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Snopes, like most other sites using popups, sets a cookie the first time you visit, so you only get the popup once per some amount of time (however long until the cookie expires). Also, these days sites get around popup blockers these days by raising the popups on a mouse click event, instead of when you first visit the page. Try clicking on an empty area of the page to generate the popup (after you have cleared your cookies).

I can confirm that they do use popups as I got one from them just yesterday. Actually what I got was a pop-under, masquerading as a Windows dialog box, which is even worse. Snopes' advertising has become quite obnoxious, but their content is still good so I grudgingly put up with it. Incidentally, if you hate popunders as much as I do, please vote for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369306 to kill them forever. (Don't add comments to the bug though, that's bad bugzilla etiquette)

NoScript requires you to explicitly enable sites to run scripts, either per session or permanently. This turns people off, but security is never easy and it's just two clicks.

AdBlock Plus and Filterset.G

Use them. It's just four clicks and a Restart. Install Now. Install Now. Install Now. Install Now. Restart.

Enjoy.

AdBlock Plus and Filterset.G

Use them. It's just four clicks and a Restart. Install Now. Install Now. Install Now. Install Now. Restart.

Enjoy.

I use the blocksite mod for FF my string looks like this:

"http://pcturbopro.com|||http://us2.4you.dada.net|||http://amaena.com|||http://winantivirus.com|||http://www.drivecleaner.com|||http://longlifepc.com|||http://scanner2.malware-scan.com/"

That all seems to be the same ad btw, for some antivirus software that is in fact spyware.

Also run WOT.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3456

What any of this has to do w/ anything I don't know...

Mozilla was achieving success from the very start. The usage of Mozilla doubled every year from 2000 to 2005 (and probably before 2000 also but the stats sites just don't have any data on that time period). Since 2005, Mozilla use has doubled yet again. Because Firefox came out in 2004, of course most people who use Firefox today didn't use Mozilla products before Firefox. That's the nature of exponential growth.

Memory leaks have been fixed for years now. Just look at the ones that were fixed this week alone. If you think there are still some unfixed, just let us know how to reproduce the leak and we'll file a bug report so it can be fixed. I would never tell you to buy more RAM to work around a memory leak. That would be incredibly stupid.

If you didn't see the incredible success of Mozilla long before Firefox came out, and if you don't see that memory leaks are getting fixed, you're simply not paying any attention.

For coding, I find PHP5's syntax clearer - verbose keywords are the key, for me. For usage, I find Perl's better - simply require/use a module, instantiate, use, etc. Plus, the CPAN archive of modules and classes is outstanding.

However, I feel about Perl's OO the way I feel about Javascript's - it's syntactically weird, as you say, and not verbose enough for me. Too much implied through context and operators, not enough spelled out. That said, I tough it out and work with 'em both.

For Javascript, syntax is apparently going more verbose in the next major ECMA release... if I understand this correctly.

That appears to be a bug in current Firefox builds. According to the documentation, a DOCTYPE declaration without a DTD should trigger full standards mode. Feel free to submit a bug report.

they don't introduce custom extensions to doctypes to render correctly

Firefox, like most other browsers, uses doctype switching. If it didn't, they'd have to choose between breaking compatibility with a hell of a lot of websites or following the specifications. The only difference here is that Microsoft are using the standard HTML way of including metadata rather than using the doctype as a heuristic.

If only someone would point that out to Microsoft.. the most obvious exception to your relationship.

No kidding. If it wasn't for Microsoft, I could have used the word "quite" instead of "often". It's not enough to have millions of beta testers (err, I mean customers) - you have to provide a way to listen to them. Collecting $99 or $249 to open a PSS ticket (and then spout worthless advice such as "do an in-place Windows reinstall" instead of providing a fix) doesn't cut it.

At least free software gets this right.

use Firefox and convince everyone to do as well

Specific problem: Firefox chews ungodly amounts of memory doing nothing.
Steps to reproduce: Use Firefox. Internet Explorer eats 40MB of RAM to display 8 tabs, Firefox uses 120MB. Three times Internet Explorer's.

Seriously, it cannot get more detailed than that. From what I've seen, all you're doing is answering every person who says what the problem is with "that's a useless bug report" just so you can avoid admitting Firefox has an issue. It does, just some of us don't really care that much and don't bother jumping through hoops to get such responses as "Mozilla is not an HTML user agent" (and Firefox by extension, but that bug is ancient).

