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Dipping into the egg nog a bit early, are we?

If you are going to dip into the egg nog, at least do it right. Drinking that pre-made swill is not recommended.

Firefox shows just fine! just so to let you people of /. know:)

Windows Live Maps has a bad habit of checking user agent strings in order to support non-IE browsers. While most people won't have a problem with Firefox, there have been cases of people using Firefox browsers with the old 2.0 beta codename "Bon Echo" as the user agent string, and it's possibile that non-Firefox Firefox browsers like Iceweasel (Firefox without the Mozilla copyright bits) may have a non-Firefox user agent. In those cases, you'll get redirected to a barely-functional page instead of the proper map view. A good way to play around with this is to use Opera's ability to easily change the browser's UA (to mimic Firefox or IE). With Opera's normal UA (or a broken Firefox UA), you'll see this. If you change Opera to masquerade as Firefox, you'll see this instead.

The correct solution is to stop using UA strings for browser detection, but have fun trying to convince Microsoft to do that.

Firefox shows just fine! just so to let you people of /. know:)

Windows Live Maps has a bad habit of checking user agent strings in order to support non-IE browsers. While most people won't have a problem with Firefox, there have been cases of people using Firefox browsers with the old 2.0 beta codename "Bon Echo" as the user agent string, and it's possibile that non-Firefox Firefox browsers like Iceweasel (Firefox without the Mozilla copyright bits) may have a non-Firefox user agent. In those cases, you'll get redirected to a barely-functional page instead of the proper map view. A good way to play around with this is to use Opera's ability to easily change the browser's UA (to mimic Firefox or IE). With Opera's normal UA (or a broken Firefox UA), you'll see this. If you change Opera to masquerade as Firefox, you'll see this instead.

The correct solution is to stop using UA strings for browser detection, but have fun trying to convince Microsoft to do that.

Just a quick follow-up on my previous post regarding UAs. If you set Opera to identify as IE or Firefox via the per-site preferences (details here), it renders Live Maps almost perfectly. Compare:

• Opera 9.10 identifying as itself
• Opera 9.10 identifying as Firefox viewing the Microsoft campus in bird's eye mode (I specifically closed the scratchpad, as I was unable to remove items from it and really didn't want to post my own address on the interwebs even in picture form)

• Scroll-wheel zoom doesn't work. Scroll-wheel zoom does work in Opera on Google Maps, so this is not a problem native to Opera (such as not exposing events to hook scrolling).
• There are obvious layout problems, but only with the floating controls. IMHO, those need to be cleaned up and re-arranged anyway, so I don't mind them being in the wrong places.
• Some hover controls are missing. Hovering over an item in the scratchpad doesn't produce the popup that allows you to clear the entry, for example.
• Missing close controls on some items. Specifcally, the "Welcome" box is missing its closed "X".

Just a quick follow-up on my previous post regarding UAs. If you set Opera to identify as IE or Firefox via the per-site preferences (details here), it renders Live Maps almost perfectly. Compare:

• Opera 9.10 identifying as itself
• Opera 9.10 identifying as Firefox viewing the Microsoft campus in bird's eye mode (I specifically closed the scratchpad, as I was unable to remove items from it and really didn't want to post my own address on the interwebs even in picture form)

• Scroll-wheel zoom doesn't work. Scroll-wheel zoom does work in Opera on Google Maps, so this is not a problem native to Opera (such as not exposing events to hook scrolling).
• There are obvious layout problems, but only with the floating controls. IMHO, those need to be cleaned up and re-arranged anyway, so I don't mind them being in the wrong places.
• Some hover controls are missing. Hovering over an item in the scratchpad doesn't produce the popup that allows you to clear the entry, for example.
• Missing close controls on some items. Specifcally, the "Welcome" box is missing its closed "X".

Why does my Xbox360 still require bizarre router settings to connect wirelessly to my router? Oh yeah I forgot, Microsoft does not care.

"Bizarre router settings"? Like what, turning on UPnP? Oh noes, GRC says the interweb will hax0r my b0x0r if I use UPnP! Never mind that routers enable it only on the internal interface ...

