Anyway, 5 different themes, researching table-less design, etc. You know what? I had to put divs all over the place instead of tables.
Really? Most of the CSS-layout pages I design have three, maybe four DIVs. You should look into that, I bet you can get rid of quite a few of them.
Multi-column layouts are annoying as hell. Yeah, they're annoying in tables too, but damn. That's why there's entire web pages devoted to getting away from tables with weird, complicated CSS
First of all, a few years ago I found tables to be "weird and complicated". Then I spent some time learning how to use them and now they make sense. Ditto for CSS; it took a little while and sme practice before I really got to know how it worked, but now those multi-column layouts seem almost intuitive. Also, I believe CSS3 is introducing new features specifically to make column layouts easier. Remember when complaining that CSS isn't a dead standard.
Example 1: I want to make a form. Forms look nice if the labels are all lined up and all the form elements are lined up. Let's assume I want a page that can have varying size text (which is what people say should be allowed with css).. Ah fuck, can't use divs here. Oh well. I tried. From what I've found, there's no way to link the size of one div to the size of the others in a way that makes logical sense to the document format and flow.
I'd like you to elaborate on this one.
Example 3: Picture page. Captions on the bottom of thumbnails.
The float method does work pretty well. Check out this tutorial. And what's this about an extra line screwing it up? Are you specifying fixed heights for your DIVs or something funky?
Personally I'm a fan of CSS because it makes my layouts much more flexible (I can switch around stylesheets and such with amazing ease) and my markup much more readable. You can have my CSS when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
30M is far from trivial, especially for a "lightweight" browser. I've used complete operating systems that didn't eat 30M of hard drive; why should a Web browser get away with it?
Also, on a low-end or older machine, 30M can be a significant space investment. I've got Linux boxes with drives in the hundreds of megabyes range; 30M ain't so trivial on one of those.
The size. Sure, the tarball isn't that big, but when I unpack it on my Linux system it eats up almost 30M of space. That's ridiculous for the supposedly "lighter" Mozilla browser.
I can't remove the Bookmarks Toolbar folder from my bookmarks. I don't use this feature and don't want that folder cluttering up my bookmarks.
While I'm talking about bookmarks, the bookmark editor is still a little flaky. For the longest time, the nightly builds wouldn't let me add or impott bookmarks at all; with 0.6, I couldn't import my bookmarks.html the first time I popped open the bookmark editor, but it worked the second time. What's up with that?
UI responsiveness: the prefs window is way too slow to load, especially the fonts panel.
Galeon has a "close" widget on every tab. That's an incredibly useful thing.
For now, I'll stick with Galeon. Firebird has promise, though, and when it gets closer to 1.0 I'll check it out again.
I wonder if IBM just a warm up for even bigger fish over in Redmond? And to raise capital for the battle.
IBM isn't exactly a "little fish". More of a sleeping giant that you don't want to wake because it will crush you like a bug; IBM's legal department is going to make everybody at SCO hurt. A lot.
Nothing against blogs, but you never know where this material came from.
While Orlowski's article which cites a Slashdot comment as the brunt of its argument is obviously quality stuff you'd want to have come up high in your searches, right?
Blogs are like any other sort of site; you'll get a lot of idiots who don't know what they're talking about, and a few gems who do their homework and cite everything properly. And *gasp* those are the people who tend to get linked to the most, which I believe figures into something search-related; I know I've read about it somewhere . . . oh yeah, it's called PageRank.
This solves their problem with bloggers manipulating search results
What problem? If there were really some awful "blog noise problem" as Orlowski thinks, Google would have done something about it, in much the same way that they deal with the Googlebombers. The folks trying to manipulate search results are still overwhelmingly commercial sites; just in the past few days I've been getting a lot of hits from a tool intended for just that purpose.
Is the New York Times full of crap too, after interviewing you Evan?
Well, let's see . . . Evan founded a company that is now part of Google, which may well have been bought so Google would be able to do neat things with blogs. Not to mention he still works on the stuff.