Use the Linky add-on for Firefox... it features such pr0n friendly context items as "Open all images links in separate tab." Which will put all the linked to pictures on one tab. Awesome!

> Here are a few Firefox flaws.

Did I ever say there are no flaws? Please point to where I said that!

Given that I've personally filed 1800-some bugs on Gecko and Firefox over the last 8 years or so, I'm quite aware that there are flaws. My point was that there are fewer flaws than there would be if no one were being paid to work on the browser. I note that you carefully avoided responding to this point.

> especially when the computer has been put into hibernation

Which Firefox version are you seeing this problem with? There was https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213637 but that claims to be fixed as of Firefox 2.0.0.8 or the latest Firefox 3 betas. If you're seeing high CPU usage after hibernation with something newer than that, please file a bug and cc bzbarsky atsign mit dot edu.

> Abuse by the developers of those who report bugs:

Are you sure they were developers and not just people who created a (free) account in the bug database and then started triaging bugs? The latter happens quite a bit. If people are being abusive, please report them to gerv atsign mozilla dot org. That sort of thing is unacceptable.

> That's been the response to the CPU hogging bug reports I've seen.

Can you please point me to these bug reports? I'd appreciate that very much.

> They don't seem to want to work on bugs that require extended troubleshooting.

Of course not! Who does? ;) More to the point, given a choice between fixing two bugs that have equal impact, but one of which does not require extended troubleshooting while the other does, the choice is clear: fix the one that doesn't need troubleshooting. It's the obviously efficient choice, if the payoffs are really the same: it fixes one of the two equivalent bugs and leaves time to also fix other bugs. If there are enough developers that there are people idle, this calculus goes out the window, of course. But that's not the situation Mozilla (or any other software project I've ever encountered) is in.

Of course payoffs depend on things like the severity of the problem, its ubiquity, etc. They can be hard to peg down precisely, and it may be that in some cases people underestimated the impact of a bug. Can you point me to specific high-impact bugs that are being avoided because of a need for troubleshooting?

> Firefox cannot be made portable

I can't speak to this, since I've never tried to do it, to be honest.

> Firefox will not allow multiple instances.

Right. The profile system inherited from Netscape is a bit of a mess. I've never seen anyone deny this.

> Firefox session restore is not reliable.

Is there a bug filed for this issue? If there is, can you please cc bzbarsky atsign mit dot edu on it? If not, can you either file or provide reliable steps to reproduce so that I would be able to file it myself?

> Firefox hogs memory.

Yes. It's being worked on. See Stuart Parmenter's weblog and the large amount of work done on leak fixing.

> while continuing to deny that any exist.

I'm going to call your bluff here, sorry. Can you point me to one instance of an active Firefox developer denying that memory issues exist? (Note: Ben Goodger is not active, and wasn't by the time he posted the blog entry people live to cite.)

> Firefox advertises extensions, then blames them for problems.

This is an issue, yes.

> A common topic of articles about Firefox is some variation of "How to make Firefox work the
> way it should".

Are these articles written by Firefox devlopers?

> Often Firefox developers blame Firefox extensions advertised on the Mozilla web site.

Advertised where, exactly? The link to addons.mozilla.org from www.mozilla.com?

Try Greasemonkey with an in-line text advert removal script.

Greasemonkey for Firefox

Disable Text ads

• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-05.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-09.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-01.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-07.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-12.html
  
• http://darwinawards.com.nyud.net:8090/darwin/darwin2007-13.html
  

Worth noting - I presume you can change the URL by updating this preference here under about config? app.update.url - the URL just a short root https://aus2.mozilla.org/update/3/ a list of variables in it, then /update.xml .
Presumably you could set this to whatever corporate server you wanted to and simply update things as they are tested?

Pug

We distribute configuration changes to Firefox through user.js and userChrome.css; settings here override the user's other settings when the browser is restarted. (Of course, this means that everybody's profiles need to be stored with a standard profile name in a standardized location, which you have to be able to copy files to remotely.)

If these aren't secure enough for you, then you might try Mozilla's guide to Locking Preferences or try their client customization kit.

You need to re-read your post, with a focus of the tense of the verbs. It is all future-state, not past or current. And besides, it looks to be a toolset for ISPs to build custom-branded versions of Mozilla with the dialup (?!) information for the ISP already setup.

What does this have to do with enterprise deployment, policy-enabling and on-going remote patching?

From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck (Emphasis mine)

"There is work going on to product a XUL based Firefox CCK. For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/."

