Domain: mozilla.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to mozilla.org.
Comments · 17,579
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discover
Discover card works fine for me with Mozilla 1.1
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Linux implementations
The first place I would expect SVG to appear in is the browser. In Mozilla the beta SVG provided by Adobe does not work. Mozilla's own implementation[mozilla.org] is stuck due to licensing issues (LGPL vs MPL). When can we expect a decent one on our beloved platform? Windows users at least a decent one from Adobe.
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Linux implementations
The first place I would expect SVG to appear in is the browser. In Mozilla the beta SVG provided by Adobe does not work. Mozilla's own implementation[mozilla.org] is stuck due to licensing issues (LGPL vs MPL). When can we expect a decent one on our beloved platform? Windows users at least a decent one from Adobe.
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Re:ho hum....
FWIW, Bug 180338 filed on b.m.o under Tech Evangelism.
It's too bad I can't personally direct where I want my tax dollars to go sometimes.
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Re:ho hum....
FWIW, Bug 180338 filed on b.m.o under Tech Evangelism.
It's too bad I can't personally direct where I want my tax dollars to go sometimes.
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Re:ho hum....
FWIW, Bug 180338 filed on b.m.o under Tech Evangelism.
It's too bad I can't personally direct where I want my tax dollars to go sometimes.
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Woohoo! More feature creep!
The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new [features] that people are asking for. --Bill Gates.
Looks like Mozilla has adopted the Microsoft philosophy - don't fix bugs, add features. Only difference is, the Mozilla bloatware is more bug-ridden than
/.'s favorite whipping boy, Windows. JWZ was right on about them being "asymptotically" closer to releasing an actual end-user product. He said this a year ago. Mozilla.org was two years behind then and they still haven't released a truly stable end-user product. And what do they do? In true Gatesian fashion, they add more features.Because this post criticizes an open-source project, it will probably get modded down as a troll. Intellectual honesty on Slashdot? Naaa . .
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Need to view sender and recipient [-1 OT]
For me, this is putting the cart before the horse
Client-side filtering is useful, as far as it goes, but it's much better to do this ju-ju server-side.
I'd rather have seen the effort put in to fixing a basic UI issue - not being able to view sender and/or recipient for any mail folder. The current mechanism only makes sense if you keep all your sent mail in a single folder. It's madness, and it's been this way for years
[grumbles...]
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Need to view sender and recipient [-1 OT]
For me, this is putting the cart before the horse
Client-side filtering is useful, as far as it goes, but it's much better to do this ju-ju server-side.
I'd rather have seen the effort put in to fixing a basic UI issue - not being able to view sender and/or recipient for any mail folder. The current mechanism only makes sense if you keep all your sent mail in a single folder. It's madness, and it's been this way for years
[grumbles...]
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Re:PC Build ready?
Exactly. Download the latest nightly for windows or for linux and you have the stuff. 1.2 is almost ready and it will take another 3 months until they are done with 1.3 (according to the roadmap , this will be around Valentine's Day next year.
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Re:PC Build ready?
Exactly. Download the latest nightly for windows or for linux and you have the stuff. 1.2 is almost ready and it will take another 3 months until they are done with 1.3 (according to the roadmap , this will be around Valentine's Day next year.
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Re:PC Build ready?
Exactly. Download the latest nightly for windows or for linux and you have the stuff. 1.2 is almost ready and it will take another 3 months until they are done with 1.3 (according to the roadmap , this will be around Valentine's Day next year.
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Thanks for pointing out the obvious!
A feature request has been filed:
Mozilla feature request
(bugtracker sure is slow today!) -
Re:My Problem with Mozilla sorta OT
There are people working on this. Currently, Phoenix is the brower only app. It's lean, quick, and efficient. Bugs are still being worked out, but it's very usable right now. Also, K-Meleon is a browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine, but not the Mozilla XUL interface.
As for email/news clients, there are two, I believe. Thunderbird and Minotaur. Neither are out at all yet to use. -
Re:My Problem with Mozilla sorta OT
There are people working on this. Currently, Phoenix is the brower only app. It's lean, quick, and efficient. Bugs are still being worked out, but it's very usable right now. Also, K-Meleon is a browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine, but not the Mozilla XUL interface.
