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You could afford to buy four and you have a whole dollar left!

That's BS. SeaMonkey (and Firefox, and Thunderbird, and thousands of other appliactions) isn't a .net application or trivial MFC application, yet somehow runs on all versions of Windows from the past decade (even NT 3.51 with some minor caveats!). It's also not written in Java. It's a pretty serious piece of software.

That's because the UI is written in XUL, and the installer includes all the libraries for it, for all win32 platforms. Not all software for windows is so lucky and portable. You're mistaken about windows apps being portable.

Explain to me how this is not more complicated than Windows where you just go to the program's site and download the installer.

Seriously, have you ever looked at the seamonkey download page where they offer a Fedora Core rpm build?

If you want the ability to be able to download and install, just use Fedora. Don't bitch if you're using a geek Linux like Ubuntu or Gentoo or Slackware or something. Fedora is a pretty usable Desktop OS right now, and most download sites offer rpm builds of their software. Not everything needs to be in a yum repository.

Look, there are other problems with desktop Linux, but the ones you cite aren't the bad ones. Hardware compatibility for example. Or kernel modules you need to recompile every single bloody kernel update. Drivers that only work under ndiswrapper. WPA support in Linux wireless-tools package instead of wpa_supplicant. Those are issues. Wireless support should be friggin' perfect by now, yet lags behind the windows world by a long shot. Those are barriers to penetration much more than the availability of a binary installer (which btw some companies also offer).

I'd agree, but put yourself in the position of someone who wants to, for instance, not simply give away their movie over the internet. Simply linking an .mpeg may not really be the solution to all your problems.

In that case, your problem is simply that you don't understand the nature of the Internet. The only way to not distribute something is to -- wait for it -- not distribute it!

In other words, even if you use Flash you're still giving away your movie because there's no way to stop the person at the other end from making a copy that they can keep. In fact, there's even a Firefox extension expressly designed for this purpose. If you think Flash will stop distribution, you're just fooling yourself.

And it's good that you can build your own player because if Macromedia won't make a player for your OS, you're free to.

Okay, you're talking about something completely different than I thought, apparently. In your previous post I thought you meant implementing a custom video player UI in Flash, that would run in a Flash player. But now you appear to be talking about implementing a modified version of Flash Player itself such that it would be a stand-alone application capable of running on platforms that Flash (as distributed by Macrom^WAdobe) doesn't support (which doesn't make any sense to me). Which is it?

• No support for video or audio. I know SVG is a vector -graphics- format, but when you compare it to flash you have to compare it with all of flash.
• No support for -any- kind of gui widgets. Want to make a radio button? You have to draw it from graphics primitives and provide all the logic (rollover effects, press effects, callbacks, etc). Hell, there's not even built-in text wrapping (it's in the 1.2 spec, I believe, but no one is even talking about the possibility of making a 1.2 viewer)
• And when you DO make those widgets, oh god, they are slow as a butt.
• No animation timeline support. This is kind of a pain in the butt in a lot of applications. You can roll your own, but that's just more work on top of the previous item.
• Incomplete implementations. The Adobe SVG plugin is pretty buggy (and I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to fix it), and the Firefox implementation is still incomplete: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html

Only if they want to develop proprietary software for Linux.

If they provide the source, then whoever maintains the distro is the only one who has to worry about issues that you are fretting over.

That's the whole purpose of distros.

Even for OSS, that's just not the same as being able to distribute one package that works everywhere. On Windows (9x, 2k, XP Home, XP Pro, Vista's 7 versions), I can ship one binary package that works for everybody. Microsoft doesn't have to approve my package before making it easily available to users - any Windows user can download my one simple installer and have it work for them regardless of their version. Now look at Linux: there are many different distros, with many different package formats. I'd have to provide RPMs, DEBs, tarballs, and probably multiple versions in each format (since it might depend on different packages for different distros). Users would have to know which package to download. If the experience is going to be easy, I have to beg the distro's maintainer to provide an official package--some distros are very slow to add new products.

