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Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0
grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
Damn! You owe me a new keyboard.
Well, Mr. Firefox developer. The world we live in is full of irony. Firefox used to push itself onto users by demanding "revolution" and taking the web back. Revolution yet again ate its children.
It's impossible not to see how delightfully twisted the situation turned out:
- the community attacked IE6
- the community caused Firefox
- Firefox caused IE7
- the community attacked Firefox
Sure, maybe you see overwhelmingly positive feedback, but don't fool yourself: if your early adopters and techies are attacking you for speed and RAM issues, or bloat... this is the beginning of the end. This is how the outrage against IE happened as a matter of fact.
Is Firefox 2 better? It could be, but that's largely irrelevant.
Mozilla was arrogant in the 1.x days about their speed/leak issues and this turned a large chunk of their advanced users against them. Now you're in a situation where making it somewhat better won't help, especially if you try and tell everybody how "FF2 is great and you're wrong".
Community psychology is a strange thing.
Or this:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx