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A Look at the Newly Released Mozilla Firefox 0.9
SilentBob4 writes "Mad Penguin is one of the first to review the latest Mozilla Firefox release, numbered 0.9. According to the reviewer, there's a lot to be thankful for, as this release is far more stable than its earlier versions and sports some new features along with a new interface. My new all-time-favorite line: 'Look out Internet Explorer... your days have been numbered for some time now, but Firefox 1.0 will surely leave you shaking on your already shaky foundations and standing in a small warm puddle'. Nicely put."
After a miss-typed URL sent me to one of those wonderful cyber-squatting "search" sites, which then proceeded to automatically install all sorts of nasty spyware and SMTP zombie malware, I banned IE from my house and removed all shortcuts and Program Menu options from all PCs. I made the decision to go with Firefox, and I can honestly tell you I haven't missed IE one bit, and there's not been one reason that I've had to open up IE again. My wife's been happy with it as well. It's clean, fast, renders pages great, much more informative about page loading status, and best of all it doesn't attempt to install software without my permission. I've encouraged everyone I know to give it a try.
I used to use Netscape all of the time. Not because it was a good browser, it actually felt too big, but because it wasn't IE. When firefox came out, I rejoiced at a small browser that didn't have all the crap that Netscape had built in. Firefox is the answer that I think many of us had been waiting for. Once it becomes more stable, more and more people will be switching over to it.
So... no, Mozilla is not dead.
At Imperial Home Decor Group / Blue Mountain Wallcoverings, we decided to switch to Firefox too just to avoid having to lock down Internet Explorer.
I agree completely; IE has big problems when it comes to some things. Most notably, it has trouble with even moderately complicated CSS and transparent PNG's. It is quite frustrating when you spend hours working on a page which looks perfect in mozilla, only to find IE is messing up some of the most basic parts.
Firefox Makes me have to do twice as much work. Let me explain.
Firefox is by far the best browser ever. It is fast, standards compliant, and runs on every platform i support.
The problem is when i develop in firefox. I do some web development, often on a dealine. If i make a stylesheet that looks awesome in firefox, 90% of the time it does not work in internet explorer, which, unfortunatly, is what 90% of my clients use.
So, after i think i'm done, and i test in ie, i know have to go back and fix it, which takes a while as IE is really borked. Therefore, i have to charge more, and my clients are not as happy.
I tell them to switch to firefox, but for some reason, they dont.It's to the point now that i've installed IE5.5 under wine, and i use that as my main development browser. sad but true. I use phoe^H^H^H^Hfirefox for my daily browsing, for sure, but IE to develop.
Strangely, if i make a site that works in IE, it'll usually work in ff and safari/khtml.
of course, this is all IE's fault.. my tongue is planted firmly in my cheek... but it is something that drives me nuts.
Remember, friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer.
Drew Crampsie - Software Developer
Open Source Business : The Tec
Tabbrowser Extensions is a great add-on to Mozilla/Firefox but it's just that--an add-on. When Firebird 0.7 was released, people were misled to believe that Firebird did not have tabbed browsing capabilities built into the browser and had to install TBE. TBE attaches itself deeply into the browser and as a result, it was often unstable when changes were made to the core of the browser. When Firefox 0.8 came out and people were still running their outdated versions of TBE that weren't updated for Fx0.8, they encountered the "No XBL Binding" error. The developers are avoiding this problem with 0.9 by automatically disabling all extensions and themes on the first run, requiring users to redownload and install compatible versions of their extensions/themes.
Firefox is a great browser and is constantly improving. Although the developers aren't implementing all of TBE's features due to fear of bloat, they are listening. We got the confirmation dialog for closing a window with multiple tabs and we may just see a single tabbed window option one day (first step = open external links in tabs, bug 172962 recently marked blocking1.0+ by Ben Goodger).
You must conform to IE; it's > 90% of the browser market, to "give up on IE" is to admit you create shoddy sites or intranets.
Is a 100% W3C-compliant site shoddy if it doesn't render properly in IE, or is IE shoddy? I agree with you that for commercial websites, they have to render properly in IE because of its overwhelming market share, but IE, and least in the days when I was last a web developer, was well-known to break W3C compliance all over the place. I would be pretty surprised if anything has changed. To call a site shoddy because it won't render in IE even if it's clearly the browser's fault because the site is just wrong thinking.
Sadly, Netscape/Mozilla in those days wasn't fully W3C-compliant either, but it did a much better job than IE. To make a site really perfect for both required (and probably still requires) some Javascript magic to serve up a page that is broken in the right ways for the target browser. This can be necessary on a commercial site, for obvious reasons.
