> (And you can omit the quotes on attribute values in certain cases; > check http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#at tributes.)
I believe that option has been rescinded in newer versions (since XHTML 1.0 at least) and that all attribute values are to be quoted these days. Of course, actual browsers are somewhat more lenient than the standard and will let you get away with all sorts of stuff, if you don't care about forward-compatibility.
Err, what does model building have to do with the beginning of anything? (Or what did you _think_ arche in archetype meant? The other possible meaning (ruler) makes even less sense.)
> Well, the only thing is that the security flaws we've
> seen in IE have been relatively minor.
Sure. Minor.
A dozen lines of javascript on an untrusted site can do quite
literally anything (within the permissions the
user has, which tends to be pretty lax on NT), and it's minor.
Well, I guess it's a good thing there
Aren't very
many of these minor bugs.
> Tell me, did you roll out IE6 within two days of release? Nobody > in their right mind rolls out a release before it's seen a few > weeks of action in the wild.
Right. I tend to use myself as the guinea pig, testing stuff like new releases on my own workstation before I deploy it for anybody else. The only thing is, this doesn't catch OS-specific bugs, since our network (at work) is heterogenous, and I only usually test under one OS. If our network were larger, I'd probably test on multiple OSes before deploying, but with the relatively small number of nodes we have, it's not a huge problem.
This policy (testing on myself) also fails for stuff I never use, that other people ask me to install, such as Real Player. (I have yet to figure out what purpose that one serves... I have never once visited a site that uses it, despite spending hours a day on the web. When people say they use it all the time, I have to wonder what kind of sites they're going to; must be something in which I have absolutely no interest, whatever it is.)
> Call me nuts, but I'd rather have an actual working product
It is an actual working product; has been since... well, for some time now. Sure, it's buggy, but all software is buggy. If anything, Mozilla is less buggy than the average browser.
> DHTML working is very, very basic.
DHTML is not quite so basic as you imply, but even if it were, DHTML is basically working. There's just a bug in it that causes a few sites to fail. FWIW, I've been using the buggy release since some time yesterday and haven't managed to find a site where I can reproduce the bug yet. Sure, I'll upgrade to 1.2.1 when it comes out, and meanwhile if I happen to run into a DHTML site that's broken, that I need to access, I can change my symlink back to the previous release temporarily (though, unfortunately, that would mean exiting my browser and restarting it, which means finishing with all the tabs I currently have open, which would be something of a pain).
> You can't have a security problem until you at least have a > working product.
Interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I'm doing any security checks; things that don't work right are immune to security problems. I bet a lot of so-called security experts are unaware of this axiom; perhaps you should write up a white paper.
For testing purposes. Testing is highly parallelisable.
> and used as a main browser by so many subscribers to this site
Because this parallelised-testing model, with everyone having nearly complete access to the bug database, has been so effective that bleeding-edge nightly releases of Mozilla these days are usually more stable than the final/gamma end-user releases of most other browsers.
Try Netscape for a while: you'll find that most of the bugs are in the commercial extensions (AIM and such); the open-source parts that were tested in Mozilla first are more solid. This isn't because more bugs were _introduced_ in the commercial extensions (plenty of bugs were introduced in the open code too), but because there were fewer testers, so fewer of the bugs were found and fixed.
Mozilla 1.0.1 is the most rock-solid browser I've ever seen. Yes, it _can_ be made to crash, but it happens far less often than in other browsers and usually involves esoteric conditions such as printing client-side-dynamic content (e.g., plugins or pages with a lot of active scripting).
I was hoping 1.2 would surpass it in stability (1.1 did not), but it looks like we're waiting for at least 1.2.1 for that.
# We plan to release Mozilla 1.2.1 with a fix shortly.
Aargh. I just got 1.2 installed and the prefbar all set up,
and now I'll have to install and customise the
prefs
toolbaragain when I install 1.2.1. Bummer.
> Which is useless for editing or revising a table. Oh, automatic indentation helps with that.
> Feel free to respond with your divine Emacs solution for > merging two arbitrary adjoining cells
You must have something more specific in mind here than what you said. Merging two horizontally adjascent cells is as easy as removing </td><td> (and maybe setting a colspan). Doing it repeatedly in a bunch of places is one keystroke per (as you record a macro the first time), or if it's something you do often you could write an elisp function that handles it. (You could pass a numeric argument for which column to merge with the following column, say.)
Merging two vertically adjascent cells (merging two rows, I assume) is not something I've ever needed to do, but if I did it on anything resembling a regular basis I'd write an elisp function that would do it automatically. That wouldn't be hard, and it could be bound to a single keystroke. If would of course stop on </table> (except that of course it would skip any </table> between <td> and </td>). (Yes, a function can fairly easily find the corresponding close tag for any given open tag, no matter how deep you nest them. Languages like elisp and Perl make stuff like this easy, because they are _designed_ to work with text.)
