Saturday, March 06, 2010

Google continues ignoring SeaMonkey and firefox derivatives...

Google has recently started informing users of Firefox 2.x that their browser will soon stop being supported for its web sites and web apps.

And they recommend other browsers that people can upgrade to:

IE 7.0, Safari, Firefox 3.6, and Opera...

Well, ¿Where is SeaMonkey?. SeaMonkey is based on the same Firefox 3.5+ engine, so why not mention it?. In fact, Firefox IS the son of the Mozilla.org browser suite, formerly known as just "Mozilla" and then renamed to SeaMonkey.

In fact, Google should stop sniffing for Firefox versions and instead check out GECKO RENDERING ENGINE versions. Plus, they should mention and point towards SeaMonkey, too.

All Mozilla-based browsers use the same rendering engine, and it's good programming practice not to check for browser version but actually checking Gecko in the user-agent string sent by the browser to the web server, as suggested by Mozilla.org itself.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Browser_Detection_and_Cross_Browser_Support

IDEA: Hey Google, why don't you guys suggest people using an unsupported or soon-unsupported gecko engine to upgrade to "a newer Mozilla.org based browser" and point towards http://www.mozilla.org/projects/#applications , which includes not only Firefox but also SeaMonkey?.

FC

Thursday, March 04, 2010

Every software program should include a reinstall script

It is my belief that every software program should include a "Re-install" script. Something that we can run from the command line and have all configuration values set up as new, without actually downloading and running the installer package again.

This allows moving apps from one system to another effortlessly, and recovering from a backup much easier than having to run a dozen installers and click a dozen times for each. Yes, I'm a command-line junkie.

IBM, back when it was a software firm with a clue, had the very bright idea to include a "rebuild.cmd" command line util with its IBM Works productivity suite included with OS/2 Warp 3.0 onwards.

Hence, the "reinstall.cmd Software Movement" is born, today, to replicate that kind of functionality as widely as possible for popular applications. Target systems are Windows mostly, but could also include OS/2 and Linux for closed source apps that might benefit from it.

I´ve created a redirector at [http://bit.ly/reinstall] that leads to this post, which will be updated to include new reinstall script developments.

My first target? Sun's Virtualbox. Find my re-install script here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbox-users/files/


I will release every one I code under a GPL license (they're just command line scripts anyway).

FC