Slashdot Mirror

Screw karma, I'm ticked.

Now, essentially every microsoft product comes in a .msi package. .msi packages are not of the devil, as so many slashdotters make them out to be. Windows 2000 and higher supports them natively. You can install the needed app to support them down to Win95.

.msi is everywhere, know it or not. Using acrobat reader at your office/house? Sure, you download a nice little .exe, but that .exe extracts a .msi to a temp dir and runs that instead. Macromedia is installed via .msi. VMWare is installed via .msi. Yes, you're running a .exe, but that .exe is just extracting a .msi and running that. Openoffice for windows is now a strictly .msi installer, and hey guess what? firefox has a .msi package too, suprise!

.msi is the .rpm of the windows world, .rpm is the .msi of the windows world. Quit blasting it because you can't run it on your linux box, it's not like the windows users can run your .rpm packages either.

Oh, and before you call me a windows zealot and some moderator mods me down for being a windows zealot, RTFJ.

Well, Firefox doesn't write global registry keys and it still won't run with "Protect my computer" min privileges. There's a bug filed for it but no action. The workaround is to run with normal privs.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26653 3
(Copy/paste since Bugzilla blocks Slashdot)

Here you go: New Web Developer Features in Deer Park Alpha 1

• CSS
  • CSS3 :only-child
  • CSS3 columns
  • CSS3 overflow-x and overflow-y properties
• A subset of SVG 1.1
• Some scripting and DOM goodies like XML Events
• <canvas> with compatibility for Apple's implementation in mind

You might want to check out some Firefox extensions. There's some truly cool things happening there.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/?application =firefox

I dunno about Mozilla, but in Firefox it's under Tools > Options > Advanced.

Here's a screenshot:
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/images/opt_ advanced.png

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/

There a bug on it. It hasn't exactly been forgotten, but I don't know if anything has been done on it yet.

That's why I use NoScript with my Firefox.

It's called "External Editor". (You have to use Firefox to use the link.)

Enjoy! :-)

The David Hyatt story was just an example of course. For instance, IE's lack[ing] CSS1&2 support is well known.

Point being: the aforementioned in combination with other rendering quirks LIMIT the number of standards that you can apply with cross-browser compatibility.

See again my comment about different rendering modes in Mozilla http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/quirks/q uirklist.html tells that you can get wildly different results for instance when it comes to tables by changing the rendering mode in Mozilla by changing the header, all the time remaining W3C compliant. This is up to the point that width/heights are reduced to nearly nothing.

So W3C compliant coding by itself isn't enough to get browser independent results. Taking all into consideration, as it is now, only a subset of the W3C/ECMA etc. recommendations is truly browser-independent.

The lack of a space for a permanant right hand scroll bar means that centred sites jump all over the place, see for example (in firefox http://www.britart.com/ ).

See the crazy discussion on bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540 and their discussion page http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=5693 50#569350

About time these snotty Firefox developers got some flak - I was getting people to use it until I saw how bad the rendering was.

And by your logic, you've just proven you're an Opera zealot. Enjoy the label. :)

My comment was nothing more than a sarcastic comparison between closed-source and open-source--not between Windows and Opera.

I have used Opera, and they have a few novel ideas in their approach. The ads are annoying, and I always have a slight clausterphobic feeling, maybe because of the sidebar...don't know. But anyway, my preference is the clean interface Firefox gives me. If I want further functionality, I can expand via a multitude of extensions. If I want ads I can always install adbar. ;) Why would I pay to remove ads on a piece of software when there is something else better suited to my requirements that costs nothing?

Oh? Perhaps you can tell me what happens when you set an entry in ua.ini to 4 or 5? http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/opera/browser ids

Who cares? Guess what happens when I go through a proxy that changes or removes my useragent string? That has nothing to do with the normal browser behaviour. If you select report as IE in opera, it still says opera in the string. By your same logic you can't detect opera client side either because I can alter my opera to be named whatever I feel like.

So I guess I shouldn't care that earlier versions of Opera don't support certain CSS parsing behavior http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?whitebg

That's correct, you shouldn't care. CSS exists to alter the look of a site. Unsupported CSS is ignored. All you should do is make the site correctly, and don't abuse CSS to format things incorrectly (sticking text under images if I changed my font size). If I am using an outdated browser, things may not look right. Oh well, that's what I get for using an outdated browser. At least I can still access the information, regardless of wether or not it looks precisely the way it did on your machine.

And I shouldn't care what improvements happen between versions of the same browser in case someone is using an older one

No, you shouldn't. HTML and CSS are standards. Write to the standard, this is simple and easy. Do not compensate for broken browsers, you can never get every obscure bug in every obscure browser, and older browsers simply don't support much of any CSS at all. None of this matters as its purely presentation.

