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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.
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.
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
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/
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
- 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?
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