As for email/news clients, there are two, I believe. Thunderbird and Minotaur. Neither are out at all yet to use. -
Re:My Problem with Mozilla sorta OT
There are people working on this. Currently, Phoenix is the brower only app. It's lean, quick, and efficient. Bugs are still being worked out, but it's very usable right now. Also, K-Meleon is a browser that uses the Gecko rendering engine, but not the Mozilla XUL interface.
As for email/news clients, there are two, I believe. Thunderbird and Minotaur. Neither are out at all yet to use. -
Re:zilla
There used to be issues with Aspell. I can't remember what exactly, but they could have been license, portability (no Mac support?) and the features of C++ used. The project went ahead and integrated Open Office's spell checker, although it might now be possible to use aspell. I'm just thankfull that they finally moved on the project as it is the only thing that's holding me back from ditching NS4.7x (I use it for mail only).
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56301 -
Re:A little misleading
It is up and running, it just may have a few bugs.I just downloaded the latest nightly build and enabled the features for my mail. So far I have seen that the icons are kind of funky, the dialog box is way oversized, there doesn't appear to be a good way of marking multiple messages as spam or not spam.
On the other hand, it does seem to be doing a good job of filtering my messages. If you were one of the folks that complained about mozilla until mozilla 1.1 or 1.2, then I wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole. If you are one of the folks, like me, who used mozilla since milestone 11 when it crashed every hour and couldn't render a heck of a lot of pages, you'll probably want to try it. Especially, if you use mozilla for mail anyway.
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Vote for it
This is bug number 199684 in Bugzilla (no direct links from Slashdot, you know). They are not sure what to do about it, but they are thinking about it.
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Spam may not be a problem much longer
Mozilla 1.3 is adding support for Bayesian spam filters
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Re:BBC and spyware
At the moment, I'm posting with Crazy Browser. It's free but not Open Source, and it's a small wrapper for the IE rendering engine that does tabbed browsing and popup killing all in one.
Hope you guys find it useful :). Otherwise, I also use Phoenix, similar with Mozilla. -
Re:BBC and spyware
Funny, I just went to the link you posted and I didn't get a pop-up.
Oh, wait... maybe it's because I use Mozilla!
Yeah, cheap shot but someone had to make it...
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Re:BBC and spywareThe Proxomitron is another such solution, and offers such nifty features such as inline ad filtering/right-click unlocking/prevention of annoying javascript/anything else you can do with a regex. Definintely a recommended tool.
Strangely enough, though, I've been using Phoenix for a while now, and have had no problem with popups.
:D -
Interesting thread @bugzilla
An interesting thread to read is here in this mozilla bug
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Re:This is good.
63k bugs huh? Wow. Kinda like this
How many are documentation errors? Variable naming inconsistencies? Refactoring notes? If you wanna hate MS, fine, but you lend credibility to that which you oppose when you fight with FUD. -
you need a Bigger agenda to give you direction
For example, Try joining the Rebel alliance in a fight against the evil empire. Sure, you want to make money and have skills that are in demand, but it's a big world and in the computer universe you are here as much as you are in Khatmandu. and we are talking about the future here right?
Head over to Mozilla.org and scope out the Mozilla Hacker's Getting Started Guide . the Mozilla community works inside of a tool they've created called Bugzilla which is just so great other projects have started using it. Bugzilla lets you follow anyhing you're interested in and even follow around other coders to see what changes they're making. I myself am something of a bugzilla Lurker watching features I'm interested in, it's like the celebrity coders show. The animal book people have done a great thing and open sourced Creating Applications with Mozilla which seems to sum things up pretty good and gets updated frequently as readers point out errors and such. Using the Mozilla environment is great for apps that run anywhere (mostly anywhere) and you can jump in to Mozilla at many different levels javascript to C code. you could create browser addons like those at Mozdev.org or standalone applications. Best of all, when Mozilla and it's Kindred have 80% of the worldwide browser market and IE is only a bit player, you can tell people that you've been a Mozilla Hacker sice 2002 and it isn't new for you.
Help us Obi Wan, you're our only hope...there's more to a job skill than the money you make with it.
May the Source-Force be with you!
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you need a Bigger agenda to give you direction
For example, Try joining the Rebel alliance in a fight against the evil empire. Sure, you want to make money and have skills that are in demand, but it's a big world and in the computer universe you are here as much as you are in Khatmandu. and we are talking about the future here right?
