weirdami: I want a stupidprogram so my mistakes can be seen easier.
You think THAT'S bad? Well, Firefox also auto-corrects your
JavaScript code, as if it's not hard enough as it is to debug! Oh yeah, and the Mozilla JavaScript debugger will ignore many common errors that will work fine in Mozilla browsers, but will blow up most other browsers. How nice.
Also, try the W3C's official browser, Amaya. Not only does it crash every 5 minutes, but it will forcably
fix your code when you save it, rather than just show you the errors, which often causes more problems than anything else. Web developer's axiom: "All HTML authoring tools suck".
I will never understand why browsers will only show an "X" if your JavaScript is broken. People should REALLY work on adding a good parser to every browser. I don't care if my documents are missing a DOCTYPE declaration, but I do care if my DIVs are not closed.
Opera rocks for debugging. It's still not much faster than IE/FF, though. If you really want error-free pages, though, you need a good editor. Relying on the browser to do thing right is a bad idea, since NONE of them work right.
If you really want an awesome HTML editor, look at
EditPlus. It won't do parsing checks, but It has the best syntax highlighting I've ever seen, so you'll see if tags aren't closed, things aren't spelled right, you forgot a quote or double-quote, etc. It's also wicked fast, supports PHP, Perl, Java, Unix formatted text, and more.
Hagar: From my experience IE sees through a lot of mistakes aswell, there are lot of pages that constis of illegal html that explorer handles... (and since all of the browser have to be compliant with the market leader, so does firefox and opera). That suxx.
Yeah, but then, the W3C never included a special verification tag that tells the browser that you've verified the code, so it's always a guessing game whether you're doing things the standard way or the popular way. It amazes me how few people know how to do HTML properly, and how few things you can really do with CSS. Everybody's at fault for the mess, not just Microsoft/Netscape (I'm not terribly fond of the W3C).
Hager: In previous versions Opera did not allow the most stupid things in "opera-mode", however from what I have heard, it does nowadays
Most browsers support a "strict" mode that will show errors, but only if you have a DOCTYPE declaration to tell the browser you're using strict XHTML. Even that doesn't always work, though. So, now we have compatibility problems within the
same version of a browser, let alone different browser versions, let alone brand differences! This is getting nuts.
vic20owner: It's the fastest most stable browser I've ever used (yes, I've used opera)
I'll go with fastest, but I've had it crash on me more often than I'd like, and it destroyed my profile once, requiring me to re-install it. Oh yeah, it's CSS support is also really screwed up. When making webpages with CSS, I've had to make more comprimises to get Firefox to work, than IE and Opera combined. It's particularly bad with padding, as I've often had text go right off the screen, and there's no scrollbar, so you can't read the whole text. Arrgh. When the hell is v0.9 going to be released?!
Floid: I'd not be so sure that 256 color setting is saving you anything. It means 1. a dithering routine has to run somewhere, and 2. PC memory isn't unified like that...
Even on old graphics cards, the dithering is done by hardware. I think 256 color mode only saves you some memory.
cecilia: there is absolutely NO reason for anyone to use IE - which is the only real bag of feces.
IE streams files properly, while FF/Opera have to download the file, first. This makes playing MPEG movies a real pest (Windows Media and Real still work fine). Also, IE handles filetypes LOADS better than Firefox. The download manager in Firefox is actually more trouble than it's worth. IE is also useful for ripping content, since it writes everything into the cache. Firefox won't let you save Flash files, for example. Firefox also has more caching problems than IE. I run a BBS, and I have lots of problems with wrong pictures showing up, the wrong CSS being used, etc.
I still use Firefox as my default browser, but it's not as good as people say it is. I still use IE for some pages.
cecilia: I'd rather know my pages are legal. eventually, IE will be gone.
I'm looking forward to IE 7, actually. It's supposed to have popup blockers, for one, though details are sketchy.
Amigamad: Some sites only work properly with ie.
E-mail the webmaster and complain! 15% of my web traffic is Mozilla, and 80% is IE. That's still pretty significant.
Mikeymike: Something that really surprised me recently was that the same date build of Firefox loads faster on Linux on my machine than on Windows.
I tend to shun conspiracy theories, but I have to admit that most of the Linux code ported to Win32 runs like crap, and I really think they do it on purpose. Every try to use a GTK application on Windows? Win32 isn't THAT slow.
Tomas: Opera is pretty much the fastest and most lightwight browser there is for windows.
I'll contest that. Opera 7 uses custom widgets in FORMs, and has lots of gratuitious animated buttons and crap. I never cared much for the Opera interface, and I think it's really starting to bog down the browser these days.
adolscent: Heck, even IE is only 11.8MB.
Heh. "Only". :-)
adolscent, to cicilia: Sorry Mom. Don't take the fact that you can't afford a $40 piece of software out on me.
Here here.
Tomas: IE is infact much bigger than 15megs...
Most browsers come in different packages. IE can be as small as 9MB or as big as 22MB, depending on what you already have. Lots of mandatory Windows updates are tied to IE, unfortunately. On Win2K, my system, IE 6.0 was an 11MB download.
Firefox v0.8 is currently a 6.2MB download, and requires Java seperately, which is 15MB. That's not bad.
[ED: Sorry, Java isn't
required. But, Java2 is
loads better than Microsoft's VM, so you might as well get it.]
cecilia: i don't need some pathetic loser child...
Stop. Just... stop.
