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.)'."
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
*another* nail?
How bloody big is this coffin?!
I'm giving up Lynx.
Gimme that booze you little pumpkin pie hair cutted freak!
The Wired kiss-of-death will strike again. They can't tout a "next big thing" without absolutely killing it.
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
Am I the only old fart feeling deja vu? Open source...fast...not Microsoft...lemme see, that's the Mosaic browser before it became Netscape, right?
Now what do I do with the "winsock.dll" file again?
The O'Reilly FireFox Factor
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
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
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
Slashdot is not the place to ask. Their site constantly displays incorrectly in Firefox. They'd do well to take heed of their own articles.
All I can think of is the scene where Uhura is re-learning English and trying to pronounce "blue" on her own:
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I'd like to see them put the tab close "X" on the tabs themselves like Safari.
--- Ban humanity.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Bill Gates files charges against Firefox's Blake Ross and Ben Goodger for allegedly making threats against Mr. Gates' life.
The two deny all charges, and intend to plea not guilty if the case goes to trial, however a report from a recent "Wired" magazine article alleges that Mr. Gates should 'Watch his back'
In completely unreleated news, Microsoft has filed to pattent the phrase "Watch your back", and will be suing the Firefox developers as well as Wired magazine for royalties and copyright infringement.
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?
Hmm. The popular trick I'm familiar with is to enable pipelining--which lets you submit multiple requests in a single tcp session; this is not the same as increasing the maximum number of simultaneous requests, although the FUDdites like to run around claiming that it is. It's not enabled by default because some lousy web servers can't handle pipelining.
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).
.NET framework to support those existances because the environment demands it.
:) 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.
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
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
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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
suddenly, you may be in troubles...
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.
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).
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
IE reinforces his revenue stream, long as people are dependant on IE, they will most likely stay with Windows.
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.
Among other things, it certainly spells the end of the era wherein O'Reilly could be taken as a serious publisher of excellent computer books.
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.
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.
Ironicly the firefox browser prints pages like crap, cutting text in half, and squishing images very poorly. I love the browser, but I always have to reprint pages in other browsers to get better results.
- Bruzer
"Tempt not a desperate man" - Willy S.
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.
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.
Custom Tailor a Web Browser Just for You
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.