Clearly we can't grant #1, because that wouldn't be sufficiently critical of MS, but be can't grant #2 either because we love Mozilla.
For some reason I want to adapt this to the duel of wits from The Princess Bride:
But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of site that would approve of an enemy, or the sort of site that would reject a friend?
A site that hates Microsoft would complain that because Microsoft's security has been notoriously poor, then Mozilla must be making a mistake. Since Slashdot tends toward favoring Mozilla, clearly I cannot choose the whine in front of you.
A site that loves Mozilla would have to rationalize the decision, and conclude that the security expert is worth hiring. But since that speaks favorably of Microsoft's security, I can clearly not choose the whine in front of me!
But Slashdot is known for its vindictiveness. Given a choice between reasoned discourse and pure snark, the site will go for snark every time. So clearly I cannot choose the whine in front of you!
etc.
I'm just glad Mozilla doesn't think this way.
In all seriousness, I've got to agree with you here. Though there's certainly been plenty of "MS has lousy security" rhetoric from people at Mozilla over the last few years.
Now to be fair, Firefox doesn't adhere entirely to standards either, or at least not the latest ones. It comes a lot closer, but I won't give it (or any other browswer) that until it'll pass the ACID2 test, which I believe only Safari and Opera do currently. Last I heard, full compliance wasn't slated until Fx 3.0, but that might be incorrect.
Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and iCab. Plus one HTML-to-PDF converter and a mobile browser. There's a great list of Acid2 status here. And yes, Firefox is looking at passing Acid2 with 3.0.
Something to keep in mind, though, is that Acid2 doesn't indicate a particular level of compliance. It's not a test that says, "OK, you pass CSS version X and HTML version Y," but a test that checks several previously neglected parts of the specs. If you think of the specs as being a floor, and a browser's compliance as being the part of the floor that is painted, Acid2 checks the corners. It's possible to have all the corners filled in, but still have a missing chunk in the middle.
The best compliance comparison I've found is, unfortuantely, missing full data for Safari. It shows Opera 9 ahead of Firefox 1.5 on CSS 2.1 and DOM, and Firefox ahead of Opera on HTML and new parts of CSS 3. It's hard to say how one should weight those, and again numbers are missing for Safari, but if I were to guess, I'd say that in overall standards compliance, Firefox 1.5 is probably ahead of Safari 2, and Opera 9 is probably ahead of Firefox 1.5 -- despite the fact that Opera and Safari both pass Acid2 and Firefox does not.
Just as an example that's on my mind right now, Mozilla does not properly support display: inline-block;. There are two alternate proprietary display properties, -moz-inline-block and -moz-inline-block. Neither one is quite right, but -box is the one that you have to use for inline-block if you want it to behave properly.
Almost, but not quite right.
It isn't that Mozilla doesn't properly support inline-block, it's that Mozilla doesn't support inline-block. Those proprietary display properties exist precisely because they don't quite match what inline-block is supposed to do.
Mozilla has followed similar paths with opacity and outline. While they had preliminary code, they used the proprietary rules -moz-opacity and -moz-outline in order to avoid creating an incompatible implementation. Once they had it working right, they switched over to the standard properties.
If you know how to code properly and comply with standards set by w3c, IE has minimal problems.
Given the dismal level of CSS support in IE (57% of CSS 2.1 in IE7, compared to upwards of 90% for Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9), it's quite easy to write properly standards-compliant CSS that IE just doesn't understand.
Writing standards-compliant code is a good start, but you also have to do one or more of the following:
Limit yourself to features that are implemented in Internet Explorer.
Accept that IE won't display your page quite the same as other browsers do.
Try to work around the missing functionality, differing interpretations, or bugs such that IE will do what you want. Unfortunately, this often involves adding non-standard code or re-mingling presentation into your content.
Of course, the same is true of any other browser that you choose to support, since no one has managed to cover 100% of the specs, never mind 100% bug-free. But given the much higher levels of support the top ones provide, you're less likely to encounter a showstopping gap in Firefox or Opera's presentation. (It does happen, just to a much lesser extent.)
if you are having major problems, your code must not be up to par with w3c's standards.
