Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla: The Good And The Bad
Rui del-Negro writes "According to this article at The Register, six security flaws in Mozilla were posted to BugTraq last weekend. They have not been added to the official Mozilla vulnerability list yet. But details can be found here, here, here and here (phew!).
Finally, two other bugs were found, relating to loading GIF files (in several Linux browsers) and Mozilla's (JavaScript) implementation of onUnload ( ).
Are they trying to prove they can beat Microsoft at their own game..? Or is someone just trying to win a prize?" On a brighter note, Zerbey writes "From Neil's Place here is 101 Things Mozilla can do which IE cannot. Very interesting reading and an excellent resource for convincing stubborn Internet Explorer users why they should switch. This article was also reported at Mozillazine. I'm still waiting for NTLM auth to be implemented so we can switch over at my workplace, the only reason we still have to use Internet Explorer."
OK, 21669 to go :-)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
As of 1.2beta almost all of these are fixed. In general opensource is not a whole lot more secure than closed source (both are programmed by humans), they just are more open with information and quicker with fixes.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"...resource for convincing stubborn Internet Explorer users why they should switch..."
Should be:
- Provides a better subjective browsing experience
If that's not true, you'll never win.If you read ALL the way to the end of the article you'll note that 5 of the 6 bugs are already fixed in 1.0.1 which has been out for a couple months now. I believe the sixth is already fixed in the 1.2 nightlies.
However, also according to the article on the register, most of these bugs are in Mozilla 1.0, which makes this kind of old news. Mozilla 1.0.1 was specifically advertized as a security bug-fix release, and has been out for quite some time.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Now, is there a 10 Things IE Can Do That Mozilla Can Not such as run ActiveX properly if at all so one can go to most msn.com sponsored sites such as MSN Chat? Or how about properly running the Java plugin so Yahoo! Chat doesn't crash after a few minutes. I'm not making this up. This happens everytime.
Believe me, like the rest of you, I love Mozilla, and I live by the tabbed browsing. But unfortunetly, there are a lot of things I do on the Internet that still force me to crawl back to IE.
Being a developer myself, I have a huge number of bugs that are reported to my team and I on a daily basis. While security is always a key concern, there is an entire process of validating a bug prior to adding it to an official bug list. An open source project, such as Mozilla, has to rely on the input of who know who for possible bugs, then also has to rely on a large number of volunteer developers to help validate the bug. Sometimes these processes take time.
Take the time to compare Mozilla's submitted bug report and their official bug list versus Microsoft's (that is if you can find a copy of it).
kha0z
Master of ImportChaos.com
the Windows version is hurting
That's strange because I've found that Mozilla is more stable and faster in Windows vs. its Linux couterpart.
my other penis is a vagina
How my favourite bug was turned into a feature is the best example I have of how easy it is to get off the track with big projects like this.
The bug got lost in several threads, flames and arguments about what IE does or does not do, until it was finally marked WONTFIX by a Mozilla demi-god. IMHO, they missed the point. There is a constant refrain in Bugzilla about whether something is "standard" or not.
From my experience, the argument about web standards is used to either fix or not fix something, depending on how someone feels about a problem.
Don't think it's a problem? don't fix it and say "it's not standard, so we won;t" or "it's not standard, but we break the standard everywhere where it makes sense". Some behaviour need changing? The same arguments apply.
I may be just whining here, but sometime I think the fact that Mozilla is a web browser is lost in the arguments. I still love Moz, but the fact that the right-margin jumps around on my otherwise fine HTML 4.x and CSS pages will always bother me.
-- clvrmnky
I've been using Mozilla for OS X since i bought my powerbook a couple months ago and have had no problems whatsoever, besdies the occasional crash. Even java works properly - still can't get games.yahoo.com to properly work on any of my lunix mozilla installations.
Yeah, imagine that, the Evil MS notifies customers that an update is avaliable, but the wonderful Mozilla organisation has people visiting the site looking for an updated version or patch. I know that my family at least finds that much easier because they have a deep interest in what web browser they use to browse the interweb...
If you're gonna complain about MS, at least use a valid argument, god knows there's a lot of them, but the kneejerk whining about MS being evil doesn't really do any good for anyone.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
Or you could go to "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Advanced" -> "Scripts and Plugins" -> and uncheck "Enable JavaScript for...Mail and Newsgroups".
