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Mozilla 1.7 Beta Is Faster And Smaller
ccady writes "Mozilla 1.7 beta is out. Not too many new features, but "Mozilla 1.7 size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 Beta is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster at window open time, has 9% faster pageloading times, and is 5% smaller in binary size." I'll be downloading it."
Go Go Mozilla!
You know where you are? You're in the $PATH, baby. You're gonna get executed!
Wow, I got here first using 1.6. Looks like some people will need 1.7 to get here faster next time
This is why I stopped using Netscape: each version was much larger, much slower, and much less reliable.
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
On the one hand, the dodo. On the other hand, the road-runner.
I hear its got 20% more zilla too!
When was the last time Mozilla had a 90%+ market share.
I use Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird too - they're my favorites. But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
It's an uphill battle, I'm afraid. That said, I'll be downloading this new version ASAP.
The next service pack of Internet Explorer plans to have longer load times, more crashes, and open a few more exploits into a Windows system.
Modzilla keeps getting better all the time.
Mozilla has a small marketshare, practically no one uses it, and finally Long Live IE!
True.
Intelligence also has a small marketshare...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I seriously doubt that a performance improvement 10% is even noticeable to the user. It's great that Mozilla is trying to catch up with fast browse-only alternatives like Safari, Konqueror and also the Gecko-based browsers, but you can't seriously speak of 'dramatic' improvements.
yes, firefox is nothing without the underlying Gecko engine. Shortly firefox will branch on the Mozilla 1.7 branch, it is very likely that Mozilla 1.8-1.9 will have much faster page rendering that Firefox 1.0. See bugzilla for the bugs targetted for 1.8alpha
When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Lynx is 99% faster at startup, 99% faster at window open time, has 50% faster pageloading times, and is 90% smaller in binary size.
In all seriousness, it's easy to improve figures like this just by removing features.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Sad, but true. However, once one tries Mozilla, IE looks old and lame in comparison. I mean, Tabbed browsing is the best. Plus, you don't have VB tied into Mozilla like it is with IE, so, the virus issue is limited somewhat...
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
The fastest speed up is not even 10%. That's about an extra 0.01 tits/second. Want more speedup than that.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm really impressed, and very much appreciative, of the amount of effort the Mozilla team has put forth over the years. I switched to Mozilla some 4 or 5 years ago, and haven't looked back since. The rapidity of development is truly astounding -- thanks girls and guys!
That having been said, I've been dissapointed with the latest iteration of the Mozilla browser. I've found 1.6 to be rather slow (autocomplete lags, for example), bug prone and (if I'm correct) java support is still on the fritz.
I'm liable to switch over to FireFox (or whatever it's called this week), except the Preference Toolbar (on which I'm hooked like a crack addiction) still does not function in this stripped down version of the Moz browser.
Anyway, I look forward to this newest version; really, I just wanted to express, in this post, my thanks for the effort put forth by the whole Moz team.
Regards,
=pararox=
Firefox will get the speed improvements, but since Firefox is already smaller and uses less, it won't be as significant (I think it is 3%?).
They basically rewrote the string implementation and it is "better faster stronger" than before.
So yeah, Firefox 0.9 will get a speed improvement too. (You can also grab a nightly. They have the improvements -- and more bugs.)
P.S. Also new in Mozilla 1.6 is the ability to block websites from hijacking your context menu (right click menu) in the browser. Yay!
Get Firefox!
How can firefox render better, it has the same rendering engine as Mozilla, are you comparing the same Mozilla version as the one which firefox is based on
e.g, Mozilla 1.6-Firefox 0.8
Mozilla 1.5-Firefox 0.7
Remeber firefox will branch soon from the 1.7 release, so far a while, Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) will have rendering fixes/speedups and Firefox won't have it till it returns back to the trunk sometime after 1.0 is released
You're looking at the README for the alpha. Try here instead.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I just love it and tab-browsing but there is still room for improvement:
A resume feature in the download manager would be a nice start...
It now support's SSO HTTP Authentication using GSSAPI Kerberos. Similiar MS's implementation of SPNEGO in IE. See bug 17578 in bugzilla for more information.
This is compatible with both IIS, and mod_authkerb for apache.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/modauthkerb/
Next the plan is to make kerberos support more general so it can be used for other protocol's like IMAP.
