Firefox News Roundup 513
Spaceman40 sent in this ZDNet story. PeterPumpkin collects way too many links to Firefox stories: "According to SpreadFirefox.com , there were almost 3 million downloads of Firefox 1.0 in the 5 days since launch, which comes to over 500,000 downloads per day. There are news bites coming out about Firefox everywhere you could possibly imagine. According to a report on MozillaZine, Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0. PC-WELT, the German equivalent of PC-World, is distributing their own customised version of Firefox to customers." Thomas Hawk writes "Rather than go outside for the past 48 hours, Scott Granneman prefers to burrow in his den and come up with one of the first definitive lists of Firefox links. Good geeking Scott. And way to overcompensate."
Matt Drudge (Score:5, Informative)
The Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro also gave an incredibly positive review to Firefox [washingtonpost.com] and took part in a web chat about it [washingtonpost.com] (good read if you want to see less techy user's reactions).
Wow... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Matt Drudge (Score:5, Funny)
OT (Score:3, Interesting)
Dude, sweet! Any ideas what's wrong with slashcode that causes the display bugs?
PS. I know this is off topic, so don't waste your mod points...
Re:OT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:OT (Score:3, Informative)
There is a small Firefox extension called SlashFix [hardgrok.org], which takes care of this problem. It's a hack, but it works. :) Good enough till 1.1 comes out...
Re:OT (Score:3, Informative)
Clicking on this bookmark will correct any screwed up Slashdot page in Firefox. Now if I could just find a firefox extention to remove the subdomains from slashdot.org automatically so I don't have to deal with any of these terrible color schemes (it.slashdot.org for
Re:OT (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla/firefox etc guess sizes for columns that have images in them, these column sizes change once the image actually arrives. In certain cases it doesn't refresh and rerender once the images are downloaded.
There is suppositivly a fix in the mozilla trunk, but it wasn't put in firefox 1.0 because it caused some pages that previously rendered fine to render badly. So fix is waiting on perfection.
Firefox News (Score:5, Funny)
Oops sorry, wrong thread...
Slashdot vs Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
Easy fix (extension) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy fix (extension) (Score:3, Informative)
if (window._content.document.location.href. indexOf('slashdot.org')!=-1) ...
I don't have any trouble (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot vs Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
I just fired it up in both IE and Firefox and they look exactly the same...
Re:Slashdot vs Firefox (Score:4, Informative)
And who modded this informative?
Re:Slashdot vs Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, It's always rendered correctly for me with multiple versions on Mac, PC and Linux.
Sigh - still on that? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a dead horse; please find some other issue to dwell on.
Good geeking Scott. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good geeking Scott. (Score:3, Funny)
--HC
It is good Press. (Score:5, Interesting)
After the browser war ended the real looser was the consumer because they got a stagnet product. But now with Firefox getting all this press I wouldn't be suprised if IE starts getting its much needed improvements soon.
Re:English translation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:English translation (Score:3, Funny)
their
Re:English translation (Score:3, Funny)
Re:English translation (Score:3, Funny)
Way to go.
-Jesse
Re:English translation (Score:4, Funny)
Re:English translation (Score:5, Informative)
Re:English translation (Score:3, Funny)
Firefox is the new Netscape (no, really) (Score:5, Interesting)
It was announced in this posting on MozillaZine [mozillazine.org], and on registering on the link provided, a private forum is available which currently has nothing in it except an announcement that Netscape's Firefox will be available on 30 Nov.
Looks like it'll have a green custom skin from the (limited) bits of screenshot in the page.
