David Hammond
United States of America
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2.0 Final (Nov 6, 2006)
Firefox 2.0 isn't a revolutionary upgrade from 1.5, but it does sport some very useful new features, such as inline spell checking and session restoration after a crash (which may happen due to things such as memory leaks from extensions, or often in my case the unstable Flash 9.0 beta on Linux).
2.0 also introduces a change in the default theme, which I am not such a fan of. I particularly find the home icon to be ugly and out-of-place. The classic theme is available for download, so this isn't too big of an issue for those who prefer the old default.
For web developers, Firefox 2.0 doesn't offer much new, since it is still based off the Gecko 1.7 branch that Firefox 1.5 used. Nearly all platform development work since Firefox 1.5 has been going into Gecko 1.8, which looks to be very impressive and will ship in Firefox 3 in 2007.
In regard to Mastertech, he is a known anti-Firefox troll and spammer of that Firefox Myths site which contains lots of deliberately misleading content, outright lies, and misquotes. Google for "Firefox Myths" and look at some of the responses to his article.
2.0 Final (Jul 26, 2007 - 12:34 AM)
The headline and conclusion of this news post is incorrect. There are two issues here: one in IE which could affect Firefox or other apps, and one in Firefox which could affect other apps.
It's possible for a website to use a URL which will cause Internet Explorer to launch a program with unsafe arguments, allowing for remote code execution. That problem still exists in Internet Explorer. Mozilla made sure that Firefox wouldn't get any of those unsafe arguments, but other programs like Trillian are still vulnerable to the IE bug.
It was then discovered that a similar issue also exists in Firefox: a website could use a URL to get Firefox to launch a program with unsafe arguments.
So right now, both Firefox and Internet Explorer have the same URL handling bug. Mozilla fixed Firefox so it can't be affected by IE's bug, and Mozilla also plans to fix Firefox's own bug. Microsoft, on the other hand, is currently plugging its ears and acting like there's no problem.
To my knowledge, the bug has not yet been found in Opera or Safari, but I wouldn't be surprised if it suddenly came up. It wouldn't be the first time this sort of vulnerability was found in all major browsers.
2.0 Final (Jun 15, 2006 - 10:23 AM)
And Microsoft and Yahoo! don't provide similar services? If Google provided an OS, you'd probably say to stay away from it because it might spy on you and stuff, while at the same time ignoring the equal risk with Windows or Mac OS X. Why do you trust Microsoft/Yahoo!/Apple/whomever more than Google when Google's about the only one that has shown strong resistance to third party (including government) information requests and there is no evidence that they have abused their information? If it reached the point where their products were forced on people without the availability of alternatives with relatively easy transition, you might have an argument. But so far, everything is optional with reasonable alternatives and there aren't huge transition barriers impacting reasonable productivity and interoperation like you have with Windows.
2.0 Final (Jun 15, 2006 - 10:11 AM)
Not to say you're the same guy, but man, your comments sound like the late Mastertech. You need an education if you think your system is "perfectly secure" under any conditions.
Let's look at some other things you've said in the past...
http://www.betanews.com/...rives/1100012093#c51159
http://www.betanews.com/...rives/1100012093#c51124
http://www.betanews.com/...rives/1100012093#c51111
http://www.betanews.com/...hare/1144184064#c214308
http://www.betanews.com/...hare/1144184064#c214507
http://www.betanews.com/...hare/1144184064#c214020
http://www.betanews.com/...hare/1144184064#c214417
That's just from two articles, and already you make most of Mastertech's fallacious arguments. From what I've seen, I don't think you're quite as bad as Mastertech was (at least not as rabid as he was/is), but you should think twice before making arguments that simply didn't hold up with Mastertech.
2.0 Final (May 20, 2006 - 8:59 AM)
FYI, the above few comments from me were replies to comments from Mastertech that have since been deleted by the BetaNews administration. I am not schizophrenic. ;)
2.0 Final (May 19, 2006 - 10:25 AM)
You're out of your mind if you think I try to make anything but Firefox look bad. As I have said before, I think Opera is a great browser. When my grandpa asked me to switch him away from IE because of all of the adware he frequently got, I picked Opera instead of Firefox because of the accessibility features. (And by the way, he hasn't had one new piece of adware since.)
