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.)'."
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
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.
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 *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.
...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.
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.
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.