We wait around while the W3C tries to pull it's thumb out of it's ass.
How hard is it to decide on a new standard? Do the members not check their email more than once a year?
The standard is basically decided upon. Most of the important parts look about the same now as they did two years ago. What we're waiting for is implementation. It's all very well to write a spec, but implementing it efficiently and correctly takes far more time. This is why every new browser release touts all the new parts of the HTML5 standard they implemented: the spec is mostly stable, and browsers are in the process of implementing it.
I do think you're underestimating the difficulty and complexity of writing a several-hundred-page spec, though. There's a reason it took a few years.
As a developer, sysadmin and end user I would like to tell you that HTTP is not for this there are other ports than 80 and the web browser is not a virtual machine.
Then it's a good thing that that WebSockets aren't HTTP. It's a completely new protocol that's designed for efficient two-way communication over a connection that's held open on both sides. See section 1.7 of that draft RFC, "Relationship to TCP and HTTP":
The WebSocket protocol is an independent TCP-based protocol. Its only relationship to HTTP is that its handshake is interpreted by HTTP servers as an Upgrade request.
From a cursory glance on websockets.org, it appears that the only thing web sockets is changing is making it simpler to send plain strings rather than complete HTTP messages. This solves the potential problem that when you get a response at the client, the (logical) connection is closed, so there's a gap until the client's next GET request arrives at the server before it can get a new event. So there's a limit to how fast you can receive the events, at least without some kind of trickery.
If you're using WebSockets, you're not using HTTP at all; there's no such thing as GET. The web browser opens the connection, and keeps it open. Both client and server can push arbitrary strings to each other with network overhead about the same as pushing them directly over TCP (at least by comparison to HTTP). It means you don't have to poll the server at all, you can set up event handlers. This is drastically more efficient; it will enable things like webmail to be both more efficient and faster (get new e-mail instantly, not after you poll for it), and will also enable things like multiplayer games in HTML and JavaScript.
WebSockets is a pretty big deal. Maybe not the most important part of HTML5, but still a big deal.
I think most web servers won't ever serve sub-second events anyway, they're simple going to die from the load with many clients. Of course, in internal apps, the situation can be different. At lot of the new stuff in HTML5 is about extending the capabilities so web tech can supplant more of the traditional desktop apps.
WebSocket servers are not HTTP servers. WebSocket is its own protocol, and servers will be written from scratch in practice. One of the design goals was to make this really easy, a couple hundred lines, so as not to inhibit adoption.
True, but to be fully fair, resizeable textareas were available as a Firefox add-on since at least March 2007 via the Resizeable Textarea add-on, three months before Safari 3 was announced and released as a beta.
I tried that extension when I used Firefox. It was theoretically nice, but actually quite buggy, so eventually I disabled it. IIRC, when I used it, it would allow you to do things like squish text fields out of existence and seriously distort the page layout. The built-in WebKit implementation (and probably also the FF4 implementation) is much more polished.
I find this is usually the case with extensions vs. native features, for most software products. The original developers know what they're doing and have high production values, while extension developers usually just hack something up without serious design, review, or testing. So I avoid using third-party extensions for any of my software (browsers, server apps, etc.) if possible.
The problem is that the people who do live like that only do so by other people not living like that. There is a reason why so much manufacturing and mining is done in developing countries with little or no restrictions, and it isn't just the labor cost.
If all third-world countries suddenly became as rich as developed nations tomorrow, you're absolutely right that the cost of consumer goods would rise greatly in absolute terms. But on the other hand, these newly-rich countries would be buying much more from us and selling much more to us, so we have a lot more money to spend. There's more total wealth, so the fact that a lot of our goods cost more doesn't necessarily mean we'd wind up poorer overall. A more detailed analysis is needed.
So I'm not an economist and don't know much about economics, but your statement sounds shaky to me. It seems intuitive, but only because we intuitively assume there's a fixed amount of wealth available (thus rich countries must take it at the expense of poor countries), and that's definitely wrong. It's certainly possible in principle for everyone in the world to be richer than Westerners are now. Do you have particular evidence for the idea that we benefit from the poverty of third-world countries, or is this just common sense to you?
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
So in other words, pretty much like America too, until we got rich and instituted environmental regulation? Like how 20 people died and 7,000 grew sick in a 1948 smog incident in Pennsylvania? That and many other incidents in the same vein were what spurred the first air pollution regulations in this country. That we all take clean air for granted today is a testament to their effectiveness.