A real-world example of this is SeaMonkey. How long will it be until Debian users can install the software easily? Windows users can have the latest version as soon as we ship it. Linux users generally have to wait for their distro to provide an updated package. We do provide tarballs which you can extract anywhere, but that's not really user-friendly... we also provide an installer, but then you're using a method of adding software other than your distro's standard package management. We do ship source, and anyone is welcome to build it and include it in distros, but the vast majority of people just want to install a binary using whatever method they normally use (e.g. google for the website, download an installer, or search Synaptic, etc).

There are also toolkits and JavaScript apps that combine W3C standards with AJAX, letting you write a lot of the dynamic page stuff in a declarative fashion, using just markup (XHTML+XForms; I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms).

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

The Orbeon folks have a nice blog that shows how to use XForms (their implementation, the Mozilla extension, or any of the other above toolkits) to accomplish typical dynamic page tasks such as listing countries and ISO codes, or resizing flickr (also via formsplayer.

We use Mozilla Sunbird and a WebDAV server here. It isn't perfect, but it is a good enough calendaring application. Lightning integrates this with Thunderbird.

Evolution, a decent Outlook alternative from Novell, has been ported.

Aethera seems stalled, but includes native windows ports of KOrganizer.

Finally, there are some versions of Kontact which can run under Cygwin.

We use Mozilla Sunbird and a WebDAV server here. It isn't perfect, but it is a good enough calendaring application. Lightning integrates this with Thunderbird.

Evolution, a decent Outlook alternative from Novell, has been ported.

Aethera seems stalled, but includes native windows ports of KOrganizer.

Finally, there are some versions of Kontact which can run under Cygwin.

not to be such a nerd, but this tutorial is ie-oriented (war!) but anyway, mozilla.org ironically has had the same thing .. only more expanded, with less ads, and for all major browsers (including ies) here: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX ... for a long time now ...

One good mechanism for getting the XML and asynchronous features but without hand coding JavaScript is to use any of the various XForms implementations. XForms is a W3C standard that defines a mostly script-free way of doing much of stuff people want out of Ajax, and it's done in a declarative way that's friendly to accessibility agents, and easier to deploy onto other devices. I was an editor of the XForms 1.0 recommendation, but new revisions have come out; see http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms

The FormFaces OSS product is an entire XForms implementation done in JavaScript, running in the browser. You write your page in HTML with XForms markup, and FormFaces does the "HiJax" thing of re-writing it for you. You never need to use XmlHttpRequest, and you can interact with regular servers, RESTful services, etc., all via XML.

Another product that does this, in a slightly different way, is AjaxForms. I just found out about it, but it looks pretty good. AjaxForms uses some server-side components to do the translation from strict XHTML+XForms markup into Ajax (HTML4+JavaScript), but they claim it can work in PHP and Tomcat servers. Again, FOSS, and available at http://ajaxforms.sourceforge.net/

I recently implemented dynamic forms for weblogs and wikis, and did it using Chiba, another FOSS product, that like AjaxForms does its conversion on the server, using Tomcat as a container.

Another important option is the work that the Mozilla Foundation and IBM are doing to make a native implementation of XForms as an XPI for Firefox and Mozilla. See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms/ -- they're now in version 0.6, with 1.0 targeting full XForms 1.0 compliance. Like all other Mozilla extensions, it's a 1-click install, and I think it's about 200KB, so it's not very big, and I hope it gets added to the default build after it reaches 1.0. (It's presently built with the nightlies.)

There are a number of other implementations, including browser plugins (FormsPlayer for IE), native implementations for embedded devices such as cellphones and kiosks (PicoForms, SolidForms, and entire server-side systems using XForms, such as Orbeon Ops, so I see an increasingly bright future for using XForms to build dynamic HTML interfaces on top of XML web services and deploy them across a range of devices.

> we not even know for certainty that Firefox 3.0 is in the works

Eh? You can download the nightly version of it from here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/latest-trunk/

The article is very verbose. It has some value, I suppose - it helped me to decide I didn't want to buy the book. There are more concise introductions to Ajax here and here

There is also an interesting library of Javascript/ECMAscript functions to perform common Ajax chores here

Firefox has a large footprint because it caches things in memory, for faster access than reading from disk. The amount of space it uses is calculated based on the amount of available memory. If you want to manually reduce it, you can set it as described in http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips#oth_me mcache . However, 99% of the time most of your RAM is unused while you're browsing the web, and Firefox's choice to use it as cache is correct and improves browsing performance.