Head over to Mozilla.org and scope out the Mozilla Hacker's Getting Started Guide . the Mozilla community works inside of a tool they've created called Bugzilla which is just so great other projects have started using it. Bugzilla lets you follow anyhing you're interested in and even follow around other coders to see what changes they're making. I myself am something of a bugzilla Lurker watching features I'm interested in, it's like the celebrity coders show. The animal book people have done a great thing and open sourced Creating Applications with Mozilla which seems to sum things up pretty good and gets updated frequently as readers point out errors and such. Using the Mozilla environment is great for apps that run anywhere (mostly anywhere) and you can jump in to Mozilla at many different levels javascript to C code. you could create browser addons like those at Mozdev.org or standalone applications. Best of all, when Mozilla and it's Kindred have 80% of the worldwide browser market and IE is only a bit player, you can tell people that you've been a Mozilla Hacker sice 2002 and it isn't new for you.
Help us Obi Wan, you're our only hope...there's more to a job skill than the money you make with it.
May the Source-Force be with you!
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you need a Bigger agenda to give you direction
For example, Try joining the Rebel alliance in a fight against the evil empire. Sure, you want to make money and have skills that are in demand, but it's a big world and in the computer universe you are here as much as you are in Khatmandu. and we are talking about the future here right?
Head over to Mozilla.org and scope out the Mozilla Hacker's Getting Started Guide . the Mozilla community works inside of a tool they've created called Bugzilla which is just so great other projects have started using it. Bugzilla lets you follow anyhing you're interested in and even follow around other coders to see what changes they're making. I myself am something of a bugzilla Lurker watching features I'm interested in, it's like the celebrity coders show. The animal book people have done a great thing and open sourced Creating Applications with Mozilla which seems to sum things up pretty good and gets updated frequently as readers point out errors and such. Using the Mozilla environment is great for apps that run anywhere (mostly anywhere) and you can jump in to Mozilla at many different levels javascript to C code. you could create browser addons like those at Mozdev.org or standalone applications. Best of all, when Mozilla and it's Kindred have 80% of the worldwide browser market and IE is only a bit player, you can tell people that you've been a Mozilla Hacker sice 2002 and it isn't new for you.
Help us Obi Wan, you're our only hope...there's more to a job skill than the money you make with it.
May the Source-Force be with you!
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Re:Eventually, this would happen
Not necessarily. Take, for example, the Mozilla Project. Anyone is able to submit a patch, but it won't get into the codebase until it has been reviewed twice (three times during a release period). Any major open-source project should have something similar (although I admit that I don't know much about any other project's procedures).
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Re:Check out what the USPTO says about it...
They're embedding the thing---a very different operation from building an end-user application for a general-purpose computer. (Would you consider embedding Phoenix?
I don't know, would you? :-) -
Re:Bring on the GTK2 version
Daily GTK2 Mozilla builds are being provided by mozilla.org.
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Beat that Google? Um, OK...
Well, for one, there's this nifty Search pane in my web browser of choice that I can just flip open.
Then, for those using that other web browser, you can add a toolbar to your browser window.
If you're running your own site, you can roll your own Google interface.
I'll be checking out the new AltaVista for a while, but I can't see anyone displacing Google as my search engine of choice for a while...
Jay (= -
Re:The W3C is a joke
Has any company yet written a complete CSS1 implementation?
Yes. Mozilla. Got most of CSS2 as well.A complete working version of DOM0?
Once again, Mozilla. Also supports DOM1. Oh, and most of DOM2. See the Mozilla DOM Support doc for the details.Yet here we are toiling away on XHTML and CSS3(!) and DOM Level 2. And they don't even seem to give a rat's ass if anyone actually follows the rules.
Good job the Mozilla developers care then. Mozilla supports XHTML and some CSS3 (see below) and DOM2 (see above).From what I hear about CSS3, it's going to be such a massive specification that no company (save Microsoft, if they actually gave a damn) would possibly be able to implement it.
Mozilla implements bits of it, mainly as vendor-specific extensions. No, that's not the same as proprietary. Vendor specific extensions are allowed by the spec if implemented correctly e.g. properties should be prefixed with -vendorname- (Mozilla uses -moz-). -
Re:Good for MozillaI would prefer that the people working on Mozilla work on optimizing it so that it launches faster.
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Some ResourcesGotta recommend IBM's great little free Java-based P3P Policy Editor as a fast & straighforward way to create compact polcies.