What would you prefer Microsoft to do? Tell all of the NAT users out there that they're SOL for playing games if they don't want to forward ports manually? They had a problem, namely allowing NATed users to directly connect to peers, and they solved it with the correct solution, namely using UPnP to dynamically request port forwarding on an as-needed basis. I'm sorry that the routers you bought (which, BTW, probably weren't from the list of routers supported directly by Microsoft, and if they were then why didn't you try calling 1-800-4-MY-XBOX?) suck so much. Next time, do your research. Hell, it's easy enough to get UPnP working flawlessly on a linux server acting as a router. I've been doing it for over two years now (obviously with my original Xbox, since the 360's only been out for just over a year). While I'm running wired now, when I wrote that entry I was using wireless. In fact, I've never had a problem with my Xbox or Xbox 360 recognizing my wireless AP. The only problem I've ever had was with NAT, and that was completely solved with the UPnP daemon.

Until the whole world moves to IPv6, you're going to run into issues like this more and more often. You can take the Nintendo approach and force users to forward ports by hand (seriously, that's what you have to do with the Wii -- it's a good thing there are no multiplayer online games yet), or you can use technology that was designed to solve this problem (among others, of course) -- UPnP.

I wanted to use a modern, CSS-based liquid layout. So I bought a book, and dove in.

There's your first problem. No book is going to give you all of the latest techniques for doing "cool" things with CSS. For that you need to poke around online at places like CSS Zen Garden, A List Apart, Liquid Designs, etc. If you must buy a book, a pocket reference is the best way to go (and even that really isn't necessary, since you can find good references online).

It seems like CSS does OK for fixed layouts but if you want to have a 200 pixel left sidebar and leave the rest of the page for content, I just can't figure out how to do it and have it look as nice as a simple table-driven layout.

Odd, I've done exactly that using a non-table layout, and I certainly didn't invent the technique. It's not purely semantic, as you end up with a couple extra divs to get your layout right, but it's a damn sight closer than table layouts. In fact, your example is actually quite trivial, compared to something like a three-column layout with bounding fixed-size sidebars around a liquid middle (there's a reason that's called the Holy Grail of CSS-based design).

Worse, after playing around with it I could not see where the advantages were over tables. Tables work, they don't take long to code up, and I feel I understand them completely with minimal effort. It seems like with a CSS layout, you waste a lot of time fighting bizarre browser compatibilty issues, while if you use tables, they "just work", far as I can tell -- and I've tested in IE, Safari, FireFox and a few others.

Oddly enough, movietally's table-based layout for its rounded-corner "Discover" box is broken on IE7 (the corners don't line up correctly). So much for "tables work". I'll grant you that CSS-based layouts can run into some funky cross-browser issues, but 9 times out of 10 the problem is not with the layout but with the designer who demands pixel-perfect magazine-like layouts in a medium that was never meant to do that (if you want that, build a PDF). If you get over your obsession for having everything lining up just so and instead focus on making the page accessible and understandable while still looking good, you'll find that CSS is often a lot easier and nicer to work with than table layouts. Besides, it makes it quite a bit easier to give your page a makeover to keep it fresh without having to recode everything (CSS Zen Garden is the prime example, but look at what Slashdot did with the recent site skinning contest -- that was limited to only CSS manipulation, which would've been impossible had Slashdot stuck with its outdated table-based design).

Nobody's saying that tables aren't useful. We're just saying that they should be used semantically. If you have some tabular data you want to display (say, a calendar), knock yourself out with tabley goodness.

comparing an orange to a Ferrari 911

A Ferrari 911? Did Ferrari buy Porsche and not tell anyone? :)

Great and lots of programmers (oh yeah sure, just 'buy the engine', don't give me that)

Why not go buy an engine? Get one or two good programmers, get a cheap engine from someone like Garage Games, and focus on your real assets. The market is going more and more towards splitting into "engine developers" and "game developers". Id rarely even builds games anymore, preferring to focus on their engine creation (they work with third parties like Grey Matter or Raven to build games like Enemy Territories and Quake IV). Epic focuses on building the Unreal technology while letting 2nd and 3rd parties like Digital Illusions and Ubisoft build games around them. There's nothing wrong with licensing technology, and you're probably better off for doing so (you can get more and better technology than what you would be able to develop while trying to make a game to make money at the same time).

Great script

Great gameplay (so difficult to pinpoint and define, isn't it?)

I would argue these are the same thing. If your gameplay is RPG-style, you need an excellent script. If your gameplay is something like Katamari, script doesn't really matter much.

Great music and sound effects

This really depends on your gameplay. One guy with a mic and the willingness to make stupid sounds with his mouth will get you all of the sound effects you need. Music is harder, and yet easier at the same time. Depending on your game, you may not even need music (I'd rather listen to the sound of the engine in a racing game) or you could allow the player to provide the music. Other games need good music, but that shouldn't be too hard to come by. There are starving musicians everywhere. You just need to find them. Put up posters around the local college campus. Troll the boards online at places like Song Fight or Overclocked Remix. For a minor outlay of cash ($500-$1000 is probably more than enough in most cases), you can get some pretty excellent music for your game.

