Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Reviewed in the Globe and Mail
Eric Giguere writes "Today's Globe and Mail has a Firefox review titled A bug-free surfing zone in its Friday review section. Slashdot readers probably won't like the last phrase, though: 'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought
Microsoft used Firefox in a press image they sent out promoting their MSN Search.
In Soviet russia, only old Koreans profit from pictures of Natalie Portman stored on Beowulf Clusters.
You might have to keep IE around? What else are you going to do with it? It's integrated into the OS. The only way to get rid of it completely is to uninstall Windows. What's not to like about that statement? It's certainly worth a chuckle.
Sure, it doesn't work with everything, but it does have some capabilities..
I thought there was one for windows too?
Windows Update is the big reason Firefox users keep having to use Internet Explorer. There's an ActiveX plugin for Firefox out there, but I don't know if (with masquerading the user agent) it will run Windows Update. Anyone tried this? There's also an extension that adds Windows Update to Firefox's Tools menu.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Firefox is bloated. I kid you not... after all the useful extensions (that imho make this product) opening new tabs takes a while and page rendering slows considerably. After a half hour of surfing, it takes up 135+++ mb of memory! Please this must be fixed!
Otherwise I love it and even with the above, miles ahead of IE.
The payroll system for my employer is written entirely in ActiveX. There's really no way to do that in the fox.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
In the end, keeping explorer around will be a good thing.
As people will sometimes acidently find them selfs browsing using I.E. and then when they have finished, will notice all the spyware and maybe infections on their machines.
As they browse they will notice the annoying ad's, they will notice the most annoying and obtrusive things some websites do.
It will just remind them that they like firefox and mozilla more.
It will also cause them to question, "Why do i have to use I.E.?" The user HATES it when they dont have a choice, they detest it to the upmost degree, and once they realise that somesites are forcing them to use internet explorer, they will turn away and shun the site.
Peace out.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
I haven't used IE to surf since I got firefox. And I have spread it around campus and have received only one complaint. Long live open source!
This is another way of starting a sig with this and ending it with that.
It isn't about using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Some of us don't have a Windows machine, so we don't even have the option of running Internet Explorer.
And why would I object to it? It's a pretty well known fact that there are pages that just won't work with anything else than IE.
At work, for instance, I can't use Firefox for certain tasks because the Java-based admin pages (finances and grading) at our University won't work with it. Java apps load and work to some extent, but the layout is so screwed up in a Firefox that the pages are essentially useless. In Linux the pages won't work at all because of some weird Java problems (I thought Java was supposed to be platform independent?).
Complaining won't help, because IE is such a de facto standard that, according to the people who maintain the admin software, there is no support for "non-compliant" software such as Firefox and never will be.
The owls are not what they seem
Yes, it's another entirely ironic aspect of Windows: you have to use their insecure web browser to update their buggy OS. I'm really surprised that the detaching of WU from IE wasn't part of some antitrust settlement.
That being said anyone have recent penetration statistics. FF was gaining 0.5% every two weeks through Mid Decemeber but this is the last data I have seen. Anyone tracking this on their own site, the absolute is maybe less important the the trend.
Help fight continental drift.
Never mind Active X. How about all those crappy sites that use Javascript to check the browser by name/version instead of using professional methods that check the browser's capability?
One day (in the far distant future, no doubt), Javascript (/VBscript) will have either been seen to be the quick/dirty solution and deprecated with dynamic pages being server based or, the DOM will have been agreed as a proper object model with an agreed API. Perhaps then, a decent script language that is consistent across builds/OSes and even the same build on different OSes will act the same way.
I'm not holding my breath tho'...
Next,The start up time when I double click a html file in my hard disk :- IE is much faster than Firefox to open files in my hard disk.(WinXX).
Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!Why does yahoo do this
they do...you must have removed it...
Firefox on the Mac asks you "You are about to close X open tabs. Are you sure you want to continue?" Safari, unfortunately, works how you describe.
So sounds like those programmers need to get a grip and realize windows +ie isn't the only combo out there. What kind of hacks are they anyway?
Don't programmers have respect for the code and the users who run it? *shakes head*
I make use of Panda Software's ActiveScan (free online virus scanner). It doesn't work in Firefox, saying it "requires the browser Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later version." That and my bank's web site are the only things I still need IE for. But I still need to get into those 2 places, so I can't avoid having to use IE now and then.
Erm it does. You must have disabled it.
Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing -> Warn when closing multiple tabs
Auto-check your UK lottery lines
Unfortunately the online banking facilities offered by UK banks (such as Nat West) simply refuse to work with anything other than IE. Its the only reason I still have a windows box in the house. (My arthritus stops me from going into town much so online banking is a must).
FF has bugs, which isn't surprising considering it is barely out of "beta" or testing mode and is not by Microsoft. It also can't do much with pages that require features only Internet Explorer has, such as the ability to run Active-X programs. These features are part of the reason IE is so riddled with malware(what malware?), but they also allow it to interact with certain websites. Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet Explorer around -- just for emergencies, of course(Why bother switching when you can just use IE all the time?). Firefox has a number of features that make it obvious how little Internet Explorer has changed over the past several years(We are comfortable and see nothing else that needs change). One of the most popular is the use of "tabs," which allow a user to open multiple pages within the same window. You can set Firefox so that when you click on a link it opens that link in a new tab, and the tabs you have open are grouped together in a tab toolbar at the top of your browser window. You can store a group of tabs and open them all when you load Firefox.(I've never found that necessary or desirable, so why use them??). FF's greatest feature is adaptability(Get with the program - the IE program!). One benefit of the open-source format is that any programmer who wants to can write a bit of software called an "extension," which adds features to the browser.(That's real malware!) There are hundreds of these extensions listed already at Firefox's home page (http://getfirefox.com), including everything from a plug-in that lets you play music from your browser toolbar(why?) to one that lets you search an on-line dictionary by clicking on a word(Big deal!). (Lots of toys and geektweaks in my opinion!) Don't take this seriously or troll me please! Its a joke!
I am actually a FFFan, but ya'll are good enough defenders of FF. Go Firefox!!!!!!
Billy
I work in a shop that is exclusively IE. In fact, they have a militant attitude to anything non-MS. Needless to say, I downloaded Firefox onto my workstation and opened up our corporate intranet site, the thing was a mess. Turns out the developers decided to use non-standard HTML and CSS along with sloppy coding practices. Of course, I'm sure someone got a huge contract for developing the site, but I fear that heads will roll once IE catches up to actually implementing standards.
I only wish I didn't submit my resignation last week, because it would have been fun to watch the IT head honchos get it when IE 7 comes out. Of course that assumes that IE 7 might implement standards. Not holding my breath though!
I was only using IE to connect to my works terminal services page. Some clever bugger in the office managed to get it working under Linux a couple of days ago... so I suspect that I'll be able to drop IE once I read his how-to!
Auto-check your UK lottery lines
My big complaint with FF isn't that you can't use Active-X. It's the massive memory leaks with tabbed browsing. FF routinely gets up to 350MB of memory usage. I use the internet *heavily* for research and reading news, so I open and close a huge number of tabs a day. Having to bookmark all the pages I have open every night so I can close down FF is a real pain (if I didn't, it would truely eat all my vm space). They really need to work on that...
(It's been a known issue for a long time, but nobody seems to be able to fix it)
If I had modpoints, I'd give positive ones to the parent comment. Amusing.
Is this a joke?
,Evene in firefox 1.0).
:- IE is much faster than Firefox to open files in my hard disk.(WinXX).
I was going to ignore it thinking it was, but just incase you're serious I will respond.
The last phrase isnt that bad as you said.Nothing wrong in keeping Internet explorer for emergencies.I have seem quite a few pages that refuse to work in netscape - apart from those sites whose contents get juggled ( Yes
You're right here, this happens. MSIE is VERY good at rendering malformed HTML. Some have speculated that this was done to prevent HTML standards from being followed by most developers, but in any case, the HTML you're seeing messed up *is* malformed. At a fundamental level it's the website's fault. If you do have to use one of those pages, do make sure you e-mail the maintainer. Often they will fix it. As FF's marketshare increases, expect this to change.
