outlining and writing in web browsers

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Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 8, 2014 at 04:21 PM

As we’re moving towards more and more online outling and writing tools, the question of which browser to use is becoming increasingly relevant.

I haven’t given this much thought until recently, since I’ve started to use WorkFlowy and Gingko more frequently. Generally my browser of choice has been Firefox, mainly for the way it renders text (I find Chrome washed out, while IE font is often ugly), plus I have a handful of favourite Firefox extensions.

But since I’ve acquired a Chromebook, I started using Workflowy in Chrome more often, and I even switched to using Workflowy in the offline Chrome app on the Windows PC.

But the main reason I started this thread was because to my surprise (I usually avoid it as much as I can), I have found a number of benefits of using IE 11 recently. E.g. in IE, PhraseExpander’s SmartComplete pop-up box shows up right by the cursor, as opposed to just somewhere in the middle of the screen, as it does with all the other browsers. I was also impressed with IE’s spell checker, as it corrected my spelling as I wrote. It looks like there might be some integration between IE and Windows that I’ve overlooked and which is missing in the other browsers, and which may have an effect on one’s productivity when writing in online apps.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring this up, in case anyone else has some observations, suggestions or experiences in this regard. BTW, I realise that there is a huge amount of Firefox extensions out there, which I don’t know anything about, as I only use a few. So it’s not just browsers vs. browsers, but also ecosystems vs. ecosystems, which include apps, extensions, and operating systems.

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 8, 2014 at 04:28 PM

Oh, yes. The other thing that prompted me to start checking out other browsers is that recently I switched off all the fancy Aero stuff on my Win7, 64-bit machine, as it was really slowing things down. So I’m back to a Classic Windows theme and I’m very happy with that, but one of the side-effects of this move has been that now some ugly vertical scroll bars are showing up in Firefox in various web apps such as Gingko, while none of that is happening in Chrome or IE…

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 11, 2014 at 11:35 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
>So I’m back
>to a Classic Windows theme and I’m very happy with that, but one of the
>side-effects of this move has been that now some ugly vertical scroll
>bars are showing up in Firefox in various web apps such as Gingko, while
>none of that is happening in Chrome or IE…

This sounds like a rendering bug on the part of Firefox’s engine. You may want to uninstall and reinstall.

I have never enabled Aero in any of my machines, always sticking with the classic theme for resource efficiency but also to avoid distraction. I have never missed it. I use Firefox as my main browser and have never seen the scroll bars you mention.

Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 12, 2014 at 12:29 AM

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>This sounds like a rendering bug on the part of Firefox’s engine. You
>may want to uninstall and reinstall.

Thanks. Unfortunately that didn’t work.

>I use Firefox as my main browser and have never
>seen the scroll bars you mention.

Currently this is only affecting me in Gingko. Basically there is a vertical scrollbar besides each column, while if rendered in IE11 or Chrome, there are none.

But the good folks at Gingko have provided me with a CSS hack using the FF extension called Stylish, which hides most of the scrollbars. I’m still curious though why the difference in rendering.

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