Which internet browser do you use?

[phongn]

Yeah, there's some good notes on that site (I particularly like his digs at the W3C mouse event and box sizing standard. btw, box-sizing is a godsend, yay for ie8 and firefox 3.5). The workarounds are easy enough anyway though.

The workarounds may be relatively simple but they aren't necessarily easy - and worse, they're time-consuming. Even with conditional comments and all that jazz.

No problem on my browser, looks much different on the designer's browser. We're both using standards compliant engines. Why is it so different? Because the web isn't meant to be pixel perfect! I like my fonts the way they are. He apparently doesn't like his, but doesn't care to resize the window and/or change the default font size. (Both of which would work without breaking anything on any good sites.)

But nope, I have to hold my nose and type "font-size: 10px;" to close the 'bug'. Aaaargh.

As mentioned before - designers are anal-retentive about control and almost all trained in the era of print or graphics and so hate anything that threatens to look different Like most people, they fear change.

[Teebs]

I use Opera mostly these days. I used to use IE 8 and then got pissed off with it. I've also tried Firefox but never really like it all that much. Opera seems to be faster and generally prettier and less crashy than the other two, at least on my computer, so it gets my use.

[Isil`Zha]

So I provide test results after you call "bullshit" - so now you declare them "irrelevant" and then jump over to conspiracy theories?

They are irrelevant. They don't actually test anything related to real world use nor are they an accurate representation of adherence to web standards, seeing how many of the tests are based on unstandardized drafts.

It also is quite noticeable in the real world. I constantly come across pages that render oddly or totally incorrect in IE. I get text boxes, like this one for posting, where you hit, for example, the URL tag to be entered - instead of entering it at my cursor, IE puts it at the end of the text box. (I don't know if it actually does this on this forum software, but I've had it happen in several other places.)

Does ACID3 actually test for this? Is the bug in the browser or is it in the software?

Much easier to just blame Microsoft though.

phongn basically covered it already. The claim that it doesn't test "anything" related to the real world is asinine. FF doesn't even get it perfect (though Chrome does.) And of course there are sites that are poorly written - but having such a low score is just ridiculous. I and many others definitely notice IE incorrectly rendering pages or having compatibility issues far more than most other browsers.

The main idea behind stopping scripted content is security, which is why IE did it; the Internet Explorer browser is proactively secure, out of the box on Windows Server, and with a simple checkbox on home computers.

But speed is definitely a nice bonus, as is reliability. And being a perfect pop-up blocker, and being a perfect ad blocker. And stopping all noise makers and animations. The benefits never end!

Well clearly its js performance does cause issues. Now, as phongn already pointed out, NoScript does it better, and is easier to use.

That just means everyone else is fucking retarded and should make like a firefox and burn in hell. The technical term is "appeal to popularity fallacy".

I was referring to customization, you twat. No developer (or maker of any product, for that matter) could make a core product that would be optimal for every single person. Not everyone thinks the same or organizes their stuff the same, or wants the interface the same. Hell, some people I work with have their tabs down the left-side, instead of across the top. I, personally, can't stand it that way, but they love it that way. How could an uncustomizable browser possibly accommodate both our tastes? It can't. If you move the tab bar, you're customizing it.

I guess a tailored suit also means the suit must be a shitty product too, eh?

cus·tom·ize (kst-mz)
tr.v. cus·tom·ized, cus·tom·iz·ing, cus·tom·iz·es
To make or alter to individual or personal specifications

So you have some odd hate of the ability to alter something to fit individual or personal specifications?

<snip>

Yes, indeed; if it was so good, why did he need to customize it in the first place?

In this specific case, it is double stupid since he first forked over extra cash for the name brand, then forked over even more money for what are surely useless customizations! Those are the marks of a poor financial planner; this kind of person should be hanged by the neck from a tall tree until dead dead dead to prevent the country from falling into a financial black hole and ruining millions of lives.

