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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.'"
Yes, exactly. People should begin to understand that Firefox's lack of ActiveX is actually a good thing.
In the article they say that it's a good thing because of security, but the Firefox programmers should find a way around it. Well there is an ActiveX extension out there, if you feel like voluntarily letting people hijack your computer...
Instead of posting "bitchfest" comments here, perhaps we should politely email the author and help him broaden his understandingof the issues?
Here is what I wrote to him, as an example.
While I am sure it is not perfect, I believe it touches on the matters he clearly does not yet understand.
Emailed to: mingram@globeandmail.ca
Re: Your article:
A bug-free surfing zone
By Mathew Ingram
Friday, January 14, 2005 - Page R31
Hi Matthew.
While I have to thank you for a relatively informative article, I also have to point out that you are still, in many ways "Not getting it"
You have fallen into two fundamental errors of understanding:
First:
" That engine forms the basis for a new browser called Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users"
In this you badly missed the point of the Mozilla project.
Firstly the Mozilla project is where various browsers, Gecko based and other, spawn from.
It was an example of the first major project ceded to the Open Source movement.
It was decided that the best way to encourage development, without being tied to a development budget, was to move the development to an Open Source model, where thousands of users/develeopers could adopt and continue the development unfettered by traditional copyright and ownership issues.
By moving the Netscape source to a "copyleft" model this has clearly demonstrated an alternative and much more useful model for ownership and develeopment.
Your second case of misunderstanding:
Adding insult to injury you only mentioned the old (and many say obsolete) Microsoft and Apple environments, and totally ignored the much more relevant and modern Open Soruce communities, such as Linux and FreeBSD.
Thirdly, in the last paragraph you wrote:
"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."
While I fully agree that Firefox is NOT perfect, the one item you chose as an erxample is not a bug!
ActiveX and similar are not features, but instead are what can be called "malware".
A model for extensions that is so insecure and flawed is not to be supported.
It was a fatal error by Microsoft, and continues to be so.
Nobody is interested in "fixing" this.
If you want an extension model with some practical features, the world has already settled on a few, most notably PHP and Java. These can be secured, and can be considered "safe" extensions when properly implemented.
The only "bug" that is relevant here is the continued dependancy by a handful of misguided developers who are still using ActiveX on web pages.
The severity of this bug is such that the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued an advisory advising people to NOT use Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer and ASP IS the "bug".
Avoiding it's faults is an improvement, NOT a "bug"
BTW, whether you want to Internet Explorer installed on a Windows system is not a choice you get to make. M$ have integrated the browser into the OS in a fashion that does not allow you to remove it.
All you can do is remove links to it. These are called "shortcuts" in Windows terms.
Maybe next time you foray into this arena, good intentions in hand, you might want to submit your article for peer review in the relevant communities. I will be glad to point you in the directions for this if you like.
Feel free to ask.
BTW, this highlights what is probably the strongest feature of Open Source software: Peer review.
By submitting code, text, and other means of expression to peer review, we utilize a wide community of people to assist in improving our works, avoiding the pitfalls of well intentioned, but misadvised concepts and cases where we simply were not aware of a relevant matter on the topic.
We are all going to make mistakes, but i
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
Tools such as 'valgrind' are great for catching memory problems like the one you described. However, it is best to use them continuously during development (ideally running automatic regression tests inside them). It's virtually impossible to clean up a huge amount of low quality code after the fact.
Frankly the firefox codebase is the result of 7 years of development done largely without unit tests or even basic QA. As a result, they have leaks, bloat, and severe malformed HTML DoSes that lock up all browser tabs/windows.
The key to good engineering is complete self-honesty, but these days it looks like firefox is being managed by a self-delusional marketing organization with no interest in fixing its serious technical problems.
Linux users are encouraged to run 'valgrind firefox' prior to modding this post down for not towing slashdot's party line.
I did some more research after that post. If you want to run firefox under valgrind you actually need to use 'firefox --debugger valgrind'. With 'valgrind firefox', the startup script causes valgrind to analyze the script, rather than the actual browser process.
Anyway, results with a single blank firefox 1.0 window:
==6273== ERROR SUMMARY: 83 errors from 5 contexts (suppressed: 272 from 3)
==6273== malloc/free: in use at exit: 691499 bytes in 12633 blocks.
==6273== malloc/free: 163851 allocs, 151218 frees, 25635248 bytes allocated.
which IMHO is rather unacceptable for a 1.0 release.