I deliberately bought a Canon inkjet precisely because I didn't want to be strongarmed into buying expensive cartridges. I'm very happy I did too.
My Canon S750 prints out decently enough, is fast, has great drivers, works with Mac, PC & Linux and has 1 cartridge per colour. I don't even have to buy Canon refills if I don't want to and 3rd party ones are cheap at 4 or 5 euros a shot.
It's too bad that other printer manufacturers don't follow suit. I know that I wouldn't buy any from any brand that tried to lock me in and when I'm asked for advice I let people know what the likes of Lex are up to. That printer might seem cheap at 60 but with paltry 4 colour refills at 55 a shot it soon adds up.
Frankly, the unecessary waste from computers disgusts me. I think the EU should slap any manufacturer who makes hardware that uses non-recyclable consumables which is precisely what this amounts to.
Re:Why OS/2 "passed through"
on
Bill Gates On Linux
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I contracted for IBM for eight months or so at the height of OS/2 (just before Win 95) and it had an excellent C++ compiler called CSet++ and an impressive set of UI classes whose name escapes me. Too bad it didn't come with an editor, wizards etc. so everything was handcoded from the command line with makefiles. Meanwhile in Windows-land Visual C++ had wizards, advanced resource editors, syntax highlighting, projects etc. MFC might have sucked, but you could certainly knock out something very rapidly.
Eventually CSet++ became VisualAge for C++ but the UI still stunk (it was a convoluted slug of a visual designer implemented in Smalltalk or something), and it still didn't provide *useful* classes - things like toolbars, status bars, tooltips etc. Every bloody UI element not defined in the CUA spec but required by modern UI design had to be coded by hand. It was no wonder that every OS/2 app was hopelessly inconsistent with each other and bugged to high heaven!
IBM had long gotten over trying to corner the market by the time that Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp went head to head. By several measures OS/2 should have won that battle - it was preemptive (not like the semi-preemptive Windows 95), had a much better filing system, was 32 bit pure and with the OS/2 Warp Red edition was cheaper than Windows 95 too.
It should have won, but IBM couldn't write a consumer OS if their life depended on it. While MS made their desktop simple and attractive, OS/2 required excessive screwing around with concepts such as right mouse drag and drop, voluminous property pages ordered by subject rather than use frequency and ugly fonts. Another dumb thing was lack of plug and play and support for consumer gear.
Now obviously Microsoft were being bastards all the time too, but IBM basically tied one hand behind their back and their shoelaces together without any help from MS. Still, one of the most laughable ways I recall of Microsoft killing OS/2 was they claimed they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2 because it didn't support OLE! But OLE was a MS techonology... (and subsequently appeared in Office for MacOS with no problems). They really had it in for OS/2 and IBM never bothered at all to fight back.
Have you even tried some of the latest distros from RedHat or Mandrake lately? You can't get much easier to use than those for a Linux based OS. The old cliche of "even my could install it" comes to mind - and this is coming from a NT fan.
Yes I've tried them and it's exactly them I'm talking about. The deskop is pretty okay, certainly good enough for closed or administered systems, but not for home use unless you know what you're doing. But I wouldn't call it consumer level. Red Hat doesn't even ship with an MP3 player for pete's sake and forget about playing DVDs. As you say, you don't even get 3d support unless you know a) that your 3d sucks because it is running in software b) what a driver is c) that there is a driver on NVidia.com and how to download it d) how to run a shell script to install it.
Most common consumer level hardware is automatically detected under the modern distros - so what's the problem?
Some is, some isn't. I had massive difficulties getting a popular DLink wireless card to work with Red Hat (apparantly wlan-ng does it but not without surgery all over the place) and I'm sure others have similar tales of woe for scanners, printers, modems and just about every other kind of device. I could be more amenable to not having support out of the box, if there were an easy mechanism for 3rd party apps to install their own drivers but there isn't.
It should really be point and click. Linux knows what stuff is on your system via PnP and therefore what stuff has no drivers. Red Hat and others should band together and produce some online database where they offer a unified and simple way of fetching new drivers and gathering stats on which hardware is being used by customers.
