Slashdot Mirror
Firefox In Print
hoovernj writes "It seems that O'Reilly is ready to release two books about Firefox in March. The first is Firefox Hacks, which will be targeted at Firefox power users. And the second is Don't Click on the Blue E!, which will be targeted at less-savvy users transitioning from Internet Explorer. Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages? (thanks to mozillaZine for the original pointer)." And reader ledmirage writes "Wired Magazine's February issue on Firefox: 'It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)'."
Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...
Does anyone *really* need a book telling them how to use a browser? Doesn't that suggest that the browser UI design is inadequate?
Ydco co
in the FA O'reilly claim firefox accounts of 22% of the market... I just whish this were so.
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
*another* nail?
How bloody big is this coffin?!
That one popular yet dubious trick of telling your browser to hit websites you point to 20 or so times at once to get a faster response...
I'm giving up Lynx.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
lets hope its the end of ie only sites. uhh lets make a web site but only make it for one browser. it is much better than the client/server software we currently use.
Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous? - Calvin
The Wired kiss-of-death will strike again. They can't tout a "next big thing" without absolutely killing it.
Also, I find the title "don't click the blue E" particularly funny. I know someone who, when asked, why they didn't like Firefox over IE they said "because it's harder to use" or some BS like that. He's a technician and apparently just wubs IE to death for some reason even though he admits to having to configure every installation to the maximum security settings. Oh well.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
Is anyone else getting tired of every news story possibly being the end of something? This summary would have been perfectly informative without that wonderful bit of speculation.
And no, I'm not new here.
Strewth, if succesful transitioning to Firefox requires me to fork out $20 for a book, I might as well spend my money on a more straightforward browser.
Seriously, exaxctly how often IS the software world rocked nowadays? Every week or so? Don't get me wrong, I love firefox but is it really having a huge impact on the software industry? After all, both firefox and IE are free (though you have to buy windows to get IE). At the most it is taking a chunk out of MS's browser market, but that's all.
P.S. Watch your back bill gates? WTF is this 1996 or something "homey"?
It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular
Well for one thing Firefox is NOT fast. Its slow as h#ll especially when starting up.. mucha slower than IE6 IME.
Not that I don't agree with the idea the firefox is taking a chuck out of IE's market share but how exactly does O'Reilly releasing 2 books on firefox equal a "end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages"?
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
Am I the only old fart feeling deja vu? Open source...fast...not Microsoft...lemme see, that's the Mosaic browser before it became Netscape, right?
Now what do I do with the "winsock.dll" file again?
Don't blame the messenger.
I shot the sheriff
What kind of less savvy users would buy a book about Firefox?
The O'Reilly FireFox Factor
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I read the wired article, and in all fairness the IE bashing was based on IE pre-SP2. A lot of it's been tightened up. A little balance, please.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
from all the helpdesk calls thAt I get, I'd say fucking enormous!
Comment Read. There will be a delay before the comment seeps into your brain.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
Slashdot is not the place to ask. Their site constantly displays incorrectly in Firefox. They'd do well to take heed of their own articles.
All I can think of is the scene where Uhura is re-learning English and trying to pronounce "blue" on her own:
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
How much money does Microsoft really make off of Internet Explorer? If the Mozilla Foundation snatches the browser market away, does Bill Gates give a damn? The home user still gets to use IE for Windows Update (and Office Update), unless she expressly use Automatic Updates. Now, if Slackware were getting 20% of the OS market, Bill Gates would need rear-view mirrors. But the browser thing is last decade's battle.
Unless we can use it as a foothold, and move on to combat the Windows monopoly.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
"Is anyone else getting tired of every news story possibly being the end of something?"
Well maybe with your post? That'll be the end of that practice.
I'd like to see them put the tab close "X" on the tabs themselves like Safari.
--- Ban humanity.
I just had this conversation with my business partner the other day (we're in web development). I was thinking about it from this standpoint - even Firefox doesn't get everything completely right 100% of the time. Those problems tend to get fixed pretty quick, luckily.
If you've ever tried to read through the W3C recommendations, you'll find them pretty dry and occasionally confusing. You can understand how browsers don't conform completely all the time.
That doesn't excuse Microsoft from developing a way-off-base browser, allowing serious security holes past testing, or refusing to fix the problems they are aware of... There are a few things I like about IE, including some treatments of CSS and JavaScript. Just today I had to implement an auto-progressing slideshow feature into a photo gallery, and IE lets me use blend transitions (Firefox doesn't, at least that I can find).
