Upgrade your browser - the more intelligent option

I PROGRAMER ^ | 31 July 2011 | Janet Swift

[roamer_1]

LOL! Mmmm... glue....

[Fast Moving Angel]

Like others, I’m running FF 5 on a Win7 machine. No problems loading — works like a champ. My only issue is (and this isn’t FF’s fault) that Verizon’s web page doesn’t load properly. After much time expended with their tech support in trying to figure out why I couldn’t access my address book, we concluded that it doesn’t work with FF — only with IE. So I pulled it up in IE — no problem. Still, I like FF better than IE. Not as cluttered, easier and quicker to use.

[Born to Conserve]

I’ll bet that the same thing can be said about Burger King. The more you “have it your way”, the higher your IQ. People who get their burgers with the standard condiments have low IQ and people who know they want something different, and ask for it, have high IQ.

Also, milk. Those with low IQ take the jugs with old expiration dates, those with high IQ take the jugs with recent expiration dates.

I don’t think there is much info here once you remove the noise.

[gitmo]

Chrome.
Fast, light, secure.

[Scoutmaster]

All I can tell you is that my ex, the tech wiz from MIT, had no use for Apple. He just found it underwhelming, and from what I could see, from years of living in the MIT milieu, his fellow super-techies felt the same.

Yeah, but I'll bet you they weren't running Windows either. Linux? Ubuntu?

As for IE, the only browser that was a bigger pain in the hiney to design webpages for was Netscape, years ago. Microsoft has generally felt that IE never needed to be compliant with W3C specs nor handle cutting edge cascading style sheet (CSS) code, although IE9 is much closer to playing with industry standards than *shudder* IE6 and other earlier versions.

I can't be fair without pointing out that Mozilla (Firefox) also has its own version of certain CSS codes. Which means you code your page to industry standards, then write special rules for IE6+, then a few special rules for Mozilla, all the time knowing that certain parts of your design just won't be handled by any IE.

[Fantasywriter]

Afaik, not one of them used Windows. I heard about Linux day in and day out, but I think Ubuntu didn’t come to the forefront until after my ex and I separated. Just to be clear, he was the tech guy, and as long as he was around all I had to know was where the on/off button was. Being on my own was a rude awakening, but I’m slowly making technical inroads. ;)

[fini]

I guess the fact that IE is already installed on almost every PC sold has no impact on the validity of the study.

[Revolting cat!]

Check out Slim, Slick!

[ru4liberty]

Bookmark

[eddie willers]

I am using Chrome.

Question then:

I was using Chrome (and liked it a lot) but I noticed that I could not get the posts here on Free Republic to default to a 12 clock Eastern Time format.

No matter what I tried, it continued to show posts only in Military Time.

When I DL'd the newest Firefox (5.0) and came back here, all was well. So I decided it must be a problem with Chrome.

Was I wrong?
Do you have a solution?

TIA

[Politicalmom]

I love my addons. I can add on tons of things to Firefox that make it more useful for me. I have weather showing in the toolbar. I have a picture zoom feature, I can set the font size differently for each website. I have to approve flash movies before they play. I have a feature that makes links “clickable”, so I don’t have to cut and paste. I have installed themes to make my browser prettier. I can click on a picture and block it from showing on my browser again. That one’s very useful around here, especially for the Helen Thomas threads! There are tons of others.

[cynwoody]

When I DL'd the newest Firefox (5.0) and came back here, all was well. So I decided it must be a problem with Chrome.

It is. I just tried it, and it wants to format timestamps like "Sun Jul 31 2011 19:49:48 GMT-0400 (EDT)". It's supposed to honor whatever date/time zone and format you have configured for your machine. It's getting the zone right, but not the format.

FR pages download with all the timestamps formatted in Pacific time, e.g., "07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT". There is a JavaScript loop that rifles through all the timestamps on the page and tries to convert each one to the local zone and format by calling, for example, new Date("07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT").toLocaleString(). Chrome's toLocaleString function is broken.

[eddie willers]

There is a JavaScript loop that rifles through all the timestamps on the page and tries to convert each one to the local zone and format by calling, for example, new Date("07/31/2011 4:49:43 PM PDT").toLocaleString(). Chrome's toLocaleString function is broken.

Is that something John R. can fix, or is it endemic to Chrome?

[willyd]

Outstanding...I see that nothing has changed for IE9..lol.

[cynwoody]

Is that something John R. can fix, or is it endemic to Chrome?

Not easily. He could substitute something else for the zone conversion code, but there isn't any good way for him to discover and implement your particular preferences. That's what toLocaleString is supposed to do, but doesn't.

I've heard that Greasemonkey exists for Chrome, although I haven't used it myself as yet. That means you could conceivably implement your own fix. You would need to write a Greasemonkey script to look for each <span> tag with class 'date', parse the existing innerHTML as a date, reformat the date to your liking, and assign the result back to the tag's innerHTML. That's what John's existing loop does, only he uses toLocaleString, which is broken in Chrome.

The existing code is at the bottom of http://www.freerepublic.com/l/common.js, in the NG_Localize function. Judging from what's commented out, it looks like he used to have a cut-and-dried implementation but decided to replace it with toLocaleString. In browsers where toLocaleString is implemented correctly, that's the way to go: users who want 24-hour time get it; users who don't, don't.