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Firefox In Print

Posted by michael on from the no,-not-the-nyt-ad dept.

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.)'."

3 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. In defense of... by lukewarmfusion · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:In defense of... by Xugumad · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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)...

  2. Re:Fast?? by P-Nuts · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.