Firefox

There is an article on CNet called, “Ups and downs for Firefox”. As Firefox becomes more widely used, hackers and their criminal counterparts called crackers, are finding more ways to penetrate its weaknesses. Firefox was pretty much ignored by the criminal element when fewer people were using the product.

Amsterdam-based OneStat awarded Firefox with 8.5% share of the browser market. According to its Web research, the share of IE has fallen to 87.3 percent. Niels Brinkman, the founder of OneStat.com, admitted that the "global usage share of Mozilla's Firefox is still increasing," mostly because 'browser users of Internet Explorer 5 are switching to Mozilla Firefox instead of upgrading to Internet Explorer 6.0."

Next time you complain to me that an image doesn't show up or that there's too much space between so-and-so, I will open up a can of whoop-ass. I can forgive you for running Windows, but not for running IE.

Spread Firefox.

I hate Internet Explorer. I hate EVERY.SINGLE.VERSION. It sucks. It sucks the life right out of me, like some sort of electronic, soul-sucking vampire beast.

Anyways, a new bug has been found and described. This bug, involving IE jumping text on hover, is due to quirky percentages in IE6’s visual formatting model.

I can’t even begin to go into the depth of this bug, but I was shocked to see how long the page was, and how it just kept on going.

I've been beta testing the new microsoft anti-spyware, and have been 100% impressed with the results.

Not only have microsoft rounded on traditional threats like gator, but their appraisal of firefox was absolutely spot on, and confirmed what i already knew..

Check out this screenshot i took.

Firefox has good pop-up blocker technology, but the pop-up coders are figuring out ways around Firefox pop-up blocking.

I’m starting to notice lately that there are a few site that have figured out how to bypass the pop-up blocking in Firefox. My fear is that this is the beginning of the end for current pop-up blocking technology – I remember how it started in Internet Explorer. A few pop-ups here, a few there … and then someone bought a pop-up gatling gun and blasted you in the face with it.

Or maybe I’ve just been so spoiled by Firefox that I freak out at the first sight of any pop-up ads.

You can get a free gmail notifier for Firefox by clicking on the link. One user's review of the notifier below. Firefox will support RSS feeds, so you could set up your mail as an RSS feed, too.

Google is cool! by Pinguin

December 24, 2004 6:59pm

"works fine but gmail is soon to have an rss for your inbox so you can see your inbox through live bookmarks" Doesn't work that well in FireFox. I think it should work in Thunderbird... I expect mail, so...

This is a comment to a blog about web design and it brings up some good points with respect to CSS and IE workarounds.

An update to IE that i.e. incorporates position: fixed or css2 selectors must be separable from earlier versions. Eric states that the few pages that would break after an update, would be fixed by their web designers quickly, because they would be pages maintained by authors who actually want to use standards and care about doing things right. I agree - but if the fix isn’t supposed to break the site for those users that hasn’t upgraded IE, the webdesigner needs something to distinguish the update from its predecessor.

This might not be easy without introducing new problems. A lot of web designers use conditional comments to fix IE-specific problems. A version change - i.e. to 6.1 - would enable them to continue with that approach - but I don’t think Microsoft wants to introduce a new version if the only improvements were “hidden” for the vast majority of the users (as css improvements in the layout engine is).

Another tricky part is whether the bug in IE’s doctype switch - the one that sends IE to quirks mode for any doctype if it finds markup (either a comment or an xml-declaration) before the doctype. A lot of pages makes use of this behaviour - i.e. to trigger quirks mode in an xhtml-document. Other pages - where the designers are not aware of doctype swithing - displays awfully in modern browsers, because they trigger quirks mode on IE but trigger standard mode in all modern browsers.

I too hope that IE will be updated in regards to css - and I believe that Microsoft should do a lot more to advertise an open web. I just think we need to remember that an update wont magically solve our IE problems as web designers - it will just add another version of IE that we have to test and check our sites with.

Great tips on web design considerations with Firefox.

The new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 browser seems to be a bit pickier about displaying incorrect coding (HTML or CSS) than other current browsers – that is, you might get a bit of a shock on some pages. While this sounds like a problem, I welcome a browser that immediately displays any coding issues.

