h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Shock horror another security flaw has been found in Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/technology/2190448.stm ) not to mention (and this is not Microsoft’s fault) an announcement of major security problems with the popular MSIE add on the "Google Toolbar" (http://sec.greymagic.com/adv/gm001-mc/ ), so given MSIE's troubled history when it comes to security issues why do you still keep using it when there are excellent (if not better) alternatives available

1. It comes with the computer

(This is the reason why 95% of people use it)

2. It works.

(My Netscapce has started crashing out in the middle of pages, so I'm thinking of changing to IE.

3. The only reason it is full of security holes is because everybody uses it, so it is worth the hackers' while picking holes in it. If everybody used Opera, I feel sure that security holes would be found in it too.

on the one occasion i know of a security hole being found in opera a fix was made availble te next day.

NS has started to crash .. asked yourself why, programs dont just start to crash without a reasion.

Yes, Netscape usually crashes because it's Netscape. I use Mozilla most of the time in Windows, only use IE when something's not displaying right in Mozilla. I also keep up-to-date with IE security patches, of which there seem to be a disturbingly large number.

Under Linux obviously there's no IE. I use Mozilla there as well, although usually in the form of Galeon, which is a lightweight browser using Mozilla's rendering engine.

Most of the time, it's fine. The newest Mozilla is really very nice indeed, although it is a bit on the big and bloaty side unfortunately.

I only use MS IE when a page won't load properly on Netscape. My problem is that I still use Netscape Communicator 4.75. I have tried later versions, but I didn't like the look and feel. A lot of people out there do web-sites that will load on IE 5 and (sometimes) on later versions of Netscape, but aren't inclined to test them with earlier versions. When I've 'complained', the response has always been, 'Why not get the latest version? It's free, isn't it.' As a software engineer, I was never allowed to take that sort of attitude to operating systems, but web-site designers don't seem to be software engineers.

I agree about Mozilla although they still need to do a bit of work on the tabbed browsing (Opera's system for tabbed browsing is infinitely superior to Mozilla's)

The uni here has Netscape as its default but it is about half the speed of IE, so I have switched to that

Opera is the fastest and I use it as well as IE - however IE is made from ActiveX controls which can be quickly (and freely) integrated into applications I write which makes it a much more powerful option.

Cheerful Dragon

For Gawds sake get a new browser Netscape 4.xx uses a rendering engine originally designed in 1994, web standards have moved on an awful lot since then. The sort of attitude the web-site designers are taking is perfectly justified as web standards have been created by the W3C so the Web would work better for everyone and browser manufactures have embraced this by producing browsers that support these standards so use one of then.

As a software engineer I'm sure you would of taken the same attitude if someone tried to run software you wrote for a Pentium machine on a 286 and then complained?

If you want to stop using obsolete technology try looking at http://webstandards.org/act/campaign/buc/

P.S. If you really like NS4.xx get Netscap6/Mozilla and download the "classic" skin - you wont be able tell the differance

>>NS has started to crash .. asked yourself why, programs dont just start to crash without a reasion.

I'm sure the reason is that somebody in my family installed some software on my PC and this is interfering with the Netscape. Life is too short to bother investigating this sort of problem when I can fix it by using IE.

I don't agree with Happy Dude about us all having to upgrade our browsers to look at modern websites. Designers should design websites to be displayable on everybody's PC. There are websites which are little more than text and links and yet they won't work on Netscape 4.7 which is the one I have. That's just bad design on the part of the website designer.

nope, its your fault for using a browser that is NOT standards compliant. You cannot expect web designers to pander to your obsession with obsolete technology unless of course you want go back to us all using html3.2 or wait ... even better lets get rid of the http protocol all together and go back to using gopher

You'll be telling me I shouldn't be using Windows 95 next!!

So what is the standard Markup Language for the World Wide Web, if it is not HTML3.2? I looked at the World Wide Web Consortium site but they don't seem to make any definitive statement as to what standard we should all be using.

try looking at http://webstandards.org/

among the current curent Standards are

XML
XHRML
MathML
CSS2

oops ...XHRML should be XHTML

I don't understand! I thought XML was a way of storing data. I didn't think you could deliver content across the Web using it. I know h2g2 uses XML internally, but the actual code that is sent to the client is HTML, isn't it?

And when I look at an xml document with my IE6 browser, it doesn't make any attempt to format it, it just puts all the tags on the screen. So how can that be a standard for the World Wide Web?

As i understand ir the XML should point to a style sheet which the browser uses to format the XML

"There are websites which are little more than text and links and yet they won't work on Netscape 4.7 which is the one I have. That's just bad design on the part of the website designer."

No, it's bad design on the part of the original Netscape coders. They took a unilateral decision to override explicitly specified table widths, stretching tables wider rather than wrapping the content properly and completely collapsing "empty" columns that were placed to make the table content more readable. By your argument, if every browser is to be supported, I could release a browser which did exactly the opposite of what Netscape does, and designers would be obliged to try to accommodate both, thus bringing the web to a standstill. Netscape 4.x is a bug-ridden pile of crud that set out to define its own standards unilaterally. Funnily enough, that's the same allegations NS4 users keep leveling at Micro$oft...

There was a wonderful documentary on TV last year; a crew had been following Netscape's coders around as they prepared to release the codebase as "open source" to the Mozilla project, allowing the community at large to decide on and implement the new features for NS5. (The day after they started filming the documentary, AOL announced their buyout, so it was a far more "interesting" programme than they had planned...)

Netscape paid large amounts of overtime over a three month period so their programmers could "polish" the 4.x code, remove libelous comments and generally prepare it for public viewing. Eventually it was delivered to one of the key programmers in the Mozilla project who looked at it for the best part of a week, then scrapped it. He said it was so full of bugs, standards violations, misconceptions and security holes that fixing it to a minimum acceptable standard *without* adding any new features would take longer than writing a standards-compliant browser from scratch.

Peet
(Using Mozilla 1.0)

I should add as only a few browser do this at the moment most web-sites that use XML do the style sheet processing server side at th moment ... but the eventual idea is that browsers will do this.

well said peet

"I thought XML was a way of storing data"
er.. no it's a markup language (i.e. someting you write web pages with)

XML stans for "eXtensible Markup Language"