Yahoo Pledges Full Firefox Support

homerj79 writes "News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site. Despite its search bar for Firefox, which was launched in February, users still had to revert back to IE for certain features of Yahoo, like customizing your Yahoo Messenger avatar via the web. A specific date has not been set, but the company did say it would not launch any new services until all existing one supported Firefox." Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo! central office.

Comments

Support from an unlikely source?

[ackthpt]

(Heard Wednesday at SDWest) Even ASP.NET 2.0/VS 2005 will have (better) support for Firefox. It sure perked up my ears. What's their plan?

Re:Support from an unlikely source?

[Anonymous Coward]

ASP.NET's html generation profile is based on an old version of Netscape where things like border-collapse didn't work. It's pretty straightforward to update this for FireFox.

Apparently one main goal of ASP.NET2 is XHTML support, which is good for everyone, except IE6 users. Until IE7 ships, Firefox may be the best environment for ASP.NET users.

Re:Support from an unlikely source?

[sp3tt]

95) Implement better support for Firefox 98) ???????? XP) PROFIT!

Re:Support from an unlikely source?

[DarkMantle]

What's their plan?

Well, since IE7 is supposed to have Tabbed browsing, maybe not CSS2.0 support, but possible CSS2.1 and is not supposed to support ActiveX. Chances are thier plan is to use the Mozilla/Firefox core for thier browser, with their own render engine.[/speculation]

Re:Support from an unlikely source?

[terrikt]

Yahoo supporting Firefox-that's such a new thing for them to say. I managed to control my initial response. I called my Yahoo connection, since they are my ISP when I began using Firefox. It's been all of two weeks or so. I discovered that I had to keep switching browsers because Yahoo was not supporting Firefox, so I asked them to help me out. They were surprised that I would even have the nerve to do that, and they plainly told me that Yahoo does not support Firefox and they could not help me. Then all my links got messed with by someone.. All I can say is beware of browsers you do not know and keep an eye on that Adware Ipinsight that is no secret. I just can't say anymore. Oh, their plan is to make money is all I can figure.

Re:Support from an unlikely source?

[Jewelry Mall]

it seems that this is possibly not true:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21949

It says that Yahoo may NOT support firefox. Oh well, it would have been really nice!

http://www.jewelrymall.com/

So Yahoo Supports Standards

[Nom du Keyboard]

So Yahoo now supports standards.

Wow! News at 11.

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[ackthpt]

So Yahoo now supports standards.

...well they used to support Suffering Based Advertising (X10 Pop-Ups)

#$*&! i DON'T want yer #&^$*(@ camera, shove it up your $&^$#*

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[geoffspear]

No, they support 2 browsers. They never claimed they were going to make their pages work on both of them by supporting actual standards; more likely they'll just use a bunch of ugly hacks so things work right on those 2 but may or may not horribly break under Safari or Opera.

If content providers and browser makers would have all supported standards in the first place, they wouldn't have to announce now that they were going to try to make everything work on the 2nd most popular browser, too.

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[jacksonj04]

Do you *really* want to go shoving a wireless X10 camera up someone's $&^$#*

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[kosmicki]

You could make a tidy profit if you offered the .avi of it to the right people.

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

We Must Destroy X10

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[SulliedTech]

Thats what I thought Goatse was about?

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[northcat]

I think they are talking about dynamic content which used activex and other stuff on IE previously and didn't work on other browsers. And streaming media and other things which aren't completely standardised and which are not consistent on all browsers. Most of the static pages look fine on FireFox to me and they did say it was about 'services' so...

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[learn fast]

Obviously Yahoo is motivated by a desire to break the Microsoft/Internet Explorer/MSN SEARCH "standard"

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[ZephyrXero]

Well, with the new retractment, I'm gonna bet that they keep on developing the way they have been for years, and then spend like half an hour trying to get it to run on firefox properly too. If they can't get it working in less than half an hour...oh well, maybe next time Firefox. Yahoo's Launch.com music video service will probably never work with FF :(

Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards

[Lacutis]

Except they changed something the last week or so. I used to be able to refresh from the inbox of my yahoo mail and it would work, now it takes me back to the main mailbox page with their 3/4 page add and the links to each part of the mail section.

It's REALLY annoying.

Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Sp0r]

I don't know about the rest of you, but whenever I browse Slashdot with Firefox the page just doesn't seem to be drawn correctly. But then, there's always the possibility that I'm crazy.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

crazy aye!

I use nothing but firefox these days, /. loads fine.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[nebulus4]

Nightly build should fix your problem ;)

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Timesprout]

Who cares. I love the irony of all the standards fanboys posting about how great standards are on a site that can't even spell standard and viewing said pearls of wisdom in a browser that may or may not render them correctly depending on some random quirk. Gotta love it.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[peragrin]

Two points

1) Slashcode isn't W3C HTML compliant

2) usually it's Firefox renders before the page is loaded bug. hit ctrl + , Ctrl - and it's fine.

Of course it doesn't happen all the time either. Some days it happens every time. or i can go weeks in-between.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Grey Ninja]

Yeah, it used to do that for me. But nightly builds solve the problem just fine. The Moox 1.0 build also works fine. If you don't like those solutions though, there's also the slashfix extension.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[ip_fired]

I used to have that problem as well. But I discovered that it was because I had turned on pipelining. Once I turned that off, slashdot rendered correctly again.

It usually manifested itself by drawing posts over the menu. Type about:config in your browser and make sure pipelining is off.

I also noticed that Google Maps has difficulty when pipelining is on as well.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Grey Ninja]

Standards fanboys eh? Man, fanboy is a word that's just getting WAAAAY over-used.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about the rest of you, but whenever I browse Slashdot with Firefox the page just doesn't seem to be drawn correctly.

This just comes up again and again, doesn't it? Let's recap:

• The cause is a Gecko bug. It's related to page reflows, which depend on connection speed, page size, processor speed etc., which is why you don't see it all the time (and some people never see it at all).
• The bug was fixed months ago in Gecko on the trunk. However, Firefox 1.0 (and 1.0.1 and 1.0.2) use the 1.7 version of Gecko, which branched from the trunk around July last year.
• The bug will be fixed in Firefox 1.1, which will use Gecko 1.8. Firefox 1.1 is due out in June.
• While Slashdot's HTML may suck like a tornado, it's not the cause in this case.
• Any questions?

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[thirteenVA]

I love how people complain incessantly about slashdot standards support.

1) Slashdot was coded years ago, when the accepted way to do things was to nest tables. It may not have been right, but it did the job at a time when CSS had even less support than it does now. Also at that time IE was a leader in the adaption of CSS (remember when NS 4 didn't even support external stylesheets without a hack) and its implementation was still poor. Developers had little choice.

2) Last i checked slashcode was open source. Recode it to standards and submit it as a patch.

3) Why has complaining about slashdot standards support become an exercise in growing your karma, all these redundant posts are always modded interesting in any discussion regarding the web.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[WillAffleckUW]

whenever I browse Slashdot with Firefox the page just doesn't seem to be drawn correctly.

See that little icon in the upper right corner? The one that if you mouseover says "Firefox Upgrades to Download" or somesuch?

Try clicking on that and downloading the upgrades.

I did that and since then have never had any problems.

Now, the stories I could tell about WebPine glitches are another matter...

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

It's not nesting tables (that's not really bad in my book, it just slowed down old Netscapes) that is the big problem.

It is the fact the Slashdot pages are invalid HTML.

And rather than fix it, or at least address the criticism, Slashdot gives a 403 Forbidden error when trying to use validator.w3.org.

As if that will make us have confidence in the HTML being valid, making it so we can't even see the errors. It would be like buying a car with a sheet over it, and not being allowed to look under the sheet before purchase.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org%2F

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[HomerNet]

3) Why has complaining about slashdot standards support become an exercise in growing your karma, all these redundant posts are always modded interesting in any discussion regarding the web.

As long as it remains a problem, people will still comment on it. Possitive ratings for comments only mean that the moderator/metamoderator saw those comments as relevant to the topic/metatopic. When the /code is cleaned up enough for people not to notice the differnce x-browser, then you'll have reason to complain.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[thirteenVA]

The biggest problem is Slashdot's, they're the ones paying for the bandwidth on this bloated code.

