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PhillyKev

Mozilla vs. IE ???

By PhillyKev, in The Bonfire

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Blahr    0

Blahr
Quote


My boss doesn't care about what is cool on the computer. Neither do any of my salaried coworkers.



Please dont assume that I feel as I do because of the cool factor (a somewhat insulting assumption) or because I'm some kind of tree hugging liberal. I am most definately not. I do CARE though, for whatever that means.
When deciding what to use I take the following things into account in order of priority:

1. Does it get the job done?
2. Is it expandable/scalable?
3. Is it reasonably supportable?
4. Is it cost effective?
5. Were any consumers or small furry animals harmed while creating or
or marketing the product?

I look for a yes to the first 4 and a no to number 5. So far I have been able to meet all
of my companies needs without having to compromise on any of these 5 things.

Going with Microsoft gives: (my personal experience here, your milage may vary)

1. Yes..when it works right
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Not by a long shot
5. Most definately

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GigaBuist    0

GigaBuist
I'm a Mozilla bigot I suppose; I stuck with NS4.x way too long and when Mozilla became usable I was all over it, somewhere around M18 if memory serves. I pretty much had to use Mozilla/Netscape though because my home desktops have been Linux since 1998 which is around the time I started doing web development and actually getting paid for it.

Now, back in 1998 development sucked. There were no good standards really do to the things people wanted to do then so you ended up with a very hacky looking HTML to get IE4.0 and NS4.x to do the same things. Thankfully that's not the case anymore -- it's fairly easy to use the same code and same logic in any decent recent browser. Bugs exist in all of them so you should work around them only when needed.

When I did web development the thought of people making an "IE only" project out of something that didn't need to be was absurd. It still is absurd and here's why:

How in the world do you know what IE 7 will work like? If you're just fumbling around in the dark how do you know if your JavaScript's manipulation of the DOM is even reasonable? If you code to documented and ratified standards you have a pretty good idea that they will be around in the next version. Using two or three seperate browsers helps to ensure that people agree with how you interpreted the specs and validators will reinforce that.

If you code an "IE only" site you've really coded for what you can test with and that's it. You don't really have a clue if sp2 for IE6 will break things.... and you probably coded to IE on Windows only -- the Mac version is an entirely different beast. They share the name Internet Explorer and that is it.

On a corporate desktop though you'll almost certainly need IE. I've seen plenty of in-house apps that are buggy as shit and only work with IE version X patchlevel Y.

Lets say your app works when it's done on current IE and the then released Mozilla. Maybe 3 years down the road IE8 will be entirely unusable with your project -- at least you still have Mozilla! You can't keep more than one copy of IE on a Windows box because of the brain damaged design that made it part of the OS. You can keep multiple copies of Mozilla running on your machine though. This scenario only holds up in the event that today's standards are tossed by the side and future versions stop supporting them. It's not likely, but it could happen.

If sites are coded to standards it's a reasonable assumption that anybody on any platform at any given date in the future will be able to pull up software that can use it. When you tie your development/testing/release cycle to a single product without regards to the standards set forth by the community the W3C you're really just shooting yourself in the foot.

Would you throw the STL away when doing C++ work for some custom flavor-of-the-day replacement? I hope not -- unless you had a really good reason and you knew that library would be around for some time. Would you assume in your C project that 'int' will always be a 32 bit integer? Scratch that ... most people are dumb enough to do that. You shouldn't though. Actually most people would be dumb enough to write C++ with alll disregard for portability in the future ... and we all know that way too many "developers" think that IE is the One True Browser out there.

I once worked at a web development shop (2002-2003) where I was the only one out of 12 techs that had a Mozilla or Netscape install on their machines. Hell I had a WebTV emulator just to see if things would work on that platform.

"But... it works with the IE install on my box!" just doesn't cut it with clients that are out there. Throw IE in the trash and never ever use it (if you're a developer) unless you need to test your own work or need it for your daily work. Turn it into your 2nd class browser. You'll save yourself time in the long run. Turn your thinking the other way around and you'll stop seeing problems as Mozilla problems but IE problems.

Here's one for you developers out there. I'll attach an HTML file for you to save. Evaluate what it should do -- it's really simple. When you click the button it should show you what 2+2 is, right? Right? It will -- if you're browser isn't a braindead pile of dung. IE gets it wrong -- dead plain wrong. Why?

Because the W3C standards for DOM (I forget which level) specifiy a recalc() method off the document object! And, IE being the good little fellow that it is, assumes that you want to naturally call stuff hanging off document... so it calls document.recalc() to rebuild your in-memory DOM tree. That's just horse shit.

Does Mozilla do stuff wrong? Yes. Does IE? Yes. Code to standards and backpedal from there. Test with multiple code streams (time permits this. Stop bitching -- you WILL save time in the long run and you'll learn what NOT to do).

I'm going to blow a gasket the next time some web monkey says, "But, coding for Mozilla is haaaaaard!". I call bullshit... coding for IE is hard too when you assume your browser will do something logical 100% of the time. At least when there's a Mozilla bug -- you can look it up and SEE what it is, what it affects, who's working on it, when it's slated to be fixed, etc. You can'd do that with IE.... you just take a crapshot in the dark with regards to whether or not you've found a bug that will be fixed or if it really is a bug.

Developers that pull stupid IE-only tricks are just hurting themselves. Your code is no easier than standards compliant code and it's usually a heck of a lot harder to follow. No, you cannot embed stuff between and Stop doing that.... no you cannot just interject a