(and you really can't blame the last 2, they're implementing things to take care of this junk).
I don't know about Konq, because its authors chose not to release a version that runs on my platform of choice, but Mozilla doesn't yet ship to block pop-up advertisements (or even "hydras", the most annoying type) by default. It has a hidden pref to disable the window.open() function while a page is loading or unloading, which should become a visible pref once bugs are worked out. I hope the pref is eventually turned on by default, at least for the case of hydras.
Once again people seem to be looking to the government to solve problems they can solve themselves, by using an appropriate browser and learning how to configure it!
Default browser configurations should not be vulnerable to a DoS attack that has been widely exploited against web users for years. Good defaults are more important than configurability, especially when your target market includes people who don't want to look through thousands of options to find a combination that fixes the problem without breaking legitimate uses of JavaScript.
In other words, if you could convince me that it's not the government's responsibility, then I would argue that it's the browser maker's responsibility rather than the user's.
OT comment: FUCK Internet Explorer. I just spent twenty minutes hammering out a lengthy post, get a a "this page cannot be displayed" when I click submit, and pressing "refresh" does not even make so much as a vague attempt to refresh, and when I press "back" everything I wrote is gone. Why am I using this fscking shit rubbishy 5.5 browser anyway.
Not fixed in 6.0. I spent a few minutes typing in a a bugzilla comment earlier today, and then clicked on a link to another bug in Outlook Express. OE opens the link in the existing IE window (wtf? that's guaranteed dataloss if the user doesn't notice). I hit back, and my comment was gone.
Mozilla is better about always keeping form data associated with session history (instead of a random 50% of the time like with IE). I need to get off my ass and figure out how to make Mozilla my default browser.
This is nothing more that a political "bone" being tossed at the "soccer moms".
I thought "soccer moms" were mothers who try to be active in the child's life. I would expect those mothers to calmly explain to their children what porn is if their children encounter it, or install filtering software themselves if they feel strongly that their child will be permanently hurt if they catch a glimpse of a naked woman. I don't think they expect the government to filter the Internet for them.
Yes, it has the word "among" above it and an ellipsis at the bottom. That makes it look like you picked out countries that Americans don't particularly like to list, rather than listing all of the countries that still use capital punishment.
The goal of some porn site owners, selling domain names through extortion, just got easier. Now they can they tell victims not only "people searching for your site will find our porn" and "people trying to guess at your domain name will find our porn", but also "news sites will link to our porn while talking about your site".
Don't wait for they to ask for money. Just send them some, along with a note saying you like the program they're working on (so they have some idea why they're suddenly getting money from strangers). I made a personal toolbar button that lets you quickly send money to any e-mail address listed on a web page. It works with Netscape 4, IE5 (but not 6), and Mozilla. You can get it here. You don't even have to install anything, although you do need to get an account at PayDirect if you want to actually send money with it.
By the way, Amazon's boycottable actions aren't the only reason not to use their donation system. It's also one of the most expensive donation systems.
Which begs the question, why doesn't Mozilla have this feature? At least, I haven't been able to find it. There has been NO time in the past 5 years I have ever had a reason to view an animated GIF. They've all been advertisements.
Edit, Preferences, Privacy and Security, Images. See Bug 90837 for discussion about moving the pref out of the Privacy and Security branch to a place where it will be easier to find.
Possible problem: are there any browsers that cannot request the ad image while the main content page is stalled? i.e. non multi-threaded?
That doesn't have anything to do with multi-threadedness. Many browsers have a limit on the number of simlutaneous requests per hostname or per window in order to reduce network congestion. In particular, both Internet Explorer and Mozilla limit the number of persistent HTTP connections to a given server to two, based on this recommendation in RFC 2616: "A single-user client [that uses persistent connections] SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy." (See this bugzilla entry for discussion about how many connections Mozilla should maintain with each web server.)
If several image tags come before the iframe tag, the page will not finish loading until those other connections time out. The same will happen if a browser intelligently decides to download images in the main content before it downloads images in iframes (this may happen anyway, if the HTML of the main content loads before the HTML of the iframe).
What if I'm one of the 40% of web surfers who has been trained to hit Alt+F4 as soon as something looking like a pop-up window appears? (Statistic pulled out of my ass.)
Did the decision to make Mozilla an "application platform" come before or after the decisions to abstract the user interface and have Mozilla draw its own widgets?
* HTML4 requires that you be able to make listboxes with a tree image in the background. How would you do that on Windows, where you don't have access to the widget code? Mozilla would be forced to use the common subset of what each OS's listbox provides, which would be a very limited listbox.
* Native widgets sometimes have subtle restrictions. For example, Windows 98 will become unstable if you create several hundred native listboxes. (It usually doesn't crash, but toolbars will stop appearing in new windows; I consider that to be instability.) Internet Explorer suffers from this problem every time I get mod points on Slashdot, but open several top-level stories in different windows before I notice.
* Native widgets may have less subtle restrictions, such as limits on the amount of text a textbox can contain.
That's a really bad reason to make an app look the same across operating systems. Most users use one operating system and many apps, not many operating systems and several apps.
