Firefox Reviewed in the Globe and Mail 615
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps these websites should move from building apps with ActiveX? just a thought
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:negatives of the review (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Insightful)
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 Window
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Interesting)
2.0 - MS branded spyglass. "We're
3.0 - Coolbar, better bookmark handling, actually quite a stable browser, despite also pushing in VBScript and ActiveX.
4.0 - Introduced DOM as well as n+1 security holes.
5.x - Lots of fixes, some CSS improvements...
6.x - More CSS improvements, though still not great.
It should be 5.x, or even 4.x because of the version 1.0 thing.
Re:negatives of the review (Score:2, Informative)
apologies (Score:2)
BTW, I haven't used IE, even on Windows, for several years - too buggy/insecure, too much the tool of the Microsoft monopoly machine. I prefer alternatives, too, and I'm excited to
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, but given current rates of development, Firefox will reach 7.0 before IE.
Re:negatives of the review (Score:5, Interesting)
In the article they say that it's a good thing because of security, but the Firefox programmers should find a way around it. Well there is an ActiveX extension out there, if you feel like voluntarily letting people hijack your computer...
Re:negatives of the review (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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 r
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be so sure that they don't have ActiveX stuff for those browsers that support it. It's easy to detect a browser and send the user to the appropriate page for the right rendering engine and plugin support. Just because you don't have ActiveX doesn't mean that it'll be broken.
If you want to see how many pages use ActiveX, even if for stupid things
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Informative)
Re:negatives of the review (Score:2, Insightful)
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 al
Re:negatives of the review (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:2)
Re:negatives of the review (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, ActiveX will go away eventually. Microsoft itself is moving away from it. But that has nothing to do with what end users need now
Re: (Score:2)
Religion and Security (Score:2)
My favorite Firefox story (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:3, Funny)
"A bug-free surfing zone [...] Firefox isn't perfect. It still has some bugs"
Did the editors who came up with the headline even READ the article?
Wait, I thought only Slashdot editors did that... GOOD LORD, "Globetechnology" is a front for Taco!
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:2)
Hmmm... wonder why...
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:2)
Hmmm... wonder why...
Because the Seattle PI is Microsoft's hometown paper.
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:2)
Here is a Business week ar [businessweek.com]
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My favorite Firefox story (Score:3, Informative)
might have to keep it around? (Score:5, Informative)
Mac IE is removed easily (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mac IE is removed easily (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:might have to keep it around? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:might have to keep it around? (Score:2)
Re:might have to keep it around? (Score:4, Informative)
choice (Score:3, Interesting)
Windows Update (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Or just don't use Windows Update (Score:5, Informative)
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: Or just don't use Windows Update (Score:2)
Re:Windows Update (Score:2)
Just tried it - no, it won't work. You can get to the "checking for updates" page but then it won't go any further. At some later point I might check to see if I can figure out what's not working, but for now: no, it doesn't work.
It's worth noting that if you use Windows XP with Automatic Updates enabled, you do not need to use Internet Explorer to install updates. (Well, except that I'm fairly sure the dialog box it displays while installing turns out to contain an embedded IE control.)
Re:Windows Update (Score:2)
I suppose since it's a plugin it's not really a bad thing, but XP has an automatic update application (I recently bought a new PC which has it, I've never seen it before, so I don't really know much about it) with a little yellow sheild icon in the tray when updates are available. According to an earlier post, it doesn't require Internet Explorer.
Re:Windows Update (Score:2)
Then again, it's actually quite easy to keep IE running without being bombarded with spyware if you just pay a little attention and do a little homework. No sweat for me, anyway.
Re:Windows Update (Score:2, Funny)
Personally (Score:2, Interesting)
Firefox or IE? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
But WINE doesn't run very well on ppc/sparc/mips (Score:2)
Of course, you might be able to run Windows under bochs [sourceforge.net], but then, my Sparc is old enough and slow enough that I really haven't been tempted to make the experiment.
What do you mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:What do you mean? (Score:2, Troll)
FUD is one ways of doing the mean things they do, the other way is called "embrace and extend." They embraced the Java API (or whatever it is that's standardized and documented about Java) and extended it with some goodies that only worked with their runtime. As with rendering webpages, the Micr
Re:What do you mean? (Score:3, Informative)
So the page layout is messed up, or the applet layout is messed up?
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, an
Re:What do you mean? (Score:2)
Nonsense. (Score:2)
Got a study to back that up? I doubt it.