Mozilla got so much money. But do they invest in development? I fear they don't. Just look at Sunbird, Lightening or whatever the calendar is called these days. Or NVU's son KompoZer?

Mozilla has the ressources to cross-finance development of other tools, to bootstrap open source. But it seems they don't want to.

I mean we have a successful tool called Firefox every company likes to play with, including a fanatic user community. We have a a wonderful mail client which lacks a calendar tool.

But what about other tools of the community? Chatzilla - wouldn't it be nice to get a standalone version? Or Fireftp stabdalone? A preconfigured Bugzilla server distribution. KompoZer. Better spellchecking tools and dictionaries. Tools for Internet Cafés, I think of a kind Browser-Only plugandplay Linux distribution. Brushed Theme for Thunderbird. An ODF view plugin. A usable pdf viewer. Developer Conferences coorganised by their mozilla-hungry AJAX-fanatic bigbusiness friends.

Real Networks, oh well.

Or you can do what I did to write the comment in the first place: use this firefox extention. :D

And here is the link: NoScript.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/

NoScript link :P

There is a great extension for firefox called Nuke Anything which allows you to remove sections from pages.
My missus had a great time deleting all the geeky stuff from slashdot.

You should have seen her face drop though when I told her she had actually removed it from the internet.

> pseudo security measures

Removing an attack vector is pseudo security? Are you for real?

I suppose you think that the latest firefox only fixed "pseudo security" vulns?

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html

I count 12, all of which would be prevented by disabling javascript.

Corporate users need access to departmental servers, you can either disable script, deny outright or sandbox their web access via a VM. It's firewalls and vlans that have become pseudo security once an attacker has compromised a workstation.

Adblock has nothing to do with this. Sure, you can't see the ads, but the articles are still broken up.

Then the repagination extension is what you need.

Firefox 1.5.0.5 .ZIP package.

The links are usually posted here, but 1.5.0.5 hadn't been posted there yet.

Seamonkey 1.0.3 - http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/releases /

Try to imagine writing a shell script that would cheerfully do a cd /usr/bin; rm *. Can you? Now look at this bug report: bug 234479

One of the programmers (Andrew Schultz) can't imagine any way of dealing with version skew problems outside of completely erasing the installation directory in order to start from scratch.

No lengthy and buggy "WGA" product check neccessary.
No advanced computer knowledge neccessary.
Browser restart is required, operating system restart is not.

(this is in the case of a Windows user).

Turnaround time from the reporting of http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2006/mfsa 2006-45.html to a fix deployed : 1 day.

I'll leave the comparisons up to others.

I have really been waiting for this build of Thunderbird. It finally includes message tagging, which is something that I've been wanting natively in Thunderbird for a long time. Tagging now also apparently works with IMAP connections, although at least some users are having some problems with that feature. (Bug #344290).

The very first page you see after installing tells you to Install Extensions. And what is only a few clicks from that page? Hundreds of untrusted extensions, with the new ones helpfully listed first.

It would be TRIVIAL to insert a trojan onto that site. You can guarantee that people would download and install it without thinking twice. With a little more effort you could even hack a popular extension's home site and insert an additional payload. Firefox would even helpfully tell all the users there was an update. Sooner or later someone would catch on, but by then it is too late. At present there is no way to gauge the trustworthiness of an extension because no one signs them. And no one signs them because PKCS is shit and there is no alternative mechanism around PGP. There should be.

The funny thing is IE was panned for ActiveX control issues and yet Firefox contains something just as serious in extensions. It is true that extensions must be voluntarily fetched by a user so the user base as a whole has a lot of protection, but it does not excuse the lack of trust information for the poor sucker who caught a dose from Mozilla's own web site.

I love using only the keyboard, and I tried many FF extensions for this, including numbered links, and the one you mentioned.

I finally came to Hit a Hint, and loved it.
It's specially good cause it doesn't interfere with the page appearance, let's you access more clickable elements, and have configurable shortcuts.

