Simon Willison’s Weblog

Interesting. When I put IE 3 on my XP Home system, any time I ran it it would destroy my User Account panel. Open the panel, there would be no content. Are you seeing no problems on your XP system? (IE3 works fine on NT though.)

Bill Mason - 11th November 2003 01:10 - #

Mine's still there. I've had a few problems with IE3 not allowing me to surf to other sites, but the default page for it is MSN so I've been using its search engine to get to other places.

Simon Willison - 11th November 2003 01:15 - #

Why IE3? Lynx, I can understand.

Joe Grossberg - 11th November 2003 02:18 - #

Mainly out of a sense of completeness - I'm really not too bothered if stuff works in it or not. I should try and get Netscape 3 going as well, if only for old time's sake.

Simon Willison - 11th November 2003 02:43 - #

Maybe the story should say "made possible by Joe Maddalone with distribution managed by Ryan Parman." :) Going overbaord with IE3, in my opinion !! Bit like card collection and doing it so you can say "Ive got the set". Cheers John

John - 11th November 2003 02:49 - #

John: true, but I credited Joe Maddalone in an item just a few days ago. I didn't want to repeat myself too much.

Simon Willison - 11th November 2003 02:53 - #

I've created a simple HTA to organize my new stable of IE browsers, looks like: screenshot.

MikeyC - 11th November 2003 03:38 - #

Why Windows Classic mode in XP? Why?? :-(

Chris Hester - 11th November 2003 12:31 - #

My browser testing utopia would just have one (gecko) browser!

alastc - 11th November 2003 13:18 - #

I've seen content s how up differently across mozilla 1.4/1.5 and firebird 0.7 and 0.71 for mac.. I definitely would have at least the core Mozilla and then Firebird, maybe even Camino (if you have a mac) and definitely Safari - and ie 5.2 (of coures if you have a mac)

Seth - 11th November 2003 15:22 - #

Because, Chris, Tellytubby Windows is just plain evil. We may have all had to upgrade to the latest version of Microcrap, but we don't have to put up with that particular skin *eugh*

Meri Williams - 11th November 2003 16:03 - #

Once you get used to it (and there are three flavours to try - blue, olive and silver) you realise how pig-ugly the chunky square original look was. Only a madman would choose it without a good reason (such as changing the fonts) over the default XP skin. :-) It's like buying a Mini Cooper and fitting the engine into an original Mini so you don't have to get used to the new design. No offence, but people should move with the times. XP's skin offers alpha transparency and more. Plus you can always reskin it via a third-party program to whatever you like. There's a great cherry red Opera 7 skin available. Will Longhorn users switch off the next look and choose "XP Mode"? :-D

CHester - 11th November 2003 19:59 - #

We're going to have to agree to disagree on that one - I just find the XP skin offends my sensibilities as a computer user, and it's the first thing I turn off when I install XP (closely followed by most of the silly graphical effects, animations, "enhanced" start menus and so on). Recently I found that you can use Tweak UI to turn off even more stuff which is just great - now my start menu opens instantly at all levels without any of those folding out animations.

Simon Willison - 11th November 2003 20:23 - #

Agree with Simon regarding XP look. Too thick to be usable.

ic - 11th November 2003 22:31 - #

"it's the first thing I turn off when I install XP"

Same here. Besides the fact that the XP skin is garish and ugly, my ancient 333Mhz system runs quicker when I turn off all the needless frills. I really don't give a rat's behind about transparency, drop shadows and fading menus. Give me performance above *all* else.

MikeyC - 11th November 2003 22:33 - #

I personally like the blue XP Luna skin. For the longest time, I really like the classic look. In fact, I would rather have the Windows 98 look over the Windows ME or Windows 2000 look. Win98 has a nice gray-coloured window and a nicer blue gradient color, which beats the newer beige and muddy blue look.

But Luna grew on me. I like how the Start button is green and the Close buttons are red. It's a small thing, but it's much more intuitive. I also like how the titlebar, taskbar and start buttons are much larger and go all the way to the edge of the screen for the first time in Windows history. Much easier to hit. (For the same reason, I don't understand people that shrink their titlebars and scrollbars to the smallest possible size to save room.)

Going back to the topic, I wonder if it's possible to port Konqueror (or it's KHTML innards) to Windows for a pseudo-Safari tester. Gotta catch them all...

starvingartist - 12th November 2003 03:45 - #

"I wonder if it's possible to port Konqueror (or it's KHTML innards) to Windows for a pseudo-Safari tester."

There's a project over at sourceforge, but it doesn't look like there's been much active development on it.

MikeyC - 12th November 2003 04:07 - #

After seeing that IE 3.0 in your shortcuts list, the only disadvantage that I can think of in this recent 'multiple ie installations' news is that we'll be watching to an inscreased number of hits from (really) old browsers in our logs. :)

Sérgio Nunes - 12th November 2003 10:01 - #

Hate to say it, but it looks like broswer testing hell to me. Hehehehhe.

Daniel Talsky - 12th November 2003 18:40 - #

As a by the way, there is no particular reason why you couldn't add Opera5 and Opera6 onto the list. Just install them into seperate folders from Opera7 (and each other). They install cleanly into folders without mucking around with the registry and/or system folders.

wink - 12th November 2003 21:13 - #

"no particular reason why you couldn't add Opera 5 and Opera6 onto the list."

Now that would be really hardcore. The way I look at it, users of alternative browsers like Opera and Mozilla upgrade far more frequently than users of IE. I have no data to back this up, but it's a gut feeling based on the fact that to use an alternative browser you generally have to seek one out and, therefore, are a bit more "web saavy". Given this: I find it VERY hard to believe that ANYONE would still be using Opera 5... by the same token it's far more likely, imho, that there would still be a few users out there using IE 3 simply because they never upgraded their OS.

MikeyC - 12th November 2003 23:17 - #

Am looking for a downloadable software tool that I can quickly see how a Web page will look and function in different browsers, without having to install all the browsers on my PC (as shown in the image at the start of this thread). Is there such a beast?

George Hagerman - 15th November 2003 17:08 - #

No there isn't - if there was, everyone would be using it. You might want to take a look at Browser Cam though which is a commercial service that can send you snap shots of your page in multiple browsers. In the long run it's much more productive to have your own testing rig set up, but to do that properly you need a Mac as well as a PC.

Simon Willison - 15th November 2003 22:58 - #

Where do I find all that stuff that makes Win98 look like XP?

shiva - 30th March 2006 12:51 - #