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I use both and prefer Mozilla (better features). Safari is ooh-pretty, but Mozilla gives me better control over things, particularly via the PrefBar that one can download at XulPlanet. I love the new "Kill Flash" button.

Don't know is NS will work with this, but it works like a charm in Mozilla - one-click access to turning on/off images, popups, javascript - whatever:

http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/

Or throttling the CPU usage of Flash/Java applets so it won't grind to a halt when I open a few pages with flash ads?
The lastest version of the preferences bar has a feature where all Flash can be deleted from the current page. The author admits its not the best solution, but it works.

I find the prefbar handy for such things. It has a Clear Cache button. The newer versions even have checkboxes for turning caching off.

Every now and then, I stumble upon a website that is just a veritable tome of knowledge

There are 66 veritable tomes of knowledge in this single online compilation. It's completely searchable by word or numerical reference and available in many languages and versions. Five languages are offered in audio, too. It's all free.

There are plenty of things that your browser does better than the generic brand.

" > IE6 has really stagnated

"Exactly how is this? I am not a web developer, but IIRC IE6 has pretty decent support for CSS1 and DOM level 1. Agree, IE hasn't kept up with bleeding edge stuff like CSS2 (and yes, transparent PNG support sucks), but that's hardly stagnation. Is there a link available somewhere (just so I could learn) that lists all the things IE6 does not do?"

The issue is not what IE can't do, but rather that it's been doing these things for four years without adding the new features that Mozilla, Opera, et al have. But take a look at 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot.

"On the other hand, IE6 SP1 seems to render this XHTML 2.0 page slightly better then Phoenix 0.6 (Moz 1.4b) does. Opera 7.1 does not render it at all."

IE doesn't support XHTML 2.0, nor does Mozilla or Opera. The page to which you refer uses Appendix C XHTML 1.0 as an example of the new XHTML 2.0 features and their XHTML 1.0 equivalents.

"As for UI tweaks, like tabs, gestures and popup blocking -- there are lots of IE "shells", like NetCaptor that add these to IE. Nothing stops someone from writing their own shell and giving it away."

The problem with that is that those shells use the outdated IE rendering engine.

And yes, yes I know, "code to standards", which is the way it *should* be...

I think Microsoft should be given a good dose of their own medicine. Code to XPFE. Write remotely distributed web applications using XUL and friends. Link to your application from a plain vanilla web site that contains an "only works w/ Mozilla" icon that points to the Mozilla site.

Of course there's a big difference between coding Mozilla specific applications and coding MS/IE only applications. Mozilla is an open-source project built on open standards. MS could, if they so choose, implement any of Mozilla's features they like. The converse is not true.

If enough people get Mozilla on their desktop, and enough people start writing good XFPE applications, this could put a serious dent in MS's plans for world domination. Among other things, Mozilla doesn't require Windows. If you write a Mozilla application, you're doing cross-platform development. If the Oracles, IBM's, SAP's, ERP vendors and the like don't see the value of this, they are missing a golden opportunity.

Take the on-line banking example people seem to be so fond of today. You could build an extraordinarily rich on-line banking application on top of Mozilla today, than virtually anyone using any operating system could access. They would have to download Mozilla, which is free. Contrast that w/ writing to IE. Perhaps MS will someday offer an intriguing feature, but if you want your clients to enjoy the experience they will need to run the latest version of MS Windows. Unless they have a recent PC, it will cost them money to use your site. That's assuming they have a PC, and have reserved room on their hard drive to install an MS OS.

And then there's AOL. After years of investing in Mozilla, at a time when their labors are bearing fruition, they ink an ignominious deal with their biggest enemy. The board of directors should take the people responsible for this to the woodshed, spank them soundly, and send them packing. How could management be so ignorant of the value of their own assets? They could do things on AOL using XPFE that would make the MSN droids drool. What dopes. On top of that, how much further development do you think a billion dollar settlement would have funded?

"I miss things like the google"

What the hell are you talking about? The Googlebar is available for Mozilla Firebird. Too bad Xulplanet's Prefsbar isn't available for the *latest* version of Firebird, as I've got very used to having it in Mozilla 1.3: I have checkboxes on the toolbar to enable/disable colours, images, JavaScript, Java, pop-ups, font size and to kill Flash. Furthermore, there is some sort of attempt at an eBay toolbar for Mozilla, but it looks immature and I can't recommend it as I haven't tried it.

This plops another toolbar which allows you to turn off JavaScript/Java/Flash while navigating. Nifty.

