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Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash

Mozilla's existence is completely dependent on other companies, whose existence is completely dependent on tracking and monetizing you. For Mozilla to pretend that they care about "privacy" insults our intelligence (what little we have).

You can dig deep into your about:config settings and fix it there ((sorry - setting so obscure can't remember it! You might find it to turn it off but Grandmama won't)) and you are right!!! Firefox only pays lip service to privacy. And like their tieup with Adobe DRM https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-c..., their advertising page for "partners" http://adexchanger.com/ad-exch..., targeting you for advertising based on your browsing http://www.pcworld.com/article..., and now Disconnect.me, they're doing favors for businesses. Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Firefox has become a megacorporation. They are not for profit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... so that money doesn't to shareholders but it goes SOMEWHERE like executive salaries and just like a megacorporation they care more about cutting deals with other businesses than they do the public because we are not their customers. They are!

"What's wrong with iTunes?", "you don't need to use iTunes if you don't need/want to" (really?), " MKV is not a popular format "

What the hell you smoked?? What's wrong with you?

For those who still have a functioning brain ... You see here in Dimeglio an obscenely clear example of the reality distortion field in action :-/

Mozilla would collapse without google.

Bullshit Microsoft would immediately step in:

Indeed, why fund the competition? M.G. Siegler speculates (based on AllThingsD’s report that there was a bidding war over Mozilla) that Google is willing to spend that kind of money just to keep Microsoft from starting a partnership with Mozilla.

You can access the camera for taking pictures and video from Safari since iOS 6.

You cite this article, which states: "there are some things missing, like support for WebRTC and getUserMedia, WebGL". That seems to imply that the feature is for shooting a video and then uploading the whole thing, as opposed to live video streaming from the device's camera, as would be used for something like Skype video chat. Good luck making a web application that scans barcodes with what the iPhone

Webgl is also supported.

The article you cited states that WebGL is among the "some things missing".

It's sandboxed like Chrome: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/06/flash-firefox-play-together-in-new-security-sandbox/

Flash in Firefox is only sandboxed like Chrome on Windows:

... offers several new features aimed to make the widely used browser plugin more secure — including a new security “sandbox” for Firefox on Windows.

But not on OS X. Chrome on Windows uses UAC/MIC too (and also puts in place some extra sandboxing features). Note, Firefox itself on Windows is still not sandboxed. This sandboxing only applies to the Flash plugin, not the browser itself and not to other plugins. An exploit running on Windows is running under low-integrity mode. It can not write anywhere to infect the system.

Firefox on OS X is not sandboxed; not the browser itself, not plugins in general and not Flash by itself. An exploit runs as the current user once it is running shell code. It runs with the user privileges and can write anywhere the user can, i.e. it can infect the local user account.

It's sandboxed like Chrome: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/06/flash-firefox-play-together-in-new-security-sandbox/

It's been a long time since anybody could legitimately blame Microsoft for standards compliance in IE.

I'm not sure how you're able to say that with a straight face. I'm pretty sure you don't do any form of web development otherwise you'd be aware of the coddling IE requires to achieve what many other browsers do "out of the box".

In no particular order here are some things that are encountered in the real world, and not "edge cases":
IE9 border radius + gradient hack.
Having to use a filter (directx!) to achieve effects like other browsers.
Up until IE10 limited or no support of CSS transitions and animations. Browser comparison
SVG animations.
Missing CSS3 selectors. If you really want to delve into things IE8, which is arguably the most popular IE version out there, is a worse offender than IE9.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how they could expect people to want or trust their cloud services.
The concept seems to go against instinct.

http://gigaom.com/2009/10/10/when-cloud-fails-t-mobile-microsoft-lose-sidekick-customer-data/

http://www.webmonkey.com/2008/04/microsoft_kills_playsforsure__screws_over_loyal_customers/

I agree, the UI needs to settle down. I loved the mobile version until they forced the supposedly "awesome" bar to be always-on. a developer recently said it's gotten crazy as well. http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/07/firefox-developer-everybody-hates-firefox-updates/ I've used FF since it was Phoenix, but now I'm trying out Chrome, Dolphin, and Opera.

I find it difficult to imagine the average joe requiring 2880 x 1800 displays anyways

That's not the point of this display. It's to provide extremely high-quality images and text at roughly the same size (in e.g. inches) as on the 1440x900 display.

Go to Best Buy and look at the difference between the iPad2 and the iPad3 (or New iPad or whatever.) Go to a webpage and look at the text. If you see a difference, that's what they're talking about. If you don't see a difference, then the "Retina" display probably isn't for you.

Look at the pictures on that web page, see any difference, if you do your kidding yourself because they are at 72 dpi, the images will be not better quality with a retina display that with any other display.

Unless you are looking at a web page where the developer actually provides hi-res images for hi-res displays. http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/03/what-the-new-ipads-retina-display-means-for-web-developers/ Best demo is (who would have thought) www.apple.com.

I copied the info from here:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/google-tricks-internet-explorer-into-accepting-tracking-cookies-microsoft-claims/

Funny, I can't remember when the ability to be able to drag and drop files in to web apps was added

It seems to be fairly common, being used by Gmail since April 2010, and is in the Mozilla docs.

Oh and if you still don't believe me that Google isn't dropping H.264 here:

A Google Spokesperson tells Webmonkey that the announcement is related to "Chrome only and does not affect Android or YouTube."

H.264 is still going to live on.

Are you referring to Mojave, where Microsoft proved that Vista is much better than XP? :)

I'm sure those studies help a lot.

according to this

Under the new proposal, add-on testing will be automated. Add-ons hosted on Mozillaâ(TM)s website will be tested against any new Aurora and Beta builds and automatically marked as compatible unless some problem is discovered.

Unless this mechanism is only for beta. ,...

Google could just PAY the royalty to use MPEG4 between now and 2020 (when it becomes open). They certainly have the money.

People keep forgetting this - Google DOES pay that royalty, and plans on continuing to pay it. They didn't pull h.264 support out of Android (or from YouTube for that matter), and they've indicated they're not going to (see the end note).

So (getting back on topic) given that there's every indication their choice to remove it from Chrome was a pragmatic business decision rather than one driven by philosophical principles, why expect them to oppose DRM if their paying customers want DRM?

That was WHATWG who proposed dropping version numbers.

Per Ian Jacobs the W3C HTMLWG has no plans to follow the WHATWG versionless path.

You can read about it here.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/html5-will-be-done-in-2014-what-comes-next/

Chrome was the only browser with H.264 support,

Wrong. Safari had h.264 support before Chrome existed. Microsoft announced some time ago that its first browser to support the <video> tag will support h.264.

Also, if Google was really acting out of anything but a perceived economic self-interest - why does Android still support h.264? Google specifically exempted Android from this move that supposedly is about "supporting open technologies".

Web sites are very poor when it comes to things like typography. Then again, so are Apple's iBooks, and even Amazon's Kindle, etc., as well, but they will improve with time.

The time is now:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/good-web-typography-is-easy-with-type-a-file/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/lettering-js-makes-complex-typography-easy/

Web sites are very poor when it comes to things like typography. Then again, so are Apple's iBooks, and even Amazon's Kindle, etc., as well, but they will improve with time.

The time is now:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/11/firefox-4-font-feature-support/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/good-web-typography-is-easy-with-type-a-file/
http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/11/lettering-js-makes-complex-typography-easy/

Considering that HTML5 isn't due to be finalized until 2022 anything goes and EVERYTHING is pre-release. Thats why they are pushing such tech like that site, because in the end, SJ wants his specs to become the standard.

Free web browsers like Chrome and Firefox are still going to have to pay royalties.

From More detailed webmonkey.com article:

The MPEG LA says it will continue to collect fees on AVC/H.264 video that consumers pay for. The video format is used on Blu-Ray discs and on most on-demand and paid video delivery services, such as iTunes. It will also continue to collect fees from software that ships with the coders and decoders required to play H.264 video — even software that’s distributed for free, such as web browsers.

Apple is trying the EEE approach with HTML5 by the looks of it:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/06/apples-html5-showcase-less-about-web-standards-more-about-apple/

So two major OS/browser vendors have a vested interest in not properly supporting HTML5. The future's not looking too bright :(

I would like to thank Stuart Parmenter, director of Firefox development Mike Beltzner, manager of Firefox's front-end-features team Johnathan Nightingale and Firefox principal engineer Vladimir Vukievi. Here is the photo: http://www.webmonkey.com/2009/11/after_five_years_on_the_web__firefox_preps_for_the_next_round/

and certainly the Mozilla Foundation chairwoman, the great Mitchell Baker. Here is the photo: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Firefox-and-Codecs-Face-of-Mozilla-at-Will-of-Community

A Russian poet Nikolay Nekrasov wrote about such people. Something like: "Mother Nature, if from time to time you have not sent such people to the world, the field of Life would be exhausted."

yeah, i hate ads too, but like them or not they pay for the web.

if you wanted to gain a large slice of online revenue, you could:

1) create your own, closed platform
2) entice content creators to your platform by banning non-compliant software
2) effectively ban other ad publishers from using that platform, forcing advertisers to go through you
3) make it hard for web publishers to make money by adding ad- to the platform's web browser.

