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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.)'."
If someone is converting from IE, I would think they'd be a little unfamiliar with things like tabbed browsing, extensions, themes, and pretty much anything FF has that IE doesn't.
Slackware
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.
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"?
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
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
Some people are very closed minded, and/or afraid to even go to the menus. I am sure the book covers more then the forward, back, refresh, stop, home, and location bar. Which most people use 95% of the time. But the little things like managing bookmark,configuring the options adding, theams, extentions, understaning RSS. Explaining why Active-X is bad. Most people when given a piece of software they don't at all the options they have they only go there when they need to. Heck I know many people who think clicking the start button is considered an advanced feature in windows. If it isn't on their desktop then it isn't worth clicking on.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
One should never give up Lynx. Espectially Web Developers, if you can make a page look good in Lynx, and in a graphical browser then you really did you job well. Including aiding the visually impared. There are some sites that I think should always be lynx ready. Like X.org and XFree86 website. because if you can't get X to work you are searching for drivers and/or direction on these sites in lynx.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
i do not know if anyone *really* needs it.
I know plenty of people that might benefit from an IE book, so i see no reason why a FF wouldn't be helpful.
My main point for resonding however, is that O'Reilly is obviously a very important point of tech media - AKA - marketing! Just a book being created about FF gives it a lot of "populace" credit. It is almost like a marketing milestone. This is a huge benefit to the idea in general, just like all the New York Times articles on FF we have been seen.
I am sure we will see an "Idiots guide to FF" soon enough!
~tim
But that's only if a majority of people use the speed enhancements, right?
Well, what do you expect to happen if this trick is published and widely distributed?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
You're missing the whole point of Firefox! Simplicity man! No bloat. Nothing installed that doesn't have to be installed. Everytime I install Firefox somewhere, I also install the Adblock and flashblock extensions - yet I'd never want Adblock integrated into the base product - many people don't use it, and if you don't use it, it just adds options to the interface, potentially confusing less technical people (who are exactly the people that should benefit the most from converting to a simple and secure browser).
My Dad can easily change the configuration of Firefox if he has to (adding allowed pop-ups for example) - something he could never have managed when he was using IE (I know, I'm his tech support). The reason? Firefox is simple - there aren't a million options. Firefox is written for non-technical users, with extensions available to render it more useful to those who want more functionality.
You'd be surprised. Basically, a lot of (mainly old) people are afraid of doing things on a computers (like opening menus) but not of turning the pages in a book.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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.
Actually, you should code to the standards provided by W3C, when it comes to HTML. If a browser fails to accept it or render it properly, the browser itself is broken, and you have the ability to say, "It's the browser's fault." You then ask the client to file a bug report with the maker of the browser, and proceed to write a temporary fix to at least keep them happy for the moment. Inform your client that you intend to continue providing only W3C-compliant HTML, and that any temporary fixes you provide could go away, based on changes to the standards or other requirements.
If it's JavaScript, well, there are some real differences that you have to code for... event handling, as an example. If you have things done properly, you've already got a script skeleton where you can just fill in the blanks.
Sadly too many developers simply write sites for one browser (usually IE) and don't even spare a thought for users of alternatives.
That's because the most frequent reason for doing an IE-only coding is that IE is far too forgiving of non-compliant HTML. Developers use that as a crutch. It's the old, "Code for the 90%, and then add the stuff to support the 10% as needed," because, thanks to companies like AOL using IE as its built-in browser, it appears that most client connections come from IE. With that "fact," they proceed to develop the pages for the majority of clients.
There's a reason standards like ANSI, POSIX, W3C, and ISO (OK, ISO standards frequently are camels, but that's a totally different topic) exist. By following those standards, anything you write should be portable from platform to platform, or at least within the genre.
OCO is Loco
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.
Not to mention that Google (and probably many other search engines) indexes pages as if it was a text-only browser. Using Lynx can really help to ensure that searchers don't get a bunch of gibberish.