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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.
Don't bash it if you haven't used it. FF3 will do it's best to migrate all the add-ons and stuff you have on FF2. If the add-on isn't compatible, it will tell you when it is.
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.
...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.
Hey! Guess what, Einstein! It's FREE! So if you've tried Open Source and don't like it, then it's really no great loss to you, is it?
I mean you show up at their website when all kinds of news outlets are running stories about firefox download day and the website doesn't even say that download day starts at 1 EST. What kind of amature shit is that?
Yes, they underestimated demand and probably have a little egg on their faces. But Firefox WORKS! And it's FREE! So what's your problem?
Oh, and it's spelt "amateur".
Then you finally download it and it's full of security holes. What the fuck?
No, it has A security hole. It will be fixed. Someone will find more holes. They will be fixed. So don't use it. Whatever the hell works for you.
I put more effort in to jacking off than these clowns put in to their "Record Download Day". What an embarassment.
Perhaps this explains your short-sightedness and/or blinkered vision. And your obvious frustration. Maybe keep it in your trousers for one day, see if you feel better then, eh?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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
I managed to get connected; but the map is kinda boring; just black on white.
Strangely, it also looks exactly like the letters "Error establishing a database connection".
Well of course there was no recipe-- that cake was a proprietary, closed-source dessert.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
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.
Amen to that. Too many apps distributed in tar.gz format have no instructions with them (or on the website). How hard is it to include the following lines of instructions (preferably near the download link):
1. First you should check your OS repositories to ensure you cannot install this program via that method. Search for: blah
2. If the program is not available in your distro's repositories (or you desire a newer version)
a. Download the following tar.gz file to your HDD
b. Move the downloaded file to the location you wish to install it
c. Open a command window and type:
blah -xyz filname.....
3. To launch the program type "blah"
About your 2nd question though. I would go ahead and select "Bookmarks" -> "Bookmark all tabs" and save them in 1 folder. Then if it works and your session is still there you just need to delete that folder. Else, just go to your bookmarks and right click on the folder you created and select "Open all in tabs".
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
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.
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).
Nah. Classic Microsoft.
They set DefaultLogo OnCake to "Blue-E".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Speaking of internet browsing, Opera 9.50 just came out as well. Has full text history search and my favorite feature...Opera Sync. I opened 10 of the same internet sites with Opera and Firefox 3 and compared the memory imprint, FF3 was 10 mb greater. Opera was already configured to grab a ton of my RSS feeds, so I believe without RSS feeds bein pulled 9.50 could have had a good 20 mb on ff3.
Just wanted to shed some light on a lesser known, but in my opinion, very good browser.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
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)
And, since then, Safari for Windows came out.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
see the cached page:
http://eaves.ca.nyud.net:8090/2008/06/18/firefox-pledge-map-pledges-as-a-of-population/
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
"June 17, 2028. Firefox 2.9.948 released. Soon we'll go to 3.0 RC1!"
And why am I suddenly reminded of WINE?
Buyers for computer parts often have to keep lots of tabs open.
Anyone doing research that cannot be finished immediately needs to keep tabs open.
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?
Maybe they want to try to beat the download record again, when all those people come looking for the patches.
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."
Corale cache worked for me, but it seems sluggish now.
downloaded version
Lameness filter prevented me from pasting in the text.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then they send you a cake.
Then you pay your ISP for 8 million downloads.
Then you profit???
What are we doing again?
You've posted references to or versions of this little diatribe three times in this thread. This is rather tiring, because the only reference I see you making to any actual Bugzilla entries is in a post from over two years ago. Of the two bugs you reference in that post, one is marked "fixed" and the other "invalid".
Now normally I would request that you either give us links to actual bugs that are outstanding. But I'm not going to do that, because I know you can't be objective when discussing this issue.
How do I know this? Because the bug marked "invalid" appears to be submitted by you. Thus I suspect that your vitriol for the Firefox/Mozilla people is a personal response to feeling scorned or something, and I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who argues because they had their feelings hurt and therefore holds an irrational grudge about something.
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...
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!
In all honesty though, I use Firefox all the time on all the computers, PC and Mac, and I use gmail, and I've never seen my memory use go above 200M (usually around 150M). And even if I can get the memory usage to go up by opening 20 tabs full of pages with huge images, together with gmail, I don't get a CPU spike.
In fact, I've never gotten a CPU spike. None of the friends I have that use FF got a CPU spike, ever.
So, I hope you can see the problem here. Many people use FF and never experience what you're talking about. In fact, every time I read it, I think it's just trolls bullshitting. I hope someone can post a video of a computer with FF3 suffering from that bug so we can have proof that the bug exists. I don't think it's a real bug.
But let's say it is real. This bug, since it occurs in corner cases, is going to be hard to fix. It will be hard to find. It probably has to do with multi-threaded code and data sharing between threads, or it has to do with garbage collector. Either way, it's not easy.
Let's talk about other browsers now. I won't bother with IE. Let's take Opera. I use Opera Mini 4 all the time. That piece of shit has bugs and breaks all the time for me. The only reason I use it is because it's better than the built-in browser, which works better than Opera, but gives me a bookmark list that's controlled by my phone carrier, which I don't want. So because I want to control my own bookmarks, I have to use Opera on my blackberry. Clearly Opera is no angel. I am a very unsatisfied Opera user. And how hard is it to fix a bug in an app that's only 130kb long? EH?? Should be cake, right? Opera Mini does crappy rendering on many pages and the most annoying thing is that sometimes it loses my feeds or breaks them so that I have to reinstall them. And there are usability issues, such as when I want to search Google, I have to click way too many times for comfort (why can't I use the enter key, once? Why do I have to click to start typing, then type, then click to open a menu and select "OK", then scroll down to search button and again click on it... why ????? WTF OPERA??).
I think Mozilla does a fine, fine job. That they can't please a certain vocal minority is understandable. And the constant "angel" example of Opera is pure bullshit.