What does Mozilla's head start have to do with the fact that they are apparently able to do cross-platform development better than a company who has vastly more people and money at their disposal?
Huh? It took Netscape like 3 years to get the menu bar in the proper place on Mozilla/Mac.
I don't think you know what your're talking about, Mozilla XUL was a massive multi-year multi-developer effort. Get back to us in 2011 before you decide who is better.
Take any normal application on Windows that has a menu - press ALT. Now you can navigate the menu option with the cursors or with menu shortcut keys. Google decided that I didn't need this ability and hacked out the well understood, standard concept menu and replaced it with a little popup off of two toolbar buttons.
In Google's defense, Microsoft did it first with IE. The menu bar is clearly on the way out as a standard Windows UI element.
Not providing ALT navigation is inexcusable, however.
(a) You're making the common mistake of conflating ODF with OOo. The two are completely separate entities. People who advocate the use of ODF are not necessarily OOo fans; they may prefer Abiword, KOffice, or even Microsoft Office.
I wouldn't blame a poster for this confusion. Sun and IBM's sales departments are using all the usual "ABM" tactics here.
Umm, yeah, if there were four open source programs that already implemented it that way and could be used as references and if every other implementation of that version of the standard in existence including Mozilla's other browser.
Every browser implements non-standard features from the Microsoft and old Netscape DOMs. That doesn't mean anyone believe they are standardized (except you, I guess).
You don't need to look at the source code to see what other products do. You just need to look at the ODF files they produce. Indeed, given the licenses of the products that implement ODF, you can obtain the copies you need for testing FOR FREE.
Wow, I thought the virtue of ODF was that it was a vendor-neutral "standard". But now you guys are openly suggesting it isn't a standard at all, and vendors should write bug-compatible OpenOffice files.
If ODF requires that you reverse-engineer someone else's product, how in the hell is any improvement over DOC?
You are trying to rewrite history based on your personal experiences and peer group.
Even in the post-"crash" era, Nintendo sold 10x as many games as Commodore. True that many/most home computer users pirated games, but the money was still in the console market. The PC market has always been much smaller.
I just don't see why it's so hard to just say Catholic when speaking of matters pertaining the general Catholic Belief, and Christian when referencing protestants.
Why would anyone do that when Roman Catholics outnumber Protestants? It's not 1920 anymore.
Controlling the default browser home page is a multi-million dollar a year business. This has always been Netscape and Mozilla's main revenue source.
Microsoft also makes a crapload of money from their development tools business -- in theory, controlling the browser platform sells copies of VisualStudio. (However I wonder how well this has worked in practice.)
Be careful what you wish for, because (in the general sense) standards wars favor the largest company with the most resources.
Aside from MS "cheating" with PC OEMs and ISPs, they totally buried Netscape in the W3C the first time around. The result was that IE was far more attractive developer platform, which is the main reason its still entrenched in corporations.
Wahwah, stop being such a butthurt nerd and try posting in a conversational style.
And you are still wrong. One could hide ads using a local proxy server, user stylesheets. greasemonkey scripts (etc), a custom plugin loader (i.e. flashblock), or even in the video driver. Good luck detecting that.
Never mind the fact that sites have miminal control over the advertising content anyway and aren't going to write a bunch of trigger scripts around someone else's Punch The Monkey ad. It's just not worth the effort in the big-picture.
I don't recall the legal basis, but yes it went to trial. IIRC webmasters sued a spamware company that was replacing banner ads with their own, and lost.
I doubt something existing in temporary memory that isn't distributed is considered a 'derivative work', but I'll leave that up to the legal experts who aren't named Stallman.
I honestly have no clue if there are applications out there already to do this type of analysis (I would be surprised if there weren't) but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to solve with good enough accuracy.
Maybe trivial technically, but not organizationally. In practice, if the person with the webserver logs wanted to compare the adserver logs. they would have to go through about 10 different people. It's not even worth it to figure out who's getting $0.0003 worth of free content.
Most web analytics use javascript bugs (which of course are blocked by ad-blocking software), so that the business people can compare numbers without getting the sysadmins involved.
Having been on the Internet before all the businesses realized they could make a buck with it, I realize that the "free Web" was actually better for not having ads on it.
Rose-colored glasses. Back in those days, great sites were constantly disappearing just because the webmaster got sick of paying hosting fees.
And there was nothing remotely like a "service", i.e. a discussion or social networking site. Who would pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
> What about limited alternatives?
OK, that might apply to SMB and a few other games, but by the 16-bit era there were hundreds of 2D platformers and most of them were shitty.
All that was tossed because it was based on Motif or whatever. You clearly don't know the first thing about the history of Firefox's development.
It took Netscape five years to deliver a working "portable" browser, and in the meanwhile their marketshare went from 50% to 1%.
Google is surely aware of that object lesson, despite your vague handwaving.
What does Mozilla's head start have to do with the fact that they are apparently able to do cross-platform development better than a company who has vastly more people and money at their disposal?
Huh? It took Netscape like 3 years to get the menu bar in the proper place on Mozilla/Mac.
I don't think you know what your're talking about, Mozilla XUL was a massive multi-year multi-developer effort. Get back to us in 2011 before you decide who is better.
Google still has to pay Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine, just like they pay Dell and other Win OEMs.