Does IE let you do that? Why do you need JavaScript in Mail anyway? I won't even accept HTML email.
Text is fine. I get the content without all the cookies and graphics.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
But, looking over the list of 101 things Mozilla does that IE doesn't, there are plenty of things that IE does, and has done for years. (It may not do them on Windows -- I have no idea.)
I can view cookies, block individual cookies, disable tooltips and a bunch of other things listed. I'd also argue that IE can be trivially installed and uninstalled and has a more complete, and certainly much more usable bookmark manager.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I've been using Mozilla for over a year now and for the life of me, I still can't access anything via. https. So, I have to open IE to do anything secure forms. I've read that I must do a complete install in order for this to work which I do, but still no dice.
Anyone have this problem?
Here's a link. On November 6, 2002, there were 31 security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer
The link is taken from: Windows XP Shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.. If Spanish is your native language: Windows XP muestra la dirección que Microsoft está tomando.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla running on a PC. Never.
Are you sure you're looking? Quite a few people at my company (it is in the Fortune 500) use it, and we're nothing special. It's not the majority of people, or even close, but certainly not zero either.
How sad. You don't 'talk' to a support technician with Mozilla, but you can usually get in contact with the person who actually wrote the code that's giving you trouble. Personally, I find this preferable to sitting on hold, paying through the nose for phone support, and talking to someone who hardly has the technical knowledge to use a computer, let alone code a browser. Mozilla's problems and bugs are well-documented; IE's are well-hidden. Mozilla has an excellent secuity track record; IE's security track record can be seen by the seemingly endless stream of advirories and patchs.
It's a shame that these Fortune 500 companies choose inferior products with inferior support on the basis that they're able to hear a human voice when there's some sort of problem; regardless of whether or not that human voice has the slightest understanding of the problem, the solution, or even the product.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
1. You can do this by writing a 12 line VB app that embeds the MSHTML COM control on separate tab controls. Some projects already do this. (Yawn)
5. uh, hit ctrl-H in IE6
7,8. Hold control, scroll mouse-wheel
17. IE does this
22. This can be set in IE
31. IE can do this
46. Is this a joke ?
77. I don't buy this. IE is a ship-component of Windows XP, and thus exists in 25 distinct locales.
97. This is just fanboyism. There is no substance here.
101. Got me there, champ.
These are just the things I know are crap off the top of my _head_. Why does fanboy shit like this make it to slashdot on such a consistant basis ?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I think Mozilla is in a position to really get innovation going again. Being a Web developer who started back in 1994, I remember first using Mosaic and Netscape back when features came so fast and furious that you really like progress was an everyday thing. I haven't felt that way lately (at least about Internet Explorer). So without further ado, here are some ways to innovate at a fundamental level, changing some things that should have been obvious.
First, making navigation buttons out of the link tags is great. But does Mozilla pre-fetch the "next" link, so that if I actually decide to go to the next page (likely), it comes up fast? WebTV has this feature. Makes the Web feel faster.
Second, why am I entering HTML tags into a plain text field? Where is the HTML text field? You know, a form object that comes with B, I, and U buttons, and allows me to visually format the text before sending (and which is delievered as standard, XHTML 1.0 compliant markup)? I've seen that Microsoft's new Web-based Outlook tools have this, but they use over 100k of JavaScript files to accomplish it. Shouldn't we just have something like this: <htmlarea></htmlarea>???
Finally, one of the things I've been waiting for is the ability to set images or other objects on angles. For example, if I wanted to have the slashdot logo appear as if it were on an incline, I might use CSS to specify the image display at -15 degrees. And if this were exposed to JavaScript, I could make some interesting animations. But I haven't seen this in CSS yet.
In short, I remember fondly when Netscape pushed the envelope -- I remember Andreesen adding the img tag, I remember Netscape implementing the file upload tag. I think some working demos of this stuff might help it gain acceptance, and give people a reference model to work from. Not to mention make Mozilla seem much more useful than Explorer.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I've found that the Bugzilla for Mozilla, Newsgroup usefulness, and general web resources are better, or at least equal to, that of Microsoft. Microsoft has an edge with phone support but, I run 10 servers and 50 workstations, all running Microsoft with SQL, Exchange, NT, 2000, and more - and I've never had to call them. I won't.
