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A Few Firefox 3 Followups
An anonymous reader writes "Using data generated by the Mozilla Firefox download pledge page, the map on this blog post ranks countries, not by absolute number of pledges made, but rather on a per capita basis. This analysis yields some interesting conclusions about where open source is strongest and weakest."
Anonymous Warthog writes "That didn't take long. In a blog posting from the TippingPoint DVLabs security team (of Kraken and CanSecWest hacking contest fame), they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. Additionally, there was a posting on the Full Disclosure security mailing list from someone that purports to have another vulnerability in the works as well. In the grand scheme of things, this probably means nothing to the general security of Firefox, but you can be sure the browser zealots on all sides will be watching carefully."
Finally, from reader Toreo asesino: "Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe) to Mozilla's Mountain View headquarters to congratulate them on shipping FireFox 3, which went live right on time last night." Congratulations are indeed due on both the browser and the release process — looks like the Firefox fever (despite some seriously taxed servers) resulted in more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
FF3 is almost infinitely better than 1.5 and 2 in terms of performance, stability, and memory usage. However, there are still some niggling performance issues that make me tear my hair out. Still, from someone who is most definitely NOT a FF fanboi, it's actually their best release by far and worth checking out.
Who cares? It's called publicity and they got it.
Should they have waited when there were no bugs?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Since the vulnerablility also affects FF 2.x, I'd say whoever discovered the problem waited to disclose the issue to rain on Mozilla's parade. So waiting to release 3.0 would have been pointless since the Mozilla team didn't know about issue.
Posted in 2006, and that's about 50 years in computer time.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Really, if you didn't have the story behind the photo, you'd think that the IE Team was congratulating itself for shipping IE.
Memo to MS: When you give someone a cake, it only makes sense to put the RECIPIENT's name on the cake. I mean, you're recognizing the shipping of Firefox. Why didn't you put a Firefox logo on the cake? That's the object of the celebration.
Let's see, Firefox:
- Can render many different doctypes: HTML 4.01 traditional, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, RSS, etc, etc, etc
- Includes a Javascript interpreter
- Has its own platform-independent GUI drawing code, and those widgets are designed to match the native widgets on each platform
- Supports UTF-8 and many, many other character encodings.
- Stores bookmark and preference data in a RDBMS (not a very capable one, admittedly, but still)
- Has a plugin framework
- Runs on virtually every OS that is still in use
- Is very friendly to web developers (e.g., supports neat stuff like Firebug)
- And a zillion other features.
This is a serious piece of work, under active development. The fact that they were able to add more features, plus stability, plus better memory management, plus better security handling (like seriously addressing XSS), PLUS address many of those only-a-problem-for-technical-twits issues that are out there says to me that the Firefox development team really has their shit together. This is an application that I have open all day, every day, and for me, it works great.(of course, I'm currently posting using Safari, so YMMV)
Actually the "corrupt profile" thing is bad enough by itself. This has been going on since the early days of Mozilla and the devs are still going "doh, corrupt profile".
Every software has bugs, be it written by Microsoft, Mozilla, the Hacker living in his mom's basement, or even by RMS or Linus Torvalds. It is a fact of computers. Now the good thing is, a fix will be released quickly, and if you really feel like it you can patch it yourself, compare that to IE, Opera, or Safari*. Basically, no development method is perfect, but open source comes close to eliminating all the bugs and if you are complaining then write up a patch.
*Yes, yes I know the core of Safari is WebKit which was forked from KHTML and you can get the source to that
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm very tempted to switch; I am particularly eager to get the enhanced javascript performance.
But I installed the Beta on my son's machine, and was shocked at the 'awesomebar'. What a monumentally bad idea, implemented in the most annoying of fashion! It is seriously the one factor keeping me from switching.
Evidently there used to be configuration options to turn it off in the about:config window, but those have been removed, in a nearly microsoftian attempt to force users into behaving how the designers wish. There is an ad-in I found that reduces the awesomebar so that it looks similar to the Firefox 2.0 version, but it still searches 'intelligently', i.e. unpredictably and unintuitively.. Is there any fix for this due out?
The other thing holding me back is firebug... does that have a 3.0 enabled version out yet?