I posted this in an earlier thread. http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/ is great for selectively disabling javascript.

Among other nice options such as killing all flash in a page :) it has a dropdown menu for what browser/OS you want to impersonate. And they must be doing well with it - as far as MS was concerned I was running XP/IE6 so the doors opened...

), and an easy way to fake the browser ID string (possible in Mozilla only if you're willing to manually edit config files).

Well nope, not only. there's a pluggin for Mozilla that puts the User Agent string as a dropdown on the toolbar: http://www.xulplanet.com/downloads/prefbar/help/in dex.html

Get it from here. It is a handy toolbar with many options. Kill Flash is one on the current Web page.

It works well in Linux, Windows, and MacOS X (v1.3 has a bug for installing XPI).

Your prayers have been (almost) answered by prefbar from Xulplanet. Apparently what you want is quite tricky, but at least as a stopgap measure they've made a button that kills flash on the current page. All in all prefbar is pretty damn cool. You might want to check it out.

Or get the pref toolbar and change your user-agent with a graphical widget in your chrome, as well as toggle popups, javascript, cookies, and lots of other goodies.

Actually, the newest version of Preferences Toolbar has just such a feature. :)

Great, no prefbar, no leech, no themes for Mac OS X. The release notes page even points at an irrelevant bug (181293) to further confuse the issue. LOSERS!

The PrefBar Nazi

• General news
• • Drudge Report
  • Google News
  • Jerusalem Post
  • JCPA Daily Alert (a thorough digest of world terrorism-related news, with links)
• News/commentary/multimedia
• • Rush Limbaugh, includes about an hour of free audio clips, updated daily
  • Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven) news - on-demand video
  • Arutz Sheva talk shows - on-demand audio (most popular is "Mid-East at the Crossroads")
  • Foundation for the Defense of Democracy - news and views
• War for Peace
• • the brain terminal
  • the dissident frogman (required reading for the French)
• Tech
• • /.
  • MozillaZine
  • Win Informant
  • MozillaNews' Bonsai Watch (a better alternative to using Bugzilla to see the most recent checkins)
• Search
• • Google
  • Dictionary.com
  • Bible Gateway

Since you were a little low on links, I thought I'd post them, along with some other info:

There's the UABar, and then MultiZilla also offers this feature, among many other features. However, the MultiZilla team doesn't want to make it too easy to change your user agent as it messes up logs of websites, but you can find out how to include it here. I did have the UABar installed for awhile, but it became redundant with MultiZilla installed.

Also, if you close your browser session when your User Agent is not at its default setting using the UABar, your default setting is replaced. With MultiZilla, your default is still in an easy to recognize place. Also, if you have Java installed, you will get errors when opening and closing Mozilla using a hacked user agent--something like "Java Virtual Machine for Netscape should not be used with MSIE." If you get that, switch your user agent back to it's default.

I have never used the Prefbar, but it looks good.

Somebody else mentioned UA Bar, but I prefer PrefBar. It's basically a toolbar and is very configurable. It has a UA spoofer (in drop-down menu) and lots of preferences too.

See XUL Planet

Well,

- tabbed browsing, and

- type-ahead find

- decent mail client built in (now with spam filtering, albeit early stages)

- image blocking built in

And nearly 100 other things that Mozilla has but IE does not.

I complain when I'm stuck at a computer with nothing better than IE.

However, since you're trolling, I'll stop here ;)

timothy

Yup! But some people still don't get it

Here's a good place to start for things XUL. Luxor borrows a bit from XUL and show some of the XML advantages over the API approach we all have been using.

Note how easy it is to develop a web site. XUL and other XML technologies will do the same for the interface.

I was able to get in if I used the prefbar from xulplanet.com to spoof as a Moz 1.0/Win98 client.

We *need* the average user to feel *more* comfortable working at a Linux desktop than a Windows machine

This is just an issue of familiarity- We're creatures of habit. If they're used to a Windows machine, then of course they're going to feel more comfortable with one rather than that alien Linux that doesn't do everything quite the same. The only way to make them comfortable as you seem to be hinting is to copy every little UI element from Windows, which is the wrong idea IMHO.

My own brother has never used anything but Unix. From Solaris workstations at work to his box at home, it's what he's used to, and you can't get him to use a Windows box. Nothing is where it should be or works the way it should. He hates windows filesharing/network browsing and thinks it's the worst design ever. He considers it an aggrivating OS and often says he can't understand why people use it.
Every time I say "games", he tells me that's what consoles are for. Creatures of habit.

