Firefox Plans Mass Marketing Drive

Ivan Mark writes "Christopher Beard, the VP of products at Mozilla Corporation, told ZDNet UK on Monday that there is a 'strong likelihood' that Firefox 1.5, the next major version of the open source browser, will be released on 29 November. Beard said they are planning a 'big marketing push.' 'You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features-- what's cool and great,' said Beard. 'People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location.'"

Comments

Might be good for film students

[Anonymous Coward]

This might be a real good way for film student to get some real world pratice. Might even land them a job.

Re:Might be good for film students

[Anonymous Coward]

Also a good opportunity for aspiring models. "Firefox is the open-source, standards-compliant web browser for everybody. With automatic pop-up blocking and enhanced privacy features, Firefox lets you take back the Internet. Plus, look at my tits."

Re:Might be good for film students

[dwandy]

Prizes for the best videos will be awarded at the end of the campaign.

Free copies of the browser?

...err, wait a sec...

Re:Might be good for film students

[Ohreally_factor]

Has anyone seen an actual link to the contest itself?

I've dug around the mozilla.org site, but all I found was this Stay Tuned! blog entry.

Re:Might be good for film students

[Nadsat]

The voiceover begins: "Firefox is proud to introduce, Miss and Mr. Firefoxy...."

Re:Might be good for film students

[Class Act Dynamo]

"...having sex. Their coupling is beautiful, much in the same way that the coupling of Firefox and your web browser is also beautiful."

Re:Might be good for film students

[soccerUSA]

People could join Team Firefox's Folding@Home team http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= teampage&teamnum=39299

Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

The average user doesn't want "new and cool". They're happy with Internet Explorer. You can explain to them about security, and they don't listen. You can explain to them why their computer keeps being infested with spyware and trojans, and they don't listen. IE is what they know, it is the only internet they've ever known, and they'll stubbornly stick with it when someone tries to make them switch to some newfanged nerdy thing with a weird name. They don't understand computers like we do so they don't appreciate the dangers and benefits and possibilities of choice. We wouldn't become enthused about changing the injectedgyroroateraxel on our car now would we, because we don't know about cars. Neither do they know anything about computers, and the paradyme is the same.

New thinking is required to make them think trying Firefox is a good idea.

And even then, in my experience, the horrible performance hit XUL gives makes even many power users go back to IE! Personally I can't tolerate how slow FF is, and use K-Meleon instead.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Andrewkov]

I disagree .. The average user I talk to is sick of pop-ups, spywayre, browser hijacks and other nusances that come with IE. When I tell them about Firefox, they are interested and some even download it.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[advocate_one]

I usually have the latest Firefox, Thunderbird AND OpenOffice on the USB keydrive I keep on me... I also have a CD with XP SP1 and a CD with SP2 on it as well... most people who I'm fixing computers for have only got dialup and they balk at the ridiculously long download times involved these days for software and updates... Firefox took 30 minutes to download the other day on one box I was fixing... (I didn't have my keydrive or service pack CDs on me), 30 minutes with IE exposed... and that default configuration XP HE used to ship in of default admin privs AND no firewall was a shock to me when I forgot to check the firewall and all these SPIM things kept popping up. I'd forgotten how bad the internet really is for most windows using folk...

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Zeussy]

u'll be surprised about what people listen too. Currently im working for shell, in Australia, Promoting their new Fuel. So I go around and talk to people. They listen, ask questions about it. Some convert, some don't. And that is trying to promote something that costs more. If you say its free and better, it really gets peoples attention.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[m85476585]

Why don't they make it so it looks and behaves exactly like IE. Have the same skins, icons, and maybe even the same useragent string. Sure the user wouldn't get tabs and it would cause confusion when a page doesn't render right, but they could just blame the website for using bad code.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[jferris]

I agree, in the sense I don't think that it will be the most effective thing that they can do. But still, it is a step in the right direction. Playing hide and seek with a potential userbase that doesn't know you exist is not going to result in many people finding you.

What I would love to see is an actual television campaign of some sorts, although I know that it is cost prohibitive for them. When I think of Firefox advertisements, what I would love to see is a series of commercials similar to what Apple did. I don't remember the exact commercials, but they had a real person explaining why they switched to a Mac from a PC. Each commercial ending with a link to read about switching over. Granted, I don't use a Mac, but it was a very smart commercial. ;-)

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[westlake]

I disagree .. The average user I talk to is sick of pop-ups, spywayre, browser hijacks and other nusances that come with IE. When I tell them about Firefox, they are interested and some even download it.

They could just download Microsoft's Antispyware, the MSN, Google, or Yahoo toolbars. It has become very easy to make these problems go away.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[tsa]

NoooooooooooooooooooooooooooO!!!!!

I mean: no tabs? The extremely irritatring automatic "We can't find this website" thingy if you make a typo, so you can type in the whole URL again? O, did I mention No tabs?

Man, you give me nightmares.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[mrchaotica]

Since the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization, I wonder -- could Firefox commercials be considered Public Service Announcements?

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[cdbeckman]

To me, this sounds incredibly similar to the Mac switch campaign and the mac arguments for switching. No more spyware! It's easy to use! No more hacking! We all know that particular ad campaign helped them so much... *sarcasm* I for one was not a fan of Apple's attempt at appealing to the "average joe," and to that extent testimonial ads have always seemed ineffective. "Why should I care what that person thought of this product, your probably paying them!"

(For the interest of disclosure and irony, I have am posting with with my Powerbook G4)

*insert Ellen Feiss joke here*

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Ankur Dave]

Isn't the main security feature of Firefox not using ActiveX? So why don't these users just disable ActiveX in the IE Internet Options?
Although there is the issue of IE being bloated...but as long as they're not a power user why would they care about small performance increases in launching the browser?

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[m85476585]

Firefox isn't much faster starting up than IE. And people could still get the regular FF. FF that looks like IE would be only for people who don't want to switch browsers.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[Zeneris]

I agree about the appalling delays e.g. for my Firefox 1.0.7 (with lots of extension, no themes) it can takes 10 seconds at 100% CPU for a new window to appear, so is damned annoying for (wanted) popup windows! ... this on a normally very fast WinXP SP2 (no swap file) AMD64/3500 939 pin 2GB RAM PC. I hope Firefox 1.5 fixes this stupid behaviour e.g. with much smarter cacheing of XUL and extension data.

Re:Going to have to do better than that I'm afraid

[AaronCampbell]

The average user doesn't want "new and cool". They're happy with Internet Explorer. You can explain to them about security, and they don't listen. You can explain to them why their computer keeps being infested with spyware and trojans, and they don't listen. IE is what they know, it is the only internet they've ever known, and they'll stubbornly stick with it when someone tries to make them switch to some newfanged nerdy thing with a weird name. They don't understand computers like we do so they don't appreciate the dangers and benefits and possibilities of choice. We wouldn't become enthused about changing the injectedgyroroateraxel on our car now would we, because we don't know about cars. Neither do they know anything about computers, and the paradyme is the same.

In my experience, that's just not true. Those who don't know much about computers tend to trust those that do. I make a suggestion, and they usually want to follow it. I'm an "IT Manager" at a small office (10 people). I didn't make it mandatory to switch to Firefox, but I told them it was better (from a security point of view as far as virii and spyware, etc). Everyone opted to get it and use it. It only took a day or two, and I heard from three of them, that they had downloaded and installed it at home too. Three more asked me if I could show them how to install it, so they could do it at home, so I typed up some short instructions. Three more said their kids already had it installed at home. I, of course, have it at home.

My point is: People aren't scared of it. They just need someone that they trust to recommend it to them. If you recommend it, and people are scared to use it, they might not trust your computer prowess. Tell them to go ask someone they DO trust.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[MrP-(at work)]

I dont use firefox (I use opera), but how many times does this happen to people who use IE? I bet a lot more than firefox

mmm...tasty

[Connie_Lingus]

Genetically-modified viral marketing...tastes great with chicken!

For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[bogaboga]

While I appreciate Firefox's achievements, marketing will not persuade me that much if I still have to tweak it to have sites with streaming media work properly. The popular URL http://zdnet.com.com/1606-2_2-5967129.html comes to mind. Heck, it might not be Firefox's fault but if the other browser on the other platform works, then Firefox should work in a lay man's view.

Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[patcito]

then maybe yo ushould switch to Konqueror from KDE 3.5 with kmplayer because it does work.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[rincebrain]

Firefox 1.5 RC3, MPlayer plugin 3.15, works fine here.

Any more questions?

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[Xeo 024]

Works perfectly fine here.

Firefox 1.5 RC3 with WMP 10.

What is the exact problem?

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[Richard_J_N]

Try mplayerplugin

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[rsidd]

Do not tell me I'll need a Media Player installed because I have Linux media players of all colors installed on my system.

Try mplayer-plugin (known on ubuntu as mozilla-mplayer), and the win32-codecs package. The site you point out works perfectly on my system if I choose windows media (mplayer-plugin) or realplayer (realplayer 10 for linux). As does Apple's trailers site (presently otherwise viewable only with quicktime 7) and a bunch of other stuff -- in fact, everything I've tried except some VRML stuff.

But from a purely browsing experience, I no longer think Firefox is the best open-source browser -- konqueror in kde 3.5 hasn't failed me on a site yet. The collaboration with Apple clearly helped...

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[spitefulcrow]

Uh, works fine with Firefox 1.0.7 and mplayerplug-in 2.85 on my Gentoo box.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[B3ryllium]

The problem is that he uses Linux, and doesn't know how to use Google. :)

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[MadJo]

hmm I have streaming in Firefox under Linux, though I do use an extension called MediaPlayerConnectivity.
No problems after I installed that, unless you count the hunt for the right codecs.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[shawb]

They will work for the lay man, because he will be simply installing firefox on Windows rather than Linux. Then he can directly launch RealPlayer or Windows Media Player (yes, these are not the best players, but they are the ones the lay man will have.)

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[shibashaba]

The realplayer version works fine for me on linux using firefox. Try the MediaPlayerConnectivity extension, you can get it from Firefoxes web site.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[Silvrmane]

That URL works fine for me. Mind you, I have both QuickTime and Media Player installed on my windows PC. Maybe the problem you are having is that such sites are not set up for anything other than Windows/Mac, which *probably* isn't a Firefox problem per se... Plug-in dependent pages muddy the cross-platform waters - do you blame the browser makers, or the web authors, for relying on plug in technology that doesn't exist on your platform of choice.

Re:For me, marketing will not "cut it!"

[makomk]

That's interesting - I always thought Konqueror had a nice interface, but 3.4.3 doesn't work with some of the websites I use (even when I pretend it's Safari - something that works for a number of sites, Hotmail and Google Maps in particular). I'll have to upgrade when it's finally released.

Of course, Konqueror doesn't (yet) run on Windows, so it's irrelevant to most of the population at the moment.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[spacefight]

I've seen a crashing Firefox too recently, but most of the time, a plugin was directly involved while loading the page (Java, for example). I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does. Couldn't firefox load the plugin somehow in an new thread which can die anytime it wants?

