I could be wrong, but I don't think you can really predict the character output of a keydown event, as it happens on a keystroke-level, before important factors (dead keys, shift and caps state, keyboard layout) are analyzed to determine the final character. The appropriate event for that would be keypress, but on my tests it can't be hijacked (maybe there could be some trick). So, you'd need a few initial keystrokes to test which characters they produce, and then attempt to guess the layout being used.
If I were to want to design this flaw for your locale, I would change the expected location of the ';' key.
And if you need to adapt to specific locales, how exactly that isn't locale dependency? I'm not saying that others are completely immune, but that it will only work for a particular set of keyboard layouts that you've expected. (and testing for the right layout will need a few more keystrokes, though that isn't the matter here)
As it checks the keydown event (which happens before the keys are interpreted according to your keyboard layout), it is locale-dependent. It won't work on my localized keyboard, as its ":" key is not in the same place as on an US/international keyboard. So it fails here both on Firefox 2.0.0.2 and IE7. (on Fx, for instance, if I type what it asks it only catches "C"; but it "works" if I type in "CÇ]boot.ini".)
"I do think Firefox is far superior to other browsers on the market."
Far superior? I think you need to backup that painfully abstract and non-obvious statement.
Since it was clearly an opinion, there's no need to try to be so harsh. Maybe he likes the add-ons, maybe he likes the rendering engine. There are some other browsers around built with Gecko, pretty much no other existing browser (apart from direct Firefox derivatives, of course) offers at the same time the power and the availability of Firefox's extensions.
I just cranked up my copy of Firefox 2.0.0.1 today after some time has passed since I last used it. I have it set to a blank page. You know what the first thing it asked me was after firing it up? It wanted to know if I wanted to set a "cookie" for the site "newsrss.bbc.co.uk" This would have been normal except for the fact that I hadn't yet even typed in a URL yet. You might say, "well, that's just the RSS news feeds doing its thing". And I'd say, "except for the fact that I'm not subscribed to any feeds!"
Web browsers need to work like newspapers with hyperlinks. That's about it.
Confirming cookies is not a Firefox default, so you probably enabled that on your own (or it might be a feature form some distribution). And then you complain about it. Makes sense.
You mean 16pt., which properly should be just under 1/4 of an inch. In reality, it's usually smaller. How is that huge? Actually, he does mean 16px. Both Firefox and Opera set their defaults in pixels, and Firefox's is precisely 16px. Opera seems to check your resolution first, but on Windows' default of 96 pixels per inch it will also default to 16px. Internet Explorer as far as I know offers no precise control on that (it just defaults to "Medium" and offers two options above and below that), but I'm pretty sure that also means 12pt Times New Roman (which, on 96 pixels per inch, translates to 16px). I have no idea about Safari, unfortunately.
When you're running low of disk space a warning appears, offering to run the Disk Cleanup tool, which tries to remove unused temporary files (among other things).
But I wonder why it doesn't erase those pesky thumbs.db files (by checking their last access date).
Some time ago a blog called Boring Boring appeared, claiming to seek the "uncoolest" things around. While its miscellaneous articles looked ok, even if you don't understand Portuguese you might note the computing-related articles (the ones on the right) are always commenting about Office 2007, even spreading some mild FUD saying the best format to save your files is Open XML because it is open, and thus guarantees interoperability.
Nobody would ingest enough water to kill them to win a toaster.
Bad comparison. Nobody would die (well, literally) for a toaster as toasters aren't anything novel. But the very same could have happened if the prize were a PS3. Or a Segway, even Segways aren't in the media anymore. Heck, a good amount of the Slashdot crowd would be willing to participate if they were offering an iPhone.
So yes, while the title may be considered accurate, it still is misleading, as it sounds like there was some kind of Wii Sports competition.
Eh? While you're actually correct in a sense, Firefox hasn't been out longer.
Firefox 2 was released 8 days after Internet Explorer 7, and neither had built-in phishing protection in earlier stable releases. IE7's betas have been out long before Fx2's too (though you could download Bon Echo nightly builds if you really wished)
But as I said, you're partially correct: Firefox uses Google Safe Browsing, which has been available since around December 2005 as an extension.
