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Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0 606

Posted by kdawson from the rough-around-the-edges dept.
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."
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Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0 More

Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0

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  • A pity as Firefox 2.0 just crashed on me. I was wondering what the hell was going on and I just refreshed slashdot to see this very story.
    :(
    I still trust it more than IE of course, but do wish as we get newer versions that the stability does continue to improve.
    I'm sure they can do it and I still have faith.

  • Do volunteers care about tracking down memory leak (Score:3, Informative)

    by d_jedi ( 773213 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:08AM (#16629482)
    It's not always the most glamorous part of coding an app, but it needs to be done.
    Personally, I haven't upgraded (and I won't until everything - esp. my extensions - "just work").. and reports like this suggest that this may be the prudent action.
    • I upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to find that of the 14 or so extensions that I use, only about 3 were "incompatible" with the new version - not nearly as bad as I had thought.

      That said, I've had it freeze a couple of times on me (however the session-restore worked, and put me right back where I left-off when it started up again). Javascript is still a major stumbling block - it's really damn slow. Aside from fixing bugs, hopefully they put a lot of emphasis on optimizing their JS engine, as it rea

    • Personally, I haven't upgraded...

      I did... But then I went right back. One of the ways I use a browser is to select text in a xterm or other app and middle click on a new Firefox tab. The keyword.URL key is set to search rather than return the first result so I get a page of search results on that text - most useful. In FF2 this doesn't work - a middle click on the browser window != typing something into the URL bar now. No problem, but I don't know what it == so I could set that. I did try Seamonkey but tha

  • The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:08AM (#16629484)
    1) The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)

    2) Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.

    3) The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features

    4) There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself

    5) The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox

    6) There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers. Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail

    7) Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated

    8) Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances - for unknown reasons - will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel

    9) RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards, and is inferior to that of IE7.

    • Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SnprBoB86 ( 576143 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:15AM (#16629516) Homepage
      Re: #4

      The backwards compatability woes indicate that, much like Windows, Firefox will slow to evolve because it is a victim of it's own success.

      • Er wouldn't they indicate that it's evolving quickly because they're happily breaking compatibility in the name of development? I think these are two entirely different sets of circumstance.

      1. It works for me (no random locks, important extensions all work)
      2. It seems snappier
      3. I already installed it and it's not causing problems so why revert

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jesser ( 77961 )
      Thanks, anonymous coward, for turning the bulleted list into a numbered list. It helps to be able to reference numbers when replying.

    • Can we get rid of C please? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by master_p ( 608214 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @07:36AM (#16630804)

      The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox

      For how long major applications like Firefox will have memory leaks? can we please stop using C altogether and use a decent garbage-collected language like D [digitalmars.com] (there are other languages around, but D is as close to C as possible)...

    • Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)

      by code65536 ( 302481 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @10:04AM (#16631620) Homepage Journal
      1) Theme: matter of personal opinion

      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?
  • no wonder IE7 team sent a cake to Mozilla foundation a la "from Redmond with love"... See it here if you have not already: http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-wi th-love/ [fredericiana.com]

  • memory (Score:3, Funny)

    by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:14AM (#16629508)
    The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation.

    So, does that mean that 640K won't be enough memory then?

  • My impression (Score:4, Informative)

    by kestasjk ( 933987 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:17AM (#16629532) Homepage
    The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.
    So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced.
    • So users should change their behavior to suit firefox flaws?
      • Why not, I've changed my behavior to suit Internet Explorer flaws (avoiding active X, constant virus scanning, etc...). Users only define there software experience if they are developers, or the developers listen to there users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LauraW ( 662560 )
      The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open

      To be fair, you could do that in FireFox 1.5 using the Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] extension. It works very well.

