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[mr. xsism]

read the news at www.osdever.net


i might just put such a sign up at least warning IE users. There are EXEs of FF that dont require installing btw and can be used on a CD or USB stick even, but meh, it's like why use FedEx when Post mail will work fine? Why? Because FedEx is more reliable.

Firefox will forever be a better product than IE, because it works the way it is expected to.

[osm]

The forums will display correctly in IE 6 and above at a minimum resolution of 800x600.

Whether IE sucks or not, there's no reason to punish users who use it.

[bubach]

You know that you can have div's set to a minimum width, and still have it expand if the resolution is higher, right?

[Eero Ränik]

i might just put such a sign up at least warning IE users. There are EXEs of FF that dont require installing btw and can be used on a CD or USB stick even, but meh, it's like why use FedEx when Post mail will work fine? Why? Because FedEx is more reliable.

Firefox will forever be a better product than IE, because it works the way it is expected to.

Hmm, you've got quite a hatred going on against IE. I'm using IE mostly because I'm efficient with it. Over the years of use I've learned many shortcuts and tricks to help speed up finding information. Now, it may not be standard-compliant, but for the end user it works exactly as expected. And since IE7 will most likely comply to both HTML and CSS standards, you'll have nothing to rant about. Firefox may be better than IE, but certainly not because of the reason you outlined in your post.

Say, you want, for any reason, to send a holiday postcard to someone living in the same town. Are you really going to use FedEx for that?

[mr. xsism]

i might just put such a sign up at least warning IE users. There are EXEs of FF that dont require installing btw and can be used on a CD or USB stick even, but meh, it's like why use FedEx when Post mail will work fine? Why? Because FedEx is more reliable.

Firefox will forever be a better product than IE, because it works the way it is expected to.

Hmm, you've got quite a hatred going on against IE. I'm using IE mostly because I'm efficient with it. Over the years of use I've learned many shortcuts and tricks to help speed up finding information. Now, it may not be standard-compliant, but for the end user it works exactly as expected. And since IE7 will most likely comply to both HTML and CSS standards, you'll have nothing to rant about. Firefox may be better than IE, but certainly not because of the reason you outlined in your post.

Say, you want, for any reason, to send a holiday postcard to someone living in the same town. Are you really going to use FedEx for that?

don't mind me, we're speaking from 2 different perspectives, user and designer. IE just doesnt render properly.

[chasetec]

Firefox will forever be a better product than IE, because it works the way it is expected to.

Actually isn't Opera the only browser that passes the latest CSS ACID test?

http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html for the curious

[Solar]

i might just put such a sign up at least warning IE users.

Please don't. It's annoying as hell. If you set up a webpage for the general public, you should honor that this same "general public" uses IE in >50% of cases...

There are EXEs of FF that dont require installing btw and can be used on a CD or USB stick even...

We had that argument several times. It's nice that Firefox is that great and that there are no-install executables, but for some people, that's still not an option.

...it's like why use FedEx when Post mail will work fine? Why? Because FedEx is more reliable.

Ah, but there's no FedEx available where I live, post mail works just fine, is cheaper than anybody else, and UPS plain sucks when you cannot receive the delivery in person...

When FedEx and Firefox work for you, great. But you wouldn't nail your mailbox shut just because you don't send via post mail, would you?

Firefox will forever be a better product than IE, because it works the way it is expected to.

The firewall admins in my company expect people to use the preinstalled IE 6 (customized company version), and using any other client software requires a special permit or will be reported.

Come on. This forum works with IE, the Wiki works with IE, thousands of other forums work with IE, so it cannot really be that hard. I am with you in your dislike for all things Microsoft, but not catering for IE is so very GNUish...

[gaf]

Come on. This forum works with IE, the Wiki works with IE, thousands of other forums work with IE, so it cannot really be that hard.

I'm sure that they could make the forum work perfectly fine with IE - it would just cost them even more time. In my opinion the question thus really is, whether it's worth investing so much time and effort in supporting legacy software, especially with the IE7 release being anytime soon. As there're still too many users running IE, one of course can't completly simply ignore the browser. I however don't see why the guys at banafide should bother about any non-critial problem related to IE (@Ryu: just maximize the window ).

It's by the way kind of funny to see the language lawyer of this forum defending a product that effectivly forces web developers to write hacky code. You could aswell ask a C programmer to make his code run on some ancient compiler that doesn't yet support the whole language standard, and maybe also gets some of the C library functions wrong..

regards,
gaf

[Kemp]

You could aswell ask a C programmer to make his code run on some ancient compiler that doesn't yet support the whole language standard, and maybe also gets some of the C library functions wrong..

Heh, to my understanding if you take away "ancient" and replace C with C++ then you're describing (almost?) every current C++ compiler out there

[Solar]

I however don't see why the guys at banafide should bother about any non-critial problem related to IE (@Ryu: just maximize the window ).

I don't see why the guys at bonafide bother about writing proprietary forum software...

It's by the way kind of funny to see the language lawyer of this forum defending a product that effectivly forces web developers to write hacky code. You could aswell ask a C programmer to make his code run on some ancient compiler...

Language lawyers want people to write code that is as compatible as possible. I agree IE is a border case, but it's a border case that still has >50% market share. And as Kemp said, I don't write my C++ code using "export" either - it's the standard, and I'd really like compiler vendors to support it, but as long as it makes my code incompatible with the mainstream compilers, it would perhaps make a statement but render my code pretty useless, so I won't use it.

[Candy]

i might just put such a sign up at least warning IE users.

Please don't. It's annoying as hell. If you set up a webpage for the general public, you should honor that this same "general public" uses IE in >50% of cases...

