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It's pretty accurate. He was one of the creators of the project now known as Firefox, and he was the lead developer for a long time until Ben Goodger took over.

Look at the MozillaZine story Phoenix 0.3 Coming Soon: Blake Ross writes in with information on the upcoming Phoenix release: "Please bang on the current Phoenix nightlies and help us shake out any last minute bugs. We hope to release Phoenix 0.3 as soon as Monday and need as many eyes on the builds as possible.

They've been working on building it in for years. Just download an SVG enabled build. Maybe you can find one most easily in the MozillaZine forums.

As pointed out by others, Firefox stability is a valid story for Slashdot. One guy having trouble with Firefox isn't, but if there's a huge group of people having troubles it's a story. Maybe the editors deceided to post the story after the n'th request. You wouldn't know.

I for one are having many weird problems with Firefox (like this one ). Still, it's my favorite browser.

As for posting to the mozilla forums, I usually don't get any help there. There are too few people to help out there and too many stupid questions. (Like people who deceide that it is important to inform forum members that Firefox s**ks, because they can't use it on a site with far from standards-compliant html).

This FAQ entry has a link to a program that will let you submit crash reports for hangs. I haven't tried it. The author of the program is Josh Soref (timeless), a Mozilla developer. I'm curious as to how well the program works, so please reply with Talkback IDs.

1.0PR had a javascript pop-up crash bug that drove me crazy. 1.0 fixed that.

Some things to consider:

1. How did you install 1.0? Did you do an overwrite? If so, do a clean install.

2. What extensions are you using? Have you disabled the extension version check?

>On one of the machines, using the 'self update' feature caused Firefox to crash in middle of the upgrade

When was this? Do you have DNS/network/firewall issues which could be causing this?

Lastly, to get some real answers from the experts people should asking here.

I could see this as being something that might possibly maybe be considered if this was something effecting over half the user base... but it's not. It's just a stupid tech support question that someone was dumb and didn't post in the right forum.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/index.php?c=4
This is where this question belongs, not Slashdot mainpage, nor Slashdot subpages.

99% of all stability problems with FF are because of extensions/plugins or unstable systems to begin with.

Isn't there some kind of firefox mailing list for this kind of stuff?

This is something that instead of being asked here should be asked at the Mozilla Firefox forums. There are lots of people who will be happy to help you.

If you believe you have found a bug, you should search if anyone has reported that bug, and if not report it here.


Sorry, but its almost offensive to see this at slashdot.

*cough* SessionSaver and Undoclosetab provide those features you mention for Firefox.

However, I'd like to know if Opera provides features similar to Download Sort or FoxyTunes.

I am still not clear as to what Mitchell Baker knew about this. But if this was done with her knowledge (Mitchell Baker is a woman, despite the name), I would suggest she should personally apologize, if not tender her resignation.

Her blog makes a vague reference to revenue opportunities from the searchbar going forward. I am not sure how I feel about this idea in general, as the general concept blurs Mozilla's role - I don't want my Firefox search bars to be like the zillions of "helpful" IE toolbars out there that direct your search.

But clearly if this is what she meant, deceptively redirecting searches through intermediaries who monitor your searching habits in exchange for money, I oppose it entirely.

We're not talking about a translation mistake or a localization issue, we're talking about basic Policy.

'' There may be a few bad apples in the Mozilla organization ''

This commercially-motivated insertion of adware/spyware is still being defended by Axel Hecht, who's on MozillaEurope's Board Of Directors (although as you can see at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1648 92&highlight= he would rather that English speakers didn't get to read about it)...

...and Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation, is still asking what the fuss is all about.

What's wrong with rerouting an eBay search to an adfarm server, with or without tracking-cookies?

Well, as the previous poster indicated, it means your official Firefox release, 1.0 Final, is intentionally adware/spyware, if you live in Germany, Austria, half of Switzerland, or the stranger parts of Paraguay. Sadly, the policy is still being defended (and hushed up where possible) by people at the very top of Mozilla.