Next,The start up time when I double click a html file in my hard disk
This is because MSIE is preloaded in RAM. I'm not familiar enough with windows to tell you how to preload FF at startup but there is a way. You can use about:config changes in firefox to speed up page rendering if you'd like. You should look into both of these if you are often opening files from the hard disk.
Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!
Ahh, finally to the reason I think you are joking. This is the default behavior in Firefox. If your copy isn't doing this it is because you turned it off. Turn it back on and once more it will ask for conformation.
"Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!"
It did, but you must have checked "Don't display this warning again" the first time you saw it. Or at least it did on windows.
"But the fact is, a lot of web servers do use Microsoft technology, and a lot of people have to be able to deal with that. It's part of their job, or something else that's important to them, and their not interested in any Microsoft-Mozilla religious war. If you forget that, you have have no hope of helping people move away from their dependency on Mister Bill's Empire."
I wasn't aware that security was a religious issue, but whatever floats your boat. Anyway, what do you suggest that will break the cycle of dependency, without bringing any "religious" issues into the picture?
Sounds to me like sooner or later the IE community is going to have to bite the bullet (pay the piper). Freedom, or slavery?
There are tools for removing Internet Explorer. IE is removed, system components that call it are adjusted, some icons disappear from the file browser, Windows File Protection is properly updated for the new no-IE state, and you have a system free of the IE nightmare.
...and I will say it again. There's a catch22 with the whole situation. Users dumb enough to have lots of spyware and other crap installed are usually unable to understand how to use Firefox.
Guess what happened?Full firefox was removed! I was shocked and sad.I think I could have been warned that removing the previos version removes the latest also. or May be both 0.9 and 1.0 should not show up in the list.Whatever.
has anyone had this prob?
Why does yahoo do this
If you need MSIE for some sites that employ ActiveX, you can use this to automate the installation of MSIE 6 on *nix via WINE: http://sidenet.ddo.jp/winetips/config.html Sidenet works pretty well.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
"Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!"
You prob turned it off:
Tools > Options > Advanced > Tabbed Browsing > Check Warn me when closing multiple tabs
Unlike the Toronto Star or the papers from Alberta?
http://linuxcentral.com/
As a Windows & Firefox user I find that the biggest problem is incompatible sites.
Because there are some incompatible sites, I am unsure when I come across a problem on any site. I have to fire up MSIE and try the site with it, in order to know what the problem is. Half the time it turns out to work with MSIE.
The solution is to reduce the number of incompatible sites. Obviously, the increasing market share of firefox helps.
It would also be great if someone wrote software that crawled the internet, finding IE specific (ie. non standard) code and sending the web admin a polite E-mail pointing out the problem and a solution. I'm not talking about Active-X controls, I'm talking about non-standard HTML.
Firefox is great and all, but it's so slow compared to IE...Just look how fast those popup windows open, so fast that I can't even click the close button fast enough to keep another 60 or so from coming up.
If only Firefox could do that....oh wait, what popup windows?
Make America grate again!
too lazy to look in bugzilla, but i think this was/is a known bug of the installer. i also believe that it was fixed on a trunk or branch or something or other (i'm not much of a dev, so these words are rather foreign to me) *after* ff1.0 gor released. maybe 1.1 will fix it no?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You know,some sites say ut plain - "Please Use IE to see this page" in a javascript dialogbox ,and somehow the data that does actually manage to show up IN firefox disappears quickly.And they are not trivial site usually ,for me to use another site - mostly its some University / Exam site thats important...
I think www.snaptest.org did it...
Why does yahoo do this
The extension that adds Windows Update to the menu is just a shortcut to wupdmgr.exe, the same thing you have in your Start Menu. It doesn't add any new features, it just mimics IE's feature of having a shortcut to it right in the browser. It's been a while since I tried, but I don't think the ActiveX plugin supports WU. This plug-in is designed for custom, legacy and intranet solutions and nothing else.
I find it easier just to not use Windows Update. I use Automatic Updates to get all my critical updates. If you're paranoid about AU, use their RSS feed and Security Bulletin Search.
OP said: "I use the internet heavily for research and reading news"
OP means: "I use the internet heavily for porn and reading slashdot"
thank you i'll be here all night.
That's the reason why FireFox is "behind" IE in maturity. So what? The reasons don't argue against IE, or the "negatives" of FF in teh review; they prove the situation is real. Reviews (and software) are for people who want to do something today. For those of us interested in FF "going places", we've got SourceForge and Slashdot.
BTW, I haven't used IE, even on Windows, for several years - too buggy/insecure, too much the tool of the Microsoft monopoly machine. I prefer alternatives, too, and I'm excited to see FF go places. I just take issue with this entire mode of comparing products, by invoking the real advantages of a status quo to defend a weakness in a newcomer.
--
make install -not war
Same here! I wish there was a fix for that. This happens on both 2K and xp. It's really annoying, trying to stay up-to-date but getting a list of software that grows longer and longer...
Instead of posting "bitchfest" comments here, perhaps we should politely email the author and help him broaden his understandingof the issues?
Here is what I wrote to him, as an example.
While I am sure it is not perfect, I believe it touches on the matters he clearly does not yet understand.
Emailed to: mingram@globeandmail.ca
Re: Your article:
A bug-free surfing zone
By Mathew Ingram
Friday, January 14, 2005 - Page R31
Hi Matthew.
While I have to thank you for a relatively informative article, I also have to point out that you are still, in many ways "Not getting it"
You have fallen into two fundamental errors of understanding:
First:
" That engine forms the basis for a new browser called Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users"
In this you badly missed the point of the Mozilla project.
Firstly the Mozilla project is where various browsers, Gecko based and other, spawn from.
It was an example of the first major project ceded to the Open Source movement.
It was decided that the best way to encourage development, without being tied to a development budget, was to move the development to an Open Source model, where thousands of users/develeopers could adopt and continue the development unfettered by traditional copyright and ownership issues.
By moving the Netscape source to a "copyleft" model this has clearly demonstrated an alternative and much more useful model for ownership and develeopment.
Your second case of misunderstanding:
Adding insult to injury you only mentioned the old (and many say obsolete) Microsoft and Apple environments, and totally ignored the much more relevant and modern Open Soruce communities, such as Linux and FreeBSD.
Thirdly, in the last paragraph you wrote:
"Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs, which isn't surprising considering it only recently came out of "beta" or testing mode. It also can't do much with pages that require features only Internet Explorer has, such as the ability to run Active-X programs."
While I fully agree that Firefox is NOT perfect, the one item you chose as an erxample is not a bug!
ActiveX and similar are not features, but instead are what can be called "malware".
A model for extensions that is so insecure and flawed is not to be supported.
It was a fatal error by Microsoft, and continues to be so.
Nobody is interested in "fixing" this.
If you want an extension model with some practical features, the world has already settled on a few, most notably PHP and Java. These can be secured, and can be considered "safe" extensions when properly implemented.
The only "bug" that is relevant here is the continued dependancy by a handful of misguided developers who are still using ActiveX on web pages.
The severity of this bug is such that the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued an advisory advising people to NOT use Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer and ASP IS the "bug".
Avoiding it's faults is an improvement, NOT a "bug"
BTW, whether you want to Internet Explorer installed on a Windows system is not a choice you get to make. M$ have integrated the browser into the OS in a fashion that does not allow you to remove it.
All you can do is remove links to it. These are called "shortcuts" in Windows terms.
Maybe next time you foray into this arena, good intentions in hand, you might want to submit your article for peer review in the relevant communities. I will be glad to point you in the directions for this if you like.
Feel free to ask.
BTW, this highlights what is probably the strongest feature of Open Source software: Peer review.