IBM were utterly incompetant at marketing it, treating it more like a wedge to drive into business to sell training / hardware than as an OS in its own right. Neither did IBM bother to get its divisions to throw their weight behind it with the consequence that even some IBM software ran better on NT.
It didn't even approach being consumer friendly until Warp 4, by which time it was already a has been
Microsoft kept putting the boot in various over and underhanded ways - spreading FUD, threatening a Windows tax on new machines even those shipping with OS/2 etc.
Linux suffers from some of these problems, but incompetency and bad marketing are hopefully not amongst them. The one thing Linux absolutely has to do however is start loading up with consumer features. This means making stuff easy, be it installing new drivers, supporting graphics and sound properly, playing games. At the moment Linux sucks unless you're prepared to put a lot of effort into it or never intend to change your hardware ever. At present I'd say that the big boys have just about mastered producing a reasonable desktop, but there is a long way to go yet.
That's fine if you're comfortable with that, but most normal people and most companies are not going to deploy a nightly with god knows what new bugs and semi-implemented features to fix one exploit. If / when Netscape 7.1.1 appears it will be built from the 1.4 branch meaning the only things that have changed between this and the last are fixes for stability, performance and security.
It is possible however with Mozilla basically horked until Firebird / Thunderbird are developed into workable alternatives to the suite, that we'll see occasional point releases from 1.4 for Mozilla too.
Re:How does mozilla handle old caches?
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Netscape 7.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Check your cache settings. You can tell Mozilla / Netscape to reload a page in various ways from every time, never, once per session or when the page has expired.
Basically Moz / NS tries to do the expected thing by default, but sites are inconsistent about their expiry settings and sometimes it doesn't work the way you think it should.
But neither does the Netscape branded version. There are a few extra buttons here or there, but for the most part they can be disabled from the pref dialog. I don't know what icons you mean either since it didn't put any there when I installed it.
The principle difference these days between the two is that the NS branded version has a spell checker, radio (Spinner) and AIM client built in and offers to installs stuff like Shockwave, JRE, WinAmp etc. It also is supported in the sense that security issues see new point releases whereas you must wait for the next Mozilla release to pick up the change. Otherwise they are almost identical. I notice you can even install the JS debugger and DOM inspector via a 'developer pack' option.
You should do. Netscape / AOL throws a lot of money into developing Mozilla.org. If no one uses the Netscape branded release, where is the incentive for AOL to continue to do this? The answer is there is very little incentive at all. Now this wouldn't be a mortal blow but it would be extremely serious and would see a lot of talented developers reassigned to other stuff.
Even if you personally are happier about using Mozilla, or even Firebird you should consider recommending the branded version to friends and family. After all, throw a bit of money back at AOL in terms of page hits, market share etc. and they'll be less inclined to pull the plug.
The thing is, SCO was never poised to seize anything on Intel platforms. I recall evaluating it at the time and was disgusted at the licence costs and unimpressed by it using SVR 3.2 when BSD4.3 and SVR4 systems were already more advanced than it. Compared to a Sun operating systems at the time, it was a steaming heap of shit. It wasn't Minix bad but frankly I thought it wasn't up to much. In fact the only thing it had going for it was it was a known quantity with some tangible sense of being supported and someone to blame if it broke.
Now to be fair to SCO, I haven't looked at their more recent offerings. But since they badly fumbled the ball there has been no need to either. Linux (and the BSDs) have long provided everything that any Intel developer would ever want, for a low costs, with no withering licence fees or odious licence issues attached.
I get it alright. Linux is the kernel and Linux is the name for a distribution comprising GNU tools, GPL (i.e. using the GPL but not FSF copyright) tools, MPL tools, APL tools, BSD Tools and much, much more. It's all in the context - if I say Mandrake Linux sucks, I mean the dist not the kernel; if I say the O(1) scheduler patch for Linux didn't work I'm talking about the kernel. It's pretty straightforward and if there is any confusion a simple qualifier, e.g. Linux kernel makes it clear.