See, this is why I like to refer to "specs" rather than "standards." Calling something a specification is unambiguous: it's a document that specifies what something (in this case, a browser) should do. A standard could be, as in W3C standards, a standard way of doing something, or it could be a standard against which something is measured. Standards-compliant code is not code which is "up to standard," but code that follows the standard way of using CSS, HTML, etc. -- well-formed, no errors, not relying on proprietary features, etc. A standards-compliant browser is one which complies with the standard way of displaying CSS, HTML, etc.
EvilML is a great example of the two meanings of standard: it's standards-compliant, as it's a valid HTML 4.01 Strict document. But I wouldn't consider it "up to standard" in terms of good coding practices, cross-browser or not.
Semantics are also very important. Do you code with semantics in mind?
OK, now you're just being silly. Semantics are great for maintenance, search-friendly sites, and producing clean code, but they're on the content side. CSS is the presentation side. But I suppose you get bonus points for buzzword use.
no browser properly handles CSS. NONE. Except maybe Opera, which at least can pass ACID2.
No, not even Opera. Keep in mind that Acid2 is not a compliance test. It tells you that the browser handles a certain set of HTML, CSS, protocols and errors properly, but it doesn't indicate full and/or proper implementation of any level of CSS.
There's a great set of comparisons at WebDevout.net (surf around the site for more detailed tables). Opera 9 is certainly in the lead with 94% of CSS 2.1 by that site's metrics, compared to 90% for Firefox 1.5, 57% for IE7 and 51% for IE6. But none of the browsers makes it to 100%.
That post is 99% true. The missing 1% is that I mistakenly typed RFID when I meant EAS. If you had been paying any attention, you would have seen that I had already pointed out my mistake. Maybe it's not EAS. Whatever the underlying technology, it was the tag that causes the alarm to go off when you walk through the detectors in front of the door, and that can be deactivated at checkout.
As for the guy who didn't look at my receipt -- again, if you'd been paying attention, you might have noticed that it was another incident at another store from another chain in a different retail market two years ago, so I don't think the yellow or white shirt is relevant.
I didn't describe any sort of "case," so I can only assume you're reading something else into the post.
What makes you so certain that the events didn't occur exactly as described (short of the already corrected RFID/EAS typo)? What makes you consider accounts of false positives with anti-shoplifting technology to be "dumbass?" And what makes you so quick to pull out insults? Do you take it personally that I described a partial breakdown of the loss prevention policies at your employer -- even one which was resolved quickly, and probably wasn't at your branch of the store?
I can think of a number of times when I've bought something and the clerk -- whether new to the job, distracted, or just lazy -- has forgotten to deactivate or remove the RFID tag, and I've walked toward the front door and had the alarm go off.
The most recent was just two days ago -- I'd ordered a DVD on sale from Best Buy's website, and chose the store pickup option. Basically you choose a nearby store, they hold it for you at the customer service counter, and you walk in with your order info and pick up the item and a receipt. The customer service people presumably hadn't been trained to deactivate it, and I certainly didn't have any reason to go through the line -- I'd paid for it already, after all -- and the greeter/receipt checker certainly had no reason to think that it hadn't already been deactivated. It wasn't a big deal, as the guy had already seen my receipt and just took it over to the counter to deactivate it, but it was still an easily-avoidable false alarm.
The worst are clothing and/or department stores, especially around holidays. A couple of years ago I bought an item at Robinson's May on the second floor, walked downstairs, walked out the door, had the alarms go off -- and no one reacted. OK, I had a store bag, but if I'd been a shoplifter, I could have walked right off and no one would have noticed, despite the blaring alarm. I went back and forth a few times to make sure it was my bag, then went to the nearest cash register -- note, not anywhere near where I paid for it -- told them what had happened, and they didn't even check my receipt before pulling it out and removing the tag.
I've been at other clothing stores and heard the shoplifter alarm go off repeatedly during a half-hour stay. I think I've only seen an employee approach someone once. I assume this means there are so many false alarms that they have no sense of urgency when an alarm goes off, because most of the time, it's a customer who is going to come back of their own volition so they can get the tag removed and actually wear whatever it is. It's just sound and fury.
You can have the greatest detection tech in the world, but if people don't use it properly, it won't help one bit.
If someone wants to control their works through copyright, they should use controlled, private distribution.
But isn't the purpose of copyright to extend legal protection beyond "controlled, private distribution"?
