World of Employment
December 23rd, 2008
The question of whether World of Warcraft is an acceptable topic during a job interview or element on a resumé comes up every now and then, but I’ve never understood why this was even a debate at all. The arguments tend to gel around the fact that WoW involves, like, a lot of time and stuff, and like, you have to, like, not hate on your guildmates!
I think this is ridiculous. World of Warcraft does not have a monopoly on the concept of being a non-work-related hobby that builds skills and demonstrates committment. Gardening, stamp collecting, hot-rod building, quilting, playing tabletop role-playing games, target shooting — these activities all require a great deal of comittment to become any good at as well as some financial sacrifices, and many of them have strong interpersonal and social components as well. But would you put any of them on your resumé unless they happened to be related to the job you were applying for? Of course not. So what attributes make World of Warcraft any different? None, I say!
Far Cry 2 — If only… If only…
December 9th, 2008
I wanted to love Far cry 2. On paper, it had all the trappings of greatness for a shooter: an immersive world, realistic physics and fire, a compelling plot, challenging and realistic combat, and a breathtaking rendering of Africa — a place where I’ve lived several months of my life.
The opening sequence filled me with absolute glee. Your character begins in a cab, being driven to a hotel by an exceedingly chatty driver — the spitting image of so many exuberant African cab drivers I’ve encountered, their ebullience perhaps an elaborate (and usually successful) ploy to get a big tip. The car putters down rough dirt roads, bouncing and jostling everything in side it, including the two of you, when another car abruptly cuts you off — and the driver laments the decline in politeness since the civil war started. That drive is the Africa I remember — full of bumpy roads, gangs of roving children, relentlessly curious young men, women selling homemade fried foods, and the occasional bribe to pass by a blockade of armed men.
Sadly, once you’re out of the car, everything goes downhill. You awake to find yourself staring at the Jackal — the bastard who armed both sides of the bloody civil war and who it’s your primary mission to kill. Right off the bat, there he is in front of you, ruining any surprise or the possibility of the Jackal turning out to be one of your friends you’ll make along the way or even — gasp! — being female.
No, instead you find him leering over you like so many snidely whiplash villans before you even have a chance to do anything, musing out loud how he’s not going to kill you now, he’s going to let you live, so you can presumably be killed in some worse way by someone else! Sadly, we all know from years of movie clichés how well this turns out for the bad guy, again ruining any dramatic suspense. He’s supposed to be an arms dealer and he doesn’t have the guts to put a bullet in my head right now? Puh-leeze.
Sadly, the Jackal isn’t the only flat, boring character in the game. In Far Cry 2, everyone else you meet who doesn’t want to kill you somehow automatically loves you. Five minutes later I find myself talking to some dude who’s chastising me for killing some of his men… and then telling me to do some errand-boy task for him and giving me an assault rifle, a rocket launcher, and his own personal car. Do I ever see him again? Nope. Do I remember his name? I don’t even think he told it to me. Why am I working for him, considering that he gave me the firepower to level his compound if I so desired? Unclear. Why did he hire me if I just killed some of his troops? Unexplained. And I could go on.
So I go out and conduct the hit like my mysterious benefactor has ordered. And this leads me to my next complaint: for a shooter, killing is no fun in Far Cry 2. Oh, it’s satisfying, of course — your guns feel solid and real, enemies fall down clutching their wounds after what almost always feels like enough gunfire, and your own character seems just durable enough to sustain going Rambo — but not too often. No, the mechanics of fighting are really very good. And that’s the problem.
You see, each bullet you fire into one of those faceless, nameless mercenaries who are tearing the country apart actually has some real effect. The mercs claw at their injuries, they’ll drop their weapons, fall to one knee, cry out in pain, scream blood-choked obscenities, convulse on the ground, and emit the most spine-chilling death rattles I’ve ever heard from a game. While in a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky your enemies grunt like kung-fu fighters punched in the gut and yell, “Your mom!” in Russian when you shoot them, Far Cry 2’s baddies are much more human in their reactions to injury. This game reminds you at every turn that bullets do bad things to men, and the gory reminders aren’t confined to your enemies, either. When you become sufficiently injured yourself, “healing” consists of watching an animation of your character pulling bullets out of his leg with pliers, or bending back broken limbs, or re-setting dislocated fingers. It’s sometimes difficult to watch, always reminding you of the fragility of the human body when faced with the business end of a lethal weapon.
