Peter Trudelle wrote: > Aaron Andersen wrote: > >> What, if anything, can those of us who thoroughly hate this feature, >> do to get it removed? > > First off, what is the real problem? Why do you thoroughly hate it?
Now I wasn't around when all this took place, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this is history as I understand it. Sometime in the spring of 1998 what was then Netscape Communications Corporation made the historic decision to release their browser under open source, and to create the Mozilla Organization to develop it. This decision was undoubtably discussed in detail amongst the Netscape execs, with the pros and cons of doing such an unprecedented thing carefully weighed. Among the pros was the potential to attract outside developers to the project, and the possibility of this resulting in better, faster development of a better, faster browser. Among the cons was the fact that once the code was under an open source licence the browser would no longer be under direct Netscape control; there would be features incorporated into Mozilla that Netscape didn't want, and features not incorporated into Mozilla that Netscape did want. This issue was partially resolved through Netscape maintaining a separate tree of overlays and such that did the things required to make Mozilla into Netscape, such as removing IRC and adding AIM. In the end, it was decided to go ahead with the open sourcing plan, mozilla.org was created and this all began. At that time Microsoft had a web browser that was sort of standards compliant, but was missing some things, and was full of proprietary, IE only tags and extensions, like <marquee> and "document.all". Netscape had a browser that was sort of standards compliant but was missing a lot of things, and had a bunch of proprietary, Netscape only tags and things, like <layer>. After a few months of hacking away at Netscapes 4.x code trying to turn in into 5.x code, it was decided to totally scrap the 4.x code and start over with what would eventually become Netscape 6.x. Exactly when the new Gecko rendering engine was written I do not know, but one thing is certain: it was decided that Gecko would support neither the nonstandard IE extensions nor the nonstandard Netscape 4.x ones. By doing so, we did not support "document.all". People would continue to write code that used document.all. People would file bugs complaining that document.all didn't work in mozilla. And every time we would politely tell them that we weren't going to support document.all because it is a nonstandard proprietary extension, and mark their bugs as WONTFIX. Similarly,.we also dropped support for Netscape 4.x's <layer> tag. People wrote pages with <layer> in them. Lots of people. People even had javascripts that detected when a Netscape browser was present and delivered pages containing <layer> tags. And yet we stuck to our original goals and WONTFIXed all the bugs asking for <layer> support. Two years later, on March 16, 2000 someone filed a bug asking mozilla to support the nonstandard proprietary extension known as favicon.ico. The first four people to comment on this bug all suggested that mozilla only support the standards compliant way of doing this, by using a <link> tag or http header to specify that a page had a site icon. That way, people who wanted a site icon could easily add one, but people who didn't wouldn't get their servers pounded with requests for a file that didn't exist and their errors logs filled up with 404s. After all, that was what we had been doing all along when there was a standards compliant way of doing something and an IE way, so why should this by any different? The bug lay dormant for a while, but about a year and a half later word got out that a fix was nearing completion and we started discussing it on the newsgroups. In each case, all of the webmasters and the majority of the nonwebmasters agreed that automatic favicon fetching was not a good idea. Somehow, over the strong objections of many people, it was checked in and turned on in 0.9.7. When I complain about the number of people who hate this "feature" and am told that lost of people like it too. But lots of people liked <layer> and lots of people like document.all. We don't support them, so why this? Can someone explain to my what makes favicon so special? The only difference I can see is that neither document.all nor <layer> wasted the bandwidth or flooded the error logs of innocent webmasters who either don't know about them or don't want to use them. Automatic favicon fetching does. And it's extremely annoying, not standards compliant, and just plain wrong. We shouldn't be doing that. A long time ago it was decided that robots would be allowed to automatically ask for robots.txt everywhere they went, so that they didn't end up where they weren't welcome. But that doesn't give Microsoft the right to just make up new such files at will, nor does it give us the right to copy them. This post is too long already, so I won't even get into the whole "your voice as a community member means nothing; if you want any influence you have to be a paying customer" philosophy that has surfaced during all of this. But I hope that somewhat answers the question, "Why do you hate it so much?" that has been asked a lot lately. Of course I could go on for another few pages if you want me to explain it more. Aaron Andersen www.xulplanet.com
