Here's a hint on how to find out the new features badly needed in IE...it's called Firefox | The Coffeehouse

adham

Here's a very simple way for IE developers to give us the features that are badly needed in IE:

1. Download Firefox 0.9

2. Download the Web Developers toolbar extension

3. Implement all the features that are in 1. and 2. but not in IE.

If MS continues to ignore IE development, users (and developers) will also adopt a very simple plan to get the features they need:

1. Download Firefox
2. Use it

Manip

This is the most useless post. You are just being critical for the sake of it, and have not said WHICH of the many features in FF you like.

I personally don't use FF because I hate the long loading time of the browser. If they did everything in IE that exists in FF the loading time of IE would jump up and you would have a lot of very angry people on your hands.
Notice this is this guys post No.1 so he proberbly came in on the slashdot band-wagon and doesn't plan on coming back :-/

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

Definitely came from /., and definitely didn't read the request for specific features. The whole new /. piece is rife with comments about "are they too stupid to look at Mozilla?". Helpful guys. Real helpful.

Keskos

A typical slashdotter. These guys are really amusing. He is loser enough to register and try to piss off people. Should be banned because of his useless post I believe.

lenn
Fo' Shizzle

Sorry gents, I don't ban users from Channel 9 for any reason other than obscene or racist links, comments, or remarks. Everyone is welcome to speak their minds, slashdotters included. It is up to you and Microsoft to defend our views.

adham

Sorry to disappoint you, but no I'm not a Linux /. fanatic. I'm actually a .NET developer who's been working with ASP.NET since the very first beta (and ASP classic before that of course). However, I did come to the forums after reading the Slashdot post as I had never seen the Channel9 Wiki before. I put my post up after spending 3.5 hours of my Saturday night helping a friend of mine clean her computer of 375 pieces of Spyware. If you want me to epxlain in detail how this is the fault of IE, I can do that in separate post. The bottom line is that after getting her computer to a semi-usable state again, I put FF on her machine and asked her to use it instead. I only made my post because I realized that if a diehard MS developer like myself has started recommending FireFox to average users, then its only a matter of time before the browser wars start all over again (and thats a nightmare for web developers!!).

Adham

P.S. Thanks for the "loser" remark. Very mature indeed. I thought these forums were for grown ups.

adham

Unless you're running a Pentium 1 machine or Firefox 0.1, I'm not sure what "long loading time" are you talking about. Your post actually implies that Firefox's (5 MB full install) is actually more heavyweight than IE (77 MB). It also implies a relation between basic features and load time which is inaccurate at best. I thought these forums were mainly for developers but I should've known from the simple registration process that that might not be the case.

Regarding the specific features I like in FF, I could list tabbed-browsing and find-as-you-type, but tell me honestly how many times have you already seen those mentioned? So I'll focus on the Web Developers toolbar as it concerns me the most. It's essentially a simple extension that allows you to do common tasks helpful to web development such as see the page's CSS documents, toggle images on/off, display image dimensions, check Javascript etc. etc. You can download it and see it for yourself. I would like to see ALL the features on that toolbar in a similar extension for IE. And yes I know some of those features may already exist in IE but I'd like to see them in a central location that you simply dock as a toolbar. Hope that's specific enough for your taste.

RoryBecker

Yeah, I've gotta agree with adham.

The web developer's toolbar is the thing to concentrate on here. I personnally use avant browser whenever possible because I like the tabbed browsing and our customers use IE and avant uses the IE renderer.

But I really like what I see in the webdev toolbar.

Just a cursory glance shows you that this toolbars should be available for every browser. I'm off now to try and find one for avant.

Jaz
From the depths of Wales I come

these forums mainly for developers. Yes there are lots of developers here, but i mean what the hell. Do you want a turing test on the registration form where you have to write a random program that it asks for, say i dunno a Program in C where it calculates what day you were born on.

There are way too many of these IE threads, Soon the whole of CoffeeHouse will be taken up with threads like "what IE really needs" and "what IE really really needs"

Manip

IE takes about 2seconds to load, FF takes around 5.. That is too long.

ZippyV
Fired Up

adham wrote:
P.S. Thanks for the "loser" remark. Very mature indeed. I thought these forums were for grown ups.

You started first.

What are those Web Developers toolbar extension-features anyway?

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

The developer extensions rock! Here's a list of features: http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/features/

Here are some screenshots: http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/screenshots/

And here's where you can download it: http://chrispederick.myacen.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/download/

Moving back to the conversation, the problem adham, is that your original suggestion wasn't helpful, and was exactly the opposite of what the article you came from asked for. It's also exactly what the entire comment thread on that article is "why should we do their job for them?" "can't they just install firefox?", etc.

Dave asked for specific features for a reason. I know for a fact that the IE team is very aware of FireFox (and every other browser out there), so saying "copy this" doesn't help. They want to know what you LIKE, what you WANT, what you NEED, what you USE about the product.

I mean, should they use FireFox's toolbar structure instead of IE's, just because it's a 'feature' that's in FireFox? Or, how about changing right click > copy shortcut to right click > copy link location... Just because that's how FF does it?

