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No need to use the out-of-date cache. Use the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox. Simply use Googlebot as your user agent and it'll get you into most of those useless registration sites.

I've never come across one of these ads. In fact, I rarely get ads as I use the Adblock Plus plugin for Firefox. This just gives even more reason to ban advertisements entirely. Thanks!

Assuming the Windows of Firefox:

• you can use the Client Customization Kit to build your own custom Firefox installer that ships with your preferred settings;
• you can edit chrome\en-GB.jar\locale\browser-region\region.properties and replace "Google" with "Yahoo.co.uk" in the "browser.search.defaultenginename" line (localize as necessary);
• you can delete searchplugins\google.xml, and Firefox will default to the next-highest-priority search engine for your locale (probably Yahoo); and finally
• you can just click on the search bar and select which search engine you want.

You're looking for fault in something that works perfectly fine.

Distrust FTW. One-click tracks-covering. You just have to remember to turn it on before surfing those dodgy sites.

To be honest, I also found it difficult to locate any "financial disclosure statement", because I presumed it was lawyerese and googled for the exact phrase. (The real lawyerese is apparently "Independant Auditors' Report and Consolidated Financial Statements".)

(Can't you just call us stupid rather than malicious? :P )

They rushed on that! I believe Firefox is licenced under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL.

Here are some of the highlights:

For 2006 investment value: $50,842,504

Total Assets: $74,148,710

Royalties Search: $61,501,145

Interest: $2,162,756

Contributions: $92,602

Unrealized gain Investments: $1,791,490

Software Development Expenses: $11,775,516

just so people know their donation is spent well.

Firefox does not look like a very typical FOSS program anymore in which developers don't get any money back from the masses of users. The developers working at Mozilla are getting paid directly from the money that the users are contributing with their clicks. Hence, I think the mantra of 'if you don't like it, fork it" is not really valid in this scenario. Note this is opposed to projects with paid developers like Apache and the Linux kernel which is supported by corporate entities and not end users.

Also, I remember that Mozilla wanted contributions for the NYT ad a few years ago and many of my friends who were students barely scraping by, contributed some of their much needed money to the project. Apart from that I guess a ton of people donated money to Mozilla in the past few years thinking that they needed funding badly. Did Mozilla really need it or were they getting enough money from Google to run that ad by themselves? The fact that the CEO of Mozilla gets a compensation of half a million dollars makes it worse.

Does this also mean the users(who are contributing to the coffers with their use of Firefox) can demand fixes to the nagging bugs and not get a 'if you don't like it fork it' reply? Take a look at this very annoying image captions wrapping bug that plagued users and web developers and was unfixed for seven years despite even stalwarts like XKCD's Randall Munroe complaining in this bugzilla thread. Note that you need to copy paste because bugzilla doesn't allow links from Slashdot https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375

It makes for very entertaining reading. I personally use Opera(I used to be a big supporter of Firefox back in the day) for it's leanness and speed. I would switch over to Firefox in a flash if they fix the bloatness.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2254

Works with everything I've tried it on.

Looks like Firefox on Windows is ok for SSL, as they use their own RNG on Windows in NSS instead of just wrapping the Win32 API.

Personally I'd prefer webkit to support Canvas3D and to have a fast ES4 implementation. Google are not using Suns hotspot VM so I think typed ES4 on a fast VM would be competitive (and run in standard web browser)!

I see this release as a hurried and premature foot in the door; an uncomfortable mishmash.

In the Conclusions section of that site, it links to an email discussion in which they point out that the reason for this was a difference in versions of the underlying rendering engine, Gecko (1.7 vs 1.8). For a meaningful comparison, you'd have to compare a version of the Suite to a version of FF with the same Gecko version underneath.

Mozilla is working on an automated performance testing framework, Talos, as well as a suite of JavaScript performance tests; it will be interesting to see some hard numbers comparing the performance of different versions of FF as well as different apps.

Does anybody actualy read the faqs for software they use? It explicitly says NOT to use filterset-g with ABP RIGHT IN THEIR OWN DOCUMENTATION - FILTERSET-G IS NOT OPTIMIZED FOR ABP! Just use Easylist+EasyElement and if your paranoid the ABP Tracking Filter and you have the best ad-blocking system on the planet.

