One interesting point from the article..
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
...[The XBox's] costs are believed to be higher than Sony's, partly because of the hard drive and a version of its powerful Windows operating system included with each machine.
I can't help but wonder how much Microsoft is paying to license the "powerful Windows operating system" for each machine from itself. Development costs will surely have been an issue, but using it to explain the current loss is stretching it a little.
Anyway, the article is quite a good overview of the current console scene. I can't help but wonder, however, if Microsoft's "go it alone" strategy is the best choice, or whether they'd be better off licensing gaming technology to other manufacturers as they are planning for WMV (see link). It would reduce financial risk to them, mirrors their current strategy for OS dominance in the personal computer industry, and Nintendo has started to do this with its GameCube (Panasonic DVD/Gamecube combo). Or would this wind up suffering the same fate as the Nuon chipset?
Well, there's one IE emulation script here that I know of. It's a regular.JS script, designed more for designers to adapt scripts easily than for clients, but it shows off the advanced side of Moz's JS 1.5 support (getters/setters for properties...).
This brings up one of my older thoughts: you know how we can format sites with user-defined stylesheets, how about user-defined.JS files added to each page you load (without a local proxy)? Is it possible to add DOM properties with the user prefs JS files somehow? This could be very useful -- emulate IE, any other browser, customise the behaviour of any document function...
Mozilla and IE offer a reasonably full DOM model of every loaded page. Every tag is represented in there, and essentially all atributes are categorised and changeable. Done in realtime, too -- have a look at the JavaScript Object Browser script on my homepage.
Opera's JS documentation, meanwhile, can be browsed in about 10 minutes. It has light JS 1.1 support -- not all properties implemented, compared to Mozilla's full JS 1.5. Its DOM is inferior in places to Netscape 4 -- as of v6, you cannot yet dynamically create positioned elements, clip content, or replace content of elements. It can't even run the above script I linked -- it doesn't even index its DOM properties correctly, so you can't say "tell me all properties of the 'window' object" like you can in every other browser.
Don't even get me started on how Opera Lies, pretending to be IE and making it an incredible pain to code in workarounds for its shortcomings.
So yes, Opera has blazingly fast HTML+CSS support, but it has sacrified good JavaScript and DHTML abilities to get it -- it's about 5 years behind the 8-ball, depending on how you want to count it.
I'd recommend Mozilla for the moment for most sites, hopefully Opera 7 will improve on this situation sometime -- the Opera developers have said DOM support is part of their eventual plans.
I was thinking of a site I use, SmoothFTP which is an HTTP to FTP portal for those of us stuck behind squid proxies and firewalls. It opens up "uploading, please wait..." windows and closes them on completion. A reasonably obvious bug like that will probably make me wait for the v1.01 final release (not trying nightlies really, I use Moz for testing at the moment).
I run nine different browsers (NS4.0, 4.76, Moz 0.90 and 0.97, IE4, 5, 6, Opera 5 and 6, all under Win98) at home and file associations aren't that bad. Once you tell all your browsers not to keep re-associating on startup, you can basically associate.HTM and.HTML with one and let it rest -- others like.GIF and.JPG I leave with image editors, and forget about.MTHML and similar.
I forgot to mention one of the best things about Moz is that it's similar cross-platform -- design once, run anywhere. IE can claim not such honour, as anyone who has attempted to get complicated JavaScript/DHTML running on IE/Mac will attest;).
Indenting? I use [BLOCKQUOTE][I]text text text text[/I][/BLOCKQUOTE] and it seems to come out alright.
According to the release notes, there's one major bug that'll stop me from using tabs. Quoth the page:
While using tabbed browser, visiting a page which calls the window.close() method of JavaScript, the entire window will close, as opposed to the tab which contained the code.
Which affects quite a lot of sites -- many web services open and close status windows automatically.
The BugZilla article at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103452 (cut-n-paste, BugZilla doesn't like/. links) also has a few interesting comments at the bottom, it's fixed and targeted at 1.01 apparently, along with a big DHTML performance fix.
