StevieC wrote:
generally, i understand that browsers have built in support for badly formed webpages, hopefuly pages unlike mine
Within the web industry "quicks mode" usually refers to two things.
1. It officially means code added to a webpage to make it backwards compatible with older browsers. For example I could use a different DOCTYPE to achieve a certain layout in a particular browser, or I could add <meta http-equiv-“X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7”/> to tell all Internet Explorer browsers to treat a page like IE7. Generally in all cases quirks mode is used to fix layout problems in older browsers.
2. For many, including myself, quicks mode is seen as a developer's lazy way of fixing layout problems that should not exist in their browsers. Microsoft happens to be the biggest offender of this. Well formed webpages should render perfectly fine in modern and older browsers. It is the developer's responsibility to insure their browsers render webpages per the various compliant standards. In this way quirks mode really has nothing to do with malformed coded webpages because a badly coded webpage is always going to be a badly coded webpage. :)
StevieC wrote:
if a web browser was coded to accept ONLY standards compliant pages, and have no support for tag soup/quirks mode, would that browser be any faster/more efficient? and obviously if so, how much by? (roughly)
A standards compliant browser will render standards compliant webpages faster, but a lot of it also comes down to how the browser was developed. Case in point, Chrome and Firefox both render pages rich in CSS3 and HTML5 fast because these two browsers have the greatest support for these standards. On the other hand Internet Explorer only has partial support and therefore will lag on rendering pages rich in CSS3 and HTML5.
Even between Firefox and Chrome there are notable comparisons. For example each tab in Chrome is a separate process in Windows. This means that because each tab is treated like a separate application when you close any tab the memory associated with that process is freed up. In contrast all tabs in Firefox are grouped under one application process. When tabs are closed the memory used isn't released. This becomes a problem if over a period of time of visiting Youtube and Playlist and other media sites the amount of memory being consumed by the Firefox process exceeds ALL available system memory. At this point Firefox becomes completely unstable and needs to be restarted. The difference here between Chrome and Firefox is with Chrome you should never experience lag-over-time because memory is always released whenever tabs are closed.
16 Feb 2012, 5:44 am
