The Future of Firefox

sebFlyte writes "As Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1 and Internet Explorer keeps trundling towards IE7, ZDNet UK has an interesting set of articles about Mozilla. Among other things, they look at the history of Firefox all the way from the pre-phoenix days, and have an interview with chief evangelist Asa Dotzler looking at what has driven the browsers success and why he thinks the release of IE7 will cause a massive boost in the uptake of Firefox."

Comments

boost leads to more exploits

[rockytriton]

It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...

http://www.dreamsyssoft.com

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...

More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.

Microsoft bought Spyglass and started flinging shit at Mosaic until they got a working browser in a short time to kill Netscape. Then they flung more shit at it to corner the browser market, then they kept on flinging shit at random, to add this and that feature and eye candy. Since nobody really checks the code outside of Microsoft, and since they don't (didn't?) really care about security as long as nobody finds the flaws, there you have it: IE pisses people off and people switch to the first decent alternative.

That's why I think IE will keep on declining, and Firefox won't.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Leroy_Brown242]

(Score:0, Informative)

Of course, negative feedback from the mods because you spoke ill of FIREFOX even though it was a valid point. Same happens with Linux and Google. Oh well.

Your point is valid though.

The larger Firefox's market share become, the larger a target they become.

Right now, exploiters hit IE because it's the most efficient way to screw over a lot of people with a browser. Exploiting Firefox would effect a whole lot less people, possibly with more effort.

The true strength of Firefox is that the community stands behind it, and can change it to fill hole. So the open source community can put their geek where their mouth is, and make a browser as good as the community can. If it sucks, then it's nobody's fault but our own.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[sobachatina]

I agree with you. The true advantage of FF is that it is written by people who want a browser that does what they want - not by people trying to enforce some strategy to make a profit.

An open source project could be weakened by a lack of interest but it can't ever really be killed as long as there still one person working on it. And as soon as the dominant, proprietary solution becomes inadequate there will be interest in the open source project again.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[frodo from middle ea]

Let's not forget, Firefox is not embeded in the OS, that itself makes is much secure (by design) than IE. e.g. In future it may be possible to discover a way to gain administrative previledges thru IE, even when running with a non previledged a/c, chances of that happening with firefox, atleast by design look slim.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Smidge204]

More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.

In practice, though, this doesn't happen as often as you might want to believe. If this were true you'd think we wouldn't be finding the same exploits cropping up in every brand of software X (especially things like forums).

And for every OSS trophy project you'll find a thousand half-assed weekend hacks that never make it past Alpha stage because, to the developer, posting it on sourceforge or whatever is more important that making a program usable to more than just himself. That's the reality of OSS development and that's what you're going to have to deal with. Everyone wants to be the one with the big idea, and be the one in charge, and so they all spend their time reinventing the same crooked wheel.
=Smidge=

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[stoph ct]

even when running with a non previledged a/c

you're saying Windows has non-priveledged accounts? what version of Windows is this?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Leroy_Brown242]

I'm not sure what you're tlaking about. Mine updates all automated style just fine.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

Software's popularity is not directly related to it's insecurity.

Software is not a bridge, that if more people stand on it the greater chance it has of collapsing.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Leroy_Brown242]

Sure. But the more people that use it, the more popular a target it will become.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Quevar]

More options in browsers will be better for everyone.

If more people use Firefox, it's possible that more people will try to hack it, but that means less people hacking IE. So, any hack that does come out will probably not affect everyone. Software diversity is very important to preventing systems from going down. I can't believe people rely solely on one OS to do their stuff - a virus comes out and everything is messed up. I would rather have a backup running a different OS that could be swapped in or better yet, a mix of multiple OSes. Same with browsers - have multiple ones and everyone ends up more secure.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[friedmud]

"And for every OSS trophy project you'll find a thousand half-assed weekend hacks that never make it past Alpha stage because, to the developer, posting it on sourceforge or whatever is more important that making a program usable to more than just himself."

As a _very_ part time open source developer I think this is fine.

I personally have published a couple of my own weekend hacks in Alpha stage... never to touch them again. I still recieved a lot of feedback... most of which was "Thanks!". Why? Because it gave people something to start from, or an example to use for a different implementation. I'm sure no one used anything in a "production" environment but that was never the purpose.

Publishing an open-source project is _never_ a bad idea. The more code and collaboration out there the stronger the community is. I never wanted to be the best at making program X... I just wanted to be helpful.

I think people have a hard time understanding that you don't always have to "win" at everything. Sometimes just being nice, or helpful can be its own reward (both to you and the community).

Friedmud

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[farble1670]

the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code

are you implying that for-profit developers don't take pride in their code? that sure isn't the case for me. as for you, i'd advise you state your views on your resume. employers will probably want to know about that.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

are you implying that for-profit developers don't take pride in their code?

All developers in closed-source companies that I've known would *like* to take pride in their code, but they always have to respect tight schedules, and end up writing "good enough" code (good enough meaning, sure, there are bugs, but no show-stoppers).

I'm quite sure Microsoft developers aren't told to take the time to do things right. They're told to hurry the hell up and make it work. I'm also quite sure most of them would prefer taking the time to do things right, but their employer doesn't pay them to do that.

i'd advise you state your views on your resume. employers will probably want to know about that.

You misunderstood my views. My view is simply that not release the source code makes it easy to hide bad code, and even the best engineers can't go against their management's wishes and constraints.

As for me, I was a developer, so I should know what I'm talking about. Not anymore though: in my new line of job, I can tell the customer to get lost until I'm sure everything's done just right, and he's usually happy with that, because my products cost well over $10k a pop and he prefers waiting than having a botched-up result :-)

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think ActiveX in IE has anything to do with the big, fat target painted on IE, eh?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

NT 3.x. NT4. 2000. XP. 2003.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Captain Scurvy]

More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline.

Or so one would hope. However, one must also take into consideration the fact that open source has a way of uncovering a lot more vulnerabilities. Granted, many of them as of late, at least with Firefox, haven't been very serious, were nit-picky, and were fixed rather quickly.

I have noticed, however, that a lot of people will just look at the number of vulnerabilities and make ill-formed opinions about open source products. They won't look at the severity or how quickly it was fixed, but they'll definitely look down on the product if they have to update it a "lot."

More than one of my clients has said something along the lines of, "Firefox/Linux/OSS? Isn't that really just as vulnerable as Microsoft stuff, but the community downplays the problem?"

So, in this way, the open source model can be a two-edged sword when it comes to persuading other people to go that route. The FUD seems to be working, at least from what I've seen.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Linus Torvaalds]

Firefox is not embeded in the OS

Neither is Internet Explorer. It has no special privileges, it runs with the same permissions as the user, same as Firefox.

Trident, the rendering engine that handles HTML, CSS, etc, is embedded by many programs, including Internet Explorer, but that's no different to any other OS. Many KDE applications embed KHTML - even Amarok, KDE's media player embeds KHTML. Many GNOME applications embed gtk-html or Gecko. The same thing will happen with WebCore on OS X.

The "Internet Explorer is embedded into the OS" criticism is pure horseshit - always has been. Funny how people attacked Microsoft for saying so in court because they thought it was a lie, and once the court case was over, attacked Microsoft because they thought it was the truth.

You can't have it both ways. It's either embedded into the OS or it isn't. And if it is, don't claim Microsoft lied in court, and hold KDE and GNOME to the same standard.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

"...put their geek where their mouth is"

Oral sex for geeks! Excellent!

"So the open source community can put their..."

Oh, oral sex from geeks. Pass.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Linus Torvaalds]

Microsoft bought Spyglass

No, they royally fucked over Spyglass. They made a deal with Spyglass so that Spyglass would get a cut of all the profits made from Internet Explorer as it was based upon Spyglass Mosaic. Remember, this was back when web browsers were something you could buy in a box. Getting a cut of all sales for a flagship application sold by Microsoft? Spyglass must have thought they really lucked out!

Then Microsoft illegally dumped Internet Explorer on the market for no cost in order to kill Netscape. 5% of zero profits isn't a lot of money, is it? Spyglass no longer exists.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[farble1670]

As for me, I was a developer, so I should know what I'm talking about

okay, you have an opinion, but please don't attempt to make blanket stmts about working software developers because you have run ins with a few crappy engineers and poorly managed projects, companies.

am am a developer (as opposed to was), and i and my colleagues take pride in and ownership for the code we write. our mgmt actually listens to us, and in general, engineers have a lot of say in what goes out the door.

I'm quite sure Microsoft developers aren't told to take the time to do things right

i know you're looking for mod points, but don't you think you've speculated enough for today?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

are you implying that for-profit developers don't take pride in their code? that sure isn't the case for me.

The difference is that the OS developer is always working out of love, and the commercial developer may (as in your case) or may not be.

There are plenty of people who are employed that dislike the stupid programs they have to work on.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

okay, you have an opinion, but please don't attempt to make blanket stmts about working software developers because you have run ins with a few crappy engineers and poorly managed projects, companies.

I was in this industry long enough to make such statements. Apparently, you seem to be working for a sensible company where engineers are listened to, and I'm glad that you do. However, I can assure you you're in a minority.

i know you're looking for mod points, but don't you think you've speculated enough for today?

Do you really think I'm looking for mod points, after having posted on this here board for 6 or 7 years and gotten all my karma on the first two days? ;-)

Besides, you don't have to be hostile...

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[loconet]

"More likely, the open-source approach, meaning the pride developers take in making good (or at least decent) code, the peer review of said code, and quick fixing when a bug is found, will prevent a decline."

To pick up on that point, Open Source features and deadlines are usually not driven by management/sales/marketing/, leaving the decision of when the product is as close to being ready as possible, to those people who actually know when that is; the egineers, developers, QA, and testers. The process is usually not hurried and pushed because of a bottom line. People involved are usually there because they like to, not because they are forced to take on any job to bring bread to the table. I think everyone agrees that, generally, people who are doing things they enjoy, and are happy, usually produce a better product.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

> Microsoft bought Spyglass and

No, they did not, quite the opposite, they tricked them into doing the work for free.

MS contracted Spyglass to write IE from Mosaic but the payment was to be $5.00 for every copy of IE _sold_. When they 'gave it away' they did not need to pay Spyglass anything.

Spyglass sued and lost. MS insisted that it was never 'sold' even when it was an unremovable part of Windows that was sold.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[loconet]

Yah since Apache, historically, has always been full of holes due to its popularity as suppose to IIS.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's quite possible that this boost will lead to more exploits which will lead to a decline...

Yep. It's just like the number of successful exploits against Apache exceeded those against IIS, due to the fact that Apache has 70 percent of the web server market against IIS's 20 percent.

Oh, wait, that didn't happen.

Well, then, it's just like the number of exploits against Linux web servers has grown to match those against Windows, now that there are an equal number of web servers running Linux as Windows.

On second thought, that didn't happen either.

Hmmm. Your theory doesn't appear to hold water.

Maybe the truth is that Microsoft's products are full of holes, because they've never given a damn about their customers, and have been focussing on lock-in instead of security.

The latter would explain why Microsoft chose the flawed "trusted site" approach for ActiveX, instead of a proper security sandbox, and why with .Net they've repeated the same mistake. The security sandbox makes the user secure and _independent_, whereas the "trusted site" model allows Microsoft to set themself up as a central authority, thus locking in the user.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[zymano]

http://www.antssoft.com/wisepopup/

This website proves that firefox can't block popups.

I use flash and adblock. It's no use.

AS long as javascript and dhtml are used we will be screwed.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[It'sYerMam]

The first one opens a new tab in the background. It does not interrupt my browsing experience, I can remove it when I want to. More importantly, it only occurs when I click that link. If I simply turn up on a site, I don't get a flood of popups immediately obscuring my view of the content.

As for the second one, guess what? It doesn't work at all. Sorry, mate!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Gordo_1]

Microsoft bought Spyglass and started flinging shit at Mosaic until they got a working browser in a short time to kill Netscape. Then they flung more shit at it to corner the browser market, then they kept on flinging shit at random, to add this and that feature and eye candy.

Since when does writing a piece of software (IE5) that single-handedly beat the competition (Netscape) through simplicity, ease-of-use and performance amount to flinging shit at random? Sure, they had a head start from Mosaic, but Netscape had a further head start. I switched to IE at version 5 because it was much more stable and faster than Netscape 4.7x.

As much as we might malign MS's heavy-handedness in its business dealings and slow movement to embrace secure coding practices, until Firefox came along, there was no browser competition. I'm no more MS lover than the average /.er, but this response reeks of the kind of subjective one-sided bias that is all too often passed off as the undisputed truth around here.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[zymano]

The second one is unblockable .

It's a firefox flaw. I come across them alot recently.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[HeroreV]

Firefox 1.1 will have 'real' updates instead of just downloading an entire installer and running it if I remember correctly. In any case, it's in the works for some version.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Tezkah]

Of course, negative feedback from the mods because you spoke ill of FIREFOX even though it was a valid point. Same happens with Linux and Google. Oh well.

This person posts at -1 because their karma is bad due to the fact that they've been modded down many times, and when someone modded them insightful it went to (0, Insightful).

YHBT, HAND. With a nice advertisement in the post as well. Nice turning it into an antislashdot attack that got modded up as well. Mods, are you encouraging people to respond to trolls, and the act of trolling itself?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[jp10558]

Actually, there was, you just may not have heard of it then. When I found out about Opera v5.12 in 2001 (long before FireFox) I tried it out, and never went back.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

Publishing an open-source project is _never_ a bad idea. The more code and collaboration out there the stronger the community is. I never wanted to be the best at making program X... I just wanted to be helpful.

A lot of people operate under this assumption. Sadly they're just plain wrong, and here's why: If you have 1000 pieces of software that all claim to do roughly the same sort of thing, and 999 are hacks, finding that 1 good program is going to be an excercise in frustration.

End users are likely to come across one or more of the hacks, curse about open source rubbish and go back to using close rubbish that at least works a little better. More sophisticated users will go and find out what other people are happy with, but it still makes the process much more complex.

It's the same reason having thousands of distros,f ew of which work well, is a bad bad thing. Some diversity is a good thing, but too much diversity is almost as bad as none.

If open source wants to survive, we need more focus on a narrower range of products as well as solid lobbying of politicians to keep open source legal.

To be fair the sorts of software you're talking about writing yourself sound more like code snippets than fully functional programs. That's not so bad since your target audience is generally other developers, and they can be expected to sort through software.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[pantherace]

No, it's not unblockable.

I use Konqueror, and have javascript popups set to 'smart'. What this means is that popups work, IF DIRECTLY IN RESPONSE TO A MOUSE CLICK. Something I'd like to see firefox implement.

Now, why would one want that? Take for example Yahoo mail (being the first that comes to mind) where a portion of their UI uses popups. Completely blocking popups eliminates lots of legitimate items.

Excluding clicking that link (cleverly done that way, by the site just to get around most popup blocking), I've not seen a popup in years that wasn't legitimate, on any machine where I have Konqueror set to "Smart". There are a very few (3 in the last year) sites where Legitimate popups don't work.

What it and similar popup blockers require a site operator to do is get a user to click on something. Possible, but a heck of a lot tougher than something like onLoad, or any of the other 'features' that software advertised. (On the list, I see 2 possible ones that could get by, both having the requisite click.)

Now, this is perfect protection for someone like me, but, as the email worm oubreaks have shown, there are a lot of people who will stupidly react when dealing with computers. However, until window.open (and similar) is not in use legitimately, it'll continue to be a problem. However, it will come down to getting people to click, compared with tricky javascript.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[callqcmd]

I think its very true. Even to the decline...
Oh! We are not talking about breasts here?
Sorry!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[MadChicken]

You need Popups must die. The first one merely puts a little warning in the status bar. I can enable popups manually for any site I need to.

Apparently there are some about:config settings you can tweak that basically do the same thing, but I have no idea what they are.

As for the second one, of course it's not a popup, it's a stupid DHTML trick. A div overlapping the other text. I wonder if there's a way to tweak user stylesheets to make these unobtrusive... Sounds like a great idea for a Greasemonkey script!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

All developers in closed-source companies that I've known would *like* to take pride in their code, but they always have to respect tight schedules

That's true of all code. There's always time pressure and deadlines to deal with if you ever want to do anything relevant or collaborate with others.

Also, there are good open source projects and there are bad ones. There are good open source developers and there are bad ones. Same for closed. All this bunk about whether its open source or not is pointless and devisive.

As for me, I was a developer, so I should know what I'm talking about.

Yes, you should...

in my new line of job, I can tell the customer to get lost until I'm sure everything's done just right, and he's usually happy with that, because my products cost well over $10k a pop and he prefers waiting than having a botched-up result :-)

You're confusing the nature of your customer and your market with the nature of your development philosophy.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

IF DIRECTLY IN RESPONSE TO A MOUSE CLICK. Something I'd like to see firefox implement.

You don't use firefox, do you?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Smidge204]

That's pretty much what I was getting at, thank you.

With all the "unusable by most people" stuff out there, someone just coming into the OSS scene is going to be very turned off trying to find something usable. This is especially important when it comes to businesses looking into possible OSS solutions.

Unfortunately the "bazaar" method leaves no room to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
=Smidge=

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[friedmud]

I do see your point but I think that it is just from a different point of view.

What I was trying to get at is that a lot of open source developers don't have end users in mind at all when they create the software they do. I certainly don't have any goals of winning anyone over to OSS. I use it because it fits my needs and I don't mind all the diversity.

For people that "Just want stuff to work" there are other options out there (Windows, Mac). For people who like to hack around and find new things and collaborate/cooperate to build better environments _for themselves_ we have OSS.

What I'm trying to say is don't corrupt my open and collaborative environment just because it doesn't suit your needs. If people don't like the diversity then they can look elsewhere.

OSS has ALWAYS had diversity and it ALWAYS will. I personally see this as a strength (OSS becomes a melting pot of ideas, where everyone learns from eachother). Again, the goal is not to conquer the world, but instead to make ourselves happy.

When you say "having thousands of distros,f ew of which work well, is a bad bad thing"... who is it a "bad bad thing" for? The people making the distros are (for the most part) doing it because it is interesting _for them_. If people use it then that is great... if they don't then that person still had the experience of creating something... something which appeals to all scientific and engineering types.

This type of argument reminds me of when people criticise other people for having odd hobbies. "What an idiot! I can't believe he spent 2 months designing and building that case mod!" In general humans are very diverse and have lots of different interests. Some like to collect beanie babies, some like to code up pet projects on the weekend (regardless of whether or not something already exists that does the same job).