Okay, now I'm sure that you don't even know what customization means. You customize something to fit your, unique, personal tastes, wants, or needs. It is therefore impossible for a product to fit those needs for absolutely everyone, out of the box, and thus, by your definition, all products are "shitty products" (ones that don't appeal to your personal unique wants or needs, specifically.)

While using bad software might not lead to babies starving in the streets, people being willing to settle for lazy developers pawning their work on to the hapless end users still causes countless volumes of human suffering. Instead of the developer taking 30 minutes to do it right, now one add-on author has to spend 45 minutes doing it, and then 50 million individuals have to spend 5 minutes each locating, deciding on, and installing that plugin.

Competent developer: 30 man-minutes, job done
Incompetent developer: 96 man-years to do the same thing

What a gross misuse of statistics. Most add-on authors enjoy doing it. And oh no, 5 minutes (a very high end figure if I ever saw one!) Besides, you typically end up saving yourself much more time in the long run customizing it to your liking. I know the tab organization alone saves me at least several minutes a day, or quite a bit more if I'm having to do a lot of research. Net gain for me.

[General Zod]

Jesus Christ. I just downloaded the new Firefox 4.0 beta and I'm absolutely appalled. Not only does it take longer to render webpages than 3.6 but the fuckers actually put the tabs above the address bar. What the zombie christ? Fuck that shit. I might wind up switching to Opera if this bullshit keeps up past the beta.

[Isil`Zha]

hmmm, haven't noticed a speed impact. Though I can see a lot of add-ons not being compatible with the rather significant changes to it.

I already moved my tabs back under the address bar...

[phongn]

Jesus Christ. I just downloaded the new Firefox 4.0 beta and I'm absolutely appalled. Not only does it take longer to render webpages than 3.6 but the fuckers actually put the tabs above the address bar. What the zombie christ? Fuck that shit. I might wind up switching to Opera if this bullshit keeps up past the beta.

Firefox 4 hasn't even reached release candidate yet.

[Isil`Zha]

I know. The change from 2.x to 3.0 wasn't quite as significant as this change, though, so I'm not surprised in the least.

It's also only Beta 1.

[General Zod]

Jesus Christ. I just downloaded the new Firefox 4.0 beta and I'm absolutely appalled. Not only does it take longer to render webpages than 3.6 but the fuckers actually put the tabs above the address bar. What the zombie christ? Fuck that shit. I might wind up switching to Opera if this bullshit keeps up past the beta.

Firefox 4 hasn't even reached release candidate yet.

Going from 3.6 to 4.0 shouldn't completely shit things up. I'm not impressed by the changes at any rate.

[phongn]

Going from 3.6 to 4.0 shouldn't completely shit things up. I'm not impressed by the changes at any rate.

It's beta. What do you expect?

[General Zod]

Opera does tabs on top too, which is why I refuse to even try it. It's compatibility relatively sucks too. Fuck that shit.

I could have sworn it was on the bottom. On the other hand it's less of a nuisance than FF's new design.

[phongn]

(What the fuck is up with the current trend of videos everywhere? This is why I couldn't use Google crap if I wanted to, but this horrible trend is spreading. PayPal and Mozilla do it now too... evil evil evil, screech kill kill.)

A video is worth 30000 words/sec? Seriously, video is good for demonstrating many things.

They also talked about working on operating systems without a window manager and such, but whatever to that, get a better operating system I say. (IMO, tabs shouldn't be part of an application at all; the window manager should be the one doing that anyway. But oh well.)

Well, the popularity of tabs indicates that window management is somewhat broken It seems people want to be able to group multiple windows together (perhaps even arbitrary ones) to reduce screen clutter and/or reduce the management load.

All in all though, their arguments really aren't bad. Not that I'll change my mind; this stuff is a religion, and see the quote in my sig for that.

Bah humbug

[Ace Pace]

Opera does tabs on top too, which is why I refuse to even try it. It's compatibility relatively sucks too. Fuck that shit.

