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Firebird stops me from blogging

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maybe that's a deliberate feature.. ;-)

seriously, when I try to write a new post from inside Firebird, the formatting buttons that pop up in IE don't appear. Is there a setting/plug-in I can use to fix this?

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    no, the control that is used for that is not cross-browser, unfortunately.
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    Welcome to the world of "rich web controls" that Microsoft promised. They are rich provided you play in their sandbox. Otherwise you have to write code twice, once to get the functionality you want in your app and once to plug all the holes in ASP.NET that didn't make the virtual gold CD.

    On one hand you can't blame them for pushing their products first, that's their job as a company.

    On the other hand, you're making them more money by building applications using their tools on their platforms. Why can't they make it a little easier for you?
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    I think Scoble talked about this a little while ago, but with respect to why we don't build stuff for other platforms. The story went something like "our dev teams are small, under pressure and under-resourced, so they do what they can with what they have, which means they do what they know best... build for Windows, which also happens to be the biggest market"... I imagine the same goes for the IE / tools teams.
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    What control is used to provide the formatting?
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    Seriously guys, do your research before typing.

    The formatting in .Text is provided by the FreeTextBox (http://www.revjon.com/ftb/) control, developed by and individual by the name of John Dyer, which in turn uses the features MSHTML editor that is built into the IE starting from version 5.5.

    Scott, how do holes in ASP.NET have anything to do with this?

    Cameron, how would you imagine this having anything to do with Microsoft building stuff for other platforms?
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    It's disappointing to see any type of web application limit itself to IE, or Firebird, or whatever. After all, the whole point of a web application is to break the client server paradigm where you had a specific client to access a specific server. You should be able to access the app from any web client. Now theory versus practice is a different argument altogether but I find it disappointing none the less.
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    Cameron, I am able to use FireBird to have a rich blog editing experience with .Text if I do the following:

    (1) Download the free User-Agent Switcher extension - http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info.php/useragentswitcher

    (2) Set the User Agent to IE 6.0

    (3) Visit the blog admin page.


    Works fine for me! Using Mozilla FireBird 0.7. hth
  • Anonymous
    December 21, 2003
    Scott - works like a charm. Thanks very much! Now I can get on with my Firebird eval. :-)
    Cheers, Cameron
  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2003
    i wonder if you could modify the machine.config and change the target of "rich" browsers also?