What is wrong with Firefox?

[Nothinman]

Curious here. Which standards has IE improperly implemented? Not being a smart-arse, but I'm curious which standards are missing in IE.

I'm not a web developer so I don't have any examples other than proper PNG support and what I've heard about the bad CSS1 and complete lack of CSS2 support. Think about it, IE has been under maintenance only, meaning nothing but security patches, since IE6 came out. The link below is from 2003, but even then MS was saying that they're not developing IE anymore in favor of working on Longhorn and whatever renderer comes with it.

http://www.webstandards.org/opinion/archive/2003/06/27/
http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/overview/
http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/demos/eagle-sun.html

 

[vtqanh]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

It is in quirks mode for Anandtech even. Does this mean Anandtech is falls under your consideration of a sloppy page?

Considering that it causes a horizontal scrollbar to show up in galeon for me, yes I would.

So what is the point of having the standards while most of the pages are not following it? Maybe after all, it's the standards that are bad?

 

[Nothinman]

So what is the point of having the standards while most of the pages are not following it? Maybe after all, it's the standards that are bad?

The standards may not be perfect, but IE's blatant disregard for them makes more work for anyone who wants their site to work well for anyone not using IE on Windows and the number of those users is growing instead of shrinking. Regularly on another forum I see posts about how some CSS things work great in FF/Mozilla and Opera but don't work quite right in IE. CSS2 has been around long enough for Opera and Mozilla to support it, what's stopping MS who has billions of free cash from putting a handfull of programmers to work on it? Oh right, they don't want to because they're redoing IE for Longhorn and they'd rather ignore already established standards while they hype up their "innovation" that won't be released for 2 more years.

 

[stndn]

From a regular user's point of view:

firefox is wrong because my news/banking/whatever website does not work, or the display is funky. worse yet, my favourite pr0n website does not work because i don't get any popups that tells me to sign up to watch secret XXX videos.

firefox is right because it makes me feel l33t when i tell my coworkers i've moved alongside the elite groups of alternative browser users and dump msie after countless security news.

From a web developer's point of view:

firefox is right because it adheres to the W3C standard recommendations, and it displays webpages (almost) as it is specified in the documentation. It also support the transparencies in PNG, CSS2, and it's extensible. I don't believe how much i would've missed if i didn't get the Web Developer's extension for my browser.

firefox is wrong because it still haven't fixed the extra row of <form>'s <textarea>. If i specify 4 columns for textarea, i want 4 columns, not 5 >(

web developers: try pie for fun ,D

back to the OP: Unfortunately, there's no way for users to make a website work on any browsers that doesn't work in the first place, unless the site owner (in this case, Dell) puts forth an effort to make it work. Okay, maybe you can make it work on firefox by installing "IEview" extension, then right click on firefox and choose "view in IE" ;p

But seriously, as others have mentioned, it's not firefox's fault. It's Dell's fault.
Non-msie browsers are not mainstream enough that web developers often don't care about coding to the web standards. This leaves the users stranded and have to resort back to msie when they are locked out of a site's functionalities just because they use alternative browser.
And unfortunately, misinformed and incompetent web developers often don't test out their site on multiple browsers. All they know is that if their bosses uses browser X, so they will make the site works on browser X so that they will not be in trouble when their bosses review the site.
(Unfortunately, i had the honour to work in that environment until earlier this month)

Web standard is not bad. It's "misguided msie web standard" that's bad. Unfortunately, some of these bad standards have to be followed, seeing how msie is still the major browser used all around the world. This is unless your corporate is brave enough to pull the plug and tell your visitor "this page is only viewable in browser X"...
Oh, the horror of going back to 1999 .........

and all this stuff about spyware, someone tell me a site that will harm my computer if i use ie. everyone talks about it but obviously its not very common.

i noticed JonnyBlaze have asked for this harmful site in different threads, only to be left with "it's too common, just search for it" or something to that extent.

Here's a suggestion: Go to "coolwebsearch" (or something like that - i forgot), or browse around porn sites. You may also try to look around gator/gaim website.
Or to be on the safe side, go to secunia's website and search for "internet explorer vulnerability"

 

[n0cmonkey]

I'd consider using IE if it worked on my platforms of choice. So IE fans, where's a download for IE for OpenBSD/SPARC?

 

[EmperorRob]

vtqanh, if you really want to solve this issue you are having then e-mail Dell and tell them what you've found. They pay people plenty of money for web developers and admins. 9 times out of 10 the developer will actually care about your problem and want it to work the way he/she designed it.

 

[rh71]

the classic battle between end-users who just want things to work vs. the know-it-all IT honchos.

Thanks FF... thanks a lot.

 

[Nothinman]

the classic battle between end-users who just want things to work vs. the know-it-all IT honchos.

In this case there would be no battle if IE would support the available standards properly.

Thanks FF... thanks a lot.

You should be sincerely thanking FF, as FF usage grows, regardless of the reason, it'll force MS to start supporting things like PNG transparency and CSS2 or be thought of as the second rate software developer they are. And more standards support means more choices for the end user.

 

[mysticfm]

If Firefox either supplants IE's dominance or forces Microsoft to fix some of the standard-flaunting portions of IE, that will be a book not just to developers but to end users, because you will then see more websites with slick designs and functionality due to the fact that developers will be able to code to the standards instead of having to fall back on the myriad workarounds and "trial-by-error-design" that characterizes so much of IE-based web design. How nice (and how fast!) it is to design a page for a browser like Firefox, when if there is a problem you can very often figure out what you are doing wrong by just examining the standards documentation, as opposed to IE where too often you have little choice but to try various permutations of the markup until you stumble onto one that works around whatever IE quirk is currently biting you in the backside.