Firefox 3.5 = Hawt!

[Zeyla]

Go get eet!

http://www.mozilla.com/

Rocks my socks so far, very fast and still very much the browser I luv...

Yeah, I know Chrome is supposed to be faster, its cool, but never really clicked with me...

[Allara]

Sigh, one more browser version my application has to support. I hope and pray that it doesn't introduce any breaking changes with respect to rendering behavior.

[Aerothas]

I've been trying to install Google Chrome 3 Beta and it always gives me an "unspecified error". Bleh :(

[Valdis]

Chrome is a little faster but it's nothing spectacular. And if you love add-ons and such Firefox has a huge list of stuff that you can throw in that expand it's functionality to some fairly impressive lengths.

[Allara]

For my day-to-day browsing, I swear by Chrome. For the enterprise software I develop, I swear by Firefox 3 (soon to be Firefox 3.5 once it passes the whole QA round). We haven't had time to add IE8 or Chrome to our official list of browsers (it's quite a job as you can imagine). And yes, unfortunately, our software still offers *full* support for IE6, transparent GIFs and all. Bleh.

[Peotr]

Huh. I always started development based on the IE platform (just because it's so prevalent).

But as for supporting older versions, such as IE6, I think you need to inform your customers that for security reasons if your application detects an outdated browser your software will refuse to run.

I know that sounds kinda backwards from a customer satisfaction point of view, but browsers are free applications. You can't coddle people, if you tell people you don't support browsers because they're outdated (implying it's too much trouble for you to make a web application ulti-platform) they'll bitch at you.

On the other hand, if you tell people that you won't allow your software to run on their outdated browsers for security and data-integrity reasons, they'll often say, "Oops, my bad."

-- Peotr

P.S. Especially if you tell them in advance.

P.P.S. Yes, ulti-platform is a new geek word.

[Allara]

Were you replying to me, Peotr? I should be clear that the application I work on is for large hospitals (it sells for 7 figures easily, with a huge implementation process, etc.) I don't get to tell these people that they have to stop using IE6. (Believe me, I wish I could.) These are very large hospitals with huge IT departments, and they are all still running thousands of copies of IE6 every day for their line of business apps and everything else. We "officially recommend" Firefox 3 as the platform, and we even support an in-house Fx add-on that turns the browser into a kiosk for them. (Corporate IT departments hate Firefox -- it doesn't integrate into Windows network policies nearly as well as IE does.) We have managed to get one of our hospitals to convert all 300-odd users of our app to Firefox, in kiosk only mode, where they can only access our app and nothing else. Unfortunately the majority of our other users are still on IE fucking 6.0. (Or IE7, which other than PNG alpha channel support, is just as fucked up and slow as shit as IE6 is.) But I digress.

Basically Microsoft screwed the business world hard with IE6. It's been around nearly a decade, and it'll be years and years more before we escape it.

[Angelie]

At UCLA (Healthcare side) - we only run IE 6. Lawson (our material management software) is not supported in IE7 or newer nor is it supported in any other web browswer. When you can limit the number of attacks to one particular web browser, management finds it easier to control it that way. I sorta tend to agree. 97% of the user base shouldn't use web browsers for anything other than the application it's designed for WHILE at work. It then begs to question why is there a need to run IE 7+, Chrome, or Firefox on certain corporations like healthcare. These browsers just makes people dwell more in the internet like I do when I start fights with other people in the forums :love:

[renshin]

I am with Angelie.

[Peotr]

... the application I work on is for large hospitals

I actually tingled when I read that.

I want to speak sagely, but in the end we both know it's bullshit, and doubly so because if you look behind the curtain I'm a guy living in a basement in Idaho. The IT industry is like prep school, nobody does anything because it should be done that way, they do things because the upperclassmen will torture you until you learn do it that way, and you'll be fucked if you're gonna let any of the freshmen do it differently when you're finally in charge.

I fail. Nothing good comes from someone with an information technology background pretending to speak wisely to someone else with an information technology background. Especially on the internet.

-- Peotr

P.S. Unless, of course, they are A CONSULTANT!

P.P.S. Beyond that, though, what the FUCK is it with the healthcare industry and Crystal Reports?

P.P.P.S. I wrote some of the software that creates our disaster recovery backups, and I remember bitching in guildchat about the problems I was having with the night operators, and someone in guildchat said (insert doofy redneck voice), "why don'tcha go buy some backup software and do it automatically?"

