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Eight Tenths Of A Lizard
Palin was the first of many like-minded souls to write with this news: "On my weekly check of Mozilla's status, I ran into version .8 of Mozilla, which seems to have been released yesterday. What a nice Valentine's day gift that was. :-)" And Alphix points to the thing itself, and suggests some things
to read."
Mozilla is my daily-use,pH-balanced Web browser of late, so I'm glad to see that it can finally allow users to avoid the degrading spectacle of endlessly cycling animated .gifs.
There's all kinds of cool keyboard shortcuts in IE. My favorite is pressing F11 to get full screen mode. Browsing the web in full screen absolutely rocks.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Under version 5.00.xx (and presumably any later versions)
:) Oh, btw, shame on whoever gave information about it being impossible to turn of animations in IE without clearly exploring the "internet options" section for five minutes.
Tools->Internet Options
Click on the advanced tab.
Under the "multimedia" section, there should be a "play animations" option. Remove the check in the checkbox in front of it.
Viola! No more animations. Although, in retrospect, some slashdot ads don't make a lot of sense now.
Reminds me of the old NCSA-turned proxy server "NoShit", and the Windows proxy "Proxomitron" I used to love before I left the MS world.
While features like disabling animated GIF's and disabling particular sites for popup windows, those nasty evil spamming advertisers are always brilliant at innovating new ways to bypass your filter controls.
Then, what are we to do? To respond to every one of their tricks right in the browser? Or should we separate the job and put it in a proxy server for that purpose?
The way I see it, using a proxy is the way to go. If you've tried Proximitron you'll know why. It's infinitely more configurable - user-configurable. Everyone will has the ability to scratch their own advertiser-induced itches.
Prozilla anyone?
> But even in the latter case, their sole purpose is to provide that sleazy sense of tactless
;-)
> production one comes to expect from all forms of adult entertainment.
I'm not going to defend animated GIFs here--they're annoying as hell, and on a dialup 56k like most people still are using, they're absolutely evil time-wasters. I recall once being SO annoyed that a page was taking so long to load, because the animated GIF banner at the top must have had thirty friggin frames...
But I just had to ask: what do you expect *other* than sleazy, tactless production in adult entertainment? Proper, tactful production? I can see it now, on PBS's Masterporn Theatre: "Oh, Madam Deepthroat, bring forth thy heaving bosoms of delight, that I might feel them up whilst thou tastest of my knightly schlong, bedewed with premature trickles of nectar as sweet as morning dew. Oh, how I have yearned to taste thy tuna steak of love, whilst you get it on with my handmaiden in some hot girl-girl action..."
Personally, I prefer the straightforward smut of a Dark Bros. or Max Hardcore production to the polished coldness of some silly Skinemax-wannabe soft stuff. But, I digress...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
How about:
setenv MAIL "xterm -e mutt"
for example
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Hey, guys, you know about the Internet Junkbuster, right? It's a proxy server that will filter cookies, ads, referer information, and lots of other stuff. It's incredibly useful if you desire privacy on the net, not to mention saving your eyes from those aforementioned strobe-light ads.
The IJB is available for UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and Linux. Configuration is just a little bit complicated, but no more so than any other standard UNIX daemon.
Alos, there's a truly wonderful program by the name of WebWasher that will do that same thing under Microsoft Windows. It's got a very slick interface, awesome features, and some very friendly guys working on it. If you have any Microsoft Windows clients, I would highly recommend installing WebWasher on them.
Definitely check out Squid as well. It's a caching proxy server that runs under UNIX and Linux. I've used it for years.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs...
...JavaScript?
On NS 4.x and IE 5.5 there is such a button, and it's right there on the toolbar! It's the "Stop" button. Once a page has finished loading, press the stop button. This kills all the flashies dead in their tracks. I do this all the time to get away from the distractions of a xmas tree of gifs most sites have turned into.
The nice part about this is that the sites I frequent get the ad hit, which isn't an option with something like junkbuster. I rather like the notion that those sites are getting the revenue from my visit. Might mean they stay around a little longer and all that.
