Mozilla Drops Support for International Domains

[Nexus]

we can only hope this stems the tide of the freakish mozilla revival ... just one more thing a mozilla browser WON'T do for you... when will these folks wake up and start working on a better browser, not a less useful one?
Vivvy (recovering Firefox user)

I have NO idea how to connect your comments to my experience. Vivvy, what horrible thing has Moz done to you? Shoot, I can take it!

IMHO, the only real hurdle for Moz/Firefox is NOT really what it "doesn't" do, so much as what technologies IE has come up with that make it both "entrenched" yet also tragically "unsecure". I can't quite connect the "Mozilla Revival" to the word "freakish" so much as "inspiring". The amount of no-nonsense Moz extensions there are are awesome. If only they can amp their browser control up to the level of portability needed for people looking to release light Moz-powered applications.

I don't know. I have a bet with someone as to where we'll be when this latest browser war finishes. IE 7 seems just around the corner.

~ Nexus

 

[Vivvy]

I'm a developer... the resurgence of mozilla, particularly firefox has been disasterous. What was a marginalized group that could be dismissed is now a marginalized group I have to pay attention to, and it increases my workload 10 fold. So far I've had to revamp 3 major sites (mostly .asp issues) because less than 2%, yes TWO percent of the visitors to these sites are using Mozilla. My clients have been overtaken by the popular media and it's insistance that everyone is moving to this kind of browser, and it's a media induced crock. While mozilla browsers made a 1-2% gain on IE last year, that still doesn't stack up against IE's 94% market share, and people are moving to FF particularly, because the media is telling them to.

My own personal experience with firefox was less than stellar to say the least with only about 70% of sites I visited being totally accessible and at some level most being less accessible.

The banner of "Firefox is so Fantastic" was taken up by the popular tech press as if it were the messiah returning to dethrone satan himself, when in fact, its only notable extra is tabbed browsing. Considering all i DON'T get with FF i can do without tabbed browsing, but ironically don't have to because I am currently using Avant.

On top of all that, this huge and yes freakish out of no where push for mozilla based browsers has just made it a new target for nefarious souls who see a new hunting ground, and in the last 6 months we've seen an upswing in security problems for mozilla based browsers because of it...

Here is the best thing to come from this "browser war" and it is definitely where I agree with you... IE 7 will be better than it might have been. If we're gonna move towards a standard, we have to have a standard browser. It just makes sense, and IE is going to be that browser.

Vivvy

 

[Theo]

Sorry to break you the news, but if you needed major overhauls it means your code/design is not up to the standards. If anything, IE's implementation of CSS and HTML is lax and substandard. It auto-completes table structures as well.

The open source community is contributing thousands of hours of design and programming time, with no financial retribution whatsoever. Bill Gates and his high paid programmers have been dragging their virtual feet for years now to implement standards & to patch security issues.

 

[Vivvy]

about half of my clients are sites that were not originally designed by me... especially these three that were all done in .asp format... it's not my coding... it's just my work to fix it... and it's unnecessary work imho since these pages look fine in all browsers except mozilla based ones...

i'm backing the horse who has the best odds to win the race, because I can't afford in my business to back the rebel....

Vivvy

 

[Theo]

Exactly my point: Mozilla has been in development for years. The inconsistencies are due to bad programming in ASP and the wrongful assumption that IE is a monopoly. All the companies that I worked for supported Netscape Navigator till its demise last year. The Mozilla foundation has done a superb job in maintaining the standards and producing a steady flow of improvements to the browser core. Netscape and Firefox are not the only ones: Opera is a great browser with a small user base - and watch out for the new Mozilla-based browser from Google.