But when you're poor, you live in lousy conditions anyway, so pollution isn't the most important thing on your mind (vs., e.g., disease or starvation). Plus, pollution controls make things more expensive, and you need that money for necessities. It's completely rational for poorer societies to tolerate more pollution, and that is in fact what happens. None of this is the fault of developed nations – it's due to developing nations' quite sensible lack of pollution regulations. As they grow richer, they'll regulate pollution more, totally independent of us.
In fact, no matter the average slashdotter bias, Microsoft has all the resources to make fully compliant products. Problem is, that is not a goal for them. Market domination is.
Circa IE8, they realized that making a fully-compliant browser is the best immediate strategy for market domination. And that's exactly what they're doing for IE9. Their explicit goal for IE9 is to make it work with all the sites that other browsers work for, without IE-specific hacks, and so far they seem to be doing a remarkably good job of it.
Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.
If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.
All the new IE9 features they've showcased are in open standards and already implemented interoperably by other browsers. IE9's <canvas> demos work perfectly fine in all other browsers – but they're much slower due to the lack of hardware acceleration. Actually, IE9's Standards Mode even removes some proprietary IE extensions from earlier versions (e.g., JS extensions; scroll down to "Same Script, Same Markup").
Microsoft is now actually trying to beat the other browsers by being actually better, as they did with IE6, so they can regain lost market share. They have the advantage that their browser only works on one platform, so they can rely on Vista/7-only APIs like Direct2D and DirectX 10 while other browsers need to support OpenGL, DirectX 9, etc.
In other words: be afraid. The enemy has learned from its defeat.
We developed a web based game BattleCell that uses Ajax/CSS instead of Flash for all the heavy lifting. We discover at least one new bug in the IE rendering engine every month.
Since this article is about IE9: have you tried it in IE9? Did it work there?
Where have you been? The video tag debate is over seems flash won.
You should link to the original blog post by Google itself. The conclusion there is "the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube" (emphasis added). So it will remain opt-in on YouTube for now. Nothing rules out a switch in a year or two – all the essential problems they have with <video> are being worked on.
Does Iron deliver what it promises to deliver? Resounding yes. Is Iron code different from Chrome? Yes, only a few lines, but that was the deal: A Chrome mod stripped from the questionable parts.
All of which can be easily disabled in a stock Chromium install. Which has the advantage of not having a delayed release schedule, and being better supported. You can disable most of the stuff in Chrome itself, in fact, and then you get hassle-free updates. So it's pretty pretentious to act as though it's different software that deserves a different name.
I read the logs and the history of Iron and I don't see the big scam. The guy created a product that works as advertised and, due to Germany's anti-Google stance, people there are more likely to go for a de-Googlefied Chrome, therefore _sometimes_ visiting SRWare's website to download it, maybe generating some bucks via adSense or by using some of the other products SRware offers. He was mainly after the good publicity –The guy who stripped Chrome from the bad parts. He got it. He delivered a product that works as promised. Where's the scam?
The scam is that he's preying off people's fear of Google by making it look like his software is significantly different. It's not. It's almost exactly the same thing as Chromium, but rebranded and with a few easily-changed defaults different. It provides no more privacy than Chromium, but he sure makes it sound like it does. He's not going to damage your computer or anything, no, but he's profiteering off misleading claims, and that makes it a scam in my book (albeit a fairly harmless one).
For what it's worth, I can confirm the logs that evmar posted. They begin at September 17, 2008, 3:00:30 PM EST in my logs for #chromium-dev on freenode. I idled in that channel since shortly after the Chromium release was announced. I'm not a Google employee or Chrome/Chromium developer, but I have used Chrome as my browser for over a year (IIRC).
Salient quotes from the log:
<Iron> because a fork will bring a lot of publicity to my person and my homepage
<Iron> that means: a lot of money too;)
...
<Iron> i dont take money for my fork
<Iron> but i have adsense on my page;)
<Iron> a lot of visitor -> a lot of clicka > a lot of money;)
Iron is a complete scam, avoid it. If you're worried about privacy, use Chromium compiled by your distro (don't want MS or Apple to get info about you, right?) and turn off everything that sends data to Google.
I can't believe that 99% of the holdouts are PC gamers.
No, they're mostly people who don't even know what an OS is. But techy people drive tech adoption, and a lot of young techy people are gamers. I admin a gaming forum, and a lot of random people there say they like Linux but are never going to consider it full-time unless it's as good as Windows for gaming. But that means supporting many more games than Mac does now (let alone Linux), plus having performance as good as Windows – a consistent 10 FPS loss would be unacceptable. So we have a long way to go.
