Poll on browsers

[espresso_addict]

Interested in what people are using for web browsing these days, as Firefox & IE seem to have more incompatibilities than I'd realised. I'm particularly interested in what you use for recreation, rather than work. I promise not to sell the information to anyone...

Comments

[cdybedahl]

Er... Shouldn't Firefox at least be in the list? According to the Google Analytics data for my personal archive, 33% of the visitors use Firefox while only 2% use Mozilla.

[espresso_addict]

Er, showing my complete ignorance here (which is why I've got myself into such a mess), but I thought Mozilla = Firefox?

[cdybedahl]

Ah. No, unfortunately it's not that simple. Mozilla-the-browser is the near-dead one-with-everything huge thing that was Mozilla-the-project's first actual product. It was later split into the Mozilla Firefox web browser, the Mozilla Thunderbird mailreader and the Mozilla Sunbird calendar. For practical purposes today, "Firefox" is the webbrowser and "Mozilla" is the entire project that develops it

[espresso_addict]

Ah, thanks. Are your usage stats for a general sample or for fandom? I've heard fair few people on my f'list mentioning using Opera.

The trouble I have, of course, is having written a couple of sites for IE6, finding when I switched to Firefox (on being forced to 'upgrade' to IE7 and hating it) that they'd broken in all sorts of strange ways. I don't really have the energy to rewrite them from scratch, unfortunately.

I pity people who have to do this for a living.

[aldabra]

I also use Internet Explorer, but only if I want to have another gmail account or LJ account active simultaneously or if something crashes firefox; I haven't ticked it because that's not very often.

[espresso_addict]

Yes, I find there are a few things that IE works for and Firefox for some reason doesn't.

[mraltariel]

Most of my machines run flavours of IE8 betas/ctps
A few run IE7

All of them have Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 installed, but I bloody hate the way it renders pages, even on its own websites. I can't put my finger on why; it is purely qualitative.

I occasionally dip into Opera and am left disappointed. My colleague in the next office uses nothing else, though.

[espresso_addict]

I hadn't even considered IE8 (curses MS under breath). I didn't mind IE5.5 and IE6, but hated IE7 on sight, largely because it renders all the text bold & fuzzy for some reason. It might perhaps be a monitor difference?

I've never even seen Opera, or for that matter Safari.

[the_wild_iris]

IE7 has smooth, anti-aliased text rendering, which on a lower-res monitor (I don't know what kind you have) might end up grainy. I think you can turn it off, though.

Safari's available for Windows now, though I haven't yet managed to download it successfully.

[espresso_addict]

I seem to be working on 1280x1024, which may well be low these days. It doesn't look anti-aliased, it looks like old-style Guardian newsprint, after it's been thoroughly thumbed.

Ah, thanks, that might be it -- I've turned off ClearType and the font display is now much cleaner.

[the_wild_iris]

Firefox for browsing, both at home and at work. I wouldn't want to do without my extensions now. I only use other browsers for testing or if a site is just too broken to work in anything but IE. Though I've thought about trying the W3C's experimental browser/editor, Amaya.

[espresso_addict]

I converted to Firefox when it became impossible to go on using IE6 (I detest IE7). It's a shame Firefox and IE are so different in the way they handle pages.

[the_wild_iris]

IE7 is a bit better since it's more standards-compliant than IE6, though still not as standards-compliant as Firefox, Safari, etc. IE8 (still in beta) is meant to be more standards-compliant still; unfortunately, Microsoft fixed things in ways that weren't compatible with coding workarounds for IE7, which has caused designers much grief...

[hafren]

I don't use IE unless a site absolutely demands it (which some form-fillers do) because it infested one of my PCs with trojans that could only be got rid of with a re-instal. Otherwise Firefox.

[espresso_addict]

Shudder.