In essence I'm saying that for most OSS developers it is a hobby. As such let us do what we like. If you don't like the way it turns out then use the other alternatives.... no skin off our back.

Friedmud

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[friedmud]

Sorry to reply again...

You state: "If open source wants to survive we need more focus on a narrower range of products"

Again I ask.. Survive what? Hobbies don't die. You can't kill my ability to collaborate with people across the web and create a good environment for myself.

No amount of people claiming "OSS Sucks" can do anything... it's like telling a coin collector that "Coins are dumb!".... if the person enjoys what they are doing they will continue regardless of outside criticism.

Friedmud

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[zymano]

I was going to download that today but now you tell me it doesn't work against dhtml.

sigh.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[zymano]

search dhtml popup in google and look at how many are selling this software.

It's exploding on the scene. They need popups to survive and they will do anything.

We need to stop dhtml . Need to strip it or the css before the page is rendered .

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

Again I ask.. Survive what? Hobbies don't die.

Hobbies can and do become obscure and even die out. The certainly can become inaccessible due to rising costs, falling availability of requirements of the hobby, or due to legislation. Skills required for the hobby can die too. The harder and more it is to get into something, the rarer it becomes and therefore the more expensive it becomes...and that's a vicious cycle.

You use the example of a coin collector. You couldn't collect coins if there weren't any coins to collect (eg. if they were made illegal and destroyed).

How many people do you know that restore steam trains today? How many people who can spin their own yarn? How easy is it to take up fencing in your area? Gun clubs are all but gone here in Australia since new tougher gun laws.

Model rocketry is going the way of the dinosaur thanks to the whole terrorist hoopla, and rising insurance costs. Model aircraft flying costs a lot more now than it use to, so fewer people do that.

Imagine a world where taking photographs (and I'm not talking about anything lewd) could get you sued or thrown in jail. Oh wait, that's already possible, but if it were common photography would be dead.

Imagine a world where you need a $10,000 license to release software or face 25 years in prison. Some companies pushing DRM would like that to be the case, and if few enough people care enough to argue against it, it's certainly a possibility. Too extreme? Imagine a world where you need to buy a rare, expensive, specialized non-DRM computer to run Linux. How accessible would the OS be then.

If you don't think the web could be killed off I'd say you're wrong there too.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[mr.hawk]

Since MS is arguing that IE is an integral part of the OS, couldn't the Spyglass owners argue for a 5% share of a percentage of the Windows profits? That'd be a nice pile of cash to collect for being "royally fucked over"!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

... run ins with a few crappy engineers

A programmer is not an engineer no matter how self important it makes some feel. You have to take and complete a curriculum of engineering courses to become an engineer. Taking MSCE courses do not count!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Zwets]

If open source wants to survive, we need more focus on a narrower range of products

Yeah, and if people want world peace, they should all be nice to each other.

In other words: how exactly are we going to accomplish that? 'Open source' doesn't want anything and there is no 'we'. There's just thousands of people behaving like people.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

Oh brother. Come up with something original.

People with common interests, ideals and goals can and do organize into groups, and it is sometimes acceptable to refer to these groups collectively.

That's like saying "There are no capitalists. There are just people" or "There are no democrats/replublicans" etc.

Have you ever heard of the FSF?

I think it is safe to say that most people who use and write open source want to see open source software continue to be written and gain popularity.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[si618]

A lot of people operate under this assumption. Sadly they're just plain wrong, and here's why: If you have 1000 pieces of software that all claim to do roughly the same sort of thing, and 999 are hacks, finding that 1 good program is going to be an excercise in frustration.
I disagree. Those projects which have the greatest following will tend to attract more attention, and so are more likely to be found (google, blogs, word of mouth, Xforge rankings, reviews, etc).
IMHO so long as these projects have a following based on merit, and open source will more likely based on merit than marketing (although both doesn't hurt), then even if your requirements aren't met by the most popular project, chances are those who use that project will be able to point you in the right direction (if you ask the right question).
I agree with the grand parent, for the simple reason that knowing your code can be (potentially) viewed by others is a great incentive to think before you type, and to put more care into what you type. Closed-source software houses have a culture of who cares what the code is like so long as it does the job (badly, securely, whatever), my experience of open source is the opposite. I would love to say it's because of some moral high-ground ethos, but it's probably just an ego and vanity thang :)
If open source wants to survive, we need more focus on a narrower range of products as well as solid lobbying of politicians to keep open source legal.
Why not leave that to the corporate open source folks and leave us late night hackers to itch that scratch? IBM and Novell (amongst others) have a vested interest in a particular product range, let them focus on that and wooing the pollies!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[It'sYerMam]

Maybe it is unblockable, but for me it's not a case of it being blocked; it flat out doesn't work. The page appears to reload, and I get an uncaught exception in the Javascript window. I don't know exactly what's wrong because I'm not much of a JS programmer, but I know what I see!

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that depend on whether the company still exists?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[kwoff]

Then Microsoft illegally dumped Internet Explorer on the market for no cost in order to kill Netscape.

What if Microsoft had released IE as a free open-source project? Would that still have been considered "illegally dumping"?

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[rdf]

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass):

On March 26, 2000, OpenTV bought out Spyglass in a stock swap worth $2.5 billion. The acquisition was completed on July 24, 2000. In the deal, they received both Device Mosaic, an embedded web browser, and Prism, a content delivery and transformation system.

Poor poor Spyglass ;-)

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[jackofallbrandnames]

If you don't think the web could be killed off I'd say you're wrong there too.

I think France tried this recently (not sure how Google ened up on that one) and laughed off the global stage.

Your coin analogy just doesn't fly. There are coins today that can't be used as valid currency, but still collected.

Perhaps steam engines are outdated, but millions enjoy locomotive hobbies today.

You may be right about model rocketry, but perhaps because today's models can go further than SPUDs.

Meanwhile, it seems you want to implement the very restrictions you rail against starting with preventing OSS developers from posting their own code for others to used for their 'own' purpose, not for production.

Sorry for seeming like a troll, but it just seems you're just pissed because you tried to find something once and because someone didn't write to your specific needs, you blame the open-ness of it.

Fact is, most technology is advanced _because_ of hobbyists. Locomotives, automobiles, photography, and even computers themselves (hw AND sw) are only some examples.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[virtual_mps]

are you implying that for-profit developers don't take pride in their code?

All of them? No. Some of them? Definitely. If you don't know any coders who work 9-5 and don't care what they're writing as long as they get paid, you must not know many coders. OTOH, you won't find many of those working on open-source projects in their spare time.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[Anonymous Coward]

If people don't like the diversity then they can look elsewhere.

...was that intended to be ironic? :)

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[farble1670]

All of them? No. Some of them? Definitely.

agreed.

If you don't know any coders who work 9-5 and don't care what they're writing as long as they get paid, you must not know many coders. OTOH, you won't find many of those working on open-source projects in their spare time.

sorry? are you implying that 1) developers that keep 9-5 hours are slackers, and 2) not working on open source projects in spare time implies something negative about by dedication or skills?

first, if you take the time to read any modern software development methodology, they explicitly state that long hours are actually detrimental because that's when you start introducing bugs. if you've actually worked in software dev, you know that there are people that work 10 hours and just make things worse, and some that work 2 hours and accomplish miracles.

second, you don't find me working on OSS in my spare time because i am not dedicated or because i don't have the skills, it's because i already spent 8+ hours coding, and it's not my style to neglect my health, my partner, or my son for the sake of OSS. i love software development, but after 8+ hours, i've had enough. and sorry, for those of us that work for a living, we don't have the option of quiting our for pay jobs to work on OSS all day.

third, while there is some good OSS software, there is also a lot of CRAP. you just don't hear about the crap. why? because if it's free, people tend to not be too upset when it is crap. the ridiculous underlying assumption that most or all OSS software is of superior quality to for-pay software is simply wrong.

Re:boost leads to more exploits

[syousef]

I think France tried this recently

When did France try to kill the web? Gross exaggeration, oui?

Your coin analogy just doesn't fly. There are coins today that can't be used as valid currency, but still collected.

Those coins aren't illegal, and although some are scarce there are plenty of coins that are common enough and affordable enough that anyone can start in this hobby.

Perhaps steam engines are outdated, but millions enjoy locomotive hobbies today.

Where? In Soviet Russia. Because in Australia there are a handful of locomotives left. The rest of the world shouldn't be too far behind on that one.

Meanwhile, it seems you want to implement the very restrictions you rail against starting with preventing OSS developers from posting their own code for others to used for their 'own' purpose, not for production.

Calm down. I want people to be more judicious about jumping in and starting their own little project instead of collaborating with others and making good software. The effort at the moment in Open Source, with a very few exceptions is extremely fragmented. When did I mention banning coders from posting their own code? I want people to think before they build. I want the code out there to improve in quality, and most of all I'm not advocating this be done through draconian restrictions. Read into what I said whatever you want though.

Sorry for seeming like a troll, but it just seems you're just pissed because you tried to find something once and because someone didn't write to your specific needs, you blame the open-ness of it.

No I'm annoyed that there are at least 30 different utilities to do everything - from the mundane like keyboard remapping to the necessary like firewalls and anti-virus, to the sublime. Some variety is good an necessary, otherwise you get stagnation, complacency and a lack of will to improve or fix bugs. Everyone doing their own thing (and most of the time not very well) leads to chaos.

Fact is, most technology is advanced _because_ of hobbyists

No argument here. I don't think I'm the person you want to be arguing with.

firefox

[msh104]

firefox is a nice browser... but technology's like .net sure seem like a trouble to me in new windows versions. I've head some sites depend on .net being pressent in order to be displayed. I sure hope they can handle it.

Re:firefox

[giorgiofr]

my friend, you are mistaken. no site depends on .net being installed on your system to be displayed. maybe they depend on .net being present on the server but definitely not on the client. no way.

Re:firefox

[ninjaadmin]

Unless of course, the site is publishing an application using "one-click deployment". In that case, the code executes on the client, and the client would need the framework. (I know, doesn't really apply here... just a technicality)

Re:firefox

[hal9000(jr)]

The parent is not a troll. It's a fact of browser life. Like it or not, there are many, many enterprise web applications that depend on features found within IE (or at least claim to--Opera usually works OK when impersonating IE). BTW, I am a staunch FF user, and Netscape before that all the way back to the 1.0 days.

Re:firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

dont worry microsoft is ditching .NET when longhorn is released.

they pissed of the VB world when they release .NET now after suckering all them into .NET they will all get pissed off with ms's new reason to force everyone to upgrade their $599.00 Dev Studio for the latest bullcrap they pull again.

nice :-) not only screw users but screw the dev's too!

Re:firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't heard of that, and I'm not sure I believe it. My company uses ASP.net for our internal web server including some custom controls and everything is rendered properly in Firefox. It's much better than our old site design that used some ActiveX controls which, of course, wouldn't display in any browser other than IE.

Re:firefox

[Lumpy]

typically because those enterprise web applications are written by no talent hacks that can not code themselves out of a paper bag. And yes this is true, I have looked at the code for many apps that cost the company I work for $50,000+ and the code is absolutely HORRIBLE.

php asp asp.net perl or java, your web app has no excuse to not support all compliant browsers.

code to real standards and spend another 10 minutes testing, anything less is plain lazy.

Re:firefox

[lukewarmfusion]

Some web applications require ActiveX to do things you can't do using standards-compliant code. You have to rely on ActiveX, Java, etc. to do things like drop-and-drop file uploading. As it stands, using a file browse interface to access individual files when you really want to click and drag thirty files at once is a pain.

(I bring up this example because it's a problem I'm dealing with now.)

So while there are plenty such web apps written by no-talent hacks, there are also apps that push the limits of web standards and require something more powerful.

Re:firefox

[MikeFM]

Unfortunately coding to compliant browsers isn't enough since 80% of users still use IE. If it takes a day to make Firefox (and other gecko-based browsers), Opera, and Safari to all work then it'll probably take a second day to make IE work. IE's crappy CSS and Javascript support is just painful. It wouldn't be such a problem except that mgmt often wants every damn lil extra feature to work in IE or not to be included at all. :(

Re:firefox

[lukewarmfusion]

While it's true that .Net opens doors that normal web technologies do not allow, the same can be said of Java. A decent web developer should advise against any decision that will eliminate all users outside of a certain environment (Windows IE6+). Even when I have to explain that IE is the majority by a long shot (~90%) no reasonable business wants to alienate a potential 10% of its customers.

Re:firefox

[tomjen]

That is because people are abusing html - html is for showing contens, with a nice layout.

To chat use IRC. To discuss: usenet. To share files: ftp.

Re:firefox

[lukewarmfusion]

I will assume you're not just trolling.

That's all well and good if you want to treat the web as a digital brochure. But that's not what it is and not what it should be.

We're talking about functions far beyond HTML. HTML is just a markup for content, yes. But we're talking about Javascript, Java, .Net, ASP, PHP, Perl, and so on. We're talking about things that extend the web way past content and well into function.

Users don't want four interfaces to do related tasks. They want one interface. So we integrate chat, ftp, and so on into websites. We make it easy to use, easy to do, and easy to support. It's the concept of web as a platform; everyone has a web browser (and they're free if you don't) so you can use software without having to write for and support a lot of specific OS or hardware platforms.

In the case of one of my sites, my users most likely have no control over the computer they will be using, the software or configuration of that computer, etc. They will rely on a web browser to do everything they need.

Re:firefox

[Stephen Williams]

At work, I've taken to using Firefox as a web browser, because I prefer it; and IE as a web application runner, because it's necessary for that task. So I'm Googling around and browsing MSDN with Firefox, but using IE for Outlook web access and Sharepoint. Different jobs, different tools.

-Stephen

Re:firefox

[dwlovell]

Not true. .Net Winforms controls can be hosted in IE using the <object> tag and operate a lot like ActiveX controls, except this time they are secure using the Code Access Security sandbox (similar to Java applet's code access security).

To view web pages that host these controls you MUST have the .net framework installed on your client machine.

This search will find tons of articles on how this works.

-David

Re:firefox

[jp10558]

Outlook Web Access seems to work fine in Opera 8 - so I would guess it ought to work in FF.

Re:firefox

[agsharad]

Outlook Web Access seems to work fine in Opera 8 - so I would guess it ought to work in FF.

It does, but its quirky. Sometimes the tables get misaligned. Often the 'New Mail' button will not popup a new window. The user experience is spoiled just enough, that if you have IE on the same machine, you would rather just use that.

Re:firefox

[jp10558]

Weird - that doesn't seem to happen at all for my mom's work e-mail. Granted, it's not used all the time (in fact, I'd say about 150 mails have been read total with it, and maybe 10 e-mails sent) but I haven't seen that at all in Opera 7.54-8.01. Maybe some bugs someone ought to look for in FF?

Re:firefox

[agsharad]

Maybe some bugs someone ought to look for in FF?
I just verified and that was indeed the case (on both counts). Though, I am not sure if it is owing to FF bugs or Opera including some 'features' that IE has. I should think the behavior is researched/documented somewhere?

Ironic

[deaddrunk]

That the page doesn't render properly in the browser they're biggin' up.

Re:Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously not, as it just rendered fine on my Screen.
I'm not sure what you think is rendering badly, but it's probably one of the ads, which seem to misbehave more often than not... But thats besides the point.

The only thing where FF sometimes screws up
are those evil flash-type ads.

Re:Ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF are you talking about?

Ijust brought it up in Firefox 1.0.4. When I read your comment, I brought it up in IE 6.0. They look identical (well, except for the ZDnet ads at the top of the page, which I have blocked and obviously don't want anyway)

Re:Ironic

[slashrogue]

What do you mean by "render properly"? 'Cause it looks just fine to me.

Re:Ironic

[aengblom]

1. It renders fine
2. Reporters don't code the web pages.
3. "Biggin 'up"????

Re:Ironic

[paranoidgeek]

I am sick and tired of hearing people complain about Firefox mis-rendering very broken webpages. It is just as silly to complain about GCC not compiling this :

#include <stdio.h>
innt main(){
printf("Hello world! \");
returrn 0;

I am yet to see one page that isnt invalid or has really weird style stuff to render incorrectly on Fx.

Re:Ironic

[koreaman]

He's not complaining about Firefox. He's complaining about the page.

Re:Ironic

[timothykaine]

I keep seeing people say that Slashdot doesnt render properly in Firefox, but Ive yet to see the issue. Ive been using Firefox since Phoenix, and this site has always rendered properly. Perhaps it only affects Windows users.

Main advantage

[mfloy]

The main reason I like Firefox is that it pushes innovation. Back when IE was the clearly dominant browser, with no real competition, there were very few sensible inovations for browsers. Sure, a few little things here and there, but for the most part it was monopolized. Firefox's popularity will ultimately lead to a better browser market all around.

Re:Main advantage

[dsginter]

Speaking of innovation, someone should innovate an ActiveX IE plugin that simply changes the IE rendering engine to Gecko.

Then we could all use CSS the way it was meant to be. The drone consumers will never know the difference.

Re:Main advantage

[superpulpsicle]

I'd be happy if firefox can just fix the CPU hammering/memory leak with Flash by 2.0.

Re:Main advantage

[savagedome]

Mod parent up up up. I don't care which browser I am using. I switched to IE (Version 4 I think) from Netscape since IE4 was better. I switched to Firefox (around ver 0.7 I think) since IE had gone down the tube. If IE7 is better than FF (I don't think it will be), I will switch. Otherwise, I am happy with FF.

'Better' is relative and don't try to nitpick on that.

Re:Main advantage

[Zathrus]

q[ I'd be happy if firefox can just fix the CPU hammering/memory leak with Flash by 2.0.]q

Given that the issue in question also occurs in IE, Safari, and any other browser with a flash plugin regardless of OS I'd guess that this is not a browser bug.

My guess is that it's a race condition inside the Flash code itself. It doesn't appear on all systems, even if they are running the same OS/browser/flash revision (and viewing the same content).

At least with Firefox you can install Flashblock and not be annoyed by CPU gobbling flash unless you really want it.

Re:Main advantage

[dpilot]

You underestimate your argument.

