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Call me crazy but shouldn't a piece of software not be labeled a release candidate when it still has a list of known issues. I realize that big software shops (I'm looking at you Microsoft) do this all the time and will even release a product with a whole bunch of known issues still unresolved (again I'm looking at you Microsoft) but it seems to me that you wouldn't label something a release candidate until you were at a point where you thought all known issues were resolved. Hence the title release candidate. If nothing no new serious bugs or security holes are found this is it.

MOZILLA FIREFOX END-USER SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT

Version 3.0, May 2008

A source code version of certain Firefox Browser functionality that you may use, modify and distribute is available to you free-of-charge from www.mozilla.org under the Mozilla Public License and other open source software licenses.

The accompanying executable code version of Mozilla Firefox and related documentation (the "Product") is made available to you under the terms of this Mozilla Firefox End-User Software License Agreement (the "Agreement"). By clicking the "Accept" button, or by installing or using the Mozilla Firefox Browser, you are consenting to be bound by the Agreement. If you do not agree to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, do not click the "Accept" button, and do not install or use any part of the Mozilla Firefox Browser.

During the Mozilla Firefox installation process, and at later times, you may be given the option of installing additional components from third-party software providers. The installation and use of those third-party components may be governed by additional license agreements.

1. LICENSE GRANT. The Mozilla Corporation grants you a non-exclusive license to use the executable code version of the Product. This Agreement will also govern any software upgrades provided by Mozilla that replace and/or supplement the original Product, unless such upgrades are accompanied by a separate license, in which case the terms of that license will govern.

2. TERMINATION. If you breach this Agreement your right to use the Product will terminate immediately and without notice, but all provisions of this Agreement except the License Grant (Paragraph 1) will survive termination and continue in effect. Upon termination, you must destroy all copies of the Product.

3. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS. Portions of the Product are available in source code form under the terms of the Mozilla Public License and other open source licenses (collectively, "Open Source Licenses") at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL. Nothing in this Agreement will be construed to limit any rights granted under the Open Source Licenses. Subject to the foregoing, Mozilla, for itself and on behalf of its licensors, hereby reserves all intellectual property rights in the Product, except for the rights expressly granted in this Agreement. You may not remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notice in or on the Product. This license does not grant you any right to use the trademarks, service marks or logos of Mozilla or its licensors.

4. PRIVACY POLICY. You agree to the Mozilla Firefox Privacy Policy, made available online at http://www.mozilla.com/legal/privacy/, as that policy may be changed from time to time. When Mozilla changes the policy in a material way a notice will be posted on the website at www.mozilla.com and when any change is made in the privacy policy, the updated policy will be posted at the above link. It is your responsibility to ensure that you understand the terms of the privacy policy, so you should periodically check the current version of the policy for changes.

5. WEBSITE INFORMATION SERVICES. Mozilla and its contributors, licensors and partners work to provide the most accurate and up-to-date phishing and malware information. However, they cannot guarantee that this information is comprehensive and error-free: some risky sites may not be identified, and some safe sites may be identified in error.

6. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. The product is provided "as is" with all faults. To the extent permitted by law, Mozilla and Mozillaâ(TM)s distributors, and licensors hereby disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, including without limitation warranties that the product is free o

If you're using firefox, create or edit user.js in your profile folder and add this code to stop websites from launching the print dialog.

Even more fun with numbers:
(All data based off the press release)

Slashdot: Over 16,000 downloads of the pack occurred since being infected.

Mozilla: Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy ... 16,667 total downloads of the Vietnamese language pack since November 2007

That is, the versions before the February one were not infected. And the download number given includes those.

Try Mozilla Weave?

Do they also block http://www.mozilla.com/ ?

The notion of trust is nothing new. The basic question comes down to this, do you trust the code (or coders for the code that) you are about to run or not? If you don't, then don't run the code. If you do, then go ahead and run the code.

That question may be easy to ask but not so easy to answer. Maybe you trust the organization but there could be inadvertent security vulnerabilities in the code. Or maybe you don't know much about the organization who authored or published the application. How do you decide whether or not to trust the application?

In theory, open source mitigates this trust issue because you can study the code yourself. In practice, it's not so easy. First of all, access to the source code is immaterial to people who are not coders themselves. Second, it would take a lot of time and mind to study the code for a large project. Sure, any competent programmer could study and verify for his or herself that my open source project can be trusted because it really isn't all that big. How can you be sure that Firefox doesn't have any malicious code in it?

