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Wonderful thing about firefox is the addons. Go find yourself a copy of Coral IE Tab and Greasemonkey. Any site that won't run correctly in non-IE browsers will load fine in an IE tab (and with the ability to sync cookies and use Adblock plus), and all those sites with "IE specific" code can be rewritten with a Greasemonkey script to correct their bad behavior (for sites you visit frequently and don't want to run in an IE Tab). There really isn't much excuse to be loading internet explorer by itself these days unless you really feel the need to isolate your IE pages from your firefox pages, you're incredibly lazy, or ignorant of your options.

Alternatively, users can download Release Candidate builds of Firefox 3.6.2 which contains the fix from here:

https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.6.2-candidates/build3/

As someone else already quoted:

Mozilla already has released a beta build of Firefox 3.6.2, which contains the fix for the unpatched vulnerability

You can already go and download that 3.6.2 beta if you want, I did.

The 'planning' is about the data of 3.6.2's release, not whether or not it will have this fix included.

IMHO, ClamWin is useful as an additional scanner, and you can use it with Firefox if you install Fireclam. As for Moonsecure, the project seems inactive, moonsecure.com returns a good old 403 right now, and nobody seems to have bothered to upload the source tarball since like 2 years (see the SourceForge project at sf.net/projects/moonav). How is this free software under the GNU GPL?

Here is the Bugzilla ticket that has the patch, and tracks its inclusion (into Fennec).

Yes. See Mozilla's developer centre wiki page on using audio and video in Firefox.

What I'm more worried about is that I cannot watch Wikipedia videos with any other device than my PC. Want to see a video clip of a place you're traveling on your phone? Not possible. Want to see videos from Wikipedia with your PS3/360? Not possible. It will create some serious problems, and I don't think Wikipedia is big enough to push the change alone.

In general I find the "must have hardware support now" argument a bit short sighted. By that reasoning there would never be any change in video codecs. In any case, the PS3 and 360 even combined represent a very small percentage of internet connected devices. And the 360's larger problem is not having a web browser so Wikipedia video would be streamed from your PC anyway and if needs must you can transcode on the fly.

As mobile phones go, my Nokia N900 plays Theora. It also runs Firefox. Fennec is on Maemo 5 (the N900's OS) and will soon be available for Android, Windows Mobile, and future MeeGo devices. Millions of devices in the field already have the capability to play Ogg Theora and it will only become more trivial to do so with Firefox releases for those platforms.

However, right now any implementation of H.264 in the core of firefox is not going to happen.

No-one is asking for that. In fact, you yourself go on to say...

Maybe it will be possible to have a pluggable video decoder for Firefox for the HTML5 Video tag so you can hook up your own solutions. That might solve the issue for everyone.

It would have solved the issue for everyone. The problem is that Mozilla explicitly refuses to do that for ideological reasons! They don't want to give users freedom of choice, if that freedom may lead them to choosing "unfree" codecs.

(note also that most claimed technical problems with DirectShow in that blog post are pure FUD)

In fact, there already is a patch to enable GStreamer support for video codecs, but so far it's only been accepted for Fennec, not for mainline desktop Firefox.

I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.

That's what I said. I don't give a crap if, in some hypothetical future, the Firefox devs suddenly realize that maybe user needs should actually trump ridiculous political posturing. The point is that now, today, there is a perfectly valid, legal, reasonable solution for supporting *any* codec in an HTML5 video element (well, any codec supported by gstreamer), but they're choosing not to implement it for strictly ideological reasons.

Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).

Uh, that's not a solution. Hell, did you even read the description of the addon? All it does is s/<video>/<embed>/. That's it. You lose all the integrated DOM support, video overlays, and all the other crap that makes the video element superior to straight object embedding.

*now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software.

Please, that's garbage. The battle is lost. It's been lost ever since Flash moved to H.264, and probably long before then. This little fight Firefox is putting up is pointless, and in the end, it's the users that will lose out.

Problem is, the Firefox devs decided they don't want to do that for political reasons, and so Fennec's implementation won't be ported to Firefox. Thank you asshole developers!

I rather suspect they decided to not do that *right now* for political reasons.

Right now html5 video is not widespread, and their purpose is still chewing at the IE marketshare. If the world embraces html5 video overnight and everybody and their dog switches to Chrome because of its h264 support, you can be damn sure they'll fold. The same if IE9 comes out with html5 support.

