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Parent: Do you have a reference to this intention?

The opening paragraph of the Firefox Development Charter says:

Firefox grew out of the desire to make the best browser for Microsoft Windows. Eventually we began to build on Linux as well, and also Macintosh. Most of our development work is done on Windows, and so that platform naturally tends to lead although we express a desire to work as well as is feasible on every system we can.

That's what I think, too. The extension management should be built closer in the installation. So if you install, you can select all the extensions you want and the setup downloads them for you, and installs them.
I imagine a DAU (duemmster anzunehmender user[ger], stupidest imaginable user) downloading mozilla and not even knowing there _are_ extensions (except they read what's on the page at start). There is an improvement, altought, in the interface (see here), but you have to browse there manually and you gotta know what you're looking for on the firefox page (its small on the right side).
Still, you have to configure it anyhow, like IE if you want it to work like you want, you cant go around this.

besides, it imports settings etc from the IE, so you don't have to set up that much. (I havent tried that, I'm not using IE at all)

That's what I think, too. The extension management should be built closer in the installation. So if you install, you can select all the extensions you want and the setup downloads them for you, and installs them.
I imagine a DAU (duemmster anzunehmender user[ger], stupidest imaginable user) downloading mozilla and not even knowing there _are_ extensions (except they read what's on the page at start). There is an improvement, altought, in the interface (see here), but you have to browse there manually and you gotta know what you're looking for on the firefox page (its small on the right side).
Still, you have to configure it anyhow, like IE if you want it to work like you want, you cant go around this.

besides, it imports settings etc from the IE, so you don't have to set up that much. (I havent tried that, I'm not using IE at all)

That's a nice feature. It keeps Thunderbird as accessible as Mozilla Mail without keeping it in memory, but personally I don't use Thunderbird regularily anymore. I just keep GMail open in a browser tab and I have a little system tray app that forwards all of my mail accounts there. Used in this way, GMail is a web app that's as functional and fast as a local mail program, possibly more so, but it's just a tiny Java app.

About the only thing I go back to Thunderbird for now is to open a newsgroup on my school server, but that functionality can easily be replicated. GMail has convinced me that email is something a web app can do better than a full program installed on your local machine and I see the web browser replacing many other functional applications with access-anywhere web apps.

I also started using Mozilla Sunbird recently (I desperately needed a day-planner), and this is also something from the Mozilla suite that could be done better as a web app. Sunbird has methods of posting your calendar online, but this would only become something anyone could do if it operated as an online service like GMail.

The only current downfall I see with web apps replacing local apps is those rare occasions when you are offline. However, a forward looking browser like Firefox could implement some kind of local caching of web apps and personal data and update all of your changes the next time you are connected. I would rather see the Mozilla foundation jump on this and implement it before Microsoft makes some kind of closed-standard .NET version and splits the user-base, thus defeating the purpoase of a cross-platform web app.

This is why I really like Firefox and hope to see it take over: it supports open standards. Ask any web developer about writing Cascaded Style Sheets. You spend a bit of time developing your page layout, and a lot of time finding workarounds and compromises to make it look reasonable in IE.

If IE holds onto it's market share long enough, it could come into another stage of development and force it's own closed web standards upon us again. Remember the browser wars? JavaScript is still scarred from them. If Firefox gets a head start on web-app development standards (IE seems to be in a dead stage right now), the first big web app development environment could be truly open and cross-platform, not proprietary, flawed and complicated like Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM).

Actually, given the increasing number of broadband users in the USA, the difference in download times for FireFox and Mozilla 1.7.3 is no longer significant.

The difference between 4.5 MB and 11MB is dramatic for the 60 million (49%) US internet users who still don't have broadband.

I'm not sure how a figure like "half" isn't significant. Half of the US still isn't on broadband and for them, Firefox downloading much easier than Mozilla. Firefox is about the size of an MP3. People can relate to downloading something that size.

But Mozilla has a few things that FireFox lacks right now: 1) better page-rendering accuracy and 2) a very good mail and newsgroup reader.

Mozilla and Firefox share the same Gecko rendering engine so I'm not sure where you get the "better page-rendering accuracy" from. Firefox has a powerful companion e-mail application called Thunderbird for anyone who needs a great (not "good") email and newsgroup reader. Thunderbird is to Mozilla email what Firefox is to Mozilla browser.