Marketing

[HawkingMattress]

Am i the only one to thing that a corporation like Mozilla should put money into developpers or bounties instead of marketing campaigns ? I don't remember exactly how many cost the Times ad, but it was way too much...
Marketing is a necessary evil for those companies which must have a return on their money. Mozilla just want market shares, and would probably be better served by paying coders to make the browser better instead of hyping it.

Re:Marketing

[Bungopolis]

A good point, but do consider that increasing the user base must surely have a positive effect on development as well. Somebody who uses Firefox is more likely to think about contributing to it than somebody who doesn't -- whether that be simply via bug reporting, plug-in development, or even direct source contribution.

Re:Marketing

[Fluff the Tiger]

'Am i the only one to thing that a corporation like Mozilla should put money into developpers or bounties instead of marketing campaigns ? ' yes 'Marketing is a necessary evil for those companies which must have a return on their money. Mozilla just want market shares, and would probably be better served by paying coders to make the browser better instead of hyping it.' marketing works. Firefox is already better than IE (unless you look at a lot of p0rn)

Re:Marketing

[RoLi]

When it comes to browsers, marketshare is very important.

For example, IE-only websites are dissapearing because Firefox already has 10% marketshare and is growing.

So the NYT ad (and all the other marketing) already paid off, because fewer websits lock out the browser.

Because this was the most important problem for Mozilla and Firefox-users, marketing indeed improved Mozilla/Firefox more than any programmer could have.

Re:Marketing

[crazdgamer]

And what good is the software if nodoby knows about it?

Software development is important, yes. But in order to get new users, you have to reach out to them, and this is where marketing comes in. Giving a new product to the same customer base will not result in growth. The number of people using the product have to increase in order for there to be growth, and that's what the marketing campaign aims to achieve.

Having an ad campaign for a product update is a solid course of action. It lets people who don't use Firefox see the new features and possibly switch over, and it lets the existing users know about the updates.

Re:Marketing

[jesser]

Firefox is already better than IE (unless you look at a lot of p0rn)

What advantages does IE have over Firefox when it comes to porn? Pornzilla's page about "Why Firefox is the best porn browser" lists some advantages Firefox has over IE, but I can't think of any advantages IE has over Firefox.

Mod parent up

[mekkab]

I hate when I try to resume firefox from sleep (i.e. it's been paged out) and it just hangs (both on Win2k, WInXP). I suspect Java is involved (or some other plugin) but its a nightmare.

I've also had the same problem with Safari; however it just NEVER came back from paging and after 10 minutes I yanked the plug from the wall (I was that pissed off!).

And I hate that Opera has issues displaying /.

/unhappy with pretty much every browser

Re:Mod parent up

[byolinux]

Use Lynx over SSH. It won't even know when you sleep the machine.

Re:Mod parent up

[trogdor8667]

I love my FireFox. I really do. But I completely agree. Every browser has problems. Internet Explorer causes vulnerabilities, FireFox isn't compatible, Opera has ads, etc etc etc.

I'm a diehard FireFox fan. I have it installed on every computer I touch (except work), and use it 99% of the time. Unfortunately, since I still have to open IE to use anything related to work (Java problems with FireFox), or open IE to listen to musical content (WMP is not compatible with FireFox, yet), I still use IE sometimes. This is honestly why I'm waiting on IE7. From what I've seen, Microsoft is making sincere efforts at becoming the best again. If IE7 is better than FireFox, I'll use it. Otherwise, I'll stick with Firefox. But unfortunately, even once 1.5 comes out, and 7 comes out, we'll still have problems, and neither one will be perfect.

Re:Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

/unhappy with pretty much every browser

So, have you tried Internet Explorer?

Re:Mod parent up

[Thing 1]

I researched this the other day because I, too, was so fed up with Mozilla's slowness to come back up after having been minimized.

Turns out there's a great answer:

From http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/qa/archives/2005/10 /beta2_candidate_builds_availab.html

[...] try setting the "config.trim_on_minimize" pref to "false"

This is done by:

1. Open new tab.
2. Go to "about:config".
3. Right-click, select New, Boolean.
4. Type the variable name, "config.trim_on_minimize", hit Enter.
5. Type "false", hit Enter.
6. Exit and restart Mozilla.

Now it won't free memory when it minimizes, which it generally takes 30-60 seconds (sometimes longer!) to restore when the user clicks on the task bar icon to bring it back up.

Re:Mod parent up

[mobby_6kl]

Opera has issues displaying /.? I thought it was Firefox that didn't render it correctly, at least up until the latest version. I've been using Opera for quite a while now, and never noticed anything wrong when browsing this site. Both the old pure html and now css versions display just fine.

Re:Mod parent up

[starwed]

I hate when I try to resume firefox from sleep (i.e. it's been paged out) and it just hangs

Firefox 1.5 tries to hold onto memory more aggressively, in order to prevent this problem. Maybe you should check it out. :)

Re:Mod parent up

[Thing 1]

No, 667 is across the street. 664 and 668 are the neighbors. I left those out because everybody's heard it, and Slashdot has a sig limit. (And, mine are all palindromes, at least the numerical part, like the original 666.)

The rest of them:

111: Skinny Beast (or Victorious Beast)
222: Too Beasty for My Shirt
333: Arboreal Beast
444: Golfing Beast
777: Lucky Beast
888: Fat Beast (or After-Dinner Beast)

Big marketing push

[haeger]

Beard said they are planning a 'big marketing push.'

...and obviously it has already started...

.haeger

Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[ServaL]

The 1.5 release has some nice new features, but there is one constant in every release: Firefox gets an augmenting chunk of memory.
After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory.

And counting.

I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[spacefight]

Indeed. It's rather annoying, that I have to close Firefox after a whole day at work while leaving all other programs running over night.

For your tabs, there's an extension which saves your tabs (or other stuff) when you close Firefox and reopens all of them when you start it up again: SessionSaver.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[__aaxwdb6741]

Yeah, it'd be nice if one could close Firefox, and open it again with all the previous tabs open. Something like the Windows Hibernate feature.

Or even better: Let the user configure a preset number of tabs which load automatically upon opening the first instance of a Firefox browser. If a Firefox instance is already open, the user has to click a certain button to make his preset tabs load.
This would be a great feature for me, as I always spend at least 20 seconds opening five tabs each time I start my browser. Google/ig, gmail and slashdot, among others.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[n0dalus]

I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

Get SessionSaver.
It will restore your open tabs on startup or after a crash. It is also great for when one of the plugins (flash, java, or maybe just Firefox itself) makes the browser slow down over time; after a lot of usage you can just close it and reopen Firefox -- with all your tabs but a fresh start on memory usage. This extension has almost entirely eliminated the need for bookmarks for me too.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[shird]

Isnt it sad though that this plugin is so popular given what most people actually use it for? Wouldn't a better solution be to have Firefox simply not crash or not chew up so much memory. I think its laughable that in the same thread about how great Firefox is, there are always people suggesting this plugin and how useful it is. Surely when considering its usefulness and widespread use you should be thinking about the faults of the browser, and not how great this plugin is.

Other browsers dont have this plugin, because they don't need it. I can use Maxthon day in day out with very very few crashes, and no unusual amounts of memory used. It has inbuilt tabs restore on restart if you want it.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[d99-sbr]

Yup, Firefox leaks memory like a sieve, seemingly independent of platform. I guess for many home users this is not a big problem, but after a day at work with 10 tabs open the swapping needed to switch tabs can be quite annoying.

I hope this is one thing that has been looked into for 1.5.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[theatreman]

Except SessionSaver won't work with v1.5 TM

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Dan Ost]

Other browsers dont have this plugin, because they don't need it

Opera has had it for as long as I can remember.

Isnt it sad though that this plugin is so popular given what most people actually use it for?

Well, I use it because I often want to come back later to a site, but don't bookmark it. By leaving the tab open, I can go back to it any time, even after restarting my laptop since SessionSaver will load it again next time I start it.

I have never had stability problems with FireFox or memory problems and yet because of the way I like to browse, I find this plugin to be essential.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[__aaxwdb6741]

Wow, thanks a bunch. Where did you learn about this trick?

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[n0dalus]

Yes the problems in the browser need to be fixed.
This might not be a "solution" but until they fix it I think people should know about it. SessionSaver wasn't created for this purpose (it's actually a very useful extension, and despite what you say it still great).

Almost all of the crashes or memory leaks I've had in Firefox are related to third party proprietry extensions that Mozilla has no say over. Sure it shouldn't be able to crash the browser but they can't be stopped from leaking memory. If the Flash plugin gets memory from the system, it's up to Flash to give it back. The plugins for IE (and IE based browsers) are far more mature and have fewer bugs.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Decker-Mage]

Why? Since you are making that complaint you must be using Windows as I am while I am typing this (Windows Server 2003 Enterprise here). These are NOT the days of DOS where you have to have free memory before a program can load. Depending on buffering requirements, any program can request more memory than it may need at any moment and if another program should come along requiring memory, the operating system (we really have modern OS's now with the NT series, sort of) will tell all programs to free up whatever unused memory blocks they have laying around. BTW, even the OS itself carves out a huge chunk of RAM to act as a system buffer. Frequently around half (although you can hack this in the registry) and this is even true in the various flavors of *nix which will use almost all free pages for system buffers. Hell, in *nix you should see 90% or so of RAM allocated ALL the time.

Sorry, but you don't seem to understand how a modern operating system works let alone a modern application within that context. I suggest starting with Tannenbaum's excellent "Modern Operating System Design"; a very nice introduction to the subject.

FWIW, my system is wired up like a pinball machine and I normally run with six tabs open ranging up to a maximum of about twenty. Peak usage is about what you experience, 100 MB, and Firefox will relinquish all but about 20 MB when I fire up multiple virtual machines here. So, the memory management does work. I've seen it in action, repeatedly.

Free memory? Bah! A waste.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[HMage]

It works okay on my Firefox 1.5RC3.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[wheany]

Try the session saver extension mentioned above. Or you could try Opera, which has the feature built in.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[TheRaven64]

I found this feature in Opera very useful when I was running one of the 7-series betas. Being a beta, it was quite unstable - it crashed once or twice a day. When it crashed, it took about 10 seconds to get back to where I was. I had the same experience with {Star, Open}Office betas - they crash, but they are able to resume from the state they were in just prior to the crash. More developers should pay attention to this, it's Raskin's First Law:

A program may not harm a user's data, or through inaction allow a user's data to come to harm.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[m85476585]

In RC3: Bookmarks -> Bookmark all tabs In 1.0.7: Bookmarks -> bookmark this page -> check the "bookmark all tabs" box.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[quarkscat]

Session-Saver is merely a band-aid for the bigger issue -- memory leakage problems. The current culture at Mozilla/FireFox of adding new "bells & whistles" to the browser without fixing core issues is disfunctional.

