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.'"

negatives of the review

[Emugamer]

"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."

Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought :p

Firefox or IE?

[narl]

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.'"

It isn't about using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Some of us don't have a Windows machine, so we don't even have the option of running Internet Explorer.

What do you mean?

[October_30th]

Slashdot readers probablyt won't like the last phrase

And why would I object to it? It's a pretty well known fact that there are pages that just won't work with anything else than IE.

At work, for instance, I can't use Firefox for certain tasks because the Java-based admin pages (finances and grading) at our University won't work with it. Java apps load and work to some extent, but the layout is so screwed up in a Firefox that the pages are essentially useless. In Linux the pages won't work at all because of some weird Java problems (I thought Java was supposed to be platform independent?).

Complaining won't help, because IE is such a de facto standard that, according to the people who maintain the admin software, there is no support for "non-compliant" software such as Firefox and never will be.

Re:negatives of the review

[adeydas]

Firefox is version 1 while IE is version 6, they are 5 versions apart (in IE's terms though ;)). So given the time IE had for development, FF would go places.

Re:negatives of the review

[Simon (S2)]

"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."

this article is great. it does a good job at explaining what firefox is and what it can do, and also tells the reader that if you try it and find a bug, don't trash it. give it time and keep it around.

i really like this article. it'S how we all should evangelize ff.

Re:negatives of the review

[fm6]

Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought

Absolutely. And they should be more standards compliant, so a web page looks the same on all browsers. And there are a lot of other reasons web servers (or any kind of server) shouldn't rely on Microsoft's baroque, unpredictable, bit-tweaking approach to software.

But the fact is, a lot of web servers do use Microsoft technology, and a lot of people have to be able to deal with that. It's part of their job, or something else that's important to them, and their not interested in any Microsoft-Mozilla religious war. If you forget that, you have have no hope of helping people move away from their dependency on Mister Bill's Empire.

Re:negatives of the review

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well there is an ActiveX extension out there, if you feel like voluntarily letting people hijack your computer..."

or using your companies internal web apps that require ActiveX untill the bigwigs can be pursuaded to allocate funds and manpower "to rebuild something that already works."

Re:negatives of the review

[PoprocksCk]

Right, but version numbers are really just marketing schemes in commercial products anyway. In the commercial world 1.0 means "good enough to sell," whereas in the Free/OSS world, it means that it's feature complete, stable, etc.

I do think that IE has had enough rewrites to have changed version numbers a few times... but they really should be calling it 5.x at this point though.

But then again, they're not even shipping standalone versions of IE though, since it's supposedly an "integrated" part of Windows (even though it really isn't). Oh well, Microsoft will continue to fool people, because people don't know any better.

Memory Leaks

[rrowv]

My big complaint with FF isn't that you can't use Active-X. It's the massive memory leaks with tabbed browsing. FF routinely gets up to 350MB of memory usage. I use the internet *heavily* for research and reading news, so I open and close a huge number of tabs a day. Having to bookmark all the pages I have open every night so I can close down FF is a real pain (if I didn't, it would truely eat all my vm space). They really need to work on that...

(It's been a known issue for a long time, but nobody seems to be able to fix it)

Re:Mac IE is removed easily

[Xenna]

The funny thing about Mac IE is that it's even less compatible with Windows IE than Firefox ;-)

Re:It's the Globe and Mail

[matts-reign]

The globe and mail are one of canada's primary newspapers. They are high on my trustworthy list. They aren't tech oriented, but that doesn't mean they aren't trustworthy. You have to remember that this article was aimed towareds untechy people. Despite slashdotters not liking the last paragraph in particular, it was a good explanation to the non-technical why some websites won't work. Overall, i feel it was a good review.

Re:It's the Globe and Mail

[Rary]

"They have a history of biased reporting..."

