IE alternative
 

Hello everybody. Thanks for taking a look at this post...

I was just wondering if anybody knew any programs that would make my life a lot easier by rendering pages like IE would...

I made the move to linux, and I'm using Firefox... I've had my system set up, and have been doing all my PHP with output designed for my browser. I showed a friend a website I'm working on, which she loaded up with IE. It looked horrible. I don't want to have to go through the WINE process, which is frankly a little to complicated for my taste.

So I'm basically looking for a program that will render web pages like IE would...

Any suggestions?

-James.

Maybe there is a problem with your code. I tend to test my pages in Firefox, Konqueror and Opera. Usually if the pages look ok in Opera, then they work fine in IE.

:) There are certainly problems with my code.

I typically don't fix any errors that I can't immediately find or see on the page, unless the page is for a client, in which case I make an attempt to search through it...

It's a lot easier though when you can see where the errors are, and I can't do that without access to IE... I'll give Opera and Konquerer a shot, but would still really like to find something that renders with MS standards...

Take it easy,

James.

Well, unless you run wine, I don't think there are any browsers that render like IE because IE does not follow a lot of the w3c standards.

Sure would be useful though... ARGH!

Appreciate it reddazz,

James.

Go to www.frankscorner.org and follow the instructions for installing IE on Linux under Wine.

MS and standards?

The main problem with MS products is that they don't support any recognised industry standards. Like most MS products, IE renders pages in a non-standard way. If your page is written to render properly in a standard complient browser, and IE renders iot wrongly, that's the fault of IE, not your code.

Thanks Xavier... I was hoping there was a way of avoiding it, but I appreciate the link... I guess I'll just do IE under WINE.

Heh. Sorry if I was a little confusing there.... I meant to specify Microsoft standards as standards of their own design....

Frankly, Microsoft is making me more and more angry the further I move away from them.

-James.

The thing is that once one product gains the mass majority of installed computers it becomes the defacto standard. Sometimes this is good and sometimes not. When it is good we have fixes to industries (not just the computer industry). When it goes bad we often times feel trapped and with no options.

Right now IE is the defacto standard and all pages need to render to that. Those that don't look ugly, etc. This is why you see web pages stating that they are designed for IE version x.x with a resolution of XXXxXXX(X).

Microsoft does adhere to some standards and when the WWW was looking at browser HTML extensions Netscape and Microsoft both submitted their choices. Instead of choosing between the two the WWW decided on both. But just because the WWW says that they will adopt both it doesn't mean that browser makers nor web designers have any intent nor desire to make a web page standard looking on all browsers.

Frankly, web pages typically, from what I have experienced after moving from Windows to Linux is that web pages, under Firefox, typically render faster but look worse. I use Opera ATM and it appears to be fast and renders pages sufficiently well to make them look nearly identical to the IE versions.

I've always felt Firefox rendered pages looked worse than under IE.

But this doesn't answer his question. No, not that I know of--there is no version of a browser that renders identical to IE.

Most webpages look worse because the designers did not consider users of alternative browsers. Any good web developer should know that not everyone uses the same browser, so they need to spend some time tweaking their sites so that they work with other browsers. unfortunatley some corporations still design their web applications for use with just IE thus shutting out a lot of people using alternative web browsers. I have found that most standards compliant websites, ender well regardless of what browser you use, but IE does not support a lot of the newer features in xhtml and css properly.

While I'd hate to come to MS's aide, give them some credit. They are going to great lengths to assure IE7 is fully standards-compliant, and are doing very well with it too. It will also support tabbed browsing... is it just me or are they ripping off Mozilla?

I understand your need, as I create web sites myself sometimes. From my experience, graphical CSS-enabled browsers are ordered like this, from best to worst:
- Firefox, Mozilla 1+, Netscape 7+
- Mozilla 0.9, Netscape 6, IE 5.5
- Mozilla <0.9, IE 5.01, IE 6
- IE 5.00, Netscape 4

Then there's Opera, Konqueror, and IE 7, that I don't know enough to put in this list (yet I've got the feeling that they'd go to a new line, after the first one but before the second one).
Finally, there's links and lynx.

The way I do usually, is to first create the structure, and the content, and test in links. Once this step is OK, I create the CSS file with css1 inside. I test in the worst available to me, namely Netscape 4 until I'm satisfied with the presentation. Finally, I add css2 to the CSS file, using ONLY css2 selectors (so as not to alter the formerly tested CSS1 presentation), and I test using the best I have, namely Firefox.

Since I do it that way, I've always ended up with very accessible web pages. They do not look the same in every browser (3 different presentations: "no-CSS", "css1", and "css2"), but they always work, and always with the expected presentation.

I hope this helps.

Yves.

Not a bad idea yinyeti... I got IE installed under WINE, but it's still not displaying the pages like my friend's XP install... I might just start my development using your process. It's logical and effective...

Take it easy,
James.