Firefox Reviewed in the Globe and Mail

Eric Giguere writes "Today's Globe and Mail has a Firefox review titled A bug-free surfing zone in its Friday review section. Slashdot readers probably won't like the last phrase, though: 'Until Firefox finds a way around that, you might have to keep Internet ExplORer around -- just for emergencies, of course.'"

might have to keep it around?

[Vermyndax]

You might have to keep IE around? What else are you going to do with it? It's integrated into the OS. The only way to get rid of it completely is to uninstall Windows. What's not to like about that statement? It's certainly worth a chuckle.

Windows Update

[IO ERROR]

Windows Update [microsoft.com] is the big reason Firefox users keep having to use Internet Explorer. There's an ActiveX plugin for Firefox [www.iol.ie] out there, but I don't know if (with masquerading the user agent) it will run Windows Update. Anyone tried this? There's also an extension that adds Windows Update to Firefox's Tools menu [mozilla.org].

well firefox has something to learn too

[earthstar]

The last phrase isnt that bad as you said.Nothing wrong in keeping Internet explorer for emergencies.I have seem quite a few pages that refuse to work in netscape - apart from those sites whose contents get juggled ( Yes ,Evene in firefox 1.0).

Next,The start up time when I double click a html file in my hard disk :- IE is much faster than Firefox to open files in my hard disk.(WinXX).

Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!

Re:well firefox has something to learn too

[TheBadger]

Erm it does. You must have disabled it.

Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing -> Warn when closing multiple tabs

Re:well firefox has something to learn too

[SuperficialRhyme]

Is this a joke?

I was going to ignore it thinking it was, but just incase you're serious I will respond.

The last phrase isnt that bad as you said.Nothing wrong in keeping Internet explorer for emergencies.I have seem quite a few pages that refuse to work in netscape - apart from those sites whose contents get juggled ( Yes ,Evene in firefox 1.0).

You're right here, this happens. MSIE is VERY good at rendering malformed HTML. Some have speculated that this was done to prevent HTML standards from being followed by most developers, but in any case, the HTML you're seeing messed up *is* malformed. At a fundamental level it's the website's fault. If you do have to use one of those pages, do make sure you e-mail the maintainer. Often they will fix it. As FF's marketshare increases, expect this to change.

Next,The start up time when I double click a html file in my hard disk :- IE is much faster than Firefox to open files in my hard disk.(WinXX).

This is because MSIE is preloaded in RAM. I'm not familiar enough with windows to tell you how to preload FF at startup but there is a way. You can use about:config changes in firefox to speed up page rendering if you'd like. You should look into both of these if you are often opening files from the hard disk.

Firefox needs to have a confirmation box when its main window containing the tabs is clicked for close.many a time i have accidently clicked the close and all the tabs are gone!

Ahh, finally to the reason I think you are joking. This is the default behavior in Firefox. If your copy isn't doing this it is because you turned it off. Turn it back on and once more it will ask for conformation.

Re:might have to keep it around?

[enosys]

IEradicator [litepc.com] is a tiny script that uses the Windows setup engine to surgically remove Internet Explorer versions 3 through 6.0 from Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows Millennium and Windows 2000(sr1).

Re:negatives of the review

[JPriest]

Substituting version numbers for actual mathematical value is fun. But you forget that Firefox actually started as Netscape.

Re:might have to keep it around?

[enosys]

XP has automatic updates [microsoft.com], a program that can check for updates, download updates using the Background Intelligent Transfer Service [microsoft.com] and even install them automatically. That program doesn't appear to use Internet Explorer.

Re:Keeping explorer around

[PhoenixFlare]

First, I use FireFox probably 99% of the time now. Due to quirks of my system somewhere, visiting a few of my favorite Flash-using sites still forces me to use IE from time to time.

That said:

As people will sometimes acidently find them selfs browsing using I.E

How do you "accidently" find yourself using IE? Have I missed something and it can't be quit anymore? Either you're using it to browse the page you're currently looking at and you know it, or you're not using it. And yes, I know about it being integrated with Windows, but it doesn't seem as if you're talking about that.

then when they have finished, will notice all the spyware and maybe infections on their machines.

I used IE exclusively for almost 5 years before I discovered Phoenix/Firebird/FireFox. I still use it from time to time for certain sites. I never had a problem with spyware or viruses. It all depends on what sites you visit, what you download, and what you install.

