Here’s something interesting: a site with a tutorial for getting FireFox to look and act like IE. You can convert your friends from the dark side without them even knowing!
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[IMG Printer-friendly version of this entry]Print Here’s something interesting: a site with a tutorial for getting FireFox to look and act like IE. You can convert your friends from the dark side without them even knowing!(9)
Rob says
I still don’t see what all the fuss is about Firefox. I’ve tried using it about a dozen times now (because everybody keeps talking about it) but i hate it. About 50% of the pages I go to often don’t display right in it and its always crashing. I’ve even tried it on multiple machines and platforms. I just don’t like it.
Honestly, I think the Firefox craze is driven more by an inert dislike of Microsoft than any real benefit from switching to Firefox.
But that’s just me.
Mark says
Here is what the fuss is about:
– Standards compliance. Any website that look poor are that way because of improper design. people don’t have to design FOR Mozilla, they just design according to the standards, and it looks good in Safari, Mozilla and Opera.
– Security. IE is a security nightmare. Website can install software without your consent, and hackers can gain control of your computer just by you visiting a website.
– Speed. Firefox is slimmer and faster at rendering pages.
– Tabbed browsing.
Many people don’t care about any of those things, but those who do use FireFox or Opera.
Rob says
Standards compliance. Any website that look poor are that way because of improper design.
Standards shmandards. Why should we developers have to specialize their code to appear correctly in Fire Fox when IE is already displaying the page correctly?
Security. IE is a security nightmare. Website can install software without your consent, and hackers can gain control of your computer just by you visiting a website.
Maybe. I’ve never had IE give me problems along those lines. There are security precautions that can be taken by IE users to eliminate much of that.
Speed. Firefox is slimmer and faster at rendering pages.
I’ll not argue with you there.
Tabbed browsing.
I have no use for that.
Honestly, I guess I get a little annoyed by all this. All these people running around talking about how terrible Microsoft is. MS puts out some great products. Honestly, Firefox is buggy, prone to crashing and a real pain to work with.
But, to each their own I guess.
Mark says
You don’t have to specialize your code to make it look right in FireFox. You just design using the standards. Right now, developers ARE specializing their code. They specialize their code so that it doesn’t look like crap in IE.
Here’s the old way of design: write your code, and specialize it to work in IE. Then, discover that it looks like crap in earlier IE versions, and every other browser, because all the code is IE-specific, so spend a long time making it work in each other browser.
The new way: design according to standards, and then create some tweaks so that it works in IE.
Before, you had to specialize for each browser. If you design with standards in mind, you only have to tweak for the browser that doesn’t follow the standards: IE. It tremendously cuts down on the time it takes.
It’s not that hard. There are only a few things in my CSS that are IE-specific. And my page looks pretty much pixel-perfect in both.
In the perfect world, IE would support the standards, and would be much more secure.
I don’t think Microsoft is a terrible company. I think Windows XP is their best OS to date, and worthy competition. I also like thier Office suite. But Internet Explorer is a horrible product, and a blemish on their company. What they did was edge out Netscape by adding better features and support for new standards like CSS. Then, when Netscape had been left in the dust, they stopped bothering to make IE a cutting-edge browser. It’s bundled with Windows, so they don’t have any real reason to improve it.
Rob says
Maybe you’re right Mark. I know you’re smarter than I am when it comes to code and such. All I have to go on are my personal experiences. Firefox crashes a lot for me. IE doesn’t. Firefox displays webpages all wonky. IE doesn’t, for the most part.
IE works better for me. That’s all I know.
Mark says
Oh, I’m certainly not denying that a certain percentage of webpages (although I seriously doubt it’s half) don’t look quite right in a non IE browser. I’m just saying, the reason for that is that they were designed with IE in mind. IE is a very liberal browser (and here you thought that this whole browser thing was apolitical). IE lets slide many things. For instance, your site’s front page has 1,650 errors. This lax parsing leads people to be lazy when they make websites, and errors stay because “it looks okay in IE.” Other browsers who use their own parser on the page might react more negatively to the errors. But if you page validates, it’ll look good in all the standardized browsers, and the same in IE except for the areas where IE has bugs (mostly CSS bugs, like how IE adds additional padding and measures the size of a DIV differently than the standard). And these bugs are fairly easy to work out. I’m just saying it’s better to start with valid code, and then tweak it to make it work with IE than to make it work with IE and then try to make it work with everything else.
IE’s share is about 60%, I think. It would be foolhardy to design just for IE users. It also would be foolhardy to just design to specs and not do IE tweaking.
Rob says
I don’t think its 50% of all websites either. Just 50% of the ones I visit, which were probably designed by people as code-dumb as myself.
Really though, I don’t see why its a coding “error” if it displays correctly in IE? Why not make IE set of standards the, um, standard?
Mark says
Because it’s dangerous to give Microsoft control of web standards. They can just start changing them, allowing IE to auto-update, and screwing everyone else who doesn’t use IE.
IE claims to support many web standards that it doesn’t support. Heck, it doesn’t even have full support of PNG images! Also, IE’s method of rendering really couldn’t be called a standard, because many things it does are bugs. For instance, the IE peek-a-boo bug that was present in MovableType’s default pop-up comment template, where you couldn’t see any of the text until you drag-selected where it should have been.
If IE supported the standards, web design would become so much easier.
King of Fools says
Make Firefox work like IE? I use Firefox because I like how it is different than IE. Plus, with all the site complaints…any web developer worth his/her salt will make sure a page appears properly in both browsers. (And Opera and Safari also.)
It is not that difficult to make a page appear properly in both IE & Firefox.