Is IE on a downward spiral?

[Matt]

So what web browser do use?

With the recent release (and success imo) of Firefox, does this mean IE monopoly is going to end soon (ish).

I know IE will still be used by computer noobs (Not insulting anyone, just cause it comes with windows), but its very interesting to see web stats with firefox lately.

[phil]

I hope iexplore stays top of the heap, then firefox will still be nice and secure... :)

[shadow03]

i use firefox, although id rather the masses of people use IE cos as phil kinda said(unless i misunderstood), if firefox becomes the most used browser then people and companies will begin to target all their spam and hacks at firefox, which after a while could turn it into another IE

[Afty]

Firefox and Opera...

[Say_Ten]

Mozilla, not in the list.

[Er00]

meh, firefox, still use outlook express though for email (ok, I figure you probably know what outlook's for...no idea why I said for email...meh :p: )

[Hg]

think it shows, Firefox wins hands dwn

[KingDaveRa]

Thing is, asking people on here which browser is best is a bit like asking on a Metallica board which genre of music is the best.

It's gunna be a bit biased tbh.

[10G0]

Firefox all the way, clearly

[Freelance]

firefox. i just prefer it. trying to use IE yesterday was a chore compared to Ff on my box.

IE is below 90% share now, but I hope iexplore stays top of the heap, then firefox will still be nice and secure... doesn't hold weight (i hope) because of the two different approaches to development. If IE becomes the better browser again (like how it beat NS4) then i'll look at it. at the moment Ff is the better browser

[JeRkY]

firefox, starting...........now

[Matt]

I was really curious to if it was used by the technical sort of people.

We still have firefox at just under 10% on our servers.

[Jobabob]

with the overwhelming monopoly of Microsoft and Windows as IE's complementary (and necessary) product, it wont die any time soon

[Nikumba]

I still use IE6 since i prefer it as as browser. I have never been a fan of open source software.

Yes granted IE has its share of security bugs, but Firefox has had a load as well.

Until Windows loose its dominatant poisition in the desktop arena Firefox will never be number one.

Besides IE7 should be cool :)

Nikumba

[Steadders]

I dont even have IE installed! which is very anoying for this like msn messenger, which will only use IE.

[Bonkers]

I use IE - its easier

[Matt]

Originally posted by Nikumba

Besides IE7 should be cool :)


I think you've got a very very long wait!

[RTO]

If yo ucould give me FrieFox's standards compliance for IE, then great. Until then IE's rendering engine is much better.

The only thing I like about FF is the tabbed browsing. IE 'security issues' I don't really need to worry about, as they mostly stem from a bug that was patched a month before anyway.

I've got FF installed to make sure any website's I design look how they should do in both browsers, but that's about as far as my use of FF goes.

But hey, lets all jump on the IE hate bandwagon ;)


Also, where's the option for Links?? I probably use that more than FF :p

[MONK]

I just love the way IE crashes and takes out ever window in one go. Moz crashes and oh look the rest are still there happily working.

Plus the amount of addins for moz is oh so useful.

[no friends]

when was IE on the up to go down...?

[TheDon]

Originally posted by RTO
Until then IE's rendering engine is much better. WHUH???? Are we on about the same IE here? IE's rendering engine is well know for being ****! It makes up it's own rules and compelty ignores alot of the web standards. Go make a page that is fully w3c compliant, load it up in firefox, and then ie, and try saying that IE's rendering engine is better then.
IE's hasn't changed that much since ie3, whereas firefox is based on the much newer gecko engine, which has very few rendering bugs (and the ones it does have are fixed quite quickly after they are reported)

[KingDaveRa]

I read something one of the IE developers had written where he basically said he gets moaned at for IE not being standards complient, but when he asks where, he said he never got an answer.

Thing is, IE is now 3 years old, whereas firefox is refreshed every few months, so whatever the W3C have changed, they can impliment. You could use Mozilla 6 and say it wasn't complient.

Trouble is, if MS wake up and start throwing out new versions of IE, using all new features (basically all the features of FF) then it'll be interesting.

[Cheez]

Originally posted by TheDon
WHUH???? Are we on about the same IE here? IE's rendering engine is well know for being ****! It makes up it's own rules and compelty ignores alot of the web standards. Go make a page that is fully w3c compliant, load it up in firefox, and then ie, and try saying that IE's rendering engine is better then.
IE's hasn't changed that much since ie3, whereas firefox is based on the much newer gecko engine, which has very few rendering bugs (and the ones it does have are fixed quite quickly after they are reported) No I would agree with Robin here, IE, for all its lack of standards complience, has a very nice renderer. It does it very quickly (FAR quicker than FireFox) and it's results look far more polished. Put a standards complient parser like Firefox's in a browser with IE's renderer and you would have a winner.

