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Mozilla The Internet Books Media

Firefox In Print 360

Posted by michael from the no,-not-the-nyt-ad dept.
hoovernj writes "It seems that O'Reilly is ready to release two books about Firefox in March. The first is Firefox Hacks, which will be targeted at Firefox power users. And the second is Don't Click on the Blue E!, which will be targeted at less-savvy users transitioning from Internet Explorer. Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages? (thanks to mozillaZine for the original pointer)." And reader ledmirage writes "Wired Magazine's February issue on Firefox: 'It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill Gates.)'."
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Firefox In Print More

Firefox In Print

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  • What could firefox hacks possibly cover? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thegoogler ( 792786 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:07AM (#11492066)
    Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...
    • That one popular yet dubious trick of telling your browser to hit websites you point to 20 or so times at once to get a faster response...

      • Re:Perhaps (Score:5, Informative)

        by virtual_mps ( 62997 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:28AM (#11492287)
        Hmm. The popular trick I'm familiar with is to enable pipelining--which lets you submit multiple requests in a single tcp session; this is not the same as increasing the maximum number of simultaneous requests, although the FUDdites like to run around claiming that it is. It's not enabled by default because some lousy web servers can't handle pipelining.

    • Re:What could firefox hacks possibly cover? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:11AM (#11492122) Homepage
      Firefox has a boatload of extensions and plugins. I could easily see a book talking about the ways to use all the extensions (and which ones are best).

      • books beat electronic documents? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by FrankHaynes ( 467244 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:41AM (#11492410)
        ...and I could easily see said book becoming obsolete roughly 1 month after its release date.

        Printed matter covering electronic applications seems really stone-age to me. It becomes outdated rather quickly, so a person picking up that Firefox book tries a hack a year later, but it no longer works because of changes in the code base, for example.

        But, I guess even though "information wants to be free", authors of said information don't want it to be. You can sell a book, but you can't sell a web site, at least not in the conventional sense.

        Maybe an e-book??? Nahhh, then those pirates over at slashdot would put it up on Bit Torrent and there go the profits.

        • ...and I could easily see said book becoming obsolete roughly 1 month after its release date.

          It'll only be obsolete if Firefox was changed completely. Most of the hacks I do to firefox (in about config, etc) are the exact same as they were back when Firefox was named Pheonix. Even if new things are added to a newer Firefox that aren't in the book, a majority of the stuff in the book will still work and the new stuff will probably be similar enough that users who read the book can figure out and find the
        • ORA releases more free content than any other vendor you can name and stuff on Safari has basically no copy protection and no DRM whatsoever. To accuse Tim O'Reilly of being profit hungry scum is just plain wrong. The simple fact of the matter is that while there is a demand for dead tree books he will happily fill it and that he has been making a tidy profit off of a very non-evil ebook system for years now.

          So just what *was* your point?
    • From the amazon full description...

      "You'll even learn how to install, use, and alter extensions and plug-ins"

      So plenty of reasons why you'll be needing this book, then...hmmm.

    • More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? Etc? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by BobPaul ( 710574 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:22AM (#11492224) Journal
      Besides defining what all the value(including the user addable ones) at about:config do.. what much else is there to tell? Editing the source? I doubt the book goes into that...

      Perhaps he could editting some of the JavaScript files FireFox uses.

      You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves [osdir.com] and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.

      This is great for things like drivers that you'd install once, but if you needed to install later you'd have to go back for the most updated version anyway, so there's little reason to save offline and since there's still 2 levels of warnings that appear on WinXP SP2 (or 1 level of warning on WinXP SP1), you really haven't decreased security at all.

      I'm sure there's lots of other stuff you can do in other script files firefox uses for config.

      He could also cover making search plugins... those are relatively simple, but can be confusing for first timmers and are kinda finicky for some websites search setups (the "official" Amazon plugin add's plusses where spaces should be, something that doesn't happen when searching on amazon directly...
      • You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.

        Isn't this the sort of thing people switch to Firefox to AVOID? Warning or no, most people click past those without reading them.

      • Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:46AM (#11492469)
        You need to do this if you want to be able to Remove the Kiddie Gloves [osdir.com] and let Firefox allow you to run EXE files you've downloaded out of the browser cache--with a warning of course--so that they are deleted automatically, rather than saving them to a specific folder where you'd have to delete them later.

        At the risk of asking a dumb question, why is forcing a user to save an executable from the web and then open it in a two step process possibly safer than allowing them to select open from within the browser?

