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Firefox Seeks Full Page Ad in New York Times
blakeross writes "Join us over at Spread Firefox as we raise funds for the most ambitious launch campaign in open source history. A portion of each donation will go towards taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times celebrating the release. All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web."
For a webpage with a lot of members who hate advertising, it sure is interesting to see how many stories about advertising we have and how many slashvertisements we get.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Just make sure they don't have the ad opposite a full-page Microsoft one...
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web
That type of hyperbole does nothing to help spread free software. I certainly hope the print-ad doesn't lower itself to these levels.
Trolling is a art,
Just made my donation...#186 according to the receipt. I think that this is going to be a great way to get out the message of browser alternatives. You can put in whatever name you want to be listed. I wonder how many times Bill Gates is going to show up?
My
Disguising it as a news story? Oh, wait... Ooops, never mind...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Maybe we should rename it to Friedefox !!!
Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox
"...all these people use firefox! switch!"
nonetheless, it should be interesting to see...
Hopefully they editors of this full page add will do a better job than the Slashdot editors did.
:)
And hopefully I won't be one of those editors either
How abt other papers?
Why does yahoo do this
Hopefully this will boost the popularity of the browser enough to break the 10% browser share mark proper. Congrats to all the donors - this is great work!
The web is definitely stagnant.
Have you seen the amount of scum you find in most http://www.* links? Scum like that only forms on stagnant water.
And much like cream, it always rises to the top.
number 214
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
A portion of the contribution? Exactly how much of my contribution will go towards the ad? Why not all? Call me cynical, but this sounds like a pretty good way to make some money.
/. about O/S browser needing help.
1. post story on
2. use 10% of donations towards ad.
3. PROFIT!!!
This will prove to be unnecessary. Firefox's market share is growing and will continue to grow due to word of mouth and techs like myself who are taking the time to install it and show people the benefits of it. Anyone who doesnt know what it is already will not be intrigued by an advertisement but will instead ignore it. These are the same people that find nothing wrong with internet explorer and enjoy the "benefits" of malware without having any clue of what information about their browsing it is phoning home to the developers of the software.
If I lived in NY I would definatly go for this. Instead of getting a $15 t-shirt this kind of endorsemnt is more unique, and seems like a great way to send the message that Firefox has arrived.
This ad won't be run until Firefox 1.0 is complete, I hope.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
Firefox is still gaining ground against IE. It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
After all, the W3C standards are effectively recommendations. We're all using something that isn't fully-conformant. So it's really up to the Firefox team to put together something that can properly interpret what's out there rather than to wait for what's out there to become perfect or at least not crash their browser at every sixth page.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/marketing-public
I can't RTFA (/.'d) but for all but the odd website here or there, I find firefox renders as the author intended. I won't say correctly since I believe in most cases, firefox is rendering correctly, just the author/site deesigner wrote for a broken browser (IE).
I can browse slashdot, do my banking, pay my bills, hit a few of the forums sites I frequent, use several different webmail programs, order flowers for my wife, buy plane tickets, book a rental car, etc. etc. all through Firefox. The odd site that breaks when I browser to it, gets ignored, and I move to the next google result.
In this case, the grass roots are doing the marketing...
It's quite ironic, actually incredibly ironic, that a process that is almost entirely driven by word of mouth would aim for promotion using above the line advertising.
Personally, and this is just an opinion, I reckon that money would be better spent on wining and dining journalists and trying to get Firefox on the cover of Times Magazine.
Or, alternatively, try to get Firefox banned for violating obscenity laws. That is usually excellent for publicity.
But a full-page advert? Seems kind of boring.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
This is a great move by Mozilla. Here are a few reasons.. 1. A good majority of people only know of Internet Explorer. They find it easy to use, and don't really have any problems with it. 2. What most of the people don't know is that there are major problems with security, and given that a lot of people do use it for bills online, shopping, etc. 3. The current stream of IE issues have made people more aware that they need to switch something more secure, but they really don't know what to switch to. 4. Wahla! They have Firefox, a credible, easy to use, and most importantly secure web browser that is starting up the browser wars all over again. With the ad, Firefox is going to get much more needed publicity and help changing a lot of things in HTML and the browser wars.
Can you hold off until I can get my name changed to John Hancock?
I read the Chicago Tribune every (95%+) morning. I don't generally miss anything in section 1, but I skim stuff in sections 2 (our Metro-area news).
Frankly, I would not even get close to seeing a full page advert in any section besides 1. Does this project seek to put the page in a leading section or in one of those 'Tempo', 'Sports', 'LifeStyles', or 'Living' sections? If so, what is the projected viewership?
Not to be casting aspersions on people my parent's age, but: Of those reading papers at all, which of them surf commonly, or even know how to download and install a program?
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
Free Mac Mini
I'm not a Microsoft-basher; I use their products productively virtually every day of my life. Excel is my workhorse, Word my constant companion for nearly a decade, PowerPoint my standard for presentations, Visio Professional a powerful tool in my arsenal, and I rely on Outlook to keep track of notes, emails, contacts, tasks, and my calendar.
I have also been using Internet Explorer since about 1996, when it came pre-loaded on a computer I bought. I found it to be adequate, and certainly seemed to be on the cutting edge (anybody remember "push technology"?). But increasingly over time it came to be an annoyance, and may represent the worst of what Microsoft is accused of: arrogance (openly flaunting internet standards and creating new ones on its own), monopolistic aggression (folding IE into Windows, virtually destroying the independent browser market overnight), and outright carelessness (creating a browser with a seemingly endless number of security holes). IE is relatively slow and clunky, has a sub-par user interface, and seems to be an ideal breeding ground for adware, malware, spyware, worms, you name it.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
This could be very important. It's easy to underestimate the importance of marketing and getting out the word. The effect this can have on ordinary people (if you're reading this, your probably aren't one) is something That Very Big Corporation is well aware of.
kudos!
I used to have problems with Firefox and pages not displaying right, but that issue has gone away completely for me with new release. Even the /. crap out has gone away. I think the time is right to show firefox to the world.
Open Source Sushi
Why'd you have to pick a liberal weenie hippy paper like the NYT? Put it in the NY Post!
Free Scotland!
What are you talking about? It's not becoming mainstream. Firefox's has got a thing called extensions. These little 'things' allow you to make your browser as customised and feature-rich as you wish. That's the great thing about Firefox! :)
Will you be a part of the open source legacy?
NY Times Ad CampaignLet's mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.
Here is how it works:
* The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
* The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities, not just the ad itself.
* An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
* Special recognition -- Community Champion -- will be given to people who enlist 10 of their friends in this campaign. (These folks have a shot at having their name in the lower half of the ad.)
* There are also two packages available for businesses to participate.
* If you have a Spread Firefox account, you will receive 100 sfx points per name slot that you purchase or refer.
* The goal: sign up 2500 names!
* More questions? Check the FAQ.
* Ready? Click the newspaper on the upper right to join in!
We (sfx members and Firefox users) will only ever have one Firefox 1.0 launch -- this is it! Let's take the world by storm.
PS: The buzz about this campaign is already starting. Check out the story on eWeek!
PS2: Thanks to everyone who's uploaded images showing how you're spreading the fire. Keep those images coming!
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have not used IE in quite some time for /. so I do not know if the problems I've been having with /. and Firefox problems would also happen with IE. With Firefox, I occasionally get the left table merged with the main table (comments overlap the left table) and an occasion, get a page with no comments but the left and right tables are present. With both of these, a refresh will resolve the issue. Is these issues also noticed with IE users? I have Firefox on many W32 machines and they all exihibit this behavior here. I do not recall my Linux versions of FF having a problem though.
Offtopic I know, I'd post at 0 if I could.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I'm just glad they provided a student price. $30 is a lot more to a poor college student like me than $10 is.
Yay, I mostly love Firefox! What good news is this that hits my eyeballs?
All donors will be listed in the ad, the signatories of a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant web.
Oh... I forgot, this is all part of that 'hackers are good luzers are bad Micro$oft is evil' movement. Eh... I'm not sure I have the energy for that... never mind then...
*opens IE*
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
# How will my donation be used?
Your donation will be used to fund the Firefox 1.0 launch campaign, including the full-page ad. Details about other aspects of the launch campaign will be available as we approach launch date.
They mention some release parties on the front page, so I assume that's where some of the money is also going. I think it would be much more effective if 100% was going to the ad, and not a release party that really doesn't do much to spread the word.
Wow, talk about pessimism.
Every single person I've converted to Firefox from IE has been more than pleased. All the techies I know have already converted, and the newbies appreciate Firefox's clean-cut, easy-to-use interface just as much if not more than IE's. It's also been shown by numerous studies across the web that Firefox/Mozilla has sizable market share now, making it force to drive the web. For example, w3Schools reports 17% for October of this year.
In other words, I already see the public making the change you think isn't happening. I also believe that it's only going to get better from here.
* - replace Internet Explorer with "the internet" for most users.
Free Mac Mini
I've been using Mozilla and later Firefox for quite a while now - I like it - but the bitter partisan political stuff is just a big turn off for many people. If you assault them with all sorts of insults to their PC, their OS, and even the web browser that works at least acceptably well for many of them, they'll probably write it off as some zealous partisan attack.
/.ed right now, and they didn't seem to have the ad up anyways, but I hope it's a bit more subdued than the summary.
The people who hate hate hate MS and/or IE have already moved on. I'm sure they'll cheer the ad, but that's a big waste of money.
SFF's site is
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Actually... the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html
--Coming up with something clever... please wait...
that is read heavy by the business community.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why is a list of names good marketing for Firefox?
I can just see it now...
Firefox browser 1.0 released
Mario "Lightfingers" Frazetti
Dane "the Gimp" Rostenkowski
Michael "Code Monkey" Miller
Peter "Frodo" Fry
etc...
What's the big deal about Firefox? It uses just as much RAM as the Mozilla browser does.
Debian (which I use) has shown that the Mozilla browser, mail, chat & composer can be broken into separate packages. That's what the big deal about FF is supposed to be.
The things that I really like about Mozilla are:
If FF used significantly less RAM than Mozilla, I'd put up with it's deficiencies, though.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Hmmm, one of the main reasons I switched TO Firefox is because IE crashes every time I try to close it. It then pops up its "I've crashed" window, with a click OK to restart IE button. Means closing IE is a multi-stage process for me.
Yes, I have all the latest service packs/updates etc.
An ad for an internet browser in the print edition of a newspaper that has an online counterpart? Hummmn, at least it will look good framed on the wall, I guess...
I know there was that slahdot article recently about malformed HTML crashing browsers, but claiming it crahses every sixth pages is an over exageration of staerring proportions.
I use firefox all the time, and I've not found any actual web page that crashes the 0.9 - 1.0PR versions.
The only page I've found with rendering gliches is Gamespot, that flickers all over the place while loading, but is OK once done. My Slashdot problems have stopped since 1.0PR.
It already can properly render most of the web. Also if a web page is actually broken, there is no way to properly render it. At best you can best guess what maybe it is supposed to be.
Actually, unlike IE, pages render correctly in Firefox, including Slashdot. Just because a site isn't done properly and thus isn't displayed in Firefox as it is IE (which apparently will accept horseshit for HTML), doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Firefox. I understand that this is not exactly what you implied, but it is a common misconception nonetheless.
On the other hand, there are VERY few pages that display weird in Firefox, with Slashdot being the only prominent example that I can come up with. However, many people are still only developing for IE, which is shit, and thus their pages are shit, and look like shit when rendered correctly in Firefox (though this is rare).
The bottom line is that you can't wait for the web to change. You have to make it change. Go download Firefox and at some point when browser usage is no longer 95% IE (and it already is much less on some sites), the web will change.