[Peotr]

P.P.P.P.S. And how many different mutations of Crystal Reports are there? I swear unto a loving God, every time someone tells me, "It was created with Crystal Reports" it's a different Crystal Reports than the Crystal Reports I saw last time.

[Peotr]

I hate text. Every time I turn back to read something I wrote, it seems to come out differently than the way I wrote it.

If my post has the taste of ego or snottiness, please forgive me.

-- Peotr (The Normal Guy)

P.S. I originally wrote, "If my post has the taste of ego or snottiness, you are tasting it wrong." See? See what I mean? You can't even be flip without sounding like a dick.

[Valdis]

It's ok it's part of that classic Peotr charm. And web based applications are the devil... It's one of my #1 issues here. Have to have IE7 because x-site only supports it and then another 3 only work on IE6 and then a different one is really best on Firefox.

[Allara]

Doing a heinous multi-quote here because everyone's saying so much good stuff!


At UCLA (Healthcare side) - we only run IE 6. Lawson (our material management software) is not supported in IE7 or newer nor is it supported in any other web browswer. When you can limit the number of attacks to one particular web browser, management finds it easier to control it that way. I sorta tend to agree. 97% of the user base shouldn't use web browsers for anything other than the application it's designed for WHILE at work. It then begs to question why is there a need to run IE 7+, Chrome, or Firefox on certain corporations like healthcare. These browsers just makes people dwell more in the internet like I do when I start fights with other people in the forums :love:

Pretty much nail on head there. There are only two reasons I recommend Firefox (and Chrome if we supported it), but these are big reasons. One is performance. The second reason is performance. (There is also a third reason, but you might start seeing a trend developing...) Our app is pretty big, and it has a really highly developed user interface. Having a high performance JavaScript engine vastly improves the experience. That said, we've put a great deal of work into our IE6 support, and it is still just fine there.


I actually tingled when I read that.

Glad to be of service?


The IT industry is like prep school, nobody does anything because it should be done that way, they do things because the upperclassmen will torture you until you learn do it that way, and you'll be fucked if you're gonna let any of the freshmen do it differently when you're finally in charge.

That was awesome. It's partly true, but unfortunately when you get down to it, a lot of decisions IT makes really have some reason behind them. Or they *used to* have a reason. Maybe that reason isn't the case any more, and they weren't paying attention when it changed. Again, Ang's paragraph up there was spot-on with the attitude (and rightfully so) about browsers at work. I just wish we could get the whole business world standardized on a modern browser with a super fast JS engine and good standards support. Then we could stay on that browser for the next umpteen years and I'd be cool with it.


Nothing good comes from someone with an information technology background pretending to speak wisely to someone else with an information technology background. Especially on the internet.

Heh, well then I probably shouldn't post this massive reply.


P.P.S. Beyond that, though, what the FUCK is it with the healthcare industry and Crystal Reports?

Inorite? Srsly.


It's ok it's part of that classic Peotr charm. And web based applications are the devil... It's one of my #1 issues here. Have to have IE7 because x-site only supports it and then another 3 only work on IE6 and then a different one is really best on Firefox.

Agreed. Every month or so we get asked "so why can't you do this?" And the answer is simply "because we're a web based application." I wish this company had taken a different approach, but it can't be changed now. There are some benefits to the web-based approach, but the Internet is way too nimble a beast for corporate IT.

[Allara]

P.S. The Internet is for PORN

[Octavus]

p.s. The internet is for porn

qft

[Angelie]

P.S. The Internet is for PORN

No truer wErds have been spoken!!

PS
Oct - try Spankwire.com! It is the best

[Sabertootth]

P.S. The Internet is for PORN

i believe this to be true

[Sabertootth]

Im using firefox 3.5 and i havent had a faster browsing experiance ever

[Andriana Duskrose]

Fucking nerds, all of you! /Goes back to banging groupies.

[Parak]

My name is Parak, and I approve these messages.

P.S. lynx > *

[Aerothas]

My name is Parak, and I approve these messages.

P.S. lynx > *

wots a lynx

[Octavus]

No truer wErds have been spoken!!

PS
Oct - try Spankwire.com! It is the best

Eskimotube.com is a new one ive come across. I think I just like the name.

[Berae]

I've always hated chrome, and its really a weird little browser. I didn't like it's menu or features, except for the stealth browsing thing was interesting.