When competition disappears from ANY market, that market stagnates. For the moment, I'll follow your example and continue to pick on Microsoft, but it's by no means limited to them. Way back in the early PC days, DOS advanced fairly rapidly to DOS 3.3, driven by hardware introductions. There was also a not widely used or known multitasking version of DOS (4?) as well as IBM's much-maligned DOS4. But basically, DOS stagnated after V3.3.

That is, until DRDOS 5.0 came out, offering much better value. (More features, not sure if it cost less.) Then Microsoft followed, and brought out their own DOS 5.0, and the stakes were upped again with DRDOS 6.0, etc. Somewhere in there, Microsoft slipped the legendary AARD code into Windows 3.1 to chill the DRDOS uptake, and also around that timeframe they "incorporated" disk compression, courtesy of Stac Electronics. (lawsuits followed, on both counts.)

But IMHO, if DRDOS 5 hadn't appeared, it would have stayed DOS 3.3 under Windows until the whole Windows vs OS/2 battle started. Also IMHO, lacking competitive pressure in a given market, a company will invest its development dollars elsewhere, and milk the stagnant market for all it can.

Re:Main advantage

[cmdrTacyo]

They Call me cmdrTacyo
Cuz I deal a brick of rock yo
all the /. ers flock yo
cause we all know
it's tacyo

Re:Main advantage

[jlarocco]

Firefox hasn't innovated anything yet.

Innovating is coming up with something new based on something else. Firefox copied almost everything it's popular for from Opera, then zipped past it in userbase, and claimed Opera's innovations for its own. No matter what the fanboys try to tell you, it's still just copying.

Re:Main advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Bravo! Encore, Encore!

Re:Main advantage

[Tumbleweed]

I've read that the upcoming new version of the Flash player solves the CPU usage problem quite nicely, but, of course, time will tell.

Re:Main advantage

[Will2k_is_here]

I have seen Firefox users highlight the same features Opera had before Firefox, but I have never seen anyone claim Firefox developers invented them.

Re:Main advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

try google next time
keywords: activex gecko

http://www.google.com/search?q=activex+gecko

Re:Main advantage

[jbravo556]

When competition disappears from ANY market, that market stagnates.

Generally, you're right, however, like everything there are exceptions. Photoshop from Adobe had never had any serious competitor, yet it keeps improving. Most of its development has been fuelled by the need for more income (from upgrades). The model, of course, does not apply to freely distributed apps that have no real, commercial value to being kept on the leading edge.

Re:Main advantage

[tabdelgawad]

I would amend that slightly to "pushes consumer-driven innovation". When the interests of consumers and companies collide, as they do, for example, in the case of popup ads, MS has to tread lightly and balance both sides but Firefox/Mozilla doesn't.

Re:Main advantage

[CloudDrakken]

It's very true, Firefox doesn't even need a large market share to accomplish what it does on a regular basis: force browser conglomerates to dedicate themselves to making a better browser, just to compete with the potential of Firefox taking a large market share from them.

And likewise, Firefox (although I have no "evidence" but this is "slashdot;") has the potential to block ad pages and other annoyances, as well as the integration with extensions which therefore threatens all aspects of the browser market even more (but this is all common-knowledge).

Yet, the fact remains that Firefox (and Mozilla in general) is true to the acclaimation that competition strengthens the consumer with the gift of choice.

Now Google (tm) just needs to make an OS and I'll be all set.

Re:Main advantage

[alucinor]

I'm getting sick of having to hear who's the innovator, and who isn't: Microsoft, IBM, Firefox, Opera -- whatever! Can't we all just write good software and leave it at that?

Re:Main advantage

[cortana]

Nah, the reason Flash is soooo annoying is because its sound output is bollocks.

On my system it defaults to usind Esound, which means that the sound gets out of sync with the video. It's very noticeable after 20 seconds or so.

Anyone know how to force it to commune directly with ALSA/OSS?

Re:Main advantage

[salesgeek]

Photoshop from Adobe had never had any serious competitor

Nothing could be further from the truth. Last I looked Fireworks and CorelDraw's PhotoPaint component are still legit. The gap between PS and it's competitors is a wide one, but if PS stagnates, there are very competent barbarians at the gate.

Re:Main advantage

[Ice_Balrog]

Right. Because, as we all know, Opera had a great extension system like XUL before Mozilla/Firefox.

Oh, wait...

Re:Main advantage

[hkmwbz]

"Right. Because, as we all know, Opera had a great extension system like XUL before Mozilla/Firefox."

No, but other browsers, like Internet Explorer, had similar stuff ages before Mozilla.

Re:Main advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

continue to pick on Microsoft

Or the Office Suite.

Now that MSFT has a good portion of that market have they done anything useful with it? I'm sure there are little things that have made a couple of people happy, but I've heard more than one person say that WordPerfect 5.1 was the perfect word processeor for 95% of people--everything more is bloat.

And back to word processors, there has been at least one story on Slashdot saying that no one really has improved any of the grammar checking capabilities, and that the market for third party ones has all but dried up.

Re:Main advantage

[elemental23]

Of course, Adobe's buying Macromedia nicely disposed of one of said barbarians.

How much life does Corel have left in them? The only Corel software I've seen in recent years is Wordperfect, which is absolute crap. In fact, I just spent a good portion of the past two days dealing with weird Wordperfect problems on a client site. The sooner that thing dies, the better.

Re:Main advantage

[Packets]

The main reason I like Firefox is that it pushes innovation. Back when IE was the clearly dominant browser, with no real competition, there were very few sensible inovations for browsers. Sure, a few little things here and there, but for the most part it was monopolized. Firefox's popularity will ultimately lead to a better browser market all around.

I don't forsee the battle between IE and firefox as anything other than an opportunity for both sides to improve the internet experience for everyone.

It's the users who win from software producers fighting each other. And neither The Mozilla Foundation or Microsoft can lose this war.

Re:Main advantage

[Ragica]

I think this is not true. During most of the time that MSIE was stagnating (and outright poisoning) the Internet, Opera continued to innovate like crazy... just most people didn't notice for various reasons. In fact a lot of mozilla/firefox's now beloved features were Opera innovations.

I don't use Opera anymore myself, alas, for various reasons (limited platforms supported, not open source, etc). But I it did get me through those dark stiffling MSIE days, for which I always look back in gratitude.

Re:Main advantage

[Shaper_pmp]

No they didn't. I don't know what you're smoking, but (IIRC) IE is still stuck back in the days of Plugins/ActiveX Controls - it hasn't got anything like a decent Extensions architecture yet (and likely, due to the lack of control for MS, never will).

The progression of developments was roughly:
Helper Apps (Mosaic, NS 1.?, etc)
Plugins (NS 2+?)
ActiveX Controls (IE 3?-6)
Extensions (Firefox)

Re:Main advantage

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, let somebody write a worm

Re:Main advantage

[hkmwbz]

"IE is still stuck back in the days of Plugins/ActiveX Controls - it hasn't got anything like a decent Extensions architecture yet"

Guess you haven't seen all the toolbars, general tools, shells, etc. for IE then :) Maxthon? Surely you have heard about Maxthon.

Re:Main advantage

[Shaper_pmp]

Entire replacement shells != Extensions to the existing shell
Compiled binary IE plugins != Script-based FF extensions

The reason Extensions are so wildly popular is that they're essentially plain-text scripts and markup, whereas IE extensions are mostly compiled DLL files. This makes the barrier to entry for FF extension programming very low, whereas you have to be pretty handy with Visual C++ to even contemplate writing an IE extension. This allows anyone to more easily customise their browser, vs needing to be a professional-level developer to do it.

With FF extensions you can (IIRC) inspect most of the UI code to see how it works, and can generate basic (but professional-looking) extensions in minutes, with notepad. Writing IE plugins pretty much requires Visual C++, a fair bit of experience, and lots more time. Because it's written in C/C++ (non-managed code) it's also a hell of a lot easier to leak memory or crash the browser in an IE plugin (again, IIRC).

Maxthon, as I understand it, is a complete replacement shell - it uses the CWebBrowser ActiveX control like IE does, but I it's more of a replacement for IE than an extension to it.

Re:Main advantage

[hkmwbz]

Look, no matter how you look at it: Browsers have been extensible for years before Firefox arrived. It is not a Firefox "innovation" to allow people to extend stuff.

And guess what, most people will never be able to create Firefox extensions anyway, not that it really matters.

Re:Main advantage

[Bert64]

Wordperfect used to be really good.. I haven't tried the latest versions, but around version 8 or so it was the best application of it's kind around..

Re:Main advantage

[Shaper_pmp]

I'm not being rude here, but I don't think you have much understanding of the way XUL works - it's a massive improvement to IE's plugins and dlls architecture, and makes it unbelievably easy to do things that in a Visual C++ DLL for IE would be a major headache.

Leaving that aside, even an incremental improvement (and XUL is/was a huge improvement) can be innovative - desktop computers had been around since the Altaire 800, but that doesn't mean the first Macintosh wasn't innovative. If things have to be genuinely unprecedented to be "innovative", then pretty much the only real innovation in the computing inductry was in Xerox PARC in the '70s... <:-/

Claiming "extension" isn't an innovation is so broad as to be meaningless - the important innovation is in the method, simplicity and power of creating them.

The point not whether "anyone will" actually create Firefox extensions, but that "vastly more people can" if they put their minds to it.

Lack of user-interest doesn't make it un-innovative - the innovation is in making it possible for them, not in making it so fascinating that they can't bear not to.

and...

[cryptoz]

an article to go nicely with the story http://netscape.com.com/Opera,+Firefox+squabble+ov er+best-browser+claim/2100-1032_3-5740879.html shows another side to the whole FF thing.

Re:and...

[ScytheBlade1]

Hardly, the Opera rep just can't read.

Nothing against Opera, it's just that the article you linked highlights a stupid mistake. Not too much else.

Re:and...

[hkmwbz]

"Hardly, the Opera rep just can't read."

"The Opera rep"? Who?

Rather, Asa lies about Opera and gets caught with his pants down.

Re:and...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, Opera claimed on the front page of their website that they had won an award that didn't exist, and Asa called them on it in his blog... but Asa was the one who lied and got caught with his pants down?

The logical hoops some people will jump through to make the facts fit their worldview (instead of the other way around) never ceases to astound me...

Re:and...

[hkmwbz]

"Wait, Opera claimed on the front page of their website that they had won an award that didn't exist, and Asa called them on it in his blog... but Asa was the one who lied and got caught with his pants down?"

Yes, absolutely correct. Asa knew that there was some room for misinterpretation (as demonstrated by plenty of people when this was going on), yet he went straight for the throat in an all-out attack. Asa knew that Opera wasn't lying, so he was actually lying himself. This is not the first time he's done something like this either.

Opera made a simple mistake, but Asa couldn't resist the chance to attack Opera yet again.

"The logical hoops some people will jump through to make the facts fit their worldview (instead of the other way around) never ceases to astound me."

People who comment on something they know nothing about never cease to astound me.

Re:and...

[Anonymous Coward]

People who comment on something they know nothing about never cease to astound me.

Kind of like people who make assumptions about what other people know? I watched this unfold across OperaWatch, Asa's blog, and several other sites before CNET got in on the action.

Wow!!

[ShaniaTwain]

ZDnet can tell the future now!? Do they have any good stock tips or winning lottery numbers?

Re:Wow!!

[it_flix]

yeah, did you think only netcraft could..?

Re:Wow!!

[Leroy_Brown242]

42

Re:Wow!!

[suffe]

4 8 15 16 23 42

Security

[ad0gg]

I want to know how firefox devs plan to address security concerns with the browsers. It seems as firefox gets more popular, the number of exploits keeps rising.

Firefox security information

Re:Security

[DrEldarion]

For the longest time, people have been saying that linux/firefox is more secure than windows/IE. One of the response to that is that it's likely that the reason windows/IE has more exploits for it is because it's the most targetted since it's the most popular.

Now that we're seeing firefox gain foothold, we're starting to see more exploits for it. I wonder if they will be proven right?

Re:Security

[Apreche]

Hm, that is true. However, compared to IE the number and severity of concerns is a drop in the bucket. If firefox really has 10% then for ever 1 firefox there are 9 IEs about. there are more than 9 IE holes for every firefox hole.

But more importantly than that, firefox holes have always been fixed within days, if not the day of. With MS you have to wait for the second tuesday to get your windows update. What will you do when an exploit is discovered the day after that?

Re:Security

[Eberlin]

I, too, am quite concerned about the security issues with Firefox. The only real consolation I have is that with open source, the code gets fixed much faster. Sure, that creates the burden of having to patch...on occasion more than once a week, but in the end, I'd rather have a fix to a known bug than no fixes at all.

I guess what I'd like (and from what I've read, it's in the works) is a better way to patch. Instead of having to re-download an entire release, if we could actually just get smaller patches, that'd be great.

Maybe a giant "bug hunt" is in order? You know, send a memo from a higher-up to all the developers about putting security first, gaining users' trust back...we'll call it "trustworthy computing." I bet it would actually work this time.

Yeah, firefox has bugs. I bet it has lots of it. I'm also sure that when they're found, they're fixed a lot faster simply because there's greater access to source code. That's the only rationale I'm hanging on to -- which makes OSS favorable to closed-source when it comes to security.

Now in terms of bug severity, I bet not being tied to the underlying operating system itself would be a distinct advantage.

Re:Security

[man_of_mr_e]

Wow, you are so completely wrong on a number of counts.

First, It takes the mozilla team an average of 2 MONTHS to fix security issues, not the "same day". Further, The vast majority of IE vulnerabilities happened before Firefox even reached release candidate stage.

For example, FF 1.05 patches 12 vulnerabilities. The oldest from April, the newest from late May based on the creation date of the referenced bugzilla reports.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html#Firefox

Firefox has had 56 publicly announced vulnerabilities this year. 24 of them of High or Critical severity.

Re:Security

[rolfwind]

I doubt Linux will wilt under pressure.

Many of Microsoft's security problems comes from initial poor design decisions AND that those design decisions are not easily revoked once put forth because of backward's compatibility.

ActiveX is an example of this. It was made before internet security was much of a concern but to this day MS cannot easily revoke it without breaking apps left and right and pissing off Developers.

They would have to keep the API and rewrite it under the surface while having it react the same. Not an easy task nor guaranteed possible.

On the other hand, Open Source has several advatanges - one of which people complain about - their are redundant APIs and programs galore in several areas. The strength of this is that sometimes overlying programs are programmed to be use a more generic interchangeable API.

*nix has lack of integration. This is IE's and outlook's greatest strength but fatale flaw in some regards. Other OSes, the mail client and webbrowser and filebrowser can be ripped out and exchanged much more easily or not have one at all. Microsoft's Windows tends to be hardcoded to IE/outlook and the otherway around. This non-modular design is a nightmare.

General politics. While I'm sure Linux programming groups have this too, it's a much larger degree where Microsoft's design decisions are often political with their business in mind while OSS tends to be more engineering minded.

Re:Security

[div_2n]

Uhh, show me any news stories about "exploits" in the wild. What you hear are security flaws that have been found due to the source being open and then promptly being fixed.

Using the word exploits seems to indicate that there are malicious websites out there taking advantage of a security hole. There may very well be, I just don't remember hearing about it.

Re:Security

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I wonder if they will be proven right?

The proof will be in the pudding.

I've been using Mozilla/Firefox since Mozilla since M13 or so (mid-2000). I used Netscape 4.x before that. In all that time, I have never had a single piece of detectable malware installed on my system-- even after browsing the many advertizing & exploit laden grey-area websites. This is on 10 different computers.

In that same time I've seen hundreds malware programs installed on my coworkers machines, all through IE.

Hundreds of infections for them, zero infections for me. That's quite a difference.

So part of this is because Mozilla/Firefox has not been heavily targeted, but it's also clear that there are some fundamental design flaws in the Microsoft products.

Re:Security

[goldspider]

Around these parts, Microsoft (rightfully) doesn't get a free pass for ANY security vulnerability, regardless of whether or not there are actual exploits "in the wild". Shouldn't we hold Firefox to the same standard?

Re:Security

[div_2n]

I never said anything about Microsoft. But since you have, I will throw you a clue stick and let you decide what to do with it.

The Firefox code is open, so security holes can be found faster and potentially fixed faster. Microsoft has been slow to respond to some security holes whereas the Mozilla team has been lightning fast for each one that I have in my memory. In fact, aren't some severe IE holes still unfixed?

Hold Firefox to the same standard? Heh, Microsoft and IE aren't even in the same league, so how can you possibly consider that?

Re:Security

[Anonymous Coward]

*Bullshit. Most of those "vulnerabilities" were spoofing or completely stupid things. The only remote execution hole I remember delt with their extention installation, and they fixed that the same day on their own server since that is the only one with default extention permission.

Re:Security

[goldspider]

You know, you can defend your position without being a flippant, condescending ass.

Re:Security

[DrEldarion]

Blah, you can't compare that unless you're using both pieces of software yourself.

I've been using Windows since, well, always, and up until around a year ago used IE exclusively. I have never had one piece of spyware, malware, a virus or worm, etc.

It's all about the users. Dumb users can screw anything up if they have access to it.

Re:Security

[BlueHands]

i think he showed that despite what you might think, he can't. :)

Re:Security

[man_of_mr_e]

Why don't you actually READ the list of vulnerabilities, rather than relying on your "memory".

Re:Security

[Bert64]

They fixed any serious vulnerabilities immediately, and left the relatively minor ones a few weeks..
On the other hand, even the non serious ones were fixed in the CVS and nightly builds pretty quickly, so atleast you can get a fixed version if you want.

Re:Security

[man_of_mr_e]

No, they didn't fix the seriou vulnerabilities immediately. The Newest and "critical" patch in the list is 2 months old. 2 Months! And because the vulnerability was hidden, nobody knew about it until Mozilla released the patch publicly. Even today, even after the patch, the details of the bugs are still embargo'd (was until July 20th, but now for some reason they've moved it back to August 1st).

The other "critical" patch is 3 Months old.

Nightly builds and CVS are irrelevant if you don't even know there is a security flaw that needs fixing.

Re:Security

[Bert64]

Well, you can criticise mozilla for not releasing details until thre is a patch, but microsoft and many other vendors have also been long guilty of that..
If anything, mozilla is doing it the right way except that they could have come up with a fix sooner.. No vendors release vulnerability information until after they have a fix available, but some vendors won't even release vulnerability information after the patch and will often deny that the vulnerability ever existed..

Re:Security

[man_of_mr_e]

Well, Mozilla is in fact one of those that aren't releaseing details of the patch even after the patch is released.

