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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."

9 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. boost leads to more exploits by rockytriton · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    http://www.dreamsyssoft.com

    1. Re:boost leads to more exploits by syousef · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Ironic by deaddrunk · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
  3. Security by ad0gg · · Score: 3, Interesting
    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

    --

    Have you ever been to a turkish prison?

    1. Re:Security by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  4. Re:Main advantage by dsginter · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    More
  5. Too bad ZDNet sucks by Gothmolly · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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  6. Sad, but true by ehaggis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    --
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  7. Re:Main advantage by Tumbleweed · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.