Even if chrome is a majority browsing product, they'd still have no incentive to kill off firefox.
The stated goal of the mozilla foundation is to "make the internet a better place, where you and your neighbors build the world you want". Contrast this with chrome's goal: "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." Putting the two together it's obvious that there is more overlap than discord there. Google is going to keep supporting firefox for a long time to come.
Flash is now the weakest link in the components needed to view the web in all its glory
What do you mean "weakest link"? You do realize that actionscript runs much faster than javascript, right? And that the graphics layer in flash beats canvas and svg in speed and features?
Google is quite right in pointing out that the weakest links are the ridiculously slow speed of current javascript engines and the uneven availability of features across the different browsers.
We obviously don't love the United States as much as we used to, but most Europeans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a government and the people. We realize that a lot of Americans are unhappy with what their government is doing.
This is true, but after electing bush, twice, it has become very, very difficult to argue that there is a difference between the american people and the american government. If mccain gets elected this time around, the american people deserves his presidency for all I care.
I wish the summary would have said why they're so hell-bent on getting users to upgrade.
Because the mozilla foundation is a non-profit whose stated goal is improving the way people experience the web. Firefox 3 is a much better web browser than firefox 2, so it would violate their own charter if they didn't try to get people to upgrade.
Because Firefox 3's rendering engine is not identical to firefox 2's, and there could be some intranet software that still needs to be adapted to be functional. This is also the same reason why MS can't simply push IE7 to everyone.
We now have web developers making desktop apps without any security or privacy expertise. The Web is becoming more heterogeneous and far far more dangerous.
What bothers me is how security is somehow pushed to the forefront as the most important issue, even more important than functionality.
The most secure system is one that is turned off. This new stuff they're adding increases the attack surface, sure, but it's also necessary to build stuff that actually works (like a web app that doesn't die when your wifi does).
But even aside from the issue of functionality vs. security, there's the issue of security somehow being way more important in the browser, which I think is nonsense. Client-server apps have always had lousy security, and were easily hijacked. Just because they now run in a browser, the threat level hasn't changed. A hacker that is determined can break in sure, but they've always been able to break in. Nothing has truly changed, except for the perception of the threat level.
All in all I think the web stack is pretty secure by default, when comparing it to the alternatives.
It allows web developers to take advantage of this feature
Canvas is a strange pick though for something to extend IE with. There's excanvas, which does a reasonable job of emulating canvas on IE using VML. It's not a perfect emulation, ofcourse, but in my experience it's good enough once you learn its limitations. For stuff like dynamic charting canvas is the right choice even today.
Re:Sometimes the correct answer is the simplest
on
Why Corporates Hate Perl
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
So your argument boils down to "perl is unmaintainable, but that's ok, because you can just replace code instead of maintaining it".
You must write bug-free code if you never have to make small changes to existing code. My hat is off to you sir.
Google does NOT have your backups. They have redundancy in their data storage, but when their servers get the command to delete something, it gets deleted everywhere, permanently!
A good UI lets you remove the extra wheels and tinker under the hood, though.
Wrong. A good UI deploys the training wheels when it senses you're about to fall. And a better UI finds a way to include self-balancing in the bike, so no training wheels are needed.
Usability is how easy the user perceives it to be to complete the task they set out to do with a piece of software.
You can take two approaches on this: - Users must be educated to have different perceptions of what is "easy", so they'll consider your software to be easy, AKA the arrogant approach - Software must be adapted to conform to what users perceive to be easy, AKA the coward's way out
In the real world, the right path is usually a mixture of the two.
The tricky part is that usability not only depends on user perception, but also on what task they want to do. Depending on the exact task, a product may range from highly usable to completely useless for the very same user. For example, iMovie is a great product for mixing together a video of your kids playing on the beach, but it's not so good for mixing together a video clip.
that seems fine, but it only pays for the software. Who pays for the extra traffic over the network ?
If they don't want you to use a service, they shouldn't offer it.
AT&T has no right whatsoever to restrict what people do as long as they stay in the confines of their contracts. If AT&T doesn't want people to use unlimited bandwidth, they shouldn't say their data plan is unlimited.
I thought we'd seen this through already with the cable and DSL companies? If you can't offer unlimited bandwidth at a consumer price point (and in all honesty, nobody can deliver that), then don't pretend to sell it. It's false advertising, and it's illegal for a reason.
Probably won't make up for all of the difference, but I expect that the US prices don't include sales taxes
VAT is 19 percent when purchasing online.
My experience with the price difference on technology products between the US and the EU is that they'll take whatever number follows the dollar symbol, add the VAT percentage to that, and then put that on the euro price tag. So that's how a $299 product becomes 359 euro. Sometimes they'll play nice and not add in the 19 percent.
Anyway, it's obvious that they can do this because people are willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to pay those prices, so I don't buy those products. There are always alternatives.
free software already does make something better, and apple is using it.
