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A Few Firefox 3 Followups

Posted by timothy on Wed Jun 18, 2008 05:58 PM
from the that's-f3-buddy dept.
Mozilla Internet Explorer The Internet
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.

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[+] IT: Last Year's CanSecWest Winner Repeats on Vista, Ubuntu Wins 337 comments
DimitryGH followed up on the earlier news that the MacBook Air lost CanSecWest by noting that "Last year's winner of the CanSecWest hacking contest has won the Vista laptop in this year's competition. According to the sponsor TippingPoint's blog, Shane Macaulay used a new 0day exploit against Adobe Flash in order to secure his win. At the end of the day, the only laptop (of OS X, Vista, and Ubuntu) that remained unharmed was the one running Ubuntu. How's that for fueling religious platform wars?"
[+] IT: Kraken Infiltration Revives "Friendly Worm" Debate 240 comments
Anonymous Stallion writes "Two security researchers from TippingPoint (sponsor of the recent CanSecWest hacking contest) were able to infiltrate the Kraken botnet, which surpasses its predecessors in size. The researchers have published a pair of blog entries: Owning Kraken Zombies and Kraken Botnet Infiltration. They dissect the botnet and go so far as to suggest that they could cleanse it by sending an update to infected hosts. However, they stopped short of doing so. This raises the old moral dilemma about a hypothetical 'friendly worm' that issues software fixes (except that the researchers' vector is a server that can be turned off, not an autonomous worm that can't be recalled once released). What do you think — is it better to allow the botnet to continue unabated, or perhaps to risk crashing a computer controlling a heart monitor somewhere?"
[+] Let Older Add-Ons Work With Firefox 3.0 164 comments
mask.of.sanity informs us of a hack that allows old add-ons to work with Firefox 3.0. Short form: in about:config, create a new boolean and set extensions.checkCompatibility to false. "The fix, which requires a little boolean creativity, great for anyone not afraid of taking risks. The idea is to stop Firefox checking its version history, allowing defunct extensions to work... [Those who do] get the fix working will have to remove the code from the prefs.js file once the stable Firefox comes out, but will enjoy their [favorite extensions] in the meantime."
[+] Firefox Goes for World Download Record 344 comments
Kelson writes "For the upcoming release of Firefox, Mozilla is preparing Download Day 2008: a campaign to set a world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Participants are asked to pledge to download Firefox 3 on the day that it's launched. The exact date hasn't been scheduled yet, but everything seems on track for June."
[+] Firefox Appears Ready to Crack 20% Share Next Month 295 comments
CWmike writes "Mozilla's Firefox browser is on pace to hit the 20% market-share mark next month. Net Applications marketing VP Vince Vizzaccaro didn't pin all of Firefox's increase on a change last month to its update dialog; he did note the new approach. 'Mozilla has implemented a change in Firefox 3.0 [Release Candidate 1] where the installation now has a checkbox that defaults to making Firefox your default browser,' he explained. He refused to ding Mozilla for the practice. 'The option is clearly displayed and labeled, unlike Safari, which misleadingly labeled the Safari install as an "update" [but has] since correctly changed to an 'install.' However, this practice is a break from the traditional practice browsers employed of defaulting this option to off.'"
[+] Firefox Download Day To Start At 1 p.m. EST 1080 comments
boustrophedon writes "Starting at midnight in their local timezones, downloaders have been asking when Firefox 3 will be ready for Firefox Download Day, June 17, 2008. Mary announced on the Spread Firefox Forum that downloads will commence at 10 AM PST." That means 1 p.m. East Coast time, and, in Justin Mason's view, some pretty annoying times of day for many parts of the world. Reader CorinneI supplies a link to PC Magazine's (very positive) overview of the new version's features, which praises the "speedy performance, thrifty memory usage, and, in particular, the address bar that now predicts where you want to go when you start typing (what Mozilla insiders refer to as the Awesome Bar)." FF3, even in Beta and RC form, and even with the extension incompatibilities I've run into, has quickly replaced FF2 as my preferred browser — for me, the improved drop-down autocomplete behavior alone is enough to justify the switch.
[+] Mozilla Outage On Firefox 3 Record Launch Day 427 comments
Kolargol00 writes "An outage affected the Mozilla.com website on the day the organisation launched its Guinness World Record attempt for downloads of the new Firefox 3 browser. The mozilla.com site was unreachable from around the world, occasionally responding with the message, 'Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.'" Since they decided to run their day from 1pm to 1pm Eastern time, the download day is actually still going, so you can still get Firefox and be part of the record.
[+] Firefox 3.0.1 Fixes 'Carpet Bombing' Issue 70 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 3.0.1 was released today. It fixes 3 security vulnerabilities, including a critical issue reported by Billy Rios, Ben Turner, and Dan Veditz. The issue could be combined with an issue in Apple's Safari browser to read data from the user's disk or to execute arbitrary code. This issue was previously discussed on Slashdot. The release also fixes a remote code execution bug involving the CSS reference counter, reported by the Zero-Day Initiative (previously discussed on Slashdot here), as well as a Mac-only potential code execution bug involving GIF image rendering, reported by Drew Yao of Apple Product Security."
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A Few Firefox 3 Followups 25 Comments More | Login /

