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MSN's Slate Recommends Firefox over IE
brightertimes writes "That's right folks, Slate (Microsoft's on-line magazine) recently printed an article enitled "Are the Browser Wars Back?
How Mozilla's Firefox trumps Internet Explorer.""
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...he says that on Firefox the fancy popup menus don't appear, and after loading up explorer I see what's missing...the exact same functionality that countless free cross browser AND cross platform javascript/dhtml popup scripts provide (for example, young pups ypSlideoutMenu which is used on the Blender foundations' homepage).
I think it's another case of Microsoft making stuff look crap in other browsers for no good reason.
Haven't tried it on a mac yet, but I'm betting it looks like ass in safari too.
I am NaN
and of Borland.
You're completely right, its part of their strategy.
Greets
fdk
I found this really nifty application called Comparator made by Vansath Dharmaraj -- it's basically a test browser with a split view: the top one is the page rendered in IE, the bottom one is the page rendered using Mozilla (which comes back to say Mozilla-powered browsers such as Firefox).
That, along with Firefox extensions IE View and Web Developer makes coding websites compatible in both IE and Mozilla browsers a hell of a lot easier.
A computer makes it possible to do, in half an hour, tasks which were completely unnecessary to do before.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
:)
Nothing, it's just that you don't go to parties full of geeks with no life
My website
Mozilla was open-sourced in 98, but it was just spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation after AOL/Netscape fired everyone last year.
Yes, Firefox is safe. Or, rather, as safe as it can be reasonably expected to get. Plugins and skins can only be installed by whitelisted servers, and must prompt the user before installation.
There's a difference between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla project. ,1998 that the source code for Netscape Communicator would be free of charge.
The Mozilla Foundation, established in July of 2003, exists to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Mozilla open-source software project.
The Mozilla project begun as when Netscape Communications announced in January 23rd
"Mozilla":
http://www.mozilla.org/mission.html
What is best in life? To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of their women.
This has already been done. The html renderer is available as a dropin replacement for MSHTML. Infact it is possible to make Outlook use gecko instead of MSHTML which I think is pretty funny.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
Erm, Safari's based on the same open-source KHTML engine as Konqueror, is it not?
The renderer is, not the whole browser...
Do you mind actually stating which design flaws those are? (I'm seriously curious, that's all.)
As far as I know, ActiveX ~= XPInstall, and BHOs ~= extensions. And yes, Mozilla extensions can deploy binary components, which means they can do anything BHOs can do anyway, including installing BHOs to mess with Explorer. Not allowing extension installs from being triggered from certain events (such as document load) is still just covering up the problem - I have seen sites that ask you nicely to manually trigger ActiveX installs to help "support" them. It happened to have been one of the nastier ones (3721.com stuff) too.
There is simply no way to make sure that users don't do things that mess up their computer. It's a fight between convenience of letting the users do things they want (such as installing that nifty feature) and inconveniencing the user enough that only things they really want gets installed.
You've been able to get all that crap from third parties for years, way ahead of opera and way ahead of mozilla. Why tabbed browsing is attributed to a mozilla or opera innovation is beyond me.
Thats fair enough but its beside the point.
Konquerer, Opera, Firebird (now Firefox), Mozilla, and many other Mozilla based browsers suffer the burden you speak of yet really are better than IE. All I was trying to say was that the website link referred to in the master blog is deceptive. It tries to make you 'click here to see how Firefox is better than IE' and actually turns out to be a refute of IE's security problem on the basis that hacking IE is a more lucrative business. I was merely trying point this out. I do all this just to try and make people aware of the shortcommings of IE. We are on the same side here. You may remember the laughable security bug a few months back where web hosts could use a simple button to redirect clients a bogie site masquerading as a legitimate one. This was the begininning of the end for me. I demonstratedthis to our Admin using a little php server in work. I showed how with one click it could be possible to gather credit cards with the bug. But more than that I was surprised that such a fundamental bud existed, and is no doubt already responsible for mass credit card fraud.. I really dont know how Ms are getting away with this. Almost Everyone (all though it is changing slowly) still uses IE. We use it in work, against my wishes...
I guess thats where your ActiveX controls comes in. I actually got forced to use Active X control today too, as it was required to participate in closed beta testing..ActiveX has its uses, but it could EASILY be substituted with something better...
The fact that they spent three years integrating anything from "explorer.exe" to the kernel with IE?
I see comments like these from time to time, but have yet to see any evidence of kernel integration of IE Microsoft claim that IE is an integral part of Windows appears to have a slightly different meaning than the interpretation of some people: to me it seems like it's integral in that builtin applications and UI use IE (but it could also purely be a legal-type claim that doesn't reflect coding realities). The new Help and Support Center is a web page, for example, and file system Explorer windows can seamlessly become IE windows. Although it isn't a builtin Windows application, Visual Studio.NET makes heavy use of IE, not only in the documentation reader but in stuff like project creation wizards (look carefully at those dialog box buttons; they're IE web page buttons).
Without IE, some of the common UI that most people expect with Windows would not exist. It isn't impossible to build a Windows kernel without IE because it assuredly doesn't even exist in the kernel in the first place, but it'd be difficult to build the UI without IE.
You might wonder why they use IE as UI. Answer: it's probably simpler than writing raw Win32 UI code, which is just plain ugly. This'll probably change with Longhorn and its extensive use for .NET; no more ugly Win32 UI coding.
No one seems to realise that a very fast and nice concoction of Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox's rendering engine) with a simplistic Win32 UI called K-Meleon is available and provides a very fast and snappy browser in Windows. Since it uses quicklaunch, you don't need to wait for ages to start it, as oppossed to FireFox. I like it anyway :)
Safari is definitely not a closed source browser. It's based on KHTML, from the Konqueror open source browser. Apple gives its changes back as required by the license to the Konqueror group.
Linky...
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm
RegardselFarto
Why no mention of Opera? To my knowledge, it's just as safe as Mozilla and its relatives and in my experience it's easier for a newbie to configure and learn. The only thing I can think of is that MS would rather promote the free project than the commercial competitor, especially seeing how Opera could kick their asses in areas other than the desktop. Or am I missing a point, as usual?
For the most part an attack would be executed at the rendering/scripting level, not the interface. The interface is all that is closed source with Safari.