Firefox 1.1 Scrapped

An Anonymous Reader writes: "The Firefox team has decided to scrap the planned 1.1 release (already in Alpha 2) and instead release the final version as 1.5 due to the significant number of bug fixes and changes. The 1.5 feature complete beta is expected next month." From the article: "We are planning for a Firefox 2.0 and 3.0, but will divide the planned work over (at this point) three major Milestones, 1.5 (September 2005), 2.0 (unscheduled) and 3.0 (unscheduled). All major development work will be done on the Mozilla trunk, and these releases will coincide with Gecko version revs."

Comments

Reccomendations for FF

[Khyber]

I'd like to point out that many of the problems now found with FireFox came about when smart script kiddies and coders found out that Java is a useful way to screw up someone's computer. Same thing with Flash.

My recommendation for the Mozilla development team is to include the support for Java and Flash within their program, BUT disable it by default, and force users to enable it when they want to. I know this sounds screwed up, but to many degrees this wil make FireFox even safer, as most users are unaware that FireFox can potentially be just as vulnerable.

One of the people I do side work for called me a couple of weeks ago, and told me she was having problems with FF. I went over to her place, and found out she had gone past my disabling Java and installing FlashBlock. She removed Flashblock (having played many flash games and gotten addicted to them) and her gmail wouldn't function the way she wanted it to with Java disabled. Of course, needless to say, she visited some site that installed some stuff thru Firefox thanks to Java. She was riddled with worms and trojans. It was so bad i had to wipe her computer clean, to her chagrin. I told her "If you try to work around my own security measures that I implement on my own system to keep my system secure, you're bound to run into problems." It took about ten hours of explaining to her and demonstrating on her laptop (boy, she hated that) how Java can screw her system up, as well as Flash. It took me less than ten minutes to use flash to riddle the laptop with spyware. She's learned her lesson (after wiping out both her harddrives) and now she won't dare get around any security I implement.

The trick here, is to educate people on what's real and what's not. Sitting around doing nothing about it but griping is not going to help, it's only going to exacerbate the problem. People need to constantly and continually educate those with less knowledge, otherwise we're going to trap ourselves into allowing the uneducated masses make the bigger decisions for us.