      Back to the topic of the article: I've upgraded to FireFox 2.0 on my XP box at home (and next week I'll upgrade my Linux box at work). I haven't noticed any ill effects from the upgrade. I haven't noticed any major differences, for that matter, other than no longer needing Tab Mix Plus because

    • Of course, you don't need FF 2.0 to do that. Anyone who has been using Tab Mix Plus [mozilla.org] has had these features (and a few more) for a while now. And there's a bunch more extensions that fly in the same flock, just search Firefox Add Ons [mozilla.org] and live it up, without upgrading.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cato ( 8296 )
        It's a lot cleaner and more reliable to have all the tab-session-saving functionality built into the browser - I used Tab Mix Plus and it was generally OK, but would frequently not restore all my tabs, and sometimes forget all of them. I now have a couple of very simple tab extensions in Firefox 2, one to let me duplicate a tab and the other to open new tabs immediately to the right of the current tab.
    • The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.

      I'm running a fresh install of Ubuntu Edgy here, with Firefox 2.0. The feature you mention doesn't work, sadly; I filed a bug [launchpad.net]. Of course, this could be some freak issue with my particular installation (although it
      • If anyone is curious, I narrowed down the bug. It seems to only occur under particular circumstances (see comment in the bugreport [launchpad.net]; basically, it occurs only when your homepage is set to an empty string).
    • Besides being SLOW, restarting isn't going to place multiple windows on numerous virtual desktops.

      I have virtual desktops containing browser windows which contain tabs. That's 3 levels with which I organize things. It may be 5 desktops times 2 browsers times 8 tabs, for a total of around 80 tabs.

      No, I don't want to restart that, even if I can.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by MK_CSGuy ( 953563 )
      The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open
      If you want that out of the box and don't like v2 you should try Opera [opera.com] - it has been a standard there for years now.
    • "The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. [...] So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced."

      Just because a new feature serves as a workaround that mitigates a known serious flaw in a program does not imply that the problem has been corrected or should be ignored. I hope the Mozilla.org folks pay attention here. There are many millions of us who like Firefox and use it by default...av

    • Re:My impression (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Onan ( 25162 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:00AM (#16629996)

      The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time.

      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?

      • 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?

        People who use more than a small subset of applications will find it useful to close some of them, particularly those of us who use applications such as (Open|Microsoft) Office.

        Some of us play games on

    • ``Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.''

      Except for the startup time...

  • I didn't switch because of security problems, but because of the attempts to foist session management onto all of us and because the Tab Killer plugin which I use to eradicate all record of tabs from Firefox doesn't work in 2.0 yet.

    Why can't the Moz developers make a simple Tabs On/Off switch in the Options Panel, and the same for session management. I do not want my browser to remember that I had ten pages open and then reopen them when it starts. I'd be running Opera if I wanted that.

    One final rant, why

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mabinogi ( 74033 )
      > I do not want my browser to remember that I had ten pages open and then reopen them when it starts. I'd be running Opera if I wanted that.

      Then use the simple switch they provide to make it not do that.
      You didn't look very hard - the very first dropdown on the first panel of the options dialogue has the option you're looking for.

  • Firefox to internet: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sporkme ( 983186 ) * on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:24AM (#16629578) Homepage
    Firefox to internet:
    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 .0 release to an established release, and to Internet Explorer, is just pretty laughable where I am sitting. I have not experienced a single crash or bug, but then I have not exactly been trying to break it. Overall, I am quite impressed and look forward to seeing where this release takes the community.
    • There will, of course, be growing pains

      Yup. Open Source products usually get decent by V3.0 or 3.1
    • ``Firefox to internet:
        If you are for any reason dissatisfied with your Firefox experience, we will gladly refund your money.''

      That doesn't mean there's no reason to grumble. First of all, because criticism tells the developers about what people want them to work on. Secondly, because some of the issues are bloody shameful. Memory leaks? Still?! Remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that have been known for _months_?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Direction (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ballwall ( 629887 )
    I love firefox, but I question where they are going. If you look at the blog post every 3rd entry is complaining about memory issues or bloat. Now here comes FF 2.0, with more features, but these seem to only exacerbate the problems. Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy. Firefox gained popularity because it was a viable option when people went looking for a replacement to IE. But that was the catch, people were looking for a repl

    • Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy.

