I'm surprised at the number of people with stability problems. I tried 3.0a1 and I had instant crashes in AJAX web apps, so I decided to wait until b1 which turned out to be a good decision, because it was much more stable. Each beta has been increasingly better. I still get a couple crashes here and there but I am betting it's due to Flash or an add-on I'm using.
On Linux I use Swiftfox, which is a recompiled Firefox optimized for individual processors so it can be even a little faster than Firefox 3. Only problem is they occasionally push out a nightly build over their update package source thingy (I tend to prefer the public beta releases) but nothing that has been unstable yet.
If you're having stability problems, you really have no right to complain until you at least TRY to fix it since Firefox gives you the tools to do so. To use another car analogy, it's like complaining your car doesn't slow down fast enough so you need a different one but you haven't even tried using the brakes yet. Well not exactly but I needed to use a car analogy. Anyways here's some things you should try:
Try running Firefox in safe-mode. If the problem goes away it's very likely a bad extension.
Try making a new, temporary profile. If the problem goes away it might be easy to fix by migrating individual files over and skipping the one that causes the problem. Also this helps to clear out old FF2 files you don't need anymore (especially if you can figure out what the files are, not hard to do since they're mostly well named).
If the problem occurs on pages which utilize a specific plugin try disabling the plugin... about:plugins can help you locate the dll to temporarily move it somewhere else to disable it (Firefox won't let you follow about: links so copy/paste the url). If it's a plugin you can't live without try seeing if there's updates for it.
Google Gears instantly crashes FF3 if sites try to use it (in b5 at least). Disable it until it gets an update.
Silverlight doesn't support FF3 yet and just refuses to run at all. MS is supposedly working on it.
Some people have reported weird slow-loading problems. I had that problem as well and traced it to the Firebug extension, or perhaps the Firecookie one... the problem is sporadic so it's difficult. However a Firebug update recently seemed to fix it. You can try disabling it if you have problems.
If you still have problems it's likely a problem with Firefox, in which case I suppose you could complain, but it would be more productive to file a bug report to increase the chances of it being fixed. To quote GLaDOS, "Thank you for helping us help you help us all."
I personally don't see why people don't like the new awesomebar. Selection rows are taller but unless you run on a 800x600 monitor I really don't see how it's a problem. With the bigger rows that can show more info in there, including page title, url, bookmarked status, favicon, and your tags. The oldbar can't show your tags or whether you bookmarked it, and it has less room for the rest.
I'd just use Print Preview if I saw something like that, and you can't do the table of links thing in the Preview. Which seems sorta dumb in and of itself, since you can't Preview what it's gonna look like.
The best you can do is window.print() to bring up the Print dialog. The user would have to select the "Print table of links" option manually and then print to any printer.
I hope they have some sort of protection against that; specifically, if you have magic_quotes turned on in php.ini (or whatever the linux equivilant is) PHP should refuse to start, perhaps logging an error message which explicitly tells the webmaster magic_quotes is no longer supported, and that it must be turned off, and the possible consequences of using old scripts designed to work with magic_quotes on. This forces the webmaster to actually go into the config file and turn magic_quotes off, and if they didn't fix their scripts or tell their clients to do so it's their own fault. And of course if they have badly configured security, this could mean even bigger consequences, but this is possible even with magic_quotes, depending on the scripts and holes in them. A separate message for safe_mode (also scrapped for 6) would also put the consequences of not properly setting up user permissions and the permissions of the account running the web server in big bold letters.
If they do something like that, no-one can really say they weren't warned, since a webmaster would actually have to go in and turn it off, and would be told exactly what could happen if they don't take the proper steps.
A friend of mine is happy these two settings are being killed, as am I. It can be tough to code with the restrictions put in place by safe_mode and magic_quotes, which as I understand are just to cater to lazy irresponsible server admins and lazy irresponsible programmers, respectively. Although safe_mode does serve a legitimate purpose since currently all scripts, regardless of which user owns it, are run under the permissions of the webserver user. This strikes me as more fo a webserver problem than a PHP problem, though. Not sure how much the PHP team could do... except for maybe safe_mode.
