My hatred of Microsoft and Adobe as a GNU/Linux user and a web developer
I had used Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and other Adobe products long before Adobe acquired Macromedia. At that time, I didn’t know the existence of GNU/Linux and open source communities. I didn’t even decide on my career as a web developer yet. Thanks to Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Vista, I decided to look for other Operating Systems beyond Windows that are able to run on the older hardware eternally (by the way, I didn’t know other OSes besides Windows back then), meaning that the future version of OS will still be able to work on old hardware. I found GNU/Linux, specifically Ubuntu.
After one year of switching back and forth between GNU/Linux and Windows, I finally made the decision to stick to GNU/Linux. However, I still would test the browser compatibility in IE through VirtualBox. And here comes my hatred of MSIE. During the course of my web development, I’ve read numerous articles about how Microsoft doesn’t follow the W3C standards for their Internet Explorer to make web developers suffer from browser incompatibility issue. I had enough struggle for the Internet Explorer, I decided to use some jQuery to encourage those who view my website to ditch their Internet Explorer.
I have become to hate Adobe since the day I switched to the Eclipse and NetBeans IDE to develop my projects. After Adobe announced that Flash Builder and ColdFusion Builder are based on the Eclipse, I was excited to know that Adobe finally makes their development tools available on all of the major OSes. It disappointed me when I went to download the beta version of these two builders, it only offers Windows and Mac versions, no GNU/Linux version anywhere. Since Eclipse uses its own EPL license instead of GPL license to govern the use of Eclipse, Adobe can make modification to its code and sell it as their own products. This doesn’t mean that Adobe can discriminate against GNU/Linux users from using their products since Adobe uses Linux on their Adobe.com website.
As an opposite effect, these hatreds actually make me become more involved with open source technologies, such as HTML 5 and Ogg theora. I use open source ColdFusion engine Railo to develop ColdFusion websites as well. I think that ActionScript will be replaced by jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks and FLV will be replaced by either H264 or Ogg Theora depending on which side will win the online video wars.
jQuery CSS Browsers Compatibility
Different browsers require different CSS property syntax, especially in CSS 3. In CSS 2, the only property that I know of requires different syntax is opacity property. Firefox called opacity, and IE called filter. You need to set values for opacity and filter properties at the same time. Not only this is inefficient, but it also adds up the size of the CSS file.
Fortunately, jQuery has a css function to make the CSS cross-browser compatible. For example:
$("#thing").css({
opacity: 0.5
});
It will auto changed to filter CSS property if the user is running IE.
However, since the new CSS 3 is in the draft mode right now, jQuery has not implemented CSS 3 standard yet. It means that border-radius and other properties that are different from each browser needs to write all of the possible style properties into the CSS file.
For more information about jQuery CSS and a jQuery plugin to support CSS 3 syntax, please read original article.
The layout of the website updated again
The layout of my main website has updated once again. Here are the changes:
- Rewrote page layout CSS to accommodate Internet Explorer
- Horizontal menu now only contains this semester’s courses to accommodate 800×600 screen
As you can see, I also changed background color for each element. I plan to change background images on EACH page in the near future, too.
Microsoft Gazelle – a new browser OS based on Internet Explorer
Microsoft announced Gazelle secure web browser Operating System concept back in 2009. When I first came across an article that talks about it on buntfu.com, I realized that Microsoft might borrow some code from Internet Explorer to build the OS. Whether MS does borrow the code or not, Internet hackers as well as online criminals will find a way to discover many security flaws just as IE since it’s a Microsoft product. As Ronnie Whisler stated in the article, “Internet Explorer is a virus, adware, spyware, and malware delivery device [as well as Windows]“. Now Microsoft is planning to kill Google Chrome OS through this new OS just as Internet Explorer did to Netscape in the past. We will see how this new OS concept is going as IE’s reputation continues to decrease.
All of the Web Browsers have Security Vulnerabilities
While many countries around the world urge their citizens to stay away from Internet Explorer because of recent GMail attack, Alastair MacGibbon stated that there is no totally secured web browser. The important consideration is “how quickly the browser provider will react to the flaw, manage it and how they will prevent it from happening in the future”. This reminds me of Firefox. Thanks to its bug submission process, the patch will be available in one to two days whereas IE users have to wait one month to get the patch. For more details about this quote, please visit http://www.smh.com.au/technology/enterprise/firefox-opera-downloads-surge-after-ie-security-scare-20100121-mnez.html.
Thanks for subscribing to my blog
I just noticed that there are some readers that have subscribed to my blog. This surprised me because I didn’t intend to write much interesting articles about GNU/Linux and other open source related news. Perhaps it’s the result of my commitment to write at least one article on the blog every day during beginning of this week:) Anyway, thanks for the encouragement to give me the opportunity to write better blog posts. If you don’t know my goal of this blog, it’s to improve my writing skill and learn more about GNU/Linux and other open source related news through my opinions.
I also noticed that there are some of my readers still use Internet Explorer. I strongly discourage you to use IE. As you can read on my earlier post, I’ve completely blocked IE users from entering my main website. If any of you are in corporate environment that are forbidden to use third-party browsers, please let me know through comment. I will reconsider opening my website to IE users. Maybe I will use one of the cross-browser CSS frameworks out there. Thanks:)
IE doesn’t Follow Web Standards and Make Web Developers and Customers Suffer (Updated)
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) discovered a big security flaw by the Chinese a few weeks ago. They used this security flaw to hack to the Google’s main server. Meanwhile, Researchers has discovered more security flaws in IE that could let an attacker to take control of targeted computer, according to an article from Mashable “More Security Flaws Found in Internet Explorer“.
UPDATE: Similar article found on daniweb.com. It also mentioned about Firefox and Chrome. I like the first sentence of this article, “Another day, another IE flaw!” It means that the Internet Explorer patches that Microsoft offered are useless.
I read lots of complains about IE not follow web standard, thus web developers are frustrated about cross-browser compatibility for their websites. As a web developer and a GNU/Linux user, I test my website in Windows XP through VirtualBox from time to time. However, I do not test the cross-browser compatibility in IE. I test the functionality of my warning box in IE. If Internet Explorer is presented, the site stops loading and displays an error message in the warning box to encourage users to switch to other browsers in order to block the IE users.