I agree my biggest peves with IE7 is the placement of the menu bar and how they screwed up the button positions on the address bar. At the very least we should be able to rearrange the order of menu and address bar.
Well, this is easy. Fact is FF fans can go on till they are blue in the face about how it is actually the superior coded browser, but in the real world you end up struggling with sites that are not FF compatible. I use IE. Life for a website designer is also a lot easier with one major browser to work with. Now then, IE7.. i am still testing it, but so far I am stunned at how fast it is. It is a flying machine, seriously, it is soooo fast. So much quicker than IE6 and even FF . Its quick and thats important when you spend all day everyday on the net. My complaint so far, is that fonts are heavy and less sharp than IE6 , not good. Anyway, loving the much faster browsing. Steve
Or could it be that IE is not CSS compatible and everyone implements nasty fixes because almost everyone uses IE (making the thing incompatible to FF). At least thats how it works for me. You do an nice CSS compatible layout and check it in IE, kaboom. The thing looks funny. The best browser is Lynx. Didn't you know? Worst comes to worst wget serves its purposes. If I have to I use Firefox and if I need to evaluate how 90% of the internet users see my site I use IE (then I frantically close it and run Spybot Search & Destroy). Somehow starting IE gets me spyware, even if I don't browse (go figure).
Don't give us this pile of BS. This is an outdated and erroneous excuse. IE and people NOT programming to W3C specifications IS the problem not Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc. MSIE DOES NOT support critical web specifications correctly or completely, most notably XHTML and CSS (e.g. the broken box model). Programmers get lazy and take bad programming shortcuts like not validating their code. 95% to 99% of website compatibility issues with non-IE browsers can be directly be traced back to programming errors on the website in question. Furthermore IE's market share has fallen to around 80% (and less in some areas). You may like the idea of one major browser, but this is not the real world. Real users use lots of different browsers and in fact any Mac user CAN NOT USE IE. The way to make web development easier is to code and then validate to W3C HTML & CSS specifications while testing on a strictly compliant browser like Firefox or Opera and then making minor tweaks to address IE specific issues. I'm no Firefox fan boy, and I dish out a fair amount of criticism about flaws in Firefox (e.g. memory issues and broken tooltips); however, I believe calling a spade a spade and claiming web compatibility issues with non-IE browsers is a load of crap and the result of poor programming practices. I'm not sold on the speed claims, however, overall IE7 is a vast improvement over IE6. I just hope they quickly fix some of the NEW rendering errors introduced by IE7 that do not exist in IE5.5 or IE6.
Why would the browser make any difference in the speed? I never understood the claim. Even if you have a 5Mb line, the main bottleneck will always be the connection and not how fast the browser renders html. With todays computers this task is not even worth for the CPU to wake up (that is if people don't overuse flash but then its Macromedia and not IE that is responsible). I still remembered how Intel tried to sell their PIII as being fast for the Internet. What? I am sure my old PIII can render html faster than it can download it through my DSL line. Its the same argument Intel uses to push their fastest Chips (for demanding office applications, lol as if it takes more than a few clocks to type some text).
Actually there is some (but not a lot) of validity to claims of different speeds for several reasons. For instance: 1) how well a browser supports gziping of pages and how quickly the browser unzips zipped files can dramatically affect the speed of browser. If the browser and server both support the zipping of files, it can reduce the total download requirements and thus reduce download times. 2) there are a lot of network optimization tweaks that can affect how fast a browser is (like pipelining). 3) once a page is downloaded it still needs to be rendered and how efficiently a browser renders pages can influence the appearance of how quickly pages render. Indeed with modern fast computers most users really can't discern much difference in rendering speeds for different browsers. In fact it is becoming very hard to scientifically discern which browser is the fastest browser under most real world conditions due to all of the other variables.
Amazingly when it comes to browsers its almost like religion for people. Same as with the never ending OS debate. If IE ever beats FF (unlikely) I will just ditch FF. Does Opera still force you to view ads? If not I might give that one a try. They have always been the technology incubator for FF which got copied by MS. KLB: about compression: I don't think there is a difference between any of the browsers. What I really hate (and see coming) is pre-fetching. I have a picture site and it always links to many other pictures from each page. So even if a user just views one picture, the browser could pre-fetch tons more eating up my bandwidth. Hopefully there will be some meta tag to turn it off.
There are good points to all the modern browsers and in reality beyond some security concerns (e.g. spyware on IE6) it shouldn't matter what browser users want to use. There really aren't VALID reasons why in 2006 any Internet website should require any specific browser. No they ditched them back in 2005. The only reasons I didn't switch back to Opera from FF was I didn't want to try and migrate my profiles yet again AND it is a lot easier to tell vendors to "fix their sites" when I was using a browser that had 10%+ of the browser market rather than just 0.5% of the market. In reality Opera had most of the important features long before Firefox or MSIE. Opera has been the leading edge browser for years with Firefox following in second and IE now trying to play catch up. The probably isn't know, but it was a point about how the browser's behavior can affect the speed at which pages load. Yes there is a trick that can be used to stop Mozilla based browsers from prefetching pages. Add the following three lines to your .htaccess file: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{X-moz} ^prefetch [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) - [F] Code (markup): It will not affect users requesting individual pages, but it will stop the prefetching of pages. I don't know if MSIE and Opera are sending the X-moz header or not when making prefetch requests.
I myself use both. Mostly firefox though, I find it a bit cleaner with some websites. However I find lots of times I'm going back to old IE =)
No matter how good is FireFox is but people wants to use internet explorer. If any body from india here and know something abt the working conditions in top class mncs, they will truely support this fact of mine that most of the people are still using the internet Explorer.. Even i dont know why????
FF is without any doubt the best choice. I switched to it after trying out IE7 and have found this to be my new favorite browser. It has some good tools built into it that IE7 doesn't offer.