"...cookies..."
Konqueror is the best I've seen in this regard. Each site that asks for a cookie Konq prompts you for. I know other browsers have this option, but in Konq you can specify to allow or deny all future cookies from a specific domain. It is perhaps Konq's best feature yet.
Actually, I personally don't think we need a button to turn it off. Instead, how about simply removing that damn "window.close()" event entirely from the language? Is there any real use for this event besides throwing gobs of advertising at you as you attempt to leave a site? It's not even effective advertising, as the audience in question isn't going to be looking at the message, but instead how to deal with a browser suddenly out of control.
The other annoying aspect to JavaScript are them pop-up windows. Unfortunately, there are a number of legitimate uses for these making it difficult to say we should just get rid of them entirely. If there were some tool on a bar to deal with these that might be worthwhile. Again, I still don't think that totally disabling JS, even as a switch, is a reasonable solution when there are alternatives that haven't yet been explored.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
I think before anyone posts to slashdot, they should read this bug report:
7 4
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689
Relating to slashdot's troubles earlier to-day.
* Seems faster than the old 0.6 or 0.7 builds. (ie the menus seem zippier).
* Seems to load faster than previous versions.
* Still can't minimize the download window w/o minimizing the entire Mozilla app.... (what gives?)
* Still having trouble installing JRE 1.3
Overall, 0.8 seems to be faster, and generally better than any of the previous builds.
Gururise
Garden Grove Real Estate
I had a great time using Mozilla 0.7; it has gotten a lot better, and so much better than the original Netscape code they were using. However, I don't think that's the issue anymore.
The real issue is, what will happen to Netscape? They aren't losing the browser war now because of Mozilla. Now it's because of AOL, who makes every stable Mozilla release into a horribly patched, rushed Netscape release with extra annoying commercial features and bundling that none of us want or need.
Also, despite the benefits Mozilla has seen due to Open Source development, I doubt it will do as well without Netscape, as gutted as it is. JWZ said that the benefits gained from opening a project like that is about 30%, which means that 70% of the work has to be done by AOL/Netscape/Time Warner, and if AOL loses this war to Microsoft, we might lose a lot of developers.
Also, it sucks seeing a great team of people turn into a large impersonal entity that no one really likes. As the Open Source community is already developing other browsers, it isn't clear how much work will be put into Mozilla, and how much will be spent reinventing the wheel.
I only hope that a truly impressive, usable browser comes out of all this: one that doesn't annoy me and show me ads, but rather lets me tell it what I want it to do. Being able to set a level of HTML compliance would be nice, as well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I've watched naive users (e.g. my parents) use a browser. When faced with an agonizing animated GIF, giant blink text, or horrible background, they move the mouse to the offending item, and try to turn it off. This is, of course, in keeping with the GUI concept: select the item, then manipulate it, perhaps with a right mouse click. This corresponds deeply with reality: if a mosquito is biting me, I focus on it and take action.
Browser interfaces are often counter-intuitive because the cure is hidden in deep menu items, e.g. edit->prefs->advanced->.... Users rarely find these things, and if they do, don't know what they do. My dad doesn't want to disable all Java apps, he just wants to stop the pain he is experiencing on the page he is currently visiting. To make a browser great, watch your new users very closely.
I have a script that gets the nightly build of Mozilla for me every day, so I've seen it get better and better. It's starting improve and be very usable performance wise. But...lately I've been using Opera v5.0b6 and the more I use it the more I like it. Very fast with few rendering problems. Well worth checking out!
Then why is practically every Slashdot page equipped with one?
Sorta funny to slam one of Slashdot's only revenue streams...
I have to ask what people who use Netscape for mail have been doing now that Mozilla is shaping up. I've used Netscape for my mail client for many years now (only for the facts that it is firstly a decent GUI client, as far as Unix clients go, and that it can display HTML mail), but Mozilla just doesn't cut it for me.