You're making exactly the right point here, although I know you didn't intend it that way.
I used to be a debian user, I really strongly supported GNU and Stallman's ideas on software. Today I'm an apple customer, and run OS X.
The most important aspect of software freedom is the freedom to use it the way you want to. I still agree with that notion completely. And the way I want to use software is "smoothly, with minimal administration, and minimal interruption". Apple may build their stuff based on the same open source code, but they go the extra mile to tie things together so I no longer have to. Apple's products save me time and effort.
I detest apple's corporate practices. They're a pretty big incentive to go back to linux. But if I need to trade time to get software freedom, which was my experience when I ran linux, then I'm merely exchanging one task master for another. The ultimate freedom is the choice of how we spend our time. Take away that choice, and you take away my freedom.
I remember people complaining about early 3.*, and I did the same back then (waiting, not complaining). It got OK around 3.2, and i expect it to be similar with 4.*
And I remember them doing the same for KDE 2.x. KDE 4 was probably on the same scale rewrite-wise as KDE 2, only on a much larger code-base for a much larger user-base. Frankly, I think they managed to do a pretty amazing job to get it out of the door halfway usable.
Not that it's bad or anything, but in the end it's all JavaScript anyway, and learning two different ways to get to the same goal (an interactive site) is generally pretty low on everybody's priority list.
GWT isn't aimed at building interactive sites. It's aimed at building web applications. We're talking about something like gmail.com, not something like slashdot.org.
I've looked at it for use in our web applications, but ended up choosing ExtJS on Zend Framework for the following reasons: - You need to trust that google / someone will maintain the java-to-javascript compiler, because it's just too much work to maintain it yourself. If many large commercial products were built with it, this wouldn't be an issue, but... - You can't adopt it partially to spruce up existing applications. You need to adopt it wholesale. - The GUI design is more desktop-like, which is a strength, but also a weakness, because at times we really need the web metaphors to shine through, and it seems more difficult to realize those things in GWT. - If you have no relevant java experience, there is a very steep learning curve associated with it, and what my team knows best is PHP and basic html.
I really like the concept of progressive enhancement. The problem with it is that as you scale up in complexity and scale down to embedded devices, it's just not realistic.
For a moderately complex web application, building a single front-end that scales down to mobile devices and scales up to 1920x1280 with all the ajaxy goodness is impossible in any reasonable timeframe without compromising for one of the situations, or both.
For me the best solution remains the gmail approach: build multiple frontends on a shared backend, each catering to a specific target market. Gmail has an ajax front-end, a basic html front-end, and a small-screen / mobile front-end. All of these work exceptionally well, better than they would had they been rolled into one gui.
As one of the people who voted on it, I can tell you that I considered the vote well-advertised inside of the ajax development community. Many of the voters are the people building the javascript libraries that are powering "web 2.0" (hate that term, but it applies here).
Don't we already have that? Yes, yes we do, it's called TinyMCE [moxiecode.com] and it is licensed under the LGPL and can be included on your form with just a couple of lines in your HTML code.
With rich text editing they mean a foundation sufficient to build a light-weight word clone in. The current browser support for rich text is so poor that it's not possible to use it without some whizkid's library, and even with the library it's really poor, barely up to the level of wordpad in capability.
Ummm... Maybe I'm just not very imaginative, but I tend to find that stability and security top my list of what I want nearly every time.
No, functionality is at the top of your list, you just don't realize it. Remember when people raved about gmail? Gmail would have never happened had the browsers focused exclusively on stability and security.
* Microsoft has a proven track record on cross-platform support, and by that I mean that anyone who ever bet on a cross-platform microsoft technology have ended up regretting their decision.
* Actionscript 3 is not less efficient than silverlight scripting. The current edge of silverlight is that it supports more languages, but adobe is working on a cross-compiler that compiles existing C/C++ code to actionscript bytecode. For example, they've ported quake 2 to flash (http://blip.tv/file/408241, 5 minutes in).
* Adobe does want to support linux, it's just not high on their list of priorities because linux users (especially 64 bit) are not technology decision makers that influence a flash purchasing decision.
Parsing a json file using eval is not a safe practice, so you need to surround it with a bunch of regular expression checks that verify that the json string doesn't contain malicious code. This takes up quite a bit of time, especially for large json strings, so the performance is not as good as you'd hope for (though still much better than xml).
What is asked for by "native json" is a natively implemented browser function that will decode a json string into a javascript object securely without requiring javascript-based security checks first. The fact that it doesn't need to do everything eval does should also provide quite a nice performance boost.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if chrome is a majority browsing product, they'd still have no incentive to kill off firefox.
The stated goal of the mozilla foundation is to "make the internet a better place, where you and your neighbors build the world you want". Contrast this with chrome's goal: "What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build." Putting the two together it's obvious that there is more overlap than discord there. Google is going to keep supporting firefox for a long time to come.
