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Use Adblock Plus instead. It's Adblock, plus automatic updating of filters, plus tweaked to be more powerful. I have had to manually adjust Adblock settings about twice since I installed it.

Also use NoScript, which prevents execution of javascript except from whitelisted servers, and with the option of temporary whitelisting for the current session. Whitelisting is not laborious: it involves two mouse-clicks. I resisted installing NoScript for a long time, as I thought Adblock Plus by itself ought to be enough, but now that I've got it I will never, ever be getting rid of it.

Some people also advocate FlashBlock, but any Flash that makes it past the above two add-ons is almost certainly Flash that I want to see.

Use Adblock Plus instead. It's Adblock, plus automatic updating of filters, plus tweaked to be more powerful. I have had to manually adjust Adblock settings about twice since I installed it.

Also use NoScript, which prevents execution of javascript except from whitelisted servers, and with the option of temporary whitelisting for the current session. Whitelisting is not laborious: it involves two mouse-clicks. I resisted installing NoScript for a long time, as I thought Adblock Plus by itself ought to be enough, but now that I've got it I will never, ever be getting rid of it.

Some people also advocate FlashBlock, but any Flash that makes it past the above two add-ons is almost certainly Flash that I want to see.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

But he can't block every browser and this addon I found lets you pretent to be internet explorer.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59

User Agent Switcher:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59
Makes your user agent string look like Internet Explorer. I think there's a way to do this in Firefox without the plugin, but that's how I do it.

Web developers have known that scanning for a certain user-agent string has been a stupid idea for about 7 years. Notice that the people who are trying to crap up the Internet and complain about lost ad revenue are idiots and scan for browsers.

Internet ads are annoying and I will block them. I'm not obligated to read the ads. Websites really do look very nice without the ads.

I don't sift through every page and Adblock everything.

Check into AdBlock Plus subscriptions. You won't have to sift through any pages. The ads will be blocked automagically. That's what this discussion is mostly about.

Seth

Try Slashdotter, a nice Firefox addon that will add cache links to stories, a custom "Reply to selected text" option, and will show a pretty little button on your status bar with an S whenever you have modpoints.

Noscript
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
Adblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/186 5
Noscript options>>Advanced>>Untrusted>>check forbid java, forbid flash etc. then allow only the flash/java files to play one at a time instead of automatically by default.

Noscript
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722
Adblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/186 5
Noscript options>>Advanced>>Untrusted>>check forbid java, forbid flash etc. then allow only the flash/java files to play one at a time instead of automatically by default.

If so it could be down to rounding issues due to accumulated error (you do a calculation and due to the fractional part you end up rounding up, something changes ever so slightly and now the fractional part is smaller so you end up rounding down).

I have to admit I thought most of these had been squashed years ago (I used to see this many times a day back in 2000). If you have time on your hands you might want to trawl Mozilla's Bugzilla for the issue. If you have slightly less time or can't find an existing bug but have a reliable test case that always shows the problem, you are probably best off filing a new bug report.

Star Wars Galaxies was good once. It's slowly devolved into FFXI. It's hard to explain just how much FFXI sucks as a game. It's sucks enough that it spawned a Firefox extension to try and ease gameplay. (I wouldn't try installing it unless you want Firefox to chew 100% CPU - the clock in it is completely braindead, and I had the skillchain part destroy a profile in the past.)

FFXI's basic problem is its basic premise. Instead of just leveling up one class per character, you have to level up two classes per character, one at a time. (You have a "main" class and a "support" class. You can change classes at certain locations, but only the "main" one gains levels.) This means you'll see the newbie areas a lot. Especially because each class has another class that it works best with, meaning you'll frequently be leveling up one class, then its side class, then its side class, and so on. The newbie areas get a lot of action.

There's no character customization. The most you can customize your character is to be missing skills, because skills cost money. Add to that the broken gameplay mechanics, where you need extremely rare equipment and consumables to even be able to hit creatures that grant experience, and you've got a game that focuses on farming to the exclusion of all else.