Great voice actors

I'd really recommend indie developers stay away from voice acting. Nintendo rarely uses it, and everybody loves their games (in fact, when they do use voice acting it's usually annoying. Hey! Listen!). Skip the expense by skipping the voice actors. Of course, you could do it in a humorous way and use your developers as the actors. Don't do this if you're going for "serious"!

Great characters (Deus Ex)

Again, this goes back to script/gameplay. You may not need characters at all if you're building a puzzle game. If you can't come up with great characters while writing your script or designing your gameplay, then you failed on the script or gameplay.

Great graphics (these days... sigh)

Then why does everybody here always say they prefer gameplay to graphics? You really have to think about your target. You're probably not going to be able to compete with the big boys in terms of graphics goo-gawgery, so don't try. You'll need something better than developer art, but not by much.

Multiplayer functionality

Depends on your game. Stardock consciously decided against multiplayer for GalCiv2 and that game is doing very well.

The central theme I've noticed in my replies

How does Bonjour compare to Univeral Plug-n-Play (besides probably being more secure, given UPnP's reputation)?

UPnP is insecure because of its reputation? Aside from a little bit of GRC grand-standing, UPnP is perfectly safe (with normal precautions you'd take for anything network-related, of course). Sure, there were a few flaws in Microsoft's implementation of a UPnP IGD (Internet Gateway Device) for use in conjunction with ICS (Internet Connection Sharing, or "NAT" as the rest of us know it), which is something you probably shouldn't use anyway (consumer-grade routers have better connection sharing). Enabling UPnP on your router for use with UPnP-aware applications like Xbox Live, MSN Messenger, Azureus, Media Center Extenders, etc, is perfectly safe. If you use a Linux box as a NAT router, you can even install an IGD daemon for Linux (of course, you'll want to make sure it's not broadcasting on your public interface).

Others have mentioned that Rendevous/Bonjour is not a competitor to UPnP. I'm talking about the perceived threat of UPnP, and the unfortunate damage that idiot GRC did five years ago by spouting off about crap he didn't understand.

Now there is something on the .NET platform that Microsoft is making called "Atlas". It builds on AJAX but allows a developer to write ASP.NET server controls that render AJAX-ish code. At least that's the concept, I believe. Will be nice to see how it pans out.

For what it's worth, Live.com (and Start.com before it) uses Atlas. Building Gadgets for Live.com/Start.com is a good way to get your feet wet with Atlas, though they could do a better job of providing documentation.

De-Piquepaille Greasemonkey Script

Damn, I wish I had mod points. FWIW, there is a Greasemonkey script to remove his annoying whoring from the front of Slashdot.

Anyway, I'm begging here: Can't we please have a Roland Piquepaille section so we can filter this stuff out? I'm not saying anything negative. I'm sure he's a wonderful guy and has a tremendous singing voice. I just don't want to read his blog.

The Slashdot editors are slow (in more ways than one). Do it yourself (requires Greasemonkey for Firefox or Turnabout for IE (be sure to get the advanced installer so you can add new scripts), and may be compatible with Opera 8).

And yes, I use my own script. I just decided to slum it and pimp my crap :)

2. Script-specific configuration values. I don't think these are commonly used, but they could be nice to have. Oh well, chances are your scripts will keep working.

If your scripts rely on GM_[set|get]Value, they won't work. The scripts may still run, but what value will they have? For example, I have a script that is only useful in the presence of GM_*Value and GM_xmlhttpRequest. Without that functionality, my script will add a useless bar to the page and never populate it with any data.

4. Fancy GM_XmlHttpRequest. This is just like XmlHttpRequest but without domain restrictions. This may cause a few extensions to stop working (not many, but a few), but it also closes the security hole.

It also breaks one of the biggest features of GM -- the ability to pull data from other sites and integrate it into the current page. Scripts like Book Burro are now completely useless. Security is important, and it is the right thing to do to remove this functionality while the GM folks look for a better fix, but it does make GM much less attractive (you're pretty much left with page cleanup scripts now that you can't pull data from other sites).

Any idea why all of the GM_* functions had to go? I can see why GM_xmlhttpRequest could be a problem, but what's wrong with GM_log, or the GM_*Value functions?

