December 16th, 2004

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Technology
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FireFox Ad Runs in New York Times Today

I read it first on NevOn, then Slashdot and everywhere else. The Mozilla Foundation ran its double-full-page ad in the New York Times for Firefox today. Here’s a decent sized image and a high-res PDF. If you look carefully, you’ll find my name between ‘Brian Christopher Bare’ and ‘Mike Barell’ in the upper-right quadrant:

As a Slashdot reader observes (reflecting a common nerd frustration): “A nice representation of all sections of people. Russian,Chinese and Indian names are common. Too bad too few women in it (maybe 1:50)”.

The ad is a great achievement for the Foundation, and reflects their broad support in the technology community (11 million downloads and growing fast). Will it change the mind of the average person (well, the average New York Times reader)? Does the average person care? I’m not sure, but sometimes marketing is as much about splash as measurable, lasting results.

UPDATE: Incidentally, in case any of you less-technical readers are wondering what it means when we say “Firefox adheres to standards more closely than Internet Explorer”, here’s a small but telling example.

This guy is trying to achieve a seemingly simple effect on a Web page. He wants to display the Web address or ‘URL’ after a link, so that when the page is printed, you’ll be able to tell where the link goes. This functionality should be a part of any Web browser (I believe this is the applicable bit of the standard or ’specification’ in question), but IE doesn’t implement it. So, what takes one line of code in Firefox takes 27 in Internet Explorer.

Comments: 3 Responses so far

Henry
December 16th, 2004
11:47 am

In fairness, the one line is CSS and the 27 lines are Javascript.

Also, with regards to standards adherence, Mozilla/Firefox has an annoying layout bug that was spotted four years ago and has not yet been corrected. It drove me nuts a few weeks ago. So, each browser has some things to answer for, though I’m not familiar enough with Firefox yet to evaluate its standards compliance as a whole.

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Darren
December 16th, 2004
12:06 pm

Henry: Indeed, though the point here is that you can achieve the effect with far less effort in Firefox.

In developing for the Web, it’s been my experiecne that Firefox is vastly superior on standards-adherence than IE. It’s not perfect, certainly, but it’s always IE that causes me the angst.

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Ross Thomas
December 18th, 2004
11:14 am

That Firefox CSS bug needs to be fixed, but how often, really, does one put an absolute-positioned element inside a relative-positioned one? In fact, it’s best to stay away from absolute positioning anyway (I see no benefit in it over using tables and invisible GIFs for styling, to be honest with you).

But the problem Darren highlights (via etc.) is more serious for the web developer, because the only alternative to this amazingly useful CSS feature, i.e. content-changing, is Javascript. Quite a lot of people surf with Javascript disabled, so this work-around won’t, er, work for them. Also it’s a lot more computationally expensive than one CSS command to alter the DOM.

I believe I read recently that Microsoft is beginning to realize it fucked up in a major way by ignoring IE over the last few years. It blows my mind that they didn’t learn from the Netscape experience. At least when Netscape didn’t put out a new release for two years it was because they were working on a complete rewrite of the code… Microsoft have been doing diddly-squat. People can be so stupid sometimes.

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