No one except pedants incapable of inferring the meaning from the context of the discussion should have any problems. And FSF suggesting that calling Linux GNU/Linux is going to stop all ambiguity is specious and flat out wrong. Do you think SCO would say GNU/Linux even if it were the accepted notation (which it isn't)? And as I have pointed out a Linux dist is not just FSF software and most contain dozens if not hundreds of different licences to cover every component.
In fact the only thing that could tenuously be called GNU/Linux is a barebones, do-nothing system consisting a shell, libs, compiler and the kernel. And there is no dist like that.
This whole GNU/Linux nonsense frankly smacks of sour grapes rather than some rational reason for a name change. The FSF is explicitly and implicitly acknowledged already ALL OVER THE PLACE in a dist, through the numerous references in documentation, manpages, info and readmes to the GPL, the FSF copyright, and through version info the toolchain. There is no need for an explicit mention in a generic name, especially when explicitly acknowledging GNU is to implicitly snub Mozilla, Apache, Perl, Python, QT, KDE, OpenBSD, XFree and everyone else who write stuff that makes Linux for something yet 'foolish' enough not to turn over their copyrights to the FSF.
Who's this 'YOU people' may I ask? Whether your superiority complex can cope with it or not, it is a fact of life that novices, newbies and the disinclined will run Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems.
Now you can sit on your elitist ill deserved pedestal and blame them when they're attacked and consequently are used as a launchpad to attack you, but do you really expect some mom using Linux for email to subscribe to CERT for exploit notices? Do you expect some musician using Linux for mp3 encoding to know or care about an ssh buffer overflow? Of course they won't and therefore it is the job of the operating system to protect them as much as is possible.
Red Hat pulling support for their personal operating systems is going to make their distributions more vulnerable, and the finger of blame will firmly point at them when it happens, just as it does now with Microsoft.
(a) Use the "normal" RH distro, get the latest and greatest software for free, and help RH and the free software community improve the software (by filing bug reports, if nothing else).
Yes, but some people actually buy Red Hat software. You know, actually put down money on the counter of Frys or wherever in exchange for a boxed set. They're in the same boat as people who've downloaded the OS. If I bought ten boxes to deploy somewhere I would be mighty upset if I got ten months of support for my troubles.
In fact, I would say that getting a paltry ten months of support would make me more inclined to not buy the boxed set. After all, maybe I should hold off for 9.1 (or 10 if the trend continues), or buy some other dist, or just download it and be done with it?
I might even look over to the shelf selling MS XP starting at $85 for the home upgrade edition and wonder how they manage to offer years of support, while Red Hat can't even after I've just paid them $149 for what I could have gotten for free.
Perhaps the answer is for Red Hat to include a support coupon in the box that gives you a year or two extra support. In other words start putting extra value into the boxed sets and perhaps people see more reasons to prefer them to a free download.
NT 4.0 has been out since 1997 or some time and they're just pulling support now. That's pretty impressive, even if they've been in maintenance mode for a long while.
Contrast that with Red Hat for example, who are yanking support for their 'personal' operating systems 12 months from the time of their release. It's kind of sobering to think that Red Hat 8.0, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1 are end of lifed in six months from now and 9.0 a mere four months after that.
While this might save Red Hat money in the short term I have to wonder what impact it will have on customer confidence. Even assuming you bought it on the very day of release at best you get twelve months maximum of bug fixes, which isn't very much especially if you were planning on deploying it. If some horrible exploit is discovered ten months from now you're screwed. You might appeal to the community to produce an updated patch, but you still forfeit any QA testing or automated RHN update that you would have gotten before.
But let's face it, only a small fraction of people would be aware of or bother to manually plug new exploits anyway. With time a burgeoning number of exploitable RH boxes will become a prime target for crackers. Too bad for them you say, but often those cracked boxes are used to launch attacks and are therefore a danger to everyone. Look at Microsoft's reputation concerning security of their operating systems and wonder if Red Hat's end of life policy will mean the same for them.
