Hi all, I have observed that there's a lot of difference in the rendering of firefox and IE. The websites designed for IE that involve some sort of DHTM menus or some javascript codes don't open smoothly in Firefox. I don't kbnow the reason. I have searched google a lot of times but no clue about what and where does the difference lies in th e rendering engines of Firefox and IE. Does any one has some information about that?? Thanx in advance. Regards.

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The difference would probably be more towards who is more closer to Javascript standards and whether the script is standard compliant. You'd have to look at EMCAScript 262 to find out whether the script in question is following standards or not. Because of the different implementations that was used with Microsoft JScript and Netscape Javascript a lot of this had to be standardise.

Firefox has chosen to work closely with standards on this, so that could be a reason why it works fine in IE but not on Firefox.


Cheers,


MC

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Firefox uses the Gecko engine created by Mozilla to render pages (and to render its windows' layout too!), while Internet Explorer uses... uses its Internet Explorer engine. IE's engine uses many many codes that Microsoft invented on their own. However, most of them do not follow web standards. The Gecko engine closely follows web standards (it's very hard to completely follow them -- only 2-3 browsers can currently do this), so the codes you write for IE probably won't be executed by Firefox. But if your code follows web standards, IE will probably understand it, though there might be a few exceptions.

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Since you're a Firefox user, I'd recommend using the IETab extension. It's derived from the older IEView extension. Essentially, it embeds as an object in a Firefox tab, the page you want to view using the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

You're effectively browsing in Firefox but using IE to render the page.

Be forewarned that there are certain unresoved issues:

> IE's ActiveX enable/disable settings do NOT work
> All popup windows open in a new IE Tab
> Navigation history list does NOT work
> SSL icon does NOT work
> Site's favicon does NOT work

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Unfortunately IE Tab has a memory leak...would give you a performance hit in your browser and potentially unsafe.

Take a look at the memory leak list here.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions

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