By submitting code, text, and other means of expression to peer review, we utilize a wide community of people to assist in improving our works, avoiding the pitfalls of well intentioned, but misadvised concepts and cases where we simply were not aware of a relevant matter on the topic.
We are all going to make mistakes, but i
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Firefox is still inappropriate for many foreign language websites that embed their fonts in their webpage. Firefox has yet to get licensing to use the (bitstream? embedded) system to display webpages.
This is the only reason I haven't switched to firefox.
You have to uninstall the previous version first, or the new version is simply installed on top of it, without removing registry keys (including the entry in add/remove programs). The Firefox site and Firefox installer advise you to remove any previous versions before installing the current one.
We had 6 new employees start the other day. They will all be regional managers for some division of the company. They all got new Dell laptops and are needing access to some kind of Oracle software that runs a java client inside IE. First of all the client would not run at all because activex was completely disabled. So I reset it to "Prompt" and after a warning it installed and worked. Later one of the people teaching the software said "We're going to need to get rid of that prompt, it is too annoying." Oh great, they want me to disable any active X warnings because "they are annoying". They didn't have a list of safe sites to use so they want it completely disabled. I might as well set their home page to comet cursor or gator.
Windows Update is not a reason to keep IE around, I work in an office that has gone to Firefox only browsing to prevent the computers from being filled with adware and spyware and let me too you it has helped 1000%. We use to have to keep IE as an option for Windows Update but now with Automatic Update, Windows XP handles all the downloading and updating without IE or those nasty ActiveX extensions. Seriously Firefox and Windows automatic update has saved well over 100 hours of tech support at work.
I wonder if anyone has lost their job because of Firefox? Downsizing the IT department because there are so many less adware and spyware related calls?
Go check out the IEBlog for their attitude towards standards... now that they've sold to all of these folks that "other browsers aren't important" there's no way they can resonably implement standards.
The globe and mail are one of canada's primary newspapers. They are high on my trustworthy list. They aren't tech oriented, but that doesn't mean they aren't trustworthy. You have to remember that this article was aimed towareds untechy people. Despite slashdotters not liking the last paragraph in particular, it was a good explanation to the non-technical why some websites won't work. Overall, i feel it was a good review.
Waffles rock.
I thought it was "Integrated" with the operating system.
Find Nearby Indie Events
The globe and mail are one of canada's primary newspapers. They are high on my trustworthy list.
They have a history of biased reporting and also they tend to not run stories that cannot be represented according to their worldview. It's suggested to not rely on the Globe and Mail as the only news source.
PHP and ASP are both server-side technologies and have absolutely nothing to do with client-side scripting/execution (which you seem to think).
HAND.
Here's Mine.
* A nice download manager in Firefox - Such that I can resume downloads after disconnection / I can download a file split over days - a littele a each day.
* Another one is,the one that opera curently has - The ability to start off from where I left it, (The webpages that were open I mean )When wither My Firefox / Windows / whatever crashed.
Why does yahoo do this
Is anyone reading slashdot really going to learn anything new from a review of firefox? Haven't we all been using it for years?
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
I love firefox. I have converted a large portion of my friends to it from IE. But firefox hasn't gotten to the point where it needs to be to eliminate IE.
For work I must enter two sites for retail sales of Nextel and DirecTV. Both of these websites (not the main site, but alternate sites just for direct/indirect retailers) do not work in firefox. No they do not use activex at all, merely IE-specific code.
The indirect channel for Nextel breaks once you log in, as the entire side menu doesn't appear (and there are no alternate links anywhere!). When using a mac, the links don't work at all no matter what browser you use (even IE for mac!).
The directv retailer site breaks after login the moment I attempt to enter their marketing portion of the site. Since all I do for my company is marketing, this is the only portion of the site I visit.
For these two sites I must switch to IE. No other browser I have tried works. The behavior of another site I use for Nextel marketing has 3 errors as well, 2 of which I have found work-arounds (refreshing the page lol). But another, which uses an input box, doesn't pop-up the correct window (even though I specifically state that this particular site should allow pop-ups).
You say to the dude: "Dude, there are serious security issues with what you are asking me to do."
Dude: "I don't care."
You: "Ok, before I do this I'll have to get approval from the CIO (or whoever's higher - the pres if need be.)
Dude: "Do it."
You to CIO via email: "Dude is asking to remove Active X prompt, The ramifications are as follows: yadda yadda yadda. overtime yadda yadda yadda potential data loss yadda yadda yadda privacy issues lawsuits"
The CIO: "Do it anyway"
You: "ok."
That's it. You don't run the damn company, your job is to advise in matters IT. If they want to jump off a cliff, it's not your job to do anything more than say "you'll die when you hit the ground below because of X"
After that, just make sure you CYA, enjoy the overtime pay and stop worrying about it.
Too many IT folk put their personal pride into things that are beyond their control... managers are like little kids, sometimes they need to fail first by themselves before they learn to listen to the subject matter experts they've hired.
Since IE has 95%+ of the market, how is it that IE-only web pages are non-standard? Like it or not, IE is the de facto standard.
It's a bug in Firefox that it cannot read web sites designed for IE.
Anybody can (and does) make that claim about any news source. Every news source has a bias, since there are people involved and those people, no matter how objective they may try to be, will allow a certain amount of bias through. I'd guess that, assuming you read national news in Canada, you're a National Post reader. You probably don't see them as being particularly biased, because they probably represent your worldview, whereas the G&M does not. That's fine. But the G&M does, for the most part, represent my worldview, whereas a newspaper that thinks an editorial on the merits of creationism is outstanding journalism (just to take a single example from recent memory) does not really represent my worldview, so I tend to consider NP as being "biased".
It's suggested to not rely on any single news source as the only news source.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
As a client, you should explain to your sales rep the issues at hand and how they are issuficient to your needs (tell em you're going all mac even).
At worst you may be able to negociate a better commission for your sales, at best they fix it.
it's briefer, to the point
it doesn't use judgemental adjectives
it has purely facts; no philosophy
I've got 6 FF browsers open with 2 and 3 tabs each. 54MB.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I don't want an integrated download manager. That way leads to bloatware. I'm happy using a third-party external download manager (GetRight).
Active-X is a big bug.
Anyone who continues to develop using it is a bad developer.
Subject says it all. :)
Of course, you might be able to run Windows under bochs, but then, my Sparc is old enough and slow enough that I really haven't been tempted to make the experiment.
I have Google's toolbar installed with popup-blocking turned off. I have Ad-Aware's Ad-Watch set to tell me any time it blocks something, and it never does anything any more. The combination of SP2's popup blocking, Spybot's immunization, and Spyware Blaster's ActiveX protection make surfing the internet as peaceful as it was before spyware and popups existed.
I've convinced my entire company to make the change to Firefox. They had to keep IE for online banking and other sites which use Active-X. I've been using Linux for 6 years, but I really can't think of a way round this. Other than making the vendor change the way they do things for a minority, is there any simple way?
This is what a lot of people don't understand or wish to face: in many many enterprise level companies today, there are applications that they are locked into or that have no alternatives that use IE as an app framework. So while FOSS advocates work on Linux video drivers so game companies will port the latest whatever game to Linux, what we really need is FOSS enterprise level business applications.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Umm, what version are you using?
When I installed 1.0 "warn when closing multiple tabs" was checked by default (in prefs->advanced->tabbed browsing), which does exactly what you are asking for.
I'm not saying I'm pro-microsoft. I'm not saying I'm anti-microsoft, either. What I am saying is this:
That one statement made by the author (Mathew Ingram) is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually remembers the start of the browser wars will know the following:
1. Netscape may have been a little startup at one point, but by the time the browser wars began, it was the biggest Internet application around -- and it held enormous weight behind it.
2. Netscape directly challenged Microsoft. Netscape thought that it could create a platform independant API, based around the Netscape software, that would make operating systems all but obsolete. They may not have been directly challenging windows, but they sure were threatening to make it obsolete. The challenged the Windows (Win16/Win32) API, which always has and (at least for the immediate future) always will be microsoft's bread 'n butter.
