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Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
Ahh, slashdot. Come for the condescension, stay for the pedantry. Unpriveleged users don't get offered or notified of updates in 3.5. You can't even use the built in facility to manually check for an update. It is actually less secure to use Firefox as an unpriveleged user than it is to run as an admin unless you actively go and see what the latest release is.
That's an odd question considering that Firefox continues to gain market share.
Perhaps you should ask yourself if "smaller" and "faster" are really the dominant factors driving users to switch browsers.
*sigh* back to work...
Guess you've never really used Opera since it has the equivilants of those add-ons built in.
Unlike IE-specific features, Mozilla-specific features have a better chance of getting into the other three major engines (Safari based on Apple's WebKit tree, Chrome based on Google's WebKit tree, and Opera based on Presto) and into W3C drafts.
Heres my guess:
Statistically out of every 10 Windows users 7 will be average (mom, dad, grandma, etc) , 1 user will be a moron and will fall for every phishing and malware attack, 1 will be a moderately advanced user and 1 will be a fairly advanced user / developer.
When you're dealing with that kind of audience, your goals are *vastly* different than highly customizable operating systems like Linux. Your criticisms are minor and superficial. Given *ANY* UI decision you can find users that disagree with it. Calling it proof is frankly laughable.
If you're interested in why windows is "bloated" you can read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx
As far as RAM is concerned, firefox itself is going to consume/require several hundred megs for an average user visiting youtube and other misc. flash heavy websites. That said, I don't have a clue what the actual RAM usage levels are of Win7 vs Ubuntu 9.10