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PCWorld Dubs Firefox Best Product of 2005

Peaceful_Patriot writes "PCWorld's list of the 'Best Products of 2005' is out and Firefox tops the list. Also notables are GMail at number 2, Apple OS X, Tiger at number 3, Skype ranks in at 8 and Ubuntu at 26!" From their Firefox article: "Are you sick and tired of Internet Explorer? Have you grown weary of the constant vulnerabilities and patches? Do you scratch your head at sudden program lockups and crashes? Are you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century? Yeah, me too."

303 comments

  1. Wow, Dell! by matr0x_x · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm very surprised to sell Dell listed so many times. I mean, Firefox, Apple, Palm and a lot of the other top 10 were very predictable, but I'd never have guessed Dell. Poor Microsoft didn't even crack the top 100...

    --
    LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
    1. Re:Wow, Dell! by jaiyen · · Score: 1

      Still, congratulations to Firefox though, especially as it seems this is the second time they've won this award this year...

    2. Re:Wow, Dell! by mboos · · Score: 2, Informative

      47. Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player

      Of course, I'm not endorsing this product. Haven't used it myself since I stopped using Windows a year and a half ago (and I use iTunes now when I'm forced to).

      --
      --Mike Boos
    3. Re:Wow, Dell! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah -- because we all know Windows Live should have put it up at number 2 at least...

    4. Re:Wow, Dell! by Skim123 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Is it just me or do all media players really seem to suck ass these days? I use iTunes because I want a podcasting tool integrated with my media player, and I do buy the occassional track from iTunes, but I don't like how iTunes just basically has one big ol' library that I have to tag and create playlists to filter.

      Not a big fan of WMP either. I liked WinAmp a lot, back before podcasts and before I bought "Apple" music through iTunes... I just wish someone would come out with a music/video media player that didn't blow. Of course, seeing as the going price for these pieces of software is $0.00, and all profit is made from selling content, and buying content essentially locks you into a particular player, I understand why we haven't seen this... (Yeah, yeah, I know you can burn a purchased iTunes song to CD then rip it back into MP3 for portability, but that's a PITA...)

      Ok, enough rambling...

      --

      I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

    5. Re:Wow, Dell! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10 is at #47.

    6. Re:Wow, Dell! by hdparm · · Score: 1
      You are exaggerating a bit. Listed Dell products are big LCD monitors, projector, colour laser printer and PDA. Dell PCs (cheap, made for masses) suck but all these are fine pieces (don't know about the PDA, haven't seen it).

      MS is represented by WMP (haven't seen that one either, don't run windows). They haven't made much stuff this year, though.

      Which is a good thing.

      There is one MS product that I really like and can't use any other anymore - their optical usb wheel mouse.

    7. Re:Wow, Dell! by tabatj · · Score: 1

      Poor Microsoft didn't even crack the top 100...

      #47 Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player

      Sure they did. Not that I'm defending MS or any of its products. I'm a Winamp user myself.

    8. Re:Wow, Dell! by Chapium · · Score: 1

      Buggy inbox? I've never encountered a problem with it. Care to explain?

    9. Re:Wow, Dell! by Praxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Visual Studio 2005 should at least be in the Top 10, IMHO. Alot of Microsoft's products may suck, but their development tools are top-notch.

      --
      http://www.policystew.com/
    10. Re:Wow, Dell! by oztiks · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I can totally understand why Dell is there, the sales model behind Dell is brilliant. You dont need to see a PC before you buy it unless you get off on fancy cases and sexy keyboards.

      So for 90% of people who need a new computer they need it to be a) cheap b) working order with good support, Dell provides this without the shopfront therefore reduces overall cost. They also offer good server products with easy to setup business leases and an array of SLA services so they have that market in the bag.

      I guess the only real market they dont reach are the gamers who want to custom build their PCs to be a 900lb gorilla in system performance. But still they are flexible enough to cater to these people if need be.

      The fact its listed more then once, i agree could be considered a bit of the top and the fact they are getting praise for specific peripherals like monitors is a bit odd if you ask me ... seems like the list is a little bit too 'particular' on personal favoriates rather then a soildly investigated and surveyed top 100.

    11. Re:Wow, Dell! by nmb3000 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Is it just me or do all media players really seem to suck ass these days?

      I've started to wonder the same thing. It seems like developers have lost the focus that you used to see. Instead of just a good and efficient audio or video player, they all have to play video, audio, and DVDs, have 1000 visualizations, a big media library, burn CDs and DVDs, use a gaudy GUI that eats CPU cycles like candy, and make hot pockets.

      On XP I personally use:

      • Winamp 2.91 for my audio needs
        Nullsoft is an example of a group that seems to have lost focus. I suppose that the "all-in-one" media app is the big thing now, but I still like being able to use Winamp all day playing audio and see it averages around 0.5% CPU usage (2GHz P4) while playing MP3s. 2.91 was the best version of Winamp yet in my opinion. Windowshade mode with always-on-top placed centered at the top of the screen with a 40 hour playlist = perfect.
      • WMP 10 for generic video playback
        I like WMP 10 a fair bit actually. It's pretty fast and responsive when playing videos and audio, and it has all the options I need in a video player. The only things I find irritating are that it sometimes has problems with videos that have been encoded oddly, and it's DRM support is annoying.
      • PowerDVD for playing DVDs (though VLC comes in handy if I just want to jump to a scene real quick).
        PowerDVD is a great DVD player for Windows. Lots of options and it does a great job of scaling and adjusting DVD video and audio for desktops and laptops.
      I guess I prefer specialized versus generalized applications.
      --
      "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
      /)
    12. Re:Wow, Dell! by Fusen · · Score: 2, Informative

      If you have any problems with WMP10 then try out VLC videolan.org, and they should go away pretty quick ;D

    13. Re:Wow, Dell! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wonder why Firefox gets number 1 yet Opera gets nothing. Opera may not be open source, but it pioneered a lot of features that were later implemented in Firefox.

      Very little separates Opera and Firefox in terms of features/stability/customisability. The only thing I can think of is that FF is open source, and has a higher profile.

    14. Re:Wow, Dell! by Malor · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, I ended up with both the 2405FPW and the 3100CN laser. The 3100CN is just okay.... decent, nothing too great.

      The 2405FPW, on the other hand, is really quite remarkable. It's HUGE, vivid, and lovely to look at all day. Excellent color. Good for gaming. If you're a really topflight FPSer, you may not like it, but for normal humans, it's just superb.

      Out of the box, the brightness is INSANE, burn-out-your-retinas bright. After you've had it a month or two, it fades to more reasonable levels. When I first had it, I had the Brightness set at 40 (out of 100), and even that was a bit uncomfortable. Over time, the monitor dimmed quite a bit. I now have it at 80 brightness, and it's perfect. I haven't had to change anything for quite awhile. I still prefer having the overhead light on, even now... there's still so much lightt that it's more comfortable with lights on. (I used to sit in the computer cave, all lights out, like many geeks I've known... not anymore.)

      Probably the biggest downside to the 2405 is that the colors change as you move your head around; the perfect viewing cone is very narrow. It's much worse when you first get it.. whatever method is used to cut the brightness down also worsens the color response a great deal, off axis. Once you've had it awhile and can turn the brightness back up, the off-axis response is better, but it'll never be as good as a CRT.

      On the whole, it is just dynamite, and you can often get it at around $750-$775, if you wait for the coupons and sales. (in other words, DO NOT buy it now, you'll pay the full $1200 list price.) I got mine for just under $1k and still think I got a heck of a deal. $775 would have been sweet, indeed.

      I haven't heard anything bad about their QC, either... I have one dead pixel in mine. Out of 2.3 million pixels, I can handle one dead one. :) They have a fairly good return policy, so if you get one you don't like/can't stand, you can always ship it back and try again.

      I don't like Dell very much for computers, but this is a GREAT monitor.

    15. Re:Wow, Dell! by RoLi · · Score: 1
      Is it just me or do all media players really seem to suck ass these days?

      Actually mplayer is great, you can run it with GUI (which I personally don't need because the keyboard and mouse navigation works great without it) or without. It's fast, it's simple, it's customizable and it does what it should do.

    16. Re:Wow, Dell! by Echnin · · Score: 1
      Though I find iTunes excrutiatingly unresponsive (this is actually a strange thing - right after I reinstalled Windows last month, using the exact same iTunes library files (itl, xml, whatever else is in that directory) as before reinstalling, everything, including searching, was snappy as hell; very soon, though, the speed got heavily reduced. Wonder why.), I think it's quite nice for an audio player. As long as you have good ID3 tags, the search is an excellent way to find my music.

      As for video, Media Player Classic is pretty nice. I kept true to a classic player called Sasami2k for a long time, because it had--and still has in my opinion--the best interface for a video player. There was just one window, with the video and a tiny border (1px default), and the controls were accessed by moving the mouse to the top or bottom of the window. No external window for controls, and the window showed just the video, and didn't clutter the desktop up with the controls. Unfortunately, it hasn't had a release since 2001, and doesn't support half of what's out there now, such as most subtitle formats. I really miss it, though.

      --
      Lalala
    17. Re:Wow, Dell! by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      There are no good media players which do everything. iTunes is great for music, and steadily improving, but does bugger all for video. WMP does everything (Well, mostly) but is a PITA to use. WinAmp plays everything known to man, and plays it well, but doesn't deal with things like podcasts without extra plugins... it goes on.

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    18. Re:Wow, Dell! by Kjella · · Score: 1

      As far as video and DVD goes, I've used Media Player Classic. It's an excellent program, the only little issue I got is that playback is sometimes choppy over the network, then again WMP and VLC act in the same way, so maybe there's something deeper going on. Wish I could manually adjust the video buffer though. Having a media library is a complete waste of time for video.

      When it comes to music, I haven't really found a real favorite. WinAmp 2.91 is good if you just want basic playback/playlist support, but I wish there were some better ways to decide what I was going to listen to (my "all MP3s" list would contain a lot of shit) without having to specifically go over and create more playlists. More like ratings, keywords and the like. For example, to take the coming season I got some christmas songs, they might be good, but I don't want to listen to them in July. And it's not like I want to listen to a "christmas song" playlist, because then I'd get fed up with them way too quickly. Overall, making a good music organizer is a lot more complicated than just a good music player.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    19. Re:Wow, Dell! by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

      I use iTunes because I want a podcasting tool integrated with my media player, and I do buy the occassional track from iTunes, but I don't like how iTunes just basically has one big ol' library that I have to tag and create playlists to filter.

      The Library is just a Show All view. Any media player would be pretty crap if it didn't have one.

      Now how is it that you want to see your collection organised?

    20. Re:Wow, Dell! by sage2k6 · · Score: 1

      Personally, I still prefer Logitech's mice. They're durable...

      The only MS product that I can't live without is One Note (and happens to be the only product from MS that I like and use willingly). But we're talking 2005 here...MS's too busy with Vista, Xbox 360 and thinking of ways to topple Google that it's not spending enough time to do much else ;)

      --

      -----
      "If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on." - Murphy's Law
    21. Re:Wow, Dell! by Freexe · · Score: 1

      Check out MediaMonkey, Its what I have been using for years now, and it is really good.

      --
      "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
    22. Re:Wow, Dell! by koreaman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Firefox has extensions, that's the thing.

      Opera is faster, doesn't shrink images (pr0n, anyone?) and has mouse gestures that consistently work.

      There's something to be said about both, so I have no idea why Firefox is so high yet opera is nowhere. For what it's worth, I use Opera, Firefox being my other favorite browser.

    23. Re:Wow, Dell! by ZorinLynx · · Score: 1

      It's funny how in all these articles that say Firefox is the best, they never mention one of the best features of Firefox (and Opera as well): Cross platform support!

      The BEST thing about Firefox is that you can run it on Windows, Linux, MacOS X, Solaris, IRIX, pretty much any OS out there. MSIE is limited to Windows, and a dated version on the Mac. When you consider that Firefox and Opera are the only really good browser choices for those running on platforms besides Windows, you'd think this awesome feature would be mentioned in the reviews...

    24. Re:Wow, Dell! by CapPicard · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I've been very happy with Dell. We have very few if any failures from Dell systems that we procure for our clients. Very good quality.

    25. Re:Wow, Dell! by I(rispee_I(reme · · Score: 1

      foobar2000 for audio.
      for video.
      Haven't found anything these can't play on Windows yet...
      but then, I simply don't watch realmedia.

    26. Re:Wow, Dell! by game+kid · · Score: 1

      Your post and the PCWorld list just might be the push I needed to shell out $959-$1199 on it. It's gotta be good if listed above Google, the one thing Steve Ballmer wants to Fucking Kill® more than anything else. I've not much dough, but I can still get it...

      My E173FP has that change-color-at-different-angle-and-different-brig htness thing too. What I worry about is the (flourescent?) light: When does the 2405's dim out entirely? I'd still get it if it lasted a year or two...

      --
      You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
    27. Re:Wow, Dell! by mr100percent · · Score: 2, Informative

      No way man, Safari is the best browser for the Mac. Firefox is slower on the mac for some reason, which is why they have the Camino fork.

    28. Re:Wow, Dell! by ElectroBot · · Score: 1

      There's a newer version of Winamp (2.95) available at http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp

      BTW. From personal experience Media Player Classic is the best video player for Windows. You can get it here http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=82303&package_id=84358

    29. Re:Wow, Dell! by getwhipped · · Score: 1

      "their development tools are top-notch [if all you want to do is get something done quick that lacks artistic value and any type of coding standard...]"

      --
      get whipped (you know you like it)
    30. Re:Wow, Dell! by Cheapy · · Score: 1

      As far as I know, pr0n isn't a guiding benchmark for "Best Products"-type articles.

      --
      Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
    31. Re:Wow, Dell! by WilliamSChips · · Score: 1

      Look at your sibling post. Opera's 88. ;)

      --
      Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
    32. Re:Wow, Dell! by Malor · · Score: 2, Informative

      After thinking about it some, I realized I've had this monitor longer than I thought. I got probably the very first run... it arrived in early March. I think the last time I changed the brightness was probably early August. Currently, at brightness 80, it's Very Bright instead of Crazy Retina-Scorching Bright like it was out of the box.

      I'm SURE it'll last longer than a year or two, at least if it's working properly. Without checking, I think the warranty is three years, so to protect themselves against premature bulb failures from heavy users, they'd want to spec them for at least twice that long. So 5 years should be a reasonably safe bet. And the bulb(s) can most likely be replaced, although in five years I'm sure there will be better monitors, and it may not be worth fixing. (double-check on that warranty before buying, I could be wrong.)