Also for folks using Windows IE (the majority) ATT&T offers up their free eternally-beta AT&T Privacy Bird which gives folks visual and auditory feedback (both controlled/turned off in Prefs) on site's P3P settings. Quite informative actually, I discovered just how awful Yahoo's policies are when I used their headline aggregator (just who are they selling my newsreading habits to?) [rhetorical question]
The P3P folks have put together a great website at P3P Public Overview which is chock-full of useful information. On the other hand here is an interesting critique and here another, suprisingly both by lawyers. Security guru Richard Smith also has an important (though hopefully now fixed?) page on supercookies and how MS IE 6's touted protections can be got around.
Mozilla of course supports P3P and it's useful to understand just how MS IE 6 suppports and applies P3P and cookies.
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Re:Chimera is still slowChimera 0.6 is definitely faster than MS-IE 5.2 on my OS X 10.2.1 dual processor machine (G4 w/2 867MHz CPUs, NVidia GeForce4 display card). I'd say maybe twice as fast, but it radically depends on the web page being accessed.
It feels like there's some sort of single threaded bottlneck in MS-IE with respect to opening network connections or rendering graphics. Ie., the slowness of MS-IE seems to get dramatically worse for web pages with lots of little gif's.
I haven't used Chimera 0.6 that much yet, but it seems stable so far. If it remains stable, I'm definitely switching to it as my main browser.
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When good interfaces go crufty
In Vernor Vinges sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of software archeology. Vinges future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology to find out how, or why, something works.
So far, in 2002, this problem isnt so bad. We call such electronic garbage cruft, and promise to get rid of it someday. But its not really important right now, we tell ourselves, because computers keep getting faster, and we havent quite got to the point where single programs are too large for highly coordinated teams to understand.
But what if cruft makes its way into the human-computer interface? Then you have problems, because human brains arent getting noticably faster. (At least, not in the time period were concerned with here.) So the more cruft there is in an interface, the more difficult it will be to use.
Unfortunately, over the past 20 years, Ive noticed that cruft has been appearing in computer interfaces. And few people are trying to fix it. I see two main reasons for this.
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Microsoft and Apple dont want to make their users go through any retraining, at all, for fear of losing market share. So rather than make their interfaces less crufty, they concentrate on making everything look pretty.
- Free Software developers have the ability to start from a relatively cruft-free base, but (as a gratuitously broad generalization) they have no imagination whatsoever. So rather than making their interfaces more usable, they concentrate on copying whatever Microsoft and Apple are doing, cruft and all.
Here are a few examples of interface cruft.
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In the 1970s and early 80s, transferring documents from a computers memory to permanent storage (such as a floppy disk) was slow. It took many seconds, and you had to wait for the transfer to finish before you could continue your work. So, to avoid disrupting typists, software designers made this transfer a manual task. Every few minutes, you would save your work to permanent storage by entering a particular command.
Trouble is, since the earliest days of personal computers, people have been forgetting to do this, because its not natural. They dont have to save when using a pencil, or a pen, or a paintbrush, or a typewriter, so they forget to save when theyre using a computer. So, when something bad happens, theyve often gone too long without saving, and they lose their work.
Fortunately, technology has improved since the 1970s. We have the power, in todays computers, to pick a sensible name for a document, and to save it to a persons desktop as soon as she begins typing, just like a piece of paper in real life. We also have the ability to save changes to that document every couple of minutes (or, perhaps, every paragraph) without any user intervention.
We have the technology. So why do we still make people save each of their documents, at least once, manually? Cruft.
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The original Macintosh, which introduced graphical interfaces to the general public, could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first. To make things worse, launching programs was slow, often taking tens of seconds.
This presented a problem. What if you had one document open in a program, and you closed that document before opening another one? If the program unloaded itself as soon as the first document was closed, the program would need to be loaded again to open the second document, and that would take too long. But if the program didnt unload itself, you couldnt launch any other program.
So, the Macs designers made unloading a program a manual operation. If you wanted to load a second program, or go back to the file manager, you first chose a menu item called Quit to unload the first program. And if you closed all the windows in a program, it didnt unload by itself it stayed running, usually displaying nothing more than a menu bar, just in case you wanted to open another document in the same program.