How much faster in comparision to other releases? What I want to know is if Mozilla is progressively getting faster, or is this just to compensate for performance regressions when they went from 1.4 - 1.5, etc.
I've been using Mozilla since 0.4 or 0.5, can't quite remember which. It's always been the best, and keeps getting better (tabs anyone?). Every release gets faster, and most get smaller, though not all.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
Seeing as Firefox is getting most of the press these days it's important to realise that the full suite is still moving along nicely. They are addressing criticisms well - a redesign of the cookie manager and speed increases are reflective of the fight against bloat and complexity.
And don't forget, changes to the suite are picked up by Firefox since FF is based off the same source tree. So a lot of work here will affect the mini-moz too....
Free iPods - now in the UK!
IE is not expected to see a major revision until Longhorn ships in 2006-2007. It is rumored that the Longhorn version will have tabbed browsing and some kind of pop-up blocking. This would probably be accomplished via the MSN toolbar, which is similar to the Google toolbar but with that *other* search engine.
But the truth is that IE has so much of the market share that revisions don't matter. People tend to use whatever came with their system, even if it is older and came with IE 5. If Microsoft didn't push the patches, quite a few people would be using these older version even now.
BTW, I'm using Firefox.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Anyone know if memory use has gotten any more efficient? I still find Moz to be a bit high in memory useage. It's not a problem if when it's up and browsing, but if I flipped to another application for awhile, and Moz gets paged out to disk, the delay to switch back to Moz is a little annoying. At least on my relatively slow by today's standards, WinXP box.
On a related note, is it just me, or does Moz get paged out a LOT quicker than many other apps? Is it playing "too" nice somehow?
It's a never ending circle - designers who don't know anything about web standards and have only ever used IE make sites that only work in IE - people try a new browser like Mozilla, and see that their favourite sites are "broken" in the new browser (when really it's because the sites were built to work around the non-compliant IE) - so they go back to IE... That said I've found Firefox does a pretty good job of rendering most pages well.
I code to the standards first and then verify it looks right with both IE and Mozilla (and Opera, and Lynx, and Konquerer). If something doesn't work with both I either remove it, tweak it until it's right, or use something like XSLT to generate the proper HTML for the given browser. It's more effort but it generally results in better code all around. If it's just CSS that is the problem I just have the site choose the desired stylesheet based on the browser used or let the user choose their own stylesheet from a list.
IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases but it's still not on par with Mozilla's support. For most things though it seems good enough to just use standard HTML/CSS without any IEisms. IE still isn't very PNG friendly though which is an ongoing annoyance for me.
Overall though it's not really a problem to just code to the standard. Coding to IE is problematic because it's a standard that changes with each release.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Wrong, W3C sets the standard and their browser is the standard. You do not have to use superstandard methods like activeX to make a working webpage, so don't.
IE is not a standard, and won't be unless Microsoft buys it's way into being a standards organization.
For detailed information aboutMozilla, read all about it in the wikipedia.
Admittedly, I get most of my site's hits from Slashdot, but I find a rather pleasant mix of Gecko, Mozilla, Opera, Apple Webkit, and occasionally someone using IE. Actually, I think Google surfs my site more than anyone. (I did tell "Slurp" to take a flying leap.) Of course it does flop over to nearly 80% IE from time to time, but I've also noticed that IE users are only interested in some file named cmd.exe or root.exe, and I've never offered either of those files from this box. It must be a Microsoft thing...
Personally I'm hooked on using Firefox, but I design my pages to look good in any light. ;-)
No-one is going to notice a 10% improvement. It is a non-factor. You need to double performance to make a noticeable difference. Granted, if they keep on improving by 10% each release, it will eventually be really good, but don't call a 10% improvement "dramatic" (or whatever the original author called it).
Personally, I like Galeon and Firefox. I just need a web-browser.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The latest Galeon is out too. Version 1.3.14. Works with Mozilla 1.4 through 1.7b and trunk. Loads pretty fast too;) For those of you who don't know, galeon is a browser based on mozilla, for gnome-but ofcourse works in other wm's too.
Each firefox release is based on Mozilla. Firefox 0.9 and 1.0 will be based on Mozilla 1.7.
Mozilla will then make Firefox it's primary browser after 1.0, and Thunderbird it's primary mail reader after 1.0. The Mozilla browser you know will still exist as "Mozilla Suite".