One approach to this problem is to run programs in what is called a sandbox. What that means is that the program isn't written in what is called the native "machine" code. Rather, it is written in a code for a virtual machine. Every time that code makes an API call, the virtual machine checks to see if it is permitted from a security perspective. Applications that run in a sandbox don't get a lot of permissions. It is OK to run an application that you don't completely trust within the sandbox because the virtual machine is going to deny any requests that could compromise or take advantage of your system anyway.

That is why the complaint about ActiveX. Both ActiveX controls and Java applets run in a web browser. The Java applet has to run in the sandbox (unless it is signed but it is beyond the scope of this post to introduce PKI and X.509 certificates) but the ActiveX control never runs in a sandbox.

Later iterations of this sandbox concept allow the user more control over what the program can and cannot do. In .NET, this is called Code Access Security and in J2SE, this is called Java Security Policy. Before running an application, the user can specify what API calls that the application can and cannot call. The problem here is that this specification is not easy to tweak for mere mortals. When you just double click the application icon, you are running the application with whatever policy that the publishing company specified. So, you are back to trusting that company since there is nothing that keeps them from specifying a policy that is wide open.

I have no experience in AIR so I could not tell you whether or not that virtual machine implements any kind of policy control. Perhaps someone that is knowledgeable about AIR would care to clarify here?

Yes, yes, and no. From the Beta 4 Release Notes:

[Improved in Beta 4!] Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.

I read somewhere in the Mozilla blogs that AppleScript has been somewhat neglected, so I guess no one has taken the task in that specific area.

We are all making comparisons to IE trying this direction years ago. I was tempted to further comment on KDE's similar attempts that were split up with 4. But in making looking to the original article, I found that I couldn't compare much. Prism, the direction in which "the lines are blurred", does not make attempts at system management or even at messing with your files. It does however give the option to make web applications like GMail work similar to local apps. According to more information about Prism, this also gives the options of having specific profiles for specific web applications. Think about it: you could have a slimmed down, no add-on profile for quickly checking your e-mail. And for general browsing you could have the full profile, no-script, adblock plus etc. Sounds pretty original

No kidding. This is the second really alarming thing I've read from the FF crew today. It's almost as if they've become disheartened by the pace set by Opera and WebKit, and are engaging in random attention-seeking behaviours.

The flaw was in Safari and the patch has been available for some time.

How is this any worse than Mozilla Corporation using its own update system to gather statistics on its users, without their knowledge?

...as you couldn't possibly be more incorrect. If you install Firefox, you will most likely start at this page. There is no mention of Thunderbird, no mention of add-ons, no mention of any other Mozilla product at all. The default home page for Firefox is here and contains no mention of add-ons, or other programs.

But all that is completely beside the point, because the real issue is other products being pushed out by default through the software update for an unrelated product by the same company. Which is what Apple Software Updater is doing.

Firefox's update by comparison *cannot* download another product that you don't have installed, not only that, but it doesn't suggest any other products, or even mention that they exist.

Your point was that Firefox "offers" their products, where they do not, they simply provide links in their browser to their site where if you wish, you can choose to go and search for their products. Your other point was that Apple is simply "offering" their products, but it isn't doing that either, it is selecting them for you, and choosing to download them to you if you don't specifically deny them every time there is a product updated.

These are two completely different things.

This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...

Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.

Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...

I don't know what's happening with your install, but I suspect you're misinterpreting what's happening. I'll address a few things.

The tab bar disappears by default when only one tab is open. This is for those who care about maximizing screen real estate by eliminating unnecessary components. If you would like to disable this, you can go to Tools > Options or Edit > Preferences (I don't know where it's found on mac builds) to get to the preferences dialog. Go to the "Tabs" section of the preferences and check "Always show tab bar."

As for the "undo close tabs" feature, it is documented in the Firefox help documentation. Go to "Closing and Restoring Tabs" under "Tabbed Browsing" in the help viewer. You can find additions to the featureset in the release notes of each release.

As for your experience with this feature, try this: Open a new window. Assuming you only have one home page, there should be one tab with your home page loaded. Now open another tab and navigate to some website. Click on one of the links on that page. Open two new tabs. Leave the first one blank and navigate to some website in the second new tab. You should have four tabs open now: your home page, one web page that contains one entry in its history that allows you to navigate back to the first website of your choice, one blank tab, and another tab at another website of your choice. Now, in this order, close tabs 4, 3, and 2.