Right now they have nothing to worry about (except maybe inconveniencing some foul-mouthed slashdot poster that can't be bothered to search for solutions, e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/83149/ ).

So as long as there's no real threat of pushing Firefox towards irrelevance, *now* is the right time to make a stand and raise awareness about how detrimental patents are to free software. Thank you, developers with a backbone!

The folks at Firefox are aware of the problem and are working on it: Project: Eradicate Startup Dialogs.

JavaScript tracing is not enabled for Web Workers, resulting in slower than usual JavaScript execution time (see bug 538440)

Uuum, browsers have nothing to do with e-mail!

I think you mean Enigmail.

Changing the scope of the copyleft has been explicitly named as something Mozilla is not going to do.
http://mpl.mozilla.org/scope/

Gerv

But to distribute your modified binary, you need to distribute the MPLed sources (but not new ones). See MPL Section 3.2.

Well, perhaps it will no longer be the case post-MPL-revision; who knows.

That line might make more sense if Mozilla wasn't offering the source code under the GPL and LGPL in addition to the MPL (Source). If you find the MPL restrictive you can always choose one of the others.

I read that pushState / replaceState link and it scared me. Note the following from it:

Suppose http://mozilla.org/foo.html executes the following JavaScript:

var stateObj = { foo: "bar" };
history.pushState(stateObj, "page 2", "bar.html");

This will cause the URL bar to display http://mozilla.org/bar.html, but won't cause the browser to load bar.html or even check that bar.html exists.

Why do I have a feeling that said effect can and will primarily be used for horribly evil purposes?

I read that pushState / replaceState link and it scared me. Note the following from it:

Suppose http://mozilla.org/foo.html executes the following JavaScript:

var stateObj = { foo: "bar" };
history.pushState(stateObj, "page 2", "bar.html");

This will cause the URL bar to display http://mozilla.org/bar.html, but won't cause the browser to load bar.html or even check that bar.html exists.

Why do I have a feeling that said effect can and will primarily be used for horribly evil purposes?

Personally the new web technology that I'm most keen to get my hands on is the pushState/replaceState stuff that is going to be in the next release of Firefox after 3.6. It makes it much easier to deal with forward/back in AJAX web apps

More on topic, it is good to see Microsoft looking to implement new web technologies again.... if they implement much of HTML5 and they seem to be doing that now and this new Indexed DB stuff it looks like the Golden Age of the web will continue for some time.

What are these pages you speak of?

If you use Firefox, you use a database.

Yeah, because SQLite has heavy processing requirements.

If you want to *really* be pedantic, why not argue that Excel is a database? Or Notepad? Or the MRU entries in the registry?

For instance, if you once in a blue moon use Office and never use a database on your PC

If you use Firefox, you use a database. If you use HTML5 web applications, you use a database.

what do you care about how fast/slow your CPU is at them?

If you play high-definition video on YouTube, you exercise a CPU.

Sorry to say, using HTML for something other than displaying information still feels like... you're trying to make an application out of a word document. Think about it, we're desperately trying to move away from the desktop but the framework we're using is primarily a framework for designing text and then clobber on tons of scripting to get it to do something else. Sure, we can do fancy stuff with it, but there's no consistency and everyone reinvents the wheel every time there's a need for something you'd take for granted in a desktop app that simply doesn't exist in pure HTML. Some might say that's the beauty of it, I call it a god damn mess that I've been fighting with for the past 10 years. If something like unprivileged XUL would have caught on, we could have had some interesting apps (links work in Firefox only) today. Sadly, we're still trying to make desktop applications out of documents, and I don't see HTML5 changing that. Granted, that we can run our applications distributed, centralized with a backend database and zero install, still make it an ideal platform to work with - but it doesn't change the fact that the markup language we're using is a hack of a tool. And don't get me started on "AJAX"...

It's time to build a dedicated open-source GUI/CRUD browser[1] that can handle desktop, MDI, data grids, tree controls, and CRUD-like applications with grace. No more bending and kicking the eBrochure paradigm to act like real desktops. JavaScript was not meant to be a systems language and DOM was not meant to be a desktop-like nor CRUD GUI.

XUL was started years ago. It does everything that you ask and hey there's even a proof of concept that you download called Firefox.