      You shouldn't have to pay that much, if you watch for sales. Watch the Ars Technica Audio/Visual club, and the deals sites. If you're willing to be patient, you should be able to get it under $800. It may take two or three months, but that extra $150 is three games or a half an iPod... or just money you can, you know, save and not spend. *grin*.

      Also, keep in mind that you'll probably be happiest with a 6800GT class (or better) video card to drive it. It takes a beastly GPU to drive 1920x1200 at 60fps. That's partly my perfectionist streak talking... you can use lower resolutions, and have the monitor scale it up. It looks surprisingly good, not at all like the blocky pixel-doubling of earlier generations. The new interpolation algorithms/hardware are much better. You can still tell it's an LCD, but you have to LOOK... it's nearly as good as a CRT. So you could use it comfortably with lesser cards if you wanted. That said, it's always nicest running in native resolution, and 1920x1200 needs a VERY fast card.

      If you wait for a sale, the money you save could be a good chunk of a 7800..... :)

      I'm confident you'll like it... but remember that if you're disappointed, Dell has a good return policy. I think you'll be out the shipping, but it's not that heavy and shouldn't be that expensive to send back if you decide to.

    33. Re:Wow, Dell! by nstenz · · Score: 1

      The Dell Axim X50 (PDA) is pretty sweet. The X3s and X5s weren't that great, but Dell seems to have gotten their act together.

      Their computers aren't that great anymore, but for your basic office PC, they're a sweet deal.

    34. Re:Wow, Dell! by ArcticFlood · · Score: 1

      You can turn Firefox's image scaling in the Options window under the Advanced tab. Uncheck "Resize large images to fit in browser window".

      --
      This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
    35. Re:Wow, Dell! by FLEB · · Score: 1

      Folders. Files. Filenames.

      I have the same problem, along with the fact that iTunes doesn't remove duplicate pointers or offline files (MP3 CD tracks, for instance) from the master list. Winamp's "Current Playlist" is the right idea, but they really need to put in more integration (drag/drop, for instance) between the Library and playlist.

      --
      Information wants to be free.
      Entertainment wants to be paid.
      You just want to be cheap.
    36. Re:Wow, Dell! by Skim123 · · Score: 1

      Spot on. Usually I arrange my MP3s into genre folders, then band folders. I'd like to be able to browser like that. iTunes seems like it is pretty spiffy if you have the ID3 tags all spelled out, and I know there are software apps like MusicBrainz that help with that, but a lot of the classical music I like is done released for free by individual performers who don't tag their MP3 files and who aren't popular enough to have entries on the MusicBrainz servers.

      --

      I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

    37. Re:Wow, Dell! by Durandal64 · · Score: 1

      I had a similar experience when I first got my 2005fp. I upgraded from a 19" CRT, and the Dell LCD was so bright and crisp that it took me time to adjust. Also, having more of my field of vision saturated with the widescreen played a part as well. But now that I'm used to it, I can't think of a better way to code than on a widescreen LCD.

    38. Re:Wow, Dell! by evilneko · · Score: 1

      They also never mention that the parent browser, Mozilla, is much less annoying, just as fast, and actually has a complete preferences dialog! ;)

      --
      Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
    39. Re:Wow, Dell! by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

      Folders. Files. Filenames.

      Can't teach an old dog new tricks eh? Forget any sort of dynamic or assisted filing of music, you want everything to just be files and folders.

      Has it occurred to you that if you are prepared to create folders for, say, genres and drag your music into them, then you can equally create playlists for genres and drag your music into them? You do realise that you can do that with iTunes, right?

    40. Re:Wow, Dell! by BasilBrush · · Score: 1

      Spot on. Usually I arrange my MP3s into genre folders, then band folders.

      So put your music into genre folders, containing band playlists.
      Or just into genre playlists, and then sort by band.
      Or put into genre playlists, then open the browser to browse by band.
      Or just sort by by genre, then band.

      I'd like to be able to browser like that. iTunes seems like it is pretty spiffy if you have the ID3 tags all spelled out, and I know there are software apps like MusicBrainz that help with that, but a lot of the classical music I like is done released for free by individual performers who don't tag their MP3 files and who aren't popular enough to have entries on the MusicBrainz servers.

      If you've dragged into playlists, you don't need the ID3 tags. But if you want them, just select all the songs that are of one genre, then open the info dialog, and set them all in one go.

    41. Re:Wow, Dell! by 75th+Trombone · · Score: 1

      I'm wagering that after you saw how much Winamp3 sucked, you never tried Winamp 5. Winamp 5 ditched the whole Wasabi codebase and returned to the Winamp 2 development trunk. They incorporated some of Winamp3's features (like the modern skinning system), but you can choose not to use them -- even to not install them at all.

      Maybe there's some highly obscure difference, but most sane observers agree that there's zero reason not to upgrade to Winamp 5.

      --
      The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
    42. Re:Wow, Dell! by Grishnakh · · Score: 1

      No, actually there's several excellent ones.

      For music, use AmaroK. It can handle huge playlists, stores cover images (and fetches them automatically from Amazon), shows lyrics and artist info (from Wikipedia), and simply works very well.

      For video, use MPlayer. It has a command-line version and a GUI version (gmplayer), and is very fast. There's no extra crap included with it, like trying to direct you to "premium services" or other pay-per-view crap on the web. There's no fooling around with DRM crap. You give it a file or URL or DVD and it plays it, period. The GUI version is skinnable, and comes with many skins. With the easily available video codec packs, it can play virtually any video file you throw at it.

    43. Re:Wow, Dell! by FLEB · · Score: 1

      I've got no problem with the idea of playlists, I just don't like the fact that iTunes is so centered around that way of working, and it's heavily resistant to other methodologies. Still, that's not so bad, except for the fact that there's near-nil for other MP3 players out there for the Mac. (Although, to be honest, I currently only use a Mac at work, so I haven't had much time or incentive to go digging for alternate MP3 players.)

      --
      Information wants to be free.
      Entertainment wants to be paid.
      You just want to be cheap.
    44. Re:Wow, Dell! by Skim123 · · Score: 1

      I'm an old stogy so the vast majority of music I have is music I ripped back in the late 90s when at college. So I already have the folder and file structure. The point is, I don't want to have to do more work to organize my media library, I want my player to work with the way it's already organized.

      --

      I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

  2. Heh by Godman · · Score: 1

    That blurb reads like an infomercial, not news.

    Of course, I ain't complaining... whatever gets people to stop using IE.

    --
    I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
    1. Re:Heh by Severious · · Score: 1

      "Nobody really cares about the top 10 unless it's your own product on there."

      Well since Firefox is Free, then we all own it and thus we all have something to care about.

      Thanks for a great program. (Posted using Firefox 1.5)

      --
      Tinfoil hat? Naa, I long since replaced it with a reinforced titanium alloy.
  3. Another Dupe! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yet again -- we saw this months ago!

    (fp)

    1. Re:Another Dupe! by m85476585 · · Score: 1

      And it was old even a few months ago! It was in the July 05 issue, which means the magazine came in the middle of June and the article was available on their website at least by the beginning of June, probably even before that.

  4. PC World Product of the year 1995... by curmi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...was OS/2. So don't get too cocky. :-)

    1. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by G27+Radio · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, but it was actually a pretty good product.

    2. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by hdparm · · Score: 1

      Pretty much the best that year.

    3. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah. I'm wondering what the hell they were thinking this time around. FF crashes like crazy and leaks memory more than a toddler with dihareea.

    4. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by splerdu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I don't think the GP meant to insult FF by associating it with OS/2, just suggesting caution that being "good" doesn't necessarily mean long-term success.

    5. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by icydog · · Score: 1

      Fortunately, the developers of Firefox are proabably not going to run off next year and start working on a different product which will turn out to suck but somehow gain an obscenely large market share anyway.

    6. Re:PC World Product of the year 1995... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So was Betamax. Your point being?

  5. Heh by nexcomlink · · Score: 1

    Nobody really cares about the top 10 unless it's your own product on there.

  6. IE Really hasn't improved by Breakfast+Pants · · Score: 1

    Two random things in IE that need to change soon: ctrl-l pops up a seperate window for you to enter a location, WHY? Ctrl-f does the same. Firefox handles both of these much more smoothly.

    --

    --

    WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
    1. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by DrEldarion · · Score: 4, Informative

      Try alt+d in IE for highlighting the address bar. Same key combo works in firefox as well.

    2. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by chicagotypewriter · · Score: 1

      F6 does the same thing if I remember correctly. It does it in Firefox, I'm pretty sure it did it in IE.

    3. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      If you're still using IE, then try this ...

      Alt+F4

    4. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by c_forq · · Score: 2, Funny

      I must not be fully patched or have some spyware or something, because that keeps crashing my IE ;)

      --
      Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
    5. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do you mean something like the Ctrl-O box?

    6. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by Chaffar · · Score: 1

      You can fix that with an Alt-F4, or better yet , Ctrl-Alt-Del...

    7. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by Crayon+Kid · · Score: 1

      Two random things in IE that need to change soon: ctrl-l pops up a seperate window for you to enter a location, WHY? Ctrl-f does the same. Firefox handles both of these much more smoothly.

      Indeed. Firefox actually has a very sensible way of dealing with this: if the location bar is not present (such as in a JavaScript opened window) then it pops up a separate window for Ctrl+L. Same goes for the search field aka Ctrl+K. It has many benefic side effects. For instance, on a smaller screen, you don't have to keep the search field visible all the time, you can popup the search as needed.

      --
      i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
    8. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 1

      Yes, it works. But that's got to be among the most aggravating, non-intuitive key combinations I've seen (and I've used Emacs!).

    9. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by DrEldarion · · Score: 1

      Well, it's a lot easier to remember when you see the underlined "d" in "address" next to the bar.

    10. Re:IE Really hasn't improved by FuzzyBad-Mofo · · Score: 1

      Yeah, that's what I end up doing every time I need the shortcut, looking at the menu to see which one is underlined. (granted I don't use IE that much) A good shortcut should be intuitive. The main problem is that there's no consistency between IE shortcuts, some use ctrl and some use alt.

  7. Old News by Saganaga · · Score: 4, Insightful
    From page 1 of the article:
    From the July 2005 issue of PC World magazine
    I thought it seemed funny that the review of Gmail said "check out Gmail the moment it launches", and that the Firefox review was from December 2004!
    1. Re:Old News by Seumas · · Score: 1

      If it was the July issue, that means it probably came out in June (or even May). Chances are the submitter sent the article submission in around that time and, in typical Slashdot fashion, just now got around to posting it.

    2. Re:Old News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When did GMail launch? Last I heard it was still in beta.

    3. Re:Old News by bluGill · · Score: 1

      Magazines typically have a 3 months lead time between when articles are due and when you see the magazine. To get a end of year (someone else says that this is a July issue, if so this whole argument doesn't apply well) best of in your hands at the end of the year they need to make the decisions in September. Anything released after that goes into the next years list - if it is remembered.

      Some authors do wait to the end of the year, but you don't see this best of lists until about the April issue.

  8. a year old by atcdevil · · Score: 1

    the quoted text is from 2004....

  9. iPod at 78 and Rio at 13 and no Nano? by ericdano · · Score: 2, Informative
    Something is fishy. No mention of the iPod nano, and Rio's crappy Carbon player is at 13? WTF?

    More PC bias going on here....

    --
    It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
    I moderate therefore I rule!
    --
    1. Re:iPod at 78 and Rio at 13 and no Nano? by nexcomlink · · Score: 1

      Tiger is at number 2 on the list. I am not surprised if other MP3 player's have gotten more popular. Nobody wants to have just another music device. Why not have something different? Maybe original and something to your taste. Not just another white iPod. It might be "cool" thing to do now. But all cool thing's have a end.

    2. Re:iPod at 78 and Rio at 13 and no Nano? by jonfelder · · Score: 5, Informative

      It could be that this story is a dupe and this article was written in July before the Nano was released. Also, it must be my imagination that an Apple product is #3.

      Naaaa...must be PC bias.

    3. Re:iPod at 78 and Rio at 13 and no Nano? by demigod186 · · Score: 1

      It IS PCWorld, of course there is pc bias. That's like saying Newsweek is biased towards news related articles.

    4. Re:iPod at 78 and Rio at 13 and no Nano? by attackiko · · Score: 1

      More PC bias going on here....

      I totally agee! Damn PC World..

  10. Stuff that mattered. by teslatug · · Score: 4, Informative

    This was published in July. Is the story a dupe?

  11. Re:awww wtf by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why bother? vi's a given.

  12. It certainly is by quokkapox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If you're like me, and you have installed the SessionSaver extension, you will find that Firefox 1.5 is extremely stable on Windows XP, and you now have 50-odd tabs of pages you will read "someday soon, when I'm not on the net" saved up in other windows.

    I hope I am not the only victim of this scourge.

    --
    it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
    1. Re:It certainly is by imess · · Score: 1

      no I don't; but I do have 2-3 windows saved up...

    2. Re:It certainly is by asavage · · Score: 1
      I actually do this sometimes when I go on the Ferry between Victoria and Vancouver. Reading and watching Videos on a laptop are a good ways to pass the time on trips.

      Also when I am not going anywhere I also leave things open for days at a time. Right now I have a recipe that I will try tomorrow or Sunday an lots of other things in tabs open.

    3. Re:It certainly is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      hello from victoria

    4. Re:It certainly is by nandhp · · Score: 1

      I must be the only person here who has switched to Opera because of Firefox's instability on Windows XP.

    5. Re:It certainly is by stoanhart · · Score: 1

      Hey island buddy!
      Uvic? I am.

    6. Re:It certainly is by Clueless+Nick · · Score: 1

      You have a working installation of Sessionsaver on Firefox 1.5? I have v0.2.1.028, and it has been disabled by the update wizard...and I am on XP.

      Can you tell me where you downloaded it from?

      --
      Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
    7. Re:It certainly is by RaNdOm+OuTpUt · · Score: 0

      You say Opera is better, yet your sgnatre is "Get Firefox"

      Make up your mind.

      --
      13. Any legal action is absolutly excluded. (Pi World Ranking List rules)
    8. Re:It certainly is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You have to download it from the author's site. I believe the link to it is posted on the extention page.

    9. Re:It certainly is by BigFoot48 · · Score: 1

      Go to the Sessionsaver home page and you'll see a mention of where the 1.5 version is posted. Works just fine.

    10. Re:It certainly is by whitehatlurker · · Score: 1
      You say Opera is better, yet your signature is "Get Firefox"

      The parent poster just does that because, deep down, he doesn't like you and wants you to suffer with FF. ;-)

      --
      .. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
    11. Re:It certainly is by asavage · · Score: 1

      I graduated from UVic 1.5 years ago. Posted anon so I am not moderated down.