I could have sworn it was on the bottom. On the other hand it's less of a nuisance than FF's new design.

You can move it. Kinda goes with the whole Opera can do neat things.

[Isil`Zha]

Opera does tabs on top too, which is why I refuse to even try it. It's compatibility relatively sucks too. Fuck that shit.

I could have sworn it was on the bottom. On the other hand it's less of a nuisance than FF's new design.

You can move it. Kinda goes with the whole Opera can do neat things.

You can move the tabs on FireFox, too. Took me all of 30 seconds to switch that on the 4.0 Beta back to being underneath the address bar.

[Medic]

Besides IE as a kid and not knowing any better, my 1st browser on my 1st computers I bought were all Firefox. I used it for years and was happy with it and the extensions, to boot.

Then 2 things happened: I tried Chrome, and though it lacked some features of Firefox and has one particular bug which irks me to this day, I also eventually bought a netbook and here in Iraq have been stuck using it.

In short, on this sized screen, it's Chrome or nothing. Also, the hardware is sufficiently anemic that I'm compelled to use this, it does feel slightly faster. (which makes a difference on my network here)


The big pain-in-the-ass for Chrome is files (pictures, movies, whatever) which weren't downloaded in their entirety don't seem to be able to fix themselves. If you cancel and resume the download, it only goes as far as the point it stopped at the 1st time and again stops there. Probably I have to do something with deleting file history (merely downloading download history doesn't fix this) but this shouldn't be a problem at all if they did their job. Firefox, for example, can pick up a download at any point in stoppage (for example, crappy wireless that keeps booting you) and eventuallly finish it. Chrome, no.

Nevertheless, I've stuck with Chrome cause I find the tabs above the address bar to be an ideal spot, and the logic of them is great. You can reorder tabs, between one window or others, a lot easier than other browsers I've used (IE and FF; on another laptop I installed Opera but I've used it like 5 times, so not really at all) and the way in which they resize themselves only when you move the mouse OFF of the tab area is much less irksome than Firefox's habit of resizing tabs to always accomodate available space on the browser. Also, when tabs are at the top, you don't have to 'zero-in' on a space below the top of the screen, but near the top. If your sensitivity on your mouse is high enough, you just flick your wrist [UP] and you can close a tab.

Little things like the tab logic of Chrome have saved me a LOOOOOOOOOOT of time compared to Firefox. Plus, the download and patches are not huge [DOZENS] of megabytes, like Firefox. Literally, it would take hours to download dozens of megabytes on my internet here, so again, Firefox is a non-starter. I haven't used the latest Firefox though, so I don' know how it compares to the latest Chrome.

edit: oh and yeah, all my computers are a flavor or another of Windows, so I have IE on all of them. And I do use it occasionally: the Army pretty much writes everything to be compliant with IE primarily (or, a lot of it just happens only to work in IE) so on various .mil sites I'm obliged to use IE. I'm not a code monkey, developer or a 25B (Army job which works with computers) so I can't put my finger on it, but these all look like crappy jobs at writing code. Good enough for government work, I suppose.

[Edi]

How is customization bad ? Are you saying I should shut up and accept what M$ offers me instead of pimping out my browser to suit my lifestyle ?

Grow the fuck up.

But, no, I'm saying the developer should do that. If something needs to be customized, that means it sucks.

You won't need to remind me to never ask your opinion on anything computer related ever again. That's how fucking stupid your statement is.

The option to customize something does not mean that one needs to do it, but a lot of people are used to doing something a certain way, so they would obviously prefer to customize things according to their preferences. And on that basis, an individual user will need to customize things unless the default layout and settings were exactly according to his preferences.

I have yet to find a program that I use where I didn't have to customize the settings to my preferences even if the majority of users use it right out of the box.

