Oddly enough, some of us haven't experienced any more instability in Firefox than Opera. Seriously, I use Firefox 2 about 80% of the time and Opera 9 about 20%, and they both crash at the same (low) rate.
Incidentally, I don't see any posts saying that the crasher isn't a flaw, and anyone who does say so is an idiot (no matter what their favorite browser is). Software should not crash, and assuming a stable environment, any crash is a flaw. There are arguments over terminology -- i.e. can a crash bug be properly considered a denial of service vulnerability or not. Even Opera devs are of the opinion that a crash bug isn't a security issue unless it (a) can execute arbitrary code or (b) can prevent you from restarting the browser.
So Microsoft sends you IE7, forcing you to choose between "Yes" and "No" on a dialog box. Even if you choose "Yes, install IE7," nothing about the install process compels you to use it if you prefer something else.
The lawsuit, filed this week in US District Court, asks that YouTube stop using the youtube.com or pay Universal Tube's cost for creating a new domain. It did not specify damages. [emphasis added]
Simple solution: Google pays for registration of the new domain, takes over hosting of utube.com, and sets it up as a disambiguation page like firefox.com (which directs you to either the Firefox web browser or the Firefox consulting firm). Maybe help them pay for an ad campaign telling people about the new site, maybe reimburse them for some of the excess traffic costs.
I have a site that gets fairly decent traffic numbers, mainly from a comic book fan site. So it's skewed a little bit towards technical, but it's still running 71% IE and 21% Firefox, with the balance made up of Safari, Opera, and a bunch of smaller browsers.
I ran some stats on Tuesday for most of October, and found a huge disparity between IE7 uptake and Firefox 2 uptake.
During the RC periods, IE7 hovered at around 2% of IE visitors, and Firefox 2 hovered around 3% of Firefox visitors. 12 days after IE7's release, it had climbed to... 4% of IE users. Firefox 2, meanwhile, had jumped to 8% of Firefox users the day of the release, and after 6 days, it accounted for 22% of Firefox users!
Reports I've seen at various news sites suggest that raw numbers of downloads have been comparable, or at least within an order of magnitude. But percentage-wise, I saw nearly a fourth of Firefox users had upgraded within a week.
I attribute this to three things: First, Firefox users tend to be more enthusiastic about their browser than IE users. In my experience, the most enthusiastic IE users get is "It works." (Not counting genuine Microsoft fans.) Second, Firefox users have already downloaded and installed a browser once (or gotten someone else to do it), so they're more comfortable with the idea. Third, because Internet Explorer is so tied to the OS, upgrading it is more likely to break something (like Microsoft Developer Studio). A lot of the more tech-savvy IE users are actually holding off out of caution.
<Stormrider> I should bomb something <Stormrider>...and it's off the cuff remarks like that that are the reason I don't log chats <Stormrider> Just in case the FBI ever needs anything on me <Elzie_Ann> I'm sure they can just get it from someone who DOES log chats. *** FBI has joined #gamecubecafe <FBI> We saw it anyway. *** FBI has quit IRC (Quit: )
I believe the proper term is "nukular," an abbreviation of "nuke-you-la'r," itself a contraction of "nuke you later," a traditional Texan greeting derived from the intense heat of a Texan barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.
How the term jumped over to fission/fusion-based weapons, I couldn't begin to guess.
Just look at what has happened to the web, with all the incompatible websites because one company chose to extend the meaning of what HTML was supposed to be, then you get idiotic web developers who follow that company like a flock of sheep, saying to themselves, wow, what a cool feature, and include it in their website only to break that site for the millions of other users who don't use that non-standards compliant browser.
Could be worse. Back in the late 1990s there were two companies who chose to extend the meaning of what HTML was supposed to be. It was Netscape-enhanced vs. IE-enhanced, and no one gave a rat's patootie about the standards because HTML 3 was so far behind what people wanted to do and no one had implemented enough of CSS to really use it.
At least now the standards are actually ahead of the browsers on most things, and there's really only one set of proprietary enhancements that people need to worry about (not counting stuff like Flash). Gecko, KHTML, and Opera are rapidly converging on the standards, with IE slowly lumbering along in the distance.
Wasn't there a plan, back in the Phoenix/Firebird days, to offer several installers, each with a different set of pre-bundled extensions? Or am I just getting that mixed up with the Firebird+Thunderbird=Mozilla Suite 2.0 idea that's also been dropped?
