November 19, 2007

grumble IE grumble

I think I'm going to start using Firefox to do my posting. There are mystical, magical, mouse-actions and control-mistypes that cause IE to do "return to previous history entry", and if you do that while you're composing an article, then advance forward again, your post is gone to the great bit bucket in the sky. I just lost a post that way.

I tried an experiment, and Firefox didn't have that problem. On the other hand, I'm noticing that when I hit "enter" in IE, the frame editor creates a new "p" tag. In Firefox, the "enter" key creates a break -- which is what happens on shift-enter with IE.

And as I'm composing this, I see that I can't use control-I to open italics. It opens the Firefox shortcut bar instead.

Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Probably the best answer is for me to get in the habit of composing my posts using Frontpage.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 07:12 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Are you using your new laptop's mouse pad? Does it have horizontal scroll support, usually indicated by some vaguely arrow-y things across the bottom of the pad? If so, you might be accidentally starting a stroke low enough for it to be registered as a horizontal scroll, which IE is probably interpreting as "go back in the history".

(Vert scroll on the trackpad I like and use; never found a use for horiz scroll, and magically turning it into "back" was even worse.)

Posted by: Jeremy Bowers at November 19, 2007 08:03 PM (njRlE)

2 Actually, I found a setting somewhere which deactivates the touchpad when a USB mouse is attached, which is what I'm using to move the pointer.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 19, 2007 08:16 PM (+rSRq)

3 I'm experimenting with editor configurations.  There are actually two separate versions of the editor, one for IE and one for Firefox, and their default configurations are different, particularly when it comes to line breaks.  I have no idea why they did that.

The shortcuts for bold, italic and so on are harder to fix.

I'll be adding an alternative editor soon to support Opera and Safari users (it works for IE and Firefox too, of course).  It has some neat features  - tabs for both multiple documents and for the design vs. code views, its resizeable, supports floating toolbars...  Unfortunately, it's designed specifically for a PHP backend.  Bleh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 19, 2007 11:53 PM (PiXy!)

4

Using IE under XP, I got used to using Control-I to get into and out of italic mode. Usually it worked, but sometimes it would cause some other effect. I gather it was a hotkey for some IE mechanism or other.

Under Vista I've never had that happen. It always works correctly (in IE) and never takes focus away from the editing window. I've noticed several subtle things like that which I assume are deliberate fixes by Microsoft.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at November 20, 2007 12:22 AM (+rSRq)

5 I have had Firefox lose significant text entries -- at times, the backspace key apparently triggers the back button.  I haven't figured out what conditions need to be in place for this to happen, but it is maddening.

So... watch out for that.

Posted by: dkallen99 at November 20, 2007 10:29 AM (1PFDl)

6 I've run into the "Ctrl-I" issue on FireFox. I've gotten used to "< i >", "< /i >" keystroke-sequence to turn italics on and off.

The "BackSpace" command (as well as "Alt-LeftArrow") produce the "Back" command in FireFox while viewing a normal web page.

Inside the comment-edit window, "BackSpace" does a BackSpace command. Once I click on a piece of the page that is not the "Comment Edit window", the "BackSpace" button sends the "Back" command to the browser.

Posted by: karrde at November 20, 2007 11:18 AM (2uK69)

7 That could never happen to me...

Posted by: ubu at November 20, 2007 12:27 PM (dhRpo)

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