FWIW, User JavaScripts is the Opera version of it, and it has a Greasemonkey compatibility mode.

Yes, I should've mentioned Opera. It's not 100% GM compatible but many GM scripts will work. Here's a page with some Opera-specific scripts (that page also links to the main Opera script repository), including a GM emulation library (implements various GM_* functions, and adds a few hacks for compatibility), but I ran into some implementation issues I documented here, about 2/3rds of the way down the post.

Now here's a De-Piquepaille script for everyone to use it happily.

Atleast its better than his "brain-not-like-computers" story from a couple of days ago.

Ill advertise this cool greasemonkey script again for those who always feel dirty after they land on primidi.com : De-Piquepaille Slashdot

How about a passive-agressive protest, where this script is extended to not only ignore the story, but automatically post an "I've boycotted this Roland Piquepaille advert"

Sorry, no, thats being a tad stupid. Its just been SUCH a boring news day...

Thats why everyone needs to install this super dooper greasemonkey script: De-Piquepaille Slashdot

It blocks stories submitted by Roland. Of course, you'd have to have installed greasemonkey. Which I forgot to do on re-install and hence saw this fucking stupid article.

Here you go

already been done

see how much people dislike that geeza ? if this was a pub he would of been slapped up and kicked out a long time ago

Wish there was a way to mark Roland articles so we could omit them and deny him his precious ad revenue.

Want to remove Roland-submitted articles from the Slashdot front page? Greasemonkey (FireFox) / GreasemonkIE (Internet Explorer) can do that. The script only applies to the slashdot front page by default (Roland entries will show up in subsections), but you can modify your includes to work on all pages.

Wish there was a way to mark Roland articles so we could omit them and deny him his precious ad revenue.

Want to remove Roland-submitted articles from the Slashdot front page? Greasemonkey (FireFox) / GreasemonkIE (Internet Explorer) can do that. The script only applies to the slashdot front page by default (Roland entries will show up in subsections), but you can modify your includes to work on all pages.

But if they don't mention greasemonkey, then the only excuse I'll accept is that it's too new to appear in print. I'm using it at work to clobber that last webapp so that I no longer have to use IE...

You really should give a link for Greasemonkey, and to the script repository.

Also, shameless pimpage, but I've built a Greasemonkey implementation for IE, GreasemonkIE. It's still in development (missing a pretty major feature right now, which should be sorted out soon -- covered in the blog entry above), but it works quite well considering IE's limitations. GreasemonkIE tries to re-use existing Greasemonkey user scripts as much as possible, but other browsers have user script support too. The new Opera beta has an implementation of user scripts, and PithHelmet does the same for Safari (among many other features). Up until yesterday, IE was the only browser left out of the user script craze, but I'm trying to rectify that.

Kill popups dead

YOUR SIG SUCKS!!!!

Why you ask? BECAUSE THIS is how you KILL POPUPS DEAD.

YOUR SIG SUCKS!!!!

I'm sure everybody has seen those ugly black "bras" that you put on the front of your car. Well, this could be a much cooler solution to that problem that could protect your whole car. And its reapplicable.

The bras are supposed to stop rocks and debris from chipping your nice paint job. Due to the nature of the problem, you really only need it on the front of your car. If you don't like bras (because they're ugly, or for more practical reasons like they're more likely to scratch your paint unless properly looked after, and they're not meant as a permanent protection -- you need to remove them for washing, for example), there are plenty of companies that provide a custom-fit transparent film (a 3M design, for most places). I have it on my own car, and I challenge you to detect it. Unless you know what you're looking for, you'll never notice it until you come within mere feet of the car. In the first picture, there's a slight blurring of the reflection on the hood, starting maybe a foot above the hood crest and going down to the bumper -- that's the hood covering. Other portions of the car that are protected are the full front bumper, the sides of the fenders adjacent to the lights (two wedges each, one on the inside between the light and the hood and one on the outside between the light and the bumper seam), the headlights themselves, the leading edge of the side mirrors, the door handle recesses, the edges of the doors, the leading edges of the engine intake scoops, and the trailing edges of the wheel wells both front and rear.

The covering looks great and works very well, but I certainly wouldn't want the entire car covered in the material. The best part is that maintenance is no different than a painted surface. I wash and wax right over the film, and only have to take care around the seams (which really are few, due to Stongard's template design). Only the hood covering's edge is ever really a problem, and a cotton swab takes care of that nicely. Swipe off the accumulated dirt and wax from the edge, and it's back to being invisible again.

