Being processor neutral is a good thing. I think this could be really interesting for the new game consoles based on the Power CPUs. Both the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3 (and any other systems using the Cell processor) should be able to benefit from such changes. It wouldn't be unlikely to see an upgraded version of these consoles in a couple years, as Sony often does anyway, that offer more power in a smaller space. Or maybe it'll just impact their next gen consoles.
With their plan to start putting Cell processors in tvs, dvd players, etc it could pan out but its hard to say yet. I think most game developers wont take full advantage of the Cell but that the ones that make the games that really count will - especially after they've cut their teeth a little bit on it.
Positioning. Things such as top, bottom, left, right seem to be the worst offenders. They just weren't aligned correctly. And I'll hold that it was buggy in Opera 8 since, as I said, Opera 9 is showing them correctly.
Maybe if you designed your pages and tested them for a busted browser like IE or Opera 8 then of course they'll look wrong in Firefox or Safari which is showing the pages correctly.
It's not that PlayStation is better, although I feel that it is, it's that PlayStation has a history, so I know what to expect and that my games will still work on the PS3, that XBox has to compete with. What keeps Linux from replacing Windows as the desktop of choice is what keeps XBox from replacing PlayStation as console of choice for most people.
The competition is good though. I expect Sony's effort to be more open source and open standards friendly is largely due to the pressure from both the XBox and the PC. Overall the 360 seems an improvement to the original XBox and I hope Microsoft's tries to make a third generation of XBox in a few years that is again a step forward. They would do well to mimic Sony because the PlayStation people really do 'get it' for the most part. Details like backwards compatibility that Microsoft almost didn't include with the 360 (still didn't - depending who you ask) are things that Sony clearly understands the importance of.
IMO the biggest risk to PlayStation lossing it's throne isn't from the XBox but from the internal management struggles inside Sony. It seems that the PlayStation division is always at odds with the rest of Sony and might be a better match for another company. I'd say that Google might be a likely buyer. They'd have a use for a powerful set top computer (Google PC anyone?) that is already a familiar brand and they respect developers enough to let the PlayStation people really do their stuff. Such a combination could be really powerful.
The only real complaint I have against Firefox's CSS support is lack of text shadows. What I do in it works as I expect from reading the standards and mostly matches Safari (and it seems now Opera 9). I have used virtually every feature of CSS1 and CSS2 and some of the CSS3 elements supported and they work. I can't say the same for Opera 8.
Any examples of where Opera 8 works better than Firefox? I gave the example that Firefox is better at element positioning than Opera 8 (which has held up to the Opera 9 test) so why not give me some tests the other way to show that Opera 8 has it's own strengths.
As someone that's spent way to much time trying to get work done on OS X I absolutely disagree. OS X is fine for users trying to run two or three windows but for serious users that run ten or twenty programs at once it just is in the way.
I'm fine with eye candy if it does something useful but if it doesn't then it doesn't belong, as a default, on my desktop. This thing looks cool but I don't see it being useful in of itself. Maybe someone will use it to create something useful though. I see 3D as being a good tool for looking at complex relationships but just replacing workspaces with a 3D cube seems pointless.
Obviously you don't know the CSS standard very well and don't use it much. Opera 9 is much improved though. If Opera 8 was so perfect then why does Opera 9 work where 8 didn't. Funny that 9 renders the CSS the way Firefox and Safari does.
I use Firefox in Linux, Windows, and OS X without memory problems. And certainly the systems I'm using aren't, as a whole, very powerful machines with a lot of RAM. I'd suspect people are having problems with buggy plugins and extensions. It'd be great if Firefox would keep these from causing problems though.
Workarounds don't mean the problem isn't a bug. I usually do bother to fix sites for Opera users but it probably isn't actually worth my time for the small percentage of users that actually use Opera. I'm glad Opera 9 seems to fix most of the problems. I love when every browser can see my sites properly but don't want to waste a lot of time making sure they do. With Opera, Firefox, and Safari trying to be standards compliant it makes IE the only one I have to waste a lot of effort on.
So let me be the first doubting thomas to give a thumbs up to Opera 9.
I will agree that Java and Flash are better established just from being around longer. XUL is newer and therefore more likely to suffer changes. I think it is probably not yet used much outside of Mozilla because they've yet to make much of a push of it and that most of it's uses are probably, like mine, for Intranets where you can be sure all the browsers are Firefox. Since IE doesn't support it you can't really do a public website in it.
They need to do some work on making sure popular extensions are well supported and bug free and easier to find. Things like adblock and forcastfox should never be an issue.