Just because you don't think knowing the browser version is important doesn't mean that everyone thinks the way you do. Plenty of people care enough about it enough that there are plenty of client side version detectors out there http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/ browser_type.html

Its not about caring, its about being misguided. The web is full of sites that don't work because someone "cared" so much that they customized the site for the browsers they know of, and in doing so fucked over the people using browsers they don't know about. Code to standard, degrade gracefully, it really is that simple. This not only makes web design far easier and saves your hair, but it works better than your misguided method of breaking your site for browsers you don't know about, or that have been altered.

Perhaps, before calling us all idiots, you may want to offer an alternate solution that works.

I did, do your job correctly. Your job is creating markup to format information, and CSS to style it. If the styling is not supported, it does not matter, the formatting and information still works. The web is not print, you cannot and will not ever be able to ensure that your site looks the same for everyone, so quit trying. Just make it *accessable* to everyone, and let the people who use up to date browsers have nice styling, and the people who don't have less nice styling.

It would be nice if I could do this, but the unfortunate reality is that CSS does not work this way.

Ecmascript does, and its the only case where you need to care. If something isn't supported in CSS, it will be ignored, and doesn't matter at all. Unsupported ecmascript may pop up error notices on the browser if its not set to hide those errors.

Unfortunately, CSS capabilities are not testable from script in any browser. You can only rely on the browser version to determine what is or is not available. Getting it wrong might result in a minor cosmetic problem or a browser crash, or maybe a hang. It is cleaner instead to base CSS on the browser version.

You will always get it wrong f

> You can detect opera on the server just fine

Oh? Perhaps you can tell me what happens when you set an entry in ua.ini to 4 or 5?
http://www.scss.com.au/family/andrew/opera/browser ids

> And no, you don't need to test for browser or version ever, for any reason, period.

So I guess I shouldn't care that earlier versions of Opera don't support certain CSS parsing behavior
http://centricle.com/ref/css/filters/?whitebg

And I shouldn't care what improvements happen between versions of the same browser in case someone is using an older one
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/selector_attribute.h tml

And I shouldn't care when Firefox implements CSS3 and eventually deprecates/drops the -moz equivalents like -moz-box-sizing
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css/properties/e xtensions/nsextensions.htm

Just because you don't think knowing the browser version is important doesn't mean that everyone thinks the way you do. Plenty of people care enough about it enough that there are plenty of client side version detectors out there
http://www.mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/sniffer/ browser_type.html

Perhaps, before calling us all idiots, you may want to offer an alternate solution that works.

> test "does this feature I want to use work"

It would be nice if I could do this, but the unfortunate reality is that CSS does not work this way.

Unfortunately, CSS capabilities are not testable from script in any browser. You can only rely on the browser version to determine what is or is not available. Getting it wrong might result in a minor cosmetic problem or a browser crash, or maybe a hang. It is cleaner instead to base CSS on the browser version.

This is a problem, yes. And it was made worse by not being able to rely on the user agent string.

CSS hacks were the result. eg.
http://www.albin.net/CSS/OwenHack.html

But CSS hacks are an ugly workaround and don't solve all your problems.
http://digital-web.com/articles/keep_css_simple/

The CSS hack approach seriously lacks elegance.
I believe that version detection is far more elegant by comparison
(providing you get the detailed version info - IE needs to report the service pack level).

Unfortunately, since the cat is already out of the bag (all the existing opera browser instances), relying on the user agent string will never truly be an airtight solution.

Perhaps instead, it would be easier and better to restore elegance to CSS. We just need to convince all the browser manufacturers to make the browser version truly testable in the CSS @media descriptor. Or maybe propose an @version descriptor.

Link Prefetching in Firefox has to be explicitly turned on by the website you visit using the tag. As another person said, Google uses this for prefetching the top result on _some_ searches.

See the Mozilla site for more information:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/Link_Prefet ching_FAQ.html#Are_anchor_a_tags_prefetched

Only Google Web Accelerator tries to use prefetching to fetch several(maybe all) links on a page, and it is available for IE and Firefox. It also uses a Google proxy server to cache pages, so perhaps not all hits will show up in a website's weblogs.

Its bullshit to claim that prefetching is causing inflated numbers, because websites that use prefetching also have the means to identify prefetch requests and can devise a way to take them into account when analyzing logs.

Related: Firefox extension - user agent switcher

Firefox only prefetches links the site has tagged. So, it's not like you visit a page with Firefox and it starts downloading the whole site, unless the web designer is smoking something and tagged all the links with rel="prefetch".
So, whining about a feature that the website has to turn on is kinda pointless. You'd think the site would figure out how to count visitors BEFORE turning on prefetch right?
Read the FAQ and see what's really going on.

OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch.

I thought of this a long time ago and while there's been plenty of debating on it, it's not actually been done. (It was marked as a duplicate of another, later submission, which starts with "This is not a duplicate of..." )

So, who wants to write it? It doesn't look like it'll be done by the guys now in charge, but if it's submitted as an already-functioning patch, they might go for it. (I, alas, do not have the l337 5ki11z to do this myself)

OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch.

I thought of this a long time ago and while there's been plenty of debating on it, it's not actually been done. (It was marked as a duplicate of another, later submission, which starts with "This is not a duplicate of..." )

So, who wants to write it? It doesn't look like it'll be done by the guys now in charge, but if it's submitted as an already-functioning patch, they might go for it. (I, alas, do not have the l337 5ki11z to do this myself)

Is Opera open sourced? Is it free? okay then...
Speaking of which, whatever happened to that 2 million dollar investment Nokia made in Minimo?

You can see Firefox discussion about this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23675 5, copy and paste the URL as Bugzilla won't accept /. referrals.

In particular, it seems like this is a Google Summer of Code submission (see comment 68. If this is accepted we could see integrated BT in FF1.5!

You can see Firefox discussion about this at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23675 5, copy and paste the URL as Bugzilla won't accept /. referrals.

In particular, it seems like this is a Google Summer of Code submission (see comment 68. If this is accepted we could see integrated BT in FF1.5!

And here and here are the "no more huge annoying ads, ever" links.

(For me it was a gif).

And here and here are the "no more huge annoying ads, ever" links.

(For me it was a gif).

or Firefox's Keyword Bookmarks?

I can type

imdb Terminator

into my mozilla address bar and it does an search on imdb.org for terminator. or

dict antidisestablishmentarianism

and it searches on dictionary.com for "antidisestablishmentarianism"

the only advantage to this that I can see is that it has addresses that I might not have known about. But there are probably better ways of going about this than making a new web page. Perhaps a blog or plugin system for picking which ones you want mozilla to use.

(see http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html for how to use moz keywords)

I don't mind cookies so much as I mind sites setting the expiration to 30 years in the future. It just bugs me that they think they own a small peice of my hard drive for that long, are they really going to get anything useful out of it if I visit the site once and then come back in 30 years?
Firefox is helpful with this, you can set the maximum lifetime of a cookie with the network.cookie.lifetime.* settings, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/cookies/coo kie-prefs.html
I have mine set to two days. If I visit a site and don't come back in that long, I don't want the cookie hanging around.

I've set firefox to delete cookies when it exits and I use Cookieculler to protect any cookies I want to keep, like login cookies on sites I visit often.

I don't like taking part in marketing surveys without my concent, and I don't like the idea of some company tracking my web usage.

Once you've set which cookies you want protected, everything is being taking care of, automatically. I really cann't understand people who don't take this simple step to protect their privacy.

The Permit Cookies extension sounds like what you need. It lets you allow a site's cookies via a hotkey (ALT + C by default). The version from Firefox's Extension site seems to require an older Firefox. Clicking through to the author's homepage gets you to a version that works in Firefox 1.0.4.

It could also be potentially possible to get illegal images, etc. without even knowing it. Something along the lines of .. img src="illegal.png" width=1 height=1

Not to mention Mozilla/Firefox link prefetching. This downloads the "next" page (including images referenced by that page), according to the prefetching hints embedded in the current page. They look like

<link rel="prefetch" href="/images/big.jpeg">

This is normally a Good Thing (tm) as the next page loads from the cache, speeding things up.

Note that Google currently embeds link tags such that the first hit in some searches gets prefetched. So if you do a google search and the first hit contains questionable material, it could end up in your cache, without you being aware of it.

Note that link prefetching is enabled by default, but you can turn it off if you like. Type about:config in the URL field and change network.prefetch-next to "false".

More info on link prefetching in mozilla here.

I'm just glad this story was here to remind me to reinstall the Firesomething extension.

Incidentally, Firesomething still works in newer versions of Firefox, if you're willing to screw with it. Just go to about:config, change app.extensions.version to "0.10", install Firesomething, exit Firefox, restart, go back to about:config, and reset app.extensions.version to the default value (by right-clicking and choosing "reset").

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=31

The momentum from the tech crowd just wouldn't be there.

Why not? Looks like a lot of the tech crowd knows about it now. Anyway, what is the one company who could build BitTorrent/Avalanche into a browser that 80+% of people use and make it invisible to the average user? Sorry, but it's Microsoft. Firefox may implement BT sometime but there are a bunch of things they're discussing.