Firefox browser, Thunderbird email would go a long way to telling joe average user what these things actually do, and why they would want it.
Possibly a good idea, but you need to take it one step further. Many people don't know what a "browser" is, or what it might be used for. It's not an issue of intelligence, it's just a bit of terminology that they haven't encountered. But they know what the web is. "Firefox Web Browser" or maybe just "Firefox Web" would get the idea across more effectively.
Sanctions only seem to work if the people in charge of the target country give a damn about the citizenry or economy. If all they care about is being in control, rather than being in charge of a nation that actually has some prestige, they'll just siphon off the country's own supplies to make up the difference.
And then there's the rhetorical win: "See, that country is trying to prevent you from having food and shelter! Aren't they evil!"
Yep. China's got business reasons to interact with other nations. North Korea is pretty much isolated (mostly by choice). As long as Tony Soprano^W^WKim Jong Il can bring in enough through the black market to keep himself and his lieutenants happy, they have nothing to lose by pissing off the rest of the world.
Isolated dictator who dislikes just about everyone, and now has nuclear weapons. I think that qualifies for the Stuff That Matters half of the tagline.
If you don't like that explanation, nuclear weapons are a technical issue.
Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.
Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?
Why didn't you fix Firefox's single huge glaring flaw, the memory leak that makes it practically unusable?
I'm going to ignore the "practically unusable" part, since there are plenty of people who somehow manage to use it anyway without problems, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that memory issues are one huge flaw. They're not. They're a bunch of tiny flaws that add up together. It's not like they can go in, fix one bug, and free up half the memory. They have to track down a whole bunch of these things and fix each of them.
If you look at the release notes, nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."
CrossOver Office is basically a pre-configured Wine plus some installers and tech support, done by people whose priorities include making it properly handle specific high-profile apps like Office. Nothing against it -- I've been a satisfied customer since somewhere around version 2, and CodeWeavers are major backers of the Wine project -- just pointing out it's the same technology that the GP already tried.
If Wine won't run Office at all on his machine, CrossOver won't help. If it's a configuration issue, though, it'll probably work.
Also useful is their compatibility database. Office 2000 and Office 97 are rated gold, Office XP is rated silver, and Office 2003 is rated bronze.
it's a reference to Solitaire? I mean, that's got to be the most-used Microsoft product out there, right?
Nonsense, everyone knows that's Minesweeper!
What I can't figure out is why they charge $200 for the game. I mean, sure, it comes with Notepad and a couple of other things, but it seems awfully steep.
Your starting score was always 1. Look at the post you just made -- it's a starting score of 1 with a +1 karma bonus, for a total of 2.
As for why it's missing from your parent post, I remember reading it in the FAQ -- the upshot is that a post that has been modded down twice loses its karma bonus (just that comment).
Assuming you're on Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP4, "Set Program Access and Defaults" should do what you want. (in "Start Menu"/"All Programs", or "Control Panel"/"Add or Remove Programs".) Since you mention the Start Menu browser icon, I'm guessing you've already done this and it didn't work.
In cases like that, I've found that what you need to do is reset it to IE, reboot, then reset it to Firefox (and maybe reboot again).
Alternatively, since you're at work, there may be some system policy in place preventing the change from sticking.
One of the main differences between IE 5.1 for Mac Classic and IE 5.2 for Mac OS X (other than the UI) is that the Mac Classic version still had ActiveX support. You can actually see this side by side if you have a PowerPC-based Mac that came with OS 10.3 or earlier (10.4 stopped shipping with IE, though Safari had long since been the default), and you installed the Classic environment. Just open up both browsers and compare the preferences.
Besides, running IE7 under wine is not a valid test environment anyway. Suppose that something doesn't render right in IE7 on Wine? Is it a site problem, a Wine problem, an IE7 on wine problem, or what? You're testing that your site looks great to the 5 people out there that run IE7 on Wine.
This is already a problem with IE6. Certain things like fonts and filters don't display exactly the same as they would on an actual Windows system. (I have a couple of pages that use a mix of behaviors and filters to make IE6 display alpha-transparent PNGs correctly, but under WINE, the images just disappear.)
IE on WINE is good for prototyping, though, if not for final testing. If you've made some changes that work fine in Firefox, you can fire up IE on the Linux box to make sure you didn't break anything major, then go over to Windows to verify it. Come to think of it, it's kind of like using Konqueror to test for Safari. It's not quite the same, but it's a good sanity test.
