yes it is insane to not want a wall of "the *" in an alphabetical search
Wouldn't it make more sense, from a usability standpoint, to program iTunes to sort using standard sorting conventions, instead of treating the titles as plain alphanumeric strings?
I noticed recently that the GNOME file manager actually sorts files numerically, so if you have, say, Chapter1.txt, Chapter2.txt... Chapter10.txt it will show chapters 1-9, then 10... not 1, 10, and 2-9.
Remember: more competition is always a good thing.
Assuming, of course, that the competition isn't fixed. IE became the dominant browser on Windows by being preinstalled. Safari became the dominant browser on the Mac by being preinstalled.
The final release of Safari on Windows will probably be offered as a bundle with iTunes and QuickTime, and probably offered through Apple Software Update. I've got QuickTime on my Windows box at work for testing purposes. Apple's updater "conveniently" offered to install iTunes when I went to install a security patch. If Apple does this with Safari as well, they've got a good chance of getting the next best thing to pre-installed.
On the plus side, Safari and Firefox are tailored toward different audiences. Safari has always been aimed at the "just make it work" crowd, while Firefox tries to get that crowd and the "trick out my browser" crowd. I suspect Safari could take some of the first audience from Firefox, but it won't be able to tempt many power users from Firefox or Opera
more folks on Mac seem to run Firefox than Safari.
I wouldn't be so sure. I know one shouldn't extrapolate too much from a single site's stats, but last month my website saw 3.9% Safari and 6.1% Mac OS -- when that was the only platform it was available for. That means almost 2/3 of the Mac visitors to my site were using Safari.
And what will they say when Konqueror will be released for Windows? Will they complain about kde damaging the OSS world?
That depends. Do you think KDE is likely to have on its to-do list: "Wipe out all Gecko browsers, Opera, and any other browser using the same engine we do, leaving just Konqueror and IE."?
Xena was never more than an unofficial nickname. No one, including the person who discovered it, ever intended for Xena and Gabrielle to be the official names for this pair of heavenly bodies.
I think it was about two years ago that Safari surpassed Opera's marketshare. It rapidly captured a majority of the MacOS segment, as people realized that Internet Explorer was a dead end, and newer Macs ceased to pre-install IE. After IE/Mac was pulled down from Microsoft's website, the older browser declined even faster.
These days, most stats give Safari 2-3 times Opera's percentage. Except for a few lists that still show lots of Netscape use, it's generally at #3 behind IE and Firefox
Not sure about the Safari application, but Webkit has been releasing nightlies for some time. At least on MacOS, they come in the form of an app that uses the local WebKit engine on the installed Safari UI.
This is also the first time I can remember seeing a company issue a security-only fix for a beta (not counting OSS programs that are in use on production servers even though they're still in 0.x versions).
I seriously figured they'd fix it in the nightlies, and wouldn't issue a fixed beta until they had, well, a new beta.
So if I'm reading this correctly, they're putting read-only support for ZFS in the initial release of Leopard for forward compatibility. The idea being that, if they add full ZFS support in a later release, and you start using it on your nifty new Leopard+1 (or Leopard+updates) Mac, you can still read the data if you plug that drive into an older Mac that only has the base Leopard system.
Aside from external drives, this means that if full ZFS is added in an update to Leopard, you can use it to store your backups. You'll still be able to pull data off the backup drive if you have to reinstall and need to grab it quickly, before you can download the updates.
He said that Safari ignores most Windows conventions. That's bad.
One of the most frustrating things about using Firefox in OS X is that it looks and feels horribly wrong because it ignors most Mac conventions*.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I made a comment about this to my wife the other day, after I tried out the Safari beta. She's a long-time Mac user, and remembers dealing with versions of all kinds of programs that had been ported -- just barely -- from Windows. She agreed it was, at the very least, ironic that Apple's software on Windows continually perpetrates the exact same violation of UI conventions that its users complain about when apps are ported the other way... but wondered it Apple might simply figure that turnabout is fair play.