        At the end of the day, you're not preventing them from opening it, nor are you really making it any safer - you're just annoying the people that really do want to open the file directly.

        Someone please enlighten me :)

        • Re:More control over EXE Files? Search Pluggins? E (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @11:35AM (#11493186)
          By making it impossible to execute in the browser, it makes it impossible to write a script to automatically execute a program.

          Psychologically, it also slows down and warns the user. The web conditions you to click along like mad, on anything that seizes your interest for a second. Having to stop and answer the dialog, then go find the exe breaks that spell.

          It's like seeing a line of flares on the side of the highway...you instinctively slow down, and look for the accident.
    • No no - This is the novelization. It tells how the scrappy underdog, Firefox, through street smarts and perserverence overcomes great odds and topples the evil giant, IE.

      Dreamworks has picked up the film rights. Will Smith is slated to star.

    • There are some cool things you can do by extracting the files from browser.jar, editing the xul commands in the individual files, then recompressing them into browser.jar.

      Do a search for firefox kiosk browser.jar and see some of the customizations.

      I would also hope that there'd be some good chapters on extension writing.

  • Necessary? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by troon ( 724114 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:07AM (#11492074)
    Does anyone *really* need a book telling them how to use a browser? Doesn't that suggest that the browser UI design is inadequate?

    • Re:Necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by freshman_a ( 136603 )
      If someone is converting from IE, I would think they'd be a little unfamiliar with things like tabbed browsing, extensions, themes, and pretty much anything FF has that IE doesn't.

    • Re:Necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:18AM (#11492184)
      Some people are very closed minded, and/or afraid to even go to the menus. I am sure the book covers more then the forward, back, refresh, stop, home, and location bar. Which most people use 95% of the time. But the little things like managing bookmark,configuring the options adding, theams, extentions, understaning RSS. Explaining why Active-X is bad. Most people when given a piece of software they don't at all the options they have they only go there when they need to. Heck I know many people who think clicking the start button is considered an advanced feature in windows. If it isn't on their desktop then it isn't worth clicking on.

    • Re:Necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gargamell ( 716347 ) *
      i do not know if anyone *really* needs it.

      I know plenty of people that might benefit from an IE book, so i see no reason why a FF wouldn't be helpful.

      My main point for resonding however, is that O'Reilly is obviously a very important point of tech media - AKA - marketing! Just a book being created about FF gives it a lot of "populace" credit. It is almost like a marketing milestone. This is a huge benefit to the idea in general, just like all the New York Times articles on FF we have been seen.

      I

    • Re:Necessary? (Score:3, Funny)

      by sharkey ( 16670 )
      Yes. [amazon.com]

    • Re:Necessary? (Score:5, Funny)

      by roystgnr ( 4015 ) <roy AT stogners DOT org> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:45AM (#11492458) Homepage
      Does anyone *really* need a book telling them how to use a browser? Doesn't that suggest that the browser UI design is inadequate?

      Inadequate [amazon.com] compared [amazon.com] to [amazon.com] what? [amazon.com]
    • Does anyone *really* need a book telling them how to use a browser? Doesn't that suggest that the browser UI design is inadequate?

      We have books that tell us how to make babies, yet I've always found that interface rather intuitive.

  • 22% of which market (Score:3, Interesting)

    by InfoHighwayRoadkill ( 454730 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:08AM (#11492077) Homepage
    in the FA O'reilly claim firefox accounts of 22% of the market... I just whish this were so.

  • Thats it.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by pploco ( 694950 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:09AM (#11492098)
    I'm giving up Lynx.

  • Oh Great, Wired's going to kill it (Score:5, Funny)

    by happyDave ( 155169 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:11AM (#11492115) Journal
    The Wired kiss-of-death will strike again. They can't tout a "next big thing" without absolutely killing it.

  • Did I miss something? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gremlins ( 588904 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:16AM (#11492159)
    Not that I don't agree with the idea the firefox is taking a chuck out of IE's market share but how exactly does O'Reilly releasing 2 books on firefox equal a "end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages"?

    • how exactly does O'Reilly releasing 2 books on firefox equal a "end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages"?

      Probably because the OP recognises Tim Oreilly [oreilly.com] uncanny abilty to predict (or influence) technology trends which is verging on presciense.

