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."

Comments

Wow, Dell!

[matr0x_x]

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...

Re:Wow, Dell!

[oztiks]

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.

Re:Wow, Dell!

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Wow, Dell!

[koreaman]

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.

It certainly is

[quokkapox]

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.

Ubuntu

[Eightyford]

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.

Alienware?

[AIX-Hood]

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.

voipbuster.com

[kyoko21]

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.

Firefox security could be worse than IE

[einhverfr]

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.

Re:Firefox security could be worse than IE

[einhverfr]

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.

office software

[towsonu2003]

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

Are you on drugs!!?

[KingSkippus]

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.

Odd

[halleluja]

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

Definitely a deserving #1

[xot]

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).

Google's response

[jesser]

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.)

A short rant.

[MoogMan]

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>