Firefox 32.0?
Pah. Wake me when we get to Firefox 187. In a couple of months.
The "blink"* element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox. The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C …
*facepalm*
Joking aside, (and slightly off-topic) the version number incrementation is insignificant to the majority of people involved with Firefox, except developers who track features and changes.
So I do wish that people will stop banging on about how quickly the version numbers are going up (not you specifically DanceMan). Does it really matter?
That said, I also wish that Mozilla would drop the focus on version numbers in the same way that Google have (in other words don't use it in marketing or promotion). Although a cursory glance on their website seems to suggest that they're finally heeding this advice.
do I get to say that I look forward to v132?
Hopefully by then they will get a FUNCTIONAL UI, where reasonable settings like browser.cache.check_doc_frequency are not buried in an obtuse about:config page, as well as stop making user experience changes just because you think you can.
There. Got that off my chest. Because the self-important twits at Mozilla simply don't listen to feedback from anyone but themselves.
> Because the self-important twits at Mozilla simply don't listen to feedback from anyone but themselves.
Well said that man.
And yes, I used to report bugs and contribute to their Bugzilla, until I could no longer stand their level of Wikipedians-like twattery.
Sorry, I don't normally post aggro comments like this, but in this case I find they're deserved.
"Such criticism isn't wide of the mark, but does ignore the fact that in the mid-90s web pages were rather dull. Fonts didn't display at all, ActiveX didn't exist, inline multimedia was in its infancy and Java was still a new kid on the block."
You couldn't use web sites as platforms for displaying what a clever coder or brilliant graphic designer you were, so you had to rely on content.
The world was so much better then.
you'd think that would be the important bit - I've found when you display the content simply, logically, cleanly and accessibly then everyone is happy but sales or graphics dept.
They're happy when they've had their 'consultation process' but most everyone else isn’t. But I must say they do do a good job of providing a 200Meg video of how to fill in the last 2k form before they demanded a few changes to make their video redundant.
Plus the web wasn't filled with hoardes of dumbass kids posting crap on social media (I really hate that phrase) sites because they didn't know about the internet as it wasn't available on mobile phones and facebook/twitter etc. didn't bloody exist.
We had usenet and mailing lists with no stupid crap graphical icons or crap graphical smileys or crap oversized picture sigs, we made do with using text characters and sigs that were no longer than 4 lines.
LOL actually meant you lauged out loud at something, not just just posted it because it seemed appropriate. Further more the acronym ROFL used to be ROTFLMAO, but even kids today are too goddamn lazy to type out the whole acronym.
P.S. Get off my fucking lawn!
The only good one I ever used was uk.adverts.computer. Most were just full of spam, or self-appointed usenet police uttering threats (and even some death threats) to get me banned by my ISP for not following the formatting guidelines to the letter - on my first attempt at posting (guideline revision 32c available intermittently on someone's private university webspace).
...and I'm a graphic designer.
Around 1994 or '95 -- a scary long time ago, now that I think of it -- I'd been doing print design for about 15 years (and print design on computers for about 10), and was the first designer in my department to dive into the Web and start exploring "new media" design to any extent, and was responsible for training the other designers in how to design for the Web. One of the first things I impressed on them that they were designing layouts for users who were on 14.4 and perhaps 28.8k links, not interactive CD-ROM presentations (a common mistake back then).
I can still remember some twentysomething clown from the Marketing department, one of the account execs, coming down to Publications/Design and complaining that our designs for his clients' Web sites wasn't "interactive" enough. In an attempt to pin him down on just what he meant by "interactive", he proceeded to show us a bunch of Web pages with buttons that wiggled and hopped when you rolled over them, big-ass animated .gif banner ads, embedded auto-playing sound and video, ridiculously large bandwidth-sucking Flash displays (Flash was brand-new then, most of us were still on 28.8k dialup, and Flash already had a really bad reputation), and generally more blinking, wiggling, wobbling, undulating crap than you could shake a stick at.
Christ, what an asshat. He's probably head of Marketing at that company by now.
Now marquee is a *real* tag of action that blink only wishes it was. Where's the love for it eh?
If you'd like to see some (measured and tempered) affection for <blink> and <marquee>, check out Bob Whipple's chapter, "The Evil Tags", in Dilger & Rice's From A to < A>.1 It's a nice retrospective of how some folks in the mid-90s received the introduction of these elements.
1Bradley Dilger mentioned once - this was at Michigan State, around the time the book was published - how much they had come to regret this title, because of all the production problems they ran into trying to have what looked like an HTML tag in the title. I note that it's still not possible to search for this book by title on Amazon.com, and Amazon doesn't display the title correctly either, when you do find it. Good job, Amazon developers!
On the other hand, the Reg doesn't do much better. It can't handle left-angle-bracket, capital-A, right-angle-bracket, because it thinks it's "malformed HTML"; but it doesn't recognize the < entity either. Thus the extraneous space in the title above. Try again, gents.