    12. Re:It certainly is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      or not... ;p

    13. Re:It certainly is by nandhp · · Score: 1
      The only excuse I have is that I hadn't come up with the following two things:
      1. http://urlcut.com/f835, short url to my affiliate bounce
      2. The slogan "1.5x features, 15x bugs. Firefox 1.5"
  13. firefox ? WTF by parasite · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If the guys would consider, even CONSIDER putting Firefox in the top 10, I guess they are too much of PRICKS to realize that (1) there are SOME people who view graphic files in their webbrowser [ones imbedded in html pages] (2) there are SOME people who use language other than English...

    Can fuckwad Firefox handle either one ? HELL NO. Don't believe me ?

    (1) Try viewing a web BBS which has maybe 5-10 50-100k jpegs per message. The only efficient way is to open maybe 5-10 tabs of message you want to read, and then flip through them... Well this turns out not to be so efficient after about the THIRD TIME when Firefox eats a whole through your entire system memory and your system grinds to a hault.

    (2) Try dealing with ANY FILES which are ANYWHERE in a directory path which has a SINGLE Non-English language word anywhere in that path. Yeah, doesn't fucking work. I just LOVE having to COPY files around and rename them everytime I want to submit them in a webmail or in POS Thunderbird to attach to email. You guys are real fags.

    1. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your bridge has called. It's lonely and wants you home.

    2. Re:firefox ? WTF by Punboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Funny. For giggles I threw together a page with 100 150k images on a single page, posted it and the images to my webserver, and loaded it with firefox. it took ~30 seconds to load... all the images loaded fine... and, when I checked how much memory firefox was using, it was using ~40MB. This is Firefox 1.5 RC3 on Windows XP SP2.

      And um, I believe you mean opening anything with letters in the path which are not standard english characters, for instance something with an é in it. Admittedly yes, Firefox can't handle these well. But, if you knew about the HTTP standard, you would know these characters are not supposed to be allowed in URLs, and if they are in it they have to be specified using their ASCII character code (much like spaces are, with %20).

      --
      If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
    3. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      > eats a whole through your entire system memory

      Agreed. There's no excuse for the memory that Firefox consumes. My Windows system with 2Gbytes of RAM swaps continuously when I use Firefox. I have to use it to view a couple of 200Mbyte reports for work, and Firefox doesn't handle them gracefully at all. It also doesn't return the memory back to the system after you leave the page. You have to quit Firefox. MSIE doesn't have any of those problems, but the company requires Firefox so I have to use it in order to be able to login to some corp sites.

      It's still better than Thunderturd. With ~10k messages in my Inbox (I answer e-mail for a living so that's a typical week), Thunderbird uses over half a gig of RAM. Outlook Express was much better, but the anti-spam filter in Thunderbird is so good I continue to use it even though it's painful.

    4. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny. For giggles I threw together a page with 100 150k images on a single page, posted it and the images to my webserver, and loaded it with firefox. it took ~30 seconds to load... all the images loaded fine... and, when I checked how much memory firefox was using, it was using ~40MB. This is Firefox 1.5 RC3 on Windows XP SP2.

      The guy you're replying to is a troll. But like many trolls, there is a kernel of truth in what he says. In Windows XP, Firefox does not seem to relinquish memory very well at all until you close all browser windows so that the controlling process ends. After a few days of browsing, my Firefox is usually using over 350 MB of memory, even when I only have a few tabs open.

      Don't get me wrong -- Firefox is leagues better than IE for me. But the memory management has a lot of room for improvement.

    5. Re:firefox ? WTF by liangzai · · Score: 1

      English characters? I thought they were Latin...

      And just because you can't SEND non-Latin stuff through HTTP, da focking browser can still show those characters, just like Safari does. The URIs of my homepage look like shit in Firefox. And this is not a security issue either, as those non-ASCII characters which are similar to ASCII letters can be emphasized in some fashion.

      This is a major drawback with Firefox, at least for all of us who are not hard-bent on using English all the time.

      And Firefox in China? Forget it. Nowadays you can use Chinese characters in URIs (Punycode), but the whole concept is annihilated by Firefox. Thus Mozilla want sno share of the Chinese market, which currently is 100.0% M$IE (except for us foreigners with PowerBooks).

      Firefox also have other problems regarding "non-English" characters in the layout machine. It is a long-standing bug.

    6. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How come all the truthful and accurate posts are the ones that get labeled as trolls?

      the fingers are in my ears and i'm going "lalalalala I cant hear you!"

    7. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For giggles I threw together a page with 100 150k images on a single page, posted it and the images to my webserver
       
      Link please.

    8. Re:firefox ? WTF by truedfx · · Score: 1

      for instance something with an é in it [...] and if they are in it they have to be specified using their ASCII character code

      é is not an ASCII character, and several different ASCII-compatible encodings which support é represent it differently (the major ones: in the 8859-* which support it, it's e9; in UTF-8, it's c3 a9). How is it decided which encoding is actually used? Or are automatic conversions to that %xx format a bad idea?

    9. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why do you think only English characters are valid Latin characters? What type of cultural imperialist are you? In case you didn't know, the French alphabet, among others, also derives from Latin. "é," for instance, is a Latin character. It isn't valid in an URL because only English characters are allowed in URLs.

    10. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Firefox is a probably the biggest resource hog I have ever seen. If it has a industry leading feature, it would have to be its enormous memory leaks. After a few hours of viewing image-based sites and saving the odd download, I quite often discover that firefox is using in excess of 256MB of RAM with just a few tabs open. Quitting all FF windows is the only way to release the resources.

      This is with FF 1.07 on W2K, but I have also observed the same happening on various linux distros since firefox first became fashionable.

      IE is spyware city.

      Netscape never was stable.

      Firefox hogs resources.

      Will there ever be a decent browser?

    11. Re:firefox ? WTF by koreaman · · Score: 2, Informative

      Opera, now gratis

    12. Re:firefox ? WTF by kimvette · · Score: 1

      On Windows with 1.0.x that was a bit of a problem, sure. With >1GB of RAM you don't hit that too often though. :)

      On Linux? Not so much.

      1.5.x should eliminate those issues.

      Incidentally I don't think the user was trolling - it is definitely a legitimate issue in some cases, but I prefer minor annoying memory leaks (Mozilla/Firefox <=1.0.x, JRE < 1.5) to huge gaping security holes.(MSIE any version, ActiveX any version)

      --
      The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    13. Re:firefox ? WTF by smiffy1976 · · Score: 1

      Has it ever occurred to you to use 'folders' to 'organise' your ludicrously sized Inbox? No, that would be too obvious...

    14. Re:firefox ? WTF by parasite · · Score: 0

      I wasn't talking so much about Chinese words in HTTP url path -- as I was talking about doing something as simple as this: locally I have a file I want to attach to an email in Thunderbird. There is 1 directory in that long path that has single Chinese word- - guess what ? I have to move and rename the file just to attach it ... that is retarded. Same goes for saving say a random .jpg from a webpage into any path on my harddrive that happens to have a chinese word somehwere in there.

    15. Re:firefox ? WTF by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nice personal attack. Are you always this much of a jerk? You must be a lot of fun at parties.

      Hey idiot, I have more than 800 folders. They're organized by week by eight different categories. Unfortuntely Thunderbird is such a piece of junk that even all of this extra work still doesn't enable it to be pleasant to use. I really needs to be fixed. Of course Firefox does to, but you don't see anyone even attempted to fix the problems with it.

      I still can't believe you'd claim that it's ok for an e-mail program not to be able to handle a week's worth of e-mail. Elm did a better job a decade ago. It's just too bad Elm doesn't do a good job with the HTML-encoded crap the Microsoft-worshipers use.

    16. Re:firefox ? WTF by smiffy1976 · · Score: 1

      Calm down, mate! I just assumed you had a mammoth inbox folder with no hierarchy. I can't comment yet upon how Thunderbird handles a high volume of e-mail, but having just installed 1.5 RC1, it seems pretty good to me. I just switched from Outlook 2000 due to its broken IMAP implementation.

  14. Ubuntu by Eightyford · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How much of Ubuntu's praise comes from the free CDs that they give away? I just got mine last week (and again today), and while it is a great Distro, I don't really see what is so special about it.

    1. Re:Ubuntu by Ravadill · · Score: 1

      I think the thing that makes Ubuntu so widely praised is exactly that... it is 'just' a great Distro. Not many others at the moment are as stable, up to date and completely free while still being user friendly.

    2. Re:Ubuntu by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      *shrugs* I use Ubuntu and Fedora and like them about the same. Neither seems to detect this laptops wifi card but I assume that's just a temporary problem. My other laptop's wifi wasn't detected when I first got it and now works fine. Actually it works better than this laptop's wifi does in Windows. A shame they don't make wifi cards an internal component that can easily be swapped out. :)

      I use Debian too but find it to be a bit patchy when it comes to polish. Some places it has it, some places it doesn't, and sometimes the polish comes and goes with different upgrades. I'd complain about how unpolished, if very functional, apt is except that yum is slow and flakey. Ximian's rug worked much better than either apt or yum. To bad the community didn't want to use it or support it after Novell seemingly killed it. Synaptic is nice for newbies though. About on par with Red Carpet although I liked Red Carpet's UI better in most ways. Debian often lags a bit, even if using one of the unstable versions, when it comes to access to new versions of software. A little frustrating. It seems the third party packages for Fedora are easier to find and that fills in a lot of holes in the offical release. Ubuntu is sort of new so I can forgive it for having fewer of these third party packages.. it seems to be improving in this regard pretty quickly.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    3. Re:Ubuntu by be-fan · · Score: 1

      People tend to like Ubuntu because, moreso than any other distro, it "just works" on a wide variety of configurations. Moreover, it's fast enough, quite streamlined, and has a large package repository. There is nothing particularly "special" about it. It just strikes a particularly good balance of qualities.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    4. Re:Ubuntu by prockcore · · Score: 1

      Well, one thing that's special is the fact that it's the *only* distro I've seen that has a PPC LiveCD.

      Other than that, it's the best PPC linux distro I've used. I'm using it on this ibook right now actually.

  15. Oh puh-leeze! by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 1

    The problem for Microsoft is the overwhelming popularity of its browser. Virus writers and hackers target IE because there are so many systems running it.

    Yeah right. And I thought you were PROMOTING firefox...

    Friendly Fire, anyone?

  16. Re:awww wtf by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Oh wow, obviously someone with mod points doesn't have a sense of humor, that or they didn't understand. A tip for future moderators, if you don't understand it don't bother moderating it. Your mod points are better used modding someone up who deserves it. If someone deserves to be read, then let them be read!

  17. #4... by cibyr · · Score: 1

    Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card

    Yeah that's a great product I use every day... wait I've never heard of it before. I thought we learnt not to produce products before the standards are finalised from the last Wi-Fi fiasco...

    --
    It's not exactly rocket surgery.
    1. Re:#4... by Magius_AR · · Score: 1
      Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card
      Yeah that's a great product I use every day... wait I've never heard of it before. I thought we learnt not to produce products before the standards are finalised from the last Wi-Fi fiasco...

      Man, don't diss something with real world results. I own the thing. The results and benchmarks are not bullshit. I used to own a 54G router (which sits in the basement where the cable comes in), and my wireless signal would barely flicker red (sometimes losing connectivity altogether) up in my second story bedroom.
      With the Pre-N, I have a full 100% green bar and 108 Mpbs throughput.

      Just because something isn't mainstream yet doesn't diminish it's greatest. Google was awesome WAY before it became a household name. Similar things can be said for Firefox and any number of any other products, such as Trillian/Miranda. Just because YOU haven't heard of it doesn't mean it isn't a great product. Hell, I'd argue most mainstream stuff borders on crap actually.

  18. Not quite with the times? by cbuskirk · · Score: 2, Informative

    I understand the list is quite long, but surely PC World could have done better than use their July 2003 review for the Itunes Music Store. 200,000 songs? Mac Only?

  19. Dupe by Doomstalk · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not only is this article from June, but it's been reported on before.

    1. Re:Dupe by DeafByBeheading · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's the number one dupe of the year.

      --
      Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
    2. Re:Dupe by chiok · · Score: 1

      I love that the first comment was "It's OCTOBER. It's not news anymore."

    3. Re:Dupe by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This Just In... Slashdot dubs "Dupes" most common occurance of 2005!

  20. The opposite ain't true by imstanny · · Score: 0
    Just because it's not as bad as IE explorer doesn't make it 'the best' of 2005, or at least that shouldn't be the reason.

    I like firefox, i use it, and i tell others to use it. But to say Firefox is the best product of 2005 is rather disappointing.

    1. Re:The opposite ain't true by narcc · · Score: 1

      I, for one, agree with their #1 pick (don't know about the others, but I'm sure on #1) I mean, can you think of a better product for the #1 spot? What would you have picked instead?

    2. Re:The opposite ain't true by AcidPenguin9873 · · Score: 1

      PIN number
      ATM machine

      New on the list:
      IE explorer

    3. Re:The opposite ain't true by imstanny · · Score: 1
      I, for one, agree with their #1 pick (don't know about the others, but I'm sure on #1) I mean, can you think of a better product for the #1 spot? What would you have picked instead?

      To name a few products that I think are a bit more revolutionary than evolutionary:

      1) Google Earth

      2) Google Desktop

      3) Wikipedia

      4) Skype

      5) Xbox 360

      6) ipod Nano/video

  21. Alienware? by AIX-Hood · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm surprised to see an Alienware machine at #6 seeing as their post-sales support has been atrocious for as long as they've been around. I know a good number of people who've bought machines from them; none of them would ever do it again. I guess this goes along with Cnet giving the Maxtor 250 external firewire drives their highest rating, while they have a 90% failure rate within the first 6-8 months.

    1. Re:Alienware? by superpulpsicle · · Score: 1

      It is possible that they have a weak support because they assume it is the 3lite techies buying Alienware boxes for PC gaming. 90% sounds way too high, that percentage almost justify closing shop. Could it be an issue with ATI and Nvidia cards overclocked and fried?

    2. Re:Alienware? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Techies build their own systems or if they don't have time they buy from Dell. Only newbies buy Alienware systems.

  22. My work here is done by theblackdeer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Mozilla Team: "Well guys, we got our goal. PC World #1 spot. Close the web site down; we're satisfied with a job well done."

  23. it just works. by jasonhamilton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're right, on the surface it looks like any other gnome based distro.

    However, if you install it on a bunch of diff laptops, then compare it to another linux distro, you'll quickly find that what makes Ubuntu so good is that there is a lot of polish underneath.

    Widescreen is detected and configured. Most wifi cards, auto mounting of external drives, sound card. Even special keyboard keys function on most systems I've installed it on.

