Firefox 10 is available on FreeBSD

OH said:
Somehow www/firefox-i18n will not function anymore with the update to 10. I have yet to investigate...
Click to expand...

In case you stumbled upon this via a search, a workaround for this problem is suggested here

I'm going to give Konqueror with webkit a shot, flash seems a lot slower than under Firefox, but that's just a minor issue for me.
 
throAU said:
Internal intranet style apps.
Click to expand...
Most corporations are the worst when it comes to marking up web sites and typically gear it toward one browser (Internet Explorer is the worst) then can't figure out why it doesn't work in modern browsers.
 
To be fair, most corporations have an SOE, and run stuff like sharepoint, because plenty of third party apps use it as a platform. But I'm not just including that sort of stuff. I'm talking about embedded web apps for configuring network/storage devices. Job tracking tools, etc. Not everything out there is open source, and it's an unfortunate fact of life that you need to be able to open non-standard pages.

If I am going to need a browser to be able to do that sort of thing, I may as well use it for everything else. Firefox works with most stuff. Chrome works with most stuff. IE works with virtually everything in the corporate space. Opera has more problems than the others. Which is a shame, because its probably coded better than the rest of the browsers out there, it just doesn't fulfill the browser function for all the pages I need it to render without hassle.

For home use it's fine though, barring the weird "Scroll pages way faster than every other app" I've seen on OS X.
 
throAU said:
IE works with virtually everything in the corporate space.
Click to expand...
That proves what I said. IE is technically, by far, the worst browser on the planet, yet you'll find most corporate apps designed using it. A huge mistake they are now paying for.

They'll look at something running in IE, but not the other browsers, and point at the other browsers thinking there is something faulty with them when the whole issue was really that they designed to a broken browser. It's like using a broken calculator to test a math problem, then complaining about a working calculator giving a different result.

Fortunately most professionals have learned not to trust IE to do anything right once they started noticing that anything tested in a modern browser (never IE) almost always works in every other modern browser.

IE is always a generation or two behind every other. Until IE8 came out, it was 13 years behind.
 
You don't quite get it. I'm not disputing the fact that IE is a generation or two behind in terms of standards support. I agree, in terms of standards support, it sucks (though IE9 is a lot better).

In the real world, where getting the job done without screwing around to work around web-ui problems is the goal, IE beats Opera. Both Firefox and the Webkit browsers beat Opera in that respect, also.

All the standards support in the world doesn't matter, if your standards compliant browser can't be used to get work done. Firefox and Chrome appear to work better in these troublesome pages than Opera does. They work with virtually everything on our private network.

Whether or not that is due to the page detecting the non-IE browser and sending different HTML to it, or Firefox/Chrome emulating IE quirks is not really my concern. They work. Opera doesn't.

This is why I have Firefox / Chrome / Safari installed, but not Opera. Every time I try to use Opera I run into too many problems with it rendering pages I need to use for my job to bother.

I'm sure I'm not alone. Opera isn't in a position to dictate what pages they will support due to strict standards compliance (only) with their current market share.

Like it or not, "IE quirks" are a de-facto standard in the corporate space. Don't work with them, and your browser is, for many users, broken.


I guess to sum up:
Corporate types mostly know IE is crap, but the less-crap alternatives don't function with business-critical web apps. Hence they can't be supported in the business.
 
I "get it" just fine. My point is, you are saying the browser doesn't work with the software. I'm saying the software doesn't work with the browser. It's the software's fault, not the browser.

That said, I don't know what your pages look like so I can't comment about any particular issue Opera may be having if it works in FF and Chrome.

Quirks mode is a bug. It's an error committed years ago and promulgated by Microsoft and Internet Explorer. No one should be using quirks. Unfortunately people did and that's what has so much corporate software stuck in the 90s to this day.
 