I'm not saying MS's tactics were fair, or even legal. I'm not saying the browser market couldn't use some fresh blood and some competition. Whether microsoft played fair or not is beyond my current scope. The fact is that Netscape made a direct move against microsoft, and making Netscape out to be the poor innocent victim is really starting to get old. They made a decision to challenge one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They lost. End of story.
Martyrs they are not. Examples of what not to do, they are.
/*end of rant*/
/dev/random
Actually, I agree with (I started this thread).
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm not saying that it is the fault of the sites, or of MSIE. I'm just saying that the main problem for users of firefox is that some sites use html that is not compatible with it.
Got a study to back that up? I doubt it.
I have not used IE at home for more than three years and have not had any problems. Sure, I've got an old version that came with Winblows 98, but I removed the network drivers from it ages ago and I doubt it would do me any good anyway. Under Linus I've have a few problems with streaming media on a few sites, but Mepis comes with Real Player and Xine. Between those two, I've got all normal formats and abnormal ones like Windoze Media, without having to worry about the trojans. Over the last three years, I've seen fewer and fewer sites requiring IE, and none of them that I actually need to use. I imagine that a site that really requires me to use IE would require me to load a steaming pile of DRM crap to work and that pile would break the scanner drivers and other stuff that I keep 98 for in the first place.
Keeping IE on the shelf is an instructive waste of time. The upgrade train never ends so when you think you need it, it's not going to work.
At work, for instance, I can't use Firefox for certain tasks because the Java-based admin pages (finances and grading) at our University won't work with it.
Too bad but don't worry. Your employer made a mistake. Most people are figuring that out by now. My University is quickly wiping out such junk. It cost a little money to get data out of the Microsoft Roach Motel, but it saves much more in the long run.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We have employment standards for the labour force; they were definatley NOT what 90% of the employers were using at the time of their implementation.
Standards are not majority rule, they are carefully designed with many factors outside of what the majority considers important accounted for.
It's the same reason that intersection sidewalks have ramps at the curb.
Most of those IE sites have horrible code, and are for all purposes unusable by people with disabilities. Those would be the same folk that got the ramps at the intersections installed, at considerable expense. They're also kicking up quite a storm in England over web access - including lawsuits.
Something to consider if you're in charge of "Defacto standard" websites.
I would suggest to anyone moving to Firefox not to make any special effort to remove IE. Two reasons for this:
As they point out, sooner or later you'll want to visit an ActiveX site
It's not worth the hassle of uninstalling IE.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Maybe that should be an option that the FF 1.0 installer gives the user, hmmm?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
" Other than making the vendor change the way they do things for a minority"
But you can help this along by pointing out the accessibily lawsuits happening in the UK.
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/12234
Learn what the fuck you're talking about.
Your Boss wanted to know what things were, and you basically said: Free stuff.
"Better" is not exactly the most stunning argument. He wanted facts, you gave him opinion.
This Boss even showed an interest (a big plus), but you blew it.
You can also tell Firefox to keep some elements of the browser in memory after you close FF, so the next time you open FF it starts up faster. Go to about:config and change browser.turbo.enabled to true.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
Based on the "fact" that most of said "article" is riddled with "quotation marks". not only do they "bother" me, but they make "it" seem like the "entire" "article" was written "without" the "permission" of a boss or "editor", and the quotations were "used" to get around that legal "snafu".
Plus... I don't have any sites which use ActiveX anymore. So its a moot point. for "me" anyway.
I believe you can appent "-turbo" to your FF shortcut to enable this behavior as well, at least in Windows.
"C:\Program Files\firefox\firefox.exe" -turbo
you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.
Of course! Every once in a while, I need a good emergency, and everybody knows nothing delivers one like Internet Explorer.
From the article:
Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users.
Oh crap! Who do I pay for this Firefox instance I'm running on my Linux box?
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Active-X does nothing that cannot be accomplished in another fashion.
It's best replacement for advanced client side interaction would be a Java appelet, but I avoid those like the plague. They are a PITA to get working, and always feel as if they're about to crash.
Personally, I've seen very few uses for either technology that couldn't be better acomplished with some HTML and a server side technology such as PHP, ASP or Perl.
To those few that need massive client side interaction, say for 3d image manipulation, I would choose something like Flash. (Primarily because of it's smoother installation as a browser plugin, and not needing "runtime platforms" to be installed.)
But I'd venture that 90% of Active-X/Java (applelets) are poor choices designed before ASP and PHP like technologies became the more powerful (in terms of overall feel/ease of use) solutions.
I wonder how much slashdot makes by posting all these firefox articles. I think firefox is too overhyped. It is bloated big time. You are all being brainwashed.
Comparing firefox to IE is like comparing opera to firefox. Why settle for IE or firefox?, use opera, it is much better.
My personal favorites are emerge, apt, or yum.... ;)
Tell me when an operating system that relies on emerge, apt, or yum is compatible with the Microtek Scanmaker 4850 flatbed scanner.
It annoys the hell out of me when people say IE is only faster because MSIE is preloaded in RAM
BOLLOCKS. I don't care. The end user doesn't care. The point made (and the point that any decent software designer should realise) is that apparent speed is as important-if not more important-than actual speed. Therefore, whatever reason IE is faster to boot is irrelevant. It just *is*.
As with the preload, you can change your shourtcuts by adding "/prefetch:1" at the end (no quotes).
I'm also one of those people that hate it when malformed html doesn't work properly in Firefox. I also would tend to blame IE for this. Unfortunately, as you said, until Firefox's market share becomes the majority, websites will have to be fix to be viewed. I'm also soley a linux user, so don't flame me for being pro-Microsoft. I'm just a designer who can take a users' point of view.
I'm undecided on the "firefox should make their code tolerant of bad html", as it could be a nice point to force website developers to adhere to standards. But meh!
Automatic Update is a part of XP. You only need to download it on Windows 2000 because it came as part of an SP.
Firefox is hardly bug-free. Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.) At this point in time, Firefox has a lot fewer bugs (or at least a lot fewer bugs that really matter) than Internet Explorer. But this has as much to do with the increasing flakiness of Internet Explorer as with the improvement in Firefox.
Sorry, but Windows isn't responsible for Firefox's memory leaks. I use it on both Windows and Solaris, and the memory consumption problems are present on both. My brother runs it on Linux, my roommate runs it on Mac OS X...etc.
Honestly, I think the memory leaks are the biggest problem with Firefox right now, and should be the first priority for the team.
is open.
Not a bad article, however, Firefox runs on many platforms including linux and *bsd. Sadly these are not mentioned.
As much as we love to call IE "not standards-compliant," we have to admit that for now, since it has so much of the market share, Internet Explorer effectively is the standard for the web.
Tools such as 'valgrind' are great for catching memory problems like the one you described. However, it is best to use them continuously during development (ideally running automatic regression tests inside them). It's virtually impossible to clean up a huge amount of low quality code after the fact.
Frankly the firefox codebase is the result of 7 years of development done largely without unit tests or even basic QA. As a result, they have leaks, bloat, and severe malformed HTML DoSes that lock up all browser tabs/windows.
The key to good engineering is complete self-honesty, but these days it looks like firefox is being managed by a self-delusional marketing organization with no interest in fixing its serious technical problems.
Linux users are encouraged to run 'valgrind firefox' prior to modding this post down for not towing slashdot's party line.
That's because Firefox didn't (doesn't?) delete the old registry uninstall info. You can do it yourself. It's under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Uninstall
No existe.
1. I answered this in the corresponding thread.
2. Well, it is a little off... If it's a formal email you should write it as such. Don't use things like M$ and BTW.
3. Active-X has little if anything to do with ASP. I use ASP all of the time in a standards compliant web authoring environment, simply as a sub for PHP when the server is IIS based. (yes I know I can run PHP on windows)
I never use Active-X. The two are completely independent of each other, although they can be used together. Active-X,
Active Server Pages
This is another reason I keep IE around. Open up a new browser window, and you've got a new session, whether you need one to test a web app you're developing or just to be logged into multiple mail.yahoo accounts at the same time. With Firefox the only way to get a new session is to log out of the old one (or close all Firefox windows.) And no, I do not want to mess around creating multiple profiles for something that IE accomplishes with a single click.