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Oddly enough, some of us haven't experienced any more instability in Firefox than Opera. Seriously, I use Firefox 2 about 80% of the time and Opera 9 about 20%, and they both crash at the same (low) rate.
Incidentally, I don't see any posts saying that the crasher isn't a flaw, and anyone who does say so is an idiot (no matter what their favorite browser is). Software should not crash, and assuming a stable environment, any crash is a flaw. There are arguments over terminology -- i.e. can a crash bug be properly considered a denial of service vulnerability or not. Even Opera devs are of the opinion that a crash bug isn't a security issue unless it (a) can execute arbitrary code or (b) can prevent you from restarting the browser.
Indeed. "So much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?"
So Microsoft sends you IE7, forcing you to choose between "Yes" and "No" on a dialog box. Even if you choose "Yes, install IE7," nothing about the install process compels you to use it if you prefer something else.
From TFA:
Simple solution: Google pays for registration of the new domain, takes over hosting of utube.com, and sets it up as a disambiguation page like firefox.com (which directs you to either the Firefox web browser or the Firefox consulting firm). Maybe help them pay for an ad campaign telling people about the new site, maybe reimburse them for some of the excess traffic costs.
I have a site that gets fairly decent traffic numbers, mainly from a comic book fan site. So it's skewed a little bit towards technical, but it's still running 71% IE and 21% Firefox, with the balance made up of Safari, Opera, and a bunch of smaller browsers.
I ran some stats on Tuesday for most of October, and found a huge disparity between IE7 uptake and Firefox 2 uptake.
During the RC periods, IE7 hovered at around 2% of IE visitors, and Firefox 2 hovered around 3% of Firefox visitors. 12 days after IE7's release, it had climbed to... 4% of IE users. Firefox 2, meanwhile, had jumped to 8% of Firefox users the day of the release, and after 6 days, it accounted for 22% of Firefox users!
Reports I've seen at various news sites suggest that raw numbers of downloads have been comparable, or at least within an order of magnitude. But percentage-wise, I saw nearly a fourth of Firefox users had upgraded within a week.
I attribute this to three things: First, Firefox users tend to be more enthusiastic about their browser than IE users. In my experience, the most enthusiastic IE users get is "It works." (Not counting genuine Microsoft fans.) Second, Firefox users have already downloaded and installed a browser once (or gotten someone else to do it), so they're more comfortable with the idea. Third, because Internet Explorer is so tied to the OS, upgrading it is more likely to break something (like Microsoft Developer Studio). A lot of the more tech-savvy IE users are actually holding off out of caution.
Yeah. I'm sure in the future plutonium will be available at every corner drugstore, but in 2006 it's a little hard to come by.
I believe the proper term is "nukular," an abbreviation of "nuke-you-la'r," itself a contraction of "nuke you later," a traditional Texan greeting derived from the intense heat of a Texan barbecue grill. Essentially, one is saying that the other person is always welcome at a barbecue.
How the term jumped over to fission/fusion-based weapons, I couldn't begin to guess.
Same reason that when a plane crashes in New York by pure accident, they're quick to point out that terrorism does not appear to have been involved.
Could be worse. Back in the late 1990s there were two companies who chose to extend the meaning of what HTML was supposed to be. It was Netscape-enhanced vs. IE-enhanced, and no one gave a rat's patootie about the standards because HTML 3 was so far behind what people wanted to do and no one had implemented enough of CSS to really use it.
At least now the standards are actually ahead of the browsers on most things, and there's really only one set of proprietary enhancements that people need to worry about (not counting stuff like Flash). Gecko, KHTML, and Opera are rapidly converging on the standards, with IE slowly lumbering along in the distance.
Wasn't there a plan, back in the Phoenix/Firebird days, to offer several installers, each with a different set of pre-bundled extensions? Or am I just getting that mixed up with the Firebird+Thunderbird=Mozilla Suite 2.0 idea that's also been dropped?
Possibly a good idea, but you need to take it one step further. Many people don't know what a "browser" is, or what it might be used for. It's not an issue of intelligence, it's just a bit of terminology that they haven't encountered. But they know what the web is. "Firefox Web Browser" or maybe just "Firefox Web" would get the idea across more effectively.
Like Sudan?
