[Techtalk] Mozilla v. Firefox

Thu Jan 27 09:37:46 EST 2005

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wednesday 26 January 2005 19:17, Carla Schroder wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 January 2005 11:28 pm, Kai MacTane wrote:
> > At 1/25/05 09:18 PM , Carla Schroder wrote:
> > >[...]
>
> No, this is just general musings on a number of issues:
>
> 1. Migrating away from IE when you have spent years happily building
> apps to IE
> 2. Wising up to the existence of users on other platforms
> 3. Escaping vendor lock-in
>
> For businesses who have years of infrastructure locked into MS, these
> are big deals. I am pretty much out of sympathy after beating my head on
> the IE wall all these years as an end user- honest to gosh, what's so
> hard to understand about "I want to be your customer, but you have
> erected this large barrier, and ironically it was never intended to be a
> barrier."
Well, one should think, this applies more to non-standard html-code than 
to web apps that are based on php, java or whatever. These are 
plattform-independent
> So I'm wondering how big a job these IE-only shops are faced with to
> climb out of the hole they've dug themselves into, and how big a job is
> writing cross-platform Web apps. Because even for internal apps that
> never the leave the company intranet, locking yourself into MS/IE seems
> like a real bad idea. You're painting yourself into a corner. It seems
> like everything is being piggybacked onto HTTP these days, and it makes
> sense- why muck with client apps when you have a nice universal client
> available?
??? Web apps are always cross-plattform (at least in theory). Well, check 
it out. Tell your Konqueror to mimick an IE x.y on NT x.y when you visit 
such a site. If it works, it's cross plattform (I once had a little fun 
doing so on 
http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/en/default.asp ;-)
BTW, even asp is no problem on Linux - on the client side (but IIRC you 
could also configure apache for aspx)
regards gebhard
p.s. Okay, it is possible to to tell IE from other browsers:
- --
<script type="text/javascript"><!-- 
  function btest() {
    if (test=document.all.tags("p")[0].outerHTML) {
      alert("MSIE :-(");
    } else {
      alert("right Browser :-)");
    }
  }
- --></script>
... 
<body onload="javascript:btest()">
This works cause only IE knows the object 'all' in DOM which 'speaks' to 
the html in the first <p>-tag. But this is a completely different issue.
(Example stems from Matthias Houdek from debian-user-german)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQFB+BvE9EYTTD7FjIERAuBoAKCFOxTA21g3ecdNUdjKI8sWrA4+KgCgnlt6
ic7HiTKzJw75qkCZKKWRNkA=
=kSeY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----