--Asa

I design in FireFox first, and then I worry about getting it to work in IE. (If I worry at all.)

And yes, I hate those 'Your browser is not supported' messages as well. There is an extension called the User-Agent Switcher though, that allows Firefox to say it's IE.

You'll want this link then. And if you have a Mac, this link should help. Still, keep in mind that Firefox was originally meant to be a Windows program (but it doesn't hurt to be available on multiple platforms though, which I'm definitely in support of).

You'll want this link then. And if you have a Mac, this link should help. Still, keep in mind that Firefox was originally meant to be a Windows program (but it doesn't hurt to be available on multiple platforms though, which I'm definitely in support of).

I think you underestimate the laziness and ineptitude of most Windows users. Why else would they still be running IE anyway?

Oh yeah, here's that link you asked for.

And since the good guys cannot always win (unless you live in an hollywood movie), it is time to prepare a nice chroot jail in which to run our beloved browser (and maybe the mail client as well).

You should have linked to the product page, I don't know how their counters work, but just to make sure.

Get Firefox, take back the web.

And yeah, the product page detects the OS and offers the correct link.

Behold.. Windows Update Extension for Firefox.

Enjoy!

How about adding a few more downloads?! Get it here.

For all the U.S. residents you can make a tax deductable donation to the Mozilla Foundation.

This would work best if it was an automatic part of a significant number of email clients.
Something like this http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245634 might do it.

i have Firefox 0.9.2 .
Firefox seems to have messed up its own page!

You will be able to see that , the "Most recent" listing overlap!!
Does this occur for Ver 1.0 PR guys also?

Mozilla Bug Security Policy. Read it, educate yourself.

Mozilla sits on security bugs frequently. They only have to mark it as a "private" and then they take as long as they want to fix it. The only time they fix it in a hurry is when it's made public. So, at any given time, there may be security bugs that moz devs know about and are hiding. That's called security by obscurity, and it's widely reviled when practiced by other companies.

Each codename appears to a place located to the east of the previous suburb:

Three Kings --> Royal Oak --> One Tree Hill --> Greenlane --> Mission Bay --> Whangamata

(from the Firefox Roadmap)

except it doesn't have a google toolbar. I need my google toolbar!!

yes it does

For the record...

Slashdot does emit code to an HTML standard, it just happens to be HTML 3.2. That's a standard. Call it "outdated" if you like but if it works, it works, right? Isn't that the point of standards, you don't have to change them every time something new comes along?

We're hoping to move to XHTML in the future (sometime within the next year, for sure, I hope) but like everything else it goes on our priority list based on resource-cost and benefit. There are bugs that need to be squashed, meaningful features to be added, and performance improvements we need to put into place that come first.

Honestly XHTML will probably just save us a little bandwidth and make the site look a little prettier, but only the hardcore readers will notice the difference, at least if we do it right. The only real long-term benefit will be to us coders -- it should let us rip out kludgy old code, but of course that's almost as tedious as writing it in the first place, so it's a mixed win.

Yes, it's a mozilla bug, not a Slash code bug. They've known about it for a year, but it's fixed now, yay.

No, it doesn't help that someone else took a static rendering of our homepage and converted it to CSS. That's a fun experiment but of course it's very different to change the code to emit HTML to a different standard.

A shout out to Peter and Shane here for working on the XHTML theme :)

OK, resume flaming us and our sucky HTML, Offtopics all around! :)

I found two of those holes. I did not find them by looking at the source code. So you're wrong :)

First off, my hearty thanks for your vigilence. You're the type of person who makes Mozilla's products safer and better for the rest of us, and I applaud your efforts.

Obviously not every bug or security issue is going to need source access to discover. I'm certainly not claiming that -- lots of peeople find bugs in closed-source code all the time! :).

However, with all due respect, you're only one link in the chain of getting a security issue fixed. Looking at a number of the issues you've reported (some of which are highly creative I must say -- I got a bit of a kick out of this one for example), I've noticed the number of other people involved in getting the problems you've found and reported fixed, and how many of them are not (former) Netscape employees. They are Open Source developers who are looking at the source and coming up with solutions, providing patches and testcases, etc. And you yourself at least have the option of looking at the souce of Mozilla if you so decide that it helps you to detect and fix the problems you find (which can be important if you rely on a project which isn't as actively maintained as Mozilla is).

