Here's One Way to Win the Browser War
While Internet Explorer clearly still holds a sizeable lead in browser usage, alternatives such as Mozilla and Opera are faring better as of late due to security concerns and an improved browsing experience. Personally, I use Mozilla FireFox as my browser of choice. Now, there is a “good” way for Microsoft to win the browser war, and a “bad” way. The good way is to improve IE, to add nifty features, make it less vulnerable to malware, and so on, and so on. That way, everybody benefits. The “bad” way is by making alternate browser unusable, and this is what Microsoft is doing (likely unintentionally) right this very minute.
If you use FireFox, mosey on over to MSDN content, such as this piece on Composition vs. Rendering. Notice how the source code sample is all squished together. That is, you see something like:
[C#] using System; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; using System.Collections.Specialized; namespace CustomControls { public class Rendered : Control, IPostBackDataHandler, IPostBackEventHandler { private String text1; private String text2; private String text = "Press the button to see if you won."; private int number = 100;
This essentially renders FireFox unusable when I need to lookup MSDN information online. What's particularly frustrating, is that this problem used to not exist on MSDN, although it did on the ASP.NET Dev Center. Back in March of this year, I took the time to find the problem and provide a fix. It took a month or so for this fix to finally make its way into the ASP.NET Dev Center, but by mid-May, it was definitely working. But now, both MSDN and the ASP.NET Dev Center don't play nicely with Mozilla FireFox. And here's the kicker: it's not working for the exact same reason as I wrote about before. Bummer.
So, I implore you, Mr. MSDN - please fix MSDN so I can browse with FireFox!