The Acid3 Test proves this. While most modern browsers such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Mozilla’s Firefox score high 90s, even perfect 100s on the test, Internet Explorer 8 is still at a laughable 20/100.
Even The Dragon Press is rendered wrong in Internet Explorer. The main page video often stretches off the page, login and search boxes don’t function how they are supposed to (although they are still usable), and there are sporadic formatting issues to boot.
Internet Explorer is also the reason we at The Dragon Press are unable to implement new features such as a video playlist on the front page (confirmed working on Firefox 3.5.3, Safari 4.0.3 and even working on Chromium 4.0.212.0 an alpha build of Google Chrome for OSX but a miserable failure on Internet Explorer). Article specific photo galleries, to be featured in our new feature series on a Foothill artists, are also difficult to impossible on the Microsoft product.
The Editorial Board of The Foothill Dragon Press believes that the school district should make a change on student computers from Internet Explorer 8 to any of the current browsers: Safari 4, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox. Many teachers have already downloaded and switched over to Safari or Firefox on their personal classroom computers; the students should be allowed to do the same on the Thin Clients in the pods yet are blocked from doing so.
Foothill students need the best software available to better utilize the hardware they’ve been given. Without efficient software, it’s like we are wasting the caring community and parent donations that we have received to help the school through the hard economic times.
[Edit: There’s another modern browser we forgot to tip our hat to: Opera. Opera Unite, a new feature found in the current build of Opera 10.10 beta, has the potential to change the way we use the internet, creating a web server out of your regular old web browser. Users can share their content (videos, photos, music and even messages) with the world, without the need for a professional hosting providor or any other hosting service. Definitely keep an eye on Opera Unite, it’ll be interesting to see where the project goes from here.]