My goal wasn't to discuss the W3C process, rather to highlight how it's not that important in terms of what developers perceive to be "standards".
I agree with that: de facto standards are more important than de jure standards, and the goal of the latter should only be to establish the former (or else they'll be ignored). However, it's not at all true that "Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc."
The biggest problem when discussing web standards is that the vendors themselves propose the standards. So Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc. From the W3C's POV they are all the same, while the marketplace sorts these things out into common "cross-browser" features versus things which are considered "proprietary".
In other words, nobody cares that CSS3 rounded borders aren't an official "standards compliant" feature, it is a "cross browser" feature and they want rounded fucking corners on their website.
Okay, so you've never actually participated in the W3C or any other standards organization. Thanks for letting us all know. Implementers pay some (not all) of the people who write and edit standards at the W3C (and elsewhere), but they write things that all implementers are willing to implement, and do.
In fact, W3C specs cannot progress to Proposed Recommendation unless they have two fully independent, interoperable implementations of every single feature. The HTML5 spec at the WHATWG has an even stronger requirement: if any major implementer refuses to implement a feature, the feature is dropped, and this has happened more than once. (Most famously, the Theora support requirement, but also Web Databases, etc.)
Typically, browser vendors use the W3C to agree on what sort of functionality authors and users want most, and then cooperate to work out a standard. Usually they try focus on the same areas and implement things more or less in sync, because a) that way authors will be able to use the features faster, and b) as soon as one browser implements something, everyone starts pestering the others with "Why does this work in their browser and not yours?"
And by the way, a version of border-radius was in W3C drafts since at least 2002. It was implemented with vendor prefixes per CSSWG policy, because it wasn't in a Candidate Recommendation yet and was subject to change. In fact, it did change, so -moz-border-radius (IIRC) behaves slightly differently from the final border-radius. It was always a standards-compliant feature.
Nope, they don't want to be tied down to such non-marketable terms such as "standard" or such constricting terms like "compliant".
"Cross Browser" sounds WAY sexier and "compatible" sounds much less like they HAVE to do something.
It's very easy to write standards-compliant pages that don't work in any browser at all. Just try writing up some XHTML2, for instance. It's even easier to write standards-compliant pages that don't work in all browsers consistently: not all specs are implemented by all browsers, specs are sometimes vague, and implementations have bugs.
No, the important thing is that the same markup works, exactly the same, in all browsers. Standards are only a means toward interoperability, and a lot of people tend to forget that. It's why we don't have standards for things that don't affect interoperability, like UI or black-box-invisible implementation details. Microsoft is totally correct to focus on the goal of getting their browser to work the same as others in practice, not just mechanically following standards to the letter.
Here's a thought. Why don't we read up on what actual Islam is, versus the supremacist Arab culture that permeates and corrupts it. Karen Armstrong did a wonderful job of pointing out what Islam actually is, and how Arab culture with it's tradition of jahilliyeh has since permeated and corrupted it (note to the curious - Wahibist Islam is a fundamentalist version of Islam where the clerics try to reconcile the pre-Mohammed "heroic" cultural mores of Arab tribal culture with Islam itself - which is what Mohammed explicitly fought against).
Why should we be concerned about some idealized version of Islam, rather than Islam as actually articulated by its most influential practitioners (e.g., governments)? Muslim theology only affects Muslims. Muslim practice affects non-Muslims too, like Mark Zuckerberg. Thus non-Muslims only care about the latter.
But even in theory, I object to the notion that you or Karen Armstrong has more right to decide what constitutes "real" Islam than the large majority of Muslims themselves. It smacks to me of trying to pretend that all major ideologies are really compatible with Western liberalism, except that they were corrupted by nasty evil people who betrayed their original meaning. And that is just nonsense. Most ideologies are not compatible with Western liberalism, and Islam as actually practiced in Muslim countries is obviously one of them.
It's a real problem for Zuckerman. He's previously made fund-raising trips to Dubai. That's over. The UAE has blasphemy laws, which they enforce. The UAE also has an extradition treaty with Pakistan, but not with the United States. So he can no longer visit Dubai, and is unlikely to get funding from any source in the Arab world. He can't even fly Emirates Air.
I'm pretty sure that Pakistan and the UAE are well aware of the political repercussions of executing the executive of a major American company for doing something that Americans actively support (permitting blasphemy). Kind of like how European countries don't try to arrest American soldiers or politicians for war crimes.
So, not a huge risk for him. Although I wouldn't blame him if he decided to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to put my faith in Pakistan's sanity.