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  • Is it finally safe to download? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WaltBusterkeys (1156557) * on Wednesday June 18, @06:02PM (#23846215)
    I gave up yesterday after a few too many server errors.

    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!

    • Re:Is it finally safe to download? (Score:5, Funny)

      by evilviper (135110) on Wednesday June 18, @06:27PM (#23846559) Journal

      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?

      I wouldn't be surprised if it's both directly and indirectly fueled by the far superior native language support included in Moz.

      Way back when Mozilla was still early milestones, I directed a Russia exchange student to try it, when IE wouldn't allow the proper entry of Russian characters for a URL.

      No doubt he went back home, spread the word about Mozilla, and is single-handedly responsible for the popularity of Firefox across Eastern Europe... *cough*

    • Self-centered, even in kindness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by superyooser (100462) on Wednesday June 18, @06:35PM (#23846663) Homepage Journal

      Oh, and good luck to the Firefox team trying to save the "E" logo from this year's cake! That thing is HUGE!

      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.

    • Download safe, but useless (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Roadkills-R-Us (122219) on Wednesday June 18, @06:37PM (#23846677) Homepage
      One of the strengths of Firefox for some time has been that right out of the box, the binary just ran on lots of Linux versions. With FF3 (starting with betas) they broke this.

      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)

      by anaesthetica (596507) on Wednesday June 18, @06:47PM (#23846809) Homepage Journal
      Comparing pledges against raw population I think is misleading. 1) Pledges don't reflect the actual download numbers, and 2) In many countries, the internet-using % of the population is actually quite low due to poverty.

      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.

  • Hey timothy: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by larry bagina (561269) on Wednesday June 18, @06:03PM (#23846235) Journal
    What happened to backslash? [slashdot.org]

  • Well done Mozilla People (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Toreo asesino (951231) on Wednesday June 18, @06:09PM (#23846335) Journal
    ...and indeed everyone that contributed towards FireFox project. You have set the bar very high for others to follow, and more importantly, you have proved that OSS model can be both financially prosperous and highly desirable to normal users too.

    And at the end there was cake too!

  • No recipe... (Score:5, Funny)

    by rocjoe71 (545053) on Wednesday June 18, @06:31PM (#23846617) Homepage

    Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe)...

    Well of course there was no recipe-- that cake was a proprietary, closed-source dessert.

    • Re:No recipe... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, @06:37PM (#23846689)

      Microsoft have congratulated the Mozilla team by sending them their second cake (minus recipe)...

      Well of course there was no recipe-- that cake was a proprietary, closed-source dessert.

      ...and possibly full of bugs!

  • All your Cake... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AllIGotWasThisNick (1309495) on Wednesday June 18, @06:39PM (#23846697)

    It was also revealed today that Mozillians keep the IE logo piece frozen since then!
    Looks like Mozilla can have IE's cake, and eat it too!

