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Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

IT-Director.com is running another Robin Bloor column; this one describes a recent browser experience. "However, the initial (test) version of this applet was created for the Mozilla Firefox browser rather than Internet Explorer so I had to download the browser in order to try it out. So I did. It took me a whole five minutes to decide to ditch Internet Explorer and switch to Firefox."
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Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 20, 2004 15:11 UTC (Tue) by blayne (guest, #19468) [Link]

Most people prefer the way Mozilla was written to satisfy their needs and wants, rather than optimizing it for the delivery of popup ads and spyware.

The biggest impediment to adopting Mozilla or Firefox is the significant number of websites that ignore HTML standards and use IE proprietary extensions. I think we've probably reached the point where the better browser will win, and those IE sites are going to be forced to adhere to open standards, as it should be.

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 20, 2004 15:52 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

The biggest impediment to adopting Mozilla or Firefox is the significant number of websites that ignore HTML standards and use IE proprietary extensions.

Worse than its proprietary DOM is IE's VERY POOR support for the W3C DOM specification.

Since most people want their web pages to be viewable by the majority of visitors to their site, this means either writing JavaScript that adheres to the defacto and out-of-date "level 0" DOM, or writing to Microsoft's proprietary DOM and leaving everyone else to view broken pages. IE has been broken for at least THREE YEARS, without even a token effort on the part of Microsoft to address these issues. This is inexcusable, since they were on the committee that finalized the specification. Since the current situation is advantageous to Microsoft, I guess I shouldn't expect anything less from them.

IE has done more to impoverish the web browsing experience of the average user than any other single thing.

[/rant]

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 2:54 UTC (Wed) by olivergeorge (guest, #4621) [Link]

It would be interesting to measure what percentage of internet sites are effectively Windows/IE only - inoperable from mozilla. My bank is one - so I'm switching (bank... not browser).

Big killers in my experience are:
* Dynamic menus (www.commbank.com.au)
* Rich text edit fields (Hotmail, ActivEdit)
* Crappy font sizes and stylesheets

A command line mozilla renderer which you can give a URL and it will use mozilla to render a screenshot - even better showing how it looks on a variety of browsers (on phones, on macs, on other linux browsers).

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 4:20 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]

  • Rich text edit fields (Hotmail, ActivEdit)
Why pick on MS' Hotmail for requiring their browser? (Makes sense to root for the home team, at least.) Look at SourceForge's best (IMHO) in-page HTML editor, the aptly named FCKeditor and note that it supports Internet Explorer 5+.

Really.

If we can't add rich-text editing to a SourceForge based project, why are we complaining about Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.?

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 4:57 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

Well, Mozilla (application suite and firefox) should include the APIs necessary to implement this sort of thing. There is a document on the mozilla.org website that describes how to use said functionality. The API was modeled after the IE API in order to make it possible to support both browsers with one set of javascript.

Of course, just because it is possible to make such a website work with both browsers doesn't mean that developers will (pretty similar to other areas of web design ...).

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 7:22 UTC (Wed) by olivergeorge (guest, #4621) [Link]

To clarify I'm not complaining about Hotmail using a rich text field - meerly using it as an example of the component in question, it seemed like something everyone would know about.

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 15:28 UTC (Wed) by hingo (subscriber, #14792) [Link]

If we can't add rich-text editing to a SourceForge based project, why are we complaining about Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc.?

My toughts exactly about 1 year ago. That was when I spent some time hacking a Rich Text Editor that runs purely on Javascript and the standard DOM. It's a bit of a stretch, but I got quite far before I had to start spending time on more important stuff. Personally, I think it could work, given a clever hacker with some spare time and imagination. If someone is willing to take over, be my guest: http://walter.sourceforge.net/.

(Imagination is needed, because html+dom was not meant to be used this way. But as we all know, that doesn't mean it cannot be used this way :-)

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 15:41 UTC (Wed) by rjamestaylor (guest, #339) [Link]

Very good.

Works great in Fire$LIFEFORM. Unfortunately it is hard to justify development time to support a user platform used by fewer than 10% (and I'm rounding way up) even if the developers are "enlightened." But, I will put a note in our Bugzilla that there is at least a beginning to a non-IE RichText editor.

Thanks.

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 22, 2004 16:25 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

WOW!! If only support for walter got into TYPO3... (typo3.{com,org} -- great free CMS/CMF)

Will Mozilla Fly? (IT-Director)

Posted Apr 21, 2004 8:30 UTC (Wed) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

it is the sworn duty of all Linux users to assist in the Demise (SP) of M$ Corp A S A P.


[/rave]

pete.

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