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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.)'."
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
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.
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...
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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I got nothing...