Your mailto link would also fail for anyone with JS turned off... including IE users. You can't blame firefox for that.
If you want to hide you emails, convert the letters to their numerical equivs manually, the post.
see here: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html
...is a notorious shill for Microsoft, as you will see if you read his past columns. I'm sure he's on the take, but even if he's not, his work is not worth reading, and has long been an embarassment to the Globe and Mail, which is in most respects an excellent newspaper.
So go ahead and write your letter, but don't hold your breath. Ingram already knows everything you are trying to say; he's not teachable. Even when he seems to acknowledge alternatives, he finds a way to undermine them, subtly or not, as in this article. He's in bed with MS, and that's it.
There are three reasons I hang onto IE over Firefox and Opera (I have both for web dev)
1. Web developement so my sites work in IE
2. Windows Update (No Automatic updates in Windows 2000?)
3. If you 'remove' IE6 under Windows 2000 you will find Windows Explorer can be used as a web browser and is equivalent to IE5. You can't truly remove IE from the OS (please somebody prove me wrong).
With the political bias of the global and mail, I don't think firefox would get any good "reputation" after all, there is already a lot of canucks hippies ranting the fact that firefox gives Microsoft more advantage for the desktop business and harms Linux, this is for you Mr. Seigo F U.
ActiveX is not the only Microsoft technology causing problems in non-Microsoft browsers.
Yahoo is a home-consumer website. Yahoo Mail uses an IFRAME and some very poor (from the standards-compliant perspective) JavaScript to provide RichText (HTML) composing of emails. None of the functionality would be difficult using standards, but Yahoo's answer to the existence of browsers other than MSIE is to deliver a different page without full functionality.
My father uses Yahoo Mail. He switched to Mozilla a couple of years ago. He only uses MSIE for WindowsUpdate and YahooMail. He confirmed Yahoo still had the problem last week; he was experimenting with Linux, and complained none of the browsers had full functionality with YahooMail. He (almost) understands this is a problem with Yahoo, not Mozilla, but consumers only see that expected functionality is missing with Mozilla, and blame the browser, not the websites.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Use the money you don't give to Microsoft and give it to a reputable scanner supplier instead.
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
It's actually quite simple if a little thought is put into it. And updating without IE is still possible, maybe not as convenient.
b sahome.mspx
1. Download MSBA from Microsoft. This isa cool tool and you can get updates from it after you scan your machine by clicking on the reletive "X"'s. And following the links to the updates. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/tools/m
I actually use MSBA to update, and it works quite. well.
2. Delete the backup copies of IE that are stored on the machine before deleting the IE executable in C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\. The backup can usually be found in C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386. I wouldn't recommend deleting the backup exec entirely, maybe just rename it to something else in case you ever do need it again. Same goes for the one in Program Files. just rename it.
anyway just my 2 cents.
I did some more research after that post. If you want to run firefox under valgrind you actually need to use 'firefox --debugger valgrind'. With 'valgrind firefox', the startup script causes valgrind to analyze the script, rather than the actual browser process.
Anyway, results with a single blank firefox 1.0 window:
==6273== ERROR SUMMARY: 83 errors from 5 contexts (suppressed: 272 from 3)
==6273== malloc/free: in use at exit: 691499 bytes in 12633 blocks.
==6273== malloc/free: 163851 allocs, 151218 frees, 25635248 bytes allocated.
which IMHO is rather unacceptable for a 1.0 release.
A large number of apps depend on the Microsoft JVM, which (of course) only works with IE. However, Microsoft isn't actually supporting this anymore: It isn't included in XP, and you can't even download it from Microsoft's site. (Usually, it's distributed by the app vendor.) So even IE users will have to transition to Sun's (browser-independent) JVM eventually, and those who have done so already have the same problems with these apps as Firefox users.
In the meantime, you need to have two separate JVMs (Sun and MS) installed to get every Java app to work, and sometimes just guess which one a particular Web app is designed for. And that's just on Windows.
Personally, I think that firefox is great (except for the decision to force the google search into its own toolbar). But, I'm personally still using the mozilla suite instead of the separate apps. Here's why:
No integration: there's no way to tell firefox "when I click on a mailto: link, open it with thunderbird"; likewise thunderbird can't handle URLs. In both cases, they insist upon using the prefs defined in gnome-control-panel, but guess what? I use KDE (and the gnome panel is broken).
Broken fonts: Gnome uses pervasive antialiasing, but the suite is still built to use the 100dpi fonts (which are much easier to read than the ttf ones).
Missing Ctrl-1,2,5 shortcuts (these would just be useful).
Extensions - must be installed using xpi and are not packaged up with urpmi - this makes them a nuisance.
Why do I want to move to the separate programs? Each of them runs in its own space, and can be quit without killing the other. So, for example, when a java applet crashes, it would be nice to only quit the browser, not the whole lot. (it would be even better to just be able to kill the java vm)
Firefox seems to consume 100% CPU for up to 20 seconds upon attempting to start a download, even for small files. Really annoying when you combine it with the sluggishness of multiple tabs.
...will ensure that IE will still be required. In fact, it still is, especiall for Windows Update.
'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
And there will always be sites that just don't work or work right in FF/Moz. But how is this any different than keeping FF/Moz, Opera, or whatever, around to do real CSS work, ala at Eric Meyer's websites, because IE is pretty much broken for some CSS things?
So FF/Moz/Opera get elevated to virtual first-tier software status, and IE relegated to second-tier status, for use with Microsoft's websites (MSDN and microsoft.com still are just a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, for when one needs to go there. The Oracle HTML docs are a bit more usable in IE than in Moz/FF, too, oddly enough).
Bill Gates calling open source types communists hurts his image in the mainstream press? Oh wait, it doesn't. The average person is infact immature, and expects it somewhat from others, and will sometimes call you elitist is you aren't like them.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Firefox doesn't 'do' ActiveX? Thats not a shortcomming...its a feature :)
I read
Well, there is an experimental ppc32 port of valgrind:
http://valgrind.kde.org/
You can also use qemu to emulate x86 linux, then run valgrind inside of it... or even pick up a cheap x86 box just to use it... it's truly an excellent tool that will catch leaks, double frees, invalid access (with its security implications), etc. I don't know anything else that comes close.
Whaaaa?
I'm using Suse 9.2 Pro and my FF and TB installs can DEFINETLY "crossover" as you describe.
When I click a mailto link in FF it spawns TB for me.
When I click a URL in TB it will spawn FF and open the page for me.
The best part is, I didn't do anything special to make it happen...it just did it.
Are you using KDE or Gnome? I think this particular problem may arise from the Mandrake packages, but the root cause is that neither FF nor TB actually have a pref for the URL/mailto handlers. They both use the gnome-wide preference which is wrong (since I use KDE) and wrong again (since my gnome install is never used and is broken) and wrong again (since it isn't documented). Richard
"Hm. I'm entitled to ramble on about something everyone knows." - Captain Picard
I think Mozilla would benefit from a coherent and consistent naming scheme.
I'm using Mozilla 1.6. Does that mean I'm using Firefox? Is that the name of the browser? If not, then what the heck is Firefox? Is Thunderbird just the e-mail part? How come I already have an e-mail part with my Mozilla (Firefox)? I don't have Mozilla suite since I don't have any IRC or the other features....
>Interestingly enough, if you tried to install Firefox or Netscape on an unpatched Windows 98 installation, the installer doesn't work.
Huh? I have a 98SE box that has been reloaded a few times from the original install cd, but never been upgraded with subsequent patches. I installed and use Mozilla without a glitch. I also installed FireFox without problem, although I subsequently uninstalled it because I use Mozilla for email as well. Yes, I also installed Thunderbird, but I like being able to open html links in a new tab which I couldn't do in Thunderbird.
Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs
...like not displaying CSS styles properly? Or changing the layout of the page (often finally to the correct layout) after hitting refresh even though it's the exact same page?
Though, even with these bugs, I still prefer it to anything else.
I see no new information, nothing different from the dozens of other articles written about the browser. If all we are doing these days is doing a Google News search on Firefox and posting every positive review that comes up, well thats sort of pathetic, isn't it?
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
My wish would be an (optional!) MSIE compatible rendering engine, that would show web pages as they would in IE. Bug-for-bug compatible, if at all possible, and, of course, must run on non-Windows systems as well. It doesn't need to be fancy (like ActiveX etc...), just show HTML+CSS like they would appear on MSIE please!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I am a doctor and my hospital has embarked upon an upgrade of its IT structure so that data can be viewed from outside the hospital. Unfortunately, all of the new web-based apps are totally IE-dependent (due to ActiveX).
The "real world" is really bleak. *Everyone*, and I mean everyone, assumes that *everyone* has a Windows PC that runs IE. I have tried complaining to my hospital's IT folks about standards compliance and such, and I get looks as if I had two heads. The Windows monopoly is so deeply ingrained that even questioning it causes others to question one's sanity.
If our justice system ever figures out how deeply Microsoft has reemed us, it will be so far in the future that Bill G and cohorts have long since passed to the grave after a life of unfettererd affluence on the backs of the unsuspecting public.
The sites don't get "juggled" in firefox. They look exactly how they are coded to. The site gets "juggled" in internet explorer and doesn't look like its coded to look. Instead, it looks good. Which obviously isn't what the developer was going for, if you look at their code.
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
Turbo was removed from firefox somewhere around the 0.6 (?) version. The stated goal of the project was for it to be as fast as possible, so it wouldn't need a 'turbo' option.
Every now and again, I come across a website which has a form that simply doesn't work unless you are using IE. It's the same each time... I fill it out, try to submit, and it fails. I repeat a couple of times until it occurs to me to try it in IE. Invariably, it then works. Submitting a comment to the webmasters of these pages regarding their lack of compatibility with Firefox or Netscape gets back a response of "Then use IE." with a "What's Firefox?" thrown in.
So, I keep IE around for emergency compatibility with certain proprietary sites. Sad but true.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
"That engine forms the basis for a new browser called Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users."
This infers that its not free for non-windows/mac systems, namely *nixes.
Odd that, my debian box Im sitting at says diffrently... (Is browsing with Firefix)
Roses are red
Violets are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poems write you!
Conversely, tell me when Microtek supports Linux well, and I'll buy from them. Tis but a matter of perspective (and voting with your wallet).
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Some have speculated that this was done to prevent HTML standards from being followed by most developers
;-) (which they have)
In that case, MS wouldn't have spent too much effort getting employees into contributing to W3C standards.
I'm not familiar enough with windows to tell you how to preload FF at startup but there is a way.
No, that was removed.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
change to another bank :)
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
This is the default behavior in Firefox.
This wasn't the default behaviour in some of the earliest versions. He must be running an old version of FF.
That's hilarious.
I don't think it has always been that way, but it certainly has for a while now. It doesn't work if you're browsing full screen, though, which can be a nasty surprise. Perhaps it's meant to be useful for browsing pr0n when your boss is around? ;-)
On a related subject, does anyone now how to make Firefox open a new tab/window when a link is followed from, e.g., a message in Thunderbird, please? It's very annoying to have your most recent window taken over, particularly if that contained something like a form that had taken a lot of time to fill in. The back button usually seems to work these days, but it's irritating even so. I've managed to do this several times recently, so if there's not already a way around it, it's probably annoying enough to justify a feature request to the developers.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Tis but a matter of perspective (and voting with your wallet).
Tell me when the rest of my family supports choosing a make and model for a flatbed scanner given as a Christmas gift, and I'll consider a different brand. And even if it's not a gift, how can I unbuy the scanner from the Linux-unfriendly company and buy a scanner from a Linux-friendly company if I already own this scanner? I don't have a time machine.
No, you download all those updates from a secure box and have them on a CD.
Where does a residential user obtain access to a secure box in order to download and record the operating system's service pack? Do public libraries tend to have CD burners on computers available to members?
Use the money you don't give to Microsoft and give it to a reputable scanner supplier instead.
Repeat the process for each peripheral that I already own, and I could almost afford Windows Server. That's how Microsoft gets you.
I'm using Windows 98. I expect Windows 98 SE to have all the patches that the original version didn't have. :)
Until people find a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
You'll have to face the music sooner or later anyway. When MS releases a new OS, and the scanner manufacturer decides that writing a new driver for an old piece of hardware is not in their best interest, you'll be stuck with either an old version of your OS, or with a paperweight that used to be a scanner.
Especially scanners appear to be hard hit by the 9x->XP migration. I have heard plenty of horror stories of scanners not even 2 years old whose manufacturer had decided not to write an XP driver.
The only way around this is for a manufacturer to document the wire protocol of its scanner so that third parties can write a driver. Not surprisingly, these are usually also the manufacturers providing the more decent hardware, and these bits of hardware are usually well supported under Linux as well. And also not surprisingly, the ones not documenting their specs and protocols are the ones playing the 'upgrade your hardware along with your OS' game.
Even if you are stuck on Windows, I'd advise you to buy only peripherals that work with Linux as well. 9 times out 10 it is just the better hardware anyway, and the manufacturer has proven that it is interested in you as a customer, not merely someone to be screwed out of as much cash as possible.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
If I had mod points I'd give you a (+1, Insightful), but as it is I'll have to reply and back you up.
I'm a professional C++ programmer. In the past five years of development, I believe that I have written a grand total of 0 memory leak bugs, just by following basic solid programming techniques such as the "resource allocation is initialisation" idiom described in the parent post. Anyone writing C++ since about 1998BC should be familiar with this technique, and its use should be second nature.
The parent was also spot on about using tools to check for this, just in case you have some circumstance where using RIAA really isn't possible (or perhaps something obscure like a bug in your compiler or a library you're using). How else do you think I'm so confident that I haven't created any memory leaks? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I don't care about ActiveX but the lack of XML data islands is very unfortunate. If you have a very application xml data ilandsa are just the tick for comunications with a server. Simple request and replay sending and reciving, totaly in the background. Then use another island with xsl in it to transform the results. I don't know (or care) if they are part of the standard, the work and are simple. Firefox should have them.
1. the reason why MSIE opens much more quickly than other browsers is quite relevant in the sense that that reason is the much contested, brought to trial, reason: IE was artificially made part of the OS. The "why?" is therefore mostly irrelevant for the end user, but quite important for the developer/enthusiast/power user. Considering how many exploits in MSIE are based on abusing malformed html, I'd much rather stick to a malformation-intolerant browser -- standard adherence is a nice side effect. While we're at it, IE craps itself with some WELL-FORMED html, so...
The parent poster's letter is obviously well-intentioned, if somewhat flawed in places, so how about some more constructive feedback and fewer flames?
If I may contribute my own 2 $MINOR_CURRENCY:
The style certainly is rather patronising in places, as others have noted. Telling someone they "don't get it", for example, is unlikely to put them in a frame of mind where they lend any credibility to the remainder of your message (or even read it, I suspect). Perhaps something less hostile would be in order, maybe "I would like to thank you for an informative article, but also to question a couple of your arguments".
The other big problem, as I read it, is that you aren't clear about what is fact and what is your personal philosophy. Based only on the three points you challenge, I would have labelled you as an unrealistic evangelist before reading on, because in all three cases, I don't think you're objectively correct: Gecko is the engine used in Firefox, Microsoft certainly is far more relevant than Linux to most people who'll be reading that article and the Mac probably is too, and ActiveX support is not a bug, as numerous corporate Intranet sites that all use the technology for productive purposes demonstrate.
