Slashdot Mirror
Firefox and Open Standards the Way Forward
lamasquerade writes "A major Australian newspaper has a lengthy and detailed feature on open source/standards, avoiding vendor lock-in, and specifically the increasing uptake of Firefox by major organisations' IT departments. It touches on security and price advantages of open source but mainly focuses on open standards -- the perils of vendor lock-in, and their importance to technologies like the Internet and digital music. Linux, OpenOffice.org and even Bugzilla get a mention and all told it is a very pro-open source/standards article, especially considering it is in a mass-circulation publication."
It's great to see a mainstream article taking this relatively well-rounded look at Firefox. There have been a million stories about how it has tabs and is free and secure, but that's just a part of the story.
Even if people don't care about any of the end-user features, it's important to support a more open Internet by using clients that at least make an attempt at conforming to standards. Many people may not care about this but there's no way they can care if they don't have the chance to hear about it.
"I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says.
There are a variety of orgranizations, large and small, that utilize open source technologies. As was pointed out in a recent thread about the looming IE7, the lack of a centralized, push-button management tool for corporate customers is one thing hampering Firefox. Another thing are applications that utilize Active X and are dependent upon an MS browser as part of their platform. Isn't a lot of high tier banking and insurance software like this; I've read that anyways?
I don't think it's timid IT people. As frightening as it may be, folks who are of my age bracket (28 this summer) are now being put into positions of leadership in technology. People who've spent 5 to 10 years with Linux and accept it. I can't imagine life without Perl and Apache. Simply unthinkable. Firefox and Google are part of this scenerio as well, which is what the author of the article is alluding to: a culture of open source software and open standards.
What I think is so great about Firefox is that it shows the promise of open source in full bloom and it speaks for itself. Nothing's worse than an OSS nerd trying to convince a normal person why they should switch to XYZ program or platform. Not that the reasons lack legitimacy; I'm just saying it's physically painful to watch because most folks don't want to hear it.
But plop a slick "modern car", as the article puts it, in front of them and they immediately reach for the steering wheel.
I Want To Believe
The huge difference is: now mozilla (firefox etc) is actually a good browser! We take it for granted now, but linux wasn't as fun before it had a good browser.
We really need an "idiot" mod.
exactly, smh even managed to put the firefox logo on their frontpage (albeit slightly rotated for some bizzare reason).
Take another look at *how* it's rotated. It is, of course, the Firefox down under.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Think a little smarter. Think compatibility with more standards than that 'other' browser. Your purported superiority is nothing more than another symptom of an anti-competitive monopoly exercising its evil powers. You see, there's a difference between quality and quantity. It's not that IE renders websites better, it's that too many short-sighted web designers write webpages which violate perfectly good and accepted standards so that IE is capable of rendering them (more or less) correctly. That's due to greater numbers of IE users, which in turn is due to the Microsoft monopoly (sorry, but it's true) shipping IE with their OS and making it impossible to really uninstall. Not only is IE the default choice for the overwhelming majority of PC users, there are actually barriers to making any other choice which have nothing to do with the relative quality of the browser. Worse yet, IE intentionally renders correct W3C-compliant code incorrectly - you have to assume it's intentional, as there are few places on this planet with a greater aggregation of programming talent than Redmond, WA. If they wanted it to render clean code correctly, it would. This deliberate perversion of web standards is nothing more than a transparent and immoral (and technically illegal, although intentional lack of enforcement renders that point moot) attempt by Microsoft to maintain a dominant position in the operating system market.
The preceding has been a waste of nearly everyone's time. You, being a troll, are uninterested in relevant facts. You are also unable to spell correctly or even to operate a spellchecker. Nor, apparently, are you capable of offering anything of substance to a conversation, and so you simply spout meaningless and poorly-constructed garbage in a feeble and pitiful attempt to garner the attention of your betters. The fact that the few responses are invariably negative serves, amazingly enough, to whet your appetite further. Why do you torture yourself so? Why do you yearn for the disdain and scorn of others? Can you not see that this path inevitably leads to a complete loss of self-esteem, and that you'll eventually wind up behind the counter at a Radio Shack (or [shudder] Best Buy), pushing cell phones and overpriced cables to the techno-retarded? You are truly a conundrum, o slashdot troll.
Microsoft has always been a software company. And they may put out operating systems and be most-known for Windows, but really their goal is just to control software platforms. The reason they sell the X-Box at a loss is to push the DirectNext platform. They sell Windows, no matter how insecure, just to push their APIs.
Avalon and its related technologies are Microsoft's long-planned attempt to finally gain control of this Internet thing as its own software platform. It's the final fulfilment of the process that started way back with IE4, when Microsoft decided to do anything and everything to get rid of Netscape and prevent the Web from becoming its own software platform. Microsoft ignores web standards because that takes the control of the platform away from them. Right now, if you run a major website, you code for IE hacks and all and hope it works for "fringe" browsers.
Web developers will need to do absolutely everything they can and speak very LOUDLY to prevent the Web from becoming closed. Fortunately, it appears that Longhorn will not be as successful as it was hyped in previous years, but the fact Microsoft is porting a lot of Longhorn's technologies to XP just to get people to use it all is something to keep an eye on, as is the sudden announcement of a new version of IE7 which will no doubt take advantage of Avalon.
I just hope that they keep innovating.
Extensions for IE such as Avant and Maxthon can do pretty much everything that firefox can do (tabs, popup blocking, gestures), so don't get too comfortable with catching up based on a few features missing in the de facto standard.
Not everyone, sadly, cares about the free principles, open standards, etc.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Photoshop's ability to load and save PNG files doesn't mean I can inspect, share, or modify Photoshop to suit my needs. Depending on the license agreement and the method by which I have to install the program, I might even be restricted from running the software whenever I want.
The point is that if Photoshop ceased to exist tomorrow or had a licence change that conflicted with your business practices/moral code, you have the option of changing to a different piece of software that supports the same file formats, etc. The same cannot be said for software with closed file formats - (ok, not entirely true since people _do_ reverse engineer closed standards, but generally because a lot of the support is guesswork they're not going to do such a good job. An excellent example is OOo, which opens and saves word documents but often gets the formatting slightly (or massively) wrong).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
[sarcasm]I have to agree here. IE and ActiveX is where web development is heading. I am confident that Microsoft will continue to support IE long into the future and will not drop support for it at an arbitrary time, like when something more profitable comes along or they change focus and my business is OK with that. I don't see that I will have any problems migrating my data away from any of their closed formats that I might be using, I won't have any problems updating their product with security patches, new features etc etc.[/sarcasm]
:-)
But, on the other hand there is a reason I am writing a point of sale system with mysql and gtk on Debian:
1. I can be confident that the system I am using is totally open to my every whim.
2. I can implement whatever feature I need/want.
3. My data will be in a format *I* want, and open to me for as long as it exists.
4. I can have an operating system/distro which suits my business (and not arrange my business to suit somebody else's product). (I am surprised at list of software I have patched/modified to behave the way *I* want and I am not even a great programmer).
5. I *own* my system in every sense of the word, one can only "license" a MS product for a non-specific amount of time.
I have been using Linux for seven years and still find new things and new ways of doing things. The flexibility and abilities are apparently endless, not last week I built my own very small distro just for kicks in an existing install, a single file including it's own filesystem and linux distro which I loopback mounted and chrooted to work on/run. After all these years I am still grateful I don't have to use inferior products anymore. I haven't even begun to touch on stuff like virtual machines but they look... well they are just amazing
Just think: People all around the world are working/developing on some great stuff *right now* , the possibilities truly are only limited only by *us* and not some company who mandates how/what we can do.