Does anybody actualy read the faqs for software they use? It explicitly says NOT to use filterset-g with ABP RIGHT IN THEIR OWN DOCUMENTATION - FILTERSET-G IS NOT OPTIMIZED FOR ABP! Just use Easylist+EasyElement and if your paranoid the ABP Tracking Filter and you have the best ad-blocking system on the planet.

There's an addon in firefox that lets you enable flash on a per file basis. (I would say movie, but there is non movie flash crap)
Personally, I think it's better for a browser to have plugins to do this kind of stuff, than having it built in. Gives you more flexibility.

Check out their financial FAQ as well. They specifically talk about how they'll be increasing money spent on grants in the next year.

Sorry, I don't see anyone else complaining of the same problem. It must be quite rare. If you're one of the very few people that experience it, you'll need to give lots details so the problem can be found and fixed. You can start by finding the regression window if it's recently become worse. Include that information in your bug report.

There are no "minimalist browser" roots. Firefox was always meant to be a web browser with 'right set' of features. Check the roadmap.

According to the financial statement, Mozilla spent $11,775,516 on "software development" in 2006. I'm guessing that mostly means salaries and benefits for employees who work on Gecko and Firefox. So the bulk of Mozilla's spending is on developing (specific) open-source software.

I don't know what the "less than $300,000" thing refers to. Maybe it refers to monetary grants to other open-source projects, or maybe it refers to things like buying laptops for volunteers so they can contribute more effectively.

They're spending far, far more than $300,000 on their software developers. Do you really think they have just three developers?

BTW, what "important memory leak bugs" do you think need fixing? I'm seeing almost no signs of memory leaks. I'd rather they focus on bugs that I actually see, such as not remembering the scroll position or not importing IE favorites in the correct order.

They're spending far, far more than $300,000 on their software developers. Do you really think they have just three developers?

BTW, what "important memory leak bugs" do you think need fixing? I'm seeing almost no signs of memory leaks. I'd rather they focus on bugs that I actually see, such as not remembering the scroll position or not importing IE favorites in the correct order.

TrackMeNot

whoops, yeah, guess you're right, none of the shows in that center column looked remotely interesting to me, so I just clicked on scrubs in the left hand column. The direct feature does not in fact work in seamonkey (well, not without the IETab plugin). Seems like sticking with torrents would be the way to go if you enjoy these shows.

The distracting function of something that moves is exactly what the advertisers want to exploit.
Personally, I've disabled animated gif's and installed Adblock and NoScript.
This helps me avoid almost all web-advertisement and has the added benefit of getting me rid of annoying flash-intros/interfaces and such crap.

1. Install the necessary fonts (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/)
2. Apply symbol font fix (http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/tth/symfontconfig.html

1. Install the necessary fonts (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/)
2. Apply symbol font fix (http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/tth/symfontconfig.html

Sun has new language for client-side scripts.. Just-so-coincidentally, Sun has had a variation of this new "language" available in your browser for a decade! It's called applets and the JRE.

Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Groovy. Whatever. Sun has a Java runtime in the browser, a sandboxed one that can only access the DOM and browser. But you still get all the Java benefits, like multithreading and bytecode compilation. And all the Java benefits, like it's implemented for IE AND Firefox on Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris. Further, it is available under the GPL, so you can port it to any other platform.

See this web page for details of Sun's leaner faster in-browser JVM.

I couldn't figure out why Gmail notifier for firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/173 wasn't working. There's no clear comment on the mozilla pages.

In my dream world, I would love to be able to deliver bytecode via HTTP, execute it in a tightly controlled sandbox, but still use the DOM as the UI delivery mechanism, but somehow I doubt that'll happen!!

I think it's a terrible idea but it is already listed as a requirement for JS3.

weak typing,

lack of threading

lack on non-prototypical OO features

It can host a variety of scripting languages such as Python, Ruby and, surprise, even JavaScript, as well as a couple home-grown languages such as Groovy and the purpose built JavaFX Script

Now before you shriek in horror at the thought of a JVM running in a web browser, Sun have made a renewed commitment to the browser via the soon to be released Consumer JRE, which aims to relieve some of the bloat and provide an improved experience.

