End of an era as Firefox bins 'blink' tag The "blink"* element, a feature of early web browsers that made text blink on and off, has been banished in the latest version of Firefox. The element had already been removed from Internet Explorer, was never implemented in Chrome and was ignored by most browser-makers because it never made it into a W3C HTML spec. The W3C …
Blimey!
Alex Limi is a frightening UX designer. His entire approach seems to be "This setting might confuse, therefore it must be removed and set to the value Alex Limi wants. All our users are idiots and cannot ever learn anything."
He's not even considering the approach of "Let's explain it better, and if it does break something, immediately show the user where to go to fix it. Maybe even give them a button right there".
Teach the user. Explain things. The approach "Don't worry your pretty little head about it" is what Apple are good at. Nobody else should try because one of the reasons for not going Apple is to avoid that approach.
He's ignoring where Firefox got its users. Most are semi-technical, the majority chose it because of the customisability. Why should I download and run an add-on simply to turn something on or off when there used to be a perfectly good UX tickybox that did it? Maybe I got the browser entirely because of the tickybox you want to take away?
Every single example he gave has very good reasons for existing, and burying them in about:config simply turns the setting from "easily visible but perhaps not explained well" to "invisible, and completely unexplained"
Argh.
On one hand Limi is right. It's a bit like the way that the WordPress CMS software lets you break your site by getting a keystroke wrong in two places in the Settings / General menu. Do that, and you have to be able to edit MySQL databases directly or edit files over a ssh link, because WordPress isn't listening any more.
On the other, how dare he stop me easily turning off images etc.
I dunno, maybe there should be a new checkbox to say 'I know what I am doing'. Call it 'show advanced options' or something...
Bits of it were, bits of it weren't. In other news, both Comic Sans and {color:green} are still supported.
But quite a lot of things were better then. If you linked to a web page, there was a reasonable chance that its content would still be the same when someone followed that link the next day - as opposed to the modern trend, which is to continually revise the content to make the writer look less stupid.
And people discussed the really *important* things, dammit. None of this "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER?" nonsense, we were too busy refuting all those laughable "reasons" why Picard was "better" than Kirk...
Ok, for those of you too busy / lazy to bother reading the history, allow me to give you the low down:
« [O]ne of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it. »
That explains a lot I guess.
"* We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable in some browsers or causing El Reg's publishing apps to choke on tag we don't use."
Er, have you heard of < and > ? Or do I have to type &lt; and &gt;?
Ignoring all that: Have your CMS people never heard of proper string parsing at all? Or tokenisation? Substitution? Or just allowing a CMS designed to put pages on the web to allow you to actually use HTML tags or angle-bracket characters without having to worry about any of that?
Hell, it's getting more and more like Slashdot in here every day. Next I won't be able to use £ without getting a ton of junk around it, or any Unicode text at all.
"* We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable in some browsers or causing El Reg's publishing apps to choke on tag we don't use."
Is El-Reg REALLY so bad at HTML? Does nobody there know the HTML entities < and > ?
I note the enhancements "including ... video acceleration."?
The cumulative speed hikes claimed in each release of a browser should mean at this point you will have read the end of this posting five minutes before I wrote it ...
The day I find a faster browser to use is the day teleportation is invented. What's that whirly whirly noise faintly reminiscent of a long running sci-fi programme I can hear ...?
Not mentioned in the release notes, but unbelievably annoying, Firefox 23 has changed the search behaviour for text entered into the address bar so that it now uses your default search engine.
You might previously have used the address bar for Google searches, and have dictionary.com or suchlike set as your default search engine in the search box to the right; now all searches from the address bar will be to your default search engine.
This addon fixes it, but it's not exactly the smartest move from Mozilla:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-search/
This addon fixes it, but it's not exactly the smartest move from Mozilla
That phrase describes nearly every change to Firefox, aside from pure security fixes, since 3.6, as far as I can tell. Some Mozilla dev has a bad idea and implements it, and someone in the community has to write an addon to restore the older, preferable behavior.