Flash is now the weakest link in the components needed to view the web in all its glory
What do you mean "weakest link"? You do realize that actionscript runs much faster than javascript, right? And that the graphics layer in flash beats canvas and svg in speed and features?
Google is quite right in pointing out that the weakest links are the ridiculously slow speed of current javascript engines and the uneven availability of features across the different browsers.
Short answer: yes, transitional runs in standards mode as well.
Long answer: read the msdn page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250395.aspx#cssenhancements_topic2
We obviously don't love the United States as much as we used to, but most Europeans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a government and the people. We realize that a lot of Americans are unhappy with what their government is doing.
This is true, but after electing bush, twice, it has become very, very difficult to argue that there is a difference between the american people and the american government. If mccain gets elected this time around, the american people deserves his presidency for all I care.
Users that run windows 98 or ME connected to the internet are not to be coddled, they are to be pitied.
Did you go through their troubleshooting documentation? Probably your profile is corrupted and it only accidentally works on firefox 2.
I wish the summary would have said why they're so hell-bent on getting users to upgrade.
Because the mozilla foundation is a non-profit whose stated goal is improving the way people experience the web. Firefox 3 is a much better web browser than firefox 2, so it would violate their own charter if they didn't try to get people to upgrade.
Because Firefox 3's rendering engine is not identical to firefox 2's, and there could be some intranet software that still needs to be adapted to be functional. This is also the same reason why MS can't simply push IE7 to everyone.
We now have web developers making desktop apps without any security or privacy expertise. The Web is becoming more heterogeneous and far far more dangerous.
What bothers me is how security is somehow pushed to the forefront as the most important issue, even more important than functionality.
The most secure system is one that is turned off. This new stuff they're adding increases the attack surface, sure, but it's also necessary to build stuff that actually works (like a web app that doesn't die when your wifi does).
But even aside from the issue of functionality vs. security, there's the issue of security somehow being way more important in the browser, which I think is nonsense. Client-server apps have always had lousy security, and were easily hijacked. Just because they now run in a browser, the threat level hasn't changed. A hacker that is determined can break in sure, but they've always been able to break in. Nothing has truly changed, except for the perception of the threat level.
All in all I think the web stack is pretty secure by default, when comparing it to the alternatives.
It allows web developers to take advantage of this feature
Canvas is a strange pick though for something to extend IE with. There's excanvas, which does a reasonable job of emulating canvas on IE using VML. It's not a perfect emulation, ofcourse, but in my experience it's good enough once you learn its limitations. For stuff like dynamic charting canvas is the right choice even today.
So your argument boils down to "perl is unmaintainable, but that's ok, because you can just replace code instead of maintaining it".
You must write bug-free code if you never have to make small changes to existing code. My hat is off to you sir.
Google does NOT have your backups. They have redundancy in their data storage, but when their servers get the command to delete something, it gets deleted everywhere, permanently!
See their own faq: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=50208
A good UI lets you remove the extra wheels and tinker under the hood, though.
Wrong. A good UI deploys the training wheels when it senses you're about to fall. And a better UI finds a way to include self-balancing in the bike, so no training wheels are needed.
Usability is how easy the user perceives it to be to complete the task they set out to do with a piece of software.
You can take two approaches on this:
- Users must be educated to have different perceptions of what is "easy", so they'll consider your software to be easy, AKA the arrogant approach
- Software must be adapted to conform to what users perceive to be easy, AKA the coward's way out
In the real world, the right path is usually a mixture of the two.
The tricky part is that usability not only depends on user perception, but also on what task they want to do. Depending on the exact task, a product may range from highly usable to completely useless for the very same user. For example, iMovie is a great product for mixing together a video of your kids playing on the beach, but it's not so good for mixing together a video clip.
that seems fine, but it only pays for the software. Who pays for the extra traffic over the network ?
If they don't want you to use a service, they shouldn't offer it.
AT&T has no right whatsoever to restrict what people do as long as they stay in the confines of their contracts. If AT&T doesn't want people to use unlimited bandwidth, they shouldn't say their data plan is unlimited.
I thought we'd seen this through already with the cable and DSL companies? If you can't offer unlimited bandwidth at a consumer price point (and in all honesty, nobody can deliver that), then don't pretend to sell it. It's false advertising, and it's illegal for a reason.
It may console you that microsoft simply raised their EU prices to pay off the fine.
But do you really honestly try to claim microsoft didn't break the law both in the US and EU?
Probably won't make up for all of the difference, but I expect that the US prices don't include sales taxes
VAT is 19 percent when purchasing online.
My experience with the price difference on technology products between the US and the EU is that they'll take whatever number follows the dollar symbol, add the VAT percentage to that, and then put that on the euro price tag. So that's how a $299 product becomes 359 euro. Sometimes they'll play nice and not add in the 19 percent.
Anyway, it's obvious that they can do this because people are willing to pay for it. I'm not willing to pay those prices, so I don't buy those products. There are always alternatives.
free software already does make something better, and apple is using it.
You're making exactly the right point here, although I know you didn't intend it that way.
I used to be a debian user, I really strongly supported GNU and Stallman's ideas on software. Today I'm an apple customer, and run OS X.
The most important aspect of software freedom is the freedom to use it the way you want to. I still agree with that notion completely. And the way I want to use software is "smoothly, with minimal administration, and minimal interruption". Apple may build their stuff based on the same open source code, but they go the extra mile to tie things together so I no longer have to. Apple's products save me time and effort.
I detest apple's corporate practices. They're a pretty big incentive to go back to linux. But if I need to trade time to get software freedom, which was my experience when I ran linux, then I'm merely exchanging one task master for another. The ultimate freedom is the choice of how we spend our time. Take away that choice, and you take away my freedom.
I remember people complaining about early 3.*, and I did the same back then (waiting, not complaining). It got OK around 3.2, and i expect it to be similar with 4.*
And I remember them doing the same for KDE 2.x. KDE 4 was probably on the same scale rewrite-wise as KDE 2, only on a much larger code-base for a much larger user-base. Frankly, I think they managed to do a pretty amazing job to get it out of the door halfway usable.
Not that it's bad or anything, but in the end it's all JavaScript anyway, and learning two different ways to get to the same goal (an interactive site) is generally pretty low on everybody's priority list.
GWT isn't aimed at building interactive sites. It's aimed at building web applications. We're talking about something like gmail.com, not something like slashdot.org.
I've looked at it for use in our web applications, but ended up choosing ExtJS on Zend Framework for the following reasons:
- You need to trust that google / someone will maintain the java-to-javascript compiler, because it's just too much work to maintain it yourself. If many large commercial products were built with it, this wouldn't be an issue, but...
- You can't adopt it partially to spruce up existing applications. You need to adopt it wholesale.
- The GUI design is more desktop-like, which is a strength, but also a weakness, because at times we really need the web metaphors to shine through, and it seems more difficult to realize those things in GWT.
- If you have no relevant java experience, there is a very steep learning curve associated with it, and what my team knows best is PHP and basic html.
I really like the concept of progressive enhancement. The problem with it is that as you scale up in complexity and scale down to embedded devices, it's just not realistic.
For a moderately complex web application, building a single front-end that scales down to mobile devices and scales up to 1920x1280 with all the ajaxy goodness is impossible in any reasonable timeframe without compromising for one of the situations, or both.
For me the best solution remains the gmail approach: build multiple frontends on a shared backend, each catering to a specific target market. Gmail has an ajax front-end, a basic html front-end, and a small-screen / mobile front-end. All of these work exceptionally well, better than they would had they been rolled into one gui.
As one of the people who voted on it, I can tell you that I considered the vote well-advertised inside of the ajax development community. Many of the voters are the people building the javascript libraries that are powering "web 2.0" (hate that term, but it applies here).
Don't we already have that? Yes, yes we do, it's called TinyMCE [moxiecode.com] and it is licensed under the LGPL and can be included on your form with just a couple of lines in your HTML code.
With rich text editing they mean a foundation sufficient to build a light-weight word clone in. The current browser support for rich text is so poor that it's not possible to use it without some whizkid's library, and even with the library it's really poor, barely up to the level of wordpad in capability.
Ummm... Maybe I'm just not very imaginative, but I tend to find that stability and security top my list of what I want nearly every time.
No, functionality is at the top of your list, you just don't realize it. Remember when people raved about gmail? Gmail would have never happened had the browsers focused exclusively on stability and security.
* Microsoft has a proven track record on cross-platform support, and by that I mean that anyone who ever bet on a cross-platform microsoft technology have ended up regretting their decision.
* Actionscript 3 is not less efficient than silverlight scripting. The current edge of silverlight is that it supports more languages, but adobe is working on a cross-compiler that compiles existing C/C++ code to actionscript bytecode. For example, they've ported quake 2 to flash (http://blip.tv/file/408241, 5 minutes in).
* Adobe does want to support linux, it's just not high on their list of priorities because linux users (especially 64 bit) are not technology decision makers that influence a flash purchasing decision.
Parsing a json file using eval is not a safe practice, so you need to surround it with a bunch of regular expression checks that verify that the json string doesn't contain malicious code. This takes up quite a bit of time, especially for large json strings, so the performance is not as good as you'd hope for (though still much better than xml).
What is asked for by "native json" is a natively implemented browser function that will decode a json string into a javascript object securely without requiring javascript-based security checks first. The fact that it doesn't need to do everything eval does should also provide quite a nice performance boost.