(1) Why must 2 separate instances of the rendering engine be required when using FoxFire with Thunderbird?

(2) Why is the Mozilla/FireFox version of a software "patch" a complete new version of the browser?

(3) Why are 2+ year old security issues ignored in favor of shiney new "bells & whistles"?

(4) Why should Mozilla/FireFox abandon their all-in-one "Mozilla" in favor of 2 separate memory hogs?

(5) Why initiate yet another marketing "push" on a product that has not had Q_1 thru Q_4 addressed?

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[roman_mir]

Be careful with the SessionSaver. I had this extension for sometime, but after I hit some stupid page that started openning multiple tabs in the FF and I just couldn't make it stop and had to kill the process, and after restart I had the same problem over and over (because of the SessionSaver,) and I had to figure out how to prevent it from doing that again by going into FF config files and removing SessionSaver's entries... Well I don't use that extension anymore.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Anonymous Coward]

1) being worked on (GRE runtime)
2) Firefox 1.5 supports incremental updates
3) name it
4) You don't have to. Mozilla keeps maintaining the suite (1.7), the Seamonkey project keeps improving the suite.
5) Multitasking.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Jumperalex]

Well then you haven't used the new version of SS .. or should I say the version that has been out for several months. It now has a function that "catches" those occurences where the browser is continually crashing, or being abnormally shut down by the user via "end process", and tells you that it noticed a problem and are you sure you want to restore the session. I've never had the problem again and I did experience the very problem you described several times both before and after the new feature.

Check it out.

As for the memory problem [shrug] I dont notice a problem. I use SS for exactly what it is meant to do: restore my tabs if I have a crash, accidently shut down FF, have to reboot, or just decide to shut down the browser. [shrug]

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[starwed]

Let the user configure a preset number of tabs which load automatically upon opening the first instance of a Firefox browser.

You know how you can set a homepage for a browser? Firefox actually lets you have a collection of homepages, which will open in tabs when you start up. Simply open the sites you want in tabs, go to Options->General, and click the "Use Current Pages" button.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[sp00nz]

Opera does this. Or atleast can be set to. It's very nice to resume browsing from where you were.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Iago515]

You can also set up folders on your Personal Toolbar and drop any sites you want opened in it. Then, once Firefox starts, middle-click on it and all the bookmarks in it will open in tabs (same as opening the folder and clicking on that option at the bottom), that way it saves having to close all the tabs if you want to open up another Firefox window. I have 4 folders on my Personal Toolbar as a few more RSS feeds, works great for me.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[tehshen]

Isnt it sad though that this plugin is so popular given what most people actually use it for? Wouldn't a better solution be to have Firefox simply not crash or not chew up so much memory.

Ever have a power outage turn off your computer? It's a shame that Firefox does not protect against power outages.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[sharkey]

Too bad SessionSaver throws a version conflict error for current versions of Firefox.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[daspriest]

"Get SessionSaver.

It will restore your open tabs on startup or after a crash."

I guess thats why I like opera, it does that as a default.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[bill_mcgonigle]

You have to follow the mozdev page to a forum on mozillazine to a homepage somewhere else where you can finally download the current version.

Sorry, I don't have a link handy. Somebody else please post it.

Yes, I do think this is ridiculous, but lots of projects do stupid crap like this so I can only assume mozdev is somehow broken for average users.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[InsMonkey]

I too surf on a Windows Server 2003 box (just to be cool like the parent poster). After reading this post in FF I browsed to the same page with IE and launched Windows Task Manager. On my box FF is eating up ~44Mb of RAM whereas IE is only eating up ~14Mb. I consulted my copies of Tannenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" AND Patterson & Hennessy's "Computer Organization & Design" and am forced to conclude that the parent poster is an asshole.

Re:Firefox, Please Tame Your Memory Hunger

[Decker-Mage]

You wouldn't be the first to have made that same (correct) conclusion. However, one problem here with comparing FF to MSIE is that what is listed in the process list as Internet Explorer is only a wrapper to the actual process doing the heavy lifting so you aren't seeing the whole memory footprint for IE. I made that same mistake when I first met FF back in the 0.5 beta and did a bit of research in my MSDN's to figure out what was up. Secondly, it also helps that MSIE is Windows specific/optimized which is another problem for FF. This is not to say that FF can't do better (see the FF pixmap topic from yesterday). I still stand by my post though. FF is more than willing to gracefully relinquish memory in low memory situations. I've seen it.

BTW, coolness has nothing to do with my use of Win Server 2003. Stability does, just as when I used to use 2KAS for the same reason. You couldn't get me near XP except during testing and I only use it in a virtual machine even then. Blech! Reminds me of Win'Me.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Xenna]

I bet it doesn't. Website designers try to make sure that IE users don't get confronted with browser crashes because of bugs. FF still doesn't have the market position to ensure that they do the same for it.

I'm sure there are lots of bugs in IE, but everyone tries to steer around them.

It's extremely rare to find a site that works better in FF than IE, it's still too common to find the reverse situation.

X.

To do what, exactly?

[lpangelrob]

Okay. I'm confused.

To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around? Automatic updates? A better preference menu? Works more with sites than the last time around? Less bugs?

Don't get me wrong — these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.

Re:To do what, exactly?

[rincebrain]

It's faster than IE in some cases, and you don't have to call your relative every few days to clean up your system.

Re:To do what, exactly?

[rkcallaghan]

To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around?

Coca-Cola hasn't changed its formula since the famous fiasco in the 80s; but that doesn't mean they need to stop promoting the product.

~Rebecca

Re:To do what, exactly?

[customiser]

I'm sure this is only part of the answer, but how about showing that they are still around (not just a 1.0 firework) and that people are still working on it, adding features and trying to make it even better (not abandoned like IE after winning the 'browser battle' with NS).

Re:To do what, exactly?

[Eric Pierce]

It's faster.

Go to any page with 100+ image on it. Click on an image to view it, and then click Firefox's back button. You're back in an instant to the page w/100+ images.
Try the same experiment w/Firefox 1.0.x. It's sloooooooooow returning to the previous page.

Also, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) support is turned on in 1.5. Send someone to http://www.croczilla.com/svg/samples w/Firefox 1.5. All the images there are vector based, and several are dynamic (click around). Check out 'XBL Shapes' near the bottom. Very cool! And SVG is a native implementation in Firefox, so you don't have have that wretched browser after thought feeling that Flash gives. Personally, I've been waiting ~2 years for SVG support to be turned on in Mozilla/Firefox. Expect to see a slew of cool SVG sites popping up in the next 6 months!

I could go on...

Re:To do what, exactly?

[cyberbob2010]

sometimes its not how you say something but how many times you say it

Re:To do what, exactly?

[ninjaz]

I the fact that Firefox is being promoted again says more than what the promotions might actually contain. There are often short-lived projects or products which ride a wave of hype, then die off, so any message would imply some sort of staying power.

Of course 'real people' telling you how great it is sort of implies that the Beautiful People will be saying it's Cool and Popular to use Firefox®! It's not enough to just have an iPod® these days. I mean OMG what if the in-crowd finds out that you use MSIE! You could be spreading a VIRUS! Or have WORMS!

I think those who are mostly concerned about the feature set aren't the ones waiting for real people in ads telling them how great it is. ;)

Re:To do what, exactly?

[Kjella]

Don't get me wrong these are good, useful features for those of us intimately familiar with browsers. But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.

You can't have been paying much attention to ads, TV ads for example. They repeat themselves over and over and over again, several times per block of ads, several blocks per program, several programs per night, several nights per week. Saying the same twice? Try two dozen times and you're getting close to a normal ad campaign. What does it take to miss one ad, even if it's a full page? Didn't buy it that day? Didn't get time to do more than skim it? Flipped right past it looking for something? And even if they did see it, most people aren't going to run off and try Firefox. You want to keep it in their memory until an IE exploit or something happens that give them a reason to, and to do that you need to keep advertising. Nobody is going to remember last year's ad.

Re:To do what, exactly?

[Feanturi]

But I'm not sure what marketing can say to Joe User that they didn't say the first time in order to get him to switch.

Every time you get a porn popup in IE, it makes Jesus cry. And then he goes and kills a kitten.

Am I the only one...

[msh104]

who would like to know what those "amazing new features and stuff" are?

Re:Am I the only one...

[Ythan]

Unofficial changelogs for Firefox releases

Open Document Format

[pubjames]

How much work would it be to get Mozilla to display Open Document Format documents? Presumably it's already got 90% of what is required.

It would be a big boost for the format if anyone with Firefox could read it.

Re:Open Document Format

[spejsklark]

Brilliant!

Yet this kind of functionality will get classed as bloatware and live a sad life in the big sea of extensions available.

Re:Open Document Format

[cortana]

No offence, but your comment reminded me of this Dilbert strip. :)

Having said that, someone could write a plugin to display OpenDocument documents, just like any other browser plugin, although I would get annoyed that every time I clicked on a link to an OpenDocument file, I had to wait for OpenOffice.org to load...

Re:Open Document Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Further arguments: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=12685

Re:Open Document Format

[Nate B.]

I don't think the parent was talking about a MIME link to open OpenOffic.org, but rather Firefox actually rendering an ODF file itself. After all, ODF is just XML with a custom DTD. What it would take for Firefox to read that would be support for the DTD and displaying spreadsheet cells as table elements, etc.

Firefox would be an ODF reader that could also print ODF. It has little to do with OOo. While ODF and OOo have an historical relationship, implementing ODF is not dependent on OOo.

Re:Open Document Format

[Kristoffer Lunden]

Since the format is XML, I don't see why it should be such a big deal. The difference from rendering XHTML, which is also XML is not that big. There's text in different sizes with different fonts, images, lists, tables... for charts and graphics, I think ODF is going to use SVG anyways?

I think it would probably mean very little "bloat" (how I hate that word) actually.

Re:Open Document Format

[starwed]

As another poster stated, this could be incredibly simple. Firefox supports XSLT; a method of transforming one type of XML document into another. All you'd need is an XSLT document which maps the Open Document format into html, and firefox could display it.

In other words, it wouldn't require any additional code added to firefox, but simply a document which explains how to turn OD into HTML. (That's assuming that this is possible, which it really should be if the Open Document Format is worth anything.)

Re:Open Document Format

[Val314]

and while you are at it, dont forget to add a Kitchensink too.

Re:Open Document Format

[Baricom]

Open Document files are zipped. Does Firefox support built-in unzipping?

Re:Open Document Format

[starwed]

Actually it does. A lot of Firefox JavaScript, for example, is stored in zip files to reduce the disk space it takes up. I think it even supports opening zipped resources online.

However, after checking out OpenDocument more, you couldn't just specify a generic XSL sheet for Open Documents, and have them look like the writer wanted. All the styling information is kept in one XML file, and the content in another, with some other XML files carrying things like the metadata. And as you mentioned, all of these are stored in a zip file. That means that more is needed than a single XSLT document.