I can understand why Apple doesn't want other operating systems to look like OS X, but why don't they want Mozilla to be able to look like an OS X app?
I'd rather have the click-through ads than pop-ups.
Agreed. Pop-up ads make it more difficult to leave the site, which you're likely to want to do if the site is making it difficult for you to look at its content. In addition, pop-ups are often "anonymous" in that you can't figure out which of the 7 browser windows you had loading just threw this ad at you, making it difficult to avoid the annoying site in the future.
If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
You're forgetting something about contextual menus: the "contextual" part.
Say there are 20 of some object on the screen (maybe hyperlinks or textboxes), I want to tell the program which one I want to perform an action on (perhaps "copy link location" or "paste"). It takes less time to right-click on the object than it does to left-click on it and then go to the menu at the top of the window/screen. And with hyperlinks, clicking the object performs a different action than the one I wanted (following the link), so I'm stuck if I only have one mouse button.
But anytime the user has to install something, you've got a potential security problem.
I know of at least two types of security holes involving ActiveX:
The user trusts someone who turns out to be malicious.
The user trusts some well-meaning but poorly written code. Another web site uses the ActiveX control's scripting interface to exploit a buffer overflow or a failure of the control to check file permissions.
I don't know how common the second type of problem is with Netscape-style plugins. I could imagine the existence of a buffer overflow in Quicktime's handling of malformed movie files, which would affect both browsers.
What happened to SimMars? Maxis released a trailer for the game over a year ago, and then redirected the web site to http://simsville.ea.com/, which is now defunct. Many members of the Mars Society were hoping to play the game, and hoping that others who played the game would become interested in supporting a real-life mission to send humans to Mars.
No, but quoting dead people is a good way of pointing out parallels between the present and the past. Paralleles like these help us see that our country has survived through greater troubles, allowing us to approach the situation with some rationality. They also give us some idea of where in history to look in order to figure out what has worked before and what hasn't in similar situations.
I liked a lot of cartoons. I agree, though, that the list could have been better without 25 cartoons that just said "pearl harbor", "we have awakened a sleeping giant", or had drawings of both pearl harbor and the WTC attacks. (The only pearl harbor one I liked was "tora! tora! tora! / terror! terror! terror!".)
Slashdot Mirror
But noone's blaming Microsoft, Netscape, Mozilla, or Konq
Really?
(and you really can't blame the last 2, they're implementing things to take care of this junk).
I don't know about Konq, because its authors chose not to release a version that runs on my platform of choice, but Mozilla doesn't yet ship to block pop-up advertisements (or even "hydras", the most annoying type) by default. It has a hidden pref to disable the window.open() function while a page is loading or unloading, which should become a visible pref once bugs are worked out. I hope the pref is eventually turned on by default, at least for the case of hydras.
Once again people seem to be looking to the government to solve problems they can solve themselves, by using an appropriate browser and learning how to configure it!
Default browser configurations should not be vulnerable to a DoS attack that has been widely exploited against web users for years. Good defaults are more important than configurability, especially when your target market includes people who don't want to look through thousands of options to find a combination that fixes the problem without breaking legitimate uses of JavaScript.
In other words, if you could convince me that it's not the government's responsibility, then I would argue that it's the browser maker's responsibility rather than the user's.
OT comment: FUCK Internet Explorer. I just spent twenty minutes hammering out a lengthy post, get a a "this page cannot be displayed" when I click submit, and pressing "refresh" does not even make so much as a vague attempt to refresh, and when I press "back" everything I wrote is gone. Why am I using this fscking shit rubbishy 5.5 browser anyway.
Not fixed in 6.0. I spent a few minutes typing in a a bugzilla comment earlier today, and then clicked on a link to another bug in Outlook Express. OE opens the link in the existing IE window (wtf? that's guaranteed dataloss if the user doesn't notice). I hit back, and my comment was gone.
Mozilla is better about always keeping form data associated with session history (instead of a random 50% of the time like with IE). I need to get off my ass and figure out how to make Mozilla my default browser.
This is nothing more that a political "bone" being tossed at the "soccer moms".
I thought "soccer moms" were mothers who try to be active in the child's life. I would expect those mothers to calmly explain to their children what porn is if their children encounter it, or install filtering software themselves if they feel strongly that their child will be permanently hurt if they catch a glimpse of a naked woman. I don't think they expect the government to filter the Internet for them.
See something wrong with that list?
Yes, it has the word "among" above it and an ellipsis at the bottom. That makes it look like you picked out countries that Americans don't particularly like to list, rather than listing all of the countries that still use capital punishment.
The goal of some porn site owners, selling domain names through extortion, just got easier. Now they can they tell victims not only "people searching for your site will find our porn" and "people trying to guess at your domain name will find our porn", but also "news sites will link to our porn while talking about your site".
spews.com is a porn site for sale.... spews.org on the other hand. Might want to change that link before 18 year olds go to it.
I wouldn't have looked at the site if you hadn't said that...
