Neowin.net

Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0
http://it.slashdot.org/it/06/10/28/2115202.shtml

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?"

Mozilla Ships Firefox 2.0 ... It's a Dud
http://www.windowsitpro.com/windowspaulthu...rott_93992.html

"I don't like it. The new Firefox "visual refresh" replaces the previously clean Firefox UI with muddy and vague-looking icons. So, one of the first things I did was download a theme that returned the old Firefox 1.5 look and feel. The built-in phishing protection is truly third-rate. There are two antiphishing options: Mozilla's weak blacklist-based protection (yes, seriously) and Google's antiphishing technology, which is both poorly rated and a privacy nightmare. The new Options dialog box is a miasma of choices, some of which are hidden in embedded tab controls. It's ugly, confusing, and illogical.
Firefox doesn't offer many truly neat features.
Firefox 2.0 is free, but it's a woefully minor improvement over Firefox 1.5 that suffers from various incompatibility problems, especially with themes and other add-ons. I wouldn't recommend this new version, to be honest. I'll be sticking with Firefox 1.5 at least for now. I recommend you do the same, or switch to the surprisingly solid IE 7.0."

Last edited by franzon on 29 Oct 2006 - 15:02

Jesus H Christ, what a troll post...

PLEASE skip the horrible formatting next time -- you reminded me of my spambox.

And Thurrott obviously don't use Firefox for its extensions, but in some sort of plain form. :p Obviously he may find it inferior.

franzon...did you sneeze on your keyboard or something?

If you don't like it, don't comment. Especially DON'T spend god knows how long making a post almost unreadable.

I disagree with that. However, there are ways of debating that without 'trolling' and posting comments like "ff suxs!!".

I'm glad to see you have no idea about whch you speak. He uses extensions, he's just not happy with the fact FF2 got labelled as such, when it's more like an interim release. Doesn't make it 'bad' though

And to those complaining about the 'troll' post, get over yourselves, it's not a troll, it's repostings of (valid) articles about the FF2 release.

Most of the stuff you quoted is untrue, franzon. Thanks for nothing.

I'm still waiting for an autoupdate notification...

I personally think Mozilla are lying out of their arses tbh. Hopefully they won't make Firefox 10 and die way before then

Ditto. I, personally, had to download it numerous times as it kept stopping half-way through. I also re-installed Windows after initially installing it. Probably counted them as separate downloads. I'd like to know the number of unique IPs that downloaded it.

I downloaded it once on my Linux machine at work, and once on my Mac at home. Both installations gave me no trouble at all.

Well I downloaded it once and used that one download to give it to some of my roommates, so there's always people like me who just download it once and distribute it to many people/different machines.

Dirty count?

Why would you blindly trust Microsoft's numbering then?
Both are obviously counting their own numbers in their most favorable way, being about their own products.

I mean, can you find a better reason to be biased?

There's nothing worse than people complaining about competitors without any proof, and blindly trusting their favorite company's number when they're in the same situation.

Well said.

I think there's a huge difference between 3 million (as reported by MS) and 1/2 a million (as reported by Mozilla). Who's is more likely? Can you conjure up downloads from nothing? Does 1/2 a million for IE7 even sound likely to you? Did Mozilla count the downloads before the official download start time and pack that into the '24 hours' post-release?

I agree with your point, it's all competition, but the IE team is not the one tellig Mozilla how many downloads they got.

so.. it's not awesome enough then

Followed by IE8, the "Oucho". Sorry Hurmie, us consumers love the competition.

That is so interesting information. :-p

I'm still using it, and have been since version 1.
I personally believe that FF2 combined with a couple of choice extensions (Tabbed Browser Preferences and IE Tab (yes, I still use IE for some websites)) make it one of the best browsers I have used to date. Also, as someone who has been brought up with computers and cant spell, I love the inbuilt spell checker!

I wanna know how many tried to download IE 7 pumping its number, only to find out they couldn't run it due to WGA and then not bothering to change from their former browser, whatever it was.

If that gives innaccurate results, it's nothing to do with MS, people just shouldn't steal software.

oooo autoupdate... no wonder 2mil in 24hours....

Wait until IE 7 goes on Windows Update. 10 trillion in 10 seconds!

No it is not. Firefox 2 is not being pushed to firefox 1.5 users via the firefox auto-update system. First of all, only Firefox 1.5.0.8 (not yet released) has the capability to do a major auto-update to 2.0. And secondly, even when 1.5.0.8 is released, Mozilla may wait for Firefox 2.0.0.1 before offering it to 1.5 users via their update system.

Last edited by Cryton on 28 Oct 2006 - 23:24

not in your life

if you have to force it into peoples pcs. you know your product is crap

If that was the case, that would mean that those 2 millions actually use firefox!!

And this time I'm pretty sure the 2 millions that downloaded FF2 actually use it.

IE7 has many improvements, not just in the browser itself but the way it deals with security aswell. You can prevent IE7 being installed on to your computer. Just like you can prevent Firefox from updating. But then you face more security risks.

Unlikely. Any download manager worth its salt can follow redirects, but it will follow it once to get the real download location, and then swarm the download from there. Thus one click on a download link will increment the download counter by one, yet the download manager will still be able to accelerate the download using parallelism.

Evidently you dislike firefox. In this thread you've claimed Mozilla have somehow inflated Firefox's download numbers (Dirty count? What the hell is that?), you've talked gobsh!te about firefox 2 being pushed to firefox 1.5 users via the update system (totally wrong) and now this.

Whilst you are of course entitled to any opinion you want about Firefox, kindly stop spreading nefarious misinformation about it.

Minefield (OS X alpha of Firefox 3.0's interface) looks pretty good so far. It's still got some work, but it's in Cocoa (or at least appears to be).

I agree. Everything Apple makes and does is perfect and smells like roses. Maybe we should hand control of all that is computers and even all the governments to Apple. All hail the Apple Core!

PS: This should translate to: "Why don't you go push Apple crap on NeoApple?"

If you don't like the look of it, skin it. You see with open source you have options for your software and hardware, unlike Apple products where the policy is "Fall in line or else"

Like GreyWolfSC said, "Why don't you go push Apple crap on NeoApple?"

loooooooooool

Read the comments my friend:
IE7 is NOT an autoupdate yet.
Firefox IS an autoupdate.

Sorry!

Then maybe you too should read the comments as someone else stated:

With a handle like yours you should be ashamed. Guru - riiiight....

Get your facts straight, son...

yeah its funny i open ff and no 'automatic update' ever occurs. i probably wouldnt have found out about 2.0 if it wasnt for neowin

If you were a computer guru, you would also find out that Firefox's auto-update system isn't active yet.
You as well as the others claiming it is, is simply making assumptions without checking the facts.

Ooo Lord... lol

Astroturf much? You're not the first person CLAIMING to have downloaded it multiple times, then promptly uninstalled it.

yeah right...

This time around firefox 2 release wasnt hyped up, and there aren't ads all over the place like with FF1. So I really think that MOST of those who downloaded firefox 2 are actually firefox1 users who are simply upgrading it.

I'm not CLAIMING. I DID uninstall it. I download and install it only to see if my web sites are compatible with Firefox - after I'm done with the testing I uninstall it.

Note that this also definitely holds true for IE 7 as well, with its unorthodox, unconfigurable UI, that featured a browser still using standards of its own in many cases. To those users, switching (back?) to alternative browsers would seem like a better choice. Firefox 2's similarity to 1.x seem to make it a safer bet that it won't scare away its users. Also, Microsoft is of course also counting the downloads made by uninformed pirates that can't even run the browser without hassle, and who knows which percentage of those just didn't bother fixing so they could avoid the checks and used e.g Firefox?

And that's MS' problem, how?

Aaand... Since IE 7 was a regular FTP download, the same happened on that browser, both as for download pumping and proxy downloads. Additionally, neither IE 7 nor Firefox 2 has their auto-update services enabled yet.

Agreed...

What's up with that, Neowin?

100% in agreement as well.

Because the article mentions IE7, directly, and is about the relative numbers of downloads of each. Or perhaps we should just start removing IE links from any FF article and FF from any IE article. Oh and then just remove any links to any downloads at all, lest Neowin look to be favouring anything at all in the world ever.

You bring up some interesting points there. I imagine Firefox would look pretty crappy on Vista, but keep in mind that Vista isn't standard yet. I imagine quite a bit of work will be done fir Firefox 3.0 to fix that up.

And I agree it shouldn't set itself as the default automatically, since some people will install it just for developing websites. It used to have an option...

And BTW, the Internet link in the start menu bases itself off of the default browser as I remember, and supposing you're talking about links on your computer that lead to websites, they do too. That's what's going on with the "default" part of "default browser". It becomes the "default". But enough of my nit-picking, I agree they should put the option back in the installer.

Sorry, but firefox does not automatically set itself to be the default browser. If you first run it and firefox is not the default, it will ask you if you want it to be the default. Or you can make it the default in the options. But it does not do it on the sly behind your back.

didnt change a thing for me when i installed it, and ie is my main browser

Maybe he's one of those "CLICK OK" people who doesn't know what's actually in the message box, because they push the button so fast just to get to the end of the installation and test the bloody thing.

Not really a valid point, 10 MB doesn't make a difference anymore. And it's not like people are gonna say "Hmm, this is 15 and this is 5. I think I'll download the 5 MB file 3 times to even it out."

Get a mirror.

Maybe I wasn't clear on my point. I personally do not care which browser people use. the point it that people should not take unsubstanciated cheap-shots at firefox, or IE for the fact of the matter... Both are good browsers with thier strengths and weaknesses...

Agreed.

Actually, u'll find that Konqueror (for mac users: the browser Apple rebadged and you know it as Safari -- yeah, read it up..) is quite used by KDE users in Linux... what i find really offensive is that Google counts Konqueror as Safari because it uses KHTML (KDE's HTML Rendering engine which Safari makes use of). I think Safari should count as Konqueror, but thats just me.. the Mac fanatics will diss me for this, but do some research and u'll see Konqueror was around long before Safari and that the Safari engine is a fork (with some contributions back to the open source community) of KHTML

Coming soon: comments from the mac minority of how superior Safari is just because it's got the Apple name on it.

Personally, I use Mozilla Firefox in windows and Konqueror in Linux. Firefox feels great in windows but firefox doesn't blend too well with KDE (using GTK), so Konqueror feels more like the rest of the desktop (when it comes to forms, buttons etc). But of course I think what the parent poster meant is for people that use GTK based desktops like Gnome/XFce.

Just an idea about the linux versions of Firefox.. Mozilla is bending backwards to add some Mac OS X improvements in versions of Firefox, and since they already have the browser on so many different platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux with GTK), it would be interesting if they could also make a QT Linux version to blend in better with KDE. Some may argue about QT's liscense, but it shouldn't apply here since Firefox is open source and using QT without paying requires for you to release your source code.

OpenOffice.org has been ported to work better with KDE, so I can't see why a more widely used application like Firefox can't be.

Last edited by Alien_II on 29 Oct 2006 - 00:26

I like Konqueror. But it has this "does-it-all file explorer + internet browser" vibe that I hated when Windows integrated IE onto windows.
I haven't used konqueror for about 2 years, but that was my impression. When it comes to rendering, it did a very good job though.

Not this argument? You don't think Microsoft does this kind of stuff?

And where's the news that these statistics were compromised?

Please source these kind of statements/facts...

Um, sure. Right.

wtf does that mean? ms is going to the pawn shop?

Yep!

WGA is crap. If you are going to put some mandatory check, at least make sure it isnt cracked before you require it for almost every download.
Not to mention it called home without anybody knowing.

Fixed.

fast? hardly, IE is generally faster than FF. Extension, themes and speed only come with opera.

Also, using m$ makes you look like a loser, Mr. Im not a Fanboy.

IE is generally faster than IE

can i say BS ?

learn to even read what you type...

dont believe me go check www.firefoxmyths.com

And you are sure that firefoxmyths.com is THE definitive website on browsers with no unbiased views at all?

I'll be checking on that FF3 alpha

IE7 downloads can't be compared to Firefox. First because IE7 has just been released in English! While Firefox2 was simultaneously released in all those languages. By the time all localized versions of IE7 are released, it will be delivered by auto update anyway.

It's a well established fact that Firefox's usage share has been increasing, so that makes me wonder what's suspect here?

That their numbers just happen to coincide with their version numbers? LOL

That seems to be the exact thing he's claiming is suspect. It does seem pretty coincidental, I have to say...

Okay, I will deny it. FF is not yet 'fully standards compliant', even if it is a lot better than IE. Nothing is completely 'standards compliant', and stop spreading that myth. Afaik, Opera comes closest at the moment.

Firefox users have some kind of trauma with iexplorer, IMHO if firefox is all but popular is fine, but some people think that firefox must be popular and rules over the universe. Why?. i don't known.

LMAO!

Yep, after about thirty minutes of surfing w/IE7 and my first random crash of Neowin, went back to the Fox. I actually like the clean interface in IE7, but I just need my extensions... excuse me, now called add-ons

IE is a flawed development, and it has been for many years now. With each new release, it is more flawed than its predecessor. I loaded up IE7 and it responds even slower than IE6, on the same machine, and installation of Windows, I can install a variety of different web browsers, including but not limited to Opera, Firefox 1.5, and Firefox 2.0, and everything responds very quickly and rendering is very smoothly. I know it's not my system, a friend of mine with a lot better system than I have has told me IE7 responds and renders very slow for him as well.