One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.
The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes.
What's wrong with incremental rendering? One thing that often annoys me when I use Opera is that it will download an entire 4MB page before displaying anything. Mozilla sometimes does that as well, but we consider it a bug (129640) when it does. Mozilla has an optimization that makes not display anything for the first 1.2 seconds of interpreting a page (unless it finishes in under 1.2 seconds), so once the first screenful of the page appears, you can usually read it while the rest of the page loads quietly.
In 2 years of reporting 800 bugs, I've been told "fix it yourself" two or three times. Mozilla developers appreciate bug reports and most don't mind an occasional "I think this bug is important because...". If you just go around complaining "This bug has been known for x months" or "I can't believe you didn't fix obscure bug y, nobody will use your browser", you might get that response, but you're more likely to be ignored.
"There should be five giant strong architectures out there that can emulate each other," he says. "The classic way you do risk management is you limit the amount of damage one person can do because he can't cross boundaries."
Make it five times as likely that one-fifth of all computers will be compromised? I don't see the advantage.
I just wrote a bookmarklet that shows you the contents of password fields in web pages. It works with passwords remembered by Mozilla, and it works in IE6, so it probably works with passwords remembered by Gator. You'll have to run the bookmarklet on each site you've stored a password on, and you'll probably want a sheet of paper.
Of course, if Microsoft added popup disabling software to IE, they would probably get blasted here for driving all the little popup-stopping software companies out of business.
Except that pop-up blocking can be done much better as part of a browser moreso than, say, a browser can be done better as part of an operating system. A browser knows whether a site tried to create a new window in response to your click, or whether you followed a link to a site that tried to create a new window in response to being loaded.
Of course, I wouldn't mind if Netscape included Mozilla's pop-up blocking in their next release, and Microsoft continued to leave the feature out of Internet Explorer.
Why are you still surfing porn with IE? Mozilla lets you block pop-ups, ignores exit pop-ups by default, and lets you open links quickly with one hand if you have a three-button mouse or a clickable scroll wheel. It even has a command and shortcut to close all Mozilla windows for when someone knocks on your door, which annoys the hell out of people who try to use the browser for anything bug porn and hit Exit accidentally.
Be sure to check out Pornzilla, a set of Mozilla add-ons useful for porning and instructions for doing things like making stealth profiles. We're always looking for new contributors who can write add-ons or fix bugs in Mozilla that affect porning. We also need input from someone who is uses Mozilla's tabbed-browsing feature so we know which tabbed-browsing bugs are most important for Pornzilla users.
I just wrote a pair of bookmarklets that take you to the previous and next numbered image or numbered image gallery. They'll probably be included in the next version of Pornzilla, along with the zoom-images and search-links bookmarklets that are already included.
Since 0.9.4, mozilla users have had the ability to block onload and unload pop-ups/unders. I've had zero problems with this. It doesn't block pop-ups you request, just the ones you don't.
If I interpreted the article correctly, it's not talking about pop-up ads, but rather ActiveX dialogs. The huge dialogs that say "Do you want to install and run this program from foo corp?". Mozilla doesn't support ActiveX, but it supports XPI, and like IE it allows sites to bring up dialogs asking if you want to install something. To see an example of Mozilla's XPI dialog, try installing the half-working Google Toolbar for Mozilla.
You see fewer XPI dialogs than ActiveX dialogs are that fewer people use Mozilla, and those that do are slightly less likely to blindly click "yes" to install something from a porn site than IE users.
automatically rendering html email has much more serious problems than wasting the bandwidth
The problem isn't the HTML. You can send links, bolded text, and even images without making recipients grab something as soon as the message is displayed. The problem is that most HTML-supporting mail clients allow the HTML in a message to load images (etc) that aren't a part of the message.
Wish lists don't have to include "don't include security or privacy holes in the software". That should be assumed. If cnet had been reviewing Outlook Express or Mozilla Mail, it would have been a reasonable request, but they were listing "features today's mailers don't have that we think would be cool" and not reviewing a specific product.
It's about 4 times harder to copy and replace, for example to change the header at the top of each of ten open files.