    I think Ubuntu is headed in the right direction. What makes Windows so great for noobs is that they install it and then they click to get on teh interweb. No mess, no fuss. One shouldn't have to spend all day trying to get the damn OS configured.

    --
    SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
    1. Re:it just works. by vivek7006 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      What makes Windows so great for noobs is that they install it and then they click to get on teh interweb

      Newbies never install OS. For a newbie windows comes pre-installed

    2. Re:it just works. by omeg · · Score: 1

      Yeah. Except for... MP3 and just about any kind of encoded video except for maybe OGM.

    3. Re:it just works. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There is readily available documents on the Wiki and the Forums that provide easy-to-follow instructions (add a repository, install a package, all via GUI) for getting all the restricted formats you'd ever want....

    4. Re:it just works. by ccp · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What makes Windows so great for noobs is that they install it and then they click to get on teh interweb.

      You mean like Mandrake (now Mandriva) has been doing since at least 1999?

      Cheers,

    5. Re:it just works. by ThePeeWeeMan · · Score: 1

      Widescreen is detected and configured. Most wifi cards, auto mounting of external drives, sound card. Even special keyboard keys function on most systems I've installed it on. I've had very different experiences installing Ubuntu on two laptops: a Toshiba Tecra 9100 and an Acer TravelMate 4103WLMi. The Tecra install went (relatively) flawlessly (over a network, no less). The Acer, on the other hand... ACPI doesn't work without using a custom DSDT (no ACPI = no battery info), wireless doesn't seem to work, widescreen isn't detected properly (the laptop has a 1280x800 resolution but Ubuntu/X seems to think otherwise and 'hang' when starting X) and some other problems. Windows XP was a breeze to install on both these laptops, and when/if I get a Vista beta, I'll be installing that on the Acer. I could've worked around these issues by installing Ubuntu to the hard drive and then hacking around as necessary, but that's not a productive use of my time. While I do in fact like Ubuntu quite a lot (and, in fact, have it installed on my older Toshiba) for its balance between polish and expert-options (apt-get and so on), it's a bit of a stretch to say that it's "no mess, no fuss" unless you happen to have old hardware.

  24. Erm.... by Skim123 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    re you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?

    I am not an IE zealot (I use FireFox), but this statement isn't 100% accurate. MS did add popup blocking support for IE in SP2. And there are a ton of new features for IE7.

    Granted, too little, too late, and way behind FireFox's release/feature schedule (which is why I use FF and not IE), but at least Microsoft is doing something. Proof that competition is a Good Thing.

    --

    I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

    1. Re:Erm.... by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      And there are a ton of new features for IE7...

      Yeah, I noticed the new security features the other day when I was ordering my copy of Duke Nukem Forever...

    2. Re:Erm.... by jofi · · Score: 0
      More than just popup blocking. Many under the hood changes.

      Just let /. have their way for the millionth time.

      --
      Blame the user, not the software.
    3. Re:Erm.... by paroneayea · · Score: 1
      Granted, too little, too late, and way behind FireFox's release/feature schedule (which is why I use FF and not IE), but at least Microsoft is doing something. Proof that competition is a Good Thing.


      Competition is indeed a Good Thing, but the trouble with Internet Explorer is largely that it doesn't support standards. Microsoft has only minimally stepped in the direction of standards compliance, and only because with the rise of other good browsers like opera and firefox, they had to or die. But rest assured, Microsoft doesn't intend to. They don't want competeition, though they'd like to compete, and they have demonstrated their willingness to break or invent their own standards (terrible in design and incompatible with anything else [see activex]) for their own products, and IE is far from any exception.

      All in all, the web would be better off with Internet Explorer dead. Nobody benefits from Microsoft's kind of "competetition".
      --
      http://mediagoblin.org/
    4. Re:Erm.... by Buran · · Score: 1

      I think the article is out of date since it also complains about Firefox being missing a few things that are most definitely in it as of the latest version available.

    5. Re:Erm.... by KarmaMB84 · · Score: 1

      most of the security improvements are bound to be invisible so wtf are you talking about?

    6. Re:Erm.... by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      The point is IE 7 isn't out yet. You're trumpetting up what at the moment is just vaporware.

    7. Re:Erm.... by Skim123 · · Score: 1

      It's easy to say, "SUPPORT STANDARDS, DAMMIT!", but not so easy in practice. This blog entry by Microsoftie Raymond Chen is worth reading.

      --

      I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

    8. Re:Erm.... by Skim123 · · Score: 1
      The point is IE 7 isn't out yet. You're trumpetting up what at the moment is just vaporware.

      While IE7 hasn't yet hit RTM, you can download the Beta.

      --

      I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.

    9. Re:Erm.... by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      While IE7 hasn't yet hit RTM, you can download [microsoft.com] the Beta [microsoft.com].

      You can get a beta of Vista, too. But it keeps losing features.

  25. Re:awww wtf by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Really, I don't bother trying to be humorous anymore. I tend to make the comments that have bright responses, because those who get it respond - while those who don't understand the humor mod down.

  26. voipbuster.com by kyoko21 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I rank voipbuster.com as the best app of 2005 because since that I have made the switch to ditch my long distance carrier for voipbuster, I have only paid a total sum of $1.28 USD for my long distance calls here in the United States as well as my long distance calls overseas to a select few countries, which includes Taiwan. :-) Nothing like free long distance as long as I have internet connectivity. Now where is the nearest open wifi access point at...lol.

  27. Firefox has improved a lot by Capeman · · Score: 1

    Read FireFox's history.

  28. meh by ImaNihilist · · Score: 0

    As long as IE is the only secure browser for online banking, Firefox wil always be second-best.

    1. Re:meh by natd · · Score: 1

      Well - are you going to substaniate that? For most users, using Firefox is infinately safer if only because they are unlikely to pickup spyware which will hook into their banking login.

      --
      Only big ligs use sigs.
    2. Re:meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      As long as IE is the only secure browser for online banking, Firefox wil always be second-best.

      Agreed. On the other hand, as long as Firefox is the only secure browser for online banking, IE will always be second-best. Now if only we could actually provide some support for the underlying assumptions behind those two statements then we might be onto something.

    3. Re:meh by ImaNihilist · · Score: 0

      A lot of banking/finance sites are IE only.

  29. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Have you grown weary of the constant vulnerabilities and patches? Do you scratch your head at sudden program lockups and crashes? - be careful, it is possible to say the same thing about FF now. I see FF crash very often now. Patches and vulnerabilities? FF has them too. It does look like FF gets the fixes much faster than IE though.

    1. Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not really. All software has bugs, anyone suprised by that fact or recently disenfranchised with Firefox because of that...well, I don't realy know what to tell you, other than this: There is no Santa Claus :(.

      Anyway, let's pretend for a moment that they are equal in the ways you described. Well, I would still pick Firefox because of it's stricter adherance to web standards. From a web developer's standpoint Internet Explorer is just terrible, in my opinion. Or in the least, the alternatives offered by Firefox are far superior. I have also dabled a bit in firefox extension creation and it's tons of fun.

      Do end users ultimetly care, or are they even aware that there are standards for the web? Just about all of them don't, as much as I would like them to. Do they care that from a programming standpoint the open nature of the browser makes developers feel all warm on the inside? Most: Nope.

      I'm not saying Internet Explorer has to be the new W3C spokesperson or re-license the software under the GPL, I simply would be very appreciative if they at least kept rendering engine even somewhat with the times and gave a little TLC to developers. Is that so wrong?

    2. Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? by Malor · · Score: 1

      I was having trouble with the update from 1.07 to 1.5... having gone through all the RCs, and having plugins from 1.07, some stuff got kinda borked up. I uninstalled, saved my bookmarks, and wiped the Mozilla directory in Application data. The subsequent installation has been flawless. (although I haven't put back my plugins yet.... likely the source of the original problem.)

    3. Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? by roman_mir · · Score: 1

      If something like that happened, the extension (and probably the author as well,) would be banned from mozdev.org and mozilla.org permanently.
      It is very easy to check the code behind the extension, you can see exactly what is happening by finding the xpi package in your profile, renaming it into .zip, openning the archive and reading the code.

      Of-course I imagine I could write an extension that would modify itself after installation. I haven't tried it, it's an interesting project. However with enough people downloading these extensions from mozilla.org it would be found pretty quickly.

      By the way, mozilla.org changed the requirements for the extensions on its site, any new update to an old extension and every new extension is prohibitted from specifying the update location for the extension that is outside of addons.mozilla.org This means that an author cannot use mozilla.org as vector for installing extension on users' machines and then modifying what the extension does with an update from his(her) own site.

      Still, there are many extensions on mozilla.org that are older versions and that do specify outside update sites and will continue doing so for all the older installations.

    4. Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      - be careful, it is possible to say the same thing about FF now.

      FF has never crashed on me- but IE did, many hundreds of times. Maybe you're some
      microsoft propagandist...

  30. Firefox security could be worse than IE by einhverfr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Actually, I think there is a point there. While I like Firefox, I think that a XUL-based web-browser is an inherently insecure architecture because there is no inherent boundary between UI and content. Yes, there is a security boundary that is enforced, but this doesn't strike me as any more secure than IE's security zones (and a lot of IE vulnerabilities involve zone privilege elevation).

    In other words, Firefox trusts what is really *content* (basically XML documents with CSS and Javascript) in chrome to build its UI, but doesn't trust the same content on the web, and this is not much different than IE trusting an intranet site but not trusting an internet site. Indeed if anything it is worse because a malicious site, if it can bypass the security check using some currently unknown vulnerability, could literally rewrite any part of the UI in any way it wants. And given the great reusability of the Firefox UI components, it will probably blend in with whatever the installed theme is. Worse still, it would have access, as Chrome, to all the XP-COM stuff in the Mozilla framework. Indeed I expect Firefox to be *worse* than IE if it ever becomes the dominant browser. And I am not an MS fanboy by any stretch.

    The advantage of XUL is that it allows for rapid cross-platform application development. For web browsers and other similar programs, this tradeoff has a fairly heavy security downside. I don't see Firefox falling off anytime soon, but I will be working more with browsers like Epiphany because of my concerns. I still deply firefox in environments where I need to be able to customize the UI (removing back buttons and the like) for corner-case environments, but in general it is no longer my browser of choice.

    --

    LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
    1. Re:Firefox security could be worse than IE by Yaa+101 · · Score: 1

      The difference is that in Firefox the security problems stay into the application layer.
      With IE the security problems are in your system as a whole.

      So ultimately Firefox is always less vunrable than IE.

    2. Re:Firefox security could be worse than IE by einhverfr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The difference is that in Firefox the security problems stay into the application layer.
      With IE the security problems are in your system as a whole.


      I see no reason to make that assumption. Sure it is a less homogenous platform. But this doesn't present problems that are not trivially insurmountable.

      The basic issue is this: you have four basic components to Firefox or the Mozilla Suite's browser: content (web pages), chrome, the MPR, and XP-COM extensions. If you want additional functionality, for example, the ability to ask the OS to run an executable, you could have it download an appropriate XP-COM module, install it, and then do whatever you want to... The main prerequisite is getting elevated status from content to chrome. Now you might have to ask what OS you are running and download an appropriate binary or source package. But it is doable.

      Here is a thought. Spend a few hours some time thinking about how you would write a popup delivery system for a Firefox/Linux platform. Look into what its limitations would be, how it could be deployed, what sorts of vulnerabilities would be required for it to be deployed silently, etc. I did this once and decided that Firefox was not adequately secure by design.

      Finally, there have been issues where Firefox in the past has exposed system vulnerabilities in Windows. So again, it is not safe to say that problems always stay in the app layer.

      --

      LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
  31. I don't buy Belkin products any more by Lifewish · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Had the most hellish time with a wireless dongle trying to get it to run under anything but Windows. Turned out, of course, that it was one of those lovely products that used about three different chipsets in the "same" model, along with a range of other gotchas. Even ndiswrapper couldn't handle it. And of course the chance of Belkin actually assisting in any way are nil.

    If there's any Belkin employees reading this: please tell your management that at least one person will start buying your products when you start releasing your hardware interfaces.

    --
    For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
    1. Re:I don't buy Belkin products any more by cbreeze34 · · Score: 1

      same thing happened to me, until i switched to SuSE, where it worked natively. though it was netgear not belkin, so that might not work for you.

      --
      using anti-bacterial hand soap is like drying your feet in the middle of a shower.
  32. What about Vim? by LittleBigScript · · Score: 2, Funny

    It is up to version 6.4

    1. Re:What about Vim? by dascandy · · Score: 1

      If you ever see an award for the most-improved torture device, I'm sure Vim would win.

    2. Re:What about Vim? by Geoffreyerffoeg · · Score: 1

      Why's this funny? GVim is a great product. Syntax highlighting, smart indenting, strong regular expression support, graphical as well as CLI interface, make/debugging support. Vim is the only editor I use on command-line shells, and GVim is my regular editor on my Windows computer. It's light enough that I can use it as the find-and-replace for MS Word (copy the text, run the regex, copy it back). And once you get used to it, the GUI/insert mode/command mode design is very efficient.

    3. Re:What about Vim? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So is my windows media player...

  33. Flickr! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ooh. Flickr is love.

  34. Hey editors: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Google introduced a new feature that allows you to avoid dupes: All you need to do is search for a few words from the headline with the phrase site:slashdot.org stuck at the end. For example, search for PCWorld Firefox Best Product of 2005 site:slashdot.org This shows two dupes. Their top-secret site: feature is still in beta, but it works well.

  35. Interesting... paradoxical... by towsonu2003 · · Score: 0
    stuff...

    so, firefox is better than google; ubuntu 5.04 is much better than ubuntu 5.10 (not in list); wikipedia is worse than windows media player 10 [etc]

  36. Am I the only one that reads... by imess · · Score: 2, Funny

    PCWorld Dups Firefox Best Product of 2005?

  37. office software by towsonu2003 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    wtf -> OS X 10.4 and Ubuntu are office software??? (http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,1207 63,pg,3,00.asp)

    1. Re:office software by pintomp3 · · Score: 1

      given the lack of of an OS category, i guess they had to put them somewhere.

  38. Why can't a browser give feedback? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    When a website sucks, wouldn't it be cool if you could press a button and tell the geek who runs it to screw off? When a website requires cookies and javascript just to view their products or get some info, wouldn't it nice to tell them to suck eggs?

    So why not put some buttons in the browser that simply load a URL like http://somesite.com/YourSiteSucks or http://somesite.com/IHateCookiesStopRequiring or other words "GreatResource", "GreatSite", "TooManyAds", "PopupsSuck".

    It would request the URL but not bother to show the "Page Not Found" error so you can go about your business.

