Firefox Is For "Regular" Users, Not Businesses 555
nk497 writes "Some have argued that Mozilla's switch to a faster release cycle has made it more difficult for companies to use Firefox, but the open-source browser maker isn't too bothered, according to one employee. Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing and founder of Mozilla's quality assurance scheme, said Firefox is for 'regular users' — not businesses. 'Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus of ours,' he said. 'A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy. I'd much rather Mozilla was spending its limited resources looking out for the billions of users that don't have enterprise support systems already taking care of them.'"
Asa does not speak for all of us (Score:5, Informative)
(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)
Asa is one guy with strong opinions. He doesn't speak for all of us.
Here's a senior developer disagreeing with Asa [google.com], for instance. We're still figuring this out at Mozilla. Asa's is not the red dino's final word.
Education too (Score:5, Informative)
Driving us here in education crazy - most of the learning management systems will "certify" a browser version for use on their various platform versions. And most promise to support within 3-6 months of release.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:5, Informative)
Lots of business don't in fact need ActiveX for legacy junk. But most businesses of significant size do want some control over when the browser will update major versions and potentially break all sorts of things.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:2, Informative)
That only works for minor point releases. Major releases (3 to 3.5, 3.5/3.6 to 4, 4 to 5) don't show up in the automatic updates. You have to visit firefox.com and manually download and run the installer.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:5, Informative)
Solution: Run Chrome
I've currently got three Firefox windows open with a total of about 35 tabs open between them. So i just started Chrome and created the same setup, three windows with 35 tabs between them. The one difference is that in chrome i just opened up 35 copies of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikipedia.org]. (I can try a more thorough test later but that seemed like a reasonable compromise for expediency's sake.)
Firefox.exe of course has one process open, which according to Process Explorer is consuming 461,952 K private bytes and 884,152 K virtual bytes.
Chrome.exe has five process running. Private byte usage for those processes ranges from 15,000 K to 166,000 K and totals 390,000 K. Virtual size ranges from 148,000 K to 283,000 K and totals 1,061,000 K.
I have one extension installed in Chrome and a little under two dozen plugins and add-ons installed in Firefox.
So base memory usage for Chrome really doesn't seem any better than Firefox, it just makes it harder to keep track of by splitting the usage up into multiple processes. Now i know that Firefox has issues with memory bloat during long periods of continual use. I can't personally speak for Chrome since i don't use it very much (i'm not fond of the minimalist approach to UI) but i do have reasonably tech-savvy friends who use it extensively and complain about having to shut it down on a regular basis to recover memory.
Linux distribution policies on Firefox updates (Score:3, Informative)
LWN has a good article talking about the policies some Linux distros are taking on Firefox updates [lwn.net].
Re:Make the best browser (Score:5, Informative)
That's what Microsoft's FUD would like to claim, but WebGL is not even close to as bad as ActiveX. You may recall that ActiveX was designed to allow websites to execute fully-privileged, unsandboxed native code. WebGL just allows websites to draw graphics using your GPU. Sure, in theory it's possible that a bug could exist in your graphics driver that WebGL could exploit... but the thing is that this already happens without WebGL - web browsers already allow websites to indirectly submit drawing commands to graphics drivers and this has been exploited in the past, as have bugs in core OS graphics functionality. About the only "unfixable" issue with WebGL is that it exposes users to minor denial-of-service issues, and even that can be reduced to a trivial annoyance.
Oh, and Microsoft have got their own proprietary equivalent of WebGL in Silverlight which has similar risks, except that Silverlight is also getting APIs that are approaching ActiveX levels of danger.
Re:Make the best browser (Score:4, Informative)
The fact that you are modded up, not down is proof that slashdot is now just for idiot fanboys.
You may recall that ActiveX was designed to allow websites to execute fully-privileged, unsandboxed native code.
100% Wrong. ActiveX was designed as a system wide plugin architecture based on COM for Windows based applications. It was designed to allow plugins to be written and distributed and used by MANY APPLICATIONS ON THE SAME SYSTEM. Its designed so that Applications can automatically 'discover' its location, meta data information, and what functionality it supports without ANY prerequisite knowledge of the plugin by the application.
MS Office was using ActiveX before IE existed. Except then it was called OLE, and wasn't as advanced as ActiveX in terms of features. OLE became COM, which had DCOM tacked on, then it was renamed to ActiveX and if you dig right down into it and look at .NET assemblies ... GUESS WHAT?!? They use the OLE/COM/ActiveX interface too!
ActiveX objects can even label themselves as 'safe for the web' and 'safe for scripting from the web' ... so the browser knows when they shouldn't be used.
The side effect of this is that ... ActiveX controls allow code to run unsandboxed if IE loads them up. The flaw is that IE loaded them without asking the user when it first started out, and it would be happen to load them from a remote website without asking. This is an IE implementation detail, not ActiveX. ActiveX is functionally the same (though more flexible) as Mozilla XPCOM objects, which run without restrictions since an XPCOM dll is native code. Any flaw in 'ActiveX' that isn't just a bug, and 'design bug' in ActiveX applies equally to XPCOM, so if you blame ActiveX for security issues, Mozilla must have the same ones ... but it doesn't, because ActiveX isn't the issue, IE is.
Oh, and Microsoft have got their own proprietary equivalent of WebGL in Silverlight which has similar risks, except that Silverlight is also getting APIs that are approaching ActiveX levels of danger.
No, silverlight is more like flash. If you wanted to say it was like a graphics format/language/definition system, it'd be more like SVG than WebGL. And for the record ... SILVERLIGHT IS A FUCKING ACTIVEX OBJECT YOU MORON, its just a properly written one that Microsoft calls by a different name so idiots such as yourself won't realize how retarded you are.
Another 'informative' post by an idiot who could only be more wrong if they said there is no such thing as existence.
Re:This does not address the most obvious issue. (Score:5, Informative)
I wish I had mod points to mod you up!
And let me expand on that from a user perspective. I manage 17 machines in my department, and I just upgraded to FF4. Well, naturally, it broke several extensions, which have finally all been updated by the developers to work. Now, I'm getting those damn popup messages wanting me to upgrade to 5.0. But guess what? Doing so breaks all the extensions I'm using, and I can't keep the damn popup from appearing day after day after day.
I've used Firefox from back when it was in early beta, and I've stuck with it and recommended it to many, many people, but this is almost too much. So let me lay it out for the developers, and pay close attention as I yell this at the top of my lungs: ISSUING RAPID-FIRE UPDATES THAT BREAK FEATURES THAT PREVIOUSLY WORKED IS GOING TO PISS OFF HOME USERS, BUSINESS USERS, AND DEVELOPERS! I'VE GOT A GAZILLION THINGS ON MY PLATE AS IT IS, SO DON'T MAKE MORE WORK FOR ME BY BUGGING ME TO UPGRADE TO A NEW VERSION EVERY OTHER WEEK AND THEN MAKING ME HAVE TO WAIT FOR EXTENSIONS TO CATCH UP. SO GET YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR ASSES AND STICK TO A SENSIBLE RELEASE CYCLE!!!
And you can be damn sure that this will come up at one of our bi-weekly technology committee meetings, so if Mozilla wants to lose a few thousand desktops, keep this shit up.