Trouble is, the Quit command has always been annoying and confusing people, because its exposing an implementation detail the lack of multitasking in the operating system. It annoys people, because occasionally they choose Quit by accident, losing their careful arrangement of windows, documents, toolboxes, and the like with an instantaneity which is totally disproportionate to how difficult it was to open and arrange them all in the first place. And it confuses people, because a program can be running without any windows being open, so while all open windows may belong to the file manager, which is now always running in the background menus and keyboard shortcuts get sent to the invisible program instead, producing unexpected behavior.
Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to load programs in less than five seconds.
We have the technology. So why do we still punish people by including Quit or Exit menu items in programs? Cruft.
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As I said, the original Macintosh could only run one program at a time. If you wanted to use a second program, or even return to the file manager, the first program needed to be unloaded first.
This presented a problem when opening or saving files. The obvious way to open a document is to launch it (or drag it) from the file manager. And the obvious way to save a document in a particular folder is to drag it to that folder in the file manager. But on the Mac, if another program was already running, you couldnt get to the file manager. What to do? What to do?
So, the Macs designers invented something called a file selection dialog, or filepicker a lobotomized file manager, for opening and saving documents when the main file manager wasnt running. If you wanted to open a document, you chose an Open menu item, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the document you wanted. Similarly, if you wanted to save a document, you chose a Save menu item, entered a name for the document, and navigated your way through the filepicker to the folder you wanted.
Trouble is, this interface has always been awkward to use, because its not consistent with the file manager. If youre in the file manager and you want to make a new folder, you do it one way; if youre in a filepicker and you want to make a new folder, you do it another way. In the file manager, opening two folders in separate windows is easy; in a filepicker, it cant be done.
Fortunately, technology has improved since 1984. We have the power, in todays computers, to run more than one program at once, and to run the file manager all the time. We can open documents from the file manager without quitting all other programs first, and we can save copies of documents (if necessary) by dragging them into folders in the file manager.
We have the technology. So why do we still make people use filepickers at all? Cruft.
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This last example is particularly nasty, because it shows how interface cruft can be piled up, layer upon layer.
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In Microsofts MS-DOS operating system, the canonical way of identifying a file was by its pathname: the concatenation of the drive name, the hierarchy of directories, and the filename, something like C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CTL3DV2.DLL. If a program wanted to keep track of a file in a menu of recently-opened documents, for example it used the files pathname. For backward compatibility with MS-DOS, all Microsofts later operating systems, right up to Windows XP, do the same thing.
Trouble is, this system causes a plethora of usability problems in Windows, because filenames are used by humans.
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What if a human renames a document in the file manager, and later on tries to open it from that menu of recently-opened documents? He gets an error message complaining that the file could not be found.
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What if he makes a shortcut to a file, moves the original file, and then tries to open the shortcut? He gets an error message, as Windows scurries to find a file which looks vaguely similar to the one the shortcut was supposed to be pointing at.
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What happens if he opens a file in a word processor, then renames it to a more sensible name in the file manager, and then saves it (automatically or otherwise) in the word processor? He gets another copy of the file with the old name, which he didnt want.
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What happens if a program installs itself in the wrong place, and our fearless human moves it to the right place? If hes lucky, the program will still work but hell get a steady trickle of error messages, the next time he launches each of the shortcuts to that program, and the next time he opens any document associated with the program.
Fortunately, technology has improved since 1981. We have the power, in todays computers, to use filesystems which store a unique identifier for every file, separate from the pathname such as the file ID in the HFS and HFS+ filesystems, or the inode in most filesystems used with Linux and Unix. In these filesystems, shortcuts and other references to particular files can keep track of these unchanging identifiers, rather than the pathname, so none of those errors will ever happen.
We have the technology. So why does Windows still suffer from all these problems? Cruft.
Lest it seem like Im picking on Microsoft, Windows is not the worst offender here. GNU/Linux applications are arguably worse, because they could be avoiding all these problems (by using inodes), but their programmers so far have been too lazy. At least Windows programmers have an excuse.
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To see how the next bit of cruft follows from the previous one, we need to look at the mechanics of dragging and dropping. On the Macintosh, when you drag a file from one folder to another, what happens is fairly predictable.
- If the source and the destination are on different storage devices, the item will be copied.
- If the source and destination are on the same storage device, the item will be moved.
- If you want the item to be copied rather than moved in the latter case, you hold down the Option key.