Perhaps FireFox is better at protecting users from the consequences of their own stupidity, but the browser is not completely to blame.

As they browse they will notice the annoying ad's, they will notice the most annoying and obtrusive things some websites do.

Spend a few minutes to install the Google toolbar or any of a bazillion free popup blockers, problem solved.

once they realise that somesites are forcing them to use internet explorer, they will turn away and shun the site.

People here love to claim how they'll never visit *insert site here* ever again, because they had to use IE/it had annoying animated GIFs/used Flash/etc., but do you really see normal users reacting that way? I'm not so sure.

Re:My favorite Firefox story

[binkzz]

No they weren't. They flat-out denied having used Firefox in the press release, despite the obvious screenshots. If they now claim they were showcasing MSN search in different browsers (something they never do), it's a lame attempt to try and save some face. Here's a link to the newsarticle that does work: http://www.nrg.co.il/online/10/ART/825/507.html

Re: Or just don't use Windows Update

[InvisiBill]

The extension that adds Windows Update to the menu is just a shortcut to wupdmgr.exe, the same thing you have in your Start Menu. It doesn't add any new features, it just mimics IE's feature of having a shortcut to it right in the browser. It's been a while since I tried, but I don't think the ActiveX plugin supports WU. This plug-in is designed for custom, legacy and intranet solutions and nothing else.

I find it easier just to not use Windows Update. I use Automatic Updates [microsoft.com] to get all my critical updates. If you're paranoid about AU, use their RSS feed [microsoft.com] and Security Bulletin Search [microsoft.com].

Re:What do you mean?

[Trelane]

Java apps load and work to some extent, but the layout is so screwed up in a Firefox that the pages are essentially useless.

So the page layout is messed up, or the applet layout is messed up?

I thought Java was supposed to be platform independent?

Java is platform-independent. There are two issues: most likely, the sites are using Microsoft's bastard Windows-ized "java" implementation (remember the Sun-MSFT Java lawsuit? It was about precisely this). I know several "java" things that require MSVM, and tie in to things like Windows Media Player and Microsoft Office. The other, much less likely, way to break Java's platform independence is to implement some classes in native code, interfaced with the Java Native Interface.

Application look would also likely be broken due to MSVM (the bastardized Java) being stuck at Java version 1.1, before they went from the AWT (Abstract Windowing Toolkit; essentially using the platform-dependent drawing system (and widgets too, I think) in a platform-independent way; you can see where this would cause problems) to Swing, where Java now draws all of its own stuff and can optionally emulate each platform's look and feel (via the plugable look and feel system). With Swing and other maturing of the Java platform (roughly Java 1.2 or maybe 1.3), Java apps pretty much did become Sun's sale phrase "write once, run anywhere" as opposed to the earlier parody of it, "write once, debug everywhere".

Re:Firefox vs IE

[Dazza]

Barclays online banking http://ibank.barcalys.co.uk/ [barcalys.co.uk] works fine with Firefox

Re:Firefox vs IE

[CaptainBaz]

Nonsense, Lloyds TSB [lloydstsb.co.uk]'s internet banking works perfectly across all major browsers and platforms.

Re:It's the Globe and Mail

[Anonymous Coward]

The globe and mail are one of canada's primary newspapers. They are high on my trustworthy list.

They have a history of biased reporting and also they tend to not run stories that cannot be represented according to their worldview. It's suggested to not rely on the Globe and Mail as the only news source.

Re:Firefox vs IE

[Anonymous Coward]

NatWest supports:

Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
Netscape 7.1 and 7.2
Mozilla 1.5 and above
AOL 6.0 and above
Firefox

Re:Firefox and it's supposed speed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you minimize the program frequently?
When you minimize the ram usage drops dramatically. Restore it and it will jump back up, but not as high as it was.

I hate biased articles like this...

[ltwally]

Right from the very start the author of this article showed either how ignorant he is, or how biased he is, with this little opener:

"Way back in the mists of time -- Internet-wise, at least -- there was a battle between a tiny startup company with a piece of software for browsing the Web (Netscape) and a giant software company with a reputation for playing hardball (Microsoft)."

