# RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards Again, this confuses me. In Firefox 1.5, clicking a feed showed you the raw markup. Now, we show you a page that allows you to pass the feed off to a reader of your choice, be it the built-in Live Bookmarks functionality or some other feed reader. In what way is this a "step backwards"? Perhaps the author meant to say that RSS handling did not extend to incorporating a full-blown reader in the browser, to which I say: there is no aspect of a feed reader that we are better-suited to implement than other application and webpage creators are, so it is much better to let them create great readers and focus on helping users find them.
Click this link in FF1.5. The link has a stylesheet associated, so shows up neatly with the information included. From what I hear, this stylesheet information is ignored by FF2.0 (?).
Weak antiphishing: there was none before, now he's complaining it's weak. Get lost.
If you were thinking of upgrading in order to benefit from it, and find that it isn't useful, you've wasted your time. I think his concerns are overblown, but it's a valid point.
3). Confusing Options dialog: hell, have you ever really gone through IE's Tools->Internet options ? Thought so. Anyway, it's really hard to spot well designed dialogs these days. Not a reason for not using the browser. Crap.
I know at least one person who tried out the beta who won't be upgrading because of this. The problem, he said, is that options have been moved off it that were on it before. He doesn't want to have to use about:config, because he doesn't want to have to spend hours digging around for information on it.
4). Compatible extensions: man, people need some time for updating their extensions, but they are quick, e.g. all my extensions have been upgraded in a few days. But, if you're willing, in most cases you can fix them on your own.
Whether its unfair or not to complain, it's still a reason people might want to hold off on upgrading. Fixing them yourself isn't an option for most people; they don't have the time to learn everything they'd need to know about XPI packages, XUL, etc.
5). Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things ?
You'd be surprised. Everyone I know does this. Hibernate is a useful feature that a huge number of people are using now. And if you're hibernating your PC, why would you shut your web browser down?
Most people only have 256MB of RAM at the moment, so even if FF only grows to about 180 or so (which can happen within a couple of days) it's a problem.
All in all, useless site, mostly useless points, definitely useless advice. The advice is useful to some people. Not you, probably not me, but certainly there are a lot of people who will be bothered by these problems.
-"I don't like the theme." ORLY well how is that IE theme support working out for you?
(1) The article advocates sticking with FF1.5, not switching to IE. (2) "The new theme is [...] inconsistent on different platforms" is an objective criticism, not subjective. The other two criticisms may be subjective, but at least the first is one that's likely to be shared by a large number of users.
-"The anti phishing is weak!" ---compared to what? The antiphishing in 1.5?
The anti-phishing feature is a primary reason many will be upgrading. If there are problems with it, they may wish to delay their upgrades until a better version has been released.
OTOH, I'm not sure a better solution to the problem than blacklisting will become available any time soon, and I don't personally share the concerns that have been expressed over google's system. Google could already track a large proportion of my web browsing habits if they wanted to. I don't really care.
-"Extensions did not automagically compatible-ize themselves!" This is a good reason not to upgrade immediately. I'm personally deferring my upgrade until the compatibility issues with a lot of the extensions are ironed out.
-"I don't understand the options screen!" BWAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! This can't be serious. When I tried out one of the betas, I found the options screen to be badly designed, missing several key features that were present in earlier versions, and all-in-all a step backwards. For people who are scared of about:config (and its resemblance to the windows registry scares a lot of people), this is a serious problem.
-"I don't like the RSS thingy! IE does it better!" Where was it again that RSS originated? Users don't care who came up with the idea. They only care whose implementation is best. The commenter seems to think that not only is IE's support better, so is FF1.5's. I haven't tried IE's or FF2's, so can't comment, but the criticism sounds valid.
You make the list of criticisms sound whiney. It isn't. It's a list of valid complaints, each of which means that some people who would otherwise upgrade to FF2.0 might not want to. Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone.
OK, I misread the specs. However, if you look at the cost of video cards with varying amounts of memory, you can start to get an idea of how expensive the memory on them is. For instance, I can get a 7800GTX-based card with 256MB for £336.00. The next card up is a 7950GTX, but let's ignore that difference and concentrate on its 512MB. It costs £355.16. That's a difference of just under £20 for 1/4 gig. This suggests that the RAM used on these cards costs about £80/GB. My best price for DDR667 RAM is £64/GB. It's not going to drive the cost of a system up by much if this RAM is used on the main system. Or if the processor has a 512MB cache of the stuff right next to it, or something.
