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.'"

Comments

negatives of the review

[Emugamer]

"Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs, which isn't surprising considering it only recently came out of "beta" or testing mode. It also can't do much with pages that require features only Internet Explorer has, such as the ability to run Active-X programs. These features are part of the reason IE is so riddled with malware, but they also allow it to interact with certain websites."

Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought :p

Re:negatives of the review

[fm6]

Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought

Absolutely. And they should be more standards compliant, so a web page looks the same on all browsers. And there are a lot of other reasons web servers (or any kind of server) shouldn't rely on Microsoft's baroque, unpredictable, bit-tweaking approach to software.

But the fact is, a lot of web servers do use Microsoft technology, and a lot of people have to be able to deal with that. It's part of their job, or something else that's important to them, and their not interested in any Microsoft-Mozilla religious war. If you forget that, you have have no hope of helping people move away from their dependency on Mister Bill's Empire.

Re:negatives of the review

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well there is an ActiveX extension out there, if you feel like voluntarily letting people hijack your computer..."

or using your companies internal web apps that require ActiveX untill the bigwigs can be pursuaded to allocate funds and manpower "to rebuild something that already works."

Re:negatives of the review

[PoprocksCk]

Right, but version numbers are really just marketing schemes in commercial products anyway. In the commercial world 1.0 means "good enough to sell," whereas in the Free/OSS world, it means that it's feature complete, stable, etc.

I do think that IE has had enough rewrites to have changed version numbers a few times... but they really should be calling it 5.x at this point though.

But then again, they're not even shipping standalone versions of IE though, since it's supposedly an "integrated" part of Windows (even though it really isn't). Oh well, Microsoft will continue to fool people, because people don't know any better.

Firefox or IE?

[narl]

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.'"

It isn't about using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Some of us don't have a Windows machine, so we don't even have the option of running Internet Explorer.

What do you mean?

[October_30th]

Slashdot readers probablyt won't like the last phrase

And why would I object to it? It's a pretty well known fact that there are pages that just won't work with anything else than IE.

At work, for instance, I can't use Firefox for certain tasks because the Java-based admin pages (finances and grading) at our University won't work with it. Java apps load and work to some extent, but the layout is so screwed up in a Firefox that the pages are essentially useless. In Linux the pages won't work at all because of some weird Java problems (I thought Java was supposed to be platform independent?).

Complaining won't help, because IE is such a de facto standard that, according to the people who maintain the admin software, there is no support for "non-compliant" software such as Firefox and never will be.

Memory Leaks

[rrowv]

My big complaint with FF isn't that you can't use Active-X. It's the massive memory leaks with tabbed browsing. FF routinely gets up to 350MB of memory usage. I use the internet *heavily* for research and reading news, so I open and close a huge number of tabs a day. Having to bookmark all the pages I have open every night so I can close down FF is a real pain (if I didn't, it would truely eat all my vm space). They really need to work on that...

(It's been a known issue for a long time, but nobody seems to be able to fix it)

Re:It's the Globe and Mail

[Rary]

"They have a history of biased reporting..."

Anybody can (and does) make that claim about any news source. Every news source has a bias, since there are people involved and those people, no matter how objective they may try to be, will allow a certain amount of bias through. I'd guess that, assuming you read national news in Canada, you're a National Post reader. You probably don't see them as being particularly biased, because they probably represent your worldview, whereas the G&M does not. That's fine. But the G&M does, for the most part, represent my worldview, whereas a newspaper that thinks an editorial on the merits of creationism is outstanding journalism (just to take a single example from recent memory) does not really represent my worldview, so I tend to consider NP as being "biased".

It's suggested to not rely on any single news source as the only news source.

Re:Write the author and politely help him

[Doctor Crumb]

In future, please refrain from using childish insults like "M$". Writing such things just serves to make the open source community seem immature, and won't help you get taken seriously.