> or for altering an entire table's per-cell format
That's trivial. You don't even _need_ a scriptable editor for that. It's easiest if you're using mostly CSS, but even if you're using lots of HTML presentational stuff, it's one regex replace operation on a selected region. vi could handle that.
Lots of people. Nobody's still _buying_ it, but there are quite a few systems out there. Two things to remember here. First, only a small percentage of users ever upgrade the OS; most wait until they buy a new computer. That goes for home users as well as businesses. Second, the usual "3 year" figure for replacing an old PC is the average only in business; among home users, the average is probably somewhat longer, and certainly the standard deviation is much higher. Third (yes, I know I said two things), a lot of people have never owned a new computer, only secondhand.
Windows 95/98/Me is more widely deployed on the desktop than any other OS, by a preposterously, frighteningly wide margin. These days NT is easily second (because WinXP OEM sales have been going for a while), but it hasn't nearly caught up yet, and won't until perhaps (WARNING: blatant speculation ahead) circa 2004.
Windows 95 is still more widely used than all versions of NT prior to XP (3, 4, 2000 Server, 2000 Pro) combined, but I doubt there are still as many actively-used Win95 systems as there are XP Home. A very few months ago there would have been, though. 95OSR2 was sold on OEM systems through late 1998, and those systems are only four years old; probably around a third of them haven't been replaced yet, and probably another third were handed down to another member of the same immediate family, and many of those may still be in use Quite a few of the rest may have hit the used computer market, though by now many of them also have been junked for parts or discarded.
Anyway, my point is, people don't stop using something when it disappears off the store shelves; it takes, depending on the item, days, months, years, or decades for that to happen. (Operating systems and major appliances fall into the years category; most perishible food items: days; other food items: months; tools and such: decades. Just now I can't think of an example that takes centuries.)
> BTW, aren't these the guys that bought Award out a little time ago?
If so, you'd think they'd trade under the Award name, rather than the Phoenix name; Award has a very good reputation for producing quality BIOSes; Phoenix does not -- quite the contrary. Like when Symantec bought Norton: they call their product Norton Antivirus because that's the better-known and better-liked name. You never hear of Symantec Antivirus anymore (yes, that used to be the name of a product), though of course Symantec is the name of the company that makes the thing. If Phoenix were to buy Award (can you provide a link on that?), I'd expect them, if they have braincell one, to use the Award name for BIOSes.
Yes, but were they already doing that before the release of the first Phoenix builds? Ford Motor Company pre-existed Ford Tractor, but when they wanted to start making tractors, they had to call them something else other than Ford. (I think they may have acquired Ford Tractor at a later date, but that's immateriel.)
You haven't been working with PCs long enough. In the early days of CMOS, when the idea of having a BIOS setup program that you could use to change settings was relatively new, Phoenix BIOS and AmiBIOS were the two major names. AmiBIOS was much nicer in a couple of fairly significant ways, and that's why you haven't heard anything about Phoenix BIOS recently.
I'm amazed they still exist as a company; I thought they'd followed the footsteps of UNIVAC long ago. The big name in BIOSes now is Award, last I checked. I do think Ami is still around, though.
> The main reason why I have never loaded Netscape as my default > browser.. well, at first IE was simply better.
Huh? At first, IE was distilled donkey urine. It didn't become usable as a substitute for Netscape until version 5. (Granted, version 5 was not the fifth version really, but nevermind that.) It wasn't better than Netscape until version 5.5, at which point Netscape had released basically nothing in quite a long while.
> Then it was because Windows is unstable enough as it is.. why > would I want to have two browsers loaded? (IE forces itself > into memory of course)
This is mostly right, but there are two points. First, with Windows 95 it is possible to not have IE installed. (There's also IERadicator for Win98, but I'm talking about just not having IE installed in the first place.) Second, if you do the upgrade to IE6, do the custom install, and click on the advanced button, you can get it to not set itself as the default browser; if you do that, I _think_ it also doesn't force itself on you at startup. I'm not certain, but that's how it _appears_ to work.
> with Netscape's little "web development" menu, that somehow > convinced me IE was better
What? IE is better because Netscape has extra features for web developers that IE doesn't have? I don't understand how you could reach that conclusion from that observation. non sequeteur.
> Now it seems Netscape is coming out with new features and IE > is outright stagnant.
Mozilla comes out with new versions more often than IE, yes.
> I think Netscape's CSS compliance has always been better as well
Only since Netscape 6. The CSS compliance in Netscape 4 was even worse than the CSS compliance in IE4. (Yes, really. A lot worse, even. So bad, many pages render better if you _disable_ CSS.) Of course, when Netscape 4 first came out, barely any web pages used CSS at all, so you didn't see the problems. If you go back and try to use Netscape 4 now, you'll see that it gets the style horribly wrong most of the time.
No time to reply to the rest; my family wants me to help with the food...