Regardless, i thank you for making the web safer for the rest of us :).

Yaz.

Hope not because Firefox makes it extremely difficult to upgrade if you want to keep your extensions.

Only one I had problems with was IE View; FF told me it couldn't install it becaue of version conflicts.
I went to the homepage , (just on spec..) and tried installing it from there. Despite the fact the link said Install IE View v0.81, my extensions now include ieview 0.82.

of course by now, the project owner (who's name isn't that obvious..) may have the 'official site' updated.

Only five of the ten security holes involved memory management (buffer overflows, etc). Two were file permission problems and three were logic errors. So avoiding manual memory management would only have kept out half of the holes.

Most of Mozilla uses safer abstractions such as reference-counted pointers and string classes (which are, of course, implemented using manual memory management). But Mozilla manages memory manually in a few places where speed matters a lot, such as image rendering. I think that's the right strategy, even though it occasionally introduces security holes, because overall speed relative to other browsers is important.

I do backend Web development primarily, but for the few times I have to - *shudder* - do front-end development, I find FireFox's WebDeveloper Extension invaluable.

Firefox profiles are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Firefox\... The problem is that changes in most of the Documents and Settings\username folder is copied to the domain server and back upon logging in and logging off. If a user jumps around machines a lot, this can cause copying entire profiles over the network. The Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings directory is exempt, and is intended for things such as Internet cache, which don't need to remain consistent across multiple machines.

Looks like bug 147344 suits, especially comment 11. Might be best if there were a specific bug though, since this would be fairly simple to implement, with a big payoff.

Firefox profiles are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Firefox\... The problem is that changes in most of the Documents and Settings\username folder is copied to the domain server and back upon logging in and logging off. If a user jumps around machines a lot, this can cause copying entire profiles over the network. The Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings directory is exempt, and is intended for things such as Internet cache, which don't need to remain consistent across multiple machines.

Looks like bug 147344 suits, especially comment 11. Might be best if there were a specific bug though, since this would be fairly simple to implement, with a big payoff.

Read them. Do you know how these flaws were found? By people looking at the source code and reporting them. The people who detected the problems couldn't have found them if the source was closed. This is Open Source at its finest.

That's almost Open Source at its finest. Open Source at its finest is this:

For each critical security issue identified, the Mozilla Foundation paid out a $500 bounty. One of the award winners, Mr. Palmgren, has generously donated his award back to the Foundation to support future bounty payments.

That is so freakin' cool, it almost brought a tear to my eye (sniff).

Ok, I'm bawlin'.

I just spent the last half hour fixing all my extensions in my new updated Firefox.

Hell my google toolbar didn't work. Did you check the comments on install page about how to make it work with the new release. jeebus. i could do it on my computer but trying to talk anyone through it would suck hard core.

All those critical bugs have been detected by reviewers from the "Security Bug Bounty Program", as described on mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation has offered a $500 bounty for each security bug found, and already has secured a $10,000 budget to do so.

Thus, all those bugs should not be seen as a proof that the Mozilla code is badly written, but rather that the Mozilla Foundation is aware that secure code is hard to write, and that a good review process is critical to reach this goal.

We've found a bug in firefox, we're really sorry. Anyone using old versions of firefox will be affected.

We've found a bug in internet explorer, we're really sorry. We'll fix it... eventually.

The only difference here is when they decided to announce the flaw.
Mozilla decided to keep it secret until a new version was released. Don't you find that at least slightly scary?

Look when this security exploit was filed: #226669.

mozilla.org really needs to include a link to their Security Centre on their front page.

I'm browsing with Spacetuna.

Are you saying companies shouldn't be applauded for using standards?

Firefox is a great browser, but the project leaders' sunny friendly face doesn't work so well when they refuse to fix this horrible UI bug that makes picking helper applications nearly hopeless in the Mac, in both Firefox and Thunderbird. This, even though there's been a patch posted since June in the discussion thread on that bugzilla page. You'd think backers of a minority browser platform would be a little less dismissive of a minority OS platform.

Oh, and you can check out the Release Notes for the RSS info. They call it "Live Bookmarking" or something.

