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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 Update: 03/18 18:24 GMT by Z : GraffitiKnight (among many others) wrote in to mention that the claim has been retracted by the Yahoo!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.

23 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. So Yahoo Supports Standards by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 5, Funny
    So Yahoo now supports standards.

    Wow! News at 11.

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny
      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 $&^$#*

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    2. Re:So Yahoo Supports Standards by jacksonj04 · · Score: 4, Funny

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

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
  2. launchcast by jkc120 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:launchcast by Gorath99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.)

  3. Re:Support from an unlikely source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Yahoo and Firefox compatibility by xtracto · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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'
  5. Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all by Jim_Maryland · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all by greyhoundpoe · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

    2. Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all by prezninja · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    3. Re:Yahoo not supporting Firefox after all by ryantate · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  6. Not Correct by phusikos · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.
  7. Competition Is Good by blueZhift · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  8. You'd hope submitters would RTFA by X · · Score: 5, Informative

    "...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
  9. Re:Yahoo! by OmegaGeek · · Score: 5, Funny

    >Something short and perhaps cowboy-based?

    Neil?

    --
    Even heroes have the right to dream
  10. Wrong, but close. by Richthofen80 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  11. Re:Yahoo! by That's+Unpossible! · · Score: 5, Funny

    perhaps cowboy-based?

    Yippee-kayay-motherfucker?

    --
    Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
  12. Re:Ahhhh.... but when will Slashdot? by thirteenVA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  13. Re:extensions ... adblock? by geminidomino · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  14. Re:aaarrgh ... quality of life by Frank+T.+Lofaro+Jr. · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
  15. Quick slashdot / firefox fix by Darth_brooks · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  16. Slashdot should support Firefox by SunPin · · Score: 5, Funny

    Big hint.

    --
    Laws are for people with no friends.
  17. Re:Hmm... by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."