Orlowski took one sentence from a Reuters story saying that Google will offer a blog-searching tool at some point in the future, performed additional research in the form of reading a Slashdot comment, and deduced that Google will axe blogs from the main search
Hmmmm . . . which one is likely to be full of crap . . . I just can't decide . . .
Oh wait, it's just Andrew "I hate blogs sooooooo much" Orlowski trolling again. Never mind.
I don't know what comment you think you're responding to . . . the post I replied to claimed that making modifications to GPL code somehow means you must distribute its source, which is not true. You only have to give people the source if you give them a binary, and then you only have to give it to people to whom you've provided a binary. Parent poster seemed to think making any changes under the GPL mandates worldwide distribution, which is incorrect; you can make all the changes you want and keep them to yourself.
So show it in your comment. Practically every other sentence on the Synapse site is "we don't use a central databse" or "this only relies on the songs you choose to play" yet you started spouting off about it judging "collective tastes" having it judge from what you download. How else are people supposed to take that?
As to the question of providers, I'm amused that you assume the only way to obtain music is through commercial channels. Unless you mean to claim that all music is by definition commercial, ou need to broaden your horizons.
Sigh. RTFA. Or if you're too lazy, just listen up:
The problem I see with The Brain is that it doesn't seem to factor out the correlation between music availability and the number of times it's downloaded. Hence, our collective "tastes" are based on what MP3 providers are pushing down our throats.
No, because this isn't based on downloads. Or on collective taste. You play songs in your mp3 player, it pays attention to what you listen to and when, and tries to figure out what you want to hear. Simple idea, shame you missed it.
If you ran The Brain on only MP3.com Top Playlists, I suspect only the sponsored songs would make it to the final stream selections.
Huh? Well, maybe in your world, but back here in the land of people who read shit before they spout off we noticed that, hey, that'd only happen if you were a dumbass and consistenly played the sponsored songs. If you don't play the song, neither does the Brain.
The architects of the GRand Unified Bootloader posted to the mozillazine forums today, flaming the choice of the name "grub" for this new system and calling for spamming of all grub-related discussion boards in retaliation.
I'm sitting here, finishing up my thesis which is due next week, happily talking about the argument from design and generally relying on the fact that the multiple-universes model is unverifiable and thus irrelevant to my argument. Then I take a break to glance at Slashdot and what do I see?
I know that Mozilla is usually advertised as "test platform" but that doesn't mean that it also should serve as a point of frustration for those who would like to be able to count on a feature existing from one dot release to another.
Considering the change you're complaining about was made for usability reasons, do you really want Moz to keep a bad usability situation just so you don't have to make a small change in automated tester?
Opera's nice, but Opera 7 has two show-stoppers for me. First it doesn't have Mozilla's standards-fascist XHTML rendering (if I serve Moz XHTML with the correct MIME-type, it'll validate and tell me where any errors are).
Second, it has a behavior that's personally annoying to me; Opera emulates the Windows "single click in the address bar selects the entire address" behavior, which is frankly stupid under X where that has the side effect of overwriting the clipboard.
The other problem with the source viewer is that Mozilla goes to the server to grab the source, not using the exact source displayed on the screen if you're using dynamic server side variables
As a couple people have already pointed out, if you're serving XHTML with the proper MIME-type of "application/xhtml+xml", Mozilla will show you XML parsing and well-formedness errors instead of trying to render the page; there's a good article on the XHTML MIME-type along with instructions on how to serve that MIME-type only to browsers which understand it over at XML.com.
I believe so, but also the old Netscape code was simply incompatible with, say, a working CSS implementation. Everything I've ever seen claimed it was just simpler to start over.
Now, it seems, they've got a pretty good HTML/CSS/DOM implementation and want to organize it so they won't ever have to do that again; one of the prime rationales they keep listing is the ability to maintain and extend the codebase in the future, which is something that the old Navigator code apparently couldn't do.
