Why does every single page of this website have a Firefow 3 logo on the bottom left-hand corner?
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We want to encourage folks to use Firefox
We produce a version of Firefox
It's in the template for the "footer" used for all the pages.
This is also the reason the "headers" of all the pages is the same.
Things have got to get better, they can't get worse, or can they?
Why is only firefox being "encouraged" Why don't we "encourage" other apps such as (what I find very useful) OpenOffice.org or all the other apps mentioned on PA Suite. Why don't they just have a link to all the portable apps on the bottom of the page? Why do I ask so many questions?
They are promoting FF as opposed to, say IE, not FF as opposed to OOo. It's basically saying "view this webpage in FF". It's because it's a webpage and FF is a web browser.
Quamquam omniam nescio, nec nihil scio.
But I find it funny how the little "ads by google" ad says:
*
Browse The Web Your Way
Download Internet Explorer 8 Now. Fast, Safer & Easier Than Ever.
www.microsoft.com/IE8
Haha, just noticed that myself. Good catch.
Quamquam omniam nescio, nec nihil scio.
D: That shouldn't be like that! OMG it should say:
iLike Macs, iPwn, However you put it... Apple is better ^_^
"Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world..."
That's quite ironic because you can't block ads in IE. Far as I can tell, Firefox is the only browser that truly lets the end user browse the web his or her own way, on their own terms.
What's weird is that Mozilla doesn't pimp PortableApps.com in return. Officially supported portability is easily one of the three biggest things about Firefox. The ability to take your whole Firefox experience to any computer with a USB port. Ad blocking. And then [insert your favorite extension here] because Firefox really is about the individual. For me it's probably my Gmail manager, though for someone else it's likely to be something else entirely. And I feel like if your Firefox isn't portable, it's missing something. Like an Xbox 360 without Xbox LIVE. It's great, it's fine, but it's not the complete experience. Sort of.
they would lose popularity for PApps.com goodness, so they aren't really interested
And I suppose that kinda publicity is part of the (huh? forgot the word. "license" could do it?) on which this site can hold Firefoxportable, as its license is kinda strange
Agreement, methinks.
Firefox's license isn't funny at all. It's free, open-source software. Where it gets interesting is that unlike most FOSS, the name and logo are trademarked, and there's a good reason for that. The source code includes sample logos/icons that you can use or, of course, you can make your own, and you can call it whatever you want, but the Firefox brand is protected to ensure it's only associated with the official software. John T. Haller is one of a few, or perhaps the only third party who is allowed to modify Firefox and still call it Firefox (or rather "Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition") and keep the icon.
However, I highly doubt Mozilla required them to link back on every page on the site. I suppose it's possible, but that's a badge, and supporters of various programs put that on their pages; it's kind of like a show of appreciation, an endorsement. The value of all of them across the Internet would be diminished if one site's were mandatory because it would call into question whether it's really an endorsement or just another ad.
I added it when SpreadFirefox was bigger (before they ditched personal blogs and kinda killed the community). You'll still see us on their leaderboards. We encourage our visitors to use Firefox as their web browser though we make the site work in other browsers (IE, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, etc).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
we make the site work in other browsers (IE, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, etc)
https://portableapps.com/node/1337#comment-5215
Quamquam omniam nescio, nec nihil scio.
we make the site work in other browsers (IE, Safari, Konqueror, Opera, etc).
Netscape's and SeaMonkey's Back function doesn't work here. And this is the only place where they don't work normally.
Ed
We don't do anything special that would mess with them. No Javascript redirects or anything. Netscape is long since dead so we don't bother with that. And you mean SeaMonkey 1.x right? Same deal as Netscape, it's horrendously outdated so we don't touch it, either. SeaMonkey 2.x should work fine as it's a modern browser.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Use the following Greasemonkey script to get rid of rubbish like this on this site.
// ==UserScript== // @name Cleaner PortableApps.com // @description Removes footer / ads / Forum statistics // @include http?://*.portableapps.com/* // ==/UserScript== var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div"); for (var i = 0; i"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
And with no ad revenue, you get no apps.