Funny that I haven't had any trouble with it. I do a lot of my intranet code in XUL.
Java and Flash are much more heavy approaches. Practically you're just downloading a program and running it on the user's machine. I could do the same thing by writing an app in just about any language. I've written Java and Flash programs and they do have their uses but they are not a real standard for lightweight applications. The benefit to web-based apps is in not having to download a heavy program and learn a new interface (although some web apps sure try to make new interfaces). I've yet to use a XUL app where I had to endure a 'loading' screen or blank square in the middle of my screen.
Mostly bugs in alignment of elements it seems. The site I'm working on now is having a lot of issues with it and I've had similar issues on other sites I've done.
To be fair I just downloaded and tried the site I'm working on in Opera 9 and am happy to say it renders very well. Looks almost identical to how it looks in Safari. In both Opera and Safari the page is rendered on the left hand side of the window rather than down the middle. Not sure if that is a bug in Opera and Safari or in Firefox but it's not the desired effect and the CSS specs seem to agree with Firefox's rendering. Anyway, it is very usable in Opera 9 which IMO is a great thing.
Since Opera 9 renders the site correctly, and quite differently from Opera 8, I think it's safe to say that Opera 8 was rendering it wrong.
I keep the newest version around and test against it - Opera 8 has crappy CSS support. Maybe Opera 9 is better. I'll have to check.
I've had no problems with Firefox 1.5 itself although a couple of the extensions I like did develop minor bugs. I often open up fifty tabs at a time and don't have any major memory problems although I'm sure some exist.
Only Safari gets close to matching Firefox's standards support. It's great to see this competition to be the best at standards support though. Firefox, Safari, and Opera can slug it out and it'll be great for all of us. I hope Opera 9 is raising the bar. Competition is good.
Yeah, but with email it can be sorted out for me by my mail program. I've yet to get my physical mail box to do that.:) Snail mail spam and phone spam are much more annoying for me than spam email.
I believe that until recently phishing wasn't even illegal in the US. I seem to remember California recently making it illegal. Without legal power there is little companies can do to stop such things. It's really not a technical issue for the most part.
If I believed in software patents I'd be rich as it is. Damn near everything cool online I did before the big companies we associate with the ideas. Hehe common geek story.
That is shitty. Sorry. If there is a major speed difference between your LAN and your WAN then you have a shit connection. Other parts of the world have as high as gigabit DSL. If they can run better in a developing country you shouldn't just accept such crap here in the US.
My own behavior is if it's a crappy book I'd just buy the cheap copy, or more likely get it from the library, but if it's a book or author I like I'll go out and buy the most expensive copy I can lay hands on. I have all the HP books in hardback and will think about buying the really fancy collectors edition when the series is done, most of Terry Brooks books in hardback, most of Neil Stephensons and Orson Scott Card books in hardback, etc. I like their books and want to own good copies of them. Some I've bought multiple copies as my original copies get worn out or lost. I could download the text for free, check the book out for free, or buy the cheaper paperback versions but that isn't what I do. I hardly think I'm much different from most people.
I do the same with movies. I own thousands of movies and many of them in both the cheap edition and a collectors edition. I could download them for free, or borrow them from the library, but I buy them because I enjoy owning them. I'm only willing to buy them after I can do as I wish with them though so I only bought DVDs after the encryption was broke. I will do the same with HD-DVDs. They are actually lossing money by encrypting them where as they wouldn't lose money from me if they were unencrypted and available online for free.
People want a physical object to signify their purchases and they especially like collectables. It's like a baseball card. You could get the information for free but you collect them anyway.
Overages. Mostly under control now but I figure that that is closer to the real price per gig than the price I get with it bundled. They probably don't expect everyone to use all their alotted bandwidth. Of course I noticed I could save about 4GB of bandwidth a day just by blocking my ssh port from untrusted servers. I was starting to get a lot of those brute force ssh attacks. 4GB a day of those is just insane. All admins out there should keep their machines up to date.:p
Nope, Google always behaves that way. We just rarely notice that different machines in their cluster give different results. It can pay to just reload your search a couple times sometimes.
In Opera 9? If so I'll be glad to see it out. Opera 8 was disappointing.
I'd love to see Opera and Safari support things like XUL so that we could create really rich cross-browser apps. I know Mozilla has submitted most of those specs for standardization so maybe it could happen. That kind of rich app could let those three seriously kill IE if developers would embrace such rich interfaces.