However, on a site that is your own personal page, it is perfectly justified (and I have done this) to just put up a notice that says "This site is 100% W3C-compliant; if it doesn't look right in your browser, get a better browser." That's telling it like it is, and you have no obligation to do anything else on your personal site.
IE doesn't conform to standards?
Well, since Microsoft has been a W3C member for years, then it's about time they get off their asses and fix their browser. That doesn't mean it can't also render MSHTML (that horrid, crufty mess), but as a starting point, it must render W3C-compliant sites correctly. To do less is to just admit they created (and continue to release) a shoddy browser.
At my work with 250+ users, we are coming very close to making that decision. Part of the reason is that we have a number of users out in the field for long periods of time using laptops in the middle of nowhere. For the most part, any internet connections are dial-up.
So, part of our reason for seriously considering moving is that we've had a number of trojans on those machines exploiting IE holes. This combined with the pain of downloading MS patches on dial-ups is leading the IT department to lean toward a FireFox standard. One of the things that had been holding us back was problems with the iNotes client in FireFox 0.8. It works in 0.6, not 0.8. Well, it is working again in 0.9.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=4638 28
People are now doing XPI versions of the dreaded ActiveX "Do you want to install Weatherbug" type things. Thankfully, there's a whitelist now, but we'll see how far it stays put.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
I helped push the use of Firefox on the vast majority of machines where I work. The amount of malware finding its way onto the systems of users who don't know any better has been substantially reduced.
I found it harder to push the use of Mozilla on users (just for testing) than it was to push FireFox when we decided to go with that browser. Users seemed to be put off that Mozilla looked different enough to "scare" them where Firefox looks more modern and has more similarities to IE which helped ease the transition. In fact not a single person complained once FireFox fired up.
This isn't to say Mozilla is a poor browser but to users who don't have an understanding of why using an alternate browser to IE is a good thing, superficial changes seem to matter much more than any functional feature.
This is yet one more broken authentication scheme from M$. If you use NTLM authentication, your network is swiss cheese. There are many articles on the Internet that explain this. You are continuing Microsoft's bad security practices. If you want to authenticate without relogin in, use standard X.509 certificates. Both Windows 2000 and 2003 server support this for login. This will both improve your network security, and allow you to move to FireFox which is much more secure than IE. Firefox is even more secure than IE with WinXP SP2.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.
IE will send your local OS credentials (username, password hash) via NTLM depending on your Security zones. The default is that sites in the Intranet zone will be sent them automatically and sites in the Internet zone will prompt for name and password. That sounds good and all, but a quick read of the Bugtraq archives will show that people are finding holes in this all the time. If you can get some piece of web content to load in the Intranet zone or even worse the My Computer zone, it's game over. The reason for the My Computer zone is that Internet Explorer == Windows Explorer and the web browser == the file manager.
Still, the whole complaint of entering your password again is tiny compared to the risks of IE. It's the *same* password that people use to log in. It's not like they have to remember a *new* password which is understandably a much bigger complaint.
I was wondering why Apple decided to mix its aqua style with brushed metal. It just doesn't seem like a natural mix. Sort of like if Kiss walked into the scene in the matrix where that control room is all white/black/transparent computer environment.
Thankfully Apple did do a good job and making sure the look was very clean without any bad pixel/widgets that you wouldn't expect to be that way. For example, whenever I theme anything else (whether it be windows, gnome, kde, whatever) I always end up with some application with a weird looking widget.
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Free your mind.
The sites average around 100,000 uniques a month all together, 4 of which are business sites and 3 of which are "fun" sites. I can tell you that IE has averaged between 90% and 96% per month for the last 12 months. Let me know if you want more detailed stats.
The sites average around 100,000 uniques a month all together, 4 of which are business sites and 3 of which are "fun" sites. I can tell you that IE has averaged between 90% and 96% per month for the last 12 months. Let me know if you want more detailed stats.
Yes, but what are the sites? Windows Software sites?
We're a daily newspaper, we get way more than 100k unique visitors a month. We are seeing around 80% IE. Mozilla based browsers make up the second largest (15%), with safari at 2% or so. I think it's a pretty good estimate considering we don't even do tech news, so our visitors really are john q. public.
But you can't even say that all 80% of those users use IE6, it's really only around 30%, with the other 50% using IE5.5 5.0 and 4.0(!). So even just developing for IE is a pain in the ass because you're really developing for 4 different browsers.