.

B

elgato · Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 16923 Location: Texas

How Does IE 8 Behave?

As Microsoft continues to tout its push toward increased Web browser interoperability, Google releases the results of a recent run of its Sputnik JavaScript conformance test, showing Microsoft's Internet Explorer falling behind on JavaScript conformance.

As Microsoft continues to tout its push toward Web browser interoperability, Google has released the results of a recent run of its Sputnik JavaScript conformance test, which shows Microsoft's Internet Explorer falling behind on JavaScript conformance.

In a March 11 blog post, "Does Your Browser Behave?" Christian Plesner Hansen, a Google software engineer, said the company has released a test runner for Sputnik so that users can run the complete Sputnik suite of more than 5,000 tests to test the JavaScript compliance of their browsers.

"Incompatibilities between browsers remain one of the biggest challenges for Web developers," Hansen said. "We hope that giving users and browser vendors an easy way to test their browser will help promote browser robustness and compatibility across the industry."

more.. link to news article

DaLizardsLair · Joined: 15 Feb 2009 Posts: 4782

I tried Firefox on my old computer, since it seemed that everyone claimed it would be faster and less time consuming.

They forgot to mention that it would shut my computer down and require me taking it in to have it removed.

You can keep firefox.

knappschiles · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4027 Location: Wi

I think you have more issues with your computer than just Firefox.

I've been using Mozilla or Firefox on ALL the computers I've had since Win 95. i don't update stuff as often as I should So often i'm running an older version of stuff until they have gotten rid of the bugs in the newer releases. But Mozilla or Firefox has never been any problem on any of my computers.

Carol

mojavelyn · Posted: Fri Mar 12, 2010 12:21 pm Post subject:

I think so too... Lizard, you did have a very old computer, you might not have had enough ram to be operating all that your were.

But FF is better then IE. I had chrome on for about 24 hours. and removed it. slow, sluggish, overrode MY computer tools... Told google to stick it.

VIOT · Joined: 11 Feb 2008 Posts: 4

I agree with the FirFOx is better over IE, any version. but recently, I have to clear up the memory space taken by FireFox, some how it leaks memory and make the internet running slugish. have any one noticed? I need to shut down the firefox at least once a day during the day to claim back the memory taken by FIrefox.

knappschiles · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4027 Location: Wi

I will sometimes see a problem like that. BUT it's usually not a FF problem but an issue of the other programs I've had open at one time or another.

I will often leave my browser open for days with no problem. But if I've opened a PDF file or done something with my graphics program. Even after they have been closed, usually THOSE are the memory hogs.

Adobe Acrobat is so terrible that I ditched it last summer and now use Foxit reader instead. It's not as seamless as Acrobat, but it's not as glitchy for me.

There is only 1 exception and that's when I leave WeatherUnderground open overnite. For some reason that site will bolox up the whole computer after a while. But there isn't another weather site with as much good info as WU for tracking a thunderstorm system in your area.

JMO,
Carol