A Few Firefox 3 Followups 407
An anonymous reader writes "Using data generated by the Mozilla Firefox download pledge page, the map on this blog post ranks countries, not by absolute number of pledges made, but rather on a per capita basis. This analysis yields some interesting conclusions about where open source is strongest and weakest."
Anonymous Warthog writes "That didn't take long. In a blog posting from the TippingPoint DVLabs security team (of Kraken and CanSecWest hacking contest fame), they confirmed that they reported a vulnerability in Firefox 3.0 to Mozilla a mere five hours after it was released. Additionally, there was a posting on the Full Disclosure security mailing list from someone that purports to have another vulnerability in the works as well. In the grand scheme of things, this probably means nothing to the general security of Firefox, but you can be sure the browser zealots on all sides will be watching carefully."
Finally, from reader Toreo asesino: "Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe) to Mozilla's Mountain View headquarters to congratulate them on shipping FireFox 3, which went live right on time last night." Congratulations are indeed due on both the browser and the release process — looks like the Firefox fever (despite some seriously taxed servers) resulted in more than 8 million downloads in 24 hours.
Re:CPU and memory hogging bugs still there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why is this considered a world record? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Foolish idea: Millions of downloads on the 1st (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Foolish idea: Millions of downloads on the 1st (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Firefox is the most unstable prog in common use (Score:4, Insightful)
Self-centered, even in kindness (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, if you didn't have the story behind the photo, you'd think that the IE Team was congratulating itself for shipping IE.
Memo to MS: When you give someone a cake, it only makes sense to put the RECIPIENT's name on the cake. I mean, you're recognizing the shipping of Firefox. Why didn't you put a Firefox logo on the cake? That's the object of the celebration.
Re:CPU and memory hogging bugs still there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, Firefox:
- Can render many different doctypes: HTML 4.01 traditional, HTML 4.01 Strict, XHTML 1.0 Strict, XHTML 1.1, RSS, etc, etc, etc
- Includes a Javascript interpreter
- Has its own platform-independent GUI drawing code, and those widgets are designed to match the native widgets on each platform
- Supports UTF-8 and many, many other character encodings.
- Stores bookmark and preference data in a RDBMS (not a very capable one, admittedly, but still)
- Has a plugin framework
- Runs on virtually every OS that is still in use
- Is very friendly to web developers (e.g., supports neat stuff like Firebug)
- And a zillion other features [mozilla.com].
This is a serious piece of work, under active development. The fact that they were able to add more features, plus stability, plus better memory management, plus better security handling (like seriously addressing XSS), PLUS address many of those only-a-problem-for-technical-twits issues that are out there says to me that the Firefox development team really has their shit together. This is an application that I have open all day, every day, and for me, it works great.(of course, I'm currently posting using Safari, so YMMV)
Re:CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Foolish idea: Millions of downloads on the 1st (Score:3, Insightful)
*Yes, yes I know the core of Safari is WebKit which was forked from KHTML and you can get the source to that
Awesomebar? (Score:4, Insightful)
But I installed the Beta on my son's machine, and was shocked at the 'awesomebar'. What a monumentally bad idea, implemented in the most annoying of fashion! It is seriously the one factor keeping me from switching.
Evidently there used to be configuration options to turn it off in the about:config window, but those have been removed, in a nearly microsoftian attempt to force users into behaving how the designers wish. There is an ad-in I found that reduces the awesomebar so that it looks similar to the Firefox 2.0 version, but it still searches 'intelligently', i.e. unpredictably and unintuitively.. Is there any fix for this due out?
The other thing holding me back is firebug... does that have a 3.0 enabled version out yet?
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:3, Insightful)
But so far most of the "mainstream" distros have done a great job in providing Firefox 3 (Ubuntu even has it included in 8.04). I wouldn't necessarily blame Mozilla for this, but rather the distro makers for failing to include a package. However, I think you are looking at this all wrong, it is more or less as huge as a leap forward as KDE 4 was for the desktop, as such some of the more "stable" distros such as CentOS are reluctant to include it as it is so new just as KDE 4 is still unavailable for some distros, but KDE 3 still is and much like Firefox 2 it still will receive updates for a while. But honestly, most of the people who use Linux use Ubuntu or a derivative (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, etc) or a more "unstable" distro then CentOS (Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, etc). So I think it is just CentOS being CentOS, being stable, don't like that? Change to Ubuntu.
Told You So! (Score:4, Insightful)
Err, technical solution? (was:Still Slow) (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses (Score:5, Insightful)
And I haven't seen FF crash. Never. On any of those machines. Apart from your little report, and the link (which conveniently points to another posting by you(!)), I haven't heard of people complaining about it either.
The way you repeat the same accusations (at least) four times in the space of two screens, and offer no proof at all beyond that link to your own message, suggests very strongly that you have an agenda. Your bug report 222660 (yes, I read your text!) doesn't contain any "easily reproducable steps", it actually reads
Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
Do you call that a bugreport? No wonder it gets marked as invalid. Similarly, your list of articles fails to convince: some pointers to decreasing the cache size is not proof of a usability-destroying bug in the application.
Also, next time just say "...when I'm browsing porn". We all know what you mean with "performing research" anyway...
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:5, Insightful)
To those who don't like it, please explain this to me: What could you do with the old address bar that you can't do now? Honestly, I don't get it.
Re:Is it finally safe to download? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:5, Insightful)
It's your vendor's job to live in the past with you. That's what you pay them for.
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:8 million, all set to exploit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, I'm sure glad that Linux users avoid all that "DLL Hell" I keep hearing about on Windows.
Yeah, yeah, mod me down...
Re:Foolish idea: Millions of downloads on the 1st (Score:2, Insightful)
In any case, people who are aware of lesser known browsers like Opera, Safari, Elinks, and Konqueror probably won't use user agent sniffing, and good riddance.
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:2, Insightful)
do you want the upgrade?
can you upgrade easily?
how badly do you want it?
is the cost of upgrading to hi?
pretty much if you need it you need to swallow the cost, if you just want it, then you dont. ok want and need can be a little blurred at times, but at the end of the day, if its too painful to upgrade, just dont.
in my experience in IT, major upgrades just sometimes have to happen, its a matter of fitting them in the most effective way possible, which sometimes is the lesser of n evils.
from a professional POV, (IMO) just stop whinging and start planning.. :-)
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:3, Insightful)
The location bar is for URLs, not searches through my bookmarks or wildcard searches through the titles of pages I visited last week.
Re:Cake is a commercial for IE, no mention of Fire (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me recap your understanding of a "clever move": sending a big cake to a rivaling company with the logo of your own application (which comes with ~90% of the world's desktop OS) on it, to get free advertising.
Clever. Yea, I can see it now.
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:1, Insightful)
If you want people to use Linux instead of Windows, get out of denial and stop going on and on about how it's OK to force a number different libraries to be updated in a three-year-old OS just so someone can use a new version of a web browser. This is completely unacceptable for corporate IT usage.
Firefox 3.0 runs just fine in Windows 2000, an 8-year-old version of Windows. So Windows is a superior operating system for the corporate desktop, since new applications are pretty much guaranteed to run for a decade after installing a given OS.
You want Linux on the desktop? You will have to match Windows' record, and not force users to play "DLL hell" just to get Firefox 3 to run with a version of Linux only three years old.
Re:Cake is a commercial for IE, no mention of Fire (Score:3, Insightful)