<p>Upgrade WHAT to 3.01?</p>
<p>The current version of Firefox is 3.01. Internet Explorer is 7 with 8 in Beta (to the best of my recollection). For Firefox and Thunderbird questions, mozillazine.org is one of the better sites on the web to get support questions answered.</p>
<p>marian - downloaded 9.0 reader and I can now view PDFs with Firefox. I also have the full Acrobat program (not just the reader) and will continue to use it if I need to edit pdfs or use other expanded functions.</p>
<p>Off topic:</p>
<p>I love the full Acrobat program! I scan articles into pdf format to save them, instead of cutting the article out of a magazine. I download articles off the net into a pdf document. And I use the program to type on any form. It’s pretty pricey, and I tried one free one, but it didn’t work as well as I had hoped.</p>
<p>OK, since I’m a web designer I’ll weigh in with some explanatory comments:</p>
<p>The reason that some sites can be viewed only in IE is simply a function of bad design. Firefox and browsers like Safari are “standards compliant” -that is, they are designed to meet coding standards promulgated through the World Wide Web Consortium – W3C – [About</a> W3C](<a href=“http://www.w3.org/Consortium/]About”>About us | W3C) </p>
<p>The standards have evolved over time as new features were introduced - but each is detailed in a specific coding language. The latest standard is XHTML 1.1 </p>
<p>IE is not standards-compliant; that is, it uses a lot of proprietary code that is unique to whatever version of IE is being run. A web designer who hand codes or who uses an up-to-date version of non-Microsoft product like Adobe Dreamweaver to design a site will end up with a site that can be viewed on all modern browsers. However, various Microsoft products like FrontPage use the proprietary code that works in IE - so web designers who use those products often create web sites that can’t be viewed in any browser other than IE. (My word for a professional web designer who charges money to create such sites is “idiot”; for anyone else, I would use the word “amateur”.)</p>
<p>The reason for compatibility issues between IE 6 & IE 7 is that IE 7 has been reworked to be more standards-compliant – in other words, IE 7 is doing things the right way, just as Firefox and browsers like Safari have been doing all along, but in doing so it breaks pages that have bad code designed by Microsoft to work with its previous browser versions. </p>
<p>Firefox has an add-on that creates a “view this page in IE” menu option, which I think is the best solution for the various compatibility issues. You use Firefox but if you come to a page that won’t work in Firefox, you can open that one in IE – and if it is one that you frequently visit, you can even opt to “always” view that particular site in IE. </p>
<p>As a web designer I have to design for multiple browsers. I use Firefox for all my browsing, but because IE is the dominant browser on the market, when I am designing web sites I code to current standard, but always look at my sites first in IE because it is more efficient for me to fix the IE problems first. If I can get the site to function well in IE using correct code, then it generally will work in other browsers with no problem; but the converse is much less likely to be true.</p>
<p>Haha - </p>
<p>but always look at my sites first in IE because it is more efficient for me to fix the IE problems first. If I can get the site to function well in IE using correct code, then it generally will work in other browsers with no problem; but the converse is much less likely to be true.</p>
<p>Microsoft strikes again. ;)</p>
<p>
And do you have a word for the “professionals” in a field such as mine who go ahead and buy these/adopt them as the standard for our industry… so we have to use them day in and day out… And can’t use them on MF or Safari or on a Mac?</p>
<p>I would use whatever word you come up with a <em>lot</em>.</p>
<p>Calmom, Thanks so much for the tip about the Firefox add-on for “view this page in IE.” It’s just what I need!</p>
<p>
I’ve mumbled ‘calmom’s’ word a few times to myself when I’ve encountered apps my company has in place that’ll work on one version of IE but not a newer version or will work on IE but not Firefox. It might get mumbled again when I know they won’t do anything about it since IT has deemed everyone’s to use just a particular (old) version of IE.</p>
<p>I make sure any web service I develop works on both.</p>
<p>Given the large number of security issues with IE and with the Microsoft platform as a whole, I think it is insane for any business IT department to mandate IE. On the other end of things, I won’t host sites on an MS platform either – I always go with unix or linux. </p>
<p>I find it particularly frustrating to take over an already designed web site and have to clean up bad code. The MS software not only codes badly, it lays down tons of extraneous code … its that cleanup job that gets me so irked.</p>
<p>I actually test my web sites on multiple browsers: IE 6 & 7, Firefox, Safari, Opera.</p>
<p>Some Mozilla futures:</p>
<p>Fennec: Firefox on mobile phones (I saw a demo this morning). Mozilla wants to come up with a base web platform that programmers can use to run on phones where the apps developer doesn’t have to deal with the hundreds of phone types out there.</p>
<p>Gecko Rendering Engine as a plugin - this means that you can use the Gecko rendering engine in another browser as a plugin so if there is a multimedia feature in Firefox that isn’t in IE, you can call a plugin to display the object using a Gecko plugin.</p>
<p>Many more graphics features. One that was particularly impressive was the mirroring of a video being played in another pane of the browser.</p>
<p>Javascript performance improvements between two to ten times faster. This should allow a new class of applications to run in the browser.</p>
<p>IF I want to learn to create my own webpage, what is the best code to learn?</p>
<p>somemom:</p>
<p>The basics behind web pages is HTML which is really just a markup language - i.e. indicators to the browser as to how to render the page. It’s fairly simple with a format of ‘tags’ (special characters) to indicate to make a line bold, italicized, a table, etc. This is essentially the same thing as word processors did many years ago - before Word and Wordperfect.</p>
<p>You can either learn HTML directly and edit a page in any basic text editor like Notepad or Notepad++, or you can forget about learning the HTML and let a WYSIWIG application generate it for you. Even Word can do this at a more basic level. </p>
<p>To make it more dynamic you could learn a scripting language like Javascript.</p>
<p>This website has excellent reference info as well as free online tutorials -
[W3Schools</a> Online Web Tutorials](<a href=“http://www.w3schools.com/]W3Schools”>http://www.w3schools.com/)</p>
<p>Another direction is to start with a basic template that has the look you want and then mark it up as you wish. This site has many of these ‘starter’ pages for free -
[Open</a> Source Web Design - Download free web design templates.](<a href=“http://www.oswd.org/]Open”>http://www.oswd.org/)</p>
<p>From that point you just need to have it hosted somewhere. This can sometimes be done for free on the ISP (internet service provider) you currently have, like your cable company if you use a cable modem, or it could be done on some free locations on the internet, or at some inexpensive areas on the internet. You can get your own domain name if available - <a href=“http://www”>www</a>. somemom.com, if you wish.</p>
<p>Somemom, if you want to hand code your own web page, then start here:
[XHTML</a> 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)](<a href=“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/]XHTML”>XHTML 1.0: The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition)) </p>
<p>This is the latest standard (xhtml 1.0, which replaced html 4).</p>
<p>Here’s a site with good tutorials: [XHTML</a> Tutorial](<a href=“http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/]XHTML”>http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/)</p>
<p>I know very little about writing code-
but I have been hearing a lot about [Ubuntu](<a href=“http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu”>http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu</a>)</p>