[NTLUG:Discuss] Re: GUI recomendations

[Bryan J. Smith]

Stuart Johnston <saj at thecommune.net> wrote:
> Unfortunately, Gecko 1.7 (Mozilla 1.7 & Firefox 1.0) has
> some major bugs, particularly it seems to me, on Linux.

Yes and no.

Some of the bugs I've discovered are _intentionally_
introduced by sites.  In other words, there are "somebody's"
authoring tools that are explicitly putting in scripts that
actually don't execute on that company's browser, but Gecko
1.7 attempts to handle (but Opera and Konqueror don't
support).  I think it's pathetic that a company would stoop
to such lows with such intentional and blantant forks.

Then again, "another" company has been doing that to AMD with
its compilers.  Since AMD processors run any extensions just
as fast as their competitor, their competitor now forks in
code that detects and AMD processors and purposely runs code
that is detrimental to performance.  This same code would
also run poorly on that competitor's processors as well, so
it's very intentional.

> I've had pretty good luck with Mozilla 1.8 beta1 and
Firefox
> DP alpha 2.

Yep, because they are getting smarter at dealing with that
intentional non-sense.  I've been playing with Rawhide (aka
Fedora Development) and the Firefox DP built for the Cairo
rendering desktop.  Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

> Even though these versions are not meant to be used
> day-to-day, they seem more stable than the releases that
> are.

Again, that's because the popular authoring tools used by
many sites aren't generating code that can knock Gecko 1.8 as
bad as 1.7.

Disabling Javascript on Gecko 1.7 engines when I hit those
sites typically does the job.  It's not the Javascript of
those engines -- there are well-designed sites that can do
all the goodies/features.  It's those sites produced by those
popular authoring tools -- ones that actually fork
differently for the "other" browser.

Which is why telling those sites that you are the "other"
browser often deals with the issue nicely.  Mozilla won't do
that because it artificially boosts the percentages for the
"other" browser with most tracking systems.



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