I have no affiliation with Stongard, other than as a customer. There are other companies that provide similar protection packages, generally using the same material. I used Stongard because I like their template designs, and they're local which means I could have their experts install the film. If you're not local to Stongard or another similar company, get a good referral for installation because putting this on without any wrinkles or bubbles is very tricky.

I'm sure everybody has seen those ugly black "bras" that you put on the front of your car. Well, this could be a much cooler solution to that problem that could protect your whole car. And its reapplicable.

The bras are supposed to stop rocks and debris from chipping your nice paint job. Due to the nature of the problem, you really only need it on the front of your car. If you don't like bras (because they're ugly, or for more practical reasons like they're more likely to scratch your paint unless properly looked after, and they're not meant as a permanent protection -- you need to remove them for washing, for example), there are plenty of companies that provide a custom-fit transparent film (a 3M design, for most places). I have it on my own car, and I challenge you to detect it. Unless you know what you're looking for, you'll never notice it until you come within mere feet of the car. In the first picture, there's a slight blurring of the reflection on the hood, starting maybe a foot above the hood crest and going down to the bumper -- that's the hood covering. Other portions of the car that are protected are the full front bumper, the sides of the fenders adjacent to the lights (two wedges each, one on the inside between the light and the hood and one on the outside between the light and the bumper seam), the headlights themselves, the leading edge of the side mirrors, the door handle recesses, the edges of the doors, the leading edges of the engine intake scoops, and the trailing edges of the wheel wells both front and rear.

The covering looks great and works very well, but I certainly wouldn't want the entire car covered in the material. The best part is that maintenance is no different than a painted surface. I wash and wax right over the film, and only have to take care around the seams (which really are few, due to Stongard's template design). Only the hood covering's edge is ever really a problem, and a cotton swab takes care of that nicely. Swipe off the accumulated dirt and wax from the edge, and it's back to being invisible again.

I have no affiliation with Stongard, other than as a customer. There are other companies that provide similar protection packages, generally using the same material. I used Stongard because I like their template designs, and they're local which means I could have their experts install the film. If you're not local to Stongard or another similar company, get a good referral for installation because putting this on without any wrinkles or bubbles is very tricky.

no popup-blockers? no flash-click-to-view? Other than the fact I'm on XP, is there any compelling reason to switch over?

The update to IE6 in XP SP2 adds a popup blocker (I don't know if it has click-to-view for flash), so that won't be a new feature for IE7. Besides, you can find many popup blockers for free for IE6 already. Just because it's not built into IE doesn't mean it can't be done with IE's programming model.

I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how such a feature should be used, but it's not hard to imagine how it could be used.

I've got your prior art right here. Check out the changelist. I'm missing dates on the changelist, but from the age of the files on my server, I can prove that version 2.5 (added focus-based fade) was built on August 9, 2001. Version 3.1 added mouse-click pass-through when the window is non-focused. From the front page, that version was June 13, 2003.

It's not exactly what's described in the patent (I don't believe it fits all 40 claims, but it fits a good majority of them), mostly because it's focus-based and not time-based, but it also shows a good example of where this type of functionality could be useful.

I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly how such a feature should be used, but it's not hard to imagine how it could be used.

I've got your prior art right here. Check out the changelist. I'm missing dates on the changelist, but from the age of the files on my server, I can prove that version 2.5 (added focus-based fade) was built on August 9, 2001. Version 3.1 added mouse-click pass-through when the window is non-focused. From the front page, that version was June 13, 2003.

It's not exactly what's described in the patent (I don't believe it fits all 40 claims, but it fits a good majority of them), mostly because it's focus-based and not time-based, but it also shows a good example of where this type of functionality could be useful.

I'm thinking it might just be talking about the popup blockers for IE... anyone tested it?

The ads are nothing more than popups that make the popup window "full screen" (ie, they set the size and position of the window to 0,0 and x,y to fill up your screen, and not actually setting the browser to its full screen togglable state, which pisses me off because all future browser windows will now be of that size), and load a flash applet. My own pop-up blocker for IE, NoPopIE has no problems catching those popups, and with proper security settings IE will prompt you to run Flash. All this is going to do for me is prompt me to finally get around to blocking popups from resizing the browser window.

You can find samples here to test against.

whats wrong with winamp 3???? I kinda like it.... needs some work on the backend, but overall its good.

