Saying that Microsoft (or Mozilla, or anybody else) should spend more time getting all the web standards right is like saying that Chrysler should make it their number 1 priority to make life easy for mechanics. Standards are used by web developers only; users don't know, or care, whether a particular site is standards-compliant or not. And web developers need to test their site on all browsers they intend to support regardless of the standards situation.
The majority of browser development time should be spent on features that benefits ALL users, not just developers.
It didn't have to be Firefox; if Opera had actually been more pre-active about getting users, they might have spurred Microsoft into action. Also, I'm guessing Apple's Safari had no small influence in the matter.
I don't give a shit if Google knows what pages I go to. I've never been able to figure out what the fuss is, personally... as far as I see it, it just means I get more targeted ads.
I think it's a huge stretch to say "having a third-party cookie" is the same thing as "spying."
back in the early days of the web, if a website was 500k in TOTAL is was large.
Are you talking about "sites" or "pages?" It seems to me that virtually all "sites" ever were more than 500k, unless it was some tiny personal site. (Even my old 1997 AOL subscription gave me 2 MB for my personal website.)
now days chewing 10 megs on a single site is nothing,
Uh, yeah... and? Sites are bigger. Do you think all the content cnn.com should be less than 10 MB?
Or are you talking about "pages"? In which case, I dare you to point to a single 10 MB page (that isn't hosting video).
most of it is ads and very little content.
WTF? Again, are you talking about "sites" or "pages?" cnn.com's *site* has zero ads on it, the ads are hosted externally to their website.
all of this is paid for by us, without our permission.
No it's not.
so what if a website is offering free content in exchange for banner hits, they don't ask me if i'd like to be tracked and bombarded with ads for the pleasure of it first do they, in fact i'm pretty sure if websites started placing a front page stating you had to unblock ads and allow 50 doubleclick cookies to be placed not many people would visit them. So cry me a fucking river if they go broke from all the ad blocking.
I honestly think you have no idea how the internet works, and in fact are hazy on the difference between "pages" and "sites." Completely clueless.
Anybody that really wants ad blocking can do it now. Most of the people that do want it don't use IE.
There's probably a large contingent of Internet users who don't even know that it's possible to block ads. They may or may not use IE.
All that this changes is control of the ads that are shown in IE. Instead of some 3rd party ad, you will get an ad that is 'blessed' by microsoft (after the advertiser pays a fee to M$).
[Citation Needed]
Can we stick to the facts (as we know them) and ignore the crazy conspiracy theories, please? Or do you have evidence that Microsoft will replace the blocked ads with their own that you're not sharing?
"Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing "off the record"? Perhaps you're using someone else's computer and you don't want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you're at an Internet kiosk and don't want the next person using it to know at which website you bank."
IE8 is supposed to solve all of that? Bullshit.
What part of that doesn't it solve? Do you have an actual argument here, or do you just like randomly typing in "bullshit" every so often?
Safari has a "private browsing" mode, and this sounds like the exact same feature. Did you call "bullshit" on Apple when they added it to Safari?
Who the hell is drinking this cool-aid?
I guess you're too busy making unsubstantiated paranoid claims and knee-jerking your bullshit flinger to drink any Kool-aid.
Look, maybe the feature will work well, and maybe it won't work well. Frankly, I don't see: 1) How you can be so angry at Microsoft for implementing a feature that their competitors (Safari) already have, and that their customers are requesting 2) Why you even give a shit, considering I'm sure you wouldn't touch IE8 with a 10-foot pole regardless of what features they add.
yes they are a large company that makes a lot of money, particularly more than Microsoft,
Uh, they do? When did this happen?
They might make more money "at advertising-related businesses," or more money "with online products," but they're not even close to beating Microsoft yet.
Or the mysterious disembodied voice from Eegah saying "watch out for snakes!" They did that one in like 10-15 different movies. And of course the famous "Hikeeba!" from Women of the Prehistoric Planet.
Where I live it's Verizon. I just tried Qwest's locater, and it says it doesn't serve my address. Just Verizon and Comcast (and possibly Clearwire, but I play online videogames.)