Despite all the defenses I can imagine, we still develop for Firefox and adjust to make it work in IE. We're both Firefox users that have to keep IE in our arsenal because that's what EVERY SINGLE CLIENT USES. None of them care to switch...and some can't because of the corporate requirements.
The only reasons for such books to exist is to:
1. Catch the eye of literate, albeit beginning computer users (aka clueless) who make a point of reading the titles of all the new IT-related books in their local library.
2. Give the sysadmins a powerful tool for turning around corporate policy: "But, boss, it's in O'Reilly! They're the alpha and omega of CS!" "OK, stop bugging me and install the damn thing, but if my Favourites are not there tomorrow, don't bother showing up again."
Just
Much though I'd like to use Firefox all the time, I often seem to find myself having to resort back to IE. This is partly due to online banking requirements etc, but also due to a surprisingly large (IMO) number of sites that don't fully function in Firefox particulary those involving DHTML menus. See, say, this site for an example where the DHTML left hand menu appears in IE but not Firefox (version 1.0 on XP, at least).
Now I'm sure someone will check the source and blame it on badly written javascript, but all the same if it works in IE and not in Firefox then I think the public at large is likely to perceive that as Firefox flaw.
What can be done to improve this ? I'd love to make the final break with IE but at the moment just end up having to resort to using it more often than I'd like. Perhaps this situation will improve as Firefox gains market share - I can but hope.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
No.
Why? Because for many, people are comfortable with the norm and when you start changing things, there is a chance you can make it worse, and rather than risk things getting worse, you stay where you are. You keep doing what you have been doing and do not change.
For many, the blue E is the internet, not a browser and with such ingraining far too many books would have to be printed and given away (along with large cash bribes to encourage people to read them).
Last year a friend of my fathers was helping me out with a car, he was complaining about all of the popups and other crap on his computer, I offered to look at it for him, but he turned me down. Why? See the above reasons.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...
Perhaps he could editting some of the JavaScript files FireFox uses.
You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.
This is great for things like drivers that you'd install once, but if you needed to install later you'd have to go back for the most updated version anyway, so there's little reason to save offline and since there's still 2 levels of warnings that appear on WinXP SP2 (or 1 level of warning on WinXP SP1), you really haven't decreased security at all.
I'm sure there's lots of other stuff you can do in other script files firefox uses for config.
He could also cover making search plugins... those are relatively simple, but can be confusing for first timmers and are kinda finicky for some websites search setups (the "official" Amazon plugin add's plusses where spaces should be, something that doesn't happen when searching on amazon directly...
The January 24th print edition of Business Week had a two-pager, advertised on the cover, about Firefox and the threat it poses to Microsoft. I actually doubt there's a mainstream publication out there that *hasn't* done a feature on Firefox.
:)
I predict 10-15% market share by mid-year
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
If everyone's sites were compliant with standards then a browser would be simple and there would be no need to fudge anything.
IE fudges sites and this hides errors, I want to see errors in pages I develop, then I can fix them.
Bill Gates files charges against Firefox's Blake Ross and Ben Goodger for allegedly making threats against Mr. Gates' life.
The two deny all charges, and intend to plea not guilty if the case goes to trial, however a report from a recent "Wired" magazine article alleges that Mr. Gates should 'Watch his back'
In completely unreleated news, Microsoft has filed to pattent the phrase "Watch your back", and will be suing the Firefox developers as well as Wired magazine for royalties and copyright infringement.
watch your back, Bill Gates
He might care if IE actually generated direct revenue. Firefox does nothing to change his revenue stream: Windows and Office.
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
"Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?"
What's the authoritative source for making sure you have a 'browser friendly' page up? I've always used W3C to ensure my code is valid, but I run into problems with my page rendering differently on each browser.. =/ Is this because each browser interprets the standard differently?
Just when you make it idiotproof, some idiot builds a better idiot.
That's cos IE is auto-loaded during your machine's startup. You are still waiting for it to load, you just don't know it.
That isn't to say that there's no improvement to be done on FF or anything else, my Linux boxen are too slow (ob: which I rarely do) becuase I want them to come up like a cd player: Click! Ready!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Biting the troll.
...), simpler parsers and make the web evolve.
You got it right: interpretation. Like if I told you "John says to Paul that he is fat". Who is fat? MSIE says it's John, Firefox says it's Paul, Opera says it's both, Safari says neither.