Well, it's just horribly bloated and slow compared to Winamp 2. The plugin architecture seems overly complex, if technically better in design than Winamp 2's (though Winamp 2's design of using standard DLLs and Windows messages for communication meant that any language capable of making a C-readable DLL and sending Windows messages could be used for writing a plugin; with Winamp 3, you're pretty much stuck using C++). Overall, it really doesn't do much more than Winamp 2, but it does it slower and buggier. I'll revisit Winamp3 after another major revision or two, but for now Winamp 2 is my preferred music media player.

Oh, yeah, and part of my dislike of Winamp 3 is the haphazard way in which alpha transparency was added. Control over alpha blending your windows seems half-assed. I may be biased, though.

I can call the fact that you're reading this comment a theft. It doesn't make it any more official than some totally random company calling me running ad-blocking software a theft.
Can we PLEASE just post the news, without any sensationalist crap, on /. front page?

. . . every time I've been to a traffic violation hearing (which I've actually only gone to one myself, though my lawyer has gone to a couple on my behalf) . . .

Oh, and I'm going to key your yellow turbo-turd, you yuppy wannabe.

Mozilla, Internet Explorer popup killer (for all flavors of windows).

NoPopIE, proving that anything Mozilla can do, IE can do as well. As for only supporting Win2K/XP, I don't have any Win9x boxes around for testing, nor do I care to.

Speed doesn't kill? Yet every time they enforce the speed limit on 17 the death rate plummets.

You're drawing the wrong conclusion here. The death rate doesn't go down because speeds decrease. It goes down because people are paying more attention to the road. When you're on the road and see a cop, sure, you slow down. But what else do you do? Right, you pay attention more. You're not going to be reading the morning paper while driving, because you're trying to keep an eye on where that cop is (and by doing so, you're getting information on where everybody else is, as well). Speed doesn't kill, but inattentive driving does.

Apply some basic science and logic! The faster you drive, the harder it is to control your car. The faster you go, the more little strains you put on that complicated machine you're driving, the more likely you'll throw a rod or blow a tire, or get brake fade at an inopportune moment. The faster you go, the more distance you have to use up while responding to the unexpected. And of course, the faster you go, the more kinetic energy to use up in the form of bent metal and broken bodies when you do collide with something.

My car was designed to handle 80mph speeds with no problems at all. Your car probably was designed that way as well. About the only vehicles that you shouldn't drive that fast in are things like Jeeps, trucks, or SUVs that were designed for off-roading (and thus have big nubs on their tires, and high centers of gravity, and basically are built for endurance rather than speed). Saying that you're making your car more likely to fail by going 10 or 20mph over the speed limit is silly. If you're breezing along at 120mph, then sure (most cars definitely are not designed for that). But you've been talking about the 80mph range (say, 75-90 or so). Not only are those speeds well within the range of your car's tolerances (again, unless you fall into the above category, or are driving some 10 year old beater that's not been properly maintained), but the effects of an impact at those speeds are not appreciably different than an impact at 60mph. Yeah, yeah, there's more kinetic energy, and whatever else, but that doesn't really matter after a certain point. There's a limit at which point the increase in kinetic energy doesn't matter anymore, because you're already going to be dead.

And he can get a fancy alpha-blended PuTTY here. However, the way I understood it, he was asking for a server, not a client. PuTTY is only a client (ssh client, scp, sftp, etc).

Bah, I knew I should have bought a German car!

I bought a German car, and it's not diesel-based, so the simple act of buying a German car does not necessarily mean it's not going to use gasoline.

No, but at http://www.daishar.com/oboslog.php there is one. Might have been that one you thought of?

tabbed browsing: Will Microsoft really do this? In Office, they give you the possibility to display all your open documents in the system tray - I can't even turn it off! And if they do this: how long will it take them? Until IE6.5? This won't last for long as an advantage for Mozilla and Opera

Microsoft added tabs in Visual Studio.NET, which allows you to browse the web inside your IDE (nice for those times when you have to hit MSDN, but don't want to pull up IE), as well as in the help viewer (MSDN on disk, VS.NET help, and a tabbed web browser, all in one). Thus, it seems that it would be trivial for them to add this into IE7. I don't know if it will be, but it seems that tabbed browsing is becoming more and more popular, and I doubt MSFT would miss that. As for the SDI/multiple docs interface Office has, in the past you've been able to revert to an MDI format. I haven't really used anything from Office except Outlook, lately, so I don't know if that's still an available option in Office XP. I'd expect it is, you just have to dig.

popup-blocking: hmm... I don't see them doing this either. They have probably lots of bindings with commercial sites that use pop-up ads, and don't want to lose this. So my idea is that they wont do this, and follow the idea the ReplayTV and TiVO guys say: blocking ads is stealing

Microsoft won't be doing this, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it instead. Internet Explorer has a very powerful extension mechanism via COM. <pimpage> Try NoPopIE for example. </pimpage> Think of it as the same way that Netscape will not support blocking pop-ups, while mozilla does -- IE doesn't do it, but you can get an extension that does.

stability: I don't use IE very often, but I think they are getting better and better. One problem (certainly in my Win98, don't know about others): if it goes down, it takes everything with it. Kinda selfish, not?

