Slashdot Mirror
No Pop-up Blocking in Netscape 7.0
jsled writes "C|Net /News.com article details how the forthcoming Netscape 7.0 will not include the nifty pop-up blocking sported in Mozilla, as AOL depends on pop-up ads for annoy^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing to their "valued" customers. The MozillaZine story and comments have a couple of extra, interesting points of detail: how to easily restore the functionality and how some sites get around the popup blocking."
Update: 08/15 12:45 GMT by J : In related news, Doug Isenberg asks over on GigaLaw:
Are Pop-Up Ads Illegal? The news publishers who say "yes" say that turning off graphics in your web browser should be illegal too.
I like and use Mozilla, but do not use the popup blocking. If a site needs the revenue of popups and I don't value the site enough to tolerate them, I won't go there.
:)
What I worry about is that if too many people block popup, the sites will turn around and block that browser (i.e. Mozilla or modified Netscape 7.0).
Of course, you could always hack Mozilla to pretend to be IE...
Bottom line: Sites need revenue and will fight to get it. Think twice before blocking ads at a site you like.
The parent comment was posted by an AC, and as such probably isn't being read by many people. Since I don't have mod points today, I'll just quote the comment here in its entirety. Don't moderate me up; moderate the parent.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards. The W3C has done a remarkable job of hijacking the web standards process, but it is not clear that W3C micromanagement has actually resulted in technically superior standards, rather than politically advantageous ones.
The W3C (amongst others) is responsible for having created a baroque web of overly complex standards, resulting in ambiguous specifications, bugs in the various implementations, and a stagnant culture where developers spend their time conforming to W3C specs rather than developing new features and doing what _they_ think is important.
I think that comment is a little flamebaity, but essentially correct. I've expressed the opinion on several occasions that standards for web markup become meaningless when the browser with 90% market share (or whatever bignum) doesn't implement them. People who say, "This web site doesn't work in IE because IE is broken," will have to accept the fact that the vast majority of users out there will simply choose to go to other web sites, rather than be told that the most widely used browser is faulty.
So I think the parent poster hit it right on the money: there is absolutely nothing intrinsically good about following W3C standards.
Don't confuse "the web" with "the Internet." Microsoft makes, and in some ways, controls, the most popular web browser. They can introduce new tags or scripting language features that aren't part of the "standards." So what? Those features will have to be defined, obviously, because content providers will have to know what they are to incorporate them in their pages. At that point, anybody is free to implement them.
Not too long ago, Netscape had that power. Remember "blink?" Netscape did what they wanted, and standards could go to hell. And it was good, because it gave us better browsers. (Well, except maybe for "blink.") The world didn't end. The web didn't collapse. None of us became slaves to Netscape. Hell, Netscape's not even around any more, except in name.
So I think you're wrong. There is no danger associated with one company calling the shots in HTML and JavaScript development. That situation has been the status quo in the past, and no harm arose.
As for standards, I say screw 'em. We have all the standards we need: IE is the reference implementation for the HTML protocol, the DOM, and the JavaScript language.
If the Mozilla guys had decided to just implement compatibility with IE instead of trying to take some kind of moral high ground, the Mozilla browser would be popular today, rather than having a number of users so small as to be statistically insignificant.
This, ultimately, is the failure of open source not-for-profit software. Since there's no motivation on the part of developers to create software that users want, they'll choose to create software that they themselves want, rendering it useless to everybody else. In this case, users want web browsers that work perfectly. In this case, "work perfectly" is defined as "renders all pages correctly." If one browser (say, IE) renders a page correctly while another (say, Mozilla) doesn't, then the other browser is at fault. The Mozilla developers' cries of standards mean nothing to anybody except other Mozilla developers.
Microsoft doesn't usually produce very good software. Windows has lots of serious flaws in it, as do Office and their other apps. Even IE is not free of serious faults. But it's vastly superior to Mozilla by the only standard that counts: it works in situations where Mozilla fails.
When Netscape was in more control, they didn't have another agenda to push. It was simply "Use Netscape!" but they didn't care what else you did.
