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Mozilla VP Talks the State of Firefox
lisah writes "As Firefox downloads pass the 200 million mark, people are talking about how its security features stack up against IE7 and protect against malware. Mozilla VP Mike Schroepfer told NewsForge's Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier that security will continue to be an issue 'for anything written in native code' but Mozilla intends to meet the challenge by including JavaScript 1.7 with the browser's 2.0 release. Schroepfer also talked about the timeline of future releases and offered just enough information to wet our whistles for 3.0."
Security is no longer a concern with the Firefox installs I've set up for various family members. Firefox updates itself now, painlessly and seamlessly, and often within a day or two of serious security alerts. I wouldn't be surprised if some exploit gets announced over the weekend and everyone is on 1.5.0.7 by Tuesday morning. That is still way better than Microsoft.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I hope Mozilla/Firefox can maintain security without adopting a restricted "protected" sandbox mode ala IE 7 on Vista. I use a simple HTML homepage stored locally on my PC and Vista's method decides to segregate it from other browser windows, making it near useless in its basic purpose. It seems like a lazy way out on the issue at the expense of convenience for the user.
Keep Firefox its own entity, don't copy this "feature" designed to bludgeon-patch IE's giant flaws.
I run windows as an admin since it is much easier (iTunes is broken as a limited user, you can't sync your ipod unless you're an admin. This is just one of the dozens of problems you will encounter trying to run windows as a limited user). I use SysInternals' PsExec to run certain programs as a limited user while I am logged in as an admin. For example, all my firefox shortcuts look like this: psexec -l -d "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe".
PsExec allows you to run a process under alternate credentials.
Here is a description of what the -l and -d parameters do:
-l
Run process as limited user (strips the Administrators group and allows only priviliges assigned to the Users group).
-d
Don't wait for application to terminate. Only use this option for non-interactive applications.]
It's not the best solution, but it works, run firefox as a limited user using psexec and then try and overwrite something in c:\program files or c:\windows, it won't let you (which is a good thing).
I've lost count of the number of times I've downloaded Firefox, but I can also say that each Windows download has gotten installed on roughly 10 different computers. So you subtract some, and you add some, and eventually you lose any hope of having a useful estimate.
The downloaded count is a simple metric that tells you that there's still a lot of interest int he product. It's easier to determine than the number of times it's been installed, the number of copies in use, or the number of users.
The number means what it means. Trying to translate from #Downloaded to #InUse is pointless.
(Incidentally: no, automatic updates are not included in the total. And IIRC there was some effort made to avoid double-counting manual updates, like not counting downloads made using Firefox. I don't remember exactly.)