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

What could firefox hacks possibly cover?

[thegoogler]

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...

Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover?

[Vellmont]

Firefox has a boatload of extensions and plugins. I could easily see a book talking about the ways to use all the extensions (and which ones are best).

Necessary?

[troon]

Does anyone *really* need a book telling them how to use a browser? Doesn't that suggest that the browser UI design is inadequate?

22% of which market

[InfoHighwayRoadkill]

in the FA O'reilly claim firefox accounts of 22% of the market... I just whish this were so.

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

[HarveyBirdman]

I'm using Firefox at the moment, but it's not the utopic experience they seem to be pushing. It gets very slow sometimes for no discernable reason. The automatic plug-in download hasn't worked once. And sometimes the text on Slashdot pages shows up shifted way over to the right completely at random. It also chokes on my company's online timecard page, and looking at the page code I don't see anything particularly unusual or esoteric. I'll keep using it, though. It *is* better than IE overall.

I'd like to see them put the tab close "X" on the tabs themselves like Safari.

In defense of...

[lukewarmfusion]

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.

Re:In defense of...

[Xugumad]

We've started not working around every little IE glitch. For example, we brought in wonderful new icons in PNG format, then realised IE kinda made a mess out of them. In the end, we left it, as:

1. They were still _usable_ under IE.
2. It's blatantly an IE bug, so if the users complain, we can tell that Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Safari/Konqueror render them fine, must be their browser.

We're also lucky to have a userbase that likes Firefox (we're at about 40% of hits coming from Firefox, currently)...

Re:In defense of...

[Brandybuck]

Just yesterday I had a run in with the author of an internal site. It was obviously coded for IE only, as download link would not work in anything but IE. The problem appeared to be munged and mutilated URLs, but I wasn't the owner, nor a web developer, so I let him fix it. But he never did.

We would *try* to fix it, but every time he would email me and say "try it now". And of course it never worked. The professional web developer who gets paid to write working web pages couldn't be bothered to test his damned bug fixes in more than one browser! Firefox is free and incredibly easy to install, but he just never bothered.

As a software engineer, I HAVE TO TEST MY CODE. It's expected of me. It's part of my job. It's an industry standard. Our Unix code is tested on more than one variety of Unix. We might not necessarily test Windows code on the Mac, but we will test Windows code on several versions of Windows. But that's because we're software engineers. We can do it, but web "developers" can't. Apparently it's beneath them.

To make a long story short, I found and fixed the problem with that web page. The URLs were malformed and invalid (file:\\path). I sent the fix to the author, but I haven't heard back from him, and the fixes haven't been applied. I think I pissed him off. Good.

Why I still use IE...

[jaiyen]

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.

More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? Etc?

[BobPaul]

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...

Totally false..

[HerculesMO]

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).

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 .NET framework to support those existances because the environment demands it.

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 :) 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.

why i still use opera

[eggfellow]

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

Re:why i still use opera

[SirTalon42]

For 1 you can set that if you install the firefox tab options extensions (which is probably just a front end to about:config).

I don't know about 2, since I use Konqueror primarily, for Konqueror you just go to Tools -> Crashes -> and the click a date (saying its ever even crashed, my list is empty cause its never crashed so I can't test it)

1.1

[Mr_Silver]

Whilst i'm a big fan of FireFox, it would be nice if they integrate some of the popular plugins directly into the application.

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).

Re:Fast??

[P-Nuts]

Well for one thing Firefox is NOT fast. Its slow as h#ll especially when starting up.. mucha slower than IE6 IME.

That's because the IE executable isn't much more than a wrapper for the MSHTML rendering engine, which is already loaded when booting Windows.

It's a shame that on Linux and Windows the Mac paradigm is not possible: of having an application loaded with no open windows. Closing the last Safari (or Firefox even) window on OS X doesn't kill the process, so for frequently used programs, the apparent load time is very fast. Of course, it's worth actually quitting larger processes if they aren't being opened much to free up memory.

Some Windows programs come with a background utility that keeps them open even when they are closed. (I think Office might have some Fast Office Start utility for example.) The problem with this tactic is the programs take up resources all the time.

True life story . . .

[harley_frog]

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."

Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted web

[Transcendent]

Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted web pages?

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 :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.

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.

Re:Firefox and Print

[linicks]

Maybe I'm missing the point, but I've found a few options under File > Page Setup to fix my initial printing problems.

1. There is "shrink to fit page" option that makes the page print the width of the HTML.

2. I also like to use the "Print Background (colors and images)" option.

With these options set, every page printed looks the same as it does in the browser.