{"id":476,"date":"2006-08-04T16:43:01","date_gmt":"2006-08-04T08:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nargalzius.com\/blog2\/http:\/www.nargalzius.com\/blog2\/archives\/2006\/08\/2006_08_04_1643.php"},"modified":"2006-08-04T16:43:01","modified_gmt":"2006-08-04T08:43:01","slug":"browsers-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/08\/04\/browsers-etc","title":{"rendered":"Browsers, etc."},"content":{"rendered":"

I felt compelled to post this as Nono<\/a> mentioned me in his recent post… which could lead people to misinterpret some stuff.<\/p>\n

What I said was correct though, so no change is necessary in his entry, but I just had to qualify<\/em> something I had said, something which I think may be interpreted wrongly by those who don’t know (or be slammed by those who do<\/em> hahahaha). Also, to reiterate what I posted as a comment.<\/p>\n\n

The Gecko Engine<\/h2>\n

First of all, for clarification purposes, I’m aware the the Gecko Engine is basically a web-layout engine<\/em> – therefore it’s features and functions to some extent, can be abstracted from the actual “color-rendering” arena.<\/p>\n

What I meant when I assumed that Flock, Camino and Firefox would probably render the image the same way (as against Safari) is because they share a common ancestry with Firefox… and the clear common denominator was the Gecko engine. But again, that’s not to say that this is<\/em> the actual cause of them rendering the colors in any way. I guess I irresponsibly used that denominator as a point of commonality, but I’m sure people know what I’m trying to drive at: that ultimately, these other browsers can be considered derivatives of Firefox, just like how Linux and it’s variants are derivatives of each other and ultimately, Unix.<\/p>\n

My point was that since they have a lot in common under the hood, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would render the same way as well. I thought it likely that they would be the same because they’re essentially brothers. I’m glad that this was proven true with Nono<\/a>‘s tests.<\/p>\n

But again, This is not to say that they cannot<\/strong> render differently when programmed to do so. To me, the Gecko engine doesn’t (or shouldn’t) limit that possibility from these browsers. Now that I’ve properly thought about it, instead of trying to find out what Flock, Camino, Firefox had in common, I should’ve<\/em> just tried to find out what they probably didn’t have.<\/p>\n

I may be off the mark in saying this, but maybe<\/em> it’s because of Safari’s direct integration with Apples imaging system. I believe WebKit uses it (which is why the widgets can do what they do, and look the way they look) and if I’m not mistaken, Safari uses it as well.<\/p>\n

I guess the best way to test that theory is to try non-gecko\/safari browsers (Opera?) and you may or may not have similar renderings as Firefox et all, but if Opera is known not<\/strong> to interface with the whatever Apple uses (CoreImage? Quartz? whatever the hell they call it now) then it should be different from Safari as well – unless it somehow has an accurate algorithm… and assuming Apple’s imaging system is as well. And to decide on that – well that’s subjective as well hahahahaha.<\/p>\n

But speaking of subjectivity, a comment I posted is something I wanted to reiterate, because if there was<\/em> a control element you could compare the renders with, then you probably eliminate the the issue subjectivity altogether.<\/p>\n

\n

You forgot to mention the most important thing we agreed on: one way to take out subjective issues out of the picture is to compare the images to an actual accurate print (assuming the printer is calibrated correctly). That would make clear which one was more “accurate” so to speak… regardless<\/em> of subjective concerns \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Browsers schmowsers<\/h2>\n

I’ve always wanted to get what I’m about to say off my chest but never found it compelling enough to merit it’s own post, so I’ll put it here.<\/p>\n

With the advent of so much browser choices, sometimes I find it amusing, how people switch at the drop of a dime. One day this build is faster, so we switch there, then another day, another<\/em> thing is faster so we switch there. Which is well and good, but once we start advocating them, a person who switches and switches kinda loses some points because how can he honestly expect people to choose something based on his preferences when he himself keeps on changing them? While having benchmarks to prove which is better, faster does justify the decision, people keep on forgetting how fast things change.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I’m using Camino now, but when people ask me what to use, I’d probably say Firefox. As to why, it’s probably because of how I see how browsers should be graded. Speed is important, but it has to be a real considerable margin for me to contemplate switching.<\/p>\n

So I’m actually glad Nono<\/a> stuck with Safari, it just shows that he truly knows what’s important to him and will not be convinced by any simple benchmark, and that’s<\/em> how people should evaluate software: always consider the the long run<\/em> scenarios \ud83d\ude42 Kudos!<\/p>\n

More than speed, what I would consider more important are two things: standards compliance, and audience demographics.<\/p>\n

This becomes a tough call when it comes to IE and Gecko browsers. On the one hand, you have IE’s massive majority, and Gecko’s better standards support. I heard that Opera (or insert any other obscure browser name here) handled acid tests better – ergo is more standards compliant… but then it loses as far as percentage goes.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. IE has large userbase, and little respect standards<\/li>\n
  2. Opera has little users, and large respect for standards<\/li>\n
  3. Firefox has large userbase, and larger respect for standards.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Wether or not one is more perfect from the other doesn’t matter. The fact is that the internet is a public domain, so you better develop stuff that caters to the numbers instead of what is “ultimately” better. If it was a simple as choosing the ultimate stuff, then we would all be driving solar cars, and all be using Macs. But life isn’t like that.<\/p>\n

    So Firefox is a reasonably good choice. Probably not as perfect as the “perfect” rendering layouts, but it really takes a bit of complicated effort to actually exploit those bugs in a normal browsing environment. Plus it has the bonus of having a massively growing userbase, so it IS feasible to consider it as a testbed instead of IE.<\/p>\n

    Lastly is that it’s cross-platform. And I just appreciated how useful that was when I had my powerbook serviced. Right now, on the PC I don’t have access to ANY of my Camino bookmarks. The only reason I’m not switching back to Firefox is because I configured Camino so much that it would be an arduous task to try porting everything to Firefox (unless they share a common way of accessing their bookmark database… or at least an import tool… which I haven’t checked hehehehe). Yet I still could imagine how simpler everything would be if I had just used Firefox for both PC and Mac. Oh and let’s not forget that I use PortableFirefox in my USB drive.<\/p>\n

    Ok maybe I should make the time to go back to Firefox hahaha. Stay tuned.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I felt compelled to post this as Nono mentioned me in his recent post… which could lead people to misinterpret some stuff. What I said was correct though, so no change is necessary in his entry, but I just had to qualify something I had said, something which I think may be interpreted wrongly by …

    Continue reading “Browsers, etc.”<\/span><\/a><\/p><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,12,13],"tags":[96,191,203,206,260,286,435,442,575,845,852,974,1278],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-photography","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-browser","tag-calibration","tag-camino","tag-color","tag-coreimage","tag-firefox","tag-flock","tag-ie","tag-nono-felipe","tag-opera","tag-quartz","tag-webkit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nargalzius.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}