We still have our trusty CSS3 animation ;-)
<style>
@keyframes blink {
from {color: black; }
to {color: white; }
}
</style>
Now all that's left is using animation and referring to this keyframe section:
<p style="animation:blink .5s infinite">This is now blinking!</p>
Takes a little more code than one tag, but looks so much better, sorta ;-)
Schrödinger's cat is <blink>not</blink> dead.
No, the cat's state doesn't alternate, it can only go from living to dead.
The point of the gedanken experiment is that without opening the box and examing the cat the system can only be described by including both the waveform of a dead cat and the waveform of a live cat (with appropriate probabilities ascribed to each).
Schrödinger's cat is <font color=gray>not</font> dead.
would be nearer the mark (but still wrong because the probability of the cat still being alive diminishes with time so the colour should really fade).
Sheesh, you'd think quantum mechanics was Hard Science or something ... Oh, wait ...
Icon because hydrogen bombs may kill cats, too.
>Actually the point of the thought experiment is...
Actually, actually, as usual the puny humans have it the wrong way around.
I was reminded of the following recently, cats once were worshipped as gods, they haven't forgotten this.
The cat is the one running this experiment, fooling a scientist to actually try it out. The whole 'is the cat dead and alive at the same time' thing is where the flawed perception gives us one-life players rise for confusion. See, the cat during the closed box period of the experiment is in the dual state of having lost another of its nine lives and not losing one. Once the cat has more than one to spare before the experiment (which it ensures by only ever taking part in this exercise eight times) then the true purpose of the experiment is achieved. I.e. the lifting of the cat from the box and the application of something resembling sawdust and silicon gel with an aroma of fish or chicken.
Cats over many millenia have devised many ingenious methods for being fed by their pets, which is odd considering how lethal they are as killing machines...
both the waveform of a dead cat and the waveform of a live cat
No, it's just a single "wavefunction", i.e. a complex-valued probability assignment to all considered states, in this case "DEAD" (dimension #1), and "ALIVE" (dimension #2), a so-called qbit.
Incidentally, this function can be described by a three-dimensional real-valued vector constrained to the unit sphere (the Bloch sphere). Thus there are actually only two real dimensions.
Totally uncalled for but linked to just because: Aperture Science Time: Schrödinger's Cat
Blimey!
Alex Limi is a frightening UX designer. His entire approach seems to be "This setting might confuse, therefore it must be removed and set to the value Alex Limi wants. All our users are idiots and cannot ever learn anything."
He's not even considering the approach of "Let's explain it better, and if it does break something, immediately show the user where to go to fix it. Maybe even give them a button right there".
Teach the user. Explain things. The approach "Don't worry your pretty little head about it" is what Apple are good at. Nobody else should try because one of the reasons for not going Apple is to avoid that approach.
He's ignoring where Firefox got its users. Most are semi-technical, the majority chose it because of the customisability. Why should I download and run an add-on simply to turn something on or off when there used to be a perfectly good UX tickybox that did it? Maybe I got the browser entirely because of the tickybox you want to take away?
Every single example he gave has very good reasons for existing, and burying them in about:config simply turns the setting from "easily visible but perhaps not explained well" to "invisible, and completely unexplained"
Argh.
On one hand Limi is right. It's a bit like the way that the WordPress CMS software lets you break your site by getting a keystroke wrong in two places in the Settings / General menu. Do that, and you have to be able to edit MySQL databases directly or edit files over a ssh link, because WordPress isn't listening any more.
On the other, how dare he stop me easily turning off images etc.
I dunno, maybe there should be a new checkbox to say 'I know what I am doing'. Call it 'show advanced options' or something...
Bits of it were, bits of it weren't. In other news, both Comic Sans and {color:green} are still supported.
But quite a lot of things were better then. If you linked to a web page, there was a reasonable chance that its content would still be the same when someone followed that link the next day - as opposed to the modern trend, which is to continually revise the content to make the writer look less stupid.
And people discussed the really *important* things, dammit. None of this "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER?" nonsense, we were too busy refuting all those laughable "reasons" why Picard was "better" than Kirk...
Ok, for those of you too busy / lazy to bother reading the history, allow me to give you the low down:
« [O]ne of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it. »
That explains a lot I guess.
"* We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable in some browsers or causing El Reg's publishing apps to choke on tag we don't use."
Er, have you heard of < and > ? Or do I have to type &lt; and &gt;?
Ignoring all that: Have your CMS people never heard of proper string parsing at all? Or tokenisation? Substitution? Or just allowing a CMS designed to put pages on the web to allow you to actually use HTML tags or angle-bracket characters without having to worry about any of that?
Hell, it's getting more and more like Slashdot in here every day. Next I won't be able to use £ without getting a ton of junk around it, or any Unicode text at all.
"* We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable in some browsers or causing El Reg's publishing apps to choke on tag we don't use."
Is El-Reg REALLY so bad at HTML? Does nobody there know the HTML entities < and > ?
I note the enhancements "including ... video acceleration."?