"The CCK project will produce a set of tools that help distributors customize and distribute the client. Support is provided for creating CD and download installers. Wizards are provided to simplify customization, installation, and ISP signup."

"Currently, our design centers around a win32 implementation because the size of my team has been limited. See Advocacy below if you don't like that."

Are these tools? No - it's a project to create the tools. How do you read that and think enterprises can deploy that NOW?

You need to re-read your post, with a focus of the tense of the verbs. It is all future-state, not past or current. And besides, it looks to be a toolset for ISPs to build custom-branded versions of Mozilla with the dialup (?!) information for the ISP already setup.

What does this have to do with enterprise deployment, policy-enabling and on-going remote patching?

From http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck (Emphasis mine)

"There is work going on to product a XUL based Firefox CCK. For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/firefox/."

"The CCK project will produce a set of tools that help distributors customize and distribute the client. Support is provided for creating CD and download installers. Wizards are provided to simplify customization, installation, and ISP signup."

"Currently, our design centers around a win32 implementation because the size of my team has been limited. See Advocacy below if you don't like that."

Are these tools? No - it's a project to create the tools. How do you read that and think enterprises can deploy that NOW?

Yes. If a little bit of money makes the difference between having a guaranteed support contract and posting something on bugzilla that may/may-not ever get answered, what do you think the better option is? Look at how long Firefox had a cut/paste bug. It took 4 years for a fix! If that bug directly impacted your productivity, would you want to wait 4 years for somebody to finally get around to fixing it for free or would you rather start a support ticket and have the issue resolved quickly at some cost?

Don't compare 24-hour phone service with guaranteed response to posting a message in a forum where you may never get a response if your bug isn't sexy enough. Free is usually only truly free if your time is worthless.

A major hindrance to Firefox's adoption in the corporate world is that it is SLOW on tables. IT departments have to make laundry list applications using tables.

IE depicts these ten+ times faster than Firefox. A page which loads in 3 seconds on IE may take 30 seconds to load on Firefox. That's a complete showstopper.

This is a well-known bug which has existed since the early days of Firefox. And no, Firefox 3 doesn't solve it.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352367

are available here http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox:2.0_Institutional_Deployment

And a great support site is here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38

I beg to differ. Check out the Firefox Client Customization Kit (CCK).

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/cck/

Here is a Slashdot story submission that helps explain why corporations have not adopted Firefox. The submission was rejected: "008-01-09 02:36:24 Mozilla gets a new CEO (Features,Mozilla) (rejected)".

Many people depend on Slashdot to help them learn about important events in computing. But this event hasn't been covered, and apparently is being ignored: It appears that Firefox does not have more market share because Firefox development has been very poorly managed.

Here is the Slashdot story submission:

Winifred Mitchell Baker has given up her position as CEO of Mozilla.

Firefox is now partly a profit-making effort. There has been considerable discussion about the possibility of Firefox issuing stock and becoming a public corporation. Firefox made a profit of $47,000,000 on revenues of $67,000,000 in 2006.

That enormous profit percentage that raises a question: Why did Firefox take in $67 million, but only spend $20 million? What is happening with the rest of the money?

Firefox development has been glacially slow. For example, in 6 years the CPU hogging and memory hogging bugs are still not fixed (although there has been considerable improvement).Thunderbird development has been abandoned. Opera is able to restore sessions, but the Firefox session restore feature throws away URLs if response is slow. Why is that, when millions of dollars are spent on development each year?

Firefox makes money when people use it to visit ads. Google pays because Firefox uses Google as the default search engine. It seems likely that a profit-making Firefox will eventually prevent add-ons like AdBlock Plus that stop the display of ads which many users find annoying.

The former CEO, Winifred Mitchell Baker, has no technical knowledge. She is a lawyer. She took the job when no one thought there was money in development of Netscape/Firebird that became Firefox.

Will the new CEO manage better? Or will Firefox development begin to be unfriendly to the user so that it will make money?

Neither of these two methods are particularly good at protecting you. As an analogy, imagine you are in a sword fight and every time you get hit, you place a piece of armour the same size as the gash over the gash. It would take you hours of fighting to get completely protected and you would not be protected until you had been hit everywhere.

A smarter method is to put armour on that covers everywhere and then take it off or open up holes in it as needed.

Backing away from the analogy again, use Firefox and install NoScript. When you find a site that requires JavaScript (Youtube, I'm looking at you) just add it into the allowed list.

Now, when the guys behind this attack buy a new domain name, you will already be protected.

Wouldn't NoScript protect the Firefox users out there?

