Biological and chemical terrorism is something which is a bit of a boogey-man. We will probably never see a devestating attack using these means because they are simply too costly.
But you admitted yourself that the group that crashed planes into buildings today was probably a large organization. Why wouldn't they want to use biological warfare? It may cost more than hijacking a plane, but it can also directly affect a much larger number of people.
You can't specify the size of the window a targeted link will open in. You have to use javascript to do that.
I agree with you that web designers should try to make their sites work even when you don't have javascript enabled. A simpler way to do that is to have the link href to the help page, but then have an onclick handler that opens the help page in a new window and returns false. (Unfortunately, onclick triggers for right-clicking on links in some browsers, and links don't have an "oncommand" event like buttons do.)
Two weeks ago, Rob Ginda and Mitch Stoltz added a weaker version of what you're asking for. Instead of only allowing pop-ups for click/enter, it blocks pop-ups for onload, inline scripts (run before onload), onunload, and timer events. This is effective against most existing pop-ups, but will stop being effective when aggressive advertisers realize they can use onfocus or onmouseover instead of onload (if they think enough people are using Mozilla and enable this pref).
To block pop-ups in onload and onunload events, add this line to your prefs.js file (or to a user.js file in the same directory):
Even more off-topic:
Does anyone know how to make Mozilla lie about what User-Agent it is? My bank software rejects Mozilla, claiming it's not compatible. I'm pretty sure it is, and I want to try to make Mozilla claim to be IE on that domain.
The pref is called "general.useragent.override". See http://mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html for an example and instructions on how to set the pref if you're not familiar with prefs.js and user.js. (Note that even though the URL contains "unix", most of the prefs there work equally well on all platforms Mozilla runs on.)
Adding something to the preferences panel to allow changing the useragent without editing a text file is bug 46029.
Google cache does not contain your images. When you view the page from the google cache, Google adds <BASE HREF="http://www.iceball.net/peter/"> at the top of the page to instruct your browser to treat all relative URLs in the page not as relative to Google's cache of the page, but to your page. So when your browser sees <img src="PSORGLOGO.jpg"> later in the document, it interprets that as <img src="http://www.iceball.net/peter/PSORGLOGO.jpg"&g t; and loads the image from your server. If your site was down, and I went to Google's cache of your site, I would not be able to see the images.
why is mozilla creating an application framework when Gnome and KDE are already doing so
You don't see Gnome and KDE applications running on Mac and Win32 very often.
Mozilla is internet application suite, when all anybody wanted from them was a decent browser.
Netscape wants Mozilla to replace Netscape 4, which included an e-mail application and an HTML editor. You may just want the web browser, but other people want other applications. If very few people want to use the mailer, then very few people will work on the mailer, so little time will have been wasted.
The Sircam worm spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares.
The ease of social engineering depends on more than just the user. Outlook Express has a lousy warning message (something like "be sure you trust the person who sent this file") that often appears when running safe attachments such as jpg files. Windows 98 uses extensions (rather than special icons or a +x file mode) as the distinction between programs and documents.
If a large percentage of users encounter dialog fatigue after a security warning appears multiple times when it shouldn't, or can't memorize the 10+ "dangerous" extensions, you have to reconsider whether it's really right to call the Outlook vector "social engineering".
The translife mission is trying to answer exactly that question: is Mars gravity (about 1/3 of Earth's) enough to keep mammals healthy and allow them to reproduce?
I've thought of fleshing out mimeTypes.rdf myself, but I can't even figure out who owns it. Mail/News? Prefs? The core browser team? With the way the project owners point fingers, can I expect anyone to lay claim to it at all?
File a bug on mail/news composition. If that's not the correct component, it will end up in the right place.
Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch.
