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

[PoprocksCk]

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...

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."

My favorite Firefox story

[Staos]

Microsoft used Firefox in a press image they sent out promoting their MSN Search.

might have to keep it around?

[Vermyndax]

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

[IO ERROR]

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.

Mac IE is removed easily

[Vandil X]

It's integrated into the OS. The only way to get rid of it completely is to uninstall Windows.

On my Mac, I just drag the "Internet Explorer" icon from my /Applications folder to the trash.

It's uninstalled :)

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:Memory Leaks

[jimicus]

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?

Re: Or just don't use Windows Update

[InvisiBill]

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.

Write the author and politely help him

[mauriceh]

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

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.

Automatic Correctness From Day One

[EventHorizon]

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.