One note: from my initial tests, Firefox 1.0 seems to suffer from the same type of caching problem as IE — once you've visited a page, then updated and uploaded the page and revisited it, FF1.0 does not give you the updated version. How annoying is that? Lots of manual clearing of the cache is in order.

My favorite Firefox add-on is the Web Developers' Toolbar (now in version 0.8), which allows you to emulate window/resolution resizing, along with more neat tricks than one could imagine — HTML and CSS validation, paths to images. Very useful for developers and designers.

New version available. For more information, click on the link. Downloads at the Mozilla website.

The Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving choice and promoting innovation on the Internet, today released an update to its award-winning Firefox 1.0 browser. The Firefox security update is available for the 27 million users who have already downloaded the free browser. The Mozilla Foundation encourages all users to download the update, which is available now on all platforms at www.mozilla.org.

"Regular security updates are essential for maintaining a safe browsing experience for our users," said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "The Mozilla Foundation has developed a community of users and developers who continuously provide feedback on Mozilla software, and as a result of that constant vigilance, we are able to provide quick and effective responses to security vulnerabilities."

The Mozilla Foundation evaluates security issues on an ongoing basis and will issue security updates as warranted. The security update for Firefox includes several fixes to guard against spoofing and arbitrary code execution. More information is available in the release notes at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/

This bit below is part of a very good analysis of Firefox market share and market penetration. I highly recommend clicking through to the entire article if you're interested in Firefox market share. IE support costs may drive companies to switch to Firefox to reduce their support costs, thus opening up more distribution for Firefox.

So, will Firefox tip? How would we know if it had? Has it tipped already?

My gut feeling is that it has not hapened yet. The stats from W3Schools, westciv, and other developer oriented sites definitely suggest a major adoption by developers, the web's "early adopters" and "visionaries", not just in terms of testing and playing with Firefox, but in using it in their everyday use.

The difference between westciv's stats and those of w3schools I'd suggest reflects the different kinds of developer who use these sites. W3Schools users are more likely to be less advanced developers than westciv's (this is not a criticism of anyone, simply an observation about the different kinds of content the sites provide). I'd predict Slashdot's stats would show an even more marked adoption of Firefox over IE (which in part would reflect the larger user share of Linux among slashdot readers). Taco, any chance of publishing your stats?

But the rate of adoption in more mainstream use of Firefox appears considerably slower. This is not necessarily something to be discouraged about (if you, like me, and most web developers, want to see at least a significant non-IE browser at play to push innovation, and stop stagnation in browser development).

The Chasm and tipping point models of adoption would suggest that wild growth among the early adopters is a necessary precursor to more mainstream adoption. But it's not sufficient.

A description on how Onfolio decided to support the Firefox browser in the 2.0 version of their RSS reader.

At the beginning of the development process for Onfolio 2.0, Firefox wasn’t really on the radar screen. Support for browsers other than internet explorer was high on the list of customer requests, but the requests were spread out over a large number of browsers, making it hard to address them without a huge amount of work. Our theory was that doing the work to fully integrate into these browsers would dilute the effort to add to the core value of Onfolio in the areas of shared collections, modeless/advanced capture, advanced searching, structured report publishing, integration with EndNote, RSS reading and so on. Then, two things happened. The first was that we got the results back from our customer survey in June and saw that 25% of people who were using Onfolio on a daily basis were also using browsers other than Internet Explorer. This was surprising because it was a lot higher than the 5%-6% market share that alternate browsers were purported to have at the time, and it was surprising because we did not work very well with those browsers. I think that most of these people used Internet Explorer when they wanted to use Onfolio, or used the Onfolio Deskbar to capture items to Onfolio or access items stored in Onfolio. We knew these people would be a lot better off with the kind of integration Onfolio has with Internet Explorer, but we still had too many other browsers that we would need to work with to make integration cost-effective. The next thing that happened pretty much solved that problem. I was listening to the radio on July 5th while driving and heard NPR’s Larry Abramson telling me that I should think about using a different browser. His story was in response to an announcement by US-CERT and some follow-up newspaper articles that came out in late June recommending browsers other than Internet Explorer as a way of avoiding internet attacks based on known holes in IE. When the initial CERT announcement and newspaper articles came out, we thought that we might need to rethink our initial decision to not support Firefox. When the NPR story hit, we were sure we were going to have to support it. That marked a level of mainstream attention that most computer issues never get.

