Slashdot Mirror
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 Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo!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.
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.
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!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Let's hope Yahoo finally decides to support Adblock ... right now, their adverts are only partially blocked by most filer sets.
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.
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
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?
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.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
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!
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.)
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.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
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?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
A little off topic, but your sig fit PERFECTLY with that post.
"It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one." - Voltaire
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.
[alk]
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.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
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.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Thats what I thought Goatse was about?
Yahoo can't decide what's it's doing -- it contradicted itself. Slashdot is supposed to stop this how? Hiring fact checkers?
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.
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.
/.'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.
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
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.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
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...
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!
I wish Yahoo had worded it like that. Instead they make false statements like:
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.
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.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
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.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
"...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.
Why dont they try for full W3C compliance and Javascript standards compliance, rather then just supporting a set of browsers.
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/