XP Widgets in IE6 and Firefox
I’ve written about Windows XP several times in the past. This time, I thought I’d make an entry pointing out the differences in how IE 6 and Mozilla Firefox handle Windows XP widgets. The results are pretty interesting.
First, a screenshot of Firefox, displaying several form elements in Windows XP.
Everything essentially looks as it should. Long and short buttons, a radio button, and a check box. Look carefully at that checkbox though; it has focus. Note the dashed border around it. It’s a little tough to see, but this next screenshot should help illustrate my problem with this.
There, now that is more easily noticeable, isn’t it? That border is absolutely hideous, and really shouldn’t be there. It makes the widget itself difficult to see, and it just looks awful. Also, I should note here that the text next to the radio button is inside a label tag. Here is another thing Firefox doesn’t do correctly; if you mouse over the radio button itself, it will perform the proper mouse over change; mouse over the label, and it doesn’t do the mouse over. This is different from the IE 6 native behavior. Mousing over a label in IE 6 will cause the radio button to change colors.
Don’t start rejoicing for IE, though, just look at what it gets wrong…
Take a good, hard look at that long form button! This is something I didn’t notice until a few months ago, as I never created buttons with that amount of text. I just happened to see a website on a friend’s machine opened in IE, and noticed that something was majorly wrong with the submit button on the site. Turns out that if you go past a certain character length, IE doesn’t handle XP’s own native widgets correctly! Not only does the same code produce a much longer button in general in IE, but those corners are horrible. Very pixelated, and they look just terrible.
So at the very least, Firefox scores several points for rendering Microsoft’s own widgets better than Microsoft’s own browser does. However, the other issues I’ve pointed out here should be resolved; it’s the little polish here and there that adds up to a perfect browser, and fixing those types of little issues will make all the difference.