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The Future of the Web: New Browsers

Discussion in 'Archive: Fan Design - Sites and Graphics' started by Grimby , Sep 23, 2010.

  1. Grimby

    Grimby Technical Consultant & Former Head Admin star 7 Staff Member Administrator

    Registered:
    Apr 22, 2000
    It seems like everyone has a beta of their new internet browser out these days. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera are all showcasing their future in the form of downloadable beta releases. How do they compare? Check it out here:

    PC Magazine: Browser Betas: The Future of Web Surfing
    Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all have beta browsers available for download. Here's a look at the Web of the near future.

    According to the article, the future of web browsing looks to be taking a more minimalist approach in regards to how much of the window is reserved for the browser controls vs. the page viewing area (thanks Chrome), feature more security, run more efficiently on your computer (thanks IE), support the all-new HTML5, and load pages faster (thanks Chrome and Safari).

    That last one is divided up into two categories: How fast the browser can process JavaScript (our IGN-based forums use a large dose of JavaScript to load the banners and custom header stuff like forum mods and drop down menus), and also graphics acceleration for things like WebGL and other new-fangled HTML5 features that our current browsers aren't built to handle. In their current betas, Chrome has a sizable lead in the JavaScript speed tests, with Opera and IE close behind. On the graphics acceleration tests, IE and Firefox are way ahead of the rest of the pack. You can probably expect all these browsers to have similar stats on the speed tests when they are finally released.

    Which begs the question, when will these browsers be released?

     
    Grimby , Sep 23, 2010
    #1
  2. darth_nemisis

    darth_nemisis Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    May 15, 2004
    This is pretty exciting. The competition is leading to better browsers, which is pretty awesome. I am digging the whole minimalistic approach. I have been using Chrome a lot lately, over Firefox which I use to use all the time. As such, I have become familiar with the combined search/address bar and the tabs being on top. The fresh Firefox look is nice and I like the Firefox button; and I look forward to using the new IE (need to get off of this piece of crap computer in order to use the beta). I've hated IE for a long time so I am looking forward to seeing how Microsoft have improved their browser.
     
    darth_nemisis, Oct 2, 2010
    #2
  3. Darth McClain

    Darth McClain Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Feb 5, 2000
    The new Chrome sounds interesting. I've been using that as my primary browser over the past few weeks over Firefox, and have really enjoyed it. The lack of "home" button is sorta strange, though.
     
    Darth McClain, Oct 2, 2010
    #3
  4. Kev-Mas_Colcha

    Kev-Mas_Colcha Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Dec 15, 2002
    As I am on Linux and am able to do this, I run Firefox 3.6.10 with Profile Guided Optimization, which is essentially technology that makes browsing faster due to the browser being optimized for the exact model of CPU you are running.
     
    Kev-Mas_Colcha, Oct 4, 2010
    #4
  5. Grimby

    Grimby Technical Consultant & Former Head Admin star 7 Staff Member Administrator

    Registered:
    Apr 22, 2000
    So far I've had a chance to try out the new iterations of IE and Firefox.

    IE9 was okay, better than the last version but still not my cup of tea (too much Microsoft influence I guess :p). Firefox 4 though I really like. A lot of the new features seem to have been copied from Chrome, but I'm fine with that because I like Chrome too.

    The best part about both these browsers is the increase in speed, and you can tell the difference immediately. All web pages seem to load much faster, even the ones bogged down with heavy doses of JavaScript (like the JC ;)).

    Anyone else had a chance to check out any of the new browsers?

     
    Grimby , May 3, 2011
    #5
  6. Salty

    Salty Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Dec 24, 1998
    I use IE9 and FF4 on a daily basis. I rarely use Chrome.

    I'm not a big fan of IE9's version of the omnibar. FF4 seems to work really well so far.
     
    Salty, May 3, 2011
    #6
  7. Lexi

    Lexi Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Oct 9, 2002
    I've experienced some trouble with FF4. It's really slow sometimes and eats a lot of CPU. It also crashes maybe once a week. Anyone else had this problem?
     
    Lexi, May 4, 2011
    #7
  8. Salty

    Salty Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Dec 24, 1998
    I used to get that a lot with FF 3.5 but so far I haven't had any trouble with FF 4. The only slowdown that I notice is when I'm exporting my bookmarks. The browser will freeze until the export is completed. I haven't had any trouble with multiple tabs being open.
     
