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How about a shortcut?
Get firefox, points to "ftp.exe ftp://mozilla.com/latest/windows/ffox.exe"
Same with "get opera", "get internet explorer"... get whatever...

Or simple let the OEM bundle the browser of their choise. Not like anyone buys windows boxed these days.

Wavelength effects what color you precieve, it has nothing to do with resolution.

then I would be inclined to agree with Mr. Ranum's points. But the fact is that there are lots of people out there working on Real Security. Let's see, there's OpenBSD's work to integrate cryptography as a system service, there's Neils Provos' work on systrace, there's GCC's ProPolice stack-smashing protection, there's OpenBSD's write XOR execute protection (which, BTW, Windows now has to some small extent), there are phishing mitigation features in Firefox, there are Free implementations of good authentication systems (e.g., MIT Kerberos, Heimdal), lots of programs now ship with sane defaults (ala Postfix and qmail), there are safe-string libraries of all license stripes, and on and on and on! The fact that Microsoft apparently does not use their own safe-string implementation is indicative of the problem here. Microsoft writes crap. If you want systems where security is a real concern, it's easy to find it. That's not to say that those systems are "secure"-- security is always a work in progress-- but to say that "our responses to those problems also remain the same" is disingenuous. Projects like OpenBSD (among many others mentioned above) have attempted to identify entire classes of problems, and solve them on the big-picture level instead of doing the patch-a-week thing.

Do you think MS will go down without a fight? Do you think that a company with almost limitless cash is going to be threatened by anything less than all-out war from the FOSS community?

I defy anyone to disprove any of my facts.

- No one is going to do anything about MS's monopoly.

- The monopoly will get worse.

- The only people who have a chance to break it are the geeks.

- Even then it would take a united effort from all of us.

Many of the major free GPL licensed programs are now available in both Windows and Linux versions. In the past they were only available for Linux/Unix users. If a small business wanted to they could replace Microsoft Office and most of their other commercial applications with free GPL licensed alternatives and still keep Windows. Here are a few examples:

• OpenOffice
• KOffice will soon be cross platform
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• GIMP for Windows
• AbiWord

Many of the major free GPL licensed programs are now available in both Windows and Linux versions. In the past they were only available for Linux/Unix users. If a small business wanted to they could replace Microsoft Office and most of their other commercial applications with free GPL licensed alternatives and still keep Windows. Here are a few examples:

• OpenOffice
• KOffice will soon be cross platform
• Thunderbird
• Firefox
• GIMP for Windows
• AbiWord

I don't see that memory usage remains a problem for most users. It's just the vocal few who are having memory problems. The main problem is that these users assume this is part of the "normal" experience of using Firefox, so they complain that every user must also be seeing the same thing. They take no steps to fix or report their problems, as they consider the problem to be "well-known" and think developers must be idiots for not being able to see it.

If you're still having serious problems with Firefox, try creating a new profile and installing the Firefox 3 Beta. If you still have problems, discuss them on the MozillaZine Builds forum. If the problems do not get resolved, just switch to another browser. It's not normal to experience serious problems when browsing, so I don't see why anyone accepts it as part of the "normal" experience.

I agree that the damage to Firefox's reputation is already done. I've found that no matter how many reports come out that Firefox doesn't have a severe and obvious memory problem, the few reports that show a problem are the ones that become popular. If any of them just included instructions to reproduce the problem on other computers, those reports would be productive. Somehow, they always seem to leave that part out.

I don't think you'll find a full feature list anywhere. My changelog and the release notes mention a lot of the new features, but if you want to know whether a specific bug got fixed or feature got added, you'll need to check Bugzilla.

In this case, it's bug 334987, and it looks like it won't be done for Firefox 3.

By the way, it would be both hard to fix (because sound comes from plugins) and controversial (because some users like to leave pandora.com playing in the background while they do other things).

If you download and run an executable that *any* website offers you on the Internet, to provide you with "more security", then you're an idiot. Oh, and if you think otherwise you're an idiot too.

Linux is often viewed as more secure than Windows...If I download a Linux distro, am I an idiot? Same goes for Firefox. The second bullet point on the Firefox web page is "Stay Secure on the Web". What if I download a Windows firewall update that Microsoft claims is more secure than the old version? Am I an idiot?

I really like the second design on that page, but the blog of one of the user interface design guys suggests that the final theme may look significantly different from all of those. sounds like they want to make firefox look native, but recognizable as firefox on every platform. I'm undecided which way I think would turn out better

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

... right here: Get Firefox 3 Beta 1

Instead of this windows-screenshot-centric review, what geeks like me really want are the release notes.

