Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 14 Jul 2013 02:20:12 +0200
"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Saturday, 13 July 2013 at 23:40:02 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> > From the developer's perspective, ever since v7, IE isn't as 
> > bad as people say. I do webdev and I've had just as much 
> > trouble with FF as I've had with IE.
> 
> Personally, I found Firefox 2 to be the biggest piece of trash 
> back in the day, I'd rather use IE6 as a user and a developer 
> (IE6 had bugs and incomplete implementations, sure, but there 
> were pretty easy workarounds for all of them - they were annoying 
> at worst, rather than show-stoppers. FF2 just simply didn't offer 
> the features I wanted at all, despite them being in the CSS 
> standard.)
> 

From a user perspective, FF2 is actually my favorite browser, as long
as it's loaded up (or rather, bogged down) with all my usual extensions.

But you're right, from an implementation standpoint it could be much
better. All sorts of bugs and leeks and inefficiencies and such (I'd
*love* a modern browser with a FF2+Winestripe/NoScript/AdblockPlus
interface). As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
"inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete implementation
of "(min|max)-(width|height)". And, maybe I'm wrong, but my
understanding is that those are all old enough that they
could've/should've been there even at the time. (Although I *just* now
stumbled on a "display:-moz-inline-stack" that's supposed to work. I'll
have to check into that.)

I even had one PITA problem where FF2 (*and* later versions IIRC) would
magically fail to show any auto-resizing Flash applet if the
height/width setting of all the containers up through the chain weren't
exactly as it expected. *Nothing* else had a problem with it except a
bunch of versions of FF.

But whatever, even with most of those issues, layout tables easily
solve like 95% of HTML/CSS problems anyway, and with zero non-imaginary
downsides (yea, they're a bit verbose, but *HTML* is freaking verbose
anyway so whatever). Sure, layout tables are web heresy, but hey,
irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of the
compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!

> And nowadays, the #1 source of pain, by *far*, is Google Chrome. 
> As in virtually every bug I get for my work sites is a Chrome bug 
> in their basic html (they, I kid you not, broke <form> with 
> multiple submit buttons in one of their releases, and <a 
> target="_BLANK"> in one shortly thereafter). Bog simple html, 
> worked everywhere else, failed in Chrome after one of their waaay 
> too frequent automatic updates) or css handling. And all bets are 
> off if you do try to get fancy, even if it works today on chrome 
> 1337, who knows how many bugs they'll introduce in the 236 
> releases that will auto-update by this time next week.
> 

Yea, if there were one browser I could eradicate from all history, it
wouldn't be IE, it would be Chrome (IE actually had some good stuff:
its box model and its JS interface for mouse buttons were actually sane
- unlike W3C's absolute dumbshit box model and mouse interface).

In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers. I use SRWare
Iron instead (it literally is Chrome but with most of the "take over
your computer" shitware removed). And even that I still never touch for
anything but compatibility testing because the interface is the
absolute biggest piece of shit of any web browser in history...or at
least it was until all the other dumbfuck browser developers decided to
ape Google's moronic UI abominations (although the unified forward/back
button was originally MS's abomination, and AwfulBars are Mozilla's
fault, but the disregard for system settings and the whole
"hide/shrink/conflate fucking everything we can" trend are mainly
Google's doing).

And it's 100% Chrome's fault that there's no longer any
widely-compatible way to embed non-flash media. The <object> tag had
been working everywhere relevant for ages (Netscape's <embed> died a
loooong time ago.) But then the assholes from Google came along, got
the W3C to standardize a completely incompatible and unneeded
alternative, included that in Chrome and did NOT include a working
<object> tag. Why disregard standards like MS does when you can just
bend the "standard" to your own whim? Yea, Google likes standards as
long as Google creates them.

So thanks for all that, Chrome.

> but it can run DOOM..... at a frame rate similar to my old 
> Pentium 1 computer despite being on a 100x faster processor. lol, 
> what a joke. I can't believe so many people actually use that 
> crap.
> 

Hah! I know, right? Shit, my 2005 *MP3 player* can run DOOM.

Plus playing a game in a browser is just simply bad user experience,
whether good framerate or not. And yea, like JS is something we really
should be encouraging anyway.

I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time back:
https://semitwist.com/articles/article/view/quake-shows-javascript-is-slow-not-fast

Although you've just said essentially the same thing far, far more
succinctly ;)

> The #2 hassle nowadays? ipads.

Yea maybe. But I figure if someone's going to try to browse the web on
a freaking *capacitive* touchscreen, of all things (and such an
orwellian one at that), then they can just be happy with whatever just
happens to actually work.

I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to finally kill
off Flash even if it's what would normally be a dumb design decision
("Uhh, hello, let the *user* opt-in with a big flashing 'you're about
to kill your battery, security and stability' warning if they have
reason to do so."). But Flash was never *really* going to start going
away without some major player finally saying "Ok, you know what?
That's it. No more Flash. Fuck Flash. Go screw yourself, Adobe."
Ultimately though, that only means Flash gets replaced by HTML5, so
it's kinda like replacing Hitler with Napoleon - technically a win, but
not much.