They didn't release the details of the bug until they released the patch. But they did described those bugs in the bulletin for the patch release. In other words, they weren't secret, and they would be counted in the bug analysis.
Did you read it?
The summary said "This important update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in addition to other security issues identified during the course of the investigation."
The details describe two vulnerabilities. Not two vulnerabilities in addition to other security issues identified during the course of the investigation. Two vulnerabilities. If this was an open source project, the details of all the changes would be available in the source code control system and bug tracking database.
I agree that Microsoft shouldn't only detail their bugs in their patch release bulletins. They should give basic summary information ahead of time.
My point wasn't "Microsoft should have given details ahead of time". It was "Microsoft is able to count a smaller number of vulnerabilities because their release process is not public".
But I wouldn't claim it's happening unless I had evidence.
You have it right there. If this was an open source project, then the internally discovered vulnerabilities they fixed in this patch would have had to be counted as separate items. So this item was counted as "two items" for Microsoft, but would be counted as a higher number for Red Hat, and possibly for Apple as well. Therefore the numbers that Microsoft publishes are not directly comparable with anyone else's.
While I've certainly heard of Microsoft not disclosing the vulnerabilities until their patches are released, I've never heard of them patching things completely in secret. Do you have any citations to back that up?
It's interesting that you attack Microsoft for secrecy but say nothing about Apple, which is famous for its hostile attitude towards people who discover exploits as well as their secrecy about their patches are what they fix.
You seem to be under a misapprehension here. I'm not defending Apple. I'm simply pointing out that Microsoft has more ability to hide security flaws in their software than any company that uses a significant amount of open-source software, and thus they can artificially reduce their "score" in this game to a far greater extent than either of the other organizations mentioned by Jones. That is, regardless of Apple's motivations and actions, they are simply not capable of hiding patches as effectively as Microsoft.
So:
1. Microsoft has more ability to "game the system" than Red Hat, Apple, or any other organization using a significant amount of open-source software in their product.
2. Microsoft has acknowledged that they are engaged in gaming the system.
I would be happy to discuss Apple's past behavior in an appropriate context. In fact if you google around you'll find that I've been quite critical of Apple when I've felt it warranted. There's plenty of other skeletons in Microsoft's closet if you want to get into a fan war, but you'll have to find someone else for THAT debate... again, google around, you'll find I defend Microsoft when I believe it's warranted. Basically, I'm poorly equipped for the kind of debate that requires uncritical acceptance or dismissal of of one company's position on every subject.
Here and now, Microsoft's figures can not be accepted on face value. Unless Microsoft reveals ALL the details of the vulnerabilities they've corrected they can't be considered comparable to even Apple's figures with their heavy loading of open source software, let alone Red Hat's.
This will probably speed up the approval of some patents, but why would someone setting up a stealth patent for a portfolio have any incentive to take part in this program?
Jones argued that Vista had a lower number of vulnerabilities than competitive operating system products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mac OS X.
Microsoft has acknowledged that they include secret undocumented patches in hotfixes, patches that would count against their "score" if they were required to count them... open source software doesn't have the luxury of hiding their dirty laundry like that. And it's not just Linux that suffers from that "disadvantage", OS X has an awful lot of open-source components, and many of Apple's updates have been patches rolled in from them.
Microsoft's gaming the system here. Statements like this should be granted no credibility.
It would take a lot less effort and we would be a lot more likely to succeed at establishing a permanent Lunar base using local resources for all bulk mass requirements (oxygen, hydrogen, food and structural materials) than even a single Apollo-style round-trip Mars mission.
And the next stop... the asteroids are closer, energy-wise, and more useful.
To hell with Mars, we have unfinished business on the Moon.
Actually with todays virtualization bits on the CPU, the virtualized machine is just as fast as native.
I'm doing it right now. It's very fast, and if you stay well clear of the limits of the machine, you'd have a hard time noticing, but it's not "just as fast as native". It's "just as fast as native would be on a cheaper machine", perhaps, but then it'd be a lot more cost effective and efficient just to get a slower machine that supported the OS you want to virtualize.
Virtualization on a desktop is mostly useful for people who have to test how something works on multiple operating systems, and for cases where you're dealing with a hostage situation gone bad... that is, you have an application you need to run that doesn't run on the OS you want to use, so you're hostage to the OS manufacturer. On a server it's mostly useful for operating systems that don't support multiple instances well, or for extremely hard management situations. Kind of like blades are, come to think of it.
