DISQUS

Mr. Back, you should see if you can get your post preview code to filter tags before displaying.

http://aphyr.com/media/screenshots/firefox_linu...

Note also that Firefox's font rendering is system-dependant. On my box running X.org 6.8 with an LCD display, I also get RGBv sub-pixel smoothing. Depending on the X server and GTK settings, it will use other methods to render fonts.

Firefox font smoothing.

That looks like sub-pixel smoothing to me. It's probably something to do with cleartype, but I don't claim to understand the windows font rendering system.

I differ on IE7 being visually cleaner... the layout feels gunked-up, to me, compared to FF, Galeon, Konqueror, or Safari. It's not as much of an issue on larger displays, but I prefer each toolbar to have a distinct purpose. IE crams things together in interesting ways, and the positioning of tabs vs the rest of the interface is an odd choice. It feels like they didn't know whether to go for a full MDI (Opera makes a big deal out of this) or opt for a simpler visual metaphor like Safari or Firefox.

All in all, I'm happy for IE users. They can finally catch up with the rest of us. ;-)

Daniel, I suspect that making Vista less usable across the existing computer base is only going to slow its growth. Having to upgrade my hardware to run a new operating system is not a good incentive to upgrade at all--it essentially increases the cost of the platform.

1) I am not brainwashed by Microsoft, really. I have conducted research and laid out my opinion for IE, which is not that it's a technically superior product, but that it's "good enough" for most users, or from the other side, that firefox doesn't present the average user sufficient incentive to switch.

So, you believe Firefox is a technically superior product to IE?

What a brilliant marketing plan.

This site is either a spoof, or in rather poor taste. Possibly both.

Speaking of mangled CSS, have you taken a look at this stylesheet lately? No newlines or spaces between statements makes it very difficult to read. If you're going to compress text, use mod_deflate, mod_gzip, or IIS's compression support--it's faster, simpler, and more efficient than running a PHP script to mangle your finely-crafted syntax.

I wrote an 8 line perl script to reformat the results of your script, and calculate that it reduces a 7340 byte CSS file to 6556 bytes, a 10.6 percent reduction in size. Mod_gzip reduces that same file to 1793 bytes, at a compression ratio of 75.6 percent. As an added bonus, that compression can apply to all text documents you serve, without destroying their readability. Try it out--setting up server side compression is easy to do, and can definitely help out if you are bandwidth-concious. :-)

For reference, here's the script:


#!/usr/bin/perl
foreach (<>) {
s/\;(?! })/\;\n\t/go;
s/\;(?= })/\;\n/go;
s/{/{\n\t/go;
s/}/}\n\n/go;
print;
}

All that being said, I have no idea what's up with spreadfirefox.com's stylesheets. Have you sent them an e-mail about it?

Given that IE has many ridiculous rendering, parsing, and layout bugs that have gone unfixed for years, doesn't support CSS 1.0 (when the W3C is now working on CSS3), has serious security flaws, doesn't support PNG transparency, is widely exploited by malicious software, and was recommended against by the US Government, could you explain why you are trying to "Spread IE"? You seem most enthusiastic about IE7 catching up to features browsers like Opera, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Safari have had for years. All of this begs the question: "Why use IE?"

Don't get me wrong--I'm excited about IE7 too, because I want to reduce the number of brain-damaged hacks in my code to deal with it's peculiar interpretations of web standards. It just boggles my mind that someone who has tried a different browser would find a compelling reason to switch back, outside of sites that require ActiveX.

Can we slam you for being a Microsoft zealot? Or would that be in bad taste? ;-)

*ducks*

The moz- prefix is exactly the sort of standards-compliant behavior the W3C recommends to allow browsers to support their own style implementations. Compare that to Internet Explorer, which introduces its custom extensions in the root namespace.

I don't advise using browser specific extensions unless necessary to adjust for bugs or non-standard behavior, but Mozilla and KHTML have done the right thing here.

1. Interesting idea. Since people (especially with tabbed browsing) navigate in a branching fashion, the idea of trees for history makes a lot of sense.

2. Context sensitive menus? You mean like the bugmenot plugin (sensitive to username/password fields), form-fill extensions, or the built-in search functionality to look up highlighted words in Firefox?

3. Wget.

4. This is a function of the print driver, not browser.

I'm guessing your complaint about "content shifting" has to do with Gecko recomputing the positions of elements based on further data as it comes in. I see this mostly in IE, but it's likely caused by oddly structured HTML or elements (especially tables) with ambiguous widths.

You make a good point about the argument, but it doesn't seem to justify the title of your post. You didn't explain anything about the phrase "hacked full of holes".

Doesn't it seem oversimplistic to say that the wide variety of Linux software projects all have the same level of security?

I can't duplicate the error with the image you included. Please post an example, and post it to bugzilla if others can duplicate it.