Viewing Thread:
"The Big IE/FF Discrepancy List (tm Monkey_man forever)"

Ok peeps, thought this would be a bit of "fun". Some of us are happy to accept that Internet Explorer exists, and that a majority of casual internet users have it. And there are some of us that refuse to use it, banishing it to the recycle bin of our minds. So basically just list known differences between the two, pros/cons, etc. I think it'll be helpful, for some reason that I haven't decided yet.

FF doesn't highlight
's, whereas IE does.
IF doesn't center objects correctly - there's always 1px difference if you center a background and a table.

Your turn (don't be too harsh on li'l old IE, MS are still learning...)

IGN is full of Flash banners though, that'll affect your resources.

You ready for the biggest difference?

IE eats your system resources :).

If you have it installed, open up 4 browser windows and open:

ukchatforums.com
www.bbc.co.uk
www.ign.com
www.gamespot.com

at the same time and look ay how much memory each page uses, 20-25Mb for ukchatforums and bbc and 40+ for IGN and gamespot each!!!!!

Now do the same in Firefox and note that there is only one Firefox process and it uses around 50Mb for all 4 pages at once!!!!!.

That's the most important difference to anyone who spends their time with any more than one webpage open at a time :).

It's as low as that for IE now? Last time I read a survey on it, it was claimed around 85%, but predicted to drop gradually.

monkey_man wrote:
> Made sense to me. I kinda figured someone would shoot of about IE and
> it's issues. Still, 85% (or something like that) of internet users
> have it, so it has to be considered when designing.

IE6 = 65%
FF = 20%

Nice to see IE5 finally dropping off, but thanks to M$ not including anything below Win2k with IE7, we're stuck with IE6 for a long time to come. Got into a habit now of working specifically for FF with CSS etc with the occassional hack sheet for IE where needed (BMH, Lists, Borders, Floats etc). Cuts down production time by about 40% as it's just a case of writing a hack sheet to fix in IE instead of the other way around.

There are a few bugs I'll miss like the whitespace in lists.

monkey_man wrote:
> Hmmm, I meant this more as a reference thread for any problems
> encountered...

Small problem encountered with IE7... DO NOT BLOCK IEFRAME!! Blows the whole system up!! Other then that, IE7 was design by an idiot with no GUI experience! Prime example... New tab button!!

Other then that, my only realy issue with IE is child selectors... Why oh why did they not include these?!! Such an awesome feature of CSS and so powerful too! hopefully they'll get the engine right this time around, but still waiting for Beta2 to find out.

My personal experience with both:

IE:
Very pretty with nice toolbar icons, though I do prefer the ones which came wit ha particular skin that I downloaded for WindowBlinds. Also, i like the way that it allows people who write web pages like myself to take little shortcuts, reducing effort in coding a site. I always close my tages and whatnot anyway, but I think it's good that it allows you to cut corners. Makes coding easier. However, it also means that if something looks right in it, it's probably not right in abnother browser. eg. for some reason, I have problems getting FF to display my website backgrounds and background colours properly when i denote them in a stylesheet rather than using . Also, i don't like the Information Bar. Full stop. The Info Bar just annoys the hell out of me. The other thing about IE that realy annoyed me was that if you typed in a URL and clicked Go, then the little bar at the bottom would fill up even if nothing was actually happening. Ie lies to you. It'd reach about half way before deciding to tell you that "The page cannot be displayed" whereas FF only starts to tell you about it's download progress when there's some download progress to tell you.

FF:
Although this browser isn't as pretty as IE by defalt, you can download skins for it which I like very much. When it comes to writing a webpage, it is extremely fussy when it comes to taking shortcuts, unlike IE, which can sometimes make it tedious to make a webpage, but it's very good practice to get int othe habit of following what FF does with your code because FF follows all the W3C standards properly, meaning that if it works in FF, it'll work in any browser as long as it works properly. Although FF has it's own "Information Bar" lookalike, I hardly ever notice it. it isn't animated and doesn't play a sound like IE's one which makes it very subtle and I tend to just carry on ithout realising it's ever appeared. Although the names of things are different to those in IE, they're not all that hard to grasp. Give it about 5 minutes or so. Plus I think I prefer FF's FTP client extensions to IE's one which is designed to look almost exactly the same as the normal Windows Explorer.

Verdict:
Best browser for browsing: FF
Best browser for writing webpages: Ie for ease, FF for making it work
Best browser for extensions and add-ons: FF
Best browser for customer support: IE
Best browser for ease-of-use: IE
Browser with most functions/options: FF
Overall favourite browser: FF

Overall it's pretty equal split, but this is just my opinion, and this is what you asked for.

Iternet Explorer always kept the History on the Cache, whereas when you sign out of BT it deletes it each time, or at least moves it somewhere else

If I knew anything about what Tyla was saying I'm sure I'd add something deep and meaningful

Made sense to me. I kinda figured someone would shoot of about IE and it's issues. Still, 85% (or something like that) of internet users have it, so it has to be considered when designing.

He went off on a rant, rattling off PC jargon left, right and centre

Hmmm, I meant this more as a reference thread for any problems encountered...