If you go to History > Recently Closed Tabs, there should be two entries, each containing the text for the titles of the two web pages that were present in the tabs you closed at the time that you closed them. Notice that the blank tab is not present. Firefox discards blank tabs with no history. If you bring up the context menu on the tab bar and select "Undo Close Tab," it will bring up the most recently closed tab. It should be the web page you navigated to from the first website you visited, with the history intact (i.e., you should be able to click "Back" and it will navigate back to that first website you entered). If you repeat this process, it will reopen the tab that you first closed. Note how Firefox opens the tabs in reverse of the order they were closed, that is, the most recently closed tabs are reopened first (last-in, first-out order).

By default, Firefox limits the tab stack to 10 entries, although this can be changed by editing a config entry.

HTH HAND

Give Weave a shot: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

I've been using it for a while now, it's pretty nice. Encrypts your bookmarks before they leave your computer too, so your private data remains private.

The Mozilla Foundation which owns the Corp has funded several projects in 2007.

• Support and maintenance of the mozdev.org
• Development of Perl 6 and Parrot
• Implementation of accessibility features in the Dojo AJAX toolkit
• Enhancement of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows
• Enhancements to the OpenSSL cryptographic library and Apache mod_ssl SSL/TLS module
• Enhance the Orca open source screen reader for Linux to support Firefox
• much more read the "projects in 2007" link...

Current work includes improving l10n tools Community Giving and Tools for the L10n Process

2006 10k USD to openbsd to continue development of openbsd and openssh. Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/03/31

You can download the latest browser from here: www.microsoft.com/IE8/download

Read the article, it was the image uploading ActiveX control that got exploited. Chances are that people who uploaded images recently and ran Internet Explorer that used the ActiveX control might have gotten their password and personal information stolen. Those Windows users who use Firefox should know that Firefox does not support ActiveX controls unless the user installed an ActiveX Plugin that allows limited ActiveX controls to be used. If the user did not install the ActiveX Plugin, I seriously doubt they got hit with this exploit if they used Firefox.

Linux, Macintosh, BSD Unix, and Non-Windows systems do not support ActiveX controls anyway so it is mostly Windows systems that are effected by the exploit, and only Windows users who use Internet Explorer and not those who use Firefox.

I am guessing that a lot of 12 to 24 year olds that have their own credit card or their parent's credit card or bank account or somehow work an have their own bank account are the ones targeted by this, as people aged 12 to 24 are most likely to use Windows with Internet Explorer and not know about the exploits out there, and just surf and click on anything they want.

A lot of family members and friends have children aged within that range who use their family's computer and after it gets so infected with malware that they cannot use it, they call me to come over and fix it for them. Nope, Linux, BSD Unix, or switching to a Mac is not an option for them, in some cases I switched them to Linux only to have them make me switch them back to Windows because certain web sites only work with Internet Explorer, or certain games they bought won't run under WINE or they have no idea how to configure WINE to run them for them. Dual-Booting just confuses them more, as does running Windows in a virtual machine. If they bought a Mac, a few weeks later they'd tell me to remove OSX off it and put Windows on it. So basically, they stick to Windows and Internet Explorer, even if I install Firefox for them. Also I install the Google Pack with StarOffice, but of course they want MS-Office instead because their friends and co-workers don't know how to open up ODT open text format documents, and they keep forgetting to "Save As" into MS-Word 97-2002 Format so their coworkers and friends can read their documents.

But even on Windows, Safari is twice as fast as Firefox, and Safari for Windows is an 8MB download (including Mac graphics libraries) while Firefox is 22MB.

I've been saying the same thing since it was called Firebird; perhaps even Phoenix was the last time the browser actually felt faster than Internet Explorer. I looked down the list of new features in Firefox 3 yesterday, and just about every last damn feature was one I either couldn't care less about or would specifically want to turn off. Oh well; I'll eventually be "forced" to upgrade. I just can't wait 'til we get the next fork, some kind of minimal Firefox. Or maybe I should just go back to lynx.

They are working on it. That was one of the changes they decided to make with Firefox 3.

