(Sorry if that subject is awkwardly worded.)

Boy, I'm encountering more and more web pages that just won't render properly and it sure looks like JavaScript is the culprit. Lately, it seems that some new web page coding technique is causing not just pages to render improperly (or not at all) but the entire browser to crash.

So my main questions is (more at the bottom): Anyone have a suggestion for a browser whose JavaScript implementation is up to snuff?

Primarily, I have been using Firefox + NoScript to avoid those cases where the JavaScript code runs forever and locks the browser up. (Especially fun for those web pages that run more than one of those nasty scripts.) That combination has been working fine though I'd disable NoScript if I could find a way to force Firefox to time out in a much shorter time. Sure, it is very annoying to have to right click and enable scripts on a page to get it to display or to get the menus to display properly. But it seems that even NoScript isn't enough to eliminate the problems I've been having. Many pages won't render anything if JavaScript is disabled. (Except the ads; that part of the HTML seem to always get displayed no matter what.) I even found one page that used JavaScript to implement the "jump to page 1 2 3 4 ..." navigation at the bottom of the article. (How that was an advantage over using a garden-variety "anchor" tag is quite beyond me.)

For many sites I have to use a specific browser because Firefox can't run a lot of JavaScript code correctly. For example, I have to use Opera when I go to LinkedIn and a bunch of other web sites. (I've gotten used to the incessant Error Console pop-ups so I just minimize it onto the panel and ignore it.) I have to use Epiphany to get AT&T's web site to display anything. (Page text gets displayed and immediately disappears in FF and Opera.)

I used to think that Firefox and all its plug-ins could solve just about any web page problem you could dream up but, lately, I'm not so sure.

Is there a browser whose JavaScript interpreter is regarded as the best around? (Related question: Is there a test suite for browsers that runs the JavaScript interpreters through the wringer?) Is there a better guard against crummy JavaScript than NoScript?

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Rick

Hi -

IMO, Firefox "is" the best around.

That doesn't mean you won't face portability problems: heck, JavaScript *is* a "portability problem". Always has been.

But, for better or for worse, it's also the only game in town for client-side, in-browser dynamic scripting.

Suggestion: developing with Firefox + Firebug (then testing on a few key alternate browsers, including possibly IE6, IE7, Safari and Konqueror - to name a few) might be your best bet.

Alternate suggestion (if you're a Microsoft kind of guy): Visual Studio 2008 supports Javascript debugging. You might (for many perfectly legitimate reasons) prefer it over Firebug.

'Hope that helps .. PSM

I knew that. About JavaScript, that is. (Isn't JavaScript an ECMA standard? Can't web developers write to the standard? Jeez! :^/ ) I'm sure, though, that some browser's implementation of the JavaScript engine is better than others and by "better" I mean it handles more code than the others do without mangling the web page or crashing the browser when it encounters broken code. (Hey... a guy can dream can't he?)

Oh... I forgot to mention Konq. I use it for a couple of sites that only seem to work properly when I visit them using that browser. Unfortunately, the Konq for KDE3 seems to be falling by the wayside as far as development is concerned. I seem to recall that it wasn't on the OpenSUSE distribution and I had to load it from the packman site (if memory serves) and that version that I got doesn't seem to want to let you manage bookmarks any more. (I know Konq's out there for KDE4 but I'm mainly a Gnome desktop-kinda-guy and haven't wanted to jump into KDE4 just yet.) Anyway... I don't use Konq for much of anything any more. Unless someone responds that they've had excellent results with Konq under KDE4. Then I'd try removing all the KDE3 stuff on disk and loading KDE4.

But... I'm not a web developer. Not quite sure how you thought that from my post. (scratching head) I'm just getting frustrated at the poor experience that I'm having when visiting various web sites that insist on using JavaScript for damned near everything (like that page I mentioned that used Javascript to implement a "next page" link) and having the browser freak out. It's no fun doing research on a topic with a dozen tabs open in FF only to have the whole browser come crashing down due to some web page's bogus code or the browser's inability to deal with some bit of seldom-encountered-so-we-won't-work-too-hard-to-get-it-right JavaScript. (I got burned by this several times today.)

Sorry. The only Microsoft code left in the house (other than what's lingering on the old floppy disks down in the basement) is the copy of XP that managed to scribble on itself a couple of years ago which I haven't had the heart to totally obliterate in case I ever want to attempt to repair it. (That system's default Grub bootstrap points to the Linux partition now.)

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Rick