The last thing you want from any language is random behavior. That's what you get from tag soup. You get no point from saying that the average person writing HTML has no clue so browsers must cope with that; it's because early browsers allowed tag soup that we're caught with it now. If malformed HTML were not possible then, people would've learned the proper syntax, like they do in each and every other programming language.
We are now in a position where we can (and must) break the circle, using XHTML served as application/xhtml+xml, which will fail (just like a C compiler would fail on a missing semicolon) on bad-formedness. This will allow for a flawless integration of new XML modules (MathML, SVG, XForms, RDF,
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Please OP, explain to me why this "could be the end".
It's sad that as much as all of you people trash Microsoft for giving out MS propoganda, you do the same exact thing for your side.
You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.
Isn't this the sort of thing people switch to Firefox to AVOID? Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
I mean, really, once you've read the title, you're most of the way there..!
;-)
Except that most people will need to click on the blue E to go to getfirefox to, err, get firefox. Maybe the 20 bucks is for explaining how to install BitTorrent
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I concur! I find it so ironic that Firefox is so proudly displayed as the Browser to use here on slashdot, and yet for whatever reason Taco can't seem to write slashdot such that it will display correctly in Firefox.
With Microsoft releasing .NET in the way that they are, the browser is an ESSENTIAL tool in their arsenal to have. And IE market share only furthers the use of .NET in a corporate setting, and that prolongs the life of Microsoft being used with the dominance they have been. .NET is easy to develop, works in a web browser (so users don't have to install software), and is cross OS compliant (since it's thru a browser).
.NET framework to support those existances because the environment demands it.
:) Amazon, Google, and now O'Reilly... they may not be giving money to Mozilla, but they are doing the advertising for free... and that's a great step forward.
The unfortunate part for Microsoft is, if they lose the browser war or at least, let another competitor have CREDENCE in the marketplace, they too will be forced to update the
However much I LOVE Firefox... I don't see Microsoft sitting down and taking a beating. They do have talented engineers there... they just need to focus their bearings, get what people asked for INTO IE, and then play the catchup game of security against Firefox. It's going to be a long hard road for both browsers, but to say the fight is irrelevant is missing the whole point of web-enabled technologies. Good thing that so many corporate enterprises are investing into Firefox
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
there are two features of opera that i haven't found in firefox that keep me on opera. if someone knows how they can be done in firefox, i'd be grateful to hear about it
1) opera by default opens all new windows in new tabs. firefox still responds to hyperlinks etc that want to bring up new windows with, er, a new window. i want tabs to be the default
2) if pc/windows/opera crashes, i can come back into it pretty much exactly where i left off - all my tabs are there with their histories intact
So you missed the CSS "opacity" item? IE uses some damm non-standardard "filtering" metod of addind simple opacity. Earlier versions of gecko and khtml use slight variations ( MozOpacity and KhtmlOpacity respectivly ).
So that book on why Firefox is better than IE sounds terrific, but at 152 pages isn't exactly what I'd call light reading. Does anyone know of any shorter dead-tree books or pamphlets that condense everything down into some nice sound-byte type facts?
-Shadow
This is all great, but it's still important to use spreadfirefox and market
Get a few images, and sprinkle them on your websites, etc.
People trust geeks and their opinions. So if all the geeks unite and say to use Firefox, there's a good chance they will.
The books are great, but it's not a time to slow down on the linking.
We need to make casual surfers think "wow, I'm out of touch, everyone talks about firefox... from books to blogs".
So spread firefox now!
suddenly, you may be in troubles...
What's next? A book on how to wipe yourself after going to the bathroom?
"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." - Ford Prefect
I *want* my browser to fudge things a bit so they look right.
As a caveat, I use Firecrap for its stability at the moment, but I wish I had a browser that parsed HTML like IE does and functions like Firefox. It's a stupid browser, it's not that hard to write, people! Tempted to go back to freakin' Lynx...
If it's so simple to write a 'stupid browser', try writing it yourself, should only take a few weeks, right? It will be easy to interpret the intentions of someone halfway through the world obscured by whatever tool they used to make the pages, right? It will be easy to be bug for bug compatible with a closed source program, right? I mean, figuring out what to do if they forgot to close a deeply nested table or missed out an angle bracket, that will be *easy* to work out won't it?
Let me know when you get it finished, not that I'd want to use it, because it'd be fundamentally broken, and I'd never know if my web pages were correct when testing on it.