However, I think an extension for opening the format in Firefox really wouldn't be too hard to write; even if it didn't support every last line of the spec. ^_^ There's actually an OpenOffice plugin for firefox, too.

Anecdotal

[dwandy]

Since we're throwing out anecdotal evidence ... none of my Firefox' have ever crashed; not under Win2k, WinXP or FC4.

Re:Anecdotal

[jacksonj04]

Mine is stable, except for when an extension which modifies the rendering engine is loaded. Web Developer toolbar, GreaseMonkey, they all cause havoc when closing the browser.

And yes I have submitted a bug report.

Re:Anecdotal

[Kjella]

Since we're throwing out anecdotal evidence ... none of my Firefox' have ever crashed; not under Win2k, WinXP or FC4.

You must run a very special breed of browser on a very special platform. To me, IE, Firefox and Opera have all crashed, and I mean more than a handful of times. Just as I've managed to crash everything from Windows 3.1 through XP as well as Debian stable (twice, on buggy hardware/driver). Now, there's a huge range between "extremely rare" and "very often", but whenever I hear of people that never ever experience crashes, I figure they must live in another universe than me. Pretending that it doesn't happen just makes it looks bad on the rare occasion that it does, and there's no reason to assume "both have bugs, they must be equal". That makes as much sense as comparing a bunker and a "paper house" from Japan, and figure both may be broken into.

Re:Anecdotal

[ThJ]

Some people are less fortunate than others. Honest Internet citizens who surf honest sites and have anti-virus and firewall software installed constantly call us here at the call center. I'm less innocent. I somehow manage to keep my equipment stable and clean. Must be a curse or something.

Two Possibilities...

[ServaL]

* You are his local Computer Guru: you have to clean up his spyware-infected PC every month or two. Then you can tell to use Firefox in spite of never repairing his Computer.

* You are not: You don't care about his browser choice.

A Chance for More Mischief

[dancingmad]

'People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location.'"

Expose + Goatse, here I come!

Not exactly great marketing

[Sockatume]

So, in order for the virtues of Firefox to be proclaimed to would-be switchers, they have to go to the website and download the commercial themselves? I doubt that's going to be particularly effective, as the limiting step is the same old word-of-mouth used to get people to look at the Firefox site in the first place.

Firemonger

[asciimonster]

Would showing of the Firemonger CD also qualify for this competition?

The Firemonger project is also boasting a lot of new features when it releases its FireFox & Thunderbird bundle. Just have a look at the cool new screenshots.

Re:Firemonger

[hotdiggitydawg]

Obvious marketing miss... if "Firemonger" is essentially a starter-pack for Firefox, why not call it "Firestarter"? You even get the added bonus of soundtrack by The Prodigy for your viral marketing videos...

Re:Firemonger

[Threni]

> if "Firemonger" is essentially a starter-pack for Firefox, why not call it "Firestarter"? You
> even get the added bonus of soundtrack by The Prodigy for your viral marketing videos...

That has the obvious downside of only appealing to spotty 14 year old boys, however.

Go Firefox

[aaronmarks]

I've been a strong believe in Firefox since day 1 and I'm really glad to see that the browser is constantly making headway. The general rule of thumb is really that if a page isn't showing up right in Firefox, then it was either made by Microsoft or it just wasn't made right (almost the same thing). Firefox has always been rock solid for me and I love it's features. I also think that it's really important that the browser is made cross-platform; what good is the web anyways if everyone can't see it the way it was intended to be seen???

I'm going to go put on my Firefox t-shirt now that my girlfriend got me for my birthday last year ;-)

--
Aaron Marks

Re:Go Firefox

[NineNine]

The general rule of thumb is really that if a page isn't showing up right in Firefox, then it was either made by Microsoft or it just wasn't made right (almost the same thing).

And who explains that to all of the users who wouldn't know HTML from COBOL? Firefox still has quite a ways to go in my opinion. It's not bad, but there are still too many sites that it doesn't handle correctly.

Re:Go Firefox

[etnoy]

You really have a girlfriend?

Please Tame Your Memory Hungry Usage Habits?

[expro]

>The 1.5 release has some nice new features, but there is one constant in every >release: Firefox gets an augmenting chunk of memory.
>After a couple of hours, it is getting some 100 Mb of memory.
>
>And counting.
>
>I hate it to restart with all those tabs open.

I would not minimize thee importance of continuing heroic efforts of memory optimization, which I know they have spent a lot of work on in the past, and hope the continue to pursue fiercely, but here are some points you might consider:

1. "All those tabs" means all those pages active simultaneously. Presumably they are also not trivial pages containing only text, and the more-complex the pages, the more memory they consume.

2. What is the memory for, if not to be used by your active application that you are doing lots of things, opening lots of tabs, in. Would you rather have applications that are unable to use the memory that you have properly to your advantage in your active applications?

3. If you think the memory is really an effect of creeping memory leaks, try using the menu option "bookmark all tabs", closing Firefox, and reopening with the bookmark. This should restore all your tabs, and now go to each page and within a few minutes do something on each page to make sure they are active and see if your memory consumption is anywhere near where it was after 2 hours. If it is, then that would seem to be the memory required to support that many pages simultaneously active and is not some sort of creeping leak.

4. There are any number of tools to profile Mozilla for memory leaks and you can contribute.

5. Try a simpler browser that doesn't do nearly so much as Firefox does, but if the browser doesn't support tabs, do you really think memory consumption will be much less opening that many individual pages in seperate windows?

Re:Please Tame Your Memory Hungry Usage Habits?

[joostje]

1. "All those tabs" means all those pages active simultaneously. Presumably they are also not trivial pages containing only text, and the more-complex the pages, the more memory they consume.
But when I close a tab, no memory seems to be freed. Have been running firefox for a couple of hours now, with loads of tabs active. I close all tabs (leaving only a blank page), and the virtual memory usage of firefox stays at 181M, with resident memory staying at 74M.

2. What is the memory for, if not to be used by your active application that you are doing lots of things, opening lots of tabs, in. Would you rather have applications that are unable to use the memory that you have properly to your advantage in your active applications?
I would rather have firefox free the memory when I close the tabs, so that other programs can use it, thank you.

3. If you think the memory is really an effect of creeping memory leaks, try using the menu option "bookmark all tabs", closing Firefox, and reopening with the bookmark.
So, with only one blank tab opened (as described above), memory usage is 181M virt + 74M res. When starting anew, memory usage is about 70M virt + 23M res. Does this prove yet there are memory leaks?

Re:Please Tame Your Memory Hungry Usage Habits?

[krunk4ever]

One of the major problems is when you "close" the tab besides just the last page, the memory doesn't seem to be freed.

Re:Please Tame Your Memory Hungry Usage Habits?

[eviltoni]

5. Try a simpler browser that doesn't do nearly so much as Firefox does, but if the browser doesn't support tabs, do you really think memory consumption will be much less opening that many individual pages in seperate windows?

Opera supports tabs, has mouse gestures, built-in seesion savers and in general does many of the things Firefox does (and does them quicker), and uses only a fraction of the memory Firefox does. It's also free now.

People who use Opera instead of Firefox are hardly settling for less

But Marketing Does Work

[dwandy]

Well ... maybe you're the exception then, because there is plenty of evidence that marketing works. People are susceptible to the advertisements that they see, and people do respond to them.
If marketing didn't work, and products really had to stand on their own merits the world would be a whole lot different than it is today.

Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing. The closed-source guys get it -- they get it because they didn't win market share by writing a better product (not even better than the other closed-source guy). The closed-source companys won market share by MARKETING.
Plain and simple.
And now that they face a new competitor (open source) they respond in a time-tested manner: marketing.
It should be plain and obvious by now that the steady stream of "articles" (c|net, zdnet etc) are just part of a marketing campaign; hidden under the umbrella of 'news'.

Re:But Marketing Does Work

[WWWWolf]

Personally I think that what the open-source community needs in general terms is more marketing.

Yeah! Open source needs marketing. I think the developers just are too modest, as in "Oh, if this thing is any good, it will sell itself". Well, may be true, but they also need to catch people's attention by telling them how good it is.

Open source folks often don't try to communicate this properly. They don't try to answer people's questions. They make the information available, they just don't try to make it really all that well accessible. "Oh, we're just building the software, here's the download, here's the documentation. If you have any questions, RTFM/RTFS/RTF technical FAQ". (One of my big peeves is too technical FAQs - if I've never heard of the program, I assume the FAQs could cover some really basic questions, as in "What it is, what it does, what it needs to run" - not "This program blows up when I do X with Y" for pages and pages.)

For example, if I'm trying to find a CMS, and need to dig five minutes through the site to find out what database systems it supports, that's a problem. If they said up front "needs PHP (safe mode not supported) and MySQL" I might not have needed to waste five minutes on the site to know that I can't run the program on my web host. =)

Firefox folks are doing this right: "Here's a good web browser. People say it's good. Here's why it's so good and popular right now." They aren't really "selling" the thing as in "buy buy buy", they just have a refined way of telling what their software is good for and answering why you should use it.

If you want to see really amazing OSS marketing, try LilyPond (see the "Dive into" and the essay). This is how to do the thing.

Re:But Marketing Does Work

[Kjella]

Well ... maybe you're the exception then, because there is plenty of evidence that marketing works. People are susceptible to the advertisements that they see, and people do respond to them.

And for the most part, marketing works very well in those areas you aren't able or willing to investigate in such detail as to look past the fluff. As far as Intel vs AMD or nVidia vs ATI or whatever, I'm pretty immue to marketing because I visit tech sites and know the numbers. Ask me about dish washers or car accessories or brands of clothing, I can always say marketing doesn't affect me but it does. Why? Because I'm not going to spend ages understanding those markets, who's selling quality and who's selling fluff. Particularly when it comes to free products, I'm sure as hell not going to do a comparative review. I'll just grab something reasonably popular and recommended and just use it, because it would be a bigger waste of time to try out lots of different software than some slight time lost with sub-optimal (but still good) software. Simple cost-benefit analysis (with time being money). Most people are never ever going to ask themselves the question "What web browser should I use?" or "Why should I switch from IE?" unless you tell them about it.

I actually remember there being a small piece about this in a social economics class I took. If you have non-perfect information, then informational advertisement to enlighten the market is socially optimal, up to a certain point. In a competitive environment, you obviously have brand wars that serve no other purpose than to steal market shares and go far beyond that point, but there's a base level of marketing that is needed to connect producers and consumers for mutual benefit. While I still think Firefox has to win on the merits of the product, visibility is needed as well. The world's best browser hidden away on sourceforge doesn't do many people any good...

Some extensions don't work with 1.5

[Secrity]

How are non-tech people going to have confidence in Firefox when it breaks their favorite extensions? After upgrading, one must do a daily extension update until all of the extensions will work again.

Re:Some extensions don't work with 1.5

[Dehumanizer]

1.5 isn't out yet - you, like me, are using an RC. Many extension authors are lazy and will only update their extensions after 1.5 is *really* released.

