Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

I’ve still been using IE11 up to now by default (for the websites it still renders adequately, with Firefox as a fallback — there’s a “Open current page in Firefox” add-in), for the following reasons:

- crisper and higher-contrast font rendering on low-DPI monitors

- Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree. Edit: And, maybe more importantly, opening a link in new window/tab also clones the history.

- generally good keyboard usage, e.g. for the history tab (you can for example always blindly hit Ctrl+H, Home, Enter to go to the last visited page, something which is more fiddly in other browsers)

- larger viewport height than possible on Chrome/Firefox/Edge (after hiding the toolbar and status bar, configuring tabs to be on the address bar, etc.)

- allows yellow search highlighting (which Firefox doesn’t on light backgrounds)

On a similar note IE and legacy Edge (non-chromium) had/still have unparalleled snappy scrolling (on touchpads). I really wish I had never used those browsers because nothing today compares to it. UWP apps have decent scrolling, but these old browsers were something else (apparently they took every touchpad movement for scrolling or something, I'm not sure what that means. If anyone from MS would like to chime in I'd be grateful!)

Right, even scrolling by keyboard feels more snappy to me on IE.

Curiously enough, IE is also the only one that allows properly selecting and copying CSS-generated content (i.e. both quotation marks added via "quotes:" as well as general free-form text added via "content:").

Firefox does some semi-functional hack for handling quotation marks, but gives up on "content:", while Chrome and all other Blink-based browsers don't handle that kind of text at all and just skip it entirely. (No idea about Safari, but given its shared rendering engine history with Chrome it presumably doesn't handle it, either.)

> - Ctrl+N/Ctrl+K clone the current tab into a new window/tab including its history, letting you “fork” the tab and effectively navigate a history tree.

You can do this in Firefox by middle (or Control) clicking the Reload button.

In Chrome those mouse actions work as well, or right-clicking a tab and selecting "Duplicate." I'm not sure if there's a keyboard command for it.

Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut, and no option to open it in a new window (which is what I usually want). Also, what I initially forgot to mention, opening a link in new window/tab in IE also clones the history.

You are now banned from Hacker News.

Currently karma is still positive. :D

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