Yes, but 1.0.x is much more stable than 1.1. I think 1.1 suffered from being right after 1.0, because the focus on getting 1.0 out the door took away developers from 1.1alpha, causing a dearth of feature improvements in that milestone; people then tried to cram new features into 1.1beta to compensate, and there wasn't time to fully stabilise in the short timeframe for 1.1 final. Hopefully 1.2 is better.
> Anyone knows where to find out where mozilla is heading ?
Go to bugzilla.mozilla.org, and do a query. Set the target milestone to the one(s) you're interested in, and search just for bugs where the severity is set to "enhancement", which is for new features.
Bear in mind, the target milestone is tenative for any given item and may change. But you can get a rough idea what's coming up by looking at such a list.
Also, most features try to land during the alpha or at least during the beta milestones, not the final. You can select several target milestones at once (e.g., mozilla1.3alpha and mozilla1.3beta and mozilla1.3) if you want to see what's coming in a certain range. This example (1.3 alpha beta or final, severity=enhancement) gives about 49 items at the moment. (Some of those will be less of a big deal to you than others, of course.)
Pegasus Mail *rocks*. My family uses it. I recommed it to people. I'd be using it myself, if it weren't Windows-only.
> Do you want to trust your email to a beta? I've been known to trust my email to a beta of Pegasus Mail...
> I do plan on checking out Pheonix soon I tried 0.3 and it was completely inadequate for my needs. I'll probably try again circa 0.5 or so, but "try again" doesn't mean I'll be ready to switch. I'm liking recent versions of Mozilla pretty well. Sure, I don't use it for mail, but I can choose not to install Mail/News if I want. Generally, I go ahead and install it so I can use it for testing purposes if I want...
> Either one beats making tables by hand, though. You need a scriptable text editor. Makes things like this so much easier. Hit one keystroke and it inserts the basic structure... <table><thead>
<tr>[cursor is here]
</tr> </thead><tbody>
</tbody></table>
The real win, though, is not with big optimizations like this but with the one little optimization that I use _constantly_. It's a dozen lines of Emacs lisp, and I can't live without it: I hit one keystroke, type the body of my tag (without the angle brackets; for example, I type 'img src="blah.png" alt="Blah"' or 'th') and it inserts the open tag and the close tag, leaving my cursor between them. Not a big deal each time you use it, but it adds up fast -- and habbitual use of it leads to well- formed markup, which is the first step toward writing HTML that actually (gasp) validates.
As an added advantage, all the keybindings I use for inserting HTML tags when editing static HTML are also available when I'm editing CGI scripts in cperl-mode, which seems to be half the HTML I write these days.
Urgle. Don't even _talk_ to me about WYSIWYG HTML editors, you'll get me going _again_. If I never again have to try to fix up a page that was created with one of those heinous monstrosities and end up rewriting it from scratch because that's easier, it will be a good thing and a marvel. Frontweaver, Dreampage, Composer, Outlook Express (it is an HTML editor, that's what it's for, right?), they're all cut from the same cloth.
> none of them are any faster for me in browsing speed (and thats > where it matters, i leave mozilla open for days if not weeks at > a time), and i never have to wonder if feature xyz is supported.
Ditto. Of course, I have enough RAM that I don't have to worry about memory footprint. By the time apps are demanding more than my 512MB, I'll have to upgrade this motherboard, because my PII/233 only has another two years or so of workstation life left in it. As far as browser startup time... that's just part of the install process, right?;-) (Actually, since I've been developing a theme, I have been restarting somewhat more often, but those are special circumstances, not normal usage.)
Of course, the poor Win9x people still have to restart Mozilla about every day (when rebooting Windows), but you get used to daily lengthy restart processes when you use Win9x; you don't notice how horrible it was until you don't have to do it anymore (when you switch to an OS with a modicum of stability, such as NT or one of the unices).
> When I was on dialup Mozilla 1.1 sucked so badly as to be unusable.
I've not had that problem. I'm on a shared dialup connection with a 33.6 modem, and if anything Mozilla is substantially better for this, because I can "queue" pages by middle-clicking them, continue to read the page I was reading, then when I finish with it Ctrl-W to go to the next page in the "queue".
To enable this behavior, go to Edit->Preferences->Navigator->Tabbed Browsing and turn on most of the checkboxes. Voila; I haven't waited for a page to load in months, because I read another page while the new one is loading.
The thing I've found that you need to make the Mozilla experience enjoyable is enough RAM. 32MB just doesn't seem to cut it unless you really pare down the fat to the bare bones in terms of your OS, all the other apps/services that are running, et cetera, and install only the bare minimum Mozilla components (just Navigator and PSM, perhaps). I can't live like that, so I have 512 MB of RAM. (Actually, the real reason I have that is so I can work with an image in Gimp that's large enough to print on 8.5x11 paper at a decent dpi, without closing Mozilla and Gnus, but it comes in handy for Mozilla too, even when I'm not using Gimp.)