After the news is released on Slashdot, it's now 40% slower to download. :D
My blog
Feeding the troll:
You are right. Mozilla's marketshare isn't large. Most Windows users probably don't even know it exists. This doesn't mean they haven't used Mozilla or that Mozilla would be insignificant.
I've seen Mozilla based browsers used in several public web terminals. You will not be able to go to a fair of almost any kind without seeing mozilla used (I've been to quite a few that had little or nothing to do with computers and seen mozilla or a browser using the gecko engine used).
Mozilla will not gain a 95% marketshare today nor tomorrow, but it will gain marketshare. IE will live long, probably a time counted in decades, but Mozilla isn't going away.
I've been following Mozilla closely since milestone 16 and I started using it as my main browser arund version 0.96. Before that it was basically horrible. It was unstable, ate memory like crazy and was too slow for me to use.
Mozilla today is a different beast from the early days:
The most stable (modern) browser I've used (links is the most stable ever)
Best standards support
Getting faster by every release
Getting less resource hungry by every release
The most extendable browser around.
IE will live long but so will Mozilla. Mozilla's marketshare will grow, IE's will probably not. Mozilla is evolving fast, IE is not. Mozilla will always be free, IE might not be. Mozilla will be developed as long as anyone wants to do it or has the money to fund it, IE will not.
All I can say that I hope that the current version of IE lives long and that Microsoft keeps iproving it at the current pace. That will ensure that Mozilla will gain marketshare as it races past IE.
Long Live (the current version of) IE
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I tried Thunderbird for a few days last week... it was so riddled with bugs I found it unusable.
In particular:
- massive problems moving/deleting nested mail folders
- massive problems importing from another mail client (Eudora)
- seems to crash sometimes for no apparent reason
- crazy things happened with the preview pane all the time, like it would disappear at random or make itself really, really tiny and refuse to return to its former, big size
- some options tied exclusively to a particular account - e.g. filters - making the mail-checking process less transparent if you have multiple/many e-mail accounts
- seems to be trying to look a lot like Outlook, which is a shame and unnecessary
I wasn't looking for problems - I WANT to use it, and it has a lot of potential, but right now I'm not gonna use it myself and I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to any non-technical people.
Read Pynchon.
Does anybody know why they stopped putting Talkback into the OS X pre-release versions since 1.6 alpha? I thought that was supposed to help them find crashing bugs. Kind of hard to do when you forget to put it in there in the first place.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
But I can't build for Mozilla. I have to build for IE. My clients use IE, the visitors use IE and that makes it the standard (even though it doesn't follow the "standards").
Ya know, I find that a funny statement.
I manage a software development group, and we have to build for IE too. But we also have to make sure our software works with Mozilla. And for Opera, and Mac, and everything else. We support all "modern" browsers (basicly, verions >=5)
You see, we can't really dictate a browser, and we're not interested in getting locked into one vendor product. We want to remain flexible for the future, and we want to remain reliable when a new browser hits the market.
So we support all browsers.
Happily, this is a very minor expense. In fact, as project manager, I can say with confidence that it costs us well under 1/1000th of our development budget. The only difficulty is to get contractors and new employees to use web standards.
In the end, our maintenance costs are lower, and our user satisfaction is sky high. We never ever get complaints about browser compatibility.... not even once in over 4 years of high-volume operation.
Oh yeah, and our apps look and work damned good too.
So what's the deal? What is wrong with organizations that can't support regular browsers without undo expense and difficulty???
I visited kavlon.org and lost my vision for a few minutes.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mngsuppo rt
That's a plugin for MNG support in Mozilla/Firefox. I would read the comments, though, some seem to warn against installing the plugin for certain builds. I only glanced over it, though; MNG support hasn't really been a priority for me, especially since I didn't even know MNG existed until people complained that they took support for it out of Mozilla.
Back when I designed graphics accelerators for a living we did a whole bunch of work trying to figure out what 'faster' ment - at least from a subjective point of view - turns out if you graph actual performance to subjective performance there's sort of an S curve, on the left it's dog slow and people are just annoyed, on the right it's so fast people don't notice performance is an issue at all and in the middle there's a vaguely exponential region where if every time you make things ten times faster they think it got better, maybe by a subjective factor of 2 .... 10% is in the noise .... unless your UI is in that far left dog-slow region
I actually doubt IE has a 90% market share any more.
