Thanks, Bitt. I went to the www.mozcafe.com site and installed their spell checker but didn't see anything. Those articles pointed me to the Spell Checker Front End, which was an important missing piece. However, now I right click, select the "check spelling" option, but don't see anything after that. I'll dig through those links and see if some of their configuration tricks will work.

This worked for me with a fairly unadulterated Firefox install without having FireBird previously:

1. Start FF
2. Install http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/windows-xpi/spellcheck.xpi
3. Close FF
4. Start FF
5. Install http://cgi29.plala.or.jp/~mozzarel/addon/firebird/spellchecker/spellcheckerfe0_4_0.xpi
6. Close FF
7. Start FF
8. Install http://cgi29.plala.or.jp/~mozzarel/addon/firebird/spellchecker/composer_xpt_1_6b.xpi
9. Close FF

Personally, I'd prefer a check-as-you-type spellchecker like those found in MacOS X browsers. All hail OmniWeb!

The procedure entry point ??1nsSupportsWeakReference@@IAE@XZ could not be located in the dynamic link library xpcom.dll

When I start firefox after doing the above steps. Seems to be generated as a result of that spellcheck.xpi installation. If I go in and prune the stuff it installed in the components folder, then the error message goes away.

Oh, also, spell checking still doesn't work, presumably because the spellcheck DLL can't start because of the above error.

Definitely works fine for me. Maybe there was a clash with that other spellchecker stuff you installed?

It would be interesting if I knew how to find out where to locate and delete the other spellechecker stuff I installed. I got it from www.mozcafe.com ...

I won't argue with you there. There's a lot of stuff about both Firefox and Mozilla that needs a lot of tidying, including plugin management. You can try looking in Tools->Options->Extensions, but I bet it won't be there.

No, it's not in that screen. The spellchecker front end is in that screen, but the spellchecker itself is not. Interestingly, there is no way to remove a plugin from that screen, only to disable it. Sigh.

If you click properties (or whatever it is) for that extension, it has a button to remove it. Not that that helps you.

You could uninstall Firefox completely and reinstall. You might have to also delete the stuff in Documents and Settings.

Ah! Missed that button, thanks.

A nifty little doohickey in firefox: When in the empeg bbs (and other sites that provide alternate stylesheets), you can choose a different look&feel.

There is a small icon on the lower left corner that looks like a box of crayons. Click that and choose an alternate theme. It's not too useful right now as it seems to revert whenever you click a link, but it's sorta cool nonetheless.

I don't feel like reading this entire thread so this may have already been mentioned but...

<frustrated rant>
From a designer's aspect, I wish Firefox would correctly render simple CSS!
</frustrated rant>

Example? I've never seen CSS that wouldn't render properly on Firefox/Firebird/Mozilla/whatever that didn't have any errors.

By the way, I'm back to using IE for most of my stuff. I gave Firefox a good solid chance, and I'll leave it installed for some stuff, but I'm back to IE as my default browser. Reasons:

- Load time. To launch a fresh session of firefox takes a maddeningly long time, even on my 3.2ghz system. IE, by comparison, launches almost instantly.

- Spell check. I tried very hard to get the spell checking functioning (as described earlier in this thread) and it never worked. IESpell just works.

- Funny wrap in text entry. When I put in posts here on the BBS with a long URL tag, the box wraps funny and goes wide if the length of the URL exceeds the width of the text entry box.

- Other miscellaneous little niggles.

I'll admit that Firefox has a lot of advantages over IE, and I really like the tabbed browsing feature especially for reading the BBS. So I'll keep it around at least for that. And I'll admit that IE has a bunch of little niggles and crashes and things of its own, so now the two programs are very nearly a dead heat. It's only a few critical things that keep me from fully embracing firefox.

IE, by comparison, launches almost instantly.

Because 99% of it is already loaded by the Windows OS

t's only a few critical things that keep me from fully embracing firefox.

I'm with ya. I use IE for all my Windows browsing needs, despite giving Firefox, Mozilla, and others a fair chance. Firefox isn't too far behind, and since M$ has no plans to update IE, I think it's got a shot to be the browser of the future on the Wintel platform.

Of course, now that most of my home computing is on my Powerbook, I don't need to worry about PC browser wars anymore.

To launch a fresh session of firefox takes a maddeningly long time, even on my 3.2ghz system.

That's weird. I have a slower computer than that and it takes very little more time than starting a new IE window. I'm talking like 0.8 seconds versus 0.4.

Maybe it's time for Tony to defrag?