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/mfsa2005- 56.html

Bug details embargoed until August 1, 2005

This, mind you is after the bug details were embargoed until July 20th. They keep moving the date back and will likely do it again when August 1st rolls around.

Re:Security

[Bert64]

So diff the source... It's not hard to find out what changed, and then with sufficient coding knowlege you could work out what was vulnerable in the first place.

Trundling?

[bigtallmofo]

trundling
v. intr.

To move along by or as if by rolling or spinning.

Wow, someone whipped out their thesaurus for this article summary.

Re:Trundling?

[CdBee]

A lot of ZDNet content is written in the UK, where "to trundle" is everyday usage, applied to anything on wheels that moves slowly (buses, trams, wheelbarrows)

Re:Trundling?

[aardwolf64]

Wow, someone forgot to close their bold tag...

Re:Trundling?

[Anonymous Coward]

Words have these things called connotations and can mean something more than what dictionaries might say. A common connotation for the word 'trundle' is one of uncoordinated or child-like movement. Word.

Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[jurt1235]

MS will try to keep integrating non web standards into its browser IE, resulting in people acutally using these new features (cool or usefull?), resulting in people using IE whether they like the browser or not, flawed like hell or not. They use it because it works on all sites. The good news I saw today (previous /. post) is that somebody made an extension which works well in firefox, but not good in IE. More of that is needed to fight on equal terms.
Maybe one innovation which MS wants to use, but which is patented by the mozilla foundation, effectively blocking MS from using it, just to get some negotation leverage to force MS to stop adding nonsense & bad implementations of standards to IE.

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[bedroll]

The good news I saw today (previous /. post) is that somebody made an extension which works well in firefox, but not good in IE. More of that is needed to fight on equal terms.

Bah. That's against the entire philosophy behind Mozilla. The point is to be standards compliant so that people don't have to choose any one browser over the others, except on the merits of the actual browser. The point is to not play Microsoft's game. We don't need others to use FireFox, even if we want them to. We just need to have a strong enough presence that companies - who employ developers that shun standards in favor of making things work in IE - to change their ways to maximize their userbase.

Remember that greed ruins utopia. If we start introducing the same sort of things that make us hate IE into Mozilla then how are we better?

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[Momoru]

It does suck that MS likes to stick non standards into their browser, but the Mozilla standard extremists take it a little too far the other way. Despite what the standard says, if Netscape and IE have been doing it for the last 5 years, its a de facto standard and the real standard should be changed. I know there are a couple of things like this, the first one that comes to mind is the "alt" tag, that Mozilla refuses to make behave like it does it other common browsers...I applaud them for sticking to the standard, but they should at least offer a "non compliant" mode.

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[jurt1235]

You are right there. How about ideas which make tabbed browsing look like a nice little invention, and patent those. It will make the browser much more valuable without hurting standards? It is not greed, it is just equalling the playing field.

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[bedroll]

How about ideas which make tabbed browsing look like a nice little invention, and patent those. It will make the browser much more valuable without hurting standards? It is not greed, it is just equalling the playing field.

Thing is, why would you do that when the majority of FireFox supporters are anti-patent? Playing the same game, even if it's "equalling the playing field", sends a message that you're no better than they are. The whole message is supposed to be that it's a better browser, built on better standards, and better morals.

Another thing to keep in mind is that IE7 is not the only FireFox competitor to use tabbed browsing, or other FireFox features. Opera has used tabbed browsing longer than Mozilla, as I recall. You also have Konquerer and it's Safari cousin. Why make it difficult for them to use the concept that you'd patent?

Besides, why keep Microsoft from using the community's ideas when every one they use is a validation of how advanced the community's product is comparibly. Microsoft is a big and slow moving entity, if the mozilla.org dev's keep making the browser better then Microsoft has little chance of actually catching up. Competition is good for everyone.

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[Anonymous Coward]

"alt", to show tooltips? That's what "title" is for.

And it works on non-images, too.

Re:Continuing diversion of standards by MS

[jurt1235]

mozilla is not a fast moving entity either (-:

I am pro opensource patents. You can license the patent to other open source projects, and so keep the supporters happy. MS & others companies too also tries to keep the community from using ideas. By patenting the ideas which the community has, you can better reach the goal of no patents, since you will have something to negotiate with. If you do not patent anything, but just have the prior art so the other one can not patent it either (see how good that works at for example the Amazon patents), then good opensource projects which really capture the public (ie people who did not care about opensource and are not busy with the concepts of it), can be wiped out again since they become target of the big patenting companies.

Firefox has the size of a very reasonable business, and needs some form of protection other then the GPL (or whatever license they use exactly) to be able to sustain in this market.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your well-reasoned and insightful arguments have convinced me to uninstall Firefox.

Insert comment

[Approaching.sanity]

Firefox doesn't have Spyware! IE7 will ship with Spyware! Linux is the r0XXXor!

[/fanboy rant]

Too bad ZDNet sucks

[Gothmolly]

I mean, they were alright and cool back in 93-94, when WfWG was out, and worked pretty well, and Novell was cool, and PC Magazine could review 8 or 10 word processors in a shootout article. But now they're just pundits, like Dvorak, who respin company press releases as insight. Sort of like a glorified, corporate, Roland Piquipaille.

Anyway, nice to see FF get some press, but I wouldn't take it too seriously - PHB doesn't trust it anyway, and Joe 4Pack doesn't read ZDNet.

Re:Too bad ZDNet sucks

[miu]

The real reason you should be wary of anything at zdnet...

and how the browser managed to grow its user base so fast.

I'm not sure why, but the use of "grow" with a non-living object makes me despise anyone who does it.

Re:Too bad ZDNet sucks

[jci]

OT, but:
Don't crystals, stalagmites, etc "grow" even though they don't live?

Giving a non-living thing living attributes (anthropomorphization) isn't really that bad, is it?

Re:Too bad ZDNet sucks

[miu]

Yes they grow, but they are not the direct object of the verb 'to grow'. A business grows. He grows his business. The first is fine, the second is nails on a chalkboard.

Dicey logic?

[DrEldarion]

If you look at all of statistics they average out to us being about 10 percent of the Web. There are estimated to be about 1 billion Web users, which means there are about 100 million Firefox users out there. It has only been downloaded about 65 million times, so the other users are people who got it some other way. The most likely place they are likely to have got it from is corporate deployments.

Now, I haven't seen these statistics myself, but they seem a bit off to me - that 10% figure is probably skewed somewhat. Considering that the people with firefox installed on their computer are the people most likely to be on the internet a lot in the first place, usage statistics for it can be misread easily.

Also, they say 65 million downloads of Firefox have been made... how many of those were repeats? I've downloaded the program quite a few times, and considering that each upgrade just requires you to download the full install again, there's no way that 65 million downloads translates into 65 million users.

This just reeks of using statistics in a misleading manner.

Re:Dicey logic?

[tsetem]

Also, they say 65 million downloads of Firefox have been made... how many of those were repeats? I've downloaded the program quite a few times, and considering that each upgrade just requires you to download the full install again, there's no way that 65 million downloads translates into 65 million users.

Well, the follow on question to this, is how many installs aren't documented? ie: The NT Admin downloads it once, and pushes out the changes to 500 desktops.

Re:Dicey logic?

[at_slashdot]

I got it doing "apt-get install mozilla-firefox" (actually that was only for upgrade since it already came installed on my Linux distro).
So this are 2 instances when users are not counted:
- it comes already installed.
- install it with apt-get or other tool from the distro repository, most of the distro have it in the repos and they don't count the downloads.

Re:Dicey logic?

[QuantumRiff]

Actually, the downloads are only for new installs. The upgrade servers are not counted. There was an article here on slashdot talking about that, but I'm too lazy to look it up. It was when firefox released version 1.0.

Re:Dicey logic?

[lightyear4]

Sounds about right..Statistically, one third of all statistics are innaccurate.

Re:Dicey logic?

[rpdillon]

There are a lot of related questions, but going in the opposite direction, like:

Linux that use central repository package management use Firefox versions which were never downloaded from the Firefox site, and were never counted.

Anyone who uses The Open CD, or Knoppix, uses Firefox but hasn't "downloaded" it.

OEM CDs, as well as ISP's CDs contain Firefox, and are not counted.

And lastly, as the post above mentioned, corporate rollout of the browser will never have a number of downloads equal to the number of computer upon which the program is installed.

In others words, your point is perfectly valid, but only serves to show that the whole "counting the number of users" idea is actually quite a challenge.

Re:Dicey logic?

[nedder]

It's ok when the perceived good-guys do it.

Re:Dicey logic?

[Sentry21]

Perhaps, but then consider offices like mine - 15 Firefox installations off one download. Larger offices achieve larger numbers - one download can translate into hundreds of installations easily, whereas it's unlikely that one install came as a result of hundreds of installations.

Re:Dicey logic?

[chris_mahan]

Or, as in my case, the download is on my usb ram drive, and gets installed lots of places (as in every pc I get my hands over).

Re:Dicey logic?

[periol]

Still doesn't work. I usually ignore the "updates" and download the latest version myself from mozilla when I'm ready to install it.

Re:Dicey logic?

[Deitheres]

Exactly. I work in an Apple call center with ~120 computers. The image used for these machines all include Firefox 1.0.4.

1 download = ~120 installs.

Women in OSS

[BigZaphod]

This is part of one of the questions in the interview: "The open source community generally has problems encouraging women to participate."

Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality. It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so. The way that question is phrased it is almost as if there should be some kind of OSS organized effort to specifically attract women to the community. What would be gained by such a movement and why is it even implied to be necessary?

Re:Women in OSS

[jimbolauski]

"What would be gained by such a movement"

You need to think outside the box yong grasshopper! Wet oss t-shirt contests, home cooked meals instead of vending machine meals, the benifits are limitless.

Re:Women in OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

I could not agree more, but in this day and age, everyone thinks that equality means diversity.

Re:Women in OSS

[BigZaphod]

Your wisdom has opened my eyes!

Wait.. they did the whole women in the workplace thing in the past and I haven't once heard of an office wet t-shirt contest anyplace that I've worked. This clearly needs remedying...

I wonder how quickly a guy would get fired for hanging up posters on the office fridge advertising such an event? (As an aside, I wonder if it was a woman doing the organizing if there'd be any firing at all...)

Re:Women in OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Women are on the internet. Are women using FireFox?

I have websites which are mostly visited by women. I would sure as heck like it if more of them were using FireFox. I'm sick of IE's broken box model.

Re:Women in OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Women are on the internet. Are women using FireFox?

You don't know any women, do you?

Re:Women in OSS

[Phroggy]

Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality.

The more people involved in open source development, the better. Slightly over half the population are women. It would be nice to have more women involved in open source development, simply because it would be nice to have more people involved in open source development.

It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so.

Are you sure about that? Perhaps girls are being pressured by their peers, parents, the media, etc. that doing geeky computer things isn't cool, and they should look down on geeks with disdain instead of aspiring to become one themselves. Perhaps boys aren't being pushed away from it as much. Or perhaps because girls just naturally learn differently, the things that get boys interested in programming don't work for girls, and we need to figure out a different way to welcome girls into the fold. Or perhaps girls just aren't interested and we should forget about it. I think it's an issue worth looking at.

The way that question is phrased it is almost as if there should be some kind of OSS organized effort to specifically attract women to the community. What would be gained by such a movement and why is it even implied to be necessary?

Same reason there should be an organized effort to attract men to the community. The more skilled coders with itches to scratch, the better software we all get.

Re:Women in OSS

[Jherek Carnelian]

Why is this seen as a problem? The open source community doesn't really try that hard to encourage *anyone* to participate regardless of gender or race or nationality. It just is what it is. Those who participate decide to do so on their own and there's virtually no barriers to doing so.

What do we have to lose?

Throw a few OSS Ladies Nights - where Ladies get all their software for Free and we might just get some where.

Or not.

Re:Women in OSS

[westlake]

"The open source community generally has problems encouraging women to participate."
Why is this seen as a problem.

You might begin by asking how many women use open source software, make purchasing decisions or have shown the slightest interest in Linux. If you don't know the answers to these questions, or if 50% of the market is indifferent to your product and alienated from its developers, I'd say you have a problem.

Re:Women in OSS

[Deliveranc3]

Another generation....

Re:Women in OSS

[kwoff]

The way that question is phrased it is almost as if there should be some kind of OSS organized effort to specifically attract women to the community. What would be gained by such a movement and why is it even implied to be necessary?

Yeah, and what about the hermaphrodite and sexless people?

Extension security

[gpinzone]

Firefox has been praised for being more secure than IE, but some say that the extension model introduces security risks. Do you agree with this? Why have you chosen this model?

I'm not terribly concerned about extension security or performance. Most extension developers host their code at Mozdev and the bad ones get weeded out quite quickly. It's unlikely that a malicious extension will get popular as you can view the source of extensions. You can't view IE's source.

Was this interview before or after the GreaseMonkey debacle?

Re:Extension security

[lpangelrob]

I'm not sure how attached I am to tying in extension security directly to browser security.

Grandma visits the Greasemonkey page. A warning sheet drops down from the tabs indicating that the software will not be installed because it could be a security breach. Grandma leaves.

It takes a little bit of work to install extensions, and I don't really see anyone going through that work without being cognizant enough to recognize that it may open a security hole in exchange for added functionality.

Re:Extension security

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? You think most people other than plug-in developers knew that Mozilla/Firefox extensions could allow someone to access your files on your hard drives? The running joke here is that's an ActiveX feature. I guess Mozilla/Firefox has finally caught up to Microsoft in the security department.

Re:Extension security

[SonicRED]

The GreaseMonkey vulnerability was discovered by a good guy and is already fixed. This totally backs up his statement where he argues that being able to view the source of the extension makes things more secure.

Also, it isn't installed by default you know. I consider myself to be a power user and I've been running Firefox since version .5. Today was the first time I've heard of GreaseMonkey. An average user first of all has to know what an extension is, then they have to choose to install it, and then explicitly give a site permission to do so. This vulnerability has no active malicious exploit in the wild and even if it did it would still be a fringe issue.

Re:Extension security

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "fixed" you mean "neutered," then yes, it's been fixed. How can you say that the GreaseMonkey extension which was open source and visible to all make it more secure? It was insecure and nobody noticed until recently! Anyone with a pre-3.5 version is at serious risk. Open Source did nothing to prevent thier machines from becoming compromised.

Re:Extension security

[PhoenixPath]

One reason that firefox checks for updates to extensions, as well as it's own components, perhaps?

I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[Weaselmancer]

Why does IE heading towards its next release trundle, whereas Firefox heading towards its next release moves swiftly?

Both are having a new release that is currently being worked on. What's the difference?

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[Cheerio Boy]

Why does IE heading towards its next release trundle, whereas Firefox heading towards its next release moves swiftly?

Both are having a new release that is currently being worked on. What's the difference?

About several billion dollars of developer bloat?

Think of it as moving a large building that's attached to other buildings versus moving say a couple of tractor-trailors.

Not a very accurate analogy but I think you get the point.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, IE7 is going to be including features that have existed in other browsers for YEARS now, for the first time. FireFox is moving on to features that are pretty much guranteed to be the next big thing in web development (e.g. SVG), but the more convenient things that drew people to it (popup blocking, tabbed browsing, etc.) are already there. So yeah, IE7 is moving along slowly.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[tidge]

where does that "several billion dollars" stat come from?

How many developers are working on IE7?

How many developers are working on Firefox?

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[squidsoup]

um.. when was IE6 released? Quite a number of years ago. Firefox releases are comparatively swift, yes.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[scabb]

But surely the tractor-trailers would be the ones doing the trundling. :)

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[whitehatlurker]

What's the difference? 24 February 2005 Update to Firefox Now Available
23 March 2005 Security Update to Firefox Released (One month) 15 April 2005 Updates to Firefox and Mozilla Suite Available (One month) 11 May 2005 Security Update to Firefox Now Available (One month) 12 July 2005 Update to Firefox Available for Download (Two months) (From [mozilla.org].)

Now, there are rumours of an imminent update to fix coding problems.

When was the last release of MS IE?

There does appear to be a speed difference.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

IE 7 *beta* is due before the end of the summer.
Firefox 1.1 is due around the same time.

IE7 won't support svg or probably even css 2.1 ("Improved" css2 support has been the most the IE devs have committed to - IEBlog) while firefox already has a decent few parts of css3, which hasn't been completed, as -moz based css tags already.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[Cheerio Boy]

where does that "several billion dollars" stat come from?

I was making a rough estimate based on the fact that Microsoft is a billion dollar corporation which includes things like large buildings, multi-million dollar networking and communications structures, and marketing droids out the wazoo. Let's not forget their stunning legal team.

By contrast the Firefox developers are a loosly knit group of people connected via e-mail, IRC, and CVS and have a relatively inexpensive infrastructure.

Thus the comparison...

Admittedly I do not know the number of Microsoft developers versus Firefox developers but I'm betting that the Microsoft developers make metric tons more money. ;-)

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"When was the last release of MS IE?"

If you are counting security patches (which is all that Firefox 1.01-1.05 really were), then the last release of IE was on June 14, 2005.

If not, then the Mozilla foundation has not relased *anything* of note in the last 6 months. Firefox 1.06 and Thunderbird 1.06 are virtually identical to Firefox 1.00/Thunderbird 1.00.

Firefox 1.1 won't be that different either, from the looks of things.

Re:I'm all for MS bashing, but...

[tidge]

your probably right about them making more money.
I don't think that they've dumped several billion into IE though.
Then again, I'm just guessing too.

It rings a bell

[kyndig]

Firefox is definately a sucess story. It caught on primarily due to one mans eagerness to assist developers, and then assist newcomers in fixing bugs. Hmm, havn't we seen this similiar type of movement before? I seem to remember an enthusiastic developer named Linus Torvalds mentioning a new idea for an free operating system

Its great to see Europe taking such a greater interest in the project as well. Perhaps EU will recognise now the political and business gain in open source development.

Re:It rings a bell

[sveskemus]

Perhaps EU will recognise now the political and business gain in open source development.

Nelson Muntz voice: Ha ha!

Not designed with security in mind

[joebp]

Time and time again, we see the same basic design flaw rear its ugly head in Mozilla Firefox.

What need is there for a web browser to have privileged and non-priviliged scripting modes? What a horrible design decision. Did they not learn from IE?