Obviously one of the goals of Chrome is that it's cheaper to do it yourself than pay middlemen.
Take any normal application on Windows that has a menu - press ALT. Now you can navigate the menu option with the cursors or with menu shortcut keys. Google decided that I didn't need this ability and hacked out the well understood, standard concept menu and replaced it with a little popup off of two toolbar buttons.
In Google's defense, Microsoft did it first with IE. The menu bar is clearly on the way out as a standard Windows UI element.
Not providing ALT navigation is inexcusable, however.
It had a light-pen, though
Don't worry about it, laptops dominate consumer sales. The GP must live in some trailing-edge community if most people he knows even have a desktop.
You mean with a basic interpreter in the BIOS.
How else is Microsoft going to get their usual cut?
Wrong kiddo, the web was already throughly broken by Netscape
(a) You're making the common mistake of conflating ODF with OOo. The two are completely separate entities. People who advocate the use of ODF are not necessarily OOo fans; they may prefer Abiword, KOffice, or even Microsoft Office.
I wouldn't blame a poster for this confusion. Sun and IBM's sales departments are using all the usual "ABM" tactics here.
Umm, yeah, if there were four open source programs that already implemented it that way and could be used as references and if every other implementation of that version of the standard in existence including Mozilla's other browser.
Every browser implements non-standard features from the Microsoft and old Netscape DOMs. That doesn't mean anyone believe they are standardized (except you, I guess).
You don't need to look at the source code to see what other products do. You just need to look at the ODF files they produce. Indeed, given the licenses of the products that implement ODF, you can obtain the copies you need for testing FOR FREE.
Wow, I thought the virtue of ODF was that it was a vendor-neutral "standard". But now you guys are openly suggesting it isn't a standard at all, and vendors should write bug-compatible OpenOffice files.
If ODF requires that you reverse-engineer someone else's product, how in the hell is any improvement over DOC?
You are trying to rewrite history based on your personal experiences and peer group.
Even in the post-"crash" era, Nintendo sold 10x as many games as Commodore. True that many/most home computer users pirated games, but the money was still in the console market. The PC market has always been much smaller.
I just don't see why it's so hard to just say Catholic when speaking of matters pertaining the general Catholic Belief, and Christian when referencing protestants.
Why would anyone do that when Roman Catholics outnumber Protestants? It's not 1920 anymore.
Nerds *do* dictate the future of the web. Which is exactly why Firefox is gaining market share.
Ha, but no. Nerds pushed the Mozilla browser for 5 years and it ended up with a 1% marketshare. Firefox was an explicit effort to de-nerdify it.
Google didn't get popular until they started returning shopping results over technical documents.
Bundling is now working against them because businesses can't move to Vista while their webapps still target IE 6.0.
(A big reason that Win7 will include a XP virtual machine.)
Controlling the default browser home page is a multi-million dollar a year business. This has always been Netscape and Mozilla's main revenue source.
Microsoft also makes a crapload of money from their development tools business -- in theory, controlling the browser platform sells copies of VisualStudio. (However I wonder how well this has worked in practice.)
Be careful what you wish for, because (in the general sense) standards wars favor the largest company with the most resources.
Aside from MS "cheating" with PC OEMs and ISPs, they totally buried Netscape in the W3C the first time around. The result was that IE was far more attractive developer platform, which is the main reason its still entrenched in corporations.
I've noticed that too. Somehow IE4/5/6 went from blazing fast on old hardware to IE8 being doggy on new hardware.
A big part of that is that there's now dozens of first and third party "Add-Ons" that get installed into IE.
Also the IE rendering engine was really optimized for old-school table-driven sites. Their CSS/DOM performance has never been up to snuff recently.
Wahwah, stop being such a butthurt nerd and try posting in a conversational style.
And you are still wrong. One could hide ads using a local proxy server, user stylesheets. greasemonkey scripts (etc), a custom plugin loader (i.e. flashblock), or even in the video driver. Good luck detecting that.
Never mind the fact that sites have miminal control over the advertising content anyway and aren't going to write a bunch of trigger scripts around someone else's Punch The Monkey ad. It's just not worth the effort in the big-picture.
I don't recall the legal basis, but yes it went to trial. IIRC webmasters sued a spamware company that was replacing banner ads with their own, and lost.
I doubt something existing in temporary memory that isn't distributed is considered a 'derivative work', but I'll leave that up to the legal experts who aren't named Stallman.
If you view source on that site, the method of adblock detection they are using is trivial. It would be easy enough to workaround if anyone cared.
I honestly have no clue if there are applications out there already to do this type of analysis (I would be surprised if there weren't) but it seems like a fairly trivial problem to solve with good enough accuracy.
Maybe trivial technically, but not organizationally. In practice, if the person with the webserver logs wanted to compare the adserver logs. they would have to go through about 10 different people. It's not even worth it to figure out who's getting $0.0003 worth of free content.
Most web analytics use javascript bugs (which of course are blocked by ad-blocking software), so that the business people can compare numbers without getting the sysadmins involved.
Having been on the Internet before all the businesses realized they could make a buck with it, I realize that the "free Web" was actually better for not having ads on it.
Rose-colored glasses. Back in those days, great sites were constantly disappearing just because the webmaster got sick of paying hosting fees.
And there was nothing remotely like a "service", i.e. a discussion or social networking site. Who would pay for it?