Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0 606
grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
The backwards compatability woes indicate that, much like Windows, Firefox will slow to evolve because it is a victim of it's own success.
Firefox to internet: (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are for any reason dissatisfied with your Firefox experience, we will gladly refund your money.
There will, of course, be growing pains. TFA highlights a known security bug, and points out that the memory leak has found its way into Firefox 2. CSS is initially seeing some compatibility hickups. There is always room for improvement. I began using Firefox 2 a few hours after the actual release. I was surprised to see an article complaining.
The other points of the article are matters of preference and wishful thinking.
-"I don't like the theme." ORLY well how is that IE theme support working out for you?
-"The anti phishing is weak!" ---compared to what? The antiphishing in 1.5?
-"Extensions did not automagically compatible-ize themselves!" OOOOHHH, well let me switch to that other browser that inherently supports third-party code. Perhaps we have overlooked the ".0" in the release version number. Third parties will have to adapt to meet the changes as Mozilla works to meet them. This does constitute a reason to potentially delay switching if extensions are absolutely necessary for your casual web usage.
-"I don't understand the options screen!" BWAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! This can't be serious.
-"I don't like the RSS thingy! IE does it better!" Where was it again that RSS originated? Was that Redmond? While IE's RSS Just Works (TM) there are clearly many custom options for this feature with Firefox, and unimaginable numbers of extensions are to follow.
So why delay switching to 2.0? Because 1.5 is just fine. Not because 2.0 is broken. Comparing a
Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l (Score:4, Insightful)
Defending Firefox isn't helping Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like quite a few people are out defending Firefox, but that's actually a disservice for Firefox.
What it really comes down to is to make Firefox into a browser that can convince the other 80+% of the users to switch. Saying "oh but, Firefox did it first!" or "you can just change x setting to make it better if you like" is irrelevant because when it comes down to it, it's whether the average users think it's better than the other browser. Making excuses for issues that even be perceived as problems doesn't help Firefox.
I like Firefox and upgraded to 2.0 on Tuesday, but it's not really the opinion of the Firefox crowd that really matters, it's the users still using Internet Explorer, the crowd that Firefox is really going after.
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
What I don't get is ever time a new version of FF comes out, you get people bitching that there extensions are not compatible. The extension compatibility issues have nothing to do with the Firefox developers, its the extension developers that have not timely released there code, bitch at them.
Bad analogy time.
You own a 1995 Ford car that you've installed custom bucket seats in. You purchase a 2006 Ford of the same model. The passenger compartment has been redesigned in the mean time, and your custom seats will not fit in the new car. In this case do you think that bitching at Ford is going to do a damn bit of good? Get new seats. If no one makes seats that fit the model yet, you'll have to wait or make your own.
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not crap. This will be an important reason for many people to avoid 2.0
Yes, there are themes and I immediately installed one of them after I set up Firefox. But you can't ask this from the user base Firefox is aiming at.
3). Confusing Options dialog: hell, have you ever really gone through IE's Tools->Internet options ? Thought so. Anyway, it's really hard to spot well designed dialogs these days. Not a reason for not using the browser. Crap.
It seems you agree on his point and yet call it crap. The options dialog DOES suck. And yes, it's really easy to spot well designed option dialogs, take a look at Microsoft Office.
4). Compatible extensions: man, people need some time for updating their extensions, but they are quick, e.g. all my extensions have been upgraded in a few days. But, if you're willing, in most cases you can fix them on your own.
The cited article is about reasons for NOT upgrading from the good and working 1.5.x. Indeed my most needed extension is not working with 2.0 yet. His objection is solid, yours lacks in more aspects than style.
7). Freezes: yes, they occur. But hello, restore session. I don't say it's no problem, I'm saying it's no reason not to switch.
So you say that it's ok to upgrade to a buggy new version. I really don't think you are entitled to an opinion on Slashdot.