The page works in all browsers(at least the 4 I have). As i understand it the issue with firefox is a bug in the browser.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[thirteenVA]

I think the term he was looking for is 'standards whore'.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last i checked slashcode was open source. Recode it to standards and submit it as a patch.

Check Slashcode out some time. Someone did recode it. In fact, the Slashdot theme isn't even in Slashcode.

Slashdot just refused to use it.

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[Loconut1389]

view source
save as
upload check on validator
File: C:\slashdot[1].html
Encoding: utf-8
Doctype: HTML 3.2
Errors: 119

No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents.

So what should I do? Tell me more...

This page is not Valid HTML 3.2!
Below are the results of attempting to parse this document with an SGML parser.

Line 4, column 80: there is no attribute "TYPE" ...HREF="//slashdot.org/index.rss" TYPE="application/rss+xml">

You have used the attribute named above in your document, but the document type you are using does not support that attribute for this element. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the "Strict" document type with a document that uses frames (e.g. you must use the "Transitional" document type to get the "target" attribute), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as "marginheight" (this is usually fixed by using CSS to achieve the desired effect instead).

This error may also result if the element itself is not supported in the document type you are using, as an undefined element will have no supported attributes; in this case, see the element-undefined error message for further information.

How to fix: check the spelling and case of the element and attribute, (Remember XHTML is all lower-case) and/or check that they are both allowed in the chosen document type, and/or use CSS instead of this attribute.

Line 11, column 11: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN"

TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0"

Line 11, column 26: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"

TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0"

Line 12, column 13: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH"

MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">

Line 12, column 30: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT"

MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0">

Line 16, column 8: there is no attribute "BGCOLOR"

bgcolor="#cccccc" style="border-top: 1px #999999 solid; border-bottom: 5px #0000

Line 16, column 24: there is no attribute "STYLE"

bgcolor="#cccccc" style="border-top: 1px #999999 solid; border-bottom: 5px #0000

Line 18, column 46: there is no attribute "STYLE" ...

Line 76, column 15: element "NOBR" undefined

You have used the element named above in your document, but the document type you are using does not define an element of that name. This error is often caused by incorrect use of the "Strict" document type with a document that uses frames (e.g. you must use the "Frameset" document type to get the "" element), or by using vendor proprietary extensions such as "" or "" (this is usually fixed by using CSS to achieve the desired effect instead).

Line 90, column 16: an attribute value must be a literal unless it contains only name characters

You have used a character that is not considered a "name character" in an attribute value. Which characters are considered "name characters" varies between the different document types, but a good rule of thumb is that unless the value contains only lower or upper case letters in the range a-z you must put quotation marks around the value. In fact, unless you have extreme file size requirements it is a very very good idea to always put quote marks around your attribute values. It is never wrong to do so, and very often it is absolutely necessary.

Line 123, column 15: element "NOBR" undefined

Line 132, column 15: element "NOBR" undefined

Line 144, column 16: element "NOBR" undefined

Line 154, column 16: element "NOBR" undefined

Line 175, column 41: character "%" is not allowed in th

Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot?

[eugene ts wong]

Man, fanboy is a word that's just getting WAAAAY over-used.

Yep. Anytime "somebody" disagrees with "anybody", "anybody" is 'obviously' a fanboy who follows 'the hive mind' or 'group think'. At least people aren't using "zealot" as much these days.

Re:fp

[soapdog]

man, I remember in the-good-old-days when first post trolls used to write at least a complete sentence like "Geee All Your First p0st are belong to us".... fp... ick... damn

launchcast

[jkc120]

What about launchcast? There's no mention of it in the article, but hopefully that's included. It's one of the few things keeping my wife from using firefox.

Re:launchcast

[Santos L. Halper]

It did say *all* of their services. I am assuming Launchcast falls in that area.

Re:launchcast

[jkc120]

Key word there is assume. Hence my question.

Re:launchcast

[Gorath99]

I agree it would be only logical to assume that it does. At the very least we'll have something to throw in their face if they don't make it firefox compatible. With a bit of luck this'll also mean that Launchcast will become useable from non-windows machines (if they stay away from writing plugins that require WMP or other such nonsense). Launchcast is one of the very few sites that I want to visit badly enough to occasionally start IE for. (The only other one being my online banking site.)

Re:launchcast

[hippie81]

I wrote Yahoo! back in February asking them when they were going to support firefox (citing that it was the fastest growing browser with a 20% market share). Here was their reply:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to LAUNCH, Music on Yahoo!.

Unfortunately LAUNCHcast is not currently compatible with the OSX system
or the Mozilla, Firefox, Safari and Netscape 6-7 browsers. At this time
there is no estimated date as to when this service may be available
using these applications.

Thank you for your feedback regarding LAUNCH. It is through user
comments and suggestions that we are able to expand and improve our
service. We are continually updating our programming as a result of
feedback obtained from our users.

LAUNCHcast requires the following in order to properly stream media
content:

PC

* Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 Professional, XP Home, or
Professional
* Pentium II, 233MHz or faster
* at least 64MB RAM
* Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher
* Windows Media Player 6.4 or higher
* Macromedia Flash 4.0 or higher

Macintosh

* Mac OS 8.5 or higher
* 200MHz PowerPC (iMac OK)
* at least 64MB RAM
* Netscape 4.5 - 4.79
* Windows Media Player 7.01 or higher
* Macromedia Flash 4.0 or higher

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Hopefully they reconsider Launch for Firefox. It's the only reason I still go to the dark side.

Re:launchcast

[Anonymous Coward]

Works just fine when you change your browser ID in Konqueror, at least it gets you to the window where music plays without the error message (I don't have sound on this machine)... so for Macs, all you need is a browser that allows you to change your broswer identification.

Re:launchcast

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always try alternatives such as Blastro.com for music videos and shoutcast for audio streams.

Re:launchcast

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of online banking sites will work with firefox if you change the user agent setting. Download the user agent switcher extension...

http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/userag en tswitcher/

Re:launchcast

[g-doo]

Indeed. Yahoo Launch's incompatibility with Firefox has long irritated me. For now, I guess you could use the radio features of Launch using Yahoo! Messenger 6. That should bypass any browser compatibility problems and serve as a temporary workaround.

(Hopefully, Yahoo! Mail will also fix their Firefox problems in the file attachment downloading area.)

Re:launchcast

[ZephyrXero]

They can use WMV all they want, it works fine with Linux+Firefox+Mplayer-plugin....yet for some reason the damn Launch site still doesn't work. When you go to watch a video it says something of the extent: "Netscape users, please download this plugin". This probably means that it's Active X infested, and the only way to get other browsers to run it is for some awful plugin to be installed...

Re:launchcast

[lifebouy]

And THAT is why the claim has been retracted, you can bet on it. They like their Lauch the way it is, to the point I think they'd rather lose it than change it.

I've sent more than one email to yahoo about Launch being broken for Firefox, and have been told, basically, So what? It works fine in IE, and that's what everyone is using. Yahoo cares nothing about their users, IMHO.

Re:launchcast

[Curtman]

Hopefully, Yahoo! Mail will also fix their Firefox problems in the file attachment downloading area

Could you please enlighten me as to what those are? I don't use Yahoo's mail but others in my family do and they claim there is a problem too, but I've never been able to find one. Click an attachment, and it asks you if you want to save it to disk. On my mom's computer I have avi/mpeg associated with mplayer, so she can just click open and it the movie begins playing.

What's it supposed to do that it isn't already?

Re:launchcast

[g-doo]

File names get truncated when file attachments are downloaded in Yahoo! Mail (in Firefox, but not in IE).

For example,
"Water_Sample_from_Your_Kitchen.doc"
becomes
"Water" (no file extension, usually)

"Water Sample from Your Kitchen.doc"
also becomes
"Water"

I've tried contacting Yahoo! Mail Help about it multiple times, but they kept responding saying that they didn't see the problem. But I've seen in Mozillazine and independent blogs that other people have reported the same problem.

Re:launchcast

[Curtman]

Then that is a different issue entirely. That isn't happening here.

Yahoo!

[Stanistani]

Well, this is certainly a cause for celebration.
What word could we yell in exultation?
Something short and perhaps cowboy-based?

