The incident report narrates how the teacher apparently asked the class to do some work through an internet browser, only to catch a student starting a program called foxfire.exe. Said teacher meted out two warnings, but the student continued using foxfire, insisting that it was a better browser. The teacher, probably having no idea what Mozilla Firefox was and tired of challenges to his authority, handed the student two hours worth of detention.

I’m thinking that, if this were real, Mozilla should use the incident as a marketing tool. The new kind of brand evangelism apparently involves exposing the stupidity of authority figures, while taking the heat for your belief in a product or service.

The high school in question? Big Spring High School, according to the image currently making the internet rounds (above). The names of the teacher, student, and parents were redacted. All I know is that I wouldn’t want my child to be studying under such a reportedly clueless teacher!

Source

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Firefox 3 on Windows 7

Yet Firefox’s developers have never made the browser more memory-friendly. Understandably, keeping multiple windows with multiple tabs open is very demanding. But Mozilla should’ve realized that a long time, as people started keeping tabs (pun intended) on things, and opening multiple windows to ensure they wouldn’t miss out on apparently compelling content. Users installing myriad add-ons probably didn’t help too.

It’s good that the Firefox 3.5 preview shows support for open source video. But I hope Mozilla takes steps to make their flagship browser less demanding on computers. It can demand a performance rating system for adds-on and help users stay away from unnecessary yet demanding plug-ins (non web-designers would find no need for Firebug for example), while concentrating on making the code do more for less.

That’s how I’d change Mozilla Firefox. What about you?

Post from: The Gadget Blog

It’s as if those pesky customers refused to update to a more advanced browser (heck, even IE7 would’ve provided a better and more secure browsing environment). Thus, it seemed that companies like 37signals and Google had to take the lead, having to publicly announce that they would no longer bother making future and current projects work properly on IE6, an application that was released way back in 2001.

Thus, the slide of IE’s market share, while definitely representing welcome relief for web developers and designers, is probably not that much a surprise for a lot of people. Even the most unassailable grips on markets start to wear away—no matter how much control the leader may exercise on the market—if newer and better competitors literally continue leaving it behind.

Sometimes this happens because customers wise up. Much rarer in my opinion is the scenario where companies and service providers basically arm-twist their users into making sensible upgrades. As the 37signals blog shares about MobileMe’s lack of support for IE6:

…I’m hoping it’s the beginning of a trend. IE 6 is definitely the most painful browser for us to support – it’s seven years old and doesn’t even fully support the CSS 1.0 standard created in 1996. Microsoft’s done an incredibly poor job of getting users to upgrade. It looks like it’s going to take pressure from big apps like MobileMe to seal the deal.

Post from: The Gadget Blog