Slashdot Mirror
Another Look At Mozilla's BugFix Rate
An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com's Security Fix blog has published the results of a look back at three years worth of critical patches from Mozilla, and found that Mozilla typically ships updates for critical flaws in about three weeks, though in more than a third of the cases it pushed out a fix in ten days or less. The data comes just a few weeks after The Post published data from a similar study that found Microsoft averaged 130+ days to fix critical flaws. Slashdot also covered that study in a previous post."
What we're seeing these days is an exodus from Firefox towards Opera, Konqueror, Safari, and other alternative browsers.
The Firefox 1.5 release didn't go nearly as well as it should have. Touted as being a breakthrough release, numerous people upgraded only to find that it was buggy, consumed far too many system resources, or just plain didn't work. Thus many people moved towards the other browsers that are available.
I used to recommend Firefox to my relatives, non-technical friends, and others. But I won't do it any more. Firefox has started to get a bad reputation, and I won't let their reputation affect my reputation. Thus I recommend Konqueror most times, but for people who can't switch to Linux or BSD I often suggest the use of Opera. Opera has shown for years now that they can write solid, secure, portable, performant browser. Thus they get recommendations from me.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
While some Mozilla developers may suggest otherwise, I doubt there is much that can be done to deal with such issues. The general architecture and code quality of Mozilla is so bad that fixing such issues would be a massive undertaking.
One of the main indicators of over-engineering in the software world is a high level of memory consumption. Even without using an in-RAM cache, the memory usage of Mozilla is still excessive. A quick glance at the code or developers documentation will show you why: it's a poorly architectured beast. What could be achieved simply and effectively using a cross-platform toolkit (such as wxWidgets or Qt, depending on licensing requirements) has been bungled up by the Mozilla developers.
Thankfully, you do have alternatives. There are Opera, Konqueror, Safari, and OmniWeb availabe to you, depending on your platform(s). They're just as featureful as Firefox, if not more so. And they often have nowhere near the memory consumption of Firefox, even after prolonged use.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.