That's mostly a function of the OS, rather than the browser. Netscape has been known to kill Win9x, as well. Try Windows 2000 or Windows XP for a much more robust and stable experience.

Overall, I agree with your assessment as to why people like IE. I like IE. It's a very good browser, imho. Yeah, sure, I can download mozilla and use that instead, but why should I bother when I already have IE? I keep a version of mozilla around just to periodically check my web sites to make sure they don't look like crap in Mozilla, but otherwise I use IE all the time.

We dun wanna see stupid pop-up ads, and MS has a vested interest in NOT providing a feature to remove them.

Microsoft may have an interest in not providing that feature, but what they did provide was a very robust and powerful plugin interface (you can easily write Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), which are basically COM objects that IE can load and which can do a whole heck of a lot).

<shamelss_pimpage>I wrote a popup killer for Internet Explorer, and IMHO it has a lot more features than Mozilla (it's still in development, so it doesn't catch everything yet, but it's getting there). Check my sig, or find NoPopIE here. </shameless_pimpage>

Right now, it only works on Win2K and XP, but that's only because those are the platforms I have available for testing. It should work on NT4 just fine, I just haven't tested it. It won't work on win9x, because I build it with UNICODE support. I could just as easily build without UNICODE support, but that may introduce problems I can't easily test (no Win9x here). Given sufficient prompting, I'm sure I could find a way to make it work on win9x (probably 98 and up, 95 is dead).

While I love developing for IE, and while we require it for support for all Internal apps, I still like Opera as a browser a lot more (from a feature standpoint).

I don't know anything about developing for Opera ("developing for" here meaning "writing extensions and plugins and such", not "writing HTML that targets a specific browser"), but IE has a very robust, very powerful extension model. You can write BHOs (Browser Helper Objects) that do anything from display a document inside the IE frame (Adobe's PDF plugin does this) to blocking pop-ups (Like this) to most anything else. You can add new toolbars (like Google's bar), new sidebars (like the vertical favorites bar, or you can make a horizontal bar), add items to the Tools menu, and more. I'm sure you can do all of this using Mozilla, too, but the beauty here is that you don't need the source for IE to be able to do all this.

And if you tire of extending IE, why not embed it? Want to add tabs? Write a new browser that just embeds IE and does that. Maybe you want a skinnable browser (there are several out there already, but you could make your own if you wanted). In fact, you could go so far as to write a nice little frame that would give you the option to embed either IE or Gecko (via the ActiveX interface to Gecko that mimics IE's interface). Maybe you don't even want to make a browser. Write yourself an IRC client using MSHTML to display everything nicely using stylesheets. Write an app that uses DHTML for the interface, rather than win32 controls (via native win32, MFC, WTL/ATL, or Windows Forms). I understand you can do all of this with Gecko too, but you get it "for free" with IE because it's guaranteed to be installed on any windows system (well, any that hasn't been obsoleted yet) and you don't need the source code to IE to use it.

You may use another version of IE than me, but the one I have 6.0 something is in comparison to opera Slow. And it doesn't even allow me to disable pop up.

There are many pop-up blockers for IE out there, including mine, NoPopIE.

Talking of smooth with a small mouse gesture I can duplicate window. far easier than crtl-N or clicking somewhere.

You could always use Sensiva, and get system-wide mouse gestures rather than just gesturing for a single application.

But maybe with smooth you mean something else ?

Well, I'm pretty sure he was using smooth in comparison to Mozilla (clunky and ugly, even the latest versions), or other Gecko-based browsers. Opera has always been fast, no argument there. Then again, he could have been referring to rendering speed. Just from personal usage (and probably somewhat of a personal bias), IE seems to render the quickest for me, and barring idiots like the slashdot page-widening trolls, usually looks good too.

If you are absolutely sure that you are getting popunders from msnbc, then why the hell am I not getting them! I hate feeling left-out.

