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Sure, /if/ your content is the type that can be presented in a text-oriented, page-by-page manner, then creating simple, barebones HTML pages is smart coding.

Actually, that's not the case. It's just a matter of using markup to structure your documents, and then letting CSS handle the display. That doesn't mean you can't use sticky footer techniques (like the one Paul O'Brien uses on SitePoint), Gilder/Levin image substitution techniques, or even advanced floating methods that literally rearrange the content so that you have floats on one part of the page floating underneath content on another part of the page even though there's another content block (or three) in between them.

And yes, I am aware of issues that plague even the most advanced designs; and how sometimes you have to use hacks to compensate for the failures of a browser (not just IE, but Firefox, Opera, and Safari/Chrome as well) to render things properly. (Don't believe me about Firefox? Look up Bugzilla 915 one of these days.)

But every design has its limits. Try pushing at the edges of HTML, and it gets painful, fast. On one project I audited, we were spending 75% of our coding time on browser workarounds.

Given that I've been doing this since 2002, I should know that every design has its limits; it's a limitation of the medium, not the languages used. As I tell everyone, HTML is for structure, CSS is for presentation, and client-side scripting is for behavior. While there is overlap between the three (as there should be with any healthy symbiotic relationship), they do have their own jobs and when used properly, they can achieve results that would otherwise be impossible with HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

But I'm one of those people who debugs as he goes along in all browsers - first with the HTML to ensure that the markup is structurally sound, then the CSS to ensure that the appearance is practically the same in all browsers made in this century (I'm a user-centric developer who prefers to put the people who will use the Web site first, rather than a designer's ego - but that doesn't mean designs can't look great while working well), and finally the scripting (script by script) to make sure that nothing's broken there either. Taking that kind of approach allows me to reduce the time spent debugging by nearly 95%. I've also found that most of the problems I have (and this isn't true for everyone) will be in the HTML itself, and that by modifying the markup slightly I can get it to work in all browsers, rather than piling on hack after hack after hack that I have to check again and again whenever a new browser, browser version or layout engine is released.

Oh, as for pushing at the limits of HTML? There really aren't any limits if you use it as a structural markup language because of the rules in place. The real limits to be pushed are with CSS and JavaScript - that's where the real magic is.

Switching to a RIA was a huge time-saver. At the edges of user interface design, HTML compatibility is thoroughly broken.

At which point I would dare say you're not creating a Web site, but an application. Two completely different environments (with their own sets of rules) co-existing in the same medium. (As someone who once had to make a Web site look 100% identical to a Flex app in all browsers, I should know.)

However, your instinct that the simplest designs are usually the best is spot-on. This is exactly kind of back-to-the-basics thinking that is behind REST, Atom, JSON, and other web-centric techniques.

As I've said before, even rich graphics intensive designs can be done using POSH (Plain Old Semantic HTML). Yeah, you may need a few container hooks, but given that multiple backgrounds and other CSS3 properties aren't properly implemented in all browsers yet, I can live with it for now. (Though I don't know how much more I can take - I want my CSS3 fix now, damnit!)

Windows XP was released in 2001. If you asked for support and patches for, say, Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 (released 2002), you'd get laughed out of pretty much everywhere.

If you wanted support and patches, yes. But if you wanted to install it, you wouldn't have much trouble.

Well, there's AIR. You can use just web-standards to develop for it. And you have the benefit of WebKit plus their JavaScipt engine, which I think is a version of Tamarin. On the free side, there's Titanium, and Prism. But these are site-specific-browsers. If you meant something that you could package into a gzip/tar and send over the web, I think you're left with the usual feature-sniffing and mass-o-files stuff that we all know and "love"...

I am a former NoScript user and have found a decent replacement in YesScript -- although I hardly ever need to use the blacklist functionality.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4922

Try YesScript

Proof?

Since the first FF 3.0 point release of 2009 (3.0.6), I count:
* A dozen critical security vulnerabilities
* Six high security vulnerabilities
* 32 vulnerabilities in total patched this year

I'm a Firefox user, and have been for years, but I'm not going to pretend that it's the Fort Knox of web-browsers just so I can have some false sense of security superiority over rival browsers, or worse, pretend it is highly secure and be ignorant of the actual realities. I'm guessing you're one of those people who don't read the security advisories for Firefox point releases, you really should; it might deflate your reality distortion bubble.