Example? I've never seen CSS that wouldn't render properly on Firefox/Firebird/Mozilla/whatever that didn't have any errors.

Feast your eyes on this in both IE and Firefox. This differences are slight but they are there. I was forced to redesign the page several times due to the age-old IE/Netscape/Mozilla issue of window margin widths. Any absolute or relative positioning is going to render slightly differently in each browser, which sucks when you are shooting for precise placement.

Other differences include Firefox not rendering the disc in front of the description date, the jog in the line below the words 'quantity', 'price', and 'amount' and the wierd alignment of the John Doe information when viewing the print preview in Firefox.

If you can find the error in my CSS, I'd like to know it.

when viewing the print preview in Firefox

Yeah...I thought it was weird that it would render the page properly (except the bullets in front of the date) but would not show properly in the print preview. I even printed a copy and the problem with the alignment was fixed, but the jog in the line was still there.

The disc thing is weird. The positioning is different, but I'm not sure which is right, or even if there is a right. The other ones (jog in the line, alignment in print preview) I don't see,

Well, here's what it looks like:


As far as the positioning, I'm not saying one is definatively right or wrong, just that both need to come up with an standardized format. How else are we supposed to specify absolute amounts if both render differently?

It doesn't do that for me. Odd.

I won't argue with you about the spacing. I have no solution.

Once again Firefox and I clash with CSS rendering. I am working on a template for a webpage that is supposed to look as similar as possible to a mock-up created in Photoshop. The nearly final result renders nicely in IE, yet Firefox tends to bungle things up.

Upon first load, many of the headers don't load and leave blank spaces. While annoying, this can be corrected by a page refresh. But extremely noticable is the right-hand column which does not appear on the right at all. Less noticable is the margin amount at the top, the misplaced navigation, and the ever-so-slight width difference in the body and footer areas (note the light blue-ish bar at the bottom).

I guess I'll spend tomorrow trying to work out potential issues in order to get both browsers to display similar results, but if neither browser can even agree on a 0,0 point, I don't see how things are ever going to look the same. If anyone out there considers themselves to be a CSS guru and has a solution, please let me know.

Well, it looks like I have my problem solved (sans some main content). Page should look nearly identical in both IE and Firefox.

What'd you do?

I cleaned up both the HTML and CSS code considerably, but the issues that I was having was pretty much an issue with IE loosly translating the CSS code, while Firefox maintains a stricter ship. By re-writing the CSS line-by-line and viewing it in Firefox as I went along, I was able to catch the culprits and make the correct modifications.

So basically from now on, my hard and fast rule is (and probably always should have been): design for Firefox and IE will probably turn out OK.

So this weekend I got hit by a piece of fucking spyware....again. Something changing my homepage. I have already screwed down the security on IE so tight that there are a lot of legitimate sites I can not see anymore, but it doesn't make a difference. I came into work on Monday, and 2 of my 4 cubicle mates also got hit by spyware this weekend, and another friend of mine's mother got hit by a really bad one that was using her computer to send spam. This is all IE's fault, and I have finally had enough of it. Using Spybot and Ad-aware and Hijackthis to fix things afterwards is all fine and dandy, but how long is it going to be before someone writes some spyware that just goes ahead and infects every file on your harddrive like a virus so that you can never get rid of it or does something equally nasty? Right now this is just an annoyance, but the potential is for it to be as bad as any virus infestation, and a hell of a lot easier to put on people's computers than virus. I practice safe computing, and I have NEVER gotten hit by a virus on my home machine, but as long as I use IE I am going to get spyware on my computer. This is just completely unacceptable.

I have been critical of Firefox for purposely choosing not be 100% compatible with IE which limits its usefulness, like the kind of stuff that Cybjorg is complaining about. I have my own issues with that kind of thing, like the fact it does not fully support div layers. But you know, I don't care anymore. I can't take IE's insecurity anymore.

So I installed Firefox two days ago and in some ways I am satisfied, and some ways I am not. I had been using MYIE2, which use tabs and mouse gestures, both of which I have gotten used to and don't think I could live without anymore. I am happy to say that the implementation of these two things in Firefox are very good, perhaps superior than MYIE2's implementation. I like all the referrer blocking you can do, that is a good addition. I am still getting used to a lot of small things, like the wierd extra wide cursor they use in text boxes like the one I am typing on right now. There are some features of MYIE2 that I will miss, like switching from tabbed to a MDI/child-parent type window with a click of a button, and some of the good extensions that have not made the jump yet to Firefox yet.