Here's an example of Firefox plugin that searches a specific website. Website designers might want to think about variations on this.

Thanks to Jason Ungerleider, there's a nice little Firefox search plugin for searching BoardGameGeek. Nice work Jason!

Tuoc Luong, EVP Technology at Ask Jeeves, recently met with the Mozilla folks to discuss collaboration and open source search technology. Here's his blog entry about the meeting.

We went on to discuss three subjects: 1) AJ Desktop Search 2) AJ Leveraging Firefox Browser 3) XUL platform.

We discussed Ask Jeeves desktop search and the notion of open-sourcing it. We're open at two levels. Contributing just the core desktop indexing technology or possibly the entire desktop search application. They discussed how/what they would evaluate before accepting a major piece of code/product contribution: code size, internationalization, etc. Whether or not we partner with Mozilla on this effort, Chris and team thought it was a good idea for us to pursue overall.

We shared AJ view and support for open source standard, especially on the desktop, and their efforts on Firefox and Thunderbird, both of which I'm impressed with. I shared that Mozilla browser didn't do it for me but Firefox certainly converted many of AJ engineering (including myself) over exclusively to Firefox. We explained that we want to support and leverage Firefox by building extensions to and plug-ins within Firefox. We discussed the fact that it doesn't make sense for us to build a browser from scratch, but we think building Ask specific functionalities on top of Firefox to build an AJ-branded or co-branded browser could make sense in 2005.

Mozilla guys then talked abou XUL and how Firefox and Thunderbird were built using XUL. I was very impressed with the UI capabilities. I mentioned that we have a piece of technology called Octopus that may be very good to integrate into XUL platform. Rafael remembered Octopus because Mark Andreessen was an investor and on Octopus's board. It's ideal as a layer on top of the browser. I thought this could be an interesting extension or integrated into XUL. I said I would demo Octopus to them at some point.

The purveyors of pop-ups are getting smarter, but they haven't outfoxed Firefox yet.

One thing that gives Firefox its mass appeal is it’s solid pop-up blocker. Now Mozilla’s pop-up blocker is being challenged. There are some websites that have found a way around the blocker after its first pop-up is blocked. One such website is Ngemu.com; Firefox and Mozilla will both block the first pop-up, however after the user clicks on a link such as “XBOX”, a pop up appears. Bugzilla’s website contains a bug report of the problem including the source code for the work around.

This user won't use IE7 until it's secure from Windows. Short and simple, that's why there's another Firefox user.

At this year’s RSA Conference 2005, Bill Gates announced a new, Windows-free version of Internet Explorer designed to be more secure and to crush the rising Firefox threat. OK, he didn’t specifically say that last part, but you know what? That’s what’s gonna happen.

Here’s my take on it:

Post by: GnomeWriter on 02/16/05 [this is my identity for comments on the CNET site]

No version of IE will be safe enough for me until MS completely disconnects it from the OS AND kills the index.dat file. (As I have said in my LockerGnome columns, integrating IE into the OS was a bone-headed move with the sole purpose of fending off antitrust lawsuits.)

If - and only if - the “standalone” IE allows *complete* removal of the existing installation AND goes at least six months without a serious security breach AND does away with the privacy-invasive index.dat file will I consider using it again.

Oh, one more thing. Even if the above conditions are met, if IE 7 lacks tabbed browsing, forget it!

We haven't tried this, but it looks like it will speed up Firefox by multiplexing downloads.

"Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!"

Click through for a useful discussion on finding the right website hosting company if you use Movable Type.

In the first weeks of October, 2004, LMT conducted a survey of Movable Type users regarding their web hosts. The survey had 234 responses and participants were drawn from visitors to Learning Movable Type, the MT Support Forums, and the MT Professional Network. The 234 responses represented more than a 130 different web hosts. Of these web hosts, only 20 had 2 or more responses. For the purpose of identifying the most MT-friendly web hosts, I have chosen to focus on those web hosts that had multiple responses (3 or more), to help give the resulting data more relevance.