I agree with you, but until we have technology (and permission!) to track people's non-Internet transactions, the fact remains that Google's attribution model is purposefully primitive to make their search listings look better. And I still think that's scummy behavior from Google.
Oh, well, I'm in Snohomish, and I get no FIOS and no dry-loop DSL. Whenever I ask them about it, they say "not yet." Dry-loop has been "not yet" for something like 6 years now... fuckers. (I think one of the problems is that we were one of the earliest areas to get DSL and they've never bothered to upgrade their equipment. Just guessing.)
It's almost enough to make me want to pay for Comcast. They're blood-sucking parasites who hate all customers, but at least they sell stand-alone Internet service for less than Verizon's local phone + DSL.
"Free" in the Open Source world is double-talk for "open source only."
Like most movements (environmentalists, extreme feminists, animal rights activists, evangelical Christians) the goal of Open Source is to tell you what to do with your life. Your goal as a free-thinking individual is to never let any of those groups dictate how you live.
And here on the west coast (Western Washington), FIOS doesn't even exist. Hell, we can't even get dry-loop DSL.
That's ok, though, Verizon. Just because we have Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, uncountable.coms-- I'm sure nobody in this area works in the tech field and really cares about connection speeds. Go ahead and finish up installing in rural Texas and just get around to us when you feel ready, k?
12 MB is an issue? I spend 1000 MB on Star Wars: Episode II, and that's a shitty movie.
Anyway, I know what it does: it lets you chat with people over the web, video and audio included. It's basically AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger done right. (Meaning, it actually works cross-platform, the audio quality is much better, it's future-proofed, etc)
The problem on the web is that an ad isn't considered very effective unless soembody clicks on it. That is just silly. Nobody clicks on superbowl ads, and yet those are considered highly effective.
That was true five years ago, but hasn't been for a long time. Any ad-serving system worth its salt has View conversions as well as Click conversions, and really good ones have advanced "Conversion Attribution" which looks at the last 3-5 user actions and weights the conversion appropriately. For example, a view might be considered a fourth of a conversion, and a later click on a search result might be considered half of a conversion.
The problem is that everybody thinks online advertising is Google, when Google purposefully uses the old-fashioned click-based method. Why? You run 40,000 banners saying "buy a big-screen TV at elec-world!" A user sees three of these on different sites, decides to buy, and then where does he go? Straight to Google, types in "elec-world" and converts.
From the Google point-of-view, because of their primitive conversion attribution, their search result was 100% responsible for the user's decision to buy a big-screen TV. The three other publishers with the banner ads get screwed, Google gets praised. It's basically a scam.
Non-Google ad servers are much more honest with advertisers. That said, even Google's crappy stats are, at least, stats and accurate (as long as you understand what they're actually counting.) Print, Radio, TV gets guesses at best. (Tivo's changing this, but generally traditional advertising has crappy analytics ability.)
I tried to explain this to a friend of mine who's a developer on the open source Adium IM program. They're going to drop OS X 10.4 support for the next release, ridiculously quickly.
The worst part is, reading through their rationale for doing this, every single reason sums up to "well, it makes development easier." Great; cater to the less-than-two-dozen developers while screwing over the tens of thousands of people running 10.4 (many on hardware that can't be upgraded). Brilliant logic there.
Well, I got modded down, so I guess somebody doesn't agree. Too many Firefox fans on this board to get an honest discussion of any of Firefox's flaws, probably. Oh well.
... Or you could just use your OS's built-in user accounts feature to give each person their own user account and/or create a guest account. God-forbid you use handy OS-provided features in the way they're intended instead of adding messy unnecessary hacks to software.
The Firefox approach leads to an annoying, "I know you wanted to browse the web right now, indicated by your clicking the FF icon, but I'm going to spend 3 minutes doing things unrelated to your browsing the web. Thank you." effect. It's like it normally has a 10-second start-up time, then every week or so it has a 3-minute start-up time. Extremely annoying.