Generalizations only help one person: you; it helps you save time typing and researching. Real feature requests which show what you want, why you want it, how you use it and how hard your life is without it are the 'useful' and 'specific' feature requests which actually make something happen.

The problem, it seems, is that everytime FireFox comes out with a new feature, everyone screams about IE not having that feature... Then, most of them get forgotten quickly. None of the comments on /. even mentioned Gestures, for instance, but a year ago that was 'the biggest thing which was going to change how the internet functioned'.

So, let's hear what you want, why, and how it'll benefit you. That'll get momentum going everytime, because that's the kind of thing which can be brought to the highest levels.

adham

Jeremy W. wrote:
The developer extensions
Moving back to the conversation, the problem adham, is that your original suggestion wasn't helpful, and was exactly the opposite of what the article you came from asked for. It's also exactly what the entire comment thread on that article is "why should we do their job for them?" "can't they just install firefox?", etc.

I understand Jermey and that's why I responded with the post about the Web Developers toolbar. That's one feature that I like, I need, and that I use a lot in my everyday work. I didn't mean for my original post to be inflamatory but it probably sounded that way because it came after my ordeal with cleaning the spywayre from my friend's box the night before.

As far as new features, I completely agree with you. IE developers should not be concerned with copying every new feature in FF or any other browser. But I think they should take a look at the feautres that most people find very useful and that keep coming up in the forums and start with that. If MS prides itself on listening to the feedback from customers and developers then why have calls for native pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing been ignored for so long? With the lack of any new innovative features in a while, it's getting a bit harder for me personally to defend IE/MS against the increasingly common "oh, but IE is dead / IE is crap" comments.

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

First, I'm not sure you need to defend IE / MS. There are very definitely things wrong with it, things you've mentioned and things others have mentioned.

Second, popup blocking is in IE on XP SP2.

Finally, while it's always nice to put the onus on the MS folk to 'go searching' (see the "Why don't they just look at [x]" I posted before Wink

), the fact of the matter is that if you are trying to be heard, the worst thing you can do is simply tell someone to listen.

Your comment on the developers tools was good, but I'm sure there are other reasons that you envy about FireFox Wink

jalt1
What?

I have both IE and Firefox on my machine, and I am a web developer. Nothing overly fancy, but I've noticed alot of things that just don't work in Firefox, and after all the posts I've seen from web developers screaming for Firefox it makes me curious.

One I can point out off the top of my head:
http://www.thespoke.net

Now granted, I will claim I just don't know what the deal is here, but what can be so vastly different in what they did on that site that would cause it to just be absolutely unbrowsable in Mozilla?

Another problem I have had are with borders in overlapping div sections where the border just gets cut off, or the rendering of tables. This just gets rather annoying for me time and again, and if I'm just doing something wrong in my design, or this is a common pitfall I don't know about would someone please steer me in the right direction.

bsilby

adham wrote:

Unless you're running a Pentium 1 machine or Firefox 0.1, I'm not sure what "long loading time" are you talking about.

Well, I'm not sure about slow loading, but FF certainly has slow dhtml performance. I have talked about this before, but its worth saying again Smiley

Run any of the games on www.def-logic.com in IE, then have a look in Firefox. Then you'll understand why I recommend to all my visitors that they use Internet Explorer--at least until Mozilla fix their rendering engine.

Cheers,
Brent.

bsilby

Actually, I've just had another thought.

If you go and take a look at the bugzilla logs--specifically the dhtml and layout areas, you'll often find people comparing Mozilla to IE. The funny thing is that most comments seem to indicate that the Moz developers are using IE as an 'exemplar' as to how things should look. They are always comparing Moz to IE, and commenting on certain fixes to get things to perform and look as good as they do in IE.

This implies that Moz developers believe IE has a better way of displaying things, and that's what they are aiming for.

Brent.

sbc
GW R/Me

jalt1 wrote:
I have both IE and Firefox on my machine, and I am a web developer. Nothing overly fancy, but I've noticed alot of things that just don't work in Firefox, and after all the posts I've seen from web developers screaming for Firefox it makes me curious.

One I can point out off the top of my head:
http://www.thespoke.net

Now granted, I will claim I just don't know what the deal is here, but what can be so vastly different in what they did on that site that would cause it to just be absolutely unbrowsable in Mozilla?

Another problem I have had are with borders in overlapping div sections where the border just gets cut off, or the rendering of tables. This just gets rather annoying for me time and again, and if I'm just doing something wrong in my design, or this is a common pitfall I don't know about would someone please steer me in the right direction.

Not sure what's happening here as when browsing with Firefox you get redirected to http://www.thespoke.net/%5Cqotd%5Cfirstpage.aspx instead of http://www.thespoke.net/qotd/firstpage.aspx
Go to http://www.thespoke.net/qotd/firstpage.aspx in Firefox and it works fine. It even looks the same in IE and Firefox.

Mozilla can only render the same as IE if all the quirks and bugs were implemented and to do this to the same level, the source code for IE would probably need to be available. I don't understand why people criticise Mozilla so much when there rendering engine (Gecko) actually works very well on most malformed (i.e. bad HTML) websites.

