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Mozilla 1.8b1 Released, Firefox Growth Slowing
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla 1.8 Beta 1 has been released, and in addition to numerous bug fixes now includes ECMAScript for XML (E4X). Mozilla 1.8 will serve as the code basis for Firefox 1.1. In other Mozilla related news, WebSideStory saw Firefox's usage growth slow down to just 15% (Jan-Feb) from 22% (Dec-Jan) making Firefox's 10% marketshare goal for 2005 potentially more challenging. Their stats also saw Internet Explorer usage drop below 90% for the first time in many years."
To me, the Mozilla nightlies are starting to feel faster than the Firefox nightlies, and certainly faster than Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.1.
Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just a side effect of my old hardware? It seems like Mozilla 1.8 will be noticeably faster than at least Firefox 1.0 and last night's Firefox Feb 26 build for sure.
According to these statistics Firefox is already over 20% marketshare. Why is there such a discrepancy between the two?
lasindi
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem that this sig is too small to contain.
One of my larger customers, with some 3000+ desktops, has asked about switching to firefox. Now, there are always some web sites and web based apps that require IE, which makes this a pain. But given the amount of time we spend cleaning spyware from machines, I think I can live with it, I don't know if the users can.
In any case, a coporate wide switch won't happen overnight. I'd expect to see the next 6 months or so start to see more corporations install linux enterprise wide. Those same corporations will complain about sites that don't work in Firefox, which helps fuel the uptake.
Also note to FF people - one of the reasons cited for not installing FF enterprise wide was the lack of central patching and policy control. This means patching security holes and forcing down settings to the clients; from my desk, without spending hours writing scripts.
Before I couldn't go FF, now I have no need. That said, I have seen neighbors go to FF from IE after someone (kid they got to help them with spyware, or an adult child, or someone else) suggested it and they have to problem with it. They don't seem to see a difference, which may be part of the problem. Since both browsers take you too the same Internet, there will be a number (and not an insignificant number) who see "nothing different" and so they stay with IE. And now that IE has popup blocking (from SP2), one of the biggest complaints people had is gone.
But either way, FF is a nice browser and even if I don't use it I'm glad it's out there (another option, more competition, etc). Also I'm suprised that adoption was so fast in the first place. I think we are out of "try this new FF browser" and into "FF is better, look into it sometime". People will still switch, but how long could we really have held up that high pace? In about 6 months FF got almost 6% of the market from 2% or so. That is AMAZING for a product that isn't forced on people (IE updates).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Most users don't know they want tabbed browsing, but everyone I've seen who has used it for a bit, gets pissed off when they have to use Internet Explorer. This is especially bad at school because, for some reason, they think it's a security concern to be able to use File->New Window (it says it's been disabled by security settings). This can be circumvented by just starting IE again from the start menu, but it's still an annoying piece of shit.
It's worth checking out recent browser-speed benchmarks. The new beta of Operate placed very well in terms of performance:
Browser Speed Analysis
Interestingly, FireFox 1.0 is vulnerable to an arbitrary code execution via drag&drop vuln that was first discovered on IE:
5 -02-22/2005-02-28/0
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/391526/200
Works on Windows and Linux apparently.
#include tinfoil_hat.h
... I Think that FireFox is good for Micro$oft. The Browsers war has been for years a black point in the reputation of m$, and have caused them legal troubles. The fact that there is another browser out there, and that there seems to be an anti-IE-pro-Firefox campaign that has reached the Media, let's microsoft say that there is just fair competition, and make the cort forget all microsoft's monopolistic practices.
... that may be just accurate
Whenever some product has tried to compete directly with Microsoft, Micro$oft has just killed it. M$ is an unfair competitor, and it know just how to get ride of the rest of the market. Just look at the FUD campaign aginst GNU/Linux they are doing
just a paranoid idea
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I have this buddy with Windows XP. You know, the kind of person who doesn't understnad just how dangerous .exe files are. As expected, this system was full of all kinds of spyware by the time I got to it. It wasn't even possible to open regedit; a spyware program was killing it. I couldn't even download Firefox from IE; I had to use the old ftp client to ftp over to ftp.mozilla.org to get the program.
So, I get and download Firefox for him. I explained to him "OK, I'm going to reinstall this system and not give you the admin password when I get time. In the meantime, use this to browse the web". I got rid of the IE icon from his desktop and replaced it with Firefox using the IE icon.
