1) Installing Skype on Windows installed chrome and made it your default browser, unless you explicitly did the custom install and opted out. This seems to have stopped with the Microsoft purchase of Skype. You can see a screenshot of the custom install process here: http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png
2) Installing or updating the Flash plugin on Windows would install Chrome (opt out for that part) and suggest you make it the default browser (this part was opt-in).
3) Installing Avast antivirus would bundle Chrome; not sure whether it was opt-in or opt-out.
There are others I've heard rumors of; but the above three I have either first-hand experience or credible witnesses for.
We already have a new browser monoculture in the offing that people are happily contributing to. Trying to browse "mobile" sites with a browser that doesn't support -webkit-prefixed CSS, for example, tends to be an exercise in pain. And if you point that out to the site developers they give you exactly the answer they would have given you in 2002: that they only care about the one browser engine they're targeting.
JavaScript the _language_ doesn't have much of a built-in type system.
JavaScript _implementations_ try to derive types from runtime information.
The guy who put together those slides is the head of the JS team at Mozilla at the moment, so I can assure you that he knows exactly how typing works in JavaScript. Don't know where you got the "whining" bit from; you may want to check your preconceptions.
The versioning setup is that N.0.0 is the next scheduled release. N.0.x is a critical security update that does not break compatibility with add-ons. N.x.0 is for critical security updates that DO break compatibility with add-ons.
Now obviously these last are avoided at all costs, which is why there haven't been any yet. But the option needs to be there... The other possibility would be bumping the major version number for that critical security update, which would be pretty odd...
> What you call crapware extensions are the only > reasons why I'm still using Firefox instead of > Chrome!
Are you actually using Firefox because of extensions you yourself did not install but that came bundled with other software? If so, I'm curious: what extensions?
Note that "third party" extensions are precisely the extensions I describe above, not the ones you install yourself.
> What real benefit does Firefox 8 give to the users > for all these hassles?
Over Firefox 7? The main ones are less memory usage, better standards support, some new web features, better performance. For some reason those are judged as not making good press copy or something, so people report about UI tweaks like the twitter thing instead.
That's exactly what Firefox 8 is doing. Except it's doing this retroactively for already-installed stuff that wasn't explicitly installed via Firefox itself.
Re:how will they disable 3rd-party add-ons?
on
Firefox 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
The idea here is to prevent incompetence, not malice.
If some malicious software really wants to modify the binary, it can in fact do that. The changes in Firefox 8 don't help there; as you note solving this involves some sort of trusted computing base and all that jazz.
But if it's just some stupid app dropping in a broken extension that it thinks is Really Important for all Firefox users to have, this check will catch that. This is happening all the time (antivirus toolbars, extensions to inefficiently look for and linkify phone numbers in web pages, the Google Update extension, and so forth). That's what Firefox 8 aims to stop.
> Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION! > UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have > to go through the rigmarole of clicking and > downloading it,
Have you actually tried Firefox recently?
Firefox 7 downloads the update in the background. If you happen to restart the browser withing 12 hours after that, the update is installed and you're done. There's a prompt during the install (one-time, just in this release) for disabling the likely-crapware third-party extensions installed on your machine. If you don't restart within 12 hours you get a notice that there is an update already downloaded and that you may want to restart to apply it.
At no point do you have to "click and download" the update. It just happens.
That all assumes that your Firefox is installed in a location you can write to, just like Chrome's automatic update behavior assumes that Chrome is thus installed, of course. If your Firefox is installed in a system location by your distro, say, then the Firefox update stuff is just disabled and it'll get updated as part of your distro's package updates. Again, just like Chrome when installed via a package.
So it's just some sort of weirdness with the old/firefox/new page... Chances are, someone just forgot to update the script that generates the text there.
Yeah, that green button is the one place the version number still appears. It's not clear to me why it still appears there; last I checked it was supposed to be removed.
The biggest problem with 64-bit IE is that is has no JS JIT. So you get pretty bad JS performance. Of course that might not matter for your use patterns.
Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome
on
Firefox 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
You do realize that Mozilla hasn't dropped support for 3.6 yet, right?