I dread calling them. It costs money, immense amounts of time, and I would sit on hold just knowing I'd end up with a moron who would suggest that I try rebooting.
This notion that a software company must be responsible for it's software, so that someone can be held liable and can be counted on to help, is really just dependency and lack of personal responsiblity, and ultimately a crutch. MCSE means Must Consult Someone Else.
Perhaps Fortune 500 companies ARE Fortune 500 companies because they pass the task of software support and maintanence off to the companies that make the software, and focus on their core business.
But they're also the ones spending obscene amounts of money and time trying to understand Microsofts insane licensing policies.
They're spending time and money evaluating Microsoft's DRM moves, preparing to deal with the inevitable (some would say immediate) consequences of Microsoft's negative, condescending attitude toward it's customers.
They're the ones who woke up one day and realized they were renting software, not buying it, and that they have an evil landlord and can't do anything about it. They're just happy their investors also like Microsoft so that they percieve this dependency as a "strategic relationship". They're the ones subject to the whip hand.
I've never walked into a Fortune 500 company and seen Mozilla. I've also never let the public see me having sex. Neither of those means that it doesn't happen.
# Erik
Look.
Microsoft notifes us *when a patch is available*.
The Mozilla community notifies us *when a security flaw is found*.
Do you want to know about a problem when it is discovered, or after someone has already engineered a fix?
If your car was discovered to be prone to stopping dead on the highway and blowing up, you'd want to know before the manufacturer figured out how to make it stop doing that. You'd want to have the option of choosing to risk it, or parking the car and driving something else for a little while.
Now you know what activies are prone to security dangers, and can either avoid those activities or use another browser for a while.
...
I've been using Mozilla for over a year now and for the life of me, I still can't access anything via. https...
do you have the mozilla-psm package installed?
the https part of mozilla is often in a second package, maybe for export or something. if you
only installed the rpm for mozilla, you may still have to install the personal security manager part.
here's what rpm on my redhat 7.2 based machine shows for example:
[root@mouser root]# rpm -qa | grep mozilla
mozilla-1.0.1-2.7.3
mozilla-nspr-1.0.1-
mozilla-psm-1.0.1-2.7.3
mozilla-nss-1.0.1-
nautilus-mozilla-1.0.6-16
so, check to see if you can install the mozilla-psm package and https should be all set
here's the rpm -qi Description for mozilla-psm:
Description
The mozilla-psm package provides Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) support
for the Mozilla Web browser.
If I can't do crap about fixing it, what should I do, stop using the www? What other browser is secure to use as a replacement? Lynx?
Yeah sure it's great to find out there's a bug, but, I'm gonna bet that 95% of users on the internet couldn't care less about what software they use as long as it gets the job done.
Geeks care about what software they use, geeks also make sure they have the latest version by visiting the sites now and then and by reading tech news, then it doesn't matter if they use IE, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape, Lynx, Mosaic or if they hold the ethernet cable to their tongue to read webpages, geeks will make sure to have the latest version and all relevant patches.
An insecure browser is an insecure browser, whether it's made by MS or not is irrelevant.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
"Supports blinking text
You can make text blink."
*blink*
This is GOOD?
He also complained about Mozilla's vaunted "standards compliance." His exact words: "Mozilla invents its own standards, and it's the only one to comply to them."
For the most part, this is only true if your friend believes that the W3 is a subsidiary of AOL. Needless to say, it isn't, and in fact many of the standards which Mozilla follows (While IE only sorta follows) were written by groups that included representatives from Microsoft. A partial list of the (real, non-Mozilla invented) standards that Mozilla enforces can be found here.
Isn't javascript "write once, run anyware" kinda stuff?
It'd be nice, wouldn't it.
JavaScript is a Netscape invention, always has been. As such, Netscape did write its own standard and is the only one to comply with it. However, there IS a real standard known as ECMAScript that Moz and IE both do a reasonably good job of supporting. Unfortunately, this does not cover everything. ECMAScript can be thought of as defining the 'core' of what scripting on browsers is often used for.