If there’s one lesson this game has taught me, it’s that fighting sucks. Where in many other shooters I find myself becoming almost bored of violence after hours of killing, Far Cry 2 makes me feel sickened. I avoid the endless guard posts not because I tire of slaying legions of grunts (like I would in another game), but because I feel like a bad person when I send bullets their way. Every time I run out of ammunition for my assault rifle and have to get up close and personal with a pistol, I can feel a knot form in my stomach as I coldly murder the frightened men whose faces I can see fill with fear. It gets even worse if things get so desperate that you have to use your machete. You’re treated to an animation of your character swiftly slicing a throat, with the accompanying cries of pain and desperation from your victim as he collapses to the ground clutching at his ruined neck. Sometimes it’s not quite enough, and he reaches for his pistol to take you with him. There really is no other option than to finish him off, which you do by delivering a coup-de-grace of machete-to-stomach, ending the man’s life with a sickening howl that is almost nausea-inducing.
The first time I did it, I found myself yelling out loud, “Oh my God, I’m a terrible person!” I glanced around, embarrassed, then realized that, no, it was true — my character really is a a terrible person. Later on, after a particularly grueling battle that came down to molotov-tossing and throat-slitting, I found myself wondering, isn’t there another way? Surely we can end this without bloodshed.
Alas, we cannot. Maybe that’s one of the lessons the game is trying to teach me: that sometimes bad men get guns and need to be killed before they kill you, and that diplomacy or stealth or sleight-of-hand won’t always be options in the face of something as monstrous as a civil war. Maybe. Meanwhile, the world of Far Cry 2 is populated by bad men with guns who very much want nothing more to kill each other and you. And that’s all — this isn’t the agency-filled world of an RPG where you can make, you know, choices, and have, you know, conversations.
Which is a real shame. The world seems less like a small African country invaded by mercenaries than it does an anarchic training ground with some buddies of yours hanging out. Having myself lived in an African village, I expected far more, well, Africans! I was expecting burned-out villages, communities huddled together trying to survive, looters, robbers, thieves, old men with world War I rifles, teenagers hawking boflotos and maybe ammunition, and more of the like. Instead, the population seems to consist almost entirely of the mercenaries who are fighting the war. It was actually pretty disheartening when I realized that I could count on every human being I met outside of a cease-fire zone to run at me guns blazing. I’d just be driving along when another jeep would pull up alongside and start shooting! Who are they? Who cares! They want to kill me, better kill them first!
Even the so-called unique locations on the map are no better. The airstrip? Sounds interesting, but it’s just a long tarmac with some rusted hangars inhabited by hostile mercenaries. There’s nothing there you can interact with; the different locale just offers some character and pizzazz to the inevitable gunfight you’ll get into once you arrive there. The chemical company? A couple train cars and a little station populated by thugs with guns. The cockfighting ring? Though the ramshackle sheet-metal compound was brilliantly faithful to real African shanties, I saw a lot less cockfighting than I did armed men shooting at me. Once the smoke cleared and I kicked my way out of the pile of mangled bodies I had managed to surround myself with, I found the actual cocks — all sitting placidly in the same pen, doing anything but fighting. Figures.
I could go on and on; sure, the locations themselves are extremely well-rendered and very unique, but their potential is mostly squandered since the only thing you actually do once you reach them is shoot at men. Again. And again. And again.
Basically, this game is such an exemplary shooter, it makes me wish it did everything else as well as it depicts fighting. I want to be able to upgrade my vehicle at the junkyard, bargain for information at the bars and chat with my buddies about their personal lives as a way of cooling down after a grueling battle. Speaking of my buddies, I want actual relationships with them. I want them to have compelling reasons to be my friends other than “oh, I’ve heard you’re a badass. Let me help you out!” or, “Thanks for rescuing me. You’re now my own personal Jesus!” I want to walk through villages of terrified, starving villagers trying to survive, cringing at my weapons but thankful that I’m not the type who comes in shooting instead. I want my cars to require more to repair them than tightening the magical repair bolt for a few seconds.
Far Cry 2 is such a rich world, full of wondrous peaks, haunting deserts, eerie towns, crumbling infrastructure, and improvised dwellings — but populated entirely by a bunch of trigger-happy goons. A world this compelling practically begs for something other than yet more gunplay.
