I tried using opera. It crashed on me more than firefox did. I'll be the first to agree firefox's memory management needs sorting out though. I'm rarely using less than 150meg of ram with it...
the version of ie7 i've played around with, i found to be really good. visiting a lot of the sites i've created with css layouts didn't show any nasty breakages.
elliot - would you be so kind as to spend more time actually reading other peoples comments and less time insulting them? Timberford specifically talked about the sites HE'D created and therefore i suggest he's probably well aware of where it does and doesnt specifically cater for IE.
Elliot: You should also read the first post properly too. I didn't say a complete boycott. I said, make a similar but more stripped down design, and put up a small notice saying you need a new browser to show the webpage properly.
Firefox has shown that people have no trouble downloading a new browser. If 80% haven't gotten a new browser, it's because they haven't been asked. As a computer "expert" i get asked to fix computers a lot, and I see people who have Firefox installed surprisingly often.
Also, spyware/adware has shown that people will not hesitate to download software to display a website. If they say yes to some crap they've never heard of, do you think they won't download a piece of software they've probably heard of, and that someone they know probably use?
To be tried and true, the more compliant and complex you make your css/html the less of a chance IE will render it correctly (most of the time). To be fair however, many browsers are guilty of little marginal differences, and totaly capable of ignoring your set styles and over-ride things to such a degree that you'll sit there pulling out your hair for 2 hours finding that negative margin you've implimented on something polar opposite of what you're attempting to debug... The one thing I would LOVE to see Microsoft do is make IE optional, and even possibly offer other popular browsers as a user alternative (yeah, that's being HIGHLY optimistic there).
But not to derail this train any further, have you by chance checked out http://explorerdestroyer.com/ ? it seems like a nice little project if you're truely wishing to stab those IE users in the face and offer them up an alternative.
You can't just completely get rid of IE, it plays a large part in the operating system itself. Even your background, if set to something besides a bitmap, is rendered with IE, starting with the IE4 active desktop.
Yes, it's become a large part of the system itself, which I think for the most part isn't necessarily beneficial. It's been proven that if it goes unupdated, it becomes a huge security risk. Remember in earlier versions of windows IE was completely optional. Microsoft has just made it so that if you don't have IE you're essentially screwed, and that's one thing I don't like about windows as a whole.
No, don't use that.
IE7 will clean this up and you don't want to have IE rendering problems within versions of IE.
You will want to use conditional statements.
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css">
#foo { property: value; }
</style>
<![endif]-->
This way, you don't have to worry about IE updating some hacks and not others.
Comments
:P
...damn.
I'll be the first to agree firefox's memory management needs sorting out though. I'm rarely using less than 150meg of ram with it...
You think most webdevs dont hand out stuff to IE specifically?
Hah.
Firefox has shown that people have no trouble downloading a new browser. If 80% haven't gotten a new browser, it's because they haven't been asked. As a computer "expert" i get asked to fix computers a lot, and I see people who have Firefox installed surprisingly often.
Also, spyware/adware has shown that people will not hesitate to download software to display a website. If they say yes to some crap they've never heard of, do you think they won't download a piece of software they've probably heard of, and that someone they know probably use?
It's just a shared HTML rendering library, which is used by several applications; it's not running in the fucking kernel. Like every other piece of internet-enabled software?