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Wicked Fast.
[ Posted by Dan on July 02, 2003 | 6 Comments ]

I have been working on a reformation of Kalsey's CSS tabs code to NOT use unordered lists and list items in favor of divs and spans. I'm also adding some JavaScript to change the className on mouseover to change the menus without having to click and get a new page (something I am sure Mr. Kalsey has thought of before).

One striking fact that has come out of the work, is that Mozilla 1.4 on Mac OSX is extremely fast (download). It renders the code I have way faster and cleaner than Safari. Perhaps I haven't been paying attention recently, or maybe I'm in a Safari induced haze, but this new release is just awesome and might become my default browser. Oh yeah, and it has a nice new icon.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

The JavaScript feature sounds useful, but I never liked horizontal dynamic menus. Like some other dynamic menus, the mouse movement required to use them is quite unnatural. I also don't think much of using divs and spans to do the job of list items, but I suppose lists don't handle the JavaScript nearly as well?

Moz 1.4 on OS X? I haven't tried it yet, but your description sounds like it may be time. How does it compare to Camino?

-Posted by Joshua Kaufman on July 2, 2003 11:33 AM

Re: horizontal navs, sometime you gotta do what you gotta do. And in this case, I gotta do horizontal.

Re: Moz 1.4 vs Camino, Moz 1.4 just feels better and faster to me right now. And it has the DOM Inspector.

-Posted by Dan on July 2, 2003 11:41 AM

I too noticed the speed boost in Mozilla 1.4 after trying it out this morning. Netscape 7.1 feels a little snappier as well.

-Posted by Quinn MacDonald on July 2, 2003 03:19 PM

You know, I wasn't convinced at first - 1.4 felt slow to me, still. But on second glance it's quite speedy and usable. Good call.

-Posted by Paul on July 3, 2003 11:20 AM

i can't believe it - you really made me try mozilla, and i am apalled! the controls are all non-standard, the buttons, fields, scroll bars are butt-ugly, and i can't see how someone concerned with design can actually use this browser as the default.

-Posted by peter on July 3, 2003 03:34 PM

I'm not sure why you'd use divs and spans, it's only going to make the markup make less sense. But it shouldn't be too hard to make the submenus appear on mouseover. I'm even thinking I might be able to get something to work without the JavaScript.

-Posted by Adam Kalsey on July 3, 2003 11:14 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).