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The same can be said for all plugins

Using a really old browser that doesn't even check for most of the MIME types that exist now is an amazing experience

http://browsers.evolt.org/

Surprisingly a lot of sites get a lot more usable (some, significantly less so)

Saying things to make the subject go away avoids useful investigation. As usual, the money needs understanding.

For example, Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation. No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.

But where does all the money go? Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in Firefox in 2008?

Did you see improvements suggesting that Mozilla Foundation had $168 million in assets in 2010? -- (Official PDF file, see page 2. Numbers are in thousands, as it says at the top of the page.)

Firefox is a world-class asset. No other browser has all the features. There is no substitute for the capabilities of Firefox together with Firefox add-ons. (Mozilla Foundation calls one thing by 3 names: Add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins.)

But Firefox is unstable. Firefox instabilities are experienced most frequently by those who open many Firefox windows and tabs, and leave them open while putting the computer into standby or hibernation several times. That is the pattern of use of those who do a lot of online research. The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite, before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for almost every version say there have been "stability improvements".

Firefox crash info:

about:crashes
Put about:crashes into your URL bar and press ENTER. Firefox will then show a list of crashes of the copy of Firefox on that computer.

Crash info for all users and all versions:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox

Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 10.0, the version before the most recent:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/10.0

Version 11 is less stable. Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 11.0, the most recent version:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/11.0

Top crashers, version 11.0:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/11.0/14

Notes:

1) The lists of crashes are ONLY the ones that Firefox caught and that were submitted. The lists do NOT include crashes that did't start the crash reporter. The lists do NOT include crashes that weren't submitted to Mozilla Foundation.

2) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.

If you're doing browser sniffing you're already doing it the wrong way.

The right way is object detection using client-side JavaScript, but there are a couple cases where object detection fails. One of them is figuring out whether the mouse cursor position includes the scroll value or not.

... You have to busy wait meaning 100% CPU usage. [JS doesn't have a] built in sleep function that relinquishes control for so many milliseconds is something that's been a basic part of scripting languages for decades. HORRIBLE.

How does this work without eating my CPU?
http://htmlfive.appspot.com/static/gifter.html

Hint 0: Examine the bottom of gifter.js
Hint 1: It uses setInterval ( http://www.evolt.org/node/36035 )

Via: http://htmlfive.appspot.com/

Interestingly enough I've worked on systems that have software interface that claims to be APACHE while serving up IIS pages --- I hardly trust info being served up about web servers -- http://www.evolt.org/node/60160

Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is . Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!

Tables in html are not for layouts, which is you're doing, they are for data. Sure people have been doing that since tables came along. Among other things using tables for layout is a bitch for visually impaired people. Evolt does have a tutorial on how to build accessible tables though. CSS is what's supposed to be used for layouts, and it's faster. A List Apart has some good articles on how to use CSS for layouts

.

Falcon

Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is . Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!

Tables in html are not for layouts, which is you're doing, they are for data. Sure people have been doing that since tables came along. Among other things using tables for layout is a bitch for visually impaired people. Evolt does have a tutorial on how to build accessible tables though. CSS is what's supposed to be used for layouts, and it's faster. A List Apart has some good articles on how to use CSS for layouts

.

Falcon

A LOT more, and for systems like the Amiga, DOS, etc. Unfortunately, it looks as though the site is obsolete, at least for current content.

No vulnerabilities, no security issues. Just plain and simple. I'm going back to using Mosaic! http://browsers.evolt.org/?mosaic-ncsa/

However, are they going to open source Lotus Notes? It seems not.

This leads me to ask when are they going to fix their crappy HTML renderer in their Notes mail client? It must have the most braindead, broken, bizarre HTML renderer in the business. Why, their are whole cottage industries around on how to work on it's crudulousness.

• Go here.
• Choose the browser you want and download.
• Unzip and click executable

Affordable (or free) antivirus software that actually works would be a start...

Affordable (or free) antivirus software that actually works would be a start...

You can't blame the player, it's just respecting the settings on the disc. It's the creator of the disc that is responsible. Consumers should not have to hunt around for a specific type of DVD player just so they can skip this junk.

The version of Shrek 2 that I bought contained the following.

Anti-piracy advert (About a minute)
Random clips of Unversal films (about 30 seconds)
Madagascar advert. This advert was a bloody tedious interview in which Ben Stiller told us how good the film is. It lasted around 5 minutes.

