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."
Sad Co-incidence (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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I use Mozilla and am very happy with it.
Re:Sad Co-incidence (Score:5, Informative)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes [mozillazine.org]
Re:Sad Co-incidence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sad Co-incidence (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:More options (Score:3, Informative)
Amaya [w3.org] is a browser made by the w3consortium. I haven't tried it yet, but a browser made by them, well I'd expect it to adhere all the standards
You've also still got Netscape but that browser hasn't been a serious competitor for a while now'but it's still availab
Do volunteers care about tracking down memory leak (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l (Score:2)
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
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Re:Do volunteers care about tracking down memory l (Score:5, Interesting)
The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Informative)
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)
The backwards compatability woes indicate that, much like Windows, Firefox will slow to evolve because it is a victim of it's own success.
I think it's the opposite. (Score:2)
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.
My 3 Reasons (Score:2)
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Can we get rid of C please? (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
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: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.
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Exactly. This has been the case back to 1.0 (and probably before). Every time a minor revision comes out there are broken extensions. You can see this in the extension browser where they have to specify the versions t
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to run Firefox for over a month (Score:2)
Now, with the 1.5 release, things aren't so nice. I started using tabs only because I thought that would help with memory usage and stability, but it seems not. I'll typically have a half dozen windows open, each with a half dozen tabs. Well, that's because of the crashes. I'd be up to 10 windows with 10 tabs each if the browser didn't keep crashing.
Right now my 1.5 release has been running fo
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Otherwise, I've been running the same instance of Firefox since 2.0 was released. There is some leaklike behavior, but for the most part, as I close and reopen tabs a lot... right now I'm only using ~160 mb. Probably more than it should, but it's not nearly as bad as I saw previous releases get, so I'm assuming there has been some improvement in this area.
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.
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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 dange
Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it does.
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So, it may well restore the bulk of a long-ish message, which is certainly better than nothing. I'm not sure I'd want to rely on it, but then so far I've not had any stability issues, so for me it's a
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Re:The 9 Reasons (Score:5, Interesting)
For lot of advanced users it is a must. It is whole reason to use FF 2, nevermind other new features.
And yes, FF 2 has bugs. But in contrary of IE, I have NO doubts that sooner or later they will be fixed.
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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:4, Interesting)
The only thing impressive about this statement is exactly how far your standards have been lowered. You actually feel that it is incredible or unusual to be able to leave an application running for a week?
When I've been using javascript-heavy sites (eg, google stuff), safari gets a little slow after it's been running for about a month. And I consider that a failing on its part, not something to brag about. The fact that firefox runs for a whole shiny week for you should be a point of shame, not pride.
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For you. It's my most problematic. Grabs 100% of the processor for no reason at random times and needs to be force-killed, leaks memory at times, still has connections open when no windows open and it's running in the dock.
Memory "leak" (was: Re:The 9 Reasons) (Score:3, Interesting)
5). Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things ?
Sorry, I'm gonna rant now ...
What, a whole week? My computer (running Ubuntu 6.06LTS) is up all the time. Basically it goes down when there's a pow
Re:Memory "leak" (was: Re:The 9 Reasons) (Score:5, Informative)
Don't be retarded. Parsing HTML into a DOM, parsing CSS and applying that to the DOM, then actually computing all of the page's layout takes considerably longer than just pulling a pre-computed DOM out of memory. Caching pre-computed values in memory is hardly a rare thing, most software does it in one way or another.
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Actually I'd like to see a browser written in a real modern language (I'm sure you were being sarcastic and are fully aware that Java is not a modern language). How about ocaml-fox?
Rich.
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I must pick you up on one thing. A smart pointer is a good thing - and about the best compromise you can get if you pass pointers around and can't reliably predict their lifetime (if you can predict it of course the standard alloc/free is far more efficient). A properly written one is *not* subject to threading issues... the one in the article merely sucked.
The central assumption of C/C++ is that once allocated, memory cannot be moved (because there are or could be unknown pointers to that memory anywh
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1 & 2. *nods*
3. I don't know if I would say confusing... just a little packed... but completely manageable.
4. Hell, all of mine auto-updated with Firefox 2 and worked.
5. I suppose it's a problem, but I just don't run into that often I suppose.
6. I can search and my yahoo account seems to work. Good enough for me!
7. Now, only having used it for about 3 days now I don't really see anything out of the norm. I have had plenty of wigged out FF cases, but that seems to be relegate
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This is a dealbreaker for me - back to Firefox 2.5.0.7.
you'll need 1.21 Jiggawatts!!1 [imdb.com] for that.
no wonder IE7 team sent a cake to Mozilla... (Score:2, Funny)
memory (Score:3, Funny)
So, does that mean that 640K won't be enough memory then?
My impression (Score:4, Informative)
So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced.
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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
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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
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doesn't do the job (Score:2)
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.
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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 latest browser wars (Score:2)
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)
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?
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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
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Except for the startup time...
I've switched back to 1.5.0.7 (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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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)
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
FF 3.0 (Score:2)
Yup. Open Source products usually get decent by V3.0 or 3.1
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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_?
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Direction (Score:2, Interesting)
Seamonkey's not that bad (Score:2)
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)
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)
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.
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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.
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You mean IE7, right? (Score:2)
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.)
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Yeah.
OMG! Firefox just ate my child! (Score:2)
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The Cake (Score:2)
the Firefox team the cake [slashdot.org].
Firefox is not buggy (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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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)
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)
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)
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
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.
Firefox 2.0! (Score:2, Funny)
Still has problems with ESPN scoreboards (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Memory leaks? That's nothing new.. (Score:2)
when will they fix rendering? (Score:2)
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)
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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Re:Meh (Score:5, Informative)
Filter on "tabs"
Find the entry for "browser.tabs.closeButtons". It'll probably be set at "1". Setting it to "2" makes the close button only visible on the active tab. Setting it to "3" makes the close button the right appear again (1.5 behavior).
Hope this helps.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, annoying me too. But, this is not IE, so there's a way to change: go to about:config and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth. You're welcome
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That's one of the few things I dislike about FF - so many useful options hidden in the completely undocumented about:config. I know opinions differ on the subject, but I personally don't think that I should have to search the web to work out how to configure an application I'm using. Would it have killed them to include a readme for it with the browser, or even a (context-sensitive?) help tool within about:config itself? (Yeah
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Re:how-how... (Score:5, Informative)
A few months ago, someone reported a security hole using a testcase that caused two types of crashes, one exploitable and the other not. The security hole was fixed reasonably quickly, but the other crash is a hard-to-fix collection of too-much-recursion crashes, so it hasn't been fixed yet. The security hole is bug 348514 and the too-much-recursion crash is 323394.
I can understand a few people getting confused due to an old security-hole testcase still causing a crash, but having it come up in mainstream news articles and Slashdot articles as "Firefox 2 might have shipped with a known security hole" day after day is getting annoying.
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It must be that crappy Intel hardware then.
I've been using FF2 fairly intensely since it was released and have found it to be better in pretty much every respect than 1.5. (Apart from making it harder to disable that useless "go" button, which is strangely no longer a toolbar button in FF2 - hint: go to about:config and look for browser.urlbar.hideGoButton).
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Whooaaa, dial the defensiveness back a few degrees there, fanatical FF fanboy!
There is no legal definition of "memory leak" but I think most people would agree that, if it steadily increases memory consumption while the user is doing
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Re:It may not be a good browser, but.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)