[Uraniun235]

I typically use Firefox. I broke myself off of IE6 a few years ago only because my desktop computer completely shit its pants and I used a dumpy old laptop for about a month while I waited for shipping on parts, and Firefox seemed to work better on the laptop. By the time I'd gotten my desktop back together, I was sufficiently accustomed to the look and feel of Firefox that I just stayed with it. I haven't really had any impetus to change again since then. If Mozilla really fucked up the UI, or had a string of really awful security vulnerabilities, that could change; but that would apply to any browser vendor.


Sometimes I find myself using IE8 at work, or rarely at home if I run across the unlikely page that refuses to play nicely in Firefox, and I don't hate it; I'm just not used to it. And, admittedly, the mantra of "it's hooked into the OS! it'll murder your children if anyone exploits it!!" is still pretty well ingrained into me, even though I've heard it's much more secure than previous versions of IE.

[phongn]

Indeed. You'd think this would be a clue bat to the window manager teams, but instead they focus on useless bullshit like wobbly 3d windows. Wooo.

I know. OSX team? " Hey look, Expose, now you can see all windows at a glance and quickly select one". Windows 7? " Mouseover the taskbar icon and it'll make the non-app windows transparent". Linux? " YAY WOBBLY WINDOWS" Oh, and lets move the UI elements randomly.

EDIT: To be fair, Apple and Microsoft have pulled off their own idiotic moves (Microsoft didn't make the Ribbon global, and OSX, for awhile, had multiple themes going on inconsistently)

Now, there is one window manager I've seen that tries to handle tabbing, and that's Fluxbox on Linux. I didn't care for their implementation (tabs replaced the titlebar. ugly), but it shows that with some work, it can be done, even without modifying applications.

I think Qt/KDE is working on arbitrary tabbing.

[Soontir C'boath]

I hope four days isn't too old but I just switched to Chrome from Firefox and I am not looking back. Firefox seemed it became a hell of a lot slower since the recent update came about. The only thing that had held me to Firefox was Adblock but it's on Chrome as well so the wall has crumbled. Also without the command, status, and title bars (with the min./max/close), Chrome gives a bigger screen space to web pages.

(-1 Vote to Firefox, +1 Vote to Chrome)

[Edi]

You won't need to remind me to never ask your opinion on anything computer related ever again. That's how fucking stupid your statement is.

It is pathetic how low people's expectations are when it comes to software. I advocate software that Just Works, and all kinds of people come out of the woodwork to jump all over it. Don't you see how wrong that is?

You sound far too preachy, like a fundamentalist. You ignore reality in some key respects. I do have low expectations of software because I have seen so much crap. I'm also constantly on the lookout for better software, which has helped me find stuff that works much better than what I would otherwise be stuck with.

The option to customize something does not mean that one needs to do it, but a lot of people are used to doing something a certain way, so they would obviously prefer to customize things according to their preferences.

Then the application should Just Work based on your personal preferences. It doesn't need to read your mind to accomplish that either - it just needs to follow the operating system's lead and not try to reinvent every wheel it comes across.

Depending on how far we're going here, I mostly agree. You don't need to reinvent everything, but sometimes you do have to reinvent something if it's implemented badly on the OS side. If the OS side is done well in that regard, then there is no reason.

Everything else is application specific, meaning the developer can have his focus groups working with his application and determine what works best.

If he does a good job, it won't need to be customized, even to get custom behavior.

The difference here is, what works for best for the masses and what works best for power users? Sure, there is usually some basic layout, settings or routine or whatever that you can set for people who barely know what the power button on a computer is and they can use it comfortably. Objective achieved. That's what a software developer should do. They sure as fuck shouldn't do basic settings tailored e.g. according to my preferences, because while it may give some arguably good advantages if you're doing some things or doing some other things a specific way, it's just going to confuse the fuck out of people who don't know what they are doing.

This is why you're never going to be able to get a one size fits all software for anything more complex than Tetris or Minesweeper. Or maybe Notepad, but that's a bad example, since there are other programs that are nearly as light as Notepad that do the same thing better and with far more features that are actually useful.