It should either silently install upgrades after you close the browser, or wait until I manually do it. But when I click the FF icon, I want to *browse the web*, not stare at progress bars.
Just install XP Pro and put it in 2000 mode, you'll never notice a difference, and you'll at least only be one step removed from the current generation of OS.
Someone boldface this and email it to the guys in charge of WordPress.
WordPress: You're SERVER SOFTWARE! You need to be able to run longer than a week without the constant upgrades, because upgrading server software is a royal pain in the ass! Seriously, my WP is constantly out-of-date, because every time I finish all the backups and get time to upgrade, there's a new version out the next day.
If you're having trouble with security, spend more time on it BEFORE release. If you're just buggy, hire more QA people or something, I dunno. But just solve the problem, please.
# Only IE and Firefox have bothered to warn me that, not only is the cert self-signed but the URLs don't match
I think IE is a little better at this, since it blatantly comes out and says, "hey, these two domains are different!" Reading Firefox's message, I missed that "phishing.itsdapead.org" and "mycomputer.itsdapead.com" were two different domains when I first read it.
It should read something like:
The site "phishing.itsdapead.org" uses a certificate that is only valid for different website: "mycomputer.itsdapead.com"
It's less words, and calls out the problem more blatantly. It includes the word "different site" and has the specific URLs in the same line (which IE does not.)
The otherwise-reliable gogamer.com site has had problems with this. Their "48-hour madness" emails also trigger phishing warnings in both Gmail and Outlook.
They're really good about shipping the product on time, but man they need some major tech help.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
Standards are a non-issue in web development.
Saying that Microsoft (or Mozilla, or anybody else) should spend more time getting all the web standards right is like saying that Chrysler should make it their number 1 priority to make life easy for mechanics. Standards are used by web developers only; users don't know, or care, whether a particular site is standards-compliant or not. And web developers need to test their site on all browsers they intend to support regardless of the standards situation.
The majority of browser development time should be spent on features that benefits ALL users, not just developers.
It didn't have to be Firefox; if Opera had actually been more pre-active about getting users, they might have spurred Microsoft into action. Also, I'm guessing Apple's Safari had no small influence in the matter.
But it all sums to: "competition is good."
And will make your USB power fall over and die and blow something up, very creative and "performance art".
You plug them into a hub.
Der. If it "falls over and dies" (I've never seen that happen), you're out maybe $20 and your computer's perfectly fine.
I don't give a shit if Google knows what pages I go to. I've never been able to figure out what the fuss is, personally... as far as I see it, it just means I get more targeted ads.
I think it's a huge stretch to say "having a third-party cookie" is the same thing as "spying."
back in the early days of the web, if a website was 500k in TOTAL is was large.
Are you talking about "sites" or "pages?" It seems to me that virtually all "sites" ever were more than 500k, unless it was some tiny personal site. (Even my old 1997 AOL subscription gave me 2 MB for my personal website.)
now days chewing 10 megs on a single site is nothing,
Uh, yeah... and? Sites are bigger. Do you think all the content cnn.com should be less than 10 MB?
Or are you talking about "pages"? In which case, I dare you to point to a single 10 MB page (that isn't hosting video).
most of it is ads and very little content.
WTF? Again, are you talking about "sites" or "pages?" cnn.com's *site* has zero ads on it, the ads are hosted externally to their website.
all of this is paid for by us, without our permission.
No it's not.
so what if a website is offering free content in exchange for banner hits, they don't ask me if i'd like to be tracked and bombarded with ads for the pleasure of it first do they, in fact i'm pretty sure if websites started placing a front page stating you had to unblock ads and allow 50 doubleclick cookies to be placed not many people would visit them. So cry me a fucking river if they go broke from all the ad blocking.
I honestly think you have no idea how the internet works, and in fact are hazy on the difference between "pages" and "sites." Completely clueless.
Anybody that really wants ad blocking can do it now. Most of the people that do want it don't use IE.
There's probably a large contingent of Internet users who don't even know that it's possible to block ads. They may or may not use IE.