I run a site that's for a windows app, so there's a majority of Windows users (I'd guess almost exclusively windows actually) visiting it... you'd expect a very high IE percentage there, but I've currently got (based on ~1.2 million hits):
IE6 60%
Mozilla 11%
IE5 6%
IE5.5 2.3%
Opera7.2 1.7%
Opera7.1 0.3%
The rest is made up of sundry bots and capture scripts.
Looking at those stats... why the $$% do people target IE5 over mozilla??? (I'd love to know why IE5 is 3 times more popular than 5.5, too...)
No, they don't agree. I enjoy a good looking site. Not only do such sites (as you describe) usually look boring, but they tend to lack rich functionality. I want a site that is usable, rich in content, functionality and looks good. You can do that and still support other browsers, but if it's a choice between supporting some random browser or having a great site - then screw the random browser.
For the most part, the web applications I work on don't have complex enough user interface requirements that the differences are that significant, but most of the time I've taken the exact opposite approach.
Essentially, because MSIE butchers the standards, I know from experience that if I develop and test my code using MSIE it often barfs on anything else. If I code on Moz, because it's pretty well standards compliant, 99% of the time it works straight out of the box in IE too.
I'd still develop under Moz if that wasn't true, though. To get a context menu item that'll tell me
* What form fields are around and what values they have
* What images the page contains
* What links the page contains
saves a _lot_ of hassle. Can they please fix the bug, though, that causes a new HTTP request if I want to view the source? Why can't it just use cached HTML?
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
> IE's CSS support has gotten better in recent releases
What recent releases? WinIE hasn't changed for something like 3 years, and as I understand it Microsoft have said they won't do any more changes to their HTML/DOM/CSS support, ever (even in the IE release that will be in Longhorn). One hopes they are bluffing or will change their mind, but the fact remains that basically, as far as WinIE's rendering engine goes, nothing has changed in years and nothing will have for years to come (no non-security-related changes to be shipped in IE before Longhorn, have said Microsoft officials).
Basically, the Any Browser campaign says to write everything to HTML 4.01 "Strict". Use CSS for all layout. Mozilla development fits this very nicely. Check out Eric Meyer's CSS/EDGE. Everything at CSS/Edge fits with the "AnyBrowser" way of doing things, but yet not everything at CSS/Edge will load with Internet Explorer.
In my own less complex pages, I've found that I can make a page load /similarly/ in both, but I can't use HTML "Strict", unless Internet Explorer starts to choke (throwing everything to the left edge when I wanted it centered, etc.).
So, as the above post mentioned, you end up writing to Internet Explorer, but you loose compatability with some "text readers for the blind", lynx, etc.
Ah, but who cares if a blind person can read your web page. Well, maybe your web page isn't just a collection of photos, maybe you have something of interest. Then, you should care.
Bottom line, the user will think that you're web page is broken if it doesn't load in I.E., and you loose readers this way. So, you end up with a web page that is a little more sparse, and less feature rich than you wanted.
That's fine. But I bet it looks like ass. The web - not the Internet as a while - the web - is a visual medium. Sites like www.mezzoblue.com or those featured at www.webstandardsawards.com are accessible and stylish. You can still view them if you want to disable images, CSS and JS, but for those of us in the modern, broadband enabled age, we can have an interesting visual experience and still be entertained by good content.
You're letting your visitors down by not making the effort.
Free iPods - now in the UK!
It would seem that the definition of "dramatic" just got marginalized. Personally I'd think of a 2x performance increase as dramatic. 1.1x is what I'd term "laudable".
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I made the mistake of installing the ActiveX plugin with mozilla at a friends place once. What a great plugin, you can make Mozilla just as susceptible to popups and adware as IE. Sheesh.
I assume these speed changes will be transferred over to Firefox as well, since it uses the Mozilla code base. That will likely make Firefox amazingly fast, since it's already faster than the stock Mozilla.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
As mentioned in this Footnotes article, the new Mozilla supports smb:// browsing through gnome-vfs, and the integration with your GTK2 theme has improved.
Life is offtopic.
I guess that makes it.....
29% Better!
-L
Don't Panic.
The pop-ups BS has nothing to do with ActiveX. By default, IE asks you if you want to download and install an ActiveX plug-in and show you who digitally signed it. It will never install an ActiveX behind your back. The pop-ups are the result of standards-compliant ECMA script code (JavaScript or JScript in IE jargon).
