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Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed
johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page. Update: 06/30 15:31 GMT by T : No longer marked as RC; the Firefox upgrade page now says 3.5 has arrived.
The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
It has a lot of plugins that provide for effortless retrieval of pornographic image and video content in bulk.
So talk standards and compliance and speed all you want. It's all bunk and you know it.
FF is best because it makes it easiest to pull down naughty media.
use telnet for browsing the internet.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Yeah they will actually, most sites will use javascript to test for the ability to use them however.
the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language
Although, I would be happy if Slashdot would work right with the existing standards.
We are all like a bunch of jonzing pirates wanting FF 3.5... Like crack addicts we need our fix... like yesterday... or the day before.
We want it NOW!!!
I suggest you take a look at Kroc Camen's "Video for Everybody" HTML5 video element implementation. Not a hint of Javascript is necessary to implement it, and it's very cross-platform. It can play back in OGG, Flash, Quicktime (even on the iPhone), WMA, or alternatively provide a download link. http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization". Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.
Le français vous intéresse?
Did they ever resolve this? It's still present in 3.0 for Linux. Basically, instead of being polite and letting the OS keep the disk spun down until data needs to be written, Firefox spins up the HD for writing every single time it does anything. So if you have an aggressive spin-down policy (like Ubuntu Jaunty does, at least) and you're web-browsing, your HD will spin up and down every twenty seconds or so.
Correction: "...and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure NOT to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language..."
(That's better.)
I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility???? Aren't they just playing into Micrsofts hands? MS is sure to just go ahead and create MSHTML 5.0 which is completely incompatible with HTML 5.0. What will they do then?
Wave there hands madly in the air, I suppose.
... send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
www.getfirefox.com :)
indeed, am I the only one still using the mac-only, closed-source iCab -but the one that invented ad-filtering 10 years before Adblock, and still updates almost every month (now with e. g. full screen favorite-sites preview...)?
Herve S.
I'm trying to decide if that's more or less hardcore than using wget like Richard Stallman does.
Le français vous intéresse?
According to the official working schedule, FF3.5b4 is going to be coming out in the near future--on April 24.
Some may have noticed that April 24 (and 3.5b4) has already passed. I find it sadly ironic that the weekly FF3.5 meetings have talked about branding, evangelizing, and marketing; and yet they can't be bothered to update their own schedule.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I usually kill off my firefox 3.0 and restart it once it reaches the point where its holding 400 megs of ram and takes a quarter-second to respond to button presses. Wasn't Firefox's advantage over Mozilla supposed to be the lack of bloat?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Without installing any kind of plugin JavaScript is supported by virtually every modern desktop browser and a growing number of mobile browsers. Yes some websites use JavaScript to do annoying things like resize/move windows, but most browsers let you limit what a website is allowed to do.
Umm Flash on the other hand requires you to install a 3rd party plugin that may not work well (or at all) depending on what platform/browser you use.
IIRC the HTML 5 spec doesn't even say that JavaScript is "required" to play videos, it's just used for the UI.
In Firefox 3.5, the bard class has been totally revised, and you no longer need to "intuit direction" to browse the web.
I do not observe this behaviour using Firefox 3.0.10 for Windows.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Running 3.0.11 here, print dialog defaults to a real printer, as it always has.
As of now, if you got to Mozilla's page and choose to download Firefox, you get version 3.5 :
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Do not download FF from anywhere except the main FF site. :P
And FF3.5 is up now for download. Pretty snappy, speed-wise. :)
Julie Moult is an idiot.
"Nonprofit" doesn't imply a lack of revenue.
It's there now.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Nope, I don't get this behavior either.
Have you checked that off in your default printer settings?
Julie Moult is an idiot.
So you are disabling javascript, but allowing flash? That makes no sense whatsoever.
For one, I don't know of many sites whose flash applets will work properly without Javascript to initialize them. For two, flash has MUCH larger potential for security holes and exploits than Javascript, which does not even have write access to the filesystem in any way. One wrong buffer overflow in flash and the thing can actually WRITE to your hard drive.
It's a setting in your OS, dude, not in FF. Like most programs, FF just implements the existing PRINT framework.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation? Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist, a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari, and most (l)users would be stuck with the latest version of IE -- IE6. Thank you, Firefox, for reigniting the browser wars, and here's hoping that this time around the wars will be fought with functionality, stability, security, and speed, rather than with a new incompatible extension to JavaScript every week.
Le français vous intéresse?
Uhm, yes, they pulled in 75 million. So?
"A nonprofit organization (abbreviated NPO, also not-for-profit) is an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization
Nonprofit does not mean "doesn't make any money".