Building Morgan — Plans
October 29th, 2008
This is a multi-part series about my journey on the road to becoming a real PC owner and user. As a Mac guy tired of being left behind when it came to new games, both in terms of software and hardware, I finally decided to take the plunge and build a gaming PC.
Time for the basics. At its most basic hardware level, a computer needs a processor so it can actually do anything, some RAM so that the processor can process more than a few megabytes at a time, a hard drive to store data on, a motherboard to let that stuff talk to one another, a power supply to fuel everything, and a case to dump it all inside.
On top of this, of course, I’d need an optical drive to actually install the operating system for the first time (and probably all the subsequent times in the future as well if you’re using Windows). Since this was going to be a gaming rig, my new computer would also require a beefy graphics card. As I wasn’t interested in stringing ethernet cables all over the place, that meant I’d need a wireless card to connect it to my home network. Happily enough, I already had a keyboard, mouse, and speakers that functioned perfectly well, so I kept those. Finally, I’d need an actual operating system to install. Necessity dictated that some version of Windows was the only choice for games, and I happen to have been lucky enough to already have several licenses of various versions of Windows handy.
There were a couple of restrictions I imposed on myself to guide my search before I actually started surfing for parts. First of all, the case itself would have to fit on the second shelf of my little rolly-caddy thing (hey, what would you call it?) and function normally when laid horizontally:
This put some serious cramps on size, but that’s okay since most of the larger cases tend to look more like car accidents due to all their flashing lights and caution-tape-like aesthetic anyway.
Second, I wanted this thing to be cheap. Not knowing how much to spend on the screen, I decided to shoot for under $500 for the actual computer itself. If you think about it, I sort of cheated, because of course the screen would be extra and would most likely tack on several hundred dollars, but for some reason I wanted to focus on the price of the actual computer itself, so I did. For the record, that’s a full computer consisting of a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, beefy graphics card, and wireless card, and in order to keep below that budget, I’d have to spend an average of $55 or less on each component. Time to hit the internet!
Next up: Shopping time!
Building Morgan — Intent
October 27th, 2008
I bought my current laptop, a now two-year-old 17″ MacBook Pro, for 3D animation and gaming. I figured I’d need its capacious screen for Maya’s enormous and bloated user interface, and that the extra size would allow the machine to squeeze out more power from its X1600 graphics card, which was pretty good in November of 2006.
As usually happens in life, things didn’t work out quite the way I’d planned. First of all, I became more and more frustrated with Maya and eventually ditched it for the far more space-efficient modo, substantially reducing the necessity of not only the machine’s 17″ built-in screen, but also the 24″ Dell display I had purchased for more space in hopes of satiating the screen real-estate monster that is Maya. Not only did I never manage to do so, but when I tossed Maya, I discovered that such an enormous palette really wasn’t necessary for modo, so I sold the screen when cash was tight. The size of the built-in screen had repercussions, too: though at 6.8 pounds, my computer is exceptionally light for a 17″ laptop, that’s cold comfort when I have to carry it around all day, and I must admit that I long for a pound or two shaved off. Even my bag is complaining, as the shoulder strap has begun to tear under the weight.
Second of all, I neglected to understand the rapidity of graphics-related innovation. A decade of Mac fanaticism and a decidedly software-centric focus had left me relatively sheltered from the hardware innovation on the PC side of things, and while I considered my laptop’s midrange X1600 relatively sufficient, the rest of the world was just waiting to laugh at me. In six months, I discovered that I could no longer run games on their highest settings. Within the year, I was down to medium settings for the new ones. A month ago, my fiancée bought me S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky — the sequel to one of my favorite games ever. Unhappily enough, the thing wouldn’t even run on the lowest settings without looking like junk and playing like it derived some perverse pleasure from viewing blue screens of death.
I begged a friend to let me play on his computer, and he generously agreed, but something felt not right about imposing on him. Eventually enough was enough. I started hitting Newegg and shopping for parts, more out of fantasy than any sort of plan, but my jaw dropped when I saw how much prices have fallen in the last year. The time seemed right; I resolved to build my own gaming PC. T’was a night of online shopping.
Stay tuned for more. Next up: plans!
Pipe Wrench Fight!
October 9th, 2008
Somebody Awesome created a version of some dopey 80s song (Take On Me) but dubbed over the lyrics to literally describe what’s going on in the surreal music video. The results are totally hilarious!
(pipe wrench fiiiight……)
Working LEGO V8 Engine!
