firefox vs ie

[sammee]

my ie will for some reason NOT show chinese characters-i am tired of trying to fix this and wondered how firefox handles the chinese characters...better, worse...?

thanks

[Shadowdh]

I use ff and it works with no problems... very occasionally it might not work but then a couple of clicks and its fine... this is rare though... (I have to admit though that I really REALLY dont like ie now I have been using ff for the last few years... ie is bad hmmkay)...

[AxelManbow]

Firefox also has a wealth of plugins that are great for the language student.

[Mitchell67]

The sooner you dump IE and switch over to Mozilla, the better your life will be.

[skylee]

Is firefox also good for traditional Chinese?

BTW why is IE bad? I've been using it since I started to surf the internet and don't really know about other browsers.

[greenmoon55]

I used chinese version of firefox and it worked well:roll:. Have a try!

Here're some good Chinese brosers (English version)

I'm using the Chinese version of this one called 'The world'

http://www.ioage.com/en/index.htm

And many people in China use Maxthon

http://www.maxthon.com/

[Mitchell67]

here's a review that might explain some of the tradeoffs:

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-5561073-1.html

It's not that IE is bad; it's evil as are all products marketed by Microsoft. I still have troubles since it is, of course, bundled with the OS on this laptop. I get conflicts when IE opens up even though the default is FF. I keep my Norton subscription and I wouldn't trust anything else.

That having been said, and I am no 'puter tech, with FF, I believe that I went to View and then Character encoding to acquire the necessary fonts for the browser.

You may otherwise go ton the Mozilla page and get a walkthrough.

[lokki]

IE lags behind in some of the functionalities, like tabbed browsing that was only introduced in IE rather recently - well maybe it's nearly two years ago by now - but still, it was many years behind mozilla and firefox. And firefox has all the thousands of plugins to add nifty little extras, both for language learning and otherwise.

You do need to keep IE as well unfortunately, since you very occastionally run into a page that is designed for IE only and will not work with anything else. Luckily these are few and far between.

[muyongshi]

Unless of course you have mac and then you are screwed since Microsoft cut of the IE for mac over 2 years ago...

Anyway....for me that is the biggest thing. Microsoft is so big now that they don't have the customer in mind with IE they only wish to control the customer.

[Nanobyte]

I have both, i use more IE 7 cuz its more simple for me and i can see all chinese characters!

[sammee]

thanks all-well couldnt hurt to give firefox a go as well as maybe checking out the 2 other browsers

will write back after i try ff

s

[Quest]

Did you go to control panel and install asian languages? Did you enable auto-select in IE?

[zozzen]

The sooner you dump IE and switch over to Mozilla, the better your life will be.

I couldn't agree more.

FF itself may not be the best, but its wide range of addons can really make the life easier.

The best reason for me is that FF has a portable version. While I don't have a laptop, i put it in my usb drive which gives me some sense of taking my "own" computer with me. Now I can keep my history, bookmark, cookies and more importantly, it has TOR addon to deal with GFW issue.

As far as I remember, in non-Chinese OS environment, there's only 1 website (now.com.hk? ) can't deliver Chinese correctly in FF. That's fine to me, because i can click IE tab to render the page with IE.

[cdn_in_bj]

Unless of course you have mac and then you are screwed since Microsoft cut of the IE for mac over 2 years ago...

Just curious, do you use online banking for any Chinese banks? If so do they work properly with IE for Mac?

[muyongshi]

No I don't and no it doesn't! If it did, I might.

[cdn_in_bj]

No I don't and no it doesn't! If it did, I might.

I guess I'll just have to get around that with Boot Camp...

[shibole]

I just use Firefox and it seems to default to a unicode font that works nicely. It can display pretty much anything, even stuff I have no hope of reading and that I never configured, like arabic.

Make sure to install all the Asian font options and stuff. Make sure the default font is set to something like Arial Unicode MS, and like Quest said make sure to set the page encoding default to auto select.

I've never had any problems with any modern browser with any modern operating system, but I hate MS for doing their best to put Netscape out of business, then once that was done totally doing NOTHING to improve IE for many many years. MSIE only ever existed to put Netscape out of business and I refuse to use trash like that.

[atitarev]

I prefer Firefox as well (safer, tabbed browsing and lots of plug-ins, especially language related) but in many cases Firefox will not work the same or not at all where IE would.

Examples: Try developing a PowerPoint slide show and save it as HTML, Firefox doesn't support the embedded objects.

I use Cognos, Firefox handling of Cognos report is poor. Many applications were developed with IE in mind. Microsoft's JavaScript is different from standard.

Another problem is firewalls. Ours is configured for MS IE, so I can't download large files with Firefox.

By the way, displaying Chinese text shouldn't be a problem using any browser if Chinese language support is installed on the computer. Browsers allow to change the page encoding (View menu) if the one used is incorrect.

Anyway, Mozilla Firefox is excellent but it's better to keep both.

[imron]

The problem is not chinese fonts. The problem is that Chinese banks use custom ActiveX controls that only work in IE. Using any other browser, you are unable to even enter your password. I use boot camp with parallels.

@cnd_in_bj I guess you've bought a Mac then?

[muyongshi]

Welcome...my one problem with bootcamp (and which is why I don't use it) is that I can't use it and still partition my hard drive for other things...