    Salty, May 4, 2011
    #8
  9. Teegirloo

    Teegirloo Jedi Grand Master star 6

    Registered:
    May 26, 2005
    I actually had that problem. FF4 made my laptop freeze. Infact it made me unable to use any other browsers as well. So I had to uninstall FF4 and then go to a previous restore point. It took a while but after all that i was able to get on IE and download FF 3.6. That has always worked fine for me.
     
    Teegirloo, May 25, 2011
    #9
  10. Magellan_the_Cat

    Magellan_the_Cat Jedi Padawan star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 21, 2003
    I was posting and playing Play-by-post games on WotC's website. Everything was fine until they "improved" their design, at which point the side-scroll function stopped working, and anything that wasn't on the initial view (including text and graphics) was cut off.
    So I tried Chrome and ran into a couple problems.
    Then I tried FireFox, which worked fine for that.
    Unfortunately, FireFox doesn't seem to like showing white text on a black background inside of a table. Why is this a problem? Well, that represents a good portion of my personal website. Short of changing my color scheme or removing all the tables, does anyone have a suggestion to get around this problem?

    Thoughts?
     
    Magellan_the_Cat, Aug 9, 2011
    #10
  11. Grimby

    Grimby Technical Consultant & Former Head Admin star 7 Staff Member Administrator

    Registered:
    Apr 22, 2000
    Do you have an example you could post? I don't know that I've run into that.
     
    Grimby , Aug 9, 2011
    #11
  12. Magellan_the_Cat

    Magellan_the_Cat Jedi Padawan star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 21, 2003
    Sure. http://www.elasticsmiledesign.info/html/mayaanimation8.html
    There is a lot of text on this page. You have to highlight it to see.
     
    Magellan_the_Cat, Aug 9, 2011
    #12
  13. Grimby

    Grimby Technical Consultant & Former Head Admin star 7 Staff Member Administrator

    Registered:
    Apr 22, 2000
    What you probably need to do is set a doctype for your pages so that the browser knows what type of HTML you are using. I use an add-on in Firefox called Firebug, which is telling me that there is no style information for the text in those tables. Now, you obviously do have the text color specified inside the body tag using the text attribute, but because the text attribute is deprecated, Firefox is probably ignoring it. (Though I'm not exactly sure why it isn't ignoring the bgcolor attribute as well.)

    So off the top of my head, there are two options you can use to fix this. The first option (and I recommend you do this regardless) is to set the doctype for your pages. All you have to do is add this to the very beginning of your pages before the html tag:
    <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

    The other thing you can do is use the style attribute instead of using bgcolor and text. I.E. change this:
    <body text="#FFFFFF" bgcolor="#000000">
    To this:
    <body style="color:#FFFFFF; background-color:#000000;">


    That should do the trick.

     
    Grimby , Aug 10, 2011
    #13
  14. Magellan_the_Cat

    Magellan_the_Cat Jedi Padawan star 4

    Registered:
    Jul 21, 2003
    Indeed, that seems to have fixed it.
    What can I say... I learned to 'code' html about 13 years ago.
    So I'm a little dated.
    Never occurred to me that they would make the new system not recognize old tried&true tags.

    Now, why is the text so friggin' huge?
    That's supposed to be H4!!! Damn, that's bigger than I normally see H1.
     
    Magellan_the_Cat, Aug 11, 2011
    #14
  15. Grimby

    Grimby Technical Consultant & Former Head Admin star 7 Staff Member Administrator

    Registered:
    Apr 22, 2000
    It's not really looking that big from what I'm seeing. Well, compared to the title at the top anyway. If you don't specify a size, it uses whatever your browser decides is the default size (which can vary from person to person depending on their screen and browser settings). You could either remove the H4 tag, or perhaps define a size using the size attribute like so:
    <h4 align="left" size="3">

    (And I'll just note here that the size attribute is also deprecated in more modern HTML4/XHTML/HTML5, but since you're using the HTML 4.01 Transitional doctype (i.e. telling the browser that you're using older code), it will still work.)
     
    Grimby , Aug 11, 2011
    #15
  16. mamoonkay

    mamoonkay Jedi Youngling

    Registered:
    Aug 18, 2011
    Exciting!!! The competition is leading to better browsers Every Day. I like it.
     
    mamoonkay, Aug 22, 2011
    #16