internet-explorer 10

Most of my screen-scraping so far has been through Perl (typically WWW::Mechanize). The big problem is that it doesn't support Javascript, which can often be an issue: The content may be Javascript-based. For example, Amazon.com shows the bestseller book list only if you have Javascript enabled. So if you're scraping the Amazon main page for the books bestseller list, you won't get it from the static HTML. The navigation may require Javascript. Instead of links or buttons in forms, you might have Javascript functions. Many pages use these, and not all of them degrade gracefully into HTML. (Try using Google Video without Javascript.) The login page uses Javascript. It creates some crazy session ID, and you need Javascript to reproduce what it does. You might be testing a Javascript-based web-page. This was my main problem: how do I automate testing my pages, given that I make a lot of mistakes? There are many approaches to overcoming this. The easiest is to use Win32::IE::Mechanize, which uses Internet Explorer in the background to actually load the page and do the scraping. It's a bit slower than scraping just the HTML, but it'll get the job done. ...

A decade with Netscape. I’ve been wavering between IE, Opera and Mozilla over the last few months, and have come a full circle. IE: Default browser. Works with BCG’s intranet. Opera: Great offline browsing. Fast downloading. Tabbed browsing. Mouse gestures. Mozilla: Powerful plugins. IE: A9 toolbar. Fantastic way of searching. IE again: Google desktop. Solves all offline browsing problems I had.

MSN’s attempt to foil Opera. via andersja

101 things you can do in Mozilla and not IE. But apart from 1. Tabbed browsing and 2. Popup blocking, I don’t quite use the other features. Mozilla (and Opera) still need some catching up to do. via New Architect

AOL, and hence its 30 million subscribers, could move away from IE towards Mozilla. That’s big.

Microsoft first tries to block MSN access to non-IE browsers, and then surrenders. I still can’t access their photos section through Opera.

IE6 is out with new features. My site has already had quite a few hits with people using IE6! BTW, it doesn’t have Java or Plugin support.

Will OggVorbis beat MP3 Pro? Will Netscape 6.1 beat IE 5.5? Will OpenBSD 2.9 overtake Linux? Unlikely. But should be interesting to watch.

I shifted from Netscape Navigator to Internet Explorer because I could cut and paste tables from IE to Excel. But now that I’ve downloaded Opera 5.11, used its zoom function, it’s gesture keys, and so on, I’m moving over to Opera. Long live Opera! (Which, given Netscape’s fate, is perhaps no more than a fond hope.)

The latest browser stats say that 69% of the world uses, Internet Explorer, while only 27% use Netscape. BrowserWatch says 57%-26%. Netscape 6 might do something about it, given that Microsoft’s split.