October 5th, 2008
This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. As an unabashed Lego freak, this practically made me drool all over the keyboard. See for yourself:
That Silly Textbook Dollar
October 2nd, 2008
At orientation this year, the campus bookstore handed out these glossy, full-color brochures full of “information” extolling the value of, you guessed it, the campus bookstore. A particular graph on one of the pages caught my eye, however:
This graphic was part of a page that was futilely attempting to explain why textbooks are so atrociously expensive, and playing up the value added by the college bookstore.
I was left asking, “What value?” In fact, what stood out the most to me was the assertion that for every dollar I spend on a book, the author gets a little over a dime. What a terribly inefficient distribution mechanism! I was instantly reminded of Apple’s iPhone App Store where developers get to keep a whopping 70% of every dollar spent by the customer! That’s enormous! iPhone app writers must be making an absolute killing right now!1
Yet this graph reveals that it’s not so rosy for our poor textbook writer. First of all, those greedy publishers take 65¢ of each dollar for themselves! But that’s not the end; the book has to pass through the bookstore, which, like any good business, has to make a profit, and so they snatch 23 out of the remaining 35 cents. Add in a penny for freight costs, and the author is left with only a little over 11¢ to show for his efforts, you know, writing the damn book all on his own. Clearly the middlemen are squeezing writers out their ability to make a living without taking second jobs.
There has to be a better way. I mean, the college bookstore itself is taking twice what the author is left with and they’re literally adding no value, to say nothing of what the publishers get.
So I started to think about what it would be like if authors were able to distribute books like I can distribute software — that is to say, digitally.
Now, slight tangent. The subject of e-books always results in much gnashing of teeth from bilbiophiles to tech pundits. But these people are missing the ball; e-books aren’t not the future, they’re the present. I have bought several e-books in the past year along, for instance, and Amazon’s unfortunately-named Kindle
Anyway. First of all, since there would be no physical goods, there would be no actual manufacturing, and hence no costs associated with it. There go the freight costs and two thirds of the paper, printing and editorial costs: so far, 22.4¢ saved that could be pure profit for the author.
This is basically assuming a distribution chain whereby the author writes a book, sends the manuscript to a publisher who reads it, edits it, hypes and markets it, and then distributes it to the 3rd party retailers. But the thing is, there are still two steps between the creator and the consumer here. That seems like an awfully inefficient distribution mechanism for a fully digital product. Really, what does the retailer do? Well, they aggregate products for a market, I suppose. But these particular digital products aren’t dependent on walking to a store to buy them; why shouldn’t you be able to go over to harpercollins.com and pick up an e-textbook without having to go through yet another middleman?
There’s really no disadvantage to bypassing the middleman. By cutting out the college bookstore, that’s another 23¢ that somebody gets, either the author or the publishers. Let’s say the publishers get these 23 pennies because the author got the last 22 which we saved by eliminating paper and printing costs. So at the moment the author’s taking home 35¢ and the publishers are getting 65¢, of which 30¢ are profit.
To recap, thus far our hypothetical textbook writer is much better off financially than he was before since he’s taking home three times as much profit compared to today’s model. What writer wouldn’t like to see his royalty checks triple?
But really, what is the publisher actually doing under this arrangement? In the past they were responsible for printing the book and managing the inventory, but now that’s all obsolete, so the money they’re getting that’s not profit in hand goes toward paying for editorial, “general & administrative” and marketing costs. let’s assume that running and promoting the online store is distributed equally among these latter two.
If you think about it, all the publisher really does is editorial work and the maintenance of an online store. Now, most writers I know do their own editorial work or have peers extensively review the manuscript before submitting it to the publisher, so let’s say that especially proactive writers could bypass this chunk of the publisher’s duties for some more cash in hand. Now all that’s left is the online store, and after eliminating editorial costs, they’re taking about 50¢ to run it.
That seems a little high to me. You see, my fellow software engineers who sell their own indie software all run their own online stores. After the stores are set up, the only recurring costs are payment processing and the like, and these typically cost between two and eight percent. Between two and eight percent. And the publisher has the nerve to be taking 50% for this same service? The nerve!
But wait! Most writers are technically illiterate, you say! How can they be expected to run an online store!! Yes, this is true, but that’s why there are pre-made solutions that don’t require technical mumbo-jumbo. If they exist in the world of indie software, it’s no stretch to imagine that they would spring up for indie publishing. These pre-made solutions tend to run on the high side in terms of price, so maybe even 9 or 10% of each sale will be going to the payment processor and the online store maintainer in the case of the indie solutions. That’s a fuck of a lot better than keeping that much for yourself after all is said and done.