All that this changes is control of the ads that are shown in IE. Instead of some 3rd party ad, you will get an ad that is 'blessed' by microsoft (after the advertiser pays a fee to M$).
[Citation Needed]
Can we stick to the facts (as we know them) and ignore the crazy conspiracy theories, please? Or do you have evidence that Microsoft will replace the blocked ads with their own that you're not sharing?
"Have you ever wanted to take your web browsing "off the record"? Perhaps you're using someone else's computer and you don't want them to know which sites you visited. Maybe you need to buy a gift for a loved one without ruining the surprise. Maybe you're at an Internet kiosk and don't want the next person using it to know at which website you bank."
IE8 is supposed to solve all of that? Bullshit.
What part of that doesn't it solve? Do you have an actual argument here, or do you just like randomly typing in "bullshit" every so often?
Safari has a "private browsing" mode, and this sounds like the exact same feature. Did you call "bullshit" on Apple when they added it to Safari?
Who the hell is drinking this cool-aid?
I guess you're too busy making unsubstantiated paranoid claims and knee-jerking your bullshit flinger to drink any Kool-aid.
Look, maybe the feature will work well, and maybe it won't work well. Frankly, I don't see:
1) How you can be so angry at Microsoft for implementing a feature that their competitors (Safari) already have, and that their customers are requesting
2) Why you even give a shit, considering I'm sure you wouldn't touch IE8 with a 10-foot pole regardless of what features they add.
yes they are a large company that makes a lot of money, particularly more than Microsoft,
Uh, they do? When did this happen?
They might make more money "at advertising-related businesses," or more money "with online products," but they're not even close to beating Microsoft yet.
Or the mysterious disembodied voice from Eegah saying "watch out for snakes!" They did that one in like 10-15 different movies. And of course the famous "Hikeeba!" from Women of the Prehistoric Planet.
Where I live it's Verizon. I just tried Qwest's locater, and it says it doesn't serve my address. Just Verizon and Comcast (and possibly Clearwire, but I play online videogames.)
I agree with you, but until we have technology (and permission!) to track people's non-Internet transactions, the fact remains that Google's attribution model is purposefully primitive to make their search listings look better. And I still think that's scummy behavior from Google.
Oh, well, I'm in Snohomish, and I get no FIOS and no dry-loop DSL. Whenever I ask them about it, they say "not yet." Dry-loop has been "not yet" for something like 6 years now... fuckers. (I think one of the problems is that we were one of the earliest areas to get DSL and they've never bothered to upgrade their equipment. Just guessing.)
It's almost enough to make me want to pay for Comcast. They're blood-sucking parasites who hate all customers, but at least they sell stand-alone Internet service for less than Verizon's local phone + DSL.
"Free" in the Open Source world is double-talk for "open source only."
Like most movements (environmentalists, extreme feminists, animal rights activists, evangelical Christians) the goal of Open Source is to tell you what to do with your life. Your goal as a free-thinking individual is to never let any of those groups dictate how you live.
You're a zealot. Gimp can be learned in minutes./i
Yeah! Hundreds of thousands of them!
And here on the west coast (Western Washington), FIOS doesn't even exist. Hell, we can't even get dry-loop DSL.
That's ok, though, Verizon. Just because we have Amazon, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, uncountable .coms-- I'm sure nobody in this area works in the tech field and really cares about connection speeds. Go ahead and finish up installing in rural Texas and just get around to us when you feel ready, k?
12 MB is an issue? I spend 1000 MB on Star Wars: Episode II, and that's a shitty movie.
Anyway, I know what it does: it lets you chat with people over the web, video and audio included. It's basically AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger done right. (Meaning, it actually works cross-platform, the audio quality is much better, it's future-proofed, etc)
The problem on the web is that an ad isn't considered very effective unless soembody clicks on it. That is just silly. Nobody clicks on superbowl ads, and yet those are considered highly effective.
