PJ on Development: Blog

Why are there so many browsers out there?

I could understand if there were a few of them for different platforms, like Windows, Mac, Linux, and so forth. But different browsers for the same platform just drives me nuts.

After creating this blog I decided to go crazy and create a whole Internet presence, with home page and all.

So, because I want to be as nice as possible to my readers I'm willing to try to different browsers.

I downloaded Firefox and Opera to work side-by-side with IE.

I'm creating my site at home, with the look and feel matching the blog -- which reminds me to say "thank you very much" to Todd Dominey for the creation of this beautiful design and allowing anyone to use it for free. :-)

I started with Firefox, which a few say that is better than IE, and opened my proto-site. First impression of it: ARRGH!!!

Because it would have to hold more than only my blog postings I had made a few internal changes on the design, which rendered perfectly on IE, and were completely missed by Firefox.

It took me a long time to adjust everything to render perfectly on both browsers.

I've read a lot of things on website design while I was trying to figure out WTF was going on with my design. Many of the designers usually blame IE for not being able to render their beautiful designs, however I had the opposite feeling. IE rendered perfectly while Firefox was breaking the design.

I don't know. Maybe it's because a great number of the designers use Mac, or are in someway anti-Microsoft.

And that reminds me once more of Joel, he says, and I agree, that if you can control your surroundings (even if just a bit) you tend to be a happier person.

Which brings me to another point. I've read and heard people praising the wonders of Firefox, but the first time I tried to use it to see a simple design it let me down. So, I'm not happy with it.

I have read the developers page for Firefox, I admit the proposal is good, but why they need to do things so different from IE? The Firefox Development Team says that they are trying to be as standard compliant as they can, but compliant to what standards?

The W3C standards are fine, but I think that with 95% of market-share IE is a de facto standard so, if you're developing a web browser I think you need to be as close to IE as possible, maybe even mimicking its rendering flaws (OK... not that much :-).

Enough of Firefox. Let's talk a little about Opera.

I've just installed the little browser (3.66 MB opposed to 4.98MB of Firefox) and opened my proto-site. The design was rendered as beautiful as it should, as I was pleased to see.

But I need to use XML for some of the features and Opera's script capabilities didn't allow me to do so. I'm a little stubborn, so I looked up its documentation and I found nothing useful.