    Then the webmaster will find those words in his logs and see them in his stat reports. If this gets popular, companies will find this a good source of feedback on their website.

    No one can patent this idea, I just posted it publicly on slashdot!

    1. Re:Why can't a browser give feedback? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, this is a great idea, good thinking!

    2. Re:Why can't a browser give feedback? by dankelley · · Score: 1
      This is a good idea. It could be done easily within your own system. FireFox could do it. I've thought about this, too, but in a more limited way. I would like to have MY brower let me make MY own judgements about sites.

      If clicking a link takes me to a site that I don't want to visit again, I'd like to have a button I can click to register this within my own browsing setup. Then, if I click again, FF could resist loading the site. The resistance could be indicated in various ways (a beep? changed cursor? A popup window?). Some aesthetic considerations apply there. And the strength of the resistance could be handled in different ways, e.g. I could perhaps click something indicating that I never want to see that site again, ever, or that I don't want to see it again until some elapsed time, or that I'm willing to see it a few more times. It shouldn't be difficult to invent a clever scheme for both the interface and the functioning.

      If this were stored in a file, then FF could export the file so I could tell friends what I think sucks. Perhaps a peer-ranked opinion database could be developed over time.

      How about it, FF authors? Can you do this? Folks might like it, a lot.

      This seems to be something that would be a natural for a non-commercial product such as FF. With commercial products, we run into issues. I doubt that M$oft wants users of its browser to "sucks-list" a M$oft site.

  39. Tiger vs Firefox by iamacat · · Score: 1

    I am surprised MacOSX is behind Firefox. The later doesn't provide a huge functionality leap over earlier products such as Opera or Safari . On the other hand, everyone who used OSX for a month will never go back to Windows. Let's start with a fact that moving a window on XP leaves annoying flicker on the background while the "damaged" windows redraw themselves, while on MacOSX the movement is perfectly smooth.

    I would give a nod to GMail though, because instant search and responsive UI for web mail are quite important.

    1. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay I am really tired of these, why the purported superiority of Mac OS X ? I dont like windows and dont use it very often but I dont like OS X, it has some pluses, its sort of bsd derived. OTOH it has lots of irritating things like netinfo ifconfig is for instance broken ... sigh (on a operating system I am fond of one can e.g. type a few short commands and turn a wifi enabled laptop plugged into a ethernet port into wifi point (and no silly adhoc either as long as the adapter supports AP mode)

      Window redrawing aside the performance isnt there, the memory footprint is awful . and all the filesystem(s) suck, Like XP the interface looks like something the toy in a kids meal comes wrapped in, sad because apple used to have slick well thought out interfaces in the OS 9 days. For an example of stupidity look at the dock, Apple seems to have started adopting really idiotic idioms from microsoft, why does the dock serve as both a application laucher and manage minimized windows mixing the two is completely asinine arg ... whats next? is apple going to adopt the system tray (aka the system notification area) from microsoft.

      In any case dont assume that one size fits all, hegemony while beneficial in the short term always leads to stagnation, encouraging everyone to move to one platform has the same effect true for the linux people, true for the apple people and currently the problem with the microsoft people.

    2. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by abaddon3k · · Score: 1

      I would have to disagree with your statement that anyone who used OSX for a month never goes back. I used OSX for three months, and i absolutly hate it.

    3. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by icydog · · Score: 1

      Windows 2000/XP windows drag smoothly for me. I've only seen a flicker when video drivers weren't properly installed, or when I used a ~1991 1 MB VGA card.

    4. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On the other hand, everyone who used OSX for a month will never go back to Windows.

      Setting your bar to Windows is like saying 'I can jump higher than a snake'. On the other hand, speaking as someone who would be coming from Linux, OSX would only offer me lower productivity for my particular type work. And for a simple reason - all the packages that I need have pretty much ancient versions in fink. And 'recompile yourself' is a step backwards from Linux, where the distros provide the last versions (or very close to) by default.

      Let's start with a fact that moving a window on XP leaves annoying flicker on the background while the "damaged" windows redraw themselves, while on MacOSX the movement is perfectly smooth.

      huh? is that what you do on your computer, move windows around? Try actually using the program you launched sometimes, you'll notice that it's *useful* (as opposed to 'just pretty') when you pay attention to the *content* of the window instead of wiggling it around. Perhaps then you'll discover things that actually matter to use in your arguments.

      --
      Warning: Excessive consumption to eye candy may cause diabetes mellitus.

    5. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 1

      Oh no, I can attest to this on three separate cards, all running the very latest drivers. Windows drag smoothly, but will often leave pixel lines that go away on redraw. The three cards: Intel 82855 64M, w/ driver PV14.18 on a Pentium M 1.6GHz, ATI Radeon 9800 PRO 256M, w/ driver 11.4 on a Celeron D 2.4 GHz, and ATI Mobility Radeon X700 128M, w/ driver 8.172 on a Pentium M 1.86GHz.

    6. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by KarmaMB84 · · Score: 1

      Are we talking about tearing here? Windows doesn't support VSync on the desktop yet AFAIK. That is supposed to be coming in LongVista or whatever it's called now.

    7. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by iamacat · · Score: 1

      And for a simple reason - all the packages that I need have pretty much ancient versions in fink. And 'recompile yourself' is a step backwards from Linux, where the distros provide the last versions (or very close to) by default.

      Well, if you use Linux I assume you like open source. Practice what you preach and contribute updated packages to fink. How do you think they got into Linux distros?

      huh? is that what you do on your computer, move windows around? Try actually using the program you launched sometimes, you'll notice that it's *useful* (as opposed to 'just pretty') when you pay attention to the *content* of the window instead of wiggling it around. Perhaps then you'll discover things that actually matter to use in your arguments.

      If you interviewed a C programmer who couldn't use printf, would you waste your time finding out what else he/she knows? If "Windows" OS can not move a Window smoothly on a dual P4 with the latest graphics card... well! In any case, it's pretty difficult to use "the program you launched" on your favorite OS. How the heck do I do copy and paste? Ctrl-V? Shift-Ins? Esc-W? Clicking left and right mouse buttons at the same time? There are two separate selections, not every program supports both and everyone has their own keyboard shortcuts. I use Gimp on OSX sometimes for philosophical reasons (I think Adobe should provide a reasonably priced version of Photoshop for casual users rather than relying on piracy to maintain their market share) and boy it's ugly!

    8. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by iamacat · · Score: 1

      Nope, just a simple fact that Windows doesn't save content of obscured windows no matter how much RAM/VRAM you have. If you move something, EVERY background program has to process WM_PAINT and redraw itself before the screen looks "clean" again. This is every time you move the window by another pixel! MS own software, such as Explorer, Word and Visual Studio takes extraordinary time to redraw. I think Explorer actually starts reading each icon from a separate file on disk! I don't what to say when a company has $40B or whatever in cash and won't pay a few programmers to fix such simple glitches.

    9. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Could you list a few reasons? It's hard to believe you otherwise.

    10. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, if you use Linux I assume you like open source. Practice what you preach and contribute updated packages to fink.

      Sorry, doesn't work this way. I have a limited amount of time and as such I'd rather contribute to the repo of the distro that I'm actually using. In case you missed my point, *I have a functional solution right now and it's NOT OSX* and I'd much rather help improve on that, thank you very much. I apologize if this might come as a shock to you.

      In any case, it's pretty difficult to use "the program you launched" on your favorite OS. How the heck do I do copy and paste? Ctrl-V? Shift-Ins? Esc-W? Clicking left and right mouse buttons at the same time? There are two separate selections, not every program supports both and everyone has their own keyboard shortcuts. I use Gimp on OSX sometimes for philosophical reasons (I think Adobe should provide a reasonably priced version of Photoshop for casual users rather than relying on piracy to maintain their market share) and boy it's ugly!

      wow, you really don't know how to make an *original* argument, do you? Nevermind a valid one. Let me help you here. Copy/paste? any reasonably recent app uses PRIMARY for select/paste and CLIPBOARD for explicit copy/cut/paste. Very old apps go PRIMARY-only, but 1. if you have to use one, you know how it wants to work and 2. if you want to bring up old stuff, you'll find inconsistencies in EVERY OS. Plus, you can use several programs to synchronize the 2 selections if that's too difficult for you. Besides, a little thinking never hurt anyone, but you are free to argue that last part. As to the GIMP part - eat your own dog food, will you? Contribute a reskin - or use GIMPshop - or just pony up for Photoshop and be done with it[*]. Since you brought it up, do you think people doing pro work who use Cinepaint or Blender chose them for their pretty UI? anyway, the only way I can think of your GIMP jab as relevant is as another example of your confusing appearance with functionality (Linux must be hard to use 'cos GIMP is sooo ugly on OSX lol!!11!). If you want to argue against GIMP, there are several missing functions w.r.t. Photoshop to make a good point, but UI complaints just label you as a novice user with an agenda. Grow up.

      Anyway, in case you lost focus of the main point - for me, my Linux machines *just work for me* for any daily chore, while the occasional interactions with OSX go significantly less efficient (2 simple examples to qualify that: ancient bash version with funny quirks and ancient version of gnuplot that lacks basic stuff like tab completion or command history across sessions). Following your argument, I should start screaming bloody murder, OSX is broken, hard to use and so on. Instead, I'll just say OSX does not quite cut it *for my work* compared to what I use and refrain to make blanket statements like 'OSX is the b3st' or 'teh suck'. Avoiding the "if all you have is a hammer, every problem around you begins to look like a nail" mentality makes life more fun, try it sometimes.

      [*] I believe the 'reasonably priced version for casual users' you're looking for is Photoshop Elements, unless you expect a cheaper version for non-pro users with all the pro features, in which case you need to work on getting your feet back on the ground and your head out of the clouds.

      --
      Warning: Excessive consumption to eye candy may cause diabetes mellitus.

    11. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by mdwh2 · · Score: 1

      On the other hand, everyone who used OSX for a month will never go back to Windows.

      Even if this true, this is a case that people only decide to use it after much research and consideration. You can't try out OSX for a month, you have to buy a new machine, and people tend not to spend hundreds on a new machine just to go back to their old machine.

      Let's start with a fact that moving a window on XP leaves annoying flicker on the background while the "damaged" windows redraw themselves, while on MacOSX the movement is perfectly smooth.

      Doesn't happen on any Windows machine I've used.

      You are correct that Windows tells applications to repaint rather than remembering the contents by default. Whatever the pros and cons of each method, OS X is far from the only platform which saves the window contents - for example, AmigaOS did this years ago, so it's hardly new functionality from OS X.

    12. Re:Tiger vs Firefox by iamacat · · Score: 1

      All right, I admit that my main reason to prefer MacOSX over Linux is clean, consistent UI rather than theoretically available functionality. I have 15 years of programming experience on many platforms, but I have no desire to use command line scripts for managing my music and photos or remember 5 versions for copy and paste keyboard shortcuts. I will indeed put up or contribute to Gimp because is free, but there is no way I am paying for it, or other unprofessional-looking UI like Windows or Redhat. I will, however pay for software with good UI. Unfortunately Photoshop Elements is not meant for creating icons, which is the only area of my image processing needs not met by iPhoto.

      I am glad that you can look past superficial issues and appreciate a program for it's inner beauty. Your dating life must be much easier than mine. (Imagining my date -> woman == Gimp -> MacOSX app) Shudder!

  40. This is a joke, rite? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Have you grown weary of the constant vulnerabilities and patches? Do you scratch your head at sudden program lockups and crashes?

    Firefox has these problems too. Sure, they're not as bad but they're still pretty ridiculous, especially in comparison with other browsers like Opera, which by Open Source logic, shouldn't be as good because of the closed source model it uses.

    Don't get me wrong, I like FF for a variety of reasons over other browsers. However, the fact that its eating 300 megs of ram with only this window/tab open (the slashdot reply box) tells of much room for improvement. And sometimes the browser just crashes without warning.

    1. Re:This is a joke, rite? by setagllib · · Score: 1

      The basic problem is that most people leave on memory caching, which is a default that is not changable other than hand-hacking the config or accessing about:config

      This has a few tangible consequences. Firstly, memory consumption grows for everything you download. It's kept in memory. And on disk. Defeating the point of both at the same time. This is stupid, but that's Mozilla.org for you, worst fucking coders to ever be recognized as a high-ranking.

      Secondly, scalability drops. I hope they're using something sensible like a hash table, but chances are, no they're not.

      Lastly (that I can care about), it will eventually run out of memory and freak out. This is rare because any extension at all has a high chance of crashing it, and also its own JavaScript interpreter, and probably a dozen other things.

      It is a steaming pile of shit that I can't believe ranks higher than Tiger (a surprisingly good system I've never used but hear good things about, basically a FreeBSD for suckers^Wartists) and countless other GOOD products.

      The security vulnerability list is fantastically long. And for each minor update (containing a few patches), you have to download the entire tree again. It's not as bad on binary-based package managers of course. It's not hard to write secure code. Thinking before you act helps.

      #1 thing I hate about Firefox more than any other of its problems: it assigns favicons to bookmarks based on the time frame in which they were downloaded, not their source. So if you are browsing multiple sites in parallel or even close enough in time, and bookmark them, you have a disturbingly high chance of your bookmarks having favicons from other sites entirely, and others having none at all. This is fucking pathetic and I can't believe that, with problems like this, the rest of the browser works at all.

      On that note, there was that laughable 'crypto' of adding a number to every byte of a 'secure' config file which really nailed the coffin as far as good ideas are concerned.

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    2. Re:This is a joke, rite? by jo42 · · Score: 1
      I don't get it either...

      I finally got around to downloading and installing Firefox 1.5.

      Three hangs, two outright crashes and one system reboot to get it going again, in less that a couple of hours, and it gets best product of 2005? And this is on a machine which had WinXP freshly installed along with Sun's JRE 1.5.0_05.

      Fark me.

  41. I know nobody cares... by koonat · · Score: 0

    I really disagree with firefox being the best product of 2005.

    Firefox is what I would recommend to anyone needing a web browser, but it's still got tons of problems. It's a hog, a complete hog. Of course there are plenty of factors to blame - but it doesn't remove the problem.

    Yes, internet explorer sucks. It sucks that the browser market has so few reasonable players. It sucks that so many popular websites refuse to evolve.

    Firefox is a glass of stinky water in a huge desert.

    --
    Double-Click here for instant highlight.
    1. Re:I know nobody cares... by oztiks · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Firefox is what I would recommend to anyone needing a web browser, but it's still got tons of problems. It's a hog, a complete hog. Of course there are plenty of factors to blame - but it doesn't remove the problem.

      Have you seen 1.5? Allot smoother to operate than previous versions i have to say..