Yeeeha!

Re:Yahoo!

[OmegaGeek]

>Something short and perhaps cowboy-based?

Neil?

Re:Yahoo!

[ackthpt]

Yeeeha!

And this morning on Radio Classics they were playing an old "Our Miss Brooks" where a hill billy jazz band was supposed to be coming by the school and the teachers, student and principal were all practicing their lingo...

Other to choose from:

Wull, dog mah cats!

Corn mah pone!

Boy howdy

Re:Yahoo!

[That's Unpossible!]

perhaps cowboy-based?

Yippee-kayay-motherfucker?

Re:Yahoo!

[AVryhof]

CowboyNeal!!!?

Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[xtracto]

Well, that is a great step but, I would like them to support games like Bejewelled 2 and other, that are ActiveX only...

They should make all they games with Java. And, I experience some problems with the calendar also... well, they say, the devil is in the details

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[thepotoo]

There's limited compatabilty, yes. But, yahoo isn't quite "embracing" firefox yet. All it's doing is conforming to the standards. Embracing would be having a link to getfirefox.com on the main page (like instead of those "You could win a FREE iPod" ads, just have a firefox banner). Yahoo being the #1 site on the net last time I checked, having a direct link to ff would kill IE off more quickly than all the ranting us fanboys do here in a lifetime. But, great so far Yahoo, you're doing well! Keep up the good work!

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll want to announce that they have a new "improved" service, that alone is some nice free advertising for Firefox.

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Look KG486]

I like Java, and I like games. But, why should anyone write their games in your ?

I too wish all web sites could conform to a standard of some sort, but I don't see how that means games should do the same.

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Look KG486]

That should read "in your language/tool of preference."

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[srid]

They should make all they games with Java.

Why so? They (Yahoo) can also use XUL for games! Dropping java would be a great relieve in the enduser side, because of efficient use of his/her resources

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you learn how to spell, please? They games, aint no shit...

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

FOCK IU!

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

FUK YU

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

1. • FUCK YOU

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[idlake]

If you are concerned about resource usage, then don't use Firefox either. The real reason not to use Java is that it is proprietary and not standards-based.

XUL may or may not be a reasonable choice, but people won't start using it until it works in IE. Since Microsoft won't do it, maybe people need to produce an XUL plugin for IE...

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[Svet-Am]

100% Java-based games is a very admirable goal, but that would require Yahoo! to mandate as such to all of their developers.

Remember, Yahoo! themselves don't develop most of the games that are found on the Yahoo! games site. Independent developers (like Popcap games) develop them and Yahoo! gives these developers great leeway insofar as how the games are implemented.

If Yahoo! were to mandate that all games on their site had to be Java-based, one of two things could happen:

1) very few games exist on the site as they are all ported

2) very few games exist at all as Yahoo! has to drop developers that are unable/unwilling to port or hire coders to port

Personally, I'd like to see all of the games be Java-based (even the delierable commercial ones) so that I could download and own them on my Linux box.

In the long run, I think that the Y! games site is going to be their biggest stumbling block because of these reasons (and, incidentally, I think it will take the longest for this site to become compliant).

Re:Yahoo and Firefox compatibility

[IANAAC]

Whaat I would love is to be able to import and export the Calendar and Address book from/to something OTHER than Palm or Outlook. Say, oh I dunno... vcs and vcard? They're pretty much importable/exportable to everything.

MODS Listen Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just reading the FAQ on moderation, and I came across something that would make a good screenshot:

Take a comment (Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic) and then label it underrated several times to get +5 Troll, Flamebait, Offtopic.

I just think that could be a pretty good sight to see, and might make for a good chuckle.

Re:MODS Listen Up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right, ek-1000-ek

Yahoo?

[spidergoat2]

I bet they'll support it! They're gonna have to if they want to get their search bars integrated into Firefox.....Hello, adware.

Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[Jim_Maryland]

From ZD Net UK:

Yahoo said on Friday afternoon that a statement from the company's Australian office on Tuesday, which claimed that all future products would be compatible with both the Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) browsers, was inaccurate.

In February, Yahoo launched a search toolbar for Firefox, but users of the open source browser were forced to switch back to IE when accessing some Yahoo services. Following communications between Yahoo and ZDNet UK sister site ZDNet Australia , Yahoo issued a statement saying the company would not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring they work on both IE and Firefox.

However, on Friday, a Yahoo representative from the US admitted that the original statement was 'factually incorrect' because, although Yahoo realises that Firefox-compatibility is important, it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[DJStealth]

it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible

Nope, just compatible with Firefox and NOT IE :)

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[greyhoundpoe]

Scanning online news sources: 30 minutes
Typing up a quick summary: 10 minutes
Rubberstamp by editors: 5 minutes

Having your submission proven irrelevant within 7 minutes of being posted: priceless

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[prezninja]

Is it just me or has there been way too much 'factually incorrect' information in front-page Slashdot articles lately? A very simple peer-review system for facts in Slashdot articles before they go on the main page would do wonders. Additional "+5 Informative" comments could potentially be appended to the article, such as the parent, and more factual and well-balanced news for the general reader would appear on the main page without the need to read all the "+5 Insightful" opinions and "+5 Funny" jokes to just get the facts. It's a humble opinion. What do you guys think?

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Then rename the site something like... kuro5hin.org!

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[Anonymous Coward]

That does NOT mean they're not supporting Firefox; it just means they're not making any promises.

In other words, it was a CYA so people won't get all pissy if one of their products ships without being completely tested in FF.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[novakane007]

mod up parent please

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[Jim_Maryland]

I realize that they are doing a CYA but I just found it funny that an article countering the "full support" was available but not mentioned.

As mentioned by other posters comments I've seen in this post, I think promising to support particular browsers is secondary to supporting open standards. They could certainly say things like "verified to work in X, Y, and Z" but I'd rather them say "compliant with open standards A, B, and C".

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[docflan]

Additional "+5 Informative" comments could potentially be appended to the article ...

If something has been modded +5 Informative, that does not neccessarily mean that it is correct.

Also, you can change your viewing preferences to ignore "Funny" and "Insightful" moderations if you want.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[starwed]

What do you guys think?
I think that if it were slashdot's goal to be an accurate source for news, we'd have seen some improvements already. Slashdot's only inherant worth is the number of people who read it, coupled with the moderation system. And isn't the moderation system part of the opensource slashcode?

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[ryantate]

Yahoo can't decide what's it's doing -- it contradicted itself. Slashdot is supposed to stop this how? Hiring fact checkers?

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[snorklewacker]

Frankly, the moderation system isn't even very good. Hard cap at +5 and -2 means the fanboy effect keeps irrelevant junk at +5, equal with highly interesting/informative/insightful. It basically makes it a flat space. This isn't necessarily so bad for posts, since the effect isn't there, but it would be immediately apparent for article moderation.

And frankly, I don't even see a reason for the moderation categories. Just mod up or down, that's really all it needs. The categories are just pretension at actual meaning, they don't actually convey it.

People have submitted many a fix to slashcode to introduce things like proper HTML with CSS (which would cut /.'s bandwidth bill in half), but it's usually been rejected. It's quite clear that maintaining slashcode or slashdot itself is beyond the abilities and/or interest of the current staff of anyone at slashdot or OSTG.

Hell, they haven't even rustled up the interest to tweak the logo or anything just to offer something slightly fresh. Still using nasty drop shadows around the icons, even. Well, there's the frightfully garish color schemes, yes.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[RomulusNR]

So you wanna blame Slashdot because corporations and governments are routinely bullshitting people, then backpedaling?

(Why exactly do we let them get away with that, anyway...? Oh yeah, cause we're a nation of pathetic dumbasses.)

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[gentoo1337]

There are some things that are true. For everything else, there's Yahoo.

Spelling Nazis, did I spell "Microsoft" right?

Ahem. :)

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[Anonymous Coward]

No idiot no! Can't you just look at the fact that the Yahoo australia office made that claim, not Yahoo US office which is the head quarters. If you don't have any brain to observe this crucial difference, what can we do? You will continue to bitch no matter what.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[rob_squared]

I read that as, "Hiring fat chicks?"

