Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Mozilla The Internet

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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Firefox News Roundup

Comments Filter:
  • Matt Drudge (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @03:55PM (#10834177)
    Love him or hate him, he spent about 10-15 minutes on his radio show Sunday night discussing Firefox. He said he was an Opera user himself (sick of spyware) but praised Firefox for challenging Microsoft and breaking their stranglehold on the web.

    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)

      by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:09PM (#10834385) Journal
      Wow. Matt Drudge is a fellow Opera user? All of a sudden, I feel dirty.
    • by tfreport ( 458641 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:09PM (#10834392)
      Of course that is why he does not have popups on his website and he made sure to put a link up at Firefox's release (or Opera's) where his readers would have immediate access and not having to go to their computer after the radio show. Wait, he did not do those things? Glad he is adding to the cause when he can actually make a difference.
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @03:55PM (#10834180)
    Fair and Balanced!

    Oops sorry, wrong thread...
  • Slashdot vs Firefox (Score:2, Informative)

    by glenebob ( 414078 )
    Too bad Slashdot doesn't render right in Firefox...
  • by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @03:58PM (#10834229) Homepage
    Scott, for your sake, I hope there's a 12-Step Program out there for you.
  • It is good Press. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) * on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @03:59PM (#10834246)
    I guess there are a lot of people who are just tired with IE. Having a tool as well know as a web browser to get all this attention for a v. 1.0 release is pretty amaizing. Normally this type of welcome is reserved for Big Company major version release.

    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.
  • by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @03:59PM (#10834248)
    And no, I'm not talking in fashion terms. Netscape announced they intend to release a branded version of Firefox.

    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.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:00PM (#10834263)
    The german version of Firefox 1.0 contains spyware in the ebay-plugin. Search queries are redirected to a data-mining corporation in switzerland.

    more about in german in:
    http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/53308
    • you wanna check if there is a datamining spyware? go to C:\...\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins (most likely C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins) and open ebay.src with the notepad see if there is any references to the said datamining spyware. Ah the beauty of open source.
    • by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:36PM (#10834773)
      Well, it's certainly not impossible that something like this could have slipped into a foreign language build of Firefox. But it's hard to imagine given the scrutiny that was given to all the aviary-branch-1.0 checkins that it got into 1.0, given how many patches people were trying to get in and the devs refused to move into the 1.0 branch. I don't know the details of Mozilla development procedures, but I do follow some Bugzilla reports for issues near and dear to my heart, and I know that Firefox in general is fairly tightly controlled by the devs (more so than the Mozilla Suite ever was).

      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.
      • by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) * on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:42PM (#10834866)
        After doing some recursive Babelfishing of some of the forum links in that article, it looks like the FF devs in charge of the German release stuff intentionally put this in there as part of a contract with the company to earn money for Mozilla Europe... but I can't really tell given the quality of translations there.

        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.
    • by Simon (S2) ( 600188 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:35PM (#10835665) Homepage
      Mitchell Baker [mozillazine.org] (yes! a girl! :) - president of mozilla foundation europe - statement [uni-duisburg.de] about the "feature":

      # 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.
    • by falonaj ( 615782 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @07:20PM (#10836783) Homepage
      The german version of Firefox 1.0 contains spyware in the ebay-plugin. Search queries are redirected to a data-mining corporation in switzerland.

      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:

      1. The Swiss company is a contract partner of Ebay.
      2. Ebay gave the Swiss URL to the Mozilla Foundation as a localized link for the search plug-in.
      3. Ebay always forwards search requests to affiliate companies, no matter whether you enter the search keywords in the search plug-in or on the site.
      4. The redirect via the Swiss contract partner of Ebay was the sole decision of Ebay.de. The Mozilla Foundation has no relation to that company. Ebay chose to give direct links for Ebay.com and for all all other Ebay sites.
      5. If you don't trust Ebay's contract partners then you should not use their services. Switching your browser won't help.
      6. The Mozilla Foundation has a contract with Ebay saying that for every Ebay search originating from the search plug-in they get a certain amount of money. This contract is valid for all localizations. The Mozilla developers have no access to any data collected by Ebay or its partners.
      7. 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)

    by omghi2u ( 808195 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:01PM (#10834277) Journal
    What I'm interested in is:

    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.
    • by thegnu ( 557446 ) <thegnuNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:05PM (#10834338) Journal
      I'm interested in the number of installs per download. Because I suspect *that* is a very high number as well.

