Saturday, October 01, 2005

Browsers

I have heard back from several people that they are getting better display in Firefox and Opera than I am in IE. About a year ago someone strongly suggested that I switch to Firefox. So why am I still using IE?

The most important reason is that I need to figure out how one thing works before I move on to another. A couple of years ago I bought a new computer and downloaded as many fonts and keyboards as I felt like. The upshot was that I got a little confused, nothing seemed to work as I expected and I couldn't explain my problem because I didn't know what application I was working in half the time. Well, that computer had a little accident.

So this time I am going nice and slow, one thing at a time. One application a week, maybe installing one new keyboard or learning one new thing and testing that out for a while.

Now the real reason for deciding that IE is the browser I am sticking with in the short term is because the Devanagari/Tamil Syllabic Editor was developed for IE and so far only works in IE. This is an application I am working with frequently so ... Here is Richard's take on this.

"Internet Explorer also offers some useful non-standard capabilities that Firefox doesn't. For example, the page the Tamil 'syllabic input' picker was adapted from uses an IE feature that allows the javascript to track cursor movement over arbitrary dynamic HTML text and thereby allows the insertion of formatting mark-up. "

I don't exactly understand this but I use it.

In the meantime if characters in Extended Latin don't display on a webpage I change the font in my browser to Microsoft Sans Serif since it displays 179 characters. I found browser font display under the Tools menu> Internet Options.

I am a bit of a technophobe actually but I am trying to deal with it in order to indulge in my love of writing systems. Thanks for your help.

2 Comments:

Blogger Simon said...

It's ok to have more than one browser on your system as they can coexist. In addition, it helps to have at least two independent implementations so that you can distinguish between implementation errors and problems with the standards.

It's well known that IE does not support well the relevant Web standards (CSS2, DHTML, etc).

Also, on my system, the following Unicode test pages appear ok with Firefox but IE cannot render some of the scripts (remember, it's the same system, so they pull from the same font database).

BMP
http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode-example.html

Plane 1 (install needed fonts, Firefox displays all)
http://www.i18nguy.com/unicode-plane1-utf8.html

11:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks Simon, I was just beginning to realize that. I was starting to figure out that, in general, other people are seeing things that I am not. However, I guess I learned a good lesson about how to define fonts and set the fonts in IE, etc.

6:02 PM  

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