Browser Wars

Yeah, the old topic surfaces again. The best browser?.... I still love Opera. If you had your tabbed browsing done properly once, you don't want to go back. But unfortunately Opera has some incompatibilities, notably with Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server we use at work. So I used to have Internet Explorer 6 for those "special" sites. Then Internet Explorer 7 has come around and I fell in love with its ClearType fonts. That love proved to be short lived, as I found out ClearType can be turned on and fine-tuned by using the ClearType Tuner (BTW I still cannot understand why this feature is hidden so deep in Windows - Steve Jobs would make ClearType alone the key selling point and differentiator of Macs). Unfortunately many web sites are not compatible with IE7. Notably I have had several problems with Blogger itself when run on IE7, so I decided to use FireFox for publishing Headworx posts. This is a shame. HTML used to be so simple. And now we have true browser madness - pages incompatible with browsers and vice versa (reminds me the headphone madness...).

But headphone madness is finally (almost) solved by the arrival of the universal, invisible, swiss - army knife, wireless A2DP Bluetooth profile. I say almost, as in its infant age there are still some incompatibilities between A2DP devices - BlueSoleil plays silence on the Griffin BlueTrip receiver and iPod BlueTrip transmitter has to be paired every 10 minutes with the Nokia Audio Gateway.

So is there an A2DP-like cure for the browser problem on the horizon? May be not ideal, but solving many of the above mentioned problems is the IE Tab plugin. IE Tab can embed Microsoft IE rendering engine on one or more FireFox tabs. And you can define URL patterns to redirect FireFox incompatible pages to IE Tab - they will open in your FireFox, but will be handled behind the scenes by IE. Something like traveler plug adapter, only for web pages. By the way I hoped I would never need thing like IE Tab. Idealist...