Still no official 64 bit browser plugin but the IcedTea folks are working on a substitute.

What exactly is "bad" about JQuery?

Bad GUI standards? What does that have to do with JavaScript? If you can name a GUI standard within a single language that it better, please let me know. Certainly you don't mean Python's GUI since there's no standard there at all. It's the same story with C, C++, Ruby, Perl, Pascal, and all of the others. A notable exception is Java (aside from the AWT/Swing duplication), and a large number of people hate that. Name something better.

What's wrong with DOM/CSS, especially when there is nothing about JavaScript itself that's intimately tied with DOM/CSS. There's no reason within the language's constraints that an applications programmer couldn't integrate JavaScript with GTK+ or Qt.

As for debuggers, have you even used Venkman? Or are you still using alert() calls for your debugging?

Mozilla breaks things all the time. Witness the bang up job they did with removing support for install.js (which allowed plugins to install without a browser restart):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=352762

But hey, they're OSS lovers, so they must be angels.

Microsoft is saying, wait, the web doesn't need to be extended at all! Well, except with Silverlight and WPF

Those are actually Brendan Eich's words. The extended commentary from which that comes is over here.

MS do indeed want to close the internet, and the name of the game is "patent encumberance." It's going to be too hard to lock up JavaScript, so they don't want to play with that anymore. They need to have everyone investing in a new MS-proprietary, patent-encumbered language.

I know it's somewhat indicative of a tinfoil hat, but that's basically what I and many others do, using NoScript.
If I trust the website enough to run javascript, then I add it to my whitelist. I don't see the need for javascript on most of the pages I go to, and would rather not have my computer running unnecessary code. Seems to my totally uneducated POV that it'd slow my computer down if I have 20 tabs each running javascript stuff, when only 2 of them ACTUALLY need it. My RAM is precious to me. =(

P3P lets a create a all-encompassing privacy plan for their browser, and only websites that comply with particular levels of user privacy, and sign their sites as doing so, are able to set and read cookies in the way that the user specifies. The standard was created by W3C, and even had support initially from IE and Mozilla.

The code for P3P in Mozilla sat untouched from 2003 until 2007, so they turned it off for a few releases to see if anyone would notice. When no one complained, they finally yanked it out of the firefox and seamonkey trunks.

The vast majority of websites are never going to file one of these documents, since it is just a bunch of paperwork, and a setup for a lawsuit against yourself.

My questions not answered by this article are:

1. What does this new system have that P3P does not?
2. Why is the FTC involved? Does the government have to control every aspect of our lives?
3. Who is actually going to trust every website out there to abide by these controls? A company that signs and promises not to abuse your data, and then asks for extra privileges are the most likely to abuse it.
4. If a website does abuse data that they promised not to, how will they be caught? Will they be tried in court as criminals? Copyright infringers are tried as criminals and we all know how that turned out.

The Do not call registry works because it is tied phone numbers, which are static for users, and are the only gateway for phone communication between a user and a solicitor. There is no such vehicle for the internet. If the U.S. government wants to assign web browsing IDs for all users, then it could work. If that ever happens, I'm moving to Cambodia.

I prefer CookieSafe. It's got a simple UI that works almost identically to NoScript. I have it set to accept cookies globally per session since many sites won't work without them, with sites that require logins white listed.

Permit Cookies is a more user friendly version of your last two steps.

Turn off cookies for all sites, then to permit a site (session or permanently) you just hit alt+c and choose one, then hit enter.

Very odd. The official keyboard reference page says that the Firefox Mac shortcut for "next tab" is Cmd-Opt-Tab, but this doesn't work on my system at all. Neither does Cmd-PageDn, which is supposedly the alternative.

Command-Option-[Left|Right]Arrow seem to do it, though.

If black-listing is your thing, why not try Adblock or Adblock Plus?

You can get filters to automatically update for Adblock Plus, but it's a game for me to use Adblock and find every little ad/script I don't want that slips through!

If black-listing is your thing, why not try Adblock or Adblock Plus?

You can get filters to automatically update for Adblock Plus, but it's a game for me to use Adblock and find every little ad/script I don't want that slips through!

