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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
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?
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?
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.
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?
This is a dead horse; please find some other issue to dwell on.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
I am trolling
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.
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.