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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."
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).
Fair and Balanced!
Oops sorry, wrong thread...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Too bad Slashdot doesn't render right in Firefox...
Scott, for your sake, I hope there's a 12-Step Program out there for you.
I guess there are a lot of people who are just tired with IE. Having a tool as well know as a web browser to get all this attention for a v. 1.0 release is pretty amaizing. Normally this type of welcome is reserved for Big Company major version release.
After the browser war ended the real looser was the consumer because they got a stagnet product. But now with Firefox getting all this press I wouldn't be suprised if IE starts getting its much needed improvements soon.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Just install the Slashfix extension until v1.1.
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
What I'm interested in is:
Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox?
Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
Ok, so mabye I do use Mozilla. But I thought I'de be the one to remind us of the abnoxiously user unfriendly 'surfing' tools we started out with.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I can't wait to see Microsoft's counter PR to Firefox...
They'll find some obscure exploit in the Windows versions of Firefox, and blow it way out of proportion. As a bit of irony, I'd wager it'd be an OS-related exploit..
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.
Al-Jazeera: Mozilla's Firefox renews browser war
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Can anyone tell me what the deal is with the regular mozilla branch?
Last time I asked a mozilla developer (like a year ago) they said that mozilla development would continue as a seperate branch and project in parellel with any firefox efforts.
But now that firefox is blowing up are they still going to spend resources on mozilla?
Will they some day just make firefox the browser of the mozilla suite? Will they discontinue mozilla suite and split up the projects?
I'm interested in the number of installs per download. Because I suspect *that* is a very high number as well.
Because I've downloaded it once, installed it a few times already, and I was away from computers all weekend. Plus users of Debian Sarge, Gentoo, Arch Linux, BSD, and any other version of Linux with a package-management system didn't download from the Mozilla site.
And what about people routing through a proxy. would the server still get a request and be able to count that download? I demand every fact in the world!
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
According to ABC Australia, Microsoft doesn't believe people want tabbed browsing. This seems to indicate they're waiting for users to tell them what they want. This is the kind of attitude that will cost them more than any onslaught of viruses and security gaffes. If you're not looking to exceed your customer's expectations, somebody else will come along and do it for you. Of course nobody thought to ask Microsoft for tabbed browsing, if it was obviously needed it wouldn't be an "innovation".
It should be illegal to say that freedom of speech should be limited.
Wow. Matt Drudge is a fellow Opera user? All of a sudden, I feel dirty.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I, for one, got FireFox 1.0 from a torrent. Are they counting the people who got it through torrents when they tell us how many downloads they have had since release? (or at least trying to guess)
I doubt it, which means that the number is likely much higher.
Also, consider that probably at least 50% of the slashdot crowd (conservative estimate) went and got it, I would say that we're a very good portion of those downloads...so is it really all that impressive??? How many average users are really getting it?
To be perfectly honest, I chose the words hard-line Islamist after some consideration as I didn't want to unduly annoy either camp!. I'm a regular reader of al-Jazeera and frankly, I don't think they're an extremist portal but they are quite hard-line in their editorialising, and willing to go slightly beyond the normal reporting role in relaying messages from (terrorist/freedom-fighter according to what side you're on) ~ groups.
Still worth reading, though. But then, I'm the last person who'd be accused of kissing american ass.....
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Firefox : tool of The Devil, it's right in the name!
goddamn I wish I could post this drek Anonymously...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
how the hell are we supposed to slashdot a site if the article has 15+ links in it?
Due to the recent broadcast by Al-Jazeera, the Bush administration has placed a ban on Mozilla code due to ties to terrorism, and urges people to stick with the more patriotic Internet Explorer by Microsoft.
Firefox on the Mac is a little awkward, mainly because its widgets are Mozilla widgets, not Mac widgets, and the behavior is slightly different. Since everything else on the Mac is pretty well integrated and uses system widgets (very few programs try to provide their own), having different drop-down menus and buttons in web pages feels weird.
Safari is much more consistent with the rest of the computer's interface. Also, it has some features like SnapBack (jump to the last URL you typed, ie snap back to your starting point) that Firefox doesn't have, and slick things like using the address bar background as the loading status indicator.
That said, I use Camino, which is the Gecko rendering engine (like Firefox, unlike Safari) but with native widgets & behaviors (unlike Firefox, like Safari).
One of my clients has a search engine on his Intranet.
