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 Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo!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.
(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?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wow! News at 11.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
"I drank what?" -Socrates
Well, this is certainly a cause for celebration.
What word could we yell in exultation?
Something short and perhaps cowboy-based?
Yeeeha!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
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);
"...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.
sigs are a waste of space
A quick fix is hitting Ctrl + and then Ctrl -
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.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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?
MSN is also going to pledge full support of Firefox :)
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.
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.
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.'
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!
Just browse games.slashdot.org with opera. THE HORROR! A good browser but yikes what a horrible color rendering.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
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.
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.
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.
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! --
This just comes up again and again, doesn't it? Let's recap:
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.
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!
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's not nesting tables (that's not really bad in my book, it just slowed down old Netscapes) that is the big problem.
a shdot.org%2F
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%2Fsl
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Posted today:
9 020384,39191834,00.htm/
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,3
----- Open Source = More Secure (mmmmkay)
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!
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.
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!"
Big hint.
Laws are for people with no friends.
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?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
view source
...HREF="//slashdot.org/index.rss" TYPE="application/rss+xml">
...
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"
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
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???
News.com.com is reporting that Yahoo! has pledged full support of Firefox across its entire site.
:D
So does this mean we should all start getting our news from Yahoo instead of Slashdot?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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.
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!
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.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
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.
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/