Of the 234 respondents, 90% were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their web host, and 90% would be very likely or somewhat likely to recommend the web host to another. There was very little differentiation among satisfaction ratings for the most popular web hosts. However, there was a wide range of responses when questioned specifically about reliability, support responsiveness, and MT-focus.

Darrell Norton reports on several ways to speed up Firefox. Follow the link to get all the details.

Speeding up Firefox seems to be a meme going around the blogsphere lately. Most of the tips I’ve seen, though, are only for broadband connections with the latest hardware and only include some of the settings that would affect performance.

This is the summary of an in depth look at configuring Firefox to block spyware, etc. It also compares Firefox and Internet Explorer approaches to the problem.

To continue my benevolent fairness, I actually think Firefox is a nice browser. It seems to render HTML without any problems, and the tabs are nice for browsing Slashdot. But just because it doesn't currently have any unpatched security vulnerabilities talked about in the press doesn't mean they don't exist (Secunia currently lists three unpatched vulnerabilities, for example).

Mozilla has had its share of security vulnerabilities in the past (just as IE has), and -- despite what the open source folk might say -- Mozilla keeps their security bugs hidden from the public (just like Microsoft does) in order to protect their customers from coming under attack by malicious users. Note that this is not a bad thing; all vendors should treat security bugs responsibly to ensure customers are not put at undue risk. It's just something you should be aware of. Just because you don't see any unpatched security bugs in Bugzilla doesn't mean they don't exist, either.

But the thing that makes me really not trust the browser is that it doesn't matter how secure the original code is if the typical usage pattern of the browser requires users to perform insecure actions.

- Installing Firefox requires downloading an unsigned binary from a random web server

- Installing unsigned extensions is the default action in the Extensions dialog

- There is no way to check the signature on downloaded program files

- There is no obvious way to turn off plug-ins once they are installed

- There is an easy way to bypass the "This might be a virus" dialog

This is what the "Secure Deployment" part of Microsoft's SD3 C campaign is all about; we design and develop secure software, but we make sure that customers can deploy it securely as well.

I personally don't care if people choose to run Firefox or Linux or any other software on their computers -- it's their computer, after all -- but we'll never get past the spyware / adware problem if people continue to think that installing unsigned code from random web sites is A Good Idea.

So, at this point in time, installing (and using) Firefox encourages exactly the sort of behaviour we are trying to steer people away from, and to me that makes it part of the problem, not the solution.

How do you get a job at google? Help program a wildly successful open source browser called "Firefox".

In a move that is sure to fuel speculation that Google is planning to launch its own Internet browser, it was announced this week that Google has hired the lead programmer, Ben Goodger, of the Firefox browser. Here's what they had to say on Wired:

Among other clues pointing to browser interest at Google are the registration of the gbrowser.com Internet address, the hiring of some key programmers, and sponsorship of a Mozilla programmer meeting. Even without a browser, Google is involved in significant competition with Microsoft. Both companies are working on desktop search tools, and Microsoft is pushing its MSN Search service as an alternative to Google.

You probably already know about it, but CNET's download.com continues to be a great location for free software and shareware. Below is the description of Firefox on the Mac download page.

Mozilla Firefox (formerly Firebird), which uses a large amount of the Mozilla code, is a lean and fast browser written using Extensible User Interface Language (XUL). It works on Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems and is designed to be cross-platform. Additional features include a new design, a redesigned Preferences window, new icons for the Bookmark Manager toolbar, improved privacy options, smooth scrolling, and various bug fixes and improvements.

New features in this release include a new Default theme that now presents a uniform appearance across all three platforms (fine-tuning for GNOME will follow in future releases); the ability to import data such as Favorites, the history, settings, cookies, and Internet Explorer passwords; the ability to import from Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 4.x, 6.x, and 7.x, and Opera (Mac OS X and Linux migrators for browsers such as Safari, OmniWeb, and Konqueror will be available in future releases). New Extension and Theme managers provide a convenient way to manage and update your add-ons; SmartUpdate notifies you of updates to Firefox; a new online help system is available; and this version includes many bug fixes and improvements.

Very cool history tool for Firefox browsers.