Apple's the new Microsoft so you damn well should care.

What does this remind you of?

http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/06/apples-html5-showcase-less-about-web-standards-more-about-apple/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+(Wired%3A+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))

Yup! HTML5 = full of win and very nifty! I look forward to the day all browsers support HTML5 and we no longer have this constant headache making sites compatible with IE6.

Still won't kill Flash though as there's too much stuff Flash can do that HTML5 can't.

Imagine: it took 6 years for W3C to get HTML5 into the semblance of functionality it has now (can recreate stuff that was being done in Flash back in 2000 when Flash 5 + Actionscript 1 came upon the scene). By the time HTML5 is finalized in 2022, Flash will be light years ahead.

I don't really see why people are shoehorning HTML5 as versus Flash when they coexist side by side nicely in your browser. (example, use Flash for the animated parts in your e-learning website or use "less easy for my sourcecode to be seen" SWFs for Flash games).

Honestly, I think all this HTML5 vs Flash crock is just a marketing campaign being done by Apple & iFanboys to sell those gimped iPads.

Apple is the only company I know that promotes lack of features as selling points. (omg! multi-tasking in iPhone OS4! whoop de doo. Nokia 3650s could do that back in 2002)

I guess it's just a bit of a wait and see what happens when the newer Android smartphones & tablets arrive in mid to late 2010. I hope more developers emerge for Android. The sheer content in the iPhone App Store that is a big factor in making iPhones popular right now.

Google is doing its part.

When will there be a final HTML 5 standard to support?

Seriously? In 2022. Read it and weep. http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/HTML_5_Won_t_Be_Ready_Until_2022DOT_Yes__2022DOT

Meanwhile, you should see wider adoption of it by 2012, which is when the world ends.

Cheers! :D

And considering how much Google loooooooves datamining, is anyone actually surprised? They already have all your mail, your searches, your docs, etc if you use their services, why not your DNS as well? This is why I have been avoiding Google like the clap and only using Gmail as a spamdump. They just seem to want their fingers in waaaaay too many pies for me to trust that "do no evil" BS.

NO company should be able to amass that much data on you, I don't care who they are or if they have a catchy slogan or not. Considering how easily this could be abused and used for censorship I think one would have to be nuts or a serious Google fanboi to want this. I wonder how much of this data they are already keeping if you use their DNS service?

Everyone used to talk about how scary MSFT was with their "embrace, extend" bullshit, but frankly ever since Darth Gates left the company to the sweaty monkey they have flailed around like a drunken elephant from one idea to another. With the sheer amount of data Google is gathering on everybody I would say they are MUCH scarier now than MSFT ever was. At least you could avoid MSFT by going Linux or Apple. What happens if Google gets the ISPs to jump on board with this? Much scarier than the sweaty monkey IMHO.

This is BS. Most proper standards define a way to extend the standard with "proprietary" extensions in a way that they are put forth by a company, added to a register and implemented to that "proprietary standard".

Yes, they do. But that is irrelevant. What's wrong is that the open standards advocates are pushing to have open standards be the requirement, disallowing any and all extensions to the standard, meaning if you have a product that implements an extended standard, you are disqualified from submitting it in a bid, and a few countries have already taken the bait.

What vendor is going to create a product that will intentionally diqualify them from government contracts? Very few, and certainly not big ones. That effectively means the development of that application is limited only to features that do not require storage in the document format.

For example OpenGL has a lot of these and it's an excellent breading ground for the "glacially slow" standard standards.

But there aren't any governments mandating the use of only standard OpenGL, and OpenGL has also been glacially slow to the point that many vendors stopped making OpenGL apps because they couldn't be sure if the etensions they needed were going to be present on any given system.

HTML is a biased example because of it's history. The process has been subverted and it's broken, thanks to the early "web", large part in Microsoft and Netscape.