Cloaking turned out to have far less impact on Opera's stats than many people expected. For one thing, even when Opera identified itself as IE by default, it still included Opera in the UA string. Really, it identified itself as IE in the same sense that IE identifies itself as Netscape. (The "Mozilla/X.y" bit at the beginning of just about everyone's UA these days was the old Netscape UA.) Most stats packages were able to detect Opera fine under those conditions.
More recent versions of Opera do have the ability to completely cloak themselves and hide the presence of "Opera" in the UA string, but it's a per-site preference, set by default only on sites that cause significant problems if they detect Opera but nonetheless work fine if they don't.
Most tellingly, there was no sudden jump in Opera's stats when it stopped indentifying as IE by default, indicating that the majority of stats out there were already detecting it properly.
This doesn't invalidate your point about devices, and I absolutely agree. People are focused on the relatively small segment of the desktop market, but in the mobile/device space, Opera has a much bigger piece of the pie... and it keeps adding new market segments. The Wii, the DS, and of course Opera Mini will run on virtually any phone with Java.
Which begs the question... why not just use Opera? Some of us already do!
Well, Opera faces the same problem Safari does: small marketshare, so too many developers ignore it.
My hope is that, with Safari now available for Windows, some of those developers will start thinking, "Oh, this is the default browser on Macs and I can test it without buying a Mac. It might be worth testing in Safari as well as IE and Firefox." Once they break the two-browser mindset, maybe, just maybe some of them will start using the most reliable method to write code that works in multiple browsers: code to the standard first and tweak it according to browser bugs and limitations. It's a lot less work than targetting browser A, adding browser B, adding browser C, etc.
Plus, a two-browser hegemony is only a little better than a one-browser hegemony. Ideally, there should be at least three major browsers with significant marketshare. Maybe 40/30/20/other, but something where there isn't a "majority" browser. That way, there's healthy competition among browser vendors, there's enough variety that malware authors have to go to a significant effort to get results, and web developers can count on the different browsers aiming for the same specs.
RTFS. Breakpad isn't just for crash recovery, it's for crash reporting. It should improve the information they get on the bugs, including bugs they didn't already know about, which should make it easier to fix them.
Take for example World Of Warcraft: it has nothing to do with the gameplay of Warcraft 1 to 3, and pretty much just uses the same setting and franchise name.
That was my first thought, too. Another successful example, going back a bit further, would be the Heroes of Might and Magic series. The Might and Magic games were single-player RPGs. The Heroes... games were turn-based battle strategy games. (I wish I could remember what game inspired the mechanics of Heroes of MM. Castle something?) Totally different type of game, but the spinoff did well enough they made 5 games in that series alone. Of course, the RPGs kept going as well, until the disastrous MM9.
I suspect one of the main things that has people up in arms is the idea that this is being considered Sim City 5, rather than a spinoff.
Why in the hell would designers want more rendering engines with their own quirks and varying levels of standards compliance?
Why? I'm glad you asked. For all the varying levels of standards compliance, they're at least converging, so that targeting standards, then tweaking for quirks, has a better chance of succeeding across browsers than targeting the browsers to begin with. On the other hand, security vulnerabilities (other than misuse of intentional functionality, like the IDN spoofing attacks a while back) tend to be specific to an engine+platform combination.
If we've got two major IE versions, Gecko, Opera and Safari, and if each engine has a big enough userbase that "designers" can't afford to ignore it, then maybe we'll actually see more web development instead of IE/Gecko development.
You can simplify things a lot by focusing your testing on engines, rather than browsers.
For instance, Firefox 2, SeaMonkey, 1.2, Camino 1.5 and Netscape 9 all use the same major version of Gecko. Unless you're dealing with something controlled by the UI -- extensions, for instance, or the search box on the toolbar -- they're going to treat your code more or less the same. You'll start seeing bigger differences in screen size and platform.
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If that's the reasoning, why did they include Firefox in the "before" graph?
Or perhaps Apple could use something designed for multiple accesses and updates by different programs... like a database.
