So, that makes me the first person ever to have commented on a Ok/cancel commic?

Well this one’s great, although I would have probably related even more if I was more of a gamer.

The css of that bar under the commic doesn’t seem to work completely though: in safari the words are under each other…

You could say that Word and Notes are like co-workers: they’re difficult to work with, come with a manual, and make life difficult. But you’ll have to work with them to get things done.

Everquest is like your relationship: it makes you misserable and constantly toys you around, but you keep coming back for more until it kills you!

Absolutely hilarious.

I’m a web developer and for me the meanest and must cruel of software is Mozilla.
If he was playing cards at that table, he’ll be like “You killed a man once? thats nothing, Im considered a world disaster, developers tremble when they hear my name, in my latest version I’m coming back to take over the world, Im thinking of starting World War III”

It’s funny that you should mention that, because in implementing the button bar I plowed through the initial implemenation in about an hour and everything looked totally sweet. The only problem was that in Moz the bar was hard left justified (not aligned under comic). It took me nearly 3 hours to fix that bug. Incredible.

For some reason the bar did not inherit the margin that every other element on the page sucessfully inherited (and that was handled by IE just perfectly). To finally get it to work I needed to do some strange combination of float: right with padding textalign center blah blah — something totally senseless.

I guess it wouldn’t be so annoying if scores of people hadn’t told me that Moz was written correctly to w3c spec. It just makes me think that either people are lying, or the spec needs some help.

In any case, I couldn’t agree more with etanko.

Hang on a second here. This could as easily have been reversed. You could build for Mozilla and spend three hours making it work for IE. The difference then would have been that you developed an implementation that worked with Mozilla, Opera, Safari (the latter two of which you said you hadn’t tested against and would likely have seen the same problems).

We can say “the world would be a much better place if all browsers worked the same way” but busting Mozilla’s chops for actually moving forward when IE has been stagnant for the last 3 years seems misplaced. Netscape was stagnant and sat on their laurels. IE came and created a browser work by actually moving things forward. Now they are subject to the same competition.

Is it painful to develop for cross browser? Hell, yes. I’d prefer that than just sit with the same poorly implemented technology forever.

Well not all browsers are created equal. Back in the days when it was Netscape vs. IE, developers, IE was just easier to code for. Netscape’s rendering engine had trouble with tables (especially nested tables) which is what designers wanted at the time.

To say that things could “easily have been reversed” is not really true here. The entire time I was coding I actually had both firefox and IE up and was checking both after each change. Both looked great in my sandbox, but only IE looked right when I moved it to the server. So there was no “reversal” possible. I was coding against both the whole time.

Now if Moz really wants to take over the world, they need to really get on the ball and work with W3C to make it possible to build amazing things (don’t get my started on why they won’t support alpha filtering) with clean, simple code. That would win over the majority of developers real quick. As long as the learning curve, and output quality for Moz is similar (and in my opinion, slightly worse), IE will continue to reign.

I think etanko does have it reversed, because if you build a validating site according to the W3C, it’s far more likely to render correctly in Gecko browsers, than in IE. And if I have to create hacks in my code I’d rather just do it once for IE, than have a multitude of hacks necessary to get modern browsers like Firefox and Safari to behave in the same quirky ways as IE. If you really want to pull out all your hair, try developing XHTML strict pages that render correctly on IE5.5+. It’s enough to make stock prices on Rogaine skyrocket!

Yeah, let me make it clear that I wish IE would do more to keep up with standards and new web technology directions (what’s going on Tantek?).

But as a project manager, it’s hard for me not to prioritize IE over the other browsers, even though it doesn’t follow w3c spec to perfection. The reality is that no browsers do, though as you said there are family or browsers which handle things in ways closer to Moz, and that family has more members than the family of browsers that handle things more like IE (Actually, I think that family is just the different versions of IE).

I think that Moz is on a good path, and they could win me over if they started to allow me to code ‘cool things’ that were just not available to IE. The developer and designer in me are both heavily swayed by cool stuff. If Moz allowed me to layer different CSS-based semi-transparent gradient sheets, and give it all a nice time behavior — then I’d spend my free time messing with that.