I probably should've phrased that better. I don't use IE by default, thus, I disable scripting in an attempt to keep other programs from loading it up as an embedded/external browser (WiMP does this) and using it maliciously. Just a minor precaution. Also, take a look at NoScript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722 it disables all scripts by default but then allows you to whitelist/blacklist on a site by site basis. It's simple and works really well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865
It is your friend.

Actually, viewing ODF in Firefox is quite fast. No need for any suite to load. Besides, the are other suites beyond OpenOffice. Koffice and Workplace are two readily available examples.

Scrapbook is a neat one that you can install for Firefox to keep a record of every page you visit (on your computer). If you visit a web page and discover that it's different at a later time, you can browse Scrapbook for the old version of the page. The bonus is that it seems to keep the page format and structure intact.

Ok, I'll bite on a couple of your points here...

The other big shove Vista has going for it is the migration for development to not only a new set of APIs, but a new concept of development that is as revolutionary as Drag and Drop event based programming made popular with Visual Basic back in 1993. Vista's XAML and core WPF technologies are a graphic designer/developers wet dream in terms of abilities, performance and moving from basic UI constructs. This can also be witnessed with Silverlight, another technology based on Vista technology.

Vista brings no new development models, and especially no 'revolutionary' ones that didn't already exist...let me explain...

XML based interfaces such as XAML have existed for quite a while now. Libraries for doing such things have also been around for a while now...just take a look at Firefox, it is based on XUL (XUL has been around since 1998). Whats even better about XUL, is it is cross platform (something XAML can't claim) and based on existing standards. You may think XAML is a big deal, but I say its just another stolen idea that has already been implemented in a better way elsewhere. You could already write native-looking apps in an XML and cross platform manner. What does XAML do that XUL does not? If you know, please enlighten me - because I don't see it.

And Vista as for the claim that Vista is buggy or broken or performs slowly, think about it in these terms instead. It is more stable than XP, OS X, and Linux and for an v1 OS release has shown that MS can get security on industry par and even best what is out there, as Vista has had fewer security flaws or bugs than OS X has in the last year and Tiger has been around a while where these issues should have been fixed a long time ago.

More stable and secure than Linux? Stability (and security, for that matter) of the platform is still questionable and I simply feel it is, at best, baseless to say it is more stable than Linux (and simply silly to say its more secure than Linux). Baseless in the sense that no one has really tested it under long duration or high load environments for any appreciable amount of time comparable to its Linux counterpart. In other words...call me when its running on servers and has uptimes >1 year, then we can start to talk.

Also, v1? You really think Vista was written from scratch? I am sorry, but I wouldn't call Vista a v1 OS...it has far too many non-v1 parts built into it to be called a v1 release.

Here's a video showing how TomTom MapShare works, and demonstrating a secret undocumented cheatcode!

TomTom mapshare explanation and cheatcode

TomTom Home is a Mozilla xulrunner based desktop application for managing content on your TomTom, kind of like iTunes for GPS devices, but written with open source software, and programmable in JavaScript, XPCOM and C++. The reason for using an extensible open source platform like xulrunner is so TomTom and third party developers can customize and extend it by writing interfaces and tools that enable users to create, manage and share content on TomTom GPS devices (like voices, points of interest, reviews, routes, pictures, music, etc), and integrate TomTom Home with online services and content providers (like Yelp, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc).

TomTom is hiring XUL/JavaScript/AJAX/DHTML Developers to work on TomTom Home and other interesting projects in Amsterdam! TomTom's a great company to work for, in a wonderful location. If you're qualified and interested, please contact me and I'll give you more details.

-Don

I generally follow that: ODF for my work and for interoperability. PDF for files to be printed by the clueless.

If I know someone is using MS Office and doesn't have a parallel installation of another suite, then I point them to Sun's ODF plugin as well as to the Firefox ODF Viewer.

I mainly use OOo, but occasionally try Koffice, Abiword, etc. I used to have MS Office one various spare machines. What got me (re-)started with OOo was how slow and crash-prone I found MS Office XP to be. When OOo hit 1.5 I found that, for me, it beat XP in speed, flexibility, reliability and accurate rendering of files produced by others. YMMV.

It's been years since I had MS Office on any machines and I look forward to promoting KOffice now that it's available even for legacy platforms.