[Web4lib] IE 9 and Firefox 4

Eric Phetteplace phette23 at gmail.com
Fri May 13 14:29:40 EDT 2011


I've run into problems with EBSCOhost's built-in PDF viewer in Chrome. It's
unfortunate that both are trying to address an annoying problem and they've
inadvertently created a new one. The only solutions I've heard of are A)
disabling the browser's PDF reader plug-in (not ideal, given that it's
helpful the other 99% of the time) and B) clicking a "download" link if it's
available, instead of "view PDF" e.g. EBSCOhost has this option but only *
after* you click view PDF and it gives you a broken, gray frame.

I'm surprised that people are reporting problems with Google Chrome for Mac.
I use it as my regular browser and have a consistently quality experience. I
think, moving forward, modern browsers like Opera, Firefox, and Chrome (and
arguably IE9, which still lags behind all of those) are going to deliver
better quality so upgrades will pay off quickly. A bigger hesitation would
be add-on/extension compatibility; when I switched to FF4, half of my
add-ons broke. If libraries rely on certain ill-maintained extensions that
will be a big hindrance to migration.

Best,
Eric Phetteplace
M.S. Candidate
UIUC GSLIS


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