Preferences and Pet Peeves
February 8, 1999
The fact is folks, there's very little difference between Explorer
and Communicator. Both work well, and both have almost all of the
same handy features. Neither implements the
HTML standard very well.
As a Web developer, I find it necessary to have both, but when I'm
browsing, I prefer Netscape by a very slight margin for two reasons.
First, Netscape tends to show you a little more information about
where you are, while Explorer tends to hide stuff from you. In this
department,
Opera
(see above)
has both major browsers beat by a mile.
Second, copying data to paste into other applications works just a
little bit better in Netscape. I should admit that I'm one of those
geeky types who hates ever to make an extra mouse-click or keystroke.
This brings me to my pet peeve about both browsers. Both (Explorer
less so than Communicator) make it a pain in the neck to open a file
from your hard drive. You'd think you could just hit Control-O, and
there you'd be, in whatever working directory you chose to specify
in the preferences. But noooo! First, up pops a dialog box, telling
you to type in a filename. Type in a filename? Get real, guys! So you
click on the "browse" button, and are taken to the directory of their
choice (not yours). Now why in the world would I be storing my HTML
files in the Netscape program directory? Netscape will default to
whatever directory you last opened a file from, but Explorer will
always go to the "My Documents" directory. So you click around your
hard drive until you find the file you want to open, and double-click
on it. Just when you think you're there, yet another dialog box pops
up, and yet another keystroke is required to open a simple gosh-darn
HTML file. What's going on here? It's ten times easier to open up an
HTML file directly from Windows Explorer. Internet Explorer is better
in this respect than Communicator - if you're already displaying a
local file, expanding the address bar will show your directory structure,
and you can simply click around to find what you want. If you're
displaying a Web site, however, and want to open a local file, you'll
have to go through the whole tedious process described above.
[I've been told that neither browser has this problem in the Mac version.]
Compatibility
Traditionally, Explorer has lagged behind Navigator in terms of
Javascript
capability, but I'm happy to report that Explorer 5.0
features greatly expanded Javascript support. Javascript tricks
(like
audio mouseovers )
that choked in 4.0 work hunky-dory in 5.0.
What about
style sheets?
Having been a publisher since the old
scissors-and-paste days, I've been champing at the bit to use style
sheets for years. Every few months I make another determined effort
to convert all my pages to CSS-compliant code, but every time I run
into so many problems with differences between the two browsers that
I finally give up in disgust, and go back to using my wicked old FONT
tags and other relics.
A handy tool for testing CSS compliance is the
CSS Test Suite,
so I gave both Explorer 5.0
and Navigator 4.5 a quick run through here. Both browsers implement
the basics, but Explorer supports a lot more of CSS, although it too
has a few quirks. Navigator still seems to have trouble with styles
in tables. One feature of CSS that I'm dying to use is
first-line and
first-letter support, which lets you specify a style to use for the
first line or first letter of a paragraph, to create effects like drop
caps. Alas, it's not supported by either browser.
One of the most obvious (to a publisher) and persistent differences
between Explorer and Netscape has always been their handling of
paragraph text. The two browsers have differing opinions about
what size text should be, and how much leading should be inserted
between lines. This means that the same paragraph will be of
slightly different lengths in the two browsers. When one depends
on tables to set up magazine-like columns, this means that nothing
ever lines up quite right.
Internet Explorer 5.0 & Communicator 4.5
The Latest from the Browser Trenches
There's a new Lizard in town.
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