Buying a PC, running Windows on it, and running Linux in a VM under that, when what you're looking for is a machine running Linux, doesn't make any sense at all. You'll be better off buying a less powerful PC if that's what it takes to get Linux support within your budget.
That sounds like a match made in hell. You get to enjoy all the disadvantages of Linux *and* all the disadvantages of Windows at the same time. Your Windows services and kernel are still exposed to malware, you have all the DRM fun of the Windows world, and you have more overhead when running the UNIX applications you bought the computer for.
Whether Jobs was grandstanding or not, that slide bothered me too. I filed it mentally as Jobs being Jobs, pretty much, but them my ox isn't being gored by Safari. I don't think it's fair to dismiss Lilly's concerns as "sour grapes", though... Jobs *did* kind of throw down the gauntlet, and it didn't seem to be Microsoft he was challenging.
I think Lilly was definitely reading WAAAAAY to much into the simplified graph.
I don't agree.
The chart bothered me as well. Either Jobs recovered damn well from putting the wrong chart up, or he really did mean that he was targeting a world where there were only two browsers.
If he was trying to avoid confusing people, he would have left Firefox out of the first chart as well.
It's not the look that's the issue, it's the behavior. All those looks have close enough to the same user interface behavior that the differences can be pretty much ignored. The big one that Apple needs to fix is the drag-by-one-corner one.
And maybe they will.
Apple's already compromised with the Windows behavior by making maximize "full screen" rather than "big enough to show the whole page".
In Web 2.0 terms, which I'm sure is all Steve really cares about, Firefox has 75% of the market and Safari only 25%. Of course he wants to go after the Firefox user.
If Web 2.0 really takes off and Microsoft's position is as bad as you claim, then the *potential* Web 2.0 market that's easy to attack isn't the 25% that Firefox has, it's the 75% that IE has.
And it wouldn't matter if IE had 100% of the web, it still wouldn't be a standards-compliant browser. IE isn't even compatible with *itself*... the web is full of hacks to accommodate the differences between different versions of IE. Getting away from that is the whole point of having standards.
But, anyway, if Steve thinks the way you do, and thinks that going after the bigger market is irrelevant, then...
1. That explains the slide, and 2. Apple *is* picking a fight it can't win, but not because it's taking on Windows, rather because it's taking on Firefox where even if it wins it's *still* the loser.
If you want an expensive contract and no phone, then they might listen, but a cheap contract with no phone gets them nothing, so there is no incentive to sell it.
Yeh, I get that. They don't want to sell a month-to-month SIM, but...
a) back when I went through this it wasn't *possible* to get month-to-month service in the US. Period. b) This wasn't a matter of him not wanting to sell it, this was him refusing to sell it. c) Back then you couldn't do better on the web either. d) Now I can get a month-to-month contract with no phone at a hole in the wall in just about any shopping center.
Can you really not just buy service and stick the SIM in any phone in the UK? Sounds like trading places.
I think it's an anti-privacy thing. The gov't (who can take away their business) wants to be able to identify every customer.
I'm pretty sure that's an excuse. I'm not complaining about them having my ID, in any case, I'm complaining about having to sign up for a 2-year contract and put a $200 deposit down (or give them a credit card # they will charge $200 to if I break the contract) just to get service.
Not only that, but my experience was before 9/11... and now in Dubya's Amerika month-to-month SIMs are available.
But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken.
You kidding me? Microsoft regularly gets away with incomprehensible abuse of their customers, and nobody cares.
First... Microsoft would have been torn apart - literally - over the design of ActiveX and the way it's use in Internet Explorer. The MPAA/RIAA-favoring restrictions installed in the kernel by Windows Media Player from 9.0 onwards, now a standard part of the OS in Vista, would have led to WMP being religiously avoided by anyone concerned with freedom of speech. The layers and layers of security band-aids are hated by *everyone*, and yet people put up with it.
Compared to that, having a first public beta using Mac OS style window borders and controls is nothing.
The portable media player market is the House That Apple Built.
Bullshit. Total bullshit. Apple introduced the iPod into a crowded field of players that were cheaper and had more functions, and in many cases were better designed, and they still took it over. Itunes is a red herring... all the early media players except the very cheapest had their own management programs, and the iTunes Music store didn't come out until two years after the iPod.
But, speaking of iTunes, do you have the same issue with iTunes for Windows?