They say the have plugged more than 300 memory leaks in the release notes. I hope that's most of them...

From the release notes:

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

I'm optimistic, but we'll see in time...

How do you define best? How do you make it a non-subjective? Do you determine they're best because they're the most preferred by users?

People forget where Firefox came from. It was not focus grouped (or even planned, really) by Mozilla. At the time, Mozilla was still almost exclusively funded by AOL, and their primary focus was the Mozilla Suite - a browser/email client/HTML editor/IRC client monolith that had lots of promising features, but was too complex and geek oriented to catch on with the general public.

Firefox exists because in 2002 Blake Ross (along with Dave Hyatt) got fed up with the code bloat and designed-by-committee UI of the old Suite, and decided to start a skunkworks-style OSS project to create the anti-Suite: a lean, fast, browser-and-nothing-else tool using the core Mozilla code but jettisoning most of the complexity that had arisen in the Suite over time.

Back then it was called "Phoenix" (as in, rising from the ashes of Mozilla). The search bar showed up very early in Phoenix's life: Phoenix 0.2, to be exact, released in October 2002. And when the search bar landed, it used Google as its engine.

Because Phoenix was Ross' and Hyatt's personal project, design decisions in those days basically came down to whatever they thought was best. They chose Google for the search engine because in 2002 Google was waaaaaay ahead of the competition in search. Heck, back in those days Yahoo licensed Google Search rather than rolling their own!

This was literally years before Google offered Mozilla a red cent for search traffic. In 2002 Google was still 2 years away from going public and had nothing like the cash mountain it has today. They certainly weren't running around throwing tens of millions at browser programmers' side projects.

In other words: Ross and Hyatt chose Google because at the time the decision was a no brainer. Every other search engine was so much worse than Google at returning relevant results that choosing any of them would have been putting the user's needs second, which was contrary to the whole point of Phoenix/Firefox.

Of course, today the quality of competing engines has mostly caught up, so if they were making the decision today maybe they'd have chosen differently, who knows. But it's a mistake to project the conditions of the world today back upon decisions made five years ago. The tech landscape was very different then.

No matter how much moolah Google pours into the Mozilla foundation, at the end of the day, it's still providing crunchy, wholesome GPL'ed software.

Revenues: $66,840,850
Expenses: $19,776,193

"Profit" (or, change in net assets, since it's a non-profit): $27,893,735

According to Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO), salaries accounted for 70% of their expenses in 2006, so that's around $14 million. Net assets increased "only" by around $22 million (lower than the $28 million you calculated, perhaps because the Mozilla Corporation has to pay taxes).

Damn, it's good to be free. You'd think that the foundation would donate its money to fund other OSS projects, but as software people have discovered, the first priority of a foundation is to ensure the existence (and a lucrative existence at that) of its staff.

According to the numbers above, Mozilla employees could raise their salaries to 250% of what they now receive and still break even, but they chose not to. They could have made way more money by selling shares in the Mozilla Corp., instead of having it be fully owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, but they didn't.

See this summary of Mozilla grants for 2006. Near the end:

It's too early to tell how much we'll spend in total, but I suspect we'll easily double the amount spent in 2006. As we move into 2008 we'll also be funding projects in more areas.

I get the impression they've gone slow at first to "test the waters" and find the best way to spend their money. They're even looking for help in giving away more:

The other constant is the importance of having people who can help us put together a funding program in particular areas, as Aaron Leventhal has done for Mozilla accessibility. To repeat what I wrote last year:

We're looking for more people like Aaron to whom we can successfully delegate responsibility for suggesting and overseeing grants in their area(s) of expertise. If you're one of those people I'm interested in hearing from you.

They've been funding lots of accessibility work, whereas many for-profits ignore disabled users entirely. They've sponsored conferences on using the internet for the public good. They also sponsor projects that are not part of FF and its revenue stream: work on Linux desktop accessibility, Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation, buying commercial javascript code and releasing it as open source, Apache and OpenSSL, and just now Perl 6.

Mozilla is working right alongside Opera, Apple, and others to advance web standards in the WHATWG and W3C. Mozilla funds work on web standards (test cases, conformance checkers, etc.), works hard to implement these standards, and even tries to bring useful features of their own platform (such as XBL and the XUL box model) into web standards so the whole web can benefit--even if it means diminishing any comparative advantage of FF over other browsers. Mozilla is working to keep the web platform viable and open in light of competition from Silverlight, Apollo, and others.