So what am I saying? I’m saying that writers need to be more entrepreneurial. They need to sell their products directly to consumers in order to bypass the cripplingly expensive middlemen who can and do ruin books, and they need to do more themselves than simply write; they need to learn to market, and sell their work as well, because the rewards of doing so will be about nine times as much profit per unit sold compared to not doing it.
They need to stop accepting the conventional wisdom of “I’ll write a book and then beg a publisher to take it, then I’ll hope that they do a good job marketing my book, then I’ll hope that it sells well, then I’ll hope that I didn’t get screwed on my contract, then I’ll hope that they send me a check every so often that’s enough for a couple of nice dinners out.”
Writers need to take their fate into their own hands and write on their own schedules, determine the target market for themselves, determine a fair price for their work themselves, and do all the promotion and marketing themselves, because only them will they truly be able to make a living. The publishing industry was created to squeeze the profit from writing into its own cup. Technology can help writers fight back, and they should be embracing it, not running from it.
Or maybe this is simply a very long way of saying that when I purchased a $100 computer science textbook this year, I was miffed that either the author wasn’t making nine times what he actually was, or that the textbook wasn’t a ninth the price.
- They are. Compare and contrast: the app store rewards developers with 70% profit and the customers with low low prices, and it’s booming; meanwhile, the publishing industry punishes its authors with inexcusable 7-15% profit and hammers readers with double-digit prices, and everywhere they’re faltering and losing sales. [↩]
- Gazillions of people used to scoff at the idea of uploading all their music to their computers, too [↩]
Poor Artanis… Always Behind The Curve
September 17th, 2008
(I will be simply delighted if there are more than five people on this Earth who get it.)
Microsoft: The New Old Apple
September 9th, 2008
The Microsoft of today is the Apple of yesteryear; directionless, adrift, unpopular, deserted by the technical elite, and home to mostly shitty software. Microsoft produces a thousand different products with no unified vision or purpose, and most of them bleed money. Like the Apple of the 1990s, research labs belch forth an unending stream of interesting but irrelevant tech-demo-products that suck away funds and talent from the popular products and the money-makers.
Windows Live Writer, for example. I’ve heard it’s quite good, but why isn’t it bundled with Vista or XP? Since you have to go out and find it to use it, its audience will be very small, dooming it to near-irrelevance in the elephantine-huge scheme of things. It’s also got no real business model behind it save a tenuous link to Windows Live, which itself is free and relies on ads to support itself. Soooooo… what’s the point? Has the product group in charge of Windows Live Writer actually produced anything valuable to Microsoft? If WLW were bundled with Vista or Office or sold for a profit, then it could begin to contribute value to the company. As is, it does nothing. It’s subsidized freeware with a small audience.
And what about Windows Life Photo Gallery? How does it differ from the Windows (non-Live) Photo Gallery that comes bundled with Vista? If you already uses one, what’s the benefit of the other? How does it enhance Microsoft’s bottom line or contribute to its technological prowess or enhance existing products?
For that matter, why does Windows Live itself exist? Microsoft isn’t any good at search and doesn’t make money from it, so Live Search is a dud. Windows Live Hotmail likewise doesn’t earn the company anything, and it’s a constant poster boy for poor software design among nerds.
And what about PhotoSynth? Sure it makes cool panoramas, but where’s the money for it coming from, and what revenus it it bringing in? None! Nada! Zippo!
This stuff is exactly what Apple did during the mid-90s. Its research labs produced plenty of amusing curios, tech demos that never materialized into successful products, and free add-ons for the Mac OS that did nothing but suck resources away from the money-making products. The Newton, for example, was hailed by its few users, but at the time it was a failing product that merely drained Apple’s coffers. An adjunct to the Newton was the eMate, a low-cost laptop with a lilliputian stylus-driven monochrome touchscreen. It was unclear at the time why Apple was producing such products when its Macintosh line was stagnating and public opinion was turning against them, and it was years before Jobs returned to trim the fat.
This is what Microsoft must do: trim the fat. Reduce the bloat, concentrate on Windows and Office, and produce only software that can either be sold for a profit, or comes bundled with the operating system to enhance its value. Apple did this and turned around its fortunes in a year or two. So can Microsoft.