PS: you have Athens and Sparta mixed up. Athens was the city of the brawling philosophers where Socrates was killed for speaking his mind, and Sparta was the regimented and tightly controlled dictatorship where everyone did the same thing.
And if you think Apple doesn't get bashed for user interface decisions by Mac users, you haven't been paying attention.
Rather than providing iPhone users with the existing universe of largely IE-optimized applications and sites in a browser that supports existing standards, and telling iPhone application developers to just go ahead and build universally compatible apps that will also run on the iPhone, Apple feels the overpowering need to once again build and control a new, proprietary playing field.
No, you haven't been paying attention. Safari is more compliant with web standards than IE or Firefox, so universally compatible applications *will* run on the iPhone. The "IE-optimized" web pages written for "whatever IE does this week" and then ported over and over again to every new release of IE (and, if you're lucky, Firefox) may not work on Safari... but that's CERTAINLY not because they're written for a browser that "supports existing standards" or because they're "universally compatible".
The big problem on Windows isn't that the browser "market" is crowded, but because it's sparse. There's basically only three browsers on Windows besides Safari: IE, Firefox, and Opera. Until Safari, there wasn't a single really usable browser using the KHTML engine (the one that's designed from the ground up for standards-compliance rather than speed), and only Opera was designed securely (yes, Safari's design is fundamentally more secure than Firefox, let alone IE).
Windows users should be welcoming the introduction of a new competing browser... one that for all its warts can only serve to improve the quality and standards-compliance of the web.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK it's pretty hard to buy a contract without a phone.
Oh, I thought that was a particularly US perversion. I tried to get T-Mobile service for a phone I already had several years ago and ended up walking out because it wouldn't have been fair to yell at the bloke... it wasn't HIS fault.
Oh, most of the carriers will do it, and they might even give you a discount, but they don't advertise it, and the sales reps in the shops don't like to admit to it.
This wasn't like that. This was... you can't get service without buying a phone, period, and not less than a two year contract. I just wanted a couple of months of service to fill in a gap, I already had the phone.
Though maybe I should have blown up at this guy:
"I don't want to buy a phone, I just want the service."
"OK. You still need to give me a credit card or pay a deposit."
"I'm paying up front, why do I need that?"
"In case you cancel."
"Why should you care if I'm cancelling? All I'm buying is the service, you've got nothing at risk but a couple cents worth of plastic."
"Everyone has to sign a contract."
I suspect now that he was planning on keeping the phone himself. But he wasn't kidding about the contract, I tried another couple of outlets and they all said the same thing.
This has changed since, though. Now you find people reselling service in little hole-in-the-wall places all over. I had the impression that in Europe they didn't have that problem, or is this one of those "the UK isn't in Europe really" things?
From the referenced page: "Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program."
SO what about libraries that have been released under the GPL rather than the LGPL? Libraries are not "programs" but they are always, no exception, "linked, merged, or combined". What happens then?
It doesn't change its role based on whether the news is good or bad.
No, it changes its role depending on why you're downloading it, and who you are.
I don't know how many people read slashdot, but if the idea that some of them might have different opinions than others disturbs you enough to post about it, you have lived a suspiciously sheltered life.
I can't imagine any reason that anyone would want to actually use Safari.
Upside: Renders faster than Firefox. Doesn't lock up periodically like Firefox. Doesn't invite doorknob rattlers via the extension API like Firefox. Supports web standards better than Firefox.
Firefox is simple if you don't install any extensions. You don't have to, and you also say they don't need to, so what's the problem here?
The way extensions are installed in Firefox is inherently insecure. It's not a huge problem, it's a lot LESS insecure than the straw firewall that is ActiveX security zones, so I'm not *terribly* worried about it, but getting that out of the way is a nice bonus.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't release the details of the bug until they released the patch. But they did described those bugs in the bulletin for the patch release. In other words, they weren't secret, and they would be counted in the bug analysis.
Did you read it?
The summary said "This important update resolves two privately reported vulnerabilities in addition to other security issues identified during the course of the investigation."
The details describe two vulnerabilities. Not two vulnerabilities in addition to other security issues identified during the course of the investigation. Two vulnerabilities. If this was an open source project, the details of all the changes would be available in the source code control system and bug tracking database.
I agree that Microsoft shouldn't only detail their bugs in their patch release bulletins. They should give basic summary information ahead of time.
