Frizzen Sparks has no sympathy, and neither do I
Graumagus posted about yet another new IE security hole, and some of his readers had the following to say:
yea, but I like IE. And I’m not so found of Mozilla. And since I keep my redundant firewalls, and virus support I really haven’t had any real problem. I know a bunch of puter geeks keep saying they like Mozilla, thus I should blindly like it as well.
Well Dammit, I refuse to change and you can’t make me! :)
Posted by: contagion at January 11, 2005 02:02 PM
I can agree with your not liking the Mozilla browser – it’s almost as bloated as IE. Firefox, on the other hand, is it’s faster, lighter little brother and you really should give it a try for a week before giving up on it. Of special interest may be the tabbed browsing, which allows you to open new pages in the same browser, rather than launching a complete new instance. This saves you alot of RAM overhead vs. IE. For instance, IE in two windows (MSN and Slate) takes up 28. 3 megs of RAM, down to 26.8 when I closed Slate. Firefox, with my blog entry, Grau’s blog, MSN and Slate takes up only 23.3 megs of RAM, and blocked the stupid pop-up window that Slate launched.
Okay, I admit that’s a close comparison, but I’m the kind of guy who bitches about things like that :)
My favorite feature is the ability to open all the pages in a bookmarks folder in tabs at once – mainly so I can cut-n-paste stuff from other sources here while editing my blog on an older laptop in the garage.
I’ll be the very first to admit that I have very, very little in the way of computer acumen. However, when I Googled “Mozilla” for some basic info, the first thing I see in the results is a story dated Jan. 10th “Critical flaw plagues Mozilla”. Not exactly the type of ringing endorsement I want to hear if I’m thinking about changing from what has been (so far, knock on wood), a perfectly good system. I’m always willing to hear other opinions on the subject, though.
Posted by: TDavis at January 11, 2005 05:12 PM
If you had read farther down the article, you would have seen where it said:
“All the latest Mozilla versions are immune”
The exploit is for an older version of Mozilla, and all later versions had already been fixed before the exploit even became known. When was the last time MS published a fix before it had been in circulation for two months?
“… but there also appears to be some dispute as to whether this vulnerability was ever practically exploitable in the first place.”
So they weren’t sure you could actually use this for nasty purposes, and in fact it would only affect the small percentage of people who use this kind of advanced internet lookup. Your average Joe would never have been vulnerable.
The final bit of pertinent info in your decision: at the shop where I work, we charge $70 for a data recovery and $105 to format your disc and re-install Windows, if you have the driver discs. I have done 4 of these in the past week, and all were caused by virus and spyware infections on computers where IE is the only browser. There are three more on the shelf waiting, and we have a 3-5 day backlog.
End rant.
January 12th, 2005 at 5:05 am
Uh, yea, I appreciate you using my comment on Grau’s site. However it was a joke. I’m known in that circle to be stubborn and bull-headed. I had already switched to Mozilla when I got my new computer.
I’m not sold that I think it’s a better browser, there seems to be some compatability problems with it and some of my other software, including windows XP.
I guess the main rant on had in that comment is that for about a year now I’ve had people telling me to get Mozilla, all computer junkies. And it seems that the people that pushed the hardest where the ones that kind of hold a grudge against microsoft. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been saying Bill Gates was the Anti-christ since 1989, but I’m going to take a review of a microsoft product with a grain of salt from someone that says they don’t like microsoft.
January 12th, 2005 at 7:44 am
Ahh, sorry about missing the tongue-in-cheekiness of it.
One is curious to know what the incompatabiity problems are, though. The only ones I have encountered originate from software packages and websites that deliberately design for IE, rather than the W3C standard HTML. Sure, I’ve run across some minor glitches in websites, but nothing that made me more than shrug. I’m used to it, since before Firefox I ran Opera, and there were several sites that deliberately sent broken pages to Opera users.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:58 pm
The three big ones I’ve noticed is that:
1) My hot keys on my wireless keyboard do not seem to want to work bringing up the internet options for Mozilla. I bypassed this by configuring them to run a program instead of how I had them set to automatically go to a website of my choice.
2) When working on Windows XP and playing with some of the features Mozilla seems to like to pause/lock for short periods of time then start loading again.
3) If you click on a link to start d/ling something it wont start. I have yet to figure out how to get around this. It sits there and shows the status bar, but nothing will download, I have to go through and manually start the process, which is annoying.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
oh, and now I’ve noticed that the comments sections on blogs don’t fit in the window properly and it wont let me resize it.
January 13th, 2005 at 7:19 pm
1) That is in how the shortcut is created, and can be edited usually if they give the option for the properties of the button-press. They usually specify “launch IE to this site” instead of “launch default browser to this site” like they should. Like you said, it can be worked around.
2) This may have been fixed in the latest build of Firefox, if you haven’t installed it already. I’ve seen XP do that in a number of programs though, so it may not be browser-related.
3) I have never run into this. Combined with the settings problem you mentioned earlier, it makes me wonder if you shouldn’t get the latest build, un-install Firefox and do a clean install. (Export your bookmarks first)
4 )I have seen comments sections that were wrongly-sized, but it has always let me adjust them.
By and large, every time I have installed Firefox on a new computer, no matter the OS, it has worked just fine, and gets better with every new build. (I’ve been running it since version 0.7 I believe) I’m suprised you’ve found that many annoyances in it.
January 14th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
1) I have my computer set for default browser not IE. I already checked that. It still isn’t liking it.
2) I’ve already downloaded the latest version of Firefox, prior to making the earlier post, it’s still doing it. And only this and the Game Majesty seem to have the problem, and with Majesty it is the game, and no they are not going to make a patch.. bastards.
3)see 1. :)
4) It wont let me resize it. I don’t know why, but it wont.
Unless they have something newer the 1.0 then I have the newest. I tried a re-install. I don’t really care about the whole 15 bookmarks I have/had. I can recreate them easily enough. Thanks for the advice though. I wasn’t coming to bitch, just to check out your site from your comments on Frizzen Sparks and saw me mentioned… But now I’ve been here, I’m like a bad STD… I just keep coming back. :)