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[thegambler416]

It's not Slashdot's fault. The original news was published on March 17. The retracted article on Mar 18th. Seems Yahoo has no clue what they want to do.

Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[srmalloy]

However, on Friday, a Yahoo representative from the US admitted that the original statement was 'factually incorrect' because, although Yahoo realises that Firefox-compatibility is important, it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible.

Additionally, having discovered this weekend that Yahoo Music only supports IE and Netscape 7.x, and filed feedback with them asking why their service checked for IE and Netscape 7.x, but failed to check for either Mozilla or Firefox when the latest Netscape browser is based on Firefox. The response I got back stated that they had no plans to make Yahoo Music work with either Firefox or Mozilla. So not only can't they say whether future products will be compatible with Firefox, they're not planning to make existing products compatible, either.

Not Correct

[phusikos]

Sorry to spoil the fun, but the article is out-of-date an incorrect. (Gotta love the Information Age!) Today, a Yahoo! representative said that the "full support" statement was "factually inaccurate."

"In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology. I'm not saying we are not going to be developing and exploring other areas -- we are. But there are so many different products on the Yahoo network that there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser," the representative said.

Hopefully, they'll still be able to expand Firefox support in the near future.

Re:Not Correct

[Coocha]

That's really too bad. I don't use Yahoo! for much, but their Launch radio seems to depend heavily on some bastardized combo of IE and Flash (unless you're using the built-in radio in Yahoo! messenger). Either way, it really limits my choices when I'm sitting in front of my Linux box.

Re:Not Correct

[Skye16]

I'm not sure, but I think the built-in radio in Yahoo! messenger is essentially an "iframe" with IE in it. I get IE errors all the time when that thing bombs out, and I don't use IE at all (standalone), so........

Re:What About Slashdot??!!

[ackthpt]

So did slashdot fix that bug with Firefox where slashdot wouldn't load up right? That's been happening a ton with Firefox 1.0.1

Not that I've seen, it still fractures. I think they've left some things open. It seems to vary with the ads.

Do you Yahoo?

[Kimos]

I don't, I Google.
Makes me want to give Yahoo a try for some of their other content though. Nice job!

Well...

[CarlinWithers]

Support from yahoo is better than not having support from yahoo. But I think what firefox really needs is a major player to go out of their way and advertise and promote them. Can you imagine if yahoo made a statement like 'we reccomend firefox as a superior browsing experience...'. The major thing keeping them from this is fear of M$ to be sure. Too bad.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... I'd guess its also because not all of their services are working in firefox...

Competition Is Good

[blueZhift]

Once again, it looks like competition is good. I've been bugging Yahoo! for years about supporting non-IE browsers, but only getting automated replies. I guess Google, and its cozyness with the Firefox creators, is enough of a threat that they felt some real heat. I hope this announcement also means that maybe Google will start supporting Firefox and other non-IE browsers when they roll out new toys like desktop search. If Yahoo! and Google keep going at it like this, it can only mean good things for the end user!

extensions ... adblock?

[lambent]

Let's hope Yahoo finally decides to support Adblock ... right now, their adverts are only partially blocked by most filer sets.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

then use a Hosts file, that combined with adblock and eDexter means i havent seen an advert/banner on yahoo in months !

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[pediwent]

Uhhh...last time I checked, Yahoo!'s primary source of revenue BY FAR was still advertising (like higher than 80%). I imagine it will be a cold day in hell when they officially support a product that erodes that revenue source.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[geminidomino]

That would suggest an issue with your filter set, not with Yahoo.

I don't use yahoo, but in about 15 seconds, I came up with this:

http://us.a1.yimg.com/*/promotions/*

Turned it on and didn't see any more ads come up. It may need tweaking after ad rotations.
Hope that helps.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[lambent]

I suppose you don't have a tongue to put in your cheek? Was it perhaps removed in a freak boating accident?

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[lambent]

I already use the suggested filter sets from adblock.mozdev.org ... which blocks out the pictures and shockwaves, but has the unpleasant uglifying side-effect of leaving behind random html detritus. And it doesn't block text adverts, either.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[rokzy]

no, that award goes to you retarded coward.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[geminidomino]

Ah, you're talking about the text... I didn't know that. Does adblock even support that? I've never tried, since I already back up adblock with Privoxy

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[ticklemeozmo]

My AdBlock Filter for Yahoo is:

http://us.*.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/*

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[Youssef Adnan]

You should actually go here:
http://www.geocities.com/pierceive/adblock/
and obtain the latest adblock file from there.

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[rob_squared]

Why would *any* company want to try to support something that they will view as a loss of revenue?

Re:extensions ... adblock?

[pediwent]

Ouch! OK, I seemed to have lost both my sense of humor and sarcasm... my apologies. Had a two hour meeting with Legal today - enough to make anyone completely humorless.

Finally.

[Dimentox]

It has always been a bother having firefox set as my default browser and using yahoo IM. Would have to copy and pase the url into IE to change my avatar or play games. Is this showing us that companys are finally embraceing alts to IE and its propritary ways? I wish more sites would follow suit and embrace a standard, its a win win situation if they do. While I am sure its nice to be able to use certain functionality of IE there are bound to be ways to do the same things in Firefox. Though it looks like the broweser wars might be back in full swing with IE7 and Firefox going neck to neck.

Re:Finally.

[mattbrundage]

Would have to copy and pase the url into IE to change my avatar or play games...

Kiss copying and pasting goodbye and download Launchy, one of the more useful Firefox extensions.

~Matt

You'd hope submitters would RTFA

[X]

"...but the company did say it would not launch any new services until all existing one supported Firefox"

No, they didn't say that. They said they wouldn't launch any new services until making sure they worked with Firefox. They don't have a timeline for when they get all existing services supported on Firefox and, not surprisingly, don't want to hold off on launching new services for an arbitrary period of time.

Pledge this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pledge? Not to look a gift donkey in the mouth, but this is the first marketing ploy I've heard to 'pledge' accessibility to customers.

Grammatical errors

[Sloppyjoes7]

Does anyone else get annoyed when people add apostrophes to possessive pronouns?

In other words, there is no apostrophe in "its."

It should read:
"News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site.

I suppose the only reason this annoys me is because it is such a common mistake in website headlines. To mod me up would help all the starving children around the world who are being subjected to poor English in their news stories.

Re:Grammatical errors

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else get annoyed when people add apostrophes to possessive pronouns?

I'm not sure. Why don't you ask the people posting to the alt.possessive.its.has.no.apostrophe newsgroup.

Re:Grammatical errors

[SmokeHalo]

The sentence as copied directly from the story:

News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site.

I understand your point about apostrophes, but in this case there's nothing wrong.

Re:Grammatical errors

[Sloppyjoes7]

Wow. They corrected it.

No joke. I copy/pasted my quote directly from the Slashdot headline. I know for a fact it had an apostrophe.

I wonder if they corrected it because of me? Seems doubtful, but it's also strange that they went back and corrected it.

Re:What About Slashdot??!!

[indros]

A quick fix is hitting Ctrl + and then Ctrl -

Browser support

[2k4u]

I hope they add support for opera too. I use opera as my primary browser and I have all kinds of problems trying to use Yahoo mail. Is it really so hard to make sure your website works with all popular browsers?

Re:Browser support

[Neophytus]

It's easy to support all browsers except IE, which is where the problem lies.

Re:Browser support

[webphenom]

Opera is a popular browser???

http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox36.htm l/

Browser Usage...

1. Microsoft IE 87.28 %
2. Mozilla Firefox 8.45 %
3. Apple Safari 1.21 %
4. Netscape 1.11 %
5. Opera 1.09 %

Just because YOU use it, doesn't make it "popular".

Re:Browser support

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call firefox popular either.

Re:Browser support

[Anonymous Coward]

Just about eight times more popular than Opera, and growing at a faster pace :-)

Re:Browser support

[Anonymous Coward]

acutally, you mean slowing down, and also discontinuing other development because of lack of resources..

Re:Browser support

[eugene ts wong]

I use Opera with Yahoo! Mail and seem to experience no problems. What problems do you have? Have you tried identifying as IE? I know from experience with Yahoo! Mail that you get slightly different pages for some reason [not necessarily Yahoo!'s fault]. I read that identifying as IE sometimes gives you faster downloads on certain sites because of file compression that is offered only to IE.