> I love choices, but when I made a choice I stick to it.
I'm with you. I use Mozilla for all my web browsing needs. I tried Phoenix, but it just wasn't... ready. Plus, I never got into the lean-and-mean thing; I want _features_, even if it means a larger memory footprint.
As far as plugins in Mozilla, I haven't had trouble with Java. Flash I can't stand, since I hate blinky flashy things with a significant passion, and no other plugins are in wide-enough use that I care about them at all. Yes, I do have to copy (or symlink) the library into the plugin directory when I install a new version of Mozilla, but Java works then. So I always symlink in the Java plugin and delete the default plugin, so I don't get asked to install Flash.
As far as stability, Mozilla 1.0 is as stable as any browser I've ever seen yet. Certainly more stable than Netscape 4 or IE5. (I have very minimal experience with IE6, not enough to say.) Now, the Mozilla 1.1 series wasn't stable, but Mozilla.org _told_ you that 1.0.x was the stable series and 1.1 was testing/development. (I've been using nightlies, but I knew I was living on the edge.)
Now, I _don't_ use Mozilla's Mail/News feature, but I am starting to watch some RFEs in bugzilla and will start to investigate when most of the ones I can't live without have been implemented. I'm predicting 2004 or so. (I get a lot of mail, so my mailreader needs are somewhat advanced. And I'm a Gnus user, and Pegasus Mail for years before that, so I know what I'm looking for.)
You want to see a _high_ profit margin, look at Bath & Body. Microsoft has *nothing* on those people. I once calculated that their votive candles cost 1000% more than at another store where I usually buy them (which, admittedly, has especially good prices and is probably not marking up more than 10-20% or so; still, even if Deane's is selling them at cost, 1000% is incredible markup).
I suspect the colored soaps are marked up even more than that. Not that the people who run an individual Bath & Body location probably make most of that markup; it all comes branded and labelled from their chain, so the markup is probably being done at that level. But _somebody_ is making a serious killing.
Sure, upgrade pricing. They've been known to do that in the past; I think Windows 95 users could get Windows 98 at a significant discount.
Thing is, they don't currently _need_ to do that, because they don't desparately need everyone to upgrade. They're sitting on a wad of cash, so they don't need the revenue right _now_, and the version of the OS people have is mostly irrelevant these days; if they can get you using the latest Media Player and so forth, that's what's on their agenda right now. OS upgrades, they'll start to push them when they need to, e.g., when they need the money or have some other motive. Paranoid people will be quick to point out how the next OS upgrade could force DRM/Palladium/PureEvil and thus be the one MS decides to push. Even MS can't credibly push _every_ upgrade on a majority of users, so they push the ones that gain them something strategic, or when they need the money to fund some project.
> I don't know if you are rememebering the internet as it was before > the boom era.
No, I'm seeing the internet as it is today. Most of the sites with the really useful information have acceptable levels of advertising (by which I mean, a banner or two, or less). When DejaNews went to excessive advertising, it *died*. Google (who use advertising in acceptable amounts, far less even than average) bought the archive, and it's more useful today than it was when Deja had it.
Google can probably generate _more_ advertising revenue than Deja was able to do for two reasons: First, and most important, any advertising they do put on there gets noticed immediately, because it stands alone and stands out. Second, they get more traffic, because more people find the site more useful. Google groups loads faster than DejaNews did, has better features, and is easier to use. I visit it more often.
(Google also probably has lower operating expenses, but that's ordinary business ingenuity at work, nothing new there. Little Caesars was doing the low-overhead thing before there was a www.)
Are there sites with useful information that load up on the adverts? Yes, a few. MapQuest is one. But these are the exception rather than the rule. Most of the pages that are loaded to the gills with a billion adverts don't contain any actual useful information.
Then there are your large corporate sites (Hewlet Packard and so on, Microsoft), which have information that's only useful if you're already a customer of that company (i.e., own one of their products). They shouldn't have to turn a profit on the site, because they ought to be able to turn a profit on the product itself; the site is just a value-added service that makes the product more attractive. Of course, not all large corporations view it that way... but if the site is _too_ loaded with adverts, it makes the site _and_ the product less attractive. Contrast with Apple, who loads their site with adverts for their _own_ products; that's smarter and will probably make them more money per visitor. They also make the ads look like they're part of the content of the site, if you aren't paying attention; that makes them seem less annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
> (And you can omit the quotes on attribute values in certain cases;t tributes.)
> check http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/intro/sgmltut.html#a
I believe that option has been rescinded in newer versions (since
XHTML 1.0 at least) and that all attribute values are to be quoted
these days. Of course, actual browsers are somewhat more lenient
than the standard and will let you get away with all sorts of stuff,
if you don't care about forward-compatibility.
> he must have been talking about archetects
Err, what does model building have to do with the beginning of
anything? (Or what did you _think_ arche in archetype meant?
