People who think this way often forget that there are actually 2 factors that work in opposite directions to skew the mortality rate that we see. 1. The actual number of infected people is higher than the number of tested and confirmed cases. This makes the virus look deadlier than it is. 2. The people who are dying today actually got infected about 2 weeks ago. So, this means you need to divide the current number of people who died by the number of infected people from about 2 weeks ago. Since the virus is spreading exponentially in most places in the world, this makes a huge difference. This makes the virus to be much more lethal than it appears. People quite often think about 1, but forget about 2, so they vastly underestimate the mortality of the virus.

Basically, because Firefox hurts IE's market share and promotes Google search, instead of Bing. Also, Firefox has much better support for web standards. Microsoft is a much worse competitor to Google than Mozilla. Therefore everything that hurts Microsoft's IE and Bing is good for Google. That's also why Google supports Opera.

The problem is large corporations that have a lot of patents still get a benefit from them. They can collect revenue and sue competitors that only have a small amount of patents. As for competitors who also have a lot of patents, they usually sign a cross-licensing deal, so both sides don't sue each other over their patents (which would cause mutual destruction). So by definition large corporations, who have a lot of patents, mostly avoid the negative effects of the software patent system and only get the benefits. The only exception are patent trolls, which even large corporations cannot avoid, but they probably figured out the benefits still outweigh the losses.

Well, I've always thought that there are people, who'd get married just to update their Facebook status, and now I have the ultimate proof :)

But the update will be very easy to install - no need to even enter the root password :)

I think there's a very common and flawed misunderstanding of how open source software works. Open source projects usually don't care about the absolute number of users. Most users are simply consumers, who wouldn't contribute anything back to the project. The only reason they would try it is because it is free (as in beer), and if it doesn't work for them, they will switch to whatever works, even proprietary, if it works better for them. But what's the benefit from having these users? Proprietary software caters to them, because they are paying consumers, so the company, that made the software makes money. However, open source projects don't make money from users, who download the software for free. They benefit from users, who contribute back bug reports and patches. These are people, who know that using open source software is not about being just a consumer for a (better) product, but it's about being part of it - by submitting bug reports and patches, you know that bugs will be fixed and you can shape the direction in which the projects goes. If there's disagreement between you and the other developers, you are free to fork the project - take all the source, make your changes to it and distribute it on your own website. If your version is better, it will gather more contributors and may become more popular than the original version. So, an open source project needs contributors to survive - they are much more important that ordinary users. You can have maybe as much as 0.1% of users, who contribute, compared to the sheer number of users, who use a proprietary equivalent to your application and still your project can continue to develop and improve. So, it's not all about market share, it's about educating your users and teaching them how to get involved in the project.

FYI, Chrome is also almost entirely open source, except for a few small additions by Google.

Almost all of the firefox crashes are caused by buggy plugins or extensions. For example, check out: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes for a list of common plugins, that are known to cause crashes. Firefox has always been very stable for me and almost never crashes, but I'm very careful with the plugins, that I allow. Usually, I disable all the plugins, except Flash and the Adobe PDF reader and always make sure, that they are updated to the latest version (Adobe's updater is notoriously broken, so I check manually). Even in the rare cases, when I have experienced Firefox crashes, the session restore has always worked fine for me. In fact I tend to not use bookmarks and just keep the tabs open for some of the interesting sites, that I read (I do that mostly for online comics) and rely on the session restore to keep them and I have never lost any of them.

In the long term, they're planning to implement that also: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-keep-plugins-updated/ This is only the first step in a multi-step process that weâ(TM)re going down: 1. The first is to do a check when we update the browser. This is what weâ(TM)ll include with 3.5.3. 2. Second, weâ(TM)re going to have a regular page that you can go to to check the state of other plugins as well. This will happen sometime this month. 3. Firefox 3.6 will check for newer versions of plugins just like we check for newer versions of Firefox or extensions. If it sees that you have one thatâ(TM)s out of date, youâ(TM)ll be sent to that page. 4. Weâ(TM)re going to try to get to the point where you can upgrade the plugin via the plugin service that we currently use for installations. 5. Weâ(TM)re also talking about using Adobeâ(TM)s Express Install system, which can update flash from the flash plugin without having to use a separate installer. So thatâ(TM)s the long term plan for now. Some of it will be in 3.6, some of weâ(TM)ll be doing in parallel and some of which is longer term.

It's called nspluginwrapper and has been in Fedora for ages. It wraps the Firefox plugins and executes them in a separate process. If that separate process crashes, the crashed plugin stops working temporarily. Reloading the page restarts the plugin again. It also allows running 32-bit plugins in a 64-bit browser. It only isolates the plugins and not the browser code, but the browser is quite stable nowadays, so I consider it an overkill and a waste of resources to run each tab in a separate process. If there are bugs in the browser, that cause crashes - they should be fixed. Firefox does that pretty well here. If people use old versions, make an easy to use auto-update, and don't push updates that break things for people, so they become afraid to update. :) Firefox also does that well. So isolating just the f*cking plugins is enough :) Sure, it's a marketing point for Google Chrome (and it's probably more useful there, because their codebase is new and less well tested, so probably more crash-prone; but I haven't used it really, so I don't know), but it's not something I really miss. I'd be more happy to see something like nspluginwrapper ported to Windows.

Hmm, I believe this has something to do with "open source" values vs. "free software" values. The open source movement tries to convey the message, that open source produces better quality software. Since it's only the quality of the software that matters, "open source fans" are more likely to use what works better for them. People, who really care about freedom, however, are much less likely to use Opera. However, since there are different kinds of freedom, when talking about web browsers, things can get a little confusing, so let me clarify:

- Opera promotes open standards (HTML, CSS) for the web, so it fights for the freedom to be able to use any browser that you choose (including free ones), and still be able to access the web. However, Firefox does the same thing also, and actually has been a lot more successful in achieving that, since it was the first browser to grab a significant marketshare from IE.
- Firefox itself is also free software by the FSF definition, so it also has all the benefits that follow from that: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Personally, I'd never even consider using Opera, unless they release it under a free license. And I don't care if other people use it or not, as it is not a threat to free software, so it doesn't really affect me at all. The real threat for free software on the web right now is IMHO Adobe Flash, which still has no usable free alternative, and which I'm forced to use under Linux, although I hate it.

And actually, Google Chrome is free/open source, at least according to the license. The only problem with it is that it was initially developed in secret internally by Google (which kinda violates the free/open source spirit) and only supports Windows, which is non-free (although a Linux version is being worked on).

You're talking about the infamous THG video. No, Athlon 64 doesn't suffer from that. (downloading videos from THG may need registration) See also this.