  • Am I the only only old fart feeling deja vu? (Score:4, Funny)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:16AM (#11492164)
    Am I the only old fart feeling deja vu? Open source...fast...not Microsoft...lemme see, that's the Mosaic browser before it became Netscape, right?

    Now what do I do with the "winsock.dll" file again?
  • The O'Reilly FireFox Factor

  • A small point (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SimianOverlord ( 727643 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:17AM (#11492172) Homepage Journal
    I read the wired article, and in all fairness the IE bashing was based on IE pre-SP2. A lot of it's been tightened up. A little balance, please.

    • Re:A small point (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tony Hoyle ( 11698 )
      Post-SP2 IE still sucks... still no tabbed browsing, still has ActiveX, still has security flaws, still doesn't support any standard post-1998.

  • Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)

    by zoeblade ( 600058 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:17AM (#11492179) Homepage

    Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?

    Slashdot is not the place to ask. Their site constantly displays incorrectly in Firefox. They'd do well to take heed of their own articles [slashdot.org].

  • Star Trek Ref (Score:3, Funny)

    by devnullkac ( 223246 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:19AM (#11492191) Homepage

    All I can think of is the scene where Uhura is re-learning English and trying to pronounce "blue" on her own:

    Buh -- Luu -- Eee

    Blue E?
  • How much money does Microsoft really make off of Internet Explorer? If the Mozilla Foundation snatches the browser market away, does Bill Gates give a damn? The home user still gets to use IE for Windows Update (and Office Update), unless she expressly use Automatic Updates. Now, if Slackware were getting 20% of the OS market, Bill Gates would need rear-view mirrors. But the browser thing is last decade's battle.

    Unless we can use it as a foothold, and move on to combat the Windows monopoly.

    • Totally false.. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by HerculesMO ( 693085 )
      With Microsoft releasing .NET in the way that they are, the browser is an ESSENTIAL tool in their arsenal to have. And IE market share only furthers the use of .NET in a corporate setting, and that prolongs the life of Microsoft being used with the dominance they have been. .NET is easy to develop, works in a web browser (so users don't have to install software), and is cross OS compliant (since it's thru a browser).

      The unfortunate part for Microsoft is, if they lose the browser war or at least, let anothe

    • not microsoft, but msn (Score:4, Insightful)

      by spectrokid ( 660550 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:40AM (#11492408) Homepage
      Any idea how many Joe Sixpacs have their default homepage on MSN? Any idea how many MS makes in AD revenue?

  • They're overhyping a bit, aren't they? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by HarveyBirdman ( 627248 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:20AM (#11492201) Journal
    I'm using Firefox at the moment, but it's not the utopic experience they seem to be pushing. It gets very slow sometimes for no discernable reason. The automatic plug-in download hasn't worked once. And sometimes the text on Slashdot pages shows up shifted way over to the right completely at random. It also chokes on my company's online timecard page, and looking at the page code I don't see anything particularly unusual or esoteric. I'll keep using it, though. It *is* better than IE overall.

    I'd like to see them put the tab close "X" on the tabs themselves like Safari.

    • > I'd like to see them put the tab close "X" on the tabs themselves like Safari.

      Just get the TabX [mozdev.org] extension and they'll be on the right place. It's the only extension I really need, actually.
      • Or you can get the extension mentioned by the AC now (didn't see that post before writing mine). Have to say I like TabX more because it does nothing else than adding the X'es. (Which is all I need)

        Also, TabX' X'es are a bit prettier compared to how TBE did it, last time I checked. But well, it's a matter of taste.

  • In defense of... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:20AM (#11492202) Homepage Journal
    I just had this conversation with my business partner the other day (we're in web development). I was thinking about it from this standpoint - even Firefox doesn't get everything completely right 100% of the time. Those problems tend to get fixed pretty quick, luckily.

    If you've ever tried to read through the W3C recommendations, you'll find them pretty dry and occasionally confusing. You can understand how browsers don't conform completely all the time.

    That doesn't excuse Microsoft from developing a way-off-base browser, allowing serious security holes past testing, or refusing to fix the problems they are aware of... There are a few things I like about IE, including some treatments of CSS and JavaScript. Just today I had to implement an auto-progressing slideshow feature into a photo gallery, and IE lets me use blend transitions (Firefox doesn't, at least that I can find).

    Despite all the defenses I can imagine, we still develop for Firefox and adjust to make it work in IE. We're both Firefox users that have to keep IE in our arsenal because that's what EVERY SINGLE CLIENT USES. None of them care to switch...and some can't because of the corporate requirements.