 

[Nexus]

I'm a developer... the resurgence of mozilla, particularly firefox has been disasterous. What was a marginalized group that could be dismissed is now a marginalized group I have to pay attention to

Yipes! Not to offend, but I'm a developer too. Very long time. In my opinion, that is a horrible reason, Vivvy. Usually when code doesn't work cross-platform, its more a matter of faulty coding than a bad browser. We're human, and HTML coding/design is a picky science as you know. Supporting multiple browsers should NEVER increase your work 10 fold. If it does, something may be wrong with your process. The manner in which IE "corrects" coding mistakes has been disasterous for the development community in my opinion. Its meant as favor to web surfers, not to developers. As developers, we need to be running our code constantly through tools like HTMLTidy, and looking for where we goofed up. Many developers like myself have sadly passed over features in IE that we're "cross-browser" compatible. Seeing how they SHOULD have been implemented (like DHTML marquees instead of IE's "marquee" tool) is very edifiying to me. I still use IE specific features, but ONLY if they can still work relatively similarly in other browsers. That's ALWAYS been the way I've coded. Unless we're all about stifling competition (which gives us BETTER products), we should be studying the standard specific features and not the product specific nuances.

For your point of view, I would imagine you're also glad browsers ship now with "display javascript errors" OFF by default, so that pages with errors on them do not interrupt the browsing experience. I think everyone should be coding properly. Microsoft did NOT invent HTML. There's is only ONE implementation of a "standard", and its not always the RIGHT one.

Here is the best thing to come from this "browser war" and it is definitely where I agree with you... IE 7 will be better than it might have been. If we're gonna move towards a standard, we have to have a standard browser. It just makes sense, and IE is going to be that browser.

Thanks for giving your point of view. I've never heard anyone rally behind IE in a way that dismisses the idea of open standards. Personally, over the years, I've come to an understanding of WHY organizations like Microsoft should not ALONE control the technologies that define a truely "open" standard. Why organizations like the W3C exist. Something closed, and proprietary really sends us down entropy road. Saying we should all raise up IE as "the standard" flies in the face of how we ever got "here" to begin with (with regards to the development of the web).

I do feel your pain with regards to "standards". Took me a while to learn what the heck XHTML was, develop in a "standard" way, and not see IE's "let me fix your HTML" approach as my friend. Moreover, I LIKE IE. I've developed HTML applications that used IE specific features at the time, like reading an XML file off a hard drive, and transforming into a dynamic menu. I've been a fan of its "event bubbling" in creating my own attributes for tags, to automatically handle rollovers as if they're a native feature of an <IMG> tag. Some cool stuff. But I'd never consider putting those into the "wild" of the Internet placing a bet on ONE browser, and dismissing all others because of decisions I made.

MOZILLA is NOT Netscape 4.7. It's a brand new world from that, and after all these years, its certainly earned its right for me to even install it (at least under "Firefox" or "Netscape"). I also support Safari and Opera as much as I can (more Safari though).

~ Nexus

 

[Rubber Duck]

Exactly my point: Mozilla has been in development for years. The inconsistencies are due to bad programming in ASP and the wrongful assumption that IE is a monopoly. All the companies that I worked for supported Netscape Navigator till its demise last year. The Mozilla foundation has done a superb job in maintaining the standards and producing a steady flow of improvements to the browser core. Netscape and Firefox are not the only ones: Opera is a great browser with a small user base - and watch out for the new Mozilla-based browser from Google.

Totally agree with you! I switched to Firefox because IE was constantly telling me sites were down or not available when infact they weren't. Firefox may not be all things to all people, but at least it works reliably. IE is an obsolete pile of crap. One of the reasons it is so poor is that because Microsoft has a virtual monopoly, it has decided not to do further development work. That alone explains why a choice of providers for this kind of software is essential.

If you like Firefox, you will love Thunderbird! Amazing!

Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Vivvy]

I'm not offended by the idea that it's "bad coding", it's not my coding... these are sites that are having to be redone because of someone else's .asp work, and the impetus behind those overhauls is the craze about Firefox and all media it's received in the last year... which impacts my clients and the amount of work they need done to their sites.

i've followed the standard arguments really closely...W3C has a long way to go to really reflect an agreed upon "standard". But that doesn't mean i don't pay attention to what they put out.... for instance often i'll opt for a css navigation instead of javascript to be more w3c or section 508 friendly, and you won't catch me using any marquee application, just because it's not a good design choice.