These days, I think of Firefox primarily as an ongoing coding challenge. "Look what we broke today!"
> Your correspondent has fond memories of using blink in Front Page 95 ... ... Few that didn't mess with HTML in 1995 will miss blink, which was widely panned for being useless and ugly.
s/Few that didn't mess with HTML in 1995 will miss blink/Almost nobody will miss Front Page/
Surely you remember the obscenely malformed and bloated HTML that it produced?
No, but I remember the hysterical reaction people would have when the browsed the page source and saw the meta tag FrontPage would embed naming itself as the origin, because I had a beautiful, tight and working project rendered broken and ugly because some fuckwit thought I had formatted one page with FrontPage and decided he knew better.
I hadn't and he didn't - I had merely used Front page's excellent and fully working WYSIWYG table building thing to organize his dubious pictorial content c/w urgent new requirement of the day as quickly as possible and forgotten - that one time - to pull the (functionally useless) meta tag before shipping it.
I only remember having a reasonably good time with FrontPage, but that's because I learned how to use it rather than just poking around expecting it to anticipate me.
You could get tight HTML code out of Word too (argh! Say it ain't so!) if you spent five minutes finding out what you didn't know and changed one setting.
It was a feature, not a bug, and one I wouldn't have wanted to tackle on a bet - that when the HTML was produced from a document it should not only look as much like the original as humanly possible, but should be back-translatable into a word document on demand with no loss of formatting information. If you didn't need that, you could turn it off and all those inline styles would vanish.
Of course, no-one is suggesting Word is an HTML editor, but the fact that it can and does generate reasonable HTML when asked properly is a bonus.
I'm constantly shocked by the number of clever people who never follow the Golden Rule with MS products (while at the same time quoting the magic four letters at every opportunity to a Linux/Gimp/Apache/name your software of choice newb).
I'm constantly shocked by the number of clever people who never follow the Golden Rule with MS products (while at the same time quoting the magic four letters at every opportunity to a Linux/Gimp/Apache/name your software of choice newb).
It might help if MS documentation wasn't generally poorly-organized rubbish with a nearly useless search mechanism that doesn't recognize quoting and defaults to treating phrases as disjunction. I've dealt with a great deal of technical documentation over the past 30-odd years, and Microsoft's has consistently ranked among the most frustrating.
At least you didn't actually use the tag this time. Last time your whole article summary here for the forum was blinking, at least in Firefox. Probably still is.
But thank god its gone, I never got why they included the blinking abomination in the first place in Firefox, by 2003 noone was coding for Netscape specificially on the web anymore. At least Geocities isn't still around, their users would be freaking out.
In an upcoming release (as can be seen in the current "UX" build) they are even planning to remove the ability for a status bar /"add-ons" bar and then forcing all your add-ons to be squashed into the top-right corner in an ugly Chrome-like mess.
These customisable toolbars (apart from Google spying) was the very reason I used Firefox and not Chrome. It's almost as if they want to destroy all of Firefox's USPs, with the "user experience" team a trojan horse sent buy Google to sabotage all the excellent work done by those working on the rendering engine recently.
COMPLAIN PEOPLE, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!!
"...Such criticism isn't wide of the mark, but does ignore the fact that in the mid-1990s web pages were rather dull. Fonts didn't display at all, ActiveX didn't exist, inline multimedia was in its infancy and Java was still a new kid on the block..."
In other words: peace, quiet, calm, bliss.
For "dull", substitute "entirely unpolluted by flashing, wiggling, jumping, blinking Flash ads and autoplaying embedded YouTube commercials".
You're welcome.
...maybe they could do something about the tiled image background tag. I know it's been years since anyone's done a page utilizing that "feature", but I still -- more often than I wish -- run across a page that hasn't been revised since the late '90s, created by someone with absolutely no design sense, with a tiled image background using an image that seems deliberately calculated to obscure the text. Tiled backgrounds with animated .gifs were the friggin' worst.
I hated pages with tiled image backgrounds back then, and I still hate them now.
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