In fact, the basic attitudes between the groups are the same, which is why embracing religion will never work out. The only two ways to overcome that is to teach a different interpration of the religion or to forgo all pretense and drop it completely in order to change majority's attitudes about religion -- and that usually means converting them young and waiting for the next generation to come into power.
How do you propose to do this, except by setting up a system of forced education that could (and would) equally be used to convert people to [insert ideology favored by the powerful here]?
Of course, Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which while not exactly "spread" by the point of the sword, it was advanced by the point of the sword.
Judaism's history was a very violent one, though they were/are not particularly interested in spreading the religion, because it is a racial religion.
First of all, the Israelites were not particularly violent by ancient standards. Remember what Rome did to Carthage, say, or what the Assyrians did to everyone they conquered. Conquering as many cities as possible and enslaving everyone was pretty standard. (This point applies equally to Islam, of course.)
Second of all, don't conflate ancient Israel with Judaism. For much of Israel's history, most of its inhabitants were idolaters, as recorded both by archeological evidence and the Bible. Today's Jews are treated as the exclusive descendants of the Israelites only because all the other Israelites assimilated and intermarried, so we no longer know who their descendants are. By the time Israelites were all Jews as we'd recognize them today, they were already in exile and in no position to commit much violence against anyone.
Seriously, have you even read the comment to which you're replying? I never said anywhere that it should be "impossible" and I clearly described what the Mozilla developers should do if any program tries to circumvent this mechanism.
Yes, I read it. It made no sense. What was your suggestion? "permanently blacklist ALL its extensions, plugins and whatnot. Report them to antivirus vendors as malware"? Blacklisting won't help, because they could just change the vendor name slightly. And you think Mozilla is going to convince antivirus vendors to flag Windows Update as malware?
If you use Windows, Microsoft controls the system. There's nothing an application developer like Mozilla can do about it. If you don't like Microsoft changing installed programs whenever they please, your one and only option is not to use Windows (unless you consider "never update" an option).
There is nothing Mozilla could do here. Your complaints need to be directed against Microsoft and Microsoft alone.
"Unlimited" plans mean a tragedy of the commons. Everyone is encouraged to use as much as possible, because it's free for them. The effect in the end is predictable: overutilization and degraded service. Make people pay extra if they use extra, and they'll be more careful about how much they use, reducing network load greatly and improving service for the majority who only care about checking their e-mail.
Of course, while they're at it they might sneak in some ways to soak more money out of customers, but if so, they'd find some way to do that anyway. They'll charge what the market will bear, and that's not going to change whether they give unlimited or capped plans. Either way, unlimited plans are a bad idea unless you really have unlimited resources.
no evil? how about deliberatly holding back on the browser hooks and infrastructure to allow for comprehensive robust adblock/scriptblock/etc ad-ons, due to such things being completely against their business model that is based on supplying advertisements?
Chromium is open-source, you know. You don't need hooks and infrastructure to modify it, you can just hack the source. I doubt it would be very hard. Chromium extensions are very limited overall, I think so that they work reliably across versions. Just because this feature hasn't been added yet doesn't mean there's a sinister plot by Google – tons of other Firefox extensions aren't possible in Chromium, AFAIK.
Besides, Google makes most of its money from text ads, which few people block. It has no reason to object to ad blockers: you're primarily blocking its competitors.
Dear Mozilla developers, please disable by default *all* extensions except:
the ones that are manually installed by the user using the standard UI inside Firefox;
the ones that are manually enabled by the user using a menu switch inside Firefox for EACH externally installed extension (do NOT show a confirmation dialog if a new extension appears out of nowhere: users always click "yes").
So it should be impossible for Windows Update, running as administrator, to add extensions to Firefox? How exactly is this miracle to be accomplished? Last I checked, the administrator can modify any program arbitrarily, such as by adding an entry to a database saying that the user manually installed a particular add-on.
Slashdot Mirror
We wait around while the W3C tries to pull it's thumb out of it's ass.
How hard is it to decide on a new standard? Do the members not check their email more than once a year?
The standard is basically decided upon. Most of the important parts look about the same now as they did two years ago. What we're waiting for is implementation. It's all very well to write a spec, but implementing it efficiently and correctly takes far more time. This is why every new browser release touts all the new parts of the HTML5 standard they implemented: the spec is mostly stable, and browsers are in the process of implementing it.
I do think you're underestimating the difficulty and complexity of writing a several-hundred-page spec, though. There's a reason it took a few years.
