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1. papab30
   Member

   Today, Microsoft has annouced that Internet Explorer 8 has been released to the public in it's final form. Read more about the release here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10199582-56.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1

   In the other half of the world, Google has released a beta version of it's browser Chrome 2 touting it's new Javascript engine and quicker overall rendering speed. Read more about the browser there: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10198282-2.html?tag=mncol

   And last, the Mozilla foundation has released another beta of their Firefox 3 browser also to be known as Firefox 3.5 which also is showing off a new javascript engine and faster HTML rendering. Read more about the browser here: http://news.cnet.com/new-beta-paves-way-for-firefox-3.5/?tag=mncol

   Now as you can see, the world for web developer has suddenly gotten a lot more confusing than it was just six months ago. Instead of dealing with just a handfull of browser, and being able to say that one is better than the other was easy. Now with three new browers, and all of them pushing new technologies I feel that we've dropped back to the late '90s early 2000.

   Lets hope that eveyone is playing on a more even ground this time around.

   Posted 2 years ago #

2. Len
   Member

   Opera's latest version seems fast too.

   Posted 2 years ago #

3. septor
   Member

   In reality all newer versions should be faster than their predecessors.

   Posted 2 years ago #

4. papab30
   Member

   Interesting enough, Opera really isn't a player in the desktop enviroment. Taking a look at this graphic, http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 , it appears that Opera is only running just under 1% of the people out there. Now I'm not knocking Opera, and I totaly think that they have a great Mobile browser, but they just don't seem to be a major player in the over scheme of things.

   @septor - I like what you said, but the word that throws things off is 'should'. Even though some browsers have been upgrades over the years, many of them of caused developers more than enough headaches. Biggest example, IE6, A major upgrade back in 2001, probably the best of the IE branch at the time, but it's got a horrible history of not playing well with web standards.

   So while 'faster' is good, working with established standards would be even better.

   Posted 2 years ago #

5. Colum McGaley
   Member

   If you really want to have a browser war. Get IE out of the picture.

   Posted 2 years ago #

6. septor
   Member

   papab30 -- That's a moot point. Standards compatibility has nothing to do with speed and I was directing my comment at each individual browser, not how they compare to the others.

   Secondly. Opera has a low popularity rating because it just recently went free so not a lot of people (when I say a lot you have to take into consideration the amount of people who still use IE because it's the only thing they know about) know of it's existence.

   Colum McGaley -- That will never happen. IE is too well known and has came bundled with Windows for too long for it to ever die. 90% (pulled out of my ass, obviously) of people that use a PC use Windows. That same amount probably use IE because it's what's came on their computer (which is another argument entirely) from the get-go and to them, those poor poor people, it's working just fine for browsing MySpace, checking their email, and gathering all sort of malware along the way because they're also probably too ignorant to do anything about it.

   This means IE is the reason a browser war even exists.

   Edit: I also want to comment on this, "So while 'faster' is good, working with established standards would be even better. "

   If your browser takes 20 minutes to render a page correctly, it's going to get passed up for something that renders it 80% correctly and loads in 3 minutes 100% of the time. The average internet visitor visits sites that are blotched together anyways, so it really won't matter to them if a box is 3 pixels off center as long as the page loads quickly.

   Posted 2 years ago #

7. papab30
   Member

   @septor

   Speaking of having IE bundled with the operating system. Windows 7 will now have the option of removing (at least taking away the UI) IE. What this means is that once the UI is removed, you are free to have any browser what so ever installed. Will this be a feature used alot? I dunno, from what you're saying many people just don't care and will never remove IE. The others that care, will they remove IE just in spit of what they feel for the browser. Or will they keep it, so that they can have many different versions on one machine?

   Do all web browser need to render pages the same. The answer follows:
   http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

   I think even if IE did not exist, there would still be many different browsers all vieying to be the latest and greatest. Look at Chrome. They're not really saying they render a web page well, they're saying that their javascript engine is the best. In fact here is an example of this: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

   Look closely when you try to run one of the experiements, they'll ask if you really want to continue if you're not running Chrome. IE may or may not run the experiment, but Firefox usually will. If that's so, does that still make Firefox worse than Chrome?

   So there are a lot of different things these browers are doing to compete against each other. New ways in creating threaded tabs (protection against browser crashes), new javascript engines to increase the speed of dynamic rendering, new ways of rendering the DOM. Each one is trying to out do the other. So IMHO, the browser wars are back, and there may not be any clear cut winner this time around.