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Being processor neutral is a good thing. I think this could be really interesting for the new game consoles based on the Power CPUs. Both the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3 (and any other systems using the Cell processor) should be able to benefit from such changes. It wouldn't be unlikely to see an upgraded version of these consoles in a couple years, as Sony often does anyway, that offer more power in a smaller space. Or maybe it'll just impact their next gen consoles.
With their plan to start putting Cell processors in tvs, dvd players, etc it could pan out but its hard to say yet. I think most game developers wont take full advantage of the Cell but that the ones that make the games that really count will - especially after they've cut their teeth a little bit on it.
Positioning. Things such as top, bottom, left, right seem to be the worst offenders. They just weren't aligned correctly. And I'll hold that it was buggy in Opera 8 since, as I said, Opera 9 is showing them correctly.
Maybe if you designed your pages and tested them for a busted browser like IE or Opera 8 then of course they'll look wrong in Firefox or Safari which is showing the pages correctly.
It's not that PlayStation is better, although I feel that it is, it's that PlayStation has a history, so I know what to expect and that my games will still work on the PS3, that XBox has to compete with. What keeps Linux from replacing Windows as the desktop of choice is what keeps XBox from replacing PlayStation as console of choice for most people.
The competition is good though. I expect Sony's effort to be more open source and open standards friendly is largely due to the pressure from both the XBox and the PC. Overall the 360 seems an improvement to the original XBox and I hope Microsoft's tries to make a third generation of XBox in a few years that is again a step forward. They would do well to mimic Sony because the PlayStation people really do 'get it' for the most part. Details like backwards compatibility that Microsoft almost didn't include with the 360 (still didn't - depending who you ask) are things that Sony clearly understands the importance of.
IMO the biggest risk to PlayStation lossing it's throne isn't from the XBox but from the internal management struggles inside Sony. It seems that the PlayStation division is always at odds with the rest of Sony and might be a better match for another company. I'd say that Google might be a likely buyer. They'd have a use for a powerful set top computer (Google PC anyone?) that is already a familiar brand and they respect developers enough to let the PlayStation people really do their stuff. Such a combination could be really powerful.
The only real complaint I have against Firefox's CSS support is lack of text shadows. What I do in it works as I expect from reading the standards and mostly matches Safari (and it seems now Opera 9). I have used virtually every feature of CSS1 and CSS2 and some of the CSS3 elements supported and they work. I can't say the same for Opera 8.
Any examples of where Opera 8 works better than Firefox? I gave the example that Firefox is better at element positioning than Opera 8 (which has held up to the Opera 9 test) so why not give me some tests the other way to show that Opera 8 has it's own strengths.
As someone that's spent way to much time trying to get work done on OS X I absolutely disagree. OS X is fine for users trying to run two or three windows but for serious users that run ten or twenty programs at once it just is in the way.
I'm fine with eye candy if it does something useful but if it doesn't then it doesn't belong, as a default, on my desktop. This thing looks cool but I don't see it being useful in of itself. Maybe someone will use it to create something useful though. I see 3D as being a good tool for looking at complex relationships but just replacing workspaces with a 3D cube seems pointless.
Obviously you don't know the CSS standard very well and don't use it much. Opera 9 is much improved though. If Opera 8 was so perfect then why does Opera 9 work where 8 didn't. Funny that 9 renders the CSS the way Firefox and Safari does.
I use Firefox in Linux, Windows, and OS X without memory problems. And certainly the systems I'm using aren't, as a whole, very powerful machines with a lot of RAM. I'd suspect people are having problems with buggy plugins and extensions. It'd be great if Firefox would keep these from causing problems though.
Workarounds don't mean the problem isn't a bug. I usually do bother to fix sites for Opera users but it probably isn't actually worth my time for the small percentage of users that actually use Opera. I'm glad Opera 9 seems to fix most of the problems. I love when every browser can see my sites properly but don't want to waste a lot of time making sure they do. With Opera, Firefox, and Safari trying to be standards compliant it makes IE the only one I have to waste a lot of effort on.
So let me be the first doubting thomas to give a thumbs up to Opera 9.
XUL offers much nicer widgets than normal HTML. To create the same widgets in HTML would be a lot more work or impossible.
I will agree that Java and Flash are better established just from being around longer. XUL is newer and therefore more likely to suffer changes. I think it is probably not yet used much outside of Mozilla because they've yet to make much of a push of it and that most of it's uses are probably, like mine, for Intranets where you can be sure all the browsers are Firefox. Since IE doesn't support it you can't really do a public website in it.
They need to do some work on making sure popular extensions are well supported and bug free and easier to find. Things like adblock and forcastfox should never be an issue.
