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Posted by Andrew Hodgkinson on 12/05/05 23:17
simon.keane@acnielsen.co.uk wrote:
> I think that you find that at leat 10-15% of all websites will not work
> correctly with Firefox.
Interesting - do you have any particularly problematic URLs (sites)?
> As for IE being outdated, what do you think security updates/hot fixes
> etc help to aleviate, not just bugs and loopholes.
IE is suffering a rapid loss of market share, not just because users are
preferring alternatives, but because developers are choosing alternatives
too. Now, IE6 comes with Windows. For people to go to the trouble of
downloading, installing, and learning to use an alternative, there must
be some pretty compelling reasons to change.
IE simply *is* very out of date with respect to things like DOM 3, XHTML
and CSS 2.1 or draft 3. You only have to visit one or two of the cutting
edge CSS design sites, or check out some feature comparison charts, to
find out how much is missing.
Take a look at a snapshot of the position in 2003:
http://www.designdetector.com/articles/results.html - from:
http://www.designdetector.com/articles/CSS2TestSuiteFailures.php
Mid to late 2005 and if anything reviews are even worse:
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3664_7-6226062.html
http://htmlfixit.com/?p=713
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/starthere/browserreview.html
There's even the issue of basic file format support - for example,
Firefox supports the SVG standard in the core. IE 6 SP2 doesn't. IE
doesn't even do transparency in PNG images properly. There's no tabbed
browsing, no session save support, no skin facility by default, and no
extension mechanism for the browser itself (Opera suffers here too, but
Firefox is a complete revelation in this area).
It is, basically, poor in comparison to the alternatives available today.
Microsoft recognise this! That's why they're working on IE7. IE7 may be
lots better than Opera and Firefox. But until it is generally available
out of beta, you're best off using something else.
Of course, if you're completely happy with MSIE, then stick with it - but
the OP wanted an alternative.
> also SSL can be a bit flakey
In what way? I have experienced no problems with SSL connections since I
first tried Firefox at 0.8 beta. Maybe there's a problem elsewhere in
your system. It would of course be useful to find out just what it is
that Firefox is using on your machine that's being unreliable, and see if
there are ways to make it work properly :-)
--
TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson
Find some electronic music at: All sorts of other bits and pieces at:
http://www.ampcast.com/pond http://pond.org.uk/
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