They don't make any money from their browsers anyway!
Opera and Mozilla certainly do make money from their browsers. They both get revenue from partnering with search engines.
Anyway, by the time the antitrust case made it to court, Microsoft's decision to bundle IE with Windows had already devastated the browser market. After killing the competition off, IE was able to grab up to 96% share of the browser market. They came quite close to so totally dominating the browser market that they could ignore web standards entirely, as web developers would (and still do) bend over backwards to make their sites work with IE, no matter how buggy or nonstandard its behavior was.
If you check out Web browser standards support summary from Web Devout you can see Firefox 2 (and of course other Mozilla-based browsers) and Konqueror have some pretty good standards support. It's really just IE that doesn't support the standards well, judging from the fact that IE has the lowest percentage of support in most categories.
Or they don't know what is causing it and cannot fix it. I'm sort of suspecting it might be the spell checker but cannot show that to be the case.
You can speculate until you're blue in the face, which is pointless, or you can simply give a Talkback ID and have someone look up the stack signature. Only a troll would continue to complain about problems instead of doing something productive about them. How to get the Talkback ID is explained in the relevant link in my first post. This is my common experience -- people continuing to complain simply are not reading the material I am pointing them to. They are trolls who just keep complaining.
You know, I though that is what the crash report thing did. It sent the information to the firefox team so they can fix it. Although the updates don't seem to address it.
Yes, you are correct up to a point. If it is a crash in Firefox, yes the Firefox team can fix it. If it is a crash in a driver or a plugin or it is caused by bad hardware, they cannot. It sounds like it is not a bug in Firefox you are experiencing if Firefox crashes a lot on you and the developers do not seem to be addressing your problem. To find out, follow the link in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article on Firefox crashing and post details of the crash such as the Talkback ID in the Firefox Bugs forum. Someone can help you determine where the crash is occurring by looking up the crash signature for the Talkback report.
But because I cannot make it do it on command, doesn't mean there isn't a bug.
Agreed. But complaining about the bug without giving any useful details such as the Talkback report identification is pointless. And it's been a very long time since I've seen someone point out a bug in Firefox that makes it crash often. Most often when Firefox crashes often, it's due to a problem with something other than Firefox. Before you say it's a bug in Firefox, just make the determination that it really is a bug in Firefox. To say that you've discovered a serious bug in Firefox without giving any details of the bug or even determining if it really is a bug in Firefox is trolling in my book. I'm still waiting for someone to point out a serious bug in Firefox 2 in the Firefox Bugs forum. Maybe you'll be the one!
At least this is the exact type of comment I was talking about. Did you notice you did not point out a single bug in Firefox? Try doing that instead of pointlessly rambling on. You generally need to be able to reproduce a bug in order to file a bug report. Maybe you are not able to reproduce it, but at least someone, somewhere, must be lucky enough to stumble upon steps to reproduce these allegedly widespread and serious bugs in Firefox, if they do exist. Right?
I'm not saying that I personally do not experience Firefox bugs. If you go to the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine, you'll see hardly any Firefox bugs at all. Almost all the problems discussed there have simple solutions in the Knowledge Base. If Firefox had serious widespread bugs, someone would be able to describe them to some extent out of the many thousands of posts in that forum. Wouldn't they?
The bottom line is that I do believe you are experiencing problems with Firefox. You are not making it up. But if you want us to believe that it is a bug in Firefox, and not some other problem on your computer, someone should back it up with the tiniest shred of evidence. That way we can all see the problem and do something about it. Ranting about vague, unspecified problems in Firefox is useless.
if this isn't a marvelously grand conspiracy to rag on firefox and the Mozilla foundation, and these problems actually exist, is telling someone they are the only ones with the problems or moding the comment down so that no one else can see it really a fix?
If not one person out of over 100 million users can demonstrate how to reproduce these problems, are they really so widespread that they need immediate attention? Or are the people posting about these problems simply trolls for making the problems seem widespread and not giving any useful information about the problem? If, as these posters claim, Firefox has these terrible problems such as hogging memory, burning CPU, hanging, or crashing, why can't they explain in detail what needs to be fixed in Firefox? If these users looked in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base, they might just find that the problem is not in Firefox, but is a problem on their systems that can easily be fixed.
What the hell for?! I mean, they couldn't possibly have one tenth that in expenses, even if they tried.
Each employee probably costs the company $100K per year in salary, benefits (vacation, insurance), and infrastructure (a place to work, parking, air conditioning, computer equipment). They have about 100 employees. That comes to $10 million per year right there. Then there's the matter of 110 million Firefox users downloading updates about once a month. How much does that much bandwidth cost?