After all, photocopiers, VCRs, audio tape recorders, CD/DVD writers -- heck, the printing press -- mean that distribution is no longer controlled or private, unless you restrict access to people who can use them. (Or you try to make it technically difficult via DRM, but that's only a temporary hurdle.) Every technological advance in information distribution has put that distribution into the hands of more people, loosening the distribution control. That's the "wants to be free" half of the slogan that often gets tossed around without the second half, that information "also wants to be expensive."
Copyright, at its core, says, "OK, it's technically easy for you to copy this and redistribute it, but we're going to declare it illegal for you to do so without permission except under very specific circumstances."
The medium -- broadcast, network, paper or plastic -- is irrelevant. Unless you think that the Internet is somehow the ultimate expression of free information, and distribution technology can't get any more "free" than this. 'Cause, you know, everything worth inventing already has been, and 640K should be enough for anyone, especially with that world market for 3, maybe 5 computers.
I recently discovered exactly how the Wayback Machine deals with changes to robots.txt.
First, some background. I have a weblog I've been running since 2002, switching from B2 to WordPress and changing the permalink structure twice (with appropriate HTTP redirects each time) as nicer structures became available. Unfortunately, some spiders kept hitting the old URLs over and over again, despite the fact that they forwarded with a 301 permanent redirect to the new locations. So, foolishly, I added the old links to robots.txt to get the spiders to stop.
Flash forward to earlier this week. I've made a post on Slashdot, which reminds me of a review I did of Might and Magic IX nearly four years ago. I head to my blog, pull up the post... and to my horror, discover that it's missing half a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and I don't remember the sense of what I originally wrote!
My backups are too recent (ironic, that), so I hit the Wayback Machine. They only have the post going back to 2004, which is still missing the chunk of text. Then I remember that the link structure was different, so I try hitting the oldest archived copies of the main page, and I'm able to pull up the summary with a link to the original location. I click on it... and I see:
Excluded by robots.txt (or words to that effect).
Now this is a page that was not blocked at the time that ia_archiver spidered it, but that was later blocked. The Wayback machine retroactively blocked access to the page based on the robots.txt content. I searched through the documentation and couldn't determine whether the data had actually been removed or just blocked, so I decided to alter my site's robots.txt file, fire off a request for clarification, and see what happened.
As it turns out, several days later, they unblocked the file, and I was able to restore the missing text.
In summary, the Wayback Machine will block end-users from accessing anything that is in your current robots.txt file. If you remove the restriction from your robots.txt, it will re-enable access, but only if it had archived the page in the first place.
Not sure, but the recent nightlies on Linux do seem more responsive than beta 1 was.
On the issue of tab switching being slow, there were some GTK-related bugs in 1.5.0 that have been fixed in one of the point releases. I don't remember whether switching was affected, but dragging tabs would sometimes lock the browser up for several seconds until the bug was fixed.
Isn't Clint Eastwood a bit old to be doing this stuff?
Obviously he's going to have to be recast. From what I hear, the front runner is Hayden Christensen. Supposedly, the plot is about the Firefox being tempted by the dark side of commerce.
While you can *build* installers on multiple platforms, the installer itself will only work on Windows.
Not much loss on Mac, since the Mac version doesn't use an installer. It's just a disk image that you open and drag the app to the Applications folder. (This is pretty standard on Mac. Install is frequently just drag-n-drop.)
This may affect Linux, at least people who download and install it instead of using their distro-provided version. You used to have the option to choose between an installer or just a tar archive of the app itself, but lately I've only seen the tar archive. I wonder if anyone has any stats on what percentage of Firefox-on-Linux users install it themselves?
I wish these people would read some books on usability!
Theory is great, but experimental evidence (if gathered properly) trumps it every time. In this case, they did a usability study and found that many people were better able to deal with the close button on the tab.
Personally, I find it annoying, and prefer the old behavior. But it's also surprisingly easy to get used to after you use it for a while.
I wonder if there's something special about Firefox that makes people confuse "a file with that name exists on the primary FTP site" with "it's released." I've seen it happen with several Firefox releases, but I can't think of anything else where people have so consistently jumped the gun.
I actually find Firefox is the simplest browser to get cookies to do what I want.
Basically, I tell it to accept all cookies, but only for this browser session. I then create a list of exceptions for sites that I want to be able to keep cookies until their normal expiration date.