Re:It sounds good but... (Score:2)
Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:4, Informative)
more about in german in:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/53308
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have a reference to any bugzilla reports or any other English language reporting on this? Perhaps more careful oversight of the localization team is required. It's important to figure out if this was an accidental move by a localization team that accepted a patch that they shouldn't have or if an insider with commit access intentionally did this and needs to be booted out.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:5, Informative)
Very disheartening if true, and I would hope that the main Mozilla Foundation folks and Firefox dev team would disavow this and take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again. Mozilla are supposed to be the good guys, and I appreciate their need to support their activities, but there are lots of people willing to help with that - witness the massive turnout of donations for the SpreadFirefox advertising effort. Spyware in official Firefox builds is NOT the way to do this.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:3, Informative)
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=164
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:5, Informative)
# We included the search plugin for ebay.de because we thought they would be useful to people. This was the only reason.
# It's very helpful to know how many searches are initiated from the search box as opposed to the URL bar. To do this requires having the browser send a piece of information to the website so it's clear the search was started in the search box. This "identify as search box initiated search" is the ONLY new thing that happens with the ebay.de search plugin.
# The providers of the search plugins give us the URL to which search queries should go. In most cases, this URL is to the main search engine system -- yahoo.de, google.de, etc. It appears that ebay.de has done something different, and given us a URL that doesn't point directly to ebay.de.
# I understand there is concern, or at least a lack of clarity about this.
Re:Firefox GER contains Spyware (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that the spyware claim is wrong.
After the Heise.de news article was published, there were some responses from Mozilla developers in the German forum linked in the article.
Here is a summary of the facts:
The contract between the Ebay and the Mozilla Foundation is interesting, but allegations of spyware are untrue if you know the facts.
Complete Stats? (Score:5, Interesting)
Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox?
Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
No no... COMPLETE stats! (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I've downloaded it once, installed it a few times already, and I was away from computers all weekend. Plus users of Debian Sarge, Gentoo, Arch Linux, BSD, and any other version of Linux with a package-management system didn't download from the Mozilla site.
And what about people routing through a proxy. would the server still get a request and be able to count that download? I demand every fact in the world!
Re:Complete Stats? (Score:2)
Re:Complete Stats? (Score:4, Insightful)
The reality is that there is no ultimate and reliable way to measure market share for something like Firefox. I inflate browser-detect logging numbers by using Firefox on several of my machines; but I deflate them by using an extention that reports Firefox as IE for some sites. I inflate download numbers because I've downloaded Firefox at home and at work: but I deflate them because I've since installed it for several friends who were IE users, without an additional download.
And that's just me.
The download count is probably a pretty good estimate, because I'd guess that for everyone who downloads an "extraneous" copy -- reinstalls, web-developer testing, etc. -- there's at least one person who got Firefox from a corporate intranet, proxy, or other uncounted resource.
It's statistically invalid, but if we must pick a metric, it seems the most reasonable choice.
Re:Complete Stats? (Score:4, Insightful)
Out of the people who downloaded FireFox in this "huge" splurge, how many of them were using either Mozilla or a previous version of FireFox?
Because I suspect that is a *very* high number.
It doesn't matter. Firefox is employing viral marketing at its best. The all important fact here is hype can be a self fulfilling prophecy. The more hype they can get about firefox (by widely publicising the massive number of downloads - regardless of whether they are new converts or not), the more media they get discussing the hype about firefox, which in turn gets more media interested...
The reality is that these days the media largely feeds off itself, so if you reach critical mass, the hype and coverage are self propagating. Cheering about massive numbers of downloads (regardless of who they're by - do you think the media bothers to check?!) is a large part of hitting that critical mass. As long as firefox manages to push past the tipping point on media mindshare it'll get wide enough media coverage that a lot of those downloads will start coming from people honestly switching because they want to see what the fuss is about.
Which is to say the massive number of downloads is all about marketing, which as we all know, doesn't have to connect with reality. Who is doing to the downloading doesn't matter (for now). Wait 6 months and then ask that question.
Jedidiah.
You'll Still never pull me away from 'Gopher'!!! (Score:4, Funny)
You know it's coming.. (Score:5, Interesting)
They'll find some obscure exploit in the Windows versions of Firefox, and blow it way out of proportion. As a bit of irony, I'd wager it'd be an OS-related exploit..