The couldn't possibly have as little as one tenth of that in expenses, even if they tried. Anyway, I've never heard of a company having to justify their revenues.
Thunderbird has been ignored for too long!
on
Thunderbird in Crisis?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah! Mozilla should stop ignoring Thunderbird. They should create a company whose sole focus is on email and other messaging technology. They should fund the new company with several million dollars so they can get off the ground. Yeah, that's what they should do... then Thunderbird will get the attention it deserves. Oh wait, that's what they're doing already. Nevermind.
Yes, the Geode has generally better performance per MHz than even the VIA C7, according to this comparison of Celeron, VIA C7, and AMD Geode. Geode beat the VIA C7 on the SPECint and SPECfp at performance per MHz, but VIA C7 beat the Geode slightly at performance per MHz in the CPU score in that article. The article also notes the Geode does not support SSE instructions. On the other hand, Geode also seems to use more power per MHz than VIA's chips, according to the Wikipedia article on Geode.
In case anyone is wondering how to estimate the cost of power for running a server, I've found that simply plugging the server into a Kill A Watt EZ is quite effective. Just enter the cost for power and let it measure the power usage for a few days to get a good average, and it will calculate the cost for power per month or year automatically. To account for the cost of cooling, you may need to double that amount.
Unlike Firefox, they actually have to pay their developers.
Mozilla pays its developers just like Opera does. There's a myth that all open source development is done by volunteers. A lot of it is, but the main contributors, at least to Mozilla code, are paid full-time developers.
They can work as entry-level green (as in low-power) PCs. Everex came out with one recently. If you want a low-noise PC with more power, maybe one built around a mobile processor would be appropriate.
There are several manufacturers selling fully built VIA C7 systems with three gigabit ports and saying they work well as firewalls. I don't think it's as outrageous an idea as you think. Is your wisecrask from personal experience, or are you just clueless?
Or add a few gigabit Ethernet ports and use it as a firewall. Has anyone used a VIA C7 system in this way? If so, I'd be interested in how well it's worked, and if it introduces any significant latency or limits bandwidth.
Your experiences are far from typical. For most users, Firefox runs very well, consuming about as much memory and CPU as other browsers or even less.
If you want the problems you're experiencing to be fixed, describe them in enough detail that someone can write up a proper bug report. Or you can follow the suggestions in these Knowledge Base articles: Firefox CPU usage, Reducing memory usage.
Oh, you're talking about Unix specifically. I thought the OP was referring to Windows. Can you really not install Firefox on a Unix system using an account without admin privileges?
Isn't the purpose of giving users non-admin accounts on computers, though, to prevent them from doing things such as installing unauthorized applications? Anyway, if you want to run Firefox on a machine without authorization, just use Portable Firefox. If you want to install applications on your own computer, I would expect you would login as an admin.
JPEG 2000 is by itself not license-free, but the contributing companies and organizations agreed that licenses for its first part -- the core coding system -- can be obtained free of charge from all contributors.
The JPEG committee has stated:
It has always been a strong goal of the JPEG committee that its standards should be implementable in their baseline form without payment of royalty and license fees... The up and coming JPEG 2000 standard has been prepared along these lines, and agreement reached with over 20 large organizations holding many patents in this area to allow use of their intellectual property in connection with the standard without payment of license fees or royalties.
However, the JPEG committee has also noted that undeclared and obscure submarine patents may still present a hazard:
It is of course still possible that other organizations or individuals may claim intellectual property rights that affect implementation of the standard, and any implementers are urged to carry out their own searches and investigations in this area.
So JPEG 2000 may be implemented for free. Why would it not be free for consumers?
As for submarine patents, there may be submarine patents. There may also be submarine patents for HD Photo. I would think submarine patents would present less of a problem for the older standard, JPEG 2000, because the patents have had longer to expire.
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Opera and Mozilla certainly do make money from their browsers. They both get revenue from partnering with search engines.
Anyway, by the time the antitrust case made it to court, Microsoft's decision to bundle IE with Windows had already devastated the browser market. After killing the competition off, IE was able to grab up to 96% share of the browser market. They came quite close to so totally dominating the browser market that they could ignore web standards entirely, as web developers would (and still do) bend over backwards to make their sites work with IE, no matter how buggy or nonstandard its behavior was.
If you check out Web browser standards support summary from Web Devout you can see Firefox 2 (and of course other Mozilla-based browsers) and Konqueror have some pretty good standards support. It's really just IE that doesn't support the standards well, judging from the fact that IE has the lowest percentage of support in most categories.
As far as I can tell, even the Linux kernel doesn't have memory randomization. You need a patch like PaX to get that feature.