      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!
    • And how many were web designers just downloading yet another browser for compatability checking purposes? I know that that's the reason why I did, and I'm sure there are countless others that fit that description too.
    • Re:Complete Stats? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Coryoth ( 254751 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:33PM (#10834728) Homepage Journal
      What I'm interested in is:
      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.
  • by Timmy D Programmer ( 704067 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:01PM (#10834280) Journal
    Ok, so mabye I do use Mozilla. But I thought I'de be the one to remind us of the abnoxiously user unfriendly 'surfing' tools we started out with.
  • by XeroRIAA ( 643593 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:02PM (#10834293)
    I can't wait to see Microsoft's counter PR to Firefox...

    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..
    • Actually, Microsoft will just point out things that install/run/integrate_with_windows_and_office conveniently via ActiveX.

      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)

    by wojci2 ( 782038 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:04PM (#10834321)
    Denmark's largest television channel, TV2, reported on the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0.

    The clip should be available from http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=node/view/5567.
    • Coverage on al-Jazeera? Hmm, maybe something along the lines of...

      '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.'

    • Oops! I clicked the link! Now I'm going to be on some FBI hit-list or something....
    • Hard-line Islamist??? You do know that Al-Jazeera was formed off a branch of the BBC News division that eventually detached itself from BBC and became independent. Not sure how a BBC division manages to become hard-line islamist (although I'm sure some troll will reply to tell me how it is...)
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:05PM (#10834336)
    Can anyone tell me what the deal is with the regular mozilla branch?

    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?

    • It seems that, for the most part, different teams work on the two projects, although there appears to be a lot of communication between the two. There is no reason to speculate that either project will end in the foreseeable future. In fact, there have been statements from the Mozilla Foundation indicating that both projects will continue, with Firefox dipping into Mozilla Seamonkey code when appropriate and vice-versa.

  • Math? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SlayerofGods ( 682938 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:08PM (#10834375)
    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
    Or 600,000 per day.....
    • 600000 > 500000, correct?
    • Re:Math? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Bobman1235 ( 191138 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:24PM (#10834606) Homepage
      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

      Or 600,000 per day.....


      Hey, Captain semantics.

      • 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


      SO, what the parent said was more accurate than what you said, yes?

  • by crymeph0 ( 682581 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:08PM (#10834381)
    According to ABC Australia [abc.net.au], Microsoft doesn't believe people want tabbed browsing. This seems to indicate they're waiting for users to tell them what they want. This is the kind of attitude that will cost them more than any onslaught of viruses and security gaffes. If you're not looking to exceed your customer's expectations, somebody else will come along and do it for you. Of course nobody thought to ask Microsoft for tabbed browsing, if it was obviously needed it wouldn't be an "innovation".
    • Well, I can believe that. Remember, Microsoft changed the windowing behaviour of its Office applications so that different documents appear in different windows, as opposed to the same window.

      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
  • by jmcmunn ( 307798 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:10PM (#10834402)

    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?
  • no fair! (Score:5, Funny)

    by i_should_be_working ( 720372 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:13PM (#10834455)
    how the hell are we supposed to slashdot a site if the article has 15+ links in it?
  • by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:22PM (#10834570) Homepage Journal
    One of my clients has a search engine on his Intranet.

    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?
    • Okay, how did you do it?
      • I cribbed (Score:3, Informative)

        by davidwr ( 791652 )
        Go to "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins" and look at the .src files.

        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.

    • 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?

      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)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:27PM (#10834648) Journal
    I REALLY hope that this spurs development of XUL based applications. There are'nt that many yet, but I'd love to see more. (trying to learn myself)

    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)

      by CosmicDreams ( 23020 )
      Indeed, and if you want to get on the ground floor of XUL development, goto XULPlanet, start reading, and get cracking on your own code.
    • Re:XUL (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Vicsun ( 812730 )
      I've seen this exact same XUL based application on every single slashdot story mentioning Firefox. It was impressive the first time, but then the effect kind of wore off. Are there no other XUL based applications on the internet?
  • by Nijika ( 525558 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:29PM (#10834667) Homepage Journal
    This could be what really, and I mean REALLY, legitimizes open source. I don't know anyone who hasn't heard the well deserved hype about Firefox, and I'm talking people who I wouldn't normally associate with even moderate computer use. Everyone's been talking about it, and not just in our IT techy circles. It almost gives me the creeps. Most under-rated feature IMHO: Bookmarks -> Open In Tabs. I can now NOT live without this.
  • What amazes me... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:31PM (#10834691) Homepage
    ...is that for at least a half-dozen years that half-million users could have coughed up a measely thirty bucks and had Opera. Five bucks a year for a browser that is fast, small, secure, has tabbed browsing, awesome bookmark management, integrated kickass email, popup blocking, etcetera endless freakin' etcetera.