MSNBC does random popup ads, in that not every time you load the page will an ad be displayed, but if you browse around on the site enough, or just get unlucky, you'll get a pop-up. I'm not sure I've ever seen a pop-under ad on MSNBC, but then I use a combination of Adzap with my Squid proxy and NoPopIE with Internet Explorer to banish most advertisements and popups. You may be using similar things, if you're never seeing popups on MSNBC

Windows 2000/XP also does this natively. It simply doesn't expose per-window control of it through the UI. Each window does have its own alpha level, and it's up to the programmer to decide if s/he wants all windows the same or not. For a good example, check out Lucidamp, a Winamp plugin that allows you to set varying levels of alpha transparency on each of the four main Winamp windows, and also works with the Mikroamp Winamp plugin.

Also, please note that Windows 2000 did this before OS X did this. Not that it matters, but it's true.

I'd like to alpha blend a few things though: winamp comes to mind, ...

Lucidamp to the rescue (yes, shameless pimpage. but I don't care!). Lucidamp has been applying alpha blending to Winamp for the better part of a year and a half (okay, so the first version sucked). There are others out there that will do this, both in Winamp plugin form (such as Lucidamp) and one-size-fits-all form like Glass2K, but I believe (and I'm biased here) that Lucidamp is the best when dealing only with Winamp.

Applying alpha blending to all windows is not really an interesting problem. There are some hoops to jump through, and you have to be realistic about what you expect, but otherwise it's a simple, straightforward process (don't believe me? This article gives you 90% of what you need to write such a tool. The other 10% is bookkeeping.)

More interesting is applying alpha blending to specific applications. This lets you be much more creative by doing something that complements an application. A translucent Internet Explorer is not interesting or useful (in fact, it's likely a drag on your system, and hard to read). A translucent Winamp, on the other hand, is a match made in heaven. What I'd really like to see is more application developers taking the time to add layered windows to their applications where it's appropriate, rather than taking this one-size-fits-all type of approach. But then, I've been playing with layered windows for a year and a half now, so maybe I'm just not getting the "wow" experience anymore.

This actually available in OSX (duh) and in Win2k (and XP, I presume). For 2k (and prolly XP) you have to buy an addon called WindowFX that does all sort of crazy UI things, but the best reason is to be able to set transparencies. Also, virtual desktops (to allow for multiple, full-screen apps to run parallel would be great to see worked into the mainstream (I hear XP has an implementation of this, and, of course, Linux WMs have done this for ages).

There's no need to buy anything. There are a number of freeware and shareware apps out there that will manipulate alpha blending in 2K/XP, mainly due to the fact that it's pretty damned easy to do programmatically. Also, alongside the more generic, modify-every-window type of apps, there are more specifically-targetted applications of alpha blending. For instance, there's <shameless-pimpage>Lucidamp for Winamp 2.x (I'll be working on a Winamp3 version soon that will hopefully be cross-platform, leveraging XFree86 4's new XRender extensions eventually) and my hack of the PuTTY win32 ssh client.<shameless-pimpage>

Also, if you're interested in adding alpha blending support to your win32 applications (called "Layered Windows" in win32 parlance), you can check out this MSDN page. Layered windows also go well with XP Visual Styles, so if you write win32 code, make sure you leverage side-by-side Common Controls to keep everybody happy.

This actually available in OSX (duh) and in Win2k (and XP, I presume). For 2k (and prolly XP) you have to buy an addon called WindowFX that does all sort of crazy UI things, but the best reason is to be able to set transparencies. Also, virtual desktops (to allow for multiple, full-screen apps to run parallel would be great to see worked into the mainstream (I hear XP has an implementation of this, and, of course, Linux WMs have done this for ages).

There's no need to buy anything. There are a number of freeware and shareware apps out there that will manipulate alpha blending in 2K/XP, mainly due to the fact that it's pretty damned easy to do programmatically. Also, alongside the more generic, modify-every-window type of apps, there are more specifically-targetted applications of alpha blending. For instance, there's <shameless-pimpage>Lucidamp for Winamp 2.x (I'll be working on a Winamp3 version soon that will hopefully be cross-platform, leveraging XFree86 4's new XRender extensions eventually) and my hack of the PuTTY win32 ssh client.<shameless-pimpage>

Also, if you're interested in adding alpha blending support to your win32 applications (called "Layered Windows" in win32 parlance), you can check out this MSDN page. Layered windows also go well with XP Visual Styles, so if you write win32 code, make sure you leverage side-by-side Common Controls to keep everybody happy.