Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla's Goodger on Firefox's Future
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand Herald has an interview with Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Firefox at the Mozilla foundation. In it he describes how he got started, his reasons for Firefox's existence and what the future may hold for the little browser that could."
In terms of features, I don't see why anyone would NOT use firefox. You could call things like tabs, quick searches and easily accesible plugins "innovative features," but its not really that innovative, if you think about it. Its just obvious. Microsoft's IE is just a way to look at web pages. Period. No customization.
Congrats to the Mozilla folks for thinking out of the box and trying to create something that users wanted.
I always wondered about that... in Firefox .10PR (and in previous version I used) Slashdot's main content area overlaps or runs flush with the left nav. No padding, no margin, whatever. I remember reading articles on A List Apart about redoing Slashdot, which made me wonder why this was still happening.
Is this a problem with Firefox or with Slashdot?
As for Firefox taking the #1 spot, I would love to see that. There are a few things I've had difficulty achieving in Firefox that work in IE, but none of them are necessary (collapsing DIV when display set to none, for example).
One day, my boss will choke on his "we should just design for Microsoft IE and if it doesn't work in your Mozilla then maybe you shouldn't use it." Bastard.
I really think Slashdot updating their HTML would be _much_ harder than what was suggested above. MUUUUUCH harder. I think what was suggested above will happen much sooner.
:)
Slashdot doesn't even need to update to 2001; all they need to do is _correctly_ support any real version of HTML - any one would do; as long as it's valid. I'll hold my breath - I look stunning in blue.
These things are of course a matter of personal preference, but I find that the innovations in Firefox are almost invariably sensible and useful.
All too often software developers add things that seem good to them, but which the end user finds irritating or just confusing. Opera is a good case in point, with lots of gee whiz cool features that I just never got around to using. That has never happened to me with Mozilla or Firefox.
It seems that with every release I'll find some new little feature that suddenly becomes essential, or at least enhances my browsing experience in some nice way, but without detracting from other things.
The latest was the search bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen when searching in the page. How brilliant! After years of search boxes popping up on top of the text that you're reading, someone figured to drop it in a place that wasn't intrusive.
Sure, there are still things that I would like changed - like moving more of the configuration away from the "about:" system, but all in all I just like Firefox and find that its greatest feature is that it doesn't get in my way - it just does the job and lets me concentrate on content.
Three Squirrels
The main reason I was so interested in firefox to begin with (and the same reason I use it today), was that it focused on trimming out the unnecessary stuff from Mozilla. This makes startup/respopnse time much quicker. It used to take +/- 15 seconds to start mozilla, as opposed to +/- 3 seconds for firefox. Granted, I always run on older hardware, but still.
The other contenders for a fast browser (konqueror and opera) don't render pages correctly a lot of the time. Konqueror's KDE daemons make it slower to start up. Opera's banners make it rather annoying to use.
I hate to burst YOUR bubble, but your statement seems to fly in the face of certain hard facts, as underscored by the chronic microsoft ie specific security woes which have buffeted microsoft users for the past few years.
While there's no panacea, and this is no time to relax our security vigilance, there's no question that firefox is a much safer choice of browser than ie - to deny that is just plain silly.
Note to geeks from a PHB in training:
Without knowing the particulars of your boss, this is generally not a good approach to convincing a PHB you want something done.
A suggestion:
Instead of planning "comebacks" for when boss says "no", present your ideas in such a way that he says "yes" the first time. Changing a "no" to a "yes" is a lot harder than extracting a "yes" in the first place.
Write down how many hours a day you spend cleaning spyware off computers (a) then give a half page summary of your proposed solution and the number of hours (b) it would take to install, debug it etc. Be as honest as possible with the time. Show boss that after x=f(a,b) days you will be ahead and have more time to work on projects and thus cut costs (use the word MONEY somewhere) in his department.
Managers are usually goaled on revenue... and thus these are the terms in which you have to express things in order to get that "yes" the first time.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
It has nothing to do with "scaling well", doing a full conversion of a major dynamic site from old HTML and tables to XHTML/CSS is a lot harder than changing one flat page.
Grr. Armchair web developers are so frustrating.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
This has been happening for quite some time. Like years.
:(
Sites (like Yahoo, IGN etc) are already making you step through ad pages before seeing content. Sometimes you can block that too, but sometimes not.
The more we fight against ads, the more annoying and intrusive the ads will become
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I myself know of Adblock - but I choose not to use it. Sites that have ads that are too annoying to use, I just don't use.
I'd rather have sites stay around longer because they are supported by advertising revenue. I don't mind a few ads as a price, and I would mind whatever payment scheme would have to replace them.
But that's just my personal stance. In the larger sense, I think that the populace at large does not care about ads so much that they seek out blocking solutions, or would even go to the effort of using an ad blocker if they could. After all, the US populace is exposed to ads so often we are just about blind to them anyway.
Popups are a differnt matter as they generate constant unpleasant irritation, and people do go to great lengths to eliminate irritations from their lives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's much, much, *much* more likely that you're getting these trojans through a completely different source and just blaming Firefox. You could have some other resident, hidden trojans that are downloading these things; remember that with XP and 2000 (I assume you're using one of them), once you have one trojan or worm, the floodgates are open for more to install themselves. Some will download porn adware, and some will even generate pop-up ads, hoping that you the user will think it's your browser. These trojans could even get through via a different machine on your local network if you have one, or if you have a poorly secured DSL router.