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
You also seem to misunderstand #2 - the complaint will be that a weak security measure may well be worse than none at all, as users may come to rely on what is in fact insufficient protection. Imagine a situation in which the filter catches say 70% of malicious sites. If people come to rely on it ("Hey, FF doesn't say this site is bad, so it must be good!") they'll be in more danger than if they were careful about what they did on-line. You're also ignoring the privacy issue he mentions, although I don't know enough about that to comment (never having used Google's toolbar).
#5 - how many of us do such things? I do for one. I imagine that most working people simply don't bother to shut down their work PC; in my case, I'd waste too much time restarting all my apps and getting back to where I was the day before. I often see FF's memory usage exceed a couple of hundred meg. It is getting better (for me at least) though, and I'm having to restart it less and less with each new release.
Personally, I see freezes as being one of the main reasons not to switch. Sure, there's restore session, great. Does it restore the text of the email/post/whatever that I was typing? No, of course not. I can certainly see that being a problem if FF freezes/crashes for you a lot.
Compatible extensions: man, people need some time for updating their extensions, but they are quick, e.g. all my extensions have been upgraded in a few days.Compatible extensions: man, people need some time for updating their extensions, but they are quick, e.g. all my extensions have been upgraded in a few days.
The RCs were available for months. I don't know if there were any changes between them that affected extensions (although given that they were RCs, there shouldn't have been), but there really aren't many excuses for authors not having updated their extensions yet, if they're still actively maintaining them. Note that this is not a criticism of FF, but if an extension you consider important hasn't been updated, why would you switch?
It may not be a good browser, but.... (Score:1, Insightful)
There we have the Internet Explorer. It only runs on various versions of Windows. It has an unpatched security flaw since 1998 (http://www.ccc.de/activex/) which the vendor doesn't even think of closing.
Then there's Opera, a nice standard conform browser. Unfortunately it doesn't come with it's source-code, so even if you buy it, you probably can just throw away your license when you buy a new computer. If you don't buy it, you'll get adware with all the consequences.
Of course there are also other alternatives like Dillo. Small, _FAST_, but without any CSS support.
So essentially you need to choose your poison. Firefox just seems to be a moderately good browser, but they finally need to clean up the code.
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Weak antiphishing is worse than no antiphishing. If a user gets used to seeing antiphishing messages pop up every time they do something stupid, then when one doesn't appear they're going to assume everything is okay.
This might be acceptable if you were talking about a tiny percentage of transactions, but Firefox can't guarantee that.
The Firefox phishing protection is host based, which means that someone has to submit a site and then it has to be verified before being added to a database. Worse, connection to the live blacklist is optional, so you may be browsing with an antique blacklist.
All that will happen is that the scammers will spread their phishing sites more widely: there are hordes of compromised PCs out there, you can't track them all.
A heuristic approach would be better: at the moment all the phishing mail I get seems to use a hole in php. Better surely to have mandatorily updated list of rules in the antiphishing engine:
Alert if apparent domain in #text of tag does not match href attribute
Alert if URL contains a space
Alert if URL is IP address with no dots
&c&c
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My impression (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, I keep my browser open because I think the odds are pretty good that at some point in the future I'm going to want to view a web page.
Why would one ever choose to quit a browser, or for that matter any application? At least for anything other than upgrades to the kernel, fundamental libraries, or hardware?
Re:Sad Co-incidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
It's different!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
If you really don't like shiny new things, you shouldn't have upgraded to Fx2.0 the day it was releasd. Wait a couple of weeks, or better still wait until they release 2.0.0.1 or whatever and then upgrade.
A concise review (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Anti-phishing: better than nothing; BTW, it's the same anti-phishing technology used in the Google Toolbar
3) FF2 options dialog is a lot like FF1.5's options dialog. Not much change.