And a slightly more useful comment: shouldn't we have a couple relatedstories linked? (heh, they don't even agree on the Web's age, what to say about the day and month)
I think an important piece of information that is missing in the summary is that the aforementioned Google Earth Blog is not official. As far as I know there's no word yet from Google about Virtual Earth.
The vast majority of computers in Brazil use pirated copies of Windows XP (and I do mean vast majority; I wouldn't be surprised if some study claimed over 99% of personal Windows copies here are illegal; even inside businesses the number might be quite high) with automatic updates disabled because of WGA. This, coupled with the general lack of knowledge of the population, means a quite big share of the online computers must be vulnerable, either through user ignorance and ingenuity ("Hey, do you remember me? We studied together on high school, and I just found these pics from us. Click here!") or due to unpatched machines -- even to the oldest XP flaws. (I once saw an information screen on an elevator of a big commercial building showing winpopup spam message boxes. I found that hilarious.)
Are they going to charge people for unknowingly distributing spam and worms? What if I use somebody else's computer through a trojan? Will that person be held responsible for the acts? (and how will he/she prove innocence?)
I'll use AC's post to share my thoughts. I'm not trying to blindly defend Firefox, but give it a more reasonable judgment:
The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)
Well, a matter of opinion I'd say. While I agree the new theme might not look as good on a classic-style Windows, I do enjoy the new tabs, and IMO they outweight any possible disadvantages of the new theme (only one I can think of is the new reload button, which looks weird; the new look of the address and search bars is also nice, and happen to fit into my overall theme). For the average user, on a mostly-default Windows XP look, the theme should still fit; for all others, odds are they have enough knowledge to change the theme on their own. But then again, this is just a matter of opinion, so just because I like it is not a reason to consider the author "wrong".
Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
What alternative to blacklisting would you suggest? This is a serious question; while I see the problem with blacklisting (and I'm sure there will be hundreds of scam cases around the world which won't be blacklisted in time -- hell, which won't be blacklisted at all), I don't know how effective other methods are. Giving a false positive is particularly dangerous, and whitelisting every single bank in the whole world is impractical.
Now about the security risks: you haven't done your research before saying it, have you? Options->Security (we'll get to the options dialog soon). By default, the system works by using both blacklists and a couple white-listed addresses, locally. Firefox automatically downloads updates to those lists.
The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
I agree some important features are missing (especially about tabbed browsing; there should be simple and practical settings to switch between "window mode" and "tab mode"). I also must say I got lost for a couple seconds in the redesign while trying to help a friend to automatically clear the downloads list on shutdown. But still, I'm not sure if it's badly designed: I'm more inclined to think that it was just because I was used to the previous one. (yeah, then you can argue the old one was alright and needed no change, I agree)
There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
Well, that happens for every Firefox release, and will continue to happen pretty much forever. I sincerely doubt it will get any better with the 3.0 release. I haven't heard of any of those "many" issues; only that most extensions just need a single version bump to work, due to Fx2's relatively small changes overall, and in fact I could bet it will get a lot worse on 3.0, since it will use a new codebase (Gecko 1.9) with several internal changes, probably forcing much more changes on extensions.
The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another g
Just setting extensions.checkCompatibility to false and will allow you to install new incompatible extensions too. I've already done it (on RC3, but hey, I doubt that'd change now), and the Knowledge Base says the same.
Another possible missing game is Extreme PaintBrawl; as far as I know, it got the lowest rating ever on IGN in 1998 (0.7 out of 10) and since then has never been topped (uhm, "topped" doesn't seem the right word for such games...).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the two primary reasons DVDs are being filled are FMV cutscenes and single-layer DVDs.
The PS3 arguably doesn't need FMV (it's supposed to have enough processing power for rendering polygonal cutscenes in a decent quality); and as I've heard (here on slashdot, heh), the PS2 has serious problems with dual-layer DVDs, forcing games to use single-layer discs. Just fix that, and surprise, your disc capacity is doubled.