BS.
I login to citibank.com at least once a month. I click the "Sign on to"->credit cards button.
I login, pay my bill surf, and leave.
I login to usbank constantly, as well as my local credit union. None bicker about the browser.
I think what they really need over at SpreadFirefox is not more donations, but more servers and more bandwidth.
For now, I've got our IT guy's blessing on running FireFox on my computer, but if they find out that it bypasses their fancy card-based security system...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
maybe I'm just such a n00b that I dont know any better, but shouldnt it be /.ed nor ./ed ? I mean, sure, dotslash sounds cool too, but its just not the same...
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try. -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822.3.
Do you mean dr. Spock or mr. Spock?
-- Qu'est-ce que la propriété intellectuelle? It is thought control.
Then switch to another bank. I know that my bank Fleet Boston/Bank of America's website renders and functions just fine in Mozilla, and has ever since I put in a ticket requesting that they fix the one page that had problems when I first signed up. If your bank tells you that you can not use the browser of your choice then tell them you will take your business otherwise. With one million downloads in under 100 hours it's not an insignificant amount of business to turn away.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I know I'm making a big mistake responding to a troll, but he brings up an interesting issue that I have been thinking about recently. Some people consider The New York Times to be left wing. Some people also consider it to be the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that its editorial page has a left-leaning viewpoint.
On the other hand, some people think The Wall Street Journal is right wing. Some people think that it is the golden standard of reporting. There is no question that the editorial page has a right-leaning viewpoint.
Personally, I think that both newspapers are confronted with a problem and deal with it in different ways. I think that both have integrity that is lacking in a lot of news sources. But while they both try to eliminate political views from their articles, they sometimes come down to a tiny binary choice in places - whether to make it slightly left or slightly right. There's no way to get it perfectly in the center. And so the Times errs on the side of liberal, and the Journal errs on the side of conservative. They're both fine reads though.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
"Firefox will not be THE player until the day that people start writing pages that work under Firefox, ignore IE's "quirks""
This simply is not true. There are certainly sites out there that have problems on Firefox, but to say that they are few and far between is an overstatement to me. I almost never find one. And when I do, that is why there is the ieview extension.
Almost all page designs that are coming onto the web now are heavily CSS based, so "the latest and greatest" often works just find on firefox. Also, most page developers never really stopped designing for netscape as well, which saves firefox a great deal of the time.
The one or two times that I have run into a page that does not work on firefox does not even measure next to how much better the browser is for surfing the net.
"...I don't care for Firefox as the rest of the web doesn't really support it and pages don't render correctly...".
...the reason that these pages don't render correctly is that nobody cares about non IE browsers these days. back in 1997ish days we used to test all of our web sites on ie and netscape. i doubt as many poeple do this today.
although i agree with you on this one (i have IE lying around and am FORCED to use it for certain sites/pages), surely this is a chicken and egg...
so if firefox does start gaining momentum and eating into % then one could anticipate better support for it.
That's a really good point you have there. It shouldn't be about bashing someone else's choice, but saying, "here, try this, you might just like it".
Take for example Yahoo mail itself.Although it doesnt do a bad job of it like opera,its not near the perfect rendering of yahoo mail by IE.
As for overlap of text over each other , I have seen it happen over dozens of pages..
It also does a bad job in some sites where forms have to be filled - the form spaces go haywire,wont submit etc...but works well in IE.
Infact one of Firefox's own page had overlapping problems..I dont remember the link,but i had posted that link in one of my earlier comments [ If you can see my entire comment history:"Firefox messes up its own page" is the subject i think ]
For sites I am sure are secure, its better to stick with IE,because the webpage seems to render so prefectly in IE than in FF.You might have noticed this difference in many sites.May be because most sites are developed with IE in mind,but then thats the way it displayed in FF.
Many a time,I have filled forms with all details and hit submit,but wont work.then i switch to IE fill it again , it works flawless.Thats real iritation for me.
And you say " Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox "......
huh
Why does yahoo do this
Seriously, people. Facts are facts.
From http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/:
The Foundation has been incorporated as a California not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Mozilla project continues to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and funds and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source software projects.
[...]
The Mozilla Foundation is a California non-profit corporation exempt from federal income taxation under IRC 501(c)3. Donations are tax deductible.
When will slashdot have standard compliant XHTML/CSS code?
Ah, ok, I was wrong. Still wondering why this "charity" would be more worthwhile than one that say, oh I dunno, feeds hungry people, provides health care for sick people, keeps tabs on our government, etc.? It seems pretty damn frivolous, when I have useful charities asking me for money every day, and doing something productive in my community (rape crisis center, drug rehabilitation halfway house, stopping pet overpopulation, etc.).
I don't respond to AC's.
oh well...site has been slashdotted...
Any serious website will be looking towards standard compliance. This is the only way to ensure pages don't break with all manner of devices and software (including aids for the disabled).
It's amazing how many commerce sites in the past 4 years have suddenly started working with Mozilla. Look at the leaders in the industry, Amazon, Ebay etc.., they all work with pretty much all browsers. Their success is built upon simplicity meaning a maximum web audience.
Talk about facts. My website which is mostly hit from slashdot referrers throughout the day has stats that look like this:
1 12576 38.70% MSIE 6.0
2 12435 38.27% Mozilla/5.0
Now, I realize that browsers can fake this information but let's assume that it's basically correct. Just about any hit that comes from a referrer outside of slashdot is not Firefox/Moz.
Does anybody else have problems with the way firefox renders slashdot? The middle table seems to overlap the sidebar sometimes... I don't know if its just my browser, or if it happens for anyone else. Either way, i find it very ironic if it is that way.
Free Flat Screen
how are you customizing form fields that doesnt work? i customize my form fields with css all the time using the border or background-color properties and it works just fine in mozilla. let me know what you are trying to do, maybe i could help you out.
steal this sig
I hereby volunteer to sign my name huge as hell on that declaration of independence.
stuff |
Well, it looks like the site is slashdotted. But if you still feel like giving away money to a good cause, I'm trying to raise funds to make dracosoftware.com a non-profit (So I don't have to worry about justifying running my hobby the same way I do now), and open-sourcing all my software. Or you could just give me money because I'm cute. Really. Cute like a button, that's me! (Prances around like rudolph) I'm cute! She think's I'm cute! ~D dracolytch@yahoo.com
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Why not USA TODAY? If the purpose of the ad is to spread awareness AND educate-USA today or the Wall Street Journal would be a better choice. Not to get into an argument about the political leanings of the paper, the Times readership tends to be more informed and better educated about this topic.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
If I were to donate, I don't think I'd want the money to go toward a full page ad. That seems to me like it wouldn't have much effect. What might work better is to follow the AOL approach and send out individual CDs with the software on it. That way, Joe Dialup doesn't have to worry about download times for it or anything. Print on the back some of the problems with IE, list the benefits of Firefox, state that Firefox is and always will be completely free, and that installation only takes minutes.
Converting them one a time is sure to work a lot better. Plus, I'm sure some percentage of people will install it believing that they'll now get the internet for free. Although those people will be disappointed that they still have to pay for their internet connection, at that point the software will already be installed, and they've run it at least once to see what happens. If they check an option to "always use this program to connect to the internet", some people may never figure out how to get IE back.
On the downside, for that small percentage of people, Firefox would seem to have the properties of Spyware, but chances are those people are already full to the brim with real spyware, so they've learned to live with it.
For the rest of the population...people will just keep the CDs lying around, using them as a coaster until their curiosity gets the better of them, at which point, they take the leap.
Come to think of it, you might as well throw OpenOffice on there too, along with anything else that will fit...
Stop slashdotting http://www.spreadfirefox.com/, help stop the stagnant web!
my other sig is a 500 page novel
Sounds like a good idea - but putting peoples names on the ad sounds a bit silly. How much room would 2500+ names take up on a page if they are even a slightly legible?
Windows 95 was released with great fanfare, including a commercial featuring the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up (a reference to the Start button). Microsoft's advertising campaign featured stories of people waiting in line outside stores to get a copy, and there were tales of people without computers buying the software on hype alone, not even knowing what Windows was.
As long as its not Stupid
Browsers are out of date because there really isnt anything to do next. xforms is all well and good.. but everyone (or the majority) has to have the support first.
I don't even use Firefox (I'm an Opera user) but I paid because anything that improves the usage of Firefox will help improve standards on the web, which is good for the Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc. users out there!
* Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
* Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
* Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
* Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
* The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing. The way I have IE configured it already blocks popups (Google Toolbar) and Ads (Admuncher or custom hosts file.) But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE. But what I do is just have multiple instances of IE open on the taskbar. Who cares when you have a gig of RAM? And I'm sure IE7 will add tabs.
Chess_the_cat. Banned. Again.
As of last time I tried to check out the site, the spreading has stopped, i.e. Request timed out
Ahem! That is a very incorrect link. If you want to see the REAL google cache go here
Mods: DO NOT mod me up! Providing a link to a cache is not insightful or informative, it is merely helpful.
They will need another fund raising campaign to pay to resurrect their webserver and database from the ashes.
[alk]
They'll switch or they'll vomit. Either way I'm sleeping easy tonight!
Since we all think he's the most evil thing since Sauron ruled the Middle Earth, we all do understand what a bad idea it is to take out a full page ad to tell Microsoft, by name, who their enemies are, right?
Why are you spending your time reading Slashdot, then? You should be out busting your ass for Habitat for Humanity, canvassing for all those charities you listed, volunteering at a soup kitchen, and clothing the naked.
... wait, you're willing to fritter away your time reading technology news and chatter? Time ~= money. You've demonstrated your willingness to contribute your time to something that isn't saving the world or neutering the un-neutered - how is contributing a few bucks any different?
Seriously. Drop what you're doing, now.
How dare you. (now I can't get to my account and rate pictures, like the one that I took and is posted (one student at a time))
If you are considering donating to this cause and haven't yet given money to the good people at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, you could probably use a good priority realignment.
--
It's called MARKETING. There isn't really some overexcited guy screaming as he types on his keyboard, it's just marketing, it's what everybody does. Like the stupid MSN butterfly commercials, there isn't somebody out thier with a butterfly suit harrassing ppl. You don't honestly beleive the ridiculous things you say, troll.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
That's new then, becuase 3 months ago I got an error. That's actually why I installed the user agent switcher.
Free Mac Mini
Everyone knows how stagnant and monopolized the web has been for the last 10 years or so.
/.?
In other news:
Linux has been a stagnant and closed source operating system.
How come such obvious crap makes it to the frontpage of
You're right, the circulation data is out there.
1.1million people per day is quite a lot, but what you must remember is that it is not just the advert but the associated press about the advert that will make the news as well. I imagine that people like the BBC, new.com will pick up on the advert and run stories about how it was funded. This will vastly increase the reach of the advert.
I can't get to any Yahoo pages with Firefox. This is really annoying to me, and I haven't been able to find any other indication of this on the web and I don't know what to do to it.
It's really bad though, I can't get to www.yahoo.com, mail.yahoo.com, or even any of the many yahoo stores. My boss has the same problem with Firefox, too. We're both using 1.0PR and we've also tried it Mozilla. I also have this problem at home.
But like I said before, I haven't seen anybody else who's had this problem which is the weirdest part to me.
Has anybody else had this problem? What did you do about it?
I fail to see what's wrong with a "stagnant browser"?
Now viruses, buffer overflows, bad security design, ok, IE is guilty as charged of those. But stagnant? Here I was thinking that's a damn good thing.