Anybody can (and does) make that claim about any news source. Every news source has a bias, since there are people involved and those people, no matter how objective they may try to be, will allow a certain amount of bias through. I'd guess that, assuming you read national news in Canada, you're a National Post reader. You probably don't see them as being particularly biased, because they probably represent your worldview, whereas the G&M does not. That's fine. But the G&M does, for the most part, represent my worldview, whereas a newspaper that thinks an editorial on the merits of creationism is outstanding journalism (just to take a single example from recent memory) does not really represent my worldview, so I tend to consider NP as being "biased".

It's suggested to not rely on any single news source as the only news source.

Re:Memory Leaks

[colonslashslash]

Couldn't agree more. I love FF and use it exclusively, but the memory leaking from the tabs is fscking annoying.

I'm not a coder, so forgive my ignorance, but how can it be that this is such a hard bug to fix? This is a legitimate question, not rhetoric.

Surely there must be a way of clearing the tab cache when it is closed?

Perhaps,

[Run4yourlives]

As a client, you should explain to your sales rep the issues at hand and how they are issuficient to your needs (tell em you're going all mac even).

At worst you may be able to negociate a better commission for your sales, at best they fix it.

Re:Write the author and politely help him

[Doctor Crumb]

In future, please refrain from using childish insults like "M$". Writing such things just serves to make the open source community seem immature, and won't help you get taken seriously.

Re:Well some things

[jimicus]

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but hey...

Problem: You want to produce a payroll system which is easy to administer centrally, doesn't require the sysadmin to install specific software and should have a rich, pretty interface.

Solution: Make it web based.

Problem: It's 1998. Web based things are a right royal PITA to write if you're using straight HTTP/HTML, particularly if they're stateful. XHTML doesn't exist, Java is patchy at best. JSP has hardly been heard of (did it exist then?)

Solution: This ActiveX thingy looks interesting. The program's still web-based but you've got a pretty good API to work with. Okay, so it's Windows only, but Macs are not exactly in heavy use in payroll departments, and whoever heard of Linux on the desktop? Adware, spyware and other miscellaneous security nightmares in IE are still a distant speck on the horizon.

Re:Memory Leaks

[MobyDisk]

My big complaint with FF isn't that you can't use Active-X.

Why? To me, this is the biggest FEATURE of FireFox. Please DO NOT ADD ANY SORT OF ACTIVEX SUPPORT. To met, that's like saying "My Email doesn' thave spam and spyware support." The only time I've ever used ActiveX is on an employer's intranet, for filling out my timesheet. And even then, they used ActiveX to instantiate the Java run-time because it was a Java applet!

Re:huh?

[tepples]

Automatic Update is a part of XP.

"Is a part of Windows XP" means "costs two hundred dollars" to many users.

You only need to download it on Windows 2000 because it came as part of an SP.

If you're trying to get a Windows service pack without using Windows Update, then don't you need to buy the service pack on CD at a nominal fee?

Re:Memory Leaks

[CrystalFalcon]

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

Nonsense.

You use in-line instrumentation and catch the leaks as they happen in real time, with source references.

A number of development products will do this. Look at BoundsChecker for one example.

There is no excuse for a single memory leak today. At least, not for an easily reproducible one.

Other than that, a few very simple engineering practices can eliminate all memory leaks. Those engineering practices are three simple rules:

1) All activity that allocates memory dynamically must be encapsulated in a class.
2) All allocation must happen in the constructor of the class that manages a dynamic memory area.
3) All deallication must happen in the destructor of said class.

There. Follow these three simple rules, and you won't get any leaks, ever. As a side effect, you get cleaner code.

If you're in an after-the-fact situation, three days with BoundsChecker can sort out 95% of the problems. The last 5% typically take some more thinking.

MSIE rendering engine

[cpghost]

My wish would be an (optional!) MSIE compatible rendering engine, that would show web pages as they would in IE. Bug-for-bug compatible, if at all possible, and, of course, must run on non-Windows systems as well. It doesn't need to be fancy (like ActiveX etc...), just show HTML+CSS like they would appear on MSIE please!

Re:negatives of the review

[AmberBlackCat]

People should begin to understand that Firefox's lack of ActiveX is actually a good thing.

People should also understand that Firefox Extensions are every bit as risky and capable of being abused as ActiveX. We've been lucky so far.