The good news keeps flooding in. Today it's a nice article titled Yahoo vows to open all services to Firefox. If you were in any doubt as to whether or not Firefox would achieve the kind of mainstream recognition necessary to improve the web, it might be good to start counting the top 100 sites that are evaluating or currently building in support for Firefox. I'll bet that list is getting pretty impressive.
Posted by asa at March 15, 2005 08:36 PMI believe thats vows, not vaows. ;)
Hopefully this means Yahoo launch as well. That is pretty much the only reason I ever need to use IE.
Posted by: Jeff on March 15, 2005 09:29 PMWhy not use that active x plugin with the extension to control it so it only powers WMP. You also need "user agent switcher". This has worked 100% of the time for me. Here's the URL on the wonderful little write-up on it...
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=167260&sid=d76f4fa1d8a2771a2313985fa62bbfbe#FF_AX
Eric: for a lot of us, half the point of using Firefox is to get *away* from MS stuff (and it wouldn't do me any good anyway since I've uninstalled WMP ;)
I have to say that since I've started using FF, I've found myself more and more interested in non-MS stuff. I recently installed ubuntu linux on a computer and have been poking around at it; I have to say I like what I see (plus I can use Firefox and all my extensions just fine on it ;)
Posted by: Limulus on March 16, 2005 05:15 PMGood news indeed. I'll bet that they'll keep matching whatever Google does, though :D
Posted by: Mikhail Capone on March 16, 2005 08:44 PMThe article didn't say it anywhere, but is this Yahoo! commitment strictly only for Windows Firefox? What about Linux or Mac OS X? Do they have plans to go to cross-platform media (e.g. ditch Windows Media) and also scrap any use of ActiveX? Because without that, Yahoo! won't fully support "Firefox" in all the platforms that the browser is available on.
Posted by: Richard Lloyd on March 17, 2005 02:27 AMRichard, Firefox is the same on all platforms. It doesn't matter if they test on Windows only. If it works in Firefox on one platform, it will work on all platforms.
Also, I'd like to see them commit to "standards" rather than specific browsers. Although, by saying they'll support firefox, it's probably what they meant anyway, and this probably explains why Yahoo! Australia & NZ are currently looking for a new web developer with strong knowledge of standards, browser compatibility and accessibility guidelines, which I recently found advertised on some job sites!
Posted by: Lachlan Hunt on March 17, 2005 09:51 PMUnfortunaltly yahoo is NOT going to support firefox. See here:
"The search firm has said that while it thinks the open source browser is important, it can't promise its services will be fully compatible with it. Yahoo said on Friday afternoon that a statement from the company’s Australian office on Tuesday, which claimed that all future products would be compatible with both the Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) browsers, was inaccurate.
In February, Yahoo launched a search toolbar for Firefox, but users of the open source browser were forced to switch back to IE when accessing some Yahoo services. Following communications between Yahoo and ZDNet UK sister site ZDNet Australia , Yahoo issued a statement saying the company would not launch any new products or services in the future without ensuring they work on both IE and Firefox.
However, on Friday, a Yahoo representative from the US admitted that the original statement was 'factually incorrect' because, although Yahoo realises that Firefox-compatibility is important, it is not in a position to promise all future products would be both Internet Explorer and Firefox compatible."
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39191834,00.htm
Posted by: Carl on March 23, 2005 05:27 PM