It reeks of the old dot-com thinking that surfing the web should be "an experience", or other such bullshit. Except while everyone wanted to _offer_ some unique experience, but noone wanted to _have_ it. Even the very same PHBs that preached about how their site will be an unique experience, you never heard them say "I visit this other site daily for the unique flashing hard-to-navigate experience."
Noone really wants a web page to be a unique life-changing experience, and noone really wants a browser that is more than a window into the web.
And in that picture, you really don't need more than the current browsers offer. They already do their job just fine, and the plethora of sites are doing a fine job with those browser features already. And whatever job they don't do directly, there are plugins for that. Time to move on already.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Hmm, I've been accessing citicard's online account managment for at least a year, most likely longer...
The web was a declaration of independence from a monopolized and stagnant print media.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Better idea: get a stoned chick to ask people to "switch"... that'll appeal to more people ;-)
I have come across quite a few financial sites that have issues with FF. Luckily, my credit union and the integrated web bill pay functionality works great with FF. It even works with Lynx from a console if I select the frame links provided (easy slection as there are only a few frames on the site).
There is a FF plugin that provides a right click on link option to open the link with IE, it is IE View. You can still use FF for 99% of your browsing and have an easy method of opening links with IE.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
The percentage of all web sites that are designed for Internet Explorer's bugs is tiny and shrinking. Serious companies that depend on their websites for business (banks, Amazon, online stockbrokers) got the message long ago; I haven't found a website that I need that I can't use with Mozilla or Firefox, in quite a long time.
Cutting-edge web designers, like Eric Meyer, have been leading the way to standards-based pages for years.
If they're gonna put a bright red target on their back (full page ad in NYT, then they'd better do this right... I can see it now: full page ad bragging about how secure firefox is and then some hacker or malware group figures out how to hijack or hack firefox... MS would pounce on this.
Moral: Do it right!!!
Firefox will only get a single shot with most users. If they download Firefox and have any problems with it at all they will go back to IE and never consider Firefox again.
That's correct, but if we don't try to change that, it'll remain like that forever. If more people are aware of Firefox and actually using it for their daily webbrowising experience, it'll lead to more open-standards complient pages and more awareness of what open-standards mean: no single vendor is able to lock you into their proprietary tools.
It may be better to wait a little longer and let Firefox muture a bit more before trying to convert the general masses with this type of advertising campaign.
Firefox won't ever "muture" to the point of supporting the old IE proprietary "standards of on e vendor alone", so it won't ever handle old pages designed specifically for IE quite right.
So please, don't come with this "let's wait and see" while Microsoft tries to lock the web with XAML and other sickness...
The time is now to change that. We have a kick-ass modern, slick web browser which is open-standards compliant and comes shock-full of great usability appliances and is also secretely comes with a fine smart-client technology which futurely will see much better use: XUL GUIs.
I don't feel like it...
Slashdot doesn't render correctly in Firefox? I don't see anything wrong with it.
You could say that about all software, or anything, really. Of course, you would be wrong.
mod parent down pls, it's clearly abuse!
Donation page here: mozillastore
xabi
Check populicio.us
I'm using firefox to block "get firefox" banners!
Hah! My bank's website looks fine in FF, IE, Konq and even Lynx. And I wrote them a very nice letter telling them that they should appreciate their IT staff.
Yes, clearly you're right since I use Firefox with it all the time.
I disagree...I think that preople sub consiously like to be told what is the best...they don't have the drive or ambition to go figure it out for themselves.
IMHO
what?
In the 1-point type that so many of my spam e-mails contain.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
thanks for modding it down folks... keep it on topic!
For all the effort slashdotters do to soread firefox , will Rob Malda - Cmdrtaco,help spread too?
Can slashdot lend...
Slashdot recommends Firefox
to the ad?
Queer enough,even slashdot doesnt render properly in FF.
Does any site in this world have
" Best Viewed in firefox 1.0 & Above " tag?
Does even mozilla.org/firefox have that?
If not let them atleast put it up b4 going to advert.
Why does yahoo do this
Wrong word, use hiperal 'HIP - er - al'
It's a combination of 'hippy' and 'liberal'. I made it up myself. Here's the definition:
Hiperal - "A person of either gender who does not shave, hugs trees and believes capitalism in general is a bad thing and that terrorists are freedom fighters."
I've moved several technophobes from IE to firefox, and every single one has been pleased and impressed. My lady friend has even commented on her having less problems pulling up sites that had once been a headache for her to deal with (her bank and various ohter sites). Thumbs up all 'round.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
the point is it's a little inaccurate for one person to say how the majority of websites do and don't work
Me neither. You can remove the FF search bar and use the URL bar, but not like in Mozilla. I believe decides whether the URL is valid and then searches or not depending on that. It is not as nice (or obvious) as the way Mozilla does it.
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
Average Joe isn't going to install anything but Internet Explorer unless his "computer expert" friend tells him it's shit. Hell, as you say, he probably doesn't even know what Internet Explorer is.
The advert should be in computer magazines frequented by "power users" and/or windows administrators. Actually, this is also the market that the Linux distributions should be pointing at, there's no point trying to sell or even give Linux to end users, they don't understand what it does.
Deleted
Is this firefox's problem or slashdot's?
I wouldn't say that the web is totally stagnant, but in certain areas it certainly has been stagnant. There are a lot of tremendous things that we could do with CSS, except that Internet Explorer hasn't been upgraded in 4 years so there's no point to using those features since 97% of the market can't use them. If Firefox had 60% market share, I have no doubt we'd see CSS 3 move along much more quickly. I dream at night of CSS columns support...
Yeah, say it's better. But don't go into some webpolitical diatribe about declarations of independence from stagnant monopomonkeys or what-have-you...
just say, "Firefox. Safer, Faster, Free. Better than IE." except without the cheesy rhyme.
To wich I say "WTF"? I can't see anything different re: the fonts.Can you?
As spreadfirefox.com is dogged by the slashdotting you may want to go direct to the donation page that explains more and allows you to sign up. Basically it's $30 per name you'd like to appear on the advert. I donated $300 (the maximum personal donation) you don't need to enter more names than you actually need.
if there was only an easy way to turn off that damn tabbed browsing feature in Firefox.
There is. I'm not sure why you'd want to use it (I personally can't live without tabs, and even those who don't like them could just avoid opening any), but TabKiller is there for anyone who wants it.
Get a full page in in the Wall Street Journal instead.
Do you have ESP?
On the day the ad hits, they'd better be damn sure they've got a set-up that can take what may be a bit more potent than a slashdotting to handle the downloads. During the .com era, I had a very good friend who worked at a Superbowl advertiser. About 5 seconds after their ad ran, their site was borked.
Firefox as an app is ready, IMO (I don't use IE anymore and don't have to dick around) - just make sure the infrastructure is ready, too.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Now, my work's webmail (iPlanet..how ironic) has issues w/the send button, but other than that I don't have problems.
My online banking with bankone works fine, as do all of my other financial sites. I even have paid all my bills for phones and other places w/firefox just fine.
Slashdot does render a bit off sometimes on the left side, but it is all I've really noticed.
Mozilla would get further by paying the Dells of the world to put Firefox on their PCs as the default browser.
Speak truth to power.
Some of my online banking or commerce type sites would bitch about non-IE, but I haven't run into that lately either. Every once and a while with mozilla the text may overflow from a table cell or something, but nothing huge.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
So I am not the only one that gets all kinds of display errors in FireFox here on Slashdot? I figured as much.
I don't know what it is, the style sheets or whatever they're using now. But I would say more than 25% of the time I have to hit refresh to get the stories to display correctly. Otherwise, they are often displayed on top of pictures, or not at all. A simple refresh and everything is ok, but that's really annoying.
I don't have these same problems in IE, whatever the reason may be.
To me "take back the web" means preventing seizures of free-speech hard drives. There is still Mosaic and Lynx, after all, right?
I have been a fan of Firefox since before 0.1 and just bought $80 of stuff from the Mozilla Store, but I do not like the way the Mozilla Foundation is going.
5 6302&action=view> by the powers that be is that Firefox 1.0 be distrubuted under what they call an "end user license agreement" that disallows modification or distribution, and that restricts what you can use Firefox for--similar to the terms of Microsoft's software. If this happens, I will not be using Firefox in the future. It might even be argued that developers of Mozilla's software should have taken head of warnings about the NPL and MPL by FSF et al. This is an example of why copyleft is superior to less-restrictive licenses (especially ones that put less restrictions on certain organisations as special cases).
Personally, I think if they better integrated themselves with the FOSS community and started using traditional FOSS methods (as well as enocuranging the FOSS community to spread the word), this would help their marketing a lot better than an ad in the NYT. I do not object to the ad of itself--it may be a good idea--but it is an example of the way MF are thinking--specifically thinking ("monopoly"..."stagnant"...) about abusing their power over what is a brilliant piece of software.
>>in open source history<< (from story)
The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source? My real objection is the attempts of people at MF to make Firefox neither (i.e.: proprietary). The whole thing about making the name and artwork proprietary a while back was not so bad (although it certainly led people to question MF's morality), as it was easy to remove references to "Firefox" or "Mozilla" and all the relevant artwork (but it still means that official builds are not free and do not follow DFSG).
The latest proposal <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=1
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Looks like we have some trolls from MS here.
FF may not render everything correctly, because those pages were written in broken code (read 'for IE'). But for me, the preview release have solved most of the problems, and I guess the 1.0 release will definitely solve most of the rest. I wouldn't care for the left-overs, then.
Personally, I do care for FF, just as I care for freedom, choice and freedom again.
First Donation!
I think... their site said 0 names so far when I donated. I can't get back in to check now!
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Bitter partisan political stuff??
I think the ad in the New York Times is to recruit new users, not new developers. Users likely won't read the discussion boards and mailing lists. They aren't going to start reading Slashdot just because they switched to Firefox.
They should be blissfully happy running Firefox, as I am, without knowing about the problems in the developer community.
have you trying upgrading the java VM? it worked for me.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
and they'll publish it for free...
Ok, first off, the notion that the underdog that actually complies with standards is somehow the badguy is completely misguided. It's IE that doesn't conform to the standards, and contrary to many MS'ers, the standards are not measured by who's winning the marketshare battle.
Secondly, install Firefox and use it exclusively on a fresh, patched XP box and then come back and tell me about how the Mozilla team needs to learn more about Spyware.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
That way, when the user sees a broken page, he can (correctly) blame his troubles on MS... ;-)
Cheers, Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
Slashdot doesn't render correctly in Firefox? I don't see anything wrong with it.
Mozilla has the same problem, and usually a reload or two will usually straighten things out. I've seen a few people mention it and so have I, but we usually get modded down as offtopic B-)
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
im Yet to have a page not work in firefox i wont say 100% of the web supports it as that's unlikley, but i have had the same amount of rendering problems with IE as i have had with Firefox i.e. None. and i have certainley had more spyware problems with IE than firefox.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Then everyone will KNOW about Slashdot and its contents including Firefox and Cowboys Neal.
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
I use both Firefox and IE. I haven't noticed Firefox crash more than IE.
What's more, a Firefox crash is a non-event, as the SessionSaver extension restores all my tabs on reload to the parts of the respective pages I was looking at.
Publicise the right things, and the switch is a no-brainer.
Information wants to be beer.
Let me get this straight. Some users might not choose Firefox because they have an awkward MS keyboard?
.0001% of all broswer users? Talk about a non-issue.
What's that like?
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
Bullshit does it, save a page to your computer and upload it to http://validator.w3.org and see how well it complys to the HTML 3.2 spec.
There's mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies within this bastard's carnival, this vicious cabaret.
Here is their page:
Help get Firefox full-page ad in The New York Times!
