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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."

40 of 513 comments (clear)

  1. Matt Drudge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    1. Re:Matt Drudge by tfreport · · Score: 4, Funny

      Of course that is why he does not have popups on his website and he made sure to put a link up at Firefox's release (or Opera's) where his readers would have immediate access and not having to go to their computer after the radio show. Wait, he did not do those things? Glad he is adding to the cause when he can actually make a difference.

  2. Firefox News by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fair and Balanced!

    Oops sorry, wrong thread...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. Good geeking Scott. by YetAnotherName · · Score: 5, Funny

    Scott, for your sake, I hope there's a 12-Step Program out there for you.

  4. It is good Press. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. Firefox is the new Netscape (no, really) by CdBee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  6. Easy fix (extension) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just install the Slashfix extension until v1.1.

  7. Firefox GER contains Spyware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware by Simon+(S2) · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
    3. Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware by falonaj · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

  8. Complete Stats? by omghi2u · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. You'll Still never pull me away from 'Gopher'!!! by Timmy+D+Programmer · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!)
  10. You know it's coming.. by XeroRIAA · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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..

  11. TV2 report by wojci2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --


    /wojci
  12. Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firefox! by CdBee · · Score: 5, Funny
    --
    I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
  13. No no... COMPLETE stats! by thegnu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  14. Math? by SlayerofGods · · Score: 5, Funny
    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
    Or 600,000 per day.....
    --

    Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
    1. Re:Math? by Bobman1235 · · Score: 4, Funny
      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

      Or 600,000 per day.....


      Hey, Captain semantics.

      • 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


      SO, what the parent said was more accurate than what you said, yes?

  15. Complacency at Microsoft by crymeph0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  16. Wow... by WIAKywbfatw · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  17. Firefox, choice of the pr0n-loving generation! by Thud457 · · Score: 5, Funny
    Face it, the only reason you get mal-ware is from cruising the seamier side of the internet looking for free pr0n. If you were good, upstanding, moral Christians, you would use IE.

    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

  18. no fair! by i_should_be_working · · Score: 5, Funny

    how the hell are we supposed to slashdot a site if the article has 15+ links in it?

    1. Re:no fair! by Darwin_Frog · · Score: 4, Funny

      This is another area in which Firefox is superior to IE. Everyone just open 15 tabs, one for each link. IE would require 15 windows for an equivalent /.ing. Firefox: making it easier to set web servers on fire.

  19. Cool FF trick - roll your own search engine by davidwr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  20. Re:Slashdot vs Firefox by Bob+Finklestein · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  21. Sigh - still on that? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Neither does IE, Netscape, Opera, Lynx, or any other browser. How do I know? Because Slashdot doesn't generate valid HTML, and therefore has no deterministically correct rendering.

    This is a dead horse; please find some other issue to dwell on.

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  22. XUL by Danathar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  23. Re:English translation by InfiniteWisdom · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  24. What amazes me... by FFFish · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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.
    1. Re:What amazes me... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful
      I gotta ask: was waiting for "free" worth an extra six years of suffering?

      You could pretty much say the same thing about any open source project. Why use OpenOffice when you could buy Office? Why use Kmail when you could buy Outlook? Why use Linux when you could buy Windows?

      The answer, for me, is always the same: Freedom has a value to me. The loss of Freedom that Opera represents is much greater than the $30 pittance that they're asking for it. If you want to pay for it, fine - that's your decision. I have a different set of values and you can't judge my actions by your own set.

      BTW, Freedom has tangible benefits in this case. I'm presenting a proposal to my boss to write new client-side software in XUL to provide our customers with access to our web application server's backend. I don't know (and frankly don't care) if Opera, MSIE, or any other browser has equivalent technology, since none of them (excluding text browsers) are as cross-platform as Mozilla. There are no license fees at all, and our customers will be able to use our application under MacOS or Linux as easily as Windows. That's not just a happy-fluffy "I'm Free!" feeling - it's the real ability to provide a valuable service to our clients, which gives our company a competitive advantage.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    2. Re:What amazes me... by flossie · · Score: 4, Funny
      ...is that for at least a half-dozen years that half-million users could have coughed up a measely thirty bucks and had Opera.

      Why would anyone pay for Opera when we have had lynx all this time for free?

  25. Re:English translation by Curtman · · Score: 5, Informative

    SpellBound seems to work pretty well.

  26. Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef by meringuoid · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I think al-Jazeera are quite right to play the messages in full. Should the media censor what the villains have to say? These people are threatening our lives, it seems: personally, I would think that if someone wants to kill me then I'd like to know everything I can about who they are and what they're about, the better to protect myself.

    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.
  27. Huh? by plj · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  28. Still some major problems by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In FireFox 1.0 the choice was made to redesign how XPI plugins are cryptographically signed. Suddenly my company's Thawte code signing certificate doesn't want to play ball with FireFox 1.0 (if anyone out there has any information about Thawte certificates, signtool, and FireFox 1.0, PLEASE help me out!) Result? Our plugin won't run under FireFox 1.0 since the browser won't allow the user to install unsigned plugins.

    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.

    1. Re:Still some major problems by The+One+KEA · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
  29. Re:English translation by InfiniteWisdom · · Score: 4, Funny

    You grammar/spelling nazi!

  30. Plugins by kid_wonder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."
  31. Re:OT by m50d · · Score: 5, Informative

    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