This seems to be an issue with the website. Perhaps the webmaster should be informed? It is also a Microsoft site and written in ASP.NET so no surprise that you may get issues with other browsers.

Just because IE can render a site but other browsers can't doesn't mean there is something wrong with the browser - fixing the HTML/CSS/DHTML is often all that is needed to get a site working.

Personally if I came across a site that did not work properly in Firefox (i.e. completely unusable), I wouldn't want to visit the site again or buy any of their products. After all it is the WORLD Wide Web, and not everything revolves around Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer (infact there are millions of people who do not use IE and Windows).

Microsoft should actually encourage web developers to code so that sites work cross browser and platform. To do this, the visual tools that create web pages (FrontPage, Word, other Office apps, Visual Studio) should output in the correct format. ASP.NET 2.0 should prove promising as that outputs XHTML that is accessible (unlike ASP.NET 1.0 and 1.1).

François Battail

One I can point out off the top of my head:

http://www.thespoke.net

Now granted, I will claim I just don't know what the deal is here, but what can be so vastly different in what they did on that site that would cause it to just be absolutely unbrowsable in Mozilla?

Hum, have you tried to use W3's validator ? No, just 95 errors like missing end tags... If your markup is not correct how can you expect that browsers reacts the same to error conditions?

The first error is here:

<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content=text/html;charset=utf-8">

Look at the quote at the end... should be:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">

That's why it's important to code with respect to standards by the way html should be well formed it helps a lot for interoperability with browsers. In xhtml - when using an xml mime type - the document is rejected if it's not valid.

TheRobbit
The Mars Volta

Let's not forget that IE has been intergrated into the windows shell and is always running whether you see it or not. So of course it starts up faster.

Much like if we're going to race and your car is already running and idling and my car is turned off. When the green light appears you can just floor it. I need to turn the car on and put it in gear and then go.

So yay IE starts up faster, it's intergrated into the Windows Shell and doesn't get real updates except when a new OS is released. That's a good trade off, oh wait... it's not.

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Here's my fave list of Firefox features. Granted I am a web developer so my tastes are unusual.

1) Tabbed browsing
It's really nice, especially when you can set new tabs to *not* get the focus. This way you can do a search and open the top five entries without having to wait for each one to load.

2) Keyword bookmarks with arguments
You can create a bookmark to a URL like
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%s
Then assign a keyword to it like "yahoo"
Then you can type your search in the address bar like
yahoo foobar
and the stuff you type after the keyword will be substituted for the %s
Some other keyword bookmarks from my own list:
kbs: http://support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx?InCC_hdn=true&Catalog=LCID%3D1033%26CDID%3DEN-US-KB%26PRODLISTSRC%3DON&withinResults=&QuerySource=gASr_Query&Product=msall&Query=%s&KeywordType=BOOLEAN&maxResults=150&Titles=false&numDays=&InCC=on
This does a search on the knowledge base (before I had to use IE because support.microsoft.com hides the "advanced search" unless you use IE)

3) Public bug discussion system
If I find a bug I can submit it, and get email whenever a test case is posted or discussion happens on the bug or even (occasionally) when it gets fixed

rhm

Damn, I just wrote a big long post on how I use Firefox (since the recent security scares), but how I'm fairly indifferent it, when I hit Ctrl-W to move to the cursor back one word (it's a reflex action as I'm used to using an editor elsewhere with that shortcut) and the whole browser window just disappears! How ****ing moronic is that?! At least with IE all that happens is the search panel appears.

Yeh, I know some Firefox fanboy is going to say that I'm a moron for not knowing that ctrl-W did that since Netscape 1.0 or whatever, but really, should a new user of a program be expected to familiarise themself with every keyboard shortcut? Esp. for a program that noephytes are expected to use and which IE users are being asked to switch to. And while closing a browser window unexpectedly wouldn't normally be a big deal, wouldn't it be courteous for the browser to somehow sense that I'd been typing into a form for the last 20 minutes and ask me before closing the window? No, I don't know how it would implement that either so maybe it shouldn't have a keyboard shortcut that closes the window (above and beyond stuff that's normal for the platform like Alt-F4). Grrr.

lars

I think CTRL-W is the standard Windows shortcut for Close. It does the same thing for me in both MSIE and Firefox. It closes the w... [Carrier lost]

Jeremy W
that blogging guy

CTRL+W is the default shortcut to close the "current document".

- Office does it
- Adobe apps do it
- Macromedia apps do it

... So yeah, hardly surprising that it's what closes the document in FF. In IE it does actually close the current "object". If you have no search / dialogs open it will close the browser.

LazyCoder
quit looking at me!

ctlr-w causes the search form to pop up in your IE? I thought that was ctrl-f?

Yeah ctrl-w closes the IE instance too.

I also just noticed I have the Google toolbar and the Yahoo toolbar installed in my IE browser. Both of which have pop-up blockers. So I'm not just blocking pop ups, I'm bitchslapping them.