What problems do you have? Maybe I can help.

Re:Browser support

[toddestan]

Take the number of hits Yahoo gets daily, and multiply by .01. I bet you'll still be over 1 million. There are a lot of Opera users out there.

Re:Browser support

[Anonymous Coward]

Really?

Next thing you know...

[suman28]

MSN is also going to pledge full support of Firefox :)

Re:Next thing you know...

[drunken dash]

I very much doubt this, since MSN is a Microsoft technology.
It's no secret that Microsoft isn't particularly fond of Firefox because they have their own competing browser that they'd prefer shoved down everyone's throat.

Since it is a Microsoft technology, they will most certainly NOT pledge any kind of support for Firefox.

-- Captain Obvious

Re:Next thing you know...

[Sylver Dragon]

Might I suggest changing your reality browser settings. It would seem that it failed to render the fairly obvious tags on the parent comment.

Re:Next thing you know...

[eugene ts wong]

Ah, yes! Let's have more proprietary HTML so that *we* have to adjust *our* reality browsers, while we have Microsoft cram their proprietary reality browsers down our throats. Yes! Let's all accept Microsoft's defacto standards of reality. This is just what we need! ;^)

Re:Next thing you know...

[Sylver Dragon]

You have it all wrong, Microsoft is working hard to make your reality browsing experience better. With the new features they have added to Reality Explorer people will be able to deliver exciting dynamic content to your reality experience. While some features may not work in all browsers, this is in no way Microsoft's fault. In fact, if you do not have the latest version of Reality Explorer you should upgrade immediately, to take advantage of all the new and exciting features. It is available free from the Microsoft site!




This ad in no way offers any express or implied warranty of gurantee or of the suitability of Reality Explorer for any purpose. Use of the software is at your own risk. In case of dispute the user agrees to the jurisdiction of Microsoft Land, and all rulings will be final and binding.

Ninjas

[jbrw]

The article doesn't say all previous services will be made compliant before launching new services (they just announced Yahoo! Assassins, remember? Do you think they're going to put that on hold until every obscure service they offer in every obscure market is up to scratch?).

It says "[...]the company will not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring that they work on both IE and Firefox" which is quite a different kettle of fish entirely. Indeed, it goes on to say that "[...] Yahoo would not commit to a date when all its current services--including avatar customization--will be available to Firefox users."

Finally!!!!

[HerculesMO]

Start with the goddamn Launchcast service which would REALLY ROCK with Firefox support. I have an IE window running in my background just to play music at work. It's annoying.

Re:Finally!!!!

[Rude Turnip]

Why compromise your standards? There are many ways to listen to music online. If an online service doesn't work well with Firefox, I take my business (or, from Yahoo's POV, my *eyeballs*) elsewhere.

Re:Finally!!!!

[HerculesMO]

It is by far, the best service of its kind. If there was a comparable service by somebody else that either used proprietary software or worked in Firefox, I'd be on it already. Unfortunately when they have the best product, I am willing to make concessions to use it, but I have emailed them numerous times about supporting Firefox, to which I always got a canned answer.

What timing...

[iJames]

I was just swearing at Yahoo! Movies last night, for promising to show me a movie trailer and then telling me at the last moment that I couldn't do it in Firefox. This was on a Mac, so I wasn't about to do it in IE.

LaunchCast also?

[thirteenVA]

I was very disappointed to find that LaunchCast does not work in Firefox(or any mac browser for that matter).

The error message displayed is:
'Sorry, we are unable to support Netscape 6.0+ at this time.'

A good thing.

[EEPS]

If this is true, It is a great step for Yahoo. I have tried to move everyone I know to firefox, including my mom. The only thing that was holding my mom back from completely using firefox was yahoo's online streaming music radio. Maby finally she can dump IE once and for all!

Like Intel pulling an AMD?

[ackthpt]

Apparently one main goal of ASP.NET2 is XHTML support, which is good for everyone, except IE6 users. Until IE7 ships, Firefox may be the best environment for ASP.NET users.

Wouldn't it be a h00t if Microsoft came out with IE 7.0 and said it was Firefox compatible ...

"our thingie is just like their thingie and is better in the Dubious Advantage Benchmark!"

That is nothing

[SmallFurryCreature]

Just browse games.slashdot.org with opera. THE HORROR! A good browser but yikes what a horrible color rendering.

aaarrgh ... quality of life

[Anonymous Coward]

>customizing your Yahoo Messenger avatar

How did we ever survive without life critical necessities like messenger avatars and smileys?

This is what is wrong with the web and web based applications.

They should provide functionality without arbitrary wysiwyg interfaces.

Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Yeah, way to go.

Let's go back to Lynx.

Nah, let's go back to Gopher!

Or let's just ditch the Internet, and bring back the BBS! :)

Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life

[Angafirith]

A little off topic, but your sig fit PERFECTLY with that post.

Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life

[That's Unpossible!]

How did we ever survive without life critical necessities like messenger avatars and smileys?

This is what is wrong with the web and web based applications.

How did we ever survive without the web?

How did we ever survive without the internet?

Honestly, who the fuck said this was about survival?

Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, end users expect microsoft word user interfaces with web based applications.

Going from basic html, javascript, cgi to a near ms word wysiwyg interface doubles the cost to develop implement and deploy a web based application.

Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life

[B3ryllium]

No it doesn't. "htmlarea" is free and released under the BSD license, and it works exactly like a regular text area.

Why code yourself what you can leverage (legally) in five minutes?

That's good, I think...

[melonman]

Last time I installed some plugin or other with IE (shockwave I think), Yahoo promptly took over the menu bar, and I've yet to work out how to undo the damage. So now this will happen to Firefox too? And this is something to celebrate?

Re:That's good, I think...

[Anonymous Coward]

....In XP.... Start\Control Panel\Add or Remove Programs\ - Uninstall Yahoo! Toolbar
Or in IE6 View\Toolbars\ - Uncheck Yahoo! Companion

Wrong, but close.

[Richthofen80]

I actually think this is a dumb statement by Yahoo, and I use firefox daily.

Yahoo should not pledge firefox support, it should pledge STANDARDS support. If all their pages validate, and contain the proper doctypes, then Yahoo becomes stardards supporting, and all good browsers that obey standards will render them correctly. They'll also gracefully degrade per platform/browser.

Re:Wrong, but close.

[Winterblink]

Was going to post the exact same comment myself. :) I'd be MUCH happier if standards were adhered to, instead of focusing on support of specific browsers. It forces the browser coders out there to make sure their support of standards is solid, and in turn makes it a hell of a lot easier for those of us who code web pages to code it once and have it work the same everywhere.

Re:Wrong, but close.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a myth that a lot of people who haven't designed web pages believe in. Basically, this is true, but only when browsers have no bugs and implement all of the implementation-defined parts of the standard in the same manner. Which will never happen in the real world.

Standards can also be vaguely written and difficult to read. Programs are not: They take a given input and create a given output.

The fact is, plain simply, if you want to design a web page, you need to test said web page on any and all browsers that you want to support.

LuanchCast

[PHanT0]

I wonder if this covers partnerships Yahoo! has with other companies.

Being from Canada, Yahoo! has partenered with Rogers to incorporate features like LaunchCast into high speed internet service bundles. I know this is the only thing I currently use IE for as LaunchCast won't support anything but IE... boo-urns.

Re:LuanchCast

[Anonymous Coward]

I use rogers as well but never use their added features like LaunchCast, except their webmail from time to time.

Type to Find Support

[slateX]

I am most annoyed that the main search bar at yahoo.com grabs focus when you start typing no matter where you click on the page. This breaks type to find ("begin finding when you begin typing" in options) and I always have to do a find on their page since it is so busy.

It is still nice news

[SmallFurryCreature]

Yahoo is not what it once used to be but it is still a pretty big internet company. Basically it means that in a public statement a company has said that Firefox is big enough to warrant special attention. For a long time IE was the only browser for most companies. If you used anything else then that was just your problem if they even admitted that you could use another browser.

Baby steps. Each company out there that realizes that windows/ie only doesn't make business sense makes the world a better place for freedom of choice.