The reason you don't notice the interpretation IE has of web-pages is that most people check on that - if it doesn't look right, they go back and fix it. Most people even work round any well-known bugs in their box-model etc, because they know that's what most of their clients will look at it on.
So the IE team doesn't have to do anything, apart from be careful not to change too much : ). If you had your way no bugs would be fixed because 'they broke my pages' even though it's your pages that are broken, and fixing the bug caused them to look wrong.
...IE is dying, film at eleven.
why print stuff like this in the first place?
sure, book is nice to handle and to read, but most of the contents handle stuff that requires you to operate computer while reading if you want to get most out of it
now wait 5 years and all second hand bookstores are filled with these books and nobody wants them, because firefox 2.0 or 3.0 or some other better browser already made it obsolete technology
I guess my point here being, save a tree, save some shelf space, save as pdf instead
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Any idea how many Joe Sixpacs have their default homepage on MSN? Any idea how many MS makes in AD revenue?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
...and I could easily see said book becoming obsolete roughly 1 month after its release date.
Printed matter covering electronic applications seems really stone-age to me. It becomes outdated rather quickly, so a person picking up that Firefox book tries a hack a year later, but it no longer works because of changes in the code base, for example.
But, I guess even though "information wants to be free", authors of said information don't want it to be. You can sell a book, but you can't sell a web site, at least not in the conventional sense.
Maybe an e-book??? Nahhh, then those pirates over at slashdot would put it up on Bit Torrent and there go the profits.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Not all of them - just the extremely useful ones. For example I find it bizzare that I have to install a plugin just so that when I ctrl-click a link it opens in a new tab directly to the right of my current one (and not to the far right of all the open tabs). This makes jumping between the current page and a child of that page annoying because you end up tabbing all over the place.
Plus, if you're getting people coming from IE, it would be helpful to have a few more buttons on the display by default (power users can easily remove them, non-power users can't easily add them). For example I always set new tab, back, forward, stop, reload, home, bookmarks, history, downloads and print with the address bar, go button and google search on the line below. Works for me, ex-IE users don't complain much either.
Oh yes, and some of the hidden options in "about:config" really should have their own menu option. It would also be nice if they turned on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled by default and cleaned up the error pages to look a little more professional. I'd offer to supply templates, if I knew who to approach and whether anyone would be remotely interested.
Apart from that, not really sure what else they could do for 1.1 (apart from some bug fixes, of course).
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I can't for the life of me fathom why anyone would pay money for a "Firefox 101"-type book when all the propaganda and how-tos anyone needs are already on their site. Not to mention the thousands of Firefox hacks and extension sites out there for the more seasoned user.
And as for the Wired article...yeah, like we need yet *another* hype rag touting the "next big thing".
Don't get me wrong...as a recently converted Firefox user, I'm glad it's getting some well-deserved press, but jam something down someone's throat and they'll want to avoid it like the plague.
--
Get a Free Mac mini!
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
most everyone on /. is hailing firefox like a new messiah, seemingly only because it's competent and not microsoft.
It is slower than IE, less compatible than IE, and arguably uglier than IE.
People jump to the conclusion that Firefox is somehow more "secure" than IE, but the only reason this seems to be true is that people have spent less time hacking it. If the IE hacker community was hard at work on Firefox, just as many exploits would be found in it.
Of course, the hackers are going to work on the most popular browser, and that is now overwhelmingly IE. If Firefox was to become used en masse like its zealots wish, it would lose it's most appealing "feature" -- the illusion of security.
Oh and put on the *script kiddie* gloves instead? You Windoze users sure love to browse promiscuously. I guess it's the side effect of using Internet Exploiter all those years.
God I'm sick of all of the FireFox stories.
:-P
Let's hear more about SCO/IBM
O'Reilly has successfully transitioned from a geek publisher to yet another corporate sellout. Quality of content has really tanked, and even those few geek-oriented books that do get released are woefully thin volumes (W. Curtis Preston, whose fantastic O'Reilly Backup book should be considered the bible of backup and restore, can't write more than 200 pages on NAS and SAN? I think the topic's a bit broader than can be covered in such a thin tome).
Tim, if you're reading this, help restore O'Reilly to the kick-ass publisher of days of yore. Kill the Hacks books. Get rid of the Annoyances. Lose the Missing Manuals. Forget about the Notebooks. Concentrate on the Nutshells and the Essentials and the Animal Books (Pocket References are good, as well). Make them well-written, well-constructed, accurate, fun, and RELEVANT. Examples of excellence: Sendmail, DNS and BIND, Unix Backup and Recovery.