Just Not Quite There Yet
August 26th, 2008
So I’ve spent a lot of time with the latest version of Firefox. I’ve used it as my primary browser, my secondary browser, and tried running with both it and Safari at once to highlight differences. I’ve reeeeeeeeeeally wanted to like Firefox 3, but in the end, I just keep going back to Safari.
Why? Well it’s a variety of things. My biggest gripe is its lack of integration with the Mac OS X Keychain. For the uninitiated, the Keychain is a secure service provided by Mac OS X that can store passwords and the like and make them accessible to applications that bother to integrate with it. Because it’s systemwide, I can be sure that any password I ask Safari to remember will be available to OmniWeb or the Finder, or the Disk Image mounter if they ask and I give permission. In practical terms, it means I can switch browsers and be sure that all my saved passwords will be remembered as long as the new browser is Keychain-savvy. It’s a terribly useful system, and I have pretty much all my passwords in it.
Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.
Another thing is the standard Mac OS X text view; developers will know it as an “NSTextView.” What’s so nice about NSTextViews? Well, for one, Appple keeps piling features into it! NSTextViews can check spelling and support a whole range of keyboard shortcuts for text selection and editing. In Tiger, NSTextViews started supporting instant definition and thesaurus lookups via an unbelievably-convenient floating dictionary panel that I use all the frikkin’ time:
In Leopard, NSTextViews can automatically detect links, change straight quotes to smart (”curly”) quotes, and check grammar. In the upcoming version of Mac OS X named Snow Leopard, who knows what they’ll add? The point is, any developer who uses NSTextViews in an application will get free features whenever Apple decided to update the NSTextView class. Thus, over the years, old applications have gotten more useful with the regular infusion of new functionality simply by using the Apple-supplied user interface widgets, and I’ve come to rely on a variety of features offered by NSTextView, in particular the systemwide spelling and dictionary integration and the text editing shortcuts. As with the Keychain, I’ve come to rely on the standardization afforded by NSTextviews.
Sadly, Firefox doesn’t use it.
And then there are all the niggling user interface quirks. Like how Firefox doesn’t respect Mac OS X’s systemwide “smooth scrolling” setting, instead, re-implementing it in what I feel is an overly slow manner. When I leave it on and use the arrow keys or the scroll wheel, it feels like it takes forever to get anywhere, but when I disable it out of annoyance, I have difficulty finding my place whenever I jump by a page-length at a time by hitting page down or the space bar. Sigh. Just use OS X’s built-in setting!
Another annoyance of mine is the perennial ignorance of the difference between a pop-up menu button and a drop-down menu button. The issue arises from the fact that in Windows, there’s one user interface element for both things. But there’s a subtle difference in OS X. A pop-up menu is used to select state; it lets you choose from a list of items to determine which one you want to be looking at or interacting with. When you make a selection, the widget itself changes its title to show you which item you’ve selected, since you may need to refer to which item you’re looking at.
A drop-down menu, on the other hand, is used to issue commands. Drop-down menus have fixed titles because they’re closely related to the menus at the top of the screen (or on the top of the window in XP or Vista). That is, the menu’s title lets you know what kinds of commands you can issue, and clicking on it brings down a list of these commands.
I’m always getting confused in Windows because both of these user-interface concepts are jammed into one widget. Whenever I click on a drop-down menu in Windows, I don’t know if I’m about to tell the program to do something or just change my selection. Usually the only cues it provides are the wording of the menu items: strong action verbs usually denote commands, but this has the unfortunate side effect of causing homographs to complicate things. Will the item labeled “Tag Field” select a thing called a Tag Field, or will it somehow tag or highlight all the fields?
Sadly, Firefox opts to adopt the confusing, inferior, Windows-like hybrid drop-down/pop-up menu universally, even on the Mac version. Sigh.
Now, don’t get me wrong; Firefox is a great browser. It’s fast, loaded with features, and feels great on Windows. My problem is that it still isn’t a first-class Mac citizen. I, like most Mac users, chose my platform because of the perceived superiority of the software bundled with and capable of running on Macs. This perceived superiority arises from useful, tightly-integrated systemwide services like the Keychain and Time Machine, and the clean, intuitive user-interfaces favored by Mac developers. In other words, we want to see our choice vindicated by using software that takes advantage of the features that set our platform apart from the alternatives. Firefox still doesn’t do this. And so I’ll stick with Safari.