Re:You know it's coming.. (Score:2)
Then, they'll make a layman's testimonial that only browsers with ActiveX can meet all of a home user's and corporate entity's needs, then state that Internet Explorer is the only browser with ActiveX to make it all work nicely.
Finally, they'll close with a Service Pack 2 for XP commercial that gets IT Managers to scramble their overworked IT departments to rush out the ultra secu
TV2 report (Score:4, Informative)
The clip should be available from http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5567.
Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firefox! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Funny)
'Windows humanitarian aid worker Minesweeper has been taken hostage by the Firefox resistance organisation. They have issued a videotape in which Minesweeper pleads with President Gates to withdraw Internet Explorer from the occupied desktops. Firefox representatives say that unless Gates complies, Minesweeper will be executed.'
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Insightful)
Still worth reading, though. But then, I'm the last person who'd be accused
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:5, Insightful)
When bin Laden put out his video during the US election, I had a devil of a time finding out what he had to say. There was plenty of coverage of the fact that he'd released a film, and lots of discussion of how it would or wouldn't affect the outcome of the election, but scarcely anything about the content of the damn thing. Surely if the Big Bad has something to say, it's in the public interest to hear him? I mean, if he really is as important and terrible a threat as we're told.
Censoring the news on political grounds - 'these are the enemy, so we won't give them the publicity' - is deeply dodgy. So we need al-Jazeera, because maybe if we average it out with Fox and dissolve the precipitate in a solution of BBC, we'll maybe have a good idea of what's actually happening in the world.
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Interesting)
so whats the deal with regular mozilla (Score:3, Interesting)
Last time I asked a mozilla developer (like a year ago) they said that mozilla development would continue as a seperate branch and project in parellel with any firefox efforts.
But now that firefox is blowing up are they still going to spend resources on mozilla?
Will they some day just make firefox the browser of the mozilla suite? Will they discontinue mozilla suite and split up the projects?
Re:so whats the deal with regular mozilla (Score:3, Informative)
Math? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Math? (Score:3)
Re:Math? (Score:5, Funny)
Or 600,000 per day.....
Hey, Captain semantics.
SO, what the parent said was more accurate than what you said, yes?
Complacency at Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)
Complacency? Probably not in this case... (Score:3, Interesting)
So, if you have two Word documents open, they appear in two different windows and appear like two seperate instances of Word (although only one instance of the application is actually running). This change was made at the introduction of Office 2000, and I'm sure it's a result of usability feedback from less savvy use
Re:Complacency? Probably not in this case... (Score:3, Informative)
How many downloads via torrents? (Score:4, Insightful)
I, for one, got FireFox 1.0 from a torrent. Are they counting the people who got it through torrents when they tell us how many downloads they have had since release? (or at least trying to guess)
I doubt it, which means that the number is likely much higher.
Also, consider that probably at least 50% of the slashdot crowd (conservative estimate) went and got it, I would say that we're a very good portion of those downloads...so is it really all that impressive??? How many average users are really getting it?
Re:How many downloads via torrents? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about system administrators that install it network-wide?
no fair! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:no fair! (Score:4, Funny)
Cool FF trick - roll your own search engine (Score:5, Interesting)
I showed him how easy it was to put that search engine in the FF search bar. The hardest part was shrinking the corporate logo down to a 16x16 icon - that's how easy it was.
It's quite easy for companies to roll their own Firefox interface to existing search engines for use by employees and customers.
Can your Internet Explorer do that?
Re:Cool FF trick - roll your own search engine (Score:3, Insightful)
I cribbed (Score:3, Informative)
Assuming your intranet has a search engine that uses a format similar to one of the existing ones, just crib from it.
For example, my client's uses the format:
http://www.blah.blah/blah?keyword=value.
You can crib from google.src and you should be okay.
Re:Cool FF trick - roll your own search engine (Score:3, Insightful)
As a matter of fact, it can. IE's Search bar is completely overridable. Google's got a version for it [google.com] even.