I never promote Firefox without also promoting Opera. My personal preference is Firefox, but if it was Opera you would have as much reason to call me an Opera fanboy.
For the millionth time, written false claims about someone is called "libel", not "slander". And my statement wasn't in the least bit libel. Here is an example of a libelous claim: "The owner of this Source had tried to redirect visitors coming from this site to specially created warning pages." It's also libelous to claim that my standards support page has ever redirected anyone to the IE warning page (a different claim than the quote above), or that I have violated your copyrights in any way, or that I am somehow manipulating the data in my tables just to make IE look bad, when every change is recorded in my changelog and anyone can test the information (I even provide several different convenient ways for people to submit corrections, privately or publicly).
And no, my data never once said that IE had better XHTML support than Firefox. For a while, I gave IE credit for supporting some of the *changes* in XHTML over HTML, even though it didn't support those elements in an actual XHTML document, but its support for XHTML 1.1 in total (which generally is more or less the figure in the "Total" section by "HTML / XHTML", although Internet Explorer's value would technically be just about 0% because it doesn't display the document as a webpage when an XHTML document follows the standard strictly) was never shown to be higher than Firefox's. Your problem is that you failed to read my table correctly and you misrepresented what it said.
In what way do I pretend to be above the law? Parodies are perfectly legal, and quoting cited sources is perfectly legal. Some of the things you've done on your site aren't. I'm tired of your constant empty threats at lawsuits. You know very well that you're guilty of much worse than anything you could accuse me of, but unlike you I don't resort to empty threats in order to win an argument.
Your page clearly says "All Myths relate to running the default install of Firefox in Windows with no Extensions." Secunia clearly shows no extremely critical vulnerabilities in Firefox on Windows. Get a clue and stop lying to your readers.
And how is Firefox less secure in Linux than Windows? That flaw was fixed the *day after* it was discovered, and right now Secunia shows no difference between the security of Firefox on Linux and Windows. If you want to talk about past vulnerabilities, according to Secunia, Opera has accumulated 48 advisories in its product life compared to Firefox's 40. By your logic, I guess Opera is more insecure than Firefox! (And no, I'm not really claiming that, just that your logic here is flawed.)
"That Opera feature is very similar." Wow. You have a serious clue deficiency. I'll explain in detail what each of the features is:
Opera's rewind and fast-forward buttons are essentially links to pages that are automatically detected as the "previous" or "next" pages in a logical sequence. This can be detected by the "previous" and "next" link types in the document or links that actually say "Previous" or "Next". There is no caching system specific to these buttons; it merely goes to the respective page.
On the other hand, Firefox's cached history feature is a completely different idea. The last few pages the user has navigated to in that tab are cached in memory (as opposed to cached on the hard drive, which is somewhat slower), so when the user hits the back button, the page is loaded from the memory cache instead of requested from the server again or reconstructed from the cached source on the hard drive.
To review: If you go from a Google search results page to some page4.html in Opera, the rewind button goes to page3.html which the Opera has never downloaded and must fetch once you click the button. Meanwhile, going from the search result to page4.html in Firefox, the back button goes back to the search results page instantly. These are two completely different operations and aren't even comparable.
As for your magical eWeek source, why should I take some nobody programmer/writer's word when all of the major security researching companies and even Microsoft say otherwise? That eWeek guy is just spreading a myth, and it's pretty easy to debunk.
"Even the definition of a Web Page on Wikipedia does not include W3C standards in the definition"
Yes it does. It says webpages are typically written in HTML/XHTML (which the definition on your Myths page says more directly), and the Wikipedia clearly says that HTML was "[o]riginally defined by Tim Berners-Lee" (the founder of the W3C) and "maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)". But I forget that you don't understand how simple logic works.