Sunday, July 15, 2012

Browser Performance upon Embedding Google Groups LawPundit Forum in Blogger: Gecko Wins (Firefox and Google Chrome), Opera Follows with a Bug, and Internet Explorer (Trident) Last with an Error Message: plus We Used Lunascape As the Toggle-Capable Test Engine

Update on "the Browser Wars" as we just embedded the new Google Groups EUPundit, EULegal and LawPundit into the corresponding EUPundit, EULegal and LawPundit Blogger blogs.

What happened browser-wise?
Some strange things.

Take it for what it is worth - but this embedding of Google Groups in Blogger has up to now worked without a hitch in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Internet Explorer produces a garbled message about not being able to embed frames and does not show the forum at all. Not usable.

Opera has one line of overlapping text at LawPundit -- a serious-enough error to deter usage.

I checked it all out again by using Lunascape 6 to access the Lawpundit blog.

At Lunascape you, where you can toggle between the Gecko, Trident and Webkit enignes for the major browsers:
  • Gecko reproduces the Google Groups LawPundit forum in the LawPundit Blogger blog without fail 
  • Webkit overlaps one line of text
  • Trident the first time around gave a runtime error and an otherwise blank page and at the second attempt produced most of the page, but  without the forum and with the message: "ERROR: Possible problem with your *.gwt.xml module file. The compile time user.agent value (ie9) does not match the runtime user.agent value (ie8). Expect more errors."
 I googled the "gwt.xml" problem and found this page (see that link).

In any case, those results match my own browser usage of Firefox as the browser of choice (because of all the options), Chrome as a good backup (perhaps faster, but limited, option-wise), Opera good with some great features but sometimes buggy and eccentric, and Internet Explorer is simply too flawed and not worth the money.