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.)'."

Comments

Re:22% of which market

[savagedome]

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp/

Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover?

[stridebird]

From the amazon full description...

"You'll even learn how to install, use, and alter extensions and plug-ins"

So plenty of reasons why you'll be needing this book, then...hmmm.

Slashdot

[zoeblade]

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.

Re:Slashdot

[Mr_Silver]

Constantly? I keep hearing how Slashdot displays incorrectly in Firefox, but would you mind specifying how exactly it displays it wrong? Is something unalligned, or is it using incorrect font sizes or something?

I get it very rarely but it is there. The contents in the middle of the page (as in, the article text and comments) are rendered too far to the left and overlap the textual links on the far left.

You can fix it by going ctrl + and then ctrl -.

This is partly due to a Firefox bug of which the fix never made it into 1.0 (but will be in 1.1) and crappy non-w3c compliant HTML that Slashdot uses.

Re:Slashdot

[akorvemaker]

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.

Just a couple points:

1. As someone else has pointed out, the incorrect rendering of /. is a Firefox bug, and its fix will be in future releases.
2. The article you point to is about using valid (X)HTML and CSS, while the statement you quoted refers to sites that use IE-only scripting. That would be referring to things like JavaScript and VBScript, not the actual page markup. While both have to do with standards and cross-platform accessibility, they're not the same thing, and I don't think it's really fair to bring /. bashing into this conversation like that.

Re:22% of which market

[forgotten_my_nick]

Not that far off. 19.2% and if I recall w3schools only recently started marking the difference between FF and Mozilla (which would bring it up to 23% if it was watching the two as one).

Re:Perhaps

[virtual_mps]

Hmm. The popular trick I'm familiar with is to enable pipelining--which lets you submit multiple requests in a single tcp session; this is not the same as increasing the maximum number of simultaneous requests, although the FUDdites like to run around claiming that it is. It's not enabled by default because some lousy web servers can't handle pipelining.

Be careful

[tessonec]

suddenly, you may be in troubles...

Re:Watch out?

[SirTalon42]

IE reinforces his revenue stream, long as people are dependant on IE, they will most likely stay with Windows.

Re:why i still use opera

[nebulus4]

1) Restart Firefox and go to Tools > Options... (Edit > Preferences... under Linux and Mac OS X), select Advanced and click on Tabbed Browsing. Then select "Open links ... in: a new tab in the most recent window".

2) Take a look at SessionSaver http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#sessions aver If you'll run into troubles during installation just go to about:config -> extensions.disabledObsolete and set it to false.

PS: more tips and tricks: http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips

Firefox and Print

[Bruzer]

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

Re:1.1

[Zepalesque]

"I'd offer to supply templates, if I knew who to approach and whether anyone would be remotely interested."

Get the source
Build It
Report a bug on it
and contribute!

This is probably a good place to start.

Re:Fast??

[cybersaga]

It's a shame that on Linux and Windows the Mac paradigm is not possible: of having an application loaded with no open windows.

There's a nice plugin called Minimize to Tray for Firefox and Thunderbird that, by using it's -turbo option, can keep a window loaded in the background for you.

Re:In defense of...

[Kopretinka]

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.

Have you tried to write them about the places where the specs are confusing? I've cooperated on several W3C specs (none of HTML/CSS, though) and I find the W3C people and working groups to be pretty responsive. A clarification can easily be added to errata and eventually folded into a "second edition". For example XML 1.0 http://w3.org/tr/rec-xml/ is currently in its third edition.

Re:They're overhyping a bit, aren't they?

[lupine]

Just middle click with the scroll wheel to close a tab by clicking on it.
That way the tab doesnt need to be active in order to close it.

Also an article in the New York Times

[amabbi]

The Gray Lady Online has an article on MSIE-alternative browsers; of course Firefox and Mozilla are mentioned, and they even mention browsers like Amaya and Safari.

Custom Tailor a Web Browser Just for You

Re:books beat electronic documents?

[BobPaul]

...and I could easily see said book becoming obsolete roughly 1 month after its release date.

It'll only be obsolete if Firefox was changed completely. Most of the hacks I do to firefox (in about config, etc) are the exact same as they were back when Firefox was named Pheonix. Even if new things are added to a newer Firefox that aren't in the book, a majority of the stuff in the book will still work and the new stuff will probably be similar enough that users who read the book can figure out and find the new stuff on their own.

In any event, reading out of a book is less strain on the eyes, and unless you have two monitors, it's easier to manage a book and a notepad or firefox window than a Firefox window and instructions in a PDF...

Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover?

[jd142]

There are some cool things you can do by extracting the files from browser.jar, editing the xul commands in the individual files, then recompressing them into browser.jar.

Do a search for firefox kiosk browser.jar and see some of the customizations.

I would also hope that there'd be some good chapters on extension writing.