> It's only Firefox that's running around screaming > about their version numbers.
Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ doesn't say what version you're downloading. Updating from Firefox 7.0.1 to Firefox 8 never says anything about Firefox 8; the experience is exactly the same as the update from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.
> I don't see Google screaming about every new > Chrome release that comes out.
As for MSI installers, those may be important for _Firefox_. Whether they're more important for the _Web_ than having an alternative to locked-down app stacks is a good question.
Recall that Mozilla's mission is "choice and innovation on the web", not "build a web browser".
> No sane person, when presented with that tradeoff, > would want to ruin his final days of life with the > miserable side effects of useless treatment.
There must be a lot of insane people out there, because it is fairly common (at least in the US) to make the decision to treat for themselves or their loved ones in that situation...
Your and your wife's situation is totally different from that. I really hope things work out for you!
Since they control software installs on your phone when you first get it, they can in fact stick their cert in your browser by default. I would think. Not sure how this would work across updates or if you used a non-default browser on a smartphone, of course.
This is for people who may want the browser. We're not talking about the default Firefox version here or anything. Anyone can take Firefox and modify it; the only question is whether the result can be called Firefox. That last bit is the only story here.
Slashdot Mirror
The two I know of recently:
1) Installing Skype on Windows installed chrome and made it your default browser, unless you explicitly did the custom install and opted out. This seems to have stopped with the Microsoft purchase of Skype. You can see a screenshot of the custom install process here: http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png
2) Installing or updating the Flash plugin on Windows would install Chrome (opt out for that part) and suggest you make it the default browser (this part was opt-in).
3) Installing Avast antivirus would bundle Chrome; not sure whether it was opt-in or opt-out.
There are others I've heard rumors of; but the above three I have either first-hand experience or credible witnesses for.
We already have a new browser monoculture in the offing that people are happily contributing to. Trying to browse "mobile" sites with a browser that doesn't support -webkit-prefixed CSS, for example, tends to be an exercise in pain. And if you point that out to the site developers they give you exactly the answer they would have given you in 2002: that they only care about the one browser engine they're targeting.
JavaScript the _language_ doesn't have much of a built-in type system.
JavaScript _implementations_ try to derive types from runtime information.
The guy who put together those slides is the head of the JS team at Mozilla at the moment, so I can assure you that he knows exactly how typing works in JavaScript. Don't know where you got the "whining" bit from; you may want to check your preconceptions.
And force users into hardware platforms you happened to compile for?
No thanks.
The versioning setup is that N.0.0 is the next scheduled release. N.0.x is a critical security update that does not break compatibility with add-ons. N.x.0 is for critical security updates that DO break compatibility with add-ons.
Now obviously these last are avoided at all costs, which is why there haven't been any yet. But the option needs to be there... The other possibility would be bumping the major version number for that critical security update, which would be pretty odd...
http://people.mozilla.com/~dmandelin/KnowYourEngines_Velocity2011.pdf (or http://www.slideshare.net/newmovie/know-yourengines-velocity2011 if you prefer them on slideshare) is a good set of slides to read about things you want to avoid to make your JS fast.
Last I checked, there were actually different prompts for those two cases. Is that not the case in the final Firefox 8 release?
> What you call crapware extensions are the only
> reasons why I'm still using Firefox instead of
> Chrome!
Are you actually using Firefox because of extensions you yourself did not install but that came bundled with other software? If so, I'm curious: what extensions?
Note that "third party" extensions are precisely the extensions I describe above, not the ones you install yourself.
> What real benefit does Firefox 8 give to the users
> for all these hassles?
Over Firefox 7? The main ones are less memory usage, better standards support, some new web features, better performance. For some reason those are judged as not making good press copy or something, so people report about UI tweaks like the twitter thing instead.
So your real problem is with the behavior of the Slashdot editors, then? Fine, but don't blame Mozilla for that.
That's exactly what Firefox 8 is doing. Except it's doing this retroactively for already-installed stuff that wasn't explicitly installed via Firefox itself.
The idea here is to prevent incompetence, not malice.
If some malicious software really wants to modify the binary, it can in fact do that. The changes in Firefox 8 don't help there; as you note solving this involves some sort of trusted computing base and all that jazz.
