Ubuntu Web Browsers – The good, the bad, the ..??

Well, I’ve been playing on my Ubuntu system for a while now. The one thing I wasn’t expecting to have was formatting problems when viewing web pages. Obviously I started with Firefox 2.0. This seems to cope with most sites, but every so often I come across a problem with the size of text being displayed. This is usually on menus such on www.firstdirect.com. See the screen shot below:

firstdirect.png

So from this example I decided to view a basic HTML page from www.downthelane.net through Firefox, Galeon, Opera and Mozilla web browsers. The examples are shown below:

firefox.png Galeon

Opera mozcye1.png

From the example site, Galeon and Mozilla seem to display the format better than Firefox and Opera. However Firefox and Opera are the more “polished” products. However I assume Mozilla and Galeon use the same build engine as they are at the same release level. Viewing the same site through Internet Explorer on my WXP box displays the site correctly. I’d be interested in views on why some browsers display the sites better than others.

Technorati Tags:
, , , , , ,

4 Responses

  1. This is why:

    It claims to be valid html 4.01, but it’s not by a long shot.

    It seems to be produced by this tool:
    http://www.webstudio.com/
    Which I assume is only tested on IE.
    As a side note, it renders fine on firefox 2.0.0.1 under ubuntu for me, which detects it in quirks mode even though it claims to be valid html.

  2. [...] felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called “Ubuntu Web Browsers”. The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu [...]

  3. hmm… interesting. i checked out http://www.downthelane.net/Page_3.html in my browser (Firefox), and it worked fine. very odd.

    have you tried epiphany? how does that display it? or konqueror?

  4. Try googling up “Acid Test 2″ if you want to test a browsers ability to display web pages correctly.

    also: why no Epiphany?

Leave a Reply