      I agree with most of what you've said, but not quite with this. The way I remember things, Firefox's original claim to fame, at least among geeks, was not being Mozilla, as in Mozilla Seamonkey [mozilla.org]. In other words, it was Mozilla with all the extra flab cut out. Just a browser. No mail client, no composer, no newsreader, no built in IRC chat client, etc etc. This made it much faster loading,

  • Defending Firefox isn't helping Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by coobird ( 960609 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:49AM (#16629676) Homepage

    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.

  • 2.0 freezes up several times a day (Score:4, Informative)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @03:50AM (#16629686) Homepage Journal
    I desperately want to use 2.0 as my primary browser, I find its form spellchecker invaluable for websites such as this one, but I too have found that it freezes up and must be force-quit several times a day on my Mac, enough to make me stick with 1.5 despite 2.0's features.

    Sounds to me like Mozilla really need to get their act together, especially given the revenue they are supposed to be generating through Google, there isn't really an excuse for this.

    • I'm surprised to read that so many people are having problems. Then again, /. has thousands of readers, and a "FireFox Problem" story is going to get some responses, so...

      Anyways, I haven't run into a single problem with it yet, and this is on three machines; One at work, two at home. I find it to be faster and more usable than 1.5. All the plugins that I use work fine, too (then again, I only use three). Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones.
  • Open Source Software buggy? With security problems? Shipped with known issues before it's ready?

    That's impossible. Only big, evil, money-grubbing, corporations do that.

    I mean, you could easily misspell IE7 as Firefox. The letters are right next to each other on the keyboard.

    (Yes, I really like flame. It's a sickness. I need help.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bky1701 ( 979071 )
      Well, by your reasoning, all follow-up software is as flawed as IE/Windows... but lets not kid, do you feel more secure on linux/firefox or windows/ie?

      Yeah.
  • And other similar needlessly and pointlessly inflammatory posts -- people, the anecdotal experience of others should not be used as the basis for any decision making process. And how this whole item is supposed to be news should be up for debate as well -- what are the editors of /. still pissed off about the Firefox pre-posting availability story? Here's an idea, load the same three pages in tabs in the latest browsers of your choice -- personally I've done this with IE7, Opera 9.02, and Firefox 2.0. My o
  • Looks like the IE7 team probably downloaded & used Firefox 2.0 RC2 before they sent
    the Firefox team the cake [slashdot.org].

  • Firefox is not buggy (Score:3, Informative)

    by ravee ( 201020 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @04:42AM (#16629912) Homepage Journal
    I have installed the latest ver of firefox on my machine running Linux and I can vouch that this new version is not buggy. It has never crashed even once and I found it to open quicker than firefox 1.5.

    Having said that, if you are using a lot of extensions including del.icio.us and many prominent ones, then it could consume some memory and might significantly slow down the machine. I think it has got to be some problem with the extension you are using rather than firefox itself.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Barny ( 103770 )
      Running on winXP sp2 here, and having no problems what so ever. Yeah it eats some ram, but with Vista on the horizon chewing up 1G just for windows, a browser useing 200-300M is not a huge issue.

      Running no extensions, like it just vanilla, except for a few about:config changes (i like having the close tab button on the right of the window, and was happy to see they implemented support to set it still) it runs for several days on end with no crashes in sight. One thing though, i do disable most javascript (p

    • Re:Firefox is not buggy (Score:4, Informative)

      by bradbury ( 33372 ) <Robert DOT Bradbury AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday October 29, 2006 @12:58PM (#16632836) Homepage
      Caca. As I pointed out in my long message on the other major /. Firefox discussion -- Firefox 2.0 still has some of the same memory allocation and management issues that are present in Firefox 1.5! These were reported as bugs and the developers have simply chosen to ignore them.

