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NYTimes Reports on Firefox
Soldrinero writes "Just three days after running a community-sponsored two-page ad, the New York Times is now running a news story on Mozilla Firefox. Our favorite browser is presented in a very favorable light, and there's a good discussion on both Firefox's useability-enhancing features and its security merits. Being fair, they also present Microsoft's solution to security problems: 'Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer'"
By RANDALL STROSS
Published: December 19, 2004
IREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.
Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.
Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.
Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.
With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.
Microsoft has always viewed Internet Explorer's tight integration with Windows to be an attractive feature. That, however, was before security became the unmet need of the day. Firefox sits lightly on top of Windows, in a separation from the underlying operating system that the Mozilla Foundation's president, Mitchell Baker, calls a "natural defense."
For the first time, Internet Explorer has been losing market share. According to a worldwide survey conducted in late November by OneStat.com, a company in Amsterdam that analyzes the Web, Internet Explorer's share dropped to less than 89 percent, 5 percentage points less than in May. Firefox now has almost 5 percent of the market, and it is growing.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, has been assigned the unenviable task of explaining how Microsoft plans to respond to the Firefox challenge with a product whose features were last updated three years ago. He has said that current users of Internet Explorer will stick with it once they take into account "all the factors that led them to choose I.E. in the first place." Beg your pardon. Choose? Doesn't I.E. come bundled with Windows?
Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla's Firefox must prove it can smoothly move from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed "a bit of a free ride." If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company's browser free on every Windows PC, I'd be more careful about using the phrase "free ride."
Trying to strike a conciliatory note, Mr. Schare has also declared that he and his company were happy to have Firefox as "part of the large ecosystem" of software that runs on Windows. In fact, Firefox is ecumenically neutral, being available also for both the Mac and for Linux.
Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer's memory. Firefox has tabs. Other browsers do, too. But fundamental design decisions for Internet Explorer prevent the addition of this and other desiderata without a thorough update of Windows, which will not be complete until 2006 at the earliest.
How fitting that Microsoft finds itself in this predicament. In late 1995, at a time when Netscape Na
does anyone actually send the reports??
Yes. I have to maintain a lot of Windows PCs the send feature is supposed to get you any suggested fixes. I have rarely seen it work for IE or for the OS but in Office XP and above you click send, wait a minute and a website comes up that sometimes even details your problem and how to fix it. Better yet, 1 out of maybe 8 times it just fixes it. While I would never use it on the servers (due to MS "fixing" things) I think it is great for PCs.
I personally just like it because I have no use for the rest of the mozilla suite. My email accounts cannot be checked through Thunderbird, I use Time & Chaos, so Sunbird is out, and frankly, I'm just not interested in whatever's left. As to customization, I have over 40 plugins running in FF right now. Seems ridiculously customized to me.
Howdy.
There is a plugin where you right click on a website requiring a password and it checks a database of usernames/passwords and gives you one.
BugMeNot
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Think something like the Times or the Telegraph, assuming the .co.uk in your headers isn't misleading.
perhaps run Portable Firefox off a thumbdrive?
Howdy.
Nice theory, but you've failed to check the most basic underlying fact -- is this really their first article about Firefox? No.
The NYT, and their lead technology writer, David Pogue, have mentioned Firefox any number of times before. Just a cursory search of the archives shows 6-7 articles published prior to the advertisement, and I know Pogue has been advocating it in his online weblog and emails as well.
So, while yes, the advertisement in the NYT helped raise Firefox's profile, it's difficult to draw any direct causality between its placement and the timing of this article. (Not to mention the traditional church and state separation the NYT enforces between its advertising and editorial regimes.)
That was being unfair. Being fair, according to TFA, Microsoft's solution to the security problems is to upgrade to the latest windows OS, i.e. XP. Not buy a new comp. Still not a solution per se. But, it's different from buying a new machine.
That was the solution for people who can't use SP2, not for the people who haven't upgraded. As such, it's quite fair, since if you can't upgrade then the problem is almost certainly a matter of hardware not supporting it.
IE = integrated into the OS....
in other words 95% of IE is already loaded...
Firefox != integrated into the OS...
in other words must be loaded before using. as in longer load time.
Once a single instance is loaded, try opening another instance? Quicker isn't it? Hmmm, I wonder why that is? IT'S ALL READY LOADED (like IE is when you first get into windows)
-Xystren
Ohh, and BTW I'm testing on a p-ii 233
Right HERE ;)
-j
???
I only use FireFox and Wells Fargo doesn't give me any problems.
1 - An installation standard that is every bit as idiot proof as installing a self executing binary with microsoft.
Errm... "yum install foo"
2 - An out of the box user interface that has the polished look and feel users have come to expect form Apple and MS.
Have you used a recent distro such as Fedora?
3 - Application suites competitive with pay products like Office.
OpenOffice?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Unfotunatly there are some odball sites out there that are IE only. This is a list of IE only sites. Most of them are pretty obscure, which makes one wonder why they even bother keeping out Moz in the first place.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
http://extensions.roachfiend.com/howto.php
Thats for extensions. Otherwise check out.
http://www.xulplanet.com/
It is very easy to do.
As sacreligious as it is, I think Firefox should have a plugin that allows Active X to run, but set-up so that only certain URLs as provided by the user allow this.
o ad :)
It has.
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm#downl
In fact, I'm using it in my firefox right now, listening to embedded midi's
And yes, it ONLY enables windows media player. All other activex plugins have to be inserted by hand.