Gold farming is a problem in FFXI because FFXI is designed to demand it of its players. This creates a market for FFXI gold, and creates demand for FFXI gold farmers. As this article notes, Square-Enix has decided to try and ban all the gold farmers instead of fixing their broken game that's designed to demand gold farmers.

On Windows, the GIF image versions of the Metamath pages render slower on Firefox than on Internet Explorer. The Firefox extension IE Tab solves this problem by using the IE rendering engine under Firefox. For example, the web page http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/projlem7.html (870K), when loaded locally (to eliminate the network speed) on a 1.2GHz Celeron, took 65 seconds to render on Firefox but only 12 seconds after right-clicking to reload it with IE Tab. However, IE Tab can't be used for the Unicode version, since (like IE) it renders the fonts incorrectly.

-- Norm Megill

1) UI (check Google, not sure what exactly you'd prefer in UI)
2) Rendering Time for New Tabs (Scroll down, there's plenty of tips but specifically the page rendering sections)
3) Mouse Gestures

1) UI (check Google, not sure what exactly you'd prefer in UI)
2) Rendering Time for New Tabs (Scroll down, there's plenty of tips but specifically the page rendering sections)
3) Mouse Gestures

Back when I benchmarked kjs against spidermonkey (both cli builds), kjs was laughably slow. I also ran the some tests in browser. The test I remember most clearly was that for 2 methods of base64 encoding a string, Opera was fastest on one and slowest on the other. Overall firefox had the most consistent performance and had (on average) the fastest javascript engine.

As you say, tamarin will give performance even more of a boost.

Disclaimer: My testing was done 18 months back.

ML, Scheme AND what you missed, you pompous buffoon, FF javascript modules in over 100,000 user installations.

The problem with flash and great projects like gnash is that it will never be a full freely distributable implementation as long as we have draconian patent laws. Components such as flash video are patented. Likewise the silverlight won't be complete in a free distribution.

That's changing. The latest beta of the Flashplayer supports h.264 video with AAC audio in an mp4 container. Mozilla Tamarin is the VM introduced in Flashplayer 9 and targeted by everything ActionScript 3 (like Flash CS3 can and Flex 2 always does, as well as the to-be-Free Flex 3 SDK). It's much faster than the one in previous versions, so developers will use that one increasingly. For video content, publishers can choose between an open standard with free tools, or a proprietary expensive one, so what do you think will they do?
That's two major building blocks right there. The rest of the format is basically just tags that define, transform and place sprites. Gnash already does a good job at that. Some pieces in the Adobe Flashplayer's renderer are patented, but there are excellent libraries for that. Of course, the API would have to be implemented (the flash.* packages, mx.* builds on that and will be part of the Flex 3 SDK).
The SWF specification isn't the problem, there are some Free tools out there that already have very good support of SWF and related protocols. With the Flex 3 SDK, there will even be one from Adobe you can legally look at (IANAL).

You have to understand that Gnash tries to support existing content first. That is a big task, and I wish them well. But if you leave out legacy support and focus on what Adobe's current tools put out, it gets much easier. Grossly simplified, there's the VM, there are readers, renderers and codecs, add glue.

The Penelope Addion Page has a little more information:


Penelope is the open source version of Eudora. This extension adds changes to the Thunderbird UI to provide a familiar UI for Eudora users. Many of the Eudora shortcuts are also supported including functionality not offered in Thunderbird.


Penelope is an Add-on to Thunderbird which implements some a Eudora User Interface and some Eudora features.

When I saw this yesterday, I actually experienced a few seconds of excitement that there might someday be a good X11 mail client. But then I looked a bit further into what it is they've actually created here; functionality-wise, this mostly appears to be Thunderbird with a few of Eudora's icons pasted atop.

If you take a look at the list of bugs submitted by users, you'll notice that the vast majority of them are regarding the fact that this application behaves nothing like Eudora.

Very disappointing, I'm afraid. I hope that some day there will be X11 mail clients available that aren't simply clones of a clone of Outlook.

I would recommend is some sort of web filter to stop any shocking "I've heard of this email site, erm, hotmale.com" incidents.

