Web broswers Rants And Raves

mainly this post is about Firefox and Internet Explorer. Opera and Netscape I have never really found useful. Firefox is Netscape reborn anew, but the user interface designers have done a 10 times better job. I will list a small amount of rant and raves about the two browsers. Netscape I always felt the interface was/is too big and bulky, of course so was Mozilla until it split off into Firefox.. Netscape always seemed slow and just plain not user friendly. Opera I find not user friendly because it just seems too complex. That doesn't mean the interface is better. it just means that the user interface designers didn't simplify it enough. They all have done a massive amount of work on their browsers which is amazing but that doesn't mean it felt useable enough.

Now on to the main course, Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox. Some of this information will be about Firefox 1.5 and some of it will be about older versions.

USER INTERFACE
User Search
Internet Explorer has always had a reasonable usable interface, but Firefox has taken this to the next level. I for one have always hated dialog boxes. They pop up and just shout use me only, all eyes on me. Where in Firefox they have a nice neat bar at the bottom of the screen that lets you use it as needed. This is a nice change from the rather disturbing yell of a failed interface.

Alerts
when it comes to alerts both Internet Explorer and Firefox have got this one right, it has a nice non disturbing yellow bar that quietly sit at the top of the screen and says look there is something you should pay attention too but you can get back to me when you can. I applaud both the User Interface professionals of the Internet Explorer 6 and the Firefox teams for this design.

DESIGNING CSS
The move on the web is to use CSS for all your design and thus separate content from display. If some items are much harder in CSS this won't promote the use of CSS. My first annoyance is positioning

Positioning
In trying to align an element to the right or left inside of a container element proves to require more thought than just align=”left”. If you read a few websites they state you should just use float to move an element to the right or left in a container element.. Firefox adds extra space to the top of the element being floated and the container element. I find this both annoying and frustrating. Next you could try using margin to set it to the right side of the container element. I think Internet Explorer has it right, that when you push something all the way over it shouldn't shove the element out of the container element. So if you set a left margin to 100% then you just get your element placed to the right side of the container element. However in Firefox this would shove the element out side of the container element. Where in Internet Explorer it just makes the container element wider. This makes sense. A lot of the times I end up just using relative positioning and use something like margin 50%. That is if I don't want to absolute position everything.

Height
one of my biggest rants for a while was that Firefox wouldn't do height 100%. The work around was just a tiled background but in some cases you couldn't. When the background is already tiled for an effect, you can't just tiled the background for a work around. As of Firefox 1.5 They have fixed that issue and I for one am very happy with that. Internet Explorer never had this issue.

Pixels
Why can't pixels be the same size in both Internet Explorer and Firefox? This just gets on my nerves. Enough said.

GENERAL RANTS
HTML
Two elements that have some of the greatest uses are the div and the span. The div creates a divisor from another element and the span is something like a text span. If you use the span text it doesn't cause a new line but you can colour the text, etc. The limiting factor is that you can't set its width and height and if you use the div tag then you get a new line. What if you just want a set of text a precise width but not a new line? In this case a span or a div tag is not useful and since I'm trying not to use tables anymore, this seems to prove a less than easy task. You can always redesign your interface but this just seems to be a factor that proves annoying on many occasions.

For now this is it as far as it comes to rants and raves regarding browsers, maybe next time we'll cover Javascript.