Moving to Firebird/Phoenix

I moved to Firebird about a month ago.  I've had some sort of gecko based browser on my machine for a while, mainly for testing out web pages and making sure they worked in non-IE browsers.  After a while I found that if I designed solely for Gecko browsers, then the sites would look fine in Opera/Gecko and usually IE.  The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS. 

The other day I went and set Firebird to be my default browser.  I deleted the IE link in quicklaunch bar.  The only IE I use is when an app embeds the IE control in the app.  See the this post from Charles Cook on embeding Gecko in .NET apps.

The day IE 6/7/8 actually renders css/edge I may switch back.  Until then, Firebird is just a better browser. 

Edit: for comfirmation, the max-height stab was done in sarcasm.  I guess IE is having trouble rendering the <sarcasm> tags :-).  My point is that fixing CSS bugs is not something done in a service pack, you need IE 6.5 if you are changing the way it renders elements.  IE 6.5 doesn't appear to be coming our way.

3 Comments

  • &lt;quote&gt;The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS&lt;/quote&gt;





    I think that statement is a little misleading. MS have leaked information that they wont be upgrading IE as the underlying OS is holding them back. However, in my mind that points to the user interface of the actual application, not the ability to render HTML. The actual CSS parser and rendering code is not part of the OS and if mozilla can do it, so can IE. MS just can't be arsed fixing the browser to standards compliance. After all, when you own 90% of the market, why bother, you are the standard.

  • &lt;quote&gt;The only problems I had where simply bugs in the IE CSS rendering engine, and it looks like implementing something like max-width can't be done without a change to the underlying OS&lt;/quote&gt;





    I hope that was sarcasm/disdain for the MS view of &quot;we own the browser war, why bother fixing our product&quot;.

  • We need a website like Eric's that will validate a browsers' CSS compliance. That way, the next time somebody claims their browser is CSS1 or CSS2 or CSS3 compliant we have a way to validate it.

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