It still uses the 4.x javascript engine, spidermonkey. Note that spidermonkey just handles the javascript language, not the document object model (anything having to do with the "document" object).
the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons
I happen to like Mozilla's toolbar configuration enough that I set IE to have the location bar to the right of the navigation buttons. But I use the huge resultion of 800x600, so YMMV. See bug 49543 to split the navigation buttons from the location bar, once Mozilla supports rearrangable toolbars and allows toolbars to be horizontally adjacent.
rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space (a la IE)
The clickable regions are rectangular. They just *look* like circles. Use the "classic" skin if you want buttons that look rectangular.
that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed
In preferences, go to Navigator > Smart Browsing > Location bar autocomplete > Advanced. (This pref was added after 0.9.3, so you'll have to grab a nightly build or wait for 0.9.4 to see it.)
there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their/etc/hosts anymore? hello?)
That's a real bug, and its name is 28586. You can vote for it if you want.
I would know if anyone's with me if I could understand the bug search
Try the search form on bugzilla's front page. The syntax is a lot like like Google's, except that each word you type is treated as a substring (so a search for "bookmark" will also find a bug with "bookmarks" in the summary).
Mozilla hasn't gained a lot of new features lately. What it has had are module rewrites, which are often necessary in order to fix tough bugs and increase speed (as well as making future development easier).
We still keep track of what bugs get fixed. We just don't keep track of who is working on a fix in the same way.
It used to be that bugzilla would ask bug owners to either accept the bug (change it from "new" to "assigned") or give it to someone else after they had owned the bug for a week. That resulted in "assigned" pretty much meaning "one person has owned this bug for a while", which wasn't very useful.
Now a bug owner is supposed to move a bug from "new" to "assigned" when he is actually working on the bug (or believes that he should be the person to fix the bug). Some bug owners forget to do that, so some bugs go directly from "new" to "resolved fixed" without ever being "assigned". The best way to tell the owner is actually working on a bug is to look at comments in the bug and the target milestone.
It's nice to know that legitimate porn sites don't want to defraud me, but how do I tell the difference between a scam and a real porn site? Especially when a large number of those sites throw enough pop-up ads at you to qualify as denial of service?
In the better-lit parts of the Internet, I feel safe assuming that if Google says a lot of people link to a site, the site isn't going to steal my credit card number. I don't feel that way when I surf porn.
Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.
There's a better argument for the importance of ease of use than "AOL Joe isn't l33t". They'll be competing against P2P services like Audiogalaxy, which is extremely easy to use, as in you click buttons next to a few songs in a list on a web page, and your AG client downloads the songs as soon as it gets a chance with no additional user interaction.
Actually, now that I think about it, the movie and music industries might not be able to compete against Audiogalaxy in ease/efficiency of use because of Amazon's "one-click purchase" patent. This could be interesting:)
DeCSS was created, and quickly became widespread, because it was the only way to play DVDs under Linux. If the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of. This might not slow down the development of a crack, but the crack would not become as widespread, and the media would be less favorable toward it than it was toward DeCSS.
a site that will crash a browser one day will work fine the next in my experience
No kidding. IE crashes on me multiple times daily, but I very rarely find a reproducible set of steps I can take to make it crash. Mozilla crashes on me occasionally, but I can almost always figure out what I need to do to reproduce the crash so I can file a bug.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to measure stability. It just means that being able to find reproducible crashes isn't the same thing as having a stable product. If you wanted to compare the stability of various browsers, you would have to get a group of users to try different browsers for their daily browsing while running your own crash reporting tool, but that's far from impossible to do.
Mozilla comes with a third-party program called Talkback that reports crashes to the developers. mozilla.org uses this data not only to find the most common crash bugs (by comparing the tops of the stack traces), but also to calculate theh "mean time between failure" to determine whether any given milestone (and maybe even nightly builds) is particularly stable. Internet Explorer 6.0 comes with a similar feature. (Both Mozilla and IE6 prompt the user before sending the crash report.)
Having spent some depressing three years in the web production business, I must say that text only browsers are pretty much ignored by the main stream web designers. A lot of juicy info is put in pictures, and if not information, then navigation.