If you'd stick to the facts and objective benefits, you'd make a far more compelling series of arguments. For example, why not mention that one advantage of Open Source is that the applications are often available on a diverse range of platforms, and not just Windows and Mac? This is an advantage for users of multiple systems, because they can use the same software on each, and support for new systems is usually rapid and complete. Similarly, you could mention that while the lack of built-in support for ActiveX does stop some web pages displaying properly, many fans of Firefox see this as a benefit. You can back this up objectively by observing that few Internet sites use ActiveX constructively, but ActiveX controls are one of the major ways an average user's sytem admits malicious software that then spoils their browsing experience. In each case, these arguments are based on objective benefits for users, rather than any personal pro-OSS philosophy (which, being brutally honest, most people using or potentially using Firefox really don't care about).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Especially scanners appear to be hard hit by the 9x->XP migration.
That was a completely different kernel series, from Win9x to WinNT. Of course there'll be problems between WinNT (used in Win2k pro and WinXP pro) and WinNT-64 (used in WinXP 64-bit), but by the time 64-bit machines are affordable, I'll have enough money saved up for a whole new computer with Linux-compatible peripherals.
There actually is an Active-X plug-in for other browsers. I don't know why you'd want to use it, though... :)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=125126&cid =10487657
This would be hella useful for me, and probably a lot of other people where I work at least. If this plugin/feature allowed the user to see how the page would be split (using a semi-transparent outline maybe), then they could just resize the browser/font and maybe make changes to the page body border, then hit a button and have PDFs of the page created!
Even better for me would be for this ability to be available in a command-line mode so I could batch process pages. Maybe also have the ability to create thumbnails too for intranet links or something...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I've actually been interviewed for a Globe article on web standards.
Getting interviewed by the regular media usually means watching what you say very carefully. There's a huge problem with the need for flashy angles and headlines, never mind inaccuracy and invention on the part of the 'journalist'. Add the short attention span of a deadline to the mix and you're left in a defensive position, trying not to be misquoted too badly versus not replying at all and getting no ink for your viewpoint.
The Globe author was quite a surprise. He started out with obsolete questions from the IE/Netscape browser war era, but had no problem shelving that and shifting his deadline so he could get up to speed. We exchanged emails for about a week on technical issues.
The final write-up was pretty good for a weekend edition of Canada's business newspaper. (The Globe is what the suits read here. It's not particularly "right wing", but it is fiscally conservative.) It wasn't what I'd have written, but I'm biased: I think open web standards are good and necessary. He did a good job of covering a few points of view in a technical area for a readership that hires an IT department to take care of things.
Yahoo gives the details for POP3/SMTP access to its servers. The catch? You have to tick a box to allow the very occasional advert from them. It doesn't seem to come from anywhere else and you can easily filter it out. No additional software required.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Sounds like a configuration problem. I can open multiple instances of Firefox in Windows, Linux and OSX with no problems. There's rarely a need for it of course, since Firefox has this handy feature known as "Tabbed browsing"... When you need a new "session" hit CTRL+T.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
ok, so the security is a serious issue, but ms will likely find a way around it and release a better version. and then, i think firefox will have to bite the bullet and accept it as a web standard.
Could you not use a PDF or PS "printer"? (Windows comes with PS-file printer, and Ghostscript is free, I know free PDF "printers" exist, but as at work we have Acrobat and at home my printer spool is fucked, I don't know the URLs).
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
*ahem*
Care to include Linux in that?
A 100% compatible MSIE like rendering engine is impossible. Even if you could emulate MSIE's handling of HTML, VBScript, and Javascript perfectly, you would have to fully emulate ActiveX. The problem is that there are too many undocumented Windows API calls, and even if those were emulated an ActiveX script could take a hash of certain Windows/MSIE components or even check for specific ASM code at certain offsets in certain files (see the discussion on Shrinker on the wine mailing lists). How would anything running on an OS other than Windows know what instruction (opcode) was at offset 0xDEADBEEF in ntdll.dll?
The way firefox must render that list of downloaded files is quite slow.
When you get too much history in there, downloading slows to a crawl. They need to only store the last 20 downloads or something, it's not really the right format for looking at download history. But yeah, click "Clean up" every so often and it'll speed up.
Firefox also has a problem with downloading an image that you've already opened. If it's not HD cached, it'll download the whole picture again.
And there's still the security problem with it storing credit card numbers on your machine.
It's by no means perfect.
"Huh? I have a 98SE box that has been reloaded a few times from the original install cd" Gee, ya think maybe Windows 98 "SECOND EDITION" has a few more patches and updates shipped with it than the first version of Windows 98. Ya f'ing moron.
That's why I'd love to see XHTML become standard. It's so much easier to validate - it would be trivial to add a validator to firefox and/or nvu/composer. Another great thing about xhtml is namespaces - which effectively allow OLE. You can embed SVG, XUL, etc. in your document trivally. Another great feature is the ability to use XSLT to transform the documents to whatever the heck you want. All we really need to nvu/composer support for xhtml to get the ball rolling.
is your friend
+ la wsuits
http://www.google.ca/search?q=web+accessibility
web accessibility lawsuits would be the search string.
...is the horrible bug that causes both firefox and mozilla proper to stall indefinitely when trying to connect to any site at seemingly random times. This happens in both Win32 and Linux builds. The only known remedy apparently is to hit 'stop' then 'reload'.
It's embarrasing as much as anything else, giving a windows-using friend Firefox to replace IE only to find that 1 out of 10 page loads fail, and they go back to "good old" IE, oblivious to the security hole he's just let himself in for.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Anybody can (and does) make that claim about any news source.
Anybody can make claims, but usually facts exist to demonstrate the truthfulness of claims. This applies to newspaper critics as well as newspaper journalists (as well as everybody else).
Every news source has a bias, since there are people involved and those people, no matter how objective they may try to be, will allow a certain amount of bias through.
Perhaps, but at some news agencies this bias is encouraged. By leaving out some facts of a story, actively working to not discover the entire story, or by careful wording, a paper goes beyond simply being written by biased humans, it becomes untrustworthy.
I'd guess that, assuming you read national news in Canada, you're a National Post reader.
I've long since given up getting my news from any one source.
You probably don't see them as being particularly biased, because they probably represent your worldview, whereas the G&M does not.
Worldviews have more to do with opinions than factual stories.
the G&M does, for the most part, represent my worldview whereas a newspaper that thinks an editorial on the merits of creationism is outstanding journalism (just to take a single example from recent memory) does not really represent my worldview, so I tend to consider NP as being "biased".
You're talking about opinion again. I was referring to Globe & Mail stories, not their opinions.
What bugs? OK, I know... but one of the major strengths of Firefox is that if you find a bug and report it, the bug usually has a high likelihood of getting fixed, or otherwise you will be shown a pretty good reason why not.
...had this as the first result.
What they say, goes. Microsoft is a company that makes a browser that renders the Web. The W3C makes the Web. What Microsoft can do is what everyone has to do - suggest changes, improvements, and modifications to the standards. Just because Microsoft implemtented the changes without getting them approved doesn't therefore make them "standard".
Sorry about the italic text. I seem to have forgotten to close a tag.
Twitter: I'm going to be one of the few people who doesn't flame you. I hope that you can become a mature and contributing poster on Slashdot. But at the moment, quite frankly, you aren't. Let me give you some constructive criticism.
Although it may seem that way, bashing Microsoft in every single post you make is not a good way to make friends or become popular on Slashdot. Feel free to criticize them, but please don't work it into every post you make, please don't resort to silly M$ and Windoze namecalling and please don't talk about subjects which you know nothing about. Problems in Firefox's code are in no way Microsoft's fault.