My point wasn't "Microsoft should have given details ahead of time". It was "Microsoft is able to count a smaller number of vulnerabilities because their release process is not public".
But I wouldn't claim it's happening unless I had evidence.
You have it right there. If this was an open source project, then the internally discovered vulnerabilities they fixed in this patch would have had to be counted as separate items. So this item was counted as "two items" for Microsoft, but would be counted as a higher number for Red Hat, and possibly for Apple as well. Therefore the numbers that Microsoft publishes are not directly comparable with anyone else's.
While I've certainly heard of Microsoft not disclosing the vulnerabilities until their patches are released, I've never heard of them patching things completely in secret. Do you have any citations to back that up?
Skeletins in Microsoft's Patch-day Closet
It's interesting that you attack Microsoft for secrecy but say nothing about Apple, which is famous for its hostile attitude towards people who discover exploits as well as their secrecy about their patches are what they fix.
You seem to be under a misapprehension here. I'm not defending Apple. I'm simply pointing out that Microsoft has more ability to hide security flaws in their software than any company that uses a significant amount of open-source software, and thus they can artificially reduce their "score" in this game to a far greater extent than either of the other organizations mentioned by Jones. That is, regardless of Apple's motivations and actions, they are simply not capable of hiding patches as effectively as Microsoft.
So:
1. Microsoft has more ability to "game the system" than Red Hat, Apple, or any other organization using a significant amount of open-source software in their product.
2. Microsoft has acknowledged that they are engaged in gaming the system.
I would be happy to discuss Apple's past behavior in an appropriate context. In fact if you google around you'll find that I've been quite critical of Apple when I've felt it warranted. There's plenty of other skeletons in Microsoft's closet if you want to get into a fan war, but you'll have to find someone else for THAT debate... again, google around, you'll find I defend Microsoft when I believe it's warranted. Basically, I'm poorly equipped for the kind of debate that requires uncritical acceptance or dismissal of of one company's position on every subject.
Here and now, Microsoft's figures can not be accepted on face value. Unless Microsoft reveals ALL the details of the vulnerabilities they've corrected they can't be considered comparable to even Apple's figures with their heavy loading of open source software, let alone Red Hat's.
This will probably speed up the approval of some patents, but why would someone setting up a stealth patent for a portfolio have any incentive to take part in this program?
I hope this doesn't derail the bill in progress to halt the exorbitant fees they're foisting on Internet 'radio'.
Jones argued that Vista had a lower number of vulnerabilities than competitive operating system products such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mac OS X.
Microsoft has acknowledged that they include secret undocumented patches in hotfixes, patches that would count against their "score" if they were required to count them... open source software doesn't have the luxury of hiding their dirty laundry like that. And it's not just Linux that suffers from that "disadvantage", OS X has an awful lot of open-source components, and many of Apple's updates have been patches rolled in from them.
Microsoft's gaming the system here. Statements like this should be granted no credibility.
It would take a lot less effort and we would be a lot more likely to succeed at establishing a permanent Lunar base using local resources for all bulk mass requirements (oxygen, hydrogen, food and structural materials) than even a single Apollo-style round-trip Mars mission.
And the next stop... the asteroids are closer, energy-wise, and more useful.
To hell with Mars, we have unfinished business on the Moon.
Actually with todays virtualization bits on the CPU, the virtualized machine is just as fast as native.
... that is, you have an application you need to run that doesn't run on the OS you want to use, so you're hostage to the OS manufacturer. On a server it's mostly useful for operating systems that don't support multiple instances well, or for extremely hard management situations. Kind of like blades are, come to think of it.
I'm doing it right now. It's very fast, and if you stay well clear of the limits of the machine, you'd have a hard time noticing, but it's not "just as fast as native". It's "just as fast as native would be on a cheaper machine", perhaps, but then it'd be a lot more cost effective and efficient just to get a slower machine that supported the OS you want to virtualize.
Virtualization on a desktop is mostly useful for people who have to test how something works on multiple operating systems, and for cases where you're dealing with a hostage situation gone bad
Buying a PC, running Windows on it, and running Linux in a VM under that, when what you're looking for is a machine running Linux, doesn't make any sense at all. You'll be better off buying a less powerful PC if that's what it takes to get Linux support within your budget.
That sounds like a match made in hell. You get to enjoy all the disadvantages of Linux *and* all the disadvantages of Windows at the same time. Your Windows services and kernel are still exposed to malware, you have all the DRM fun of the Windows world, and you have more overhead when running the UNIX applications you bought the computer for.