Frankly I wondered why I ever played EQ. At first you see a whole world with lots to do and explore and you wonder how you can ever get bored. The first 15 levels or so pass quite well, learning new skills, spells and so forth but each level seems to increase the amount of camping, medding, skill raising,/auc'ing and all the other time consuming repetitive shit EQ makes you do in order to progress. If you're a casual gamer, your experience grinds to a halt watching a blue bar crawl for hours at a time as you sit, med, stand, attack, sit, med, stand, attack for hours. To relieve the monotony you can/auc, sit,/auc, skill,/auc for hours instead. Grouping helps, but not much. Where is the fun in that?
Even the much touted expansions never fixed the fundamental faults in the game choosing instead to put uber gear to keep hardcore addicts playing but ignoring the mid game and low level experiences, or doing much to fix the disasterous RSI inducing UI. One expansion in particular actually was so disasterous (Luclin) that it killed performance and was bugged for months even for people who didn't buy it but who had to upgrade to the new engine.
Now online games don't have to be like this, so perhaps Verant have learned from experience. Or perhaps they haven't. Once bitten twice shy? Perhaps. Star Wars may become a wonderful game, or it might be eye candy wrapped around a compulsive (and not in a fun way), flawed design as EQ. Given there is already a plan for expansion pack in the works (Verant feebly justifies it as benefitting players to have less features in the basic game to give them time to explore their reduced world) and given it takes months to establish a mature world, perhaps its better holding off to see what the story is. Fools rush in as they say.
Ever wanted to know the potential of XUL in Mozilla? Try here for the Mozilla Amazon Browser.
Mozilla also has support for various web services, SOAP, XML-RPC and more making it ideal to capitalize on burgeoning amount of raw data in XML sites such as Amazon are offering these days.
Mozilla has had popup whitelists for a long time (soon after they landed in NS 7.0 in fact) and mpgs and wmvs work out of the box too, assuming you bother to have a plugin available to handle the appropriate content types. Do you think Firebird has some magic plugin fairy that makes it handle content types it knows nothing about?
As for missing features, how about being able to edit a page, send a page to someone, read mail or news, address book, debug a page with the JS debugger, view the page DOM?
Now perhaps you think 'well extensions will appear for some of that stuff', but then you're just proving my point. Firebird is only a fraction of the functionality of Mozilla right now and until Firebird 0.6 becomes 1.0 through lots of development (and it will be welcome when it happens), it will not be a comparable product. And Thunderbird is even further behind. And having an unmanaged bunch of third party extensions is no substitute for provide functionality that should be in the browser itself or at least offered (e.g. as a base extension pack) during installation.
I would love to switch, but unfortunately it is not suitable for my requirements yet. I'm sorry if this upsets you but it's a plain fact. I welcome Firebird for being a cool browser with a clean UI and look forward to its development but until it has a comparable feature set including the major functional components of Mozilla, I will not be able to use it. And that is probably going to take at least five months, right up until 1.6 before that is likely to be the case.
It's nice that people think Firebird is great, but there is a lot of hard work ahead before it is anything like comparable to Mozilla.
It might be lighter, but then it has just a small fraction of the functionality in the Mozilla suite. The 1.5 / 1.6 will not hold a candle on 1.4 until *all* or a significant amount of the functionality in Mozilla is retooled as extensions or ships with Firebird / Thunderbird.
What did you expect? If you install any significantly changed program straight over an old version, it is no surprise at all if it crashes. Old / renamed DLLs, files etc. are a recipe for unexpected behaviour. Mozilla 1.4 is going to crash almost straight away if there are any dangling Moz 1.3 components around, or if it favours them over the ones in the GRE, or if the chrome is all screwed.
Uninstall the old one or install 1.4 in a new directory and perhaps these problems will go away.
Erm, you said you didn't like downloading everything yet you hate net installers??? Have you even used the Moz net installer? It has a checkbox that allows you to save the stuff you download to your local disk so you don't have to reconnect if you install it again.
No you don't even have to download it since there is a net installer. If you only want the browser download and run mozilla-win32-1.4rc2-stub-installer.exe and it will only download the bits you say you want.
I use the mail & news component all day and it is IMHO one of the most powerful apps on the market. It's certainly a lot better than Outlook (Express), Apple Mail and Evolution.