Clearly you've never once used the Mozilla Suite.
Or perhaps it is no longer included by default anymore in the Suite.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/venkman/

You also have stuff like Rhino that makes Javascript a _compiled_ language. You also have a .NET Jscript compiler. So, Javascript _can_ be a compiled language.

Well, Mozilla Firefox only opens one popup behind the main window and let me back straight out :).

SpiderMonkey (C++) and Rhino (Java)

SpiderMonkey (C++) and Rhino (Java)

Oh, shit, I wish I knew. I hated the way that you seemed to have to be a firefox hacker to know how to do this shit. But you don't -- there are lots of examples to learn from now.

Plus, I learned with help from da intarweb:

• XUL Reference
• DOM Ref
• XmlHttpRequest

And an out-of-date but still informative book (got cheap!).

Some Firefox extensions like venkman (JS Debugger) and one called "Extension Developer" which has a real-time graphical XUL eval thingy that's worth its weight in gold.

Toss in reading about how to create closures in JS (imperative for developing useful OO libraries). And about two serious weeks of sweat equity to get started.

I just wish that FF would let us going document.element instead of force us to write document.getElementById("element") in order to reference DOM objects. the former is less typing than the latter...

That's not a feature, it's a bug. It's not FF, it's the w3c. And it's the right decision. Standards and all that, right?

The document object already has a shitload of properties, and this IE idea doesn't cooperate nicely, since the property namespace clobbers the id namespace. Bad browser-maker! No cookie!

wget http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.4 &os=win&lang=en-US

Oh... wait. Windows doesn't have wget, does it. How about

curl http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.4 &os=win&lang=en-US > firefox.exe

Hmmm, that won't work, either, will it? Guess you should have chosen a different OS.

wget http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.4 &os=win&lang=en-US

Oh... wait. Windows doesn't have wget, does it. How about

curl http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-1.0.4 &os=win&lang=en-US > firefox.exe

Hmmm, that won't work, either, will it? Guess you should have chosen a different OS.

After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not. Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?

For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.

Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.

Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.

After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not. Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?

For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.

Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.

Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.

After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not. Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?

For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.

Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.

Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.

After the jpg incident, wouldn't you tend to look at the code handling other image formats for similar problems? Guess not. Would you apply the same logic/I'm cool because I bash Microsoft stupidity to Mozilla/Firefox?

For example in 2002 an arbitrary code execution vulerability was found in Mozilla's PNG code (155222). That obviously set off people searching for other image vulnerabilities, which resulted in them finding Mozilla's GIF decoder was also a flawed, allowing for arbitrary code execution (157989). By your logic once that initial alarm goes out the code should be checked and all bugs will be found; if bugs are still present in that module (or in Microsoft's case, in a completely seperate but similar one) then it represents a huge failure by the organization. Now since open source projects have tens of thousands of eyes to check source code once a flaw has been found, I'd assume it applies equally to Mozilla. Lets test that theory.

Fast forward to 2004, and the PNG library still has arbitrary code vulnerabilities (251381). Given that people knew as earlier as 2002 that there had been PNG vulnerabilities, WHY did they not find this one until 2 years later.

Fast forward to 2005, and this time it's the GIF code. Now we already knew the GIF library had problems 3 years ago, yet somehow an arbitrary code execution flaw, which existed from the very beginning of the Mozilla project (1998), is found (mfsa2005-30). This dangerous exploit has been sitting in open source code for 7 years. 3 years ago attention was brought to that very module for the very same kind of exploit. And yet it wasn't found until just a few months ago. By the logic of Nos, the Mozilla Foundation, and everyone who has checked the code, are morons. Or perhaps Nos has some doublethink to get himself out of the Microsoft bashing to make himself cool hole he dug himself.

Blame FireFox-- it's the one rendering it slowly. These bugs have been known about for quite some time:

Fixed background makes scrolling painfully slow
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90198

slow scrolling in pages with position:fixed elements
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20130 7

Yay!

Blame FireFox-- it's the one rendering it slowly. These bugs have been known about for quite some time:

Fixed background makes scrolling painfully slow
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=90198

slow scrolling in pages with position:fixed elements
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20130 7

Yay!

use the Adblock extension.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?application=firefox&id=10

I certainly know the problem you've describing.

Solution for me was to download the Firexfox "CustomizeGoogle" extension.
Once installed, the last tab allows you to enter regular expressions of sites to completely remove from displayed search results.

A little bit of config later and its goodbye "about.com", "go.com", "experts-exchange.com" and all the other similar "nothing to see here (unless you give us money)" sites.