At this point, Mozilla's advantage isn't so much in secure code but fast patch response times.

layout.css.visited_links_enabled = false

Note: this works only in Firefox 3.5 (Beta/Preview).

By the way, if you are using Firefox 3.5 with layout.css.visited_links_enabled = false and you still want some visual clue for visited links, try my Link Status extension! (How pushy....)

Suggest some better combination than ff+noscript+abp if you know one, I'll stay open for new ideas.

Mine is Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper (Youtube comments begone!), RequestPolicy, YesScript and Cookie Monster (cookies don't might not flash, but you might want to practice moderation anyway).

Suggest some better combination than ff+noscript+abp if you know one, I'll stay open for new ideas.

Mine is Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper (Youtube comments begone!), RequestPolicy, YesScript and Cookie Monster (cookies don't might not flash, but you might want to practice moderation anyway).

Suggest some better combination than ff+noscript+abp if you know one, I'll stay open for new ideas.

Mine is Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper (Youtube comments begone!), RequestPolicy, YesScript and Cookie Monster (cookies don't might not flash, but you might want to practice moderation anyway).

Suggest some better combination than ff+noscript+abp if you know one, I'll stay open for new ideas.

Mine is Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper (Youtube comments begone!), RequestPolicy, YesScript and Cookie Monster (cookies don't might not flash, but you might want to practice moderation anyway).

Suggest some better combination than ff+noscript+abp if you know one, I'll stay open for new ideas.

Mine is Adblock Plus, Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper (Youtube comments begone!), RequestPolicy, YesScript and Cookie Monster (cookies don't might not flash, but you might want to practice moderation anyway).

I've been happy with RequestPolicy so far. It's not a drop in replacement however. On the upside it blocks all cross site requests, not just javascript (was that an invisible 1x1 gif?), on the downside if you want a third party image to load you will also enable javascript from that party. You also can't block javascript from the site you are on, but that's what YesScriptis for.

I've been happy with RequestPolicy so far. It's not a drop in replacement however. On the upside it blocks all cross site requests, not just javascript (was that an invisible 1x1 gif?), on the downside if you want a third party image to load you will also enable javascript from that party. You also can't block javascript from the site you are on, but that's what YesScriptis for.

If anything, I'd say the author of Noscript has proved two things: one, that he is human and makes mistakes, and two, that he has the integrity of character to appologise for his mistakes and rectify them. Neither of which makes him any less trustworthy than anyone else.

From what I hear, he only "apologized" and fixed the problem for several reasons:
1. Because the Firefox devs said that NoScript was breaking Firefox's Add-on Policy when it started monkeying around with AdBlock Plus.
2. NoScript's rating was plummeting on the Firefox Add-on site. If this rating drops too much, NoScript would no longer be considered a trusted add-on, and therefore every version would be subject to security review before it exited the Sandbox.

Oh, yes, you read that correctly. NoScript is currently not reviewed before new versions go up on the Firefox add-on site.

Incidentally, Mozilla made a new policy spelling out some restrictions for add-ons after this incident.

If anything, I'd say the author of Noscript has proved two things: one, that he is human and makes mistakes, and two, that he has the integrity of character to appologise for his mistakes and rectify them. Neither of which makes him any less trustworthy than anyone else.

From what I hear, he only "apologized" and fixed the problem for several reasons:
1. Because the Firefox devs said that NoScript was breaking Firefox's Add-on Policy when it started monkeying around with AdBlock Plus.
2. NoScript's rating was plummeting on the Firefox Add-on site. If this rating drops too much, NoScript would no longer be considered a trusted add-on, and therefore every version would be subject to security review before it exited the Sandbox.

Oh, yes, you read that correctly. NoScript is currently not reviewed before new versions go up on the Firefox add-on site.

Incidentally, Mozilla made a new policy spelling out some restrictions for add-ons after this incident.