Windows has a similar scheme, for most kinds of files. But as Ive just explained, if you move a program in Windows, every shortcut to that program (and perhaps the program itself) will stop working. So as a workaround for that problem, when you drag a program from one place to another in Windows, Windows makes a shortcut to it instead of moving it and lands in the Interface Hall of Shame as a result.
Naturally, this inconsistency makes people rather confused about exactly what will happen when they drag an item from one place to another. So, rather than fixing the root problem which led to the workaround, Microsoft invented a workaround to the workaround. If you drag an item with the right mouse button, when you drop it youll get a menu of possible actions: move, copy, make a shortcut, or cancel. That way, by spending a couple of extra seconds choosing a menu item, you can be sure of what is going to happen. Unfortunately this earns Microsoft another citation in the Interface Hall of Shame for inventing the right-click-drag, perhaps the least intuitive operation ever conceived in interface design. Say it with me: Cruft.
- It gets worse. Dragging a file with the right mouse button does that fancy what-do-you-want-to-do-now-menu thing. But normally, when you click the right mouse button on something, you want a shortcut menu a menu of common actions to perform on that item. But if pressing the right mouse button might mean the user is dragging a file, it might not mean you want a shortcut menu. What to do, what to do?
So, Windows designers made a slight tweak to the way shortcut menus work. Instead of making them open when the right mouse button goes down, they made them open when the right mouse button comes up. That way, they can tell the difference between a right-click-drag (where the mouse moves) and a right-click-I-want-a-shortcut-menu (where it doesnt).
Trouble is, that makes the behavior of shortcut menus so much worse that they end up being pretty useless as an alternative to the main menus.
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They take nearly twice as long to use, since you need to release the mouse button before you can see the menu, and click and release a second time to select an item.
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Theyre inconsistent with every other kind of menu in Windows, which opens as soon as you push down on the mouse button.
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Once youve pushed the right mouse button down on something which has a menu, there is no way you can get rid of the menu without releasing, clicking the other mouse button, and releasing again. This breaks the basic GUI rule that you can cancel out of something youve pushed down on by dragging away from it, and it slows you down still further.
In short, Windows native shortcut menus are so horrible to use that application developers would be best advised to implement their own shortcut menus which can be used with a single click, and avoid the native shortcut menus completely. Once more, with feeling: Cruft.
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Meanwhile, we still have the problem that programs on Windows cant be moved around after installation, otherwise things are likely to break. Trouble is, this makes it rather difficult for people to find the programs they want. In theory you can find programs by drilling down into the Program Files folder, but theyre arranged rather uselessly (by vendor, rather than by subject) and if you try to rearrange them for quick access, stuff will break.
So, Windows designers invented something called the Start menu, which contained a Programs submenu for providing access to programs. Instead of containing a few frequently-used programs (like Mac OSs Apple menu did, before OS X), this Programs submenu has the weighty responsibility of providing access to all the useful programs present on the computer.
Naturally, the only practical way of doing this is by using multiple levels of submenus thereby breaking Microsofts own guidelines about how deep submenus should be.
And naturally, rearranging items in this menu is a little bit less obvious than moving around the programs themselves. So, in Windows 98 and later, Microsoft lets you drag and drop items in the menu itself thereby again breaking the general guideline about being able to cancel a click action by dragging away from it.
This Programs menu is the ultimate in cruft. It is an entire system for categorizing programs, on top of a Windows filesystem hierarchy which theoretically exists for exactly the same purpose. Gnome and KDE, on top of a Unix filesystem hierarchy which is even more obtuse than that of Windows, naturally copy this cruft with with great enthusiasm.
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Following those examples, its necessary to make two disclaimers.
Firstly, if youve used computers for more than six months, and become dulled to the pain, you may well be objecting to one or another of the examples. Hey!, youre saying. Thats not cruft, its useful! And, no doubt, for you that is true. In human-computer interfaces, as in real life, horrible things often have minor benefits to some people. These people manage to avoid, work around, or blame on user stupidity, the large inconvenience which the cruft imposes on the majority of people.
Secondly, there are some software designers who have waged war against cruft. Word Places Yeah Write word processor abolished the need for saving documents. Microsofts Internet Explorer for Windows, while having many interface flaws, sensibly abolished the Exit menu item. The Acorns RISC OS abolished filepickers. The Mac OS uses file IDs to refer to files, avoiding all the problems I described with moving or renaming. And the ROX Desktop eschews the idea of a Start menu, in favor of using the filesystem itself to categorize programs.