Even if the platters were essentially weightless, the motor components require power to spin.
A less powerful motor requires less power to spin, because it can have fewer turns on its coils. I can see that motor that needs to turn a tenth of the total mass might well run at twice the speed for only half the power consumption.
A head, especially one that has to follow a 30kRPM wobblin' taco, requires a complicated gimbal suspension mechanism and arm
A flexible disc surface may be manipulated via an appropriate aerodynamic head design so that it is sucked to an appropriate distance from the heads, reducing the required complexity of the head mounting mechanism.
How do the lighter platters save energy in a constant velocity system?
1. You're assuming a perfect system. In reality, much of the platter's momentum will be lost to vibrations which will dissipate throughout the system. These vibrations will be substantially reduced by lighter platters.
2. Because you don't use it as a constant velocity system. As well as decreasing spin-up power, it also decreases spin-up time. This makes it more viable to spin the disks down when they're not being used.
Real world problems my @$$. I know hardly anything about web development, but just for the heck of it, I did a one page implementation of an xhtml/css webpage* a month back.
You see, that was your mistake. Real-world web developers don't use XHTML, because IE doesn't support it so well.
It seems IE7 may be fixing some of these problems, from all I've read about it. Understanding that an XML declaration at the start of the file shouldn't put the browser into quirks mode is certainly a welcome development. But it'll still be a few years before I feel comfortable suggesting to my business partners that we should concentrate on XHTML. HTML4 and (limited) CSS2 is where the commercial web dev world is at the moment, and progress is currently slow.
You're misunderstanding his answer. What he seemed to me to mean was "Internet Explorer is part of Windows, therefore you need a Windows license to run it. We don't want to give away those licenses. Therefore we're going to do what we can to prevent people running it without one, and if that means making it incompatible with compatibility layers, that's the way the world is."
Despite the fact that desktop web applications are only now becoming a commonplace development system, and that browsers are now adding features (like the Canvas element, advanced storage systems and networking interface specifications that the W3C Web Applications Working Group are designing) that are key features to enabling this revolution?
No, that threat is ten times more real today than it ever was back then.
I am utterly AMAZED that he actually suggested browsercam. Yeah, the site is a good idea, but who has non-interactive sites anymore? If I want to develop my site with ANY javascript, I need an actual browser to test it in.
If you search for them, there are services based on the browsercam model that offer VNC connections rather than static images back. As a Windows/Linux developer, I've successfully used such services to add Safari support to our applications before now. I'm sure it'll work the other way around, too.
If it was '95 and Firefox *was* available, I still don't suspect you'd be running it on your fairly impressive (for the time) 486DX2/100 with 32 megs of RAM.
that still has a problem (for the common user) that spyware could silently modify the trusted keys to include
You should have to sign keys yourself to add them to the trusted list. So when it detected a key on removable media, this system would pop up a dialog asking for you to re-enter your password to verify you wanted to add the keys to your list.
Well, yes, but you'd use it in combination with another kind of attack (e.g. DNS poisoning) to redirect people to your servers when they enter the correct domain name. Yes, it's harder than traditional phishing techniques, but I suspect it would be a lot more effective.
Now, if the system were arranged so that for routine matters you could just go into Court yourself and put your case plainly without fearing for your life, the demand for lawyers would be reasonable, and their price more in line with the value of their service.
Have you ever tried? I don't know a lot about US procedure, but over here in the UK it's actually fairly easy to go to court without a lawyer, and they do a lot to make it easier. And our legal systems are pretty similar to each other, when you look at them...
Why has the IE team ignored this critical standard?
At a guess, it was because hacks like the one you point out work in most cases, and they preferred to work on features that couldn't easily be emulated in script.
Frankly, I disagree with that site's assessments of a lot of stuff. For instance, they give IE 50% for support of 'background-position', because it calculates position relative to the outside of the border rather than the outside of the padding. Honestly, there's a lot more that *could* be wrong with it, so I think losing 50% for a minor bug like this is a little picky. IE also loses a lot of points for accepting syntactically invalid structures and treating them as if they were valid. What happened to the principle of being permissive in what you accept?
They've also given IE an 'N' for inherit in every type, whereas I'd suggest giving it a 'partial' as it supports _implicit_ inheritance of attributes, just not explicit. If they're counting it the way I think they are, that single decision has made a difference of about 10% in total score. Doesn't seem reasonable to me that IE has lost that much for a single missing rarely-used feature.