Re:Not designed with security in mind

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they not learn from IE? ... Interesting question. And just to throw the question out there, I really wonder: What did they learn from Netscape?

Stick to standards

[giorgiofr]

somebody made an extension which works well in firefox, but not good in IE. More of that is needed to fight on equal terms

No, please, do not wish for this. It would only lead back to the way it was a couple of years ago. We should just stick to standards and in the long run this will win by itself. Developers are the ones driving this market, they will enjoy the standards, standard-compliant browsers will be more appreciated, we will win. But if we start playing like MS does, we won't. And in the process the web will suffer greatly.

Re:Stick to standards

[MrChom]

The problem with sticking to standards is that nothing ever really changes once you go down that route.

If people had stuck with the original version of HTML and nothing else then would we have seen the rise of asp/jsp/php etc?

That said, some standards should never have been broken. I can remember when Flash really was optional and when I could go on any computer and not worry about the Internet because popups, viruses etc. were rare.

People to this day wonder why I migrated to Linux with Firefox...most of them stop when I tell them about the "virus protection" Linux has, and the benefits of Firefox.

Re:Stick to standards

[ESqVIP]

I don't really understand your comment.

If people had stuck with the original version of HTML and nothing else then would we have seen the rise of asp/jsp/php etc?

ASP, JSP and PHP have nothing, absolutely nothing to do with what version of HTML you're using (or if it ever changes). HTML is a markup language, they're server-side programming languages (or frameworks/toolkits, in some cases). Their point compared to common CGI (or other server-side page generation methods) is that they merge nicely with HTML, but they could merge with pretty much anything. Even if the web were in plain text with menus (like telnet), there would be a need for easy dynamic content generation, and such tools would eventually appear.

That said, some standards should never have been broken. I can remember when Flash really was optional and when I could go on any computer and not worry about the Internet because popups, viruses etc. were rare.

People to this day wonder why I migrated to Linux with Firefox...most of them stop when I tell them about the "virus protection" Linux has, and the benefits of Firefox.

While I agree that sticking to standards may lead to stagnation (fortunately there are active groups, like the WHAT-WG, looking for new standardized solutions for new needs), here I completely miss your point and train of thought. What does breaking standards have to do with flash and web annoyances?

Component Model

[agsharad]

While IE is obviously going to learn a lot from Firefox and improve their browser, there is one thing they are unlikely to provide. And that is the component model that Firefox offers. The basic browser is very small (and fast). Then there are hundreds of add-ons to choose from. Users get to decide what they want and install it. The browser morphs to serve the user rather than the other way around.

Re:Component Model

[jp10558]

How quickly everyone forgets BHO's (remember google toolbar???).

that was cool

[ResQuad]

Its nice to see ZDnet publishing something useful from time to time. I, along with much of the /. community, have been on the Mozilla/Firefox bandwagon for a long time. Its a nice brief (relative) overview of this history, a nice bit for remanising.

Though I dont think the covered the split very well at all. Just that one mention of it and it was "seperate" for the rest of the time.

Awesome

[CypherXero]

"Asa Dotzler started contributing to the Mozilla project early on. He had developed an interest in open source software in 1995 while he was at Auburn University in Alabama, where he was studying architecture and preservation."

That's just awesome. I attend the University of South Alabama, and I know exactly where Auburn University is. I think it's pretty cool to see another person from Alabama that is far from the stereotype of the "redneck" or "hick". Word up to Asa!

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

I attend the University of South Alabama, and I know exactly where Auburn University is.

Spoken like a typical U of SA geography grad student.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

pffft. those other guys are overrated. crimson-white all the way.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

far from the stereotype of the "redneck" or "hick". Word up to Asa!

Um, "Word up?" WTF is that?

More Features Please

[Anonymous Coward]

I use FireFox over IE any day, but I also use Maxthon over FireFox. Maxthon (used to be called MyIE2) has more features than FireFox. I know FireFox has extra features plug-ins, so does Maxthon.

There are other differences too. When I click on some links in FireFox, they open up in a new FireFox window, not in a new tab. I hate that about FireFox. When I click on any link in Maxthon they always open up in a new tab. Even ads (with ad-blocking off) open up in a new tab and not a new window in Maxthon. This is just one example out of many.

Re:More Features Please

[blankmeyer]

There is an option to change this. In Tools|Options under the Tabbed Browsing section the top lets users define how to open links and external links. I have mine set to "New Tab" and do not have any external windows popping up.

Competition is good for everyone

[RealityProphet]

I'm glad that firefox is putting pressure - whether real or imagined - on microsoft, as this certainly prevents them from resting on their laurels.

IE 7 is bound to maintain microsoft's dominance over the browser market. However, this will at least keep them on top with a (desperately needed!) much improved browser.

Sad, but true

[ehaggis]

I like Firefox, I have deployed Firefox as the defacto browser in my company and it is my primary browser.

That being said, it is sad when only (a questionable) 10% usage rate is viewed as any type of challenge to IE. Have we lowered our standards for what real competition should be?

Re:Sad, but true

[rnelsonee]

I think so :) It makes us feel better saying Firefox is a real competitor to IE.

And really, from a features standpoint, it certainly is. Kind of like Apple is to Windows. No one expects Windows to go away, but the hyped features in Longhorn show that Redmond is trying to play catchup to certain features in OS X.

But you're right - it isn't true competition. We should expect IE to go away any more than Windows itself. But the 10% is getting bigger every year, and considering that FF isn't included in Windows, it shows that word of mouth works.

Re:Sad, but true

[Sentry21]

Real competition is going from nothing to 10% in the short span of time that it has taken Firefox. Compare this to Opera's gains of pretty much nothing in all the time it's been around (what is it at now? 1%? 1.1%?), and yeah, I'd say that's competition.

If Firefox were 'holding strong' at 10%, then yeah, that wouldn't be much competition - but it's not. It's growing, slower now, but still growing. Last time I checked it was at 6%, and now we're at 10%. How long until 15%? Then more? I look forward to it.

Re:Sad, but true

[Dehumanizer]

Have you any idea (you may have, if you RTFA) how many people "10%" are?

Besides, 10% is, to many PHBs, the "magic number" - you can no longer create IE-only sites "to save time", because that means refusing 10% of your potential customers outright.

Re:Sad, but true

[jp10558]

Worse for the IE only site is that you also have to figure the other browser's in - I think Safari and Opera each have ~2% so you're at maybe 15% you drop in an IE only site.

Also, I hope that FF will continue to convince people to write more standards complient sites (and not just do an IF IE do this, IF FF do this - and leave out Opera, Safari etc users) so everyone can access them.

Re:Sad, but true

[nahdude812]

More importantly, 10% is a large enough figure that us web developers can now make a strong case to our PHB's that the websites we develop really should be done in a way compatible with other browsers (ie standards compliant).

10% user base is actually more significant than you might think, not in a "10% is a bigger value than you think" sort of way, but in that less than 10% of 'net users are computer nerds now, meaning that it's not just techies who are using "other browsers."

Perhaps the implications of even that statement aren't immediately obvious, but to PHB's, a techy who's bucking the trend will also know enough to use IE when Firefox doesn't work. That's not going to be the case for non-technical folk, so if some appreciable portion of your users will simply give up on your site as a result of your architectural decisions, then now you're talking a real dent in income.

While Firefox still had 5% or 6% of the browser share, chances are that if a feature didn't work for someone, and they were really interested in being your customer, they'd use IE instead. Now that's no longer the case. At least via PHB logic.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Nimrangul]

The requirement of so much work to get Firefox to work in what I think of as a sane manner is what has convinced me to uninstall it.

I am still running it today, as I have yet to download Opera, but the lack of ease with which to modify the appearance alone of Firefox just drives me bonkers.

I have spent more than three days reading, researching and trying my damnedest to get Firefox's addressbar to work the way I want it to (keep favicos and put the most recently used domains on the top of the drop down) and have been spending a fair bit of time trying to get Firefox to stop opening more windows and only use tabs, which seems to be impossible.

I admit that this was my first time trying anything Mozilla since like Mozilla 1.3 or so, but I just cannot stand the way it works. At least with Opera it starts almost how I want it and I can easly change what I don't like.

Extensions are fine and all, but I'd rather the browser work right without me spending so much effort on it.

Flawed logic

[JanusFury]

His statement that IE7 requiring Longhorn will likely drive MORE users to Firefox seems to be based on slightly flawed logic... after all, Apple requires users to upgrade to the latest version of their OS for most of the new applications they release (like GarageBand) and that doesn't seem to have hurt them any. (The fact that most of the upgrades are free might have something to do with it, I guess...)

Re:Flawed logic

[quasi_steller]

Yeah, but most OSX users are ordinary people, Windows OTOH has a lot of corporate users. Many corporations don't even want to upgrade to Windows XP when Windows 2000 works just fine. Many corporations will wait until they absolutely have to upgrade to Longhorn.

I'm a Firefox fanboy.

[lheal]

From TFA:

People like my mum didn't like going on the web any more as they thought bad things happened there. Firefox took a lot of that pain away -- you could go on web without being afraid of pop-ups trying to trick you into downloading spyware.

People like me like it, too. I'm a Unix and Windows system admin. I should be able to use the web without getting viruses and spyware, right? Now, I can.

I used to use Netscape, or Mozilla, or whatever was there. Sometimes things would be broken, and I'd have to use IE.

One day I noticed more than usual quirky behavior from my PC running Winders2000 Server. I downloaded, installed, and ran a spyware removal program. What a surprise, they had me. The installer was still in the IE cache.

Now, the only thing I use IE for is WindowsUpdate. I wash afterwards.

Re:I'm a Firefox fanboy.

[Dehumanizer]

This may be useful to you, then. :)

Re:I'm a Firefox fanboy.

[lheal]

Thanks!

I'm glad I switched!!

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest reasons why I'm glad I switched to Firefox is all of the customisations you can do to it - I get a seven day weather forcast sitting down on the status bar - because I want it there, if I decide I no longer want it there, well I can take it away just as easy.

Support for multiple proxy servers - the ability to right click and see who's site I am looking at and the interigate cookies. All good things that help people use the internet safely and effectively - simply plugged in to a mixture of customisations that suit me.

RSS feeds, tabbed browsing and pop up blockers are all fantastic additions by themselves.

If I really need to look at the page in IE - I can right click and view the site in IE, but it thats a last resort now - I don't mind the odd formating issues. Perhaps all of these features are not new but it's free and it works as I want it and well.

unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[dnaumov]

I will probably get modded down below the floor for this one, but after reading so many articles praising Firefox and preaching the impending death of Internet Explorer I just have to get this off my chest:

Am I really the only one here who is thinking that with every single version past the very last 0.9 releases Firefox has been GOING DOWN THE SHITTER? Don't get me wrong, I've been a Firefox user since the 0.8 days and truth be told it's still my primary browser (I am posting this from 1.0.5), but I think the quality of QA the latter Firefox releases have been getting quite frankly sucks and I am not talking about the security issues here. With every new release Firefox is becoming more and more unstable and these days version 1.0.5 is crashing at least 2-3 times a day for me. Yeah, surely Firefox has been getting all these nice new features and UI polish, but when it comes to stability, the 0.9 branch beats the newer builds hands down. Just a short rant and perhaps food for thought.

Spare me the "PEBCAK!" and the "You must be running an M$ OS, LOL!", thank you.

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[kihjin]

Part of the Open Source process is that the users have the ability to participate. Don't expect your problem to automagickly fix itself. There's code available, and a long process known as DEBUGING that you could be experimenting with right now.

Firefox 1.x branch has only crashed on me once since I downloaded 1.0.0, however many months ago that was. Your issue doesn't translate onto me, hence it sounds like an isolated problem.

Another plus for Firefox is that since you are so unhappy with it, you have the option to uninstall it... unlike a particular browser bundled with the OS.

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[kurokaze]

yeah I would agree.. it's still crashing relatively regularly for me as well (I'm on 1.0.4). On top of that, I really would like them to reduce the memory footprint.. its HUGE!

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the new builds, use the old builds.
Here are the versions of it from 0.8 to current (Firefox):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/
Here are the versions of it from 0.6 to 0.7 (Firebird):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firebird/re leases/
Here are the versions of it from 0.1 to 0.5 (Phoenix):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/phoenix/rel eases/
Here are the versions of the Mozilla Suite from 1.0 to current:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/rel eases/

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[hilaryduff]

it doesnt crash for me. its possible you have something corrupted somewhere.
i think the win32 version of firefox is faster than on linux

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[kashani]

Try removing all your extentions. I had a number that weren't exactly compatible from version to version that were causing a number of problems.

kashani

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[mpcooke3]

Could be related to to the sudden increase in popularity. Lot's of people mean lot's of change requests means some breakages- atleast initially.

Probably they had to rewrite half of gecko just to get the slashdotters off their back about the page layout bug.

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Just becuase YOU dont have the same problem doesn't mean the problem is isolated. Jesus, you fanboys are a bunch of arrogant fucktards. I have similar problems as that user here.

Looks like you have egg on your face now - its not fucking isolated you sack of shit.

I also find your attitude that people who have problems with open source software should know how to program and delve through the code to fix it themselves. Wow, what moronic arrogance and BS!

Don't market a fucking browser to the typical end user and then shrug your shoulders by saying "Fucking fix it yourself". Yeah that will go great when you are advocating firefox use to your computer novices in your family. Douchebag.

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[Anonymous Coward]

can a post be insightful and flamebait at the same time?

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[TuringTest]

can a post be insightful and flamebait at the same time?

It can't. If he has problems with his Firefox installation then he should be bugreporting to Bugzilla, not flamebaiting to Slashdot.

Re:unhappy with Firefox 1.x

[shish]

If he has problems with his Firefox installation then he should be bugreporting to Bugzilla, not flamebaiting to Slashdot

Like the guy who pointed out the window icon was broken on windows 9x something like 3 years ago, workarounds were available immediately and a proper fix pointed out soon after, yet the problem is *still* there?

The reasoning is that although not having a window icon makes FF look horribly unprofessional, it isn't a security risk, so they won't accept the fix into the 1.0 branch.

Needs resuscitation

[OpenSoresTroll]

Like most open sores projects, Firefox may have some technical superiorities, but for the majority of users (currently almost 90% in the case of Firefox), there is absolutely no need to subject themselves to the difficulties of downloading and installing a new browser when it's very easy to continue using IE. What's that you say? Security updates? Also very easy. I just click on Windows Update and it installs all the patches for me lickety-split. If I need security patches for Firefox, I have to re-download and re-install the whole frickin' thing! Ludicrous!

Remind me again why I would ever want to fiddle around with this Firefox thing? Why is it that Firefox loads slower than IE and uses more memory while it's running? I thought it was lean and fast? Doesn't look that way to me. Why is it that some web sites don't look right with Firefox? Tabbed browsing? Who cares? It just takes up space that could be used to display a web page and has no other benefits that have been able to easily determine so far.

I say it's a done deal and, try as they might, the Mozilla folks have so far failed to produce a superior product. Maybe they should look outside of the former Netscape intern, over-eager Stanford student with rich parents crowd for developers, or maybe professional management would help.

Love,
OpenSoresTroll

firefox breaks my laptop's ability to wake up

[rnd()]

Does anyone else have this problem?

When my laptop is sleeping w/ firefox open, waking it up results in a very slow (up to 10 minutes) period during which the machine is unusable and firefox uses 100% of the CPU.

I have stopped using firefox in windows for this reason. MSN Toolbar tabs stink, but at least I save about 35 minutes per day in wakeup time.

Re:firefox breaks my laptop's ability to wake up

[nikolajsheller]

I have seen this issue as well (XP-sp2, Dell laptop). I generally try to remember to shut FF down before closing the screen. Annoying, but still preferable to using IE, in my opinion.

Re:firefox breaks my laptop's ability to wake up

[Anonymous Coward]

Try setting the maximum meory cache size lower:

1) type about:config in the location bar (and hit enter)
2) Right click on any key, then click New, Integer
3) The name will be browser.cache.memory.capacity
4) The value will be the size, in kB, of Firefox's memory cache. I recommend 16 MB (16384), but you may want more or less, depending on how much ram you have.
5) Restart the browser and try it out

Re:firefox breaks my laptop's ability to wake up

[rnd()]

i don't want to try it now b/c i've got a bunch of great windows open in IE, but I will try it asap. Thanks much for the tip. I do prefer FF and was disappointed that it ended up being the culprit in the wake from sleep problem.

How download stats work

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been explained time and time again. The download counter lists downloads from the official Mozilla site only. So yes, it does list repeat downloads. However it doesn't take into account the millions of people who download firefox at download.com (go look at how many millions is listed on their site), or at any other sites. It also doesn't count people who download it once and deploy it on 500 systems with an automatic install. So all in all, if anything, the download count is on the low side.

The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF growth

[Infonaut]

Dotzler figures that fifty percent of Windows users are still on Win 2k, and in order to get all the spiffy new IE 7 features, they'll need to upgrade to XP. His calculation seems to be that people will become annoyed at having to upgrade their OS just to get a new browser, and will therefore jump to Firefox instead.

I'm not sure about that logic. When MS puts their mind to it, they can make a fine browser. They jump from IE 3 to 4 and then to 5 was impressive. My guess is that IE 7 will not be as bad as expected, and they may sneak in a few features that the Firefox team hadn't anticipated. Microsoft wants to push users to upgrade, so if they can create even one little "must have" feature in IE 7 that Firefox doesn't already use, they may succeed in enticing more than a few Win 2k users to buy XP.

Even if Microsoft doesn't roll out a blockbuster with IE 7, I doubt that the release of a *competing* browser is going to somehow push people to switch to Firefox. With all the press Firefox has been getting, if you haven't at least tried out Firefox by now, you're not likely to so unless IE leaps out of your browser and stabs you in the forehead.

You Office Space Quoter!

[Anonymous Coward]

typically because those enterprise web applications are written by no talent hacks that can not code themselves out of a paper bag.

There was, nothing wrong with it, until I was about 12 years old and that no talent ass clown became famous and started winning grammys.

Yet Another History Lesson

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that the first article is mostly waste; how many Mozilla history lessons do we really need to read before we get the picture?

However...

[ucblockhead]

They can't count multiple machine installs. I've probably installed firefox on ten machines (well, hard drives) overall. Probably half are no longer being used.