It's from the Renaming FAQ. Scroll down a little bit on this page.

"What's a Firefox?"
A "Firefox" is another name for the red panda.

Wikalong is a Firefox Extension that embeds a wiki in the SideBar of your browser, indexed off the url of your current page. It is probably most simply described as a wiki-margin for the internet. (Ctrl-Shift-A to activate). I think this is the kind of extension that will really set Firefox apart from IE. Very inventive, shows why having a plugin architecture is cool. Of course, being based on wiki software, this feature needs to obtain a critical mass of users to become truly usefull. However, having a user-maintainted commentary box for every website seems like a great idea. Homepage.

This if for firefox alone but i know there is lots of translations for the rest of the parts in the project. http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp_otherproj .html#firefox I agree with your point that translations are great.. Helped me convert some of my swedish friends for sure.

That's not surprising, considering the theme was released on, and I quote the page, "Released on December 31, 1969".

Seriously though -- a port should be in the works. Hang on till then :-)

-- CD

Noia 2.0 still doesn't work and I have an ugly default theme :(

The proxy support, however, as improved a lot :)

I'm finding myself quickly leaving sites that are built, either intentionally or out of ignorance, as IE-only.

With tabbed browsing, fantastic bookmark controls (add bookmark here and synchronized bookmarks), great content tools (bugmenot, adblock), the browser goes almost everywhere.

Folks who are reading this and who made the plunge, but still use Outlook, SWITCH TO THUNDERBIRD! While I wasn't very happy with the seemingly random way my old emails were imported (messages with multiple mime parts dont have the correct items displayed on the pane, and others meant to be displayed as shown as 'part1.1' attachments), I was incredibly happy with the abilities and extensions of the program.

Specifically, I found Thunderbird very happy to deal with my POP3 and IMAP accounts, interface very easily with GnuPG (via Enigmail)

Mozilla really sucked for quite awhile, but these days I'm surprised when I find people who still only use IE. How 2001.

I look forward to the work being done on calendaring.

No, Mozilla uses libpr0n AKA libimg2 which uses libjpeg code.

The list is here - as is typical in a point-point release, they're all security fixes only.

(My favourite comment is:

The "send page" function can overrun the heap on very long links. With compelling content that people will want to forward to all their friends and the right link this could be used to execute arbitrary code.

Actually ftp.mozilla.org isn't a mozilla.org server - the name points to a bunch of mirrors. The different mirrors run on different systems. It's the one at indiana.edu that's running Gentoo.

a word of warning if your planning on upgrading Firefox, some .9 extentions don't work with 1.0

Ones i found don't work:
* Allow Right Click
* BugMeNot
* Down Them All
* Googlebar
(and maybe a few i forgot)
some update automaticly, but sometimes you need to go to http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/ and do it manually.

but i like the "find in page" bar they have now, and the built in RSS notifier, it also has better integration to ThunderBird

Thanks Mozilla! Great browser! and a great mail client!

Do you have HTTP Referer turned off? Some servers won't send images if they don't receive the proper Referer header. Open about:config and check network.http.sendRefererHeader. Make sure it's set to 2.

... and best of all, you don't have to download an extension like this. :-P

Seriously, I find both browsers good, but for the above reason and because I favor open source software when it comes to stuff that have very much to do with internet security (like browsers), I'm going for Firefox. But I agree Opera has a rich feature set and an innovative team of designers behind it. However, I can't say I care much who was first about what feature. As long as a browser has the features I need, I'm happy. :-)

You can find the release notes for Firefox 0.10 (aka 1.0PR AKA "Greenlane") here - http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/0 .10.html. The MozillaNews link got the wrong page for the release notes, but thankfully, the Firefox Homepage gets the right link.

You can find the release notes for Firefox 0.10 (aka 1.0PR AKA "Greenlane") here - http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/0 .10.html. The MozillaNews link got the wrong page for the release notes, but thankfully, the Firefox Homepage gets the right link.

For one, am I really forced to press ctrl to stop links from opening in a new window? And those links that use a new window, there's really no way to keep them in tabs?

I recommend the Mouse Gestures extension. I always open my links in a tab with gestures. That's the only thing I missed when I switched from the big O, but wouldn't switch back now.