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The Future of Firefox

Posted by Zonk on from the phoenix-rising-indeed dept.

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."

4 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. Insert comment by Approaching.sanity · · Score: 0, Flamebait

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

    [/fanboy rant]

    --
    RTFA again for the best results.
  2. Eh? by rwaliany · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

    --
    - Ryan
  3. Re:firefox by tomjen · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

    --
    Freedom or George Bush
  4. Re:boost leads to more exploits by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I agree that open source developers are typically more careful since they do their work for free and thus typically have more motivation to make it work properly than just "I don't want lower marks on my review". even I personally have caught myself being careless on projects for work because it won't affect my paycheck, when a completely trivial app I write for pleasure has to be stonewalled and built to perfection.

    But there seems to be a permeation in the open-source community of the idea that open-source developers don't make mistakes. They do. Sometimes they lack an understanding of the underlying components, sometimes they are just lazy. OSS has flaws.

    I suspect that, at the moment, Firefox has more security issues, and probably more severe security issues, than IE. And I think both products have been and will continue to be patched adequately and promptly when a vulnerability is found. Of course, the question is: will the users upgrade before the worm is released? To me, on this they seem to be on level ground. I think IE users will be likely to upgrade because it'll be bundled in one of the regular 'windows updates' mandated by SP2. But OTOH, the folks who have switched to FF are more aware of the potential for security issues, and may be more apt to go through the pains of updating their browser whenever a patch is released.

    Time will tell, I suppose.