As a developer, sysadmin and end user I would like to tell you that HTTP is not for this there are other ports than 80 and the web browser is not a virtual machine.
Then it's a good thing that that WebSockets aren't HTTP. It's a completely new protocol that's designed for efficient two-way communication over a connection that's held open on both sides. See section 1.7 of that draft RFC, "Relationship to TCP and HTTP":
From a cursory glance on websockets.org, it appears that the only thing web sockets is changing is making it simpler to send plain strings rather than complete HTTP messages. This solves the potential problem that when you get a response at the client, the (logical) connection is closed, so there's a gap until the client's next GET request arrives at the server before it can get a new event. So there's a limit to how fast you can receive the events, at least without some kind of trickery.
If you're using WebSockets, you're not using HTTP at all; there's no such thing as GET. The web browser opens the connection, and keeps it open. Both client and server can push arbitrary strings to each other with network overhead about the same as pushing them directly over TCP (at least by comparison to HTTP). It means you don't have to poll the server at all, you can set up event handlers. This is drastically more efficient; it will enable things like webmail to be both more efficient and faster (get new e-mail instantly, not after you poll for it), and will also enable things like multiplayer games in HTML and JavaScript.
WebSockets is a pretty big deal. Maybe not the most important part of HTML5, but still a big deal.
I think most web servers won't ever serve sub-second events anyway, they're simple going to die from the load with many clients. Of course, in internal apps, the situation can be different. At lot of the new stuff in HTML5 is about extending the capabilities so web tech can supplant more of the traditional desktop apps.
WebSocket servers are not HTTP servers. WebSocket is its own protocol, and servers will be written from scratch in practice. One of the design goals was to make this really easy, a couple hundred lines, so as not to inhibit adoption.
True, but to be fully fair, resizeable textareas were available as a Firefox add-on since at least March 2007 via the Resizeable Textarea add-on, three months before Safari 3 was announced and released as a beta.
I tried that extension when I used Firefox. It was theoretically nice, but actually quite buggy, so eventually I disabled it. IIRC, when I used it, it would allow you to do things like squish text fields out of existence and seriously distort the page layout. The built-in WebKit implementation (and probably also the FF4 implementation) is much more polished.
I find this is usually the case with extensions vs. native features, for most software products. The original developers know what they're doing and have high production values, while extension developers usually just hack something up without serious design, review, or testing. So I avoid using third-party extensions for any of my software (browsers, server apps, etc.) if possible.
The problem is that the people who do live like that only do so by other people not living like that. There is a reason why so much manufacturing and mining is done in developing countries with little or no restrictions, and it isn't just the labor cost.
If all third-world countries suddenly became as rich as developed nations tomorrow, you're absolutely right that the cost of consumer goods would rise greatly in absolute terms. But on the other hand, these newly-rich countries would be buying much more from us and selling much more to us, so we have a lot more money to spend. There's more total wealth, so the fact that a lot of our goods cost more doesn't necessarily mean we'd wind up poorer overall. A more detailed analysis is needed.
So I'm not an economist and don't know much about economics, but your statement sounds shaky to me. It seems intuitive, but only because we intuitively assume there's a fixed amount of wealth available (thus rich countries must take it at the expense of poor countries), and that's definitely wrong. It's certainly possible in principle for everyone in the world to be richer than Westerners are now. Do you have particular evidence for the idea that we benefit from the poverty of third-world countries, or is this just common sense to you?
Visit a developing country sometime. You will quickly observe that:
1) Not even the rich can afford single story houses, let alone mansions because of land scarcity
2) Even a tiny fraction of the population driving causes unbelievable amounts of traffic and pollution (you will feel this with your own lungs -- not just read about it)
3) Environmental destruction is effectively permanent (even if some of the ruined pieces or nature theoretically _could_ recover if they had not been covered by apartment blocks, sidewalks, ware houses, or toxic sludge).
4) People do not ever _debate_ whether environmental destruction is bad. They generally find themselves powerless reverse it once it has happened (e.g., it's a LOT easier to keep an existing forest alive rather than try to grow a new one once you've lost all your topsoil and rainfall due to widespread deforestation).
So in other words, pretty much like America too, until we got rich and instituted environmental regulation? Like how 20 people died and 7,000 grew sick in a 1948 smog incident in Pennsylvania? That and many other incidents in the same vein were what spurred the first air pollution regulations in this country. That we all take clean air for granted today is a testament to their effectiveness.