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
You don't have to. The latest Release Candidate *IS* the final build.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
I think firefox 3.5 IS here now. I just went to getfirefox.com on osx and ubuntu and both show graphical links to download firefox 3.5. Downloading and going to 'about firefox' shows no indication that it is a release candidate.
For me, 0% of the time the right hand is cut off. I doubt it's FF.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
Shrug. I block flash too, so what's the difference? Flash player is as big a potential security exploit as javascript.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Please excuse me for being a paltry light user of Firefox... but aren't you an outlier in this particular case? The most tabs I ever have open on Firefox is three, maybe four. IMHO, you're a power user and while your comments are insightful, I have to wonder whether or not your insights are of relevance to the average user of Firefox? I'm all for improvement, but if the improvement is only noticeable when you've got 30+tabs open a day and are burning through close to a gig of RAM to keep everything operating... then what good is the improvement to the average user?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
The Firefox project is funded by Google.
Le français vous intéresse?
If you go to either mozilla.com or getfirefox.com they now offer Firefox 3.5 as their main offering, not a Release Candidate
I'm sure they'll catch up. :P
Julie Moult is an idiot.
>I squirted milk out my nose when I read that.
Had you been drinking milk at the time or are you just really wierd?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I saw some of the stuff they do with the video tag and tried it out on my machine. http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/
It seems like they are encouraging doing elaborate things with this tag. I'm hoping that this won't escalate into what we have now with flash.
Even if it isn't as much of a resource hog for playing video, once people start rotating / clipping 20 videos on a single page it'll bring your system down.
If you can suggest a way that they can fund operations without revenue, I'm sure you're eligible for a Nobel. All non-profits take int revenue in some fashion to pay for operating expenses. Non-profits are just limited in how much they can take in and how they handle it. Generally speaking it's limited by the amount of service they're providing and how much it costs to provide the service.
A properly run non-profit is going to turn a profit in some years in order to make up for years when it's running a bit in the black. It's just that the cash ends up going back into the non-profit rather than being distributed to shareholders or on non-related endeavors.
No profit doesn't mean they don't have money. Many people and companies donate money, buy merchandise, and donate servers or the like.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
...is that Firefox finally has an 'open a new tab' icon by default (adjacent to the last open tab in the list), I know that you can add an icon yourself, and that double-clicking the tab bar opens a new tab, but I know plenty of people that weren't even aware that tabbed browsing is a feature of Firefox as it wasn't obvious!
No, but they do receive donations, plus money from a deal to put Google as the default search. Google is not the only one donating.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
BuR4N here's a link for you to read since you seem to think non-profit means no income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Profit
Yes, thanks. Now I still need to wait for the .deb; and then I'll be up!
Not sure why this is modded "troll"; but that aside, it seems they've jumped the gun and posted the current RC as the final version on softpedia. No idea why they would have done so.
For me, 3.0.11 defaults to the last printer I used, which could be my default printer, but often isn't. I find this convenient and I like it.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
Of course, you could do this back in 2000, with a simple object tag, a mimetype, and a url.
Is there a 64 bit version that I'm not seeing? Do I have to build it?
You still had to hope that the user had a video plug-in installed for that mimetype, and that the plug-in happened to support the codec you used.
I don't think the video tag matters a great deal, but the popularity of flash objects used for playing mp4 files shows that there was room to improve on the year 2000.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Okay, at one time, there were standards around CSS and DOM being implemented, and Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards, and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time, and that was deemed Evil.
Now there are standards around HTML5 being proposed, but probably 10 years off, or at least way off, and Firefox and Google are implementing a version of these standars before they are standards, and are trying to become the Defactor Quirks Mode way things are done for a long time, and that is deemed Good.
If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
Windows users can go to "Help > Check for updates..." in FireFox now to find the 3.5 update. It also has a button to test which extensions will need to be disabled before you actually run the update on that page.
Like you do with flash, and like you have to hope that a browser is HTML5-capable, actually has a screen and isn't being read to a blind user via a screenreader, etc. Nothing on the web is guaranteed; it's intended to be flexible and adapt to the end-user.
It shows nothing of the sort. Flash is used all the time, often to create entire sites and display simple text, when HTML can do that much better. To some flash developers, everything is an opportunity to use flash. Not that I'm singling out flash devs or anything; lots of people do it, with DHTML menus etc., almost as much as with flash.
Open Help>Check for Updates. It's released already
right...
It is available through the software update in the browser. I find it faster. Still have to play with some of the new settings but so far very nice improvements. Best of all my addons all worked right away!!!