Instead all that we have is dashed border styles, unsorted list-based menus (which really feels like a hack), and image replacement for accessibility. That’s not too bad, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes me want to get out of bed and code. And for the time being it doesn’t present a compelling story over what IE offers, especially when IE is like 95% of your user base is running.

I think that Moz is on a good path, and they could win me over if they started to allow me to code ‘cool things’ that were just not available to IE.

A set of experimental things, some of which only work in Opera, others that work in Opera/Moz and a few rare ones that work in IE as well:

CSS Destroy : I like the Alphabet and Lady Bicolor
CSS/edge : I like the BoxPunch

These aren’t meant to say they’re there. Many of these can be done in IE using other methods though I like the elegance of some of these techniques (others, not so much). I agree with you, in addition to being standard compliant, they need to move forward. We’ll see how that goes.

NICE! contrary to previous report here the whole new comment system and interface (with buttons under the left side comic panel) renders great with Safari on my machine. thank you Thomas!

thank you Thomas!

(Looks around) Thomas?!

Perhaps we should call him thegoodthomaschi from now on.

Building a crossed browser web site is one thing, but building a web application its completely different. You need a lot more DHTML, and regardless of w3c spec, developing for IE is faster, and when time is money, you can spend all your time (and $$$) trying to develop a drag and drop web application for IE and NS.
Usually the front-end supports NS but the back-end is only IE.

Another thing that we are forgeting is that IE supports behaviors and htc files.

Your Comment button displays and works fine in Opera.

“And for the time being it doesn’t present a compelling story over what IE offers, especially when IE is like 95% of your user base is running.”

Are you sure that THIS site is visited with IE 95% of the time? I have hard time beleaving that given the nature of the people you target.

Shame about the adverts.

Shame about the adverts.

We do try to maintain a level of quality with what’s being served by monitoring it and ensuring they are mostly advertisements related to HCI and Usability. While we’d love to serve an ad free site, we do this project in our spare time and well … who doesn’t like to see something come back from their investment, right?

Are you sure that THIS site is visited with IE 95% of the time? I have hard time beleaving that given the nature of the people you target.

Judging from our server logs, I’d say no - we have at least 15% non-IE browsers not counting aggregators and search engines.

While Tom was expressing his frustrations with building this comment bar, I think his 95% statement was more general and referring to a project manager’s prioritization. Regardless, IE is a large majority and it’s true that one can get frustrated spending double the time to accommodate one more browser.

My view of the problem is if you have to build for cross browser anyways, that means you are building for IE, Moz, Opera, Safari at a minimum and in that case, building on Mozilla then tweaking for IE if more efficient. The fact is that it’s not just Mozilla that behaves differently from IE. IE is the sore thumb right now.

As for etanko’s query of web applications - I have to admit IE is far superior for building web applications and this leads back to Tom’s assertion that Mozilla is standards compliant but not pushing the envelope. In a lot of ways, I think we’re basically in agreement of what’s working now and what needs work.

I love the fact that the Word box says “word!” LOL.

Tom

What about Steve Krug…surely we need mention of him in these annals?

It’s about time we brought the humanity back into HCI

Nice job.

Krug is definitely worth mentioning. If you listen to our rap song you’ll actually hear him in the third verse along with a few others we didn’t get to include in the big showdown in February.

Sorry, but isn’t “pushing the envelope” part of what got us into this mess in the first place? I am assuming, of course, that the standards are the envelope.

If one could be sure that any subsequent standard actually specified what the first browser to implement some feature implemented (I hope you can follow that!) then that’s great - the Mozilla and Opera teams and everyone can make new wotsits so that you can do spiffy, “cool”, new things and then when the standards committee and the rest of the browsers catch up everything should still be fine even on all those browsers which didn’t originally have the feature (again, I hope that’s clear). That isn’t the way it is, however.

I think that Moz is on a good path, and they could win me over if they started to allow me to code ‘cool things’ that were just not available to IE.

XUL?