Beyond the core are the areas of scripting that make up the buzzword-compliant DHTML (Dynamic HTML, a fancy way of saying JS, CSS, and HTML)
This is where cross-browser scripting gets hairy. The standards used for manipulating documents dynamically are collectively defined by the W3 as the DOM, or Document Object Model, which has many uses outside of HTML, but we'll stick to its HTML uses for now. Unfortunately, some of the more advanced elements of the DOM are still in a drafting phase, and as such are not ready to be used as standards. Meanwhile, browsers implement support in their own ways, lacking any sort of rules to adhere to. It's my hope that as these drafts are finalized into W3 Recommendations, that MS will include support for them as I know Mozilla will. Until then, browser detection will continue being a way of life for advanced client side scripting.
> It has much fewer bugs and still retains all the
> functionality needed to have a decent web
> experience.
Let's get real here. Dillo is great to browse simple stuff like local HTML documentation, and it's good for checking on the local news sites (when it doesn't choke on them too badly), but that's about all it's good for.
It has some sort of annoying cache bug that lets it get "stuck" (refusing to load a document whether you hit reload or not) on pages like Google's search results.
As distributed (version 0.6.6), Dillo doesn't do any kind of authentication or SSL. It also doesn't do Javascript/Java. So it has to be *very* casual browsing. It also doesn't print.
(I use Dillo myelf for viewing local copies of web pages I make for my students. This is mainly because it's so FAST.)
-- Rick
I recall reading about this; those bugs were fixed before the bugs were reported this weekend.
It's been a long time.
In particular, if I wish to have Spanish-language dialogues in Mozilla, I (as of a month ago) can not upgrade to Mozilla 1.0.1 because none of the volunteer Spanish translation teams [1] has updated their 1.0.0 translations to version 1.0.1; instead they chose to direct their translation efforts towards 1.1 and 1.2.
Compare this to AbiWord, which has a translation structure such that, if a given translation team decides that meeting girls at dance clubs is far more fun than spending Saturday night translating dialogues, the translations still work for new versions of the program. If any new dialogues appear, those dialogues will be in English until someone steps up to bat to translate them, but any unchanged dialogues remain translated.
IE has an edge here, since their translation teams are paid; guaranteeing that any formal release of IE will be translated in to all officially supported languages. The disadvantage to this is, if a given language is deemed by Bill Gates to not be worthy of translation, you have to use the application in English (or one of the other official languages).
This structure causes Mozilla 1.0.1 to have translations available in languages like Estonian (a beautiful language [2] which has about, as I recall, 2 million speakers) but not in Spanish (which has more native speakers than English--about 325 million).
OK, thinking out loud, it should not be too hard to set up a perl script which unzips a translation for a given version of Mozilla, compares the labels against the English version for a given later version of Mozilla, and then translates all of the labels it can; leaving the untranslated labels in English. This would be far more productive than posting to Slashdot; perhaps a Mozilla guru can tell me if a tool like this already exists.
- Sam
[1] There are three Spanish trnaslation teams: One for Latin American spanish, one for Argentinian Spanish, and one in Spain. The Argentian is the most active group right now.
[2] One of my linguist teachers is a native Estonian speaker; she once talked to us in Estonian to demonstrate a language learning technique.
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
the desire for standards compliance is so web designers can write their sites once and have it work everywhere, without having to worry about what browser the client is using...
however, your statement for using IE as a base for a standard is not only silly, it's stupid:
we've written an in-house webapp that only works on IE5.5+ (5.0 does NOT work, something in the DOM or javascript), and testing on IE6 i found using the javascript "prompt" command doesn't work and throws javascript errors -- but everything else seems to work okay.
so, for our in-house webapp, we require IE5.5SP2, because we can ( sidenote: i wanted to target mozilla). having a website on the internet cannot, for the most part, require any specific version of a browser. because they are all incompatible with each other... should we use IE3, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, or IE6???
so, which version of IE should we all use as the standard? and if you come up with a particular version, the penetration % is not nearly as high...
i'm rambling and responding to a troll... oh boy
If the software you are using has a security flaw with grave enough consequences, you should stop using the software.
Now, who can better evaluate whether a security breach is serious enough to stop me from using the software? Microsoft, or my organization??? Isn't this obvious?
And I don't come whining with the "users don't care" crapshit. I care. That's enough reason for Microsoft to release advisories when the flaws are found, not when they're patched.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
2) View source opens notepad. I want to be able to edit, save (without it downloading the damn thing again!), and whatever.
File --> Edit Page
I'm sure there are security bugs in Mozilla that haven't been made public yet. That was the problem with the onUnload(). It was known about for a long time, but not until it became public did it get fixed.