4) The extension authors tend to be slow to update. The whole point of Beta1/2 and RC1/2/3 was to give developers, especially extension developers, ample time to update their extensions. If they don't make use of that time, it's their fault for not supporting their users. But on that note, very little changed API-wise between FF1.5 and FF2, so much extension updates involve nothing more than bumping the "maxVersion" string. If that's the case, you can disable extension compatibility checking in about:config and force 1.5 extensions to be accepted in 2.0. That's what I do, and I encounter no problems.
5) Show me a piece of software with no memory leak issues.
5a) FACT: IE7 uses *MORE* memory for the same number of tabs and sites.
5b) FACT: FF2 is MUCH better than FF1.5 in the memory leak department.
5c) FACT: Many of the memory leaks are actually caused by extensions. And there are a LOT of poorly-written leaking extensions out there (in fact, switching from the SessionSaver extension to the built-in session saver in FF2 brought about a very noticeable change).
5d) People forget that webpages these days require lots of memory now that people are using more an more images. And remember that when an image is displayed, it is decompressed into a raw format in memory (since compressed formats like JPEG and PNG are for storage and transport only) and people forget about that effect on memory.
6) It's better than 1.5's CSS engine. It's certainly not a perfect engine, but it's a hell of a lot better than IE7 (now if some sites decide to make use of incorrect behavior in IE7's CSS engine, that's their problem for not following W3C specs).
7) I can't speak for other others, but I have not encountered this. And I have been using Firefox 2 for well over a month, ever since RC1 was spun in mid-late September. Keep in mind that most of the bugs that people report with Firefox are actually the result of crappily-developed extensions.
8) No comment.
9) How could it possibly be a step backwards. 1.5 showed RSS feeds as raw XML. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how a pretty display of RSS feeds is worse than a XML parse tree. 1.5 also didn't give people much options on what to do with them: only live bookmarks were available. 2.0 now lets you pick an aggregator of your choice. Explain to me how this is worse?
Re:Responses from a Firefox developer (Score:4, Insightful)
Apples and oranges IMO, but since you bring it up, I'll take the bait.
Replace 'should' with 'may' and you would be 100% correct, and that is a more accurate comparison. What Firefox is doing is obviously not what some people would prefer, but it is not obviously wrong either, just as Lynx is not 'obviously wrong' to display a web page without stylesheets. For that matter, it is possible even in Firefox and several other modern browsers to disable stylesheets on a web page and view them with the default html stylesheet. This is not 'wrong'- it is completely acceptable, and is in fact the whole reason that we started using CSS- it allows one to remove the formatting information without losing content.
Likewise, the reason that the formatting data on BBC is in an XSLT stylesheet and not in the RSS feed itself is just that. It is visual formatting information that is unrelated to the content, and may be used or ignored as the user agent sees fit without affecting the content itself. Are standalone feed readers (or better yet, web based ones such as Google's) 'obviously wrong' if they don't display the RSS feed with the BBCs stylesheet rather than loading it into their own interface? It's exactly the same thing, they just happen to have a more fully featured interface than Firefox does.
Re:Firefox is a piece of shit (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is it that every comment in this page that compares IE favorably to FF is modded -1?
Why is it that every comment in this page that mentions problems w/ FF like memory leaks, crashes, etc, is either not modded up or is modded down?
Slashdot users pride themselves as a bit more informed that the dumbass NOOBs, so why are we incapable of holding 2 opposing viewpoints at the same time? Isn't that supposed to be the mark of intelligence?
Nobody has ever accused Slashdot of having intelligence, but I think the average user would consider themselves to be a notch or 2 above average.
It just seems like people that have the political agenda of advancing FireFox thinks that the best way to do that is to hide any criticism and treat any suggestions to convert to IE7 as totally unacceptable.
When firefox debuted--and I've been running it since then (since v
What I'm saying is, we used to convince people to switch by giving them MORE INFORMATION. Now, it seems, the accepted tactic is trying to play-up FF strengths and hide FF criticism.
That's sad to me.
Go ahead, mark me -129 offtopic flamebait troll, but anyone reading this page knows that what I'm saying is true.