But you wouldn't want to do that. It's 10 times easier (and faster) to use a suitable search and replace in your editor to do that, than cutting and pasting using the windowing system. Use the right tool for the job.
I'm talking about editing multiple files. I'd be scared if I found that a text editor had a "replace block in multiple files" feature. Remember that I already have each of these files open in text editor windows, possibly on different screens.
Which makes it quite difficult to "port an application to linux", since some users won't be able to alt+click, some won't have use of ctrl+arrow key shortcuts, etc.
Nope, can't see how that's a problem. Keyboard and mouse events can be handled within your app however you want them to be. If you're talking about telling users how to manipulate windows, then don't -- just tell them how to use the app.
The problem appears when your app uses Ctrl+left for "go left a word in a body of text" and Alt+click for "open link in a new window behind this window", but some users can't use those shortcuts because their window managers use them.
Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
on
AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 4, Insightful
People here at/. complain about web banners, popups, popunders, etc. but they go giddy when they get to watch TV commericials. How does that make any sense?
I am one of those people. Let me try to explain why I like some ad formats and dislike others.
I like television ads because many are funny, and because my interest in psychology makes it interesting to think about why a particular ad works. I like most web banner ads because they don't get in the way and are sometimes funny. I love Google text ads because they're useful, sometimes more useful than the search results.
On the other hand, I don't like the large square ads Yahoo News uses because they can make it very difficult to read the text around them. Slashdot uses similar square ads, but Slashdot's flash less and are positioned between paragraphs rather than floated next to them, and so are no more annoying than banner ads.
I don't like pop-ups and pop-unders because they require my attention to dismiss, and because they take away the option of "quickly leaving the site because the ads are annoying" available on television and sites without pop-ups. They turn leaving the site into a two-step process, closing the ad and leaving the site. I don't consider "you may open windows on my desktop" to be part of the implied contract of going to a web site.
They want to know what you did and didn't like about the old AdCritic site. I said that I liked that it was free of charge and that the QuickTime videos were high-quality. I also said that I was ok with the range of ads but would like to see it increased, for example by including all of the Got Milk ads.
I was comparing Mozilla's middle-click with the two methods available in IE, not comparing Mozilla's context menus with IE's. Mozilla also supports the other methods for Open Link in New Window but doesn't make those methods faster than IE does (which I should have mentioned). Netscape 4 does make context menus fast, which is why I said that IE's are unnecessarily slow.
And are you using windows that requires complex keystrokes or multiple mouse clicks for cut+paste?
The problem with X's "primary selection" paradigm is that it's only useful for copying and pasting. It's about 4 times harder to copy and replace, for example to change the header at the top of each of ten open files. It also differentiates between mouse selections and keyboard selections, and I don't agree with that distinction.
At least X11 gives you many alternative window managers.
Which makes it quite difficult to "port an application to linux", since some users won't be able to alt+click, some won't have use of ctrl+arrow key shortcuts, etc.
I don't know how much you know about the project beforehand, so I don't know how much of this makes since to you...
I've reported about 800 bugs (search for bugs reported by jruderman), but it sounds like you've been following the release process more closely than I have.
If you're doing 13 things at once, you need multiple virtual desktops or less coffee, rather than MDI in each of your favorite apps. You can't expect each application to let you arrange its windows in complex ways. Using tabbed windows also works poorly when you want a notepad window to be associated with one task, and an irc window to be associated with another task.
Being able to turn off popups is especially nice when dealing with adult web sites...
Yep, as is support for bookmarklets such as "search links" and "show linked images". IE used to support these bookmarklets but dropped support in version 6.
Being able to middle-click links to open them in new windows is also nice. Shift+click in IE requires two hands, and right-clicking to select "open in new window" is slow in IE because IE requires two clicks for context menus.
Ctrl+Tab is also the standard UI convention for switching between groups of controls, which makes sense for framed web pages. The UI convention for MDI apps is "don't use MDI". But as long as Mozilla has tabbed browsing, it might as well override Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs in tabbed-browsing mode while leaving it for switching frames/panes in windowed mode. Ctrl+PgUp and F6 would be kept as "only switch tabs" and "only switch frames/panes".