Bug 57351

Was marked ass a duplicate of 147777
See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777

Vitaly Sharovatov and Walt Gordon Jones have an interesting back and forth on ideas for a proper fix. Search the page linked below for "Walt Gordon Jones" to follow the conversation.
http://sharovatov.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/startpaniccom-and-visited-links-privacy-issue/

Walt Gordon Jones summarizes his point:

The idea that the only way to protect your history data is to give up keeping history at all seems broken to me. Just because the information is in the browser, and I may use it in other ways, doesn't mean it has to be used to mark up the rendered HTML on sites I visit. There's nothing that inextricably ties history to the browser's rendering engine.

You can open a command prompt and ftp it from: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

That's how we used to get most things in the old days...

You can use FTP.

In Vista, you can open the "File"-menu in the "Computer"-view of an explorer-window and "Add a Network Location" which points to an ftp-site. I'd wager that Windows 7 has something similar.
You can also open a standard explorer-window and type ftp://ftp.mozilla.org where you normally see your current directory.
Or, if you dislike using a GUI-interface to get your Firefox-installation, you can use the ftp DOS utility in a command window.

What would be nice, though, is if there where something like Aptitude for windows so that you had a central tool where you could simply select which freeware or open source applications you wanted and then have them downloaded, installed and kept up to date automatically.
The worst part about a new Windows or OSX installation is hunting for, downloading and installing all the damn applications and utilities.

It can be done. Run this command.

explorer ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5b99/win32/en-US/Firefox Setup 3.5 Beta 99.exe

(This works on XP -- I haven't tried it on other versions of windows)

An OEM could stick this in a batch file on the desktop of a new machine. You know - make it easy for a user so they don't have to learn FTP syntax. Perhaps there could be several such batch files, so a user could choose which browser they wanted to download and install.

Or you know, just type ftp://ftp.mozilla.org into windows explorer.

Or in the run box.

Or, in a command line, run: ftp ftp.mozilla.org

Fail troll fails.

Really?

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org

(For Windoze users, that's under "My Network Places" or whatever they'll call that in 7.)

Do you know of any hotspot or JIT compilers for HTML or JS?

You mean like http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin or http://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme for JS?

Can you guarantee that Firefox is patched?

Turn on the automatic updates, set it to download and install them automatically, and then install this addon and lock down the options panel. There might even be a better extension to accomplish it... it took all of about five minutes to find that on Google.

I mean... seriously, in a browser that's so customizable, do you really think your particular problem hasn't been encountered and attacked numerous times already?

The Firefox CCK (Client Customization Kit) wizard of course!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2553

Also, Mozilla has offered the CCK for previous versions of Firefox.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/

So this sounds like no more than new name and an update? I don't consider this to be big news.

The Firefox CCK (Client Customization Kit) wizard of course!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2553

Also, Mozilla has offered the CCK for previous versions of Firefox.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/

So this sounds like no more than new name and an update? I don't consider this to be big news.

I mentioned this in a post above, but IE Tab is your friend.

Enterprises support IE because it runs ActiveX controls. Until FF does this, it will not appear in desktop builds for the majority of Corporate America.

Then they need to find: IE TAB

Get the best of both worlds, pretty trivial to add sites to the list of IE sites and it all happens automatically. Been building a plan to migrate to FF completely in my spare time. Build your own browser will make a huge difference as currently I'm relying on some custom scripts to make the app deployable and maintainable. It works, but I hate to admit that it just aint as easy as using the registry or belting links into the favourites folder. Unfortunately all the native text processing tools in windows suck, so managing things the *nix way just doesn't work!

I don't find that fair. I have always loathed the "search from toolbar" hijack they built into IE. Then I found I had to turn off Domain Guessing AND Internet Keywords in Firefox, and the options weren't even visible in the UI. This bullshit has gone on too long. If the computer illiterate need this feature, at least give it a checkbox:
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/domain-guessing.html
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/internet-keywords.html

Now if you really are in favor of a free-for-all in this area, Verisign should go back to returning their own pages as a DNS result. I think they would have the inside track on sending a user where they did not intend to go.