I'm so glad they fixed the %£$@! space bar

[mooncaine]

I tried Firefox now & then for OS X, but one thing always made me turn back to Safari: I couldn't stand how the spacebar in Firefox didn't adhere to standard practice: scroll the web page down. I saw this /. story and decided to give Firefox another try. Hurray! The spacebar works as it should!

The Future of Firefox is another 5 MB download...

[Steve_Jobs_HNIC]

Coding misstep forces new Firefox release

http://news.com.com/Coding+misstep+forces+new+Fire fox+release/2100-1002_3-5792635.html?tag=nefd.top


well....at least we have extensions.... here's my list:

TextZoom - because I'm blind as a bat
Adblock - use with Filterset.G from http://www.pierceive.com
Session Saver - saves tab sessions _when_ firefox crashes
Web Developer - lot of web dev options
IE View - click to view in IE
Target Alert - let's me know what I'm clicking on
ForecastFox - show forecast
FindBar Switch - makes the find bar toogle hide/un-hide with CTRL+F
Download Statusbar - much better than the download window/popup
SpellBound - because my spelling sux

We are spreading firefox...

[B11]

I'm the "guru" to my friends and family, and when I'm asked to "fix" the internet, that is, get rid of pop-ups and such, I install or recommend Firefox. I show what it can do, how those annoying pop-ups, active-x download prompts, noisy flash ads, etc., can disappear and they are amazed.

My sister installed it on her computer at work after bieng so frustrated with IE problems. Now her boss has it on his computer, at work, at home, and on his laptop. Her co-workers are using it.

I'm sure other "gurus" are spreading the word.

IE bundled with Windows

[Hamstij]

As long as IE remains bundled with the windows OS, Firefox will *never* take off and reach a significant install base.

I work as a consultant for many IT firms, and even though they are perfectly aware of IE's limitations and security problems, they do not make the change to an alternate browser simply because it is far easier to stay with the one already installed on the system.

Inertia means that Firefox will always remain a fringe browser until some anti-monopoly law makes MS remove IE. And that will never happen. No matter how awful IE becomes now or in the future, sheer laziness means it will always be the predominant browser.

Re:IE bundled with Windows

[Bulln-Bulln]

I'm not so sure about that. OK, it's not scientific, but in surverys I saw about the favourite browser on the Mac (done on "regular" Mac websites, not geeky/techy pages) showed that about 30-40% use prefer a Gecko browser (mainly Firefox or Camino) and only about 60% use a WebKit browser (especially Safari, of course).
While the bundled Safari browser is dominant on Mac, Gecko browsers like Firefox do have a significant install base. Maybe it has something to do with Jaguar support. Safari on Jaguar is no longer supported by Apple (and never been supported very well), but Gecko browsers support Jaguar. IMO Win2000 and Jaguar share a simmilar role. Both systems are still used, but don't get official browser updates by the OS venor. Thus the only way to get a recent browser on these plattforms is to use an alternative, which is mostly Firefox.

Re:IE bundled with Windows

[drsmithy]

As long as IE remains bundled with the windows OS, Firefox will *never* take off and reach a significant install base.

IE managed to make a significant impact on Navigator's marketshare before it was "bundled"...

OTOH, the Internet community back then was arguably more tech-savvy, so that might have had something to do with it.

Re:IE bundled with Windows

[corblix]

As long as IE remains bundled with the windows OS, Firefox will *never* take off and reach a significant install base.

Oh, come off it. Do you really think Windows is going to be the dominant OS FOREVER??? Be real. In another 15 years max, we'll have someone else to be mad at.

I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ads

[zymano]

But one thing I would like developers to add in the code is to turn off 'dhtml' quickly with a button at the top of the screen .

If you don't know. Most of the popup ads are Macromedia flash or new dynamic html based.

We need switches at the top to turn them off quickly and not dig through options which can be a hassle.

Deerfield is good . Not as fast as opera in quick back but pretty good. It still can hang on an ad. Good job there too. I was one of those on bugzilla bugging you guys ! Sorry about that.

Thanks Firefox developers.

By the way . I tried digging through the firefox source code and man o man . Anyone have any tips to start when reading all that code ?

I think the opposite. Firefox will lose users.

[Work Account]

Once IE 7 is deployed and more sites use IE 7-specific tags and technologies, including one-click deployment that relies on .NET technologies being incorporated into the browser, I think Firefox will slowly lose users.

Also, the next IE version will have tabs and all the modern browser things people are used to, so Firefox will have less of a purpose.

Tack onto this that Microsoft Anti-Spyware will be installed on the majority of machines by the time IE 7 ships, and you have a recipe for declining # of Firefox users.

I'm a big Firefox fan btw and am using it right now.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[KrisW]

Extensions are fine and all, but I'd rather the browser work right without me spending so much effort on it.

I can understand your frustrations, but I think you're confusing the phrase "work right" with "work the way I want it to".

Firefox's arrogant developers?

[black hole sun]

The future of FireFox...as directed by the developers. End users be damned. I'm not trying to start a flame war or be a troll, and let it be known that Firefox is my only browser, but I've been observing the bugzilla and how developers react to some of the requests of users.

For example, take bug #252371 (I'd link, but we all know mozilla's policy on /. linking). The bug is " incremental find/search in page does not find/highlight text in textarea/form/text entry boxes". What this verbose description means is I cannot search this box in which I am typing. I cannot search wikipedia text boxes. It's a bug in Firefox, apparently fixed in mozilla, and it has been around since 1.0PR (aka, since last July). The bug has 174 votes. This is an insane amount of end users, because most users couldn't be bothered/are unaware of Firefox's bugzilla. That they take the time to CC themselves to the bug and vote for it shows just how serious this issue is to them.

What's being done about it? Absolutely nothing. People have posted eloquent requests on the bug page, pleading to get this fixed -- each time, they are effectively told to "fuck off or patch it yourself." Now I understand Bugzilla is typically for developers only, but you'd think for such an important and frustrating bug some lenience might be expected. Just check the comments of the develoeprs and you'll find what may be evidence of a larger problem with open-source development, the hostile mantra of "We don't owe you anything. If you want something done, do it yourself." Yeah, well, for those of use that don't have intimate knowledge of C++ and how the Firefox infrastructure operates, we're kind of SOL.

This kind thinking will drive users straight back to the Microsoft camp, and if I wasn't so strongly pro open source and pro-Linux, that's exactly where I'd think of returning after being treated thus.

Re:Firefox's arrogant developers?

[Anonymous Coward]

People have posted eloquent requests on the bug page, pleading to get this fixed -- each time, they are effectively told to "fuck off or patch it yourself."

As the etiquette advices, don't post comments unless they provide some NEW usefull information. Posting comments requiring people to fix it are only wasting the time of the developers.

I seriously think that the new update system in 1.1 is far more important than anything else, so I don't blaim them if they release the new version without fixing that bug. And I do also suffer for that same bug.

I didn't read the source code, but if I guess correctly, this bug is not very easy to fix (that is propably why it still exists). I know C++ quite well, but I have found out that fixing bugs in Firefox is not very easy. It is quite complex system and usually if you modify some part of the code, it will affect several other parts also.

Re:Firefox's arrogant developers?

[cbiltcliffe]

There's an extension that does this. I can't remember what it's called off the top of my head, but something like "Find within text boxes", or similar. Google it.

Maybe the reason they're hesitant to fix this bug is because the code to do it is already done, you just have to get the extension.
Of course, it would be nice if they linked to said extension in the bug description.....

Wrong!

[shoemaker251]

I'm sorry, but that is completely incorrect. The .NET Framework only needs to be installed on the web server, NOT the user's client machine. There is no requirement that users have the .NET Framework installed to render ASP.NET pages.

I think I prefer opera

[SamQ]

I find Opera a more versatile browser (even with the ads--although there are ways around that ^_^). I am still not happy with the way in which either browser prints however...

Re:I think I prefer opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you explain how to get around the ads, please? Because my Opera here has a big massive ad on the toolbar that I would like to get rid of.

Re:I think I prefer opera

[Anonymous Coward]

(even with the ads--although there are ways around that ^_^)

Yeah, you could, like, pay for the product?

Re:I think I prefer opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Pay for a browser?

That is an interesting concept... except that Windows comes with IE, Linux comes with Konqueror, and Firefox is a free download for all.

Sorry, I don't think I'll be paying for a browser any time soon.

Re:I think I prefer opera

[Anonymous Coward]

Fix described here!

Re:I think I prefer opera

[Dehumanizer]

Then don't use it. Or do you believe that your refusal to pay entitles you to stea... I mean, use it for free?

100,000,000 FF users?

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you look at all of statistics they average out to us being about 10 percent of the Web. There are estimated to be about 1 billion Web users, which means there are about 100 million Firefox users out there. It has only been downloaded about 65 million times, so the other users are people who got it some other way. The most likely place they are likely to have got it from is corporate deployments."

I'm sorry, the quote is just plain wrong.
Fact is, most people who use firefox have downloaded it more than once. FF has also not hit 10% of the browser market share.

My feeling is that FF users spend more time browsing than mom-and-pop occasional users, ergo FF is overrepresented on the browser-share charts. I'd guesstimate, with 65mil downloads, an installed userbase of perhaps 40 million - less than half dotzler's prediction.

Firefox is a great browser, better than IE in nearly every regard - except for the fact that for what most corporations are doing, IE already works and requires no extra investment of time to continue work. large companies are risk averse, and would not switch to FF even if they were convinced it were of vastly superior quality.

Firefox better than IE? Not saying much...

[Kazoo the Clown]

The Firefox team is pretty full of themselves-- it will take the attention to detail to make Firefox better, but I don't get the sense they are aware of that. Things like the annoying way it incessantly steals your input focus while you're typing, the fact that the Open New Window feature is virtually useless due to the Home Page feature which is itself useless (two areas where IE is actually better). Features that should have been worked out before the "sexy" features like popup blockers which can be done externally (and better, too). But users can always be retrained anyway, because We Know Better(TM).

Firefox should remember that they don't have to add sexy features every release like Microsoft does, and in fact that is Microsoft's biggest problem-- they have to add new features because they need you to update. Unfortunately, the Firefox team apparently also needs you to update in order to sustain the overinflation of their egos.

Both teams need a draconian Steve Jobs to force them to improve the usability first (and I don't even use a Mac). Someone who will take them to task over the little things. Otherwise creeping featurism and bloat will kill them off. The problem is, the little things just aren't as exciting to work on or talk about, which is a big reason why Microsoft's products are so lousy. Here's hoping it isn't becoming Firefox's reason too...

ActiveX

[gilesjuk]

More likely ActiveX controls? (which are a potential security risk).

Re:ActiveX

[Anonymous Coward]

Noooo now its .NET a non tainted buzzword.

He said...

[Kjella]

It's unlikely that a malicious extension will get popular as you can view the source of extensions.

GreaseMonkey is not malicious. It is insecure. Yes, a third-party GreaseMonkey script could be malicious, but that is like saying Firefox is malicious because it has a security bug. Personally I prefer extensions that do nothing but passively manipulate my pages. We've finally gotten rid of most JS/Java bugs, and I sure as hell don't want to add another script language *cough* vbs *cough* activex. But I guess people want that kind of stuff...

Kjella

Re:He said...

[Anonymous Coward]

The same could be said of ActiveX, but it doesn't make it a good idea or absolve Microsoft for making it so unsecure in the first place.

Re:He said...

[Anonymous Coward]

ActiveX is a core feature of Internet Explorer, while Greasemonkey is an optional plugin. While neither of them should be insecure, a badly designed core feature is considerably worse than a badly designed plugin.

Pure PEBCAK

[NDPTAL85]

I have been running The Deer Park Alpha 2 release since it came out and it has been nothing but rock solid for me. So I don't know why the official 1.0.5 release is so bad for you. I suggest you increase your knowledge of computer operations.

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way . I tried digging through the firefox source code and man o man . Anyone have any tips to start when reading all that code ?

Start at the beginning, and work your wany to the end of each file. :P

reason

[zymano]

only 4 or 5 developers.

Asa's blowing smoke

[museumpeace]

saying an improved IE is goint to INCREASE the number of people abandoning IE is something only PR people can say with a straight face. For that to actually happen, IE 7 would have to fall flat on its face for for reasons such as this.

Re:Asa's blowing smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't RTFA, did you? Take a look - Asa's reasoning is completely sound. (And no, I'm not going to give you the clue you so badly want. Go RTFA.)

Re:Asa's blowing smoke

[museumpeace]

I am a win2k user. But I already use firefox, and before Firefox, I grabbed each Mozilla version as it became available. So Asa's reasoning would not apply in my case. The question is how typical am I? How many people run IE on Win2k? ...for them, yes, Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot.

Mozilla Suite

[mnemonic_]

When are they going to drop Mozilla Suite development and focus solely on Firefox and Tbird, like they said they would 2 years ago?

IT fixits

[RancidMilk]

I was working on a computer at work, and it turned out that IE had become shot and wouldn't upgrade. So I installed firefox, and changed the icon to the IE blue "E". The people didn't even notice the switch, and I knew I would be able to use it everytime I used their computer. Brilliant.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[gshub77]

ever actually launch FireFox on a mac? it actually takes minutes to launch....
i dont know why it just does. Safari i dont like so much but waiting 2-3 minutes sometimes even 5 to go to google is in no way going to fly.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Nimrangul]

I am bias, I had used Internet Explorer for years and then Opera, trying the latest Mozilla every once and a while, but I could never stick with it.

Every single time I went to do something there would be a nagging issue that I could do nothing about.

I have to work to get Opera to Work Right®, but it is all rather simple to do, the browsers in the 7 and on series seem to be designed specifically for it.

Meh, the adds aren't as annoying as the lack of easy customization for me.

Swiftly?

[dprior]

Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1

Swiftly? Really? If FFX's progression towards 1.1 is swift, then I run the 100 meters in a flash.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because it's so hard to type Ctrl-T to open a new tab. And installation is so hard when all you have to do is point and click. Stick with AOL, it has all the hand holding you seem to need. Maybe next you'll figure out how to create bookmarks (or favorites) to keep track of sites you want to visit. Hard stuff, but you'll get it eventually.

how IE7 will help firefox

[phantomfive]

From the article:
We have high hopes that we'll do better and better in that space with Windows 2000 users. If users don't upgrade to Windows XP they won't get IE 7, but 50 percent of businesses are still using Windows 2000.

If a site looks broken in IE6, win2000 users will be annoyed with Microsoft (no IE7 for win2000).

Market segmentation is a good thing: it will keep people from designing to a single browser. The more different browsers have a significant market share, the more likely the internet will look good for me in Lynx.

Re:how IE7 will help firefox

[Linus Torvaalds]

If a site looks broken in IE6, win2000 users will be annoyed with Microsoft

If significant numbers of websites look broken in IE6, then it will be because there are few IE6 users about. So long as there are a significant numbers of IE6 users about, web developers will make sure their websites work in it. And typically, the user blames the website not the browser anyway. The number of people who are going to be annoyed at Microsoft are going to be in a minority.

We still test in IE5 and that's pretty typical. IE5 was released seven years ago. If IE7 is released this year, then people will still be testing in IE6 in 2012. Probably longer - it didn't require an OS upgrade to switch from IE5 to 5.5 or 6.

Re:how IE7 will help firefox

[Dehumanizer]

The more different browsers have a significant market share, the more likely the internet will look good for me in Lynx.

I love that sentence! :)

Behind the scenes article

[Anonymous Coward]

ZdNet UK also has a new "behind the scenes at the Mozilla Foundation" article which talks about some of the contributors and has photos of the office (including a cool bridge made of soda cans)

http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,39020463,392 08853,00.htm

Firefox in the enterprise world

[bsquizzato]

I still think Firefox won't be used widely throughout the corporate enterprises until the team develops a good update system. It's enough of a pain for me to install over my old version when an update comes out, let alone hundreds of computers.

Re:Firefox in the enterprise world

[jZnat]

Guess what? That's being worked on right now. They already have a good start with Deer Park Alpha 2, and you can download the nightlies via the auto-update. Definitely worth checking out and watching as the patching system finishes.

Eh?

[rwaliany]

Firefox is no longer a fox, it's a snail. We should call it firesnail. I hate to note that IE6 runs faster for me on wine than firefox.

The big thing with IE7 is DRM

[WillAffleckUW]

enforced at the point of a gun - lawsuit - whatever, same end point.

Now that's why I don't want to use it, and downloaded Firefox and Opera for my home WinXP laptop.

Hey, anyone know which Linux distro works best with an AMD 3000 laptop with FireWire, USB, and 11g?

Wishful fool...

[Yolegoman]

Speaking of innovation, someone should innovate an ActiveX IE plugin that simply changes the IE rendering engine to Gecko.

If such a plugin was made, M$ would release a patch which fixed some "security errors" before web developers everywhere could cry "Hallelujah!".

Firefox doesn't have as many holes.

[zymano]

Most firefox holes are not serious.

Do you have any links to prove that FF has the same serious flaws as IE ?

IE 6.0...August 27, 2002

[sygin]

Why does IE heading towards its next release trundle, whereas Firefox heading towards its next release moves swiftly?

"Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0. Release date: August 27, 2002"

I rest my case.

1.0.6 coming soon

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that 1.0.5 broke several extensions. All other languages are stuck on 1.0.4, because 1.0.6 is coming soon...

Re:I'm so glad they fixed the %£$@! space ba

[wilhelm]

Now if only they could allow using of key bindings which users expect. Sure, windows users expect the windows-style key bindings, but for Unix-heads, many (dare I say most?) probably expect the emacs-style bindings in a text box, because that's what Moz used, and Netscape before that, and there is a whole history of Unix GUI programs which have offered those same key bindings for YEARS. I switched to Konq because of it.

Let's hear it for the principle of least surprise. Or not.

Contempt for Bug #115174 which costs money!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have witnessed Bug #115174 being treated in the same way. This bug is not just an inconvenience. It costs users money.

Month after month the "blocking*" flags are minused. The latest instance is tagged with "Not a regression." The comment before that asks for an "ecommerce" keyword. I wonder if it will be granted.

Until then, NEVER save confirmation pages from e-commerce transactions and other POST [POSTDATA] forms... unless you choose "Web page, complete".

Re:Contempt for Bug #115174 which costs money!

[assassinator42]

That does seem pretty serious. View-source doesn't seem to do that, why don't they just have save webpage as HTML just save the output from view-source?

