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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 Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo!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.
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
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.
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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.
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!
Yahoo can't decide what's it's doing -- it contradicted itself. Slashdot is supposed to stop this how? Hiring fact checkers?
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
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.