I don't find that fair. I have always loathed the "search from toolbar" hijack they built into IE. Then I found I had to turn off Domain Guessing AND Internet Keywords in Firefox, and the options weren't even visible in the UI. This bullshit has gone on too long. If the computer illiterate need this feature, at least give it a checkbox:
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/domain-guessing.html
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/internet-keywords.html

Now if you really are in favor of a free-for-all in this area, Verisign should go back to returning their own pages as a DNS result. I think they would have the inside track on sending a user where they did not intend to go.

The naming warfare already indicates a measure of status symbol, the arm Linux smartbook versus the windows intel netbook ie stupidbook (especially in the education market). The performance advantage of Linux the operating system can specifically be tweaked at the coding level for the processor and system to squeeze as much performance as possible and that can be extended out into the office suit in the case of openoffice.org and of course browser fireofox and email client thunderbird (now with lightning https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313).

So really fine tuned custom installation which allow for effective manufacturer branding within the applications and even the operating system, they just have to be careful about how the balance out their specific distribution and what additional software libraries to mirror for free download and even what proprietary software the sell via their home sites.

The second computer market is going to be a very competitive and active market with lots of changes occuring for some time to come.

Firefox doesn't block Flash content by default, but Flashblock does and works in the same fashion as described in your quotation.

If people are concerned about their privacy then why don't they use Firefox, AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript? The truly paranoid can download and use Tor as well. Do people have a right to complain if they aren't willing to lift a finger to protect themselves?

If people are concerned about their privacy then why don't they use Firefox, AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript? The truly paranoid can download and use Tor as well. Do people have a right to complain if they aren't willing to lift a finger to protect themselves?

If people are concerned about their privacy then why don't they use Firefox, AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript? The truly paranoid can download and use Tor as well. Do people have a right to complain if they aren't willing to lift a finger to protect themselves?

And is there any decent and easy to use encoders for these formats? With flash it is butt simple to convert it to .mpg, .avi, etc and there are tools like VideoDownloader extension for Firefox that will automatically convert it from the browser based on your preferences.

Last time I went looking for Ogg and Matroska converters (about a year ago) I just couldn't find any that had the ease of use and multiple format conversion like there was for flash. I doubt this will get much traction unless there is a butt simple GUI based way to convert the video into the format of your choice, preferably from your browser because it is just too damned nice and convenient to be able to format shift for your PSP, iPod, etc and have it on the go.

Heck you can do green screen style processing with Javascript in real time.

Here is a link to a 64-bit linux nightly build that sorta works[the controls on the video don't seem to work real well]. The link in the summary wants to try to give you a 32-bit build which probably won't work for most people.

requiring Microsoft to reverse engineer how Firefox unencrypts

"Reverse engineer"? You mean they have to read the source code? Oh noes! How will they ever manage to do that!?

User Agent Switcher.

That's kind of misleading. A help file on Windows is (more or less) an archive of HTML files bundled with some other gubbins like the index. The Windows help engine (unsurprisingly) uses Trident as its HTML renderer. But there isn't any particular connection between help files and Trident. Indeed, there is a Firefox addon that can read Windows help files.

Which is why I am a usability engineer, and tried applying for the Ubuntu Add/Remove usability testing internship : )

I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)

Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements on the web:

If you're not using Firefox, you should be.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Once you've got Firefox, you should install tools to protect you from advertising. First one is Adblock Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

This lets you block advertisements, and is configurable.

Next, if you want to block particular sites completely, you can use this tool, called BlockSite:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145

After you've done all this, you can customize Google to remove certain items you don't want to see with the CustomizeGoogle add on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.

If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements in your mail:

First, install Thunderbird:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.

Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.

So you need to install the Webmail add on.

http://webmail.mozdev.org/

Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.

After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.

Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".

--//--

How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:

Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr

I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)

Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements on the web:

If you're not using Firefox, you should be.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Once you've got Firefox, you should install tools to protect you from advertising. First one is Adblock Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

This lets you block advertisements, and is configurable.

Next, if you want to block particular sites completely, you can use this tool, called BlockSite:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145

After you've done all this, you can customize Google to remove certain items you don't want to see with the CustomizeGoogle add on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.

