Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 11:46:25AM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman wrote: Opera was segfaulting quite a bit, so I decided to try Firefox for a month. Hmm. It really shouldn't be doing that. Since the 7.x series of Opera solidified, it's been extremely, well, solid ;-) It crashed on me 4 or 5 days ago, but those are very, very rare. I'm a little different than some, though, in that I do manually close my browser from time to time. (Mostly to erase those pesky session cookies) I'm running opera_7.54-20040803.5-shared-qt_en_i386.deb (yeah, I should grab their latest security update) on an up-to-date Debian Sid. I'm in general agreement with your notes -- the biggest thing in Opera's favor being its speed and configurability, while the adblock extension (and Sage!) rule the roost for Firefox. Recently, a few of us at NBLUG gave a little talk on our favorite Firefox extensions. Our notes are in this thread: http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/2005-January/016545.html In particular, if you want extended tab functionality, you might look into: http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en or http://hemiolapei.free.fr/divers/tabmix/tabmix.html.en 4. Configuration is easier than Opera. But this is a double edged sword. The reason why Firefox is easier to configure is that there's less to configure. Things that are normally extensions on Firefox tend to be built-in on Opera, making the Opera preferences menu more busy. See about:config for a few more. I'm really terrible about taking notes, but I did some things that noticeably sped up Firefox's rendering, and more importantly to me, the speed of the UI itself (i.e. switching tabs) I generally got there by following hints from these two pages: http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive/2005/01/28/48720.aspx http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53650 Forgive all the links in this post -- I hope people find them useful. -troy ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
Bill Kendrick wrote: On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:36:22PM -0600, Jay Strauss wrote: 3. Rendering is wonderful: pages render more faithfully under FF than Opera. I've been using FF for a couple of months on both M$ and Linux and unfortunately I'd have to say the rendering is not so wonderful when compared with IE (at least in my experience) for example when I look at: http://www.sheddaquarium.org/mem_individual.cfm FF smashes the ticket options together, IE has them nice and separated. Hrm, as it should. There doesn't seem to be anything in there that says there should be space after the ul.../ul list. The part of the page in question is a table, with /zero/ cellspacing or cellpadding, so it's no wonder it's pretty tight in there... The descriptions of each are within a div.../div, but the style in question (ltbluetext) simply sets color, font and font size. Nothing about spacing, margins or padding around the enclosed section of text. The lack of specification of margins does not dictate that margins should not exist. A portable HTML coder ought to have explicitly set the margin size desired, rather than rely on the existence of a default margin on div elements. My current biggest pet peeve about IE's mishandling of things would include its broken support for absolute positioning. Should be relative to the enclosing box, but instead is relative to the window coords. Awful. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 05:15:13AM -0800, Micah Cowan wrote: My current biggest pet peeve about IE's mishandling of things would include its broken support for absolute positioning. Should be relative to the enclosing box, but instead is relative to the window coords. Awful. I'm sorry... do you mean, literally, the position of the IE window on the screen/desktop!? -bill! Hey, where'd my jaw go? ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
Bill Kendrick wrote: On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 05:15:13AM -0800, Micah Cowan wrote: My current biggest pet peeve about IE's mishandling of things would include its broken support for absolute positioning. Should be relative to the enclosing box, but instead is relative to the window coords. Awful. I'm sorry... do you mean, literally, the position of the IE window on the screen/desktop!? Is that surprising? You wouldn't want an absolute element to remain in the same place on the screen if the window itself had moved... no browser would do /true/ absolute positioning (and it would be broken from a CSS POV). Technically, I actually mean the top-left corner of the display area, since obviously expanding toolbars and whatnot should shift the entire display downwards. What I was trying to say is that CSS's idea of absolute positioning coordinates is that they are relative to the enclosing block-level element; whereas relative coordinates are relative to the location at which the element being positioned would otherwise have been placed. But IE's idea of absolute positioning is that they are always relative to the display area's top-left corner. ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
[vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