The memory issue was supposed to be one of the big fixes in 3.0. According to the release notes of beta3 they've fixed a lot of memory issues. I'm not sure how many of those issues were caused by previous betas :) http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0b3/releasenotes/

They've had that fixed in the Betas for quite a while. Native widgets, even. Why don't you try out the latest beta?

It still doesn't run on my computer and Firefox 2.latest_stable_release works fine. What's up with that? It just crashes immedietly upon opening.

"Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?"

Did you know that if you link to the RSS feeds you can see the 'articles in the future' w/o having to pay?

Bonus tip: Firefox with 'Flashblock' will simply frame the courtesy/inane embedded flash and you can once again stuff the ./ editor's head back between his/her ass, where it usually resides.

= = = = = = = = =
Mods please note: This is simply an exercise to determine how to lower karma - if you're just looking to burn points, don't bother wasting them...there are better alternatives than making my day, thanks.

An interesting feature of google that I've always liked is the "This page may harm your computer" or whatever they put on dangerous links. I wonder how viable it would be to have a firefox plugin that did something similar.

Firefox 3 does this. If you start to load a site that's in Google's database of malicious (and compromised) pages, Firefox 3 will show a big red "Suspected attack site!" thing instead of parsing the page.

Mozilla and Google put a lot of effort into making it possible to do this without slowing down page loads. Firefox downloads a list of 32-bit hash prefixes for compromised sites. If a hash prefix matches (which will happen on any malicious page load and perhaps 0.1% of other page loads), Firefox asks Google for the rest of the hash. Both the local database lookup (which can require disk access) and the possible request to Google happen in parallel with Firefox resolving the DNS entry and connecting to the site.

Last week, the site of Firebug author Joe Hewitt was compromised, and Firefox 3 Beta 3 users saw this.

Here.

I fear you may be using Apple Mail. If so you have you have my condolences as Apple Email is not truly an email program, but some sort of psychological test program designed at driving its users insane. I suggest using thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ [mozilla.com]. There are many add-on for backup email. Again its free and easy to use.

Okay, I don't really listen to your radio program Mr. Limbaugh, but from what I can tell it seems your a complete jackass. However, as a life long IT guy, I've always tried to help out a user even if they are a nut case.

1.) Screen Sharing - Use VNC. http://www.redstonesoftware.com/products/vine/server/vineosx/index.html. Its free, easy to use, and if someone whines about it being insecure - kick them, hard.

2.) Email backup with Time Machine - You failed to mention just what email program you are using, I fear you may be using Apple Mail. If so you have you have my condolences as Apple Email is not truly an email program, but some sort of psychological test program designed at driving its users insane. I suggest using thunderbird - http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/. There are many add-on for backup email. Again its free and easy to use.

Somewhere along the line Apple got this reputation that ANY thing they make is solid gold and perfect in all ways. I can assure you this is very much not true. Hopefully this helps and lets you get back to your insane rantings.

That's why creating a new profile is the most recommended fix for Firefox problems: "With a new profile the application will run without any extensions, themes, or customized settings that may be causing problems." Updating your plugins and drivers can help also. For more information, you can look at the MozillaZine Knowledge Base or the new official Firefox support site.

I still use Firefox, but it seems to get buggier and buggier as time goes on.

1. I just tested exactly what you describe in your post above, and I still have "Show File" regardless of where I import to iPhoto from. Do I need to do another video to prove you wrong? It only takes me a few moments to record something that takes 10 seconds.
2. This is an amazingly trivial thing to quibble about. I've proved that you can export stills from iMovie (you take a still, then reveal it in Finder). If you're not happy about the way Apple did it, submit a bug on it. I have done this previously (an issue with Terminal in the developer builds of Leopard), and it was fixed ASAP.
3. From your movie, I cannot make out the window that you are claiming descends below the Dock. Personally, I've yet to manage to make a window that cannot fit completely on the screen. Mac OS X is aware of where the Dock is, and will resize windows to accommodate it. Take a screenshot of it, using the Cmd+Shift+3 built into Tiger.

I'm also interested in knowing how my not upgrading to Leopard to be like all my sheep Mac buddies has anything to do with my complaint.

I was pointing out that if you are as dissatisfied with Mac OS X Tiger as your whining on here and in your video makes you out to be, there are alternatives. You have an Intel Mac. You could install any OS you want to on it. That you are still using 10.4 merely indicates to me that you are going out of your way to find things to troll and whine about. Apple still supports 10.4, as well, for that matter, and you could submit a bug report on your Mail window problem (if it really is a problem; in your video I could not make out the bottom of the window being below the Dock). But I'm betting that you've submitted no bugs, as you're just here to troll and whine.