From the thread at http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1648 92:

MozEurope's Axel Hecht in this German discussion thread (http://firefox.stw.uni-duisburg.de/forum/viewtopi c.php?t=9677) admits he included this reroute in the FF-de ebay searchplugin. Yet he claims it's perfectly alright to do this. Btw, this action leave a tracking cookie on your computer (yuck!).

I would have a little faith in the community, as it is huge, strong and very passionate. There may be a few bad apples in the Mozilla organization, but I can assure you that the community will push to get Mozilla.org to deal with this issue appropriately. There's already an increasingly angry thread over on the MozillaZine forums.

The power of Open Source... if you stop trusting the people in charge of the software, you can always fork it and maintain your own distribution. Obviously, that's about 10 degrees of overreaction at this point, but I suspect you'll see a statement either clearing up this issue soon enough, or a cleaning of house in the Mozilla Europe group.

Mitchell Baker (yes! a girl! :) - president of mozilla foundation europe - statement about the "feature":

# We included the search plugin for ebay.de because we thought they would be useful to people. This was the only reason.
# It's very helpful to know how many searches are initiated from the search box as opposed to the URL bar. To do this requires having the browser send a piece of information to the website so it's clear the search was started in the search box. This "identify as search box initiated search" is the ONLY new thing that happens with the ebay.de search plugin.
# The providers of the search plugins give us the URL to which search queries should go. In most cases, this URL is to the main search engine system -- yahoo.de, google.de, etc. It appears that ebay.de has done something different, and given us a URL that doesn't point directly to ebay.de.
# I understand there is concern, or at least a lack of clarity about this.

If you want to read more about this, check this out:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1648 92&highlight=ebay

all fine, but better read this http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1648 92 :-(

And no, I'm not talking in fashion terms. Netscape announced they intend to release a branded version of Firefox.

It was announced in this posting on MozillaZine, and on registering on the link provided, a private forum is available which currently has nothing in it except an announcement that Netscape's Firefox will be available on 30 Nov.

Looks like it'll have a green custom skin from the (limited) bits of screenshot in the page.

Does anyone know of webmail/local clients that can do labels like gmail does? To me, that's the slickest thing about gmail, and i'd kill a man for that feature in thunderbird

Have you tried the latest Thunderbird? 0.9 was released about a week ago and claims to have something like that.

(If that is what you want, please don't feel the need to kill anybody -- just donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

Delete your profile:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.phtml?title=Profil e_Folder

It's out. It's announced on the front page of Mozillazine. http://www.mozillazine.org/ But it's not meant for the average user, only people who have been doing testing of nightlies for a while.

Check out http://users.dart.net.au/~srgeorg/ as discussed in http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=9599 5.

This should be the last release candidate [RC] before the big 1; because in theory all the bugs should have been ironed out in this RC, but, nonetheless, Mozilla.Org is asking users who want to beta-test to download it and, in particular, check for bugs in these areas in RC2:

• authentication (especially over SSL)
• extension installation via update.mozilla.org and other sites
• MacOS X builds
• the new re-implementation of software update.

Some non-English RC2 builds are avaliable too according to Mozillazine. (Where are they?) For more info check out Ben Goodger's (lead developer's) blog.

For the rest of us, 1.0 final is supposed to be coming out in less than a week--then we can all party ;-).

Note that Firefox 1.0RC2 was released today. More info

People have been reporting problems with upgrading from 0.8 to 0.9. It seems like there may be a compatibility problem with older profiles that causes 0.9 to freeze. I think I may wait a while before upgrading since 0.8 works fine for me.

Bloggers: 43 Folders, Kris Dresden, Diane Duane, Paul Ford, Neil Gaiman, Michael Hanscom, Jason Kottke, Anne Murphy, Jessamyn North, Alia Phibes, Quentin Tarantino, and Wil Wheaton.

Linklogs: Anil Dash, Best of Craigslist, Boing Boing, CoolGov, Daze Reader, Fazed, Kottke Remainders, LinkMachineGo, MetaJournal, Michael Hanscom's Linklog, Museum of Hoaxes, NewYorkish, Paul Ford's Linklog, Snopes: New, SubText, and UFies.org.

Chicago: Chicagoist, jamas.org, CHICAGO.Metroblogging, Chicago Snapshot, CTA Tattler, Gapers' Block, and L or El.