To end my little rant, here's a helpful bit of code pulled from the pastebin source (GPL) to combat magic_quotes in _GET and _POST and _COOKIE:
// magic quotes are anything but magic - lose them! //
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
{
function callback_stripslashes(&$val, $name)
{
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
$val=stripslashes($val);
}
if (count($_GET))
array_walk ($_GET, 'callback_stripslashes');
if (count($_POST))
array_walk ($_POST, 'callback_stripslashes');
if (count($_COOKIE))
array_walk ($_COOKIE, 'callback_stripslashes');
}
I installed SP3 on an SP2 computer running IE8 beta (didn't realize I should've uninstalled it first) and had no problems. IE8 still works AFAI can tell. I don't use it for much other than Microsoft Update, though the Developer Tools are welcome for when I have to make a website IE-compatible (I know the Developer Toolbar was a separate add-on for IE6/7 but it broke for me recently and I couldn't get it to work again).
You are more than welcome to make fonts which incorporate letters from whatever alphabets you want. I dunno if this tool lets you do this since the site has been given a thorough slashdotting (but it should).
Besides, it's not like someone is going to make "Comic Sans 2" and it will take the world by storm overnight and MS will start shipping it with Vista.
He posted on [url=https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432406]the bugzilla post[/url] saying he's preparing a cleaned pack. Apparently his computer was infected with the trojan which infected the lang pack files.
It's noteworthy that the actual trojan isn't in the files... just the code which does the advertising stuff, I think. It can't propagate from these files. Since it took so long to be detected it's possible the infected code doesn't work (after all it was intended for HTML documents and not language packs) but this is just personal speculation.
Your solution wouldn't fix the problem. The "screen saver"'s "installer" can easily be the source of the virus or trojan or whatever instead of the actual "screen saver". And installers are expected to have to run with elevated privileges (especially in Vista since Program Files can't be written to without them).
As an addendum, it seems this COFEE is a USB thumb drive with software which allows you to poke around in Windows while Windows is running. This is a bit more significant since booting into another OS means the first OS' security restrictions can't apply (unless you used encryption). Even in Windows I can access my Linux personal files without a password with an efs2 driver.
Pulling passwords from within Windows is a bit of a different matter, and I would see it as a security risk. Furthermore full drive encryption is totally bypassed with this, and if you have a Truecrypt drive mounted it would be scanned too.
Of course this only makes it more likely the tool will be abused when it is inevitably leaked.
I guess the lesson is if you have things you wouldn't want the police to see, even if you have encryption in place, whenever someone knocks on your door turn your PC off (and optionally, back on) before answering it. And/or use Linux.
Anyone can boot from a Knoppix live CD and mount NTFS drives in Linux and poke around. NTFS security is not applied under Linux so you can have a look at anything you want. I don't see how this is a big deal.
The only thing that might be a problem is browsing the registry, but I wonder if wine's regedit can load native Windows registry hives. If so, then all Microsoft has done is taken existing Linux functionality and made it user friendly for the police.
Speaking of which, anyone wanna place bets as to how long it takes for this tool to spread across p2p and torrent sites?
I'm sure some friendly neighborhood hacker will come through with a Windows patch. Just like the uxtheme.dll patches and the TCP > 10 concurrent connection attempts patch.
I dunno TOO much about Linux package management, but you SHOULD be able to select the DVD as a package source and then do a dist-upgrade.
I've never tried it though. I just download the ISO for possible reinstall purposes later (an old Windows habit... I haven't needed to use it yet) and do an apt-get dist-upgrade when it's avilable, which it doesn't appear to be ATM.
I have used Vista. I have given it multiple chances. I even gave SP1 another chance. I can't even get audio to play back correctly without sounding corrupted, although in fairness I blame nVidia for lack of Vista support for my motherboard (nForce 2 chipset with integrated audio). Note that I can hate Vista without it being Microsoft's problem, although I hate Microsoft for unrelated Vista problems as well. Don't get me started about gaming performance.
Vista continually underperforms XP every time I try it, and I have never gotten a virus or trojan on XP so Vista's security features are meaningless for me. There's really no contest here. XP wins out for me easily.
I have uncovered various glitches in Explorer and the OS in general which are usually prevalent in ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE which, given MS' track record, are unlikely to be fixed until Windows 7 or at least SP2. Hell there are still glitches in XP's explorer which have gone unfixed.
I should also mention I have wrestled with that same audio corruption problem on and off in XP, and it was gone for a bit until I was forced to install new sound drivers to play GTA San Andreas (otherwise I would get BSoDs at the same point in-game) and the problem returned. However, I have NEVER, not ONCE, had an audio corruption problem in Linux. Drivers were picked and installed automatically and I have never had to give a care about them.