No. What I am trying to get across is this. It doesn't matter that it is the page's fault. That software is not going away. It is far simpler to just not use opera, than rewrite every app on the corporate intranet. Thus, Opera gets dumped.

Doesn't matter who's fault it is from an idealistic point of view.
 
@throAU

Essentially what you are saying is: Religion is not going anywhere, might as well convert to one right now.

No, thx.
Even if it takes us another 1000 years, we'll get it right.
 
throAU said:
It doesn't matter that it is the page's fault. That software is not going away. It is far simpler to just not use opera, than rewrite every app on the corporate intranet.
Click to expand...

I understand that. I just didn't want anyone to think this was any one browser's fault.

On a side note, this is why web developers preach coding to web standards and not to any one browser.
 
I would like to reemphasize the post I made earlier in this thread, stating that the page rendering problems in opera here have largely dissipated. For instance, in earlier versions every third page would not render correctly, and I would use the authormode (default) > usermode toggle button. VS this week/month/year, maybe one in fifty sites do not render well enough, across a wide variety. (I have however applied a few tweaks, fixing unwanted loading of TTF fonts.)
 
You can't compare how a browser renders pages with random web sites and fault the browser. There are so many sites made by incompetent people and businesses on the 'net. Just because a site works in one browser does not mean it will or should work the same in another browser.

I get these questions all the time on a web dev forum. In almost all cases, the page was coded wrong and the fact that it worked in browser X was either luck or black magic.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I understand that. I just didn't want anyone to think this was any one browser's fault.

On a side note, this is why web developers preach coding to web standards and not to any one browser.
Click to expand...

Oh I agree, it's not strictly the browser's fault, if the browser's aim is to be 100% W3C standards compliant.

In an ideal world, this is fine.

In the REAL world, many of these apps were written before standards were defined or before standards compliant browsers were commonly available. People need to use various apps to get their job done. At home, you can tolerate/spent time working around compatibility issues between browser and server app.

At work, time is money. Telling someone you can't do the job (or your new SOE will not work with the company's environment) because some corp application is not standards compliant will get you laughed at/fired.

A browser being standards compliant, but not working properly with mission critical apps means nothing to a business. Getting the job done comes first, and expecting a company to rewrite/test/deploy new versions of working apps simply due to the ideal of standards compliance is not going to fly - pretending it is and not attempting to inter-operate with broken web pages is only going to cost market share, perpetuating the problem (by making corp types reluctant to roll out new browsers).

If the choice is between the latest version of IE, which has security updates/better standards compliance (than earlier IE) and still works, or an alternative that doesn't work with internal apps/may break in future with the company's apps, guess what gets rolled out?

Anyway... back to FF10.

I'm running it now, seems to be a vast improvement on 4 and 5 which were the last versions I used (and, unlike Opera, I haven't found an app on our intranet it doesn't work with, yet). Extended support duration still needs to be longer though.
 
overmind said:
Is this still true regarding Chrome/Chromium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncerhCLi2o0&feature=player_embedded?
Click to expand...

I don't think most of these problems are specific to Chromium. When I open Firefox and go to google.com, despite have instant search turned off, when I start typing in the search box suggestions appear under the search box and I can see transferring messages to google sites in the status bar.

Here is a concern that I think is specific to Chromium. If you use their browser sync for all your data (browser history, passwords, cookies, etc) this information is sent to the google servers unecrypted. Of course you aren't forced to use browser sync. Firefox encrypts the data locally then sends it up.
 
jrm said:
Here is a concern that I think is specific to Chromium. If you use their browser sync for all your data (browser history, passwords, cookies, etc) this information is sent to the google servers unecrypted.
Click to expand...
Not quite. Passwords are encrypted.
 
I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.
 
sossego said:
I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.
Click to expand...

Maybe you could volunteer.
 
sossego said:
I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.
Click to expand...

But they support arm, ia64, mips, s390 and sparc, besides i386 and amd64. What more architectures do you need?
 
drhowarddrfine said:
Extended support has been, or will be, stretched to 12 months for enterprise users.
Click to expand...