And you can push it out via Group Policy too, so it's even easier to roll it out across a company than it is to do so for Firefox, which doesn't integrate with any enterprise-level network configuration tools.
That's not to piss on Firef
XUL (Score:5, Informative)
Example of XUL app is the amazon.com content browser
http://www.faser.net/mab/remote.cfm [faser.net]
Of course you MUST use Mozilla/Firefox to view it!
Re:XUL (Score:3, Informative)
Re:XUL (Score:3, Insightful)
Well deserved stardom. (Score:3, Interesting)
What amazes me... (Score:5, Interesting)
I gotta ask: was waiting for "free" worth an extra six years of suffering?
Myself, I think y'all paid heavily for your reluctance to cough up some pissant cash.
Re:What amazes me... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yeah, and weird HTML rendering (until very recently) and a funky interface (even now).
Re:What amazes me... (Score:5, Insightful)
You could pretty much say the same thing about any open source project. Why use OpenOffice when you could buy Office? Why use Kmail when you could buy Outlook? Why use Linux when you could buy Windows?
The answer, for me, is always the same: Freedom has a value to me. The loss of Freedom that Opera represents is much greater than the $30 pittance that they're asking for it. If you want to pay for it, fine - that's your decision. I have a different set of values and you can't judge my actions by your own set.
BTW, Freedom has tangible benefits in this case. I'm presenting a proposal to my boss to write new client-side software in XUL to provide our customers with access to our web application server's backend. I don't know (and frankly don't care) if Opera, MSIE, or any other browser has equivalent technology, since none of them (excluding text browsers) are as cross-platform as Mozilla. There are no license fees at all, and our customers will be able to use our application under MacOS or Linux as easily as Windows. That's not just a happy-fluffy "I'm Free!" feeling - it's the real ability to provide a valuable service to our clients, which gives our company a competitive advantage.
Re:What amazes me... (Score:5, Funny)
Why would anyone pay for Opera when we have had lynx all this time for free?
Fun Fact (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What amazes me... (Score:3, Funny)
You young people.
the bearer of bad news (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Slow compared to Mozilla - requires the use of the moox optimized builds. I just built myself a new(ish) machine last night, though, so the extra CPU speed may make this a moot point for me, but the 550mHz Pentium III I was using was definitely not an optimal platform for Firefox.
2) Buggy when lots of tabs are opened - more so than Mozilla. I'd say it crashes around 2x-3x more often than Mozilla. Being careful about how many tabs are open minimizes this, but still - annoying.
3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap somewhere long ago that this would be worked on 'after Moz 1.7/ff 1.0,' but I've not kept up on that. By far the worst problem I face every day with both Moz & FF.
Regarding Mozilla - some of FF's features need to be ported over, ESPECIALLY the extension manager! I mainly had the impetus to get Firefox moox going as I had a bad extension install that totally borked my Moz install, and there's no easy way to remove them from Mozilla, despite all the FAQs I found.
Bad Idea for both: turning off the ability of javascripts to change the status bar text also turns off link previewing - ridiculous; those should be two entirely separate things.
Other than that, the Moz & FF teams have done remarkable work, and I'm looking forward to new versions, and the very painful death of IE.
FUD? (Score:3, Informative)
Slow compared to Mozilla? I'm using it in Windows XP on an AMD (3000+) run eMachines... and it is faster than IE! It loads faster, renders pages faster and generally is the fastest application on my PC.
2) Buggy when lots of
Re:the bearer of bad news (Score:3, Informative)
Uh? Works for me... Did you uninstall any previous versions before installing 1.0? Installing over an old copy still causes strange glitches, I've found.
Re:the bearer of bad news (Score:3, Interesting)
Haven't had crashing issues in years. Well, except for some flash stuff, but I'm pretty sure that has to do with my shady sound drivers.