At least this is the exact type of comment I was talking about. Did you notice you did not point out a single bug in Firefox? Try doing that instead of pointlessly rambling on. You generally need to be able to reproduce a bug in order to file a bug report. Maybe you are not able to reproduce it, but at least someone, somewhere, must be lucky enough to stumble upon steps to reproduce these allegedly widespread and serious bugs in Firefox, if they do exist. Right?
I'm not saying that I personally do not experience Firefox bugs. If you go to the Firefox Bugs forum on MozillaZine, you'll see hardly any Firefox bugs at all. Almost all the problems discussed there have simple solutions in the Knowledge Base. If Firefox had serious widespread bugs, someone would be able to describe them to some extent out of the many thousands of posts in that forum. Wouldn't they?
The bottom line is that I do believe you are experiencing problems with Firefox. You are not making it up. But if you want us to believe that it is a bug in Firefox, and not some other problem on your computer, someone should back it up with the tiniest shred of evidence. That way we can all see the problem and do something about it. Ranting about vague, unspecified problems in Firefox is useless.
Costs cut into profit, not revenue. It'll stop reading right there. You can go on typing if you would like...
Each employee probably costs the company $100K per year in salary, benefits (vacation, insurance), and infrastructure (a place to work, parking, air conditioning, computer equipment). They have about 100 employees. That comes to $10 million per year right there. Then there's the matter of 110 million Firefox users downloading updates about once a month. How much does that much bandwidth cost?
The couldn't possibly have as little as one tenth of that in expenses, even if they tried. Anyway, I've never heard of a company having to justify their revenues.
Yeah! Mozilla should stop ignoring Thunderbird. They should create a company whose sole focus is on email and other messaging technology. They should fund the new company with several million dollars so they can get off the ground. Yeah, that's what they should do... then Thunderbird will get the attention it deserves. Oh wait, that's what they're doing already. Nevermind.
Since when do corporations need to justify their revenues? Sigh... yes, of course, they're making money so they must be EVIL!!!!
Personally, I like to play Peekaboom, also by van Ahn and others at Carnegie Mellon.
2.7 gigawatts? 2.7 gigawatts? Great Scott!
Yes, the Geode has generally better performance per MHz than even the VIA C7, according to this comparison of Celeron, VIA C7, and AMD Geode. Geode beat the VIA C7 on the SPECint and SPECfp at performance per MHz, but VIA C7 beat the Geode slightly at performance per MHz in the CPU score in that article. The article also notes the Geode does not support SSE instructions. On the other hand, Geode also seems to use more power per MHz than VIA's chips, according to the Wikipedia article on Geode.
In case anyone is wondering how to estimate the cost of power for running a server, I've found that simply plugging the server into a Kill A Watt EZ is quite effective. Just enter the cost for power and let it measure the power usage for a few days to get a good average, and it will calculate the cost for power per month or year automatically. To account for the cost of cooling, you may need to double that amount.
Maybe someone should tell the companies that are making PCs out of these boards, such as Systemax.
They can work as entry-level green (as in low-power) PCs. Everex came out with one recently. If you want a low-noise PC with more power, maybe one built around a mobile processor would be appropriate.
There are several manufacturers selling fully built VIA C7 systems with three gigabit ports and saying they work well as firewalls. I don't think it's as outrageous an idea as you think. Is your wisecrask from personal experience, or are you just clueless?
Or add a few gigabit Ethernet ports and use it as a firewall. Has anyone used a VIA C7 system in this way? If so, I'd be interested in how well it's worked, and if it introduces any significant latency or limits bandwidth.
Firefox CPU usage
Firefox hangs
Your experiences are far from typical. For most users, Firefox runs very well, consuming about as much memory and CPU as other browsers or even less.
If you want the problems you're experiencing to be fixed, describe them in enough detail that someone can write up a proper bug report. Or you can follow the suggestions in these Knowledge Base articles: Firefox CPU usage, Reducing memory usage.
Oh, you're talking about Unix specifically. I thought the OP was referring to Windows. Can you really not install Firefox on a Unix system using an account without admin privileges?
The plugin gripe is point 7 of the 12-point plan:
7. Make common plug-ins work out of the box
Isn't the purpose of giving users non-admin accounts on computers, though, to prevent them from doing things such as installing unauthorized applications? Anyway, if you want to run Firefox on a machine without authorization, just use Portable Firefox. If you want to install applications on your own computer, I would expect you would login as an admin.
So JPEG 2000 may be implemented for free. Why would it not be free for consumers?
As for submarine patents, there may be submarine patents. There may also be submarine patents for HD Photo. I would think submarine patents would present less of a problem for the older standard, JPEG 2000, because the patents have had longer to expire.