Slashdot Mirror
I could be wrong, but I don't think you can really predict the character output of a keydown event, as it happens on a keystroke-level, before important factors (dead keys, shift and caps state, keyboard layout) are analyzed to determine the final character. The appropriate event for that would be keypress, but on my tests it can't be hijacked (maybe there could be some trick). So, you'd need a few initial keystrokes to test which characters they produce, and then attempt to guess the layout being used.
Okay, I used the wrong word. Sorry, English is not my first language.
And if you need to adapt to specific locales, how exactly that isn't locale dependency? I'm not saying that others are completely immune, but that it will only work for a particular set of keyboard layouts that you've expected. (and testing for the right layout will need a few more keystrokes, though that isn't the matter here)
As it checks the keydown event (which happens before the keys are interpreted according to your keyboard layout), it is locale-dependent. It won't work on my localized keyboard, as its ":" key is not in the same place as on an US/international keyboard. So it fails here both on Firefox 2.0.0.2 and IE7. (on Fx, for instance, if I type what it asks it only catches "C"; but it "works" if I type in "CÇ]boot.ini".)
Since it was clearly an opinion, there's no need to try to be so harsh. Maybe he likes the add-ons, maybe he likes the rendering engine. There are some other browsers around built with Gecko, pretty much no other existing browser (apart from direct Firefox derivatives, of course) offers at the same time the power and the availability of Firefox's extensions.
I just cranked up my copy of Firefox 2.0.0.1 today after some time has passed since I last used it. I have it set to a blank page. You know what the first thing it asked me was after firing it up? It wanted to know if I wanted to set a "cookie" for the site "newsrss.bbc.co.uk" This would have been normal except for the fact that I hadn't yet even typed in a URL yet. You might say, "well, that's just the RSS news feeds doing its thing". And I'd say, "except for the fact that I'm not subscribed to any feeds!"Web browsers need to work like newspapers with hyperlinks. That's about it.
Confirming cookies is not a Firefox default, so you probably enabled that on your own (or it might be a feature form some distribution). And then you complain about it. Makes sense.
Windows does clean it... well, sort of.
When you're running low of disk space a warning appears, offering to run the Disk Cleanup tool, which tries to remove unused temporary files (among other things).
But I wonder why it doesn't erase those pesky thumbs.db files (by checking their last access date).
Sorry, I should have written that on the original message. The simplest proof is (very surprisingly, to me) right there in the footer, in small letters: "©2007 BORINGBORING - A Microsoft project". Also, others have already investigated further, and the domain was registered by a guerilla marketing agency, not just some random person.
Some time ago a blog called Boring Boring appeared, claiming to seek the "uncoolest" things around. While its miscellaneous articles looked ok, even if you don't understand Portuguese you might note the computing-related articles (the ones on the right) are always commenting about Office 2007, even spreading some mild FUD saying the best format to save your files is Open XML because it is open, and thus guarantees interoperability.
Bad comparison. Nobody would die (well, literally) for a toaster as toasters aren't anything novel. But the very same could have happened if the prize were a PS3. Or a Segway, even Segways aren't in the media anymore. Heck, a good amount of the Slashdot crowd would be willing to participate if they were offering an iPhone.
So yes, while the title may be considered accurate, it still is misleading, as it sounds like there was some kind of Wii Sports competition.
...make your Time.
Well, in the end it all did fit quite well with the magazine in question and the subject of collaboration!
Eh? While you're actually correct in a sense, Firefox hasn't been out longer.
Firefox 2 was released 8 days after Internet Explorer 7, and neither had built-in phishing protection in earlier stable releases. IE7's betas have been out long before Fx2's too (though you could download Bon Echo nightly builds if you really wished)
But as I said, you're partially correct: Firefox uses Google Safe Browsing, which has been available since around December 2005 as an extension.
Didn't the W.T.F. in August?
And a slightly more useful comment: shouldn't we have a couple related stories linked? (heh, they don't even agree on the Web's age, what to say about the day and month)
(in the second part)
Now I understand why the PS3 floats in the advertisements.