However, for the most part, this effort has been piecemeal and on the fringe. So far, there has not been a mainstream computing platform which has seriously attacked the cruft that graphical interfaces have been dragging around since the early 1980s.
So far.
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OT: Other Gecko Based Browsers
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it got faster
I'm using an iMac vintage 2001 regularly. The processor is a G3 @ 600MHz, it has 256 MB RAM.
My first experience was with MacOS 9. Now the default boot is MacOS X.1.5.
It is faster now. And using a slim browser like Chimera does speed some things up. Internet explorer is still slow in startup and display.
I also wrote some small programs with the developer toolkit. Carbon. Compiling is reasonably fast. I can't complain.
I'm not using it for office applications. Also for gaming it's not fast enough (sadly). It's mainly my email and web computer
-Arnulf
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Re:One more indication...that YOU are an idiot
And... just because some "flock of narrow-minded OS zealots" says something's good, it must really be bad? After all, enthusiasm itself is a bad thing, right? I agree that many times people blatantly bash non-OSS products just because source code wasn't included, but have you (Coward) ever tried a different browser? Or are you too narrow-minded to try out other products?
So, IE is better because it does not include tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management, selective/smart/total pop-up ad blocking, mouse gestures, customizable default stylesheets, different themes, image loop control, smaller memory footprint, faster rendering (in many cases), and many other features?
I refer you to (available in Windows and Linux):
Phoenix
Mozilla
Opera (by the way, proprietary, but good just the same) -
Re:One more indication...that YOU are an idiot
And... just because some "flock of narrow-minded OS zealots" says something's good, it must really be bad? After all, enthusiasm itself is a bad thing, right? I agree that many times people blatantly bash non-OSS products just because source code wasn't included, but have you (Coward) ever tried a different browser? Or are you too narrow-minded to try out other products?
So, IE is better because it does not include tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management, selective/smart/total pop-up ad blocking, mouse gestures, customizable default stylesheets, different themes, image loop control, smaller memory footprint, faster rendering (in many cases), and many other features?
I refer you to (available in Windows and Linux):
Phoenix
Mozilla
Opera (by the way, proprietary, but good just the same) -
Re:I find Mozilla on OS X slow
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Re:I find Mozilla on OS X slowChimera! the
.6 version was just realease, and is finaly stable enough / feature rich enough for me to use as an every day browser....E
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Re:that's not the issue
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Re:one thing that IE does that Mozilla doesn't
I've grown used to typing 'google' and hitting ctrl + enter and having the http://www. and
.com added automatically. I really miss it when using Mozilla. Is there a comparable function?Yes. Just enter "google". Mozilla will
- Look for bookmarks with the keyword "google"
- Look for google on your local network
- Look for www.google.com
The IE Ctrl-Enter method blindly adds http://www. and
.com around whatever you've typed, even if that's already a fully-formed URL (try it!). Mozilla actually insert www. and .com at the correct points in the URL (so you could type "google/options" to reach http://www.google.com/options/). -
Re:10 Things...
Why not try Pheonix then?
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Re:Why users "should" switch
Well, number #2 is Popup blocking, yet the Bugzilla crew still refuses to fix their main bug involving that "feature", listed here.
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Re:The 101 list is bullshit
77. I don't buy this. IE is a ship-component of Windows XP, and thus exists in 25 distinct locales.
Mozilla has 86 Localistaion projects registered. OK, so some are quite (or more that quite) old, but there are 28 localised versions of 1.1, and thus beats IEs 25. -
Off-topic pedantism
> There is no spoon. There is only Zuul. It's spelled XUL. There is only XUL. HTH.HAND.
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Open enough?Well, are they open enough? their policy allows for not disclosing vulnerabilities.
The main reasoning seems to be that vendors should be able to protect their customers.
But what happened with the privacy leak recently found in Mozilla? Granted, it was a minor glitch, but it is nevertheless useful in studying how policy affects security.
Did it help end users that it was marked sensitive? Well, Netscape knew about the glitch when they shipped their browser, yet, they shipped it. On the other hand, the leak was patched shortly after the story broke, so the answer should be a clear "No!"
This is an example that it is not sufficient to have the sources open, you have to get some light onto the problems too.