    • Re:In defense of... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Xugumad ( 39311 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:29AM (#11492304)
      We've started not working around every little IE glitch. For example, we brought in wonderful new icons in PNG format, then realised IE kinda made a mess out of them. In the end, we left it, as:

      1. They were still _usable_ under IE.
      2. It's blatantly an IE bug, so if the users complain, we can tell that Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/Safari/Konqueror render them fine, must be their browser.

      We're also lucky to have a userbase that likes Firefox (we're at about 40% of hits coming from Firefox, currently)...
    • So you missed the CSS "opacity" item? IE uses some damm non-standardard "filtering" metod of addind simple opacity. Earlier versions of gecko and khtml use slight variations ( MozOpacity and KhtmlOpacity respectivly ).

    • Despite all the defenses I can imagine, we still develop for Firefox and adjust to make it work in IE. We're both Firefox users that have to keep IE in our arsenal because that's what EVERY SINGLE CLIENT USES.

      And that's an attitude we can only hope spreads to more website developers as time goes on. You code for one, but adjust to make sure it works in the other. In my mind it doesn't matter which is first and which is second, more that the end result is a site that probably works pretty well in either

      • Re:In defense of... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
        Just yesterday I had a run in with the author of an internal site. It was obviously coded for IE only, as download link would not work in anything but IE. The problem appeared to be munged and mutilated URLs, but I wasn't the owner, nor a web developer, so I let him fix it. But he never did.

        We would *try* to fix it, but every time he would email me and say "try it now". And of course it never worked. The professional web developer who gets paid to write working web pages couldn't be bothered to test his

    • Re:In defense of... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kopretinka ( 97408 )

      If you've ever tried to read through the W3C recommendations, you'll find them pretty dry and occasionally confusing. You can understand how browsers don't conform completely all the time.

      Have you tried to write them about the places where the specs are confusing? I've cooperated on several W3C specs (none of HTML/CSS, though) and I find the W3C people and working groups to be pretty responsive. A clarification can easily be added to errata and eventually folded into a "second edition". For example XML 1.

  • Why I still use IE... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jaiyen ( 821972 )
    Much though I'd like to use Firefox all the time, I often seem to find myself having to resort back to IE. This is partly due to online banking requirements etc, but also due to a surprisingly large (IMO) number of sites that don't fully function in Firefox particulary those involving DHTML menus. See, say, this site [bumrungrad.com] for an example where the DHTML left hand menu appears in IE but not Firefox (version 1.0 on XP, at least).

    Now I'm sure someone will check the source and blame it on badly written javascript,
  • Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?

    No.

    Why? Because for many, people are comfortable with the norm and when you start changing things, there is a chance you can make it worse, and rather than risk things getting worse, you stay where you are. You keep doing what you have been doing and do not change.

    For many, the blue E is the internet, not a browser and with such ingraining far too many books would have to be printed and given away (along with large cash bribes to encourage people t
  • The January 24th print edition of Business Week had a two-pager, advertised on the cover, about Firefox and the threat it poses to Microsoft. I actually doubt there's a mainstream publication out there that *hasn't* done a feature on Firefox.

    I predict 10-15% market share by mid-year :)

  • In other news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:24AM (#11492244)
    Bill Gates files charges against Firefox's Blake Ross and Ben Goodger for allegedly making threats against Mr. Gates' life.

    The two deny all charges, and intend to plea not guilty if the case goes to trial, however a report from a recent "Wired" magazine article [wired.com] alleges that Mr. Gates should 'Watch his back'

    In completely unreleated news, Microsoft has filed to pattent the phrase "Watch your back", and will be suing the Firefox developers as well as Wired magazine for royalties and copyright infringement.
  • watch your back, Bill Gates

    He might care if IE actually generated direct revenue. Firefox does nothing to change his revenue stream: Windows and Office.
  • "Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?"

    What's the authoritative source for making sure you have a 'browser friendly' page up? I've always used W3C to ensure my code is valid, but I run into problems with my page rendering differently on each browser.. =/ Is this because each browser interprets the standard differently?
    • Is this because each browser interprets the standard differently?

      ...and some choose not to implement standards at all, and some choose to make up their own way of doing things. Most of the sites that are tweaked for IE are done so because IE does a lot of things in its own way. If every browser followed standards, this would be a non-issue.