Also, the forthcoming XP service pack 1 will only allow you to remove the icons for browsers, a Reuters article here notes:
A new button on the Windows start menu, titled "set program access and defaults," allows users to choose between four default options: computer manufacturer choice; Microsoft only software; non-Microsoft software; and customized settings, which is the default choice.
So basically, it's nothing new for those of us familiar with deleting shortcuts and running the Mozilla installer.
Anyway, congrats to the Mozilla hackers on getting this far! I can't wait for the next few releases. Another bonus -- now the APIs are frozen, it should make projects like K-Meleon (a light MFC UI for the Moz engine for Win32) a lot easier.
Opera... I've got v5.12 and v6.00 installed at home, and am moderately impressed. It handles HTML and CSS pretty well (at least on most sites), but my major complaint is its JavaScript support.
Opera Lies. Default installs pretend to be IE, adjusting the userAgent string and adding some of IE's DOM properties. This isn't so bad... document.all works, for instance, but try something like document.body.insertAdjacentHTML and things will go belly up rapidly. Things like clipping, dynamic DIV creation and innerHTML are still not implemented -- as of v6 it's still playing catchup to Netscape 4 in these areas. So you need to detect Opera specifically in any advanced project to do workarounds.
A good test to distinguish between browsers used to be for document.createElement, which IE and NS6 support but Opera 5 didn't. For those of you not familiar with the DOM this allows you to create tags anytime and place them in the document. Run this in Opera 5 and 6:
alert(document.createElement);
and you'll find that v6 reports it exists. But it doesn't -- it's simply a blank function, to allow more pages to think they can run in Opera. This is pretty foolish -- if a coder like me decides a page requires that ability to run, why report that it exists when it clearly doesn't?
So in conclusion, hopefully Opear v7 will clear this up and implement proper DOM1 support (that is, beyond getElementById and similar). Until then, I'll browse with IE6 or Mozilla.
(Random note: Anyone know if Konqueror can or has been ported to Windows? I'd be interested to try that too as an alternative... and don't have the HD space for a Linux partition).
We went over PCR recently in a Biochemical Genetics lab. Apparently, the primer oligonucleotides can only be up to 3000 base pairs apart or so for the process to work effectively.
If this is the case, replicating the millions/billions of bases you'd have to recover to reconstruct the organism would surely be a daunting task.
Or are there any other PCR techniques more powerful than the standard 2nd year University ones we study? Would some Celera style shotgun approaches be applicable here?
I spotted this yesterday at Retuers, which has another article on it. One of the more interesting quotes from Jim Cullinan, lead product manager:
Service packs are meant to fix critical compatibility, reliability and security issues in a product until an updated version of it can be released.
"We've never issued a service pack for a general consumer" product, he said.
Hmm, I guess it must have been a case of mistaken identity when I downloaded that "Windows 98 Service Pack 1" at home from that renowned hax0r site "Windows Update".
Good to see Microsoft on the ball again, I'd hate to see them spreading FUD to look like they were going to extreme lengths to comply with the antitrust provisions.
Basically, it allows reading any given local file and browsing through the local folder tree in Mozilla -- the site mentions 1.0RC1 was tested and affected, it hasn't been updated since then.
It was discovered on the 30th of March, Netscape was informed on the 24th of April, and hadn't acknowledged the security researchers' notification within six days, so it was made public. (Cue flame war about MS's security woes...)
Pretty nasty... anyone with the new build care to test it?
The current series has a bad bug in DHTML animation performance that I've noticed -- performance regressed in the 0.97 -> 0.98 release, and ever since then rapid animations etc. have often not rendered correctly.
Read through the bugzilla entry there -- apparently some experimental builds have 450% increased JavaScript animation speed, some test are linked to try it out yourself. Does anyone more in touch with the Moz project internals than I have an idea as to when this will be integrated with the main branch of the code -- I heard 1.01 was the target a while back?
I say this as Moz is looking more and more likely to turn up on user's desktops as part of AOL/Compuserve/whatever as they escape from MS's browser licensing terms. Bugs in release candidates are fine (that's what they're there for) but if mass-market NS7 has shortfalls like these, it could spell trouble for JavaScript developers like me.