Whether Jobs was grandstanding or not, that slide bothered me too. I filed it mentally as Jobs being Jobs, pretty much, but them my ox isn't being gored by Safari. I don't think it's fair to dismiss Lilly's concerns as "sour grapes", though... Jobs *did* kind of throw down the gauntlet, and it didn't seem to be Microsoft he was challenging.
I think Lilly was definitely reading WAAAAAY to much into the simplified graph.
I don't agree.
The chart bothered me as well. Either Jobs recovered damn well from putting the wrong chart up, or he really did mean that he was targeting a world where there were only two browsers.
If he was trying to avoid confusing people, he would have left Firefox out of the first chart as well.
It's not the look that's the issue, it's the behavior. All those looks have close enough to the same user interface behavior that the differences can be pretty much ignored. The big one that Apple needs to fix is the drag-by-one-corner one.
And maybe they will.
Apple's already compromised with the Windows behavior by making maximize "full screen" rather than "big enough to show the whole page".
If they're smart, they'll do a little more.
In Web 2.0 terms, which I'm sure is all Steve really cares about, Firefox has 75% of the market and Safari only 25%. Of course he wants to go after the Firefox user.
If Web 2.0 really takes off and Microsoft's position is as bad as you claim, then the *potential* Web 2.0 market that's easy to attack isn't the 25% that Firefox has, it's the 75% that IE has.
And it wouldn't matter if IE had 100% of the web, it still wouldn't be a standards-compliant browser. IE isn't even compatible with *itself*... the web is full of hacks to accommodate the differences between different versions of IE. Getting away from that is the whole point of having standards.
But, anyway, if Steve thinks the way you do, and thinks that going after the bigger market is irrelevant, then...
1. That explains the slide, and
2. Apple *is* picking a fight it can't win, but not because it's taking on Windows, rather because it's taking on Firefox where even if it wins it's *still* the loser.
I don't think Jobs thought he'd eliminate Firefox, either.
Well, he put up a slide showing Safari eliminating Firefox.
Either someone switched slides on him and he recovered nicely, or he really thinks he can eliminate Firefox.
I have no idea why he'd want to. It's Internet Explorer that's the problem, not Firefox.
But that's what he put up.
If you want an expensive contract and no phone, then they might listen, but a cheap contract with no phone gets them nothing, so there is no incentive to sell it.
Yeh, I get that. They don't want to sell a month-to-month SIM, but...
a) back when I went through this it wasn't *possible* to get month-to-month service in the US. Period.
b) This wasn't a matter of him not wanting to sell it, this was him refusing to sell it.
c) Back then you couldn't do better on the web either.
d) Now I can get a month-to-month contract with no phone at a hole in the wall in just about any shopping center.
Can you really not just buy service and stick the SIM in any phone in the UK? Sounds like trading places.
I think it's an anti-privacy thing. The gov't (who can take away their business) wants to be able to identify every customer.
I'm pretty sure that's an excuse. I'm not complaining about them having my ID, in any case, I'm complaining about having to sign up for a 2-year contract and put a $200 deposit down (or give them a credit card # they will charge $200 to if I break the contract) just to get service.
Not only that, but my experience was before 9/11... and now in Dubya's Amerika month-to-month SIMs are available.
But the Windows world isn't like that. It's a cold, unforgiving place where nothing is sacred, users turn like rabid wolves on any company that makes even the smallest error, and no prisoners are taken.
You kidding me? Microsoft regularly gets away with incomprehensible abuse of their customers, and nobody cares.
First... Microsoft would have been torn apart - literally - over the design of ActiveX and the way it's use in Internet Explorer. The MPAA/RIAA-favoring restrictions installed in the kernel by Windows Media Player from 9.0 onwards, now a standard part of the OS in Vista, would have led to WMP being religiously avoided by anyone concerned with freedom of speech. The layers and layers of security band-aids are hated by *everyone*, and yet people put up with it.
Compared to that, having a first public beta using Mac OS style window borders and controls is nothing.
The portable media player market is the House That Apple Built.
Bullshit. Total bullshit. Apple introduced the iPod into a crowded field of players that were cheaper and had more functions, and in many cases were better designed, and they still took it over. Itunes is a red herring... all the early media players except the very cheapest had their own management programs, and the iTunes Music store didn't come out until two years after the iPod.