      I *crashed* (core dump and all) Firefox 2.0 3 times in the first 30 minutes of using it. All you have to do is use ulimit set the virtual memory limit so that memory allocations fail relatively early during your browsing experience (rather than after 5 days of browsing when you would lose much more browser state information -- or have to take a long time to restore a complex session).

      It is *NOT* production level software when it is that easy to produce a core dump.

      I have subsequently investigated the cause of this. Its simple. Firefox uses the new memory allocation primitive in its C++ code which in turn ends up either throwing an exception or abort()ing when a malloc() fails (depending upon how libstdc++ is compiled). The supporting graphics libraries (GTK & GDK) use g_alloc() which when malloc() fails calls g_error() which ends up calling abort().

      The upper level Firefox code (nsSigHandlers.cpp) will only do something "nice" (setup to do a stack trace and attach the debugger) if Firefox is compiled in DEBUG mode (which is probably not true for most or all 'production-wanna-be' versions). In these cases the abort() terminates the program and produces core dump if you have your core dump ulimit and permissions setup to allow for that.

      While the in-browser session saver may fix some of the excessive memory usage problems they still are NOT handling most memory allocation failures in a robust fashion.

  • 9 Reasons to upgrade to 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)

    by sygin ( 659338 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @04:53AM (#16629954)
    I have been using Firefox 2.0 on Windows and Linux for a while now (RC1)

    1. It is faster than 1.5
    2. It is more stable than 1.5
    3. It is smaller than 1.5
    4. It does more 'out the box' - requires less extensions
    5. It looks better than 1.5
    7. I love the spell checking
    8. It is more secure than 1.5
    9.If it uses more memory, it is because it remembers
        the previous pages and the back button works instantly.

    The reasons not to quoted in the 'story' are moronic

    Cheers
    Sygin

  • Responses from a Firefox developer (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29, 2006 @04:57AM (#16629982)
    I am a Firefox developer, so I can comment with some authority on these points.

    First, as to the "critical security hole", as we've already stated in numerous other places, the actual exploitable hole was patched long ago. A non-exploitable crash does remain and will eventually be fixed. Anyone who reports this as a security hole has not done their due diligence.

    Second, the summary posted here is a bit surprising. The feedback we've seen so far is quite the opposite of this summary: most users are, in fact, reporting better performance, lower memory usage (we fixed some of the most egregious leaks), and an easier-to-use browser. Additionally, we fixed far more bugs, especially old, longstanding bugs, in this release than in any previous Firefox release. So even if none of the new features flotas your boat, this release *should* be a polished step forward, once you start poking around a bit.

    Third, as to the nine points this article raises:
    # The new theme sucks
    As this is a matter of personal preference, I can only encourage those who dislike the new theme to download one of the many alternative themes available. There are updated versions of the 1.5 Winstripe/Pinstripe themes, as well as many others, whatever suits your fancy. I will note that the majority of editors reviewing Firefox 2 have felt that the new theme is a step forward; so clearly not everyone believes this is a negative point.

    # Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
    This argument is unclear. One of the antiphishing modes uses a blacklist and the other submits URLs to Google. So it at worst is not both weak and privacy-violating at the same time. Going further, however, I would ask for a less vague argument about privacy. Switching on full antiphishing protection displays a warning notice to the user specifying exactly what sorts of data is sent where, and for what purpose. I hardly consider it a violation of privacy to allow people to explicitly choose to send their data somewhere else. (Of course, given that Google doesn't actually do anything with this data other than feed it into their anti-phishing database, I don't consider it a violation of privacy regardless, but we have options precisely because not all users will feel this way.)

    # The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
    Especially given the positive feedback we've gotten on the redesigned pref window, I'd suggest explicitly naming problems here rather than making such a vague and general argument. The new options box is IMO a vast improvement on the old one: it reduces the number of tabs containing embedded tabs to one (the Advanced tab), it rewords many options for grammar and clarity (especially where the old wordings had generated bug reports), and it slightly modifies the default set of options to better fit actual usage. Name the "important features" being hidden and I suspect the list will consist of features that are very important to a tiny fraction of our userbase.