Having followed Mozilla very closely for the past several years, I can tell you that these people are not in it for the money; they are religiously devoted to the idea of advancing the Open Web for the pub

Are you completely uninformed or are you being intentionally untruthful here?

> Firefox's roots go back a while (2 years?) before that roadmap was
> written. The original goal was to make a minimal browser, however,

You're just plain wrong here.

The original goal, that I helped define in early 2002, was to make a browser that could actually compete with IE and gain market share where the feature bloated and designed by committee Mozilla Application Suite had failed. We didn't skimp on features and included many features, bringing it up and beyond parity with IE, that the suite never had.

> people soon realized that Mozilla never really was bloated. Stripping
> out the "bloat" from Mozilla ended up with a negligible amount of
> speed & memory improvements.

Horseshit. We cut launch time and new window time in half in just a few months. We cut the download size by almost 300%. Simply removing the other app XUL overlays was a huge performance win all by itself. Then top developers (this was Dave Hyatt, the creator of XUL, and Joe, Ben, and Blake, the most experienced XUL programmers on the earth at that time) writing much cleaner XUL with sane CSS rules and avoiding the known slow XUL features, were able to get the new browser so far ahead of the Suite performance and usability that the Mozilla leadership agreed it would be a better path forward than the Suite.

From the 0.1 release (the first public release of the browser that would become Firefox) notes:

Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features. A few of the features new to this release include:

• Speed, Speed, and Speed
  Phoenix was designed with performance as a primary goal. The XUL experts built a browser that starts in nearly half the time of Mozilla and its commercial derivatives. New windows also snap into existence almost twice as fast as Mozilla and commercial derivatives.

(emphasis mine.)

And that was the first release before we'd even grabbed all the low hanging performance fruit. Speed and size continued to improve with every single point release while we built great new features like complete settings and data migration, extension management, customizable toolbars, web form auto-complete, and more. The browser was more featureful, faster, and smaller than the Suite.

> Then parts of the UI code were rewritten to provide features that
> people always wanted in Mozilla (such as customizable toolbars).

Yep, we gave users a set of features that people wouldn't or couldn't implement in the Suite. We listened to the users, which had outgrown the Suite's user base in size and involvement long before we shipped 1.0, and built the browser that we believed they would love using enough to spread to their IE using friends, families, and co-workers.

> In the end, Firefox ended up being a little slower and a little more
> memory hungry than Mozilla. Hence they made up the "right set of
> features" line.

Again, this is just bullshit. Go back and read the Phoenix 0.1 release notes. "Phoenix is not your father's Mozilla browser. It's a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Shall I repeat it. "a lean and fast browser that doesn't skimp on features." Where in that statement of purpose do you read that the goal was to make a minimalist browser?

When we shipped Firefox 1.0, the Windows version clocked in at a 4.7MB download compared to the Suite's 13MB download. Firefox 1.0's startup time on low to medium end systems was half that of the Suite and a noticeable improvement even on the fastest systems. Firefox 1.0's memory usage at startup was about 10% better than t

The Mozilla Corporation also makes some money by developing "official" Firefox add-ons (titled "Companion"), such as the Firefox Companion for eBay, and the Joga Companion back during the football worldcup.

The Mozilla Corporation also makes some money by developing "official" Firefox add-ons (titled "Companion"), such as the Firefox Companion for eBay, and the Joga Companion back during the football worldcup.

Someone with no technical knowledge cannot run a technically oriented company. A CEO cannot be the leader of something she or he doesn't understand.

Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla is an extremely socially uncomfortable lawyer with no technical knowledge who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now that Mozilla Foundation is making millions from making Google the default browser, Winifred can afford to hire people to make herself look good.

There are many, many quirks in Firefox, not just Thunderbird, that should be fixed, but no technically oriented manager to organize that. For example, the CPU hogging bug has been there for at least 5 years. Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently. See Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

Don't let ignorant managers destroy your programming efforts. Find some way to have them removed.

I'm thinking prism

While I wasn't saying those solutions should be used (just could be used), I hadn't heard of Prism. Here's a link FWIW. It's a fairly interesting concept.

And Thunderbird is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Just let your eyes glaze over the Outlook parts and pay attention to the Thunderbird parts.

We all pay for our internet connection and then a significant portion of our bandwidth is used solely for the benefit and profit of Google to stream ads all over your screen.

Firefox + Adblock + NoScript = User Control

Declare your independence from Internet advertisers and take back control of the connection that you pay for. Your bandwidth, your client, your rules.