But, speaking of iTunes, do you have the same issue with iTunes for Windows?
PS: you have Athens and Sparta mixed up. Athens was the city of the brawling philosophers where Socrates was killed for speaking his mind, and Sparta was the regimented and tightly controlled dictatorship where everyone did the same thing.
And if you think Apple doesn't get bashed for user interface decisions by Mac users, you haven't been paying attention.
Rather than providing iPhone users with the existing universe of largely IE-optimized applications and sites in a browser that supports existing standards, and telling iPhone application developers to just go ahead and build universally compatible apps that will also run on the iPhone, Apple feels the overpowering need to once again build and control a new, proprietary playing field.
No, you haven't been paying attention. Safari is more compliant with web standards than IE or Firefox, so universally compatible applications *will* run on the iPhone. The "IE-optimized" web pages written for "whatever IE does this week" and then ported over and over again to every new release of IE (and, if you're lucky, Firefox) may not work on Safari... but that's CERTAINLY not because they're written for a browser that "supports existing standards" or because they're "universally compatible".
The big problem on Windows isn't that the browser "market" is crowded, but because it's sparse. There's basically only three browsers on Windows besides Safari: IE, Firefox, and Opera. Until Safari, there wasn't a single really usable browser using the KHTML engine (the one that's designed from the ground up for standards-compliance rather than speed), and only Opera was designed securely (yes, Safari's design is fundamentally more secure than Firefox, let alone IE).
Windows users should be welcoming the introduction of a new competing browser... one that for all its warts can only serve to improve the quality and standards-compliance of the web.
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK it's pretty hard to buy a contract without a phone.
Oh, I thought that was a particularly US perversion. I tried to get T-Mobile service for a phone I already had several years ago and ended up walking out because it wouldn't have been fair to yell at the bloke... it wasn't HIS fault.
Oh, most of the carriers will do it, and they might even give you a discount, but they don't advertise it, and the sales reps in the shops don't like to admit to it.
This wasn't like that. This was... you can't get service without buying a phone, period, and not less than a two year contract. I just wanted a couple of months of service to fill in a gap, I already had the phone.
Though maybe I should have blown up at this guy:
"I don't want to buy a phone, I just want the service."
"OK. You still need to give me a credit card or pay a deposit."
"I'm paying up front, why do I need that?"
"In case you cancel."
"Why should you care if I'm cancelling? All I'm buying is the service, you've got nothing at risk but a couple cents worth of plastic."
"Everyone has to sign a contract."
I suspect now that he was planning on keeping the phone himself. But he wasn't kidding about the contract, I tried another couple of outlets and they all said the same thing.
This has changed since, though. Now you find people reselling service in little hole-in-the-wall places all over. I had the impression that in Europe they didn't have that problem, or is this one of those "the UK isn't in Europe really" things?
In Europe, unlike in the US, Apple has the option of selling the iPhone through its own dealer network without a simlock.
They could do that here, sell a generic GSM phone. T-Mobile customers atleast would be able to use it.
From the referenced page: "Fortunately, license incompatibility only matters when you want to link, merge or combine code from two different programs into a single program."
SO what about libraries that have been released under the GPL rather than the LGPL? Libraries are not "programs" but they are always, no exception, "linked, merged, or combined". What happens then?
Um. Why did you download the same file three times?
Did you suppose that you would magically get *different files* if you downloaded them twice?
It doesn't change its role based on whether the news is good or bad.
No, it changes its role depending on why you're downloading it, and who you are.
I don't know how many people read slashdot, but if the idea that some of them might have different opinions than others disturbs you enough to post about it, you have lived a suspiciously sheltered life.
Safari is faster, more standards-compliant, and potentially more secure than Firefox.
I can't imagine any reason that anyone would want to actually use Safari.
Upside: Renders faster than Firefox. Doesn't lock up periodically like Firefox. Doesn't invite doorknob rattlers via the extension API like Firefox. Supports web standards better than Firefox.
Downside: needs a cute mascot.
Sorry KDE dudes, KMelion just doesn't cut it. Safari owns KHTML on Windows.
Firefox is simple if you don't install any extensions. You don't have to, and you also say they don't need to, so what's the problem here?
The way extensions are installed in Firefox is inherently insecure. It's not a huge problem, it's a lot LESS insecure than the straw firewall that is ActiveX security zones, so I'm not *terribly* worried about it, but getting that out of the way is a nice bonus.