Anyway, more power to the Mozilla project! It's good to see a truly free, standards compliant, cross-platform browser out there. Looking back a year, I wonder what it'll be like in a year's time...
Ah, this reminds me of "Bearhugger's Homeopathic Whiskey" from the Discworld series....
A recent but short-lived line, which never caught on despite the best scientific recommendation, was Bearhugger's Homeopathic Sipping Whiskey. It is a founding fact of homeopathy that the effectiveness of a remedy increases with dilution. Jimkin decided, therefore, that this idea could profitably be applied to his own product. Strangely enough, the slogan 'Every drop diluted 1 Million Times!' failed to attract custom even though, in theory, merely being in the same room as an uncorked bottle of the stuff should make the purchaser riotously drunk.
Yep, the two browsers are very much different between platforms. It's an incredible pain actually debugging DHTML scripts between the two, especially if you consider IE4/Mac which has more bugs than your average ant colony.
IE5 on the Mac runs its own rendering engine called "Tasman". In fact, IE5/Mac was the first commerical browser to introduce full CSS1 compliance, meaning things like first-line or -letter psuedo classes and full support for 'float' etc.
IE5.5 and IE6 on Windows are pretty similar. The big advance on Windows was from IE5->5.5 which included the new CSS filter syntax (for fancy transitions and fades, the "whizz-bang Windows features" that never made the Mac version), more CSS compliance and importantly not having to start a new copy of the rendering engine for every frame. That means you can float divs over IFrames, something that Mozilla can do as well. (Like I said, they like playing catchup:). IE6 doesn't have a lot that's too new underneath the UI, just a few more DOM properties here and there (like 'backCompat' and implementation details), about the only major new feature is the "Media Bar". A supply of bug fixes in the future is the main reason why I upgraded:).
If you're really interested load up the "JS Object Browser" script from my homepage in each of the various browsers to inspect the DOMs.
First off, kudos to the Mozilla project team for getting this far... it's shaping up to be an excellent browser especially once you count the security track record of the opposition.
One question I have as a DHTML web designer, is that will v1.0 fix the DHTML timing issues? The v0.98 changelog indicated that "DHTML performance has regressed", which I can verify is putting it lightly -- one of my animations that revealed a DIV via clipping worked fluidly in Moz 0.97 and hardly at all in Moz 0.99, which still hasn't patched it. Check out the "Popup Menu v5" script on my homepage on a slower computer if you want to see what I mean.
A quick search of Bugzilla reveals some articles also mentioning this issue. Does anyone know what plans are afoot to improve this?
I hope DHTML performance improves before this tree is used for another NS6 or AOL browser release, as otherwise it could render some of the more technically involved sites unviewable. If anyone's more involved in Bugzilla than I and knows the bug ID that most work is going into, please post a link to vote for it, otherwise try this one:).
Apart from that, I'm finding new Mozilla releases to be strides above the versions this time last year. Hopefully once fully mature it'll be the cross-platform web page development environment of choice... that's one area in which IE can never beat it, with the huge differences between IE on Windows and Mac.
I have written a Hierarchial Menu script. And it took me quite a lot longer than 5 to 10 minutes.
Let me assure all the posters saying "I can do it in 30 seconds flat, it's just hiding DIVs" that menus like mine and HierMenus are quite a bit more than that. Yes, it's true that you *CAN* make a single-level popup where the triggers overlap the divs work in IE5+ and NS6 in a few minutes. But if you want multiple levels of autogenerating, correctly highlighting cascading menus working in as many browsers as possible, it's a decent coding effort.
You have to do everything 3 different ways for a start:
document.layers for NS4 document.all for IE4+ document.getElementById for IE5+ or NS6, Opera etc.
And that's just for getting references to page elements -- modifying them is another story entirely. Working around browser bugs takes anywhere from weeks to years -- I started the first version around Nov 2000, and am currently hacking away at the v5.1 script. Netscape 4 behaves differently with every different version, the platform of your computer, and it seems even the phase of the moon. Don't think about getting me started on IE on the Macintosh.
