IE8 is the best! Wait, what?! Who wrote this??

It really is not huge difference whether to use and choose IE or Mozilla or Opera because all are really great. The real point is that they simply are web browsing softwares and they need help to run smoothly and securely and the help comes from the part of anti-virus and anti-trojan softwares.

It is a mistake assuming that by having a browser which is regularly updated, nothing will go wrong and no security matters might come along.

IMHO, it is also a mistake to assume that anti-virus and anti-trojan software will pick up where a browser leaves off in the security dept. I can also attest that smooth operation and security aren't the only factors that make a browser 'great'. Rendering, performance, stability, compliance, etc. all play a part. We'll just have to differ in opinion here.

Have a look over here bermuda: http://www.ozzu.com/general-discussion/several-anti-virus-products-tested-with-shocking-results-t97772.html

Now if only websites would start complying to IE8...

I beg to differ. FF often crashes on me and IE8 doesn't.

As I have mentioned numerous times (sorry to those that have read this a hundred times) the biggest problem is the lack of standards. If we really want compliant rendering we need to stick to an XML/XSD type rendering mechanism. If it ain't right blow it up. The problem is that most web browsers cater for the n00b who is now a web professional. I mean try it. Try parsing an incorrectly formated XML document, or validating an XML document that doesn't comply with the specified XSD. The web internet (I say web because there is far more to the internet that websites) is full of badly built sites, hacked and broken markup and css. The only time we can complain about vendors not being standards compliant is when we ourselves become standards compliant.

It is kinda like slavery and prostitution, as long as there is demand there will be supply. So let us take responsibility for this one. Rap ourselves across the wrist and make a concerted effort to not build websites that pass FF compliance or IE compliance but pass the W3C compliance test.

The next biggest problem is the way we have turned a presentation layer into an application layer. I mean really, web 2 is great and all that but is it needed? We keep bloating things and then complaining when they don't work, never mind the fact that we break the entire document object model when we do this. Arb JS to perform Async operations, view state field to create stateful representation


IIf we want all this then we should rather stick to flash, or desktop applications. The web was designed as a presentation layer. Lets keep it to that

Man it's good to have you back Rabid Dog. I've missed your excellent contributions.

Disagree again. The web was intially designed as fail safe data transfer mechanism. Data transfer being the keyword, not "check out my super cool menus and animations!". Anyone remember SGML? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_G ... p_Language



There you have it folks "validation was never pursued". And there in lies the biggest flaw with with html and xhtml. Keep websites simple and they will work as I said previously, browsers should not render sites that do not comply to the specified DTD or XSD.


If xhmtl is a subset of XML it is not difficult to validate. I still maintain, if you cannot build it right, then don't build it.

Thanks atno, hopefully my contributions will continue to be helpful

Why does everyone have to knock IE everyone also suggests to me that I should use another however the only time I have had problems with IE is when there are other problems on the computer that causes files to be corrupt.

Don't take it personally. I have always taken the stance that all web browsers suck I use IE 8 all the time and FF for render testing, so don't feel alone.

I actually like IE8. Since it was released I actually have it open at all times in addition to FF and flip back and forth for a variety of reasons. One being, I like the "InPrivate" browsing for secure sites and transactions. I've never used any prior version of IE as much as I have IE8

It could be that I'm just set in my ways, but I just prefer Firefox. There are several add-ons that I just don't want to be without while I work or play.

That being said, we only support IE for our internal apps here at work, so I use IE7/8 extensively for testing. I hardly ever open it at home, though.

And there in lies the reason for this silly little debate It is all about preference. You grow up on Unix you won't switch because you are comfortable and productive with it. Same for other OSs, same for IDE's

But I still recon that browsers should bomb on invalid sites by doing some sort of DTD or XSD validation and I am sticking to my guns!

From Firefox 3.5 Release Notes:


Not trying to imply that this is a reason to use one over another, just was reading over the notes and made me think of your post.

While your argument is valid (by saying that web designers should code properly), Firefox was able to render more incorrectly coded sites then previous versions of IE. I may have misunderstood your argument there, but that is what I got from that huge paragraph This one ties in with the above quoted paragraph, and while I have done that before and tested on previous versions of IE, they managed to mess something up numerous of times. Not all the time, not even most of the time, but some of the time. While there could be bad web designers (and there are), browsers shouldn't be only for themselves... what good is a browsers if it's not user friendly?Before I say anything else, let me say what I think Web 2 is. I believe that Web 2 is where users interact with a site... like this forum. I would say that user interaction with the site is a good thing... without it, there wouldn't be ozzu.com, forums or anything else like that... just news site and how-tos posted by administrators and things that were mailed to administrator either by e-mail or by mail.Now it's my turn to disagree. JavaScript is easier to learn

Seriously though, while Flash is great and all (it is), it could get a little difficult to slow learners like me. I would prefer JavaScript over Flash. While that could be "bad designing practices" to you, it's really not that bad (unless I totally misunderstood your argument there ).
Is that what you think what I'm for? The 'web candy' or the 'eye catchers'? That's funny, because most people say my site is 'boring'.
That is what I was aiming at. (Besides the joke that nobody got (Probably because it was poorly worded)).

I said that because I've used previous versions of IE and everytime, I would have to make a hack for IE to make my site look right, while my site looks relatively the same in all other browsers (By that I mean Opera, Firefox and Safari (I did forget to check some other browsers... no offense to other browsers and other browser-users).

My experience with other IE's made me biased against IE8 and believe it had compliance problems as well (like other earlier versions of IE's). I didn't even update my IE to IE* (It's still IE7), and that is because I don't use IE anymore... I'm now using Mozilla Firefox and sticking to it.

I can't possibly agree with you more on this. XHTML syntax errors that violate a DTD should punch developers in the face in the same manner with which a missing semicolon in C++ does.



I think you did misunderstand his argument. Just because something is easier to learn doesn't make it the right tool for a particular application domain. Web developers are trying to push HTML/Javascript too far in order to jury-rig it into acting like a full-blown desktop application, when there are already plenty of other, much better tools suited for the task. Flex/Flash/AIR, etc. Bad design practices are bad regardless of who's doing the actual development.