[Lonskils]

I've always hated chrome, and its really a weird little browser. I didn't like it's menu or features, except for the stealth browsing thing was interesting.


and clunky

[Allara]

I've always hated chrome, and its really a weird little browser. I didn't like it's menu or features, except for the stealth browsing thing was interesting.

Disagree completely. Once you get used to it, Chrome is better than all other browsers IMO. But it is very much an opinion thing! It's definitely different.

To to wrap up my comments from earlier -- today our primary component vendor released a new build with support for Fx3.5, and our app cleared QA without any changes whatsoever for 3.5. Smoothest upgrade ever. Yay! Now for IE8... /grumble

[Berae]

Disagree completely. Once you get used to it, Chrome is better than all other browsers IMO. But it is very much an opinion thing! It's definitely different.
Well, I may have appreciated it more if I had a multi-core processor. The whole multiple processes thing may have made it a better app in that case :)
Stupid Athalon 64 3000+ >.>

[Aerothas]

I loved and happily used Firefox for many years. Once Chrome Beta was available I tried it and have been using it ever since. I still run IE8 and Firefox 3.5 for compatability reasons. As far as I know IE8 and Chrome 2.x doesn't support HTML5, which is why I've been trying to upgrade Chrome to 3.0 Beta...

[Allara]

Well shit. I made our app treat IE8 users as if they were using Firefox 3.x, and everything seems to work nearly flawlessly on a quick run-through! IE8 literally fixed hundreds of little rendering bugs and subtle issues. I'm way impressed with how far it's come, but it's still hopelessly behind Fx3.5 and especially Chrome in the performance department. But color me impressed... Now if IE9 can bring on performance like crazy, we may be on to something finally.

[Peotr]

Well shit. I made our app treat IE8 users as if they were using Firefox 3.x, and everything seems to work nearly flawlessly on a quick run-through!

Thats the story of IE6 and the European Union, and it's part of why I posted about you guys telling your clients they can't use IE6 any longer.

A lot of people don't realize that the US doesn't control the HTML standard, and even more people don't realize that HTML wasn't invented in the United States. Marc Andreeson helped to build Mosaic, the first web browser, but HTML predates Mosaic by about 6 years, and its development (and authorization for open-source use) comes from Tim Berners-Lee, who created it for CERN (the European Nuclear Research consortium.)

HTML and Javascript are both open source, but the development and expansion of HTML is controlled by the W3C, and the standards of authorization for use are ultimately controlled by the European Union. When Microsoft first entered the browser market they gained market share by giving their browser away; later they tried to capitalize on that market share by developing J++ and JScript, an uberset of Java and Javascript, respectively, that would only work with Windows.

Sun took them to court, and for the first time in its history Microsoft lost. J++ now refers to Microsoft's compliant implementation of Java, and JScript, although loosely supported, is no longer being developed and is officially abandoned.

In a similar fashion Microsoft attempted to extend the capabilities of the browser by creating their new .NET framework, the core of which was to be IE6 and C#. Originally known as .COM 2.0, it didn't actually alter HTML or Javascript, but instead made it possible for the browser to use ActiveX controls, extending the ability of the browser by allowing it to tap into the libraries used by the operating system.

Of course, these abilities would only be available on Microsoft Windows. Microsoft's argument was that any browser running on Windows could freely use the ActiveX objects, and that because of this, .NET wasn't a monopoly tool for Internet Explorer (although wide adoption would cripple browser capabilities in other operating systems.) The EU disagreed, and the lawsuits and court proceedings in Europe began before IE6 and .NET 1.0 were even released. By the time both were released Microsoft had already lost the first rounds of EU court proceedings.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the IE6 / .NET fusion turned into a tragedy - not only because of the EU's anti-monopoly lawsuits (which were a problem), but also because allowing the browser to tap into the OS's .dlls became a security nightmare. By the time the EU issued the ultimatum on IE6 Microsoft was ready to throw in the towel. It is said that Microsoft spent more developer time and money hotpatching IE6 than it spent on developing all of the versions of Internet Explorer to date. It is also said that IE6 alone has cost the IT industry more than 3 trillion dollars in security measures, theft, and dead-ended software development. I don't know if anyone else remembers the arrival of IE6.5, but suddenly a bunch of the cool things that IE could do (that none of the other browsers could do) suddenly vanished. You could still do all those things, but you had to write your own .dlls - the libraries from the OS were no longer available. I remember when it happened, because I was developing an online printing application that was going to run from an IIS server, and we were seriously considering making the application IE6 only. And then the rug was pulled out from under us, and I lost about 3 months of development time trying to figure out how to do everything without the easymode libraries.