A couple of days later, my friend says he wants to keep Firefox. He told me the tabbed browsing was "tight".
I think Firefox is currently the best open source application for non-technical people out there. It is 100% open source and better than the competition (better CSS than IE; more security than IE; more feautures than IE).
My favourite browser is still galeon.
There are 3 things that have been in galeon for years and are not in Firefox yet:
1. Tab detach feature
2. password manager not based on autofilling (which is dissallowed by some banks thus my on-lin bank site has password unmanageble by firefox [operations requires one-time passwords and tokens so no, there is no extra security in that ]).
3. sessions - saved in given point of time (windwos with tabs) or when browser crashes
Also there is one feature needed:
4. disabling flash player - same way as hjava.
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
As you know, Firefox is based off the Mozilla 1.7 branch. The Mozilla devs did a lot of work 'deCOMtaminating' Mozilla for 1.8. Essentially they're removing XPCOM interfaces from various performance-critical parts of the app, allowing tighter binding + faster execution. It makes a huge difference, especially on slower hardware. Firefox 1.1 will be based off Mozilla 1.8, so it will take advantage of the streamlining.
Yeah, several pages that Slashdot has linked to in the last couple of weeks go right through Mozilla / Firefox's pop up blocker, in fact, with one of the Tab extensions that I have loaded in my home copy of Mozilla, it is supposed to treat all new windows as tabs.. and I've NEVER had a popup window happen in that browser.. (not even the ones I want to get, even enabling them in the preferences) till the other day.. clicked a story off of Slashdot, and it popped open a new window, which then closed a second later, and I had 4 new tabs open, all with different ads in them.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
and techsavvy users is probably the reason websidestory is seeing falling stats, every good filterset and hostsfile block them and their javscript tracking shite by default
Rumor has it that IE 7 will sport all the little whiz-bangs like tabbed browsing and so on that Firefox has. What this means is that the "average" non-techie user will see no difference, and there for no reason to migrate from IE 7, should they already have it. As well, I see a problem with a feature that most techies like, but the average user sees as a big hassle: Surfing the web, only to find that the base install requires a lot of plug-ins to be installed to open Flash, Real files, and all the other popular crap. My worthless two cents...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What I do is make the top menu icons small, remove the "bookmark" toolbar, adjust the remaining two bars to be useful.
Then I show them that you can see more of the screen in Firefox than you can in IE, "You can see more of the internet". This makes Firefox look better on every page they see. As dumb as that is, it works.
I then do as above, removing shortcuts to IE.
Show them their favourite sites in Firefox. Maybe they think that, no matter what you say, everything will look a bit different, or a lot websites of don't work, or they will have learn to do everything a different way or something. Maybe they think it's like someone saying that Linux is just like Windows to use: kind of true for some, but a bit misleading.
Drive home the concept that it's the same web they're looking at whatever they use.
Oh, and show them a site they like but that has really bad ads, with popups blocked and the banners filtered with adblock.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Most users don't want tabbed browsing? Are you on Crack? EVERYONE I've showed tabbed browsing to has loved it. Even when I didn't do it intentionally, e.g., googling for something with a friend I start middle clicking, he sees these tabs extending off to the right and goes "WHOA - what's that?" -- I show the sites opening up in the background -- he says "That's cool!" That's the usual response from tech savy to friends who think AOL is a nice service.
As for the "90% IE", three words "user agent spoofing".
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I've tried Firefox many times, and I have it installed right now, but I keep going back to IE. Why? Because Firefox just doesn't "feel" right.
Minor things bug me, like "Bookmarks" in Firefox versus "Favorites" in IE. I don't really care what you call them, but I've trained my muscle memory to hit "alt-a" to open the "Favorites" menu. In Firefox, I have to consciously think about hitting "alt-b" (which is a more cumbersome chord than "alt-a", as well, given the placement of 'a' vs. 'b' on a qwerty keyboard). I could live with that, retrain my muscle memory, but there's a bigger problem once the menu is open. In IE, I can step through the entries by typing the first character. If I have three favorites starting with 'm', I can hit 'm' three times to get the third one. This works in Firefox, except when a bookmark starts with the same character as one of the accelerator keys ('b' to bookmark the page, 'm' to manage bookmarks, 'o' on a submenu to open all bookmarks in tabs (which seems like a stupid feature to me anyway, and why isn't it on the main menu page as well as submenus?)). If I have the same three bookmarks in Firefox starting with 'm' as I have favorites in IE, I can't quickly access them by typing 'm'. As soon as I do that, I'm taken to the window to manage my bookmarks. That sucks.