I have yet to find a program that I use where I didn't have to customize the settings to my preferences even if the majority of users use it right out of the box.

That just means you have yet to find a good program. Don't worry, neither have I, but the difference is I'm not OK with it. I strive for a better world.

Oh, I've found some good programs, all right. They do what I need them to do, they do it efficiently and well and for some of them the only tweaks I've had to do were very minor (such as setting tab spacing length). Could these programs be better? Undoubtedly. Do some of them need to be for what I do? No. Somebody else may have different requirements.

I also strive for a better world and am not content to let things lie, but the key is that I do not require perfectionism out of the box because I have an idea of just how complex modern software is.

[Agent Sorchus]

I hope four days isn't too old but I just switched to Chrome from Firefox and I am not looking back. Firefox seemed it became a hell of a lot slower since the recent update came about. The only thing that had held me to Firefox was Adblock but it's on Chrome as well so the wall has crumbled. Also without the command, status, and title bars (with the min./max/close), Chrome gives a bigger screen space to web pages.

(-1 Vote to Firefox, +1 Vote to Chrome)

One of those random things that having cats earns you is figuring out what happens after they walk across your keyboard, as such I know that in Firefox all you have to do is to hit F11 and your current webpage takes up your entire screen. When you do this there is a hidden bar that contains only the tabs and the address bar. So you can get rid of the command status and title bars same as with Chrome, while also hiding the remaining bars so that you use the full page.

[Soontir C'boath]

One of those random things that having cats earns you is figuring out what happens after they walk across your keyboard, as such I know that in Firefox all you have to do is to hit F11 and your current webpage takes up your entire screen. When you do this there is a hidden bar that contains only the tabs and the address bar. So you can get rid of the command status and title bars same as with Chrome, while also hiding the remaining bars so that you use the full page.

I knew that already and I do not like what it does ie. hiding the address bar etc up there and covering the start menu taskbar. I like more space but not so much that it would remove other things from view.

[[R_H]]

I use Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I tend to use Chrome the most, then Firefox, with Opera dead last. Right now I'm using Firefox.

[Medic]

One of those random things that having cats earns you is figuring out what happens after they walk across your keyboard, as such I know that in Firefox all you have to do is to hit F11 and your current webpage takes up your entire screen. When you do this there is a hidden bar that contains only the tabs and the address bar. So you can get rid of the command status and title bars same as with Chrome, while also hiding the remaining bars so that you use the full page.

I knew that already and I do not like what it does ie. hiding the address bar etc up there and covering the start menu taskbar. I like more space but not so much that it would remove other things from view.

Quoted for truth. Not being able to access the tabs and address bar = having to add one step (hitting F11) to the process of GOING TO ANY OTHER PAGE, every single time. Can you even hit F11 by touch? I sure as hell can't.

I'll summarize why Chrome's my favorite in lieu of my huge, above post: it saves me time. I'm not talking about faster download speed though Google claims it's faster and I certainly don't think it's slower, no, it's just bare-bones. Tabs-on-top may not be liked by Zod and some others but it's hilarious to point out: Mozilla thought they had to steal it. What does that tell you? It tells me they reached the same conclusion as I did, it saves time; it's a better default.


ps - and by 'steal' don't be overly lawyeristic. I don't mean it in such a damning fashion, more like the idea of when console makers were 'stealing' design cues in controllers from each other like daul sticks, vibration and bumpers / triggers.

[Terralthra]

What do so many of you have against IE? I know lots of idiots fine, people didn't like 6, but even then, that's the past now; no reason to dislike 8.

I'm slow to forgive, but even I have come to accept firefox as being decent at 3.5. IE has moved just as far.

It takes ~2 seconds to open a new (blank) tab. Literally. I press CTRL-T in Firefox or Chrome, I get a new tab next-to-instantaneously. I press CTRL-T in IE, I get a spinny cursor for two seconds while the new tab shows "connecting..." (to what? It's a fucking blank tab). Yeah, no thanks.