Google knows it all.
I think an important piece of information that is missing in the summary is that the aforementioned Google Earth Blog is not official. As far as I know there's no word yet from Google about Virtual Earth.
Seems like they don't know their own country.
The vast majority of computers in Brazil use pirated copies of Windows XP (and I do mean vast majority; I wouldn't be surprised if some study claimed over 99% of personal Windows copies here are illegal; even inside businesses the number might be quite high) with automatic updates disabled because of WGA. This, coupled with the general lack of knowledge of the population, means a quite big share of the online computers must be vulnerable, either through user ignorance and ingenuity ("Hey, do you remember me? We studied together on high school, and I just found these pics from us. Click here!") or due to unpatched machines -- even to the oldest XP flaws. (I once saw an information screen on an elevator of a big commercial building showing winpopup spam message boxes. I found that hilarious.)
Are they going to charge people for unknowingly distributing spam and worms? What if I use somebody else's computer through a trojan? Will that person be held responsible for the acts? (and how will he/she prove innocence?)
*not posting as AC or else I might be arrested*
So, let's see:
We have an obvious winner!
In the end, somebody managed to get through the technobabble!
I'll use AC's post to share my thoughts. I'm not trying to blindly defend Firefox, but give it a more reasonable judgment:
Well, a matter of opinion I'd say. While I agree the new theme might not look as good on a classic-style Windows, I do enjoy the new tabs, and IMO they outweight any possible disadvantages of the new theme (only one I can think of is the new reload button, which looks weird; the new look of the address and search bars is also nice, and happen to fit into my overall theme). For the average user, on a mostly-default Windows XP look, the theme should still fit; for all others, odds are they have enough knowledge to change the theme on their own. But then again, this is just a matter of opinion, so just because I like it is not a reason to consider the author "wrong".
What alternative to blacklisting would you suggest? This is a serious question; while I see the problem with blacklisting (and I'm sure there will be hundreds of scam cases around the world which won't be blacklisted in time -- hell, which won't be blacklisted at all), I don't know how effective other methods are. Giving a false positive is particularly dangerous, and whitelisting every single bank in the whole world is impractical.
Now about the security risks: you haven't done your research before saying it, have you? Options->Security (we'll get to the options dialog soon). By default, the system works by using both blacklists and a couple white-listed addresses, locally. Firefox automatically downloads updates to those lists.
I agree some important features are missing (especially about tabbed browsing; there should be simple and practical settings to switch between "window mode" and "tab mode"). I also must say I got lost for a couple seconds in the redesign while trying to help a friend to automatically clear the downloads list on shutdown. But still, I'm not sure if it's badly designed: I'm more inclined to think that it was just because I was used to the previous one. (yeah, then you can argue the old one was alright and needed no change, I agree)
Well, that happens for every Firefox release, and will continue to happen pretty much forever. I sincerely doubt it will get any better with the 3.0 release. I haven't heard of any of those "many" issues; only that most extensions just need a single version bump to work, due to Fx2's relatively small changes overall, and in fact I could bet it will get a lot worse on 3.0, since it will use a new codebase (Gecko 1.9) with several internal changes, probably forcing much more changes on extensions.
Just setting extensions.checkCompatibility to false and will allow you to install new incompatible extensions too. I've already done it (on RC3, but hey, I doubt that'd change now), and the Knowledge Base says the same.
Another possible missing game is Extreme PaintBrawl; as far as I know, it got the lowest rating ever on IGN in 1998 (0.7 out of 10) and since then has never been topped (uhm, "topped" doesn't seem the right word for such games...).
I think you mispelled "masturbator".
Apple just announced Leopard will create 100,000 Ballmers in Asia!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the two primary reasons DVDs are being filled are FMV cutscenes and single-layer DVDs.
The PS3 arguably doesn't need FMV (it's supposed to have enough processing power for rendering polygonal cutscenes in a decent quality); and as I've heard (here on slashdot, heh), the PS2 has serious problems with dual-layer DVDs, forcing games to use single-layer discs. Just fix that, and surprise, your disc capacity is doubled.