Another issue I have with Firefox is the installation of themes and extensions. Why must I restart the entire browser just to change a theme? I can understand having to do that with the installation of an extension (the same thing is necessary in IE), but for switching my theme? That's just silly. Still, that's a minor issue that's made worse by the fact that Firefox's default theme is pretty poor (the button icons are pretty amateur, and just don't look "right" to me). So, I go to find a better theme, and many of the listed themes don't have any preview image (side note: If you have a website dedicated to something visual like a browser theme, you had better have previews for every item -- I'm not clicking through and installing every theme that has no preview just to see if I like it or not). Once I find a theme I like (or not, as the case may be), and am able to install it (after a new release, good luck getting old themes to work), I still have to stop and restart the browser just to see what it looks like. Lame.
Perhaps I'm just too set in my ways to switch away from IE, but that's fine by me. I use SP2's popup blocker alongside my own custom-built blocker. I set the security permissions properly so I can block Flash crap. I have full control over cookies. I haven't had a spyware infestation in quite some time, and the last virus I got was back in 1994. In short, IE works for me, and I've long since gotten used to its minor problems. The utility I'd gain by switching to Firefox is not enough to outweigh the need to learn and get used to a whole new set of minor annoyances.
It needs to have one vulnerability to be a problem.
People say this frequently but it is simply wrong. Imperfect security is not the same thing as bad security.
From some sort of theoretical perspective one vulnerability and many vulnerabilities are equally exploitable. From a practical perspective things are different. What is necessary for there to be a "problem" is for there to be a large quantity of vulnerable systems of a certain sort installed. There are a number of conditions which must be met to go from "a vulnerability exists" to this point. Among them are the range of installed versions of the system, the range of versions which contain vulnerability, the range and nature of individual vulnerabilities that vulnerability represents, the time between the discovery of the vulnerability and the patches, the patches take to be installed by the end user, and in general the likelihood that a potential exploiter of vulnerability may expect that attempts to exploit will be successful.
All of these are effected by the frequency and quantity of bugs, not just "has there been a bug ever". In particular, if major security patches are released on a bimonthly basis because the vulnerabilities are many and frequent, it is much harder to get everyone to upgrade and install all of these patches than if there's one big urgent security patch once. (One might say that hacking on this scale is a social process, not a technical one.)
There is some sort of basic human inability to create a perfectly secure software program. But this does not mean a focus on security cannot be beneficial.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You can leave out mail and newsgroups, the address book, and the IRC client.
With modern demand paging systems, it doesn't matter anyway, as long as you don't load and use the other components. If you don't do e-mail with mozilla, the email code won't even be fetched from the disk. Same for IRC or other stuff that you don't use.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Here's something funny - I have firefox installed on my family's computer, I suggested that they use it, and they do, unless they need to go to an IE specifc website. Yesterday, I walked by the computer, and there's my sister sitting there with a good 10-15 firefox windows open.
I say "Hey, you know you could open all those sites in one window?"
She says "Oh in tabs? I'd rather use seperate windows"
That said, does anyone know of an extension that would allow me to organize tabs in multiple rows based on the site they were from? I'm willing to write one myself, but it's going to take me a little while to learn how to.
kaens.blogspot.com
- Februry is a short month
- New releases of Firefox updates have all but stopped. Its been about 4 months since the last update
- Lack of helper apps/extensions - Not much new (that is publized on places like
/.)
Firefox is solid. Early adopters have it and are happy. No new updates, so new reason to download it.No one really knows a whole lot about the new extensions because Firefox relies almost exclusively on the OSS forword of mouth. The current batch of extensions are not quite primetime so no one is pushing them.
Firefox is solid, but its reached a platue where Netscape was at 2.0. Now Firefox has to take to the next level with better advertising and new features, or fall between the cracks, just like its older brother.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
It cannot be assumed that FireFox doesn't have the same amount of bugs and vulnerabilities, it hasn't had as much attention paid to it.