    # There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions o Firefox.
    Actually, since the Gecko engine remained at version 1.8, with almost every XPCOM interface backwards compatible with Firefox 1.5, this release has by far the _fewest_ number of incompatibilities of any release in Firefox history. Most extensions are compatible once their version numbers are set properly, and only a small fraction actually broke. Additionally, we contacted the authors of the most popular extensions in advance of the release to explicitly ask them to test their extensions, and filed bugs to track the upgrading of popular extensions. While we can always do more here, I think this has been th

  • Firefox 2.0! (Score:2, Funny)

    by T.Louis ( 1015101 )
    I love it! Can I have some of that Remond cake?

  • Still has problems with ESPN scoreboards (Score:5, Interesting)

    by streak ( 23336 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @05:16AM (#16630070) Journal
    Well, it seems like every version of Firefox still has issues with espn.com.
    Its definitely the most reliable site to crash and/or generate 100% cpu time on any recent version (1.5.x and 2.0).
    Just go browse to one of the scoreboard pages a few times. It really likes to do this on Mac.

  • One of the reasons I switched from Firefox to Opera was that Firefox - even the latest version - seemed to eat up more and more memory, and never released it even when I closed all but one of the firefox windows.

  • Most of the changes deal with things that I don't much care about. I'd like it to freeze up less often and leak less memory, but what I would REALLY like would be for the rendering to work properly in Indian writing systems. And it would sure be nice to have a little button to click on for clearing the URL like in Galeon.

  • My reply on these issues would be... (Score:5, Informative)

    by thrill12 ( 711899 ) on Sunday October 29, 2006 @07:36AM (#16630800) Journal
    (taken from here [listvine.com])
    1. Not true. The theme is perhaps not consistent, but this does not matter to the casual user who downloads Firefox for use on 1 platform.

    2. Not true. Antiphishing technology privacy issues are clearly noted when the user ENABLES the (by default DISABLED) feature. This makes it completely by users' choice, and defeats this issue completely.

    3. Little bit true. There are certain options hidden which should be visible. But it's a choice made towards new users, not towards old users that still remember releases such as Firefox 0.9. So it's actually a good thing. And user interfaces tend to address the most common denominator anyway, which is also a proper thing to do.

    4. Little bit true, but to be expected ! Extensions access XPCOM-exported functionality. It is by default that many of the XPCOM interfaces are not stable - this is known to developers and this is clearly noted next to the interfaces you want to develop upon. If extensions use unstable interfaces they know that it could break in future releases. Short story: this issue is no issue at all.

    5. 50% True. But this is a bug that could just as well be fixed in Firefox 2.0.1. Memory leaks are however not easy to fix, and it is by no means sure that it would be even fixed in 3.0, so pure speculation to make this an issue not to upgrade to 2.0.

    6. True. But this also represents a transitional problem that will most likely be fixed (or worked around) in the 2.0-branch

    7. Unverifyable. The author refers to some blog that mentions presumably a Firefox 2.0 RC3-version. But there are no details on the setup of the person's Firefox, nor on the extensions he had installed (see 4). This makes this issue unverifyable and strikes it off this list.

    8. True. Again not something major that couldn't be fixed in the 2.0 branch - have patience.

    9. Untrue. The article author states that RSS feed handling takes a step backwards - in the linked article there is no mention of this: it says that RSS feed handling has never been so good in Firefox as it is in IE7. This is a feature that Firefox may be lacking, but as it has never been present in earlier releases this is NO REASON not to upgrade. Stricken, your honour.

    My judgement from the issues he stated ? He mentions 2 issues that would qualify as a "no-go" for upgrade, the history bar and the CSS issues. But both these issues are minor in that they could be fixed in the 2.0 branch. I clearly show why the other issues are not so true, and sometimes clearly dead-wrong. In my eyes, the author is writing a big fat troll, and slashdot should know better than to post this. Now the damage has been done, this discussion can quickly be silenced, hopefully.

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