Re:Some extensions don't work with 1.5

[ClarifyAmbiguity]

How many non-tech people use extensions? I barely use them myself, but then again Firefox is my secondary browser to Opera.

Re:Some extensions don't work with 1.5

[Secrity]

1.5 isn't out yet - you, like me, are using an RC. Many extension authors are lazy and will only update their extensions after 1.5 is *really* released.

Yeah, I know that I've been using RC's, it just seems that 1.5RCn has been out for quite a while. After 1.5 is released I don't think that I will be upgrading or testing RCs until my "must have" extensions are updated to work with the latest release or RC (or unless there an upgrade due to a major security problem). At work I am using 1.0.7 and at home I am using 1.5RC3. The only real differences that I see between the two versions are in the functionality provided by extensions.

Re:Some extensions don't work with 1.5

[Secrity]

I know that at least a few non-tech people use extensions, especially Adblock. I had used Opera for a long time before I started using FF. Many of the extensions that I use provide functionality that I missed from when I had been using Opera (especially SessionSaver). I would probably still be using Opera if it had the functionality of the Adblock and Forcastfox extensions.

Awwww...

[richie2000]

Firefox 1.5 (...) will be released on 29 November.

Aw, on my birthday. They shouldn't have... Thanks, guys! :-)

Re:Version 1.5

[WillerZ]

I just hope they can maintain this momentum going forward. They need to look for cross-brand synergies in order to deliver on their key objectives.

Why is this acceptable?

[NineNine]

A 3rd party program to make Firefox work correctly? Why, exactly, do you see this as acceptable? I certainly don't.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[cortana]

Isn't Firefox just a third party program that makes GNU/Linux or Windows or your OS of choice work correctly? Ok so you might use Opera or some other browser... in which case, isn't $browser just a third party program that makes your computer work correctly?

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[bheer]

Isn't Firefox just a third party program that makes GNU/Linux ... work correctly?

No. Although you have a great career waiting for you in literary criticism and comparative literature studies.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[RAMMS EIN]

Perhaps it's accepted because people feel they don't have a better choice. I've been screaming that Mozilla was too bloated from the beginning, and the fact that this issue is still around might well prove my point. But then, what browser would you use instead of Firefox? I use Konqueror, myself, but some sites refuse to work with it, and it depends on lots of KDE stuff. I like Opera, but I can see some people not liking it. It also crashes once in a while. There's a whole load of text browsers, but navigating websites is one of those few things I think actually do work nicer in a GUI. I really think there isn't enough choice on the web browser market. I guess people use Firefox because it just sucks less.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[Crayon Kid]

No. It adds extra functionality.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[Hugonz]

MMMMM I'll bite.

First of all, it is not a "3rd party program", it is an extension. In Firefox, pretty much all beavior is written using ECMAScript and XUL, so everything is in the same level of hierarchy. The issue that this is not included in the mainstream installer is an entirely different matter.

It happens that this one extension gives you the behavior *you* are expecting. And what you expect the browser to do isn't necessarily the right thing.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[mikerozh]

A 3rd party program to make Firefox work correctly? Why, exactly, do you see this as acceptable? I certainly don't.

Well, nothing is perfect in the world. You have a choice right now: IE or Firefox. I don't think that Opera is a comparable choice. Each has it's own problems. I think many people would agree with me that Firefox so far is much better than IE. If there is something that can improve your usability then I think it is good thing to have it. So as long as there are memory leaks in the Firefox it is actually very handy to be able to reload it without loosing any open tabs.

I'm not arguing with you that memory leaks should be fixed as soon as possible.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[jp10558]

Please expand on why you would consider Opera or really any other modern standards complient browser any less of a choice than FireFox? I can't see FireFox really being any better (though possibly more used - and that proves little) than any other browser that supports about the same coding standards.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[bulliver]

Really...

Although konq is my usual browser, I tried the new free version of Opera, since they ditched the ads, and it rocks. In my opinion, way better than firefox.

Everyone paints firefox as the poster child for the open-source movement, whilst I find it memory hungry, bloated, slow, and ugly...

If you haven't tried Opera since they ditched the ads, I recommend that you do...

That being said, I still use konq for all but the few sites that refuse to display in it, even after changing the browser ident.

Re:Why is this acceptable?

[mdwh2]

Obviously having an extra feature in an extension is better than something which can't offer that feature at all. The point is, why is it acceptable compared with offering that feature as standard?

But of course, if you're going to ignore Opera for the sake of it, I guess the only thing we can say about Firefox is that it's not as bad as IE...

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[dkf]

I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. Plugins are inherently a potential source of trouble since they're "plugging in" extra code into the browser (which is how they support their functionality, of course) and if they've got a bug the crash can take out the browser itself. While it is possible to write plugins such that virtually all the plugin code actually runs in another process (some plugins work this way) they cannot run entirely in a separate process, and so cannot be totally isolated.

FWIW, this isn't a Firefox issue. It's just a fundamental problem with all plugin-based architectures (Windows is particularly infested with this sort of trouble, given that it's all founded on COM, which is itself the same sort of thing as a plugin arch...)

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[IamTheRealMike]

Theoretically, it's technically possible yes. In practice, it is unsafe - a crashed thread could have done quite literally anything before triggering the exception. For instance, it may have trashed the heap arena. So, swallowing the crash in one place would just cause another one somewhere else.

Now, you could run the plugin in a new thread AND a new heap. But then you may as well use a totally different process, the code involved would be mostly the same. And *that* is quite a complex undertaking, not worth the overhead when it's better to just fix the crashes.

Re:Version 1.5

[16384]

At Mozilla Corporation, we understand how to unleash virtually. Think innovative, cutting-edge. Our feature set is unparalleled, but our turn-key re-sizing management and newbie-proof use is invariably considered a remarkable achievement. Think mega-cyber-killer. Our feature set is second to none, but our real-time action-items and easy configuration is frequently considered an amazing achievement. We will cultivate the capability of user communities to repurpose. Do you have a game plan to become proactive? If you morph virally, you may have to implement ultra-mega-intuitively. We think we know that it is better to streamline perfectly than to engineer micro-perfectly. If you maximize virally, you may have to engage virtually.

Mozilla Corporation has revamped the concept of web services. We pride ourselves not only on our feature set, but our newbie-proof administration and user-proof use. The micro-CAE factor is web-enabled. If you architect intra-vertically, you may have to transition super-super-macro-nano-extensibly. What does it really mean to seize "wirelessly"? If all of this may seem dumbfounding to you, that's because it is! The project management factor is interactive. Do you have a plan of action to become innovative? Do you have a plan of action to become blog-based? We always redefine customer-directed branding. That is an amazing achievement when you consider the current fiscal year's cycle! The channels factor can be summed up in one word: intuitive. We have come to know that it is better to brand interactively than to reintermediate magnetically. If all of this may seem discombobulating to you, that's because it is!

Re:Version 1.5

[Walkiry]

>They need to look for cross-brand synergies in order to deliver on their key objectives.

And don't forget to leverage their inhouse know-how in order to shift the paradigm to a solution focused market deployment.

And please, don't cross the streams!

The adblocker does it

[Nice2Cats]

The main reason I use Firefox on my Mac over the otherwise pretty good Safari is the adblocker plugin. Not having crap blink in my face on every second site, not having a little bit of text squeezed in between fat columns of ads for stuff I simply don't want, let alone need, has really changed my attitude towards the web in general. There is no way I am ever going back to a browser that doesn't support this feature. If you are thinking about testing Firefox -- get that plugin when you do.

Re:The adblocker does it

[mikeplokta]

Try SafariBlock, which aims to replicate AdBlock in Safari.

Re:The adblocker does it

[Rogue Pat]

I'm using PithHelmet with Safari.

Re:The adblocker does it

[Vo0k]

No, no, no. That won't pass. It's like a spyware "spyware detector" program that offers you to remove itself for a fee. "Get Firefox with Adblock, you won't be annoyed with ads like this one." This is just wrong.

Re:The adblocker does it

[typhoonius]

The latest stable release of Camino has ad-blocking built-in (plus all the Cocoa goodness you get from Safari).

Re:The adblocker does it

[anarkhos]

I can't tolerate the Mac version of Firefox. It doesn't behave like a Mac app at all, especially the text fields!

There are ad-blocking plugins for Safari.

Re:Mozilla can advertise all they want

[sl8r]

Yes, Firefox has been known to allow spyware to infect a pc.

So, are you going to provide us with some proof, or are you just gonna sit there with that smug look on your face?

Extensions...

[xtracto]

Web Developer toolbar, GreaseMonkey, they all cause havoc when closing the browser.

I used to have a lot of extensions installed on Firefox (it is my primary browser on Win2k) but I think it is what makes it unestable. Nowadays I just have adblock, and I am thinking in changing that for Privoxy.

I think for a "stripped" browser, firefox is quite big on memory (125,468K virtual size, 59,156K private) against a Mozilla.exe with 65,204K virtual size 12,216K private. What is exactly what they "stripped" ?

Re:Extensions...

[masklinn]

What is exactly what they "stripped" ?

Strippers?

Re:Extensions...

[StevoJ]

Damn! I'm going back to Mozilla!

Re:Extensions...

[mrchaotica]

I use Firefox without any extensions half the time because I'm too lazy to install them. Nevertheless, Firefox manages to crash fairly regularly for me (i.e., crashes are the only reason the process ever stops). I'm fairly certain that in my case it's due to the memory leak, since I tend to accumulate tens or hundreds of tabs over time. Also note: this happens on Linux and Mac OS (I don't use Windows).

Re:Mozilla can advertise all they want

[MrP-(at work)]

i dont know about the spyware claims but i also prefer Opera (been using it as my primary browser since 6.0, and was using it as a secondary since 3.x)

Too much hype

[Viol8]

Am I the only one getting tired of all the hypoe surrounding browsers?
"New and cool"? I don't think so. Theres little thats "cool" (unless you've
just returned from a 15 year trip to another planet and have just found out
about the WWW) about a web browser , which is little more than an HTML
renderer with extra bits. Is a new RSS or HTML or Style sheet engine
cool? Yaaaaawwwwn. Hardly. A true 3D holographic browser with touch
interface , now THAT would be cool , but a few new features and bug fixes
on a web browser? Errr , no.

Re:Version 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet... We're up to 14% already.

Anyway. What are your reasons for saying that?

Typical conversation

[slavemowgli]

You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features-- what's cool and great [...]

Maybe it's just me, but that kinda makes me think of dialogues like the following:

Phone: *ring*
User: *picks up the phone* Hello?
Marketing drone: Hi! Have you ever thought about switching to Firefox?

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[kyofunikushimi]

fwiw, they've fixed an issue with the removal of plugins crashing ff. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31602 5#c6 appears to have been a popular issue.

How about less features...