Overall, that's about 5 minutes of unskippable junk, unless my DVD player breaks the rules a little by allowing this stuff to be skipped. It doesn't matter whether or not my player can bypass this stuff, it's the fact that Universal expect its customers to sit through this anytime they want to watch a film they paid for. I returned the disc.

I think it's sensible that Universal should state that the film is protected by copyright. They should do this by printing a warning on the disc and the box. They should not be forcing customers to sit through this tedium each time they watch the film.

If they continue to try to control the user experience to this extent, they can't be surprised when piracy becomes a more attractive option. Pirated products should not be superior to the original.

if you're interested in the madagascar thing, see these links. I wasn't the only one pissed off by it. Thankfully they seem to have removed the advert from later versions. I'm still not paying for Shrek or any Universal DVDs if I can avoid them.

http://www.supercalafragalistic.com/madagascarrevi ew.htm
http://lists.evolt.org/archive/Week-of-Mon-2007040 9/189359.html
http://www.aubreyturner.org/index.php?/orglog/2006 /04/

Very good, but not 100% correct: adding the IE version number to the title bar is so *you* can keep the versions apart, but the Windows feature called "process specific subroutine library" is what makes the IE stand-alones, well, stand alone. Read more about it here, and get prepackaged IE stand-alones here.

Now I have IE6 stand alone next to normally-installed IE7, and really the only difference is that IE6 can't use ActiveX plug-ins. Unfortunately that doesn't help when you have a layout heavy with transparent PNGs and are trying to fix it for IE6 :-)

Actually you can run IE6 standalone under windows after installing IE7.

Bottommost link

Very handy really

There you go: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

Install IE7 and use these stand-alone zipped versions to test your site. The trick was to grab all the files in \program files\internet explorer\ and include a iexplore.exe.external (I don't recall that filename very well, it's been some time till I used them).

In Nov. 2003, ie standalone appeared on the evolt.org website. I used that to run IE 5.0, 5.x side-by-side. Now, (I haven't tried this), if you already have IE7 installed you can use Multiple IE to have IE3 IE4.01 IE5 IE5.5 and IE6 installed standalone.

Hope this helps.

If you don't want to use a virtual machine, what I did was upgrade to IE7 and use
a stand-alone version of IE6, I believe the version I use I got from:
http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

IE6 stand-alone is a little buggy, but I find this works fine for testing rendering..

Or you can just download IE3 / IE4 / IE5 /IE6 here, and run it without the need to install anything.

I have no idea if this is legal or anything, but i do know that it's a very simple solution that works...

Why don't you just download the standalone versions of Internet Explorer from Evolt? That way you can have ever version running on the same Windows install at the same time. Get them from:

http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone

The problem is that Firefox and other non-IE browsers are just trying to support the W3C standards and what web publishers write for their sites. Someone could certainly create a slimmed down version of Firefox that didn't have any bells or whistles, but would you continue to use it if some sites starting displaying incorrectly?

Firefox is gaining acceptance because it's more secure, generally faster, and provides far better support for the newer W3C standards such as CSS2. If you're looking for a small footprint blazing fast load times, try Cello, which can be downloaded from here. Sure, it's from 1994, but it'll run on a 386sx and you can fit 4 copies of it on a floppy. =)

Or maybe not... in any case, here is the patch:

Well, I assume blind people use text-readers as one of their tools; So this pretty much would make any Flash-based site useless.

You do not know what you are talking about. Period.

One has been able to make accessible flash for at at least three years. I was too lazy to look for older citations. That was flash 6; 8 has far more accessibility stuff from what I understand.

Please STFU. TYVM. HTH, HAND.

That's why there are standalone versions of Internet Explorer.

Reposted from something I wrote a while ago

You cannot prove anything about the future... but you can identify trends.

Before Netscape 1.2 came out, it was a common, non-standard hack to use multiple title and body elements to get crude animation. Netscape 1.2 came out, and screwed these pages up. Following standards ensured forwards compatibility with Netscape 1.2.

Before Netscape 2.0 came out, missing quotes on the end of an attribute were detected as errors by Netscape 1.x and compensated for. Netscape 2.0 came out; it did not. Large sections of pages disappeared. Following standards ensured forwards compatibility with Netscape 2.0.

Before Netscape 3.0 came out, people were careless with their ampersands, failing to correctly encode them in URLs, for example. These were detected as errors by the current browsers, and compensated for. Netscape 3.0 came out; it did not. Lots of broken links everywhere. Following standards ensured forwards compatibility with Netscape 3.0.