Funny that I haven't had any trouble with it. I do a lot of my intranet code in XUL.
Java and Flash are much more heavy approaches. Practically you're just downloading a program and running it on the user's machine. I could do the same thing by writing an app in just about any language. I've written Java and Flash programs and they do have their uses but they are not a real standard for lightweight applications. The benefit to web-based apps is in not having to download a heavy program and learn a new interface (although some web apps sure try to make new interfaces). I've yet to use a XUL app where I had to endure a 'loading' screen or blank square in the middle of my screen.
Really you can get some pretty kick ass servers for $1000 a month. Incredibly low price for a small business start-up.
Mostly bugs in alignment of elements it seems. The site I'm working on now is having a lot of issues with it and I've had similar issues on other sites I've done.
To be fair I just downloaded and tried the site I'm working on in Opera 9 and am happy to say it renders very well. Looks almost identical to how it looks in Safari. In both Opera and Safari the page is rendered on the left hand side of the window rather than down the middle. Not sure if that is a bug in Opera and Safari or in Firefox but it's not the desired effect and the CSS specs seem to agree with Firefox's rendering. Anyway, it is very usable in Opera 9 which IMO is a great thing.
Since Opera 9 renders the site correctly, and quite differently from Opera 8, I think it's safe to say that Opera 8 was rendering it wrong.
I keep the newest version around and test against it - Opera 8 has crappy CSS support. Maybe Opera 9 is better. I'll have to check.
I've had no problems with Firefox 1.5 itself although a couple of the extensions I like did develop minor bugs. I often open up fifty tabs at a time and don't have any major memory problems although I'm sure some exist.
Only Safari gets close to matching Firefox's standards support. It's great to see this competition to be the best at standards support though. Firefox, Safari, and Opera can slug it out and it'll be great for all of us. I hope Opera 9 is raising the bar. Competition is good.
Yeah, but with email it can be sorted out for me by my mail program. I've yet to get my physical mail box to do that. :) Snail mail spam and phone spam are much more annoying for me than spam email.
I believe that until recently phishing wasn't even illegal in the US. I seem to remember California recently making it illegal. Without legal power there is little companies can do to stop such things. It's really not a technical issue for the most part.
If I believed in software patents I'd be rich as it is. Damn near everything cool online I did before the big companies we associate with the ideas. Hehe common geek story.
That is shitty. Sorry. If there is a major speed difference between your LAN and your WAN then you have a shit connection. Other parts of the world have as high as gigabit DSL. If they can run better in a developing country you shouldn't just accept such crap here in the US.
My own behavior is if it's a crappy book I'd just buy the cheap copy, or more likely get it from the library, but if it's a book or author I like I'll go out and buy the most expensive copy I can lay hands on. I have all the HP books in hardback and will think about buying the really fancy collectors edition when the series is done, most of Terry Brooks books in hardback, most of Neil Stephensons and Orson Scott Card books in hardback, etc. I like their books and want to own good copies of them. Some I've bought multiple copies as my original copies get worn out or lost. I could download the text for free, check the book out for free, or buy the cheaper paperback versions but that isn't what I do. I hardly think I'm much different from most people.
I do the same with movies. I own thousands of movies and many of them in both the cheap edition and a collectors edition. I could download them for free, or borrow them from the library, but I buy them because I enjoy owning them. I'm only willing to buy them after I can do as I wish with them though so I only bought DVDs after the encryption was broke. I will do the same with HD-DVDs. They are actually lossing money by encrypting them where as they wouldn't lose money from me if they were unencrypted and available online for free.
People want a physical object to signify their purchases and they especially like collectables. It's like a baseball card. You could get the information for free but you collect them anyway.
Overages. Mostly under control now but I figure that that is closer to the real price per gig than the price I get with it bundled. They probably don't expect everyone to use all their alotted bandwidth. Of course I noticed I could save about 4GB of bandwidth a day just by blocking my ssh port from untrusted servers. I was starting to get a lot of those brute force ssh attacks. 4GB a day of those is just insane. All admins out there should keep their machines up to date. :p
Nope, Google always behaves that way. We just rarely notice that different machines in their cluster give different results. It can pay to just reload your search a couple times sometimes.
In Opera 9? If so I'll be glad to see it out. Opera 8 was disappointing.
I'd love to see Opera and Safari support things like XUL so that we could create really rich cross-browser apps. I know Mozilla has submitted most of those specs for standardization so maybe it could happen. That kind of rich app could let those three seriously kill IE if developers would embrace such rich interfaces.