Honestly, they're TEXT ads. They're small. At the bottom of the page (below the fold on many pages). Don't move. Don't make noise. And don't distract from the rest of the page (same color).
I'll never understand someone so averse to ads that they freak out and need to block stuff like that. Especially considering it is those very ads that lets you have access to this site in the first place.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I guess that I should care?
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
You obviously do, otherwise you wouldn't be here. If you didn't care for anything on this site... why are you posting in the forums?
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Several reasons like that people like this come here sometimes. Or that I like to be helpful from time to time.
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do." Asimov
Yeah, we frown on the illegal ThinApp trade here whereas other sites turn a blind eye. Granted you can get the trial and make it yourself as long as you don't share it with anyone, but most people seem to go the illegal trading route. And even if we did have the funds for it, it can't legally be used on most open source software anyway, so it's not as useful.
And it's a shame JauntPE didn't go open source as it should have. Instead it's become a bit of a mess.
I'd love it if someone could code a solid DLL-hooker and open source it so it would work and not have the fees or licensing issues that all other solutions have. But I don't know anyone with the skills to do it. I know I don't have said skills without taking a LOT of time to learn it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
To understand the fanaticism for ad blocking, you have to go back about 15 years. Ads on the Internet were brilliant. Where on TV, you had programming entirely interrupted for a few minutes at a time, every 10 minutes or so, on the Net you just had a banner at the top, maybe another at the bottom. They didn't animate (much) and were unobtrusive.
Over the years they got more and more intrusive and annoying. And with Internet Explorer, what could you do? Netscape was no better (actually Netscape wasn't as good, for other reasons) and while there were a few popup blockers, they didn't work 100%.
Then they went from images to flash, and then to spyware and adware that would bother you when you weren't even looking at the webpage or using the program they came with, or would monitor your activity and sell it to spammers.
My first Windows computer was a graduation gift, and my second one I got from my ISP for signing up for 2 years of DSL. My mother bought my third one when she came into a bit of money, but after I bought and built my fourth and current computer, it occurred to me that these folks are making a lot of money and they're not sharing a dime of it with me. I mean, they want to use my computer and my internet to make money. I then discovered that one of the nondescript buildings I drove by on the way to work was an advertising company. Not one vehicle in the lot worse than mine; in fact, all nicer. BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Corvettes, Mustangs, these guys were making a killing.
So yeah, when Firefox brought ad blocking, I jumped on board and never looked back. I've got no problem supporting them if they want to kick something back, but that requires more effort than I care to put out. My wife does that - she's got this scanner, she scans all our grocery purchases. It's for that Nielsen company, they track all the consumer habits. You hear about Nielsen ratings; at one point we were logging our TV watching. And we're always getting little stuff in the mail. She says it's worth it and that's fine by me, as it also gives her something to do.
However, you're right - I think Google is on the right track with AdSense, at least for the viewer. I put AdSense on my blog, but I cut it off after a year of it not paying anything. I'm sure I don't get the hits, say, this site gets, and I didn't do anything to advertise my site - I didn't want to commercialize or even really popularize it at all anyway. So for a while I didn't want to support even AdSense.
However (again), since PortableApps.com does both provide a great service and rely on those ads, I'll make an exception for this site on both my Portable Firefox installations - the one on my flash drive I use at work and the one on my home computer. Yep, using PortableApps at home means if I go on vacation (which doesn't mean real vacation but usually visiting family or friends several states away), I can just take my external hard drive with me and bring pretty much everything but Windows.
But you're wrong about "no ad revenue, no apps". Sorry, but that's entirely false. The entire open source movement, most notably Linux, has proven that a project can grow in viability and popularity even without people paying. Granted, they get money other ways, they make it work, I don't know all the details, but both sadly and gladly, if anything happened to PortableApps.com, know that portablizing software will continue. That's the future - everything all tangled up in the Windows registry is the old way, and it still works better for some things, but for more and more stuff, sandboxing and virtualization are either emulating an installation environment, or replacing it. However, point well taken and nobody here, I would hope, would wish anything but the best for PortableApps.com.