It also seems to be missing some mozilla bugs, e.g. the one where a float positioned next to a table that's too wide for the remaining space will overlap the table rather than move the table down to below the float.
Revolution X was a good game. Or at least the coin-op version was. Might have been a bit shit on a console though. And that thing the reviewer says about it being lame 'cause you can start again from where you died... works beautifully if you have to pump coins into the machine to do it.
Huh? All the systems on this lineup use standard PC3200 (DDR400) RAM. Which is the same RAM that you could use as system RAM with many motherboards (e.g. this one). I don't see why the RAM would be faster on the video card than in the main system...?
Also, a GPU inside the CPU would get to benefit from the CPU's cache, which would usually contain any data that had recently been modified by the main redraw thread, thus eliminating the need to go out to get data from that memory. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like a 25% reduction in the amount of memory access the GPU needs to perform.
What you've suggested is already done by low end accelerators like the Intel GMA 950. Works ok, but as I said, slow.
The reason this is slow is (a) that it's an intel GPU, and they've never been any good anyway, and (b) that it has to contend with the CPU for access. If you integrate the two into a single component with an nVidia designed GPU, I don't see any reason it couldn't perform as well as current separate systems do. And cost significantly less, and use less power.
Ah, ignore me. They're using a bizarre CVS/Web gateway that lists deleted files inline with ones that are still in the current version but with a different icon. And doesn't mention that they're deleted on the log page for them. Strange.
Memory size and bandwidth are the usual limitations. Remember that if you want 2x AA, you double your memory usage, and if you want 4x AA, you quadruple it. So, that game that needed 128 megs on the video card, with 4x AA, can suddenly need 512.
Of course with the GPU integrated into the CPU you wouldn't need card-based RAM at all. You'd process your video on system RAM, and it would be as fast as the GPU accessing its own RAM at the moment is (not shit like shared-memory video cards are at the moment). This results in flexibility: if you're only using 128MB of RAM for your graphics, you can reuse the other 384MB as additional system RAM.
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License-free drugs are substantially more important to the public good than license-free Milli Vanilli.
# RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards
Again, this confuses me. In Firefox 1.5, clicking a feed showed you the raw markup. Now, we show you a page that allows you to pass the feed off to a reader of your choice, be it the built-in Live Bookmarks functionality or some other feed reader. In what way is this a "step backwards"? Perhaps the author meant to say that RSS handling did not extend to incorporating a full-blown reader in the browser, to which I say: there is no aspect of a feed reader that we are better-suited to implement than other application and webpage creators are, so it is much better to let them create great readers and focus on helping users find them.
Click this link in FF1.5. The link has a stylesheet associated, so shows up neatly with the information included. From what I hear, this stylesheet information is ignored by FF2.0 (?).
Weak antiphishing: there was none before, now he's complaining it's weak. Get lost.
If you were thinking of upgrading in order to benefit from it, and find that it isn't useful, you've wasted your time. I think his concerns are overblown, but it's a valid point.
3). Confusing Options dialog: hell, have you ever really gone through IE's Tools->Internet options ? Thought so. Anyway, it's really hard to spot well designed dialogs these days. Not a reason for not using the browser. Crap.
I know at least one person who tried out the beta who won't be upgrading because of this. The problem, he said, is that options have been moved off it that were on it before. He doesn't want to have to use about:config, because he doesn't want to have to spend hours digging around for information on it.
4). Compatible extensions: man, people need some time for updating their extensions, but they are quick, e.g. all my extensions have been upgraded in a few days. But, if you're willing, in most cases you can fix them on your own.
Whether its unfair or not to complain, it's still a reason people might want to hold off on upgrading. Fixing them yourself isn't an option for most people; they don't have the time to learn everything they'd need to know about XPI packages, XUL, etc.
5). Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things ?
You'd be surprised. Everyone I know does this. Hibernate is a useful feature that a huge number of people are using now. And if you're hibernating your PC, why would you shut your web browser down?
Most people only have 256MB of RAM at the moment, so even if FF only grows to about 180 or so (which can happen within a couple of days) it's a problem.
All in all, useless site, mostly useless points, definitely useless advice.
The advice is useful to some people. Not you, probably not me, but certainly there are a lot of people who will be bothered by these problems.
-"I don't like the theme." ORLY well how is that IE theme support working out for you?
(1) The article advocates sticking with FF1.5, not switching to IE.
(2) "The new theme is [...] inconsistent on different platforms" is an objective criticism, not subjective. The other two criticisms may be subjective, but at least the first is one that's likely to be shared by a large number of users.