When you complain to the web site operator, you might mention that adding alt text not only makes the site usable in lynx, but also goes a long way toward making a site usable by blind users.
Alt is the "alternative text" attribute of an <img> tag, telling browsers what to display if the image doesn't load or can't be displayed. A page will not validate as HTML4 unless every image has alternate text. It's not difficult to add alt text, as long as you're careful to specify empty alt text for images that don't add meaning to the page. (For example, a picture of a trash can with word "delete" underneath it, where both the trash can and "delete" are part of a link that deletes a message, should have alt="" rather than alt="trash can" or alt="delete".)
The only drawback to adding alt text is that IE and older versions of Netscape display the alt text as a tooltip, which looks redundant if the image is just a the text in a fancy font. The authors can work around that in IE (but not in Netscape 4) by including title="" on each image with non-empty alt text.
I loaded a recent Slashdot article (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/19/15562 11) over an ISDN connection with the four Windows browsers I have. Instead of timing how long it took between hitting "reload" and the progress bar stopping, I looked at how much of the page each browser displayed while loading the 50 or so comments that are displayed with my threshold:2 and overflow:3.
slashdot in light mode
ie article, no comments
moz article and the comments loaded so far
ns4 article, no comments
opera article, no comments
slashdot in heavy mode
ie nothing except stuff above the article
moz article, no comments
ns4 nothing except stuff above the article
opera nothing except stuff above the article
Conclusion: the fastest way to read Slashdot over a non-broadband connection is to use Mozilla and set Slashdot to light mode.
I didn't test Konqueror because it isn't available for my platform (!?), and I didn't test Gecko embedders because they should behave similarly to Mozilla when rendering pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Biological and chemical terrorism is something which is a bit of a boogey-man. We will probably never see a devestating attack using these means because they are simply too costly.
But you admitted yourself that the group that crashed planes into buildings today was probably a large organization. Why wouldn't they want to use biological warfare? It may cost more than hijacking a plane, but it can also directly affect a much larger number of people.
You can't specify the size of the window a targeted link will open in. You have to use javascript to do that.
I agree with you that web designers should try to make their sites work even when you don't have javascript enabled. A simpler way to do that is to have the link href to the help page, but then have an onclick handler that opens the help page in a new window and returns false. (Unfortunately, onclick triggers for right-clicking on links in some browsers, and links don't have an "oncommand" event like buttons do.)
Two weeks ago, Rob Ginda and Mitch Stoltz added a weaker version of what you're asking for. Instead of only allowing pop-ups for click/enter, it blocks pop-ups for onload, inline scripts (run before onload), onunload, and timer events. This is effective against most existing pop-ups, but will stop being effective when aggressive advertisers realize they can use onfocus or onmouseover instead of onload (if they think enough people are using Mozilla and enable this pref).
To block pop-ups in onload and onunload events, add this line to your prefs.js file (or to a user.js file in the same directory):
user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);
Even more off-topic:
Does anyone know how to make Mozilla lie about what User-Agent it is? My bank software rejects Mozilla, claiming it's not compatible. I'm pretty sure it is, and I want to try to make Mozilla claim to be IE on that domain.
The pref is called "general.useragent.override". See http://mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html for an example and instructions on how to set the pref if you're not familiar with prefs.js and user.js. (Note that even though the URL contains "unix", most of the prefs there work equally well on all platforms Mozilla runs on.)
Adding something to the preferences panel to allow changing the useragent without editing a text file is bug 46029.
see subject
Google cache does not contain your images. When you view the page from the google cache, Google adds <BASE HREF="http://www.iceball.net/peter/"> at the top of the page to instruct your browser to treat all relative URLs in the page not as relative to Google's cache of the page, but to your page. So when your browser sees <img src="PSORGLOGO.jpg"> later in the document, it interprets that as <img src="http://www.iceball.net/peter/PSORGLOGO.jpg"&g t; and loads the image from your server. If your site was down, and I went to Google's cache of your site, I would not be able to see the images.