ActiveX can be very useful in IE-based Intranets and in the right hands, such as dowloading a plug-in from a trusted site to scan your computer for viruses, or using the Windows Update service to patch your computer with the latest OI updates.
I've been using IE for six years and I've never had any spyware, spoofware, adware, worms, viruses, etc. These are all the results of ignorant users given too much power by IE. All of these malicious programs are installed by your own action, like willingly opening up an executable attachement, pressing "Yes" to a Gator ActiveX prompt, or opting in to file download services like Kazaa.
People are responsible for their choices. If you're clueless, no program on Earth will protect you.
I ran into one of those yesterday on a sporting goods sales site... wrote them a nastygram quoting their rejection-page back to them, together with my browser identity, then asking whether I should expect the same kind of bullshit from their merchandise that I find in their web site design.
idiot bastards!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I have to say I agree.
But I also understand where MikeFM is comfing from.
The problem is everybody is laboring under the delusion that they're a fricken designer because they can recognize a nice site when they see one. Sometimes its the designer and sometimes its the client and often its both.
There's a huge gulf between being able to see that a site is good and bad and being able to produce a good site oneself. Unfortunately, once a non-pro gets his ego invested in something, he can't be objective anymore. A real pro can walk away from something he thought was great because, (a) he's there to accomplish somethign for the customer, no t just feeding his ego, (b) he knows there's plenty more where that came from and (c) he'll have a chance to try his brilliant design on the next customer.
MikeFM goes to far. There's a big differnce between realizing that most designs suck and thinking design itself sucks. Since I am not a graphic artist, when I have to design a web interface I follow three rules: (1) keep it simple (2)steal from clean designs I admire to the greatest degree compatible with [1] (3) Put as muc of the design into CSS as I can, consistent with my understandign of CSS. It pretty much guarantees acceptable mediocrity, which is pretty good for a non artist.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Camino 0.8 is on the way too.
22 January 2004: We are in the process of driving the Camino 0.8 buglist to zarro boogs. We will be branching off Mozilla 1.7 (now scheduled for April) and will release shortly after. We expect Camino 0.8 to be faster and even more solid than 0.7...
The Mozilla suite and the Firefox, K-meleon, and Camino browsers all use the Gecko engine. The Konqueror and Safari browsers use the KHTML engine. Apparently, the KHTML developers have a more pragmatic policy with respect to implementing MSHTML extensions *cough*document.all*cough* than the more standards-minded Gecko developers.
If a bank site doesn't work properly in anything other than IE, I usually send them an email linking to articles about serious security holes in IE, usually including the SSL certificate one, and tell them they should tune their site to run in all browsers, as some of us are too knowledgeable to want to use something as crappy as IE for online banking.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You do realise that 15% of 1.2 million hits is still 180,000 hits?
15% non IE is obviously not a majority, but it's not insignificant either. Only dealing with IE would piss off 1 in every 7 visitors to your site.
Advanced users are users too!
Generally, stylesheets overall _reduce_ the bandwidth usage of a site, mostly through the elimination of redundant tags.
Be careful when using setInterval() and setTimeout(). Mozilla 1.3 cannot use setTimeout() recursively to create the effect of setInterval() without maxing CPU usage. setInterval() works fine. If you want something to happen at regular intervals, use setInterval() to make all browsers happy.
---
One issue where the browsers are different is capturing key events:
MSIE6 requires:Mozilla1.3 works with:[addchar() is a generic function to handle the processing of each key regardless of the browser.]
[Why did Slashcode add a space within the ECODE tags?]
Luckily both sets of code can be on the same page with the KeyPress event being set correctly without testing for the browser names. I prefer the second method because it allows the code to be contained in a
To be on-topic:
Does Mozilla1.7 allow for the awful event model of MSIE? Will this code still work?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Wait - what sort of person quits Mozilla after firing it up? I usually have at least five Mozilla windows open. The only time I have no Mozilla window open is immediately after a reboot. I suspect that for most users, Mozilla's absolute paging behavior (what happens when you quit it entirely) is a non-issue except how it handles the creation and destruction of additional windows beyond a certain low number.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
I disagree. I've yet to find one person who raves about how "stylish" and "good-looking" a web site is an then points to a website that isn't a pain in the ass to use.