1.0.5 Still Not Auto-updating!

[sconeu]

Has anyone else noticed that 1.0.5 still doesn't show up as an available update to 1.0.4?

Re:1.0.5 Still Not Auto-updating!

[Lukey Boy]

I think it's missing from the auto-update server because 1.0.5 breaks a lot of extensions. They're working on a 1.0.6 (there's already candidate builds out) that don't have that side effect.

Re:1.0.5 Still Not Auto-updating!

[PigIronBob]

i did, did it manually

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[zymano]

thanks alot. lol.

Here's your Firefox ActiveX

[Spy der Mann]

FireFoxView is an extension that lets you click on a link or page and view it in Firefox.

You might also want to try
Mozilla ActiveX control for VB apps.

Oh yes, before it sucks

[Com2Kid]

Back when it was Phoenix it started up fast, ran fast, it was wonderful. Now it is slooooooow to boot, sucks up Memory.

Just my imagination? Not really, I had an old Phoenix install on my machine, ran it, and was amazed by the speed. Reminded me of why I originally started to like it.

Comparing Mozilla to Firefox, same memory usage (within a few megs) and about the same startup time on any machine without lots of RAM (admitedly on my faster machines with 512+ RAM, Firefox is signifigently faster than plain ol' Moz)

How does that differ from commercial or in-house?

[SuperKendall]

...And for every OSS trophy project you'll find a thousand half-assed weekend hacks that never make it past Alpha stage...

Yes you will. Just as for every succesful commercial or in-house app you'll see a thousand failures. But at least OSS failures are ones generally based on technical merits, and not so much based on a company running out of money or a project being killed for political reasons eeven though it's quite good.

Not to mention that each of those thousand failures is a learning experience for the next one. Remember Edison saying he didn't mind thousand unsucessful attemps to make a light buld because he now knew a thousand things that didn't work? It can be (not saying it always is) the same with OSS. You can actually see what people pick up and use, and try to understand why.

You do see some simialr bugs cropping up across a lot of different forums, because programmers make simialr mistakes and a lot of software is being written and re-written for a huge range of platforms - like Java or PHP or Ruby. So sharing cannot happen quite as much as would be ideal, but at least sharing can happen in the form of UI sharing - if you like the way a user interacts with some piece of software you can replicate that.

Firefox has inferior keyboard control...

[kisrael]

This isn't meant to be a troll, and I have brought this up on the firefox msg boards:

Its interesting that Firefox has the same inferior keyboard control and window history behavior that good old Netscape 4.7 had.

I mean, it has tabbing through links, but then go back with alt-arrow, and the link you were on is no longer tab selection.

Shift-click to open a new window in IE, and the new window has the history of its parent...I find this VERY useful in navigation under some circumstances. Plus, ctrl-N opens a clone of the parent, including history...again, it's not too hard to come up with scenarios where this is useful behavior. I know some purists like that Ctrl-n goes to the homepage, and other purists like that ctrl-t opens a 'blank' tab...but I think both "new window" and "new tab" should have 3 options: blank, homepage, or clone of current window.

Only tabbed browsing and the much superior ctrl-F behavior keeps me with Firefox. And the general smugness of not quite being so much of MS's bitch.

And I wish to high heaven that they would return the ability to search textareas with ctrl-F!!

Re:Firefox has inferior keyboard control...

[jp10558]

I know opera has a duplicate feature ctrl-alt-n to do what IE does, but in a tab, whereas ctrl-n just opens a blank page (I may have an older keyboard setup - it may have been changed in O8).

It also searches in text boxes (though it has the older IE style pop-up dialogue box for ctrl-F.

Many eyes, but not all of them friendly

[jfengel]

Open source is a two-edged sword for security. Or more precisely, a two sided curve:

1. Open source means that finding holes is a lot easier
2. Open source means more eyes spotting and fixing them

So there's a curve: a small open-source product has as many holes as a small commercial product, but those holes are wide open in public. I'd be reluctant to run something from Sourceforge from a tiny community of programmers, because it doesn't actually have many eyes on it.

Your only saving grace is that no hackers are out there targeting you. You survive on security by obscurity.

The ratio of evil eyes to good ones is probably constant, but it takes only one malicious coder to spot an error in open source. So Firefox may be safe, but that doesn't mean that open source in general is safe.

And that's without even bringing up the nightmare that malicious contributors can do.

Re:Many eyes, but not all of them friendly

[FooBarWidget]

Malicious contributors? In every open source project I know, contributions are reviewed before they get applied.

oh, flashblock rocks. Thanks!

[mattnuzum]

Oh, flashblock rocks!

Where have you been all my life?

Typical Fanboy Luser Response

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the typical personal attack.. Someone describes a legitimate problem with something that is well-revered to the point of fanboyism is personally attacked for daring to say something bad about it.

I have alot of issues with Firefox crashing too and I consider myself to be a pretty advanced computer user, after all I code for a living.

Re:Typical Fanboy Luser Response

[cbiltcliffe]

I consider myself to be a pretty advanced computer user, after all I code for a living.

So does the IE team at Microsoft... ;)

Seriously, though. I've seen people who code for a living make horrendously sloppy code, and I've seen professionals make code so elegant it makes you cry. I've also seen amateurs posing naked on the internetAARRGG^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H do both of those.
Saying you code for a living tells me absolutely nothing about the quality of your code, or your technical ability to use/fix computers.

All I know is, I do fix computers for a living, and generally laugh at the causes and solutions for problems that Nerds on Site, Geek Squad, and big box technicians come up with.
I've installed Firefox on dozens of computers, running Windows 95 up to XP SP2. I've installed it on Linux machines running several different distributions and versions.
I'm running 1.0.5 on my Windows XP machine at home, my wife is running it on her Windows 98/Debian 3.1 laptop. I'm running the Debian 3.1 version on my Linux desktop, too.
I've seen it crash about 3 times, and then, only when I leave dozens of tabs and windows open for weeks on my machine. I've never seen it crash on a machine that's been running for less than a couple of days.

No, it's not exactly a full random study, but we're talking hundreds of machines, here.
While I appreciate you might have the problem, and some other people might have the problem, it's certainly not common, or I would have run into it before, wouldn't you think?

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Bulln-Bulln]

I'm not the person you replied to, but I'll respond anyway.
Firefox is my default browser (I'm on Mac). Firefox takes a while to launch, if launched the first time. FF creates creates the profile directory, registers its chromes and so on. After that, FF usually starts fast - not so fast as Safari, but still fast. Only if FF has been updated to a newer version or an extension has been installed, FF may act in a simmilar way as after a fresh install (but only once).

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[B11]

I use flashblock (along with adblock) and it takes care of those annoying float-over flash ads without intervention on my part.

false

[diegocgteleline.es]

"In future it may be possible to discover a way to gain administrative previledges thru IE, even when running with a non previledged a/c"

Huh, what the fuck? IE is a process and it runs with users' permissions. It's just not possible to gain administrative privileges through IE just because there's no part of IE running with administrator privileges

I'm tired of all that "IE is integrated with the OS" bullshit. Microsoft said that because otherwise they'd have to remove IE from windows and they've enought money to make the judgue believe that. IE is integrated in the "active desktop", the explorer or the help reader or msn messenger, but that does NOT mean it's integrated in the "os" in the real sense. It's integrated in the OS if you call "OS" to explorer.exe, but it is certainly not integrated in ej: the kernel or the libraries implementing the win32 API. And the programs which use it (explorer, etc) use it as a com object, ie: it's not really "tightly integrated"

Re:false

[frodo from middle ea]

ever heard of local exploits ? What I am saying is , chances of finding a local exploit to gain admin previledges in IE are much higher than in firefox

Re:false

[Tim C]

Why do you say that? IE is not integrated into the OS, other than by virtue of the fact that parts of the desktop shell use mshtml.dll to render HTML, as do third party apps (because it's guaranteed to exist on the system).

Privilege escalation exploits typically occur when a process starts with or obtains higher privileges (eg Apache on linux typically starts as root), and is then "tricked" into holding on to them longer than it should. IE doesn't do this, it runs as the invoking user. Unless you have a specific issue in mind, I don't think you have any reason to think that IE is more likely to offer a privilege escalation exploit than any other piece of software running under Windows.

(not that it matters, as the vast majority of Windows users run as admin anyway...)

and then what did they do????

[catfoo]

from the article.. "At the time Dotzler was working for a market research company in Texas. His wife, Deanna Pierce, worked different hours, so he would often work on the Mozilla project in the evenings until she got home" ..and then what did they do???? just curious

FF shouldnt change

[mnmn]

FF is at a sweet spot, works rather well and fast. Add more, its too heavy. Remove stuff its too light.

The only way forward I think is complete integration of SVG(coming!), complete compliance with HTTP, HTML and XML standards (possible SMGL too); as much as it should pass the ACID2 test which only one test opera version has passed.

I moved to opera from firefox simply because opera is slightly faster. Theyre not too different in functionality otherwise. Opera is also better standards compliant. This is where I want FF to catch up.

Apart from these, a browser is most needed where there are no native browsers. Firefox is the first thing I download when I install Solaris or AIX. They should keep updated ports for all the architectures, even the lesser known ones and the dead ones like openvms, beos, OS2 etc.

Thats all I could ask for.

And what the heck is TURDLING?

Re:FF shouldnt change

[Petrushka]

The only way forward I think is complete integration of SVG(coming!), complete compliance with HTTP, HTML and XML standards (possible SMGL too); as much as it should pass the ACID2 test which only one test opera version has passed.

Beg pardon - you mis-spelt 'Safari' ...

Re:FF shouldnt change

[mnmn]

Yer right.

I somehow associated opera with the acid2 passing. I think i read the opera guy promising to pass the test or something in an interview. Just tested it too.

Just something for browser makers to do.

Hype

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the way development towards a .x release is labeled as "blazing" but the effort behind a full major upgrade is referred to as "trundling".

Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro

[thetoastman]

I have been avoiding the Windows/2000 Professional to Windows/XP Professional upgrade on one of my home systems for a long time.

I use Windows/XP Professional as one of my systems at work and I loathe the environment. About the only reason I would consider upgrading the home system is to investigate IE 7.

And the only reason I plan to investigate IE 7 is to make sure web sites I build will work in that environment.

The method is: Build the web to standards, and hack on it until IE can render it correctly. I don't imagine IE 7 will change this method. It just means that I will have to use different hacks for a new set of standards embelishments that Microsoft decides to make.

Software freedom exposes the myth of "choice".

[jbn-o]

If you didn't care what browser you used, you wouldn't bother to consider which browser is "better" (for any definition of better). You would simply use whatever someone put in front of you. Clearly you do care about what browser you are using, you are merely making your decision based on criteria which differs from how the debate is being framed. I'll do something similar below.

Firefox is being pitched in terms that will lose them the market share they desire.

Firefox has tabbed browsing, Javascript pop-up blocking, RSS feed reading capability, and other technical advances. Microsoft's Internet Explorer will get some of them too, and perhaps offer technical advances which Firefox does not have. MSIE will continue to come with the Microsoft Windows operating system whereas Firefox will continue to be a download away. So if users ares being taught to value Firefox for technical reasons, Firefox users on Microsoft Windows will be left with fewer reasons to download Firefox in the future. MSIE will be more convenient than Firefox and MSIE will offer the technical advantages users have been taught to value.

The Mozilla Foundation offers no better argument here; they pitch the argument of "choice" which is neither true nor convincing. A choice of web browsers was available long before Firefox existed: one could run MSIE, Netscape, or Opera (among other browsers). Choice only requires two alternatives, but at one time these three were quite popular.

An argument that would have been more convincing, but would have required different allegiances than the Mozilla Foundation has, would be to talk about software freedom. Even if one runs a proprietary OS, one could run a web browser that gives users software freedom as Firefox does for its users. Even if one is not a programmer (as most users aren't), one can benefit from the large library of Firefox extensions available and the daily activity on Firefox code which tends toward getting bugs fixed quickly; all practical consequences of software freedom. Talking about software freedom also exposes another weakness in the "choice" argument -- none of those choices offer software freedom because they are all proprietary programs -- so you can see how "choice" can railroad you into losing your freedom.

Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro

[Infonaut]

And the only reason I plan to investigate IE 7 is to make sure web sites I build will work in that environment.

Until a recent career shift, I did pretty much the same thing. We ran IE 6x in Win2k under VirtualPC so we could check rendering behavior, but we coded to W3C standards and then tweaked to force IE to work properly.

According to some of the stories I've read (including this one), IE 7 *may* support full CSS2, but will probably only cover a subset of CSS2. Great. This is just what we all need - another incomplete implementation of CSS. What year is it?

"Alternative" History?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing "alternative" about this "history" of the Firefox project compared to the others already published is that Mr Dotzler talks about himself more. Good to see the "write three lines of code and then claim to have written the whole thing" tradition started by Marc Andreessen is still alive and well in the browser business.

yeah, like the ads-if-you-don't-pay feature

[jbellis]

those firefox bastards, always ripping off opera...

on a more serious note, didn't omniweb have tabbed browsing blah blah blah before Opera?

Re:yeah, like the ads-if-you-don't-pay feature

[Rits]

on a more serious note, didn't omniweb have tabbed browsing blah blah blah before Opera?

OmniWeb? Not at all. Opera had traditional MDI UI from it's start. The Netcaptor IE-shell introduced the tabbar. Opera 4 added a 'windows bar' that worked much like the Windows taskbar, and is as functional as a tab bar. Every serious browser released since then except MSIE has something like it.

Re:yeah, like the ads-if-you-don't-pay feature

[jlarocco]

This always confuses me: the unobtrusive text ads on Google are good, but the unobtrusive text ads in Opera are bad?

Also, yes, I think Omniweb did have tabs before Opera.

Re:yeah, like the ads-if-you-don't-pay feature

[Juanvaldes]

>>Also, yes, I think Omniweb did have tabs before Opera.

Not at all, Omniweb was one of the last to implement a tab feature. Arguments could be made about other features but not tabs.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[gibson042]

It is unclear from your post whether or not you are still using Firefox, but if you are then you should be very interested in the Single Window extension, which can trap all new window requests to new tabs. I apologize if you already knew about this, no longer use Firefox, and/or are annoyed by yet another extension-based fix instead of built-in functionality.

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[zymano]

http://www.popuptest.com/

Guess my adblock was outdated.

Also uninstalled flash.

Damn crap !

Re:I'm so glad they fixed the %£$@! space ba

[Anonymous Coward]

I have emacs style key bindings in Firefox. At least some of the most basic ones like C-f, C-b etc. although many of the M-something combos are stolen by toolbar menus. If I recall correctly this was achieved through some general gtk setting. You'll have to google it.

That is said about all open source

[the_raptor]

It is said of all open source that is only more secure because it doesn't have much market share compared to closed source applications.

Of course the best example for open source security is Apache.

Security has nothing to do with closed or open source. Secure products will be made by people who care about security, and until very recently Microsoft didn't care. Any open source application that relies on the community doing security auditing will be full of bugs. The most secure programs are those that are designed to be secure and have regular security audits by the primary developers.

But Fx is not a real IE alternative

[siim04]

Here are some reasons:

1. My parents can't use it.

They can't watch the weather at beaches and cities (here in Estonia) as these webcams are all using ActiveX controls (you have to download) and are not viewable with Firefox. They can't successfully use their e-mail (Squirrel WebMail I guess) because Fx doesn't let them log in (something to do with security I think - you have to use a "clean" (freshly opened) IE to use it too). Now these are quite understandable necessities in the WWW world. And if Fx can't handle them then it can't be used!

2. My sister can't use it!

Because she likes to go chaing and playing games on the web. As we all know, Fx has some serious resource leaks, that will soon render your computer useless (hint - she only has 64kB resources as she is generally using Windows 98SE as The Sims 2 (which by the way works fine - though slow, but no leaks at least) doesn't work on Linux). And the memory use tends to be filled up faster while visiting pages with lots of Macromedia, Java and scripting components on them. Also she blogs at MSN Spaces :D.

3. My brother doesn't want to use it!

Because he likes to visit los of forums and search the web for games. On Fx that brings you to lots of pages that either are not displayed correctly or present him lots of popdowns (and some popups). You can say that on IE there should be more popups, but there are NOT because I have taken my time to configure the security zones in IE and he actually knows how to use them. Actually even my sister does and noone ever tought her how to use them :S. So anyone who cares to improve their web experience be removing disturbing ads and rendering popups or other annoying scripts useless, can easily take up the Security Zone in IE. No need for doing extra installations at all. All I am hoping for is the ability to add more custom secrity zones in IE 7 for more control (and yes I know you can add your own custom security zones by editing registry right now).

4. I can't use it!

Because I follow the latest web standards and techniques - so do the pages I visit. Fx doesn't FULLY support XSL stylesheets (XSLT recommendation is not fully implemented), which causes problems on most of the pages using XSL stylesheets. However, Internet Explorer shows these pages perfectly. XSLT is W3C recommendation.

I would also like to point aut that IE is no more integrated to Windows than Gecko to Windows or Linux. The fact, that IEs engine is being used by many programs doesn't mean integration - Gecko is also been used by many programs in Windows, though many less than IEs engine as Gecko is less common.

The number of flaws found in Fx this year already exceeds the number found in IE. The Fx add-ins seem to be ActiveX alternatives as they seem to do the same things. Fx Extensions seem to be like IEs add-ons - as they seem to be the same things (help on rendering or add toolbars/controls to IEs interface). So what is new in Firefox? Functionally I don't see anything you can do with Fx+add-ins+extensions but can't with IE+add-ons+ActiveX. The biggest difference is user interface. And the speed really depends on the number of components rendered. Plain HTML (+ css and sometimes even JavaScript) tends to be rendred faster in IE, add ActiveX, Flash or Java, Fx will probably be faster. But Flash is generally used for advertising or to annoy people with large or small screens (anything not mainstream), so it will take at least 3 months till you reach a page where you want/need it (that was exactly how long it took for me after installing Linux on my computer before I had to install Flash in Linux).

I am not anti-Firefox or pro-Microsoft, I am a kind of "spokesman" for freeware (as the sofware you don't have to pay money for) for personal use (home use) and Fx and IE are equal to me (Opera would not be equal though there is a freeware version).

Firefox update BROKEN

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Firefox's update feature is broken both automatic and when you press the "Check Now" button.

I just (3:45 PM USA Pacific Time, GMT-7) tried it with Firefox 1.0.4 and it said "Firefox was not able to find any available updates".

