Cheesy Quintessence

I read an interesting article about a corporate transition from Internet Explorer to Firefox. In moderate detail, it goes over the tremendous benefits the employees have seen for prevailing over a few hurdles encountered in the company’s case. As statistics have shown that corporate users aren’t Firefox’s audience, it’s quite pleasing to read about such a successful transition.

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Today when I was waiting for my next class to begin, I decided I was sick of having to put up with Portable Firefox as my portable USB flash drive browser. So, I decided to investigate the placement of Opera on a USB drive, and found this nice tutorial on how to do it. It’s a little outdated (being for Opera 7, apparently), and there’s a lot of editing to do, but it works nicely and is totally worth the hassle.

Now I have an Opera configured to be independent of drive letters and to not write cache to the disk, so I can enjoy the best possible Internet experience anywhere there’s a USB port! On top of that, it uses over 2 MB less disk space than Portable Firefox, which doesn’t even have mouse gestures, page fitting, ident spoofing, notes, or a plethora of other usability features I’ve come to love. This, combined with Miranda IM, really has me set for using public computers in comfort.

You’ve likely stumbled upon the successor of pop-up advertisements: DHTML pop-ups. These advertisements utilize JavaScript to change the CSS positioning of a block element containing an ad. A pop-up blocker will not stop them because they don’t create windows; all of the event takes place in the web page itself. Additionally, the “close” buttons on some of these elements have a secondary function of opening a pop-up window, which will get past many pop-up blockers because the browser will interpret it as a requested window!

Why don’t advertisers seem to understand that people will not tolerate this crap? It’s really unfortunate that JavaScript is going to be abused in this way… because I’m to the point of turning it off almost all of the time. Browsing without JavaScript is much faster due to excessive use of it, as well. Perhaps the advent of such JavaScript abuse will change the approach Google has been taking with its more recent projects, such as Gmail and Google Maps, both of which absolutely require JavaScript.

But since there are a few sites out there that still demand JavaScript, I think it’s time that browsers take an accessible and intuitive approach to JavaScript permissions. My ideas…

1. Incorporate a JavaScript whitelist or blacklist, at user’s choice; much like Firefox’s pop-up, image, and extension installer lists.
2. Add handy buttons to add or remove the currently viewed server from the whitelist or blacklist.
3. Add an option to refuse JavaScript from off-page servers.
4. Add a quick, per page option for JavaScript permissions; much like Opera’s image loading options.
5. Add numerous JavaScript options pertaining to the manipulation of CSS. Extra points if your whitelist/blacklist can individually change each server’s permission to each of these.

Today I finally wrote a page that renders correctly in Internet Explorer. It was a difficult feat, but I managed somehow.

All designers planning to write standards compliant pages for Internet Explorer should follow my lead.

I find the stories regarding Internet Explorer found on Google News to be absolutely hilarious. Every story shown on the front page is about Internet Explorer’s insecurities in some way or another, whether it be about moving to a real web browser, a patch, or just yet another new exploit.

Hopefully the days of Internet Explorer’s domination are almost over. The voice of protest is gaining volume. For those who are too ignorant in regard to computer topics, even the Department of Homeland Security says to stop using IE.