I heard somewhere someone replaced one of these expensive cables (I dunno if it was Monster or not) in a store display with a coat hanger and everyone thought it sounded better afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume he means non-en-us language version.
You DO realize safe-mode exists so you can uninstall and disable extensions without having them running, so they can't crash Firefox.
I'm surprised at the number of people with stability problems. I tried 3.0a1 and I had instant crashes in AJAX web apps, so I decided to wait until b1 which turned out to be a good decision, because it was much more stable. Each beta has been increasingly better. I still get a couple crashes here and there but I am betting it's due to Flash or an add-on I'm using.
On Linux I use Swiftfox, which is a recompiled Firefox optimized for individual processors so it can be even a little faster than Firefox 3. Only problem is they occasionally push out a nightly build over their update package source thingy (I tend to prefer the public beta releases) but nothing that has been unstable yet.
If you're having stability problems, you really have no right to complain until you at least TRY to fix it since Firefox gives you the tools to do so. To use another car analogy, it's like complaining your car doesn't slow down fast enough so you need a different one but you haven't even tried using the brakes yet. Well not exactly but I needed to use a car analogy. Anyways here's some things you should try:
If you still have problems it's likely a problem with Firefox, in which case I suppose you could complain, but it would be more productive to file a bug report to increase the chances of it being fixed. To quote GLaDOS, "Thank you for helping us help you help us all."
Oldbar
I personally don't see why people don't like the new awesomebar. Selection rows are taller but unless you run on a 800x600 monitor I really don't see how it's a problem. With the bigger rows that can show more info in there, including page title, url, bookmarked status, favicon, and your tags. The oldbar can't show your tags or whether you bookmarked it, and it has less room for the rest.
I'd just use Print Preview if I saw something like that, and you can't do the table of links thing in the Preview. Which seems sorta dumb in and of itself, since you can't Preview what it's gonna look like.
The best you can do is window.print() to bring up the Print dialog. The user would have to select the "Print table of links" option manually and then print to any printer.
I hope they have some sort of protection against that; specifically, if you have magic_quotes turned on in php.ini (or whatever the linux equivilant is) PHP should refuse to start, perhaps logging an error message which explicitly tells the webmaster magic_quotes is no longer supported, and that it must be turned off, and the possible consequences of using old scripts designed to work with magic_quotes on. This forces the webmaster to actually go into the config file and turn magic_quotes off, and if they didn't fix their scripts or tell their clients to do so it's their own fault. And of course if they have badly configured security, this could mean even bigger consequences, but this is possible even with magic_quotes, depending on the scripts and holes in them. A separate message for safe_mode (also scrapped for 6) would also put the consequences of not properly setting up user permissions and the permissions of the account running the web server in big bold letters.
If they do something like that, no-one can really say they weren't warned, since a webmaster would actually have to go in and turn it off, and would be told exactly what could happen if they don't take the proper steps.
A friend of mine is happy these two settings are being killed, as am I. It can be tough to code with the restrictions put in place by safe_mode and magic_quotes, which as I understand are just to cater to lazy irresponsible server admins and lazy irresponsible programmers, respectively. Although safe_mode does serve a legitimate purpose since currently all scripts, regardless of which user owns it, are run under the permissions of the webserver user. This strikes me as more fo a webserver problem than a PHP problem, though. Not sure how much the PHP team could do... except for maybe safe_mode.
To end my little rant, here's a helpful bit of code pulled from the pastebin source (GPL) to combat magic_quotes in _GET and _POST and _COOKIE:
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
{
function callback_stripslashes(&$val, $name)
{
if (get_magic_quotes_gpc())
$val=stripslashes($val);
}
if (count($_GET))
array_walk ($_GET, 'callback_stripslashes');
if (count($_POST))
array_walk ($_POST, 'callback_stripslashes');
if (count($_COOKIE))
array_walk ($_COOKIE, 'callback_stripslashes');
}
I installed SP3 on an SP2 computer running IE8 beta (didn't realize I should've uninstalled it first) and had no problems. IE8 still works AFAI can tell. I don't use it for much other than Microsoft Update, though the Developer Tools are welcome for when I have to make a website IE-compatible (I know the Developer Toolbar was a separate add-on for IE6/7 but it broke for me recently and I couldn't get it to work again).
You are more than welcome to make fonts which incorporate letters from whatever alphabets you want. I dunno if this tool lets you do this since the site has been given a thorough slashdotting (but it should).
Besides, it's not like someone is going to make "Comic Sans 2" and it will take the world by storm overnight and MS will start shipping it with Vista.