Even though 1.0.5 is out with critical security fixes and has been for at least 2 days!

Good work Firefox! :(

From TFA

[dacarr]

From the "love" article:

"It has only been downloaded about 65 million times, so the other users are people who got it some other way. The most likely place they are likely to have got it from is corporate deployments. "

Also note that it's in the various Linux distibution archive networks (e.g., APT) - so it's easy enough to just apt-get install firefox (if you're in Debian or deriv's), and this won't count. In fact, I'm betting money that you'll more likely count more users going that route than corporate rollouts.

Just make Firefox a bit more faster

[Aggrajag]

like Opera, please!

standards compliance ... drag and drop in Gallery

[pbhj]

You may be interested to know that Gallery the wonderful OSS php gallery (which I'm using to let my family see pics of our new baby, btw) has a Java based system for enabling drag and drop of images into the galleries. It's non-native styling but works quite well for me on WinXP with FF.

HTH with your "problem".

pbhj

Re:Main advantage .. extensions

[pbhj]

does Opera have extensions now?

For me the extensions are what keeps me with FF. The webdeveloper extension justifies the choice of browser by itself.

Then there's adblock!

Last I heard Opera didn't have the community extensibility which leaves the way open for innovation _and_ allows many cool Opera features to be integrated such as properly working tabs and mouse gestures.

Someone I'm sure can correct me and tell me where Opera got these from?! And in any case "there is nothing new under the sun" ... Opera (or whoever) just used a metaphor: tabs from filing cabinets, gestures from people making signs.

Firefox in corporate world here

[bach37]

A large firm in my state with over 30 branch offices recently made the switch for ALL users to use Firefox. They blocked the access of running the IE executable. Perhaps 800 employees, in a multi-state region. Also it's word on the street: b/c employees will just tell their family members, etc.

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[zymano]

http://www.antssoft.com/wisepopup/

NOT so fast. This is unblockable and gets through!

IE7 advances ...?

[pbhj]

Yeah, IE7 will probably have border-radius without using the CSS "standard".

It will support a new png-like graphics format that isn't png but works almost as well.

It will crash on any site with -moz in the styles.

Clippy will help you browse the internet.

You'll get warnings like "this site is not authorised by Microsoft, viewing this site may cause your computer to lose data files and stop responding or allow an authorised user access, are you sure you want to continue to 'google.com'".

IE7 will be great! ;0)>

Re:IE7 advances ...?

[Infonaut]

IE7 will be great! ;0)>

Don't be surprised if it's better than you expect it to be. MS is terrible at innovating, but very good at counterpunching when someone threatens them.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[xouumalperxe]

more simply, he could middle click to open some random link in a new tab. But what of the links that target _newwindow? those are bitches. They still spawn a new window needlessly, when they could just pop up in a new tab. I myself have never gotten around this problem. And before you ask, I think that in this day and age, copying the URL and pasting it in the ctrl+T spawned tab at all acceptable. Screw handholding, users want something that works, and works the way any sane person expects it to. From all the years of MS abuse I suffered, I was greatly surprised when middle clicking in the bookmark menu in FF actually did the right thing and opened the bookmark in a new window. This is the stuff he's talking about, and anybody who uses a computer with some purpose other than using a computer should be allowed this. Even those who do use the computer just because, me included, should demand that such things work.

Re:Main advantage .. extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

adBlock is lame. Get a decent proxy (like proxomitron or privoxy), a decent set of filters, and you can use any browser you want ad free. It makes no sense to use a browser specific plugin when you can get ad blocking and a lot more for all browsers at once.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Nimrangul]

"I am still running it today, as I have yet to download Opera..."

Anyways, this kind of thing shouldn't require an extension. It should be in options, along with how tabs functionm instead it takes a bunch of time hunting down the desired functionality in extensions or writing some oneself.

That kind of stuff bugs the hell out of me. The idea of extensions is great, adding to a web browser is a novel and interesting concept. But adding basic controls through stuff you have to find yourself is a pain which could be easily avoided. Things like download managers and irc clients I can understand as being extensions, but having a button to close a tab, or how tabs handle mouse overs should be a built in option.

XUL and Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox just rox - Checkout the amazing stuff that can be done with XUL , creating "webapps" that looks like desktop-clients.

http://demo.atmail.com/ is a great example. Login to the "XUL" interface - It's like Thunderbird, but via the Web!

Re:The Future of Firefox is another 5 MB download.

[starwed]

Luckily, the nightly builds of Firefox now have updates available by binary patches. It's not turned on by default (and I'm sure it has it's own problems right now), but it is there to test out. When Firefox 1.1 is released, there shouldn't be a need for anymore 5MB downloads. ^_^

Re:The Future of Firefox is another 5 MB download.

[Chris Brewer]

You forget the best reason to install Session Saver - it keeps your browser session when you install/update other extensions. The first extension that gets installed when I do a new FF install.

What?

[millennial]

Trundling? You know, every time that MS releases a security patch for IE, it can be considered a version update. They really aren't moving that slowly compared to Firefox.

Tried Firefox. It sucked..

[Anonymous Coward]

... on older hardware that is. On my ancient 400Mhz Dell (windows 2000/320Mb ram), IE6 has it all over the current Firefox in terms of rendering speed as well as java initialization speed. Love all the Firefox extensions (especially Flash suppression), but the poor performance means that IE6 is still my main browser.

I know I've heard that somewhere before

[a.d.trick]

Oh yeah, it was the last time they released the flash player

Re:Main advantage .. extensions

[jp10558]

Opera also doesn't have the vulnerabilities one gets from extensions - see the beta whitelist they had to add, and now the greasemonky debacle. I still maintain that if anyone can alter the core app, you will end up with the same issues you have with IE BHOs.

As an anonymous coward said, various third party adblockers (well, that's what AdBlock is - a separate program that clicks into FF) are as good or better than adblock - see proxomitron and AdMuncher. The best part is both of those work for all browsers on your system, so you're not locked into any particular browser because of adblocking.

Re:Firefox doesn't have as many holes.

[jp10558]

I don't know, the recent greasemonky issue where they can read your entire hard drive seems rather serious to me - though this is more an indightment of the extension system than FF specifically.

incorrect link

[krunk4ever]

the correct link for the 2nd article [Mozilla: IE7 will boost Firefox take-up] is:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39 020384,39209591,00.htm

Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro

[radtea]

Even if Microsoft doesn't roll out a blockbuster with IE 7, I doubt that the release of a *competing* browser is going to somehow push people to switch to Firefox. With all the press Firefox has been getting, if you haven't at least tried out Firefox by now, you're not likely to so unless IE leaps out of your browser and stabs you in the forehead.

It is a well-known phenomenon in the software industry that competitor upgrades are a good time to shake their customers loose. If the upgraded product is too different (has so many new or changed features that it looks and feels like a different product) or is too heavy (requires new hardware or an OS upgrade from Win2000 to WinXP, say) then users will be motivated to look for other solutions to their problem.

I don't know what issues IE 6.0 has, because I only run it once on any machine (to download FF). But IF FireFox has the features users want that aren't in IE 6.0 there is a chance that they will consider FF over IE 7.0 as their next browser IF IE 7.0 is "too different" from IE 6.0 or is too heavyweight, or buggy or otherwise not good.

Re:I like firefox. Idea - floating dhtml popup ad

[jp10558]

I'm a little confused though - is that page supposed to pop something up? I ask becasue I have successfully blocked some pop-ups which are DHTML based using proxomitron.

Granted, there isn't a block all approach, but a community finding said ads can easily block them to a list like the vaunted G list (I think, I don't use FF or AdBlock) or grypen's proxo list - and AdMuncher too I would guess.

Re:How does that differ from commercial or in-hous

[syousef]

But at least OSS failures are ones generally based on technical merits, and not so much based on a company running out of money or a project being killed for political reasons eeven though it's quite good.

You seem to be arguing that politics does not play a part in Open Source. Need I remind you of the recent spat between Andrew Tridgel and Linus where Linus was effectively pressuring Andrew to drop his project to appease a 3rd party (so that Linus could keep bitkeeper)?

Wherever a group of 2 or more people collaborate there will be politics of one form or another involved. It doesn't matter what your development philosophy is.

Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro

[Infonaut]

It is a well-known phenomenon in the software industry that competitor upgrades are a good time to shake their customers loose. If the upgraded product is too different (has so many new or changed features that it looks and feels like a different product) or is too heavy (requires new hardware or an OS upgrade from Win2000 to WinXP, say) then users will be motivated to look for other solutions to their problem.

I hadn't heard of that phenomenon, so I must have not been paying enough attention over the years. Thanks for pointing this out. I suppose the key is in whether Firefox takes advantage of the opportunity with some marketing muscle and/or a new rev of Firefox.

Don't use that link to Filterset.G

[amake]

They ask that you use this one when posting "on Slashdot or other major sites." Maybe they don't mean in comments and whatnot, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

Gecko

[DaoudaW]

Well I RTFA and I can't believe that any article about the history of Moz/FF doesn't say anything about the cool little browser that started it all. I remember downloading Gecko in the fall of 1998 and being startled at the speed and simplicity it brought to the web. Yes, I also saw its shortcomings but I wasn't interested in an application suite. I just wanted a browser that rendered webpages quickly on an older computer and it did that wonderfully, thank you!

Then I kept upgrading through the milestone releases, m1 through m17, and then the point releases on the way to 1.0. A few of them had major bugs, but most of them were quite usable and features kept being added. Mozilla 1.0 was a good browser, but had become a bit bloated. I was looking forward to trying Netscape 6.0, but it turned out to be DOA. What a disappointment! Why/how netscape took gold (pun intended) and turned it into lead is the story that needs to be told.

So I stayed with Mozilla until Phoenix became available. I used both Mozilla and Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox until Firefox was approaching 1.0, by then Firefox was hands-down the best browser available and I haven't looked back since.

Re:standards compliance ... drag and drop in Galle

[collar]

The parent poster did say "You have to rely on ActiveX, Java, etc.", not just that you had to use ActiveX.

So his problem remains.

Re:2 Women in OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better if we could get 2 women to participate. That's what I'm talking about.

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a button to close a tab - right off to the right. No need to waste space with such a button for *each* tab.

Also, did you read Firefox's FAQs? You can make everything go to new tabs by going to about:config, turning on browser.tabs.ShowSingleModePrefs (or something like that, I forget the name), and then going to Options -> Advanced and checking "Force links that open in new windows to open in:" and selecting "a new tab".

A bit long-winded perhaps, but the functionality is indeed built into the browser.

Migration to Firefox

[ShimmyShimmy]

from article "we rarely hear of companies doing wide-scale migrations from IE." Actually, I disagree with that. A lot of places use firefox, and have specific settings/features specifically for netscape-based browsers. I go to Lehigh University, where firefox is standard on every computer.
Somehow, I just don't feel like "migrate" is quite the right word. Obvoiusly, if a company put Linux on every one of it's computers, it'd be pretty damn migrated. However, since you obviously can't have a Windows box that doesn't run IE, it's still hanging on every computer. But the IT guys push it and tell all the professors/staff to use it for security issues, and all the Mail is Thunderbird.

I really feel like Firefox and Thunderbird are a lot more "migrated" than it seems like, but it's just not a complete move away from IE becuase you could still use it if you absolutely wanted to.

Long live Firefox!

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Nimrangul]

That's about as built in as the sex in San Andreas or unlocking Ein in Dead or Alive, there is no way to get to it without knowing exactly what you're doing in the first place.

Also, I already have that option set to true and the additional options do not exist within the Advanced options, so you're incorrect. It's browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs you were refferring to, but it does not add jack to the Advanced nor the Tabs options. Though I suppose that browser.tabs.opentabfor.windowopen would work for what I wanted in the beginning.

Once again, this is stuff that should be set up in your options to begin with, not unlocked by knowing what option to change a bigass list of options.

XulRunner

[bahwi]

XulRunner is what I've been waiting for! We've got our fully functional CRM app, but having people download Firefox and run it through that just doesn't look as professional as it could.

Of course, firefox --chrome http://blahblahblah.../ works, but is still more difficult, and people begin to wonder where this Firefox thing came from. Yeah, spreading the browser is a great cause and good crusade, BUT, business is business. In fact, when people call tech support complaining IE won't work(why are they calling us? No idea, we're just too nice sometimes), we tell them to install FF, and they're good to go.

Hopefully with the Gecko Runtime Enviroment(GRE) coming along, it will make smaller downloads for the other apps once you've got one installed. (Installed FF, great, Tbird and Xulrunner are miniscule downloads). Perhaps not, but maybe...

Different level

[SuperKendall]

There are always politics. But even OSS politics are more open. Projects in a company can (and will) be canceled because a manager does not like someone on a team, on a whim, out of fear of success, or a thousand other wierd reasons.

Furthermore real commercial products can be nixed because of legal issues. There's a lot of software that can be made non-commercially that a commercial venture would never touch with a ten-foot pole - DeCSS, Hymn.

In all endevours human politics will come to bear. The solution is to keep those politics as open as you can so problems do not fester in the dark.

Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1

[cakesy]

"As Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1 and Internet Explorer keeps trundling towards IE7..."

I thought that it was Firefox crawling like a dead snail towards 1.1 and IE flying at the speed of light towards IE7...

talk about bias in journalism!

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Shaper_pmp]

"That's about as built in as the sex in San Andreas or unlocking Ein in Dead or Alive, there is no way to get to it without knowing exactly what you're doing in the first place."

You appear to be using a different definition of "built-in" from the rest of us. We use it to describe functionality that's available with no additional downloads or installations. You seem to be using it as a synonym for "staring you right in the face".

<Inigo>
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
</Inigo>

"Once again, this is stuff that should be set up in your options to begin with, not unlocked by knowing what option to change a bigass list of options."

Why, exactly? Why should Firefox default to exactly the settings you like? What about the millions of inexperienced IE users who even now are initially confused by advances like tabbed browsing, and want it to work simply and understandably out-of-the-box?

The really big upturn in Firefox's adoption rate came when the developers weren't afraid to design for the stupidest user. Rare or unusual settings are hidden to avoid confusing people, and for the more 1337 there are the hidden preferences, which can be discovered with about 0.94 seconds' Googling.

Your problem appears to be that you want power users' control with idiot-level instructions, and you're eternally going to be frustrated on that score.

Of course, Firefox could indeed be made easier to use and configure, but with the built-in options alone it's already more powerful than pretty much any other browser out there.

Finally, part of the reason for Extensions is to put power back into the hands of the users, to come up with stuff the Mozilla developers didn't, wouldn't or couldn't think of. Popular extension functionality (IIRC) is even considered for folding into later versions of the "main" Firefox build, so your arguments are more that Firefox isn't developing fast enough in exactly the direction you want, rather than a genuine fault with Firefox...

Re:Name one platform Firefox doesn't suck on.

[Nimrangul]

I never said it wasn't developing fast enough, I said that the browser is being developed in a manner that makes no sense, they're adding stuff, but nothing in the programme to manipulate the additions.

I also never said I expected Firefox to work exactly how I want it by default, I want it so I can make it work that way. Which, it seems is impossible, flat out, without me making my own goddamned extension.

The purpose of the Options should be to select options, not to be almost empty so people have to change flags in order to turn on the ability to select options.

I could care less how rapidly a browser develops, I want it to follow what I would have thought common sense, "if it's an option, have it configurable in the Options."

The fact that there isn't a part in the browser to configure shortcuts and macros bothers me. I'm sorry if you like to run around looking through various chrome files for every possible configuration change. The ability to switch to being completely tab driven should just be there, it should not be something that is only possible through an extension.

Oh, browser.tabs.opentabfor.windowopen doesn't set it so when you open a window it opens a tab, nor does browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs. I guess the damn thing just isn't ready to be a tabbed browser yet. Maybe later, but right now it's bouncing on the edge unwilling to actually cross the damned line and become what Opera has been for a long time now.

With the hidden options which one must hunt for, Firefox may infact be powerful, but not in a manner that is accessable, not accessable to anyone that is not willing to devote hours tracking down and changing things to configure their web browser.

It took me 10 minutes to configure Opera 8.01, it has taken me more than 7 hours of work and I still haven't gotten Firefox to actually stick within tabs alone. Me, I guess I'm crazy, I want my options all in one place, cleanly.

I said it at the beginning, Firefox isn't being made so that it can actually be configured by people, it is not easily customizable, though obviously it is configurable by Firefox devotees who already know what to change.

Re:How does that differ from commercial or in-hous

[Anonymous Coward]

Politics is a huge role in the free software/OSS world! Mozilla.org and OpenOffice were both born out of corporate politics. Gnome was born out of FSF politics.

And projects are most certainly not rejected on the basis of technical merit. Have you ever seen the source code to Gaim? I'll give you a hint: it stinks. It's IMO very disorganized and has historically been riddled with security holes. And yet it is one of the most popular free software packages.

Or OpenOffice. OpenOffice is far from a work of art in terms of code, but superficially speaking it fills an important void in functionality, and fills it well.

Or look at Linux itself. From a code standpoint it's not as clean as BSD. But which is more popular? In this regard free software has its own sort of "worse is better." Linux is more popular because it is updated more often, not because the code is robust. Similarly, OpenOffice and Gaim are popular because they have an interface that everybody likes, not because they are secure or well written.

Re:The reason he thinks IE 7 will spur more FF gro

[Anonymous Coward]

Um. As I recall, IE 5 was an awful lot like IE 4... Then IE 5.5, you couldn't tell much difference between IE 5. IE 6, same deal.

AFAIK the major differences were security holes and under-the-hood features. From a UI perspective it is exactly the same as IE 4, or close to it.

Now, IE 1-3 is radically different from IE 4+. I'll give you that. Every now and then I'll install an old version of '95 or NT on an emulator to run Windows, and it'll come with IE 3, and I'll be just shocked. But IE 4 is really when IE became its modern incarnation, so to speak. Everything else is just incremental improvement.

Guess we know the poster's preferences

[Zepalesque]

"As Firefox moves swiftly towards 1.1 and Internet Explorer keeps trundling towards IE7..."

Very non-partial post there buddy ;)

Re:Main advantage .. extensions

[Bert64]

But the extensions are optional, people will install a diverse set of extensions depending on their requirements so you won't get a single static target like you do with IE..

Re:Firefox doesn't have as many holes.

[Bert64]

But this is a vulnerability in a particular extension that you have to explicitely download and install.