Miscellaneous: Ask Slashdot, Citying, Cult of the One-Eyed Cat, Good Plastic Surgery, I Work With Fools, Schmo Blog, TeeVee, This Is Broken, Today In Alternate History, and x-entertainment.

Apple Bloggers: Buzz Andersen, Bill Bumgarner, Todd Dominey, Folklore, Steven Frank, John Gruber, Dave Hyatt, Brent Simmons,

The ability to make the browser popup ALT attributes for images?

Mozilla/Firefox is standards compliant and you won't ever see this happening without using an extension. IE's behavior which you have gotten used to is simply incorrect. Web designers should be instead using the TITLE attribute.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1408 28&highlight=embed

" really enjoy using Firefox, it's a real breath of fresh air after years of IE window opening, cluttering the taskbar and having to deal with popups wasting my time."

"Are difficult to install for my family, who simply don't understand or trust the process."

"Often incompatible with latest releases, preventing me from upgrading for months"

"What happens when one of those authors goes bad? We are so used to installing these extensions we really never give it a second thought, especially upgrades. verson 0.5 of ACME extension does what we want so yea lets install 0.6 clickerty click. We probably install more extensions than we ever clicked "YES I WANT A DIALER" button in IE. Isnt this a huge community driven security risk."

In a nutshell, one is worried that the UMO (update.mozilla.org) staff does not have the resources to properly scan all extensions and extension updates for malicious code. And even if you do check the extension when submitted, the author may add an update later with malicious code, and then Firefox installations all over the world may get infected.

Currently, they may be able to handle the task, but if Firefox manages to gain even more popularity, one can probably expect even more submitted extensions, and with a larger user base, it becomes a tempting target for crackers.

Fortunately, the discussion in the MozillaZine forums seems to result in a lot of nice ideas about how one can handle this, but it might still be something one needs to keep in mind.

It would be sad if Firefox was hit by security problems with extensions similar to how ActiveX has been a problem in Internet Explorer.

Perhaps Firefox's growing popularity will lead to more donations, of which some money can be used to hire staff to really make sure that UMO is not used as a tool to spread malware?

Unless you want to test it, submit bugs or somehow get involved with the project, you shouldn't. According to the MozillaZine announcement:

"Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. You can get these test builds from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the "feature complete" preview) and you're not really interested in testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0."

From MozillaZine:

Asa Dotzler writes: "Today we have our first Firefox 1.0 candidate builds available for testing. You can get these test builds from FTP. If you've already downloaded 1.0 PR (the "feature complete" preview) and you're not really interested in testing and bug reporting, then you should probably stick with 1.0 PR for a couple more weeks and upgrade when we release the official Firefox 1.0.

Be aware, there's some sort of Java bug with the application update mechanism. There is a bit of a thread here.

... if by any chance you have MS LAN with AD, you can deploy Firefox to all your clients nearly instantly using Firefox MSI. It works like a charm and increase their chances to keep the promise.

If there are millions of Firefox users, the script kiddies and exploiters of the world will just change targets to this new popular browser.

1. There ARE millions of Firefox users. Downloads of 1.0PR have averaged about 1 million per week.

2. While people often claim that security is approximately inversely proportional to popularity, none ever provide any evidence that the premise is even remotely valid. Why is that?

Popularity may make it a bigger target, but that doesn't negate the fact that it's designed for security, that the team developing it takes security very seriously, and that the security problems that they've had have consistently been fewer in number, less severe, and fixed more quickly than IE's problems. And IE has had several years to stabilize.

Here's (part of) what one of Mozilla's own developers has to say about their push to market themselves as more secure than IE: "How can you say its built with more security in mind? There is no proof, and we've had holes in pretty much every component ... The whole activex install angle is pure bullshit ... Note that IE has never ever tried to delete anyone's Windows desktop, for example. A user bitten by that may not think Firefox is secure..."

This is likely a reference to Safari's new canvas tag, mainly intended for dashboard. A version of it is being specified in the graphics part of the WAHT WG Web Applications 1.0 spec, so you're likely to see it in Mozilla sooner or later

Actually, according to MozillaZine the fix has been fixed in the 1.0 code tree, but hasn't been merged into the existing builds yet. I would expect a fix before 1.0 goes gold.