I have not used IE at home for more than three years and have not had any problems. Sure, I've got an old version that came with Winblows 98, but I removed the network drivers from it ages ago
Re:Well... (Score:2)
I think it's a question of how the system (which is used in every one of our national institutions such as universities and government) was specified to begin with. I suspect that in order save money the compatibility issues were limited to Windows and IE only. The poor code-monkeys have just taken the easiest, specification compatible route.
Windows Update (Score:3, Interesting)
Market Share? (Score:3, Interesting)
That being said anyone have recent penetration statistics. FF was gaining 0.5% every two weeks through Mid Decemeber but this is the last data I have seen. Anyone tracking this on their own site, the absolute is maybe less important the the trend.
Yes, you can remove Internet Explorer (Score:2)
Re:Market Share? (Score:2)
For statistics, the w3schools browser statistics [w3schools.com] page is interesting. It's listings are month-by-month, not week-by-week, but still interesting. It's a technically-oriented, but otherwise non-partisan site.
Active X? (Score:2, Interesting)
One day (in the far distant future, no doubt), Javascript (/VBscript) will have either been seen to be the quick/dirty solution and deprecated with dynamic pages being server based or, the DOM will have been agreed as a proper object model with an agreed API. Perhaps then, a decent script language that is consistent across
Developing to IE only (Score:2, Interesting)
I only wish I didn't submit
Re:Developing to IE only (Score:2)
Memory Leaks (Score:5, Insightful)
(It's been a known issue for a long time, but nobody seems to be able to fix it)
Re:Memory Leaks (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Memory Leaks (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Automatic Correctness From Day One (Score:5, Interesting)
Frankly the firefox codebase is the result of 7 years of development done largely without unit tests or even basic QA. As a result, they have leaks, bloat, and severe malformed HTML DoSes that lock up all browser tabs/windows.
The key to good engineering is complete self-honesty, but these days it looks like firefox is being managed by a self-delusional marketing organization with no interest in fixing its serious technical problems.
Linux users are encouraged to run 'valgrind firefox' prior to modding this post down for not towing slashdot's party line.
'firefox --debugger valgrind' (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, results with a single blank firefox 1.0 window:
==6273== ERROR SUMMARY: 83 errors from 5 contexts (suppressed: 272 from 3)
==6273== malloc/free: in use at exit: 691499 bytes in 12633 blocks.
==6273== malloc/free: 163851 allocs, 151218 frees, 25635248 bytes allocated.
which IMHO is rather unacceptable for a 1.0 release.
Re:Memory Leaks (Score:3, Insightful)
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 engineer
Re:Memory Leaks (Score:2, Insightful)
No, the biggest problem is incompatible sites... (Score:2)
As a Windows & Firefox user I find that the biggest problem is incompatible sites.
Because there are some incompatible sites, I am unsure when I come across a problem on any site. I have to fire up MSIE and try the site with it, in order to know what the problem is. Half the time it turns out to work with MSIE.
The solution is to reduce the number of incompatible sites. Obviously, the increasing market share of firefox helps.
It would also be great if someone wrote software that crawled the internet,
Re:No, the biggest problem is incompatible sites.. (Score:2)
I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm not saying that it is the fault of the sites, or of MSIE. I'm just saying that the main problem for users of firefox is that some sites use html that is not compatible with it.
Write the author and politely help him (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is what I wrote to him, as an example.
While I am sure it is not perfect, I believe it touches on the matters he clearly does not yet understand.
Emailed to: mingram@globeandmail.ca
Re: Your article:
A bug-free surfing zone
By Mathew Ingram
Friday, January 14, 2005 - Page R31
Hi Matthew.
While I have to thank you for a relatively informative article, I also have to point out that you are still, in many ways "Not getting it"
You have fallen into two fundamental errors of understanding:
First:
" That engine forms the basis for a new browser called Firefox, which is free for Windows and Mac users"
In this you badly missed the point of the Mozilla project.
Firstly the Mozilla project is where various browsers, Gecko based and other, spawn from.
It was an example of the first major project ceded to the Open Source movement.
It was decided that the best way to encourage development, without being tied to a development budget, was to move the development to an Open Source model, where thousands of users/develeopers could adopt and continue the development unfettered by traditional copyright and ownership issues.
By moving the Netscape source to a "copyleft" model this has clearly demonstrated an alternative and much more useful model for ownership and develeopment.