-"The anti phishing is weak!" ---compared to what? The antiphishing in 1.5?
The anti-phishing feature is a primary reason many will be upgrading. If there are problems with it, they may wish to delay their upgrades until a better version has been released.
OTOH, I'm not sure a better solution to the problem than blacklisting will become available any time soon, and I don't personally share the concerns that have been expressed over google's system. Google could already track a large proportion of my web browsing habits if they wanted to. I don't really care.
-"Extensions did not automagically compatible-ize themselves!"
This is a good reason not to upgrade immediately. I'm personally deferring my upgrade until the compatibility issues with a lot of the extensions are ironed out.
-"I don't understand the options screen!" BWAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! This can't be serious.
When I tried out one of the betas, I found the options screen to be badly designed, missing several key features that were present in earlier versions, and all-in-all a step backwards. For people who are scared of about:config (and its resemblance to the windows registry scares a lot of people), this is a serious problem.
-"I don't like the RSS thingy! IE does it better!" Where was it again that RSS originated?
Users don't care who came up with the idea. They only care whose implementation is best. The commenter seems to think that not only is IE's support better, so is FF1.5's. I haven't tried IE's or FF2's, so can't comment, but the criticism sounds valid.
You make the list of criticisms sound whiney. It isn't. It's a list of valid complaints, each of which means that some people who would otherwise upgrade to FF2.0 might not want to. Obviously it doesn't apply to everyone.
OK, I misread the specs. However, if you look at the cost of video cards with varying amounts of memory, you can start to get an idea of how expensive the memory on them is. For instance, I can get a 7800GTX-based card with 256MB for £336.00. The next card up is a 7950GTX, but let's ignore that difference and concentrate on its 512MB. It costs £355.16. That's a difference of just under £20 for 1/4 gig. This suggests that the RAM used on these cards costs about £80/GB. My best price for DDR667 RAM is £64/GB. It's not going to drive the cost of a system up by much if this RAM is used on the main system. Or if the processor has a 512MB cache of the stuff right next to it, or something.
Even if the platters were essentially weightless, the motor components require power to spin.
A less powerful motor requires less power to spin, because it can have fewer turns on its coils. I can see that motor that needs to turn a tenth of the total mass might well run at twice the speed for only half the power consumption.
A head, especially one that has to follow a 30kRPM wobblin' taco, requires a complicated gimbal suspension mechanism and arm
A flexible disc surface may be manipulated via an appropriate aerodynamic head design so that it is sucked to an appropriate distance from the heads, reducing the required complexity of the head mounting mechanism.
How do the lighter platters save energy in a constant velocity system?
1. You're assuming a perfect system. In reality, much of the platter's momentum will be lost to vibrations which will dissipate throughout the system. These vibrations will be substantially reduced by lighter platters.
2. Because you don't use it as a constant velocity system. As well as decreasing spin-up power, it also decreases spin-up time. This makes it more viable to spin the disks down when they're not being used.
Real world problems my @$$. I know hardly anything about web development, but just for the heck of it, I did a one page implementation of an xhtml/css webpage* a month back.
You see, that was your mistake. Real-world web developers don't use XHTML, because IE doesn't support it so well.
It seems IE7 may be fixing some of these problems, from all I've read about it. Understanding that an XML declaration at the start of the file shouldn't put the browser into quirks mode is certainly a welcome development. But it'll still be a few years before I feel comfortable suggesting to my business partners that we should concentrate on XHTML. HTML4 and (limited) CSS2 is where the commercial web dev world is at the moment, and progress is currently slow.
You're misunderstanding his answer. What he seemed to me to mean was "Internet Explorer is part of Windows, therefore you need a Windows license to run it. We don't want to give away those licenses. Therefore we're going to do what we can to prevent people running it without one, and if that means making it incompatible with compatibility layers, that's the way the world is."
That threat no longer exists.
Despite the fact that desktop web applications are only now becoming a commonplace development system, and that browsers are now adding features (like the Canvas element, advanced storage systems and networking interface specifications that the W3C Web Applications Working Group are designing) that are key features to enabling this revolution?
No, that threat is ten times more real today than it ever was back then.
I am utterly AMAZED that he actually suggested browsercam. Yeah, the site is a good idea, but who has non-interactive sites anymore? If I want to develop my site with ANY javascript, I need an actual browser to test it in.