The other possible meaning (ruler) makes even less sense.)
Sure. Minor. A dozen lines of javascript on an untrusted site can do quite literally anything (within the permissions the user has, which tends to be pretty lax on NT), and it's minor.
Well, I guess it's a good thing there Aren't very many of these minor bugs.
> Tell me, did you roll out IE6 within two days of release? Nobody
> in their right mind rolls out a release before it's seen a few
> weeks of action in the wild.
Right. I tend to use myself as the guinea pig, testing stuff like
new releases on my own workstation before I deploy it for anybody
else. The only thing is, this doesn't catch OS-specific bugs, since
our network (at work) is heterogenous, and I only usually test under
one OS. If our network were larger, I'd probably test on multiple
OSes before deploying, but with the relatively small number of nodes
we have, it's not a huge problem.
This policy (testing on myself) also fails for stuff I never use,
that other people ask me to install, such as Real Player. (I have
yet to figure out what purpose that one serves... I have never
once visited a site that uses it, despite spending hours a day on
the web. When people say they use it all the time, I have to wonder
what kind of sites they're going to; must be something in which I
have absolutely no interest, whatever it is.)
> Call me nuts, but I'd rather have an actual working product
It is an actual working product; has been since... well, for
some time now. Sure, it's buggy, but all software is buggy.
If anything, Mozilla is less buggy than the average browser.
> DHTML working is very, very basic.
DHTML is not quite so basic as you imply, but even if it were, DHTML
is basically working. There's just a bug in it that causes a few
sites to fail. FWIW, I've been using the buggy release since some
time yesterday and haven't managed to find a site where I can
reproduce the bug yet. Sure, I'll upgrade to 1.2.1 when it comes
out, and meanwhile if I happen to run into a DHTML site that's
broken, that I need to access, I can change my symlink back to
the previous release temporarily (though, unfortunately, that would
mean exiting my browser and restarting it, which means finishing
with all the tabs I currently have open, which would be something
of a pain).
> You can't have a security problem until you at least have a
> working product.
Interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I'm doing
any security checks; things that don't work right are immune to
security problems. I bet a lot of so-called security experts are
unaware of this axiom; perhaps you should write up a white paper.
> why is it available to the public at large then
For testing purposes. Testing is highly parallelisable.
> and used as a main browser by so many subscribers to this site
Because this parallelised-testing model, with everyone having nearly
complete access to the bug database, has been so effective that
bleeding-edge nightly releases of Mozilla these days are usually
more stable than the final/gamma end-user releases of most other
browsers.
Try Netscape for a while: you'll find that most of the bugs are in
the commercial extensions (AIM and such); the open-source parts that
were tested in Mozilla first are more solid. This isn't because
more bugs were _introduced_ in the commercial extensions (plenty
of bugs were introduced in the open code too), but because there
were fewer testers, so fewer of the bugs were found and fixed.
Mozilla 1.0.1 is the most rock-solid browser I've ever seen. Yes,
it _can_ be made to crash, but it happens far less often than in
other browsers and usually involves esoteric conditions such as
printing client-side-dynamic content (e.g., plugins or pages with
a lot of active scripting).
I was hoping 1.2 would surpass it in stability (1.1 did not), but
it looks like we're waiting for at least 1.2.1 for that.
Aargh. I just got 1.2 installed and the prefbar all set up, and now I'll have to install and customise the prefs toolbar again when I install 1.2.1. Bummer.
> Which is useless for editing or revising a table.
Oh, automatic indentation helps with that.
> Feel free to respond with your divine Emacs solution for
> merging two arbitrary adjoining cells
You must have something more specific in mind here than what you said.
Merging two horizontally adjascent cells is as easy as removing
</td><td> (and maybe setting a colspan). Doing it repeatedly in a
bunch of places is one keystroke per (as you record a macro the
first time), or if it's something you do often you could write an
elisp function that handles it. (You could pass a numeric argument
for which column to merge with the following column, say.)
Merging two vertically adjascent cells (merging two rows, I assume)
is not something I've ever needed to do, but if I did it on anything
resembling a regular basis I'd write an elisp function that would do
it automatically. That wouldn't be hard, and it could be bound to a
single keystroke. If would of course stop on </table> (except that
of course it would skip any </table> between <td> and </td>). (Yes,
a function can fairly easily find the corresponding close tag for
any given open tag, no matter how deep you nest them. Languages
like elisp and Perl make stuff like this easy, because they are
_designed_ to work with text.)
> or for altering an entire table's per-cell format
That's trivial. You don't even _need_ a scriptable editor for that.
It's easiest if you're using mostly CSS, but even if you're using lots
of HTML presentational stuff, it's one regex replace operation on a
selected region. vi could handle that.
> Who uses Windows 95/98 still?
