Firefox News Roundup

Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."

Comments

Matt Drudge

[Anonymous Coward]

Love him or hate him, he spent about 10-15 minutes on his radio show Sunday night discussing Firefox. He said he was an Opera user himself (sick of spyware) but praised Firefox for challenging Microsoft and breaking their stranglehold on the web.

The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro also gave an incredibly positive review to Firefox and took part in a web chat about it (good read if you want to see less techy user's reactions).

Easy fix (extension)

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install the Slashfix extension until v1.1.

Firefox GER contains Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

The german version of Firefox 1.0 contains spyware in the ebay-plugin. Search queries are redirected to a data-mining corporation in switzerland.

more about in german in:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/53308

Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware

[Fnkmaster]

Well, it's certainly not impossible that something like this could have slipped into a foreign language build of Firefox. But it's hard to imagine given the scrutiny that was given to all the aviary-branch-1.0 checkins that it got into 1.0, given how many patches people were trying to get in and the devs refused to move into the 1.0 branch. I don't know the details of Mozilla development procedures, but I do follow some Bugzilla reports for issues near and dear to my heart, and I know that Firefox in general is fairly tightly controlled by the devs (more so than the Mozilla Suite ever was).

Do you have a reference to any bugzilla reports or any other English language reporting on this? Perhaps more careful oversight of the localization team is required. It's important to figure out if this was an accidental move by a localization team that accepted a patch that they shouldn't have or if an insider with commit access intentionally did this and needs to be booted out.

Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware

[Fnkmaster]

After doing some recursive Babelfishing of some of the forum links in that article, it looks like the FF devs in charge of the German release stuff intentionally put this in there as part of a contract with the company to earn money for Mozilla Europe... but I can't really tell given the quality of translations there.

Very disheartening if true, and I would hope that the main Mozilla Foundation folks and Firefox dev team would disavow this and take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Mozilla are supposed to be the good guys, and I appreciate their need to support their activities, but there are lots of people willing to help with that - witness the massive turnout of donations for the SpreadFirefox advertising effort. Spyware in official Firefox builds is NOT the way to do this.

Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware

[Simon (S2)]

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.

Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware

[falonaj]

The german version of Firefox 1.0 contains spyware in the ebay-plugin. Search queries are redirected to a data-mining corporation in switzerland.

It seems that the spyware claim is wrong.

After the Heise.de news article was published, there were some responses from Mozilla developers in the German forum linked in the article.

Here is a summary of the facts:

1. The Swiss company is a contract partner of Ebay.
2. Ebay gave the Swiss URL to the Mozilla Foundation as a localized link for the search plug-in.
3. Ebay always forwards search requests to affiliate companies, no matter whether you enter the search keywords in the search plug-in or on the site.
4. The redirect via the Swiss contract partner of Ebay was the sole decision of Ebay.de. The Mozilla Foundation has no relation to that company. Ebay chose to give direct links for Ebay.com and for all all other Ebay sites.
5. If you don't trust Ebay's contract partners then you should not use their services. Switching your browser won't help.
6. The Mozilla Foundation has a contract with Ebay saying that for every Ebay search originating from the search plug-in they get a certain amount of money. This contract is valid for all localizations. The Mozilla developers have no access to any data collected by Ebay or its partners.

7. The contract between the Ebay and the Mozilla Foundation is interesting, but allegations of spyware are untrue if you know the facts.

TV2 report

[wojci2]

Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.

The clip should be available from http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5567.

Re:Slashdot vs Firefox

[Bob Finklestein]

I'm convinced the new "FIRST POST!!!!!1111" comment is "SLASHDOT DOESN'T RENDER RIGHT IN FIREFOX!!!!!!" Seriously I've been using Firefox for several months now, check Slashdot multiple times a day (because I'm a huge loser with too much time, let's just get that one out of the way), and I've had /. render incorrectly ONCE. Out of the hundreds of times I've loaded this page, that's a percentage I can deal with. I would choose a fast, secure browser with modern features that incorrectly renders a few pages a small amount of the time over that insecure, outdated, and all around piece of crap from Microsoft any day of the week.

And who modded this informative?

XUL

[Danathar]

I REALLY hope that this spurs development of XUL based applications. There are'nt that many yet, but I'd love to see more. (trying to learn myself)

Example of XUL app is the amazon.com content browser

http://www.faser.net/mab/remote.cfm

Of course you MUST use Mozilla/Firefox to view it!

Re:English translation

[Curtman]

SpellBound seems to work pretty well.

Huh?

[plj]

If the whole system crashes it is probably a bug in the mouse driver, or in display driver. Firefox only runs in userspace, and shouldn't be able to crash the whole OS - well, at least not unless you still run the Win 98/Me -line OSes, where the kernel memory is not completely protected from userspace violations.

I cribbed

[davidwr]

Go to "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins" and look at the .src files.

Assuming your intranet has a search engine that uses a format similar to one of the existing ones, just crib from it.

For example, my client's uses the format:
http://www.blah.blah/blah?keyword=value.
You can crib from google.src and you should be okay.

Re:OT

[m50d]

It's not slashcode, it's an incremental rendering problem in firefox - AIUI, the rendering engine is rounding the column width each time it renders the page again, which is every time it gets more data, and the errors add up to make it misaligned. That's why the bug only appears on lower bandwidth connections, and hence didn't get fixed by the mozilla devs for a while. It is fixed in mozilla trunk, which I think will become firefox 1.1 eventually.

Re:Still some major problems

[The One KEA]

I didn't even know that cryptographic extension signatures _worked_ in Firefox 1.0!

And before you start flaming the Firefox developers over a change that seems rather unfair and ill-timed to you, keep in mind that no matter how stable Firefox was before the 1.0 release, it was beta software. Beta software can be modified at the drop of a hat.

Ergo, you should have at least planned for the possibility that something might change in the 1.0 release, ESPECIALLY if you are actually offering production-level software to people.

Finally, if you are having problems with the Firefox Signtool team (whoever they are), then you should try other avenues of assistance, like the MozillaZine Forums - if you got a "figure it out yourself dumbass"-type response there, I'd be shocked.

Re:OT

[MindStalker]

Just so you know the other guy is wrong! :)

Mozilla/firefox etc guess sizes for columns that have images in them, these column sizes change once the image actually arrives. In certain cases it doesn't refresh and rerender once the images are downloaded.
There is suppositivly a fix in the mozilla trunk, but it wasn't put in firefox 1.0 because it caused some pages that previously rendered fine to render badly. So fix is waiting on perfection.