Richard “All I Need to Know About the Internet I Learned By Top-Posting with Outlook and Surfing with IE” Morochove writes, in the Toronto Star, 2004.07.18, p. D2 (not online):
When it became as good as Netscape’s browser… Explorer killed off competing Web browsers. Or did it? […] Netscape 7.1 is loaded with features – overloaded for my tastes…. Unless your ISP is AOL, you won’t make use of all the features of this sluggish, bloated browser. However… Mozilla [is] a full-featured Internet application that’s better suited than Netscape for non–AOL users….
If the thought of picking and choosing from a long list of browser extensions for downloading makes your eyes glaze over, Firefox is not for you.
Except it works fine right out of the box. What extensions do you actually need?
Opera has been around for years…. [I]t comes with useful features Internet Explorer lacks… you can save a collection of Web pages, opening the group later. […]
The open-in-tabs feature is easily found, even in Moz and Firefox. (No mention of tabs per se, mind – one of several features sufficient unto themselves to justify switching.)
Some Web sites will not display properly unless they’re viewed using Internet Explorer. That’s more a function of the Web-site designer than the browser.
Correct!
Internet Explorer is more forgiving of Web sites that don’t conform to the World Wide Web consortium’s (W3) [sic] standards.
No, that’s not true. The Gecko- and KDE-based browsers have a better implementation of quirks mode vs. standards-compliance mode. (So does IE for Macintosh, actually.) Compliant pages look better on those browsers and noncompliant pages generally do not look any worse, save for the counterexample Morochove notes:
Some Web sites are specifically designed [not to] work well with other browsers. Some of the worst offenders are the Web sites of financial institutions.
Indeed. But isn’t it curious how tiny North Shore Credit Union could produce a fully-compliant site using only two developers? (Go, Scott Baldwin – and mazel tov on the new baby.)
Wouldn’t it be interesting for this esteemed columnist to actually tackle – and coherently explain – Web standards to his readership? Could be a challenge, given that his column is entitled Computer Watch and barely ever mentions a device that doesn’t run Microsoft system software. But he’s halfway there.
Want to come out to our next Webstandards.TO boozeup, Richard? You’re buying.
(Cf.: Dump Explorer; Fisking Paul Boutin.)