Can I thank all the people who have contributed to this thread, especially those who have gone into some technical detail? It allows me to come back to something that was raised in the Wotsup thread, namely the question of why some of us still use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.
As this discussion has shown browsers are complicated programs and there are many advantages and disadvantages of each. For example, if I were to move away from IE I would have to investigate how each browser handles non-Roman scripts and resizing text. (I won't bore you with the difference between EUC-JIS, Shift-JIS, New-JIS and Old-JIS, because I don't understand it either.) This is time consuming. Many years ago I tried Netscape for a while, but went back to IE for the simple reason that I was using a laptop with a touchpad and not a mouse and there was more scrolling in Netscape.
Can I also mention how much more pleasant this type of discussion has become on this list. We are far more tolerant than we used to be. I can remember the time when we IE and OE users were subject to a lot of personal abuse. We were regarded as unsound people who had the wrong attitude of mind to be loyal QL-ers. They was even a suggestion we should be barred from this list!
I fell foul of the anti-Microsoft people in my first week on the list, when I was completely new to the world of emailing and was given an authoritarian lecture by someone who assured me he had the best email program available. I now know what his problem was. His super program only handled ASCII codes 32 - 126 so any accented characters were coming up on his system as rubbish. (Think yourself lucky that we are living in 2004, Phoebus. If you had included Greek in an email 5 years ago - and your Greek reproduced perfectly in OE - you would have been seized from your home, transported across the Atlantic in a sealed box and publicly lynched at the first available QL show. ;-)) )
Even worse the greatest preachers of the time were the ones who knew nothing about knipping etiquette.
Thanks Geoff.
I think the point is that there are several choices available, and they are all very good as they are competing products; and they are mostly free software.
You may remember the big fuss some years ago when M$ were going to charge for IE. Fortunately the popularity of Netscape, at that time, managed to stop that happening.
This has done us all a favour, as browsers are very sophisticated pieces of code.
I use several browsers on different machines, and they all interpret www pages in different ways and have different features. Yet they are all good.
On PC's I use Opera by preference - because is good - and IE too to check out page features. Yet, I wouldn't rule out using other browsers ... just haven't got the hard disk space on my old PC's :-(
I would recommend to anyone to use 2 or 3 different browsers ... because of their individual features when you need them.
For email I use Demons' Turnpike, which has a customised version of IE bound with it. Turnpike has also now adopted the Windows Explorer interface so it is easy to navigate consistently within Windows.
But I guess this PC talk is boring for the Linux and BeOs users ... :-)
Mozilla is very good on the iMAC too .....
Is Phoebus just teasing us when he mentions a dedicated browser for QDOS/SMSQ ?
-- Malcolm Cadman _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.quanta.org.uk/mailing.htm