Opera was segfaulting quite a bit, so I decided to try Firefox for a month. Previously, I used and loved Galeon. Then they rewrote the browser about the time when the GNOME2 framework started, and made it pure crap. So I know that you don't really get comfy with something as personal as a browser in just a week, so I decided to give Firefox a month. Here are my perceptions of Firefox, 2 weeks into a month: 1. Not as fast as Opera, but still very fast. Sadly, I think the MS Windows version of FF might be faster than the Linux version. 2. Mouse gestures suck badly. Too unforgiving -- I get many mouse gesture aborted messages. Sometimes it registers a L-R gesture as a R-L gesture. Go figure. Like tabbed browsing, this should be part of the browser proper, not an extension. I much prefer mouse gestures on Opera. 3. Rendering is wonderful: pages render more faithfully under FF than Opera. 4. Configuration is easier than Opera. But this is a double edged sword. The reason why Firefox is easier to configure is that there's less to configure. Things that are normally extensions on Firefox tend to be built-in on Opera, making the Opera preferences menu more busy. 5. The Adblock extension is reason enough to use Firefox. 6. Some extensions really belong in the browser proper. For example, since Firefox is a tabbed browser, the functionality of the Tab Clicking Options extension ought to be part of the browser. Similarly, mouse gestures and Launchy should be part of the browser. A rant about Launchy. I *hate* the fact that I need an extension to handle mailto: links. Hate, hate, hate. When I click on a mailto link, I want to run mutt in an xterm. There's no excuse to 1) need an extension for this and 2) have to write an XML stanza. I'll be damned if I spend 20 minutes figuring this out, although if I stick to Firefox, I guess I'll have to at some point. 7. Javascript is much more mature on Firefox than Opera. Opera Javascript could be a nightmare sometimes. Much better on Firefox. 8. Opera has many undocumented features and features you have to enable by *adding* undocumented stuff (not changing, but adding) to config files. That sucks. 9. The password manager works better on Opera. There are pages that the password manager on Firefox doesn't appear to recognize. 10. FF is MUCH more stable than Opera. By an order of magnitude. Which is a shame. Opera used to be the most stable browser on Linux. 11. One of the things I really liked about Opera is that, no matter what, no new browser windows would open. Everything opened in a tab, under all circumstances. There seem to be certain types of links that cause FF to open the page in a new window. Bleah. The only time I ever want a new window to open is if *I* instantiate it. I don't want the browser to instantiate a new window, under any circumstances. 12. Printing is much better on FF. The pages print more faithfully to what you see on the screen. Printing pages was always a hinky thing on Opera. The items that are most important to me are: 2 - Opera has much better mouse gestures 5 - FF has Adblock 6 - The mailto: link thing on FF is a real annoyance. 7 - FF handles Javascript better. 10 - FF is more stable. 11 - FF doesn't put all links into tabs. So after week 2, it's a dead toss-up between FF and Opera. Pete -- The mathematics of physics has become ever more abstract, rather than more complicated. The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated. He also appears to like group theory. -- Tony Zee's Fearful Symmetry GPG Fingerprint: B9F1 6CF3 47C4 7CD8 D33E 70A9 A3B9 1945 67EA 951D ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
3. Rendering is wonderful: pages render more faithfully under FF than Opera. I've been using FF for a couple of months on both M$ and Linux and unfortunately I'd have to say the rendering is not so wonderful when compared with IE (at least in my experience) for example when I look at: http://www.sheddaquarium.org/mem_individual.cfm FF smashes the ticket options together, IE has them nice and separated. A rant about Launchy. I *hate* the fact that I need an extension to handle mailto: links. Hate, hate, hate. When I click on a mailto link, I want to run mutt in an xterm. There's no excuse to 1) need an extension for this and 2) have to write an XML stanza. I'll be damned if I spend 20 minutes figuring this out, although if I stick to Firefox, I guess I'll have to at some point. I agree wholeheartedly Have you been using Thunderbird? Its quite nice, except the spell checker sucks. Jay ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
Bill Kendrick wrote: On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:36:22PM -0600, Jay Strauss wrote: 3. Rendering is wonderful: pages render more faithfully under FF than Opera. I've been using FF for a couple of months on both M$ and Linux and unfortunately I'd have to say the rendering is not so wonderful when compared with IE (at least in my experience) for example when I look at: http://www.sheddaquarium.org/mem_individual.cfm FF smashes the ticket options together, IE has them nice and separated. Hrm, as it should. There doesn't seem to be anything in there that says there should be space after the ul.../ul list. The part of the page in question is a table, with /zero/ cellspacing or cellpadding, so it's no wonder it's pretty tight in there... The descriptions of each are within a div.../div, but the style in question (ltbluetext) simply sets color, font and font size. Nothing about spacing, margins or padding around the enclosed section of text. Really, what seems to be happening is IE is insisting on putting some blank vertical space after the /ul tag. Maybe if the whole section was wrapped in p.../p it'd come out better. Or they could specifically set margin-bottom for those ul groups or something... Oh, I stand corrected. I didn't realize IE was doing it's own thing. Jay ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
Really, what seems to be happening is IE is insisting on putting some blank vertical space after the /ul tag. Maybe if the whole section was wrapped in p.../p it'd come out better. Or they could specifically set margin-bottom for those ul groups or something... Oh, I stand corrected. I didn't realize IE was doing it's own thing. Jay Unfortunately, that's the prevalent problem with IE's market dominance-it breaks standard HTML and has quirks, and so other browsers like Mozilla/FF either break it the same way or implement the standard as it should be implemented. Chances are, if you dig a little deeper, you might find that the designer of that web site uses a MS tool for design... -dan ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
Re: [vox-tech] Four week test of Firefox versus Opera
On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 08:09:49PM -0600, Jay Strauss wrote: I stand corrected. I didn't realize IE was doing it's own thing. That, just under security holes, is the top reason to dislike IE. :^P -bill! ___ vox-tech mailing list vox-tech@lists.lugod.org http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox-tech