Lots of people. Nobody's still _buying_ it, but there are quite
a few systems out there. Two things to remember here. First,
only a small percentage of users ever upgrade the OS; most wait
until they buy a new computer. That goes for home users as well
as businesses. Second, the usual "3 year" figure for replacing
an old PC is the average only in business; among home users, the
average is probably somewhat longer, and certainly the standard
deviation is much higher. Third (yes, I know I said two things),
a lot of people have never owned a new computer, only secondhand.
Windows 95/98/Me is more widely deployed on the desktop than any
other OS, by a preposterously, frighteningly wide margin. These
days NT is easily second (because WinXP OEM sales have been going
for a while), but it hasn't nearly caught up yet, and won't until
perhaps (WARNING: blatant speculation ahead) circa 2004.
Windows 95 is still more widely used than all versions of NT prior
to XP (3, 4, 2000 Server, 2000 Pro) combined, but I doubt there are
still as many actively-used Win95 systems as there are XP Home. A
very few months ago there would have been, though. 95OSR2 was sold
on OEM systems through late 1998, and those systems are only four
years old; probably around a third of them haven't been replaced
yet, and probably another third were handed down to another member
of the same immediate family, and many of those may still be in use
Quite a few of the rest may have hit the used computer market,
though by now many of them also have been junked for parts or
discarded.
Anyway, my point is, people don't stop using something when it
disappears off the store shelves; it takes, depending on the item,
days, months, years, or decades for that to happen. (Operating
systems and major appliances fall into the years category; most
perishible food items: days; other food items: months; tools and
such: decades. Just now I can't think of an example that takes
centuries.)
> BTW, aren't these the guys that bought Award out a little time ago?
If so, you'd think they'd trade under the Award name, rather than
the Phoenix name; Award has a very good reputation for producing
quality BIOSes; Phoenix does not -- quite the contrary. Like when
Symantec bought Norton: they call their product Norton Antivirus
because that's the better-known and better-liked name. You never
hear of Symantec Antivirus anymore (yes, that used to be the name
of a product), though of course Symantec is the name of the company
that makes the thing. If Phoenix were to buy Award (can you provide
a link on that?), I'd expect them, if they have braincell one, to use
the Award name for BIOSes.
Yes, but were they already doing that before the release of the first
Phoenix builds? Ford Motor Company pre-existed Ford Tractor, but
when they wanted to start making tractors, they had to call them
something else other than Ford. (I think they may have acquired Ford
Tractor at a later date, but that's immateriel.)
> I hadn't heard of Phoenix before this week
You haven't been working with PCs long enough. In the early days
of CMOS, when the idea of having a BIOS setup program that you could
use to change settings was relatively new, Phoenix BIOS and AmiBIOS
were the two major names. AmiBIOS was much nicer in a couple of
fairly significant ways, and that's why you haven't heard anything
about Phoenix BIOS recently.
I'm amazed they still exist as a company; I thought they'd followed
the footsteps of UNIVAC long ago. The big name in BIOSes now is
Award, last I checked. I do think Ami is still around, though.
> The main reason why I have never loaded Netscape as my default
> browser.. well, at first IE was simply better.
Huh? At first, IE was distilled donkey urine. It didn't become
usable as a substitute for Netscape until version 5. (Granted,
version 5 was not the fifth version really, but nevermind that.)
It wasn't better than Netscape until version 5.5, at which point
Netscape had released basically nothing in quite a long while.
> Then it was because Windows is unstable enough as it is.. why
> would I want to have two browsers loaded? (IE forces itself
> into memory of course)
This is mostly right, but there are two points. First, with
Windows 95 it is possible to not have IE installed. (There's
also IERadicator for Win98, but I'm talking about just not
having IE installed in the first place.) Second, if you do
the upgrade to IE6, do the custom install, and click on the
advanced button, you can get it to not set itself as the default
browser; if you do that, I _think_ it also doesn't force itself
on you at startup. I'm not certain, but that's how it _appears_
to work.
> with Netscape's little "web development" menu, that somehow
> convinced me IE was better
What? IE is better because Netscape has extra features for web
developers that IE doesn't have? I don't understand how you
could reach that conclusion from that observation. non sequeteur.
> Now it seems Netscape is coming out with new features and IE
> is outright stagnant.
Mozilla comes out with new versions more often than IE, yes.
> I think Netscape's CSS compliance has always been better as well
Only since Netscape 6. The CSS compliance in Netscape 4 was even
worse than the CSS compliance in IE4. (Yes, really. A lot worse,
even. So bad, many pages render better if you _disable_ CSS.)
Of course, when Netscape 4 first came out, barely any web pages
used CSS at all, so you didn't see the problems. If you go back
and try to use Netscape 4 now, you'll see that it gets the style
horribly wrong most of the time.
No time to reply to the rest; my family wants me to help with the
food...