No, at least on MS Windows. (On Linux, opening Mozilla a second time *always* starts a new process, which is worse because of speed.) But Mozilla has far fewer website-related crashes than Netscape, and I think it has fewer crashes overall, at least if you use a milestone build rather than a daily.
The roadmap doesn't say "2 weeks". If you look at the drawing in the roadmap, you'll notice that there's a lightning-bolt break in the 1.0 branch, indicating a break in the (time) scale. I also don't see the "4 weeks" you mention on Tinderbox.
Case in point, bug 99344 [mozilla.org]. The Mozilla team has known about this one for at least six months, yet the bug still lives.
I'm surprised at how often users complain about that a bug or enhancement request "has been open for 6 months" or "has been known for 2 years". The age of a bug is not a good measure of its severity. In fact, severe bugs generally get fixed more quickly than minor ones, so most old bugs are minor ones. Instead of complaining about how long a bug has been known, complain about how many sites it breaks, whether it's a regression from older versions of Mozilla, and what standards it breaks.
Some classes of bugs, such as security holes, are important to fix quickly. For other classes of bugs, you have to explain why this bug is more important than one reported a week ago that could be fixed by the same developer.
I actually prefer opening new tabs, mainly because it's fast and easy to switch from tab to tab at the keyboard; CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN.
Hmm? Alt+tab is faster than ctrl+pgup, because it requires fewer hands. Are you using one of the Linux window managers that forces you to switch windows by moving the mouse?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the main things that I still haven't figured out (and I have looked) is how to go to the address bar using the keyboard. In Opera you hit F8. In IE you hit Alt-D. I'm sure Mozilla must have this really obvious feature or people would go insane, but I just can't seem to find it.
h elp/
Ctrl+L. For other shortcuts see http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~jruderma/mozilla/keyboard-
The other thing that's a bit annoying, though has improved greatly since I first tried the 0.9.3 release, is the feeling that Mozilla is a little sluggish. I don't know if it's actually slower rendering an average page than Opera is (perhaps a tiny bit), but it feels slower. Opera seems to get everything worked out in the background before drawing a page; Mozilla seems to draw it as it goes.
What's wrong with incremental rendering? One thing that often annoys me when I use Opera is that it will download an entire 4MB page before displaying anything. Mozilla sometimes does that as well, but we consider it a bug (129640) when it does. Mozilla has an optimization that makes not display anything for the first 1.2 seconds of interpreting a page (unless it finishes in under 1.2 seconds), so once the first screenful of the page appears, you can usually read it while the rest of the page loads quietly.
ObMozBugComplaintBitchSlap
In 2 years of reporting 800 bugs, I've been told "fix it yourself" two or three times. Mozilla developers appreciate bug reports and most don't mind an occasional "I think this bug is important because...". If you just go around complaining "This bug has been known for x months" or "I can't believe you didn't fix obscure bug y, nobody will use your browser", you might get that response, but you're more likely to be ignored.
"There should be five giant strong architectures out there that can emulate each other," he says. "The classic way you do risk management is you limit the amount of damage one person can do because he can't cross boundaries."
Make it five times as likely that one-fifth of all computers will be compromised? I don't see the advantage.
I just wrote a bookmarklet that shows you the contents of password fields in web pages. It works with passwords remembered by Mozilla, and it works in IE6, so it probably works with passwords remembered by Gator. You'll have to run the bookmarklet on each site you've stored a password on, and you'll probably want a sheet of paper.
Of course, if Microsoft added popup disabling software to IE, they would probably get blasted here for driving all the little popup-stopping software companies out of business.
Except that pop-up blocking can be done much better as part of a browser moreso than, say, a browser can be done better as part of an operating system. A browser knows whether a site tried to create a new window in response to your click, or whether you followed a link to a site that tried to create a new window in response to being loaded.
Of course, I wouldn't mind if Netscape included Mozilla's pop-up blocking in their next release, and Microsoft continued to leave the feature out of Internet Explorer.