Actually I'm really glad they changed the interface, as it has helped me tremendously with getting folks off of IE and onto Firefox! Thanks IE Team! Oh, for those having trouble convincing an older relative to switch, old hairyfeet has a little trick that seems to work everytime. Don't bother talking about security, their little eyes will just glaze over, what you need is a juicy carrot, or in this case ForecastFox! Just install ForecastFox with their Zip Code at the top (menubar) and you'll find that having the 3 day forecast and weather alerts makes FF sell itself.

Now as for your problem, I'm sorry but IE8 is pretty much IE8. What I CAN do is point you to the page that will let you make Firefox look like IE6. It is an experimental, but if you really want the IE6 look without running an out of date insecure browser this is probably your best bet. Good luck!

Bennett, I'm glad that you thought of that. Slashdot is not the place to file Mozilla feature requests, though. Try this place instead:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi

For KDE (Konqueror) feature requests:
https://bugs.kde.org/

For Opera feature requests:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/forum.dml?id=24

The firefox addon Live HTTP Headers will provide all the redirect information you'll need although it's not the sort of thing an average user will be able to decipher.

All addons are installed from https://addons.mozilla.org/ so block it. This way they only get the addons that you have previously installed. You can also look at Firefox ADM to see what group policy settings you can control. Or you can let the users choose what they want. The fact is that if it works for them why would you want to stand in the way of that. On some of my machines I have vanilla firefox, and on some I have firefox with 15+ addons. I personally have never had an issue with broken addons ending my browsing experience (though I have seen some people have this happen).

There's nothing closed and proprietary about the format. There already are open source groups rewriting it.

Adobe is doing significant rewrites. Take a look at the upcoming 10.1 release. Under the hood, it's a huge set of changes.

It is in Adobe's economic interest to do so as they have a huge investment in the technology. They have competition in the form of Silverlight, HTML5, etc, and said open source.

One of those Javascript engines you speak of was contributed to open source by Adobe.

As politicians like to say, everyone is entitled to their opinion, just not their own facts.

Ahh, the day that comes...

Believe it or not, it's already landed on trunk - at least for Firefox running on Windows 7.

np: Autechre.ws Webcast (02.03.2010)

Try this if you want to have that sort of layout in Firefox.

It's easy for them to offer all these privacy features when companies, google's advertising partners, have mostly moved on to Flash-Cookies (LSO's) anyway, which are far more insidious than browser cookies and most people still don't know about them. At least with FireFox I can install a plug-in, "BetterPrivacy" that will give me control over the Flash cookie infestation!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623 Newest version: for 3.5 - 3.6

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/6623#version-1.38 Older version for 2.0+

When I first found out about these Flash cookies and installed the BetterPrivacy FireFox Add-on I was blown away by the stuff I found hiding on my computer! Now I knew how amazon and others knew what I had been looking at on the internet even with all of my privacy protections on...

Also; please remember that the open-source Chromium is not exactly the same thing as the Chrome that everyone downloads. Lot's of stuff is added that you don't have the source code for...
All that said, competition is good. I'm glad to see it. But I don't trust Google any more than I trust Microsoft when it comes to privacy, perhaps even less so.

It's easy for them to offer all these privacy features when companies, google's advertising partners, have mostly moved on to Flash-Cookies (LSO's) anyway, which are far more insidious than browser cookies and most people still don't know about them. At least with FireFox I can install a plug-in, "BetterPrivacy" that will give me control over the Flash cookie infestation!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623 Newest version: for 3.5 - 3.6

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/6623#version-1.38 Older version for 2.0+

When I first found out about these Flash cookies and installed the BetterPrivacy FireFox Add-on I was blown away by the stuff I found hiding on my computer! Now I knew how amazon and others knew what I had been looking at on the internet even with all of my privacy protections on...

Also; please remember that the open-source Chromium is not exactly the same thing as the Chrome that everyone downloads. Lot's of stuff is added that you don't have the source code for...
All that said, competition is good. I'm glad to see it. But I don't trust Google any more than I trust Microsoft when it comes to privacy, perhaps even less so.

It's not just when maximized. The general Chrome interface is very compact, having the menu bar done away with. When using Firefox, I install the Classic Compact extension, which is an improvement. But designwise, it doesn't look as polished as the default Chrome or Firefox theme.