The widgets for lists and trees are terrible in Mozilla (at least on Unix), and it really makes me wish that the Moz folks had decided to stay with Gtk+ for the toolkit, rather than rolling their own for the sake of portability.. I'm not sure they knew what they were getting into with a new toolkit, especially since they'll probably have to deal with the same things that the Pango folks are..
Anyway, back to my initial query -- what are people using instead? There have been a number of clients based on toolkits like Tk (blech) and even straight Athena widgets (triple blech). The nicer-looking clients (IMHO) seem to be all glam and no substance.. What's up with that?
If someone can find me a 3-pane Gtk+ or Gnome GUI client that is stable and that can handle PGP/GPG, I'd be forever grateful.
--
I would suggest watching http://www.mozillazine.org/build_comments/ and getting or not getting builds based on the excellent comments Asa puts up there.
I'm not sure why your text entry widget wasn't working; if you could file a bug report on it (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org) that would be great. The menu bug is a very recent regression and is being worked on.
That said, you are not the only one who wants this functionality. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11459.
The discussion on that bug includes a way to fix it using Protozoilla. This fix is currently being considered for inclusion in the main source tree.
<rant>.
why on earth does mozilla not let me link my <a href="mailto:blah"> to another app? this just seems absolutely stupid!
cause honestly, who would want to use mozilla mail when you could use something like pronto.
</rant>
im refering to the linux version, havent tried any other os's in a few years
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk ?"
stuff
If they could put an option to disable those !"/$£@23$ javascript popup windows without disabling javascript. I mean come on just try this site then wait 5 seconds and count how many windows you have to close! Nuts! ;-)
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We are In an internet world with no borders nor fences, who needs windows and gates...
I think it's really important to keep other options alive.
IE is a great browser, but it lacks some important features. It's hard to control javascript, for example, and you can't turn off animated gifs. I don't think that's accidental. If you let people turn off the ads, the advertisers won't be happy, and as a good multi-national corporate citizen, MS probably won't want to do anything to jeopardize the platform's value to advertisers.
There's no way (at least no easy way) to convert a real video file into something you can edit or recompress. Why? It's a feature that content providers want. To me it's a bug. I can understand Real doing that, and having a proprietary data format comes in handy.
More and more I think we're going to see these large companies deliberately crippling our tools for the benefit of content providers. But that only works with proprietary data formats and protocols. The web is still open.
The big story in advertising is pop-up windows. If Mozilla bills itself as the browser that helps you defeat that annoying ads, a lot of people will respond to it. And a lot of people will put up with annoying little errors as they get worked out, because the pop-up windows are incredibly annoying. MS isn't going to do that. They'll never side with their users over the content providers. That leaves a niche.
As for me, the ability to turn off animated gifs will be enough to make me switch. Those things really bug me.
All of these ads are going to get worse and worse. Mozilla should bill itself as the answer. It is the answer. And we need it.
I think browsers should be more customizable with what they allow the users to do.
For instance, why can't I bind a button to turn off animated gifs, cookies, and JavaScript? Microsoft considered making a similar button in IE, but stopped when people started calling it "The Porn Button". But if that's what users want, they should be able to do it.
The web is becoming overrun with proprietary data formats and protocols, but at least the open ones do get more popular. Notice the popularity of mp3's, Shockwave Flash, DivX-encoded movies, and mpegs. That's because there are at least players out there for everyone, and the tools aren't too hard to find.
Pop-up windows and banners don't necessarily work; web advertising needs a different model that doesn't involve annoying the consumer. Maybe product placement would work somewhat better, or text ads like Google, or little "sponsored by" buttons.
Personally, I use junkbuster to get rid of ads; it's also cross-platform, and cross-browser compatible, and works rather well.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, then it's time to switch to Moz. Quoting the 0.8 release notes:
There are several new hidden prefs (UI will be added eventually) to turn off various annoying features on web pages:
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");e rnal.open","noAccess");
user_pref("capability.policy.popupsites.windowint
user_pref("capability.policy.default.windowintern
user_pref("browser.target_new_blocked", true);
Cheers,
-j.