The cumulative speed hikes claimed in each release of a browser should mean at this point you will have read the end of this posting five minutes before I wrote it ...
The day I find a faster browser to use is the day teleportation is invented. What's that whirly whirly noise faintly reminiscent of a long running sci-fi programme I can hear ...?
Not mentioned in the release notes, but unbelievably annoying, Firefox 23 has changed the search behaviour for text entered into the address bar so that it now uses your default search engine.
You might previously have used the address bar for Google searches, and have dictionary.com or suchlike set as your default search engine in the search box to the right; now all searches from the address bar will be to your default search engine.
This addon fixes it, but it's not exactly the smartest move from Mozilla:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-search/
This addon fixes it, but it's not exactly the smartest move from Mozilla
That phrase describes nearly every change to Firefox, aside from pure security fixes, since 3.6, as far as I can tell. Some Mozilla dev has a bad idea and implements it, and someone in the community has to write an addon to restore the older, preferable behavior.
These days, I think of Firefox primarily as an ongoing coding challenge. "Look what we broke today!"
> Your correspondent has fond memories of using blink in Front Page 95 ... ... Few that didn't mess with HTML in 1995 will miss blink, which was widely panned for being useless and ugly.
s/Few that didn't mess with HTML in 1995 will miss blink/Almost nobody will miss Front Page/
Surely you remember the obscenely malformed and bloated HTML that it produced?
No, but I remember the hysterical reaction people would have when the browsed the page source and saw the meta tag FrontPage would embed naming itself as the origin, because I had a beautiful, tight and working project rendered broken and ugly because some fuckwit thought I had formatted one page with FrontPage and decided he knew better.
I hadn't and he didn't - I had merely used Front page's excellent and fully working WYSIWYG table building thing to organize his dubious pictorial content c/w urgent new requirement of the day as quickly as possible and forgotten - that one time - to pull the (functionally useless) meta tag before shipping it.
I only remember having a reasonably good time with FrontPage, but that's because I learned how to use it rather than just poking around expecting it to anticipate me.
You could get tight HTML code out of Word too (argh! Say it ain't so!) if you spent five minutes finding out what you didn't know and changed one setting.
It was a feature, not a bug, and one I wouldn't have wanted to tackle on a bet - that when the HTML was produced from a document it should not only look as much like the original as humanly possible, but should be back-translatable into a word document on demand with no loss of formatting information. If you didn't need that, you could turn it off and all those inline styles would vanish.
Of course, no-one is suggesting Word is an HTML editor, but the fact that it can and does generate reasonable HTML when asked properly is a bonus.
I'm constantly shocked by the number of clever people who never follow the Golden Rule with MS products (while at the same time quoting the magic four letters at every opportunity to a Linux/Gimp/Apache/name your software of choice newb).
I'm constantly shocked by the number of clever people who never follow the Golden Rule with MS products (while at the same time quoting the magic four letters at every opportunity to a Linux/Gimp/Apache/name your software of choice newb).
It might help if MS documentation wasn't generally poorly-organized rubbish with a nearly useless search mechanism that doesn't recognize quoting and defaults to treating phrases as disjunction. I've dealt with a great deal of technical documentation over the past 30-odd years, and Microsoft's has consistently ranked among the most frustrating.
At least you didn't actually use the tag this time. Last time your whole article summary here for the forum was blinking, at least in Firefox. Probably still is.
But thank god its gone, I never got why they included the blinking abomination in the first place in Firefox, by 2003 noone was coding for Netscape specificially on the web anymore. At least Geocities isn't still around, their users would be freaking out.
In an upcoming release (as can be seen in the current "UX" build) they are even planning to remove the ability for a status bar /"add-ons" bar and then forcing all your add-ons to be squashed into the top-right corner in an ugly Chrome-like mess.
These customisable toolbars (apart from Google spying) was the very reason I used Firefox and not Chrome. It's almost as if they want to destroy all of Firefox's USPs, with the "user experience" team a trojan horse sent buy Google to sabotage all the excellent work done by those working on the rendering engine recently.
COMPLAIN PEOPLE, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!
"...Such criticism isn't wide of the mark, but does ignore the fact that in the mid-1990s web pages were rather dull. Fonts didn't display at all, ActiveX didn't exist, inline multimedia was in its infancy and Java was still a new kid on the block..."
In other words: peace, quiet, calm, bliss.
For "dull", substitute "entirely unpolluted by flashing, wiggling, jumping, blinking Flash ads and autoplaying embedded YouTube commercials".
You're welcome.
...maybe they could do something about the tiled image background tag. I know it's been years since anyone's done a page utilizing that "feature", but I still -- more often than I wish -- run across a page that hasn't been revised since the late '90s, created by someone with absolutely no design sense, with a tiled image background using an image that seems deliberately calculated to obscure the text. Tiled backgrounds with animated .gifs were the friggin' worst.
I hated pages with tiled image backgrounds back then, and I still hate them now.