Why are you still surfing porn with IE? Mozilla lets you block pop-ups, ignores exit pop-ups by default, and lets you open links quickly with one hand if you have a three-button mouse or a clickable scroll wheel. It even has a command and shortcut to close all Mozilla windows for when someone knocks on your door, which annoys the hell out of people who try to use the browser for anything bug porn and hit Exit accidentally.
Be sure to check out Pornzilla, a set of Mozilla add-ons useful for porning and instructions for doing things like making stealth profiles. We're always looking for new contributors who can write add-ons or fix bugs in Mozilla that affect porning. We also need input from someone who is uses Mozilla's tabbed-browsing feature so we know which tabbed-browsing bugs are most important for Pornzilla users.
I just wrote a pair of bookmarklets that take you to the previous and next numbered image or numbered image gallery. They'll probably be included in the next version of Pornzilla, along with the zoom-images and search-links bookmarklets that are already included.
Since 0.9.4, mozilla users have had the ability to block onload and unload pop-ups/unders. I've had zero problems with this. It doesn't block pop-ups you request, just the ones you don't.
If I interpreted the article correctly, it's not talking about pop-up ads, but rather ActiveX dialogs. The huge dialogs that say "Do you want to install and run this program from foo corp?". Mozilla doesn't support ActiveX, but it supports XPI, and like IE it allows sites to bring up dialogs asking if you want to install something. To see an example of Mozilla's XPI dialog, try installing the half-working Google Toolbar for Mozilla.
You see fewer XPI dialogs than ActiveX dialogs are that fewer people use Mozilla, and those that do are slightly less likely to blindly click "yes" to install something from a porn site than IE users.
automatically rendering html email has much more serious problems than wasting the bandwidth
The problem isn't the HTML. You can send links, bolded text, and even images without making recipients grab something as soon as the message is displayed. The problem is that most HTML-supporting mail clients allow the HTML in a message to load images (etc) that aren't a part of the message.
Wish lists don't have to include "don't include security or privacy holes in the software". That should be assumed. If cnet had been reviewing Outlook Express or Mozilla Mail, it would have been a reasonable request, but they were listing "features today's mailers don't have that we think would be cool" and not reviewing a specific product.
Overture's only purpose to me so far has been to search for various things and be entertained at how much money people are blowing on getting hits.
What are the best/highest ones you've found? I played this game with Leonard Lin and he beat me with "Poker" and the misspelling "Casion".
I'm talking about editing multiple files. I'd be scared if I found that a text editor had a "replace block in multiple files" feature. Remember that I already have each of these files open in text editor windows, possibly on different screens.
Nope, can't see how that's a problem. Keyboard and mouse events can be handled within your app however you want them to be. If you're talking about telling users how to manipulate windows, then don't -- just tell them how to use the app.
The problem appears when your app uses Ctrl+left for "go left a word in a body of text" and Alt+click for "open link in a new window behind this window", but some users can't use those shortcuts because their window managers use them.
People here at /. complain about web banners, popups, popunders, etc. but they go giddy when they get to watch TV commericials. How does that make any sense?
I am one of those people. Let me try to explain why I like some ad formats and dislike others.
I like television ads because many are funny, and because my interest in psychology makes it interesting to think about why a particular ad works. I like most web banner ads because they don't get in the way and are sometimes funny. I love Google text ads because they're useful, sometimes more useful than the search results.
On the other hand, I don't like the large square ads Yahoo News uses because they can make it very difficult to read the text around them. Slashdot uses similar square ads, but Slashdot's flash less and are positioned between paragraphs rather than floated next to them, and so are no more annoying than banner ads.
I don't like pop-ups and pop-unders because they require my attention to dismiss, and because they take away the option of "quickly leaving the site because the ads are annoying" available on television and sites without pop-ups. They turn leaving the site into a two-step process, closing the ad and leaving the site. I don't consider "you may open windows on my desktop" to be part of the implied contract of going to a web site.
