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September 27, 2003
Mozilla Phone Support
MozillaZine reports that Decision One will offer Mozilla phone support on top of its current Netscape service.
I've always been surprised that users would shell out the 40 bucks for support for Netscape, but obviously they are, as they continue to keep that service, meaning its profitable.
Not sure if anyone knows, but paying 40 bucks for a problem includes return calls for up to 24 hours, in case the issue reoccurs or such. So its not a total rip off.
Some poeple suggest that corporate users would use this. Which I very much doubt, they would want a deal that would allow experts to analyze their issues, and if need be, fly over to fix the issue on site. They don't care about bookmarks disappearing and such trivial issues, which is what DesicionOne solves. A enterprise customer rather pays a set fee for unlimited support rather than pay per incident, such as why an applet works in 4.x and not in Gecko. The nightmares I have from those, sigh.
I do see some potential for enterprise support, but DecisionOne it isn't. I wonder if IBM is up for it :) Netscape was able to do this because it had tons of developers who could be asked when the devsupport group was unsure or needed more information. Now with no concentrated expertise, this will be hard.
Reading comments about this reminds me how naive people are. Not everyone using Mozilla knows about the "forums" or "bugzilla". And bugzilla is unusable for a newbie.
Posted by doron at 11:07 AM | Comments (9)
September 22, 2003
Groceries from Hell
In the US, grocery store clerks (is that the correct term?), when using their special card to get savings, tell you how much you have saved after the reciept is printed. Natrually, today, I get told "You saved Six s...", akward pause, deep inhale by clerk. "Six.. sixty six" it finally comes out. Yup, $6.66.
Texans seem to be very religious. I shall now go devour the bagel from hell with some sinfull creamcheese!
Posted by doron at 4:41 PM | Comments (17)
Crash Recovery for Browsers
Managed to crash Red Hat 9 today with evil dom code using Mozilla. Upon restart, Epiphany asks me if I want to recover the state I was in (this isn't the wording used), and presto, all my tabs where back.
Mmmm, usefull features in a browser. What a novelty.
Posted by doron at 9:35 AM | Comments (11)
September 19, 2003
Building Mozilla with VC++ .NET 2003
The latest VC++ from Microsoft, 2003 edition, doesn't build mozilla out of the box. Hixie posted some patches in bugzilla, and I finally got the trunk to build with it.
I diffed my tree and posted a zipped version of my moztools here. Note that configure.in is being changed regualry these days, so part of the patch might have to be applied manually.
Posted by doron at 10:08 AM | Comments (13)
September 14, 2003
Good "Blogs Messing Up Search Results" Example
My blog is now 2nd result for "Get A New Screenname" in Google (and AOL Search, which is powered by google). Its before aim.com, which is the offical aim site. All because of one entry about how I had to get a new one. I found out after seeing that query as a referrer to this blog.
I wonder if "normal users" need blog results in their search, or if its diluting an already diluted web more (Google results are getting worse by the day).
Posted by doron at 9:30 AM | Comments (4)
September 11, 2003
Eolas Ramblings
Regarding the latest developments in the Eolas Patent Case:
1) So plugins might be screwed - which will hurt advertisers. Perhaps this is a good time for native SVG support as a flash alternative? Natrually, currently the only SVG implementation is the plugin from Adobe, which doesn't solve the issue.
2) Microsoft seems to think that the patent only covers if the plugin content is from an external (different domain basically) source - this covers mostly only advertisements.
3) A solution would be to have the plugin area have a button saying "Display Content", which would display the plugin. Natrually, advertisers would hate that :)
Posted by doron at 3:22 PM | Comments (7)
Change
Its amazing how much the world has changed in the past 2 years, and yet how little as changed as well. Amount of violence around the world is growing it seems. Stupid earthlings.
Posted by doron at 6:25 AM | Comments (10)
September 10, 2003
AOL Sucks - Or How I Had To Get A New Screenname
my perfect AOL screenname, DoronRosenberg, has been suspended. I totally forgot that internally binded accounts get deactivated when your contract runs out, which should have been today (but I quit a month early).
So my new screenname is nsidoron. The interface isn't frozen and has some nifty methods like ::SlapTIMSWith(*object) and ::GangBangletInit().
Posted by doron at 9:53 AM | Comments (2)
September 9, 2003
Epiphany 1.0
Posted by doron at 11:49 AM | Comments (10)
September 8, 2003
Adobe SVG Plugin Returneth
The installer doesn't find mozilla, you need to copy over the npsvg* files. Seems to work fine in mozilla, no scripting though.
Posted by doron at 6:00 PM | Comments (10)
September 5, 2003
Return of the Search King
Looking at referrers to this blog, I found someone had used the new Yahoo Search with my first name. I started fooling around with the search and found some stuff people wrote about me that Google never found.
Good old Yahoo.
Posted by doron at 9:22 AM | Comments (14)
September 3, 2003
Spengler Optimized on Mozdev
I put the first "optimized" version of the Web Services Inspector onspengler.mozdev.org. Rewrote some of the files, cleaned up the XUL and UI a bit and split up the js into multiple files. The .h view is still broken and is used as a debug console for now :)
Posted by doron at 11:56 AM | Comments (10)
September 2, 2003
Best Linux Browser
I've been using Epiphany as my main browser, since my main desktop at IBM is running linux (Red Hat 9). You can get rh9 rpms here.
It has a simple pref panel structure (4 tabs!), and its really fast (powered by our beloved Gecko), which is what matters these days it seems. If I need a more advanced browser, like debugging a web application, SeaMonkey comes to the rescue with DOMI and Venkman.
The only 2 nits I have about epiphany:
1) No way to make toolbars only show icons without changing the gnome-wide prefs for that.
2) No whitelisting for popup blocking, I use too many web apps that require popups.
No themes, which I can live with, as usually only the default themes work well. I do miss sidebars, which I only use to search references, which isn't that often.
If you want a small, fast browser with customizable UI on linux, try epiphany. You might just like it.
Posted by doron at 10:38 AM | Comments (12)