The main reasoning seems to be that vendors should be able to protect their customers.
But what happened with the privacy leak recently found in Mozilla? Granted, it was a minor glitch, but it is nevertheless useful in studying how policy affects security.
Did it help end users that it was marked sensitive? Well, Netscape knew about the glitch when they shipped their browser, yet, they shipped it. On the other hand, the leak was patched shortly after the story broke, so the answer should be a clear "No!"
This is an example that it is not sufficient to have the sources open, you have to get some light onto the problems too.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Like the subject says. Automatic updates are not a feature that will make people love MS over Linux. Even people who like MS would typically still prefer to decide for THEMSELVES when it's a good time to upgrade instead of having no choice over the matter.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.onunlo ad", "noAccess");
[take out the space]
I love the fact that security bugs are made public. I can decide whether to implement a workaround, disable a functionility, switch to an alternative, or wait a few days for the binaries to come out for my distro.
At least we know about them, and are able to fix them unlike with IE.
You don't have to shout, I can hear you just fine.
Seriously, you are making my exact point. This is why designers will use relative widths to ensure their content can be rendered nicely in a variety of interfaces.
My assertion is simple: the existence or non-existence of a height scrollbar should not change the relative width of the viewframe. The scrollbars belong to the application, and not the content. I don't know any designer or user who expects a scrollbar to cause a reflow of the contents, shortening or lengthening all responsibly stated relative widths by X pixels.
You are right: designers should expect the width and height to change. This why we have used percentiles to describe relative widths to make sure things flow nicely, regardless of the interface. Having a situation where the width changes on arbitrary changes to height is, IMHO, plain stupid.
Anyway, if the history of that bug, and the conversation threads here say anything, it's that this is not one of those cases where anyone is concretely "right" or "wrong". This is a usability issue, and I would challenge the Moz team (or anyone else) to submit this behaviour to a battery of real usability tests. If it was determined that the majority of users and designers don't mind how a good number of existing pages render, then I'd reconsider.
Until then, I'm not convinced.
-- clvrmnky
My favorit
My favorite bug is wh
My favorite bug is when mail cras
My favorite bug is when mail crashes whenever I tr
My favorite bug is when mail crashes whenever I try to sen
My favorite bug is when mail crashes whenever I try to send a message
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I don't know how you are getting that from me. I'm the last to say I want an absolute width, and have made that clear several times. I am using percentiles to describe CSS objects which are floated left. This is pretty generic. I am not flaunting anything. I have no problem with the width changing if the container the text is in, or near, changes.
I can't put it any plainer: I object to the scrollbar, which is an application widget, counting as any width in the viewable contents of a page. If it was anything else, I'd be agreeing with you, but it is a scrollbar. I do not consider the scrollbar a CSS object around which I must flow my content. If you do, fine. This is what the bug is essentially about. Some agree, some don't.
It's pretty common to build a site with a common navbar across the top. If some of those pages happen to have a maximum height above the viewport, and some that do not, navigating between the pages does two major things:
1. Causes the right margin to jump by however many pixels the scrollbar is set to
2. Causes the hyperlink that the mouse pointer is currently under to move away from the pointer
This last is especially insidious. UIs where gestures cause controls to move away from the the pointer are just bad.
From a usability standpoint, I cannot agree that this is not a problem. Scrollbars are part of the chrome, and not the content. Gestures shouldn't move the UI around in unexpected ways. An interface that encourages this behaviour is flawed.
The first item just makes Moz look unpolished unfinished. It's a graphical browser, for crying out loud! It should look good.
It should be easy for designers to develop simple pages that do not violate good usability. It should be easy for Mozilla to render standards-compliant pages in a friendly manner.
Mozilla is the only browser that does this, AFAIK. This is not a user agent issue. It is an application issue squarely in the domain of the Mozilla presentation code. Just because we can access the application chrome with a URL doesn't mean we should, in this case.
Just to make it clear, I am not trying to establish an abolute size. I am not trying to enforce a particular width. I am objecting to 60% + 20% in a simple CSS property that is changing because of an application control, and not content. I have no problem with reflows being forced due to content changes. Scrollbars are not content. If you must disagree with me on this, so be it. Please do not conflate my issues with usability with any type of fixed or absolute positioning.
-- clvrmnky