Lots of people used to complain about banking problems with non-ie browsers. Yet I use the dutch Postbank as my bank and it works perfectly fine with opera on linux and firefox as well. It is slow progress but there is progress.

I can foresee a time when every serious website will simply run on every browser out there. For someone old enough to remember "this site best viewed with" messages or even links to microsoft.com that is a nice vision.

This is way overdue for us Mac users

[WillAffleckUW]

At home, I tend to use my iMac to surf the web, and I always start at Yahoo.

So now I can upgrade from IE4 to a real browser like Firefox, safe and secure in the knowledge that my fave portal will work with it.

Kinda stomps on the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, doesn't it?

Re:This is way overdue for us Mac users

[Just Some Guy]

I've been using my.yahoo.com with Mozilla and Konqueror for ages - to my knowledge, I've never once accessed it with Internet Explorer. Is there something magical I've been missing by browsing it with something else all this time, or do you just consider official support to be more important than I ever bothered to?

Re:This is way overdue for us Mac users

[WillAffleckUW]

I've been using my.yahoo.com with Mozilla and Konqueror for ages - to my knowledge, I've never once accessed it with Internet Explorer. Is there something magical I've been missing by browsing it with something else all this time, or do you just consider official support to be more important than I ever bothered to?

Some of the sites my son likes to surf don't work too well unless you have IE, but I'm pretty sure if Yahoo is supporting FireFox on the Mac as well that they should work fine for him on FireFox.

After all, you can never have to much Foamy the Squirrel, Happy Tree Friends, GoGaia, or plug-ins ...

Music is a Good Thing

[WillAffleckUW]

The only thing that was holding my mom back from completely using firefox was yahoo's online streaming music radio.

Now if I could just get Nathan Hale High School radio (KNHC) to broadcast in a Mac-friendly way - with Yahoo Streaming Music - my life would be complete!

It's all about the music. The rest is just worldly possessions that should be invested in a European value index fund ...

Not just Firefox, need Opera too

[WillAffleckUW]

I use opera as my primary browser and I have all kinds of problems trying to use Yahoo mail.

This is why my Mac (sadly) at home still uses IE (or did until I heard that Yahoo will work on Firefox for the Mac now), whereas my other Windows boxen all use Opera at home.

Quick slashdot / firefox fix

[Darth_brooks]

use the ctrl + and ctrl - shortcuts to increase the text size, then reduce it back to normal. This will re-render the page properly. Why this works, I have no idea.

Fox fires on Safari for Mac

[WillAffleckUW]

Yeah, and then you can upgrade from Firefox to a good browser like Safari.

If I wanted to go on a Safari, I would have.

I'd rather twirl Fire with the Foxes.

SLASHDOT!!1one

[thepotoo]

3) Why has complaining about slashdot standards support become an exercise in growing your karma, all these redundant posts are always modded interesting in any discussion regarding the web.

I think slashdot does not render correctly in firefox. Maybe they should recode the site.

WTF? I got modded a redundant troll? But you said...

Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all

[webphenom]

Posted today:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39 020384,39191834,00.htm/

Following Google?

[MikeCapone]

Well, maybe that, but it's probably more that Google has started officialy supporting Firefox in most things (there's even a rumor about a GBrowser based on Firefox), so Yahoo couldn't be left behind on that.

standards

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article, "Yahoo's decision to launch new products that support both major browsers is a huge boost for Firefox".

This is all very nice, but I would rather they make the effort to support actual standards instead.
Yes, Firefox is quite good with standards, but aiming to support Firefox and aiming to support the standards are two slightly different things. The sort of difference where their web developers would consider IE a 'standard' just because ninety-odd percent of the people on the web use it. Popularity != standard.

Re:What About Slashdot??!!

[MyDixieWrecked]

There's actually a firefox plugin called SlashFix. google it. It fixes the rendering errors.

Can't make their products Firefox compatible?

[loconet]

Well and that is why Google will continue to be the dominant search engine and why I will continue recommending their products to my clients, friends, and family.

And why Yahoo's product incompatibility will be irrelevant once Google takes over by doing it the right way.

Bye Yahoo, unfortunately your 1998 mentality won't get you far nowadays.

Re:Can't make their products Firefox compatible?

[toddestan]

Google doesn't do half the things that Yahoo does, and as far as I know, Yahoo's equilivent of the things Google does work fine outside of IE. It's things like games.yahoo.com and Yahoo Messenger that that is causing the all the problems.

And atleast Yahoo mail works with Opera, unlike Gmail.

great for yahoo mail users!

[NimNar]

finally! I am looking forward to using html features with their email...until now I had to switch to IE to be able to send bold, italic or colored text in email.

Re:great for yahoo mail users!

[Principal Skinner]

Yes, it is with mixed emotions that I look forward to this new capability. It will only increase the amount of HTML mail that I get, the vast majority of which uses NONE of HTML's capabilities except in the signature block, but still uses 4 times the disk storage. On the other hand, it probably won't increase such email much; IE users who decide to migrate after this change would be using the HTML already, if they were so inclined. Probably not many people who are already using Firefox will start using the HTML feature once Yahoo[ungrammatical punctuation omitted] turns it on.

In days of old, Yahoo[u.p.o] would let you hand-code your own HTML if you checked a box saying "Allow HTML" or something like that. I guess enough people were scared by the notion of having that much control that they decided to take it away, but I miss that feature from time to time.

Great.

[oliverthered]

Now all they have to do is.

Stop truncating my email at x chars.
Support SSL for pop3 so my email isn't sent for everyone to see.
Support message ID's in pop3 so kmail doesn't download my email 3 times.
Stop putting plain text attachments in the message body or at least let me downlaod them, it really screws up patches.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are talking about Yahoo, right, even though your email address is with Hotmail? I've never yet encountered any per-email size limit, and if I did, I would just put it in a zip archive up to 10MB, which is probably still an impolite size to dump in someone's mailbox.

Plain text attachments (on Yahoo.co.uk at least) can be downloaded with no word-wrapping at all, a patch I sent today is fine as far as I can see.

Unfortunately, any reply I send contains the header "In-Reply-To: 6667" which confuses the mailing lists I send to.

The solution to hiding email traffic from prying eyes is do-it-yourself, i.e. using PGP and making everyone write to you in PGP. Otherwise it's a false security - the plaintext has probably already been exposed at least once. For POP3 access over SSL you should expect to pay for the service. Freemail demands maximum server throughput demands plain text.

Re:Great.

[oliverthered]

'You are talking about Yahoo, right, even though your email address is with Hotmail?'
I don't use my hotmail address.

'The solution to hiding email traffic from prying eyes is do-it-yourself,'
Well unfortunately when you ask most companies for a pgp key they give you a blank look.

e.g.
When applying for a job, tell them that your worried about ID theft and you don't want to send you CV unencrypted.

I had to request a new driving license about 6 months ago and they asked my to email my personal details, I asked them for a pgp key, and my ticket is still left open today. Hardly a sign that the government is security conscious, especially with all the phishing going on.

You're an idiot. Here's some elucidation.

[karmaflux]

1) Oh good; excuses. That will fix anything. Also, I think you meant "adoption of CSS." Finally, you point out that Slashdot was coded years ago -- do you think that slashcode has been under code freeze for all those years? No. But has the HTML been fixed? Also no.

2) Last time I checked, "open source" did not necessarily imply "the developers give a shit about third-party patches." There are open source projects out there who appreciate it, but slashcode ain't one of 'em. It's got Not Invented Here syndrome in a bad way. In fact, someone at A List Apart retooled Slashdot to be standards compliant (part one, part two) -- then showed how it would be PDA compatible, and save OSDN bandwith costs. Did the slashcode group care? Hell no.

3) Complaining about Slashdot standards support is te ONLY way we have to goad slashdot into supporting standards -- just like it's the only way we have of convincing MS to support the same standards. Clearly, the devs aren't motivated by much -- hell, the code was handed to them already! -- but maybe they'll get sick enough of their users bitching that they'll implement one of the eleventy trillion fixes that has already been created for them.

All Business

[Headcase88]

Yahoo isn't doing this as a favour to anyone. Firefox has a sizeable share and Yahoo is squandering away business by not supporting Firefox. Like someone way above said, Yahoo should have supported standards in the first place.