    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)

      by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) *
      Five bucks a year for a browser that is fast, small, secure, has tabbed browsing, awesome bookmark management, integrated kickass email, popup blocking, etcetera endless freakin' etcetera.

      Oh yeah, and weird HTML rendering (until very recently) and a funky interface (even now).
    • by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:06PM (#10835247) Homepage Journal
      I gotta ask: was waiting for "free" worth an extra six years of suffering?

      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.

    • by flossie ( 135232 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:08PM (#10835264) Homepage
      ...is that for at least a half-dozen years that half-million users could have coughed up a measely thirty bucks and had Opera.

      Why would anyone pay for Opera when we have had lynx all this time for free?

    • Fun Fact (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Apotsy ( 84148 )
      End users do not pay for software, unless we're talking about games.
  • by Tumbleweed ( 3706 ) * on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @04:43PM (#10834877)
    Okay, I'll be the one to say it: Firefox has some problems that I'd like to see fixed. I'm using it as my primary browser now, but I'm careful how I use it.

    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)

      by ImaLamer ( 260199 )
      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.

      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
    • 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.

      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.

    • > 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.

      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
  • by ehiris ( 214677 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:05PM (#10835234) Homepage
    They have a Microsoft's worst nightmare [business2.com] article in the last edition.
  • by jafac ( 1449 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:13PM (#10835337) Homepage
    Is this an article about Firefox?
    Or Computer Geeks with Obsessive-Compulsive disorder?
    (irrational exuberance, indeed)
  • by pclminion ( 145572 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:15PM (#10835361)
    In FireFox 1.0 the choice was made to redesign how XPI plugins are cryptographically signed. Suddenly my company's Thawte code signing certificate doesn't want to play ball with FireFox 1.0 (if anyone out there has any information about Thawte certificates, signtool, and FireFox 1.0, PLEASE help me out!) Result? Our plugin won't run under FireFox 1.0 since the browser won't allow the user to install unsigned plugins.

    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.

    • by The One KEA ( 707661 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @06:00PM (#10835973) Journal
      I didn't even know that cryptographic extension signatures _worked_ in Firefox 1.0!

      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)

    by kid_wonder ( 21480 ) <publicNO@SPAMkscottklein.com> on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:30PM (#10835601) Homepage
    now if only the plugins were updated ... or backwards compatible
    • Re:Plugins (Score:3, Informative)

      now if only the plugins were updated ... or backwards compatible

      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.
  • by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @05:35PM (#10835664) Homepage
    I suggest that the Mozilla foundation takes a lesson from the MS playbook and repackage Firefox with Thunderbird, Nvu [nvu.com] and maybe a Mozillarized Gaim.

    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)

    by zonix ( 592337 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @06:22PM (#10836230) Journal

    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.

    z
  • by valmont ( 3573 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @06:25PM (#10836264) Homepage Journal
    hello fellow slashdotters. a couple of months ago i put together this thing [blogspot.com] which i've officially just named the "Firefox advocator [blogspot.com]". If you like it, please, oh please spread the word :)
  • by Castaa ( 458419 ) * on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @06:49PM (#10836503) Homepage Journal
    The San Francisco Chronicle is the largest circulation newspaper in the Bay Area. They wrote a very positive review about FireFox vs. Internet Explorer this week. It was on the front page of Monday's Technology section.

    Internet Explorer has new foe - Firefox 1.0 beats Microsoft browser in several areas
    SF Chronicle Review [sfgate.com]
  • classic Mic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geg81 ( 816215 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2004 @08:27PM (#10837436)
    When their competitor comes out with a new product, Microsoft places pre-emptive calls [com.com] to the media trying to preemptively kill their competitor:
    Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows who never writes or calls, told News.com that he and his team were "sharpening pencils" in efforts to get the word out about IE's new security features in the Windows XP Service Pack 2 release.

    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.

"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne

Working...