But when you're poor, you live in lousy conditions anyway, so pollution isn't the most important thing on your mind (vs., e.g., disease or starvation). Plus, pollution controls make things more expensive, and you need that money for necessities. It's completely rational for poorer societies to tolerate more pollution, and that is in fact what happens. None of this is the fault of developed nations – it's due to developing nations' quite sensible lack of pollution regulations. As they grow richer, they'll regulate pollution more, totally independent of us.
In fact, no matter the average slashdotter bias, Microsoft has all the resources to make fully compliant products. Problem is, that is not a goal for them. Market domination is.
Circa IE8, they realized that making a fully-compliant browser is the best immediate strategy for market domination. And that's exactly what they're doing for IE9. Their explicit goal for IE9 is to make it work with all the sites that other browsers work for, without IE-specific hacks, and so far they seem to be doing a remarkably good job of it.
Uh, well it depends on something that isn't clear to me: Is >canvas< and the specific features thereof they're talking about IE9 specific, or is it part of the html5 standard? If it's part of the standard, but hardware accelerated through IE9, then that's probably okay. Even if it means developers assume an IE9 target and do more with the tag than would be practical to do on non-accelerated browsers. I mean sure IE has a, shall we say, privileged position on Windows, but it's not like other apps can't access the graphics hardware.
If it's IE9-specific extensions to html5, then yeah, that's bullshit.
All the new IE9 features they've showcased are in open standards and already implemented interoperably by other browsers. IE9's <canvas> demos work perfectly fine in all other browsers – but they're much slower due to the lack of hardware acceleration. Actually, IE9's Standards Mode even removes some proprietary IE extensions from earlier versions (e.g., JS extensions; scroll down to "Same Script, Same Markup").
Microsoft is now actually trying to beat the other browsers by being actually better, as they did with IE6, so they can regain lost market share. They have the advantage that their browser only works on one platform, so they can rely on Vista/7-only APIs like Direct2D and DirectX 10 while other browsers need to support OpenGL, DirectX 9, etc.
In other words: be afraid. The enemy has learned from its defeat.
The internet is being viewed on a lot of tablets, phones and netbooks that don't have the hardware support for this.
And Internet Explorer market share is really high on tablets and phones, is it?
We developed a web based game BattleCell that uses Ajax/CSS instead of Flash for all the heavy lifting. We discover at least one new bug in the IE rendering engine every month.
Since this article is about IE9: have you tried it in IE9? Did it work there?
Where have you been? The video tag debate is over seems flash won.
You should link to the original blog post by Google itself. The conclusion there is "the <video> tag does not currently meet all the needs of a site like YouTube" (emphasis added). So it will remain opt-in on YouTube for now. Nothing rules out a switch in a year or two – all the essential problems they have with <video> are being worked on.
Flash hasn't won. It just hasn't lost quite yet.
Does Iron deliver what it promises to deliver? Resounding yes. Is Iron code different from Chrome? Yes, only a few lines, but that was the deal: A Chrome mod stripped from the questionable parts.
All of which can be easily disabled in a stock Chromium install. Which has the advantage of not having a delayed release schedule, and being better supported. You can disable most of the stuff in Chrome itself, in fact, and then you get hassle-free updates. So it's pretty pretentious to act as though it's different software that deserves a different name.
I read the logs and the history of Iron and I don't see the big scam. The guy created a product that works as advertised and, due to Germany's anti-Google stance, people there are more likely to go for a de-Googlefied Chrome, therefore _sometimes_ visiting SRWare's website to download it, maybe generating some bucks via adSense or by using some of the other products SRware offers. He was mainly after the good publicity –The guy who stripped Chrome from the bad parts. He got it. He delivered a product that works as promised. Where's the scam?
The scam is that he's preying off people's fear of Google by making it look like his software is significantly different. It's not. It's almost exactly the same thing as Chromium, but rebranded and with a few easily-changed defaults different. It provides no more privacy than Chromium, but he sure makes it sound like it does. He's not going to damage your computer or anything, no, but he's profiteering off misleading claims, and that makes it a scam in my book (albeit a fairly harmless one).
Iron really doesn't provide any advantage over Chrome with regard to privacy.
For what it's worth, I can confirm the logs that evmar posted. They begin at September 17, 2008, 3:00:30 PM EST in my logs for #chromium-dev on freenode. I idled in that channel since shortly after the Chromium release was announced. I'm not a Google employee or Chrome/Chromium developer, but I have used Chrome as my browser for over a year (IIRC).
Salient quotes from the log:
Iron is a complete scam, avoid it. If you're worried about privacy, use Chromium compiled by your distro (don't want MS or Apple to get info about you, right?) and turn off everything that sends data to Google.
Gaming is one of the last things keeping people from switching to Linux entirely
Linux has a global 1% share of the desktop. Top Operating System Share Trend
I can't believe that 99% of the holdouts are PC gamers.
No, they're mostly people who don't even know what an OS is. But techy people drive tech adoption, and a lot of young techy people are gamers. I admin a gaming forum, and a lot of random people there say they like Linux but are never going to consider it full-time unless it's as good as Windows for gaming. But that means supporting many more games than Mac does now (let alone Linux), plus having performance as good as Windows – a consistent 10 FPS loss would be unacceptable. So we have a long way to go.
My goal wasn't to discuss the W3C process, rather to highlight how it's not that important in terms of what developers perceive to be "standards".
I agree with that: de facto standards are more important than de jure standards, and the goal of the latter should only be to establish the former (or else they'll be ignored). However, it's not at all true that "Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc."
(Apologies for replying to myself.)
The biggest problem when discussing web standards is that the vendors themselves propose the standards. So Apple is the most compliant with Apple's proposed standards, while Microsoft is the most compliant with Microsoft's proposed standards, etc. From the W3C's POV they are all the same, while the marketplace sorts these things out into common "cross-browser" features versus things which are considered "proprietary".
In other words, nobody cares that CSS3 rounded borders aren't an official "standards compliant" feature, it is a "cross browser" feature and they want rounded fucking corners on their website.
Okay, so you've never actually participated in the W3C or any other standards organization. Thanks for letting us all know. Implementers pay some (not all) of the people who write and edit standards at the W3C (and elsewhere), but they write things that all implementers are willing to implement, and do.
In fact, W3C specs cannot progress to Proposed Recommendation unless they have two fully independent, interoperable implementations of every single feature. The HTML5 spec at the WHATWG has an even stronger requirement: if any major implementer refuses to implement a feature, the feature is dropped, and this has happened more than once. (Most famously, the Theora support requirement, but also Web Databases, etc.)
Typically, browser vendors use the W3C to agree on what sort of functionality authors and users want most, and then cooperate to work out a standard. Usually they try focus on the same areas and implement things more or less in sync, because a) that way authors will be able to use the features faster, and b) as soon as one browser implements something, everyone starts pestering the others with "Why does this work in their browser and not yours?"
And by the way, a version of border-radius was in W3C drafts since at least 2002. It was implemented with vendor prefixes per CSSWG policy, because it wasn't in a Candidate Recommendation yet and was subject to change. In fact, it did change, so -moz-border-radius (IIRC) behaves slightly differently from the final border-radius. It was always a standards-compliant feature.
Nope, they don't want to be tied down to such non-marketable terms such as "standard" or such constricting terms like "compliant".
"Cross Browser" sounds WAY sexier and "compatible" sounds much less like they HAVE to do something.
It's very easy to write standards-compliant pages that don't work in any browser at all. Just try writing up some XHTML2, for instance. It's even easier to write standards-compliant pages that don't work in all browsers consistently: not all specs are implemented by all browsers, specs are sometimes vague, and implementations have bugs.
No, the important thing is that the same markup works, exactly the same, in all browsers. Standards are only a means toward interoperability, and a lot of people tend to forget that. It's why we don't have standards for things that don't affect interoperability, like UI or black-box-invisible implementation details. Microsoft is totally correct to focus on the goal of getting their browser to work the same as others in practice, not just mechanically following standards to the letter.
Here's a thought. Why don't we read up on what actual Islam is, versus the supremacist Arab culture that permeates and corrupts it. Karen Armstrong did a wonderful job of pointing out what Islam actually is, and how Arab culture with it's tradition of jahilliyeh has since permeated and corrupted it (note to the curious - Wahibist Islam is a fundamentalist version of Islam where the clerics try to reconcile the pre-Mohammed "heroic" cultural mores of Arab tribal culture with Islam itself - which is what Mohammed explicitly fought against).
Why should we be concerned about some idealized version of Islam, rather than Islam as actually articulated by its most influential practitioners (e.g., governments)? Muslim theology only affects Muslims. Muslim practice affects non-Muslims too, like Mark Zuckerberg. Thus non-Muslims only care about the latter.
But even in theory, I object to the notion that you or Karen Armstrong has more right to decide what constitutes "real" Islam than the large majority of Muslims themselves. It smacks to me of trying to pretend that all major ideologies are really compatible with Western liberalism, except that they were corrupted by nasty evil people who betrayed their original meaning. And that is just nonsense. Most ideologies are not compatible with Western liberalism, and Islam as actually practiced in Muslim countries is obviously one of them.
It's a real problem for Zuckerman. He's previously made fund-raising trips to Dubai. That's over. The UAE has blasphemy laws, which they enforce. The UAE also has an extradition treaty with Pakistan, but not with the United States. So he can no longer visit Dubai, and is unlikely to get funding from any source in the Arab world. He can't even fly Emirates Air.
I'm pretty sure that Pakistan and the UAE are well aware of the political repercussions of executing the executive of a major American company for doing something that Americans actively support (permitting blasphemy). Kind of like how European countries don't try to arrest American soldiers or politicians for war crimes.
So, not a huge risk for him. Although I wouldn't blame him if he decided to err on the side of caution when deciding whether to put my faith in Pakistan's sanity.
In fact, the basic attitudes between the groups are the same, which is why embracing religion will never work out. The only two ways to overcome that is to teach a different interpration of the religion or to forgo all pretense and drop it completely in order to change majority's attitudes about religion -- and that usually means converting them young and waiting for the next generation to come into power.
How do you propose to do this, except by setting up a system of forced education that could (and would) equally be used to convert people to [insert ideology favored by the powerful here]?
Of course, Christianity has its roots in Judaism, which while not exactly "spread" by the point of the sword, it was advanced by the point of the sword.
Judaism's history was a very violent one, though they were/are not particularly interested in spreading the religion, because it is a racial religion.
First of all, the Israelites were not particularly violent by ancient standards. Remember what Rome did to Carthage, say, or what the Assyrians did to everyone they conquered. Conquering as many cities as possible and enslaving everyone was pretty standard. (This point applies equally to Islam, of course.)
Second of all, don't conflate ancient Israel with Judaism. For much of Israel's history, most of its inhabitants were idolaters, as recorded both by archeological evidence and the Bible. Today's Jews are treated as the exclusive descendants of the Israelites only because all the other Israelites assimilated and intermarried, so we no longer know who their descendants are. By the time Israelites were all Jews as we'd recognize them today, they were already in exile and in no position to commit much violence against anyone.
Seriously, have you even read the comment to which you're replying? I never said anywhere that it should be "impossible" and I clearly described what the Mozilla developers should do if any program tries to circumvent this mechanism.
Yes, I read it. It made no sense. What was your suggestion? "permanently blacklist ALL its extensions, plugins and whatnot. Report them to antivirus vendors as malware"? Blacklisting won't help, because they could just change the vendor name slightly. And you think Mozilla is going to convince antivirus vendors to flag Windows Update as malware?
If you use Windows, Microsoft controls the system. There's nothing an application developer like Mozilla can do about it. If you don't like Microsoft changing installed programs whenever they please, your one and only option is not to use Windows (unless you consider "never update" an option).
There is nothing Mozilla could do here. Your complaints need to be directed against Microsoft and Microsoft alone.
"Unlimited" plans mean a tragedy of the commons. Everyone is encouraged to use as much as possible, because it's free for them. The effect in the end is predictable: overutilization and degraded service. Make people pay extra if they use extra, and they'll be more careful about how much they use, reducing network load greatly and improving service for the majority who only care about checking their e-mail.
Of course, while they're at it they might sneak in some ways to soak more money out of customers, but if so, they'd find some way to do that anyway. They'll charge what the market will bear, and that's not going to change whether they give unlimited or capped plans. Either way, unlimited plans are a bad idea unless you really have unlimited resources.
no evil? how about deliberatly holding back on the browser hooks and infrastructure to allow for comprehensive robust adblock/scriptblock/etc ad-ons, due to such things being completely against their business model that is based on supplying advertisements?
Chromium is open-source, you know. You don't need hooks and infrastructure to modify it, you can just hack the source. I doubt it would be very hard. Chromium extensions are very limited overall, I think so that they work reliably across versions. Just because this feature hasn't been added yet doesn't mean there's a sinister plot by Google – tons of other Firefox extensions aren't possible in Chromium, AFAIK.
Besides, Google makes most of its money from text ads, which few people block. It has no reason to object to ad blockers: you're primarily blocking its competitors.
Dear Mozilla developers, please disable by default *all* extensions except:
So it should be impossible for Windows Update, running as administrator, to add extensions to Firefox? How exactly is this miracle to be accomplished? Last I checked, the administrator can modify any program arbitrarily, such as by adding an entry to a database saying that the user manually installed a particular add-on.