That doesn't mean it's perfect (the news reader could do with better filtering and other things) but frankly I can think of no other client I'd rather use in place of it.
I hope you've raised a bug on this problem. I don't doubt you're seeing an issue, but I suspect that unless others know about it too it will never go away.
If sites such as Slashdot etc. bothered to use XHTML, it would be prefectly possible to use MathML. The reason that it doesn't work in HTML is the simple fact that HTML isn't well formed, so you can't stick MathML in the middle of it and it expect it do anything.
On similar lines to your suggestion, there would be nothing to stop a site using an iframe for example if they just had to put some MathML into a page, but the proper answer is use XHTML or some other XML markup.
Slashdot Mirror
My Canon S750 prints out decently enough, is fast, has great drivers, works with Mac, PC & Linux and has 1 cartridge per colour. I don't even have to buy Canon refills if I don't want to and 3rd party ones are cheap at 4 or 5 euros a shot.
It's too bad that other printer manufacturers don't follow suit. I know that I wouldn't buy any from any brand that tried to lock me in and when I'm asked for advice I let people know what the likes of Lex are up to. That printer might seem cheap at 60 but with paltry 4 colour refills at 55 a shot it soon adds up.
Frankly, the unecessary waste from computers disgusts me. I think the EU should slap any manufacturer who makes hardware that uses non-recyclable consumables which is precisely what this amounts to.
Eventually CSet++ became VisualAge for C++ but the UI still stunk (it was a convoluted slug of a visual designer implemented in Smalltalk or something), and it still didn't provide *useful* classes - things like toolbars, status bars, tooltips etc. Every bloody UI element not defined in the CUA spec but required by modern UI design had to be coded by hand. It was no wonder that every OS/2 app was hopelessly inconsistent with each other and bugged to high heaven!
It should have won, but IBM couldn't write a consumer OS if their life depended on it. While MS made their desktop simple and attractive, OS/2 required excessive screwing around with concepts such as right mouse drag and drop, voluminous property pages ordered by subject rather than use frequency and ugly fonts. Another dumb thing was lack of plug and play and support for consumer gear.
Now obviously Microsoft were being bastards all the time too, but IBM basically tied one hand behind their back and their shoelaces together without any help from MS. Still, one of the most laughable ways I recall of Microsoft killing OS/2 was they claimed they wouldn't port MS Office to OS/2 because it didn't support OLE! But OLE was a MS techonology... (and subsequently appeared in Office for MacOS with no problems). They really had it in for OS/2 and IBM never bothered at all to fight back.
Yes I've tried them and it's exactly them I'm talking about. The deskop is pretty okay, certainly good enough for closed or administered systems, but not for home use unless you know what you're doing. But I wouldn't call it consumer level. Red Hat doesn't even ship with an MP3 player for pete's sake and forget about playing DVDs. As you say, you don't even get 3d support unless you know a) that your 3d sucks because it is running in software b) what a driver is c) that there is a driver on NVidia.com and how to download it d) how to run a shell script to install it.
Most common consumer level hardware is automatically detected under the modern distros - so what's the problem?
Some is, some isn't. I had massive difficulties getting a popular DLink wireless card to work with Red Hat (apparantly wlan-ng does it but not without surgery all over the place) and I'm sure others have similar tales of woe for scanners, printers, modems and just about every other kind of device. I could be more amenable to not having support out of the box, if there were an easy mechanism for 3rd party apps to install their own drivers but there isn't.
It should really be point and click. Linux knows what stuff is on your system via PnP and therefore what stuff has no drivers. Red Hat and others should band together and produce some online database where they offer a unified and simple way of fetching new drivers and gathering stats on which hardware is being used by customers.
Linux suffers from some of these problems, but incompetency and bad marketing are hopefully not amongst them. The one thing Linux absolutely has to do however is start loading up with consumer features. This means making stuff easy, be it installing new drivers, supporting graphics and sound properly, playing games. At the moment Linux sucks unless you're prepared to put a lot of effort into it or never intend to change your hardware ever. At present I'd say that the big boys have just about mastered producing a reasonable desktop, but there is a long way to go yet.