That way any site that requires cookies will work, and the moment I close Firefox, I'm back to only the cookies on sites I'm willing to trust.
Opera has a similar feature, which will delete any new cookies on exit, but it's a little trickier to get to work in the same way. Instead of just making a whitelist of sites, you have to disable the checkbox, visit the site you trust, then re-enable it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of more concern is compatibility. I mean, will you be able to use Paper-RW in a Paper+RW Printer?
And let's not get into Paper-RAM.
Dryads, of course!
Nay, that would be the grand ship FyreFawkes, matey.
Wait 'til I get going!
Now, where was I...
For some reason I want to adapt this to the duel of wits from The Princess Bride:
But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of site that would approve of an enemy, or the sort of site that would reject a friend?
A site that hates Microsoft would complain that because Microsoft's security has been notoriously poor, then Mozilla must be making a mistake. Since Slashdot tends toward favoring Mozilla, clearly I cannot choose the whine in front of you.
A site that loves Mozilla would have to rationalize the decision, and conclude that the security expert is worth hiring. But since that speaks favorably of Microsoft's security, I can clearly not choose the whine in front of me!
But Slashdot is known for its vindictiveness. Given a choice between reasoned discourse and pure snark, the site will go for snark every time. So clearly I cannot choose the whine in front of you!
etc.
In all seriousness, I've got to agree with you here. Though there's certainly been plenty of "MS has lousy security" rhetoric from people at Mozilla over the last few years.
You must be new here.
There will certainly be a lot of cognitive dissonance. It'll be interesting to see which side various people fall on.
Sadly, most people so far seem to be making fun of her name.
Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and iCab. Plus one HTML-to-PDF converter and a mobile browser. There's a great list of Acid2 status here. And yes, Firefox is looking at passing Acid2 with 3.0.
Something to keep in mind, though, is that Acid2 doesn't indicate a particular level of compliance. It's not a test that says, "OK, you pass CSS version X and HTML version Y," but a test that checks several previously neglected parts of the specs. If you think of the specs as being a floor, and a browser's compliance as being the part of the floor that is painted, Acid2 checks the corners. It's possible to have all the corners filled in, but still have a missing chunk in the middle.
The best compliance comparison I've found is, unfortuantely, missing full data for Safari. It shows Opera 9 ahead of Firefox 1.5 on CSS 2.1 and DOM, and Firefox ahead of Opera on HTML and new parts of CSS 3. It's hard to say how one should weight those, and again numbers are missing for Safari, but if I were to guess, I'd say that in overall standards compliance, Firefox 1.5 is probably ahead of Safari 2, and Opera 9 is probably ahead of Firefox 1.5 -- despite the fact that Opera and Safari both pass Acid2 and Firefox does not.
Almost, but not quite right.
It isn't that Mozilla doesn't properly support inline-block, it's that Mozilla doesn't support inline-block. Those proprietary display properties exist precisely because they don't quite match what inline-block is supposed to do.
Mozilla has followed similar paths with opacity and outline. While they had preliminary code, they used the proprietary rules -moz-opacity and -moz-outline in order to avoid creating an incompatible implementation. Once they had it working right, they switched over to the standard properties.
Given the dismal level of CSS support in IE (57% of CSS 2.1 in IE7, compared to upwards of 90% for Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9), it's quite easy to write properly standards-compliant CSS that IE just doesn't understand.
Writing standards-compliant code is a good start, but you also have to do one or more of the following:
Of course, the same is true of any other browser that you choose to support, since no one has managed to cover 100% of the specs, never mind 100% bug-free. But given the much higher levels of support the top ones provide, you're less likely to encounter a showstopping gap in Firefox or Opera's presentation. (It does happen, just to a much lesser extent.)
See, this is why I like to refer to "specs" rather than "standards." Calling something a specification is unambiguous: it's a document that specifies what something (in this case, a browser) should do. A standard could be, as in W3C standards, a standard way of doing something, or it could be a standard against which something is measured. Standards-compliant code is not code which is "up to standard," but code that follows the standard way of using CSS, HTML, etc. -- well-formed, no errors, not relying on proprietary features, etc. A standards-compliant browser is one which complies with the standard way of displaying CSS, HTML, etc.
EvilML is a great example of the two meanings of standard: it's standards-compliant, as it's a valid HTML 4.01 Strict document. But I wouldn't consider it "up to standard" in terms of good coding practices, cross-browser or not.
OK, now you're just being silly. Semantics are great for maintenance, search-friendly sites, and producing clean code, but they're on the content side. CSS is the presentation side. But I suppose you get bonus points for buzzword use.
No, not even Opera. Keep in mind that Acid2 is not a compliance test. It tells you that the browser handles a certain set of HTML, CSS, protocols and errors properly, but it doesn't indicate full and/or proper implementation of any level of CSS.
There's a great set of comparisons at WebDevout.net (surf around the site for more detailed tables). Opera 9 is certainly in the lead with 94% of CSS 2.1 by that site's metrics, compared to 90% for Firefox 1.5, 57% for IE7 and 51% for IE6. But none of the browsers makes it to 100%.
Liar? Fake?
That post is 99% true. The missing 1% is that I mistakenly typed RFID when I meant EAS. If you had been paying any attention, you would have seen that I had already pointed out my mistake. Maybe it's not EAS. Whatever the underlying technology, it was the tag that causes the alarm to go off when you walk through the detectors in front of the door, and that can be deactivated at checkout.
As for the guy who didn't look at my receipt -- again, if you'd been paying attention, you might have noticed that it was another incident at another store from another chain in a different retail market two years ago, so I don't think the yellow or white shirt is relevant.
I didn't describe any sort of "case," so I can only assume you're reading something else into the post.
What makes you so certain that the events didn't occur exactly as described (short of the already corrected RFID/EAS typo)? What makes you consider accounts of false positives with anti-shoplifting technology to be "dumbass?" And what makes you so quick to pull out insults? Do you take it personally that I described a partial breakdown of the loss prevention policies at your employer -- even one which was resolved quickly, and probably wasn't at your branch of the store?
D'oh! s/RFID/EAS/
I can think of a number of times when I've bought something and the clerk -- whether new to the job, distracted, or just lazy -- has forgotten to deactivate or remove the RFID tag, and I've walked toward the front door and had the alarm go off.
The most recent was just two days ago -- I'd ordered a DVD on sale from Best Buy's website, and chose the store pickup option. Basically you choose a nearby store, they hold it for you at the customer service counter, and you walk in with your order info and pick up the item and a receipt. The customer service people presumably hadn't been trained to deactivate it, and I certainly didn't have any reason to go through the line -- I'd paid for it already, after all -- and the greeter/receipt checker certainly had no reason to think that it hadn't already been deactivated. It wasn't a big deal, as the guy had already seen my receipt and just took it over to the counter to deactivate it, but it was still an easily-avoidable false alarm.
The worst are clothing and/or department stores, especially around holidays. A couple of years ago I bought an item at Robinson's May on the second floor, walked downstairs, walked out the door, had the alarms go off -- and no one reacted. OK, I had a store bag, but if I'd been a shoplifter, I could have walked right off and no one would have noticed, despite the blaring alarm. I went back and forth a few times to make sure it was my bag, then went to the nearest cash register -- note, not anywhere near where I paid for it -- told them what had happened, and they didn't even check my receipt before pulling it out and removing the tag.
I've been at other clothing stores and heard the shoplifter alarm go off repeatedly during a half-hour stay. I think I've only seen an employee approach someone once. I assume this means there are so many false alarms that they have no sense of urgency when an alarm goes off, because most of the time, it's a customer who is going to come back of their own volition so they can get the tag removed and actually wear whatever it is. It's just sound and fury.
You can have the greatest detection tech in the world, but if people don't use it properly, it won't help one bit.
But isn't the purpose of copyright to extend legal protection beyond "controlled, private distribution"?
After all, photocopiers, VCRs, audio tape recorders, CD/DVD writers -- heck, the printing press -- mean that distribution is no longer controlled or private, unless you restrict access to people who can use them. (Or you try to make it technically difficult via DRM, but that's only a temporary hurdle.) Every technological advance in information distribution has put that distribution into the hands of more people, loosening the distribution control. That's the "wants to be free" half of the slogan that often gets tossed around without the second half, that information "also wants to be expensive."
Copyright, at its core, says, "OK, it's technically easy for you to copy this and redistribute it, but we're going to declare it illegal for you to do so without permission except under very specific circumstances."