>A "blacklist" of phishing sites needs to be stored somewhere, and you need to be able to do queries against it.

>It changes too fast, and is too large, for it to be stored locally.

That's plausible, but in practice the option of local storage has proven usable:

What information is sent to Mozilla or anti-phishing partners when Phishing Protection is enabled?

"When Phishing Protection is used in default mode, no information about the sites you visit is sent to Mozilla or anti-phishing partners. Rather, sites are checked against a local list that is downloaded to your computer and updated on a regular basis."

Isn't this already enabled? If I go to http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/its-a-trap.html I get a phishing warning. An about:config 'safebrowsing' search already shows all the settings and google urls.

Ah, you mean the way it already works, then? Good idea!

What people call the memory gobbling bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still present in Firefox version 2.0.0.7, even though the bug was reported perhaps 5 years ago. Versions 2.0.0.7 and 2.0.0.6 are far more stable than previous versions, but Firefox is still the most unstable program in common use.

The CPU hogging bug in Firefox may be caused by inadequate allocation of resources. Maybe the chaining of the event handler code with numerous windows open is an issue.

Firefox crashes Microsoft Windows. Apparently there is a bug in Windows, or more than one, that causes the entire Microsoft Windows OS to become unstable when Firefox starts CPU hogging. In any case, the only way to get Windows back to a stable state after killing Firefox is to re-start the computer.

It's interesting that Firefox can be used to show that Windows is an unstable OS, in some cases. Linux is completely stable; it is only necessary to kill Firefox to regain resources.

The Firefox CPU hogging bug occurs only during heavy use of Firefox, with many Windows and tabs open for several hours, such as happens when someone in purchasing in a corporate environment is researching computer parts. The problem is made worse if the computer is hibernated or put in standby.

If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop. The fan is often the laptop component that fails first.

It is interesting to note that the latest version of Opera also exhibits CPU hogging, but much less frequently. However, using Opera is not as comfortable because of poor design decisions in Opera.

See: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.

Firefox developers apparently game the system by abusing those who report bugs: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs.

Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

Basically, this seems to be the underlying problem: Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, is a socially uncomfortable lawyer who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now Mozilla Foundation is making millions from designating Google as the default search engine.

Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.

From the original announcement:

The new organization doesnt have a name yet, so Ill call it MailCo here. MailCo will be part of the Mozilla Foundation and will serve the public benefit mission of the Mozilla Foundation. (Technically, it will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, just like the Mozilla Corporation.)

Who just amended their privacy policy to remove notice of privacy policy changes?

Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip

Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>

Here's my list: OpenOffice, e-Sword, Firefox, Google Desktop, TightVNC, Thunderbird, Picasa, AVG Anti-Virus, GIMP, IrfanView, VLC Media Player, FileZilla, 7zip

Stupid lame filter nuked my <ul>

Use Mozilla Firefox... http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ ...with Adblock Plus... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10 ...with my filter subscription... http://www.jabcreations.com/home/home-downloads.ph p If you're seeing any advertising after using my subscription contact me and I'll be happy to update my list.

In case you didn't see it because it's one level down, as realdodgeman noted, Google pays Mozilla Corp. to make Google the default search engine in both Firefox's integrated search dropdown as well as start page. In fact, the start page redirects to a page hosted on Google's servers.

(Side note: Opera also gets paid by Google for its search box)

"Which, assuming you want to support IE users, means no."

You can support IE users ... just inlcude links to the download pages for Opera, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, etc.

Better yet, give them full support - have them download a bootable linux distro to replace Vista Millennium.

I didn't work for me. Firefox 2.0.0.6. There is an issue with Java and this firefox version:

from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.6/relea senotes/ :
"The Java Console extension that came with Java SE 6.0u1 (J2SE6.0.01) is incompatible with Firefox as reported in Bugzilla. Java should work as expected, but the menu item "Java Console" will not be available in the Tools menu. This issue has been fixed in Java SE 6.0u2 (J2SE6.0.02) and is available for download from the Java website."

In my case nothing works. I rarely use applets (and frankly I try to avoid it as much as possible on the web) so it isn't a big problem for me.

Part of this may sound like preaching to the choir, but bear with me. There is a tendency to want the government to do something about every problem, and the hassle of online scumbaggery is no exception. Individuals (and their guardians) need to take responsibility for their own protection, and not expect either the government to protect them (which it cannot) or for faceless strangers to be kind to them, which a tiny but significant portion will not.

Each of these steps solves roughly half of the remaining problems not solved by the previous ones.