    2. Re:I know nobody cares... by Anonimouse · · Score: 1

      You've got to be joking right?
      Have you seen how much memory it uses?
      Just as a challenge do this.
      Get a fresh installation of FF then go to https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/showlist.php ?application=firefox&numpg=1000&category=All
      to return ALL the extensions for firefox.
      Now have a look at how much memory it takes. Its about 76Mb on my computer. Now do the same in Opera. Its about 30Mb.
      Notice also how even if you close the page on FF the memory is not freed up (memory leak)
      Tell me with a straight face that this is a smooth product and a worthy award winner.....

    3. Re:I know nobody cares... by oztiks · · Score: 1

      I was mearly stating since i switched from the older versions it perfoms allot quicker on my pc, I cant really disagree with the fact that it eats memory though .. I was checking it on my process list it uses about 41232 RSS and for VSZ its above 61000

      Tell me with a straight face that this is a smooth product and a worthy award winner.....

      Thats a bit harsh though even if it does eat a fair wack of memory its still a good program and a better alternative than IE (though i dont know why i'd bother to try and get it working under wine :P). As for opera, have it, detest it, regret installing it and i'd pefer to use lynx ..

    4. Re:I know nobody cares... by weiran · · Score: 1
      Thats a bit harsh though even if it does eat a fair wack of memory its still a good program and a better alternative than IE
      Very true, but I did open a few too many tabs the other day (about 20) and it was using well over 100MB of memory, even after I closed all but two of them and went on browsing with just a few tabs open. To me, Opera just seems far more responsive, but there are a few quirks you have to get used to. It's the same with switching from any browser to another.
    5. Re:I know nobody cares... by bunratty · · Score: 1
      Notice also how even if you close the page on FF the memory is not freed up (memory leak)
      Almost certainly the memory is freed up to be reused in Firefox, just not returned to the operating system. This is normal memory behavior and not a memory leak. If you kept doing a sequence of steps over and over, and memory kept climbing higher and higher without limit, that would indicate that memory is not being freed for internal reuse, and that would be a memory leak.
      --
      What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
    6. Re:I know nobody cares... by Anonimouse · · Score: 1

      And eerr. Yes, that's exactly what happens. Just read the other threads if you don't believe me. If the app keeps sucking up memory without returning it to the OS then that *is* a memory leak. And no, that is *NOT* normal memory behaviour.

  42. My endorsement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I recommend Media Player Classic.

    It's probably the best all-around media player available on Windows.

    iTunes is probably good for buying music. For playing music, I find it about as bloated and awkward as Windows Media Player 10.

    1. Re:My endorsement by ozmanjusri · · Score: 1

      Tunes is probably good for buying music. For playing music, I find it about as bloated and awkward as Windows Media Player 10.

      Yeah, I tried iTunes for a while, but didn't didn't really get into the way it worked. QCD is the one I keep going back to; http://www.quinnware.com/.
      It feels like the Firefox of media players - the basic player is fairly lean (2.5 megs download) and you can add plugins for just about everything.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
    2. Re:My endorsement by MooUK · · Score: 1

      For me, Media Player Classic for video and for audio oddments (single downloaded files that I don't intend to keep, etc). For music, foobar2000.

  43. The list seems rather arbitrary by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Funny

    I could be wrong, but I think they just took a top 10 list and padded it with 90 sponsored links.

    1. Re:The list seems rather arbitrary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Welcome to the modern magazine.

      20% content 80% ads, especially between the pages of articles.

  44. Are you on drugs!!? by KingSkippus · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've never had a problem with Gmail! I have no viruses in my inbox (and they now offer free virus scanning of your e-mail). I don't know what the hell you're talking about with the "buggy inbox" comment. It's always worked like a charm—no, make that better than a stupid old charm—for me on Firefox, IE, and Opera.

    I was very skeptical of Gmail when a buddy sent me an invite way back when. I thought, "I have to read ads to see my e-mail? Forget it," and almost deleted the invitation. I went ahead and registered for an account, though, thinking that I could at least send files to myself and use it as an online repository. In no time, I had registered another "real" account that I use for all of my e-mail. I'm even a site admin, and I have all of my e-mail from the site forwarded to a Gmail account that I use because I like the client and the interface better than any POP client I've run across. (Yes, even Thunderbird.) If they'll just come out with Google Calendar, I'll probably even dump my work e-mail account!

    Being a rather proud person, I hate to admit I'm wrong about something, but I was definitely wrong about that, and I'm glad I signed up. I highly recommend to everyone I know that they get a Gmail account, and it definitely earns that number two spot on that list.

    1. Re:Are you on drugs!!? by sgent · · Score: 1

      I absolutely agree. Gmail has one feature that IMHO is killer -- its ability to create and store email "coversations". No more reading through old text unless I want to. No more wondering what the hell I wrote on the 3rd round reply. I haven't found that feature in any other mail program (although I've seen some attempts at it, nothing is as good). Also, the search functions in Gmail are much better than Outlook at least.

    2. Re:Are you on drugs!!? by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 1
      I have no viruses in my inbox (and they now offer free virus scanning of your e-mail).

      I don't see why Slashdot is lauding Google for this. In this day and age, even in "beta" (ha), for it to even have been launched without virus protection is nigh unforgivable.

    3. Re:Are you on drugs!!? by ArcticFlood · · Score: 1

      Not everyone needs virus scanning. Even if you're on Windows, if you don't use IE you can often avoid it by being smart and not running random files through email.

      --
      This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
    4. Re:Are you on drugs!!? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In your email you read your mail without ads.
      In Google email ads read your mail wihtout YOU!

  45. No Competition = No Innovation by serutan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Are you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?

    Some people would label that statement hollow cynicism. But in fact, a Microsoft manager told me straight out when IE 6 was about to be released that it wasn't really going to have any new features, because with Netscape pretty much dead there wasn't much point in developing IE anymore.

    Microsoft had already introduced XmlHttpRequest as an ActiveX object with IE5. They had all the pieces in place back then to promote the off-channel request technique and give it a nifty name like "AJAX." Web apps could have been 5 years ahead of where they are today, and MS would have had a huge head start instead of now scrambling to catch up with Google.

    1. Re:No Competition = No Innovation by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 1
      They used it to create one of the first 'real' dynamic web applications (in the asynchronous sense), in fact, it was the reason it was created, IIRC: OWA - Outlook Web Access. The fact that people didn't really explore it for a few years isn't really their fault.

      When I want to cringe, I think of IE 4 and "Channels".

    2. Re:No Competition = No Innovation by smiffy1976 · · Score: 1

      'Channels' and 'Active Desktop' - the first features to disable on a fresh Windows install. Seriously though, how many 'features' do you need to disable to get a workable Windows desktop on a new install? At least you can use Group Policy Editor to turn off most of the crap, but it's the devil's own work hunting through that particular morass of options!

    3. Re:No Competition = No Innovation by jbolden · · Score: 1

      Channels made sense for users who had infrequent but good internet access. For example people on laptops. I used to use them heavily with my palm pilot (though this wasn't IE's implementation).

  46. Yargen! by dauthur · · Score: 1

    I hope Opera doesn't try to steal this like they did a few years ago.

    On the other hand, Opera is getting a little more slick when it comes to speed. I notice a Hell of a large difference when using Opera instead of Firefox, but Firefox doesn't cache things like Opera does.

    On some other hand elsewhere, Gmail getting second is no surprize, though I bet they're going to sink like a Greek airliner when they lose cabin pressure over the new mandatory virus scan. Hopefully Google will think of something fast.

  47. Sluggish, Memory Hog.... by Albert71292 · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    If you like a browser that sucks memory, and slow to load pages, then Firefox is the browser for you... if you like fast browsing, with less of a "footprint" on your hard drive, then Opera is the browser for you :-)

    --
    "A Bird In The Hand Will Poop On Your Wrist"-Benny Hill,1982
  48. Firefox 1.5 supports Pango with Cairo, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    so that I can see Chinese in bold style now, which I have been waiting since I first use Linux:

    http://wangxiaohu.org/#post-64

    1. Re:Firefox 1.5 supports Pango with Cairo, by mixmasta · · Score: 1

      cool.

      --
      #6495ED - cornflower blue
  49. Read the headline by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 1
    It says best product, NOT best selling product. If you ever worked with OS/2 (read lucky to have the right expensive hardware) then you would have found it a good product for business uses. Certainly an awfull lot better then the crashfest that was windows 95 let alone Windows NT 4.0 desktop.

    No OS/2 was the typical case where MS somehow manages to sell the entire wold on an inferior product. Don't ask me how they manage it time and time again, if I knew I would have Bill Gates billions in stead of Bill.

    Same can really be said about Firefox, although I prefer Opera (it is pure tabbed browsing and doesn't constantly forget that and open new windows instead except for help screens), good product but loosing in market share to the totally inferior IE.

    Live ain't fair.

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

    1. Re:Read the headline by yoyhed · · Score: 1
      In Firefox's Options, under the Tabs section, there's 2 options to fix your problem:

      Open links from other applications in: *A new tab in the most recent window
      Force links that open new windows to open in: *A new tab

      I do like Opera though, it's faster with all the same features. But I still use Firefox for one reason: you can middle-click links in the bookmarks toolbar to open them in a new tab (in Opera this only works on links in web pages).

      --
      WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
    2. Re:Read the headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, first you point out that OS/2 needed the "right expensive hardware", and then you're bewildered about how Windows managed to outsell it? Comeon, you've had 10 years to think about it, it's not a big mystery why OS/2 failed.

    3. Re:Read the headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, and when Windows 95 came out, it forced TONS of people to upgrade... Many spent over a thousand dollars or more to upgrade their already $1800+ dollar computers... Just to run a goddamned OS! OS/2 ran just fine on my system at the time, on the other hand.

    4. Re:Read the headline by TriezGamer · · Score: 1

      In Opera, you can use the slide-out tray on the left and middle-click your bookmarks there for the same effect -- I find it more convenient than using the menus anyway. Put the links in a folder and you can middle-click the folder to open them all at once -- each one in it's own tab. You can also slide the bar in and out with F4, so it doesn't stay in your way. You can also disable the ability to slide it in and out by clicking on it if you find yourself accidentally doing so.

    5. Re:Read the headline by mdwh2 · · Score: 1

      But I still use Firefox for one reason: you can middle-click links in the bookmarks toolbar to open them in a new tab (in Opera this only works on links in web pages).

      Not quite as convenient, but note that you can shift-click bookmarks in Opera to open them in a new tab.

    6. Re:Read the headline by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      Umm, same hardware that NT boxes came with. From some amazing coincidence, OS/2 and NT ran on most of the same hardware.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  50. You mean like opera does by default? by SmallFurryCreature · · Score: 3, Informative
    It sure is handy even if it leads to me currently having an embarrising amount of tabs.

    It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.

    Opera on Linux went through a bit of problems at first but the crashes didn't matter, just restart and continue were you left off.

    If only MS had at any point in its history realized that people are not upset about crashes, they are upset about lost work, they would not now be ..... eh top IT company with a strangle hold on the desktop, office software and internet browser market......

    Where was I going with this?

    --

    MMO Quests are like orgasms:

    You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.

    1. Re:You mean like opera does by default? by darkmeridian · · Score: 1

      The crashes when you find the porn may be exploits posted on the sites meant to exploit IE flaws. The porn really isn't free; someone's trying to build a botnet. At times, Firefox will not suffer from the exploit per se, but it will crash. For an example, look at astalavista.box.sk. It gives out warez, sure, but it also tries to infect your computer with spyware.

      --
      A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
    2. Re:You mean like opera does by default? by patio11 · · Score: 1
      It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.

      A pity IE has no feature which will show you the history of sites visited today. Then you could just press some key combination (maybe Ctrl-H to make it easy to remember, we're talking about IE users after all), press the button for "sites visited today", and just pick the one you wanted with a single click. Maybe even make it searchable.

    3. Re:You mean like opera does by default? by Kjella · · Score: 1

      It is a live saver however because the one thing that killed windows/IE for me years ago was that just as you found the site with the real free porn, eh I mean real usefull bit of info IE or windows or both crashed forcing you to start searching from the start again.

      Of course, that didn't have anything to do with the porn sites all trying to exploit the latest crash/hack/insert bookmark/take over homepage/install ad/spy/malware bug in IE/Windows, particularly the "free" ones. There are *still* no free lunches.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:You mean like opera does by default? by whitehatlurker · · Score: 1
      Cool. I didn't know that ctrl-H hides Opera. That's too freaky. Thanks.

      Anyway, sessions are not history. Sessions can have history, which is nice. But the idea is that I can have a group of windows all come up just the way they were when I left them.

      They are two different features, both of which are very useful, and IMHO should be in every browser, especially sessions in browsers that crash a lot.

      Try them out.

      --
      .. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
  51. Odd by halleluja · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How can you rate Firefox no #1 and Google (search engine) at #16 ?? Wikipedia is certainly useful..

  52. Firefox vs IE... by RoadDogTy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I agree that it's valid to criticise IE for a lull in development once they won the browser war and ousted Netscape. I also think the competition between Firefox and IE is ultimately great for the consumer, since it has sparked a new emphasis in feature development for all the major browsers. This article seems to take it to an unwarranted extreme however, as the latest IE (particularly through SP2 and the optional MSN Toolbar) developments have added a lot in terms of security, for example the new anti-phishing filter. Also, Firefox has more than its share of critical vulnerabilities listed on Secunia, including more than a few that were as big of a deal as the recent IE exploit.

  53. oo.org by eneville · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What? Did these guys not hear about openoffice? How can media player be rated > oo.org!!!!

    1. Re:oo.org by elasticwings · · Score: 1

      Oddly enough, anymore I prefer mplayer under Linux to WMP on Windows. It's finally getting easier to get all the codecs for that application than it is for WMP. http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

    2. Re:oo.org by eneville · · Score: 1

      I've heard bad things about mplayer, and that it's future is limited to it not being designed in modules, basically xine has a brigter future becuase of better design. How true that is, I don't know. If you havn't already, give xine a go.

    3. Re:oo.org by ivoras · · Score: 1
      Did you ever use OOo? If yes, and you have a grain of objectivity in you, you'll know.

      As one friend of mine said: We ("the geeky") use OOo only because there's nothing better out there that will run on Linux (and similar systems). The thing is: it's buggy, it's bloated and compared to some other commercial software, it's not very feature-rich. The user interface is tolerable. (My authority to make this claims comes from using it exclusively as an office-application-set for two years, and I'm a demanding user :) OOo 2 has bugs that 1.1 didn't have.)

      It's great that it exists, but it's just not as good as Firefox and others on the list, even though they also contain nasty known bugs.