Before Netscape 4.0 came out, people were still careless with character entities, omitting the trailing semicolon (I believe this was a property of many graphical editors, such as Frontpage). This was detected by the current browsers, and compensated for. Netscape 4.0 came out; it did not. Following standards ensured forwards compatibility with Netscape 4.0.

Before Netscape 6.0 came out, people used a variety of non-standard Javascript techniques and layer elements, detecting Internet Explorer, and serving them alternative code. Netscape 6.0 came out, it didn't support the proprietary Netscape-isms of previous releases. Following standards ensured forwards compatibility with Netscape 6.0.

More recent problems include stylesheets served with an incorrect content-type header, and table-layout images being broken up with lots of little gaps.

This list only includes Netscape behaviour, as that is the only list I have to hand. (Thanks to this article). I'm sure similar things apply to other browsers.

There is plenty of evidence that sticking with standard code results in forwards compatibility.

There are really only two important properties of future browsers:

• They are likely to support at least as much of the specifications as the current version
• Nobody can test in them

Thus, my overwhelming desire is to simply treat future browsers as I would any other browser I couldn't test in: code to standards, and when I get a chance to test, fix up what is necessary.

There are very few good reasons these days to write invalid code. Mostly it's just ignorance and apathy that causes people to write invalid code.

You already can run stand-alone versions of IE. Evolt has a good repository for this, and the very excellent QuirksMode has a great guide to implementing it (basically, you just create a seperate directory for each IE manually, such as C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer 5.5\, and install to there).

The evolt.org browser archive has Mozilla back to version 0.6, and other browsers going back much, much farther. Mosaic, anyone? Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb?

http://browsers.evolt.org/ for a large archive of quite a few browsers.

The document you pointed out was written in September of 1995, however, the HTML 3 standard, according to the same website, was adopted in March of 1995

Look a little closer. That's an expired draft. HTML 3 was never finished, it was abandoned in favour of describing existing practice - that specification was called HTML 3.2. That's why it's such a mess - it's a hodge-podge of previously proprietary extensions.

That is strange, because I just ran across a website today where the guy was trying to update a table from HTML2 specifications to HTML4.

Strange because it's clearly not true. There's no such thing as an HTML 2 table, you can see for yourself by looking at the spec.

I was trying to google the specifications of these early browsers, but I cannot find anything, and archive.org for the netscape site only goes back to netscape 3.

You want Evolt's browser archive.

Did Netscape 2 and the first versions of IE actually support HTML3?

No, nothing did, because HTML 3 was never finished. However Netscape supported tables as far back as Netscape 1.1, modelled on the HTML 3 draft specification.

Results 1 - 10 of about 14,300,000 for Working Internet Explorer Exploit. (0.23 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 785,000 for Working Opera Exploit. (0.31 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 531,000 for Working Firefox Exploit. (0.29 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 448,000 for Working Mozilla Exploit. (0.28 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 434,000 for Working Netscape Exploit. (0.25 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 234,000 for Working Mosaic Exploit. (0.22 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 206,000 for Working Safari Exploit. (0.36 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 34,500 for Working Konqueror Exploit. (0.27 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 71,000 for Working Camino Exploit. (0.23 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 685 for Working Omniweb Exploit. (0.18 seconds)

I haven't even heard of some of those but apparently they're browsers.
http://browsers.evolt.org/

And so the lesson the Manolo he takes away from this for the new bloggers is to be aware that the large part of the mission of the blogging it is to entertain, and so you must write well, in the lively manner.

An article on AListApart, How to Write a Better Weblog talks about how good writing is important as does another article, Structured Writing - An Outline, on Evolt.

This sounds similar to the long-defunct Internet Explorer for Solaris. It included so much Windows emulation code that it couldn't run for more than a couple of minutes before crashing, producing the biggest core dump you've ever seen.

Given that Digital Research wasn't exactly going anywhere with graphical UIs, I rather doubt it.

DR-DOS 5 had a cut down version of the GEM GUI. There's no reason to assume that wouldn't have led anywhere.

If Microsoft hadn't crushed Netscape, perhaps Netscape's vision of network applications in the vein of XUL would have come along years earlier

Or, more likely, we'd still be stuck with the craptacular Netscape 4.x and 6.x releases that were so godawful bad that Internet Explorer was an massive improvement.

The reason why Netscape 6.x was so bad was because the Mozilla project gave in to the geeks and decided that, although the world had been quite happily implementing GUI applications for years, not-invented-here was a terrible curse, and so they felt the need to develop their own GUI toolkit based on XML and Javascript.

If the Mozilla project was driven by actual business needs of a competitive browser vendor, I think it's very likely it would not have fallen into this trap. Netscape no longer being such a competitive browser vendor is directly attributable to Microsoft's illegal actions.

up until about a year or so ago the compatability wasn't high enough to recommend it to non-geeks.

Comptibility with what exactly? Internet Explorer oddities. Oddities that wouldn't exist had Microsoft not been in the market. This is another example of Microsoft's presence in the market holding back competitors. If Mozilla didn't need to be compatible with such code, you'd have been able to recommend it to non-geeks sooner.

BTW, your other statement about browser dominance is deeply, deeply wrong. Prior to IE4 Netscape had a >90% market share.

I don't think that's right. There were lots of browsers about in those days that people don't generally remember nowadays. Evolt has archived dozens. A contemporary article lists Internet Explorer as having 25% of the market during Internet Explorer 3.0 times. I don't think any browser prior to Internet Explorer attained 90% market share (not counting the early days, of course).

Wow, you really had to stretch there didn't you.

See my response to the other guy about that. I didn't mean to imply that the Stac infringement was directly linked to Apple, I was just giving it as another example of an unfair advantage over compteitors due to illegal action.

nowadays software based on-the-fly compression of volumes is hardly considered a significant feature.

I was just reading a comment yesterday about how great it is that Reiser4 will include this as a plugin.

If Microsoft hadn't conned their way into a cheap deal for Mosaic

Ah, they conned how?

At the time, browsers were applications businesses paid for. Microsoft "paid" for licensing Mosaic in part with royalties from Internet Explorer profits, neglecting to mention the salient fact that they were going to give it away for free. A cut of zero profits doesn't add up to a lot. And then they included it in Windows and charged for it too. Microsoft eventually settled for $8 million after being threatened with a contractual audit by Spyglass.

perhaps web developers would be able to use CSS, PNG, HTML, HTTP, etc without being held back by Internet Explorer's flaws

No, they'd merely be held back by a close-sourced Netscape run by AOL instead.

Table layout algorithms have been essentially identical in all major browsers for at least 4 years.

Then how come people complained when Netscape 6 was released and it "broke" their table layouts? And how come people complained when Internet Explorer 6 was released and it "broke" their table layouts?

I've been using CSS for many years.

Then how come you feel the need to argue against straw-men? Who is telling you to use "18 layers of divs and spans"?

There's no excuse for telling someone to replace thier tables with divs "just because".

Again with the straw-men. Who is telling people to replace their tables with divs "just because"?

the widespread reliance on these bugs is a major obstacle to the uptake of correct CSS implemetations in IE

I've already pointed out this is untrue. The Internet Explorer developers are implementing correct CSS without stopping on account of people relying on these bugs.

Table layout algorithms have been essentially identical in all major browsers for at least 4 years.

Then how come people complained when Netscape 6 was released and it "broke" their table layouts? And how come people complained when Internet Explorer 6 was released and it "broke" their table layouts?

I've been using CSS for many years.

Then how come you feel the need to argue against straw-men? Who is telling you to use "18 layers of divs and spans"?

There's no excuse for telling someone to replace thier tables with divs "just because".

Again with the straw-men. Who is telling people to replace their tables with divs "just because"?

the widespread reliance on these bugs is a major obstacle to the uptake of correct CSS implemetations in IE

I've already pointed out this is untrue. The Internet Explorer developers are implementing correct CSS without stopping on account of people relying on these bugs.

Let's not forget Mosaic, upon which Netscape was built.

Still, I havea great fondness for the big, pulsing, waiting for 56K dial up N that was Netscape in the early days.

Hey, since when did Netscape 3 stop rocking? Download it, or get the Firefox skin. :D

No Photoshop for Solaris you say?

To further weirden your day, let me also submit this link: MS Internet Explorer for Solaris and HP-UX (Outlook Express is also available).

> 30% to 35% Market share before IE4

IE3 had 30-35% market share? Wow. Care to back that up? -- IIRC Netscape 3 was _everywhere_ at the time.

And oh, about the 60MB IE install: that includes the Windows Shell Update that brought a web-ified shell to Win95 and NT _and_ updated the OS's widgets. The browser alone is 8.46MB against 9.73MB for Navigator 4.

> It's really straining reality to talk of a working market and "people voting with their wallets" here. Had Microsoft sold IE separately from Windows, with it's own pricetag, things would've been different.

But why should Microsoft sell IE separately? People voted with their wallets that a "web browser with an OS" is the way to go. Is there some divine law that mandates a profitable market for web browsers? (There used to be a profitable market for memory managers once, QuarterDeck made good money on it before Win95 killed that market. I don't recollect QuarterDeck crying 'antitrust'.) Who said selling web browsers has to be a business? It can be, of course; but _must be_?

Consumer OSes from DOS 1 to OS/2 OSX and XP show a clear trend of aggregating things that were normally thought of as separate products. OS/2 included a damn complete productivity suite comparable to Apple/MS Works. Linux distros ship with things like CD and DVD Burning software that compete very effectively with commercial offerings. (Of late XP has started doing so too.) Threfore, to claim that Microsoft cannot add stuff to its OS is rubbish.

Of course, as the OS vendor Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't hobble competitive products... for example *requiring* IE to open a link in the Add/Remove Programs dialog is wrong, and this is this behavior the antitrust lawsuit has fixed. If you expected Microsoft would be drawn and quartered for this, though, you don't quite have both feet on the ground.

> Windows had the ability to encode to mp3, so there was a way to do it without licensing.

Yes, and Windows XP still has the ability to do it: it uses the royalty-free Fraunhofer encoder which encodes only upto 56kbps. The fuss about Microsoft dropping _that_ from the XP beta was because they felt including an inferior codec wouldn't help anyone. Feedback said otherwise, and MP3 stayed.

And oh, if encoding in MP3 is _that_ important then Debian and Redhat out-of-the-box must be very poor OSes indeed: they have _no_ MP3 encoding support (because of patent reasons, but to a user that hardly matters).

> 30% to 35% Market share before IE4

IE3 had 30-35% market share? Wow. Care to back that up? -- IIRC Netscape 3 was _everywhere_ at the time.

And oh, about the 60MB IE install: that includes the Windows Shell Update that brought a web-ified shell to Win95 and NT _and_ updated the OS's widgets. The browser alone is 8.46MB against 9.73MB for Navigator 4.

> It's really straining reality to talk of a working market and "people voting with their wallets" here. Had Microsoft sold IE separately from Windows, with it's own pricetag, things would've been different.

But why should Microsoft sell IE separately? People voted with their wallets that a "web browser with an OS" is the way to go. Is there some divine law that mandates a profitable market for web browsers? (There used to be a profitable market for memory managers once, QuarterDeck made good money on it before Win95 killed that market. I don't recollect QuarterDeck crying 'antitrust'.) Who said selling web browsers has to be a business? It can be, of course; but _must be_?

Consumer OSes from DOS 1 to OS/2 OSX and XP show a clear trend of aggregating things that were normally thought of as separate products. OS/2 included a damn complete productivity suite comparable to Apple/MS Works. Linux distros ship with things like CD and DVD Burning software that compete very effectively with commercial offerings. (Of late XP has started doing so too.) Threfore, to claim that Microsoft cannot add stuff to its OS is rubbish.

Of course, as the OS vendor Microsoft has a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't hobble competitive products... for example *requiring* IE to open a link in the Add/Remove Programs dialog is wrong, and this is this behavior the antitrust lawsuit has fixed. If you expected Microsoft would be drawn and quartered for this, though, you don't quite have both feet on the ground.

> Windows had the ability to encode to mp3, so there was a way to do it without licensing.

Yes, and Windows XP still has the ability to do it: it uses the royalty-free Fraunhofer encoder which encodes only upto 56kbps. The fuss about Microsoft dropping _that_ from the XP beta was because they felt including an inferior codec wouldn't help anyone. Feedback said otherwise, and MP3 stayed.

And oh, if encoding in MP3 is _that_ important then Debian and Redhat out-of-the-box must be very poor OSes indeed: they have _no_ MP3 encoding support (because of patent reasons, but to a user that hardly matters).

You could always return to Netscape 1.1N. Best .. browser .. evar.

Man, 1995... I still remember being awed by the way that places like yahoo.com and hotwired.com looked in Netscape (was 2.0 even out yet? I forget, heh), compared to what I was used to before that (stuff like pine or gopher running on green-screen terms). I was 16 at the time, in college a couple of years early, and looking back (20/20 hindsight and all that), I wish I'd taken the hint on my early fascination and gone into programming/web-related studies and jobs then instead of chemistry... I guess I felt obligated to pursue a "real job" like chemistry. Here, ten years later, I'm a programmer and chemistry is just sort of my side hobby. I wonder sometimes what my life would have been like had I gotten into CS and gone into the IT workforce by '97-'98 instead of picking it up as hobby later and entering the IT workforce right before the bust.

