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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.
I gave up yesterday after a few too many server errors.
That said, the map of countries is pretty cool. Ignoring the island micro-nations (the Falkland Islands won with 2% of 3000 people pledging to download), it's interesting to see how high Firefox penetration is in Eastern Europe. I wonder if that's a function of very connected economies without a lot of love for Microsoft and a strong desire for free software?
Oh, and good luck to the Firefox team trying to save the "E" logo from this year's cake! That thing is HUGE!
What happened to backslash?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Adobe has routinely hit greater than 10 million downloads per day.
There are other companies as well. Hell, what about MS updates? How many of those bastards get downloaded on Patch Tuesday?
This is a fake attempt at a record.
It wasn't very smart to encourage millions of downloads when it was very likely there would be bugs.
...and indeed everyone that contributed towards FireFox project. You have set the bar very high for others to follow, and more importantly, you have proved that OSS model can be both financially prosperous and highly desirable to normal users too.
And at the end there was cake too!
throw new NoSignatureException();
Nah. It saves all that stuff for you. It even saved my session from FF2 to FF3.
This browser is much more responsive than FF2. My performance in Gmail is much improved. The memory leak was not fixed, but it was finally addressed it seems. The memory usage still creeps up very high, but it takes much longer to reach the point of a performance hit than before. The memory leak was/is my biggest issue with FF and as far as I can tell with FF3, it may be only a minor annoyance... which I am happy to have when compared to the numerous Force Quits needed per day with FF2.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
It's actually not just a memory leak. It is a CPU hogging bug, also.
Since that bug is now 7 years old, and still not fully fixed, I suppose I should post my list of Firefox developer excuses again. The list is not complete. There have been other excuses that I haven't had time to add to the list.
Firefox Developer Top 20 Excuses
for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory
and CPU Hogging bugs.
These are actual excuses given at one time or another.
One of the strengths of Firefox for some time has been that right out of the box, the binary just ran on lots of Linux versions. With FF3 (starting with betas) they broke this.
A non-trivial portion of the commercial and research Linux user base has to stick with EL4 or a source rebuild from CentOS, Scientific Linux or whatever because of third party tool support requirements. And not everybody wants to upgrade their OS just because a new browser is out.
FF3 requires a pretty new library (libpangocairo 1.0). I spent an hour trying to come up with it this afternoon for my 100+ users. No luck so far.
The firefox team really let us down big time. We've been anxiously awaiting this release because it's supposed to solve the memory bloat problems (several of us here have to restart the browser several times a week because it's consumed insane amounts of RAM).
Has anyone else had the mysterious "cookies disappearing" problem?
Neither of the RC's, or the Beta 5 that I tried had this problem. I have googled and it seems a few other people are having the same problem, but I've yet to find a fix.
It's really quite annoying. I've tried loading up in Safe Mode (no extensions), but even then my cookies just "vanish", seemingly after a random amount of time. I'm also having a problem with Foxmarks (endlessly syncing but not actually syncing), but I guess the Foxmarks devs will bang that one out soon.
Overall my followup is I'm not too impressed. Might just go back to RC2...
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
I actually really like the new address bar. Now I know how those people who like Vista must feel.
Please understand why MS sends the cakes!
The cakes doesn't mention Firefox or Mozilla in any way, but very clearly IE. Hence, MS sends the cakes not to congratulate Mozilla, but to get Mozilla to advertise for IE.
Very clever move by MS!
Is the awesomebar and the URLs it quick-fetches(?) customizable?
Sounds nice but it could be annoying (and potentially embarassing).
From what you say, I'd actually want to keep my history so it already recognizes my surfing habits (if I understood correctly...).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.