(5) 4 reasons that make IE a better browser than Firefox (from the webapplication developers perspective)
- the unbeforunload event gives you the chance to warn the user when he/she leaves the page without saving his/her work.
- the contenteditable property of almost every element.
- direct access to the clipboard so you can actually implement a real cross page/document copy and paste functionality
- you can programaticaly open the 'save as' and the 'open' dialogs of the browser for saving data on the harddisk (later this year I will write a more detailed post on this).
- printing! Printing is sloppy in all browsers but IE7 (I don't know how IE8 is doing). When you print pages they seem to get rerendered by a totally different process then the process that renders the page for the screen. And this separate rendering process is full of nasty little bugs in every well known browser but IE7. With IE7 you actually get the feeling that it prints what you see on the screen.
Note: these are just 5 reasons that make IE a better browser than firefox. I am not saying that IE is a better browser than FF. There are a ton of reasons why you might consider firefox to be a better browser then IE. But to me it always seems possible to work around these bugs and quirks of IE with a bit of creative programing. But the above mentioned features can't be implemented by any amount of javascript programming in FF and that leaves you with... ehm nothing or at least less features for the FF user.
PS i know you can work around the lack of the contenteditable property in FF by using iframes and designmode... but editable content seems to me in the current time such a trivial option that I can not believe it is not implemented in FF yet.
- the contenteditable property of almost every element.
- direct access to the clipboard so you can actually implement a real cross page/document copy and paste functionality
- you can programaticaly open the 'save as' and the 'open' dialogs of the browser for saving data on the harddisk (later this year I will write a more detailed post on this).
- printing! Printing is sloppy in all browsers but IE7 (I don't know how IE8 is doing). When you print pages they seem to get rerendered by a totally different process then the process that renders the page for the screen. And this separate rendering process is full of nasty little bugs in every well known browser but IE7. With IE7 you actually get the feeling that it prints what you see on the screen.
Note: these are just 5 reasons that make IE a better browser than firefox. I am not saying that IE is a better browser than FF. There are a ton of reasons why you might consider firefox to be a better browser then IE. But to me it always seems possible to work around these bugs and quirks of IE with a bit of creative programing. But the above mentioned features can't be implemented by any amount of javascript programming in FF and that leaves you with... ehm nothing or at least less features for the FF user.
PS i know you can work around the lack of the contenteditable property in FF by using iframes and designmode... but editable content seems to me in the current time such a trivial option that I can not believe it is not implemented in FF yet.
Labels: firefox, IE6, javascript
2 Comments:
Are you serious?
1.) onbeforeunload works in Firefox
2.) why would you want to edit a non-editable property, and if so, as you mentioned, just switch designMode on
3.) I DONT want my browser to access my clipboard, that would be a security breach - a.k.a. A Bug!
4.) Not sure what the excitement is here, but if you want the user to be able to save a file, just provide a link/button/image pointing to the file, and voila! it auto-opens the save as dialog (or gives options to open in the applicable application
5.) printing! Have you used the IE7 printing? Its broken! big time! when the printer dialog box pops up, try moving it 1 pixel in any direction! - Woah! what happened to my preview? The preview is anoyingly fullscreen, like it or not - bug. Scaling still crops some content, and if the original page was rendered in quirks mode, the printed page renders in Standards mode (due to how it is accomplished), thus breaking the rendering layout.
Want to print/preview on A4? no dice!, want to print on legal? - Ha! not a chance, 11x17 OMG! ROFLOL!
I would pay $100/month to use Firefox rather than IE.
In fact you could try to pay me $50/month to use IE, and I would turn you down.
3 words.
Worst Browser EVA
By
Donald, At
April 29, 2008 9:21 PM
@Donald
I am serious. In reaction on your reply the following:
1) I cannot believe that I overlooked that one! You are right and i got it working thanks to mozilla's extensive documentation on it: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/index.php?title=DOM:window.onbeforeunload&action=edit (just click it)
2) You can not think up situations in which you would want to edit or format texts in a webapplication? Well open any desktop application work with it for a couple of minutes and you will get the idea. Or take a look at zimbra, google docs or any cms for that matter. And as I stated what favors IE is that every element can be made editable. In the current ff versions designmode only works for a complete document! But in firefox 3 we will be able to make every element editable so there is hope.
3) I completely agree with you on the security issue. But for a webdeveloper it is really nice to have these possibilities. As stated in the title these five points are from the webapplication developers perspective. You are reasoning from an users perspective.
4) In your proposed solution you will always have to built a serverside part that takes care of returning the file to the user. That introduces all sorts of privacy and security issues that the system administrators of your users will get nervous about. Also when the user looses his or her internet connection they will loose all their work. So by providing a 100% client-side technology for saving your work on the client-side you leave all the data of the user within their own security zone and you provide the guarantee that they will never loose their work due to a bad internet connection.
5) Well there you go IE7 isn't perfect either. But all the 'bugs' you mentioned seem minor to me when you realize that other browser don't even get the basic rendering right. It all starts at a proper rendering. The fact that IE renders quirksmode pages in standardsmode when printing seems a non-issue to me. I can't imagine why, in 2008, you would ever want to develop a webapplication in quirksmode.
And then the 50/100 dollar remarks. I think you missed the point I wanted to make. These are five point that make IE a better browser in comparison to firefox. I am not saying that IE is the best browser. But it seems that telling good things about IE works like a red flag on some people.
As a user I also prefer FF. Mainly because it is open source and I just like the idea behind that. But if somebody would offer me 50 dollars per month to use IE instead I would switch :o) I think IE has come a long way and has a lot going for it.
By
Thomas Ummels, At
April 30, 2008 3:48 AM
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