Well, we disagree on the second point. YouTube, Hulu, and every other video site I can think of are on my side (but I am biased to think I am right).
I don't think the tag is really intended for today, it is intended to make the experience smoother 10 years from now (at each stage, hosting, browsing, etc.).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Nah, just lactating.
I'm not sure my title will make enough people read this but not a lot of people know that they even own an Internet browser. Simply watch this real and pathetic investigation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3vv0_RNTM8 . I'm dead serious, we live in our own world...
According to that page you cited, April 24 is Beta 4 and according to the release notes for 3.5b4 it was released April 27. Although a little off I'm not sure it qualifies as scorn or says their attitude is "...can't be bothered to update their own schedule". Especially since it says right there "Future date are estimates" on a page authored April 19.
That worked out really well. I read the blurb, it said it was available. Did the check for updates, it downloaded and restarted, and then I went into the story.
All upgrades should be so easy!
Same reason why people go "FRIST PSOT!" on new Slashdot articles.
Softpedia were trying to "break the street date" as it were.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
Do those little utilities we used to use with Win95 memory leaks work on this, or will FF not let go of it?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
WTF? Nobody does that anymore!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Indeed, I -am- the only one still using the Mac-only closed-source browser that invented Web browsing 5 years before iCab....
Just tested firefox 3.5 (or actually started using), and the video mode seems excellent.
No flash or anything else and seems to work splendidly. I can't imagine why anybody would be against this (I mean users, I know several companies that of course oppose anything they can't control).
I'll be curious to see how this works out. My standard demo of firefox eating memory like a fat family at a pizza buffet is to leave gmail (chat enabled) along with slashdot open all night. In the morning, voila, 600 megs of memory utilized.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I squirted milk out my nose when I read that.
> Had you been drinking milk at the time or are you just really wierd?
You must have gotten Eric Cartman's bad kidney.
I know it's a real long shot, but I don't suppose they added an option to turn off the awesomebar?
If you like, Tab Mix Plus has that as an option, among many other nice things. Unfortunately, the main version hasn't been updated for 3.5 yet, but you can find the development version here, or simply override the compatibility check, which seems to work fine.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
No, they're on the side of money -- creating media that's difficult to save to your own machine, so they can add adverts and DRM on the site, and make you link your friends to their copy instead of just sending them yours.
Looks like everybody's trying out their new installations on the Acid Tests 'cause it's /.'d.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Well, I downloaded the final version and played with it on OS X for a bit. I usually use Safari on OS X because I have a hard time getting over certain deficiencies of Firefox and Opera. The good things are javascript performance is now quite good, better than the Safari 4 release by a significant margin (although still lagging the Webkit nightlies as one would expect). It's still not there for the ACID3 test, but it's getting close. It still is a little less responsive, but nothing too significant. They haven't cloned the text box resizing feature yet, so I still need to dig up an extension to do that, and of all things basic UI components should be built in. The grammar checker does not work at all. The spelling checker fails to use the default spellchecking service, so it does not know any of the words I've trained OS X to recognize and which work in all my other programs. All the other system services are likewise unavailable.
In short, it' better in all the ways one would expect, but they've still done nothing to make it work like a truly native application which makes it a second class citizen for power users. This is sort of ironic since the plug-in extensions to Firefox normally make it ideal for power users on other platforms. It's too bad they ignore all OS wide plug-ins on OS X.
If you compare Mozilla's revenue to Apple and Microsoft, their funding is pretty non-existent. When you look at all the other so-called MicroSoft beaters, and find most of them have vanished to near-obscurity (Corel? Lotus Notes?), and look at the other open source software companies slowly gaining traction against MS, Firefox is pretty exemplary in what they've accomplished.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I wonder if there is any possibility to turn off (forced) font smoothing in Firefox 3.5 on Linux.
If you're using a modern computer with a 64-bit cpu and a modern 64-bit operating system, you won't get any of the speed benefits of FF3.5 because TraceMonkey does not yet work. This is extremely irritating, to say the least! Mozilla's solution is to run the 32-bit version on top of your 64-bit OS, but this isn't really a solution at all...
It's amazing how many developers are still stuck in the stone age (comparatively, in computer terms)... I wish I had the technical knowledge to help fix something like that, but I imagine JIT compiling takes some serious expertise.
I, too, have considerable amount of extensions, have run all of the betas and RCs for 3.5 and am running the final release on Mac OS X 10.5, and have seen nothing like this. In fact, I'm using Nightly Tester Tool to run about half of my extensions that are still not updated for 3.5.
