(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.

Goodbye IE6 and goodbye Font Scaling

Last week it occured to me that probably along with saying goodbye to IE6 we also can say goodbye to worrying about what happens with the page layout when fonts get scaled up by the user.

Firefox and IE7 have both a good zooming button in the right lower corner of the browser. This way of zooming gives a much better user experience then just scaling the fonts. When you come to think of it from a users perspective it seems pretty strange to just only scale the texts on a page and leave the rest as it is.

The only problem is that in my experience elderly (who use font scaling the most) don't tend to use the most modern equipment. They mostly seem quite content (even proud) with their 5 year old PC still in working order. So we might have to wait a little while.