Internet Browsers

[Samurai]

Unbelievable.... First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft ? The Register

[carboy]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Unbelievable.... First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft ? The Register

Not unbelievable, really.

Once upon a time, IE had a near monopoly on the browser market. At that time, it made sense for Microsoft as a company to be non-complaint to standards. If you have 90% of the browser market share, most people developing a website or a web-app would most likely only test against IE. So the site or app wouldn't work as well against other browsers. So a huge mass of people wouldn't quickly shift from IE to a different browser because some site they regularly visit wouldn't work as well on a non-IE browser.

But now IE's overall share of the market has slowly gone down over the last 7-8 years. Now keeping IE non-compliant would no longer serve much competitive advantage to Microsoft, but at the same time would give them negative publicity. So it now makes sense for MS to be compliant.

And if they want to be compliant, they can probably do it better than most other browsers because of their resources - only Google would have comparable resources.

If you take C++ compilers, the Microsoft compiler was one of the first to be conformant to the C++98 standards - it didn't give much competitive advantage to be non-compliant. Again now, MSVC10 is more conformant with most of the C++0x standard than a lot of other compilers.

[sgiitk]

I must say I am also surprised by the 3:1 lead of Firefox over IE. I am a FF lover, but I have not come across too many people running it. They just use whatever is installed in the machine - IE. However, once I make them aware of FF, esp if I install it with a few add ons - like dictionary, tab scope, show IP they are hooked.

[carboy]

Originally Posted by sgiitk

I must say I am also surprised by the 3:1 lead of Firefox over IE.

Internet polls are good fun, but they aren't statistical polls & hence you can't derive meaningful information from them.

In the real world, IE has a 46% market share, FF has a 29% share, Chrome 9%, Safari 5%, Opera 3% & all other browsers including mobile ones have a 8% share.

The first browser I used was one of the early versions of Netscape when it used to be paid product. I also had NCSA Mosaic (the precursor to Netscape) installed but didn't use it much. I moved to IE after that. Then once Firebird (the original name of Firefox) became available & became much better than IE, moved to Firebird. Then IE5, I think was reasonably good so started using IE5 & Firebird/Firebird together (I think it was because IE5 had better XML support, but not sure). Then was using Firefox alone for a few years, till IE8 got released - mainly because of tabbed browsing - IE6 didn't support tabbed browsing (Tabbed browsing was invented by Opera). For a short time I also tried the Avant Browser before that - Avant was a IE6 wrapper which allowed tabbed browsing, but was not so stable. At the time IE8 was released, I was looking for a change anyway - Firefox was too bloated, sluggish & too many memory leak issues & I liked IE8. For more than a year now, I am almost using IE8 90% of the time, though I have Chrome & Firefox installed on my machine.

[Newpunter]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Unbelievable.... First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft ? The Register

Actually, these tests do not test complete HTML5 compliance. They only test only a portion of the spec. Even better, these tests only test the parts where IE is better ( the reason being that Microsoft themselves submitted these tests to the W3C).

IE9 Leads Pack in HTML5 Support? Not Exactly | Webmonkey| Wired.com

Further, these test results were not supposed to get out coz the test suite isn't even complete yet :

Re: Test results and report table from miss.verstaendnis@nurfuerspam.de on 2010-11-03 (public-html-testsuite@w3.org from November 2010)

[RaguHolla]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Unbelievable.... First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft ? The Register

As it is done by MS, test will make IE look better!. No doubts MS is doing a good job confirming to standard.

Originally Posted by sgiitk

I must say I am also surprised by the 3:1 lead of Firefox over IE. I am a FF lover, but I have not come across too many people running it. They just use whatever is installed in the machine - IE. However, once I make them aware of FF, esp if I install it with a few add ons - like dictionary, tab scope, show IP they are hooked.

I am with you sir. 3 years ago shifted to FF. Never bothered look into another browser. As standard setup, I have Firefox + noscript + adblock, installed on all machines. Browsing is blitz ever since.