But so far most of the "mainstream" distros have done a great job in providing Firefox 3 (Ubuntu even has it included in 8.04). I wouldn't necessarily blame Mozilla for this, but rather the distro makers for failing to include a package. However, I think you are looking at this all wrong, it is more or less as huge as a leap forward as KDE 4 was for the desktop, as such some of the more "stable" distros such as CentOS are reluctant to include it as it is so new just as KDE 4 is still unavailable for some distros, but KDE 3 still is and much like Firefox 2 it still will receive updates for a while. But honestly, most of the people who use Linux use Ubuntu or a derivative (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, etc) or a more "unstable" distro then CentOS (Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, etc). So I think it is just CentOS being CentOS, being stable, don't like that? Change to Ubuntu.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I told you so! So now we have what? 8 million suddenly vulnerable machines?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Isn't this one of the reason that bit torrent exists?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I'm not trying to belittle your problems and I am in no way affiliated with Mozilla or Firefox, but on the dozen of machines I use regularly I have never seen the problem you describe. Even though I regularly have twenty, thirty, or more tabs open at a time, and have lots of extensions installed, and leave FF open for the entire day.
And I haven't seen FF crash. Never. On any of those machines. Apart from your little report, and the link (which conveniently points to another posting by you(!)), I haven't heard of people complaining about it either.
The way you repeat the same accusations (at least) four times in the space of two screens, and offer no proof at all beyond that link to your own message, suggests very strongly that you have an agenda. Your bug report 222660 (yes, I read your text!) doesn't contain any "easily reproducable steps", it actually reads
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Do you call that a bugreport? No wonder it gets marked as invalid. Similarly, your list of articles fails to convince: some pointers to decreasing the cache size is not proof of a usability-destroying bug in the application.
Also, next time just say "...when I'm browsing porn". We all know what you mean with "performing research" anyway...
Yup. For me one selling point was the British English version. Dictionary spell checker having no problems with colour and customise 8)
If we had to wait for "stable OSes" and corporate adoption nothing would ever move forward. FF3 is a cutting edge browser using cutting edge libraries to get the best functionality available right now, like it should.
It's your vendor's job to live in the past with you. That's what you pay them for.
Game... blouses.
Wow, I'm sure glad that Linux users avoid all that "DLL Hell" I keep hearing about on Windows.
Yeah, yeah, mod me down...
Breakfast served all day!
In any case, people who are aware of lesser known browsers like Opera, Safari, Elinks, and Konqueror probably won't use user agent sniffing, and good riddance.
This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
do you want the upgrade?
can you upgrade easily?
how badly do you want it?
is the cost of upgrading to hi?
pretty much if you need it you need to swallow the cost, if you just want it, then you dont. ok want and need can be a little blurred at times, but at the end of the day, if its too painful to upgrade, just dont.
in my experience in IT, major upgrades just sometimes have to happen, its a matter of fitting them in the most effective way possible, which sometimes is the lesser of n evils.
from a professional POV, (IMO) just stop whinging and start planning.. :-)
-- $_='ab-bc ratvarre';tr"'a-z'"'n-za-m'";print
Let me recap your understanding of a "clever move": sending a big cake to a rivaling company with the logo of your own application (which comes with ~90% of the world's desktop OS) on it, to get free advertising.
Clever. Yea, I can see it now.
Donaldm, I keep seeing you advocating this silly point that the Linux situation requiring constant upgrades to libraries to run new binaries is somehow OK. It's not OK for people in enterprise environments.
If you want people to use Linux instead of Windows, get out of denial and stop going on and on about how it's OK to force a number different libraries to be updated in a three-year-old OS just so someone can use a new version of a web browser. This is completely unacceptable for corporate IT usage.
Firefox 3.0 runs just fine in Windows 2000, an 8-year-old version of Windows. So Windows is a superior operating system for the corporate desktop, since new applications are pretty much guaranteed to run for a decade after installing a given OS.
You want Linux on the desktop? You will have to match Windows' record, and not force users to play "DLL hell" just to get Firefox 3 to run with a version of Linux only three years old.
Oh come on. It's a friendly gesture by the IE team. It's the higher ups and the marketing people who are evil.