If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements in your mail:

First, install Thunderbird:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.

Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.

So you need to install the Webmail add on.

http://webmail.mozdev.org/

Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.

After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.

Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".

--//--

How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:

Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr

I think you are putting way to much stock in how a few minutes of advertising can adversely affect your life. Just ignore them, fast forward, or hit the DVD Menu button and skip all that crap. Seriously the only way to avoid all of what you call "corporate propaganda" is to live in a cave, never buy anything and live a completely self-sufficient life, never have any contact with the outside world, never again read anything, listen to anything, or watch anything. Then you would truly be "free" of the corporate shackles. (As a bonus you could also realize that you've had people shouting in your ears their whole life and that you never realized how much your thinking had been muddled - in the silence of your cave.)

Ahh... now you're telling me it's impossible and/or impractical. Which is great, because it just so happens I already did it. As a matter of fact, I wrote a series of pieces for members of an eating disorder recovery group on how to avoid all the negative imagery and get healthier. It's on a private forum, so I'll just stick it in here.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements on the web:

If you're not using Firefox, you should be.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Once you've got Firefox, you should install tools to protect you from advertising. First one is Adblock Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

This lets you block advertisements, and is configurable.

Next, if you want to block particular sites completely, you can use this tool, called BlockSite:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145

After you've done all this, you can customize Google to remove certain items you don't want to see with the CustomizeGoogle add on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

With this tool, you can remove advertisements, filter out sites you don't ever want to see in your search results, and remove google tracking. Which may screw up Muses website statistics tracking, but will prevent you from becoming a target for advertisements specifically related to eating disorders and dieting etc.

If you take the time to install and set up these tools, you will be amazed at the difference.

--//--

How to avoid advertisements in your mail:

First, install Thunderbird:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/

This mail reader has a built in spam blocker that learns how to identify spam as you mark things as spam/not spam. This will go a long way towards keeping your mailbox advertisement free.

Once you've got that installed, you want to be using it to read your web based mail, like Hotmail, Yahoo, GMail, etc.

So you need to install the Webmail add on.

http://webmail.mozdev.org/

Once you've installed this, you'll be able to view your mail from all these websites without having to see their banners and other assorted crap.

After this is all done, you should set up folders for every piece of mail you expect to receive, and filters to automatically move them there. This will prefilter your pile, and your learning spam filters will also prefilter.

Between the two, you'll have an ever shrinking pile of messages that "might" be spam to wade through and mark as "is spam" or "is not spam".

--//--

How to avoid advertising in your multimedia:

Stop paying for cable television. Disconnect your service, and use the money you save to buy a DVD burner for backup, a video card for your computer that supports TV-Out, and a large external hard drive that you can use to carry files to and from your fr

Even AdBlock and NoScript may not be enough. I've read about a recent trend where adverts are hosted directly on the content server. So if your website "requires" JavaScript and/or people have whitelisted it, ads will get through because the scripts and images are hosted directly on your website. Bastards.

In case you are willing to do something about it:

• Greasemonkey (FF|IE)
• Platypus
• Shiftspace
• JetPack
• Chickenfoot
• Privoxy
• Proximodo

the last of which is hosted by... SourceForge.

Get AdBlock instead and legalize online gambling. There is no need to compromise your freedoms just to avoid having to punch the monkey.

I realize that you're being facetious, but you can get rid of the obnoxious flashing ads through a simple browser add-on, wouldn't it be better to get rid of the censorship?

Firefox has an extension called Scrapbook that allows you to save to your cache entire copies of a webpage without saving screenshots to your hard drive. Your browser automatically downloads all pages from a website within a link depth that you set, and you can direct the process to be restricted to one domain.

I spidered www.whitehouse.gov on January 20 and January 21, 2009 to a link depth of 3. I wish I remembered to do the same thing with Blagojevich's webpages before they were changed.

If a popular FOSS project like Firefox can have a 10+ years bug on the core HTML rendering, why should we be picky on a 7+ years old on a less popular application? The bottom line is: none has (enough) interest in it.