A weird issue with FF on Win7, team-bhp rendering goes haywire. Team-bhp forms fonts extremely large as if there is zoom applied. So far only team-bhp looks doesn't matches or renders properly. Anyone facing this issue?

[RX135]

Originally Posted by RaguHolla

A weird issue with FF on Win7, team-bhp rendering goes haywire. Team-bhp forms fonts extremely large as if there is zoom applied. So far only team-bhp looks doesn't matches or renders properly. Anyone facing this issue?

I confirm that this is non-issue with me on Win7 (running FF 4.0beta6).

BTW, you may have zoomed in accidentally(?) and then closed the tab. Firefox remembers it the next time you open that URL. It is a good feature, unless you have to keep zooming out every time, in which case, it would be indeed an issue.

[jkdas]

Originally Posted by Ardy

Microsoft has launched the beta version of IE9

URL to the news article: Microsoft's new browser is pretty cool. No, seriously

If I am not mistaken, IE9 would require either Vista or Win7 OS platform.

Needs Win 7.

Did anyone try? Heard it faster as it has hardware acceleration support.

[NetfreakBombay]

Originally Posted by RaguHolla

A weird issue with FF on Win7, team-bhp rendering goes haywire. Team-bhp forms fonts extremely large as if there is zoom applied. So far only team-bhp looks doesn't matches or renders properly. Anyone facing this issue?

Try pressing ctrl + 0 when team-bhp is open. This will reset and font size preferences that might have been set for team-bhp. E.g. if you are scrolling with middle mouse wheel and press ctrl accidentally, it sets font size preference for that tab.

[RaguHolla]

Originally Posted by RX135

I confirm that this is non-issue with me on Win7 (running FF 4.0beta6).

BTW, you may have zoomed in accidentally(?) and then closed the tab. Firefox remembers it the next time you open that URL. It is a good feature, unless you have to keep zooming out every time, in which case, it would be indeed an issue.

Still with FF3.6, Never zoomed. Checked zoom factor, fonts also!

Originally Posted by NetfreakBombay

Try pressing ctrl + 0 when team-bhp is open.

I will try that. thanks guys. I will also check if going to FF4 will have any effect. Between, how stable FF4 on Xp & Win 7?

[null]

Why not opera folks? I dont see anyone opting for it? I feel it is equally good and upto the mark when it comes to performance, speed & compatibility compared to chrome and better compared to IE or FF or Safari.

[Glass]

Originally Posted by null

Why not opera folks? I dont see anyone opting for it? I feel it is equally good and upto the mark when it comes to performance, speed & compatibility compared to chrome and better compared to IE or FF or Safari.

I have stuck to Opera for many years now, though all the other browsers remain installed on my system. For me, it is the best and was a pioneer on most features now present in other browsers.

[captrajesh]

Hi

I have Internet Explorer and Google Chrome as my browsers.

I've noted one funny thing. I've observed that I cannot post messages when I'm browsing with Google Chrome. I can browse and read messages and threads without problem but when I try to reply in a thread, the script changes to Times Roman. After typing the text (even running into several paragraphs) when I click the Submit button, the following message appears:

1. The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 20 characters.

Is anyone else using Google Chrome and is facing the problem?

[anilisanil]

I am replying to you via chrome. I have ~300 posts and most of them are from chrome!

[Newpunter]

Originally Posted by null

Why not opera folks? I dont see anyone opting for it? I feel it is equally good and upto the mark when it comes to performance, speed & compatibility compared to chrome and better compared to IE or FF or Safari.

Have been using Opera for 10 years now and I think it is the best browser that has all the required features built in and is still the lightest and fastest of all. Opera are the guys who keep innovating and bring new features to the browser, while others just copy and claim them as their own features ( Eg: Tabs, Speed Dial, History search from address bar, Built in Search box, Mouse Gestures, Built in RSS reader, Tab Previews, and many more ). Try the latest Beta of opera 11. They have just brought a new feature called Tab Stacking that is so simple yet so elegant.