Does the escape key work? (Konq doesn't run on my operating system so I can't check.)
why is mozilla creating an application framework when Gnome and KDE are already doing so
You don't see Gnome and KDE applications running on Mac and Win32 very often.
Mozilla is internet application suite, when all anybody wanted from them was a decent browser.
Netscape wants Mozilla to replace Netscape 4, which included an e-mail application and an HTML editor. You may just want the web browser, but other people want other applications. If very few people want to use the mailer, then very few people will work on the mailer, so little time will have been wasted.
The Sircam worm spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares.
The ease of social engineering depends on more than just the user. Outlook Express has a lousy warning message (something like "be sure you trust the person who sent this file") that often appears when running safe attachments such as jpg files. Windows 98 uses extensions (rather than special icons or a +x file mode) as the distinction between programs and documents.
If a large percentage of users encounter dialog fatigue after a security warning appears multiple times when it shouldn't, or can't memorize the 10+ "dangerous" extensions, you have to reconsider whether it's really right to call the Outlook vector "social engineering".
They'll experience >1g on their way down, too.
The translife mission is trying to answer exactly that question: is Mars gravity (about 1/3 of Earth's) enough to keep mammals healthy and allow them to reproduce?
I've thought of fleshing out mimeTypes.rdf myself, but I can't even figure out who owns it. Mail/News? Prefs? The core browser team? With the way the project owners point fingers, can I expect anyone to lay claim to it at all?
File a bug on mail/news composition. If that's not the correct component, it will end up in the right place.
Please keep in mind that the mozilla browser is all new source code, build from scratch.
It still uses the 4.x javascript engine, spidermonkey. Note that spidermonkey just handles the javascript language, not the document object model (anything having to do with the "document" object).
Pretty much everything else is new, though.
the location bar becomes full length below the navigation buttons
/etc/hosts anymore? hello?)
I happen to like Mozilla's toolbar configuration enough that I set IE to have the location bar to the right of the navigation buttons. But I use the huge resultion of 800x600, so YMMV. See bug 49543 to split the navigation buttons from the location bar, once Mozilla supports rearrangable toolbars and allows toolbars to be horizontally adjacent.
rectangular navigation buttons are used to save vertical space (a la IE)
The clickable regions are rectangular. They just *look* like circles. Use the "classic" skin if you want buttons that look rectangular.
that annoying "Search Netscape Search for" pulldown that appears as I type a URL is removed
In preferences, go to Navigator > Smart Browsing > Location bar autocomplete > Advanced. (This pref was added after 0.9.3, so you'll have to grab a nightly build or wait for 0.9.4 to see it.)
there's no pop up alert when a site is unreachable (no one has "127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net" in their
That's a real bug, and its name is 28586. You can vote for it if you want.
I would know if anyone's with me if I could understand the bug search
Try the search form on bugzilla's front page. The syntax is a lot like like Google's, except that each word you type is treated as a substring (so a search for "bookmark" will also find a bug with "bookmarks" in the summary).
Mozilla hasn't gained a lot of new features lately. What it has had are module rewrites, which are often necessary in order to fix tough bugs and increase speed (as well as making future development easier).
We still keep track of what bugs get fixed. We just don't keep track of who is working on a fix in the same way.
It used to be that bugzilla would ask bug owners to either accept the bug (change it from "new" to "assigned") or give it to someone else after they had owned the bug for a week. That resulted in "assigned" pretty much meaning "one person has owned this bug for a while", which wasn't very useful.
Now a bug owner is supposed to move a bug from "new" to "assigned" when he is actually working on the bug (or believes that he should be the person to fix the bug). Some bug owners forget to do that, so some bugs go directly from "new" to "resolved fixed" without ever being "assigned". The best way to tell the owner is actually working on a bug is to look at comments in the bug and the target milestone.