[bradleyland]

...and more bug fixes. I push Firefox to a lot of my clients, but the infamous memory leak issue pops up on occasion, forcing certain users back to IE. Also, plug-in support for Firefox flat sucks. Plug-ins are the #1 complaint I get from users. The WMP plug-in blows chunks, and there's no readily available alternative that the user can get to without jumping through hoops. To them, it's easier to open IE where it "just works". How about when Firefox randomly deletes a user's bookmarks? They love that too.

It's a great browser. It's got awesome features, and I don't think it lacks in that department, but I do think it needs some polishing if market share is to grow much beyond what it is today.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[GetHimHesDifferent]

It's extremely rare to find a site that works better in FF than IE, it's still too common to find the reverse situation. Websites which look better in IE are made by "designers" who are either lazy (pressured?) or ignorant of web standards. They conform to the largest user base only - IE. As IE loses market share to proper browsers (FF, Opera, Safari, Konqueror...), this approach will no longer be good enough. A designer who knows about web standards will likely know that it's better to keep the poor Internet Explorerites happy with IE hacks (as they make up what, 80%?). If they don't then IE visitors will see the website as "broken", when really the website is fine, it's just IE that's broken.

Re:Mozilla can advertise all they want

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can view adbanners, you can nab a virus/malware/spyware via a web-browser program!

Yes, believe-it-or-not, it's been known to happen & was even reported here on slashdot in the past quite a few times the last 2-3 years now.

See here for more potential vulnerabilities found in FireFox in the past, & also its plugins, such as the "greasemonkey" one that made 'big headlines' in the past, e.g.'s:

http://secunia.com/advisories/16911/

http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/07/19/143241.shtml?ti d=154&tid=172

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1838261,00.as p

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/12/mozilla_id n_fix/

(And, there are others, those are just examples... as well as the initial point I made about adbanners having been shown to harbor malware/spyware inserts into your OS as well in the past 2-3 years now a few times already).

Sure, many of them have been patched (as far as internal-to-FireFox code itself), but what about those plugins as well?

(I'd say, it's a GOOD bet that more will popup in the browser extensions FireFox has available for it, unfortunately... part of the "growing pains" of this browser, and a note about the 'danger' of 3rd party extensibility tools. ActiveX didn't come out as planned for IE either, so-to-speak, security-wise outside of Intranet usage & then probably not 110% totally safe either).

APK

P.S.=> Personally, though I think FireFox is excellent work & has come a LONG ways (since "FireBird" etc. builds of it), Opera 8.51 is my web-browser choice, since Opera's typically been shown to be faster:

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html#win

And, also it seems that Opera has always been less subject to online vulnerability vs. BOTH FireFox &/or IE, period, as well as being consistently a faster/better performer year in & year out... apk

Qwantz

[slvi]

Firefox renders all the sites I visit adequately, except http://www.qwantz.com/. Qwantz is a zany web-comic where the punchline is often in the image's title tag. The tag's often quite long and Firefox refuses to show me all of it! I have to right-click it and view the image info. It gets tedious fast.

IE shows me all the tag from just hovering over the image.

What's up with that?

Re:Qwantz

[Astatine]

I hope I'm remembering this correctly, I _think_ it's the "title" tag I'm thinking of (can't be bothered to go to the effort of checking...)

I used to develop a big scary web application. This web application used title tags to include descriptions of things which were sometimes quite long. After being localized into French they came out very long, and Firefox truncated them. The testers duly filed a bug report. It was assigned to me and I researched and discovered that apparently "title" is meant for short summary text only and should not include an essay; Firefox is behaving correctly. I removed the descriptions from the title tags and put them somewhere else; bug resolved.

Qwantz should use something else instead. I believe "alt" might be considered correct, except the browser doesn't have to display it unless you disable images...

Re:Qwantz

[jesser]

That's bug 45375. Fixing it correctly (so tooltips not only aren't truncated, but wrap when they need to) apparently requires a scary change to XUL layout, which is the main reason it hasn't been fixed yet. It looks to me like it will be fixed in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 3).

I think there are extensions you can use so you'll see a different kind of tooltip that doesn't suffer from the bug.

correction..

[Anonymous Coward]

Youre wrong! Opera doesnt have ads anymore.
It's been 100% free and Ad free since version 8.5
For me its just 1 annoying thing about it, it doesnt support rich text editing.
It will in version 9, but thats not coming before Christmas..

Worth of VC capital

[NineNine]

You, sir, have just written all you need to procure millions from venture capitalists. Congratulations! I recommend taking the money to buy yourself lots and lots of toys. Don't worry too much about actually putting out a product or generating any revenue. Those two paragraphs are worth MILLIONS!

Re:Worth of VC capital

[16384]

I just used the corporate gibberish generator at http://www.andrewdavidson.com/gibberish/ :-)

Same here

[m85476585]

Works with RC3 and WMP10 (Win XP). I have had problems with MSN.com.

Maybe Session Saver would...

[chester_br]

In the (rare) occasions in which Firefox crashed on my Mac, Session Saver was a great helping hand (I don't use its automatic restore for every startup, just for browser crashes).

Don't know whether it restores data such as server-session-id cookies (which would be needed to salvage this insurance app incident, for example), but having such an option available as a plugin is what made me stick to Firefox in both Windows and Mac OS X.

Not to be an ass

[beforewisdom]

I don't mean to be an ass by writing what I am about to write. I like firefox and I use it work. I find the extension mechanism to be tremendously innovative, useful, and ample justification for the existence of firefox. Firefox 1.53RC for linux: 8.2 mb If I recall correctly ( and I could be thinking about windoze versions which ar smaller ) some of the original firefox versions were around 6 mb. Is firefox on the road to getting fat like mozilla?

why upgrade?

[frankcow]

there's still no bittorrent client...

Re:why upgrade?

[wootest]

Well, no. It's a browser. If you want a Bittorrent client, download one.

Re:why upgrade?

[frankcow]

So what? Bittorrent is a protocol, much like ftp. Why would Firefox have included basic FTP functinality???? Because it's commonly used, like BT. Interestingly: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/06/153 7201&from=rss ( Opera Embedding BitTorrent Client)

Re:why upgrade?

[wootest]

Firefox is about taking away stuff that has nothing to do with browsing, and enhance browsing. Opera's better compared to the now-discontinued Mozilla Suite. Opera right now does a ton of things that Firefox doesn't, and as long as these things aren't central to browsing (like rendering engine or network layer improvements) I'm of the opinion that they shouldn't be implemented just because they're in Opera. I even think "Live Bookmarks" is pushing it by a mile. (Note that I'm not talking about extensions. I'm talking about the core browser.)

Depending on what aspect of Bittorrent you're pushing, your example may be a flawed example. For example, if you maintain a web site, you can go in your web folder via FTP and upload a file or two and rearrange some folders, and access the same set up via HTTP. There is such a thing as an FTP server and an HTTP server, but there's no such thing as a Bittorrent server that's completely parallell to them. There are Bittorrent trackers, but they are accessible either via for example HTTP (when you're checking what's on offer) and via a Bittorrent client (when you're downloading or seeding).

I agree that maybe it would be nice if the Download manager could open up torrent files automatically and start downloading and seeding and doing the usual jig when it comes to being a Bittorrent client, but generally downloading something over Bittorrent is more complex than simply downloading a file over FTP or HTTP, so I doubt it could be done as nicely while keeping control of the transfer parameters you would want to change. Furthermore, you can download a folder over Bittorrent, which could open the door for misunderstandings when it comes to setting permissions and other problems like it. In the same vein, maybe it'd be nice if Firefox decompressed/expanded your zips, gzs, bz2s, tars, sits, rars, mounted your iso/bin+cue/dmgs... I think this would open the flood gates for these other things if it was done internally in Firefox, but it'd make a nice extension if done right.

Re:why upgrade?

[An Onerous Coward]

I strongly prefer that the browser just does what it knows best. I'd rather it just pop up the dialog asking me if I want to open it with Azureus.

What advantages do you think an integrated BT client would have?

Re:why upgrade?

[frankcow]

integration of my most common tasks

Re:why upgrade?

[An Onerous Coward]

Simple, succinct, but it glosses over the downside. When I wake up in the morning, I want to shave, brush my teeth, and comb my hair, but integrating all those functions into one utensil wouldn't make for a better morning hygiene experience. A simple BitTorrent client might make sense in Firefox, but personally I want more control than a simple client would give me, especially in Firefox's environment (where the programmers will presumably want to make the experience similar to any other download).

At a minimum, I would want control over maximum download and upload speed, to decide when to stop seeding the file, and to be able to decide whether or not to download individual files within a directory. I just can't see a sane way to do that in Firefox's current download manager, and I can't see why I should want it to try.

I'm not aware of any other browsers that have such a thing integrated, so saying there isn't a reason to use Firefox until you get that particular feature seems a little silly. What are you using?

Re:why upgrade?

[frankcow]

actually, you've just given me an incerdible idea for a new product, a shaver/toothbrush/comb all in one. Just be careful you don't cut your tongue, or get toothpaste in your hair. I totally agree about control of things like d/u speeds. I think there should be a simple tool in firefox, for my simple tv show downloads, of 100 MB apps. When it comes to ISOs and other important downloads (even albums, where I may just want one song right away - 'high priority'), I'd still want the detailed control of Azureus or BitLord

One big feature left

[patiodragon]

Some communication on the Windows version during update. As recently as updating to the 1.0.7 version on windows, if you were not the Admin, the program gives you no information what is going wrong while the circle thing in the corner continues to spin like it's "working". We need a little shout-out to the lesser-user, good moz-people.

thanks.

Repetition is the Key to Remembering

[RAMMS EIN]

``To an end user, what is there to tout so that they can be 'more convinced' than when the 1.0 marketing first came around?''

Just saying the same things again is good. Especially if the ad looks different. The more you hear things, the more you're inclined to remember and believe them.

Maybe the first time people thought "hmmmpf, I don't need a new browser". Now they've had some more time with their old browser, maybe a few more incidents with their computer, and now when they get confronted with Firefox again, they might think "that's right, there's this browser that's supposedly better, maybe i _should_ check it out.".

RC3 still has rendering errors

[squarooticus]

I've still seen rendering errors on display: inline divs wrapping when there's more than enough horizontal space remaining. If I reload the page, they then display fine. This didn't happen with the 1.0.x series, but has plagued 1.5 RC's.

Re:RC3 still has rendering errors

[mw22]

Do you have a link were we can see the mentioned problem?

Re:RC3 still has rendering errors

[squarooticus]

Of course, naturally I now can't get it to happen. (There must be some corollary to Murphy's Law for this.) But if there's a problem with my CSS that could cause non-deterministic rendering, please let me know. I've run it through validators, but who knows...

http://www.krose.org/yark/renderr.html

Thanks,
Kyle

Re:RC3 still has rendering errors

[mw22]

Well, there is nothing wrong with your css, it should work fine.
This is a incremental reflow bug in Mozilla, see:
http://wargers.org/mozilla/test/renderr.html
This uses a javascript hack to trigger the bug, compare it with javascript turned off.