      --
      -- Sig down
    4. Re:oo.org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So O.o is bloaty, but MS office isn't?
      You need to redefine the term for me I think....

    5. Re:oo.org by eneville · · Score: 1

      Did you ever use OOo? If yes, and you have a grain of objectivity in you, you'll know.

      As one friend of mine said: We ("the geeky") use OOo only because there's nothing better out there that will run on Linux (and similar systems). The thing is: it's buggy, it's bloated and compared to some other commercial software, it's not very feature-rich. The user interface is tolerable. (My authority to make this claims comes from using it exclusively as an office-application-set for two years, and I'm a demanding user :) OOo 2 has bugs that 1.1 didn't have.)

      It's great that it exists, but it's just not as good as Firefox and others on the list, even though they also contain nasty known bugs.

      That just doesn't make any sense, just because you have an opinnion of OO does not give you authority to make that judgement. I too have used OO, I was using StarOffice back in 1998. It wasn't bad then, and as time has passed I've seen nothing but improvement in this software. It has far less bugs than MS Office, which I do not consider an application suitable for Office work on anything but the latest hardware as it continues to bloat yeilding increased boot latency.

      Besides, those who are truely geeky and wise use latex, or troff.

    6. Re:oo.org by ivoras · · Score: 1

      No, it's not that - my "problem" (maybe "problem" is too harsh a word) is that it's almost as bloated. For example, its startup time is the same or worse. And at ~200MB on drive (windows version) excluding JRE it's not exactly smallish.

      --
      -- Sig down
    7. Re:oo.org by ivoras · · Score: 1
      That just doesn't make any sense, just because you have an opinnion of OO does not give you authority to make that judgement.
      I can state my opinion, can I? :) What I said was probably a bit harsh but it's the truth.

      Latex and troff are nice and good, but NOT usable in common office environment - you can't just re-educate users to, instead of using WYSIWYG tools, start typing some "weird" markup :) And for the truly geeky, even they (or "we") often just don't want to mess with it all.

      --
      -- Sig down
  54. Definitely a deserving #1 by xot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think FF definitely deserves the #1 slot.A lot of people would argue that IE runs better or Opera is a better browser.Yes , Firefox crashes.Yes, it has bugs.Yes, it sometimes uses huge amounts of memory.BUT so does every other peice of software ever written.It just doesnt have to do with the firefox itself but also the user environment like the operating system,the kind of hardware,buggy systems themselves etc.These are not ALWAYS the reasons for crashes and slowdowns but most of the time they are.

    And I think what most people miss while comparing Firefox to Opera or IE is that Firefox is a much younger project than the others.Opera has been around for a number of years and has only just started to add better features.IE has always been around since there have been webbrowsers..So if you equate the amount of time these products have been in the market and the innovation/features they have been able to produce...Firefox wins hands down.Given a little time more, I dont think there will be any comparison to it.
    All this without considering the financial aspects of software development(IE & Opera are commericial FOR PROFIT projects).

    --
    Lord of the Binges.
    1. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anyletter · · Score: 0

      Firefox is a young product as long as you don't include Mozilla or SeaMonkey. 5 years of development and we're just now seeing 1.5? Aaaand it isn't even as polished as it ought to be? What a waste of time. If you think FF is ever going to catch up with Opera at this rate, then I've got some KMart stock I'd like to sell you. KMart's a new company on the retail scene and its market share is exploding. "For Profit" software companies (especially in lieu of Opera's business model) means you get the best and most efficient employees. Something Firefox would never have if it weren't for Fortune 500 companies endorsing it left and right. I'd rather my money go to Opera where they're required to disclose their expenses/profit/et. al. than Firefox. Who knows where that money is going. Also, do you really, honestly, consider IE a "for profit" program. When is the last time you heard someone say, "Damn, that IE, I need it so bad so I guess it's time to drop $200 on Windows."? Sure, it may not be free, but it also isn't "for profit". I think, maybe, you need to pull that head of yours (and you do sound reasonable enough) out of your ass. Please!

    2. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "[i]Yes , Firefox crashes.Yes, it has bugs.Yes, it sometimes uses huge amounts of memory.[/i]"

      Great! So this is the 'killer' open source desktop app, and yet it has all these problems? Not a great advertisement for Free Software, is it? Telling 'M$ losers' how their software is 'bloated and buggy', and then we all sing the praises of Firefox which has the same problems -- que?

      Oh, and the 'Firefox is young' argument is comical. Gecko and XUL, the core, has been in development for over FIVE YEARS. 95% of the code is what we'd call 'Mozilla', so it's only the licks of paint that are new.

    3. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "All this without considering the financial aspects of software development(IE & Opera are commericial FOR PROFIT projects)."

      So ?
      Is making profit wrong ?

    4. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Opera has been around for a number of years and has only just started to add better features

      What the hell?! Firefox fanboy revisionism at work?

    5. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Rits · · Score: 2, Insightful
      "Opera has been around for a number of years and has only just started to add better features."


      Why does this post get marked as 'interesting'? There's no denying that Firefox' extension system is doing wonders for keeping the browser lean and still offering lots of (potential) functionality. But when manu of the extensions you can download are available by default in Opera (often Opera is the inspiration for the extension to begin with) it is hard to maintain that Opera didn't innovate in the past decade. It has pioneered the MDI browsing experience, spearheaded proper CSS implementation, and generally been focused on offering users control over their browsing experience. It is still the only browser where you can disable JavaScript with a simple shortcut. Etc.

      Recently Opera has also focused on making all this power more accessible for everyone, and dropped the price tag and ads. You can attribute that to the power of real competition offered by Firefox if you like. But if Opera didn't have 'better features' in all these years, it wouldn't have been around for all this time.
      --
      If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
    6. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Kjella · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Opera has been around for a number of years and has only just started to add better features.

      HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA. And this at +5? Come on guys, this deserves a -1, Troll. Seriously. Why do you think people have preferred adware or paying for Opera over sticking with IE? Why do you think Opera has survive the dark ages when IE was at 95% and lots of sites were IE-specific? Opera has been providing a much better browser than IE for years. Firefox has copied all the good stuff Opera has innovated and managed to bring it to a much wider market because they're free as in beer and in speech, but they were in no way first. That is revisionist history at best.

      I admit Opera is feeling the pressure (it's not without reason they started giving away the browser with no ads recently), but give me a break. If you want a simple install (doubleclick-next-next-next-finish) but still powerful browser, Opera is still far superior to Firefox. What Firefox has brought to the table is one extremely moddable browser for powerusers (and overmodders, which are like the people who spend weeks styling their cars and hours driving it), and that is about on par with Opera for the common user (not that the common user would care much about browsers at all if IE cleaned up their security holes).

      The biggest thing Firefox did, which Opera is profiting just as much from, is that more and more sites are becoming specs-compliant. Running Opera has become a very pleasurable experience, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone. That's also why I don't care much about converting Firefox users, because their marketshare doesn't inhibit my ability to use Opera at all. Every user not using IE is a win for Opera in my opinion (Opera the company may disagree). I think that if Firefox can win the market, there is room for more Opera users, not less.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    7. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by RebelFX · · Score: 1

      FF deserves to be the number 1 despite having some issues. Developers fix quickly of any new bug, therefore it's the safest browser around. Furthermore, unlike Opera or IE, it's an open source project, meaning anyone can improve the browser.

      After testing different web browsers, I can assure I waon't switch to nay other browser. Period.

    8. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Go back to your phpBB forum, fuckwad.

    9. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Opera are commericial FOR PROFIT projects" - by xot (663131) on Saturday December 03, @04:46AM

      Newsflash - Opera 8.5x is FREE.

      "Firefox is a much younger project than the others" - by xot (663131) on Saturday December 03, @04:46AM

      Oh, really? Have you ever heard of FireBird, or Phoenix?? They are the 'progenitors' of FireFox!

      Also, How about Netscape (one of the world's OLDEST browsers)?? Because that's where FireFox's technology & heritage spring from...

      Years of it, & as old as Opera is iirc, if not older considering it is a Netscape spin-off.

      (IE, &/or Netscape BOTH "bit off of" Mosaic as well, incidentally!)

      "Firefox wins hands down" - by xot (663131) on Saturday December 03, @04:46AM

      Does it? Take a read here:

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

      (As you can see, clearly, Opera definitely won more tests of browser speed than IE &/or FireFox (& it's ancestors/cousins) did in that test - I challenge you to find another OR more recent test that is as comprehensive, because I honestly would like to see/find yet another of these for my bookmarks - thanks!)

      * :)

      (Also - I had to clear the air of the "F.U.D." is all, & inform you with current info. so your posts are more accurate as well, not to "bust" on you (I don't even know or have anything against you you so there's no point in that imo) & just a wee bit of history as to the roots of all of these modern web-browsers)

      APK

    10. Re:Definitely a deserving #1 by Splintax · · Score: 1
      And I think what most people miss while comparing Firefox to Opera or IE is that Firefox is a much younger project than the others.Opera has been around for a number of years

      Even if your comment about Opera having "been around longer" was valid, you're ignoring the fact that just because a browser is developing faster than another (although I disagree with that too), that doesn't make it any better at all. "Opera is better, but hey, at the rate it's going at now, Firefox will be just as good, therefore Firefox is better!"

  55. Google's response by jesser · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From 7 things the Gmail Team is thankful for this year:
    * Winning the "PC World World Class Award" for being #2 on the list of The 100 Best Products of 2005. (We don't mind being #2, especially to Firefox. Plus, it gives us more to work for.)
    (The list appeared on the main page of mail.google.com on Thanksgiving 2005.)
    --
    The shareholder is always right.
    1. Re:Google's response by Jugalator · · Score: 1

      * Winning the "PC World World Class Award" for being #2 on the list of The 100 Best Products of 2005. (We don't mind being #2, especially to Firefox. Plus, it gives us more to work for.)

      Based on opinions and webmail competition in July 2004.

      Not that it may have changed for Gmail in particular, but with the quickly evolving web service market, this article should be taken with a huge grain of salt. There are even factual inaccuracies in the list due to how some products have evolved, and their ratings have been made by taking these inaccuracies into account... Ouch

      --
      Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  56. Internet Explorer FUD by PhotoBoy · · Score: 0

    I love Firefox and it's all I use to browse the web thanks to its extensions, but I think there's more criticism of IE than it fully deserves. Get rid of the extensions in Firefox and I don't believe it's substantially better or worse than IE. They both have most of the features I would want in a browser. Aside from tabs, it's only when you start augmenting Firefox with extensions that it becomes head and shoulders better than IE.

    The article talks about scratching "your head at sudden program lockups and crashes", I've found both browsers occasionally crash, in fact I would say IE is marginally more stable than Firefox, although FF is catching up again since 1.07. And I've had the theme in Firefox go odd on a number of occasions making Firefox unusable even in safe mode. I was glad to have IE around then.

    The only real criticism of IE is the patching, but I'm not convinced Firefox is any more secure. It's just that IE has the biggest market share and therefore is targeted the most. Firefox has had its fair share of security flaws discovered, if it were at 85%-ish market share, would it be in a constant state of patching too? Not that this excuses MS for having security holes, but if Firefox gets a really good sized share of the market will it be any safer?

    This isn't some sort of pro-MS, anti-Firefox rant, as I genuinely prefer Firefox, but I think many of the criticisms of IE are just things people repeat without actually bothering to decide if they are true.

  57. Re:awww wtf by peterpi · · Score: 1

    Hehehe. That brought a chuckle to my morning, thankyou :)

  58. Lots of tabs? Try foXpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm willing to bet that foXpose is a handy companion if you find yourself having lots of tabs open. The name pretty much speaks for itself. And if not, the screenshot certainly does.

    Just installed this yesterday, so I can't comment on bugs or how useful it really is, but it seems neat.

  59. A short rant. by MoogMan · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I'm sorry to say that Firefox isn't really all that good. I started using it years back (firebird 0.8), and thought it was great - much better than IE, and much better than Galeon at the time. Mozilla was too sluggish for me, so I thought Firefox was The Answer(tm).

    Five years or so down the line, I've grown to almost hate it. It's still the memory hog it once was. It basically freezes up on pages that display lots of images/flash, which really is unacceptable.

    So I've moved back to Opera (again!). My vote for best product of the year would have to be Opera. They've become free (as in beer, not speech), which I think is awesome. They've also gone to the effort of making things easy for most standard Linux distros.

    So until I start hearing good news about Firefox speed and memory improvements, I'll be sticking with Opera thank you.

    Sorry for the rant, but I feel it was necessary.</rant>

    1. Re:A short rant. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have to totally agree! Opera totally blows away Firefox. Everytime I stop using it and become a FireFox zombie to fall inline with the rest of the /. crowd, I am brought back to consciousness as to why I use Opera in the first place. It is blazingly fast on all platforms, I love it's skinning and the fact that it REALLY shows non-compliant web pages (visit Centos's website and see how it doesn't work with opera on the navigation at the top).

      I now know that if a site works in opera, it works for all browsers.

      Thank you Dr "O"!!!

      You can now move along/nothing to see here...

    2. Re:A short rant. by chrisgeleven · · Score: 1

      Pretty hard to use Firefox for 5 years since Phoenix 0.1 (the first release of what became Firefox) didn't come out until September 23rd, 2002.

      1.5 definitely has speed improvements. I don't notice the memory issues anymore and it doesn't bother me.

  60. number 88 by zogger · · Score: 1

    Opera number 88 in the list

  61. Rubbish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What a load of shit. If it was the most overrated product of 2005 then I could understand Firefox coming first.

  62. Firefox deserves #1? by hkmwbz · · Score: 2, Informative
    Maybe, but your post certainly doesn't support that remark.
    "Yes, it has bugs.Yes, it sometimes uses huge amounts of memory.BUT so does every other peice of software ever written."
    So because other programs are buggy that excuses Firefox's bugginess, and it deserves to be #1 even if it is just as bad as other programs when it comes to crashing and gobbling up memory? Strange logic.
    "And I think what most people miss while comparing Firefox to Opera or IE is that Firefox is a much younger project than the others."
    It is you who are missing the point, actually. Firefox as project is relatively young, but it is built on years old technology. It is the true successor of Netscape. In fact, it is based on the open sourced next generation Netscape code.

    As a program, Firefox is built on mature technology, and it's had things go smoothly because older browsers have tried and failed various approaches, and therefore Firefox could easily learn from these mistakes and avoid them.

    "Opera has been around for a number of years and has only just started to add better features."
    You have got to be kidding me!

    If you look at the changelog for Firefox 1.5, guess which browser had most of those features first? Opera.