You may say it's wrong, but if we weren't getting money from the ads, I wouldn't have been able to afford to host the site this long. It's $13,000 a year. And that's in addition to all the other stuff I pay for that's related including legal stuff, accounting, etc. Like it or not, this stuff takes money. And without us as the most popular platform, one of the closed source restrictive things would probably have become the defacto standard by now.
Granted the ads won't be our main source of revenue going forward as we partner with hardware and software providers. But open source isn't magic... you need a revenue source and a business plan to play on the same level as the big guys. Linux does because it has that backing from huge multi-billion dollar companies.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
If you don't mind me asking this personal question...
You said it cost $13,000 dollars a year to run this site (more than my mom makes per year). About how much revenue do you make from the ads you post.
And if you do mind, just remove the post.
I'll just say that it's less than $13,000 a year. And the 'to run this site' is misleading. The $13k is for hosting only. It doesn't include legal, accounting, stuff digital certs, software or the business side of things like the travel and negotiations I've been engaged in with multiple parties.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
...and a click, partially because I'm curious about how they're presenting IE8.
You may be right about the site; like I said, the site staying open should be in all our best wishes and interests, but I think all my points about apps themselves were all dead on. Even without the site, technically, the apps can continue. And Linux, I don't pretend to know everything about how it works (quite the opposite actually) but it remains true that they've figured out a way to make a decent operating system without charging the end user. I don't know who all's paying for it, aside from the ones that do cost money, and of course the support and stuff.
$13,000? That's crazy. I don't doubt it, but "wow". I had no idea. I know that a forum can run more bandwidth than one might think. I had a board a few years back with 50 or so people, and I was paying $10-15 a month for 50MB of space and unlimited traffic. (Not the site I mentioned before - this never had a single ad on it.) It was a sweet deal because it came with a leased license for a forum platform that shall go unnamed. I guess you pay for reliability though, because I had none whatsoever. Outages were random and not infrequent. Ultimately it got shut down because someone asked me where they could get the PC version of Final Fantasy 8 (a limited-edition run) and I suggested they search one of the filesharing networks. (Yeah, you'd think being the admin I could set the rules, but no, certain rules are dictated above even the admin's head, kind of a shocker. Still tweaks my melon to think about it.) Guess I should have suggested eBay, eh?
So, if you don't mind my asking, what does $13K get you for hosting? Obviously the site gets a lot of traffic, so you're getting unlimited or a lot of bandwidth. The apps are all hosted on SourceForge, and the graphics are minimal and get cached. The forum is decent sized, but it's not huge, it can't take up an obscene amount of space on the servers. And you've got to have some kind of redundancy/uptime guarantee, since the site's never down and always fast.
If I haven't said it before, thanks for all you've done here, and if I've ever expressed a lack of gratitude, I apologize for it.
I have to agree with John on this one - they're text ads which aren't intrusive and which support the site. This site is one of the few sites I have adblock turned off on because I like to support it and because I trust John not to go putting any flash nonsense on it.
I wouldn't do any ads with flash, animation, sound, etc. We had a flash object on our page once inadvertently when AddThis went and changed their little "Share This Article" button to something much more intrusive. I ditched it the same day and posted this in response:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/addthis_privacy_warning/
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Can we change it to 3.6 now lol???? Actually it does work. For the longest time I use and loved IE after visiting here trying PortableApps and using Firefox portabley I now have installed it locally on all of my 4 systems and recommend it to all systems I tech
Well done John FOSS lives forever
Now can someone create a dictionary that tells me how to spell port ably or even portable-ize
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss
the use of reviving a one year old topic?
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
S9nce there was already a topic I figured I would ask about the update to the Firefox badge here Should I have made another NEW post about the same thing?
“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.” Dr. Seuss
sorry - missunderstood you.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate