No offense Ziggy, but a lot of what you talk is a lot of "hog wash."
If me or others on this board would take our time to write a page on your lies and somewhat miscalculations, with links to back up or statements, you would look like a fool...
lie
n.
1. A false statement deliberately presented as being true; a falsehood.
2. Something meant to deceive or give a wrong impression
I am not deliberately presenting falsehoods as truth. I may not be right (this is yet to be determined), but I'm not doing it on purpose.
FireFox has been hit many times and is everyday with adware and malicious files.
Firefox can get attacked just as well as any browser. However, it is far more resistant to spyware/malware than IE6 is. There are many reasons why:
- Firefox does not offer any way for code to install or run without prompting the user. If it did, it would be a bug. In fact, the installer code pops up the dialog no matter what (which is annoying if you're writing an extension, but deal with it).
- Extensions are written in JavaScript. There are limits to the language. So don't expect an extension to ever be able to write a corrupted BIOS EEPROM file (some malware does this) or corrupt Winsock DSPs (some malware does this).
- Plugins, the only things that can be binaries, can only be installed manually or through the PFS, which only lists well-known plugins that get registered through MoFo or AOL/Netscape.
- Extensions are installed by the browser; they do not install themselves -- so arbitrary code cannot get executed.
- Conversely, the browser uninstalls extensions. So if something did install, the browser could remove the extension quite easily. If for some reason it doesn't, it's a bug.
FireFox sends a message of a great browser with security and quick bug fixes, even though they have taken a week or weeks to complete. Also common sense would tell you that as a browser becomes older, more bugs/security holes will be found.
Actually, if you hang around Bugzilla, you'd notice that most of the security bugs that got fixed in 1.0.1 got fixed within a day or two. They did not release a new version of Firefox publically to avoid confusion (if they released a new version that fixed just one vulnerability at a time, they'd be on Firefox 1.0.21 -- which would really confuse people). However, the security-minded can run an aviary nightly (which does not contain any modifications to Gecko, the rendering engine -- just mainly bugfixes that will make it to a new point release) if they are very concerned about Firefox's security.
FireFox is somewhat completely re-done, but still uses heavy "icing" or what have you from Mozilla.
The main things shared between Mozilla and Firefox are:
- the XPFE toolkit
- the XPCOM toolkit
- Gecko
- NSPR/NSS
The XUL toolkit, extensions/plugin framework, and several tens of thousands of lines of code are different. And now that Seamonkey is dead, Firefox is "the" browser. Mozilla is now just a reference platform.
(NB: if you've ever wondered why Mozilla themes/extensions don't work at all in Firefox, it's because Firefox has different XUL bindings and a much different extension framework -- Mozilla doesn't use extension overlays; Firefox does)
QUOTE
Windows Media Player license download bug is one of them...
Not to mention this bug has been fixed. Just pointing out an example of what Keith uses to gain the upper hand in a situation and back FireFox 100%.
Okay, I stan-corrected. Last I heard, they said "this is the intended behavior".
Also Keith there is no set code (law of ethics, so you have it) for the version number in which you release your program in.
As I said before, in my opinion as a developer, Microsoft version numbers are more hype than truth. Especially with IE. IE4-IE6 are all basically the same on the inside, with improvements to the rendering, but nothing too major. Generally, the "major" portion of a version number changes when something seriously major gets changed. Microsoft did the right thing with Windows 2000/Windows XP. Windows 2000 is NT 5.0 and XP is NT 5.1. That accurately protrays the differences. Longhorn is NT 6.0, which also accurately protrays the differences. However, IE6 should really be IE 5.0 or IE 4.5, since IE6 is basically IE5 + P3P + CSS1 + some CSS2 + better JS/VBS (i.e. it supports document.getElementById) + better cookie handling. And IE5 is IE4 + less buggy + better COM+ support + better JS/VBS support + other minor enhancements. I personally cannot tell the difference between IE5 and IE4 rendering. My site looks the same in both browsers, and Slashdot looks the same to me, and just about every site I've ever tried looks/feels the same.
Keith just because you are a, what was it, "web developer"; doesn't give you any more OPINION on matters, which is what you are mostly speaking in half the time.
I mention that I'm giving an opinion when I am. And anyways, the point of a forum is to communicate opinions. Can you imagine how boring a forum would be if every post was like "grass is usually green" or "the drummer of Def Leppard only has one arm"?
