The Bastard Love-Child of Opera and Firefox
Usually referred to as Internet Explorer, or Internet Destroyer, has nearly reached completion so now you can download a beta version to see exactly how your site, and the sites you visit break. Now let’s all take a deep breath and give a w00t w00t because now we can plan ahead and try to fix those annoying little bugs.
Surprisingly enough my site didn’t break, and all those annoying little bleeps telling me that my own site was trying to install malicious content on my computer went away (say w00t for me) and my .png’s no longer have an ugly grey background. Don’t celebrate yet because IE still messes up margins and padding, yet it’s not as bad as it was before.
Maybe it’s because I’ve dumbed my styles down enough that not even IE dares to destroy them. Or maybe IE has just gotten better, I don’t know, I still have to apply hacks, but for the most part it’s not to the magnitude that I’ve had to before.
That’s where the fun stops kiddies, IE looks like the mentally challenged bastard love-child of Opera and Firefox. No don’t laugh, I’m not kidding. I’m pretty sure that when it came time to design the browser IE’s designers sat down in front of two big-ass screens that had screenshots of Firefox and Opera on them and asked themselves exactly how they could rip them off. They took the bloated crap-fest from Opera and the… actually I’m not entirely certain what they took from the original Firefox because I’ve only just installed it. But they seem to have ripped off quite a few Firefox extensions (Tab Mix Plus, for example), so they’re still on my shit-list for that.
Overall I’m impressed that they seemed to have actually tried this time. However, like just about everything Microsoft does, they’ve failed yet again. It’s visually as well as feature-bloated, it rips off two of the most popular browsers (three if they’ve stolen from Safari, I don’t have a Mac) and messes with the default browser layout. Which is another sore point with me, I’m used to browsing with the basic Back | Forward | Refresh | Stop | Home setup, IE changes all that and it will take a bit of getting used to for most people, I can’t even begin to imagine the trouble older, less web-savvy, people are going to have trying to figure it out. Perhaps alternative browsers will rise in popularity? Probably not, Microsoft has made the new theme shiny enough that it will probably entice more than a few people into going back to IE.
This is about as close as I’m ever going to come to saying something nice about a Microsoft product that isn’t Office. IE is still, by far, one of the worst browsers out there. If not for incompatibility with properly designed sites then for the messed up design the designers decided looked really cool. I’m definitely not going back to using IE, I like my extensions and the safety (think blanket) of Firefox, if I were going to switch I’d more than likely switch to Opera, then Netscape and finally, as a last resort, IE.
You know what the funniest thing about all this is? All those IE users who like to use the excuse that they don’t want to switch to a new browser because of the learning curve are actually going to have to learn a “new browser”. Hoorah, there is justice in the world!
In other news there are a few changes: I’ve removed the skins, changed the default to another pink theme (because I was unhappy with the sloppiness of the last one) in keeping with going pink for October, two Stylish themes for Fanfiction.net and mls.ca as well as a mini-tutorial on theming your forum have been added to For You.
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Hi I'm Becky, often referred to as The Knitting Hillbilly and Pussybear, owner of this site and general nuisance. I'm a knitter, serial complainer, known whistle blower and I run the ever popular
Although IE7 has added a couple of new bugs of its own, it seems to have fixed enough of the existing ones that I’m now worried about whether my recent site layouts, having been tested in IE7, break in IE6. (I wish I could install more than one version of IE at a time.) It seems to support min-width etc., which is nice, and of course its text rendering is beautiful.
It remains to be seen how many (non-geek, common or garden) IE6 users will upgrade. Some people will presumably stick with their current version until they actually buy a new computer…
#1 Gemma Oct 19, 17:57 Permalink