Please bear with us while we weather a Slashdotting!
Let's mark the launch of Firefox 1.0 with a community marketing campaign that will take the buzz around Firefox to the next level: the first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community.
Here is how it works:
* The full-page ad will include the names of everyone who supports the campaign along with a message about the benefits/features of Firefox.
* The campaign will act as a fundraiser to support all Firefox 1.0 launch activities, not just the ad itself.
* An individual contribution of $30 will get your name included in the ad ($10 student rate).
* Special recognition -- Community Champion -- will be given to people who enlist 10 of their friends in this campaign. (These folks have a shot at having their name in the lower half of the ad.)
* There are also two packages available for businesses to participate.
* If you have a Spread Firefox account, you will receive 100 sfx points per name slot that you purchase or refer.
* The goal: sign up 2500 names!
* More questions? Check the FAQ.
* Ready? Click the newspaper on the upper right to join in!
We (sfx members and Firefox users) will only ever have one Firefox 1.0 launch -- this is it! Let's take the world by storm.
PS: The buzz about this campaign is already starting. Check out the story on eWeek!
I do have problems from time to time with Slashdot. The problem I see is with aligning the columns. The center column will start somewhere in the left column. A few reloads does seem to fix it.
I'm not so sure about that...
File: index.html
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 106
No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8
.
[snip]
.
This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!
Ads like this don't come cheap. Is the New York Times giving them any kind of break?
Sounds like the cash could be better spent.
=1000101
Have you upgraded FF to 1.0PR? There were some reports a while ago that the
Slashdot problems with FF were correct in that release.
If you are using the most recent FF, please check with bugzilla to make sure
that the problem has been reported.
*sigh* back to work...
Did you try with the .net stuff? I don't know if it works with that.
FireFox works fine and renders pages almost perfectly. I've used it since .5 and have only run into less and less problems the longer I use it. And when I run into a page that doesn't render correctly I just CTRL+U and it pops up the source and runs W3C's Tidy program thanks to the Html Validator extension, and it tells me right away if the are errors in the code. If so, e-mail the webmaster and ignore the site till they learn how to properly make a web page.
Hmmm. I've found that while Firefox needs a bit of coaxing to render slashdot.org, Mozilla works perfectly.
Short version: There is a bug (217527) in Firefox. There is a fix, but it exposes a worse bug (246382), so the fix won't be checked included in 1.0.
The upside is that setting Slashdot to light mode means I don't have to see the horrible new color schemes :-\
Yes, you could complain that you're giving to a for-profit organisation. But you'd be wrong.
the layman's guide to computer science
I've tried firefox several times, it's just rather crude and doesn't work nearly as nice as the mozilla suite. I just don't see what the big fuss is about.
The coloum overlap bug is being worked on, and I think they have it fixed for the next release.
see this Bugzilla page.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Wow I never noticed that before. Maybe its a space saving technique... efficient web design. ;) Is it possible that Firefox does it correctly and Internet Explorer just does it wrong, and it overlaps because it was designed for IE?
I downloaded the latest Firefox version for OS X but it just doesn't cut it for me. I use Safari and I love the minimalist interface. Even the way Tabs are presented in Safari is perfectly thought out. Firefox is slowing gaining ground in the interface department but it's still too 1997. It has a few extra features but I don't have a pressing need for any of them. I also don't see any speed advantages. I wish them luck against IE for Windows world, but Safari already won that battle on OS X.
Dear Sean,
As with most IT folk, we spend a great deal of time reading slashdot. Thank you for pointing out the FireFox security compromise. And consider your blessing revoked.
Regards,
DoD IT guy
Apart from Slashdot, I can't find a page that doesn't render just fine in Firefox
Slashdot needs an "Ironic" moderation option.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Yeah, yeah, yeah. citibank.com may work in Firefox, but citi-bank.com requires IE.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
A List Apart had a story where they redesigned Slashdot to make it CSS-based (yes, it still looked the same afterwards).
Changing every single page on the site to CSS takes a lot of work
Not true. If you check out Slashcode you will see that there aren't that many templates.
Martin May
Open source means bug free
That's the funniest thing I've ever heard.
The
I'm sorry but a browser holy war is not suffecient requirement to change one's bank. If your financial institution is so mediocre that you'd go somewhere else JUSt because its webpage is IE only, chances are you could/should find a better one anyway.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
$30 to get your name in the paper.
And most of the ad just be a list of names, which will consume most of the space best used to plug Firefox itself.
A better donation strategy would be:
$100 for your name to be added, limit of N names
$anything if you just want to chip in and help out.
This allows those who don't have $30 to spend to contribute (I'd love to contribute a couple of bucks if it were a well-designed advertisement), while giving the big donaters a reward for their donation without making the ad nothing more than a list of names.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Seriously, the web browser you use is practically a religion now. "Spread the good word about Firefox, and save the souls of those IEites"
And since when does "many choices of web browsers" mean "monopolized"?
Praise Opera, without which we are naught.
Your grandma won't change from IE for the same reason that my dad keeps using that stupid Compuserve browser. You have to get them going with it from the outset, or present them with conclusive preoof that Firefox is better along with a totally bombproof means of getting it installed.
What's the real objective that we're trying to achieve? If you can't afford to repeat, repeat, repeat, then there are probably many more productive things you can do with the money.
That apart, I'm about to send out A2-sized Red Hat configuration deskpads to IT resellers this side of the pond, and have offered free space to put something related to Mozilla on it (given it is part of every Red Hat distribution). So far, no-one can give me anything I can use on it :-(
I'd be delighted to put any Mozilla ad on it if someone could rustle one up - or point me at one I can use.
Ian W.
http://www.express.uncc.edu
It htrows a browser alert, and then lets you continue. Sometimes it logs in just fine, but alot of the javascript won't work properly. Then again, that site craps out on IE as well during heavy loads (registration season) and in general is a fairly shitty portal system.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Put together a retail version for Win/Mac that can be sold in the stores next to the popup/spyware tools. If you ever go into a BestCircuitDepotUSA, there is almost always someone in those aisles. A well designed informative box could do wonders. You would'nt believe some of the junkware that gets bought because people are desperate to free themselves of the popup/spyware scourge.
Points to hit on...
Popups can be controlled.
Plugins can be easily monitored and deactivated
Email viruses are much less likely to cause trouble.
People pay $100+ to try solve those problems, and they don't understand that most of those tools are themselves spyware.
My 0.02
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I'd have to agree with the grandparent poster. I haven't had any problems for years with any of the Mozilla/Firefox browsers when accessing Citi online banking and Citi Cards bill management. I use Firefox exclusively for any online financial manangement and have had no problems so far.
If the cost is even half that, at $30 to get your name on the page, thats 1,667 names they're going to have to cram into the advert. And if only a portion of each donation goes towards the cost of the Ad, there'll be even more names. There'll be no space left for the message!
Someone has not thought this through at all.
446 for me. This was just over an hour after the Slashdot story was put up.
Kind of surprised there are so few putting their money where their mouth is.
Mozilla at least had the "preload to ram" option to help launch times.
FF has no such thing, and since I switched my parents to it, they usually launch 15 or so copies, clicking away waiting for the window to appear. I talked to them about this behavior but they just don't care. Ah well.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Isn't this quite a narrow advertising effort - for a start, do the dead-tree ads appear on the NYT website (unlikely) and also, isn't this limited to only people who buy the dead-tree NYT (yes, I know that's not just New Yorkers)? It seems quite a US-centric advertising effort - who outside the US would bother contributing to it?
Then you have some setup that isn't default. I just tried the exact same thing and it doesn't work. No matter what text size I try on Firefox it doesn't look the same as the IE side.
Same here (on Linux). You might want to use ctrl+scroll, it is faster than refresh.
Still wondering why this "charity" would be more worthwhile than one that say, oh I dunno, feeds hungry people, provides health care for sick people, keeps tabs on our government, etc.?
:)
It's not.
Donate to both.
Problem solved.
The enemies of Democracy are
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organisation and therefore all money made has to go to furthering the foundation
Or paying the executives. There's no reason a "non-profit" can't pay it's CEO $1,000,000/year, and still not show a profit.
I don't respond to AC's.
Firefox 0.6 you could have maybe made this statement. I haven't had any issues after 0.8 release. I was so impressed with 1.0PR, I e-mailed all my friends that its out and its awsome. Even the non-techies friends are loving it. I personally don't think firefox needs an ad in the New York Times. Word of mouth is the best advertising there is. And Firefox has a real good buzz going.
I use firefox at home and at work and i rarely bump into any problems. Yahoo launchcast is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that didn't work correctly for me recently. Was even surprised when one of our vendors are using firefox. Web Development team cringes at having to support a new browser, but so far they everything works perfectly.
The public IS changing.
There's no place like ~/
And I thought geeks only dreamed about pr0n?? I do... thru firefox at all time! Safer sex!
Uhh, pages that render poorly in Firefox are more likely due to poor coding on the page rather than the browser. Every instance of poor rendering that I've seen has been due to someone coding a page to work specifically with IE (asp, etc). If IE was w3c compliant, and developers wrote compliant code, you would see most of that garbage disappear.
IE development is dead, anyway. You can wait all you want.
I've used the CitiCards site for years with no problem in the Mozilla Suite. (I don't know if it works in Firefox, since I don't use that.)
--Dan
Web Tips
Okay, well, Firefox is better than IE already (for starters, I'm using Firefox right now but somehow IE just doesn't work on my Mandrake Linux system), but three hours ago we learn of Firefox crapping out on bogus HTML code where MS IE was demonstrably more robust.
I would like to see these errors fixed in Firefox before it is launched (as v1.0) and before the NYTimes ad, and not only because we want Firefox to be ready to make a good first impression. Fixing these errors also shows me that the Mozilla Dev team is willing to take a realistic view of how good their product is, acknowledge problems, and fix it. Until they do that, I'm not prepared to spend money promoting the product.
I recognize that fixing these HTML parsing errors will take an ungodly amount of time. It will probably mean pushing the release date into December or 2005. But if they don't, MozDev (I mean the Mozilla Development Team) would then be acting like a large corporation: plan the budget two years ahead of time, plan the schedule one year ahead of time, and stick to it no matter what happens "or else senior management will have our heads!" Well, one advantage of non-corporate F/OSS is the agility in revising schedules and the large clout of the technical staff rather than marketing.
Please, MozDev, recognize the problem: Firefox crashes, and MS IE doesn't. Fix it. You are the shining example of F/OSS, the #1 application usable on Windows and F/OSS OS's alike. Don't let the hype and the need to "save face" push you into launching Firefox before it's ready. Microsoft pushed back Longhorn; you can push back FF v1.0.
And lest I sound like an ingrate, Firefox has been an absolutely astounding piece of software that is key to refuting Microsoft's claim that "F/OSS doesn't work". It's exactly for this reason that I don't want it all ruined because Mozilla puts out a full-page ad before it robustly parses improper HTML.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I have managed to get many of my friends to move over, EXCEPT for my fiance.. who still uses AOL. Her sister (a CS Grad) has moved ages ago though!
Have a nice day!
i always feel better when i see a splash screen. if FF had this, then people would not be tempted to re-click.
I just commented on that. In fact all of you should.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
* Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
:)
There are a host of User Interface people that would count this as a plus.
* Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
Yeah, because it is so much nicer to have BonzaiBuddy install itself and not require a restart.
* The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
Disable the talkback agent. Problem solved.
- Tony
Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
:P To customize form fields, add "-moz-appearance: none !important;" to the field's style, and then add style accordingly.
:P
Oh no custom scrollbars! The world is ending!
Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Not anymore. Having upgraded from 0.9.3 to 0.10, it automatically updated extensions. Some didn't have equivalents right away, but soon did later. This won't be a problem anymore, as they aren't going to change the architecture anytime soon.
Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
And IE is any different?
Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Um. Troll alert. Admuncher is a system level ad filter. It is browser/program agnostic.
The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my tastes.
What are you really trying to say?
The only reason I switched in the first place was tabbed browsing.
I doubt it. You didn't switch to simply try it out, like 99.9% who use/used firefox?
But you can get SlimBrowser or Avant Browser now and they'll add tabbed functionality to IE.
And, as everyone conveniently forgets to mention about these IE knockoffs, they come with their own security vulnerabilities along with all of IE's.
And I'm sure IE7 will add tabs.
Three cheers for vaporware!
Help get Firefox full-page ad in The New York Times!
Please bear with us while we weather a Slashdotting!
If they can't handle a Slashdotting, how are they going to deal with a New-York Times-ing?The latest proposal by the powers that be is that Firefox 1.0 be distrubuted under what they call an "end user license agreement" that disallows modification or distribution, and that restricts what you can use Firefox for--similar to the terms of Microsoft's software. If this happens, I will not be using Firefox in the future.
I personally think that the same thing that happened to XFree will probably happen to Firefox, assuming they go that route. I'm not sure if its possible, considering I havent read the licensing around the Mozilla Organization, but it wouldnt surprise me to see a fork of the last possible version the minute they adopt more restrictive licensing.
.
"Practically" a religion? Just thank Marc that you're not being proselytized by the Church of Emacs.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
What if the names are the message? Like if they make a Firefox logo by coloring the names (in small print) the right colors, or something like that. You can be creative about it and still make it fit.
Oh, by full page, do they mean a full spread of left, right, top and bottom (like a whole sheet) or just one side of that?
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
* Firefox can't render custom scrollbars or formfields
Show me the part of the css/html spec that defines this. I can show you the part of the faq that says its downright WRONG to do it.
* Having to ditch extensions entirely everytime there's an upgrade
Didn't happen when I switched from 0.9 to 1.0PR.
* Having to restart the browser everytime you install an extension
Yeah. Sucks. Same as IE though. Atleast with extentions like sessionsaver, restarting doesn't make you lose anything.
* Adblock doesn't block ads nearly as well as IE with Admuncher installed (it even blocks text ads!)
Adblock blocks text ads just fine. Anything that has its own display element is blockable (And this includes PRE, P, SPAN, DIV, etc.)
* The TalkBack agent appears way too often for my taste
Download a build with it disabled? I only see it when my browser crashes, which is only due to bad Java causing bad memory leaks.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I completely agree with this. Why would you blame a softare product that CONFORMS to the standards for not rendering properly?
Blame M$ for saying "Hey, now that they have a 95% share of the browser market, why don't we enhance the user experience by introducing propriatary features."
"Bonus," says Bill, "We'll flush out the last 5% and make another cool billion off the people who cant view a site without our product!"
Blame the webmaster who doesn't put in the effort, and it's not that much effort, to make a compliant website so that all may enjoy his or her creation.
Obviously people need to re-evaluate their thought process when they run across a site that doesn't display properly. Those who think "this browser sucks" should instead look deeper into the problem; don't take the easy way out and switch back. Nobody ever affects change by just letting it slide.
Actually, there is an extension on Mozilla Update called IEView (I think) that allows you to right click on a page and have the option "view in IE" appear. Maybe not applicable to code so malformed it will crash the browser, but certainly useful for sites that don't display nicely in Firefox.
Sounds perfectly reasonable, I'd suggest bugging some people in #mozilla about it. The only problem is quirks mode comes up based on doctype declarations, not on presence of actual bad html.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
So whenever a paged is messed up in FF I should assume it's because the author intended it to be so? Webmasters are an evil bunch, I knew it.
Windows XP SP2 / FF 1.0PR
I get so tired of having to copy, tab, paste, didnt work, tab back, copy, copy, copy, copy, tab, paste. Dammit. tab, copy, copy, tab, paste. FUCKING COME ON. tab, copy, copy, tab, paste. There, finally.
Apparently I'm not the only one with the issue.
Results 1 - 10 of about 13,200 for copy paste bug firefox.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Oh no custom scrollbars! The world is ending! :P To customize form fields, add "-moz-appearance: none !important;" to the field's style, and then add style accordingly.
Remember that geeks already typically use Firefox. This whole thread was started about how it's going to be in a national magazine targeted towards non-geeks.
Non-geeks go to websites that may or may not be formed with standards in mind. They are likely IE specific. If the site has custom scrollbars and the user has to add that ridiculous tag to get them to work they aren't going to like it.
You people constantly forget that geeks aren't the majority.
I doubt it. You didn't switch to simply try it out, like 99.9% who use/used firefox?
Everyone here seems to point out tabbed browsing as being the IE killer. I don't see the usefulness in it at all. Perhaps he did.
They should add the update functionality before an actual "1.0", don't you think?
/. firefox stories. This feature should have top priority in the current firefox development. Or do you want to get first a 20% market share to disgruntle and disappoint the masses (painful uninstall, install, get all extensions again process). They will back off from firefox and lose their interest in IE alternatives.
This has been discussed a couple of times, especially in the latest
It may seem a little harsh, but in the Macs we don't have nearly the same browser monoculture we have in Windows. And of course, the Windows user base is an order of magnitude larger than Macintosh's. So the battle must be fought in Win32 world.
OTOH, if you really mean by saying that 'Safari already won that battle' is that there's no need to use anything but Safari, then you're thinking down the same path that led us to our current predicament. By the same token, too high a usage rate for Firefox (above 70%) is also a bad thing, but considering that scenario is rather far-fetched, no one worries about it today.
AC, well said. I wish more people realized the same thing.
Sure. If you explain what "it" stands for (oh...and what on Earth does the BSD license to do with Firefox--I was talking about the MPL and NPL).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
This happened to me before. It was because I had the adblock extension loaded. Yahoo distributes some ads from the same servers their content comes from.
Is that all going to fit?
Anyway... $30 and I get my name in the NYT? Sounds good to me. But, someone out there is going to have to get me a print copy as I'm UK based.
to firefox, slashdot will have to fi x the layout for all those extra users.
sounds like garcia has the Non Default setup.. i have installed Firefox .9 on over 20 machines and have never had any rendering problems. In fact most of the people i have shown firefox to have either liked it more than IE or could not tell the difference
I'm sure they will attain their goal; I'm trying to get to the Donate Page now!
I'm trying to get the Donate Page to take my money. Keeps insisiting my ZIP code is wrong for my credit card. Most assuredly, it isn't...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you had actually read the bug this file is attached to you'd have noticed that this was a first proposal based on Netscape's old licence *AND* that it has already been shot down - so where's the big scandal?
(Along those same lines - I hate that suddenly just about every recent installer for GPLed software displays the GPL as an EULA when the GPL is only binding for those people that distribute the software and not neccessarily the end-user who just uses a pre-compiled binary. Why should those end-users have to provide sources et al as long as they don't distribute modified binaries? The GPL is no end-user license; it's usually in a file called COPYING.txt, not USAGE.txt...)
np: Ulrich Schnauss - Clear Day (A Strangely Isolated Place)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Maybe about:credits is a good place to start. Am maybe I'm biased because my name is already there.
Joseph Elwell.
Why not the Wall Street Journal or something that is more relevant to everyone. Not everyone reads NYT. USA Today would be better...
-- $G
How are they abusing their power? This is a legit piece of OSS, licensed under the OSF approved Mozilla Public License.
/. legal teachings, trademarks are lost if they are not protected. See Xerox, Kleenex, and maybe eventually Google for such instances. Lack of trademarked artwork in no way hinders the actual functionality of the software, so what's the problem? In a more practical sense, protecting their trademark also ensures that not just anyone can roll a Firefox build, put in lots of crappy patches that make it suck, and make it look just as legit as the official builds. In that instance, who gets the blame for a shoddy product? More than likely not the person who made the build.
The "artwork" problem you mention stemmed from the fact that MF is protecting its trademarks. The code itself is free and available, but as you may remember from
Plus, what bug # are you referring to? You link to an attachment, but an attachment means nothing without the discussion and context of the actual bug. Not to mention the attachment has a revision date of June 2004.
Right now, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Marketing and brand recognition is one of the categories where OSS suffers, simply because everyone is busy coding and resources are scarce. Even recently, most of the major marketing efforts on *behalf of* Linux are coming from major corporations (with cash), such as IBM, Novell, and RedHat. Linus is too busy to be worried about TV ads (rightfully so). It's good to see that Mozilla recognizes this is a weakness, and continues to address it.
Don't forget that because this is all open source, if something really truly bad starts to happen, nothing stops you from branching and starting your own project. See xorg if you need an example.
How many people in the target audience actually care about versions numbers? Let's be realistic here its probably between 0 and 0. People who have not heard about Firefox already (ie the target audience) are not going to say "oh its ONLY 1.0, I'll wait for 2.0". Version numbers only matter to geeks not normal users. My wife, my father, my brother, and my mother all would NOT be able to answer the question "What versions of IE and Windows Media Player do you use?". And these are people who surf the web, do spreadsheets etc on a daily basis. Icon placement and name are what matters. Version number does not. Trust me that's the last thing people are going to think about when they see this ad.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Typed very quickly--sorry if this does not make much sense:
*If* MF are going down this route--I've had my suspicions for some time and even more so now, but my grandparent post may have been a little presumptious--then, the MPL would allow the code to be forked, so long-term there would be no problem, but MF could make it a pain to do so--in fact maybe peeps should download what they can off Mozilla.Org. I, also, don't know how clear it is in the CVS who owns all the copyright and what everything is licensed under. It is possible for them to play on uncertainty.
Personally, I think for the very reason that it would be forked, MF will not go the whole hog (and make it `more' proprietary if that is possible--bit like "more free" or "more unique"). They may (and have to some extent) play on the uncertainty surrounding which bits are proprietary and which are free though. If I'm being really cynical, one could argue that the whole popular NYT-ad &c marketing stunts are about advertising Mozilla Foundation & Firefox so they get popular with the non-freedom-aware masses, so that if it forked most users would still use the MF version regardless of whether it is proprietary or not.
It is possible that MF `only' want to create a cloud of uncertainty over whether the software they release is free or proprietary so they can threaten lawsuits against someone or something. IMO, however, this is worse than making it proprietary. At least M$ are honest and freely admit that their software is proprietary (& you have to sell your soul to them &c...). In fact if an organisations attempts to confuse/cloud what a piece of software's licensing terms are, this is, theoretically, the time whne everyone (even proprietary-software lovers) should ditch it and try and fork if legally possible. MF are trying to release Moz & Fx under several different licenses already (some contradicting each other--in fact the new "EULA" has terms to deal with contradicting MF licenses). They also have a "trademark license" which is actually a copyright license in disguise. This sort of legal confusion is starting to piss of me (and probably other users and developers).
NB: Even before the EULA gets implemented (if it does), the artwork and crash-reporter are proprietary, thereby making Firefox proprietary. Also it already asks you to agree to MPL (which is pointless) when installing.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
This was not a proposal, if you would care to actually read the bug this was attached to, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25267 9
The Bug is that Firefox needs an EULA, and the reporter of the bug just added Netscape's old EULA as a starting point. They then realized that that EULA's language is not going to work, and are now working on a new one.
The pricing model is leading to stagnation of a kind I guess.
As long as the producer continues to have to pay more the more popular his content is, rather than getting a cut from the consumer, the more the scummy stuff is going to accumulate.