The way they do things now is a bit messy, and cleaning this up (which they might not even do) is just a first step to getting more business. It'll save 'em more money in the long run to adhere to standards. Firefox is the flavour of the day; it'll likely be replaced by something "better" at some point.

Ironically, MSN seems to be moving toward support for all browsers. I don't use it enough to verify anything thouroughly though.

Slashdot should support Firefox

[SunPin]

Big hint.

Hmm...

[bonch]

Since when was Firefox a standard?

Re:Hmm...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Since when was Firefox a standard?

That, of course, is not what the original article ever said. What Firefox does is support world-wide web standards better than the leading browser. Standards compliant pages will run better on Firefox than IE. Therefore Yahoo is moving towards world-wide web standards by making pages that render and function correctly on Firefox.

Now was that so hard?

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox isn't "standard".

But it was developed as the flagship "standards suporting" browser (along with the Rest of Mozilla). Standards are good, as long as they don't get in the way of progress.

Re:Hmm...

[Curtman]

Therefore Yahoo is moving towards world-wide web standards by making pages that render and function correctly on Firefox.

I wish Yahoo had worded it like that. Instead they make false statements like:

• In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology

The reality is exactly as you say, and Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape all share a rendering engine that is NOT new technology, but has been in use for a very long time now.

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the standards that this "new technology" supports are even older. The CSS2 specification is at least 6 years old, and Firefox and Opera are the only modern browsers to support it fully.

IE6 has only fragmented support, and we now know that Microsoft are still not committed to bringing us full CSS2 support in IE7. :(

Re:Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Firefox and Opera are the only modern browsers to support it fully.

*cough*safariandkonqueror*cough*

Yahoo UI Lockdown?

[Doc Ruby]

Has anyone else noticed that Yahoo's homepage is no longer very "selectable"? I try searching for text within the page (-F in Mozilla), and can't get the "Find" dialog to appear. I can't drag-select other text. It's like they've got the page locked down, so only their UI (not the client SW) is effective. That's hardly "full" support, of Firefox or any other browser.

Re:Yahoo UI Lockdown?

[geekwithsoul]

Works fine for me with Firefox 1.01.

Re:Yahoo UI Lockdown?

[rsadelle]

Huh. I hadn't noticed that since I don't usually try to navigate the front page with the keyboard.

Typing anything while on the page puts what you type into their search box, even if you click out of the search box first. However, ctrl+f and typing into the find box works (Mozilla 1.7.3, Windows XP). Luckily this is only true on the front page. You can still keyboard navigate other pages, if you can get to them.

Re:You're an idiot. Here's some elucidation.

[thirteenVA]

2) Last time I checked, "open source" did not necessarily imply "the developers give a shit about third-party patches." There are open source projects out there who appreciate it, but slashcode ain't one of 'em. It's got Not Invented Here syndrome in a bad way. In fact, someone at A List Apart retooled Slashdot to be standards compliant (part one [alistapart.com], part two [alistapart.com]) -- then showed how it would be PDA compatible, and save OSDN bandwith costs. Did the slashcode group care? Hell no.

Actually in the list apart article, they only downloaded the index page through their browser and retooled that with new html. They never even downloaded the slashcode source. Also slashdot does care (see this), however no one including the people in the ALA article, have made a real effort to improve slashcode.

Your come here to battle and you didn't even read the articles you posted as 'proof'.

Yahoo Rendering Bug

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that when I upgraded to Firefox 1.0.1 (which I use at work), Yahoo's sign in page doesn't render correctly, but the older 1.0 version I use at home does. Why should a supposed "improvement" in Firefox make its rendering engine worse?

FreeBSD

[raddan]

I was under the impression that all, or nearly all, of Yahoo!'s content was served up by FreeBSD machines. What kind of perversion went on that they decided to put IE-only content on these boxes? Maybe their press release confusion is an indicator of other weirdness in the company, too.

Re:FreeBSD

[tepples]

Perhaps the thinking is that FreeBSD:server::Windows:desktop. You wouldn't run a server using a desktop OS, and in my conjecture of the opinion of these administrators, you wouldn't run a desktop using a server OS.

Far be it from me to complain...

[Novous]

...about more support for FireFox. But perhaps they should have been standards compliant to begin with?

It's good news, sure. But they shouldn't have relied on IE to fix malformed metadata in the first place.

I'll let it slide (to an extent) if it's taking advantage of IE-specific APIs, considering years ago IE was more-or-less the only browser people used. When 95%+ of your userbase uses IE, you can usually get away with that if it means getting even more of a user base (a prettier easier to use website at the expense of support for other browsers). In the end, if you have even more users, the ends justify the means to a business.

Sweet

[dlichterman]

Google first.....and now yahoo.... Finally were getting some support --------------- Check out firemonger, the CD with Firefox/TB/themes/extensions Http://firemonger.org

Thanks to Oddpost!

[the0ther]

I'm guessing they're revamping all Yahoo www-properties to support Firefox because of Yahoo's acquisition of Oddpost's email client. Currently Oddpost only works on IE 5+ running on Windows. It seems likely that Firefox would run Oddpost just fine, or with the most minimal of tweaks.

Messenger support for Linux

[Fragmented_Datagram]

Now if they'd just upgrade the Messenger client for Linux so I could use the webcam feature without resorting to Windows.

Re:Messenger support for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

You have webcam drivers for Linux now? Last time I checked, PWC was being taken out of the kernel, and it will be abandoned completely due to a Gender War over an NDA between the author of the driver and the camera company, and the fact that the extension was closed source.

Re:Messenger support for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an opensource PWC driver that is available and works great.

http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/

Re:You're an idiot. Here's some elucidation.

[thirteenVA]

I decided to come back and craft a more thorough rebuttal to make sure your uninformed reply does not get modded up.

"Oh good; excuses. That will fix anything. Also, I think you meant "adoption of CSS." Finally, you point out that Slashdot was coded years ago -- do you think that slashcode has been under code freeze for all those years? No. But has the HTML been fixed? Also no. "

Nope, you're correct, there is no code freeze, but as with any project its tough to find time to go back and fix something that works. Slashdot HTML obviously works as is.

" Last time I checked, "open source" did not necessarily imply "the developers give a shit about third-party patches." There are open source projects out there who appreciate it, but slashcode ain't one of 'em. It's got Not Invented Here syndrome in a bad way. In fact, someone at A List Apart retooled Slashdot to be standards compliant (part one, part two) -- then showed how it would be PDA compatible, and save OSDN bandwith costs. Did the slashcode group care? Hell no. "

In the ALA article, they only downloaded a single page (through their browser, not from slashcode source) and rewrote the html. Big deal, anyone here could have done that. It provides nothing for slashdot to use. Big deal, they proved something we already knew, that the slashdot layout can be reproduced using cleaner code. Had the people really wanted to help they would have downloaded the source code.

" Complaining about Slashdot standards support is te ONLY way we have to goad slashdot into supporting standards -- just like it's the only way we have of convincing MS to support the same standards. Clearly, the devs aren't motivated by much -- hell, the code was handed to them already! -- but maybe they'll get sick enough of their users bitching that they'll implement one of the eleventy trillion fixes that has already been created for them"

Complaining is NOT the only way. Contributing is another way that comes to mind. You again mention code being handed to them, where is this code? The code from the ALA article that you obviously did not read otherwise you'd know there is no code, just a rebuilt index page?

Support standards, not browsers

[geekwithsoul]

While it looks this story is incorrect, it still should be pointed out that the problem is not designing websites to work with specific browsers, it is getting them to comply to existing standards. If major sites like Yahoo started coding for W3C standards it would push developers of compliance-challenged browsers <cough>Microsoft</cough> to fix their software. Then, in the Utopia that would develop, web developers would know that their compliant code would display the same in whatever browser was used. Kind of the whole idea for standards, you know? Oh, and then monkeys would fly out of my butt.

Not Happening

[Anonymous Coward]

Yahoo! have retracted their promise: not everything will be Firefox-compatable after all.

Some domains complain about open relay

[CRB2500]

Some sites won't accept mail from my yahoo account claiming it's not RFC compliant. Heck if I know but it'd be nice get on it if not...

http://www.rfc-ignorant.org/

Who are these guys anyway???