I'm not even talking about that far back. Let's look at HTML5 and CSS3. The WhatWG admits that HTML5 won't be ratified as a standard until 2022.

Most innovations happen on a way higher level than document format standards, but if the need arises proprietary extensions can be defined for a document format, then that can slowly be worked into a new version of the main standard.

I have no problem with that either, so long as governments allow bids with such extensions. The problem is that open standards advocates are pushing governemnts to disallow that.

I see absolutely no issues here with requiring openness. It doesn't stifle innovation one bit.

Now you're being disingenuous. Certainly you can see how it stifles innovation at a little, this was alluded to in your comment "can slowly be worked into a new version of the main standard".

Now there's a post that should be marked informative. Unfortunately, your link is broken.

webmonkey (January 22, 2007): Wikipedia Adds NOFOLLOW Attribute To Outbound Links

webmonkey (January 26, 2007): Wikipedia to Web: "Stop Following Me!"

Now there's a post that should be marked informative. Unfortunately, your link is broken.

webmonkey (January 22, 2007): Wikipedia Adds NOFOLLOW Attribute To Outbound Links

webmonkey (January 26, 2007): Wikipedia to Web: "Stop Following Me!"

That is one of the dumber stories the WSJ wrote, although since Murdoch took over, there have been a lot of dumb, poorly edited stories.

The significant fact, as I and other readers pointed out in the comments, is that it's meaningless to say that 50,000 wikipedia editors left, unless you know the base number that it's drawn from.

Google search for "Number of Wikipedia editors." 300,000 editors have edited Wikipedia more than 10 times. So that would make it 17%. Aren't WSJ reporters supposed to do that?

But another WSJ reader said:

Guys, Do your homework. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia becoming less relevant or the other reasons discussed. It's because they mahttp://news.slashdot.org/story/09/11/25/160236/Contributors-Leaving-Wikipedia-In-Record-Numbers?art_pos=6#de a technical change to the site that makes it less attractive for spammers to use. It's a good thing that these spammers are no longer editing the site to link to their blogs / websites.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Wikipedia_Adds_NOFOLLOW_Attribute_To_Outbound_Lin

The ribbon system allows for the logical grouping of actions by function. This allows for a more intuitive interface for the standard user. They also have context-aware ribbons, such as picture and table editing which appear and hide themselves only when you are working on that specific object.

There is nothing in the standard menu model that prevents it from either having logical top-level groupings, or context aware items. The ribbon is only different in the sense that it exposes the contents of the grouping (usually) as icons, and does so horizontally rather than vertically - notably taking up more screen space in the process, but that may not be a bad thing in itself.

If you can point to some objective evidence for the truth of this "more intuitive interface" then please do so. I for one am sceptical, but then I'd just prefer a CLUI.

See Hotcaptcha which did exactly that. The site where it was hosted is gone though.

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AKA__Porn_Mode__Arrives

The existing foundations are all but useless. There is no good reason why HTML 5 should be ready by 2022 instead of 2009 or 2010. Hopefully Berners-Lee can actually get an organization started that will get real work done.

Safari 3.1 supports major HTML 5 features like video and audio. It is based on WebKit. Why would Google have to add HTML 5 to WebKit too?

from webmonkey.com

Included in Chrome is the Google-born and now open-source Gears, a piece of technology used for the same purposes as HTML 5's offline features.

"Gears has a lot of great value. It's best thought of as an alternative API already out there," says Fisher. "HTML 5 is great if you have a newer browser, but what about the vast majority of users that have an older browsers? Gears is a vehicle to make this API available to older browsers. We're working to match HTML 5 versions of these APIs."

Fisher stops short of labeling Gears a stop-gap to HTML 5. "Gears is very compatible and supportive of HTML 5. It is on a trajectory to become another implementation, another platform that is to put HTML 5 on people's desktops."

Also of interest (from the same page),

Chrome developer Darin Fisher says that while Chrome was under wraps, a few things had to go. Despite using the latest branch of WebKit (the same branch to be used in the next version of Safari), the local database features didn't make it into Chrome's first release. Unfortunately, the safety and performance factors of Chrome's isolated sandbox system, which enables faster and more secure browsing by partitioning tabs in memory and CPU process, would break the built-in WebKit database functionality.

I hope this helped answer your questions.