My guess? One of your considerable amount of extensions is causing your problem. You could find out, but you apparently don't care that much to find out which, but you are sufficiently motivated to post on /. (admittedly much easier). But why? Your data was worthless, and since you posted AC, it doesn't seem like you get any personal satisfaction out of venting your spleen.
AC, I am disappoint. There are standards. There should be a goatse link here, or at least some kind of real platform troll.
DRM killed all my friends, you insensitive clod.
I have seen that problem as well. Very annoying.
Another problem is that you can do print preview, and you can choose to print a selection... but you can't preview what will print if you print only the selection. This would be very useful when you want to make sure the selection will print as you expect, or if you want to scale the print to fit on a certain number of pages.
Even better, what if they made the print preview interactive? The user could cut out blocks they don't want to print, or select certain sections to print. Currently, I accomplish this by using Firebug to delete unwanted structures from the page before I print.
True enough.
But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5. Yes, I understand that HTML5 can wrap Flash content, but why add the extra layer? I just can't see sites like hulu.com doing that, as much as I would like to see it happen.
As far as Flash performance, maybe my expectations are lowered, but I've never really had great problems on any fairly recent Linux distribution (last 5 years or so).
Except its not, dude. Firefox 2 worked perfectly fine. All other applications recognize the default printer including Thunderbird. Something changed/broke in Firefox 3.
We knew it was coming. After chrome's incognito mode, everyone knew that people like to watch pr0n without worrying about the sites showing up in the awesome/whatever-the-fuck-is-the-name-bar! I have a shortcut (chrome -incognito) just for that reason but now it seems like I can do all that right from Firefox!
It's good but, IMHO, not perfect though. The private browsing mode saves+hides your current tabs and starts a new session in the new mode, and when you switch it off, it loads all those tabs all over again! It's perfect for casual users but for freaks like me who have close to 100 tabs open on an average, it's not the right way to go. I would have preferred it to be done the way chrome handles it - open the private mode in a completely new window and run both the sessions simultaneously depending upon which window the user is browsing on. I hope they tweak it soon or someone makes an extension to run it that way.
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB
How often does the operating system write to the virtual memory allocated to Firefox when one runs it on a low-cost subnotebook PC with a 4 GB SSD?
And actually I might notice that every application on that machine DOES NOT behave the same way. This changed from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. Even Thunderbird recognizes the default printer. And yes, I've removed and re-installed Firefox 3.
LOL Asshole for not realizing everyone in the world does not use Winbloze.
Addendum : Found one issue with the old version (0.3.7.3) on 3.5. The close buttons on the individual tabs (which I prefer over the singular close button) will occasionally disappear when opening and switching between tabs, with no way that I've found to get it back other than restarting Firefox. This does not occur with the latest dev version (0.3.7.4pre.090516).
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
May I really ask who or what Firefox developers fight(!) with? Like or not, MSI is the way to get into Enterprise, a signed MSI is even better. In fact, most of .exe installers you see these days are actually MSI packaged in .exe.
It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software, at least in a FTP folder like "alternate_installers" which admins will pull msi from. It became even more interesting since I found this: http://wix.sourceforge.net/ , yes open source from MS, hosted by Sourceforge and it actually works. What does MSI do? Hurt feelings of the developers there? I really can't understand. It is basically RPM for Windows which gives some bonus features like repair etc. to ordinary users but it is huge deal on enterprise.
ps: Same thing on OS X but we are kinda fine with Drag&Drop installs while it even matters at home sized networks. A .pkg would be way better. Anyway, no gigantic enterprise sized OS X networks around like the Windows ones.
...extension called Taboo - "the cure for tabitis"
The root cause of the problem is that FF uses SQLite. Real databases (even "Lite" versions), are paranoid about file integrity, and therefore do file commits via fsync(), or whatever, almost every time they do file writes. The FF developers brought this on themselves when they included SQLite as an integral part of Firefox. This is a browser, not a database, folks. Why the bleep does it need an SQL database? And how long before the Russian Business Network starts running SQL injection attacks against Firefox?
I remember several years ago, when the browser was called Mozilla 0.95. Besides a browser, it had email and usenet news and web development tools and it was big/bloated/slow, and people were making "about:kitchen sink" jokes. Firefox was forked out of Mozilla and presented as the lightweight lean-and-mean *WEB BROWSER* that people really wanted. I think it's time for another such fork. Firefox is an OK operating system, but it lacks a lightweight web browser.
I'm not a programmer, but if I had a team of programmers reporting to me, and a budget to pay them with, I'd start a Firefox fork. First to go would be SQLite, and I'd revert "abortion bar" to the previous Firefox behaviour.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
And some sites don't work at all if JavaScript isn't enabled. Just because a lot of people use JavaScript when they don't have to doesn't mean it's actually required by the features they're using. <video> itself works fine without JavaScript.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5.