This is good for WC3 - thank you Firefox

[saskboy]

World wide web standards are going to benefit emensely from Firefox's popularity, since I assume it's a browser that uses real standards, so for people to make sites that work well with it, they will also be making a website that works well with other standards compliant browsers.

In this way Firefox is trailblazing through the world wide web, and going to make things easier for other IE killers.

"used proprietary software"

[tepples]

If there was a comparable service by somebody else that either used proprietary software or worked in Firefox, I'd be on it already.

Microsoft Internet Explorer is proprietary software.

So, does this mean

[ShieldW0lf]

News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site.

So does this mean we should all start getting our news from Yahoo instead of Slashdot?

:D

What about games?

[Anonymous Coward]

As an educator I would love to see ALL of the games be played in FireFox on both Mac and Windows!

This is good!

[alphax45]

Today I tried to make a Yahoo! Photos thing in Firefox. The little flash video thing said there is a tool you can use to upload many photos at once. I couldn't find the link at all for this "tool". Of course not, doesn't work at all in Firefox. If you want to use Firefox, you have to upload ONE file at a time. So right now I'm using IE, but glad to see I won't have to for much longer.

What About LAUNCH Music in Yahoo

[Cnik70]

Will this finally be upgraded from it's netscape 4.77 dependancy?

New Technology? Pfft...

[Eddy Da KillaBee]

From TFA:"In the grand scheme of things Firefox is still a new technology."

What's so new about following some damn W3C standards that have been around for some time now? This isn't about Firefox, it's about standards-compliance!

Yahoo! Mail in Firefox

[chriscrowley]

I just wish Yahoo would fix their spell checker when using Firefox with Yahoo Mail. It almost always mangles up the words it is correcting.

i.e.
Original Message:
"\nThis is spelled uncorrectly."

It should change it to this:
"\nThis is spelled incorrectly."

But instead it changes it to this:
"This is spelled unincorrectly"

Notice it mangles the word "incorrectly" and it even removed the period. I can live with it removing the blank line ("\n"), but after spell checking my emails, they usually end up worse than the original email with the spelling mistakes.
Many times I end up pasting them into a word processor to check them before hitting Send.

Cowards..

[TheCeltic]

Come on Yahoo.. Where is the spine? Well, google still gets my business!

There's no way. They don't even support ymessenger

[Anonymous Coward]

They haven't updated their ymessenger client for Linux in years. How are they planning to support everything in Firefox when they can't even get a simple thing like ymessenger updated and supported on non-IE non-Windows platforms?

Retooling Slashcode for Web Standards

[Principal Skinner]

Clearly, the devs aren't motivated by much -- hell, the code was handed to them already!

Not exactly. They were given an HTML page and CSS file or two showing how it could be done. This is only the first step; reworking Slashcode to produce this standards-compliant HTML is a different, very non-trivial thing, and the ALA people did not do that. Evidently no one else has, either.

Damn.

[RyoShin]

It got retracted? That sucks.

One of the only things I use IE for is Yahoo! LaunchCast. If only they had some sort of contact information, I'd demand that they put out FireFox support or I'd withdraw my subscription...

Steps to get free advertising but do nothing

[Lord Haha]

1. Release pro-open source alternative - get your story on slashdot
2. Retract statement at last moment but story is still up
3. ???
4. Profit?

Since when is a web browser new?

[crimoid]

"Firefox is still a new technology"

Since when is a web browser a "new technology" (as quoted from Yahoo's rep)? Come on. Just be standards-compliant!

Avatars require IE

[Anonymous Coward]

On Yahoo I receive this list of requirements :

- Microsoft Windows operating system
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

as seen on : http://avatars.yahoo.com/error_browser.html That's when trying to play with Messenger avatars Note: I am using the German website, it may be different on others.

The 'retraction' isn't that surprising (or bad)

[Stephen Samuel]

Basically, the new notice says "Hold on -- we're not going to sit on our hands until everything runs on firefox!" They're still committing to support Firefox, but it's not a "Stop the presses!" kind of issue.

It's probably a competition issue for them because I'd expect that the people most likely to switch to Firefox probably make up a really juicy demographic that they don't want to lose out on.

I don't even see a reason for the moderation categ

[oliverthered]

Because I mod up troll's ,++flaimbates and mod down funny in my personal settings. since troll is often used for insightful but I didn't understand the poster, and if I want jokes I'll look at my self in the mirror.

Great...

[Anonymous Coward]

...now how about full Mac compatibility for Messenger?!

Products "not appropriate" for Firefox?

[codemachine]

"...there may be some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser."

Someone needs to tell Yahoo that if an application is not appropriate for one standards compliant browser, then it is not appropriate to be a web application. In fact, it really can't be called a web application anymore if it only runs in IE - it is a Windows application at that point.

This whole retraction is just an excuse to cover the fact that they're too lazy to fix all of their buggy code.

Or for the version they show on ABC.....

[sideshow]

perhaps cowboy-based?

Yippee-kayay-motherfucker?

Yippee-kayay-mother-fooler!

Or, and I swear I'm not making this up:

Yippee-kayay-Mr-Falcon!

even if it was true

[POds]

Why dont they try for full W3C compliance and Javascript standards compliance, rather then just supporting a set of browsers.

Dont "add" Firefox support, just drop ActiveX

[Elranzer]

You know, it shouldn't be such a big deal these days when companies announce "adding FireFox support." For one, Firefox isn't "new technology" or even its own browser really, it's just a Gecko browser (and Gecko is a few years old). If they add "Firefox support" then shouldn't Galeon, Netscape, Mozilla Suite and KMeleon work too?

All this implies is that these companies ignorantly programmed all of their web technologies under ActiveX, which only works under one browser under one operating system and only if ActiveX is turned on (and SP2 turns it OFF!), and they're just NOW trying to fix this. If companies like Yahoo would, for example, write their Avatar maker in pure Flash or something instead of ActiveX, then Mac/Linux/OtherOS and even Win32 Firefox/Mozilla/Opera users can all use the technology. It seems like Y2K all over again, when companies thought hitting the 99-00 roll-over would never happen in their lifetime.

Companies are just now realizing that there's web users other than Windows/IE users, especially since Mac users tend to be music nuts and would gladly use Yahoo Launch if only it would work for them. Programming only for the "lowest common denominator" is just now seeming to be a bad business practice, and just plain lazy to boot.

Yahoo must have heard the cries of their fans, the ones they haven't lost completely to Apple and Google for similar services:

Mac/Linux User: "Hello!! We can't use Yahoo Launch! It requires Windows! I'm gonna use iTunes!"

or

Windows Gecko/Opera User: "Hello! I am using a browser other than IE here. I shouldn't be forced to use IE, despite want Microsoft wants! I'm gonna use iTunes instead!"

or even...

Windows-IE User with ActiveX Turned Off: "Hello!!! I am NOT going to turn on that shitty, insecure ActiveX 'feature' just to use Launch. I'm going to iTunes!"

I don't see how this would be positive news if it were worded correctly: "Big, responsible web company realizes that proprietary web technologies only works in one specific browser/OS combination with insecure 'feature' left on, therefor supporting monopolistic control of one product and forcing said insecure 'feature' to be turned on, and now realizes more customers can be reached if it used safe and standard code that can be accessed by more than one browser and OS."

full Firefox suport

[1davo]

Hmmm, I have used Firefox regularly since, what whazit 0.3? and have really enjoyed the advanced features and fast execution times.

However, since Firefox started getting really positive press http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/17/139 253&tid=154&tid=218 I have noticed an increasing number of crashes as I surf around with Firefox at my side.

Methinks the cause is not Firefox but rather due to an ever increasing amount of malformed content.

OK you can cue Agent Scully now if you want but no shit I do not think its just about W3C compliance anymore.

There's a new browser war afoot.

Peace_out

guess microsoft gave them a call

[Anonymous Coward]

and, err, you know, "straightened them out"

"...some products that are, perhaps, not appropriate for that browser" -- this is total bullshit, what products that are appropriate for IE wouldn't be appropriate for Firefox?

YMessenger for Linux

[ganda1fthewhite]

Yeah, now wouldn't it be great if they came up with a version of messenger for linux that actually had features worthy of the 21st century?