Among other things, it certainly spells the end of the era wherein O'Reilly could be taken as a serious publisher of excellent computer books.
If you cut off my arms and legs, I could still count on my fingers and toes the number of books about a web browser I've read in my life.
At the risk of asking a dumb question, why is forcing a user to save an executable from the web and then open it in a two step process possibly safer than allowing them to select open from within the browser?
At the end of the day, you're not preventing them from opening it, nor are you really making it any safer - you're just annoying the people that really do want to open the file directly.
Someone please enlighten me :)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Why should Bill Gates care? People who are switching from IE to Firefox are, by definition, Windows users. IE isn't even a separate product anymore - the Mac version has been discontinued and the Windows version is only being distributed as a component of Windows. This doesn't concern Microsoft any more than it would if people were switching en masse from WordPad to AbiWord. Obviously MS wants people to buy their software, but people buy the same copy of Windows whether they want to use MS Office and IE or integrate Lotus 1-2-3 with Miami Vice.
Whether or not MS is really concerned with FF is debatable. My personal hope is that they're ignoring it, but I doubt that's the case.
It's just a testimony to the power of open development and a reminder that we're all better off when there are at least two horses in every race.
I use Firecrap for its stability at the moment, but I wish I had a browser that parsed HTML like IE does and functions like Firefox.
You should use Maxthon. The speed and better rendering and support of IE, with the tabbed browsing and middle-clicking etc of firefox (with the necessary extensions required to do it which make it buggy as hell i might add).
I.O.U One Sig.
Do what others suggested and change the target of the blue E so that it launches Firefox.
I did that on my Dad's computer and he never knew the difference. Of course, he's lucky if he can turn on the power switch to his computer in the first place, but that's another story altogether.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
I work for a small university library in Mississippi as the Automation Librarian. Frustrated with spyware, viruses, and the like, infecting our public Internet workstations (and with no money to work with), I decided that change was needed. So, I installed Linux on the workstations and customized the desktop so that only the icon for Firefox was visible. That was earlier this month, and so far I haven't heard any complaints from the students. I know that I'm sleeping better at night now. Soon, I will have Firefox loaded on all our computers and tell people to use that rather than IE. Just a small effort, but as Kosh once said, "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebble to vote."
It's all fun and games until someone loses the key to the handcuffs.
Ironicly the firefox browser prints pages like crap, cutting text in half, and squishing images very poorly. I love the browser, but I always have to reprint pages in other browsers to get better results.
- Bruzer
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
Why should MS care about loosing browser dominance? I mean, IE is free software that takes up time and resources from the company's profit centers? Why should they compete? The Browser Wars of the '90s are long done, and probably won't be happening again because we don't need them. The world of the web is going toward standards compliant code. There is no point in getting 'dominance' from having proprietary code anymore. Nobody cares and nobody benefits from proprietary code. So if I was MS, I would just kind of let IE die off and put those resources into profitable products. That is after all what MS does best--making a profit, not making quality goods. So why should MS take a stand and fight back? It doesn't make sense to me.
Why is there a flashlight on the cover?
Anti-phishing.
If there is never a dialog associated with a particular action, it's harder/impossible to trick the user with an injection attack. The clueless user will download the EXE & forget about it.
Excellent step by step explanation of how to become a Mozilla coder.
So aren't making sense.
First you say
The average person writing HTML has no idea how to properly develop it, and this includes people who do this for a living!
Then you say
I *want* my browser to fudge things a bit so they look right.
What's the point of properly developing HTML if a browser is going to *fudge* things?
You totally contradicted yourself, enjoy Lynx.
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
When are they going to implement modal dialogs? There is no easy way to do that (everything I found requires very ugly hacks and even so, you can if you try access the parent window)
Firefox did me same thing that Opera once did. Suddenly firefox crashed and I lost ALL my bookmarks and extensions suddenly. Is there any other choice than backup firefox everyday / start using IE again?
You can find a screenshot here:
t it led.png
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/b/dbs172/un
(Yeah, I'm lazy)
By making it impossible to execute in the browser, it makes it impossible to write a script to automatically execute a program.
Psychologically, it also slows down and warns the user. The web conditions you to click along like mad, on anything that seizes your interest for a second. Having to stop and answer the dialog, then go find the exe breaks that spell.
