1 RANT LOAD

[vakkotaur]

Okkay, so that IE is harfy isn't exactly news to anyone. At least it can be hammered, clobbered, and bludgeoned into not being as stupidly wide open as the defaults it arrives with would have it.

But doing that results in it whining about that having been done to it. I turned off ActiveX stuff for a reason, damnit. Let it be off! No. In its finite wisdom every page with ActiveX will not really load until the "helpful" dialog box saying I've turned ActiveX off and ActiveX won't run is dismissed. Damnit, I said OFF, and I flipping well mean OFF! Stop harassing me. Bugging me to turn ActiveX on won't work. I won't turn it on. But I will get irked.

And totally unrelated is the little gem of being unable to scroll if a chunk of text is highlighted. Not if any text is highlight, no, you can highlight a word or sentence, or maybe more. Or maybe more, sometimes. We don't dare have consistency. Not even irritating consistency. Instead an unpredictable irritation.

You may be asking why I want to scroll with something highlighted. Fine, it makes it easier to read or skim ahead and go back to a point. But whether I can scroll or not scroll should at least be consistent! And of course when I start writing about this I look for an example and can't find one... what gives? It happens not every time, just often enough to be irksome.

If I had a choice of a different browser in this instance, I would exercise it. I have a hard time imagining an alternative actually worse than IE. Thank you Microsoft. Get Lost.

Comments

Re: The water's fine over here.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

It's not a matter of platform, but what can get out through the proxy. Guess what kind of proxy?

At home I use Opera, pretty much whatever the platform is. I might try the linux browsers again once I have a faster linux box. They all felt slow (or seemed to have the wrong feature set...) last I tried. If I *must* use IE, I do have the Avant thing that uses the IE stuff but a better feature set. Alas Avant has a nasty problem here when I tried it - forms didn't work.

Jay showed me Safari on his iMac. Looks fairly nice, but I'd really want tabs, at least. I really have grown to loathe single-window only browsers, and not just IE (one thing Avant tries to fix). Of course I don't have any Mac hardware anyway, so it really doesn't matter.

Oh, and not running a security hole and/or annoyance generator is certainly a feature.

Re: The water's fine over here.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

Jay has an iMac? Wow. I assume he got it to try the Darwin underpinnings of Mac OS X.

Yes, every Mac news web site that has a message board has some complaint thread that Safari doesn't do tabbed browsing. Someone suggested using the bug-reporting feature to complain en masse. Someone else suggested that it's likely to show up in Safari since the feature now exists in Konqueror.

I'm not sure when the first mainstream tabbed browser came along, but the concept has caught on like wildfire. I would be inclined to say it's Opera, even though it's a slightly different execution of the concept. Mozilla certainly brought it to the fore with the open-source crowd.

Re: The water's fine over here.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Opera had MDI all along. Mozilla may have had actual tabs first. Opera now has all worlds, in a way. In MDI there is regular MDI and tab-like buttons (much like mIRC open channel selection buttons). Opera can do SDI, with multiple apparent instances. I don't think it can do MDI with 'Desktop Window' ability (I haven't tried the v.7 beta so I dunno if "something new has been added" in that area.)

Re: The water's fine over here.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

AAPL should bring CSS and HTML compliance up to par with Gecko in Safari.

I actually downloaded a Chimera nightly today. It's OK, and faster than mozilla, but I'm already missing some of the features Mozilla has, so will most likely switch back.

It's only been a day, tho. We'll see.

Re: The water's fine over here.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

What features have you found wanting in Chimera? Something I found an improvement over Mozilla was the tab group. I can click a single button in my toolbar and open an entire set of tabs. However, I imagine such a feature will eventually make its way into Mozilla if it isn't already up and coming in the next release.

Re: The water's fine over here.

[yakko.livejournal.com]

First of all, I want the "X" button back that lets me close the current tab. I'm also wanting details about cookies, the ability to change settings and the User Agent at will (a la prefbar... I wonder if XUL chrome will work in chimera. I assumed it wouldn't), middle button does "Open in new tab" (tho that's also broken in Mozilla), decent font sizes and control over being stuck with small fonts...

The "X" button is the major peeve right now, tho.

Re: The water's fine over here.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's an issue. I've just gotten used to pressing command-w to close a tab. It also closes a window, unless there are tabs open, in which case it closes the active tab.