Don't you wish people would give you 5 times the amount you asked for
:)
Not when I'm "asking for it" by predicting that a satellite will fall and hit my house
It's nice to know that legitimate porn sites don't want to defraud me, but how do I tell the difference between a scam and a real porn site? Especially when a large number of those sites throw enough pop-up ads at you to qualify as denial of service?
In the better-lit parts of the Internet, I feel safe assuming that if Google says a lot of people link to a site, the site isn't going to steal my credit card number. I don't feel that way when I surf porn.
I was going to post a similar comment, using the exact same subject. You're too fast.
Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.
:)
There's a better argument for the importance of ease of use than "AOL Joe isn't l33t". They'll be competing against P2P services like Audiogalaxy, which is extremely easy to use, as in you click buttons next to a few songs in a list on a web page, and your AG client downloads the songs as soon as it gets a chance with no additional user interaction.
Actually, now that I think about it, the movie and music industries might not be able to compete against Audiogalaxy in ease/efficiency of use because of Amazon's "one-click purchase" patent. This could be interesting
DeCSS was created, and quickly became widespread, because it was the only way to play DVDs under Linux. If the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of. This might not slow down the development of a crack, but the crack would not become as widespread, and the media would be less favorable toward it than it was toward DeCSS.
a site that will crash a browser one day will work fine the next in my experience
No kidding. IE crashes on me multiple times daily, but I very rarely find a reproducible set of steps I can take to make it crash. Mozilla crashes on me occasionally, but I can almost always figure out what I need to do to reproduce the crash so I can file a bug.
That doesn't mean it's impossible to measure stability. It just means that being able to find reproducible crashes isn't the same thing as having a stable product. If you wanted to compare the stability of various browsers, you would have to get a group of users to try different browsers for their daily browsing while running your own crash reporting tool, but that's far from impossible to do.
Mozilla comes with a third-party program called Talkback that reports crashes to the developers. mozilla.org uses this data not only to find the most common crash bugs (by comparing the tops of the stack traces), but also to calculate theh "mean time between failure" to determine whether any given milestone (and maybe even nightly builds) is particularly stable. Internet Explorer 6.0 comes with a similar feature. (Both Mozilla and IE6 prompt the user before sending the crash report.)
Having spent some depressing three years in the web production business, I must say that text only browsers are pretty much ignored by the main stream web designers. A lot of juicy info is put in pictures, and if not information, then navigation.
When you complain to the web site operator, you might mention that adding alt text not only makes the site usable in lynx, but also goes a long way toward making a site usable by blind users.
Alt is the "alternative text" attribute of an <img> tag, telling browsers what to display if the image doesn't load or can't be displayed. A page will not validate as HTML4 unless every image has alternate text. It's not difficult to add alt text, as long as you're careful to specify empty alt text for images that don't add meaning to the page. (For example, a picture of a trash can with word "delete" underneath it, where both the trash can and "delete" are part of a link that deletes a message, should have alt="" rather than alt="trash can" or alt="delete".)
The only drawback to adding alt text is that IE and older versions of Netscape display the alt text as a tooltip, which looks redundant if the image is just a the text in a fancy font. The authors can work around that in IE (but not in Netscape 4) by including title="" on each image with non-empty alt text.
I loaded a recent Slashdot article (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/19/15562 11) over an ISDN connection with the four Windows browsers I have. Instead of timing how long it took between hitting "reload" and the progress bar stopping, I looked at how much of the page each browser displayed while loading the 50 or so comments that are displayed with my threshold:2 and overflow:3.
slashdot in light mode
ie article, no comments
moz article and the comments loaded so far
ns4 article, no comments
opera article, no comments
slashdot in heavy mode
ie nothing except stuff above the article
moz article, no comments
ns4 nothing except stuff above the article
opera nothing except stuff above the article
Conclusion: the fastest way to read Slashdot over a non-broadband connection is to use Mozilla and set Slashdot to light mode.
I didn't test Konqueror because it isn't available for my platform (!?), and I didn't test Gecko embedders because they should behave similarly to Mozilla when rendering pages.
Is this freshmeat or is this fuckedcompany?