Yes, but 1.0.x is much more stable than 1.1. I think 1.1 suffered
from being right after 1.0, because the focus on getting 1.0 out the
door took away developers from 1.1alpha, causing a dearth of feature
improvements in that milestone; people then tried to cram new features
into 1.1beta to compensate, and there wasn't time to fully stabilise
in the short timeframe for 1.1 final. Hopefully 1.2 is better.
> Anyone knows where to find out where mozilla is heading ?
Go to bugzilla.mozilla.org, and do a query. Set the target milestone
to the one(s) you're interested in, and search just for bugs where
the severity is set to "enhancement", which is for new features.
Bear in mind, the target milestone is tenative for any given item
and may change. But you can get a rough idea what's coming up by
looking at such a list.
Also, most features try to land during the alpha or at least during
the beta milestones, not the final. You can select several target
milestones at once (e.g., mozilla1.3alpha and mozilla1.3beta and
mozilla1.3) if you want to see what's coming in a certain range.
This example (1.3 alpha beta or final, severity=enhancement) gives
about 49 items at the moment. (Some of those will be less of a
big deal to you than others, of course.)
> I use pegasus.
Pegasus Mail *rocks*. My family uses it. I recommed it to people.
I'd be using it myself, if it weren't Windows-only.
> Do you want to trust your email to a beta?
I've been known to trust my email to a beta of Pegasus Mail...
> I do plan on checking out Pheonix soon
I tried 0.3 and it was completely inadequate for my needs. I'll
probably try again circa 0.5 or so, but "try again" doesn't mean
I'll be ready to switch. I'm liking recent versions of Mozilla
pretty well. Sure, I don't use it for mail, but I can choose
not to install Mail/News if I want. Generally, I go ahead and
install it so I can use it for testing purposes if I want...
> Either one beats making tables by hand, though.
You need a scriptable text editor. Makes things like this so
much easier. Hit one keystroke and it inserts the basic
structure...
<table><thead>
<tr>[cursor is here]
</tr>
</thead><tbody>
</tbody></table>
The real win, though, is not with big optimizations like this
but with the one little optimization that I use _constantly_.
It's a dozen lines of Emacs lisp, and I can't live without it:
I hit one keystroke, type the body of my tag (without the angle
brackets; for example, I type 'img src="blah.png" alt="Blah"'
or 'th') and it inserts the open tag and the close tag, leaving
my cursor between them. Not a big deal each time you use it,
but it adds up fast -- and habbitual use of it leads to well-
formed markup, which is the first step toward writing HTML
that actually (gasp) validates.
As an added advantage, all the keybindings I use for inserting
HTML tags when editing static HTML are also available when I'm
editing CGI scripts in cperl-mode, which seems to be half the
HTML I write these days.
> The Mozilla html editor is TOP NOTCH.
Urgle. Don't even _talk_ to me about WYSIWYG HTML editors, you'll
get me going _again_. If I never again have to try to fix up a
page that was created with one of those heinous monstrosities and
end up rewriting it from scratch because that's easier, it will be
a good thing and a marvel. Frontweaver, Dreampage, Composer,
Outlook Express (it is an HTML editor, that's what it's for, right?),
they're all cut from the same cloth.
> none of them are any faster for me in browsing speed (and thats
;-) (Actually, since I've been developing a theme,
> where it matters, i leave mozilla open for days if not weeks at
> a time), and i never have to wonder if feature xyz is supported.
Ditto. Of course, I have enough RAM that I don't have to worry
about memory footprint. By the time apps are demanding more than
my 512MB, I'll have to upgrade this motherboard, because my PII/233
only has another two years or so of workstation life left in it.
As far as browser startup time... that's just part of the install
process, right?
I have been restarting somewhat more often, but those are special
circumstances, not normal usage.)
Of course, the poor Win9x people still have to restart Mozilla about
every day (when rebooting Windows), but you get used to daily lengthy
restart processes when you use Win9x; you don't notice how horrible
it was until you don't have to do it anymore (when you switch to an
OS with a modicum of stability, such as NT or one of the unices).
> When I was on dialup Mozilla 1.1 sucked so badly as to be unusable.
I've not had that problem. I'm on a shared dialup connection with
a 33.6 modem, and if anything Mozilla is substantially better for
this, because I can "queue" pages by middle-clicking them, continue
to read the page I was reading, then when I finish with it Ctrl-W
to go to the next page in the "queue".
To enable this behavior, go to Edit->Preferences->Navigator->Tabbed
Browsing and turn on most of the checkboxes. Voila; I haven't
waited for a page to load in months, because I read another page
while the new one is loading.
The thing I've found that you need to make the Mozilla experience
enjoyable is enough RAM. 32MB just doesn't seem to cut it unless
you really pare down the fat to the bare bones in terms of your
OS, all the other apps/services that are running, et cetera, and
install only the bare minimum Mozilla components (just Navigator
and PSM, perhaps). I can't live like that, so I have 512 MB of
RAM. (Actually, the real reason I have that is so I can work with
an image in Gimp that's large enough to print on 8.5x11 paper at
a decent dpi, without closing Mozilla and Gnus, but it comes in
handy for Mozilla too, even when I'm not using Gimp.)