It's like seeing a line of flares on the side of the highway...you instinctively slow down, and look for the accident.
While this wasn't what he was talking about, you have to be careful with opacity. The rendering can easily lag even the most powerful desktop if not used -- well, I want to say "properly", but "carefully" would be better.
I've tried and tried myself, on several different occasions. The idea was to have a fixed background on in the top-right, and have divs with a background color that's semi-transparent -- ie, opacity: 50%.
Well, it can more or less work with the non-standard tags for all modern browsers, but lags something awful once you attempt to scroll. I eventually resorted to an already diluted background image set to divs only, for the same effect. So that's another <sizeofbackground> down the drain, bandwidth-wise.
The moral of the story: It will be nice when CSS3 becomes something more than a draft. I hope.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
What's the point in books on software... you cant search them and they are out of date at time of print cos in a few weeks things have moved on patches released extensions updated, etc.
*Sigh* and posting too soon without looking at the two posts above can get you a -1 Redundant
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Let's allow reality to intrude for a moment, shall we. Geek slang and symbolism has little currency beyond Slashdot, O'Reilly is unknown to most readers and snide references to the "Blue E" doesn't ring their chimes.
Can't believe no one has commented on this yet- since when is a flashlight of the order animalia? Where does this elusive flashlight live, what does it eat, how does it reproduce.
Weirdo geeks want to know!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Where are the security updates? To date, not a single Firefox security flaw, as reported by Secunia, has been fully dealt with, and only one has even been partly resolved. Even the first security flaw, from August 2004, has not been addressed by the Firefox developers. In the mean time Apple has no remaining unpatched security flaws in Safari, after the latest security update, and has historically patched discovered flaws in a timely fashion. Firefox is in no way as horrendous as Internet Explorer, of course, but what is it about Firefox's open source development process that is preventing them from patching known flaws? Is the open source process really working, or is it hindering the development process? How long will it be before the known Firefox security flaws are fixed and how many more security flaws will be found in the mean time?
--- What?
It would be a useful topic for "Ask Slashdot".
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Which is why the FF default is not to allow people to launch EXEs. If you have the technical knowledge to edit the code and change that, then you probably have the common sense not to open random executables.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
Maybe. But it's at least the beginning of lazy Firefox-only scripted webpages.
This is sure good for standards-compliance, but it still won't do any difference for sites that rely on Java or Flash, which still effectively block many or all non-x86 users, specially Flash.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Isn't this the sort of thing people switch to Firefox to AVOID? Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.
I've always thought this was a stupid argument. If I click on a link that says download, and a download window pops up I know what I'm downloading. If it's an EXE then I'll save it to the desktop and double click on it. Why should I have to save it to the desktop first? Saving an EXE file to the desktop and running it is NO safer than running it from the temp folder...
However, if the book were to target particular extensions and plug-ins that were particularly useful - AdBlock being an obvious candidate, and explain these for a new user, then there's probably scope.
Admittedly, extension updates may well make information about setting things up obselete, but more general tips may, perhaps, still be useful.
im in ur
Custom Tailor a Web Browser Just for You
Woot watch ur back Microshaft or someone is going to make a FREE browser that beats your FREE browser. Why exaclty should MS care again, besides saving face ? Im pretty sure they make exactly 0$ off of IE.
"Freedom and Justice for All" is a registered trademark of The United States Govt Inc. Not available in all areas.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted web pages?
:before usage, and the like). Also, firefox got away from the horrid Netscape implementation (which made me an IE only scripter to begin with) going for the more W3C standards, which actually makes it compatible with many, many common "IE only" scripts in use today. I was suprised that some of my websites suddenly worked with Firefox after one of their newest releases.
If so, good. I used to only like IE because of the scripting ability with JavaScript and CSS, but now after the newer versions of Firefox came out, I find it performs much better than IE in many aspects (yet, there still are a few bugs).
For instance, Firefox supports more W3C standard CSS attributes than IE currently does (see
I especially like how Firefox now allows you to use "document.all" when referencing an object, but gives you a nice suggestion in the JavaScript console to use the W3C standard: getObjectByID() or such. Very, very helpful.
I hope Firefox leads the way with JavaScript and CSS... they're actually doing it right.
The article pages render fine, it's just the main index that renders funny. Make a live-bookmark folder for the headlines and you won't have to visit the front page anymore.
> Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
**** RANT WARNING ****
This is a obvious troll. It's a failed product if it can't handle the script I produce and I have to write the code in different dialects to make both browsers understand me.