Ten Best Flickr Mashups
by Michael Calore 24 Feb 2006

Either you don't make more than $10 an hour (in which case you can't afford cable television) or the pure pleasure of spending effort, sweat and tears building it yourself in your incredibly copious spare time is more important to you than, say, watching fine AOL Time Warner programming anytime you want for $10 a month.

(Pausing the Daily Show now. sweeeet.)

Personally, I would encourage you to build your own DVR, but don't force me to build one for myself. I'd never get around to it... too busy learning to use all those other HTML tags.

Either you don't make more than $10 an hour (in which case you can't afford cable television) or the pure pleasure of spending effort, sweat and tears building it yourself in your incredibly copious spare time is more important to you than, say, watching fine AOL Time Warner programming anytime you want for $10 a month.

(Pausing the Daily Show now. sweeeet.)

Personally, I would encourage you to build your own DVR, but don't force me to build one for myself. I'd never get around to it... too busy learning to use all those other HTML tags.

I like www.webmonkey.com for everything you need for web development.

WebMonkey.com is where I started when I wanted to learn how to be a web developer. I even sent my mom there. Great tutorials, and good humor too.

- Visit MyGeekdom.com and geek out!

. . .when webmonkey was he best thing out there for newbie web programmers. It's sad, but they sort of fell off at some point. But in the beginning, when it was all about client-side scripting, wasn't none better than Thau! The dude still cracks me up.

They even had a UNIX cheat sheet and tutorial for when we grew up and began working on the server-side of things.

Developer Shed (all about using open source technologies):
http://www.devshed.com

Webmonkey:
http://www.webmonkey.com

Both are VERY good.

Guru
Web Monkey - Baring any trademark restrictions
Web Guru
Classified
Slacker
Code Monkey
Code Poet - Dont forget the t-shirt if you use this one
Web Tamer
Undefined
Uber Geek - Again the t-shirt here.
Caffine Addict - t-shirt
H4x0r
Script Kiddie

There are endless possibilities with these, as I am sure you have scene. Use a little creativity (If you feel you don't have any, find someone with a copy of PhotoShop or Illustrator on their machine and ask them) and see what works for you.

Not to mention I have yet to see a Flash page with a static image - they're always animating with a rotating logo or some other action.

Flash is more (less) than noisy multimedia, and more (less) than 007-movie-intro-on-drugs animations. Macromedia's own site uses Flash for the navigation at the top of most pages on their site, and that doesn't do any animation except on rollover.

As well as being the only viable cross-platform cross-browser vector solution right now, if you want to use your own font and you don't want the overhead of lots of GIF's, Flash is the only cross-platform cross-browser font solution. AFAIK the 3.x browser approaches for embedded fonts in Web pages never standardized. Microsoft can ram a new font like Verdana or Trebuchet into the operating system, but other sites have to use Flash.

(I acknowledge the argument that sites can bloody well communicate whatever they have to say in serif, sans serif, and fixed, but designers would disagree.)

For another subtle, silent, non-animating use of Flash, check out webmonkey's front page.
--

Way back before Wired's online presence got bought out by Lycos, they experimented with this format. The interstitial ads were everywhere on the site, but were perhaps most annoying when trying to get to their "Threads" discussions (long since gone). There was an overwhelmingly negative response. One friend of mine went as far as to inject ads for his own nascent web design company into his posts on their discussion groups, then crow, "Let's see how you like it!"

The problem is that regardless of what streaming multimedia enthusiasts would have you believe, the web is most often used like a big phone book. Or a magazine. Sure, more often than not, the magazine is Hustler, but people are flipping through indexes (Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, AskJeeves, MySimon) to find the content they really want (porn, home electronics, news, music). It's not like a TV where we expect a certain show to be on a certain channel at a certain time, which is exactly what makes television ads work. Banner ads are, in some sense, more appropriate than interstitial ones because they look more like magazine ads.

The only reason magazine-style ads don't work in the online world is because display technology has such a long way to go. Think about the number, density, and (comperable) quality of the quarter or half page ads in the average color glossy monthly publication. Think about putting something like on a single web page, so that you could get ad and content on the screen simultaneously, without compromising the readability or navigability of either. It's enough to give a web designer fits.

Ironically, it looks like Wired has gone back to interstitial ads on their Hotwired site. Pity. It's a long time since that site has been useful for anything (other than as a portal to Webmonkey, Wired, or what appears to be their biggest advertiser, but I remember when there was some pretty good political and social commentary on that site. Sigh.