I've also been using it since the "M" days. Back then I had three POP3 accounts, for example, worked fine for me. What was your problem?
As for JavaScript and plugins in e-mail, those are security issues waiting to happen. If you know someone who sends messages which are utterly dependent on plugins/scripting, please beat him/her with a large cluestick. Also, that argument falls into the mentality of "someone might want feature x, so we must include it in the default installation", which is the original reason why Mozilla is a bloated, slow app suite in desperate need of reorganization.
Finally, you're jumping to conclusions. You seem to assume that the features you want are not going to be supported, which is simply contrary to everything the roadmap is telling you. The sky isn't falling.
Hm. Well, personally I've had issues with Opera. The Linux versions have craptastic font support, and its CSS support has issues. You claim on your page that Opera 7 has only 6 "minor" CSS problems. First result of a Google search for Opera 7 CSS bugs gave me a page that listed 32. Whoops.
As for Opera's "clean, intuitive" interface (another claim from your page), you might check out Matthew Thomas' claim that Opera is the only UI worse than Mozilla's.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Most of the CSS-layout pages I design have three, maybe four DIVs. You should look into that, I bet you can get rid of quite a few of them.
Multi-column layouts are annoying as hell. Yeah, they're annoying in tables too, but damn. That's why there's entire web pages devoted to getting away from tables with weird, complicated CSS
First of all, a few years ago I found tables to be "weird and complicated". Then I spent some time learning how to use them and now they make sense. Ditto for CSS; it took a little while and sme practice before I really got to know how it worked, but now those multi-column layouts seem almost intuitive. Also, I believe CSS3 is introducing new features specifically to make column layouts easier. Remember when complaining that CSS isn't a dead standard.
Example 1: I want to make a form. Forms look nice if the labels are all lined up and all the form elements are lined up. Let's assume I want a page that can have varying size text (which is what people say should be allowed with css).. Ah fuck, can't use divs here. Oh well. I tried. From what I've found, there's no way to link the size of one div to the size of the others in a way that makes logical sense to the document format and flow.
I'd like you to elaborate on this one.
Example 3: Picture page. Captions on the bottom of thumbnails.
The float method does work pretty well. Check out this tutorial. And what's this about an extra line screwing it up? Are you specifying fixed heights for your DIVs or something funky?
Personally I'm a fan of CSS because it makes my layouts much more flexible (I can switch around stylesheets and such with amazing ease) and my markup much more readable. You can have my CSS when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Also, on a low-end or older machine, 30M can be a significant space investment. I've got Linux boxes with drives in the hundreds of megabyes range; 30M ain't so trivial on one of those.
For now, I'll stick with Galeon. Firebird has promise, though, and when it gets closer to 1.0 I'll check it out again.
Favorite feature Firebird already has that Opera doesn't and never will: no cost, no ads.
IBM isn't exactly a "little fish". More of a sleeping giant that you don't want to wake because it will crush you like a bug; IBM's legal department is going to make everybody at SCO hurt. A lot.
While Orlowski's article which cites a Slashdot comment as the brunt of its argument is obviously quality stuff you'd want to have come up high in your searches, right?
Blogs are like any other sort of site; you'll get a lot of idiots who don't know what they're talking about, and a few gems who do their homework and cite everything properly. And *gasp* those are the people who tend to get linked to the most, which I believe figures into something search-related; I know I've read about it somewhere . . . oh yeah, it's called PageRank.
What problem? If there were really some awful "blog noise problem" as Orlowski thinks, Google would have done something about it, in much the same way that they deal with the Googlebombers. The folks trying to manipulate search results are still overwhelmingly commercial sites; just in the past few days I've been getting a lot of hits from a tool intended for just that purpose.
Well, let's see . . . Evan founded a company that is now part of Google, which may well have been bought so Google would be able to do neat things with blogs. Not to mention he still works on the stuff.
Orlowski took one sentence from a Reuters story saying that Google will offer a blog-searching tool at some point in the future, performed additional research in the form of reading a Slashdot comment, and deduced that Google will axe blogs from the main search
Hmmmm . . . which one is likely to be full of crap . . . I just can't decide . . .