He posted on [url=https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432406]the bugzilla post[/url] saying he's preparing a cleaned pack. Apparently his computer was infected with the trojan which infected the lang pack files.
It's noteworthy that the actual trojan isn't in the files... just the code which does the advertising stuff, I think. It can't propagate from these files. Since it took so long to be detected it's possible the infected code doesn't work (after all it was intended for HTML documents and not language packs) but this is just personal speculation.
Your solution wouldn't fix the problem. The "screen saver"'s "installer" can easily be the source of the virus or trojan or whatever instead of the actual "screen saver". And installers are expected to have to run with elevated privileges (especially in Vista since Program Files can't be written to without them).
Then they switch proxies and come back.
As an addendum, it seems this COFEE is a USB thumb drive with software which allows you to poke around in Windows while Windows is running. This is a bit more significant since booting into another OS means the first OS' security restrictions can't apply (unless you used encryption). Even in Windows I can access my Linux personal files without a password with an efs2 driver.
Pulling passwords from within Windows is a bit of a different matter, and I would see it as a security risk. Furthermore full drive encryption is totally bypassed with this, and if you have a Truecrypt drive mounted it would be scanned too.
Of course this only makes it more likely the tool will be abused when it is inevitably leaked.
I guess the lesson is if you have things you wouldn't want the police to see, even if you have encryption in place, whenever someone knocks on your door turn your PC off (and optionally, back on) before answering it. And/or use Linux.
Anyone can boot from a Knoppix live CD and mount NTFS drives in Linux and poke around. NTFS security is not applied under Linux so you can have a look at anything you want. I don't see how this is a big deal.
The only thing that might be a problem is browsing the registry, but I wonder if wine's regedit can load native Windows registry hives. If so, then all Microsoft has done is taken existing Linux functionality and made it user friendly for the police.
Speaking of which, anyone wanna place bets as to how long it takes for this tool to spread across p2p and torrent sites?
Ah, but you CAN slipstream SP1 now.
I just looked at the XP sister tool page and they have support for the latest XP SP3 refresh so it's a good bet they'll support it in 1.4.5 final.
I'm sure some friendly neighborhood hacker will come through with a Windows patch. Just like the uxtheme.dll patches and the TCP > 10 concurrent connection attempts patch.
You must be semi-new here...
I dunno TOO much about Linux package management, but you SHOULD be able to select the DVD as a package source and then do a dist-upgrade.
I've never tried it though. I just download the ISO for possible reinstall purposes later (an old Windows habit... I haven't needed to use it yet) and do an apt-get dist-upgrade when it's avilable, which it doesn't appear to be ATM.
I have used Vista. I have given it multiple chances. I even gave SP1 another chance. I can't even get audio to play back correctly without sounding corrupted, although in fairness I blame nVidia for lack of Vista support for my motherboard (nForce 2 chipset with integrated audio). Note that I can hate Vista without it being Microsoft's problem, although I hate Microsoft for unrelated Vista problems as well. Don't get me started about gaming performance.
Vista continually underperforms XP every time I try it, and I have never gotten a virus or trojan on XP so Vista's security features are meaningless for me. There's really no contest here. XP wins out for me easily.
I have uncovered various glitches in Explorer and the OS in general which are usually prevalent in ALPHA QUALITY SOFTWARE which, given MS' track record, are unlikely to be fixed until Windows 7 or at least SP2. Hell there are still glitches in XP's explorer which have gone unfixed.
I should also mention I have wrestled with that same audio corruption problem on and off in XP, and it was gone for a bit until I was forced to install new sound drivers to play GTA San Andreas (otherwise I would get BSoDs at the same point in-game) and the problem returned. However, I have NEVER, not ONCE, had an audio corruption problem in Linux. Drivers were picked and installed automatically and I have never had to give a care about them.
But you can't get exploited when your computer is off, and very rarely when you're not hooked up to the 'net.
GMail deletes spam older than 30 days.
In 30 days I've gotten 45 legitimate e-mails and 1792 spam. Most were automatically filtered, a few manually.
So 97.55% here... hrm.
An interesting percentage would be how much of the spam snuck through, but I don't have that metric.... couldn't be more than a couple dozen though.
The Russians didn't detonate it in the ocean causing huge tidal waves.
I heard somewhere someone replaced one of these expensive cables (I dunno if it was Monster or not) in a store display with a coat hanger and everyone thought it sounded better afterwards.