> And here I thought it was just me that hated that.
No, it's not just you. I was elated when I first found out I could
turn it off and get the old behavior back.
> I love choices, but when I made a choice I stick to it.
I'm with you. I use Mozilla for all my web browsing needs. I tried
Phoenix, but it just wasn't... ready. Plus, I never got into the
lean-and-mean thing; I want _features_, even if it means a larger
memory footprint.
As far as plugins in Mozilla, I haven't had trouble with Java. Flash
I can't stand, since I hate blinky flashy things with a significant
passion, and no other plugins are in wide-enough use that I care
about them at all. Yes, I do have to copy (or symlink) the library
into the plugin directory when I install a new version of Mozilla,
but Java works then. So I always symlink in the Java plugin and
delete the default plugin, so I don't get asked to install Flash.
As far as stability, Mozilla 1.0 is as stable as any browser I've
ever seen yet. Certainly more stable than Netscape 4 or IE5. (I
have very minimal experience with IE6, not enough to say.) Now, the
Mozilla 1.1 series wasn't stable, but Mozilla.org _told_ you that
1.0.x was the stable series and 1.1 was testing/development. (I've
been using nightlies, but I knew I was living on the edge.)
Now, I _don't_ use Mozilla's Mail/News feature, but I am starting
to watch some RFEs in bugzilla and will start to investigate when
most of the ones I can't live without have been implemented. I'm
predicting 2004 or so. (I get a lot of mail, so my mailreader needs
are somewhat advanced. And I'm a Gnus user, and Pegasus Mail for
years before that, so I know what I'm looking for.)
You want to see a _high_ profit margin, look at Bath & Body.
Microsoft has *nothing* on those people. I once calculated that
their votive candles cost 1000% more than at another store where
I usually buy them (which, admittedly, has especially good prices
and is probably not marking up more than 10-20% or so; still, even
if Deane's is selling them at cost, 1000% is incredible markup).
I suspect the colored soaps are marked up even more than that.
Not that the people who run an individual Bath & Body location
probably make most of that markup; it all comes branded and
labelled from their chain, so the markup is probably being done
at that level. But _somebody_ is making a serious killing.
Sure, upgrade pricing. They've been known to do
that in the past; I think Windows 95 users could
get Windows 98 at a significant discount.
Thing is, they don't currently _need_ to do that,
because they don't desparately need everyone to
upgrade. They're sitting on a wad of cash, so
they don't need the revenue right _now_, and the
version of the OS people have is mostly irrelevant
these days; if they can get you using the latest
Media Player and so forth, that's what's on their
agenda right now. OS upgrades, they'll start to
push them when they need to, e.g., when they need
the money or have some other motive. Paranoid
people will be quick to point out how the next
OS upgrade could force DRM/Palladium/PureEvil
and thus be the one MS decides to push. Even MS
can't credibly push _every_ upgrade on a majority
of users, so they push the ones that gain them
something strategic, or when they need the money
to fund some project.
> I don't know if you are rememebering the internet as it was before
> the boom era.
No, I'm seeing the internet as it is today. Most of the sites with
the really useful information have acceptable levels of advertising
(by which I mean, a banner or two, or less). When DejaNews went to
excessive advertising, it *died*. Google (who use advertising in
acceptable amounts, far less even than average) bought the archive,
and it's more useful today than it was when Deja had it.
Google can probably generate _more_ advertising revenue than Deja
was able to do for two reasons: First, and most important, any
advertising they do put on there gets noticed immediately, because
it stands alone and stands out. Second, they get more traffic,
because more people find the site more useful. Google groups
loads faster than DejaNews did, has better features, and is easier
to use. I visit it more often.
(Google also probably has lower operating expenses, but that's
ordinary business ingenuity at work, nothing new there. Little
Caesars was doing the low-overhead thing before there was a www.)
Are there sites with useful information that load up on the adverts?
Yes, a few. MapQuest is one. But these are the exception rather
than the rule. Most of the pages that are loaded to the gills with
a billion adverts don't contain any actual useful information.
Then there are your large corporate sites (Hewlet Packard and so
on, Microsoft), which have information that's only useful if you're
already a customer of that company (i.e., own one of their products).
They shouldn't have to turn a profit on the site, because they ought
to be able to turn a profit on the product itself; the site is just
a value-added service that makes the product more attractive. Of
course, not all large corporations view it that way... but if the
site is _too_ loaded with adverts, it makes the site _and_ the
product less attractive. Contrast with Apple, who loads their site
with adverts for their _own_ products; that's smarter and will
probably make them more money per visitor. They also make the
ads look like they're part of the content of the site, if you
aren't paying attention; that makes them seem less annoying.