Don't wait for they to ask for money. Just send them some, along with a note saying you like the program they're working on (so they have some idea why they're suddenly getting money from strangers). I made a personal toolbar button that lets you quickly send money to any e-mail address listed on a web page. It works with Netscape 4, IE5 (but not 6), and Mozilla. You can get it here. You don't even have to install anything, although you do need to get an account at PayDirect if you want to actually send money with it.
By the way, Amazon's boycottable actions aren't the only reason not to use their donation system. It's also one of the most expensive donation systems.
Which begs the question, why doesn't Mozilla have this feature? At least, I haven't been able to find it. There has been NO time in the past 5 years I have ever had a reason to view an animated GIF. They've all been advertisements.
Edit, Preferences, Privacy and Security, Images. See Bug 90837 for discussion about moving the pref out of the Privacy and Security branch to a place where it will be easier to find.
They could encrypt their content, their ActiveX control could decrypt it, and hacking IE to kill the popups would be illegal.
Web pages do not have a right to open new browser windows.
Possible problem: are there any browsers that cannot request the ad image while the main content page is stalled? i.e. non multi-threaded?
That doesn't have anything to do with multi-threadedness. Many browsers have a limit on the number of simlutaneous requests per hostname or per window in order to reduce network congestion. In particular, both Internet Explorer and Mozilla limit the number of persistent HTTP connections to a given server to two, based on this recommendation in RFC 2616: "A single-user client [that uses persistent connections] SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy." (See this bugzilla entry for discussion about how many connections Mozilla should maintain with each web server.)
If several image tags come before the iframe tag, the page will not finish loading until those other connections time out. The same will happen if a browser intelligently decides to download images in the main content before it downloads images in iframes (this may happen anyway, if the HTML of the main content loads before the HTML of the iframe).
What if I'm one of the 40% of web surfers who has been trained to hit Alt+F4 as soon as something looking like a pop-up window appears? (Statistic pulled out of my ass.)
That would drive away anyone with a slower computer, because Java does not load very quickly.
Did the decision to make Mozilla an "application platform" come before or after the decisions to abstract the user interface and have Mozilla draw its own widgets?
Several reasons for not using OS-native widgets:
* HTML4 requires that you be able to make listboxes with a tree image in the background. How would you do that on Windows, where you don't have access to the widget code? Mozilla would be forced to use the common subset of what each OS's listbox provides, which would be a very limited listbox.
* Native widgets sometimes have subtle restrictions. For example, Windows 98 will become unstable if you create several hundred native listboxes. (It usually doesn't crash, but toolbars will stop appearing in new windows; I consider that to be instability.) Internet Explorer suffers from this problem every time I get mod points on Slashdot, but open several top-level stories in different windows before I notice.
* Native widgets may have less subtle restrictions, such as limits on the amount of text a textbox can contain.
That's a really bad reason to make an app look the same across operating systems. Most users use one operating system and many apps, not many operating systems and several apps.
I can understand why Apple doesn't want other operating systems to look like OS X, but why don't they want Mozilla to be able to look like an OS X app?
I'd rather have the click-through ads than pop-ups.
Agreed. Pop-up ads make it more difficult to leave the site, which you're likely to want to do if the site is making it difficult for you to look at its content. In addition, pop-ups are often "anonymous" in that you can't figure out which of the 7 browser windows you had loading just threw this ad at you, making it difficult to avoid the annoying site in the future.
We need the the money to pay our electricity bills.
If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
You're forgetting something about contextual menus: the "contextual" part.
Say there are 20 of some object on the screen (maybe hyperlinks or textboxes), I want to tell the program which one I want to perform an action on (perhaps "copy link location" or "paste"). It takes less time to right-click on the object than it does to left-click on it and then go to the menu at the top of the window/screen. And with hyperlinks, clicking the object performs a different action than the one I wanted (following the link), so I'm stuck if I only have one mouse button.
Better than that, what about ex post facto? I thought it was unconstitutional to pass a law making past actions illegal.
I know of at least two types of security holes involving ActiveX:
- The user trusts someone who turns out to be malicious.
- The user trusts some well-meaning but poorly written code. Another web site uses the ActiveX control's scripting interface to exploit a buffer overflow or a failure of the control to check file permissions.
I don't know how common the second type of problem is with Netscape-style plugins. I could imagine the existence of a buffer overflow in Quicktime's handling of malformed movie files, which would affect both browsers.What happened to SimMars? Maxis released a trailer for the game over a year ago, and then redirected the web site to http://simsville.ea.com/, which is now defunct. Many members of the Mars Society were hoping to play the game, and hoping that others who played the game would become interested in supporting a real-life mission to send humans to Mars.
Problems don't get solved by quoting dead people
No, but quoting dead people is a good way of pointing out parallels between the present and the past. Paralleles like these help us see that our country has survived through greater troubles, allowing us to approach the situation with some rationality. They also give us some idea of where in history to look in order to figure out what has worked before and what hasn't in similar situations.
I liked a lot of cartoons. I agree, though, that the list could have been better without 25 cartoons that just said "pearl harbor", "we have awakened a sleeping giant", or had drawings of both pearl harbor and the WTC attacks. (The only pearl harbor one I liked was "tora! tora! tora! / terror! terror! terror!".)