I showed him how easy it was to put that search engine in the FF search bar. The hardest part was shrinking the corporate logo down to a 16x16 icon - that's how easy it was.
It's quite easy for companies to roll their own Firefox interface to existing search engines for use by employees and customers.
Can your Internet Explorer do that?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is a dead horse; please find some other issue to dwell on.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, I can believe that. Remember, Microsoft changed the windowing behaviour of its Office applications so that different documents appear in different windows, as opposed to the same window.
So, if you have two Word documents open, they appear in two different windows and appear like two seperate instances of Word (although only one instance of the application is actually running). This change was made at the introduction of Office 2000, and I'm sure it's a result of usability feedback from less savvy users who were "losing" their documents when they opened another one, etc.
Essentially, the change makes it easier to immediately see and switch between all the Word (or Excel, etc) documents that you've got open at any one time but when you have more than a few open it can really clutter the taskbar, hence creating a whole new usability issue.
Bottom line: I'm sure Microsoft's usability experts regard the windowing behaviour of MSIE as better the way that it is than the way that it could be if they switched to tabbed browsing.
And, before anyone says brings it up, let me just say that even offering people a choice of tabbed and non-tabbed browsing raises yet more usability issues. You might prefer a tabbed approach, and henc select such an option if it were available, but what happens when your technophobic work colleague needs to use your PC for five minutes? Sometimes, from a software engineering point of view, giving users as few options as possible is the preferable path.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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!
This could be what really, and I mean REALLY, legitimizes open source. I don't know anyone who hasn't heard the well deserved hype about Firefox, and I'm talking people who I wouldn't normally associate with even moderate computer use. Everyone's been talking about it, and not just in our IT techy circles. It almost gives me the creeps. Most under-rated feature IMHO: Bookmarks -> Open In Tabs. I can now NOT live without this.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
I guess Firefox needs a spell checker... Um Yea. I don't see one installed. The number of posts of people like the parent there who are superior because of thir spelling ability usually drops when I am using OS X whose text areas boxes have red underline spell checking.
...is that for at least a half-dozen years that half-million users could have coughed up a measely thirty bucks and had Opera. Five bucks a year for a browser that is fast, small, secure, has tabbed browsing, awesome bookmark management, integrated kickass email, popup blocking, etcetera endless freakin' etcetera.
I gotta ask: was waiting for "free" worth an extra six years of suffering?
Myself, I think y'all paid heavily for your reluctance to cough up some pissant cash.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
SpellBound seems to work pretty well.
'Windows humanitarian aid worker Minesweeper has been taken hostage by the Firefox resistance organisation. They have issued a videotape in which Minesweeper pleads with President Gates to withdraw Internet Explorer from the occupied desktops. Firefox representatives say that unless Gates complies, Minesweeper will be executed.'
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
thir :-p
their
Okay, I'll be the one to say it: Firefox has some problems that I'd like to see fixed. I'm using it as my primary browser now, but I'm careful how I use it.
:(
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Regarding Mozilla - some of FF's features need to be ported over, ESPECIALLY the extension manager! I mainly had the impetus to get Firefox moox going as I had a bad extension install that totally borked my Moz install, and there's no easy way to remove them from Mozilla, despite all the FAQs I found.
Bad Idea for both: turning off the ability of javascripts to change the status bar text also turns off link previewing - ridiculous; those should be two entirely separate things.
Other than that, the Moz & FF teams have done remarkable work, and I'm looking forward to new versions, and the very painful death of IE.
Screw the spellchecker! Let's just forward everything to you first! =)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
Oops! I clicked the link! Now I'm going to be on some FBI hit-list or something....
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Yeah, it's pretty sweet actually. You just need to edit your prefs.js file to tell it which sites to provide NTLM credentials to. No "friendly" interface for doing this yet though I don't think (or maybe I just missed it).
a tion-uris" , "http://,https://");e -auth.trusted-uris", "http://,https://");
Something like this (not that I'm recommending this as a good config), will allow the creds to be sent to all web servers:
user_pref("network.negotiate-auth.deleg
user_pref("network.negotiat
If you use a proxy server, it's probably not *too* unsafe, since NTLM can't really be proxied via HTTP proxies anyway (AFAIK).
When bin Laden put out his video during the US election, I had a devil of a time finding out what he had to say. There was plenty of coverage of the fact that he'd released a film, and lots of discussion of how it would or wouldn't affect the outcome of the election, but scarcely anything about the content of the damn thing. Surely if the Big Bad has something to say, it's in the public interest to hear him? I mean, if he really is as important and terrible a threat as we're told.