But if it's just some stupid app dropping in a broken extension that it thinks is Really Important for all Firefox users to have, this check will catch that. This is happening all the time (antivirus toolbars, extensions to inefficiently look for and linkify phone numbers in web pages, the Google Update extension, and so forth). That's what Firefox 8 aims to stop.
> Firefox goes "NEW VERSION! NEW VERSION!
> UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE!" and then you have
> to go through the rigmarole of clicking and
> downloading it,
Have you actually tried Firefox recently?
Firefox 7 downloads the update in the background. If you happen to restart the browser withing 12 hours after that, the update is installed and you're done. There's a prompt during the install (one-time, just in this release) for disabling the likely-crapware third-party extensions installed on your machine. If you don't restart within 12 hours you get a notice that there is an update already downloaded and that you may want to restart to apply it.
At no point do you have to "click and download" the update. It just happens.
That all assumes that your Firefox is installed in a location you can write to, just like Chrome's automatic update behavior assumes that Chrome is thus installed, of course. If your Firefox is installed in a system location by your distro, say, then the Firefox update stuff is just disabled and it'll get updated as part of your distro's package updates. Again, just like Chrome when installed via a package.
And one more thing. If a "8.0" in small font on a webpage constitutes "screaming", we have very different definitions of "screaming". ;)
One other note. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ (which is the official Firefox download page right now) does not show any version numbers. Neither does http://www.mozilla.org/
So it's just some sort of weirdness with the old /firefox/new page... Chances are, someone just forgot to update the script that generates the text there.
Yeah, that green button is the one place the version number still appears. It's not clear to me why it still appears there; last I checked it was supposed to be removed.
The biggest problem with 64-bit IE is that is has no JS JIT. So you get pretty bad JS performance. Of course that might not matter for your use patterns.
You do realize that Mozilla hasn't dropped support for 3.6 yet, right?
> It's only Firefox that's running around screaming
> about their version numbers.
Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ doesn't say what version you're downloading. Updating from Firefox 7.0.1 to Firefox 8 never says anything about Firefox 8; the experience is exactly the same as the update from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.
> I don't see Google screaming about every new
> Chrome release that comes out.
It does it just as much as Mozilla does. Compare http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/10/chrome-stable-release.html and http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/08/mozilla-firefox-adds-twitter-search-and-new-features-that-make-web-browsing-easier/ which are both the official announcements for Chrome 15 and Firefox 8 as far as I can tell.
What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?
Except they _are_ working on memory footprint.
As for MSI installers, those may be important for _Firefox_. Whether they're more important for the _Web_ than having an alternative to locked-down app stacks is a good question.
Recall that Mozilla's mission is "choice and innovation on the web", not "build a web browser".
> No sane person, when presented with that tradeoff,
> would want to ruin his final days of life with the
> miserable side effects of useless treatment.
There must be a lot of insane people out there, because it is fairly common (at least in the US) to make the decision to treat for themselves or their loved ones in that situation...
Your and your wife's situation is totally different from that. I really hope things work out for you!
Since they control software installs on your phone when you first get it, they can in fact stick their cert in your browser by default. I would think. Not sure how this would work across updates or if you used a non-default browser on a smartphone, of course.
If you're doing HTTPS, the wireless carrier only knows the hostname, not the whole URL. Unless you're going through one of their proxies, of course.
The whole point of implementing in JS is to not increase attack surface: everything pdf.js does can already be done by web pages.
This is for people who may want the browser. We're not talking about the default Firefox version here or anything. Anyone can take Firefox and modify it; the only question is whether the result can be called Firefox. That last bit is the only story here.
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/10/26/offering-a-customized-firefox-experience-for-bing-users/ has more details if you care... and mentions that there are also customized builds being distributed by Twitter, Yahoo, and so forth.
It doesn't even indicate that. All it indicates is that Mozilla allowed Microsoft to use the "Firefox" trademark for this particular modification of an existing open-source browser. Just like Twitter, Yahoo, Yandex, and various other parties are already doing. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/10/26/offering-a-customized-firefox-experience-for-bing-users/