My one major issue with it at this point is the fact that is soooo slow. It is much, and I mean MUCH, slower than IE or MYIE2. I can watch it creating the page every time, something I never see in IE. It probably takes 2 or 3 times longer to render. I have gone online to their forums and tried a bunch of tweaks suggested there, but none of them worked for me at all. This is a big issue, maybe not a dealbreaker, but it is damn annoying. It also seems sometimes Firefox refuses to show a page, but it has only happened a couple of times so far. I will stick with it because as annoying as these things are, they pale in comparison to the annoyance of the gaping security holes of IE.

Thanks for this thread BTW, a lot of Tony's questions ended up being my questions too, and there was some good answers. And Tony, if you are going to stick with IE, you should try MYIE2. It uses the IE engine to render, so most things work exactly the same, but it throws in some great features like I mentioned.

My one major issue with it at this point is the fact that is soooo slow. It is much, and I mean MUCH, slower than IE or MYIE2. I can watch it creating the page every time, something I never see in IE. It probably takes 2 or 3 times longer to render.

I have not experienced this. To me, both products seem to render pages quite quick.

Questions:

Are you testing apples to apples? For example, loading from a hard disk instead of online so that random variances in network speed don't affect you?

Do you have one app or the other set to download more than two HTTP streams at the same time? That might affect download/render speed. Earlier in this thread somewhere, I think we discuss how to set that feature in Firefox, you need to make a registry change to set that feature in IE.

Finally, are you confusing Firefox's rendering style with slowness? When viewing the BBS for example, Firefox will render each of the table cells that contain the messages as-it-gets-them. IE waits until it's got the whole table loaded before it renders it. This can make it look like firefox is loading the page slower sometimes, although it seems to not make the actual start-to-finish rendering times any different from what I could see. If I recall correctly, this has been one of the hallmark differences between IE and all of the netscape products for many years.

I'll give MyIE2 a stab, thanks.

Are you testing apples to apples? For example, loading from a hard disk instead of online so that random variances in network speed don't affect you?

Yes, it is slower both when the page is brand new, and when the page has already been loaded once. It appears to be the rendering that is slow, not the downloading.

Do you have one app or the other set to download more than two HTTP streams at the same time? That might affect download/render speed. Earlier in this thread somewhere, I think we discuss how to set that feature in Firefox, you need to make a registry change to set that feature in IE.

Already done on both. This is also a tweak I have used with IE for a long time, and is one of the first things I did with Firefox (the RFCs be damned.)

Finally, are you confusing Firefox's rendering style with slowness?

Yes, there is that. After some further testing I admit this makes it look worse than it is, but it is still slower. I was testing on http://scragz.com/tech/mozilla/test-rendering-time.php , which records load times using some javascript, The first time loading it, I got 11 seconds with Firefox vs 6 with IE, subsequent loading averaged 9 seconds for Firefox and still 6 for IE. Not as bad as my original "2 to 3 times" estimate, but still noticably slower.

More troubling is the fact that during my further testing I had problems with pages loading again. Going on to Fark (for instance) and clicking on 6 or 7 links really fast in MYIE2 is fine. Doing the same in Firefox guarantees that some of the pages will not load. And hitting the reload button does not work in this instance either, I have to close the window and reclick on the link to get it working. Maybe I can fix this behaviour, time to wade through their forums again.

And another thing, I just went to Google and hit the News link...and nothing happened. Actually, none of them did, not groups, or images, or any of the rest of the links. Reloading the page, hitting it multiple times, nothing helped. Searching works, but not those links. I had to close the browser and reload it for it to work again.

So obviously there are some issues, but I am willing to cut them some slack since it really is still pretty new. And as I said, it is still not as bad as getting spyware on my computer.

Already done on both. This is also a tweak I have used with IE for a long time, and is one of the first things I did with Firefox (the RFCs be damned.)

It might be interesting to see if you run into the same discrepancies and problems if you set them both back to the system defaults.

Lately I've been getting a problem with my dialup connection where the line drops if I'm streaming too many pieces of data down the line at once. I've just now set up both IE and Firefox so that they're back to the defaults again, I'll see if the problem goes away...

It might be interesting to see if you run into the same discrepancies and problems if you set them both back to the system defaults.

Not a bad thought. I installed it with just the defaults on another computer, and I had the same problem with opening a lot of links too quickly. Not sure about the other problem, since it only happened that one time anyway. Couldn't find a solution in their forums, may be ime to post there.

Just discovered the "duplicate tab" extension. Copy the current tab AND the history. Comes in handy when I am typing a reply in here, and I want to go back and check out an older post in the thread real fast without losing my message (or having to copy it and repaste it later.) Very nice.