You can easily circumvent this bug in Mozilla's rendering by instead of using this:
div.center > div {
    margin-left:auto;
    margin-right:auto;
    display: table;
}
use this:
div.center > div {
    text-align: center;
}
See here: http://wargers.org/mozilla/test/renderr2.html

This is probably already a known bug of Mozilla.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Xenna]

Come on, guys. Redundant? Flame Bait? These are serious issues that are really holding back acceptance of my (and probably your) favorite browser. Is Slashdot turning into a bunch of blind fan-boys that try to shut out the real world?

X. (disappointed)

Just do a remix of Balmer shouting "Firefox"...

[master_p]

...instead of "developers". It would be very cool.

Re:Just do a remix of Balmer shouting "Firefox"...

[popra]

genius!

Konqueror can do this with KOffice

[RAMMS EIN]

Konqueror can open OpenDocument through KParts and KOffice. The same way, it can open a whole lot of other formats, too. This seems to be the way to go if you want your web browser to display all kinds of file formats.

Still missing...

[TheBlackzone]

What I am really missing is a decent deployment tool for Mozilla products. I have to take care of approx. 80 PCs (mixed OS versions of Windows and Linux) in our company, most with Firefox and Thunderbird installations.

It's a pain to keep them up-to-date and in sync with the latest available version. Most users are unable (or not allowed) to update software, so I have to do.

Help spread Mozilla products in companies by providing deployment aids for the sysadmin.

Re:Still missing...

[erkokite]

Check out FirefoxADM: http://sourceforge.net/projects/firefoxadm
and the firefox msi packages: http://msi-repository.sourceforge.net/

Re:Still missing...

[TheBlackzone]

That's what I was looking for. Thanks for the hint :-)

no good solution

[penguin-collective]

I've seen a crashing Firefox too recently, but most of the time, a plugin was directly involved while loading the page (Java, for example). I must say though, that a plugin shouldn'be able to crash Firefox itself, although it does.

If you're going to write a browser in C or C++, then plug-ins can crash the browser; it's an unavoidable property of the way C and C++ work. Using a separate thread won't protect the browser.

You can run viewers in a separate process, but then it's not a plug-in, it's an external viewer. The UNIX/Linux version of Mozilla allows external viewers to be captured and treated like plug-ins. However, that's a cumbersome workaround and makes doing other things with the plug-ins a lot harder (like controlling them from JavaScript).

The fundamental problem is the language in which Firefox is written: C and C++ lack what's called "fault isolation". Languages like Java and C# have fault isolation, as did many of the languages in use before about 1985.

How about perfect irony...

[Colin Smith]

And advert proudly proclaiming... "Less adverts...!"

That's a killer feature for you. You obviously don't visit many porn sites...

Will people pitch a message that stresses freedom?

[jbn-o]

If by free you mean a reference to price, that would be sad. I think you're right—that will almost certainly be the message people use to pitch Firefox. But that message is not unique. Another silly message has been used by the Mozilla Foundation in the past—browser "choice"—when they talk about either Firefox or the Mozilla Suite. This message fails to convince because it is not true.

What separates Firefox (and Mozilla Suite, but nobody is talking about that anymore) from the rest of the popular web browsers is software freedom. Firefox lets users run, inspect, share, and modify the program at any time for any reason. There are many great consequences of software freedom but the freedom itself is what makes the difference and the freedom itself should be celebrated by name. Plenty of proprietary browsers cost the users no money, so being available gratis is no big deal. If all one cares about is price, one has long had the choices of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator. But if all one cares about is price, before the Mozilla Suite was available, no popular web browser would give the user software freedom.

The following message is still true, so many years after this essay was written:

"Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too."

I think a marketing drive around Firefox would be a perfect time to introduce users to software freedom, and in so doing, tell users why Firefox matters with a message that is unique, true, and compelling. Let's hope that the Mozilla Foundation's commitment to the Open Source movement is not so strong that they're willing to do as that movement advocates and dispense with talking about software freedom by name and championing software freedom for its own sake.

ODT In mozilla using XSLT

[La Gris]

As Mozilla is able to do client side XSLT transformations, and as Odt is an xml format. You should be able to display OpenDocument in mozilla natively, providing a prepoer XSLT file. What did you like more ?

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Transmogrify_UK]

What a load of rubbish. It is far from common to find sites working better in IE than FF. Web sites tend to JUST WORK in Firefox. More often than not, sites viewed in IE tend to fire off numerous javascript errors, pop up windows and other garbage I don't want to view. With Firefox, you can view the site how the designer intended or how YOU want to view it (turning off stylesheets or images, for example). Firefox is infinitely more stable than IE and web designers don't generally have to contend with bug fixing for sites when viewed in Firefox. CSS hacks and other non-standard browser bugs are very much the domain of IE. You're obviously not a web designer because your post shows little knowledge of browsers.

I'm sure there are lots of bugs in IE, but everyone tries to steer around them.

As a web developer of 8 years, I can assure you, it's neigh on impossible to steer round the bugs in IE.

Flash plugin

[Spy der Mann]

Alright, let me jump into the complaining bandwagon.

(I'm using FF 1.07, i don't know if they got this fixed by 1.5).

If I have Slashdot (or Yahoo! mail) open on my Firefox, the flash ads keep leeching the CPU to 100%, even if the tab is _NOT_ the active one, or if Firefox is not the active application. And I was wondering why compiling my C++ app took so long

Adblocking them won't work, since they're usually in an iframe whose url always keeps changing. So I have to freaking close Firefox so I can work in peace.

Has this been fixed in 1.5?

Re:Flash plugin

[bluemist]

> Has this been fixed in 1.5?

As a 1.5 user I can't answer this one as there is a good way to get rid of Flash ads (and all other ads) without eliminating Flash.

1. Install the extension NoScript.
2. Install the extension AdBlock Plus. (google for it)
3. Restart Firefox.
4. Download FilterSetG (a filter text file, google for it) and load it into Adblock using it's preferences.

Browse, ad, Flash, Movie, etc. free on the web.

Much faster and drastically reduces Firefox's RAM consumption.

Re:Recently downloaded Opera!

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Firefox is getting security updates, unlike "the other browser" which is full of holes and as such being taken advantage of by phishers. Anyone using Internet Explorer needs a handful of spyware tools close to hand because be assured, your system will be absolutely chock full of spyware as a result of IEs lack of security.

Its a mac

[mekkab]

I'm running the latest Opera download on a mac running tiger. It renders the Css a bit toofar to the right, then rerenders it right. However It leaves artifacts of the first rendering, so I try to click on a link but it doesn't work because now the link is actually an inch or so to the left.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[crache]

In konqueror, if the flash plugin freezes up, you can kill it and continue browsing the page, just without flash functionality.

Marketing hasn't been proven to work

[Tezkah]

Well ... maybe you're the exception then, because there is plenty of evidence that marketing works. People are susceptible to the advertisements that they see, and people do respond to them.

Marketing hasn't been proven to work, please, give me one example where sales increased as a result of advertising, and not advertising budgets being increased due to increased sales. Think about it, when did they start hyping Firefox? The New York Times advertisement only happened after the browser was being downloaded left and right by people via word of mouth.

Same with all products, they become popular, so the company that makes it has a lot of money to advertise the product. When sales start to stumble, the advertising budget is the first to go when cutting costs.

Really, theres just no proof that advertising works, but word of mouth definitely does. What do you do then? Make a better product, just like how Internet Explorer beat Netscape in the first browser war, it wasn't because they had a massive advertising campaign, it was because they made a better browser. Unseating IE is a little harder because it is included in every windows computer out there, but it is possible. Just spend the money on browser improvements, not silly advertisements that just blend in with the thousands of other advertisements people see every day of their lives.

Re:Marketing hasn't been proven to work

[dwandy]

Marketing hasn't been proven to work, please, give me one example where sales increased as a result of advertising, and not advertising budgets being increased due to increased sales.

Off the top of my head:
Nike
Tommy Hilfiger
Adidas

All three had limited visibility in the marketplace. Each then commenced on a marketing campaign and (at least for a time) dominated their respective markets. It's interesting to note that shoes seem to be pretty ripe pickin's for ad campaigns. All three 'major' companies: Nike, Adidas and Reebok spent time in the sales dumpster at one point or another, and all three were brought back by aggressive marketing.
last, but not least of the examples: CocaCola. They spent a truckload of cash in developing nations to sell their product. They are purely in the business of creating a demand where there was none before. ... oh, throw McDonalds in there too. Hamburgers and coke are not the national food in India, Africa etc.... purely a demand fabricated by marketing. ... oh, and beer and cigarettes. All of them.

Think about it, when did they start hyping Firefox? The New York Times advertisement only happened after the browser was being downloaded left and right by people via word of mouth.

Word of mouth is advertising - just 'cause it's free doesn't mean it's not a form of marketing...it just means you've convinced your customers to be ambasadors as well. (see lego)

When sales start to stumble, the advertising budget is the first to go when cutting costs.

This particular fun factoid is true because most companies are run by bean-counters, and advertising is classified as an expense, and therefore when sales tumble, expenses are cut... companies also cut r&d, irrespective of the fact that this will also hurt future sales. Sometimes the company needs to live within it's means, and this may mean cutting costs.

theres just no proof that advertising works, but word of mouth definitely does. What do you do then? Make a better product

how I wish that were true. Sadly, there are so many sub-optimal products that outsell far superior products for a variety of reasons. The most common example that the 'best' product doesn't always win in the marketplace is the beta/vhs bit. betamax was the superior technology for the time, but I've never see one... A well marketed lump of sh*t will outsell a poorly marketed pot of gold any day of the week.

just like how Internet Explorer beat Netscape in the first browser war, it wasn't because they had a massive advertising campaign, it was because they made a better browser. Unseating IE is a little harder because it is included in every windows computer out there, but it is possible.

Being included on every PC is a fairly major marketing campaign. Do you think AOL and all those other offers got included for free? I think the fact that it was included with the OS was the driving reason IE beat Netscape. There's going to be a lot of people who take both sides on which ones was better... you know there are still people out there using Netscape...today??

Just spend the money on browser improvements, not silly advertisements that just blend in with the thousands of other advertisements people see every day of their lives.

hmmm ... I think that Open Source needs marketing in general terms - my original comment was to that effect. Does that include Firefox? I think so.
It's also evident to large companies that people are influenced by marketing - otherwise, if it was simply a true 'expense' it would get permenantly cut from the budget.
There are two good points

Re:Marketing hasn't been proven to work

[dwandy]

Hi Illiterate Coward.
The request was for 'one example where sales increased as a result of advertising', not for 'companies started out small with large advertising departments'.
RTFPP (that's 'Parent Post' for you jerkass.)

Marketing Works, but isn't Necessary

[TubeSteak]

Reminds me of a Lego story a while back. Lego brought in 250 model train enthusiasts to help design a new Lego train set.

The new locomotive, the "Santa Fe Super Chief" set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts in 2002, and their word-of-mouse [sic] helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing.