    • I don't think there's a single browser that renders every standards-compliant page correctly. Firefox comes close, as do most non-IE browsers. But yes, they are all slightly different.
  • I mean, really, once you've read the title, you're most of the way there..!

    Except that most people will need to click on the blue E to go to getfirefox to, err, get firefox. Maybe the 20 bucks is for explaining how to install BitTorrent ;-)

    Justin.
  • there are two features of opera that i haven't found in firefox that keep me on opera. if someone knows how they can be done in firefox, i'd be grateful to hear about it

    1) opera by default opens all new windows in new tabs. firefox still responds to hyperlinks etc that want to bring up new windows with, er, a new window. i want tabs to be the default

    2) if pc/windows/opera crashes, i can come back into it pretty much exactly where i left off - all my tabs are there with their histories intact
    • For 1 you can set that if you install the firefox tab options extensions (which is probably just a front end to about:config).

      I don't know about 2, since I use Konqueror primarily, for Konqueror you just go to Tools -> Crashes -> and the click a date (saying its ever even crashed, my list is empty cause its never crashed so I can't test it)

    • 1) Restart Firefox and go to Tools > Options... (Edit > Preferences... under Linux and Mac OS X), select Advanced and click on Tabbed Browsing. Then select "Open links ... in: a new tab in the most recent window".

      2) Take a look at SessionSaver http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#sessions aver [texturizer.net] If you'll run into troubles during installation just go to about:config -> extensions.disabledObsolete and set it to false.

      PS: more tips and tricks: http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips [mozilla.org]

  • I've been slowly switching over everyone I can. If someone asks me to fix their virus-and-spyware laden XP machine, I tell them I'm only going to do it if they'll switch to a safer web browser and learn how to run Ad-Aware. At first they're kind of reluctant, but after two or three times of me having to fix their computer (at my leisure) they're usually pretty open to new ideas.

    So that book on why Firefox is better than IE sounds terrific, but at 152 pages isn't exactly what I'd call light reading. Doe

  • This is all great, but it's still important to use spreadfirefox and market [spreadfirefox.com]

    Get a few images, and sprinkle them on your websites, etc.

    People trust geeks and their opinions. So if all the geeks unite and say to use Firefox, there's a good chance they will.

    The books are great, but it's not a time to slow down on the linking.

    We need to make casual surfers think "wow, I'm out of touch, everyone talks about firefox... from books to blogs".

    So spread [spreadfirefox.com] firefox now!
  • ...IE is dying, film at eleven.
  • why print stuff like this in the first place?

    sure, book is nice to handle and to read, but most of the contents handle stuff that requires you to operate computer while reading if you want to get most out of it

    now wait 5 years and all second hand bookstores are filled with these books and nobody wants them, because firefox 2.0 or 3.0 or some other better browser already made it obsolete technology

    I guess my point here being, save a tree, save some shelf space, save as pdf instead

  • 1.1 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:41AM (#11492414)
    Whilst i'm a big fan of FireFox, it would be nice if they integrate some of the popular plugins directly into the application.

    Not all of them - just the extremely useful ones. For example I find it bizzare that I have to install a plugin just so that when I ctrl-click a link it opens in a new tab directly to the right of my current one (and not to the far right of all the open tabs). This makes jumping between the current page and a child of that page annoying because you end up tabbing all over the place.

    Plus, if you're getting people coming from IE, it would be helpful to have a few more buttons on the display by default (power users can easily remove them, non-power users can't easily add them). For example I always set new tab, back, forward, stop, reload, home, bookmarks, history, downloads and print with the address bar, go button and google search on the line below. Works for me, ex-IE users don't complain much either.

    Oh yes, and some of the hidden options in "about:config" really should have their own menu option. It would also be nice if they turned on browser.xul.error_pages.enabled by default and cleaned up the error pages to look a little more professional. I'd offer to supply templates, if I knew who to approach and whether anyone would be remotely interested.

    Apart from that, not really sure what else they could do for 1.1 (apart from some bug fixes, of course).

    • Re:1.1 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tribulation2004 ( 751416 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @11:20AM (#11492957)
      You're missing the whole point of Firefox! Simplicity man! No bloat. Nothing installed that doesn't have to be installed. Everytime I install Firefox somewhere, I also install the Adblock and flashblock extensions - yet I'd never want Adblock integrated into the base product - many people don't use it, and if you don't use it, it just adds options to the interface, potentially confusing less technical people (who are exactly the people that should benefit the most from converting to a simple and secure browser).