I believe Firefox (or was it mozilla) was already mentioned in that magazine.

RFC 2557: MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate Documents, such as HTML (MHTML)

There's a Mozilla KB entry about MHTML support and open bugs for load and save (IDs 18764 and 40873; bugzilla won't accept links from Slashdot). Plus the maf extension to support MHTML.

Even a dual G5 feels sluggish coming from a _single_ P4.

I have a dual 1 GHz G4 with 1.25 gigs of RAM and I don't have to wait for anything. Nothing feels sluggish. The only things that are sluggish are things that have to do with grabbing data from the hard drive and rendering complicated things in Final Cut.

The machine is over three years old and I'm constantly amazed every day at how speedy it still seems.

RAM has an enormous impact. I also have a 1 GHz PowerBook with only 768 megs of RAM and it's much more sluggish. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the lack of another processor, but with the lack of RAM and the slower, more crammed hard drive.

When Anand was saying that he would need at least a 3 or 3.5 GHz G5, I was slapping my forehead in disbelief. Shouldn't a guy like him know how computers work? Don't you run CPU meters every now and then? The processor isn't the bottleneck for every little thing. You don't blame the processor when you're copying files to a USB 1.1 hard drive and it takes forever, do you?

There are so many factors at work, take Anand's review of Safari's rendering speed. His discussion of it seemed a bit simplistic. To see how complicated it is check out Dave Hyatt's take on it.

There are a bunch of dual 2.0 G5s at my friend's editing lab, but they only have 512 megs of RAM and video editing on them seems slower than on my dual 1.0 G4....that is until I go to render things or encode to MPEG2, then the G5s own my piddly G4.

Buy some more RAM.

Assuming there aren't any overriding difficulties with patents or licence problems, this would absolutely ideal for deploying Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird. One of the biggest issues holding Firefox back from enterprise deployment in MS shops is the fact that there's no MSI installer. This would allow it to be rolled out to all the desktops domain-wide via Group Policy and , as the installer tracks any changes made, it can be rolled-back/uninstalled or upgraded easily. All that would needed to add to that would be some basic properties (hopefully via GPOs also) to allow admins to customise & lock it down a little (say, auto-set the web proxy details), and it'd be perfect!

In fact, after doing a quick search it looks like someone's already done it (don't know if it uses WiX, though it is mentioned in the Bugzilla listing):
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1380 33

Superb! Finally a way to get rid of IE from the corporate desktops :)

More thoughts, and some suggested counter-measures for Google (hey, let's be fair.)

Gerv

More thoughts, and some suggested counter-measures for Google (hey, let's be fair.)

Gerv

Gerv, who works for mozilla/bugzilla, already went through this, and found several ways around google's hackery. He then went and summarized the multiple ways to do it in good browsers.

Gerv, who works for mozilla/bugzilla, already went through this, and found several ways around google's hackery. He then went and summarized the multiple ways to do it in good browsers.

Gerv, who works for mozilla/bugzilla, already went through this, and found several ways around google's hackery. He then went and summarized the multiple ways to do it in good browsers.

gerv, a mozilla developer, has a few blog entries that talk about how the print service tries to stop you from getting to the jpeg's, and how to bypass that.

Google Print, And Clue Barriers
Google Print Hacking Ideas

gerv, a mozilla developer, has a few blog entries that talk about how the print service tries to stop you from getting to the jpeg's, and how to bypass that.

Google Print, And Clue Barriers
Google Print Hacking Ideas

A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting

I've been looking at this - there's a blog post with some preliminary discussions, and a follow-up giving some ways of getting around it. The short answer is that if you just want to save the image to disk, it's not too hard in a decent browser.

Gerv

A full exploration of the html obfuscation and DRM employed by Google would be very interesting

I've been looking at this - there's a blog post with some preliminary discussions, and a follow-up giving some ways of getting around it. The short answer is that if you just want to save the image to disk, it's not too hard in a decent browser.

Gerv