I actually prefer the close button for all tabs being on the right. If you prefer it on each button, its probably possible to write an extension to change it
What REALLY bugs me about FF on OS X is the fact that middle click opening links in new tabs is broken. That is the single reason why I've stayed with safari.
To stop this sort of thing, it really should be illegal (if it is not already) to misrepresent how something is licensed. Telling other people they can copy something when they cannot (or even giving them contradictory messages) is IMO worse than illegally copying it yourself.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Or maybe the FOSS community should look at Mozilla and what they're doing right. How many other open source project are as successful as Mozilla? On the desktop? Cross-platform? Against Microsoft? You know, maybe the "FOSS methods" methods you mention are just not as good as traditional marketing for these sorts of applications.
:)
The *real* *question* is whether Firefox is free or open-source?
No, that's not the *real* question. Hate to break it to you, but only a very very tiny minority even worries about that question. Real questions that matter to the success of Mozilla are things like: is it easy to use? Is it standards compliant? Is it easy to install?
This is an example of why copyleft is superior to less-restrictive licenses
I disagree. Oh, you mean, the GPL is superior because is restricts what I can do with the code.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
So lets get this straight. I criticised the MPL/NPL. You now think I should explain to you why the BSD license (not one I mentioned) is better than the BSD license ("it").
Well, it would be handy knowing which BSD license you mean and what "better" means, but anyway, if both "BSD license"s refer to the same license, you are asking me to say whether an undisclosed license associated with BSD is better than itself.
Well this is very interesting question because if I say it is better than itself then it logically cannot be, and if I say....
Oh nevermind...why am I talking to dumbass ACs?
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Not too much difference between them. I know many people who would change banks just because they are going to be charged $5 a month for the online service, and feel the service should be free.
Blar.
I like and use Firefox. But to be perfectly honest, it isn't the huge leap over IE that people want it to be. The achievement has been in getting something to run as well as IE, which is monstrously difficult in itself (one of the very first times an open source group has equalled commercial software in terms of user experience).
The primary benefits of Firefox are:
1. Security. You don't get spyware and such. You can also get the same result if you disable ActiveX controls and other features in IE, but most people don't do this. If Microsoft changed the defaults--which they won't because many sites depend on them--then IE would be on part with FF.
2. Tabbed browsing. This is a fairly small interface feature, though a very useful one. If Microsoft added it to IE--and they undoubtedly will, because it's easy to do--then there goes the biggest visible difference.
I realize that FF has other nice features (and I fully agree with people who cite them, because, again, I like and use FF), but those are the biggies. And the big negative feature is simply this: Sites that rely on ActiveX controls don't work under FF. Yes, I know, security, blah, blah, blah, but most people only see the "not working" part.
Why not tell us who the bank is? I use Washington Mutual and except for a stupid AUTOCOMPLETE=off it works fine. And my CitiBank credit cards through Accountonline.com work find in FireFox, too.
Fellowship 9/11
It's a clothing designer in my area. I had to look at the source to figure out that I had to go to /main.php to see the website.
Hands in my pocket
Actually, unlike IE, pages render correctly in Firefox, including Slashdot. Just because a site isn't done properly and thus isn't displayed in Firefox as it is IE (which apparently will accept horseshit for HTML), doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with Firefox.
Well, that depends on your goals. If your goals are to conform to standards, congratulations, you've succeeded and the rest is a rather moot point.
If your goal is to take market share away from IE, you might run into problems. I doubt the average Internet user will see a page broken in Firefox, which works (or worked) in IE, and go "damn those Microsoft bitches and their crappy implementation!!" They will likely blame Firefox, even if that's wrong. Or more likely, they simply won't give a crap whose fault it is. They had a browser that worked for them and now they have one that isn't working. Back to IE they go.
We're in our own little slashworld here, where people care about standards and implementations and who's somehow right versus who's somehow wrong. There's nothing wrong with that, but we can't assume it is widely true outside of our little world. Most people are going to use what they perceive works better for them. Pages that only render in IE, or pages that downright REQUIRE IE, might be all the impetus some people need to switch back or avoid switching altogether. Maybe they can be overwhelmed by the other better features (I have no idea how I used the Internet without tabs!), but your task just become more difficult.
Um, if your bank is so technically inept that it cannot code for more than one browser I would worry seriously about its other technical aspects like security.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
They all pretty much offer these things...so, I went with the one that had the most ATM's...but, if they try charging me for crap..I'll just switch to another...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Hotmail doesn't; look, for example, at the contacts list; behaves differently in IE than in Firefox
I dont't think a browser will become good by not conforming to standards. I don't think _any_ browser should mimic IE's behaviour, which is anyithing _but_ following w3c standards or recommendations.
Just because so many people use IE that doesn't mean we (or Firefox or anyone else) should drop the following of standards just to render broken code like IE does.
Broken code should be rendered broken, so the coders who put up shitty pages realize that their skills are reasonably flawed.
It's the same old MS poliy that everyone can click their way thourgh anything. Joe Anybody sits down, produces 2 megs of frontpage generated crap which is 10 k's in clean source and css, and thinks (s)he's a genius, because IE renderes it ok.
I can but hope the day will finally come when not only linux people and real coders will produce compliant page sources, but everyone. Utopia.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Remember that geeks already typically use Firefox. This whole thread was started about how it's going to be in a national magazine targeted towards non-geeks.
:D In which case, you change Windows theme, since Firefox uses the Windows theme for these things. And, there are Firefox themes out there that change the scroll/form styles like Noia Extreme.
:D)
Oh. I thought he was talkin about making a website. It never occured to me that he was talking about theming
Everyone here seems to point out tabbed browsing as being the IE killer. I don't see the usefulness in it at all. Perhaps he did.
Again, I assumed I was dealing with a fellow nerd. It would be really hard for me to say I tried Firefox because I heard lots of hype about tabs. I tried it cause I wanted to try it! Its like gmail, saying you signed up for the search feature is sort of odd, the real motivation is more general. Don't get me wrong though, I love tabs. (Plug into school terminal, load all fark links in tabs, walk away and read at leisure during class
citi-bank.com does not resolve according to nslookup.
Umm... No. I hit it with my pop-up blocker turned on full blast, and didn't even bother to disable JavaScript, and found a site linking to geocaching sites, among other things.
That's what I did and I love it. Loads faster,(definete + on dialup) pages draw faster ( + on an older machine),a more uncluttered look reminiscent of googles page (a + anyway you slice it). Every once in awhile I take a peek a full version slashdot and it's too "busy". I'm glad we have this option here. Still get all the content.
I wonder how much bandwith they would save just offering the uncluttered look only?
Or maybe the FOSS community should look at >>Mozilla and what they're doing right...<<
/. which has an annoying interface for keyboard use)--I'm at uni and don't have a PC in my halls set up yet.]
I love Mozilla, and I love Firefox even more and have done ever since before 0.1. I was questioning the recent thinking of some of the people at MF, not whether Mozilla & Firefox are the best things since sliced bread (which, incidentally, is not that great).
>>You know, maybe the "FOSS methods" methods you mention are just not as good as traditional marketing for these sorts of applications.<<
I actually agree with you on that point. You probably need both for *marketing*. It is one of the reasons why I like Mozilla & Firefox. I, as I stated am not sure whether the NYT ad is the most efficient way to spend marketing money--it is not as clear as some of the other campaigns--but maybe I will be proved wrong.
>>but only a very very tiny minority even worries about that question.<<
Mainly because they do not realise it exists and what the real difference between the two is. If you people took the time to understand/research what the question meant (both from pragmatic and moral, and short- and long-term perspective)... I was expressing a fear that some unscrupulous people (I don't know who) in MF may play on the masses' ignorance on this issue.
>>is it easy to use? Is it standards compliant? Is it easy to install?<<
You think that using an open and free model might not have had something to do with these things? You think that if you use an MS-style proprietary business model, you would get standards-compliance and ease of use?
>>I disagree. Oh, you mean, the GPL is superior because is restricts what I can do with the code.<<
Well...not specifically you...but it does stop free software from being made into proprietary software (which if some get their way looks like it could be the way of Mozilla & Firefox--parts of them are already proprietary actually--but I hope and think that this will probably not happen.) It also clears up confusion over whether a particular version of the software is free or proprietary--especially where a company/organisation chooses to lie about this. You might think about these things as superiour (in the sense of usually encouraging freedom) especially to a license like NPL where one organisation (was NS apparently now MF) has special powers to make a proprietary fork of a free-software package.
Hopefully that made sense. [I'm very tired, hungry, being on PC too long and fed up with using a PC without a mouse installed (along with Moz 1.0 which cleverly doesn't have as many key shortcuts as later versions and
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
This might help : (from http://users.tns.net/~skingery/firefox/Home_Page.h tml)
/Prefetch:1 to the end of the line in the target field.
/Prefetch:1
Firefox is slow to load initially on Windows XP. You can speed this up a bit by using XP's built in prefetcher. Simply right-click on the Firefox icon you use to start the browser. Add the text
The whole line should look something like the following:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
Well I get new product recommendations on slashdot all the time. Heh. You damn geeks making me spend my hard-earned student loans.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Theres a few reasons why I use FireFox instead of Safari on OS X:
1) Tab close button on the tab itself... it's a real hassle when I go to switch a tab and actually close it by being a little off the mark.
2) No confirmation for closing the actual window when you have tabs open. If by some mistake, you actually close the whole window (either by not thinking for a moment or mistakenly thinking you're closing a browser window opened from a link) it's extremely annoying that it will close all your tabs. Firefox and Mozilla will ask for confirmation when closing a window with multiple tabs.
3) Rendering is busted! My website doesn't render correctly in Safari 1.3 and it's W3C COMPLIANT! So wtf there. Granted, it renders fine in 2.0 that is distributed with the OS X 10.4 preview but still the fact it took them years to get to that point is a little silly. (I guess I just hold Apple to a higher standard than others).
4) Completely lack of extensibility. I understand that simple is good and all and that's what most people like about it but sheesh some sort of plug-in api would be nice.
Those are my gripes and why I don't use Safari.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I think they mean that the way the web works is stagnant, rather than the content. As in, it has vast potential, but we're not using it because most of the web is being held back by IE developers sitting on their asses saying "our product is fine how it is."
And I have to agree with everyone else, Firefox works with every page I use, save Windows Update. Saying "I won't use this until everyone else uses it" makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution. You are a part of "the public" that you urge to change, so quit whining and get to it.
A lot of it has to do with designers and marketing departments that are overly concerned with pixel perfect "branding" and not so much with actual functionality/sales. They would actually prefer that someone who won't be getting the pixel-perfect "experience" not see the site at all.
...and filed appropriately (flushhhhh)
Firefox already renders most of the web properly, or at least effectively. Also, I've only ever had Firefox crash on ONE site (and none since upgrading to 0.9 and later), NOT one of every six that I visited. Slashdot now renders correctly. In all cases where there have been rendering problems it was attributed to broken HTML or IE-only plugins or other junk.
Anyways, ALL standards (not just W3C) are recommendations (there are no laws mandating conformance--otherwise they wouldn't be called standards--they would be REGULATIONS). And in my personal/freelance development work EVERYTHING I use is fully compliant (my personal home page for example, is fully/strictly compliant to XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2). So no, not EVERYONE uses non-standard tools and methods. If an ordinary joe like me can do it, everyone else on the net can too...no excuses.
My point is that Firefox need only render popular sites that are reasonably conformant. Who cares if some idiot's blog on Geocities can't render? More importantly, Firefox has to do it reliably and securely, and fail gracefully (not chrashing--rather it should show error messages or display as much as possible based on accurately following standards). By doing this and driving towards 10-20% market share and beyond, developers will be pressured into using standards, just like the rising market share of IE resulted in the stagnation and blight of IE-only plugins/BHOs, activex, etc.
What are you talking about.
1) In safari the tabs are fixed size. Once you have more tabs then can fit on your bar you have to use the stupid drop down. In firefox the tabs automatically resize temselves.
2) Firefox has more features including some I can't live without like find as you type.
3) firefox looks better (IMHO).
4) Better popup blocking and flash bocking.
5) Profiles
6) "Block images from this server"
I could go on and on.
You may like safari better and I respect that but don't go around pretending that everybody would feel the same way. I for one think that firefox is a way better browser then Safari and I bet many other would feel the same way.
evil is as evil does
I use both macs and windows quite a bit so I'd like to point out a few things.
Safari is a damn nice browser on OSX. I agree about the minimalist interface, and it is pretty fast considering I use it on a 700mhz G3 (ouch). I've used several versions of firefox on OSX and they seem really crappy and slow. I can understand why a lot of Mac users would be turned off by it. One of the reasons for this though is that they're focusing a majority of their effort on the Windows side of things. This may suck to people who don't use Windows, but it makes sense. They want to make a difference and Windows is over 90% of the market, so of course they're going to focus on that the most.
You cant judge firefox until you've used it on Windows. It is DAMN nice, and blazingly fast. It's also really stable, even with assloads of extensions installed. I have about 10 extensions installed, and I have a crash maybe once every few months. That's average with any other browser I'd say.
That's one of the thigns that sucks about safari though - it's not extensible. You get only what Apple wants you to get. Extensions in firefox are a god send and let you customize your browser exactly the way you want it. This is one of its best selling points, along with the awesome rendering engine (gecko) of course.
So I'm not really sure what my point is, but I guess it sounded like you hadn't tried firefox on anything but OSX. I just wanted to say that on Windows, it kicks serious ass, and Microsoft should be starting to get a bit worried by now.
Joseph?
I would like to try Firefox. Where is a version that's built for glibc 2.2? (I'm using SuSE 8.1, and this installation is just a bit more than a year old. I consider installations of such an age not as new any more, but still as current.) Demanding glibc 2.3 is not a Good Thing(tm), IMO.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
Would you rather their budget go to pay coders to re write their entire web interface or do important things?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Addendum: I rather doubt the bank has its own in house design team anyway. It's most likely subcontracted out and has nothing to do with internal security
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I suppose that is true nowadays; when i set up my checking acount (years back) i had alot of incentive to do so at the state credit union over other banks due to lack of fees on checking and third party ATM usage. While their website works fine in Mozilla, I personally value saving a few bucks over having to fire up IE once in ablue moon and would stay with them anyway
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
The flickering on Gamespot is due to bug 132337 . This was fixed last week, but I'm not sure it'll make it into Firefox 1.0.
One of those days...
For onlt $500 you get your business name and something like 14 names in a seperate box.
Having a buiness name appear in the NYT has to count for something...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
(Almost complete) BS! I use Firefox as my default browser and have not have a problem with using it to correctly render the sites I visit. For those pages that are written to only be accessible using IE simply install the extension for Firefox that allows you to view the page in IE. If you get a page that absolutely insists on IE simply go to Tools in Firecfox and select View Page in IE. Simple and painless.
One day I woke up and saw all my rights had disappeared, that's the day I knew the terrorists had won.
Yet none of the page fonts look the way they do under IE. Under IE the page fonts look clean and crisp. Under Firefox they look like blocky text. Reminds me of what Netscape and Mozilla looked like under X.
It must be your PC. I test websites side-by-side all the time and see no difference at all here. I've done dozens of Firefox installs and have never seen a font issue on any of them. Seriously dude... it's your box.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
No one has mentioned the one feature of Safari that keeps me using it. You can use command-shift-left arrow or right arrow to switch between tabs. I use that keboard shortcut more than any other when browsing. I like Firefox, I use it for website that Safari doesn't play nice with, but I'd use it a lot more if I could use a keyboard shortcut to switch tabs.
Actually neither of those things you said about the attachment are at all clear to me from the bug comments or the attachment itself (but I'm tired), but, assuming you are right, the bug itself seems to nonetheless be calling for further restrictions on Firefox's licensing (and does have serious support) which can only be a bad thing.
There isn't a big scandal yet (except the more minor thing that, as I've stated elsewhere, some (dispensible) parts of Firefox are already proprietary).
WRT forcing people to agree to the GPL:
Licenses are not agreements, so it makes no sense agreeing to a license (hence license agreement in "EULA" is an oxymoron which I think means that it is actually an agreement or contract but one that is a bit like a license (or that the agreement's author wants you to think is)). [It doesn't make much sense as license and agreements are diametrically opposed from a legal perspective: the former is a (not necessarily solicited) one-way permission to do something (e.g.: letting someone fish in your lake); the latter, a two-way agreement between parties involving reward for both sides (e.g.: buying and selling).]
Also, there are two possible legal issues with trying to force users to agree to the GNU GPL, that I can think of:
* Firstly, depending how the text of such a dialog box is phrased, it could (and is likely to) violate the "copyright" (EIR&DR) of third-party copyright holders of parts of that software--who have chosen to release only under the GNU GPL (or a less permissive license)--by attempting to put restrictions on use of the software.
* Secondly, one may argue that the inclusion of the GNU GPL (linked) within the software itself results in that software being non-free as the GNU GPL is non-free (at least the preamble is and the FSF have given mixed messages about the rest).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
1) Tab close button on the tab itself... it's a real hassle when I go to switch a tab and actually close it by being a little off the mark.
Exactly. Why would a user want to close something she's not looking at?
Does the Dock have a little X next to each icon where you can end a program? Of course not, that would lead to data-loss accidents. You first have to restore the program so you can see its window, and then click on the X to quit it.
I've been a fan of Moz since the start and before that Netscape, I've donated my $30 :)
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
1) In safari the tabs are fixed size. Once you have more tabs then can fit on your bar you have to use the stupid drop down. In firefox the tabs automatically resize temselves.
Conversely, firefox has a minimum size to which it will shrink a tab. Once you hit that point, additional tabs just pour off into nowhereland. They keep opening, but you can never see the tabs to click on them.
Firefox needs a way to produce a menu of ALL webpages you have open- in any tab, in any window...
Advertising like that is likely a waste of money. Why not use those funds to pay the programmers to make FireFox even better?
I'm still using 0.8 on my iBook, and it not only works perfectly fine, but it's got a nice Safari-like toolbar theme (albeit aqua rather than metal). It looks at least as Mac-like as Safari. The only problem is that I haven't found a theme for newer Firefox that looks like this, which is why I haven't upgraded yet.
I use it instead of Safari because I like the tab handling (as others have described) better.
Anyway, if you want I can email you my copy -- just email me at mrchaotica (at) gmail or write your email in a reply to this post (that goes for anyone, by the way).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This is not true at Bank of America, I would doubt it would be true anywhere else. It is not the same team but it is in-house.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Mozilla foundation has a BIG following. Why not just declare one day a 'Mozilla Day' and have everyone who likes Mozilla and wants to help use a Mozilla-supplied .signature that day. Maybe a Mozilla Day could be a Mozilla Week or Mozilla Month. Wouldn't that be more effective than the NY Times ad, in the end?
Simpy
As we know, computing continues to live by de facto standards. IE is the de facto standard for web browsers, and pages that render in IE must also render in other browsers. The computing industry sets its own standards, for better or for worse. Other industries have real standards that they must apply (ex: basic OBD-II functionality on automotive engine control systems in the US), but that's not how it works in the computing industry.
The goal of the web is not to form all content into a generic standard. The goal is to make information available to the most people and the current way to do that is to support IE. What behavior would you propose for an ideal standards-compliant browser? Not rendering pages that have poor markup? I think some people would love that, but fortunately for the public it will never happen (and should never happen as that would defeat the purpose of the web).
"Personally I don't care for Firefox as the rest of the web doesn't really support it and pages don't render correctly ..."
That's bullshit. Firefox is very standards-compliant and fully supports the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and will properly render pages that are written correctly.
Don't put the blame for web designers who don't know how to design correctly on the browser. You put garbage in, of course you're going to get garbage out.
Maybe this is flamebait but I'm sick and tired of this incorrect attitude from so many people and it's not fair to give great software a bad name it doesn't deserve.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
Although I mostly use Opera (works just a bit better then FF for me, although FF is pretty close now), whenever I come at a page that does not render properly in Opera or FF I always look for a 'contact'-possibillity on the site and use it to inform the webmaster. :-) ) and ask them to do something about it. Many times I get an answer that this problem was unknown and will be looked at. It's been a long time ago that I got an answer in the sense of "Well, maybe YOU have a problem, but all the rest of our clients/visitors use IE and it works for them so we won't change a thing". (But no answer is still not uncommon, alas).
I give a description of the problems, tell them wich browser(s) I use (and that I use IE only at gunpoint
So if you experience (sp?) problems with a site, tell the webmaster. (S)He will find out that IE is NOT the only browser in this world and many times pay attention to the problems.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Just give us a full-page spread of Firefox-ko and Thunderbird-ko, that'll get everyone's attention.
[o]_O
FYI, Bank of America works just fine in Firefox and Mozilla.
From 6:24am this morning
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
I'm probably going to ditch Chase because not only does their site not work in Firefox (it keeps insisting javascript isn't active, those insensitive clods) when it sure as hell IS on, but the site USED to work just fine in Firefox.
I filed a complaint/support request about this fact, and they responded telling me to use unavailable software (Windows IE) or software 5+ years out of date (Netscape Communicator 4.x). Obviously they didn't bother to read my email as the email clearly said that I AM USING A MAC.
I'm going to send them back a response telling them that it used to work just fine and I don't feel safe trusting my financial security to way out of date, unsupported, and generally insecure (IE) software. If they still don't react to that, I will switch, and I don't think it's unreasonable for banks to actually read communications from their customers, not break things that work just fine, and expect customers to use out-of-date stuff.
i am a soviet space shuttle
what would be a good for launch publicity is to 'cheat' firefox into the top ranking hit for anything relating to web browsers. :-D
Google for internet explorer, firefox comes out top hit, Google for web browser, firefox comes out as top hit. You get the idea
My other OS is also FreeBSD
I work for a company which has a policy of only supporting IE. I have been lobbying to get the funds to rewrite some of IE specific code. Hopefully I will be able to do it in '05
m@t
They key problem with your statement here (and everyone else who makes these claims) is the confusion about who "I" is referring to. By stating your point in this manner, you leave a grey area that leads people to assume that the GPL somehow abridges the rights of the person who created the content (as compared to a BSD-style license).
The truth of the matter is that as compared to a BSD-style license, none of the author's rights are further abridged by going GPL - it is the end-user's rights which are further abridged.
GPL = I make code. I give code to everyone. Everyone shares my creation in the spirit that I originally created it, or they're not allowed to share in it at all.
BSD = I make code. I give code to everyone. Nice people share my creation in the spirit that I originally created it, but mean people are free to steal my ideas and their augmentations from the free community and make a killing off of it, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.
The only tenable position from which one can argue that their rights were restricted by the GPL is the position of the mean guy above, who was trying to rip off the open source coder. In which case you can suck it.
11*43+456^2
Oh yeah?
Notice the TIME STAMP difference... WHAH!
