Browsers (Was: A very basic blog about D)

[Adam D. Ruppe]

On Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 03:52:34 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 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.

Eh, the UI was indeed pretty ok. Actually even modern firefox can
look pretty similar to it, so I don't hate firefox with a passion
the way I do chrome, since it is a pretty decent ui.

But I, believe it or not, have a soft spot for IE6. Its interface
was simple enough, it did separate processes for each site way
before chrome "invented" it (IE6 did it the sane way: one process
per window, something Firefox actively prevents you from doing
even if you specifically ask for it! "Program X has detected an
instance already running" should be a crime.) so while IE6 was
prone to crashing somewhat often, it at least had limited damage.

Important note though: change the security settings to disable
scripts on non-trusted sites. But that's not just an IE6 tip,
that is even more necessary today than it was ten years ago...
computers have gotten faster, javascript has gotten faster, but
websites have gotten slower. And I actually like noscript a bit
better than IE's security settings screen, it is more convenient,
but at least IE's functionality is built in.

I find news websites especially, but also other ones like
dlang.org, are completely unusable without JS blocked.
dlang.org's stupid hypenation thing drags it to a crawl. News
sites put up 1,000 bars for twitter and facebook and whatever
else that slow them brutally.

Hey, webmasters, if you have content I actually like and want to
share, I'll copy paste the link. I don't need those useless
buttons.... and if they slow the loading so much, I'll just close
the site, so you lose.

But with js disabled it isn't so bad.

> As an example of rendering issues, the lack of
> "inline-block" can be annoying, and so is the incomplete

YES. inline-block makes css useful. I'm not even really
exaggerating there, that's how important I think it is. floats
are waaay too painful to deal with.

The moz-inline-stack thing doesn't quite work the same iirc, I
remember trying it and finding it didn't make it a real block, so
you couldn't center text or something like that inside it. But
meh, FF2 is virtually dead so I just ignore it.


inline-block btw was in CSS 2.0. Microsoft implemented it
buggily, but the functionality was there. konqueror did it right
(khtml used to be really nice until Apple and Google got their
filthy paws all over it).

But the standards committee was always biased toward Netscape,
and Firefox was Netscape's successor so they inherited that bias.
This is a kinda strong charge that I can't prove, but I think the
case is pretty good: look at how many times IE did something
clearly superior to Netscape/early Firefox, the box model, the
mouse buttons that you mentioned, and there's more too.... but
the standard always seemed to prefer the NS/FF way. And when FF
didn't implement something, you could count on the standard to be
revised some time later. It happened with CSS 2.0 -> CSS 2.1,
conveniently dropping features FF never implemented (thus making
them "standards compliant"), and recently happened again with
display: run-in, which they said was unimplementable, but
Microsoft managed to do it right years ago. Firefox never did,
and instead of being lambasted for not following the standard,
the standard just got revised again to agree with FF.

(and of course, one defense is "it is useless anyway".... well
yes, but only because you idiots somehow managed to get
significant market share and never bothered to implement it!
There's been more than one time I wanted to use it, saw it
working in IE8 and rejoiced, just to see it fail in firefox 9 or
whatever the hell it was at last year when I tried this. Ugh.)

If the standard got revised to agree with IE6's implementation
back in the day, I'd be for that. IE6 was a de-facto standard
anyway. But that rarely happened. The other way around though,
common. (one thing I'll praise HTML5 for doing though is writing
down some IE implementations as the standard, finally making
something that works in practice, standards-compliant too, like
drag and drop for instance. But even then they managed to muck
some things up.)


> 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


I can't agree with you there, I dislike layout tables and here's
why: one week, the client says 3 columns are in. Next week, he
changes his mind and wants it back to 2 columns. Not too hard
with the css things. A lot of boring work with tables. Or "add a
row there", not too hard when you can just throw it in with a
clean html file, but very difficult to find the right place in a
mess of nested tables.

(Perhaps I've just had bad experience because the html is ugly as
sin, but I've never seen clean layout table code except isolated
in specific instances. I find writing clean css based html to be
very easy.)

There *are* times when I think they are right, but usually these
are very limited places, and I actually prefer the whole display:
table thing now. Then when (not if!) the client changes his mind
again, there's a moderate chance that it can be changed: for
instance, changing a form from:

Name: ___________
Email: ___________

to

Name:
_______________

Email:
______________


With <table> is a pain. But with the css, you can change it form
display: table-cell to display:block in the appropriate place and
be done with it. (Now display: table still leaves some to be
desired, I prefer inline-block when I can, but still it is a good
step.)

> irritating the HTML dogma pushers (while sidestepping most of 
> the compatibility troubles they face) is half the fun!

I'll agree with that though, it does make me smile to say "just
ignore the standard lol".

> In fact, I never even allow Chrome to touch my computers.

I wish I could, but one of my big clients uses it religiously so
I need to have a copy every so often to track down the bugs he'll
inevitably find.

For a while I started replying "get a better browser" whenever
this came up, but alas even if he personally did, there's enough
marketshare of it out there now that it wouldn't really solve the
problem business-wise.

> 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.

Aye, Google has really taken over from Netscape in my above rant
now.


> I actually wrote a little blurb on the same point some time 
> back:

heh I'm pretty sure I read it a while ago too.


> 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.


Aye, but again, what the bosses use, I have to use. And he went
so far as to buy me one of those ipads so I wouldn't have any
excuses to ignore it any more too :(

(On the bright side though, I do like watching sports on it.
Almost completely useless for doing actual work with it,
touchscreens are terrible, but not bad to prop up like a little
tv and watch stuff on.)

> I do think iOS deserves some kudos for having the balls to 
> finally kill off Flash

Blargh, I wish Flash was dead, but it keeps coming back up.
There's the ogg vs mpeg format war that is a huge hassle that
means now all my work sites are forced to write even more code:

<video>
<source mp4> (most things)
<source mp4 lower res> (the iphone refuses to play higher res)
<source ogv> (firefox)
<object> (flash fallback)
   <embed /> (i think this is useless)
     <a href="download"></a> (finally the only one that should be
there IMO)
    </object>
</video>


Blargh. And then "the ipad video UI doesn't match the Chrome
which doesn't match the Firefox which doesn't match the Flash"

Just shoot me.