If you're planning on using Firefox, use this firefox extension to get text-size changing buttons. For some reason they're not on the toolbar palette by default.

Then you're not using a proper doctype.
The differences in Javascript isn't really that big.
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Migrate_apps_ from_Internet_Explorer_to_Mozilla

To allow for KNOWN SAFE Javascript, and to limit the least without any other intervention required (automatically updated white lists:)

GetFirefox.com
AdBlock Plus
I could also recommend getting Peer Guardian (with HTTP blocking ON) to block against other known malicious sites.
You can set up a filtered DSN (ie: ScrubIt.com)
Finally, you could also find an application that will add a list of known baddies to your own HOSTS file (which would then force a known bad site to redirect to 127.0.0.1/localhost!) (ie: Spybot, Search & Destroy)

HiVis Big? Theres a whole section of firefox themes tagged 'large' for this purpose, btw.

Something else missing from this suggestion is that browsing isn't stateless - the normal bookmark interface isn't very accessible, but you still want to be able to easily get back to where you were after a VM refresh. Something integrating SpeedDial with online bookmark storage might be useful.

HiVis Big? Theres a whole section of firefox themes tagged 'large' for this purpose, btw.

Something else missing from this suggestion is that browsing isn't stateless - the normal bookmark interface isn't very accessible, but you still want to be able to easily get back to where you were after a VM refresh. Something integrating SpeedDial with online bookmark storage might be useful.

I know another poster has mentioned Mozilla download helper. This is an add-on that saves most online streaming content by right clicking on a drop down list. You can the reencode (uggh) for your DVD (divx) player using Super. Just drag and drop your flv files to the Super windown and select Avi/Divx as the output type with a bit/frame rate equivalent to Home Theater Profile of DivX. You can also reencode to most mobile devices with Super.

DVD Jon was actualy a pretty knowledgeable hardcore geek way before he did the CSS crack.

Wait, I thought it was Christopher Finke that did the CSS hack!

I do something similar. Use LiveHTTPHeaders extension, look for a URL in a header with FLV mime-type, copy/paste/save as...

javascript is a prototype based language, rather than class based (although you can simulate it quite nicely).
more info here

Have you ever seen C libs embedded in Rhino, maybe built with gcj?

Have you ever seen C libs embedded in Rhino, maybe built with gcj?

Firefox has a component named "libpr0n". It's developed by an organization named Mozilla (which also develops a full suite named Seamonkey), and the fundamental basis of its UI technology uses an XML namespace defined by a uri of, get ready for it, http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there. is.only.xul

If you are in the business of reselling a distribution, you may have a point. If you cannot sufficiently hide the development names of pieces of your system from dour humourless micromanagers, then you cannot do your job, full stop. This may or may not be your fault, but it's hardly a reason to keep dragging out the same tired old "the name is too silly" argument. Serious people take Mark Shuttleworth seriously, and it's not just because he has money.

"Firefox extension called DownloadHelper..."

Do you know how that compares to the VideoDownloader extension?

Now, surely you jest... I find unplug works very well, and is quite reliable, and is very easy. If you have access to a unix box, you can even issue a simple conversion (or write a simple script):

ffmpeg -i filename.flv filename.mpg (or ogg, or mp3, or...)

If no Linux box is available, then you could always just watch it straight through VLC. And the nice thing about all of this: it is free (as in beer and as in choice). And of course you get to not support a company that has (rightfully) earned the ire of many IT people the world over...

The problem with JavaScript is that it's horribly slow to execute.

No *nix desktop runs Exchange + Outlook, nor runs Word.

Not true. You can, in fact, get Office to run on a *nix desktop. You'd just be much better off retraining people for OpenOffice or KOffice.

Word should be trivial to replace, but it isn't. It is hard to make people change, and most managers aren't willing to listen to complains just to save a few thousand (yet most should).

Put that few thousand into a training program. Done.

It would be a much more valid argument if there were still really critical features that either office suite doesn't have, but the reality is, for 99% of what you need to do with an office suite, KOffice is fine. Then, for maybe .9%, OpenOffice will cover you. That leaves .01% that you need Office for, so just make one XP machine and turn RDP on, for those very rare cases.