      My Dad can easily change the configuration of Firefox if he has to (adding allowed pop-ups for example) - something he could never have managed when he was using IE (I know, I'm his tech support). The reason? Firefox is simple - there aren't a million options. Firefox is written for non-technical users, with extensions available to render it more useful to those who want more functionality.

  • Serious problems in O'Reilly Editorship (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sloth jr ( 88200 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @10:44AM (#11492450)
    O'Reilly has successfully transitioned from a geek publisher to yet another corporate sellout. Quality of content has really tanked, and even those few geek-oriented books that do get released are woefully thin volumes (W. Curtis Preston, whose fantastic O'Reilly Backup book should be considered the bible of backup and restore, can't write more than 200 pages on NAS and SAN? I think the topic's a bit broader than can be covered in such a thin tome).

    Tim, if you're reading this, help restore O'Reilly to the kick-ass publisher of days of yore. Kill the Hacks books. Get rid of the Annoyances. Lose the Missing Manuals. Forget about the Notebooks. Concentrate on the Nutshells and the Essentials and the Animal Books (Pocket References are good, as well). Make them well-written, well-constructed, accurate, fun, and RELEVANT. Examples of excellence: Sendmail, DNS and BIND, Unix Backup and Recovery.

  • Well... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Among other things, it certainly spells the end of the era wherein O'Reilly could be taken as a serious publisher of excellent computer books.
  • In BW's Jan. 24 issue, on the cover is "Firefox: The Browser Worrying Microsoft" with a story inside.

    Whether or not MS is really concerned with FF is debatable. My personal hope is that they're ignoring it, but I doubt that's the case.

    It's just a testimony to the power of open development and a reminder that we're all better off when there are at least two horses in every race.

  • True life story . . . (Score:5, Interesting)

    by harley_frog ( 650488 ) <harley_frog&yahoo,com> on Thursday January 27, 2005 @11:04AM (#11492725) Journal
    I work for a small university library in Mississippi as the Automation Librarian. Frustrated with spyware, viruses, and the like, infecting our public Internet workstations (and with no money to work with), I decided that change was needed. So, I installed Linux on the workstations and customized the desktop so that only the icon for Firefox was visible. That was earlier this month, and so far I haven't heard any complaints from the students. I know that I'm sleeping better at night now. Soon, I will have Firefox loaded on all our computers and tell people to use that rather than IE. Just a small effort, but as Kosh once said, "The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebble to vote."

  • Firefox and Print (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bruzer ( 191590 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @11:04AM (#11492727) Homepage

    Ironicly the firefox browser prints pages like crap, cutting text in half, and squishing images very poorly. I love the browser, but I always have to reprint pages in other browsers to get better results.

    - Bruzer

    • Re:Firefox and Print (Score:3, Interesting)

      by linicks ( 704116 )
      Maybe I'm missing the point, but I've found a few options under File > Page Setup to fix my initial printing problems.

      1. There is "shrink to fit page" option that makes the page print the width of the HTML.

      2. I also like to use the "Print Background (colors and images)" option.

      With these options set, every page printed looks the same as it does in the browser.

  • Also an article in the New York Times (Score:4, Informative)

    by amabbi ( 570009 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:16PM (#11493701)
    The Gray Lady Online has an article on MSIE-alternative browsers; of course Firefox and Mozilla are mentioned, and they even mention browsers like Amaya and Safari.

    Custom Tailor a Web Browser Just for You [nytimes.com]

  • Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted web (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Transcendent ( 204992 ) on Thursday January 27, 2005 @12:20PM (#11493748)
    Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted web pages?

    If so, good. I used to only like IE because of the scripting ability with JavaScript and CSS, but now after the newer versions of Firefox came out, I find it performs much better than IE in many aspects (yet, there still are a few bugs).

    For instance, Firefox supports more W3C standard CSS attributes than IE currently does (see :before usage, and the like). Also, firefox got away from the horrid Netscape implementation (which made me an IE only scripter to begin with) going for the more W3C standards, which actually makes it compatible with many, many common "IE only" scripts in use today. I was suprised that some of my websites suddenly worked with Firefox after one of their newest releases.

    I especially like how Firefox now allows you to use "document.all" when referencing an object, but gives you a nice suggestion in the JavaScript console to use the W3C standard: getObjectByID() or such. Very, very helpful.

    I hope Firefox leads the way with JavaScript and CSS... they're actually doing it right.

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