It is possible however with Mozilla basically horked until Firebird / Thunderbird are developed into workable alternatives to the suite, that we'll see occasional point releases from 1.4 for Mozilla too.
Basically Moz / NS tries to do the expected thing by default, but sites are inconsistent about their expiry settings and sometimes it doesn't work the way you think it should.
The principle difference these days between the two is that the NS branded version has a spell checker, radio (Spinner) and AIM client built in and offers to installs stuff like Shockwave, JRE, WinAmp etc. It also is supported in the sense that security issues see new point releases whereas you must wait for the next Mozilla release to pick up the change. Otherwise they are almost identical. I notice you can even install the JS debugger and DOM inspector via a 'developer pack' option.
Even if you personally are happier about using Mozilla, or even Firebird you should consider recommending the branded version to friends and family. After all, throw a bit of money back at AOL in terms of page hits, market share etc. and they'll be less inclined to pull the plug.
Now to be fair to SCO, I haven't looked at their more recent offerings. But since they badly fumbled the ball there has been no need to either. Linux (and the BSDs) have long provided everything that any Intel developer would ever want, for a low costs, with no withering licence fees or odious licence issues attached.
No one except pedants incapable of inferring the meaning from the context of the discussion should have any problems. And FSF suggesting that calling Linux GNU/Linux is going to stop all ambiguity is specious and flat out wrong. Do you think SCO would say GNU/Linux even if it were the accepted notation (which it isn't)? And as I have pointed out a Linux dist is not just FSF software and most contain dozens if not hundreds of different licences to cover every component.
In fact the only thing that could tenuously be called GNU/Linux is a barebones, do-nothing system consisting a shell, libs, compiler and the kernel. And there is no dist like that.
This whole GNU/Linux nonsense frankly smacks of sour grapes rather than some rational reason for a name change. The FSF is explicitly and implicitly acknowledged already ALL OVER THE PLACE in a dist, through the numerous references in documentation, manpages, info and readmes to the GPL, the FSF copyright, and through version info the toolchain. There is no need for an explicit mention in a generic name, especially when explicitly acknowledging GNU is to implicitly snub Mozilla, Apache, Perl, Python, QT, KDE, OpenBSD, XFree and everyone else who write stuff that makes Linux for something yet 'foolish' enough not to turn over their copyrights to the FSF.
Yeah right.
Now you can sit on your elitist ill deserved pedestal and blame them when they're attacked and consequently are used as a launchpad to attack you, but do you really expect some mom using Linux for email to subscribe to CERT for exploit notices? Do you expect some musician using Linux for mp3 encoding to know or care about an ssh buffer overflow? Of course they won't and therefore it is the job of the operating system to protect them as much as is possible.
Red Hat pulling support for their personal operating systems is going to make their distributions more vulnerable, and the finger of blame will firmly point at them when it happens, just as it does now with Microsoft.
Yes, but some people actually buy Red Hat software. You know, actually put down money on the counter of Frys or wherever in exchange for a boxed set. They're in the same boat as people who've downloaded the OS. If I bought ten boxes to deploy somewhere I would be mighty upset if I got ten months of support for my troubles.
In fact, I would say that getting a paltry ten months of support would make me more inclined to not buy the boxed set. After all, maybe I should hold off for 9.1 (or 10 if the trend continues), or buy some other dist, or just download it and be done with it?
I might even look over to the shelf selling MS XP starting at $85 for the home upgrade edition and wonder how they manage to offer years of support, while Red Hat can't even after I've just paid them $149 for what I could have gotten for free.
Perhaps the answer is for Red Hat to include a support coupon in the box that gives you a year or two extra support. In other words start putting extra value into the boxed sets and perhaps people see more reasons to prefer them to a free download.
Contrast that with Red Hat for example, who are yanking support for their 'personal' operating systems 12 months from the time of their release. It's kind of sobering to think that Red Hat 8.0, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1 are end of lifed in six months from now and 9.0 a mere four months after that.