[Matt]

IE displays a website and ignores any errors, and trys to show something regardless.

This encourages bad programming and when it comes to accessibility of website is very very bad.

[Zenith]

What I like about Firefox is that you can use it on a dual-boot system (Windows/*nix). If the default profile is on a mutually accessible partition/share then you can have the same bookmarks, cookies and features in both operating systems. Add a bookmark in *nix and it is there in Windows, and vice-versa.

[Freelance]

zen, where is the setting to move the user files? i used to know, but forgot as i'd like to do just that.

anyone know what the mpuk web server reports as most used?

[Cheez]

Originally posted by Matt
IE displays a website and ignores any errors, and trys to show something regardless.

This encourages bad programming and when it comes to accessibility of website is very very bad. I'm talking about the renderer not the parser. I completely agree that IE should enforce compatibility and not allow designers to get away with murder.

Remember if your website offers a service, or is commercial, then it is AGAINST THE LAW for your site to not comply to WAI accessibility guidelines

[KingDaveRa]

I think thats only law in the USA.

Remember, we are still a separate country, although you wouldn't know it.

[Joolz]

Originally posted by KingDaveRa
I think thats only law in the USA.

Remember, we are still a separate country, although you wouldn't know it.

Its law in this country...

[Zenith]

Originally posted by Freelance
zen, where is the setting to move the user files? i used to know, but forgot as i'd like to do just that. You don't "move" the user files.
THIS PAGE (http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/firefox-thunderbird.shtml) has a good step-by-step of how to share Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird between Windows XP and Linux.

[Cheez]

Originally posted by KingDaveRa
I think thats only law in the USA.

Remember, we are still a separate country, although you wouldn't know it. No that's this country, the law is still going through congress in the states. It's covered by the 1998 and 2002 Dissabilities Discrimination Act, and in our case at work it's also covered under the 2003 Special Education Needs and Dissabilities act.

[KingDaveRa]

Ohhhhh. Makes a change!

I stand corrected then :D

[RTO]

Originally posted by Chris
No I would agree with Robin here, IE, for all its lack of standards complience, has a very nice renderer. It does it very quickly (FAR quicker than FireFox) and it's results look far more polished. Put a standards complient parser like Firefox's in a browser with IE's renderer and you would have a winner.

Thank you Chris, someone that's taken the time to look into it properly and not just signup for the FF fanboy club ;)

[Zenith]

I would have thought it was obvious why IE has a fast renderer. Programs such as Firefox and Opera have to make a system request to the various API's, which in turn perform their functions. IE just cuts through the request part and accesses the API's directly.

As for the Firefox fanboy club, I was a member of the club back when it was called Netscape. My anti-M$ views are WELL known on these boards. :)

[Joolz]

Originally posted by Zenith
I would have thought it was obvious why IE has a fast renderer. Programs such as Firefox and Opera have to make a system request to the various API's, which in turn perform their functions. IE just cuts through the request part and accesses the API's directly.

Sorry Zenith... but... that's complete tosh.

"System Request to the various APIs'"!? What!? Oh dear. Sorry m8 there is ONE API... its just that MS know how to use it more efficiently. There is no 'request part'.

The only API that MS don't provide the complete headers to are the ntdll.dll. Which is not surprising as bad things can happen using them :P

[Zenith]

Originally posted by Holes
Sorry Zenith... but... that's complete tosh. <snip> In my defence, look at the time of the post. :)
I'll stick to what I do know about in future (hardware).

[Matt]

Originally posted by Chris
No that's this country, the law is still going through congress in the states. It's covered by the 1998 and 2002 Dissabilities Discrimination Act, and in our case at work it's also covered under the 2003 Special Education Needs and Dissabilities act.

Which basically one company somewhere will be made an example of.

[Cheez]

Apparently, several have already made out of court settlements with the RNIB. :D

[Mouce]

Well, the reason why IE is faster is because its core is built into the OS. It's pre-loaded with the shell environment, part of the explorer shell. This is why IE eats 10mb RAM, and FF or Opera almost 35mb.

