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Firefox Reviewed in the Globe and Mail
Eric Giguere writes "Today's Globe and Mail has a Firefox review titled A bug-free surfing zone in its Friday review section. Slashdot readers probably won't like the last phrase, though: 'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"
You might have to keep IE around? What else are you going to do with it? It's integrated into the OS. The only way to get rid of it completely is to uninstall Windows. What's not to like about that statement? It's certainly worth a chuckle.
Windows Update is the big reason Firefox users keep having to use Internet Explorer. There's an ActiveX plugin for Firefox out there, but I don't know if (with masquerading the user agent) it will run Windows Update. Anyone tried this? There's also an extension that adds Windows Update to Firefox's Tools menu.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Is this a joke?
,Evene in firefox 1.0).
:- IE is much faster than Firefox to open files in my hard disk.(WinXX).
I was going to ignore it thinking it was, but just incase you're serious I will respond.
The last phrase isnt that bad as you said.Nothing wrong in keeping Internet explorer for emergencies.I have seem quite a few pages that refuse to work in netscape - apart from those sites whose contents get juggled ( Yes
You're right here, this happens. MSIE is VERY good at rendering malformed HTML. Some have speculated that this was done to prevent HTML standards from being followed by most developers, but in any case, the HTML you're seeing messed up *is* malformed. At a fundamental level it's the website's fault. If you do have to use one of those pages, do make sure you e-mail the maintainer. Often they will fix it. As FF's marketshare increases, expect this to change.
Next,The start up time when I double click a html file in my hard disk
This is because MSIE is preloaded in RAM. I'm not familiar enough with windows to tell you how to preload FF at startup but there is a way. You can use about:config changes in firefox to speed up page rendering if you'd like. You should look into both of these if you are often opening files from the hard disk.
Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!
Ahh, finally to the reason I think you are joking. This is the default behavior in Firefox. If your copy isn't doing this it is because you turned it off. Turn it back on and once more it will ask for conformation.
No they weren't. They flat-out denied having used Firefox in the press release, despite the obvious screenshots. If they now claim they were showcasing MSN search in different browsers (something they never do), it's a lame attempt to try and save some face. Here's a link to the newsarticle that does work: http://www.nrg.co.il/online/10/ART/825/507.html
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
The extension that adds Windows Update to the menu is just a shortcut to wupdmgr.exe, the same thing you have in your Start Menu. It doesn't add any new features, it just mimics IE's feature of having a shortcut to it right in the browser. It's been a while since I tried, but I don't think the ActiveX plugin supports WU. This plug-in is designed for custom, legacy and intranet solutions and nothing else.
I find it easier just to not use Windows Update. I use Automatic Updates to get all my critical updates. If you're paranoid about AU, use their RSS feed and Security Bulletin Search.
I'm not saying I'm pro-microsoft. I'm not saying I'm anti-microsoft, either. What I am saying is this:
That one statement made by the author (Mathew Ingram) is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually remembers the start of the browser wars will know the following:
1. Netscape may have been a little startup at one point, but by the time the browser wars began, it was the biggest Internet application around -- and it held enormous weight behind it.
2. Netscape directly challenged Microsoft. Netscape thought that it could create a platform independant API, based around the Netscape software, that would make operating systems all but obsolete. They may not have been directly challenging windows, but they sure were threatening to make it obsolete. The challenged the Windows (Win16/Win32) API, which always has and (at least for the immediate future) always will be microsoft's bread 'n butter.
I'm not saying MS's tactics were fair, or even legal. I'm not saying the browser market couldn't use some fresh blood and some competition. Whether microsoft played fair or not is beyond my current scope. The fact is that Netscape made a direct move against microsoft, and making Netscape out to be the poor innocent victim is really starting to get old. They made a decision to challenge one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They lost. End of story.
Martyrs they are not. Examples of what not to do, they are.
/*end of rant*/
/dev/random
Memory leaks are notoriously difficult to fix, largely because it's very difficult to find what's caused it.
The basic definition of a memory leak is "program requests memory, uses it, then doesn't give it back to the system afterwards". Here's an example of code that will cause a memory leak every time it's called:
int leakyRoutine () {
char *leak;
leak=malloc(1024);
return 0;
}
What happens here is: The program asks the operating system for 1024 bytes of memory. The operating system will return with a pointer to 1024 bytes of memory, which is stored in the variable leak.
It's the program's responsibility to give that memory back afterwards. But once you're out of the function leakyRoutine(), the context is lost - you don't know what the value of the variable (and thus pointer) was. And if you don't know what memory you've got, you can't give it back.
The operating system knows what memory every program has allocated, so can reclaim the memory back quite easily. But because the operating system doesn't know what the program is doing with its memory, it can't do so while the program is running. Otherwise, data corruption is likely.
The above is a trivial example, and it's easy to see the problem. But what if there's a million lines of code, pointers are passed as arguments and return values between functions and you're not clear as to which function is responsible for freeing which pointers?
I believe you can appent "-turbo" to your FF shortcut to enable this behavior as well, at least in Windows.
"C:\Program Files\firefox\firefox.exe" -turbo
This is another reason I keep IE around. Open up a new browser window, and you've got a new session, whether you need one to test a web app you're developing or just to be logged into multiple mail.yahoo accounts at the same time. With Firefox the only way to get a new session is to log out of the old one (or close all Firefox windows.) And no, I do not want to mess around creating multiple profiles for something that IE accomplishes with a single click.