It is not lazy to expect, as with many other languages that the basic code should be able to run anywhere. I shouldn't have to force my users to waste bandwidth downloading a script which is twice as long, just because two different programmers working for different organizations who view each other as the foe, program the interface differently.
That's not lazy, it's stupid!
Now that there is a popular alternative to IE it just means that webdesigners will have to work twice as long to be able to do the same work.
It's the same lame problem as with Microsoft and Sun Java support.
Grumble...
**** END RANT ****
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
I bet this could be a millionseller overnight.
But. Your going up against the goliath that has all of our money. No doubt this book will be reviewed by lawyers so tight for Micro$oft, a straight-pin couldn't fit in their rectums. Then when they find things offensive to the company and the product line, they'll call many of the statements in the book out-an-out lies, and begin slander suits against the author and publisher, asking for billions in reported damages...
Gads. You gotta see this coming.
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
And all this time, I thought Bill O'Reilly was the Pro Bush, Pro Microsoft journalist that's on Fox News Channel.
Certainly. The problem has to do with people who are not computer experts. When a pr0n page loads a spyware exe on them, many people will select "yes, do run the program" when asked, because they don't know any better. This results in spyware crap. When saving, they have to actively find the program and run it. Regular grandmas don't (can't) do that, so even though they have a spyware program somewhere on their hard drive it never gets executed and thus does not spread.
True security is built in layers. This is one such layer.
Every fucking Firefox article we have, someone starts bitching about how Slashdot doesn't render correctly in FF, and we have to endure 18 posts of "OMG THEY R STILL USING TABLES AND NOT CSS" and "It's a FF bug dumbass".
THIS HAS BEEN FIXED, SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT ALREADY
Firefox 1.1 will have the fix in the trunk, they backed it out because it was breaking other sites, that's why it wasn't in FF1.0. It's a race condition, and it's been fixed, end of story.
Slashdot sucks
Maybe the success of FireFox can make _FireFox Hacks_ successful enough that people start saying "hacker" when they mean "clever computer user", and "cracker" when they mean "security breaker", rather than conflating the two overlapping terms. If we can depose IE merely on technical superiority, maybe anything is possible.
--
make install -not war
Actually the W3C has little to do with scripting, the only standard for scripting is ECMA 262, also known as JavaScript. The reason some of your IE-only sites started working in Firefox is, as you pointed out, because invisible support for document.all was added. This is actually moving away from the standards, but it was felt necessary because of all the webmasters who refused to fix their pages! But I'm sure you aren't one of those... :)
What if you meant to hit cancel but hit OK anyway? That mistake is the latest and greatest virus causing havoc on your computer. This is a marginally useful security feature, but useful nonetheless.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
which is a much bigger deal than people used to thinking realized. Depending on who you talk to, up to %50 of Americans are functionally illiterate. I remember working in a fast food restuarant in High School and being told not to tell customers to read the order screen in front of them because half of them couldn't. The hope is if you hit them with enough warnings, they'll either stop and read them (which is very hard for them to do) or get scared and just click 'no'.
Another favorite anecdote: I was once called out to fix an Internet connection for some secretaries, who could get to their homepage but after that it was "Page Could Not Be Displayed". The problem? Their homepage was secure, and they kept clicking 'no' to the warning they were leaving a secure page for an unsecure one.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Any book that grows stale quite fast is due for an update quite soon, which means more sales, which means happy managers, which means managers green-lighting a book such as this.
I don't understand why M$ would care about a browser war for a browser they give away ? Can they make money with IE ? How ? And why the hell is my karma bad ? Just noticed that.
I mean,she looks at porn! how much cooler can she get.......
is she free for a date?
Maybe something like this is what you're looking for?
I needed a Java guitar tuner that only played in IE and I was drinking some meade, holding a guitar, and then searched for some lyrics (bad combo). I had ActiveX scripting set to prompt but I had my hands full and a good buzz going so I hit Yes on a web page (it seemed a harmless lyrics page and I was buzzing good) and promptly recieved 7 trojans, my first virii ever. Long live the Fox.
Security is the inverse of convenience. If you create a 100% convenient system to use, it will end up being 100% insecure.
Locks on our front doors are inconvenient because they make us stand out in rain fumbling for keys. But who among us remove our door locks for the convenience of not getting wet in the rain?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Is anyone else having major problems with firefox stalling on random sites and refusing to work at all with SSL-enabled sites like ebay?