But this really isn't about my design choices. It's about using a browser that is ineffective. When I use firefox it can't access an unacceptable number of websites. I want a browser that will allow me to browse the entire internet, not just what mozilla browser developers think i should see. Firefox and it's proponents may force a standard, but the reality is that standard probably won't look like firefox...

I'm surprised no one has picked up on the fact that i'm not using IE ...

Vivvy

 

[Nexus]

But this really isn't about my design choices. It's about using a browser that is ineffective. When I use firefox it can't access an unacceptable number of websites. I want a browser that will allow me to browse the entire internet, not just what mozilla browser developers think i should see. Firefox and it's proponents may force a standard, but the reality is that standard probably won't look like firefox...

It's clear you have a completely different perspective than I have, Vivvy. You keep talking about Firefox or IE "forcing" or "being" the "standard", when my perspective tells me that IE and Firefox attempt to CONFORM to the standards. They cannot BE the "standard" themselves.

Usually for practical reasons I tell people I work with "make sure it works in whatever browser the client uses" AND in IE for Windows, and then all other standard browsers next. IE 5 for Mac is a hopeless cause and generally should be ignored if possible.

There was a notion sprung a while back to do "object" detection and not "browser" detection, in an effort to decide which direction code should run. If you do "object" detection (ie: does this browser have "document.all", then use it, does this browser support "iframe" then use it, if this browser supports... etc).

You say things like "not just what mozilla browser developers think i should see" and I can't figure out how that connects to anything. Moz developers aren't "limiting" choices. The only way I DO see "issues" is with the otherwise highly cool application development platform Moz uses called XUL. It's very nnice, but requires a Mozilla browser to make a website into an "application".

I can only suggest you consider viewing the WEB as something that wasn't invented for Internet Explorer to browse, and along came other browsers that weren't as compatible. The very perspective you're exposing creates the problems you're facing. Someone esigned those ASP pages poorly, and now they need to be redone. Javascript aside, HTML rendered output is pretty simple, and its almost ALWAYS bad html coding that causes cross-browser problems.

ALL my pages run in Firefox just fine... and I do LOADS of complex things in my pages. In one interface I created an effect where users selected "rows" by clicking on checkboxes. Those rows highlight with each checkbox by changing their stylesheet. Before I ever tried Firefox I made this feature, cognizant of standards. Firefox came along, and I decided to try it on Moz. Everything worked perfectly.

I'm surprised no one has picked up on the fact that i'm not using IE ...

Not sure how we would know unless you were browsing our websites. What DO you use?

Currently, I use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, and Safari.

The only really problematic websites for Firefox and others, are those using ActiveX objects. It's ironic that Microsoft started out flirting with support for Netscape "plugins" before usurping the issue and even dismissing Java as a developer open standards option. Hats off for services like GotoMyPC that have still thrived in multiplatform environments while providing one of the best web enhancement services around.

~ Nexus

 

[Vivvy]

isn't gotomypc the best thing since sliced bread? as much as i travel i'd be totally lost without it...

Vivvy

 

[dtobias]

I'll add my support for what others have said... if your site doesn't work properly in Firefox, that probably means that you, or whoever developed it, used bad coding in the first place. Stop whining and fix your code.

 

[Rubber Duck]

I'll add my support for what others have said... if your site doesn't work properly in Firefox, that probably means that you, or whoever developed it, used bad coding in the first place. Stop whining and fix your code.

Indeed, I have recently experienced exactly the opposite. Site developed in EasySiteWizard (HTML means nothing to me), displays perfectly well in Firefox, but then I get the bad news from third partly that site is displaying all sorts of HTML debris in Internet Explorer. Would seem to me that much of the bad code is actually in Internet Explorer itself. Good reason as any for junking it, except that if your a developer, it is not only important that you develop the site properly, but it is also important to know to what extent the Microsoft product will corrupt the way it is displayed!

Regards
Dave Wrixon