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Rant. About web browsers no less.
I keep running into people who notice I use Firefox and they get this weird look and go “Why would you still use that? Get Chrome.”
Um. No.
Aside from one of the most visually clunky interfaces I have ever seen (using it seems pretty clunky too, though I notice the latest versions of Firefox default to a similarly clunky UI. Really Mozilla? What’s with that?) Chrome is glitchy, updates are frequently scary (especially for those who upgrade within a few days of the release) and it still has compatibility and speed issues.
All of that aside though, it jumps on my biggest browser related pet-peeve ever (this problem is not specific to Chrome, but I will get to that in a moment) and fails to preform the simple function of fully recognizing CSS!
Seriously. Going on 16 years since CSS 1 specification was introduced. There is zero reason for a new browser to fail recognizing simple CSS and I promise, if I am doing it, it is very simple CSS.
I redid my journal layout yesterday (checkerboard overload!) with the intention of a brighter, easier to read for those who have issue with light text on a dark background and overall cleaner (though not necessarily less busy) look. With those goals in mind, and, given that I am a designer by training, the little details are important. The little details like say the colour of the borders!
What should visitors to my journal be seeing? (Right, please ignore the other tabs. The thought occurs that taken out of context and when presented all together like this the topics of said tabs could be a little worrisome)
This, as presented by Firefox, is exactly as it should appear. The checkerboard background with a transparent purple overlay containing the main elements and 50% grey, ridged borders. There is actually quite a lot of transparency at work in this design and while there are some older (really old) and mobile browsers which may be unable to display the transparency, I have accounted for that as well. For standard browsing on a PC/Mac or similarly capable mobile device this is what visitors should be seeing.
Opera is equally capable of presenting the design as it should be and while Opera has issues of its own (less now than the last time I used it with any degree of seriousness I hear) properly displaying page elements is not one of them.
Enter Google Chrome.
What happened to my borders?
Yes, I know, it a small thing in the grander scheme, but it begs the question: If something this small, this simple can be overlooked, screwed up or however it is the Google programmers managed to fail this when they set out to build Chrome (I have my suspicions, something which should have been compensated for) , what else did they plain and simply drop the ball on? What else are Chrome users missing? Made worse by, in the case of things like this, they would never even know.
What about Safari?
Right down to an identical shifting of page elements. From this it is safe to assume the real issue to be the Webkit engine both browsers (and a significant number of mobile browsers) run on and is somehow related to how it reads/displays Hex codes in CSS. However, if Gecko (Firefox) can do it and Presto (Opera) can do it, why can’t Webkit? One would think with 14 years (Webkit can trace its origins to 1998) and starting in a web environment which already included CSS, full CSS compliance would be a given. One would apparently be wrong and if one is me and attempting to write CSS for a new layout without having to duplicate several elements to accomplish what is essentially a smack upside the head for fail browser engines, one starts to wonder what in hell 28% of internet users can possibly find so damn great about this browser!
Yeah, I will get to tweaking the CSS to optimize it for Webkit based browsers. Eventually.
I do have to grant the Chrome users one small bit of leeway though, (and yes I know 20.8% of those reading this entry are using Chrome, it isn’t personal, if it works for you, great. Firefox is far from perfect either and apparently doesn’t work at all for some, simply more polished, but you are missing out) at least they are not among the 34.2% (30.2% for this journal, still not personal, but I do wonder why) using I.E. with all of its built in security risks and this …
There are (a lot of!) I.E. specific lines of CSS in the new layout in an attempt to get it to recognize the transparency … and the borders. All of which become useless depending on how upgraded/not upgraded the version of I.E. you are using is. There is a magic window in there somewhere where the transparency works. I’ll be damned if I know what that window is, and frankly, I don’t feel like writing a small dictionary of code to cover all the rest of the configurations. The borders? Yeah, they never work.
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This! This is exactly what prompted this whole rant! No, I don't do web design very often (and a large portion of the why is also that statement!) but when I do I get so frustrated trying to make it work across the various browsers. I will never understand why they all have to do everything so differently and I don't just mean the different engines, the engines all serve a purpose and handle various tasks in different ways, I mean make the various engines standard compliant so when the various end products get to the viewer it hasn't cost some poor designer/coder half a head of hair, several years of their life and a wall that now needs patching!
But then print is no better. If I start thinking about the various colour profiles (Machine, OS, Monitor, does whatever is being designed also have to be web compliant and oh god the printer colour profiles ... don't get me started on printer profiles) I get the overwhelming urge to hide in a corner sobbing and mumbling interesting things like "It's not red, too much blue, the cyan is bleeding!"
err ... yeah. And it should now be abundantly clear why I stopped doing design professionally.
*edited for typing fail
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Anyway, at home I like Firefox, just because I like it. When I'm Simming at the same time, Chrome seems to slow my game down. Having Firefox open doesn't seem to hog half the resources that Chrome does.
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