Browsers!

The competition between browsers has made building web pages (and surfing the net) a real pain! I have had to test this site on several browsers to arrive at a design that looks fairly good on some of them. This page gives you my experiences with the two big guns :

INTERNET EXPLORER 6

The big one from Microsoft offers the best in terms of consistency and reliability in implementing CSS. Workarounds were needed only to accomodate other browsers. Coding is a pleasure.
however...
It shows a tendency to crash and close all open windows fairly frequently (like whenever I access Rediffmail - this has stopped now, but many other sites are still browse-me-nots). It even crashed when I clicked on a link whose href attribute didn't have a closing quote! IE 5.5 was a lot more stable. CSS positioning gives funny results when used with inline frames, and titles to links are suddenly very shy. Saving frames is still an area with limited options, which is surprising since Inline Frames have been supported since version 3. You'd think they would have improved saving by now, wouldn't you? If you were to save this page as 'Web Page Complete', you would notice that the background graphic is not saved. Other than this minor irritant, this feature alone makes this my preferred browser. This browser has been used the most to test this site.

IE's support for HTML entities (special characters) is very poor. The entities it does support are drawn rather crudely. This browser seems to concentrate on the more common uses of HTML. Good enough for 99% of users, but it is the remaining 1% who give the Net reason to exist.

NAVIGATOR 6.1

This has got to be one of the slowest browsers ever! Because using it is such a pain, I usually don't. Heavy on systems resources, so keep the number of windows down. Another point against it is the automatic connection to Netscape's activation page, which is a trick I'm always very suspicious of. This version (finally) supports inline frames - better late than never! Another feature which is still missing is the ability to save an entire webpage, including images, stylesheets, etc. These guys don't latch onto good ideas quickly. CSS support is ok but targetting within frames is bad. Claims to be powered by Gecko but provides no mention of this in the 'About' section, which only talks of Mozilla. HTML error correction isn't very good. I know I should write correct HTML rather than depend on the browser to make sense of it all, but if IE and Opera can think, why not Navigator? Scripts that run on Navigator 4.7 and IE don't run here.
This browser has very good help files, particulary the section on 3rd Party Cookies which is a must read for those who value their privacy on the net.

This browser has exceptional support for HTML entities and renders them artistically, making for plesant reading. Ideal for presenting scientific documents where content is important and cool CSS formatting is secondary.

NAVIGATOR 4.7

An oldie, but goodie. Doesn't support much CSS and hasn't heard of inline frames so it may not be suitable for viewing some sections of this site. Very good for more tolerant sites. The bug that bugged me the most is the one in CSS implementation for relative paths. This browser interprets these as relative to the HTML document, rather than the stylesheet. Makes external style sheet kinda useless, atleast for a developer like me. Clicking on the 'next page' link won't take you anywhere. This link has been positioned with CSS which upsets this browser.

Wait, I ain't done yet! The next page talks about Opera, Enigma, Mozilla and Mosaic.

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