Exchange + Outlook is even harder, because it not only has a calendar system but also make it available to the network

Gosh, that's never been done before.

Now, if only we had a way to share them...

Trust me, Exchange + Outlook is a solved problem. If anything, the irony here is that I haven't been able to implement any of these at work, as there's not really any other good groupware clients for Windows, other than Outlook -- although most of the open servers can probably talk to Outlook. But if you can get them on Linux, I'd suggest Kontact and probably Kolab as the server.

It's even possible that KDE will be ported to Windows wholesale at some point, from what I've been reading. If that happens, just standardize on Kontact.

Of course, this would be a bit annoying if you find you have to switch it on for torrentspy and then switch it off when you want to surf in general (without the inherant lag).

Apparently, you have never heard of FoxyProxy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/24 64/). It automatically connects directly/via proxies depending on the URL.

Speaking of Wine, I don't use it a lot. I have some Windows foreign-language-study programs that run just fine under it. Some Windows games run all right under it; the occasional crash is part of the fun :). The one application I'd like to see working better is Personal Ancestral File, but the Linux alternatives are competitive. I use OpenOffice or Koffice or emacs for office stuff, and write new software in perl or Java or C#, all of which are cross-platform.

Actually, there is a mouseless browsing addon for Firefox that allows you to easily browse without a mouse. I use it all the time on my laptop where I do everything I need to do without touching a mouse (I hate touchpads). Emacs, Pidgin, rxvt, and Firefox with this addon (my main applications) can used just as quickly, if not quicker, without a mouse.

The only problem is Flash stuff, such as Youtube. You can't control the video playback without a mouse by any means I know about. You also cannot follow Flash links either. However, this is no problem for me as I do not have Flash installed (you can watch Youtube without Flash).

To get back to the article a bit, it seems that the "commercial" is placed on top by the Flash player, not embedded in the video. This means watch with a different player (mplayer or vlc), you will not see these ads.

How about the Mirrordot cache? I would give you the Google cache too, but that one doesn't seem to be working.

By the way, you can install the Slashdotter Firefox extension and automatically get all 3 cache links appended to every link in an article summary. Very handy.

No kidding, look at all of these reports: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksear ch=flash+crash

Something I do miss are the "next-previous" functions of the NeXT browser. Current browsers only permit you to follow a link and then to run back and forth over the path you took ("back" and "forward"). The NeXT browser had the additional function of following the next link of the previous page ("next"). That allowed me to make a page which was a list of pages to be looked at and then to walk that "path" with a click per page.

I think he's talking about <link rel="next/previous/contents"> in the head.

SeaMonkey has View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar that shows buttons in the navigation for this. It's not in Firefox, though there's a Site navigation extension.

What do you mean, incompatible?

I seem to be running D2, and I have Slashdotter enabled...

Or use the Slashdotter Firefox Plugin, which isn't compatible with D2. It's ability to hide threads I'm not interested in far outweighs any advantages of the new layout. I also like the reply (no more typing in <blockquote>) feature, and various AJAX features.

All but one major browser family now ship with some native SVG support. As expected, Microsoft Internet Explorer fails miserably but at least they have that proprietary greygloom thing to tie you to their platform.

As for VRML, X3D may not see the resurgence DHTML (AJAX) did by virtue of not being natively implemented. However, XML, javascript, CSS, SVG and canvas are here now. Already threatening make the modern browser a viable development environment for 3D content.

After realizing that his attempts to block the ADP users are useless, he chose to block Firefox users completely. And he's made a site called whyfirefoxisblocked.com using outdated information to justify what hes doing. I love it.

The bottom line of all of this is that the purpose of his site (http://articlewagon.com/) is to serve Google Adsense ads and generate revenue only by adsense. A clear violation of the Google Adsense TOS. https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer. py?answer=48182 Specifically the part that says "No Google ad may be placed on pages published specifically for the purpose of showing ads, whether or not the page content is relevant."

I recommend reporting him to Google Adsense TOS violations, since its not fair to those who use Adsense the way it should be. adsense-abuse@google.com