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While our initial review of Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 focused on cataloging their new features (www.nwdocfinder.com /6233), this follow-up test put the new browsers through an extensive range of trials. These tests, of development standards conformance and page performance, were designed to show that browser choice can affect greatly how well users access Web content.
We found that in standards conformance, Firefox 2 is the measurably dominant browser. Performance results varied widely depending on the test case and Web site used (www.nwdocfinder.com /6259). We did see somewhat of a trend that Internet Explorer was faster than Firefox, though we also found that older, less-compliant browsers (that is, IE 6 and Firefox 1.5) were faster than their upgraded brethren. Interestingly, our control browser, Opera 9, struck a nice balance between performance and standards conformance, and warrants a deeper look from those who want it all.
In our testing of markup conformance, we found that no browser supports even older markup specifications such as HTML 4 perfectly. If you poke around the HTML and XHTML specifications hard enough, you will find many little and occasionally some big problems in the browsers. The markup omissions were more notable with IE. For example, IE 7 does not support a number of character entities, including useful math symbols. It does not support the <q> tag nor does it support all aspects of how the <object> tag should act, such as pulling in external files.Firefox 2 also had some problems with <object> and a few issues with test cases for the <text area> tag.
When it comes to markup conformance, neither browser offers perfect support, but many developers will deem both passable in their HTML support. Yet upon deep inspection, we found Firefox 2 to be more complete in addressing specification details.
The case of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) support is similar. At a basic level, you may not see much of a difference between the browsers. In basic tests we noticed mostly subtle visual differences, such as the interpretation of keywords for border types, the fantasy font family, or font-sizing keywords. However, all these differences are within the realm of being correct interpretations of the CSS specification.
When looking at more complex CSS examples, we saw almost three...