Check my homepage, and navigate in, it's called "Cascading Popup Menus". It works in Moz, NS4, IE4+ and Opera 5/6, Ihaven't tested Konq but I'd appreciate feedback. (End Shameless Promotion:)
For their price, it's probably pretty reasonable. Their menu is ~50k of JavaScript, mine is 12k but highly condensed. They used to give it away for free, as it was developed as a tutorial-like series of columns -- have a read through all the revisions before criticising Peter Belesis (the author).
As an experiment I wrote my own (smaller) banner-removal JavaScript and stuck the whole thing inline in the user box. It worked, but it's not going to stay there long, and I'm not going to post it here, as I respect the need of/. to be a self-sufficient business in its own right.
Before I do much else, one thing I would really like to know is... relatively how much does/. get paid per impression and per click? The ad-removal scripts hide the ads but they are still downloaded (unlike host files) so does/. get a manageable amount of money from that impression? Or is the site oly sustainable when the ads themselves are clicked?
If it is mostly on a per-click basis, I am seriously considering writing another script... that automatically detects the URL of the top banner ad via a bit of DOM manipulation in JavaScript and requests the document via a small IFrame in my user space. (This would work best for in-page images, iframe ads could get tricky if they're served off different domains). Think about it, supporting/. with every click... and seeing a few interesting products. I'd perhaps even include a small 'pop up larger window' link in there if it looks interesting.
Is anyone interested in this? It comes back to the per-impression or per-click issue, but I think it could be a useful trick.
My site opens external links in new windows. That's mostly because it uses DHTML pretty heavily as a presentation system, and standard navigation rules don't apply well... check it out, I'm giving away the scripts used.
But anyway, at least on my system, why not try dragging the link in question onto the browser address bar? That opens it up in the current window, no problems, no matter what collection of TARGETs or ONCLICKs the author has added to the A tag itself.
SmartIn Designs has an excellent list as well, one of the best host-blockers I have come across for this and I did used to maintain my own. DoubleClick, be gone.
Several formats and levels of protections are available, so check it out even for the docs. You'll probably want to trim it down a bit... the largest list is pretty damn large.
Anyone know of any other ones out there? I think using a CVS-like system to maintain a decentralised host blocking list could be a good idea... anyone trying this already?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, the article is quite a good overview of the current console scene. I can't help but wonder, however, if Microsoft's "go it alone" strategy is the best choice, or whether they'd be better off licensing gaming technology to other manufacturers as they are planning for WMV (see link). It would reduce financial risk to them, mirrors their current strategy for OS dominance in the personal computer industry, and Nintendo has started to do this with its GameCube (Panasonic DVD/Gamecube combo). Or would this wind up suffering the same fate as the Nuon chipset?
"Unnecessarily slow dripping mechanisms"? Bah!
Every serious Evil Overlord has long ago forsaken them in favour of things much more practical.
Plus, not only will your World Domination plans be more effective, they'll be cheaper too.
:)
Well, there's one IE emulation script here that I know of. It's a regular .JS script, designed more for designers to adapt scripts easily than for clients, but it shows off the advanced side of Moz's JS 1.5 support (getters/setters for properties...).
.JS files added to each page you load (without a local proxy)? Is it possible to add DOM properties with the user prefs JS files somehow? This could be very useful -- emulate IE, any other browser, customise the behaviour of any document function...
This brings up one of my older thoughts: you know how we can format sites with user-defined stylesheets, how about user-defined
Dynamic HTML support.
Mozilla and IE offer a reasonably full DOM model of every loaded page. Every tag is represented in there, and essentially all atributes are categorised and changeable. Done in realtime, too -- have a look at the JavaScript Object Browser script on my homepage.
Opera's JS documentation, meanwhile, can be browsed in about 10 minutes. It has light JS 1.1 support -- not all properties implemented, compared to Mozilla's full JS 1.5. Its DOM is inferior in places to Netscape 4 -- as of v6, you cannot yet dynamically create positioned elements, clip content, or replace content of elements. It can't even run the above script I linked -- it doesn't even index its DOM properties correctly, so you can't say "tell me all properties of the 'window' object" like you can in every other browser.