Most of them have formatting problems, cannot handle inline images (properly or at all). Table support from Word 2000 is lacking.

Not sure what you're talking about here. OO.org Writer has never skewed images or tables on me in Word documents.

You're not Joe Sixpack. "How come it says I cannot save my file in /bin? Huh? I didn't log in as root, whoever that is.

Now you're just being silly. Apps default to saving files in the user's home directory, and Joe Sixpack is the last person who's going to bother backing out a couple directory levels to find /bin and then try to save there. That would be like trying to save in C:\WINNT as a normal user, which Windows XP will also stop you from doing.

whereas a 1-900-DRONE would calmly answer, explain, and the user would be supported.

Microsoft won't give you support unless you've registered your OS with them. In which case, you only get support for a short time before you have to start paying for it. The commercial Linux distros do exactly the same thing, including supplying support phone numbers. There's no reason Joe Sixpack can't call up for support just like he can with Windows. In fact, Joe will get his application support in most instances from the exact same place. Convenient.

KMail is great, the only programming complaint I've had with it is that it silently dies if it runs out of disk space. But the spellchecker is right out of 1995

I haven't found KMail to be all that great; adequate for a quick mail check/send, maybe.
How is a spellchecker "right out of 1995"? Is it missing "axe" as a synonym for "ask"?
Evolution has been working fine for me using precompiled binaries, and has consistently shown itself to be at least as responsive as Outlook on systems with similar or identical specs. If Evolution was too slow to be usable on any given system, so was Outlook. Also, it has thus far shown no deficiencies in the spellchecker.

Again, I have to say: I'm not sure what you're talking about.

delete your JRE without telling Mozilla, then try to use a website infected with applets; it crashes with no warning

Actually, no, it doesn't. It displays a plugin icon for you to click on and go get a JRE if you want one.

lack of ability to send a mailto: link to anything other than Mozilla's mail client

It can do this just fine. It sends to whatever happens to be your default mail client. You can set a default mail client in both Windows and Linux. Mailtos currently go to Evolution on my machine.

and the inability to tailor the browser string to be whatever I want without recompiling

It's at this point I've finished my coffee and started checking your trolling history, because this is simply wrong. Mozilla can be configured to do this without a recompile by way of the userPrefs.js file. A neat little GUI component is also available at XUL Planet with an easy to use in-browser installer.

Microsoft's browser certainly can't do this, nor could you modify and recompile it to make it do so. It's less of a problem of course, but only because of very bad web design tailored to IE. Microsoft certainly won't help you out with a UA spoofing GUI for any IE-hostile sites out there, though.

It remains that the purchase price is a very, very small part of the total cost of ownership.

Until it comes time to renew the subscription on your "purchase"?

let's stop kidding ourselves about it being ready

Who's kidding who here? You've failed to even keep your facts straight about the deficiencies you cite.

Don't even bother sending me flames telling me that vi is the greatest word processor ever

Now I know you're kidding. I'd only sic vi on people I hate. :)

I'm certain Linux has deficiencies on the desktop for some people, but nothing like you've covered. The real problems are ingrained user habits that have become their source of comfort in using a particular OS, and for some people, functionality that is completely missing from Linux's software library. ...and the latter isn't as common as people seeking exact duplicates of Outlook and Microsoft Word would make it seem.

In that case, you're referring to the preferences toolbar from XulPlanet. Enjoy.

Got a response? TalkBack!

Got a response? TalkBack!

• Glade XML for GTK+ apps
  
• XUL from the Mozilla project
  
• and now Renaissance from the GNUStep/Cocoa folks
  

how about sites that think mozilla can't render something?
nothing quite as annoying as
"you need Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6.2.2+ to view this site"
...especially when mozilla 1.3a gets blocked but netscape 6.2.2 doesn't!

solution: some browsers allow you to change the userAgent.
in mozilla, the prefbar plugin allows this (among other things).

What I would like to see, and this is off-topic, is XML menu specification.

Funny, I have to browse Fark using Mozilla (1.2.1), or I have no idea what is in store on the sites it links to.

Of course I use the Preferences Toolbar to tweak the options (No java, no popups, and sometimes no cookies.) Filtering through a proxy helps too. Perhaps one of their ads is crashing Mozilla for some reason.

Tabbed browsing is the only way to go for looking at loads of news stories, especially with shift-middle-click set to load tabs in the background. (Click a bunch and read one while the others load...)

Aargh. I just got 1.2 installed and the prefbar all set up, and now I'll have to install and customise the prefs toolbar again when I install 1.2.1. Bummer.