Seriously, everything's in a giant XML file? +1 to readability, but -5 to scalability.
Wouldn't it make more sense, from a usability standpoint, to program iTunes to sort using standard sorting conventions, instead of treating the titles as plain alphanumeric strings?
I noticed recently that the GNOME file manager actually sorts files numerically, so if you have, say, Chapter1.txt, Chapter2.txt... Chapter10.txt it will show chapters 1-9, then 10... not 1, 10, and 2-9.
It depends very much on where you look. My site sees 25% Firefox and 4% Safari. Other stats show Safari around 3% and Firefox around 15%.
(And FYI, it's "Firefox," not "FireFox.")
Assuming, of course, that the competition isn't fixed. IE became the dominant browser on Windows by being preinstalled. Safari became the dominant browser on the Mac by being preinstalled.
The final release of Safari on Windows will probably be offered as a bundle with iTunes and QuickTime, and probably offered through Apple Software Update. I've got QuickTime on my Windows box at work for testing purposes. Apple's updater "conveniently" offered to install iTunes when I went to install a security patch. If Apple does this with Safari as well, they've got a good chance of getting the next best thing to pre-installed.
On the plus side, Safari and Firefox are tailored toward different audiences. Safari has always been aimed at the "just make it work" crowd, while Firefox tries to get that crowd and the "trick out my browser" crowd. I suspect Safari could take some of the first audience from Firefox, but it won't be able to tempt many power users from Firefox or Opera
I wouldn't be so sure. I know one shouldn't extrapolate too much from a single site's stats, but last month my website saw 3.9% Safari and 6.1% Mac OS -- when that was the only platform it was available for. That means almost 2/3 of the Mac visitors to my site were using Safari.
That depends. Do you think KDE is likely to have on its to-do list: "Wipe out all Gecko browsers, Opera, and any other browser using the same engine we do, leaving just Konqueror and IE."?
"I can feel it in my bones"
and "I know it in my gut."
etc.
Sure, but the asteroid Ida has a moon, Dactyl, as well, so I'm not sure that's useful criteria for planethood.
Xena was never more than an unofficial nickname. No one, including the person who discovered it, ever intended for Xena and Gabrielle to be the official names for this pair of heavenly bodies.
I think it was about two years ago that Safari surpassed Opera's marketshare. It rapidly captured a majority of the MacOS segment, as people realized that Internet Explorer was a dead end, and newer Macs ceased to pre-install IE. After IE/Mac was pulled down from Microsoft's website, the older browser declined even faster.
These days, most stats give Safari 2-3 times Opera's percentage. Except for a few lists that still show lots of Netscape use, it's generally at #3 behind IE and Firefox
Not sure about the Safari application, but Webkit has been releasing nightlies for some time. At least on MacOS, they come in the form of an app that uses the local WebKit engine on the installed Safari UI.
This is also the first time I can remember seeing a company issue a security-only fix for a beta (not counting OSS programs that are in use on production servers even though they're still in 0.x versions).
I seriously figured they'd fix it in the nightlies, and wouldn't issue a fixed beta until they had, well, a new beta.
So if I'm reading this correctly, they're putting read-only support for ZFS in the initial release of Leopard for forward compatibility. The idea being that, if they add full ZFS support in a later release, and you start using it on your nifty new Leopard+1 (or Leopard+updates) Mac, you can still read the data if you plug that drive into an older Mac that only has the base Leopard system.
Aside from external drives, this means that if full ZFS is added in an update to Leopard, you can use it to store your backups. You'll still be able to pull data off the backup drive if you have to reinstall and need to grab it quickly, before you can download the updates.
I made a comment about this to my wife the other day, after I tried out the Safari beta. She's a long-time Mac user, and remembers dealing with versions of all kinds of programs that had been ported -- just barely -- from Windows. She agreed it was, at the very least, ironic that Apple's software on Windows continually perpetrates the exact same violation of UI conventions that its users complain about when apps are ported the other way... but wondered it Apple might simply figure that turnabout is fair play.