Let's take a look at your mezzoblue.com example:
* Uses inconsistent highlighting -- background rollovers (ugh) on part of the text like the "also available" websites, underline rollovers on other parts like the "Designing with Web Standards" link.
* It uses images for text in its heading. At the moment, I am sitting back fram my computer and leaning on a recliner. My face is about 1.5 to 2 times my normal viewing distance, and I use 1152x864 on a 17" monitor, which is already a high resolution. Normally, I just bump up the text size and have no problem reading a website (as do disabled people). This website's topic entries are unreadable to me, and I had to lean forward plop my face right next to the screen to read the "also available" heading. Heck, that's damned small text even for a lot of glasses-wearing older folks that I know of, with no way to work around it.
* The site uses rollover menus. I don't think I know *anyone* that likes using rollover menus -- I *really* hate it. It doesn't even use your typical old annoying rollover menu -- this has an image background or something. It took ten seconds or so for the image to load, so I had floating white text on a light blue background for a bit. It was pretty unusable.
* Widget functionality is unclear to a viewer. Once again, the analysis I've heard of rollovers holds true -- they're used by designers that have such an unintuitive design that they require the user to wave the mouse around over the interface to figure out how it works. There are rollover menus in the upper top corner. There's no visual indication that these little dinky images are, in fact, rollover menus. It wasn't until I started scanning the page with my mouse cursor that I figured it out.
* Confusingly chosen and similar visual indicators. The mezzoblue.com site uses a diagonally-upward-aiming triangle to indicate a menu (*most* of the time). For starters, this indicator is inconsistent with the common desktop use of a downward-aiming triangle to indicate a popup menu. It is also almost identical to the diagonally-downward-aiming triangle that is used to indicate a section header *on the same site*. Not only that, diagonal triangles most common use in current HCI is for a half-open expandable section of data, a convention from Mac OS. The sections look like they *might* roll up when clicked, but do not in fact do so.
* Dissimilar widgets are visually identical. If this designer *had* to make rollover menus and grokked HCI (a dubious pair of bedfellows to begin with), he'd know that one does not make widgets that operate differently but appear identical to the user. Up at the top, we have three blocks of text that appear the same (upward-diagonal triangle, text). The first two ("about", "weblog") are rollover menus. The third, "contact", is a link. When I started rolling my cursor over them, I sat and waited on this link, assuming that my browser was just slow to pop up the associated menu.
* Text colors poorly chosen for readability. Much of the text/background combinations involve two very similar shades of blue. Most of this is readable to me at my current viewing distance if I increase the size, but I know many people that would *not* be able to comfortably read such text.
Honestly, mezzoblue.com seems an excellent example of why sites should *not* be "stylish" -- when designers use "stylish" as an excuse, they're frequently making websites that are simply poorly built from an interface point of view.
Finally, as I've argued before, a lot of people making "stylish" websites with "extra zazz" are people that are familiar with the conventional way products are sold. Most products need to appear flashy, interesting, and novel just long enough for a person to impulsively choose to buy them. For conventional products, "flash" h
May we never see th
The problem is that the "in theory Flash could be useful" argument is used to justify a huge range of websites that, frankly, are a pain in the ass to use, load slowly, are uncomfortable for users of older computers, and exclude the disabled and users of alternate browsers or people that disable plugins for security reasons.
In my entire life, I have seen *one* website that used Flash in what I could consider a significantly beneficial manner, and I have seen many, many websites in my life. The website was for an MP3 player, and one could try out the interface in an embedded Flash object. The rest of the site did not use Flash. There was no equally effective way to reproduce this functionality without Flash, the functionality was clearly important to the product (the product was partly being sold based on having a good interface), and a user without Flash still had the ability to work with the rest of the website.
On the whole, I have seen so little effective use of Flash, and taking into consideration the significant drawbacks of it, that if someone asked me whether to use Flash on their site, I would feel comfortable simply saying "no". The odds of it being a good idea are so phenomenally low that it's just not worth trying.
May we never see th
Ok, I used/ instal l_flash_player_6_linux.tar.gz
f or more links
http://macromedia.mplug.org/tarball/generic
I think. Works for me with Mozilla 1.7a on Fedora x86.
BTW I also got Flash Click-to-play, which stalls each animation until you click to activate it.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
Check
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html