Also, one of the nicest non-complience issues I believe was how it sent requests. An issue which was brought up a while back.

Basically IE sends it requests like this;

1) HTTP
<An IIS server replies, a normal server says;>
Sorry? or it times out
2) Oh, you're not normal, ok, ACK

The timeout period was as long as 60 seconds, hence why some sites open immediatly in IE and take ages in Opera or FF.

[Joolz]

Originally posted by Mouce
Well, the reason why IE is faster is because its core is built into the OS. It's pre-loaded with the shell environment, part of the explorer shell. This is why IE eats 10mb RAM, and FF or Opera almost 35mb.

That's why it loads faster. That's not why its faster at rendering. You see, IE mostly resides in mshtml.dll. This DLL is an ActiveX dll that can be used by many clients. However, thanks to explorer, its refcount never gets to zero. This means that it is permanently in memory. HOWEVER, when a new process loads, it takes a 'copy'. This is due to the way Windows Virtual Memory System (and Process Protected Memory Spaces) work. So, your 'memory usage' theory is, unforunately, tosh.

However...

Originally posted by Mouce
Also, one of the nicest non-complience issues I believe was how it sent requests. An issue which was brought up a while back.

Basically IE sends it requests like this;

1) HTTP
<An IIS server replies, a normal server says;>
Sorry? or it times out
2) Oh, you're not normal, ok, ACK

The timeout period was as long as 60 seconds, hence why some sites open immediatly in IE and take ages in Opera or FF.

Yes! That's why IE renders faster. Evil sneaky trick. That, tbh, any of the other browsers could do if they wanted! :)

[Cheez]

Originally posted by Holes
Yes! That's why IE renders faster. Evil sneaky trick. That, tbh, any of the other browsers could do if they wanted! :) Which they don't as it's a violation of the HTTP standard... It essentially makes calling IIS an HTTPd a misnomer, its Microsoft HTTP++ or something.

Same with IIS's screwed up error codes, theres not just a 500 error anymore, there's a Microsoft 500.x error to say what has gone wrong, a bane to user-agent writers everywhere.

[GeeDee]

And therein lies the root of your argument Chris.

The complaints you've been making about IE are all from a developers / techies point of view.

A browser is written for the end user and not to make your (the guy getting paid to create web solutions) job easier.

So what if they 'cheat' with web requests? The bottom line is the page loads faster. So what if the HTTP 500 error is not what YOU want it to be? The bottom line again is that the user will feel a little more comforted than a white page with HTTP 500, FO on it.

Going on and on about web standards isn't going to achieve anything. At all. You're looking at the web through rose tinted spectacles. It's not full of programmers who are passionate about the w3c standards and it's not full of users who know what they are doing. It's full of people who want to make a solution that 'just works' and who want web pages to 'just load' as fast as possible. MS have developed a browser for USERS which does that. I'm the first one to accept that it's had far more security exploits than it should have, but the bottom line is the browser does work.

In addition, most web sites now are created with IE in mind. They are developed and tested using IE. Therefore, I use IE. I don't have any problems doing this -- everything looks just fine to me. I don't see the point in fighting against 97% of the developers out there, who's primary target browser is going to obviously be, IE.

The amount of people I see complaining 'oh this website is ****, it's not w3c compliant, it looks wrong what a crappy website, waa waa waa'. If you use IE, these problems go away. The site was designed for IE, so either accept and use it, or stop complaining about every 3rd website out there. Case in point, not sure if it's still true, but the last time I saw firefox in use the 'reply' field in vbulletin was about 1/3rd of the size it should have been. In IE, it 'just works'.

:)

Giles.

[Cheez]

And therein lies the root of your argument Chris.

The complaints you've been making about IE are all from a developers / techies point of view.

A browser is written for the end user and not to make your (the guy getting paid to create web solutions) job easier.

I've never written a browser so I can't really say much about this.

So what if they 'cheat' with web requests? The bottom line is the page loads faster.

Well, at some point a line has to be drawn, there has to be a standard way of requesting a webpage, otherwise the ultimate result is needing a different bit of software installed for every single website you visit.

So what if the HTTP 500 error is not what YOU want it to be? The bottom line again is that the user will feel a little more comforted than a white page with HTTP 500, FO on it.

The error code is designed for people who develop or write apps / user-agents to interact with a webserver, not the end user, this is examplified in IE where by default no error codes are shown, IE has something called "Friendly HTTP errors", a good thing imho.

