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."
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.
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.
Safari is better... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
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..
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?
Where's the damn NYT ad? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How many downloads via torrents? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about system administrators that install it network-wide?
Re:Firefox 1.0 for Mac OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
Safari is much more consistent with the rest of the computer's interface. Also, it has some features like SnapBack (jump to the last URL you typed, ie snap back to your starting point) that Firefox doesn't have, and slick things like using the address bar background as the loading status indicator.
That said, I use Camino, which is the Gecko rendering engine (like Firefox, unlike Safari) but with native widgets & behaviors (unlike Firefox, like Safari).
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?
Copy Bug? (Score:1, Interesting)
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 users who were "losing" their documents when they opened another one, etc.
Essentially, the change makes it easier to immediately see and switch between all the Word (or Excel, etc) documents that you've got open at any one time but when you have more than a few open it can really clutter the taskbar, hence creating a whole new usability issue.
Bottom line: I'm sure Microsoft's usability experts regard the windowing behaviour of MSIE as better the way that it is than the way that it could be if they switched to tabbed browsing.
And, before anyone says brings it up, let me just say that even offering people a choice of tabbed and non-tabbed browsing raises yet more usability issues. You might prefer a tabbed approach, and henc select such an option if it were available, but what happens when your technophobic work colleague needs to use your PC for five minutes? Sometimes, from a software engineering point of view, giving users as few options as possible is the preferable path.
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:the bearer of bad news (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
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:the bearer of bad news (Score:2, Interesting)
Submitted using Opera7 (again).
Re:Safari is better... (Score:4, Interesting)
Plugins (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:the bearer of bad news (Score:2, Interesting)
I used KDE once, and was actually in awe when I used Konqueror, simply because it did not hang while rendering a page.
Re:Mozilla is bloatware (Score:2, Interesting)
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]
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good geeking Scott. (Score:2, Interesting)
Honestly! He's a member of our local LUG, and he's always doing so much - teaching Linux courses at the community college, writing articles, earning a living, - that he HAS to be going 22 1/2 hours a day!
Keep up the good work, Scott, and Mrs. G., I would up his life insurance policy.....
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.
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 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.
Are you SURE about this? Mine seems completely responsive all the time. Maybe I just can't find a webpage that'll load slowly enough.
> 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.
Never, ever, seen that happen. Are you sure you're not smoking crack?
Admittedly, I'm still using 0.10.1 at home under Linux, but I've got 1.0 at work on Windows, and I'm pretty sure neither do any of the things yours does. One issue I do have is that for some reason the download manager comes up when I do a "Save Image As". I guess its not necessarily a bug, but its dumb and no browser should behave that way.
Re:Even hard-line Islamist news portals like Firef (Score:2, Interesting)
News organizations walk a fine line between covering the news and creating the news in situations like this. Never mind the legitimacy or lack thereof behind terrorist acts; the purpose of this kind of self-censorship is set boundaries on what is legitimate news and what is propaganda. Al-Jazeera has the right to set their own standards, as does Matt Drudge and anyone else who purports to publish "news".
It all comes down to credibility and how much people can trust you to be taken at your word. The New York Times on its worst day is a more credible source than The Drudge Report because they have different standards for what constitutes "news." And it shows: when Drudge goes off on something, people take it with a grain of salt because he's been wrong before. When the Times says something is important, people take it seriously because they are more credible (this is also why CBS screwing up the Bush-National Guard story is such a big deal). It's the old 'cry wolf' story - spew bs often enough and people won't take you seriously.
People can rant all they want about Big Media and bias and all that, but they fact is they have standards and are deeply concerned with maintaining their credibility.