Censoring the news on political grounds - 'these are the enemy, so we won't give them the publicity' - is deeply dodgy. So we need al-Jazeera, because maybe if we average it out with Fox and dissolve the precipitate in a solution of BBC, we'll maybe have a good idea of what's actually happening in the world.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
They have a Microsoft's worst nightmare article in the last edition.
thir
Way to go.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Last sunday a big Israeli newspaper - "Yedihot" (AKA ynet on web) published a 3 page article (!!!) about Firefox. I was amazed (in a good kind of way) to see a HUGE FireFox logo in the newspaper I read every day.
Online version available here (Hebrew content).
"Firefox fix for slashdot: Ctrl+,Ctrl-"
Dude, sweet! Any ideas what's wrong with slashcode that causes the display bugs?
PS. I know this is off topic, so don't waste your mod points...
$8.95/mo web hosting
Is this an article about Firefox?
Or Computer Geeks with Obsessive-Compulsive disorder?
(irrational exuberance, indeed)
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
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.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I really have to ask, what was the motivation for changing the signing protocols AGAIN? And even more importantly, why was it ever decided in the first place to use some nonstandard signing protocol? OpenSSL is already built in to the browser, so why not use standard X.509 certificates and signing procedures?
The FireFox signtool team has been extremely unhelpful so far. Their responses have been of the "Figure it out yourself, dumbass" type.
I think that is a terribly counterproductive attitude to have. We are a software company producing specific tools. It is not our business to figure out how the most recent incarnation of Mozilla Signtool works. The end result of all this is that we have to recommend that our customers continue using IE because we can't get the stupid plugin to work under FireFox.
And believe me, it doesn't make us happy to recommend IE to our users. But so far we have no choice, and the FireFox development team has done nothing to help us. Quite frankly, they seem arrogant.
You grammar/spelling nazi!
Gotta disagree with you on this. I used to think the UI on Firefox/OSX sucked, but since 0.8 I think it's pretty good. That was *always* the only thing Safari had going for it over Firefox. Safari's vaunted rendering speed is actually pretty bad. Try out a Javascript speed test or an image rendering speed test to see for yourself. Safari is significantly slower than Firefox. It does seem to handle image layering manipulation better, but that is it. Everything else is much faster in Firefox. Of course I should point out that Opera (especially the 7.6 beta) is much faster than either.
now if only the plugins were updated ... or backwards compatible
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
I want to know when I can buy a copy of the NYT and see my name.
The day after your indictment, of course.
KFG
This should be as an Internet Suite not an intergrated package a la Mozilla.
That way each application can piggyback on the succes of the others. Currently Firefox is getting all the press and as such could help Thunderbird. When Gaim get's better VOIP featurers they can drive the market penetration for a while etc.
Each application should be independant with an overall effort to make them look and feel alike.
A XUL killer app would round it off nicely
Help fight continental drift.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
Slow compared to Mozilla? I'm using it in Windows XP on an AMD (3000+) run eMachines... and it is faster than IE! It loads faster, renders pages faster and generally is the fastest application on my PC.
2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
Firefox crashes? Again, even in Windows I've only had Firefox "lock up" twice in about six months. Once was loading a page which was created to spread MyDoom (I guess that the string locked up the browser?). In Mandrake and Fedora I've never had Firefox crash. Even still, I regularly use and update to nightly builds so I would expect it to crash but it never happens.
2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
Yes, a problem in the past (like 0.8 builds) - but not so much anymore. I've had in the upwards of 50 tabs open at once and it never really caused a problem. Yes, they are hard to discern after about 20 are opened, but CTRL+PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN is good for switching between tabs quickly.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Don't be too hard on them. It's probably the only good feeling they get in their lives.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
End users do not pay for software, unless we're talking about games.
Free Hans!
Get the "Tab X" extension. That will give you the "close tab" button in each individual tab. I'm sure there is a switch tab key also, but I can't tell you what it is...
Because the rendering engine changes needed to fix the bugs created by the god-awful HTML 3.2 emanated by Slashdot's template code were too invasive and "scary" for the Aviary branch. Introducing them could have cuased massive regressions and other problems.
Firefox 1.1 will not break Slashdot anymore. Why the templates haven't been fixed is anybody's guess...
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
what the grandparent was talking about is using creating many search plugins and not having to change a registry entry everytime you want to use different searches from the toolbar. So can your Internet Explorer do that?
