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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.
Who cares? It's called publicity and they got it.
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)