The medium -- broadcast, network, paper or plastic -- is irrelevant. Unless you think that the Internet is somehow the ultimate expression of free information, and distribution technology can't get any more "free" than this. 'Cause, you know, everything worth inventing already has been, and 640K should be enough for anyone, especially with that world market for 3, maybe 5 computers.
I recently discovered exactly how the Wayback Machine deals with changes to robots.txt.
First, some background. I have a weblog I've been running since 2002, switching from B2 to WordPress and changing the permalink structure twice (with appropriate HTTP redirects each time) as nicer structures became available. Unfortunately, some spiders kept hitting the old URLs over and over again, despite the fact that they forwarded with a 301 permanent redirect to the new locations. So, foolishly, I added the old links to robots.txt to get the spiders to stop.
Flash forward to earlier this week. I've made a post on Slashdot, which reminds me of a review I did of Might and Magic IX nearly four years ago. I head to my blog, pull up the post... and to my horror, discover that it's missing half a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph and I don't remember the sense of what I originally wrote!
My backups are too recent (ironic, that), so I hit the Wayback Machine. They only have the post going back to 2004, which is still missing the chunk of text. Then I remember that the link structure was different, so I try hitting the oldest archived copies of the main page, and I'm able to pull up the summary with a link to the original location. I click on it... and I see:
Excluded by robots.txt (or words to that effect).
Now this is a page that was not blocked at the time that ia_archiver spidered it, but that was later blocked. The Wayback machine retroactively blocked access to the page based on the robots.txt content. I searched through the documentation and couldn't determine whether the data had actually been removed or just blocked, so I decided to alter my site's robots.txt file, fire off a request for clarification, and see what happened.
As it turns out, several days later, they unblocked the file, and I was able to restore the missing text.
In summary, the Wayback Machine will block end-users from accessing anything that is in your current robots.txt file. If you remove the restriction from your robots.txt, it will re-enable access, but only if it had archived the page in the first place.
Not sure, but the recent nightlies on Linux do seem more responsive than beta 1 was.
On the issue of tab switching being slow, there were some GTK-related bugs in 1.5.0 that have been fixed in one of the point releases. I don't remember whether switching was affected, but dragging tabs would sometimes lock the browser up for several seconds until the bug was fixed.
Obviously he's going to have to be recast. From what I hear, the front runner is Hayden Christensen. Supposedly, the plot is about the Firefox being tempted by the dark side of commerce.
Allow me to direct you to the Off By One Browser. It's a fast, bare-bones, no-frills, no-nonsense browser.
Or, if you're on Linux, take a look at Dillo.
You'll find both browsers quite capable by the standards you requested.
Fortunately, there's also a drop-down menu of all open tabs at the far right of the tab bar, which will probably get a lot more use than those arrows.
Not much loss on Mac, since the Mac version doesn't use an installer. It's just a disk image that you open and drag the app to the Applications folder. (This is pretty standard on Mac. Install is frequently just drag-n-drop.)
This may affect Linux, at least people who download and install it instead of using their distro-provided version. You used to have the option to choose between an installer or just a tar archive of the app itself, but lately I've only seen the tar archive. I wonder if anyone has any stats on what percentage of Firefox-on-Linux users install it themselves?
Theory is great, but experimental evidence (if gathered properly) trumps it every time. In this case, they did a usability study and found that many people were better able to deal with the close button on the tab.
Personally, I find it annoying, and prefer the old behavior. But it's also surprisingly easy to get used to after you use it for a while.
I wonder if there's something special about Firefox that makes people confuse "a file with that name exists on the primary FTP site" with "it's released." I've seen it happen with several Firefox releases, but I can't think of anything else where people have so consistently jumped the gun.
I actually find Firefox is the simplest browser to get cookies to do what I want.
Basically, I tell it to accept all cookies, but only for this browser session. I then create a list of exceptions for sites that I want to be able to keep cookies until their normal expiration date.
That way any site that requires cookies will work, and the moment I close Firefox, I'm back to only the cookies on sites I'm willing to trust.
Opera has a similar feature, which will delete any new cookies on exit, but it's a little trickier to get to work in the same way. Instead of just making a whitelist of sites, you have to disable the checkbox, visit the site you trust, then re-enable it.
Sure, but you'll need to have the Tengwar fonts installed in order to read it.
Oh, sorry, I thought you said "Elvish." My mistake.