Going on and on about web standards isn't going to achieve anything. At all. You're looking at the web through rose tinted spectacles. It's not full of programmers who are passionate about the w3c standards and it's not full of users who know what they are doing. It's full of people who want to make a solution that 'just works' and who want web pages to 'just load' as fast as possible.

The best way to make things "just work" is to code them properly, no page loads faster than an XHTML / CSS page, speak to any of the people I have convinced to at least try it that way, they will all tell you it's simpler to work with and the results are cleaner and faster.

MS have developed a browser for USERS which does that. I'm the first one to accept that it's had far more security exploits than it should have, but the bottom line is the browser does work.

I'm not saying otherwise, IE is a fine browser in this regard, I don't even particularly care that it lets you get away with illegal and invalid code unlike some more vehement proponents of web standards, but it -should- work with valid code, it currently doesn't. A problem that Microsoft themselves acknowledge.

In addition, most web sites now are created with IE in mind. They are developed and tested using IE. Therefore, I use IE. I don't have any problems doing this -- everything looks just fine to me. I don't see the point in fighting against 97% of the developers out there, who's primary target browser is going to obviously be, IE.

This is changing, and if you speak to the worlds worst web designer he (or she) will tell you they are aware of other browsers and want to try and make it work on all of them. The thing any developer or designer has to remember is that the website they are making isnt for them. It's for the people who are visiting it, their audience if you will. If you're cutting out your audience, then theres no point in having a site at all. A fully accessible website, written to the current standards will work in -ANY- browser, even in WorldWideWeb, the first ever browser, written by Tim Burners-Lee back in the early 90s while being just as usable as it is in the latest browsers, sure it might look a bit naff in non CSS browsers, but the way HTML goes back to its true perpose of being a simple markup language means that it doesn't lose any of its usibility, you can navigate just as easily as if you're on the latest version of IE with all its s****y activex dodads. Suddenly your site is open to everyone, no matter who they are or what they are using to view your site. Sure the end user on IE it doesn't matter much to them if your site is accessible and compatible or not, but to anyone who requres use of a text reader etc. Your site is suddenly open to them whereas your non accessible rival business will be basicly telling them to "fo" as you put it.

There is a hidden benefit to this as well, with the use of CSS based design and the return of HTML to being a markup language, you can give your web documents proper semantics, A document can look like this:

<h1>Heading</h1>
<h2>Subheading</h2>
<p>
Paragraph of text.
</p>

This makes a surprising amount of difference to the relevence placed on a pages content by search engines such as google, it makes the page on the whole easier to index and the hits to your site will be relevent to what people are searching for. After all, a search engine reads through a site in a similar way to a text reader, so asside from accessibility and compatibility, you're adding searchability to your site, again something your rival's badly coded, IE6 only site will lack.

The amount of people I see complaining 'oh this website is ****, it's not w3c compliant, it looks wrong what a crappy website, waa waa waa'. If you use IE, these problems go away. The site was designed for IE, so either accept and use it, or stop complaining about every 3rd website out there.

This has begun to become somewhat less of a problem than you're making out I feel, Sure there -are- bad sites out there that only work on IE6 but more often than not people have made an effort.

You're looking at things based on your own position, you have a relatively new computer, running the latest version of Windows, the rest of the world isn't so lucky, they might not be able to afford a computer than can run Windows 2000 or XP, so they won't have IE6. They might be at work where the computing policy forbids IE6, they might be on a text reader due to visual impairment or they may not have windows or indeed an x86 PC at all. The web is about the free sharing of information for everyone, if you make people need newer computers, or program x on platform y to view certain sites then you're suddenly cutting a lot of people out of your site, it makes poor business sense to do that, and it doesn't take much effort to not do it.

Sorry for the waffling essay, but I hope that clarifies my position on web standards a bit better. :)

P.S.

Case in point, not sure if it's still true, but the last time I saw firefox in use the 'reply' field in vbulletin was about 1/3rd of the size it should have been. In IE, it 'just works'.
This isn't a very good case in point, It's only these forums that suffer from it that I've seen, so someone has broken something somewhere, somewhat like the links in posts that don't underline. :)

[firestorm]

I use both I.E and firefox. Firefox is on my main box and all other windows machines use I.E both work fine and I can't fault any of them :)

[Afty]

Originally posted by Mouce
Basically IE sends it requests like this;

1) HTTP
<An IIS server replies, a normal server says;>
Sorry? or it times out
2) Oh, you're not normal, ok, ACK

The timeout period was as long as 60 seconds, hence why some sites open immediatly in IE and take ages in Opera or FF. That doesn't make sense.

