Life As It Comes 
Uberball1 Comment
Dave invited me to sign up for a fantasy football league this year. Here are my results of the draft that took place last week:
P Manning, QB
R Bush, RB
W Dunn, RB
R White, WR
S Smith, WR
N Burleson, WR-TE
J Elam, K
D Chiefs, DST
B Roethlisberger, QB
C Benson, RB
M Alstott, RB
A Bryant, WR
A Gates, TE
D Vikings, DST
Yikes!No Comments
I was reading on MozillaZine, and I found an instance of why embedding IE’s Trident rendering engine into the new Netscape Prototype is a Bad Thing™.
Apparently it is possible to invoke the IE engine without having the user’s permission, and that makes it possible to use any IE exploit without the user even knowing he/she isn’t rendering with the Gecko engine anymore.
See http://freespace.virgin.net/pdj.stone/ietest.html.
AOL Releases Ridiculous New Netscape PrototypeNo Comments
AOL today released a prototype of what promises to be their worst idea yet - an outsourced, dual rendering engine, cluttered browser based on Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 (the final will be based on 1.0).
It uses an installer created by another company AOL killed - NSIS, the Nullsoft Install System.
The beauty of Firefox is in its uncluttered simplicity and its lack of loyalty to any particular site (NS Browser by default enables pop-ups on netscape.com). Apparently Mozilla even offered Firefox to Netscape for rebranding, but they turned it down in order to extend it themselves apart from Mozilla. They don’t even mention the Firefox developers in the credits - just that it is based on Firefox 0.9.3.
To be fair, once I cleaned up all the garbage on the toolbars, it looked a little more acceptable. The feature to switch rendering engines seems to work pretty well and is a neat little feature - although the average user probably doesn’t know how much more vulnerable he or she becomes when the switch is made. Also, there are a few interesting new features that are not base Firefox functionality. It will be interesting to see what the final release looks like.
One thing is for sure: it has a long way to go before it hits the mainstream.
Great Resource1 Comment
Long has the problem of IE’s shoddy PNG support plagued me. Today, while I was playing around with something that looked good in Firefox but ugly in IE, I came upon this site: The PNG Problem in Windows Internet Explorer.
Most likely someone has stumbled upon this before me, but I was so thrilled to see it that I wanted to post about it here.
The site offers javascript which will “correct” the display of transparent PNGs for Internet Explorer, assuming they are not used as CSS background-images.
Wonder of wonders!