   Posted 2 years ago #

8. septor
   Member

   papab30 -- AFAIK IE is still an opt-out feature which means people getting a new PC and not knowing any better are still going to swim in the lake with IE. Unless during setup you get to choose which browser is used, which seems unlikely and is still not going to change anything as people buying new PCs that used IE on their old PCs aren't going to pick Firefox, Opera, or Chrome just because they have the option to now.

   Not going to comment on your entire post, as it's all the same thing over and over. However, there were browser wars long before Firefox, Chrome, and web standards came along.

   Edit: You have to look at this from the average users point of view, not in the view of anyone that comes here.

   Posted 2 years ago #

9. papab30
   Member

   Actually I'm not looking at this from average joe's point of view, hence putting this thread under the 'designers talk' topic.

   From a designers point of view I am totally excited about having browsers that should do what they're advertised to do, and not what they think they should do. All three browsers, Firefox, Chrome and IE are all advertised to act according to web standards. All three are touted to have better javascript engines than before. Which in the end means that I, as a web developer, do not have to waste time on stupid rendering problems or non-standard javascript calls and focus on giving the user a rich user interface experience.

   I am glad that these organizations are being pushed by each other to start making some dramatic changes in the way the web will be viewed and experienced.

   Posted 2 years ago #

10. septor
    Member

    10% of the browser population isn't going to sway decisions. :]

    Posted 2 years ago #

11. greg
    Member

    I just wish all the big browser developers would get together and decide on a single rendering engine to use - it's hopeless having Webkit, Gecko, KHTML, Presto, Trident et al. Having code that can render completely differently based on which engine is used just makes no sense.

    Posted 2 years ago #

12. papab30
    Member

    Oh I know. I just spent a month doing a complete overhaul of a website and dealt with the problems of working with all of the major browsers and seeing huge issues between each just on simple things like layouts and positioning.

    So my personal level of service, I've dropped trying to support IE6 and Firefox 2. Both of those have been supplemented by automatic updates of browsers. Both of those can be easily replaced and both of those render HTML in completely different ways.

    I'm now focused on IE7, Firefox 3 and Chrome. Chrome is very close to Safari so I feel comfortable that if it works with Chrome it should work with Safari. Now as of this week, we're looking to deal with IE8 and it's compatiblity mode settings.

    So how are you others dealing with this? What browsers do you support and which ones are you leaving out?

    Posted 2 years ago #

13. greg
    Member

    I test in FF3, IE7, Opera, Chrome and Safari (Windows). I use netrenderer to preview sites in IE6 to make sure things are still usable but I'm not too fussed about rendering differences. I figure that if people are inttelligent enough to switch to FF then they're intelligent enough to update from FF2 to 3 so I don't bother with that.

    I recently finished a new design for a personal project and, after spending way too much time tweaking it so it displayed properly in IE7, found that certain parts broke in IE8. I nearly cried! I haven't tried out the latest IE8 release so fingers crossed things will be okay in that.

    Posted 2 years ago #

14. uberlemurguy
    Moderator

    I test in FF3, IE7 (not really I use IE8 in compatibilty mode), Opera and Safari (sometimes).

    IE8 has fantastic developer tools that have amazing javascript error catching that works when rendering as IE7. Which allows you to fix IE7 and 6 errors. IE8's rendering sucks (at least in the beta version

    Posted 2 years ago #

15. greg
    Member

    It looks as though the rendering in the final version of IE8 has improved on the beta versions a lot. I've only played with it a little but pretty much everything rendered the same as FF3 - definitely a good sign.

    Posted 2 years ago #

16. papab30
    Member

    Having used IE8 today to test out the website, I found that the browser likes to use strict CSS2.1 rules. This sure throws off a few things like using overflow: auto to give a column automatic length when an item is floated. I ended up having scrollbars on the right and bottom. When I switched over to overflow: hidden I had no problem.

    I went into IE8's developer window and found that because of CSS2.1, a totally unknown value (which is escaping me right now) was being thrown onto my floated items. Setting a width and height on the container item fixed it, but wasn't the best solution.

    So IE8 is different to develop for, just another thing to get used to I suppose. Time to study up on CSS2.1.

    Posted 2 years ago #

17. 1websitebuilder
    Member

    IE has indeed pimped out from the older versions but I'm still a Firefox supporter. Mainly because there are some FF add-ons I can't live without.

    Amy Cameron
    BuildMySiteforFree.com

    Posted 1 year ago #

18. LobsterMan
    Key Master

    IE8 gets a 21 in the acid3 test, FF gets 93, safari/chrome 100 so I guess IE still obviously sucks.

    Posted 1 year ago #

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