Your second case of misunderstanding:
Adding insult to injury you only mentioned the old (and many say obsolete) Microsoft and Apple environments, and totally ignored the much more relevant and modern Open Soruce communities, such as Linux and FreeBSD.
Thirdly, in the last paragraph you wrote:
"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."
While I fully agree that Firefox is NOT perfect, the one item you chose as an erxample is not a bug!
ActiveX and similar are not features, but instead are what can be called "malware".
A model for extensions that is so insecure and flawed is not to be supported.
It was a fatal error by Microsoft, and continues to be so.
Nobody is interested in "fixing" this.
If you want an extension model with some practical features, the world has already settled on a few, most notably PHP and Java. These can be secured, and can be considered "safe" extensions when properly implemented.
The only "bug" that is relevant here is the continued dependancy by a handful of misguided developers who are still using ActiveX on web pages.
The severity of this bug is such that the US Dept. of Homeland Security issued an advisory advising people to NOT use Internet Explorer.
Internet Explorer and ASP IS the "bug".
Avoiding it's faults is an improvement, NOT a "bug"
BTW, whether you want to Internet Explorer installed on a Windows system is not a choice you get to make. M$ have integrated the browser into the OS in a fashion that does not allow you to remove it.
All you can do is remove links to it. These are called "shortcuts" in Windows terms.
Maybe next time you foray into this arena, good intentions in hand, you might want to submit your article for peer review in the relevant communities. I will be glad to point you in the directions for this if you like.
Feel free to ask.
BTW, this highlights what is probably the strongest feature of Open Source software: Peer review.
By submitting code, text, and other means of expression to peer review, we utilize a wide community of people to assist in improving our works, avoiding the pitfalls of well intentioned, but misadvised concepts and cases where we simply were not aware of a relevant matter on the topic.
We are all going to make mistakes, but i
*Sigh* (Score:2)
Re:Write the author and politely help him (Score:2)
I think you meant ActiveX, not ASP?
Re:Write the author and politely help him (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Write the author and politely help him (Score:3, Interesting)
There may be a few esoteric points of open-source philosophy and ideology that the article author is "not getting", but given the audience I hardly think emphasising those aspects of the issue would have been a good thing for him to do. Actually, reading the
Why I hate Active X (Score:2)
Windows Update (Score:2, Interesting)
I w
How can you get rid of IE? (Score:2)
damn it all (Score:2)
I hate biased articles like this... (Score:5, Informative)
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*/
Not disapointing at all (Score:2)
As they point out, sooner or later you'll want to visit an ActiveX site
It's not worth the hassle of uninstalling IE.
Bug Free? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bug Free? (Score:3, Informative)
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 "spe
IE is also good for mutliple concurrent sessions (Score:3, Informative)
Re:well firefox has something to learn too (Score:2, Informative)
Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Tabbed Browsing -> Warn when closing multiple tabs
Re:well firefox has something to learn too (Score:4, Informative)
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
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
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:well firefox has something to learn too (Score:3, Informative)
Re:well firefox has something to learn too (Score:5, Informative)
"C:\Program Files\firefox\firefox.exe" -turbo
Re:Firefox and it's supposed speed. (Score:2)
Lets hope they've got someone working on it already. It's the one problem I have with FF.
DISCLAIMER: I'm no expert on FF or the memory growing problem so please correct me if I'm wrong (I'd like to know) but keep th
I don't know... (Score:2)
Re:Firefox and it's supposed speed. (Score:2)
You're right. That is odd because I've just started FF and I'm at 53MB. I've seen it hit 180MB before. It's absolutely crazy. But I'll stick with it until it effects my machine's performance.
Re:Devil's advocate vs. Go Firefox! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Keeping explorer around (Score:3, Informative)
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 int
Re:Uninstall Problem? (Score:2)
Re:Uninstall Problem? (Score:2)
Re:Uninstall Problem? (Score:2)
Maybe that should be an option that the FF 1.0 installer gives the user, hmmm?
Re:Firefox vs IE (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Firefox vs IE (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Firefox vs IE (Score:2)
You may have to set the browser to identify itself as IE though, as some online banking sites are picky like that.
Re:It's the Globe and Mail (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's the Globe and Mail (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Perhaps, (Score:2, Insightful)
At worst you may be able to negociate a better commission for your sales, at best they fix it.
The fly in the ointment: Games (Score:2)
Re:Well some things (Score:3, Insightful)
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: Th
MSIE rendering engine (Score:3, Insightful)
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!