Re: While-loop not listening to conditions

Joshua Cranmer wrote:
Seamus MacRae wrote:

(Conveniently, the JLS is available in two clicks plus four keystrokes in Firefox, Google Chrome, and, with some tweaks, even Internet Exploder.

<Ctrl>-T, j, <Down>, <Enter> for me in Firefox

Heh. That gets me to http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/ which is probably because I went there recently to get URLs pointing to recent posts here that anyone could use to read those posts.

, although I tend to go to
jls instead. In one of my old bookmarks settings, it was just two clicks (open spec menu, select JLS 3).

Alt-B, click if it's "above the fold" in your bookmarks menu in Firefox.

If you bookmark it in Chrome, a few characters typed in the address bar will probably autocomplete to it, similar to your Ctrl-T, jls, down, enter.

I would still avoid IE. There's a computer I work on from time to time that has no other web browser -- admin won't allow third-party browsers. Even leaving aside its bad reputation for instability and security holes, it's doggone SLOW. It fires up, it starts loading some site rather than a blank page. Clicking the stop button doesn't make it instantly abort doing so and wait patiently for user input, oh no, it will still chug away "connecting" and then loading that site. Sometimes it will eventually stop, showing either a blank page or "Action canceled". Sometimes it loads much or all of the page before actually acknowledging that "stop" was clicked. Of course this machine has a broadband low-latency connection to the Internet and still it takes ~2 whole minutes to go from double-clicking the little "e" to having the ability to actually type something into the address bar and go there.

After which it continues to be excruciatingly slow to respond to anything. It spins for ages on any kind of page load, chugs when scrolling, chugs when typing anything in, all on a dual-core 2GHz system with 1GB of RAM. This is a reasonably current version running on an XP Pro box. Firefox is much faster to become usable and to surf with even on a Vista box (~10% slower operating system) with comparable hardware, and Google Chrome is faster still, but not as "full-featured" for sites that heavily use pdfs, Flash, and the like.

One thing I like about Firefox is the ability to tame the worst evils of Javascript, preventing sites from interfering with right-clicking and the like, or hijacking your browser. One nasty site I came across recently disabled both click-drag selecting text on the page AND the right-click menu, stupidly. Firefox couldn't re-enable selecting text, alas, but it did prevent the right-click menu being suppressed, so I could still "select all". Of course none of their silliness would stop "view source" or "save page as..." from the main menu, or even "print", which with a suitable "printer" driver selected could dump the page text to a file. Apparently those idiots have delusions of copyright granting them absolute control or something. This is true neither technologically (I copied an excerpt from their site to use elsewhere despite their efforts) nor legally (that little excerpt was bright-line fair use).

The other idiots Firefox helps with are advertisers. AdBlock Plus is a godsend, especially versus ads that don't just sit quietly in their designated boxes within the page layout until a user deigns to click on them but, rather, insist upon making themselves impossible to ignore by being noisy, animating flashily, or (worst of all) scribbling outside of their boxes and thereby rendering much of the host page unreadable, the rotten parasites. The one problem with ABP is that somewhere along the line they lost the feature to "hide" vs. "remove" ads. Now it only "hide"s them. The difference is that if a page has slow-to-load ads and tries to detect ad-blocker use, the page still loads slowly with "hide" and the ad-blocking gets detected with "remove". One former use I had, removing those site-meter whosits and pixel.gif tracking bugs, is neutered, since my main reason for removing these wasn't privacy but speed -- not a one of those exists that doesn't take several full seconds to load because the server it loads from is overwhelmed with requests 24/7, and every single one of them seems to be loaded in a script at the top of the page, which makes nearly the whole page wait to load until the tracking bug loads (or times out), versus if they'd used a plain old <img> tag as God intended.

Oh well, at least it isn't the bad old days (circa 1999) when the only viable choice of browser was Internet Exploder and if the tracking bug failed to load, Internet Exploder stopped loading the whole page and told you "The page cannot be displayed..."

Although IE's got a new, nearly as horrible bug: any kind of timeout loading a page now redirects you to ask.com. If you want to retry you have to hit back and then refresh instead of just refresh. Worse, the redirect wipes its memory of form contents so if it was a form submission, back+click submit won't work, you have to redo everything. Firefox not only doesn't redirect you like that, it doesn't forget form contents if you leave and return to a page either, except if the site designer boneheadedly put a script on the page to wipe the form on page load. The worst offender for this being Google Blogger's comment submission page -- it has so many bugs it has to have been ghost-written for Google by Microsoft. Besides the form blanking on reload even in browsers that are coded to preserve form contents, the captcha is unreliable, the form as a whole is unreliable, the page breaks the back button -- if you go to it from page X you need to hit back twice instead of once to return to page X -- and last but not least half the time you go there, start typing, and suddenly the form erases itself about five seconds later. I think the latter two bugs are caused by some bug that makes the page reload all by itself randomly sometimes. At least it doesn't go into a reload loop; that would have made it completely unusable, since the form would keep blanking and the captcha keep changing faster than you could fill everything in and submit it.

Long digression from Java; sorry. Upshot: for God's sake don't use IE!
.