New home page

[Stephan Soller]

On 07.10.2010 23:59, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller at helionweb.de>  wrote in message
> news:i8kmuc$15t$1 at digitalmars.com...
>> On 07.10.2010 14:56, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> "Stephan Soller"<stephan.soller at helionweb.de>   wrote in message
>>> news:i8k8k9$230n$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>>>
>>>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/
>>>>
>>>
>>> Not to complain, just FYI, this is what that page looks like for me:
>>>
>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis1.png
>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis2.png
>>> http://www.semitwist.com/download/arkanis3.png
>>>
>>> Interestingly, if I turn JS on, than it'll look a lot better *until* it
>>> finishes loading, at which point it goes back to looking just like those
>>> screenshots.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the screenshots. May I ask which version of Firefox (if I see
>> that correctly) your're using
>
> v2.0.0.20
>
> Which actually kinda surprises me because I could have sworn I was on a much
> later version of the 2.x line. I *know* there was a period where it kept
> updating itself seemingly all the time (which got quite irritating when I
> just wanted to go to a particular URL). But I guess that must have been the
> only 2.x version I was able to find after giving up on FF3. And IIRC, the
> built-in update won't let me update to anything less than FF3.
>
> And yea, I know FF2 is really old, but I tried 3.0 and 3.5 and the JS was
> only marginally faster, it doesn't seem to fix any of the rendering bugs
> I've come across in FF2 (I have 3.5 on my Linux box, just for site testing),
> and every other change they made I hated and downloaded extentions to
> undo...until I realized there was no extention to un-unify the unified
> forward/back buttons (which I had thought was a good idea when IE7 came
> out -- until I actually used IE7), and realized the only winestripe-like
> things for FF3 weren't nearly as good as the real winestripe. So I figured
> "Why bog it down with even *more* addons just to turn it into a half-baked
> FF2, when I can just use the real FF2?" YouTube bitches to me about it, but
> well, fuck YouTube; never liked having over-compressed videos pre-embedded
> into a web-based player anyway.
>

Maybe you should consider looking into some other browsers? Opera, 
Chrome and other Gecko based browsers might give you a better experience 
that the newer Firefox versions. This is the reason why there are 
different browsers after all.

Staying with FF2 for to long might really hurt your browsing experience 
since quite a bunch of functionality was added to the browsers itself 
lately. And trust me, it's really way easier to use the new stuff than 
all the old workarounds (e.g. webfonts, svg, css based animations, 
transparency, dropshadows, video, and the list goes on...). I really 
expect many people to use this stuff in the near future, not only 
because it's cool but mainly because it's so much easier than the old stuff.

I've seen people holding on to Netscape 4 because they didn't like the 
newer versions. They could endure a surprising amount of totally broken 
pages but the internet wasn't fun for them. Fortunately we have a lot 
more alternatives today. :)

>> The JS stuff is quite interesting since the page actually does not use JS
>> at all. The only situation where JS should actually be involved is for IE
>> (because you need to introduce unknown elements to IE before using them).
>> I'm not aware that any version of Firefox interprets IE conditional
>> comments (although there was talk about it once) so this behavior is
>> somewhat concerning.
>>
>
> Don't worry. Turns out it was just a quirk caused by one of the million
> add-ons I have installed to make the web bearable. When I disabled all of
> them, the behavior and results with JS on were exactly the same as with JS
> off.
>
>> However this page uses quite new and still in progress browser stuff
>> (HTML5, CSS3) so it'll give old browsers a very hard time. It's more like
>> a showcase for the new stuff.
>
> I see, that explains it. Personally, I'll have no interest in CSS3 unless MS
> decides to backport IE9 to XP. I hate Win7 and refuse to let XP die
> (Granted, Win7's not quite as bad as Vista, but it's close).
>
>> Take a look at [this screenshot][1] to see how it's supposed to look like.
>> It was made with font antialiasing on a standard TFT but the text might
>> look a bit awkward on CRTs or TFTs with a different subpixel layout
>> (usually the OS takes care of that when rendering text). There's also the
>> [design prototype][2] which does not use the "new" techniques. It should
>> work on your browser (at least most stuff, I never IEified it nor did
>> extensive cross browser testing since it's only a prototype).
>>
>> [1]: http://arkanis.de/projects/arkanis-development-v3/ubuntu.png
>> [2]: http://arkanis.de/weblog/2008-05-25-modern-ambience-design-prototype/
>>
>> And finally there's also the [old design][3] which works in IE 5.5, 6 and
>> 7 (ditched 4, 5, and 5.01 and I'm not sure about 8). It took about two
>> weeks to make it work in IE 5.5 and 6 if I remember correctly.
>>
>> [3]: http://arkanis.de/projects/arkanis-development-v2/photo-ambience/
>>
>
> Ahh. Yea, all of those do look better :) Actually, even I've ditched IE6
> (it's *that* old). 'Course, part of that is because having multiple versions
> of IE installed is a PITA - if even possible at all. In fact, that's why I
> haven't upgraded to IE8 - I'd lose the ability to test on IE7 which I think
> is still fairly common.
>

Actually you could run IE 5 up to 6 on one WinXP. You only needed a 
couple of DLLs and the iexplorer.exe of the corresponding IE version. 
The [Evolt browser archive][1] provided these nice standalone versions 
of IE. I used it for a long time since it is considerably faster than 
using VMs but I'm not sure if this still works with IE 7 and 8. Because 
of that I switched to VMs a few years back (one VM for IE 6 on XP, one 
for IE 8 on XP which will give you IE 7 by using the compatibility mode 
and one for IE 8 on Win7 because of the fonts).

[1]: http://browsers.evolt.org/

Happy programming
Stephan