That was true five years ago, but hasn't been for a long time. Any ad-serving system worth its salt has View conversions as well as Click conversions, and really good ones have advanced "Conversion Attribution" which looks at the last 3-5 user actions and weights the conversion appropriately. For example, a view might be considered a fourth of a conversion, and a later click on a search result might be considered half of a conversion.
The problem is that everybody thinks online advertising is Google, when Google purposefully uses the old-fashioned click-based method. Why? You run 40,000 banners saying "buy a big-screen TV at elec-world!" A user sees three of these on different sites, decides to buy, and then where does he go? Straight to Google, types in "elec-world" and converts.
From the Google point-of-view, because of their primitive conversion attribution, their search result was 100% responsible for the user's decision to buy a big-screen TV. The three other publishers with the banner ads get screwed, Google gets praised. It's basically a scam.
Non-Google ad servers are much more honest with advertisers. That said, even Google's crappy stats are, at least, stats and accurate (as long as you understand what they're actually counting.) Print, Radio, TV gets guesses at best. (Tivo's changing this, but generally traditional advertising has crappy analytics ability.)
I tried to explain this to a friend of mine who's a developer on the open source Adium IM program. They're going to drop OS X 10.4 support for the next release, ridiculously quickly.
The worst part is, reading through their rationale for doing this, every single reason sums up to "well, it makes development easier." Great; cater to the less-than-two-dozen developers while screwing over the tens of thousands of people running 10.4 (many on hardware that can't be upgraded). Brilliant logic there.
Well, I got modded down, so I guess somebody doesn't agree. Too many Firefox fans on this board to get an honest discussion of any of Firefox's flaws, probably. Oh well.
... Or you could just use your OS's built-in user accounts feature to give each person their own user account and/or create a guest account. God-forbid you use handy OS-provided features in the way they're intended instead of adding messy unnecessary hacks to software.
The Firefox approach leads to an annoying, "I know you wanted to browse the web right now, indicated by your clicking the FF icon, but I'm going to spend 3 minutes doing things unrelated to your browsing the web. Thank you." effect. It's like it normally has a 10-second start-up time, then every week or so it has a 3-minute start-up time. Extremely annoying.
It should either silently install upgrades after you close the browser, or wait until I manually do it. But when I click the FF icon, I want to *browse the web*, not stare at progress bars.
Windows 2000? Seriously?
Just install XP Pro and put it in 2000 mode, you'll never notice a difference, and you'll at least only be one step removed from the current generation of OS.
Someone boldface this and email it to the guys in charge of WordPress.
WordPress: You're SERVER SOFTWARE! You need to be able to run longer than a week without the constant upgrades, because upgrading server software is a royal pain in the ass! Seriously, my WP is constantly out-of-date, because every time I finish all the backups and get time to upgrade, there's a new version out the next day.
If you're having trouble with security, spend more time on it BEFORE release. If you're just buggy, hire more QA people or something, I dunno. But just solve the problem, please.
Here we have FF3 saying
"You have tried to access a secure site with a dodgy certificate, Cancel or Allow?"
IE meanwhile troops on regardless giving a better "user experience"
No it doesn't. It presents a message nearly identical to Firefox's, and makes it just as hard to proceed to the site.
Talk about FUD, christ. Try to be a little less blatant next time, most of the people on this board have access to IE to confirm things like this.
# Only IE and Firefox have bothered to warn me that, not only is the cert self-signed but the URLs don't match
I think IE is a little better at this, since it blatantly comes out and says, "hey, these two domains are different!" Reading Firefox's message, I missed that "phishing.itsdapead.org" and "mycomputer.itsdapead.com" were two different domains when I first read it.
It should read something like:
The site "phishing.itsdapead.org" uses a certificate that is only valid for different website: "mycomputer.itsdapead.com"
It's less words, and calls out the problem more blatantly. It includes the word "different site" and has the specific URLs in the same line (which IE does not.)
The otherwise-reliable gogamer.com site has had problems with this. Their "48-hour madness" emails also trigger phishing warnings in both Gmail and Outlook.
They're really good about shipping the product on time, but man they need some major tech help.