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Mozilla VP Talks the State of Firefox

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what's-the-fox-up-to dept.

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."

14 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. I believe... by archcommus · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's spelled "whet." Either way the 3.0 stuff is interesting.

    1. Re:I believe... by jejones · · Score: 4, Informative

      Something "whets your appetite," and that's probably what the author intended to write. To "wet your whistle" is to moisten your dry mouth (not necessarily to slake your thirst--wetting your whistle doesn't go that far), and has nothing to do with making someone eager for anything... but maybe the author was thinking of something like

      "After a long day of coding, I like to kick back and sip an ice-cold bottle of Mozilla..."?

  2. Security? by remembertomorrow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As long as people are running programs from administrator accounts, there will be far more security problems than there should be.

    Maybe when Vista comes out (circa 2020 AD) and becomes widespread, this problem will be alleviated a bit. Those of us using other OSes (Linux, MacOS, etc.) are fine at the moment.

    --
    Registered Linux user #421033
    1. Re:Security? by allusionist · · Score: 3, Funny

      AD 2101 Vista was beginning...

  3. Realplayer bundling by User+956 · · Score: 4, Funny

    As Firefox downloads pass the 200 million mark, people are talking about how its security features stack up against IE7 and protect against malware.

    Protect against malware? They're bundling with it!

    --
    The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
    1. Re:Realplayer bundling by dvice_null · · Score: 3, Informative

      Real Player is bundled with Firefox, not the other way around.

      This just means that Firefox will get users from Real Player user base, from those who don't already use it. It doesn't mean that Firefox will from now on delivered with Real Player. It might get some bad reputation for Firefox, but on the other hand it will get some reputation for Firefox and marketing is what OSS projects are usually missing badly. All the techies should know that this doesn't affect the Firefox product quality at all and other than techies.. don't really care about it.

  4. The State of Firefox? by Billosaur · · Score: 4, Funny

    Isn't that near Nevada? Or maybe Montana -- my geography's not good.

    --
    GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
    1. Re:The State of Firefox? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      I think it's North Carolina's Portugal.

  5. They nailed it by quokkapox · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  6. Re:Copy/paste bug STILL not fixed! Arg! by dvice_null · · Score: 3, Informative

    > Firefox also seems to be a huge memory hog,

    See this article:
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox

    It will tell you how to recude memory usage and also points you to an extension which you can use to track down extensions that leak memory: http://dbaron.org/mozilla/leak-monitor/

  7. Re:Firefoxpacks by dvice_null · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have 4 computers that have Firefox installed on them. All those computers use Linux, so those installations are not counted at all. There are also loads of websites which offer Firefox downloads for their users, those are not counted either. And then we have companies that might have thousands of users and the it-staff propably downloads Firefox once and then copies that to all the computers. That is propably 199 million more downloads.

  8. Re:Recent updates by dvice_null · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here is a pretty good resource for solving issues with Firefox:
    http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Issues_(Firefox )

  9. Re:Firefoxpacks by Kelson · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.)

  10. Re:I can't wait until IE 8! by vux984 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Can MS speak the same on IE 8?

    Of course they can, just not yet. You just need a bit of patience.

    After all how can MS know what features they'll be inventing or innovating before their competition has invented and innovated them first?? ;)