Actually, being open source, it's had far more attention paid to it than IE has.
Flash for Website Navigation is bad because:
- it renders your page inaccessible for blind,... people
- people can't use their browsers comfort functions with Flash (like Open in new Window)
- Flash is too dumb to distinguish between right mouse clicks and drags (like the ones used in mouse gestures), it opens a popup menu with lots of useless commands on right-click - Flash Animations and Intros annoy the shit out of your site users when they have to wait for them even though you have already seen them (slow down site usage which kills your userbase)
- Flash Player is not available for all Browsers on all Operating Systems
- Who says all your visitors want your page to look the same (Font, Font-Size,Sound,...)
You should think a bit about all these points before you decide you really need to break compatibility and comfort just for a bit of eye-candy/bells and whistles.
Linux is not Windows
Ditto (Suse 9.1)
--Joey
Well, i have a friend who switched from IE6 to FF 0.9 all by his own. No i didn't even told him about FireFox (but i installed FF in that PC tho). Anyway, he didn't even know that FF has tabbed browsing until he saw me using it. "Wow! You can open many pages in the same window(TM)".
Ahh, and don't forget that when the time IE7 is released (hopefully in our lifetime), Firefow will have many new features.
Use cygwin and Mozilla/Firefox to provides seamless access to X Windows and X applications from within Web browsers and big corporations will love Linux even more.
m l
I have been using this in the 20th century:
http://www.powerlan-usa.com/webtermx.ht
P.S. I am also looking for ISP offering NFS access to Linux software (I have no time to install everything myself).
P.S.2 I hope that some day I will be able to run both Linux and Windows simultanoesly without vmware.
I checked out the docs for ECMAScript for XML and it looks like this is a really cool feature! Now instead of big long yucky DOM calls we get simple parent.child.grandchild access to XML data. This is going to be a boon for people doing Ajax, since it's basically all XML data.
The problem with doing this is that you are cutting these people off from the many sites coded for IE. I use Firefox 95% of the time but I keep an IE around for sites that balk. Often it helps.
Ah, but there IS a way to take care of this, and it's something that, had I really cared to, could have accomplished in about five minutes, both to install it and to show the person how to use it.
A simple extension for Firefox called "Open this page in IE." It allows you to load any current page or link to a page into IE, all without you having to open any programs. It'll just open the window for you, load the page, and you can close it when you're done with it.
But the reason I didn't is mainly because I think your 95% assertion is incorrect. In most (>99%) cases, I think that the non-functioning aspect of the page has little to do with vital functions and more to do with things like fonts that aren't sized correctly, and in the other cases, it's usually a situation where it's not that important to the person and they won't bother to deal with it.
What's more, I can think of only one specific group of sites that don't at least FUNCTION in Mozilla/Firefox as opposed to IE, and that group is Microsoft-based pages. The MSDN library, MSN Gaming Zone, Windows Update and the like... Those are the only pages I can think of that have severe functionality issues in Firefox. And I view a LOT of different webpages. All the rest are minor cosmetic things that the average user wouldn't notice in the first place.
After FF starting getting a lot of attention, I was expecting the M$ politburo to respond swiftly and fiercly - but they didn't and it puzzles me.
It is very un-M$ to allow competition in a market segment. And its unlikely they didn't see this coming. Why did they wait this long to respond (IE 7.0)?
Its a testament to the strength of their monopoly that they haven't HAD to add new features to IE in 3 years (6.0 released Aug 2002).
seem to be adopting firefox just as much as their *nix and MacOS counterparts.The article states 5.47% of windows users use firefox vs 5.69% of all OS users. I actually thought windows users percentage will be far lower.
/. I'd think firefox would account for 90%
Would be interesting to see a "What browser do you use" poll on
That actually leads me to thinking that geeks are a far lower percentage of the population than I originally thought.
The following statement is true
The preceding statement is false
It's to get past those irritating sniffer tools that were common a few years ago, that blocked you from a site if you weren't using the latest version of IE or Netscape.
So, a naive stats tool would pick Opera up as IE, whereas a smarter one would realise that it's actually Opera.
Fair enough. I just find it unnessesary to want to get statistics for usage in one particular geographical location. The web has evolved to cross most borders demographics should be treated as that.