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.
Is it finally safe to download? (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, the map of countries is pretty cool. Ignoring the island micro-nations (the Falkland Islands won with 2% of 3000 people pledging to download), it's interesting to see how high Firefox penetration is in Eastern Europe. I wonder if that's a function of very connected economies without a lot of love for Microsoft and a strong desire for free software?
Oh, and good luck to the Firefox team trying to save the "E" logo from this year's cake! That thing is HUGE!
Hey timothy: (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is this considered a world record? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are other companies as well. Hell, what about MS updates? How many of those bastards get downloaded on Patch Tuesday?
This is a fake attempt at a record.
Foolish idea: Millions of downloads on the 1st day (Score:1, Interesting)
Well done Mozilla People (Score:5, Interesting)
And at the end there was cake too!
Re:If it ain't broke don't fix it. (Score:5, Interesting)
This browser is much more responsive than FF2. My performance in Gmail is much improved. The memory leak was not fixed, but it was finally addressed it seems. The memory usage still creeps up very high, but it takes much longer to reach the point of a performance hit than before. The memory leak was/is my biggest issue with FF and as far as I can tell with FF3, it may be only a minor annoyance... which I am happy to have when compared to the numerous Force Quits needed per day with FF2.
CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses (Score:1, Interesting)
It's actually not just a memory leak. It is a CPU hogging bug, also.
Since that bug is now 7 years old, and still not fully fixed, I suppose I should post my list of Firefox developer excuses again. The list is not complete. There have been other excuses that I haven't had time to add to the list.
Firefox Developer Top 20 Excuses
for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory
and CPU Hogging bugs.
These are actual excuses given at one time or another.
Download safe, but useless (Score:5, Interesting)
A non-trivial portion of the commercial and research Linux user base has to stick with EL4 or a source rebuild from CentOS, Scientific Linux or whatever because of third party tool support requirements. And not everybody wants to upgrade their OS just because a new browser is out.
FF3 requires a pretty new library (libpangocairo 1.0). I spent an hour trying to come up with it this afternoon for my 100+ users. No luck so far.
The firefox team really let us down big time. We've been anxiously awaiting this release because it's supposed to solve the memory bloat problems (several of us here have to restart the browser several times a week because it's consumed insane amounts of RAM).
Re:Is it finally safe to download? (Score:5, Interesting)
A better gauge of Firefox's penetration would be to look at actual downloads [spreadfirefox.com] against number of internet users [cia.gov] in a given country.
Maybe slightly OT (Score:2, Interesting)
Neither of the RC's, or the Beta 5 that I tried had this problem. I have googled and it seems a few other people are having the same problem, but I've yet to find a fix.
It's really quite annoying. I've tried loading up in Safe Mode (no extensions), but even then my cookies just "vanish", seemingly after a random amount of time. I'm also having a problem with Foxmarks (endlessly syncing but not actually syncing), but I guess the Foxmarks devs will bang that one out soon.
Overall my followup is I'm not too impressed. Might just go back to RC2...
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a fairly significant installed base of "enterprise" linux distros out there that are still using older versions of libraries. FF2 works just fine on these systems, but FF3 breaks that compatibility.
At the very least it would have been nice to be able to obtain a version that statically links in libpangocairo.
By not providing some solution for this problem, the Mozilla Foundation is depriving themselves of a significant number of users.
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:5, Interesting)
An upgrade cycle is a major effort in an environment like ours, requiring testing with dozens of EDA tools and a variety of desktop apps. An upgrade that breaks a vendor tool or even access to critical docs, or that requires us to rebuild tools, modify user configs, etc, impacts schedules in a negative way, which means major headaches for everyone. 150+ desktops, 150+ compute farm systems. And don't even get me started on fixes that require users to restart X or reboot. High powered engineers working 80 hour weeks, some running things that require hours to set up? You have no clue what you're talking about when you blithely suggest upgrading.
And switching is not an option. Our app vendors support their apps on very few OSes. Typically one or two versions of EL and one or two SUSe. That's it. Ubuntu and Fedora aren't even in the picture.
When we upgraded most of the company from EL3 to EL4, we lost about a week. That's extremely expensive.
Cake is a commercial for IE, no mention of Firefox (Score:3, Interesting)
The cakes doesn't mention Firefox or Mozilla in any way, but very clearly IE. Hence, MS sends the cakes not to congratulate Mozilla, but to get Mozilla to advertise for IE.
Very clever move by MS!
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded Firefox3, untarred it it to my desktop, and it ran just fine.
A non-trivial portion of the commercial and research Linux user base has to stick with EL4 or a source rebuild from CentOS, Scientific Linux or whatever because of third party tool support requirements. And not everybody wants to upgrade their OS just because a new browser is out.
I posit that open source application developers should not be expected to support every OS that might be in use at the time of release. This is basically how the open source world works: Project X releases a stable version of their source code and then the distribution developers port, test, and package the software for use with their specific distribution.
Since RHEL5/CentOS 5 has been out for quite some time, RHEL4 and variants are considered legacy OSes in many circles, especially when it comes to the fast-changing world of the Linux desktop. It's not fair to blame the Firefox devs for linking against a library that brings them many benefits and new features but might not happen to come pre-installed on any number of old distributions. If anyone's to blame here, it's your "third party tool" vendor because they're locking you into a distribution that rapidly becoming unsupported by the rest of the world.
Re:Warning: clear history before updating from FF2 (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds nice but it could be annoying (and potentially embarassing).
From what you say, I'd actually want to keep my history so it already recognizes my surfing habits (if I understood correctly...).
Re:Download safe, but useless (Score:3, Interesting)
Distros do in fact plan to create versions that statically link in not just libpangocairo but also GTK (because of the 2.10 dependency).
Re:Awesomebar? (Score:1, Interesting)