You can bet YouTube will. Chrome supports <video>, YouTube has test pages that use it, and for that matter the editor of HTML 5 is employed by Google. If <video> really is better, which it theoretically should be, other sites will be pushed to support it for feature parity and consistency with the biggest player out there.
Some people will still try using encumbered formats. There's no way to stop that. Some people serve images instead of HTML for the same reason. But <video> is a step in the right direction for the web regardless.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
"It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software"
Mozilla Firefox version 3.0 will be offering the much requested MSI installer which will enable the end user to install the Firefox web browsing software application on multiple computers at the same point of time
but have since grown to love it. If you bookmark your favourite sites but still clear private data on exit (history especially) then the awesome bar only lists sites in your favourites (or current session) when typing in, making it a lot more managable and trainable. so now when i start firefox s is slashdot, e is ebay and n is bbc news, nice!
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
You still had to hope that the user had a video plug-in installed for that mimetype, and that the plug-in happened to support the codec you used.
Exactly right. I went to the FireFox video tag demo page with Safari 3.1 just now. Safari uses QuickTime to render things in the video tag (which surprised me slightly; I thought it was only Safari 4 that supported the tag). Unfortunately, the video was in Ogg Theora format and I don't have the Theora QuickTime plugin installed. The result was that the browser provided an embedded QuickTime display, but the video didn't work. Pretty much exactly the same behaviour we've had with object/embed tags for the last decade or so. I hope the video tag specification will be fixed to require graceful failure if the browser or plugin doesn't support the format, rather than just not working but reporting success.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple says they support the tag in 3.1:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25197
At present, the html5 working draft suggests showing a link to the video if playback is not supported. There is also an example of using javascript to fallback to a plug-in if the browser does not report that it can 'probably' play the video (apparently being sure is a bit tough).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
apparently being sure is a bit tough
Being sure before you load it is difficult. Being sure after is trivial. It might take longer for fail-over to happen if you have to try opening the video with a plugin and then handle failure only when it reports it, but it's still better than just displaying a non-working video UI.
One of the ideas of the video tag is that you should be able to nest them with different video formats and have the first supported one work, then fail-over to a flash video or Java applet video player if none of them works. This isn't possible if the handler is reporting success when it fails to load the video.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Will Flash videos play if I don't have Adobe's thrice-becursed annoying crash-happy proprietary plugin installed?
Oops! Oh, well.
(I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the user's operating system decide what software to use to play it.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
Yeah, I used to think that way.
And then I got my current job, and started working with normal, non-IT-industry users.
I know, for IT people, it doesn't make sense. I mean, printing it is unnecessary and just creates extra physical clutter, a piece of paper you're just going to misplace. If you just save the link (possibly someplace online, like your private scratchpad at Perlmonks), you can go there any time, from anywhere. Why would you ever want it on paper?
But it's different for normal users, because (Are you sitting down? Mind your blood pressure, this may be a bit of a shock...) they don't have the internet available everywhere all the time.
Really, no fooling.
They don't have handheld devices that can browse the web. They don't have the internet on every floor (much less every room) of their house. They don't have it in their car. The computer in the house (there's never more than one) is probably shared between several family members, and even if nobody else is using it, it still takes at least five minutes, usually more like ten, to get something off the internet, because they have to wait for the computer (which is old and slow and never had enough RAM in the first place because it was a cheaper model) to boot up, then wait for the internet connection to dial, then try to find the site...
That's assuming they *have* the internet at home; a double-digit percentage of the population doesn't.
Some people only have internet access at a friend's house, or at the public library.
Many only have internet at work. They can't take a web page home, and even if it's needed for a job-related reason, they can't take it with them to meetings, or when they have job duties away from their regular desk -- or maybe they can't take it to the desk, if they have internet at a shared workstation, which is common. They can't take a website and show it to a coworker, or the boss.
So they print the web page (or the email message, or whatever) so that they can have continued access to it when they walk away from the computer. They want to take it with them.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Those are all valid points, but if we *allow* them to use printing as an option, surely it will just prolong this behaviour! Printing an article off for a friend with limited internet access seems reasonable--I was specifically thinking of a work environment. The last couple times I have worked in that type of office, people printed all kinds of things they absolutely did not need--especially people with computers at their desks!
Why do non-IT users need to access work-related webpages at home on their offtime? Also--in the U.S. only 7% still use dial-up.
Maybe we just need a maasive paper tax to help people think twice about what they chose to print!