I'm not saying I'm pro-microsoft. I'm not saying I'm anti-microsoft, either. What I am saying is this:

That one statement made by the author (Mathew Ingram) is complete bullshit. Anyone who actually remembers the start of the browser wars will know the following:
1. Netscape may have been a little startup at one point, but by the time the browser wars began, it was the biggest Internet application around -- and it held enormous weight behind it.
2. Netscape directly challenged Microsoft. Netscape thought that it could create a platform independant API, based around the Netscape software, that would make operating systems all but obsolete. They may not have been directly challenging windows, but they sure were threatening to make it obsolete. The challenged the Windows (Win16/Win32) API, which always has and (at least for the immediate future) always will be microsoft's bread 'n butter.

I'm not saying MS's tactics were fair, or even legal. I'm not saying the browser market couldn't use some fresh blood and some competition. Whether microsoft played fair or not is beyond my current scope. The fact is that Netscape made a direct move against microsoft, and making Netscape out to be the poor innocent victim is really starting to get old. They made a decision to challenge one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. They lost. End of story.

Martyrs they are not. Examples of what not to do, they are.

/*end of rant*/

Re:Memory Leaks

[jimicus]

Memory leaks are notoriously difficult to fix, largely because it's very difficult to find what's caused it.

The basic definition of a memory leak is "program requests memory, uses it, then doesn't give it back to the system afterwards". Here's an example of code that will cause a memory leak every time it's called:

int leakyRoutine () {
char *leak;
leak=malloc(1024);
return 0;
}

What happens here is: The program asks the operating system for 1024 bytes of memory. The operating system will return with a pointer to 1024 bytes of memory, which is stored in the variable leak.

It's the program's responsibility to give that memory back afterwards. But once you're out of the function leakyRoutine(), the context is lost - you don't know what the value of the variable (and thus pointer) was. And if you don't know what memory you've got, you can't give it back.

The operating system knows what memory every program has allocated, so can reclaim the memory back quite easily. But because the operating system doesn't know what the program is doing with its memory, it can't do so while the program is running. Otherwise, data corruption is likely.

The above is a trivial example, and it's easy to see the problem. But what if there's a million lines of code, pointers are passed as arguments and return values between functions and you're not clear as to which function is responsible for freeing which pointers?

Re:well firefox has something to learn too

[xandroid]

You can also tell Firefox to keep some elements of the browser in memory after you close FF, so the next time you open FF it starts up faster. Go to about:config and change browser.turbo.enabled to true.

Re:well firefox has something to learn too

[hendridm]

I believe you can appent "-turbo" to your FF shortcut to enable this behavior as well, at least in Windows.

"C:\Program Files\firefox\firefox.exe" -turbo

IE is also good for mutliple concurrent sessions

[kalirion]

This is another reason I keep IE around. Open up a new browser window, and you've got a new session, whether you need one to test a web app you're developing or just to be logged into multiple mail.yahoo accounts at the same time. With Firefox the only way to get a new session is to log out of the old one (or close all Firefox windows.) And no, I do not want to mess around creating multiple profiles for something that IE accomplishes with a single click.

Re:The No.1 feature I want in Firefox

[Bwmat]

First of all, the mozilla team is working on a better download manager. Multi-session downloading is one of their goals for 1.1 i think. And for your second point, you need this extension: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1645 13

Re:negatives of the review

[NemosomeN]

"Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs, which isn't surprising considering it only recently came out of "beta" or testing mode. It also can't do much with pages that require features only Internet Explorer has, such as the ability to run Active-X programs. These features are part of the reason IE is so riddled with malware, but they also allow it to interact with certain websites." Why is that something that we should hate? It's true, no matter how you slice it. It's not the fault of Firefox, it's just reality. Websites use ActiveX (I think I have run into around 5 that use it legitimately, but that's another issue), and Firefox doesn't [natively] support ActiveX. And the ActiveX plugin is crap. (I haven't used it, but sorry, if the official beginner's guide says it's crap, what are the chances?)

Re:My favorite Firefox story

[kidlinux]

For anyone who hasn't seen this, here's another article with a screenshot [nrg.co.il].

Re:MSIE rendering engine

[Anonymous Coward]

My wish would be an (optional!) MSIE compatible rendering engine

1. This would be hard to do, it would require a lot of reverse engineering and MSIE really renders pages very unlogical way. It looks like it has made on purpose to render pages so wrongly.

2. That would be really bad feature if people start using it. It would mean that companies wouldn't have to change their websites to follow the W3C recommendations, and that would mean web pages that would be looking good only with IE or with IE engine, and that would make webdevelopers and browser developers and users life harder.