Dito the other way around. When I'm not using mainstream product XYZ I really don't want to be bothered and told about it every twenty seconds. When somebody else is using some product that is KNOWN to be incompatible, you should warn them once and be done with it. If you won't fix IE, place a single warning screen on the site and place a cookie so it won't show again.

The firewall admins in my company expect people to use the preinstalled IE 6 (customized company version), and using any other client software requires a special permit or will be reported.

Come on. This forum works with IE, the Wiki works with IE, thousands of other forums work with IE, so it cannot really be that hard. I am with you in your dislike for all things Microsoft, but not catering for IE is so very GNUish...

Dito here for the first bit.

The second: did you ever actually try to get something properly working? Something remotely advanced in content? I've messed with javascript for a few times, css, website design and so on. It took me 2 hours to get the CSS right for the w3c validator, Opera and Firefox. It took me some 4 extra hours to get IE close, wrecking all the others. After 2 hours more I got it working in all but the validator, since IE wouldn't work within the limits of the standard, and the validator (obviously) not outside of the limits.

I strongly advocate developing something according to the standard there is, only at the last moment possibly considering hacking it to work in some common product. For you Solar, why do you think the very first thing in pretty much any portable OS is a HAL? So you can skip the hacking. What if all X86es were equal except for the one most people used without a choice (*cough* dell label perhaps... *cough*)? Would you make it work on generic x86 and then perhaps fix the dell stuff you're not even aiming for, or would you make the dell stuff most important?

I think you're mainly advocating IE compatibility because it hits YOU. You're going to be struck if you can't check the forum when using something you can't choose not to. Don't let your personal feelings take the upper hand when reasoning for a group.

It's by the way kind of funny to see the language lawyer of this forum defending a product that effectivly forces web developers to write hacky code. You could aswell ask a C programmer to make his code run on some ancient compiler...

Language lawyers want people to write code that is as compatible as possible. I agree IE is a border case, but it's a border case that still has >50% market share.

>50% generic market share, of which quite a percentage is because of retarded support departments that rather have a known security hole than an unknown one.

I, as language lawyer, prefer if you write code that is both standards-compliant and working, and only if you can't get both write it with an #ifdef for the compiler around it, and a note claiming it's a hack for the compiler. Preferably as last resort, after getting it working.

[bubach]

For a pretty simple design as the osdever forums (compared to what you can do) it's pretty strange that IE makes that much trubble.

And as I said in a prevoius post:
"You know that you can have div's set to a minimum width, and still have it expand if the resolution is higher, right?"

This means that even if the window is really small, you'll get a scrollbar instead of a wrecked design.

I do quite some website stuff, and can easily get pissed becasue of IE, but most of the time some fix is known and you just have to find it with your google skills.

[Candy]

Shameless copy/paste from slashdot.com on the exact same subject:

All of these are pretty bad for web developers, but they have knock-on effects that end-users suffer from, but don't understand. For example, when was the last time you ran across a bug on a website? Did you ever consider that a web developer would have got around to fixing it before you had trouble with it if he hadn't been busy trying to work around a bug in Internet Explorer?

The Acid2 test is merely a collection of all kinds of ways in which browsers screw up support for particular specifications. The idea is that it contains lots of things that browsers get wrong which cause hassle for web developers, and that browser developers can use it as a check-list for bugs. It's also a gimmick to raise awareness for these bugs to put pressure on the browser developers to fix them.

And you know what? They're pretty right. If the guys making the new forum had concentrated on getting it right in IE, they wouldn't have had a forum for anybody here to complain about.

[chasetec]

Disclaimer: I run my own osdev forums so I think I have some insights to all of this but my opinions might be biased.

If the guys making the new forum had concentrated on getting it right in IE, they wouldn't have had a forum for anybody here to complain about.

Take a look at the latest posts on the osdever forums. There are plenty of issues still that appear in every browser. They have how many IE problems? One? The problem is not IE(which should be supported 100% for a public website), the problem is trying to develop custom forum software. I think it's a bad idea to develop your own forum software. I've worked on 3 different custom developed pieces of software for the http://www.osdev.org forums. I've made all the same mistakes before and I've come to the conclusion that forum software should be developed by people dedicated to writing forum software.

I converted to a fairly standard forum package(phpBB) recently and not only has it been easier for me to admin but the usage of my forums has doubled in the last month and a half. As far as supporting IE goes I've noticed that phpBB comes with a seperate CSS file for IE but do I care? No. The only IE issue I've had to deal with is a transparent png. IE 6 doesn't render the transparency correctly but I caused(and can live with) this issue when I modified a graphic to look better on an optional dark blue color theme that I added.

I understand that osdever tried phpBB before and it got hacked on them so that probably factors in to creating their own forums but phpBB is much better security wise now. Besides any public web software is going to have security issues. I just schedule daily backups and database dumps and if there is a security problem I would just wait a short amount of time for phpbb to develop a fix and restore my backups. Most people that get burned on phpBB go buy vBulletin, not try to write their own software.

Personally I think the forum problem has been solved already and AJAX doesn't really add anything to a web forum. But then again I might be able to say the operating system problem has already been solved If someone really wanted to design new AJAX/Javascript forum software it would be good for a AJAX community(maybe http://ajaxdever.net) but an osdev community shouldn't have to deal with this(again learned from causing similar problems myself). I had zero complaints when I switched to standard forum software.

Of course all this is philosophical and more people need to be posting bug reports on the osdever forums.

[Kemp]

Agreed that "off the shelf" software will in most cases be substantially better than the home-grown alternative, if only because they have a long head-start on fixing the same things you'll come across, and they probably worked on it full-time as well.