I switched from Netscape to IE quite a few years ago (not because it was already installed, but because Netscape started to suck). Now I've switched (back) to Mozilla, because I'm one of those power-users who loves to customize and use all the new whiz-bang features. But the average user doesn't even KNOW there's a "preferences" area - all they care about is that their favorite sites look good and work properly. Unfortunately, I find myself occasionally having to revert back to IE to view a site because some DHTML-this or ActiveX-that doesn't work properly (sure, we can blame the web-site developer, but the average guy will happily blame his browser first).

If you're referring to the PrefBar component, try pressing F8 to toggle it.

Check out the Preferences Toolbar. Allows you to switch on and off JavaScript, popups, etc with the click of a button. Might be what you're looking for:

Preferences Toolbar

Cheers,

Costyn.

I think you want the XUL Preference Toolbar... You can turn off popups, javascript, images, all sorts of nastiness as well as change your UA from a small toolbar that sits under the address bar

Go thou to xulplanet and get thyself the prefs toolbar. You need this anyway, to turn page colours off and on and easily change your user-agent string.

Go thou to xulplanet and get thyself the prefs toolbar. You need this anyway, to turn page colours off and on and easily change your user-agent string.

If you get Mozilla and PrefBar , you can toggle javascript, popup blocking, and more from your toolbar. It also works on a variety of platforms.

• ~ Example website ~
  This is an example of a website using Anti-Theft.

The interesting thing is that if you use the Preferences Toolbar (download here) to change the user-agent string to, say, NS 6.2 Lin or IE 6.0 WinXP, it works just fine.

-CF

twiddling settings is annoying for the user, if they choose to turn it off and on..

stuff like this makes me glad i loaded mozilla on my wife's pc at home, then went to http://xulplanet.com to download the preferences toolbar. she learned quickly to be able to turn javascript on and off at her whim, from a simple toolbar.

I still haven't found a VB equivilant for another OS.

Stay tuned!

Try getting the prefbar from XULPlanet and setting your user agent to something they like.

101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot

• 98. Supports IRC Protocol - This is something I don't even use. This is just another program which should be separate but isn't and gives rise to the "mozilla is bloated" argument.
• 99. Open Source - Yeah, but good luck sifting through it ;)
• 100. Bugzilla - OK, lots of people use this, but Bugzilla != Mozilla. So it's not like Mozilla has built-in Bugzilla features... This is unrelated to the list.
• 101. Giant Lizards are Cool - 'Nuff said.

More info about the toolbar can be found here.

1. I don't use it (yet), so I won't comment on it.
2. Disable Javascript to disable popups. Not as good a solution, but it works fine for me.
3. Again, I can disable scripting altogether. There are also some "advanced" security settings that give you some control over these.
4. Woo-hoo! This is actually very cool, and I wish IE would just do it.
5. Same in IE, but whether they're better may be a matter of opinion.
6. As far as I know, it is possible for third-party developers to make sidebar plugins, but I don't use them anyway.
7. Yeah, more sizes would be nice, especially for presentations and when people are looking over my shoulder. The "shortcut" is that you hold down control and use the scrollwheel. Quite nice, actually.
8. I assume this doesn't work properly in IE. You shouldn't use absolute font sizes on the web, anyway (think accessibility).
9. Yes! I also love this feature.
10. This is available under File -> Properties, but it sounds like it's not quite as complete as Mozilla's. Combine with View Source and #11 below, and it's all there.
11. This is part of the "Web Tools" or whatever MS calls it now. They'll give you the complete DOM representation of the page.
12. Definitely not available in IE. How useful is it? (I know that's not the issue at hand, though.)
13. A minimal amount of customization is available, largely through the windowing system. Fortunately, the "theme" that they have (nasty Windows widgets) is at least generally consistent with the rest of the operating system.
14. "Displays more informatin" doesn't sound like a "can't do" kind of thing. Fact is, it does display some info, even if it's not the best.
15. Sweet. Can't quite do that, but the "Quick Search" thing that MS provides sounds similar. I have it set up, for example, so that when I type "dict lentiform" it maps to "http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=lentiform". I have similar mappings for the Java API, AcronymFinder.com, etc.
16. Nice.
17. IE just does it differently. The funtionality is still there, and perhaps difficult to get to for the novice. But then is a novice going to be doing this, anyway?
18. See #17. I don't have to "search around my filesystem". They're in exactly one place, which you can get to through a control panel in IE.
19. ...