They want to know what you did and didn't like about the old AdCritic site. I said that I liked that it was free of charge and that the QuickTime videos were high-quality. I also said that I was ok with the range of ads but would like to see it increased, for example by including all of the Got Milk ads.
Hey Jonas :)
I was comparing Mozilla's middle-click with the two methods available in IE, not comparing Mozilla's context menus with IE's. Mozilla also supports the other methods for Open Link in New Window but doesn't make those methods faster than IE does (which I should have mentioned). Netscape 4 does make context menus fast, which is why I said that IE's are unnecessarily slow.
And are you using windows that requires complex keystrokes or multiple mouse clicks for cut+paste?
The problem with X's "primary selection" paradigm is that it's only useful for copying and pasting. It's about 4 times harder to copy and replace, for example to change the header at the top of each of ten open files. It also differentiates between mouse selections and keyboard selections, and I don't agree with that distinction.
At least X11 gives you many alternative window managers.
Which makes it quite difficult to "port an application to linux", since some users won't be able to alt+click, some won't have use of ctrl+arrow key shortcuts, etc.
So, why can't you use two hands? :)
:)
OH, that's right, your talking about pr0n sites
Exactly
I don't know how much you know about the project beforehand, so I don't know how much of this makes since to you...
I've reported about 800 bugs (search for bugs reported by jruderman), but it sounds like you've been following the release process more closely than I have.
If you're doing 13 things at once, you need multiple virtual desktops or less coffee, rather than MDI in each of your favorite apps. You can't expect each application to let you arrange its windows in complex ways. Using tabbed windows also works poorly when you want a notepad window to be associated with one task, and an irc window to be associated with another task.
Being able to turn off popups is especially nice when dealing with adult web sites...
Yep, as is support for bookmarklets such as "search links" and "show linked images". IE used to support these bookmarklets but dropped support in version 6.
Being able to middle-click links to open them in new windows is also nice. Shift+click in IE requires two hands, and right-clicking to select "open in new window" is slow in IE because IE requires two clicks for context menus.
Ctrl+Tab is also the standard UI convention for switching between groups of controls, which makes sense for framed web pages. The UI convention for MDI apps is "don't use MDI". But as long as Mozilla has tabbed browsing, it might as well override Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs in tabbed-browsing mode while leaving it for switching frames/panes in windowed mode. Ctrl+PgUp and F6 would be kept as "only switch tabs" and "only switch frames/panes".
Is their a way to force >1 mozilla process?
No, at least on MS Windows. (On Linux, opening Mozilla a second time *always* starts a new process, which is worse because of speed.) But Mozilla has far fewer website-related crashes than Netscape, and I think it has fewer crashes overall, at least if you use a milestone build rather than a daily.
The roadmap doesn't say "2 weeks". If you look at the drawing in the roadmap, you'll notice that there's a lightning-bolt break in the 1.0 branch, indicating a break in the (time) scale. I also don't see the "4 weeks" you mention on Tinderbox.
Case in point, bug 99344 [mozilla.org]. The Mozilla team has known about this one for at least six months, yet the bug still lives.
I'm surprised at how often users complain about that a bug or enhancement request "has been open for 6 months" or "has been known for 2 years". The age of a bug is not a good measure of its severity. In fact, severe bugs generally get fixed more quickly than minor ones, so most old bugs are minor ones. Instead of complaining about how long a bug has been known, complain about how many sites it breaks, whether it's a regression from older versions of Mozilla, and what standards it breaks.
Some classes of bugs, such as security holes, are important to fix quickly. For other classes of bugs, you have to explain why this bug is more important than one reported a week ago that could be fixed by the same developer.
Anyone who uses "kludge" in a sentence
What's wrong with the word kludge? I use the word occasionally, and I even found it in Boggle once while playing with my family.
I actually prefer opening new tabs, mainly because it's fast and easy to switch from tab to tab at the keyboard; CTRL+PGUP and CTRL+PGDN.
Hmm? Alt+tab is faster than ctrl+pgup, because it requires fewer hands. Are you using one of the Linux window managers that forces you to switch windows by moving the mouse?