Differences Between Internet Explorer & Mozilla

July 27th, 2005 · No Comments

IBM Developerworks has an interesting article on the differences between IE and Mozilla, and things you should take note of when porting/creating web apps:

Ever have trouble getting your Internet Explorer-specific Web applications to work with Mozilla? This article covers common issues associated with migrating applications to the open source Mozilla-based browser. You’ll first learn basic cross-browser development techniques, and then develop strategies for overcoming the differences between Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

When Netscape started the Mozilla browser, it made the conscious decision to support W3C standards. As a result, Mozilla is not fully backwards-compatible with Netscape Navigator 4.x and Microsoft Internet Explorer legacy code; for example, Mozilla does not support as I will discuss later. Browsers, like Internet Explorer 4, that were built before the conception of W3C standards inherited many quirks. In this article, I will describe Mozilla’s quirks mode, which provides strong backwards HTML compatibility with Internet Explorer and other legacy browsers.

I’ll also cover nonstandard technologies, such as XMLHttpRequest and rich text editing, that Mozilla does support because no W3C equivalent existed at the time. They include:

* HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1
* Cascade Style Sheets (CSS): CSS Level 1, CSS Level 2 and parts of CSS Level 3
* Document Object Model (DOM): DOM Level 1, DOM Level 2 and parts of DOM Level 3
* Mathematical Markup Language: MathML Version 2.0
* Extensible Markup Language (XML): XML 1.0, Namespaces in XML, Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents 1.0, Fragment Identifier for XML
* XSL Transformations: XSLT 1.0
* XML Path Language: XPath 1.0
* Resource Description Framework: RDF
* Simple Object Access Protocol: SOAP 1.1
* ECMA-262, revision 3 (JavaScript 1.5): ECMA