Don't even get me started on how Opera Lies, pretending to be IE and making it an incredible pain to code in workarounds for its shortcomings.
So yes, Opera has blazingly fast HTML+CSS support, but it has sacrified good JavaScript and DHTML abilities to get it -- it's about 5 years behind the 8-ball, depending on how you want to count it.
I'd recommend Mozilla for the moment for most sites, hopefully Opera 7 will improve on this situation sometime -- the Opera developers have said DOM support is part of their eventual plans.
I was thinking of a site I use, SmoothFTP which is an HTTP to FTP portal for those of us stuck behind squid proxies and firewalls. It opens up "uploading, please wait..." windows and closes them on completion. A reasonably obvious bug like that will probably make me wait for the v1.01 final release (not trying nightlies really, I use Moz for testing at the moment).
.HTM and .HTML with one and let it rest -- others like .GIF and .JPG I leave with image editors, and forget about .MTHML and similar.
;).
I run nine different browsers (NS4.0, 4.76, Moz 0.90 and 0.97, IE4, 5, 6, Opera 5 and 6, all under Win98) at home and file associations aren't that bad. Once you tell all your browsers not to keep re-associating on startup, you can basically associate
I forgot to mention one of the best things about Moz is that it's similar cross-platform -- design once, run anywhere. IE can claim not such honour, as anyone who has attempted to get complicated JavaScript/DHTML running on IE/Mac will attest
Indenting? I use [BLOCKQUOTE][I]text text text text[/I][/BLOCKQUOTE] and it seems to come out alright.
Which affects quite a lot of sites -- many web services open and close status windows automatically.
The BugZilla article at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10345
Also, the forthcoming XP service pack 1 will only allow you to remove the icons for browsers, a Reuters article here notes:
So basically, it's nothing new for those of us familiar with deleting shortcuts and running the Mozilla installer.
Anyway, congrats to the Mozilla hackers on getting this far! I can't wait for the next few releases. Another bonus -- now the APIs are frozen, it should make projects like K-Meleon (a light MFC UI for the Moz engine for Win32) a lot easier.
Opera... I've got v5.12 and v6.00 installed at home, and am moderately impressed. It handles HTML and CSS pretty well (at least on most sites), but my major complaint is its JavaScript support.
Opera Lies. Default installs pretend to be IE, adjusting the userAgent string and adding some of IE's DOM properties. This isn't so bad... document.all works, for instance, but try something like document.body.insertAdjacentHTML and things will go belly up rapidly. Things like clipping, dynamic DIV creation and innerHTML are still not implemented -- as of v6 it's still playing catchup to Netscape 4 in these areas. So you need to detect Opera specifically in any advanced project to do workarounds.
A good test to distinguish between browsers used to be for document.createElement, which IE and NS6 support but Opera 5 didn't. For those of you not familiar with the DOM this allows you to create tags anytime and place them in the document. Run this in Opera 5 and 6:
alert(document.createElement);
and you'll find that v6 reports it exists. But it doesn't -- it's simply a blank function, to allow more pages to think they can run in Opera. This is pretty foolish -- if a coder like me decides a page requires that ability to run, why report that it exists when it clearly doesn't?
So in conclusion, hopefully Opear v7 will clear this up and implement proper DOM1 support (that is, beyond getElementById and similar). Until then, I'll browse with IE6 or Mozilla.
(Random note: Anyone know if Konqueror can or has been ported to Windows? I'd be interested to try that too as an alternative... and don't have the HD space for a Linux partition).
Yeah, progress is being made on SirCam :).
One one hand, it makes for great copy protection.
:)
On the other, they'd compress wickedly well for distribution...
One thing that interests me...
We went over PCR recently in a Biochemical Genetics lab. Apparently, the primer oligonucleotides can only be up to 3000 base pairs apart or so for the process to work effectively.
If this is the case, replicating the millions/billions of bases you'd have to recover to reconstruct the organism would surely be a daunting task.
Or are there any other PCR techniques more powerful than the standard 2nd year University ones we study? Would some Celera style shotgun approaches be applicable here?
we just did!
Hmm, I guess it must have been a case of mistaken identity when I downloaded that "Windows 98 Service Pack 1" at home from that renowned hax0r site "Windows Update".
Good to see Microsoft on the ball again, I'd hate to see them spreading FUD to look like they were going to extreme lengths to comply with the antitrust provisions.
What's the status of this vulnerability?
Basically, it allows reading any given local file and browsing through the local folder tree in Mozilla -- the site mentions 1.0RC1 was tested and affected, it hasn't been updated since then.
It was discovered on the 30th of March, Netscape was informed on the 24th of April, and hadn't acknowledged the security researchers' notification within six days, so it was made public. (Cue flame war about MS's security woes...)
Pretty nasty... anyone with the new build care to test it?
...the DHTML performance will increase?
The current series has a bad bug in DHTML animation performance that I've noticed -- performance regressed in the 0.97 -> 0.98 release, and ever since then rapid animations etc. have often not rendered correctly.
Read through the bugzilla entry there -- apparently some experimental builds have 450% increased JavaScript animation speed, some test are linked to try it out yourself. Does anyone more in touch with the Moz project internals than I have an idea as to when this will be integrated with the main branch of the code -- I heard 1.01 was the target a while back?
I say this as Moz is looking more and more likely to turn up on user's desktops as part of AOL/Compuserve/whatever as they escape from MS's browser licensing terms. Bugs in release candidates are fine (that's what they're there for) but if mass-market NS7 has shortfalls like these, it could spell trouble for JavaScript developers like me.
Anyway, more power to the Mozilla project! It's good to see a truly free, standards compliant, cross-platform browser out there. Looking back a year, I wonder what it'll be like in a year's time...
...pilots would be unable to tell the difference between simulator and real combat.
Ender's Game, here we come...
With all that gelatin, his hand will probably shake well enough on its own :).
...latest research indicate that "Foot and Mouth" disease is the first virus unable to spread via Outlook.
:).
Experts and laymen alike were shocked
:).
Yep, the two browsers are very much different between platforms. It's an incredible pain actually debugging DHTML scripts between the two, especially if you consider IE4/Mac which has more bugs than your average ant colony.
:). IE6 doesn't have a lot that's too new underneath the UI, just a few more DOM properties here and there (like 'backCompat' and implementation details), about the only major new feature is the "Media Bar". A supply of bug fixes in the future is the main reason why I upgraded :).
IE5 on the Mac runs its own rendering engine called "Tasman". In fact, IE5/Mac was the first commerical browser to introduce full CSS1 compliance, meaning things like first-line or -letter psuedo classes and full support for 'float' etc.
IE5.5 and IE6 on Windows are pretty similar. The big advance on Windows was from IE5->5.5 which included the new CSS filter syntax (for fancy transitions and fades, the "whizz-bang Windows features" that never made the Mac version), more CSS compliance and importantly not having to start a new copy of the rendering engine for every frame. That means you can float divs over IFrames, something that Mozilla can do as well. (Like I said, they like playing catchup
If you're really interested load up the "JS Object Browser" script from my homepage in each of the various browsers to inspect the DOMs.
Step 1) Substitute "CBDTPA" for "Windows Longhorn" in the feature list.
Step 2) Reread it.
Is it just me, or does this talk of trusted, secure platforms and completely digital audio paths seem strangely familiar...?
First off, kudos to the Mozilla project team for getting this far... it's shaping up to be an excellent browser especially once you count the security track record of the opposition.
:).
One question I have as a DHTML web designer, is that will v1.0 fix the DHTML timing issues? The v0.98 changelog indicated that "DHTML performance has regressed", which I can verify is putting it lightly -- one of my animations that revealed a DIV via clipping worked fluidly in Moz 0.97 and hardly at all in Moz 0.99, which still hasn't patched it. Check out the "Popup Menu v5" script on my homepage on a slower computer if you want to see what I mean.
A quick search of Bugzilla reveals some articles also mentioning this issue. Does anyone know what plans are afoot to improve this?
I hope DHTML performance improves before this tree is used for another NS6 or AOL browser release, as otherwise it could render some of the more technically involved sites unviewable. If anyone's more involved in Bugzilla than I and knows the bug ID that most work is going into, please post a link to vote for it, otherwise try this one
Apart from that, I'm finding new Mozilla releases to be strides above the versions this time last year. Hopefully once fully mature it'll be the cross-platform web page development environment of choice... that's one area in which IE can never beat it, with the huge differences between IE on Windows and Mac.
More power to the lizard!
I have written a Hierarchial Menu script. And it took me quite a lot longer than 5 to 10 minutes.
:)
Let me assure all the posters saying "I can do it in 30 seconds flat, it's just hiding DIVs" that menus like mine and HierMenus are quite a bit more than that. Yes, it's true that you *CAN* make a single-level popup where the triggers overlap the divs work in IE5+ and NS6 in a few minutes. But if you want multiple levels of autogenerating, correctly highlighting cascading menus working in as many browsers as possible, it's a decent coding effort.
You have to do everything 3 different ways for a start:
document.layers for NS4
document.all for IE4+
document.getElementById for IE5+ or NS6, Opera etc.
And that's just for getting references to page elements -- modifying them is another story entirely. Working around browser bugs takes anywhere from weeks to years -- I started the first version around Nov 2000, and am currently hacking away at the v5.1 script. Netscape 4 behaves differently with every different version, the platform of your computer, and it seems even the phase of the moon. Don't think about getting me started on IE on the Macintosh.
Check my homepage, and navigate in, it's called "Cascading Popup Menus". It works in Moz, NS4, IE4+ and Opera 5/6, Ihaven't tested Konq but I'd appreciate feedback. (End Shameless Promotion
For their price, it's probably pretty reasonable. Their menu is ~50k of JavaScript, mine is 12k but highly condensed. They used to give it away for free, as it was developed as a tutorial-like series of columns -- have a read through all the revisions before criticising Peter Belesis (the author).
- Angus.
You know what else?
/. to be a self-sufficient business in its own right.
/. get paid per impression and per click? The ad-removal scripts hide the ads but they are still downloaded (unlike host files) so does /. get a manageable amount of money from that impression? Or is the site oly sustainable when the ads themselves are clicked?
/. with every click... and seeing a few interesting products. I'd perhaps even include a small 'pop up larger window' link in there if it looks interesting.
As an experiment I wrote my own (smaller) banner-removal JavaScript and stuck the whole thing inline in the user box. It worked, but it's not going to stay there long, and I'm not going to post it here, as I respect the need of
Before I do much else, one thing I would really like to know is... relatively how much does
If it is mostly on a per-click basis, I am seriously considering writing another script... that automatically detects the URL of the top banner ad via a bit of DOM manipulation in JavaScript and requests the document via a small IFrame in my user space. (This would work best for in-page images, iframe ads could get tricky if they're served off different domains). Think about it, supporting
Is anyone interested in this? It comes back to the per-impression or per-click issue, but I think it could be a useful trick.
My site opens external links in new windows. That's mostly because it uses DHTML pretty heavily as a presentation system, and standard navigation rules don't apply well... check it out, I'm giving away the scripts used.
But anyway, at least on my system, why not try dragging the link in question onto the browser address bar? That opens it up in the current window, no problems, no matter what collection of TARGETs or ONCLICKs the author has added to the A tag itself.
SmartIn Designs has an excellent list as well, one of the best host-blockers I have come across for this and I did used to maintain my own. DoubleClick, be gone.
Several formats and levels of protections are available, so check it out even for the docs. You'll probably want to trim it down a bit... the largest list is pretty damn large.
Anyone know of any other ones out there? I think using a CVS-like system to maintain a decentralised host blocking list could be a good idea... anyone trying this already?