This has been a show-stopper for a few people I know.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
IE fudges sites and this hides errors, I want to see errors in pages I develop, then I can fix them.
All browsers fudge sites to some extent, otherwise only fully compliant pages would display (I'm assuming by fudging you mean 'fixing' the HTML so that it'll display). Just take a look at Slashdot's many unclosed P elements; if it weren't fudged you probably wouldn't see much. If you really want to see errors I recommend W3's Validator. And if you're writing a web page, please use it. Writing validating web pages to begin with isn't hard. It's a lot harder to fix existing non-validating pages.
Bullshit.
I design pages to validate as XHTML 1.0 strict with CSS1. They always render perfectly (as I intended, and consistent with what the W3C documentation describes) in Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera. And MSIE consistently screws up the formatting. Every page I ever design I have to spend the same amount of time coding a special 'fixup' CSS for MSIE that gets loaded using IE-conditional-comments.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
My company is fairly large and is 100% IE-only. Sorry guys!
Really! It has an XUL interface, a boat load of plugins, all catching up to the 1.0 way of things. I like it.
,and instead of having a Layers: label, PUT a bloody CLOSE mark in thet op right, because NOONE wants to clumbsily DOUBLE click to close a TAB, and ALSO when you close a tab, MOVE right, unless you are arabic, the move left, BECAUSE WE READ LEFT TO RIGHT!!!!!!! aaaaaaaaaargh.
I tried K-Meleon. Within 5 minutes I had a list as long as my arm of features it needs.
OK, the next is a OT but interesting (hopefuly insightful) rant on the K-Meleon code, I have downloaded the build setup, I might even hack some things into it, I am that fused about it. I love the minimalistic shell over gecko, gecko is beautiful, I could eat gecko on toast, so this minimal shell should be like emacs configurable, you know what I am saying, anyway, rant on:
Does K-Meleon have a plugin framework? It is abysmal at a first install, but it is 0.9 (WHY why use screen real estate with "Layers:" why call tabs layers? Why do I have bookmarks, favourites, hotthigummies, and groups? How do I switch off this annoying mouse gesture thing that I didnt know was on and my tabs (sorry layers) kept switching. WHERE is the middle click load in background?
OK after some time I found some help in configs, but right now I feel the interface is awkwad for my browsing habits, which are very iterative, I spawn masses of tabs, and then whittle through them, sometimes spawning 2-3 tabs per tab I close, until I have exhausted the space of knowledge, I skim read, bookmark, then go back.
I cannot do things linearly, my brain was designed to multi task, and forgets more than 5 things, so tabs should remember where I wanted to go.
WHY can ICONS CHEVRONS?? WHY WHY WHY!!?!? I was thinking, WTF is a bookmark CHEVRON?? A FSCKING ICON!! seriously, did these guys run auto-theasaurize on thier source code?
I mean, you have to actually THINK of new words while programming, why not just keep it simple
useit.com thanks.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I especially like Venkman. Debugging JavaScript with IE is a serious pain.
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(or so I paraphrase). While I am a FireFox user, spreadfirefox.com doesn't render properly in IE (true, it is oriented towards FireFox users). However, it also renders poorly in FireFox (there are some overlapping DIV layers, creating unreadable content). It does, however, render properly in Safari and other non-Gecko browsers. Ironic, isn't it?
This message printed on 100% post-consumer recycled electrons.
Click here to install the SlashFix Extension.
It'll bug you about it not being a trusted site though.
The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)'."
Lol how many time in the last 10 years have we heard that claim.
I agree! That is one of the many many things that I prefer about OS X over Windows.
The funny thing is... I've heard people call OS X "stupid" and "wasteful" because of this design feature. Apparently, they're still living in a world where 640k was more than anyone would ever need
What if you meant to hit cancel but hit OK anyway?
Windows gives you TWO security warnings, and firefox still asks "Do you want to open this with Explorer.exe or save it?"
What are the chances you're going to accidentally hit the OK button 3 times instead of hitting cancle?
You're much MUCH more likely to get a virus packed inside an XPI container and have the user install that.
Everyone is all crazy crazy for Firefox but there are a few practical limitations on Firefox. The most annoying to me is that I can't download from my digital locker at Amazon when I buy secure ebooks in LIT format. You still have to use IE to handle that. Even the new $5 a hit support folks gave up and gave me my $5 back. Maybe Amazon could lean on Microsoft but I don't know to talk to there. Maybe these new books can give clues.