For that matter, it's not like Apple is forcing you not to use another mail client, there are a quite a few of free choices (Thunderbird, Eudora, Correo, and Mulberry spring to mind).

Who the fuck are these people: http://blog.mozilla.com/

Sure, we know Asa but the rest?

You'll appreciate Firefox 3 when it's released then, because it now integrates with the UI on each platform, and it does it pretty darn well as far as I'm concerned. I'm using 3b3pre under GNOME and it even uses the icons from the current theme. It's pretty schmick.

No, that's Thunderbird 2.

Link to the actual Mozilla Labs project page instead of to some blog: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

I hate to want to reply to own post, but just in case you think TFA is just some goof with a Blogspot blog, the original quote is from Mozilla Labs, specifically from Dan Mills, a FireFox dev and former Novell engineer - definately not the average moron.

The choice in distributions is worth more to linux then having one unified "distro". From what I have seen, distributions usually just do the packaging of the various programs. Distrobutions are the ones that package the .rpm, .ebuild, .deb, whatever files. They don't actually write the applications themselves usually.

Quite a few of the applications are usually done by the GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc devs. That is why we have all these apps starting with a K in them! Look at the long list of apps that are "official" for GNOME. Same for KDE. It is up to the KDE/GNOME/Xfce folks to make a "unified" interface as far as the user is concerned with GUI.

Getting things to work on various hardware (not printers and some other things) is up to the kernel developers. These things get written as kernel modules. So problems with hardware X is either one of two things, the kernel lacks support for hardware X, or whatever distro you are using fails to properly detect/autoconfigure the kernel to load the drivers for hardware X.

The rest of the applications are done independently or are part of the GNU tools. Examples of independent apps include Firefox, The GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc. The GNU tools are things like cat, make, wget, etc.

In short, distros just do the packaging, and change a few/alot settings on the window manager to give the distro a unique feel. Yes some distros do alot of work as far as auto-detection of hardware, but there is much more to the opensource development process then just the distro.

A lot of the strengths of linux comes from the fact that various distros are able to try out things, and other distros are free to copy, or not to copy. In reality there are only about 10 or so major distros. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, ... the big names (I'm not going to try to give a full listing, no need to create any flames). There are hundreds of distros, but for all practical purposes, there are a limited selection of distros designed with new users in mind. I'd not be counting things like CentOS, gentoo, slackware or puppy linux for this "problem". CentOS is more or less a server distro, and puppy linux solves a unique problem. Gentoo and slackware are just.. um.. not something I'd hand the CD to a new user and say "go install it". This is another example of why a single "super" distro just won't cut it. Finally you have to remember that alot of the developers are doing this work on their own time, its hard to dictate to folks what they have to work on if you are not paying them ;)

The choice in distributions is worth more to linux then having one unified "distro". From what I have seen, distributions usually just do the packaging of the various programs. Distrobutions are the ones that package the .rpm, .ebuild, .deb, whatever files. They don't actually write the applications themselves usually.

Quite a few of the applications are usually done by the GNOME/KDE/Xfce/etc devs. That is why we have all these apps starting with a K in them! Look at the long list of apps that are "official" for GNOME. Same for KDE. It is up to the KDE/GNOME/Xfce folks to make a "unified" interface as far as the user is concerned with GUI.

Getting things to work on various hardware (not printers and some other things) is up to the kernel developers. These things get written as kernel modules. So problems with hardware X is either one of two things, the kernel lacks support for hardware X, or whatever distro you are using fails to properly detect/autoconfigure the kernel to load the drivers for hardware X.

The rest of the applications are done independently or are part of the GNU tools. Examples of independent apps include Firefox, The GIMP, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, etc. The GNU tools are things like cat, make, wget, etc.

In short, distros just do the packaging, and change a few/alot settings on the window manager to give the distro a unique feel. Yes some distros do alot of work as far as auto-detection of hardware, but there is much more to the opensource development process then just the distro.