As for me personally, I use Gentoo Linux and love it. I do, however, recognize the fact that Windows is a tool that should be used at the proper time for its proper purpose. Comparing Linux to Windows is like comparing a utility truck to a Corvette. Sadly, for gaming Linux just doesn't cut it (not a shortcoming of the OS, but the producer's fault.) For ease of use and configuration Windows is king. I can't remember the last time I have even seen a text configuration file for anything in Windows. ATI cards work on Windows. Windows is not a very good or stable OS, but there is no reason to refuse to use it on principle if it's the best tool for the job.
Although I dislike Windows, that doesn't make me refuse to use the *good* software the Microsoft has put out over the years. I don't care how much you hate Microsoft, or how evil they are, but Visual Studio is a good product. So is Microsoft Office.
Once again, please don't go ranting about it being Windows's fault every time somebody has a problem. You have made a great number of "Freaks" doing this.
Cheers,
~uman aka koreaman
Le français vous intéresse?
Have you tried Tools, Options, Advanced, Tabbed Browsing? You may also need want to think about Single Window Mode.
i nfo.php?application=thunderbird&version=1.0&os=Win dows&id=425
It's actually part a thunderbird problem to some extent I think (it should ask nicely before overwriting a current tab/window), Linky extension may help.
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/more
http://gemal.dk/mozilla/linky.html
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Fantastic, that (Tools->Options->Advanced->Tabbed Browsing) was exactly what I was looking for. Many thanks.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Beyond that, some tags work differently from version to version. I recall a person I was helping out whose page didn't work in mozilla -- turned out that the tag worked differently in ie4, ie5, ie5.5, ie for mac, ie6, and ie6sp2, but worked the same in opera and mozilla.
Do you REALLY want to risk your business on such a standard?
It's been a long time.
My father (mentioned above) started using YahooMail because I recommended it because it was the only free webmail with POP3. The free YahooMail no longer has POP3 in the US. (The UK version may be different.)
History:
- 1995: I signed up for free mail accounts on GeoCities and Yahoo. Geocities allowed free POP3, so that became my main home email address.
- 1999: Yahoo bought Geocities. Yahoo quickly added free POP3. I merged my accounts.
- 2000? Yahoo changes the free POP3 to require at least weekly advertisements. One additional unwanted email is almost unnoticable with the rise of spam. I still recommended YahooMail to everybody; this is when my father signed up.
- 2002? Yahoo moves POP3 to the paid subsciptions. Attempts to use POP3 get an email recommending giving Yahoo money. I stop recommending YahooMail.
A Slashdot discussion about a year ago turned up that the UK YahooMail still had free POP3. I am not recommending to my US-based friends and family that they use a UK email address. They have enough trouble typing URLs that do not end with ".com".
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
As others have said Firefox loads slower than IE initially because portions of the IE code are always running in memory, and are loaded in the background when Windows boots. If IE were a standalone application like Firefox, it would be about the same speed or slower. Use the turbo option that others have described to keep parts of Firefox in memory and get a similar effect. Mozilla has that option available from preferences for years, I'm not sure why they left it out of Firefox.
What I do instead of closing Firefox is to leave it open, and have any documents open in a new tab in the browser that's already running. This can be configured under the Advanced preferences. In that same section there is an option to warn before closing any browser with more than one tab open, which is what you're looking for. That option has been there since at least 1.0pre that I know about, and on a fresh install it should have been selected by default. Just go in there and check that box.
There is an extension that can make tabbed browsing even more wonderful than it already is. Just go to Tools -> Extensions and click on the blue link to get more extensions, and install the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension. What it can do is keep all related tabs together in colored groups, and let you move tabs around manually, make the tab bar scroll when there are too many tabs to display, and some other stuff like making links that would normally open in a new window open in a new tab instead. Also, it will save and restore a group of tabs, and restore the tabs you were using when Firefox crashed. I'm not sure if Firefox can do that by default. Oh, and you can undo closing any number of tabs. I'm sure you've also many times closed a tab when you didn't mean to. With the Tabbbrowser Preferences extension, you can bring that tab back. It's very cool.
The other extension that I really recommend is Adblock. Install that, and then get a pre-defined filterset for it like Filterset.G, so you don't have to train it. Just save the file there with the latest date as part of the filename. Import the filterset by going into the Adblock preferences and clicking on Options -> Import Filters.
Enjoy Firefox.
As long as Windows Update needs IE to run, IE will stay around for a very long time.
Are there any major websites that actually use ActiveX? I have yet to come across any.
Flash ads are displayed by Slashdot. So, as the Flash movies are displayed in Internet Explorer using an ActiveX control, we can say that "./ use ActiveX" when browsed with IE.
If that is true, then it just sounds like good engineering to me, and adherence to the robustness principle ("be liberal in what you accept...").
It is a Yahoo UK address. Try it and see if that works for you. I don't know if Yahoo has chosen to be bound by UK/European privacy rules instead of US ones but that would be another advantage. Email is still not private though...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
"Adding insult to injury you only mentioned the old (and many say obsolete) Microsoft and Apple environments, and totally ignored the much more relevant and modern Open Soruce communities, such as Linux and FreeBSD."
:)
I just wonder, when will it stop. I won't even comment on calling linux or freeBSD relevant (think X11), but saying that Apple envorement is in any way outdated...
The battle of equals for sure
Everytime you get this complaint, record it and place a call to your technical support at the vendor that requires activeX. Oracle is a big company, they charge a lot of money for their products. Tell them in clear terms that their design is making things difficult for you. Start demanding something that works in FF.
Make sure when you talk to other admins you mention this issue. You as a customer alone probably isn't big enough to get Oracle's attention (though of course I don't know your situation). All the admins you can talk to is.
Well, you're half right.
The "firewall" in XP does not block egress traffic.
There's nothing to block phone-home exploits.
Ever see the TV commercial where the kid installs the cool new game on her dad's box?
gewg_
Flattered, thanks, but it's not the first time. I'm happy when morons like that waste their time on little fish like me.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You obviously don't know what an HTTP session is. Here's what you need to do to figure it out. Sign up for two accounts on some website that allows you to "log in" and "log out". Say you signed up for mail.yahoo.com. Open two Firefox tabs. In one tab log in under your first account, in another log in under the second. Now go and refresh the first tab. Notice how it is impossible to be logged into seperate accounts in each tab at the same time. That's because your login information is stored in a session, which is shared between all firefox tabs and windows.
Now repeat the exercise with two IE windows. Make sure that for the second window you actually start another instance of IE instead of going File->New Window. Now you'll be able to be logged into a seperate account with each window. That's because each seperate instance of IE has its own session. If the second window had been opened with File->New Window you'd have gotten the same behavior as Firefox though.
You obviously don't know what an HTTP session is.
Yeah, I had never come across this new fangled technology in 12 years of web development until I just read your article.
If Firefox is sharing a session between tabs, then it sounds like a pretty bad bug. Multiple browser instances, be they tabs or windows shouldn't have access to the session data of another. The only exception to this would be child windows.
Anyway, I still haven't heard why it's impossible for someone to open more than one instance of Firefox at a time when I do it pretty much every day!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
If Firefox is sharing a session between tabs, then it sounds like a pretty bad bug. Multiple browser instances, be they tabs or windows shouldn't have access to the session data of another. The only exception to this would be child windows.
How exactly would you have a tabs from multiple instances in the same window? Anyway, I personally think is one of those "feature, not a bug" type of thing where whoever designed the session handling simply screwed up.
Anyway, I still haven't heard why it's impossible for someone to open more than one instance of Firefox at a time when I do it pretty much every day!
Maybe they're not the same instance, but if they share the same session, they may as well be the same instance as far as I'm concerned. And every time I've shut down one such instance from Task Manager, it made the other windows crash.
This breaks my imageindex script that I've used for 10 yrs (quick and dirty, makes an HTML file out of images in current dir).
also laughable is that Firefox counts the border WIDTH against total window size when doing CSS-P calculations -- so my thick 5px window borders (I don't like precise mouse grabs) actually offset the content of the windows by as much as 5px! Result: slashdot articles overlap with the grey sidebar at times.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
...webservers running on port 1080.
Bug#85601
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"