> 3) HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE problem shared with Mozilla - the UI is not multithreaded! Ugh. Fucking ridiculous design - I'm fairly sure I saw something in some roadmap so
Business 2.0 cover story (Score:3, Informative)
I can't tell. . . (Score:3, Funny)
Or Computer Geeks with Obsessive-Compulsive disorder?
(irrational exuberance, indeed)
Still some major problems (Score:5, Interesting)
I really have to ask, what was the motivation for changing the signing protocols AGAIN? And even more importantly, why was it ever decided in the first place to use some nonstandard signing protocol? OpenSSL is already built in to the browser, so why not use standard X.509 certificates and signing procedures?
The FireFox signtool team has been extremely unhelpful so far. Their responses have been of the "Figure it out yourself, dumbass" type.
I think that is a terribly counterproductive attitude to have. We are a software company producing specific tools. It is not our business to figure out how the most recent incarnation of Mozilla Signtool works. The end result of all this is that we have to recommend that our customers continue using IE because we can't get the stupid plugin to work under FireFox.
And believe me, it doesn't make us happy to recommend IE to our users. But so far we have no choice, and the FireFox development team has done nothing to help us. Quite frankly, they seem arrogant.
Re:Still some major problems (Score:5, Informative)
And before you start flaming the Firefox developers over a change that seems rather unfair and ill-timed to you, keep in mind that no matter how stable Firefox was before the 1.0 release, it was beta software. Beta software can be modified at the drop of a hat.
Ergo, you should have at least planned for the possibility that something might change in the 1.0 release, ESPECIALLY if you are actually offering production-level software to people.
Finally, if you are having problems with the Firefox Signtool team (whoever they are), then you should try other avenues of assistance, like the MozillaZine Forums - if you got a "figure it out yourself dumbass"-type response there, I'd be shocked.
Plugins (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Plugins (Score:3, Informative)
Up until 1.0 they haven't cared about this. It was beta software, and anything and all could be changed. Things would break, if it meant the final (1.0) product would be better. Now that we have 1.0, things designed for it won't just break, and we will have backwards compatibility.
Lesson from MS' playbook (Score:3, Insightful)
This should be as an Internet Suite not an intergrated package a la Mozilla.
That way each application can piggyback on the succes of the others. Currently Firefox is getting all the press and as such could help Thunderbird. When Gaim get's better VOIP featurers they can drive the market penetration for a while etc.
Each application should be independant with an overall effort to make them look and feel alike.
A XUL killer app would round it off nicely
Not only TV2! (Score:3, Informative)
Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.
Am I the only Dane who noticed that the Danish public service channel DR [www.dr.dk] had a news spot about Firefox too?
In fact, shortly after 1.0PR they even added the appropriate RSS-link info to the news section [www.dr.dk] on their site, so people can easily create Live Bookmarks, with just a few mouse clicks.
zThe Firefox advocator (Score:3)
Very positive San Francisco Chronicle review (Score:4, Interesting)
Internet Explorer has new foe - Firefox 1.0 beats Microsoft browser in several areas
SF Chronicle Review [sfgate.com]
classic Mic (Score:3, Interesting)
That sort of thing is maybe OK for a small startup; it's not OK for Microsoft or other large companies. The only difference to their past behavior is that Microsoft incorrectly thought they had won this battle already. Well, they killed Mozilla, but Mozilla is back from the dead, and once dead, there's no more dying then.
Firefox, choice of the pr0n-loving generation! (Score:5, Funny)
Firefox : tool of The Devil, it's right in the name!
goddamn I wish I could post this drek Anonymously...
Re:NTLM Authentication (Score:3, Informative)
Something like this (not that I'm recommending this as a good config), will allow the creds to be sent to all web servers:
user_pref("network.negotiate-auth.deleg a tion-uris" , "http://,https://");
user_pref("network.negotiate -auth.trusted-uris", "http://,https://");
If you use a proxy s
Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Safari is better... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Firefox doesn't render Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox 1.1 will not break Slashdot anymore. Why the templates haven't been fixed is anybody's guess...