It is a well known fact that if you can influence the purchasing decisions of a few dedicated users (enthusiasts) they'll market the product for you for free.

Sometimes its better not to try and sell a complicated product to non-techies who can't/won't understand the product without significant education.

what does coke say?

[enjahova]

What does coke say this time that you did not already know? They havn't changed it since I have been alive, yet I am drinking coke right now instead of some other beverage.

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[tomhudson]

My question is how the fuck you can make a web site conform to IE, when IE can't even conform to itself?

IE is like Word - different versions, different patch levels, don't work the same. Stuff that works in XP sp2 doesn't work a few months later.

I gave up. Fuck Microsoft. They can't be bothered to fix their crap, I'm not going to be bothered working with it. I code to firefox, and when people tell me something doesn't work, I just tell them "Gee, your browser must have a virus", and to go to getfirefox.com. Tehy ALL buy it. After all, b0rked, virus-laden software is synonymous with Microsoft.

I spent a couple of hours last night checking because someone was saying that a cretai feature wasn't working properly on my site - IE was giving them an "error in line 597" which is a laugh, because there IS NO LINE 597! Once they see that, they become much more receptive to switching browsers.

It took a couple of weeks for someone to complain. Why? Because everyone else has a copy of firefox already on their computer, and is either using it as their main browser, or, when something doesn't work in IE, fires up firefox. This was unheard of a couple of years ago, but its fast becoming the norm.

Don't think Microsoft doesn't know they've lost the browser market. They know. What they want to do is replace the browser as the future platform with .NET, which is another piece of bloatware designed to keep another generation of MCSEs under thrall.

And before you mod this as troll or flamebait - think about it ... why did Microsoft publicly declare that there would be no IE7? Because they don't want the browser to be the next platform, because they don't have a good-enough product, and can't compete, and they know it. That they're now going to produce an IE7 means nothing - the browser is no longer a major part of their long-term survival strategy. They can't lock you in with it, its gone, baby!

Just switch to firefox and get over it, already!

And while you're at it, if you have a domain, throw some firefox banner ads on it. They get more clicks than anything else you can put up there (except banners for free pr0n, of course).

PithHelmet

[John Muir]

Same here and I find it better than Adblock on Firefox on Windows.
Very effective little extension, I must pay for it sometime!

Here for those interested:
http://culater.net/software/PithHelmet/PithHelmet. php

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[tomhudson]

As a web developer of 8 years, I can assure you, it's neigh on impossible to steer round the bugs in IE.

... which is why its best not to even try. Tell them they have a virus (they will always believe that one), and send them to getfirefox.com.

Re:Mozilla can advertise all they want

[John Muir]

Yeah, that's Windows. Could Firefox even protect it in an ideal world?

*The Mac user sits smugly*

Re:lacking

[Monimonika]

pstils, Head over to Mozillazine forums and describe your problem(s) over there in a bit more detail. Someone should be able to help you.

Mass Media Student, ideas?

[Darthmalt]

I'm a mass media / film student and I'm thinking about making a 30 second commercial. My question to you /. community is; What was it about Firefox that helped you convince the Joe User's in your life to switch.

Blame Game

[pipingguy]

Remember that with free or open source software there is no monolithic company to blame things on when bad stuff happens. This is probably the single biggest issue holding back open source.

Managers typically don't know anything about how software or computers function. When it breaks, they call Microsoft and if that doesn't fix the problem, well, it's out of their hands. There's always someone else to blame when you have Microsoft.

It works for the low-level employees as well; "my computer crashed, I can't get any work done".

Tabbed browsing, no spyware

[cyberformer]

The main "selling" points of Firefox 1.5 are the same as for 1.0: It's more user-friendly and secure than IE. So the marketing push is aimed at people who:

1. Don't pay much attention to browsers, and so ignored the marketing the first time round. (People are bombarded with ads all the time. It can take a while for something even to be noticed.)

2. Do know a bit about browsers, but thought that Firefox was too new (1.0 products tend to be unstable) or decided to wait for Microsoft to release IE 7 (which still isn't available, except to a selected group of beta testers).

Re:Where's the money?

[RobertF]

Am I the last sane person on the planet that thinks that a business should actually attempt to make a profit (or *any* kind of income)? Who's paying for this, and are they just doing it for fun? Honestly, what's the point of marketing to give away a free product?

Mozilla is an Open-Source foundation. So I guess your same questions could be applied to any open source application. Why does anyone create open source applications? Why make a product if you don't want people to use it?

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Shimbo]

I bet it doesn't. Website designers try to make sure that IE users don't get confronted with browser crashes because of bugs. FF still doesn't have the market position to ensure that they do the same for it.

I have found that IE crashes tend to be rather less reproducable than FF ones. So yes, there are probably fewer sites that kill IE cold; that doesn't necessarily mean it's more stable in terms of crashes per page view. I'm sure other people have different experiences though.

Re:Recently downloaded Opera!

[ElBeano]

If Opera crashes constantly, then you have a plugin or file corruption issue. Do you really think it could be THAT bad otherwise?

Firefox a security nightmare? What are you smoking? The security issues that pop up are almost never as serious as those that face IE, an unpatched Firefox is still quite a bit safer than IE. I know, because I have to clean up the messes that IE leaves for folks that use it. Never have I had a PC infected with a trojan, spyware or virus that used Firefox exclusively for browsing

Opera 8 is much more stable than Opera 7 was

[I'm Don Giovanni]

'Twas true that Opera 7 = crash fest. But Opera 8 is much better; you should give it another try. :-)

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[NanoGator]

"I dont use firefox (I use opera), but how many times does this happen to people who use IE? I bet a lot more than firefox"

For me personally (and across 3 or 4 machines over the years...) IE has been decidedly more stable than Opera or FireFox. I've found that visiting lots of image heavy sites wit Opera or FireFox will either crash or become so slow that they need to be restarted. I've never had this problem with IE 5 and newer. In FireFox's defense, though, I haven't updated in a few months, so I cannot say that problem exists today. Once in a great great while, IE will crash if it's been open for several days and I run across flash or a movie file. (I think that's happened a whopping 3 times in the last year.)

That said, neither are so unstable that I won't use them. Opera recovers nicely by bringing the pages I was on back up and FireFox takes considerably longer to give me any trouble. In either case, the browsers have to be open for days at a time. I honestly don't think the stability of either app will cause people to stay with IE.

Not to be a nag, but..

[bluemist]

Shouldn't we fix a little problem first before going final?!?

I've been using Deer Park/1.5 (1.61a) since Beta 2 on OSX and BeOS.

A major problem with 1.5 with every version under Apples OSX is the need to Force Quit it (sometimes several times a day.)

The problem only occurs when the render engine is trying to plop up a menu OVER the web page (such as the AdBlock menu in the lower right, or even Firefox itself trying to helpfully suggest past entries from a spindown list when I'm typing into a field or URL.

It seems to be a race condition as I have a lot of tabs generally open and the "stuck" menu entries will float above the web browser page and will show over other application windows (such as Finder) which are moved over the top of the Firefox window.

I've had this happen on:

    266 Mhz, 196 Meg RAM, OSX 10.2
    266 Mhz, 512 Meg RAM, OSX 10.3

  And have even heard of this happening (from a recent post through OSNews):

http://www.nonstopmac.com/2005/11/the_reasons_behi nd_my_love_for.htm ..on a:

    G5, 1 Gig (2 Gig) RAM OSX 10.4

So it's not the age of my systems.

As this is NOT a crash, the crash reporter never springs into action (though the crash reporter DOES send information on how many "start ups" vs. "shut downs" the user has done.

And I really can't detect if this problem has been reported yet due to the design of the Mozilla bug page and search.

Shouldn't we fix this one LITTLE problem before proclaiming victory?

(The memory pig problem would be nice too but I won't hold my breath..)

I'm posting this here as I don't really know how to voice a complaint or how many other people this is affecting.

Firefox, used with NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and FilterSetG is the most enjoyable experience I've ever had on the web.

Re:Where's the money?

[NineNine]

And my question still goes unanswered... where's the money coming from? Who's willing to pay to convince people to use their free product? Doesn't make any sense to me at all. Somebody with some serious money has a serious agenda they're trying to push.

Re:slashdot

[petermgreen]

rofl

btw its a good idea to disable karma bonus if replying to trolls it lowers you maximum potential karma loss and reduces the chance of accidental mod-downs caused by re-parenting of your comment.

Negatives of IE

[DrIdiot]

Firefox has a lot of positives, but sometimes people really need a good reason to change. Some people won't change for some new features.

I think this is a really good reason not to use IE

The fact that gaping vulnerabilities like these are found in a closed source browser like IE all the time and yet remain unpatched is one of the most convincing arguments to lead people away from IE.

Dilbert and Marketing

[mrchaotica]

Yeah! Open source needs marketing.

Isn't that the same thing Dilbert said about Nirvana Co.?

Wow

[ioudas]

There might be a small populace who looks at this marketing and switches. However if it comes to be the case of me and many of my friends, we are just not interested. I have a browser which is secure, reliable and reads every site out on the internet (well the ones i look at anyway.) Avant is that browser. I dont see any huge major reason why i should switch over to firefox. Retarded Slashdot troll will say BUT IOUDAS ITS BASED ON INTERNET EXPLORER AND ITS TEH SUX11!!one eleven..

Label me as flamebait unless firefox wipes my ass after visiting slashdot... Im not really interested in twiddling with a browser and learning a new program or interface. Upgrades? Toolbars? Pretty much every browser gets new features. Im not impressed. I have yet to see something that was so revolutonary that I NEED IT! Why would i ditch a working solution that i dont have malware or popups on? What firefox should worry about instead of dipshit marketing ploys is how to get people like myself interested in actully switching over to their browser.

Re:Where's the money?

[RobertF]

The money comes from individual donations. Shocking as it may be, there's no secret agenda to it, there are a large amount of individual donations, helped by advertising revenues, Mozilla merchandise sales, and deals like that made with Google, in which they get paid to have Google as the default search engine for the search bar. It all ads up really, and the growth increases these revenue sources. Not to mention they have enough left over to pay software engineers, hosting fees, and management. But advertising is critical to their growth, which is critical to their existance.

With the end result that we get a high quality, free browser. Not a bad system, eh?

Really reaching out.

[n-baxley]

So they're going to promote their product to people who haven't heard of it...by showing videos on their website. Am I missing something here?

Re:Yeah but will it compensate for this?

[Destoo]

...Firefox crashed.

And I had to do it again and I had to do it fast, so it wasn't as good.
It's kind of.. a bummer..

I'm Xenna and I'm looking for car insurance.

Re:slashdot

[Vo0k]

btw its a good idea to disable karma bonus if replying to trolls it lowers you maximum potential karma loss and reduces the chance of accidental mod-downs caused by re-parenting of your comment.

Not always. With some moderations like "troll", the post immediately loses "+1 Karma bonus", dropping to 0 from 2, and can be modded just -1 more.
Plus, I can afford it :)