And IE6 still couldn't render a fucking .PNG properly.

Since then Microsoft has become a W3C nazi. Like it or not, Microsoft is ahead of Mozilla, Opera, Chrome and Safari for standards compliance - the only battle that MS is still fighting is whether CSS padding extends the dimensions of a DIV or is constrained by the dimensions of a DIV, and frankly I think Microsoft's position is the correct one (if you declare DIV to be 40x40, giving it should not increase its dimensions - that is caused by spacing.) MS is also closing on Konqueror, a target which is a little Quixotian, since there are a whole host of non-HTML plugins and stuff that Konqueror doesn't support.

I'm very positive on Internet Explorer. I use Firefox now, but I still think there's a lot of good in IE. And though the security issue was very real (nightmareshly real) in IE6, the security holes in IE7 were much smaller, and IE8 might actually be more hardened than Firefox.

[Allara]

In it's released form, the .NET Framework is not an ActiveX library. The scope of the .NET Framework (it's very definition and intent) changed quite a bit from conception to release, however, and this is probably what you're referring to.

I agree with you (and Microsoft) on the padding dimensions issue. It's a big pain in the ass the way the "standards" want it, and I have to work around that methodology quite a bit (although I wouldn't have to if Microsoft had been doing it the other way the whole time).

We'll be doing a full and thorough test run in IE8, and after that concludes I'll know quite a bit more about how much progress has been made. I'm sure there are still issues lurking beneath the surface, waiting to be found.

From a security standpoint, IE8 is probably at the top (although Chrome may have it beat for stability, just *barely*), but I don't particularly care about security. Higher browser performance is everything to me, because it means I can keep giving the users better experiences. The days of static HTML are long gone, and all the other browers out there have learned that lesson. IE8 isn't quite there yet, but it's close.

[Allara]

Like it or not, Microsoft is ahead of Mozilla, Opera, Chrome and Safari for standards compliance

Not trying to get into an argument, but... I'll bet the WebKit, Mozilla and Opera teams would take issue with the above statement. Microsoft might be decent (as of 2008, not earlier) with respect to currently finalized standards, but it isn't up to par with the emerging standards i.e. CSS3 and HTML5. Microsoft has been behind for a very long time, and still is, like it or not. The fact that in the year 2009 I can finally say that IE8 mostly renders my application correctly in standards mode, isn't exactly a compliment. And I'm very curious why you think IE is actually ahead of any of those browsers even for current standards (i.e. CSS 2.1).

Note: I understand why Microsoft is not implementing CSS3 and HTML5. Once burned, twice shy, and they refuse to implement features until they're standard. Good for them, but it's not our fault they screwed up so badly in the past and got sued to oblivion by entire countries and corporations. Web standards operate mostly by consensus, and with Microsoft consistently outside of that consensus, first by creating their own standards, now by refusing to acknowledge new almost-standards, they still create a severe dampening effect on web development as a whole.

[Domathoine]

I love the little history//technology lessons freely available to those of us patient enough to read the Hoss boards. :-)

[Angelie]

It's almost as good as the lore in World of Warcraft!!!

[Peotr]

I'm trying to suppress an urge to geek out.

I'm failing, but I'm trying.

I geeked out so hard my original reply was almost 3 pages long (and unfinished at that.) I am searching for some conciseness inside of brevity.

[Allara]

/duck

[Lonskils]

go on and post 3 pages, I'm sure everyone hear wants to see a 3 page post by peotr. I know I almost wet myself when I read that.

[Domathoine]

The best part about long Peotr posts is the PS's at the end... and, depending on the topic, usually some great interjected humor within the post itself!!

I say bring it on.

[Angelie]

Especially masturbation!

[deezy]

Do it peotr. For great justice!

[Domathoine]

Free bump.

For Peotr:

http://goatsex.org/

[Lonskils]

They finally put in a new tab button weee....

[Berae]

A lot of people don't realize that the US doesn't control the HTML standard, and even more people don't realize that HTML wasn't invented in the United States. Marc Andreeson helped to build Mosaic, the first web browser, but HTML predates Mosaic by about 6 years, and its development (and authorization for open-source use) comes from Tim Berners-Lee, who created it for CERN (the European Nuclear Research consortium.)
Damned socialists, always coming up with ideas and giving them away for free! Its un-American!

[Beelzebubs]

We control the intrawebs!