Oh wait, it's just Andrew "I hate blogs sooooooo much" Orlowski trolling again. Never mind.
Seth Finkelstein investigates and finds it's a joke. Film at 11.
No, the l33t speakers are already urgently needed in other areas.
I don't know what comment you think you're responding to . . . the post I replied to claimed that making modifications to GPL code somehow means you must distribute its source, which is not true. You only have to give people the source if you give them a binary, and then you only have to give it to people to whom you've provided a binary. Parent poster seemed to think making any changes under the GPL mandates worldwide distribution, which is incorrect; you can make all the changes you want and keep them to yourself.
No, they'd be required to give it to anyone to whom they provided a binary. RTFL.
So show it in your comment. Practically every other sentence on the Synapse site is "we don't use a central databse" or "this only relies on the songs you choose to play" yet you started spouting off about it judging "collective tastes" having it judge from what you download. How else are people supposed to take that?
As to the question of providers, I'm amused that you assume the only way to obtain music is through commercial channels. Unless you mean to claim that all music is by definition commercial, ou need to broaden your horizons.
<flame type="obligatory">
Now, is that comparison counting the 150MB of KDE libs that have to be loaded just to start Noatun, or not?
</flame>
The problem I see with The Brain is that it doesn't seem to factor out the correlation between music availability and the number of times it's downloaded. Hence, our collective "tastes" are based on what MP3 providers are pushing down our throats.
No, because this isn't based on downloads. Or on collective taste. You play songs in your mp3 player, it pays attention to what you listen to and when, and tries to figure out what you want to hear. Simple idea, shame you missed it.
If you ran The Brain on only MP3.com Top Playlists, I suspect only the sponsored songs would make it to the final stream selections.
Huh? Well, maybe in your world, but back here in the land of people who read shit before they spout off we noticed that, hey, that'd only happen if you were a dumbass and consistenly played the sponsored songs. If you don't play the song, neither does the Brain.
Or not. What a difference maturity makes.
I'm waiting for the day when it's readable by meerkats.
I'm sitting here, finishing up my thesis which is due next week, happily talking about the argument from design and generally relying on the fact that the multiple-universes model is unverifiable and thus irrelevant to my argument. Then I take a break to glance at Slashdot and what do I see?
Considering the change you're complaining about was made for usability reasons, do you really want Moz to keep a bad usability situation just so you don't have to make a small change in automated tester?
Second, it has a behavior that's personally annoying to me; Opera emulates the Windows "single click in the address bar selects the entire address" behavior, which is frankly stupid under X where that has the side effect of overwriting the clipboard.
Using Moz 1.2.1, I'm not seeing this problem.
As a couple people have already pointed out, if you're serving XHTML with the proper MIME-type of "application/xhtml+xml", Mozilla will show you XML parsing and well-formedness errors instead of trying to render the page; there's a good article on the XHTML MIME-type along with instructions on how to serve that MIME-type only to browsers which understand it over at XML.com.
Now, it seems, they've got a pretty good HTML/CSS/DOM implementation and want to organize it so they won't ever have to do that again; one of the prime rationales they keep listing is the ability to maintain and extend the codebase in the future, which is something that the old Navigator code apparently couldn't do.
As for JavaScript and plugins in e-mail, those are security issues waiting to happen. If you know someone who sends messages which are utterly dependent on plugins/scripting, please beat him/her with a large cluestick. Also, that argument falls into the mentality of "someone might want feature x, so we must include it in the default installation", which is the original reason why Mozilla is a bloated, slow app suite in desperate need of reorganization.
Finally, you're jumping to conclusions. You seem to assume that the features you want are not going to be supported, which is simply contrary to everything the roadmap is telling you. The sky isn't falling.
As for Opera's "clean, intuitive" interface (another claim from your page), you might check out Matthew Thomas' claim that Opera is the only UI worse than Mozilla's.