A must!

The numberedlinks on mozdev is legitimate and "trojan"-free. As others have said, you have to open the attachment in an e-mail for the evil one to work.

AFAIK, as long as you get your attachments from the Get More Extensions link (which most people that I know do), then you should be safe.

Personally I only download FF extensions from the official site.
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions.php?app=fire fox

Agent Switcher for Firefox is an easy way around the agent check.

In restrospect, that probably was a bit unclear. The good stuff is in the comments of the perl script, which lists all the problems with the format, includes links to the developer's explanation of the insane format and the bugzilla page suggesting doing something about it.

In restrospect, that probably was a bit unclear. The good stuff is in the comments of the perl script, which lists all the problems with the format, includes links to the developer's explanation of the insane format and the bugzilla page suggesting doing something about it.

Microsoft laboratory has become the "Bell Labs" of the 21st century.

Absolutely. Just take a look at some of Microsoft's current and upcoming projects. They're going to seriously change how we interact with computers and the world. Examples: Zune, Windows Live Local, Windows Live Search, the Aero Interface, IE 7, MSN Desktop Search, Security and Data Improvements in Vista

I could go on.. but you get the point. We should all thank Microsoft for being so generous with their R&D budget. That's MS.. always on the cutting edge.

Yes, you're right, we build on existing standards: XML, CSS, XPath, XML Schema data types...

As for your point about breaking existing content, it perplexes me that you keep making it.

But, let's try a test.

1. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/ in FireFox and note the results.
2. Install the XForms XPI from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xforms and restart Firefox.
3. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/ again and see if adding XForms support to the browser breaks existing content.

Thanks!

"Yes, you download a single installer for all of the above, but it's still a separate app.

Oh stop talking about thinks you obviously know nothing about - try this if you want to be proven wrong:

- Download and install the mozilla suite
- Open the task manager and look at the processes tab to note the number of processes (N)
- Run Mozilla Suite and note the processes is now N+1
- Select mail from the window menu or press ctrl-2 to open mail, note processes is still N+1!!
- Close both the mail and mozilla suite and note the processes is N again
- Apologise for arguing incorrect points!

It's pretty simple to search on Mozilla's site, but here is the add-ons page, and here's its mozdev site.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Reader AK Marc griped that "Opera gets no respect," despite seemingly good showings when stacked up against other popular browsers, writing

• Options are spread out all over the place and hard ot navigate. The two seperate panels (Appearance and Preferences) aren't particularly helpful, but just the layout of both is awful.
• Middle click support. I can middle click just about anywhere in Firefox to open the target in a new tab/window (dependant on my settings). I can't in Opera.
• It's not friendly to IE switchers like myself, due to lack of Bookmark History buttons on the normal toolbar. I've eventually migrated to an Opera-similar set-up using All-in-One Sidebar, but that a long time of getting used to, i'm still not entirely comfotable with it (sometimes going to the main navigation toolbar to open my bookmarks), and the switch behaves in a different (and better) way to Opera's
• The horrible default skin colour it ships with. They really need to change this to the native setting as default
• I don't like having my tabs way up the top of the browser and far from the page (though this could just be due to Firefox's implementation being my first)
• There are probably some other minor differences that just help make Firefox feel more comfortable

It has better standards compliance than the other two.

Solution: always test new browser versions on a new profile.

Then you don't destroy your bookmarks, extensions, settings, etc.

Thanks for that tip! For anyone else that didn't quite catch how to, here's a link to a firefox how-to: Firefox quick searches / smart keywords

Noscript might fix that. That and Privoxy. If running privoxy is not practical then adblock as suggested by others.

Noscript might fix that. That and Privoxy. If running privoxy is not practical then adblock as suggested by others.

IIRC, one of the goals of the reflow work being done is to make it possible to add inline-block support, but that won't arrive until at least Firefox 3.0...

I recommend AdBlock Filterset G, it does all the hard work of block lists for you, and it updates automagically: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/

In the rare case when you have found some useable flash site, you can install FlashBlock.

I'm personally too annoyed by the large flash marks it leaves to use it, but if you need flash, FlashBlock at least will let you survive.