    Also, Opera was one of the first (if not the first) browser with MDI. Popup blocking was also built into Opera before anything else. And the search field to the right of the address field in Firefox and IE7? Yet another Opera invetion from ages ago. Not to mention things like sessions, that let you continue where you left off, and so on. Bookmark nicknames? Opera. Easy deleting of private data? Opera.

    Heck, even the built in e-mail client in Opera was lightyears ahead of others, like Gmail, which borrowed Opera's concept of virtual folders/labels.

    I'm not even going to go into Opera for mobile phones...

    You obviously don't know much about Opera, or you wouldn't have made a remark like that.

    "So if you equate the amount of time these products have been in the market and the innovation/features they have been able to produce...Firefox wins hands down.Given a little time more, I dont think there will be any comparison to it."
    So what exactly has Firefox brought to the table in terms of innovation? Silly me, I thought Firefox was supposed to be a lean and mean browser, not a feature beast!

    So how exactly does Firefox win "hands down"?

    Also, I've already answered the "amount of time" comment. Obviously Firefox has a huge advantage, in that it could start off clean, and look at older browsers to cherry-pick features and functionality. It doesn't have to make all the mistakes older browsers have made. Then again, it has made serious mistakes, some of which are being fixed or have been (extensions support).

    "All this without considering the financial aspects of software development(IE & Opera are commericial FOR PROFIT projects)."
    So you think Firefox created itself for free? That no one has paid any money for it?

    Let me give you another history lesson. Mozilla was funded by AOL, and then AOL gave it a few millions in cash and sent it on its way. In other words, AOL's customers paid for it. Now others started donating to Mozilla - Google, Sun, Nokia, and so on. Now their customers had to pay the bill for Mozilla's development.

    Now Mozilla has created its own corporation - the Mozilla Corporation - because they want to be able to make more money.

    If you think Firefox or Mozilla has not had to consider the financial aspects of software development, you are dead wrong.

    --
    Clever signature text goes here.
    1. Re:Firefox deserves #1? by Achromatic1978 · · Score: 1
      As a program, Firefox is built on mature technology, and it's had things go smoothly because older browsers have tried and failed various approaches, and therefore Firefox could easily learn from these mistakes and avoid them.

      Totally. I remember being so excited at the possibilities for Mozilla, after being disappointed by Netscape 6. But it was a horrible abomination. But some of its core showed a lot of promise, and that's what we've got now, FINALLY.

  63. mozilla and mass media ... by rzr · · Score: 1

    Did u notice the PcMag.com logo ? What is the reason ?

    * http://www.mozilla.com/images/home/monitor-screen. png

    --
    -- http://rzr.online.fr/
  64. ALT+D is a key combo that needs to die. by Kristoffer+Lunden · · Score: 1

    ALT+ should stick to activating buttons and menus. In other languages, there are menus that should have the accelerator D, and there are more of these examples of these collisions. I'm pretty sure the designers of IE has had plenty of reason to smack themselves in the head for not thinking this through beforehand.

    Epiphany for instance refuses to follow the conventions on this one, and while it is a bit annoying the first period of time, I do think they are making the right descision. CTRL+L still works, of course, and in the same smooth way as Firefox. Being consistent and catering to all users of all nationalities are both worthwhile goals IMO. Copying an old mistake from a mostly obsolete dinosaur is not.

  65. What a rag. 10.) Treo 650? by CDPatten · · Score: 1

    I know PC World is a rag, best used as toilet paper, but come on.

    The Treo 650 made the top ten?! I've known a few people who have had them (myself included) and it crashed more then Windows 95 on a bad day. I never used the 600, but the 650 is a POS.

    Seriously, iPod Photo makes the list, but the Nano doesn't? Does anyone really think that GMAIL is the second best product of the year, lol.

    But my favorite one is, ready for this, its number 33, "The New York Times on the Web". LOL, what a rag.

  66. What a strange article by Jugalator · · Score: 1

    Opera: Best for power users who keep many pages open at once and perform frequent downloads. There's an e-mail program included, but banner ads on the free version of the browser are annoying.

    This was a mighty confusing (and simply incorrect) thing to say to me, until I noticed it was said a year ago.

    Ummm...

    So this is rather "Predictions of Best Products of 2005"?

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  67. Re:mod`g up by LordKaT · · Score: 1

    What the fuck? Did anybody else think they were drunk when they read this?

  68. But, consider this... by paulius_g · · Score: 1

    While I like Firefox a lot, I do believe that it's becoming bloated in a way. Running Opera gives me way better performance but I just can't stand how Opera looks and feels. Firefox sometimes spasms all over my RAM or CPU and ever crashes out of thin air, both on my Windows and CentOS Linux computers.

    Now, I have quite some friends which I recommended Firefox and other OSS products.

    One of my friends was getting just annoyed by the amounts of spyware that he saw using IE. He wasn't a computer geek, nor a computer beginner. I gave him the link to Firefox and he's been using it since a pre-1.0 release! Now, I told him to upgrade to 1.5, and this is what happened:

    "Ah! All my bookmarks are gone, the Google search bar on the top doesn't work. I can't save bookmarks and all the menus are 'screwed' up"

    So, I told him to get the British version because it was still at 1.0.7. And it worked perfectly! So there's your story.

    Also, believe it or not, my Grandma uses Firefox. I've installed 1.0.7 on her computer (didn't have time to try 1.5.0 yet) and Firefox had bouncing menus!
    Yes, the menus bounced, literally! Up and down all the toolbars of all the Windows. So I was forced to install Opera, which doesn't have great additions such as adblock.

    Firefox is great, but what about the whole performance and bugs prospect? Although, it's still the browser I use on all my non-Mac computers.

  69. Go go Gadget search! by TCQuad · · Score: 1

    What? It's not like we've talked about this list before. Technically, though, it was first linked to from this article in June.

  70. Top 10 by adius · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately my favorite crm/billing system isn't on the list. Based on PHP, MySQL and AJAX. Still in beta but very promising.

    http://kreotek.com/products/phpbms ..and it works great in Firefox!

  71. Sorry, no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes , Firefox crashes.Yes, it has bugs.Yes, it sometimes uses huge amounts of memory.BUT so does every other peice of software ever written.

    Konqueror doesn't use huge amounts of memory. Safari doesn't use huge amounts of memory. Neither of them have crashed on me in the past year or so.

    Saying "yeah, all software is bloated" is an excuse that isn't founded in reality. Firefox has failed in its #1 priority: to be small and fast.

  72. why does osX rate and not freebsd 6.0 ? by ericcantona · · Score: 1

    from the linked to web site:
    "Mac OS X Tiger delivers 200+ new features which make it easier than ever to find, access and enjoy everything on your computer. Upgrade your Mac for $129."
    $ 129 !!!
    ...for a second rate bsd.
    why rank this higher than the real thing (more than 200 improvements), available for free (of course)
    I can undestand than joe public could be taken in but, really, pcworld should know better

    --
    When the seagulls follow the trawler, it's because they think sardines will be thrown in to the sea
    1. Re:why does osX rate and not freebsd 6.0 ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I guess it rates higher for the same reason as gold-plated costs more than tin-plated.

  73. Re:A short rant. & A REPLY by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "I have to totally agree! Opera totally blows away Firefox." - by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03, @09:20AM

    Yes, it does & has in the past, as far as performance!

    See here:

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

    For speed/performance? Opera IS the FordGT (from the automotive world) of webbrowser programs, hands-down - the fastest.

    If you're into FAST & SECURE webbrowsers? Opera's your ticket-to-ride without a doubt! It also shows the LEAST security holes out there as far as browsers go iirc also.

    Still don't get me wrong:

    I'm not knocking FireFox though.

    It's also a hell of a product, & its extensibility helps make it even better via its XUL 3rd party coded extensions!

    BUT, those very extensions have proved a liability before (ala the "GreaseMonkey" extension vulnerability earlier this year):

    http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=156306&thre shold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=154&mode=thread&pid=131 03631

    That very thing is what has helped imo, to hobble IE, because it installs things w/out asking (ActiveX controls) by default. FireFox isn't like that, YOU make the moves on installing extensions, so YOU have to watch out & keep abreast of updates to them (the features for updating your extensions in FireFox are excellent by the by imo)

    HOWEVER - I can tell you, point-blank/first hand though, that when it comes to fixing holes or bugs in their app? The Mozilla team's AWESOME!

    I helped them fix an error while the FireBird product parsed a homegrown forums board @ NTCompatible.com a year or two back, & when the bug was reproduceable consistently, I wrote them with it & how to reproduce it on THEIR end.

    They wrote me back, directly, the next day & fixed it, and even showed up to speak with us their directly, which I thought was MEGA-COOL of them - talk about service & accessible personnel!

    APK

  74. FireFox is a bloated monster by Tim2005 · · Score: 1

    This is not meant to start an argument. It's a simple observation: FireFox is easily the biggest resource hog on my computer. I've seen it chew up 400-500MB of memory with only a handful of web pages open. Why do people give this program a pass? Is it simply because it's open source and thus not polite to criticize it shortcomings?

  75. VLC / Media Player Classic by billybob · · Score: 1

    I totally agree. "Mainstream" media players these days totally suck ass. They are so bloated and ugly that it makes me want to die.

    If you use Windows, I _highly_ recommend Media Player Classic. It's interface is based on the old school MS Media Player 6, which was as simple as it gets. It's small, fast, light footprint, but tons of option and keyboard controls if you want.

    VLC is also pretty good and available for many different platforms. I dont like it nearly as much as MPC, but, the nice thing about it is that it will play about 99.9% of all media files you will ever download, regardless of whether or not you have the codec installed. This is the only time I use it in fact - when I dont have a codec installed for some random type of file. Some people love it as their main media player, it's just a matter of taste really.

    I believe both have built in support for DVD playback as well. However, as I have a regular DVD player for my TV, I've never actually tested it.

    --
    Joseph?
  76. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  77. what about windows hosts file? by insomniac8400 · · Score: 1

    The windows hosts file is the best blocking method I've found. I use the hosts file from here: http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm Its the best popup and spyware blocker around.

  78. Alienware?! by DrIdiot · · Score: 1

    Yes, that $200 case is a real great product...

  79. Firefox Used Against Invasion by camperslo · · Score: 1

    Well it isn't the Borg that they're up against, but people in Season 1 Episode 10 (the latest one) of the ABC TV series Invasion can be seen using Firefox. It's in the scene where folks are explaining why they kidnapped the blogger, about 19 minutes in not counting commercials.

  80. PCWorld articles by msbsod · · Score: 1

    Almost all links in PCWorld articles point to PCWorld articles. In particular all citations are PCWorld references only. Normally valuable documents contain lots of external citations. References to third party documents illustrate that the writer knows what she or he is writing about and that statements are evaluated by a larger community. PCWorld articles on the other hand are of extremely low quality. They contain almost no imformation. It often seems the writer has no idea what she or he is writing about. It goes even so far that PCWorld writers report about the Cebit without knowing how to spell Hannover (the Cebit is located in Hannover). Of course the PCWorld editors also miss such points. Who cares about PCWorld?

    1. Re:PCWorld articles by Roguelazer · · Score: 1

      It's the online version of a print magazine. Do you expect them to have external citations? When was the last time you read a tech magazine that linked to reviews of products done by other magazines?

    2. Re:PCWorld articles by msbsod · · Score: 1

      http://www.theinquirer.net/ (online computer journal)
      http://www.electronicsweekly.com/ (online electronics journal)
      Just to name two of many journals with lots of external citations. Journals like PCWorld with their low standard are rather the exception than the norm.

  81. On the Mac it's Apple-L by tsch · · Score: 1

    Apple-L highlights the address bar. Apple-D is the "bookmark" command.

    Apple-K highlights the search box. It's probably the keystroke in Firefox that I use the most.

  82. Firefox by solo6 · · Score: 1

    Tried it, dumped it. It is too much of a pain in the butt to setup (you have to reinstall every media player you own, for example); and it's AV playback was erratic to the point of freezing or simply not working. This has never happened to me with Explorer, any version. Yes, for now, it is less secure than IE, but that will last only so long as it remains a bit player in the world browser marketplace. Should they gain serious market penetration, watch out. It took Mozilla a very long time to fix bugs and vulnerabilities in the second last edition, which they addressed by rolling out a whole new version. At their current rate of flaw/attack adaption, what's going to happen if they do gain significant market scale and hackers become seriously interested? No thanks.

  83. "Apple OS X" by Caspian · · Score: 1

    It's "Mac OS X", made by "Apple".

    See also: My current signature.

    Why can nobody ever get this right? It's like the mental midgets who say their computer runs "XP OS" and talk about others running "Linux OS".

    --
    With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
  84. Rocketboom: IE and Firefox preference... by Spoing · · Score: 1
    --
    A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
  85. Aren't they rebranded? by iamlucky13 · · Score: 1

    Hold on a second. I thought most of the Dell accessories like their TV's and printers were made by other manufacturer's with the Dell name stuck on them, or at best, to Dell specifications. Am I wrong? If not, they hardly deserve the listings.

  86. Clearly they've missed out on the last year... by ninja_assault_kitten · · Score: 1

    if they're claiming Firefox to be a superior browser in terms of security.

  87. Opera doesn't have regexp adblocking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    in itself nor in any extension.

    That's all I care about.

    Nothing else matters.

  88. Firefox in the top 100 predictible? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No way, it sucks! Firefox sucks, Skype sucks, Google is OK. I don't know what I'd put in the top 100 but DEFINITELY not Firefox. It's an average browser, like opera, or netscape. Nobody uses it.. junk junk.

  89. Dated Information by mkiwi · · Score: 1
    I noticed the itunes music store article linked to a story that said it was "not yet compatable with PC's." What?! ITMS has been compatable with Macs and PCs for many months and PC World just forgot about that? PC World needs to more throughly review the products they tout rather than rely on old articles written in the stone age to do so.

    It is irresponsible journalism to simply take the hottest trends, put them on the top of the list, and use "album filler" for the rest of the top 100. Give the readers the content they deserve!

  90. What about SuSE? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I've tried Ubuntu and its got nothing on SuSE 10. SuSE has always had great hardware support, and Ubuntu didn't work with 5 new hardware devices i had on my 3 computers, where SuSE had drivers for them all. Yast is the best system control panel for any distrobution. Its installation program is the best, whereas Ubuntus is the worst i've ever seen. Hands down Suse is easier and better supporting than Ubuntu, I just don't get why people like it so much.

  91. no voting standard?!?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    10101111011010111101011101010111101 1 10 11 1 01010101 0101010101 01 01 01 0101 01 0 101 0101010101 01010101010101010100000001110101011101100101010 1011010101 010101 0101 011010 10 1 010 10 1010 11 01010
    like the above its complete b..s..
    andyeppers im drizzunk