So please, don't do that, ever.

Re:One thing I'd like fixed

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox seems to consume 100% CPU for up to 20 seconds upon attempting to start a download

I had the same problem, it is because the parser for the file containing download history is so slow. Here is how to fix it:

Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Download manager history -> Clear-button

Also select option to clear history after succesfull download, or when Firefox is closed.

Re:negatives of the review

[FyRE666]

No, it doesn't. You're thinking of "Active scripting", which is Javascript in IE. Interestingly, disabling Javascript in the old NS4 browser used to also disable CSS (what little CSS it could manage anyway!)

Re:Bug Free?

[Piquan]

Use it to access my resume and you'll find a really nasty Javascript bug. (The link to my email is generated on the fly, to hide it from spambots. The hover behavior works correctly in IE but not Firefox.)

I don't see any nasty bug in Firefox. I do see a minor bug in Internet Explorer, and some bad HTML design in that code.

The IE bug is that it displays, when you hover over the image, "click here to send me email". It is getting that from the alt tag on your image, and shouldn't. The alt tag [w3.org] is to "specify alternate text to serve as content when the element cannot be rendered normally". However, the image is being rendered normally, so IE shouldn't be rendering that tag. If there were a title tag [w3.org], it should render that, though.

Now, think about why the alt attribute is mandatory on img elements. It's to achieve device independence. When somebody isn't loading images (because they're blind and using a screen reader, or using a cellphone or other low-bandwidth device, or because they haven't started X and are using lynx, or for whatever reason) then they should be able to get a coherent web page. The web community has been trying for years to get authors to include alt tags; they wrote the accessibility guidelines [w3.org] mostly just to be able to officially say to include alt tags. Finally, in HTML 4, the alt tag was made mandatory.

So, what's the point of your alt tag? It doesn't replace the image in a non-image setting. In fact, in most cases when there are no images (blind, cellphone, lynx, etc) there is no mouse, so your replacement text is usually inappropriate. In some such cases, there may not even be JavaScript. (You can handle that gracefully too.)

Now, suppose I saw your sig and was considering hiring you. One thing I'd do is to check your resume. I see that you spent most of your career as a tech writer, and still can't think about the range of your audience. Since (in this hypothesis) I saw your sig on /., I'd check your posting history and see your post. Here, you flame about a "really nasty JavaScript bug" which, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with JavaScript, and is also not a bug but a correct implementation of the XHTML spec. You claim to be qualified in XHTML, but don't understand something as simple and well-documented as the purposes of alt vs title. Did you never actually read the XHTML spec? What gave you the idea that alt should provide tooltips? Mr. Rabinovitch, why (in this hypothesis) should I continue to consider you?

That's a rhetorical question, by the way. I don't care about hiring you; my team is currently full of people who do think about cross-compatibility, and read documentation, and understand their tools. I'm just telling you that you've done yourself a disservice in posting this. If I were you, I'd think about fixing that resume webpage before somebody also thinks that you don't learn from your mistakes.

Re:Bug Free?

[Aewyn]

Actually, no, it's not a bug, it's a feature (I've seen sites hide anchor URLs this way, which is quite annoying, so I can understand why they did this; could be used for "phishing scams").

Try Edit -> Preferences -> Web Features, and click "Advanced..." next to "Enable Javascript". There's an option to allow scripts to "Change status bar text", which is disabled by default. Your script should work (I've tested it).

So, no, not a bug, and certainly not a "nasty" one (reading that, I was expecting something closer to browser crash or security-related problems...)

Hope this clears up things...

Re:negatives of the review

[aichpvee]

Mozilla started as Netscape. But it was always my understanding that Firefox is a ground-up rewrite as a true second generation browser.

Re:negatives of the review

[John Allsup]

Yes. Require (as is usual anyway) web access to be done via a company proxy-cache, and don't configure M$IE to use the cache (basically, have the internet router block ports in an appropriate way.)

You could also do a quick hack to rename Internet Explorer to Intranet Explorer just to emphasise this. (Basically, you should consider using IE to access untrusted sites on the internet as unhygenic.)

I've used Opera (with ads) and then Firefox for a while, and thus have never even needed to learn much about removing spyware. (Which makes it hard to advise others who have already caught spyware.)