Cloaking turned out to have far less impact on Opera's stats than many people expected. For one thing, even when Opera identified itself as IE by default, it still included Opera in the UA string. Really, it identified itself as IE in the same sense that IE identifies itself as Netscape. (The "Mozilla/X.y" bit at the beginning of just about everyone's UA these days was the old Netscape UA.) Most stats packages were able to detect Opera fine under those conditions.
More recent versions of Opera do have the ability to completely cloak themselves and hide the presence of "Opera" in the UA string, but it's a per-site preference, set by default only on sites that cause significant problems if they detect Opera but nonetheless work fine if they don't.
Most tellingly, there was no sudden jump in Opera's stats when it stopped indentifying as IE by default, indicating that the majority of stats out there were already detecting it properly.
This doesn't invalidate your point about devices, and I absolutely agree. People are focused on the relatively small segment of the desktop market, but in the mobile/device space, Opera has a much bigger piece of the pie... and it keeps adding new market segments. The Wii, the DS, and of course Opera Mini will run on virtually any phone with Java.
Well, Opera faces the same problem Safari does: small marketshare, so too many developers ignore it.
My hope is that, with Safari now available for Windows, some of those developers will start thinking, "Oh, this is the default browser on Macs and I can test it without buying a Mac. It might be worth testing in Safari as well as IE and Firefox." Once they break the two-browser mindset, maybe, just maybe some of them will start using the most reliable method to write code that works in multiple browsers: code to the standard first and tweak it according to browser bugs and limitations. It's a lot less work than targetting browser A, adding browser B, adding browser C, etc.
Plus, a two-browser hegemony is only a little better than a one-browser hegemony. Ideally, there should be at least three major browsers with significant marketshare. Maybe 40/30/20/other, but something where there isn't a "majority" browser. That way, there's healthy competition among browser vendors, there's enough variety that malware authors have to go to a significant effort to get results, and web developers can count on the different browsers aiming for the same specs.
RTFS. Breakpad isn't just for crash recovery, it's for crash reporting. It should improve the information they get on the bugs, including bugs they didn't already know about, which should make it easier to fix them.
Well, you could always look at what they have added to CSS support:
Remember, that 400k does *not* get you scripting, CSS, or plugins. You aren't going to be viewing YouTube with Dillo anytime soon.
That was my first thought, too. Another successful example, going back a bit further, would be the Heroes of Might and Magic series. The Might and Magic games were single-player RPGs. The Heroes... games were turn-based battle strategy games. (I wish I could remember what game inspired the mechanics of Heroes of MM. Castle something?) Totally different type of game, but the spinoff did well enough they made 5 games in that series alone. Of course, the RPGs kept going as well, until the disastrous MM9.
I suspect one of the main things that has people up in arms is the idea that this is being considered Sim City 5, rather than a spinoff.
Mozilla was originally a testbed for future versions of netscape, then they went their separate ways.
More info in this comment.
LOL! I hadn't noticed that!
The reviewer probably just imported his settings from Opera, but it doesn't make it any less amusing.
Why? I'm glad you asked. For all the varying levels of standards compliance, they're at least converging, so that targeting standards, then tweaking for quirks, has a better chance of succeeding across browsers than targeting the browsers to begin with. On the other hand, security vulnerabilities (other than misuse of intentional functionality, like the IDN spoofing attacks a while back) tend to be specific to an engine+platform combination.
If we've got two major IE versions, Gecko, Opera and Safari, and if each engine has a big enough userbase that "designers" can't afford to ignore it, then maybe we'll actually see more web development instead of IE/Gecko development.
You can simplify things a lot by focusing your testing on engines, rather than browsers.
For instance, Firefox 2, SeaMonkey, 1.2, Camino 1.5 and Netscape 9 all use the same major version of Gecko. Unless you're dealing with something controlled by the UI -- extensions, for instance, or the search box on the toolbar -- they're going to treat your code more or less the same. You'll start seeing bigger differences in screen size and platform.