You want a smart keyword:

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/smart-keywords.html

For google results:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=wikipedia+%25s

If you are feeling that thing:

http://www.google.com/search?&btnI=1&q=wikipedia+%25s

I don't know what sites you go to, but there is only one website I ever see that prompt for, and that is an intranet website. It would be an issue if this could be used to get saved passwords more easily, which I haven't seen anything about yet, but that is easily prevented by using the secure login plug-in.

There is a Firefox extension called TrackMeNot at http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot that issues random requests to search engines generated from a wordlist. All that needs to be done to make it lookup poison is to modify the query strings with various WHOIS lookups and add .TLD or .ccTLD to the end of the generated search string and send it off. For more usability both the wordlists and WHOIS lookup site strings could be stored in user-editable text files and more words could be added from http://www.gattinger.org/wordlists. List updates could be distributed as extension updates. Later maybe something to randomly do command line lookups could be added too. Finally,a feature could be added to request Squatter URL's and load them in the background without caching to use up their bandwidth. If I knew extension code I would do it myself but as of yet all I can do is provide ideas. To get the source for the extension simply grab it from http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173 and rename it anything.zip then open it up. If anyone does anything with this please email me about it. Thanks. Note: I am not affiliated with TrackMeNot

Two options: one two.

Here's just a partial list

And that's just what's missing from both Firefox _and_ Mozilla Suite / Seamonkey. Seamonkey has some features which Firefox doesn't, and vice-versa.

I'm not sure from your comment whether you already know about this, but Google Calendar does have a read/write API that uses its general data API scheme. The Google Calendar provider for Mozilla Thunderbird uses this API and allows you to create new appointments in Thunderbird itself.

Jingle support in third-party Jabber clients isn't really Google's problem!

They make a plugin for that. I know it harms the folks that host the website, however abusing features of my browser to shove products at me is not a good way to attract folks. I know of some sites that don't abuse the ads, and thus I allow them on those sites (linux.com, slashdot, etc). For others, I'm sorry.

Also a minor note, using adblock does make those 30 second pages load faster, as you don't have to wait on the ad servers, which are usually the bottleneck on these types of pages

Taken from the source in question:
* The Original Code is Mozilla XML-RPC Client component.

also you can find the exact same code here:
http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/extensions/xml-rpc/src/nsXmlRpcClient.js#956

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.

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.

No seriously, the fact that obtaining FLVs give you trouble has to be an exceptional case, considering your credentials as a computer -friendly (at least) person.

the DownloadHelper addon for firefox tends to work fairly well for me, though it gives you a list of the videos in each tab, and being as the names are usually just effectively random alphanumeric strings, it's hard to tell which videos you've downloaded and which you still need to get if you're wanting to grab a bunch of videos at a time.

the online converter at vixy.net also works, though it tends to get flaky at times (cutting off your download in the middle or throwing "invalid video ID" when the url is perfectly fine.) and is slow at best.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433

It burns a lot of CPU time, uses a lot of bandwidth, crashes browsers, and - not for the first time - has serious security issues.

On Firefox, there's an extension called Flashblock. It blocks Flash by default, but allows you to re-enable it on a page-wide or applet-by-applet basis. Several other extensions will do the same thing.

In IE7, you can double-click a spot in the status bar (third box, right to left, of the boxes just to the left of the security zone indicator (the thing that usually says Internet)) or open the Add-on Manager from Tools in the command bar or menu bar, and disable or enable the Flash ActiveX control. This will globally enable or disable flash, but doesn't take effect on a given page until that page is refreshed. Alternatively, the third-party add-on IE7Pro has applet-by-applet flash blocking.

I realize that some sites need it, and on those there's nothing you can do about this problem except hope Adobe updates their software ASAP. For everywhere else though, do yourself a favor and block it.

Since it's now impossible to run a Slashdot story without someone linking to an xkcd cartoon, I propose that we start using tags to save a step. For example, I've tagged this story "xkcd277". Maybe the Slashdotter extension can support that syntax, both by making it easy to tag stories this way and by turning those tags into "Related links" entries or something like that.

Or you can just install the No Script plugin in Firefox and worry a lot less :)

Alerts should be content-modal, not window-modal - Filed in 2000.

You can export (and import) passwords with the Password Exporter addon.

FireFox was supposed to be getting a JIT compiler for JavaScript. It's the one from the Flash player, where it runs ActionScript. That's apparently now expected in 2008. Then we'll see some real improvement.

And boy, do I hate seeing the list one item at a time.