Anyway, for some good nostalgia, here you go:
Archive of old versions of Netscape back to 1.1 days on multiple platforms
Wayback machine link for Yahoo! front page, late 1996 (hotwired.com excludes wayback, darn it... i recall it being visually louder than a hawaiian shirt on fire. the current wired.com is actually subdued compared to what I recall it being)

First off, I should point out that I'm the guy who was interviewed by Demos for the report, and also the same Seb Potter that the nice people at the BBC interviewed for their piece. Please excuse any rambling in the article, I was interviewed very early in the morning, before coffee, on the day after the wedding of two close friends, and my brain was most definitely not fully engaged.

The first thing that I notice on here is a lot of detracting comments from people who haven't read the full report, but are just going on the headline. I'm not particularly surprised, as, of the several members of the press that interviewed me, only the BBC actually wanted to try to present the story in a positive light. Others just wanted to regurgitate the press release and get some nerdy quotes about not having a social life, for which I was happy to disappoint. No member of the press that I spoke to had actually read the port as far as I could tell.

Strangely, nobody wanted to publish my photo, because I don't look at all like the stereotypical image of a trainspotting nerd. I feel sorry for the other 5 people who were put forward by Demo as being examples of what Demos calls the "Pro/Amateur" economy, as the press ignored them completely.

So guys, remember that when you're pressing that submit button, you might be coming off as no more intelligent than a tabloid journalist.

I'm pretty encouraged by the report and what Demos are doing with it. For those who don't know the background, Demos is a think-tank organisation that provides policy advice to the british government. In this case, their advice has been obscured behind a knee-jerk press reaction, a reaction that I especially wouldn't have expected from the audience that the report praises.

You might need to know who I am, that I have the nerve to represent the community in this way. Well, I'm a 27 year old programmer from England. I've held a series of successively senior roles in several companies over the last 8 year, that has led to my current position as the Technical Director a company called Getfrank (http://www.getfrank.com/. Along the way I helped get Battle.Net started in Europe when I worked for Sierra/Vivendi running their online presence back in the 90s.

6 years ago, almost to the week, I was one of a handful of people that started an online community called evolt (http://evolt.org/). Actually, the wedding I was at this weekend was for 2 of the most prominent members of that community. I'm about to dump most of my time over the next couple of weeks to work on a complete rebuild of the technical architecture behind the community.

About 2 years ago I started working with the Plone project http://plone.org/, and became a core developer through working myself silly helping to get the 2.0 release out of the door. I don't get to contribute to the community as much as I would like at the moment, but that's mainly because everyone there is pretty damned good at what they do.

I have a steady girlfriend, but then, so do nearly all of my geeky friends, except the married ones. I have a social life that can best be characterised as amplified. I code about 50 hours a week at work for clients (on OSS projects), and about 30 hours a week for fun (on whatever the hell I like, but mostly little Torque Engine-based games for fun).

The point about the Pro/Amateur thing isn't people making a living out of their hobbies, it's mostly about motivation, and the availability of expertise and knowledge outside of the traditional bounds of "professions". In fact, it's one of the first indicators that many sections of the economy are noticing a move back away from the protestant work ethic, and back towards concepts of social responsibility and pride in self-directed achievement.

It's all small steps, and getting a report like this published and noticed in the press is just the first tiny step towards change, but it's definitely going to be an interesting journey.

Check it out.

A lot more than just Netscape in there. Very, very fascinating.

I picked up this book last week. I found it an excellent read and suitable for CSS users both novice and advanced. It gave me a couple ideas for ways to do these and further illustrated the necessity of web standards compliant design.
I also bought it because I met the author at the 2004 TOevolt Conference and he gave a great seminar and was a cool guy to boot.
It also spends some time on web accessibility, something all developers really need to start thinking about.

Can't they just make a simple browser that works, ie just display webpages.

OK, you know you can always go back to Netscape 1.22 - Simple, secure :D

Forgot to mention these: compatibility information on CSS3 Selectors. compares ie6, firefox 0.8, mozilla 1.7 rc1, safari 1.2 and opera 7.50 quick overview by Dante Evans since 2004-05-14