re: Norwegian Websites Declare War On Internet Explorer 6
Sunday, February 22, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by gewg_
(4444 messages posted)
Arminius wrote:
|Norway is a relatively small place.
|
No argument there. There're just the nation with the big brass ones
who is willing to take the initial PR hit to raise an important issue.
The movement is spreading:
cache of http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/norwegian-websi.html
Professional Web developers have been wanting this for years.
|Can't help but wonder whether some kind of back room deal has been cut
|between "Norway's largest eBay-like site, finn.no" and Opera Software
|(also Norwegian) to squeeze IE out.
|
A valid question. If, however, you heard from devs
about how much time (and money) is put into ADDING support
for the LEAST standard-compliant browser(s),
it would quickly become apparent that the beef is valid. Some samples:
cache of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/01/145231#26291983
(Scroll up to #26291983 for another cogent item there.)
http://origin.arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/ie8-super-standards-mode.media/breakdown.png
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?mode=nested&threshold=5&sid=914757&cid=24779515#24779515
(The *best* link was in my original post.)
..and with IE (as with so many M$ products)
new versions aren't a graceful evolution with clean backwards-compatibility.
cache of http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/19/2056228#26923297
|When I decided to try another browser a little over a year ago[,]
|I decided to try Opera because it claimed to be the fastest browser at the time,
|and wasn't as resource hoggish as Firefox.
|
Yeah. Gecko/Mozilla has historically had problems with memory consumption/leaks.
FF3 made a giant leap in that regard (but dropped Win9x support).
|I have come to like the tabs
|
Opera was a pioneer there.
|and the built in download manager.
|
The Gecko/Mozilla "Download Manager" has always been a glaring weak point.
A "download danager" that won't resume a broken download is misnamed.
Luckily, there are many proper download managers available.
...and IE's "download manager" (not even accessible) is just a bad joke.
|IE is spartan by comparison.
|
Yup. Let me correct myself here: IE6 was released in 2001,
so that would actually make it (shamefully) from this century.
|Nevertheless there are times when I use IE because Opera isn't up to scratch.
|
I bet you if you feed the URL of each of those pages
into the WorldWide Web Consortium's HTML validator, http://validator.w3.org
you will find that they are steaming piles of broken code.
The other possibility is that clueless webmasters used M$-only constructs
like (incredibly dangerous) ActiveX Controls.
With Mac gaining ~2% of the market per year, that is just ignorant.
With more and more people accessing the Web via their phones
(running Symbian, Palm, Linux, Android, etc.) it's just plain dumb.
|1. Opera (the world's fastest browser)
|takes much longer to load the NBC news website than IE does,
|and Opera tends to lock up while the page is loading so I use IE for that one.
|
Like I said, a steaming pile of a site. They can't even pass the pre-test:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.nbc.com/News_%26_Sports
Don't blame the browser
for not being able to render the crappy code of nincompoop developers
who should have jobs that include asking "Do you want fries with that?".
The Mozilla folks have pages about this kind of incompetence/cluelessness:
cache of http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism
|2. With Opera I wasn't able to register at the Sony corporate website
|to lodge my claim for the free Playstation 3 they owed me.
|The online form didn't work so I had to use IE for that.
|
I went to the archive of my favorite Mozilla newsgroup and did a search for "Sony".
I didn't see anything about that site sucking.
That's all the farther my interest goes. I despise Sony.
|3. Opera doesn't display .xml correctly. I use IE for those.
|I prefer to get the links and download the files manually.
|
If it's **any** XML, Gecko shines there.
If it's *some* XML, again, run the URL thru the validator.
Now try to render a page containing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) by using IE.
Now use IE to try to view a page that uses transparent GIFs.
Neither is supported--even with the latest version of IE.
|After reading that CERT report you linked to gewg,
|I got to thinking Microsoft might have been better off in the long term
|if the judgement in the 1998 antitrust case filed against them
|had forced Microsoft to separate (dis integrate in the literal meaning of the words)
|IE from Windows.
|
IE's stagnation for years and years hurt them and hurt the progress of the Web.
Monoculture is BAD.
cache of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Potato_Famine
|It would have forced them to design a new, hopefully more secure browser
|from scratch.
|
I don't know about that. M$ is infamous for their unwillingness to throw away code.
|
All messages in this thread [show all]
 | |  | re: Norwegian Websites Declare War On Internet Explorer 6 (gewg_: Sun, Feb 22, 2009, 12:38 pm) |
|