For decent sized enterprises, perhaps 6 months is about how long full compatibility testing will take. SOE re-spins will typically be at least 12-18 months apart.

12 months is not long enough.
 
It took enterprises 10 years to get rid of IE6, and some still haven't, so I guess there is no hope for them. IE10 will begin a 12-month cycle for Microsoft so I guess they're screwed.
 
jrm said:
Maybe you could volunteer.
Click to expand...

I had volunteered. I've talked to the maintainer of 10-4 fox.

You can thank me now, bbzz, for something I worked on and asked about six months ago. I also tried asking it to be implemented- powerpc use- on the mozilla developers' mailing list.
 
Like many open source projects, they are limited by the number of people available to work on such things and have to devote more of their work where it's most needed. I know those on Macs that still run PowerPC are still in abundance but the future of PPC on Macs is no more and might be in doubt elsewhere, at least on the desktop.

Boris Zbarsky tried to recruit me at one time and was very grateful of my time when I started to get involved. It didn't go anywhere because I never had the time I wished to put into it.

Nobody works harder than the folks at Mozilla.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
It took enterprises 10 years to get rid of IE6, and some still haven't, so I guess there is no hope for them. IE10 will begin a 12-month cycle for Microsoft so I guess they're screwed.
Click to expand...

IE9 still works with IE6 designed sites just fine (haven't tested IE10 yet), and IE updates are included in the OS. IE7 and IE8 are still supported.

Why a company would take on the additional workload of testing for support with Firefox on an annual basis when there is a browser (that works for the work apps) that will be supported with security updates for multiple years is anyone's guess. It does not make economic sense, and thus it will not happen.

Until the FF guys get that, they aren't going to make inroads into corporate space.

It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, if you are not supportable. You need to be MORE supportable than IE to make anyone in corporate land care. That means group policy (or equivalent, centrally controlled configuration) support, multi-year timeframes for support, and corporate deployment/upgrade tools. Even chrome has group policy tools, and it's a lot newer than Firefox.

Being shiny isn't enough.


edit:
Note, this is a fairly windows centric point of view, but consider this as "phase 1" of getting rid of IE on the desktop. Once IE is irrelevant, that's another reason to run Windows, gone.
 
throAU said:
IE9 still works with IE6 designed sites just fine (haven't tested IE10 yet), and IE updates are included in the OS.
Click to expand...
IE9 does not run on XP. IE10 won't work on anything less than Windows8 (or is it 7?).
IE7 and IE8 are still supported.
Click to expand...
Not for long. IE9 will be pushed soon.
Until the FF guys get that, they aren't going to make inroads into corporate space.
Click to expand...
They already have made inroads which is why they are extending the support to 12 months. Like I said before, they aren't doing anything different than what Chrome does now and Microsoft will be doing shortly.
Note, this is a fairly windows centric point of view, but consider this as "phase 1" of getting rid of IE on the desktop. Once IE is irrelevant, that's another reason to run Windows, gone.
Click to expand...
About eight years ago, I said IE would be a minor browser by now. I was almost, somewhat correct. Back then it had 95% market share. Today it's hovering just above 50% and falling. Not too shabby a prediction.

If you visit web developer sites or tech sites that show their visitor browser usage, like ArsTechnica, you find that IE visitors number around 15% or so. The people who know how the web works don't use IE. A large number of them also use Macs, too.

My second prediction was that if ChromeOS turned on NX (now the name escapes me), it would be the death of Windows but I think I see a trend toward the every man switching over to Apple computers to go with all their other Apple products. It happened to my son just recently. All of his classmates had Apple notebooks (ALL of them). He was impressed by them so much he bought a Mac to replace his desktop. Then he stole my iPad. Now he wants an iPhone, too.

Wait a minute! Did I go off topic?!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top