How annoying that would be? Being a developer 90%+ of the web sites I browse are in English which is not my native language. Hopefully it will respect the browser language settings (I use an English browser) or it can be switched off.

Answering to your question, maybe this is what you're looking for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/918

It seems no browser offers the functionality to wipe those out, and yet they can contain malicious code (there was a recent infection at the office).

You might be interested in the BetterPrivacy plugin for Firefox.

It's news because there are people like me who've been waiting for this functionality before switching.

The Firefox developers basically refused to make an interface for per-site permissions part of the core product, forcing everyone to use CS Lite and NoScript or similar. They do the job, but every time there's a new version you have compatibility problems.

As soon as these new functions hit the Linux and Mac versions of Chrome, I'm saying goodbye to Firefox. It's slow, bloated and crashy, and I've only been sticking with it because of the lack of CS Lite and NoScript on other browsers. I suspect Firefox is going to pay the price for valuing advertisers at the expense of users.

Major attack vector: Acrobat Reader. Security company publishes intrusion analysis in pdf format. If you clicked it, you may be part of the problem.

This is Slashdot. Who clicks on the article links?

On a serious note, the Link Alert extension for Firefox will put an icon following links that go to a PDF file. (I know that the /. editors kindly put "(PDF)" after it, but to be honest I tuned it out, and if I felt like reading TFA would have just clicked.)

I feel Chrome is behind the times. Firefox has good solutions for these problems:

1. Tree-style tabs: Maintain related tabs in a group, with tree-like relationships between different tabs. When done with a subject, close the whole tree related to that subject. I use Tab Kit, which provides some other functionality in addition to tree-style.

2. Temporary bookmarks: For bookmarks that are of interest now but may not be in a few weeks

I feel Chrome is behind the times. Firefox has good solutions for these problems:

1. Tree-style tabs: Maintain related tabs in a group, with tree-like relationships between different tabs. When done with a subject, close the whole tree related to that subject. I use Tab Kit, which provides some other functionality in addition to tree-style.

2. Temporary bookmarks: For bookmarks that are of interest now but may not be in a few weeks

I feel Chrome is behind the times. Firefox has good solutions for these problems:

1. Tree-style tabs: Maintain related tabs in a group, with tree-like relationships between different tabs. When done with a subject, close the whole tree related to that subject. I use Tab Kit, which provides some other functionality in addition to tree-style.

2. Temporary bookmarks: For bookmarks that are of interest now but may not be in a few weeks

Latest release works with Firefox 3.6

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

No one wants Flash and I suspect no one will want yet another browser plugin. WebGL is a much nicer option:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/webgl-for-firefox/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/09/three-more-webgl-demos/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/10/webgl-in-the-wild/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-goes-mobile/
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/webgl-draft-released-today/

And here's WebGL combined with Theora video to create a 360 degree interactive video:

http://bjartr.blogspot.com/2010/01/long-delayed-webglu-update-some-360.html

I have ImageZoom, and zooming in on the pictures shows that they're actually the same image.

Is this a recent decision? Up until about last week, Mozilla representatives were saying they were not supporting any OS-supplied CODECs, period.

Here's the bug, described as:

Bug 382267 is being restructured to not contain implementations of decoders for
video codecs and to allow different backend decoder implementations.

Implement a backend that uses GStreamer to decode audio/video, allowing support
of all the video formats that the user has GStreamer plugins for.

This has been around for a while, but isn't completed yet and appears to be targeted for Fenec.

Lets talk again when group policies are present in Firefox/Chrome

I came in to say this myself. I can't believe the article didn't even really hit this point. It's a huge issue once your organization scales past a few dozen machines.

I think it's kindof a systemic open source blind spot, actually, a product of the fact that most open source developers are (a) unlikely to have an itch involving centralized administration and (b) probably not keen on the principle of centralized administration in general, since software freedom in the end means control of your own machine.

Of course, at work, it's not your *own* machine, and it serves the purpose of software freedom if free software can circulate more broadly. Plus, Firefox is just a better too. So people have been talking about this very point for years. And amazingly, nobody at Mozilla seems to get it. I'd bet Firefox could have another 10-15% of browsershare if they did.

There is at least one project out there which is aiming to change this, but I think it's going to take more than one isolated and barely known project to get around this issue.