If you search for them, there are services based on the browsercam model that offer VNC connections rather than static images back. As a Windows/Linux developer, I've successfully used such services to add Safari support to our applications before now. I'm sure it'll work the other way around, too.
If it was '95 and Firefox *was* available, I still don't suspect you'd be running it on your fairly impressive (for the time) 486DX2/100 with 32 megs of RAM.
Wasn't it only later that they decided to bundle IE with Windows for free (version 3?), and therefore dominate the market by default?
IIRC, IE 2.0 was bundled with NT4, starting in late 95 (?).
Yes, it's called Hansard; you can access a searchable copy of it at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/.
that still has a problem (for the common user) that spyware could silently modify the trusted keys to include
You should have to sign keys yourself to add them to the trusted list. So when it detected a key on removable media, this system would pop up a dialog asking for you to re-enter your password to verify you wanted to add the keys to your list.
Well, yes, but you'd use it in combination with another kind of attack (e.g. DNS poisoning) to redirect people to your servers when they enter the correct domain name. Yes, it's harder than traditional phishing techniques, but I suspect it would be a lot more effective.
Now, if the system were arranged so that for routine matters you could just go into Court yourself and put your case plainly without fearing for your life, the demand for lawyers would be reasonable, and their price more in line with the value of their service.
Have you ever tried? I don't know a lot about US procedure, but over here in the UK it's actually fairly easy to go to court without a lawyer, and they do a lot to make it easier. And our legal systems are pretty similar to each other, when you look at them...
Why has the IE team ignored this critical standard?
At a guess, it was because hacks like the one you point out work in most cases, and they preferred to work on features that couldn't easily be emulated in script.
Frankly, I disagree with that site's assessments of a lot of stuff. For instance, they give IE 50% for support of 'background-position', because it calculates position relative to the outside of the border rather than the outside of the padding. Honestly, there's a lot more that *could* be wrong with it, so I think losing 50% for a minor bug like this is a little picky. IE also loses a lot of points for accepting syntactically invalid structures and treating them as if they were valid. What happened to the principle of being permissive in what you accept?
They've also given IE an 'N' for inherit in every type, whereas I'd suggest giving it a 'partial' as it supports _implicit_ inheritance of attributes, just not explicit. If they're counting it the way I think they are, that single decision has made a difference of about 10% in total score. Doesn't seem reasonable to me that IE has lost that much for a single missing rarely-used feature.
It also seems to be missing some mozilla bugs, e.g. the one where a float positioned next to a table that's too wide for the remaining space will overlap the table rather than move the table down to below the float.
Revolution X was a good game. Or at least the coin-op version was. Might have been a bit shit on a console though. And that thing the reviewer says about it being lame 'cause you can start again from where you died... works beautifully if you have to pump coins into the machine to do it.
System RAM is SLOW compared to GPU RAM.
Huh? All the systems on this lineup use standard PC3200 (DDR400) RAM. Which is the same RAM that you could use as system RAM with many motherboards (e.g. this one). I don't see why the RAM would be faster on the video card than in the main system...?
Also, a GPU inside the CPU would get to benefit from the CPU's cache, which would usually contain any data that had recently been modified by the main redraw thread, thus eliminating the need to go out to get data from that memory. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like a 25% reduction in the amount of memory access the GPU needs to perform.
What you've suggested is already done by low end accelerators like the Intel GMA 950. Works ok, but as I said, slow.
The reason this is slow is (a) that it's an intel GPU, and they've never been any good anyway, and (b) that it has to contend with the CPU for access. If you integrate the two into a single component with an nVidia designed GPU, I don't see any reason it couldn't perform as well as current separate systems do. And cost significantly less, and use less power.
Ah, ignore me. They're using a bizarre CVS/Web gateway that lists deleted files inline with ones that are still in the current version but with a different icon. And doesn't mention that they're deleted on the log page for them. Strange.
So why is there a copy of the GPL in their CVS?
Well, yeah, but you've never heard of one that can run Windows Vista before, I'll bet. :)
Memory size and bandwidth are the usual limitations. Remember that if you want 2x AA, you double your memory usage, and if you want 4x AA, you quadruple it. So, that game that needed 128 megs on the video card, with 4x AA, can suddenly need 512.
Of course with the GPU integrated into the CPU you wouldn't need card-based RAM at all. You'd process your video on system RAM, and it would be as fast as the GPU accessing its own RAM at the moment is (not shit like shared-memory video cards are at the moment). This results in flexibility: if you're only using 128MB of RAM for your graphics, you can reuse the other 384MB as additional system RAM.