While this might save Red Hat money in the short term I have to wonder what impact it will have on customer confidence. Even assuming you bought it on the very day of release at best you get twelve months maximum of bug fixes, which isn't very much especially if you were planning on deploying it. If some horrible exploit is discovered ten months from now you're screwed. You might appeal to the community to produce an updated patch, but you still forfeit any QA testing or automated RHN update that you would have gotten before.
But let's face it, only a small fraction of people would be aware of or bother to manually plug new exploits anyway. With time a burgeoning number of exploitable RH boxes will become a prime target for crackers. Too bad for them you say, but often those cracked boxes are used to launch attacks and are therefore a danger to everyone. Look at Microsoft's reputation concerning security of their operating systems and wonder if Red Hat's end of life policy will mean the same for them.
Even the much touted expansions never fixed the fundamental faults in the game choosing instead to put uber gear to keep hardcore addicts playing but ignoring the mid game and low level experiences, or doing much to fix the disasterous RSI inducing UI. One expansion in particular actually was so disasterous (Luclin) that it killed performance and was bugged for months even for people who didn't buy it but who had to upgrade to the new engine.
Now online games don't have to be like this, so perhaps Verant have learned from experience. Or perhaps they haven't. Once bitten twice shy? Perhaps. Star Wars may become a wonderful game, or it might be eye candy wrapped around a compulsive (and not in a fun way), flawed design as EQ. Given there is already a plan for expansion pack in the works (Verant feebly justifies it as benefitting players to have less features in the basic game to give them time to explore their reduced world) and given it takes months to establish a mature world, perhaps its better holding off to see what the story is. Fools rush in as they say.
Mozilla also has support for various web services, SOAP, XML-RPC and more making it ideal to capitalize on burgeoning amount of raw data in XML sites such as Amazon are offering these days.
Mozilla has had popup whitelists for a long time (soon after they landed in NS 7.0 in fact) and mpgs and wmvs work out of the box too, assuming you bother to have a plugin available to handle the appropriate content types. Do you think Firebird has some magic plugin fairy that makes it handle content types it knows nothing about?
As for missing features, how about being able to edit a page, send a page to someone, read mail or news, address book, debug a page with the JS debugger, view the page DOM?
Now perhaps you think 'well extensions will appear for some of that stuff', but then you're just proving my point. Firebird is only a fraction of the functionality of Mozilla right now and until Firebird 0.6 becomes 1.0 through lots of development (and it will be welcome when it happens), it will not be a comparable product. And Thunderbird is even further behind. And having an unmanaged bunch of third party extensions is no substitute for provide functionality that should be in the browser itself or at least offered (e.g. as a base extension pack) during installation.
I would love to switch, but unfortunately it is not suitable for my requirements yet. I'm sorry if this upsets you but it's a plain fact. I welcome Firebird for being a cool browser with a clean UI and look forward to its development but until it has a comparable feature set including the major functional components of Mozilla, I will not be able to use it. And that is probably going to take at least five months, right up until 1.6 before that is likely to be the case.
It might be lighter, but then it has just a small fraction of the functionality in the Mozilla suite. The 1.5 / 1.6 will not hold a candle on 1.4 until *all* or a significant amount of the functionality in Mozilla is retooled as extensions or ships with Firebird / Thunderbird.
Uninstall the old one or install 1.4 in a new directory and perhaps these problems will go away.
Erm, you said you didn't like downloading everything yet you hate net installers??? Have you even used the Moz net installer? It has a checkbox that allows you to save the stuff you download to your local disk so you don't have to reconnect if you install it again.
No you don't even have to download it since there is a net installer. If you only want the browser download and run mozilla-win32-1.4rc2-stub-installer.exe and it will only download the bits you say you want.
That doesn't mean it's perfect (the news reader could do with better filtering and other things) but frankly I can think of no other client I'd rather use in place of it.
I hope you've raised a bug on this problem. I don't doubt you're seeing an issue, but I suspect that unless others know about it too it will never go away.
On similar lines to your suggestion, there would be nothing to stop a site using an iframe for example if they just had to put some MathML into a page, but the proper answer is use XHTML or some other XML markup.