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# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/9/2004 1:11 PM Milan Negovan

Amen to that! At least in Forefox you can kind of read articles on MSDN. It's just that the left nav tree becomes useless. In Opera MSDN is not usable AT ALL. I mean all I get is unstyles MSDN topics. :(

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/9/2004 1:12 PM Milan Negovan

Ahem, I meant "unstyled" :)

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/9/2004 1:25 PM Scott Mitchell

Milan, the article text itself may be readable, but the actual code is anything but, being all scrunched up like that. I hope they fix this sooner than later.

# This Firefox extension will have to do in the meantime 8/9/2004 3:36 PM nas

http://ieview.mozdev.org/

This plugin adds menu items to the page context menu, and the link context menu. Right-clicking a link now includes an "Open link target in IE" menu item. Right-clicking elsewhere in the main body of the page (not within an image, text box, etc.) gives "View this page in IE."

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/10/2004 6:35 AM Scott Duffy

I totally disagree.

When the Firefox programmers were deciding what kind of browser to make, they were presented with two choices:
1) They can make their browser render all web sites the way IE does (perfect compatibility with IE)
2) They can ignore web sites that don't render properly (perfect compatibility with standards)

I think the Firefox team has purposely and thoughtfully chosen choice #2. And so users of Firefox will just have to accept that some non-standard web sites will not look good in Firefox. It's the cost of switching to that browser. Pay the price, and stop complaining about web sites that don't work.

Or switch back to IE.

As well, it's a bit rich to complain to Microsoft about the problems you are having switching OFF of their platform. "How come I can't open Microsoft DRM music files on Linux? Microsoft must be evil!"

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/10/2004 7:33 AM Big Jim in STL

I can't disagree more with you, Mr. Duffy. It's the WORLD wide web, not the Microsoft-wide web. It's up to MS to conform to basic standards - or would you be happy if they made their own markup language ("MSTML" instead of "HTML", say), and only IE worked with it?

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/10/2004 8:03 AM Scott Mitchell

Scott, this isn't Slashdot, we're not folks whose passion is to slam Microsoft.

Listen, I'm about getting work done. As a developer, I spend a lot of time online, and I've found FireFox to provide the most efficient and powerful browing experience. Similar to how I find ASP.NET to be the most powerful and efficient server-side programming technology. I also spend a lot of time on MSDN, so it would be best, for me, if FireFox could adequately display content in FireFox. When Microsoft makes me switch to IE to view MSDN they are slowing me down, which slows down my use of ASP.NET. I would argue it's in their interest to have their technical docs as accessible as possible.

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/11/2004 7:05 AM Russ Nemhauser

I'm curious - what specifically about FireFox makes you choose it over IE?

I agree that it is the WORLD wide web and that standards are standards and need to exist (and IE should follow them), but after using other browsers it just became perfectly clear to ME that IE was quite simply the best one to use, especially since I use Windows.

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/11/2004 8:12 AM Scott Mitchell

Russ, here is what I really like about FireFox:

-- Popup blocker (yes, I know IE has this with XP SP2, but I run Win2k3; yes, I know there's Google Toolbar, but still a number "get through")

-- Tabbed browsing, which is especially enhanced with the TabBrowser extension

-- The ability for extensions, and the rich extension library that exists (see http://update.mozilla.org)

-- The WebDeveloper Extension. It's amazing, and saves oodles of time when needing to examine/edit a site's CSS or view table layouts, or validate HTML/CSS

-- The interface is more customizable (skinnable) and prettier, IMHO

-- Certain things about FireFox are helpful to me. I like the way cutting and pasting from a Web page to a text file works in FireFox, it picks up stuff that IE doesn't handle as well, for example.

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 8/12/2004 4:26 AM Brian

Is this an OK fix?

http://www.vlad1.com/~vladimir/blog/archives/2004/08/10/43/

# Lazycoder weblog » Browing msdn with FireFox 8/25/2004 12:52 PM Pingback/TrackBack

Lazycoder weblog » Browing msdn with FireFox

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 9/10/2004 8:10 AM dudes

IE should have followed what? Many decisions were made long time ago, for one reason or another and after all those decisions are made, IE become the first browser to support rich content. You see the online pundits and slashdotters complaining about IE and you think you can too. What's the logic behind complaining about a decision made 4-5 years ago today? Firefox guys made decisions not to support many rich features IE uses, and those programmers behind MSDN decided to use these rich features. You can't switch a site to over a different platform, just because it is called standard complaint and moreover, most of the things in javascript is not standard complaint at all. I found it interesting that even someone like Scott can be arrogant on this topic.

Do I agree that MSDN should work with Firefox, sure. Do I agree that Microsoft is doing something bad or something bad intentionall? No No. That's I think is bullshit and something we should see only on Slashdot.

You have the right to complain about MSDN not working with Firefox the way you want, since you are a customer, but you have no right or any reason to complain about why Microsoft does it this way, since everything should be obvious to you already, but if you believe in the propaganda spread on slashdot or some other sites you might be ridiculed for it.

# A FireFox Friendly MSDN 10/20/2004 3:05 PM Scott on Writing

# re: Here's One Way to Win the Browser War 10/20/2004 11:45 PM Lowell Meyer

I'm the MSDN developer responsible for fixes to things like this on our site, and I just wanted to add here that this has now (to our knowledge) been completely fixed on our site. We fixed it in the dev centers back last April/May; however, the problem has still existed in the library (pages under /library) until just recently-- that's the problem mentioned above here (it wasn't a regression, as Scott suggests). Due to a variety of complications, we haven't been able to fix it until just recently.

That being said, all code samples should work correctly now, in all browsers.

Regarding web standards, IE, and Firefox: in IE's defense, many of the decisions regarding how IE renders content were made BEFORE the standards existed. As such, it isn't necessarily IE's fault for failing to conform to web standards. It is simply that standards have been set which disagree with how IE used to render content, which places our IE team in a bind-- do we change to the new standard, and cause pages that were designed for previous IE versions to fail? Or, do we continue to support pages designed prior to the existance of the standard?

That being said, I am a big fan of web standards, and I believe that web pages should work for everyone. I also believe that IE should support web standards whenever and wherever possible.

I would like to add that I am a Firefox user at home, and that we were not intentionally breaking any browsers. There were actually (somewhat) good reasons why code samples were set to collapse white space before (in non-IE browsers), but that's a much longer discussion. Anyhow, I'd just like to say that we really do care about making our site work for everyone, and that we really like getting feedback about problems with our site. And, more importantly, we listen to that feedback and try to fix as many problems as we can get to. I'm also all about web standards and good HTML/CSS; it's just a long uphill battle to take millions and millions of existing pages and make them happy.

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