    • Re:If it ain't broke don't fix it. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by moore.dustin (942289) on Wednesday June 18, @06:11PM (#23846365)
      Nah. It saves all that stuff for you. It even saved my session from FF2 to FF3.

      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.

        • Re:CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses (Score:5, Informative)

          by ClamIAm (926466) on Wednesday June 18, @07:23PM (#23847269)
          You've posted references to or versions of this little diatribe three times in this thread. This is rather tiring, because the only reference I see you making to any actual Bugzilla entries is in a post from over two years ago. Of the two bugs you reference in that post, one is marked "fixed" and the other "invalid".

          Now normally I would request that you either give us links to actual bugs that are outstanding. But I'm not going to do that, because I know you can't be objective when discussing this issue.

          How do I know this? Because the bug marked "invalid" appears to be submitted by you. Thus I suspect that your vitriol for the Firefox/Mozilla people is a personal response to feeling scorned or something, and I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who argues because they had their feelings hurt and therefore holds an irrational grudge about something.

    • Re:OSS Incompetence (Score:5, Funny)

      by pandrijeczko (588093) on Wednesday June 18, @06:13PM (#23846397)
      This is just further proof hat Open Source Software is most useful for little independent projects - not trying to win download records or writing secure software.

      Hey! Guess what, Einstein! It's FREE! So if you've tried Open Source and don't like it, then it's really no great loss to you, is it?

      I mean you show up at their website when all kinds of news outlets are running stories about firefox download day and the website doesn't even say that download day starts at 1 EST. What kind of amature shit is that?

      Yes, they underestimated demand and probably have a little egg on their faces. But Firefox WORKS! And it's FREE! So what's your problem?

      Oh, and it's spelt "amateur".

      Then you finally download it and it's full of security holes. What the fuck?

      No, it has A security hole. It will be fixed. Someone will find more holes. They will be fixed. So don't use it. Whatever the hell works for you.

      I put more effort in to jacking off than these clowns put in to their "Record Download Day". What an embarassment.

      Perhaps this explains your short-sightedness and/or blinkered vision. And your obvious frustration. Maybe keep it in your trousers for one day, see if you feel better then, eh?

      • Re:CPU and memory hogging bugs still there? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gazbo (517111) on Wednesday June 18, @06:19PM (#23846463)
        FF3 is almost infinitely better than 1.5 and 2 in terms of performance, stability, and memory usage. However, there are still some niggling performance issues that make me tear my hair out. Still, from someone who is most definitely NOT a FF fanboi, it's actually their best release by far and worth checking out.

      • Re:CPU and memory hogging bugs still there? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by raddan (519638) on Wednesday June 18, @06:44PM (#23846769)
        You're kidding, right? Do you have any idea how complicated a modern web browser is?

        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)

    • Wow, that's a strange map (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, @06:29PM (#23846569)
      I managed to get connected; but the map is kinda boring; just black on white.

      Strangely, it also looks exactly like the letters "Error establishing a database connection".

    • Re:Instructions Please!!! (Score:5, Informative)

      by lordofthechia (598872) on Wednesday June 18, @06:35PM (#23846657)
      Amen to that. Too many apps distributed in tar.gz format have no instructions with them (or on the website). How hard is it to include the following lines of instructions (preferably near the download link):

      1. First you should check your OS repositories to ensure you cannot install this program via that method. Search for: blah
      2. If the program is not available in your distro's repositories (or you desire a newer version)
              a. Download the following tar.gz file to your HDD
              b. Move the downloaded file to the location you wish to install it
              c. Open a command window and type:
                        blah -xyz filname.....
      3. To launch the program type "blah"

      About your 2nd question though. I would go ahead and select "Bookmarks" -> "Bookmark all tabs" and save them in 1 folder. Then if it works and your session is still there you just need to delete that folder. Else, just go to your bookmarks and right click on the folder you created and select "Open all in tabs".

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