According to your logic, IE would load sites from a non-IIS much slower than any other browser...

[Cheez]

I'm looking at it here, and I see no difference between IE requesting a page from IIS and Firefox requesting a page from IIS.

IE6:


GET /main.asp?page=1904 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-gb
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 1.0.3705)
Host: intranet.bcuc.ac.uk
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cache-Control: no-cache
Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQCCRQQBC=HEKDHDMAAEMGNIIEAKBALMHN


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:20:04 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private
Transfer-Encoding: chunked


FireFox:


GET /main.asp?page=1904 HTTP/1.1
Host: intranet.bcuc.ac.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDQCCRQQBC=CHKDHDMABCDBJHNCNDGLBGKO
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:24:16 GMT
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-control: private
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Ok so FireFox sends more headers, otherwise there's no difference between the requests and responses?

[Storm]

I mostly use IE for browsing teh web. Tis fast and has all the usual features. However, I always use either Opera or Firefox when browsing pr0n :p damn

....I bet I'm not alone on that :p

[Er00]

hmm, so my FF is just weird then as it loads pages a hell of a lot faster than ie :p:

[Cheez]

I've just re-read through my long rambling post, s****y activex dodads is supposed to say s****y activex dodads, not what you might think. :)

[Freelance]

everyone loves cute foxes and owls

[Joolz]

Originally posted by Chris
I'm looking at it here, and I see no difference between IE requesting a page from IIS and Firefox requesting a page from IIS.

Its lower level than that. Its to do with the ACK packets from IIS when it 'picks up' the connection. Its nothing to do with the GET yadayada stuff.

[KingDaveRa]

http://grotto11.com/blog/slash.html?+1039831658

The whole syn/ack thing.

[Cheez]

Yeah just been reading up on it, it's hardly a cheat. It almost seems sensible.

[Mouce]

This is only marginally less stupid than RunTCP's "solution"-- and I say "marginally" only because in the grand scheme of things, this probably makes sense to Microsoft's network engineers. After all, eventually all clients will be Windows platforms running IE, and all servers will be Windows platforms running IIS. And then we can break all kinds of rules! Rules are only there to hold us back and force us to play nice with other vendors. Well, once the other vendors are all gone, who cares about some stupid RFC?

[TheDon]

Originally posted by GeeDee
most web sites now are created with IE in mind. They are developed and tested using IE. Therefore, I use IE. I don't have any problems doing this -- everything looks just fine to me. I don't see the point in fighting against 97% of the developers out there, who's primary target browser is going to obviously be, IE.
Most websites now are actually created with cross-browser compatability in mind because people have woken up to the fact there is a whole world of people out there that don't even use windows.
What about all the people on *nix? Should they just forget about using the web because they can't run ie?
Maybe we should all just install the latest version of windows and hand bill gates our cheque books, because what's the point in using anything else? seeing as most people use windows we all should!
If a web developer is creating a site just for ie then they are lazy and not doing their job properly. It's not hard to create a CSS/XHTML site that will work in any browser, and as Chris said, it will load a hell of alot quicker than any site some table loving, ie-only web developer will pull up.

[Matt]

Theres nothing wrong with tables.

All my sites are cross browser compatible, they work in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Safari and (unfortunatly) IE - And most problems occur in IE for Mac.

And most sites need to be of W3C standards to be fully accessible.

[TheDon]

Originally posted by Matt
Theres nothing wrong with tables.

All my sites are cross browser compatible, they work in Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Safari and (unfortunatly) IE - And most problems occur in IE for Mac.

And most sites need to be of W3C standards to be fully accessible. Nothing exactly wrong with them, just tables take ALOT longer to render than the same site done in css.

[Matt]

really, never noticed that much, got some example sites?

[Cheez]

Originally posted by TheDon
Nothing exactly wrong with them, just tables take ALOT longer to render than the same site done in css.

<not a fan of the gecko renderer>

This is browser specific though, Firefox is an utter dog at rendering CSS based sites, you really notice it if there are static background styles on a div and you scroll a lot.

</not a fan of the gecko renderer>

Having said that, KHTML (Konqueror, Safari) is pretty much the same, and IE isn't much better when it comes to static (no-repeat) backgrounds on div's or tables.