Sanctions only seem to work if the people in charge of the target country give a damn about the citizenry or economy. If all they care about is being in control, rather than being in charge of a nation that actually has some prestige, they'll just siphon off the country's own supplies to make up the difference.
And then there's the rhetorical win: "See, that country is trying to prevent you from having food and shelter! Aren't they evil!"
Yep. China's got business reasons to interact with other nations. North Korea is pretty much isolated (mostly by choice). As long as Tony Soprano^W^WKim Jong Il can bring in enough through the black market to keep himself and his lieutenants happy, they have nothing to lose by pissing off the rest of the world.
Isolated dictator who dislikes just about everyone, and now has nuclear weapons. I think that qualifies for the Stuff That Matters half of the tagline.
If you don't like that explanation, nuclear weapons are a technical issue.
Thunderbird, as a companion to Firefox, seems to be getting the "also-ran" treatment. Releases tend to trail Firefox releases by weeks or months, and there seems to be very little promotion or marketing.
Do you expect the influx of Eudora developers to change this? Are there any plans for more coordination between Firefox and Thunderbird in terms of scheduling, marketing and promotion?
I'm going to ignore the "practically unusable" part, since there are plenty of people who somehow manage to use it anyway without problems, but you seem to be under the mistaken impression that memory issues are one huge flaw. They're not. They're a bunch of tiny flaws that add up together. It's not like they can go in, fix one bug, and free up half the memory. They have to track down a whole bunch of these things and fix each of them.
If you look at the release notes, nearly every 1.5.0.x release has fixed some memory leaks. 2.0 has fixed a bunch more. They still have more to go, but it's not as if they sat down and said, "Let's ignore the memory leak."
Ever heard the term, "shooting fish in a barrel"?
CrossOver Office is basically a pre-configured Wine plus some installers and tech support, done by people whose priorities include making it properly handle specific high-profile apps like Office. Nothing against it -- I've been a satisfied customer since somewhere around version 2, and CodeWeavers are major backers of the Wine project -- just pointing out it's the same technology that the GP already tried.
If Wine won't run Office at all on his machine, CrossOver won't help. If it's a configuration issue, though, it'll probably work.
Also useful is their compatibility database. Office 2000 and Office 97 are rated gold, Office XP is rated silver, and Office 2003 is rated bronze.
Nonsense, everyone knows that's Minesweeper!
What I can't figure out is why they charge $200 for the game. I mean, sure, it comes with Notepad and a couple of other things, but it seems awfully steep.
As a discussion involving Microsoft grows longer, the probability of the Galactic Empire or Sith being mentioned approaches one.
Your starting score was always 1. Look at the post you just made -- it's a starting score of 1 with a +1 karma bonus, for a total of 2.
As for why it's missing from your parent post, I remember reading it in the FAQ -- the upshot is that a post that has been modded down twice loses its karma bonus (just that comment).
Assuming you're on Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP4, "Set Program Access and Defaults" should do what you want. (in "Start Menu"/"All Programs", or "Control Panel"/"Add or Remove Programs".) Since you mention the Start Menu browser icon, I'm guessing you've already done this and it didn't work.
In cases like that, I've found that what you need to do is reset it to IE, reboot, then reset it to Firefox (and maybe reboot again).
Alternatively, since you're at work, there may be some system policy in place preventing the change from sticking.
Not quite. Microsoft used to ship ActiveX for MacOS as well, but it was never ported to OS X.
One of the main differences between IE 5.1 for Mac Classic and IE 5.2 for Mac OS X (other than the UI) is that the Mac Classic version still had ActiveX support. You can actually see this side by side if you have a PowerPC-based Mac that came with OS 10.3 or earlier (10.4 stopped shipping with IE, though Safari had long since been the default), and you installed the Classic environment. Just open up both browsers and compare the preferences.
This is already a problem with IE6. Certain things like fonts and filters don't display exactly the same as they would on an actual Windows system. (I have a couple of pages that use a mix of behaviors and filters to make IE6 display alpha-transparent PNGs correctly, but under WINE, the images just disappear.)
IE on WINE is good for prototyping, though, if not for final testing. If you've made some changes that work fine in Firefox, you can fire up IE on the Linux box to make sure you didn't break anything major, then go over to Windows to verify it. Come to think of it, it's kind of like using Konqueror to test for Safari. It's not quite the same, but it's a good sanity test.