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
http://applemuseum.bott.org/sections/ads.html
e Win95.jpg
n ilaSitesCom/welibm.jpg
I prefer this one:
http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/newads5/Appl
or this one:
http://static.userland.com/manilasites/images/MMa
This is by far the biggest problem with the Internet business model. Consumers want free content, producers want to give consumers what they want, providers want to charge producers or tax consumers through intrusive ads. Consumers hate the ads because they want their free content. Consumers already feel like they've given their share of money by paying the ISP for the cost of entry.
Nobody has come up with a bulletproof business model, but one suggestion has been to meter your data like your electricity, water, and gas. That could work, as long as the money went back to the source's provider. That way, the cost of provision is shared by those who use it. This system could be unnecessarily cumbersome and no doubt costly to set up.
Are there websites that offer more theories or business models for the Internet on a large scale? My quick Google search revealed business models for businesses on the Internet.
I appreciate the effort, for sure. It's good to see someone actually doing something to increase awareness to the masses.
However -- if alternative, standards-compliant web browsers are ever going to be taken seriously by typical home users who couldn't care less, the community should be doing more than a full page ad containing "Congrats on reaching version 1!" followed by a list of obscure names of geeks who donated.
How many of these individuals can even tell you what version of the AOL InterWeb they are using now?
It would most likely be more beneficial to spend the money on a targeted, well-rounded, cross-media, strategic advertising campaign that communicates WHY the software should be taken seriously and the consequences of not doing so in non-technical terms.
Advertising on a nationally syndicated computer help radio show like Kim Komando's would be a good start.
Hopefully this one ad won't be the last thing the Spread Firefox group will do. I look forward to what comes next.
I am logged in to citicards.com through Firefox 1.0PR this very second. I have used it, with no tricks, with every Firefox browser since before it was called Firefox.
The infamous freeipods.com site doesn't play well with Firefox. For a more realistic example, the online surveys I take (in return for cash via PayPal) don't play with Mozilla, and consequently, Firefox. I have to launch IE in order to use them. Not only does the public need to use a more secure browser, but the companies and web designers need to put together browser-independent sites. In this day and age, there is no excuse for anything being proprietary, because people can and will find an alternative to it or a way around it.
Please give me 5 sites that don't render under Firefox.
Microsoft.com and those ActiveX weenies don't count.
I've been using firefox for a while now and there is a serious (and annoying) bug that causes firefox to use 100% cpu quite frequently. It was present on 0.9 and still is on 1.0 PR.
Only a very poorly-designed app wouldn't prompt the user to save any unsaved information before quitting.
Not true. The fact that you are looking at page 12 of document ABC.HTM is itself a kind of data; data that will be lost when quit. Sure, ABC.HTM is easy enough to remember, but real-world URLs can be hundreds of characters long.
It's the same with tabs. The relative scarcity of actually wanting to close a tab you're not currently viewing, multiplied by the proportional ease of doing that in 1 click rather than 2, is less than the effort it would take to recover a lost web page from memory/history (multiplied by the probablity). Then there's the fact that needing to avoid those dangerous close-buttons in between each tab forces a user to click far slower than otherwise possible.
Actually, you can right- (or control-) click on a program's icon and select "Quit" to quit it.
I was, of course, only referring to the fastest way to accomplish something.
I hope someone writes a validating HTML rendering engine (or adds a validating mode to gecko) so there can be a browser out there that does this. I think you'll find that even with the Firefox UI, virtually nobody will use it.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Furthermore, what is this shit about putting everybody's name in the NY Times?
The best thing would be to have the names as light grey text on a white background, as a background to the whole ad.
You can get Safari-style tabs in Mac Firefox.
My website has never rendered correctly on mozilla's renderer for years (and I don't want to work around it) because of:
0 8
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1674
but it has worked for years in IE.
IANAL... /., escrow. In this case, if they said that people could copy even when the license said they couldn't could make that point in the license irrelevant.
i learned a term here on
yes, i didn't quite get what exactly escrow means.
The attachment is on bug 252679. Rafael Ebron, who attached it, said "this attachment is invalid and the review is '-'. A EULA is needed to protect us from frivolous lawsuits and that's all."
The shareholder is always right.
too bad i won't see the firefox ad in the new york times since i am using firefox with an ad-blocking/popup-stopping script. muahaha.
If anyone can use the firefox name and logo for their own version of firefox, then people can stick ad/malware and distribute their own version of it, which could give firefox a bad name ("i downloaded firefox and i got 30 porn popups, and my cpu caught fire from the extra cpu load, don't use it!").
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Very clever idea.
However they might just see an OEM rate increase for Windows if they did that. If I were Michael Dell I would be afraid of that.
But certainly if Alienware or a smaller vendor or better yet Apple includes Firefox in addition to Safri, it would surely increase the adaption rate.
http://saveie6.com/
Safari is not a great browser. It has significant compatability problems, at least with the pages I used it with.
Camino is the way to go. Once loaded, it's as fast as Safari, and it's MUCH better at rendering correctness. It's designed for OS X, and looks like a native app. It has had a minimalist interface similar to Safari's since before Safari existed. It's easily the best browser for Mac.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
But isn't that exactly the point of FOSS, that someone can build and release their own version?
If you can only use your changes privately, then it's not much better than MS's Shared Source...
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
If 'open source' were only an ideological one, then you might be right. But it's not -- Mozilla more than anything has shown that it has practical benefits, too. Most people might not care that Mozilla is free and open source, but they do care that it's fast, secure, well featured, supports standards, and is in active development. And those are all a direct result of it being free and open source.
Whether FireFox continues to be free and open source is important to everyone, whether they realise it or not, because that affects whether it'll continue to be all of those things in the future.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Keep in mind that according to the roadmap, Firefox 1.0 for OS X is lagging behind 1.0 for the other platforms. So you're right, it's not ready on OS X, but they're not claiming that it is.
they should create a msi installation image for mass deployment! they should spend money creating that package instead of placing it on an add and they will get more conversions. we have hundreds of computers just waiting for a switch to firefox. though there are some msi installations created by 3rd party, i would like it come from the team. they should also be able to integrate it to group policy in windows.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
And personally, I use Saft and PithHelmet to address your other concerns.
Oh get of ya'll high horsey, if its good and free as in no cash needed, then use it.
Otherwise, go and stick to IE and die, or pay for opera or MYIE.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Get Mozilla Firefox It doesn't make that annoying sound when you click on links.
I hate to say this, but they better raise a LOT of money for a full-page New York Times ad. I believe such an ad will cost US$50,000 for the national edition, and circa US$80,000 for the New York metro edition.
I do think that putting it in USA Today is a better choice, since USA Today is widely available all over the USA.
The Chase credit card site works perfectly. In fact, it is the entire reason I'm using firefox. It doesn't work in konqueror (or didn't a year ago), nor mozilla 1.4.
I agree there should be a way to get to them but they don't disappear. They will appear once again as you close other tabs.
evil is as evil does
That's odd then because it used to work for me and then quit doing so. Perhaps I should check my Adblock settings...
i am a soviet space shuttle
Heck, to come to think of it, if they'd use somethnig like AAlib ... they could even use 'letters' to construct up images =)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Here's the same thing in FireFox -- it scales tabs exactly the same way.
Why invest in a newspaper ad when we could reach our audience through cheap popup ads?
In my opinion they should post lots of portraits of Slashdotters who have already switched so the general public could see that the most cool people already use it, think "ipse dixit?" and instantly want to jump on the bandwagon as well, because of their emotional appeal. This is an appeal to popularity, argumentum ad verecundiam and ad populum at the same time. Granted, it is a genetic fallacy, appeal to misleading authority and ignoratio elenchi, but strangely enough it really works well in marketing directed to profanum vulgus, it's always been. We will only have to present it in the form of an argument by consensus. There should be cool and "3173" people on one side, all using Firebird, Mozilla, and Galeon, and boring people on the other side, wearing suits and using Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and other proprietary software. This is a great idea.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Yes till about 15 tabs. Firefox can accomodate over 25 on my screen.
evil is as evil does
Here's Firefox with 25 tabs open -- each tab only has a favicon listed, which makes it difficult to determine what each tab is. Additionally, you can't access all the tabs at once -- it doesn't even offer a pull-down menu to access tabs past the edge.
Safari manages to keep the visible tabs at a useable size, and provides a simple way to access the rest. Firefox shrinks tabs to the point of uselessness, and prevents you from accessing the overflow.
i find that ebanking on HSBC is impossible for me because the ebanking gateway doesn't recognise teh LINUX os!!! NOT good. i have to use Konqueror with spoofing turned on to get it to work
meh
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
thus, it is a more international choice.
Also, at this step, you probably want the "more informed and better educated" readership, they are more likely to be semi-early adopters of a "new" product.
"each tab has enough space available to feature a meaningful label, and 'overflow' tabs are available in a pull-down menu."
What you consider a feature I consider an annoyance. I don't want the damned overflow feature I want more tabs I can click on directly.
evil is as evil does
Ctrl-Page up/down works very nicely, as does the already mentioned Ctrl-Tab...
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Yeah, because Firefox is such a lousy OS. What the hell are you talking about again?
open source.
Because it's a fscking bad idea!
:)
It's bad enough every media player and office application on the Windows platform re-inventing the wheel and drawing its own custom controls, now you Windows users expect every WEB PAGE to have this ability as well? God, I fear for you people, I really do.
IHBT, I guess.
I get rendering problems with Firefox on Windows XP when ClearType is turned on. Left edges of words in italics are often clipped (mostly better in PR 1.0 than 0.9). Sometimes bullets are drawn without the benefit of ClearType even when all the other text on the page has it. Those look quite blocky (also improved in PR 1.0). Redraws tend to cause distortions. For example, if you have text near a button and then move the cursor over the button, part of the the nearby text is redrawn starting at the wrong pixel, causing distortion, shifting, and tearing (still problematic in PR 1.0).
When scrolling, some scan lines are skipping, making it look like output from a dot matrix printer with a flakey pin. This especially happens on form controls, like radio buttons and checkboxes.
Sorry, I can't post a screenshot to a public server from work.
Although I'm used to seing that as OSS or F/OSS instead of OS.
It's stealing if I intended my ideas to become public property for the good of everyone, and someone else decides to capitalize on that effort without benefitting the community in the same way I did with the original work. Take the example of the known BSD network stack code in MS products. The BSD guys put their open-source license on that stack because they wanted to benefit a community. They surely didn't wish to give microsoft a leg up in their decidedly anti-community practices. Yet by using their BSD license instead of a more restrictive GPL license, they allowed that to happen.
And I never said there was anything wrong with making money.
11*43+456^2
It might, except that J. Random Reader isn't going to "get" an ad promoting several competing products, and it would waste the not-insignificant amount of dough that went into the effort. After all, to the non-initiated, an advertisement for everything but IE will come across as desperate.
That being said, I'm all for a full-page ad in the NYT for Safari. It has to be a different ad, though.
"You can use command-shift-left arrow or right arrow to switch between tabs."
:-(
I HATE that misfeature of Safari. On several OS X applications (Textedit, Appleworks) command-shift-left arrow and command-shift-right arrow are keyboard shortcuts for highlighting the from the middle of a line to its beginning or end. The makers of Safari apparently forgot that people do type in web browsers--for example, to write comments in web forums like the one I'm typing now--and thought that the keyboard shortcuts they used for switching tabs were "safe" when they weren't. That made it a pain to edit text typed into text boxes.
Of course, consistency of keyboard shortcuts across applications is one area where OS X is inferior to Windows XP, or even Linux (if one doesn't take into account old applications like Emacs or XFig that predate the now somewhat standard Qt or GTK+ toolkits).
Actually, if one types a few paragraphs of text into a text box in Safari, the echoing of letters typed into a text box slows to a crawl. That was the main reason I stopped using Safari and started using Firefox.