Having messed around with del.icio.us I toyed around with some ideas for integrating something like it into a firefox extension. Thus historyAgent was born (see my profile). It is sort of like other online bookmark managers, but better (IMHO). I invite you all to poke around and see how it works for you. The extension works well, but will log "every" site you visit. The favlet option work similar but makes it a lot quicker to quickly build a history that you can log and view, then file them as you see appropriate. It is similar to online collaboration tools, so you can just quickly save pages from any computer and come back and organize them later. I will be adding in rss/rdf/partial foaf output at a later date. If you have any question about it.. Check out this screenshot:

Big Baer presents wonderful set of HTML ideas for creative use of style sheets.

Where did we lose our collective CSS coding creativity? Are we all still burdened with a table layout mentality? Do we read the W3C Cascading Style Sheets Specification and not get it? CSS allows for so much freedom from traditional table based layouts that we sometimes do not consider page and layout design alternatives. What a pity. Time to think outside the box!

I was waiting for the big search companies to take in Firefox as one of their own, and now they are.

Finally, a search engine is getting around to recognize the Firefox browser. Yahoo! has acknowledged the browser's increasing market share by making available the Yahoo! Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox.

I saw this on Technosailor. JustBlogIt is a cool plugin:

Pretty slick. Right-click on a page or selected text and JustBlogIt will blog it for you. It has built in support for Wordpress, MoveableType, Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, Radio Userland, Textpattern, Typepad, journalspace, b2 and BLOG:CMS. Nice job, guys.

The IDN Spoof is a security whole where bad guys take out domain names that contain "special" foreign characters which are indistinguishable from normal characters, and fool you into thinking you are someplace on the web where you are not.

For example, I might register and get a security certificate for microsöft.com, hoping that users would not notice that it is different from microsoft.com. Of course, this is an obvious example. Many of the character substitutes are quite indistinguishable from the originals.

The Mozilla Security group is putting together a plan of action to ensure the maximum protection in the interim.

Anyway, this is a hard problem, Firefox is working on solving it, even though it is really the security certificate authority's responsibility (e.g. Verisign is ill advised to sell a certificate for microsöft.com to some far-off bad guy).

Let the games begin.

February 15, 2005

IE7

Will this be the last gasp of a dying empire - or will it be the moment when, given the best chance in years the followers of open software and standards turn and flee?

You decide.

Game on.

This would be really great for Firefox and RSS/Atom feeds from blogs and such.

Mike Rowehl: Randy seems to have some momentum going for his Universal Subscription Mechanism proposal. The basic idea is that we deal with some content types specific to RSS and Atom so that the browser can shove the handling off to an external app that then push the subscribe URL into something that knows what to do with it. Not a bad idea, but I like my idea for a subscription service better. However, if people think that the proposal Randy made is the way to go I don’t want to be a bad sport. I just want things to be simple and work by default. So I hacked together a Python USM handler that works for me under Linux using Firefox.

Randy: Thanks Mike, this is awesome!

Firefox is pretty quick, but here's some info on making Firefox faster.

Speeding up Firefox seems to be a meme going around the blogsphere lately. Most of the tips I’ve seen, though, are only for broadband connections with the latest hardware and only include some of the settings that would affect performance.

The Firefox Tweak Guide has the full details on how to speed up Firefox regardless of your connection or hardware, reprinted in part below. Don’t forget that the easiest way to tweak user files is with chromEdit extension.

Firefox is on fire!

On February 15th, exactly 99 days after it was released, Firefox 1.0 smashed through the 25 million download milestone.

Thank you.

Thank you for helping us take this product from 25 to 25 million, from our little corner of the world to yours, from the technically elite to Karen and Rimone.

With a minimal set of tools—an affiliate system, a small donations fundraising system, blogs, galleries, forums, and the good old human larynx—you all are spreading Firefox to a quarter of a million people a day. More than 500,000 sites now link to Firefox according to Google—a fivefold increase from six months ago.

What was just a small flame 100 days ago has since exploded into a phenomenal demonstration of the power of open source. Tens of thousands of devoted users and fans are a powerful and capable force of change. We have created a special commemorative image if you would like to mark this milestone on your own site.