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.
Am I the only Dane who noticed that the Danish public service channel DR had a news spot about Firefox too?
In fact, shortly after 1.0PR they even added the appropriate RSS-link info to the news section on their site, so people can easily create Live Bookmarks, with just a few mouse clicks.
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
hello fellow slashdotters. a couple of months ago i put together this thing which i've officially just named the "Firefox advocator". If you like it, please, oh please spread the word :)
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
The San Francisco Chronicle is the largest circulation newspaper in the Bay Area. They wrote a very positive review about FireFox vs. Internet Explorer this week. It was on the front page of Monday's Technology section.
Internet Explorer has new foe - Firefox 1.0 beats Microsoft browser in several areas
SF Chronicle Review
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
The American people are so gullible these days, that the current administration is afraid that if they broadcast Bin Laden's message on any news channel, folks will eat it up uncritically, just like they do all the other crap on TV news these days. Thus it will lead to the downfall of this administration
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I am no native english speaker, but here is my attempt at an translation:
k er_qry_de.pl"
Firefox user realized, that while using the ebay search function of the browser, ebay wasnt contacted directly, but a website in switzerland. Instead of opening the ebay search-site at: http://search.ebay.de/search/search.dll firefox redirects the requests to the address on the server www.webtip.ch.
Affected is the german edition of the browser, the win32 as well as the linux version. In the meantime emotions boiled up due to the assumed espionage.
The domain belongs to the metaspinner ltd. After being questioned by heise online, Christoph Berndt CEO of Metaspinner explained, that the redirection is based on a partner contract between mozilla and ebay and is tested at the moment. The earnings of the deal, of which Berndt knew no details, are supposed to be given to the Mozilla Foundation. Metaspinner Ltd is just providing the server for the Mozilla Foundation. Berndt emphasized, that his corporation is not logging requests or ip-addresses.
In the meantime Axel Hecht from the Mozilla Foundation as well as Abdulkadir Topal, who maintains the german version of firefox spoke up. The Foundation needs money, to pay for example the hired developers. And: "Mozilla.org or mozilla-europe receive no information conceirning the data, the user enters in the search-bar (This can be checked by anyone due to open-source)".
Who prefers to communicate with ebay directly, can just replace the following line in the ebay search plugin ebay.src:
action="http://www.webtip.ch/cgi-bin/mozilla/trac
with
action="http://search.ebay.de/search/search.dll"
and restart firefox. The search-plugin is contained in the directory searchplugins of the Firefox programm directory.
something clever to make me stand out!
Hard-line Islamist??? You do know that Al-Jazeera was formed off a branch of the BBC News division that eventually detached itself from BBC and became independent. Not sure how a BBC division manages to become hard-line islamist (although I'm sure some troll will reply to tell me how it is...)
That sort of thing is maybe OK for a small startup; it's not OK for Microsoft or other large companies. The only difference to their past behavior is that Microsoft incorrectly thought they had won this battle already. Well, they killed Mozilla, but Mozilla is back from the dead, and once dead, there's no more dying then.
> Similarly, system widgets aren't used even for in-page items like radio buttons,
> checkboxes, buttons, text fields. I cannot fathom the hubris that makes the Mozilla
> developers feel that their application is so uniquely important that it
> deserves to look different than every other application on my system.
FYI, I heard the explanation for this some time ago in #mozilla: no system widgets exist that would allow mozilla/firefox to implement the CSS specification(s).
News organizations walk a fine line between covering the news and creating the news in situations like this. Never mind the legitimacy or lack thereof behind terrorist acts; the purpose of this kind of self-censorship is set boundaries on what is legitimate news and what is propaganda. Al-Jazeera has the right to set their own standards, as does Matt Drudge and anyone else who purports to publish "news".
It all comes down to credibility and how much people can trust you to be taken at your word. The New York Times on its worst day is a more credible source than The Drudge Report because they have different standards for what constitutes "news." And it shows: when Drudge goes off on something, people take it with a grain of salt because he's been wrong before. When the Times says something is important, people take it seriously because they are more credible (this is also why CBS screwing up the Bush-National Guard story is such a big deal). It's the old 'cry wolf' story - spew bs often enough and people won't take you seriously.
People can rant all they want about Big Media and bias and all that, but they fact is they have standards and are deeply concerned with maintaining their credibility.
I'll tell you what the 'effect' is! It's pissing me off!
:p
Liberty in your lifetime