A lot of the strengths of linux comes from the fact that various distros are able to try out things, and other distros are free to copy, or not to copy. In reality there are only about 10 or so major distros. Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, ... the big names (I'm not going to try to give a full listing, no need to create any flames). There are hundreds of distros, but for all practical purposes, there are a limited selection of distros designed with new users in mind. I'd not be counting things like CentOS, gentoo, slackware or puppy linux for this "problem". CentOS is more or less a server distro, and puppy linux solves a unique problem. Gentoo and slackware are just.. um.. not something I'd hand the CD to a new user and say "go install it". This is another example of why a single "super" distro just won't cut it. Finally you have to remember that alot of the developers are doing this work on their own time, its hard to dictate to folks what they have to work on if you are not paying them ;)

Just to keep history in perspective, AOL didn't kill Netscape, and neither did Microsoft. The latter did their bit, but the primary Netscape killer were the Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management.

The reason that AOL was able to buy Netscape in the first place because Netscape was already failing financially and in market share. The reason Netscape was failing financially was because of its own misuse of the hottest property ever squandered in the age of the Web: www.netscape.com. The home page of the first popular consumer browser, the word once synonymous with the World Wide Web (and, however incorrectly, The Internet) was never taken advantage of. It was pathetic.

Also, in addition to vain infighting of the worst kind, the company was overrun with useless middle management from various hastily and foolishly made acquisitions which included deals for positions of "power" at Netscape. I think there was something like 30 Vice Presidents (most made via acquisitions, not promotions from within) at one point, when it was maybe 2000 employees? That's more VPs than Microsoft had at the time (with 20000 employees)... There were 7 (seven!) people between a senior engineer and Jim Barksdale...

Microsoft's role in the demise of Netscape was simply to provide a hard hitting competitor, something Netscape had no idea how to counter. Yes, Microsoft pulled some evil tricks, such as giving away free software (11 years later we are still seeing that this model can work!) purposefully breaking JavaScript using their monstrous, non-compliant JScript (which singlehandedly pushed back the coming of Web 2.0 at least 5 years), various deals for IE only installations brokered with computer makers, i.e. their usual bag of tricks.

Netscape's response was to flail and fail instead of doing something original like, say, making netscape.com into what Google eventually would become... The talent was there, more importantly the *audience* was there, but there was no one brave enough at the helm to take advantage of it. Or, more fairly, there was too much dead weight for those brave and talented folks to carry...

R.I.P.

Install:
Firefox http://en.www.mozilla.com/en/firefox/
Ad-Block plus https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

You're now browsing the internet as it should be. Welcome.

Quote: "I personally think Google is on thin ice here and would personally not like to see this deal go through."

I agree.

Anyone doubting how much Google has started to become a factor in our lives should run Firefox with the NoScript add-on. NoScript will show you that most web sites deliver all of your browsing history to Google-Analytics.com.

The U.S. government's idea that it can get any information from any U.S. company at any time by threatening to put the executives of the company in jail, and can keep that secret, means that, using Google's information, your entire history online can be tracked by the U.S. government.

Only Firefox with NoScript can prevent this. Since Google has been paying $50,000,000 each year to the Mozilla Foundation, the developers of Firefox, and since Google makes money through advertising, it seems likely that Firefox will eventually not allow add-ons like NoScript and Ad-Block.

When I learned that the founders of Google bought themselves a Boeing 747, I began to worry that they are not people like us any more, but have rich man's sickness. Someone with that sickness will do anything to make more money.

NoScript makes your browsing much more secure, in addition to giving you the option to stop spying. It's amazing how many web sites run Javascript scripts linking the web sites we visit to other servers at other companies.

Deciding what needs to be unblocked is extra work, however.

It is easy to find if you simply google it. I used the following as search words: "firefox 3 beta 2 download", sans quotes. However if you are the type that wants a direct link, see the beta download page.

When you can't find something in a site, its often much easier to just simply put it in google, or any other search engine.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

I realize you're trolling here and quite successfully so because you're +1 right now, but it is a problem that the Firefox developers have listened to and addressed in a very large way. I watched the memory usage on my browser while browsing large pages with lots of tables, frames, AJAX intensive, etc. and watched as Firefox actually freed up the memory it was using after it was done with it. In my tests only once did it reach over 100MB and shortly afterwards it dropped back to 60MB which is quite acceptable.

The developers have acknowledged the memory flaws in the release notes, specifically;

You'll note that page cacheing and memory fragmentation were the big thorns in the side of Firefox causing it to chew memory like it was free and unlimited and I see from practical experience that they've addressed exactly that.