Bullshit. Every company has an agenda: use our products or services instead of our competitors'. That was true of Netscape as well.
For that matter, everybody-- person or company, whichever-- has an agenda. Anybody who claims otherwise merely has a secret agenda.
As for harm... how much PNG do you see on the web? Not much. Could that be partly because IE's support is lacking? If IE doesn't support it right, people won't use it.
You're trying to call the limited use of a graphics file format a harm? That's a stretch. Who cares if the graphics are PNGs or JPEGs or TIFFs or ASCII-art. There's zero harm in your example, except possibly to the licensors of the PNG format, if there were any. There aren't, so... so what?
Mozilla tries to be something different, something BETTER: A standards compliant browser.
Okay, so now we're getting down to brass tacks. You believe compliance with standards is an absolute good, and therefore any browser that complies with standards is prima facie better than any browser that doesn't. I think that's wrong. Browsers, like many things, derive value from utility. Mozilla has no value to me, because I find it to be of no use, due to the fact that it fails to render pages correctly. I don't care about the finger-pointing match. I don't care if the browser is at fault or the web page. Since it doesn't work, Mozilla is of no value.
And I can make fully standards compliant pages that IE can't render correctly. IE is actually quite lacking when you start pushing the boundaries.
You have a browser which is used by (let's just say for argument) virtually everybody. After the browser has already reached almost total market penetration, somebody comes along a develops a standard. The standard calls for browsers to work differently from how the absurdly popular browser does things.
Now, is the browser broken, or is the standard broken?
Standards are valuable, just like everything else, only to the extent that they're useful. If the standard doesn't reflect reality, it should be ignored.
This is true - but the standard *would* reflect reality if it wasn't for a monopoly (which, by the way, are illegal in the US) saying otherwise ;)
Remember, we're talking about browsers here, not operating systems. Microsoft's browser won the market through a hard fight. The first few versions of IE were terrible, but around version 5 it started kicking Netscape's little butt around pretty seriously.
You can't seriously look at IE 5 or 6 and say that their dominance of the market is due only to unfair business practices on the part of Microsoft. Those two versions of IE are the best browsers running, plain and simple.
If the standard is ignored, it doesn't reflect reality. Your point is circular.
No, it isn't. Because one of either the standards or the browsers came first. If the standard retroactively defines what is and what isn't acceptable to be different from what the browsers do, then the standard is useless.
Standards are not being defended by anyone here as an a priori good....
Yes, they are. Perhaps you haven't been following the threads closely enough. That position is precisely what I'm arguing against. Standards are not an a priori good, and browsers that claim compliance with de jure standards while abandoning compatibility with de facto standards are flawed.
Okay, it seems we disagree. I'm going to give you three reasons why I think Mozilla is inferior to MS IE. To keep things fair, I'm comparing IE 6 under Windows 2000 to Mozilla 1 on the same computer. Remember, I'm not talking about Mozilla prereleases here. I'm talking about version 1.0, the currently shipping version of the product.
I'm not trying to throw these particular issues open for debate. I'm just guessing, but I'll bet they've been thoroughly documented elsewhere anyway. Instead, I'd like you to counter with reasons why you think Mozilla is superior. Since we're debating the meaning and value of standards compliance qua standards compliance elsewhere, I think it's best if we just leave that out of this discussion altogether.
1. Mozilla is slow, slow.
Opening a new instance of the browser takes ten to twenty seconds. Opening a new browser window inside the same instance takes three to five seconds. That's inexcusable in my book. Rendering speed is kind of moot if it takes too darned long to even get the window open.
2. The toolbar is "broken."
The Mozilla toolbar lacks a "home" button, and it squeezes the address bar in to the right of the four main (and huge) buttons, leaving it severely truncated and unable to completely display long URLs.
3. Text editing in textarea widgets is inconsistent.
I noticed this one when I tried to use Mozilla to post to Slashdot. The textarea widget seemed fundamentally buggy.
Okay, those are the first three that pop into my head. Now, your turn.