1. A fool and his unarchived data are soon parted. If you want it, make an offline copy of it.
2. Switch to Linux, a Mac, or Anything But Windows. Most of the following only apply if this one won't work for you.
3. Switch to Mozilla Firefox.
4. Buy and install a firewall box.
5. Buy and install a virus scanner.
6. Download and install Lavasoft Ad-Aware or similar spyware detector, even if your virus scanner says it provides that protection.
7. Don't open email with attachments, or respond to spam with so much as a single click. You have been warned.
8. Stay away from porn sites. They're bad for your computer.
9. Stay away from online games except those you know to be crap-free.
10. You don't know that any of them are crap-free.
11. Don't download commercial music except from commercial vendors to whom you pay a fee. Yeah, sucks to be us. But you get what you deserve, and if you're trying to get something for nothing, you'll give something for nothing in return.

So what do you do if your kids download some game, P2P app, or other crapware-laden piece of stupidity? Take away the computer. What if you have several kids, and you don't know who did it? Enlist their aid and hold them all accountable. Tell them that if any of them downloads crapware and the guilty party won't come forward, they all do their homework at the library (for a week or month or whatever).

If you can't even get her name right, how is it you're such an expert on what her capabilities are? It's Mitchell.

Mitchell is the board chair of the foundation, and the CEO of the _corporation_ (there is a significant difference). The corporation makes it pretty clear that it's focus is Firefox, not Thunderbird. The primary goal is increasing the market share of a stable product that enhances the end-user experience, keeps the web from becoming a proprietary sandbox dominated by a single browser product and its creators ideas on client lock-in, and providing a safe alternative to other browsers.

If a CPU bug or other quirk bugs you, instead of pissing on people (you've got a lot of balls saying that people don't want to do the work) and grinding whatever axe you have with Mitchell's name on it, get involved with the project and try and help address the problem. At the very least, reference the bugzilla id's of the bugs you mention, because I can think of several reasons why a CPU would spin or for memory bloat, and some of them have been acknowledged and improved on over the course of major and minor releases, and maybe there's a fix or a reason why the quirks that irk you haven't been addressed.

Insightful my ass. Petty and completely off-topic is more like it.

Of course they did.

The two lead engineers have been working paid full-time on this for years, where do you think those resources are coming from? The mozilla build team has pushed releases, Thunderbird has had its place on mozilla.com along side Firefox etc.

Basically, the issue now is - how is Thunderbird going to survive without all this support? I'm not saying it all is going away, but Thunderbird WILL have to do more on its own. As I understand it, Mozilla Foundation/Corporation (not sure which) might still help out somewhat financially, but I am not sure of the status on that situation.

However, I think there's no reason to believe "it's all over". There are plenty of other organizations/companies doing top-notch Mozilla work without being a physical part of Mozilla Corporation. See Joost, Songbird, and others. Also, it will be interesting to see what high-level decisions are taken by the Thunderbird team now that they will be more independent. I think there's a chance they will have to think more radically about Thunderbird's place in the world than what has been the case up until now.

Someone with no technical knowledge cannot run a technically oriented company. The Mozilla Foundation needs someone competent. Winifred cannot be the leader of something she doesn't understand. That's Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, an extremely socially uncomfortable lawyer who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now that Mozilla Foundation is making millions from making Google the default browser, Winifred can afford to hire people to make herself look good.

There are many, many quirks in Firefox, not just Thunderbird, that should be fixed, but no technically oriented manager to organize that. For example, the CPU hogging bug has been there for at least 5 years. Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently. See Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

Don't let ignorant and managers destroy your programming efforts. Find some way to have them removed.

What is the big deal? Firefox brings its own settings and doesn't effect your system as every file is put to the firefox-directory or its profile. Simply try it. It won't bite :)

And of course you could keep MSIE as your main browser. It's not as if you were changing your mailclient or something. Like you could use notepad AND word ;)

MSIE sucks, Firefox is nice, it's as simple as that.

Try out the free add ons.

http://www.mozilla.com/

Firefox 2.0.0.5 has been released, this version fixed the firefoxurl:// bug. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/2.0.0.5/relea senotes/

Used to be there, I'm sure it's still there in one form or another but here...it's straight from the Firefox site: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/1.5. 0.11.html and one from Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=216542&cid=175 75552 What was that about false information?

Windows only http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2007/07/10/securi ty-issue-in-url-protocol-handling-on-windows/

The company that makes millions of dollars a year, that we're supposed to feel sorry for.

The nonprofit corporation, wholly owned by the Mozilla Foundation, to be precise.