You are like the Democrats in America. Will always defend themselves at the expense of Bush or another Republican.
I resent that; I bleed red.
"Yes I know we did that, but THEY DID THAT FIRST."
Users don't care who did what first, what we care is who will fix it first and who has a better product.
You're right. Users care about only a few things primarily:
- which product is better
- which one is updated more
- how complicated the product is
Apache is a far superior product than IIS. But people use IIS. The reason is that they may not possess the knowledge to modify a httpd.conf file or setup Apache. Or, they may have to fulfill a request from someone higher up in their organization and do not know how to do it with Apache, or Apache can't (for example, I know a guy who hates IIS but has to run it because his company needed something that was only avaliable for IIS/ASP). There's not much that Apache can't do nowadays (heck, with PHP, you can load COM+ controls [ActiveX controls] and manipulate them just like you can in ASP, and you can load .NET forms and manipulate them just like you can in ASP.NET -- requires Windows though), but it just doesn't suit some people. It's the reason why most ATMs run OS/2. OS/2 died in 1995 with the release of Windows 95. But before then, banks had already deployed OS/2, and most of the ATM software only runs on OS/2 (Diebold's software being the memorable exception -- then again, Diebold ATMs suffer from the Blaster worm....). Switching to Windows would require them to find another vendor, and since Windows is technically superior to OS/2, it would be a smart decision. But they won't until there is some need for them to (it's the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule).
Currently MSIE7 is the best product, wether you like it or not.
MSIE7 is vaporware. Sure, details are being released, but I can't tell the accuracy of the claims. But as I said originally, IE7's standards support will suck. Just like in IE6. This article should confirm this. I also said that 32 bit PNG support is unlikely, but it seems that it is quite likely. Cheers to Microsoft. Now I wish they'd fix CSS2 or add support for the "needs finalization" CSS 2.1 (the W3C is mainly waiting on the company members to say "okay, ship it" -- Microsoft is one of the people holding it up). As for the claim that it's going to be a tabbed browser, I'm not going to say anything until I see it. I highly doubt it, since one of the "selling points" in Windows XP was that all of your MSIE windows would get grouped in the taskbar. Microsoft has done a complete 180 before, so it's anyone's guess.
IE6 is not technically superior to Firefox. It may have some pros that make it better than Firefox in some respects. ActiveX, for example. Though ActiveX is far less powerful than XPCOM, it's more widely adopted. So you need IE to view ActiveX. Firefox can host ActiveX, but it's highly unlikely Mozilla will ship with it enabled (if there's a vulnerability in ActiveX, it becomes Mozilla's responsibility to fix it, and makes MS fanboys go "ha, so your browser is really not secure!"). The few things that IE has that Firefox doesn't (P3P being a major one) aren't really all that great (P3P information can be faked, spoofed, and so on, so it's not really all that good of an indicator of the site's privacy policy). And there is a P3P plugin for Firefox, if you want it. IE7 will make the competition somewhat closer, since it might add tabbed browsing, but feature-for-feature and technical aspect-for-technical aspect, Firefox will weigh out better. That is, of course, assuming that the Gecko development team doesn't revolt after the news that they killed Seamonkey (they won't, but maybe a member or two will leave to make a Seamonkey fork).
Every week more and more security bugs/holes are being reported in FireFox.
And the same amount or greater are reported in IE (you can only count holes -- bugs are not reported in IE, and I'm sure that if there was some sort of bug tracker for IE, there'd be thousands and thousands of open bugs). Sure, Firefox has bugs. They fix them. They make it in a new release. IE has bugs too, but the ones that really piss me off (only 24 bit PNGs [alpha channel ignored], no position: fixed, background-attachment: scroll only on body) have persisted since IE4 or IE5. That's 5 years. Too long to wait for patches.
Also not to mention bugs with downloading in FireFox, which have not been fixed since the first version of FireFox was released... Over a year now and simple bugs haven't been fixed...
I'm aware of them. Most of them were fixed in Gecko 1.8. If you're up to it, download a trunk Firefox nightly (using latest Gecko 1.8) and see if you can reproduce it. If you can, search Bugzilla and confirm bugs or file new ones. The more people who try and break Firefox, the better Firefox will be.
Also, this article implies that the WMP fix is cosmetic; it implies that you can still install the malware that is exploiting this bug.
