Let’s talk browsers. Specifically, Opera 11.51, Firefox 7.0.1, Safari 5.1 and Chrome 14.0.835.163. I don’t have access to Internet Explorer 9. Ordered best to worst.

JavaScript standards compliance: http://test262.ecmascript.org (lower failures is better):
Firefox: 191 failures
Chrome: 425 failures
Safari: 832 failures
Opera: 3,750 failures

HTML5 standards compliance: http://html5test.com (higher is better):
Firefox: 313 and 9 bonus points
Safari: 293 and 8 bonus points
Opera: 286 with 7 bonus points
Chrome: 284 and 2 bonus points

CSS3 standards compliance: http://acid3.acidtests.org (higher is better):
All score 100% with fluid animation.

JavaScript benchmark performance: http://webkit.org/perf/sunspider/sunspider.html (lower is better):
Firefox: 211.9ms +/- 1.3%
Opera: 258.2ms +/- 2.7%
Safari: 291.4ms +/- 0.9%
Chrome: 298.3ms +/- 7.1%

In every test, Firefox 7 came out on top. I realize it’s the newest browser of the bunch, but it’s fairly clear that it’s holding its own against its competitors. It performs, it’s standards compliant, and it’s still my browser of choice. Further, it’s interesting that Firefox beats the pants out of Chrome in 3 of the 4 tests, and yet Chrome is gaining market share. Go figure.

Now, here’s the funny thing. For those arguing the case for plain text email- you are explicitly putting yourself in a “plain text world”. When someone sends you something, say a mashup of a restaurant review, and you can’t view it with mutt, who’s problem is that? The sender, or the receiver? Think about that for a second. It’s 2009. We should be able to do so much more with email than we’re currently doing, as Aza states, but the plain text folks aren’t interested in that. “Gimme the text, remove the bloat. The web belongs on the web.” they’ll say. Well, I guess the world is interested in passing them by.

Full disclosure- I have been a heavy plain text email advocate in the past. Post 0 and post 1 demonstrate that. Let’s just say I’ve had a change of heart. I want to do more with my email. Also, I’ll be sending all my emails in both plain text and HTML encoding, for those who insist on living in the past as well as for those who actually want to enjoy their email.

Mozilla- I apologize for rushing to conclusions before making an intellectual and educated decision about the post regarding blocking bugs in the browser. I should have followed up on more research, formulating a more educated decision before posting. I have no excuse, other than my lazy nature to argue while building on a sandy foundation. Even though I may not agree with how the development of Firefox, or Gecko, is progressing, I was out of line with that post. Please accept my apology.

I do hope, however, that you take a closer look at the code, maybe even with the stringent attitude that the OpenBSD team has towards its OpenBSD operating system, and stabilize the browser. My experience has been that Firefox has been unreliable since version 1.5, progressively getting worse. While the delay of Firefox 3 may be improving the code base, I worry that the browser is getting bloated and unstable. Please take these criticisms seriously, as they are coming from a fan who loves the product, but is looking at either running Konqueror or Epiphany on my Ubuntu machine as a replacement. I would love to see Firefox completely displace Internet Explorer in the market, but at this point, I’m beginning to have my doubts.

Thanks,
Aaron

First, a friend of mine got me hooked. Steve Dibb, a Gentoo user (yeah, I know. ), loves it, and has been using Seamonkey ever since I’ve known him. Being a heavy Firefox advocate, I tried everything in my power to show him the One True Browser, but he refused to budge. Now, rather indirectly, he’s got me using IceApe. How did that happen?

Well, running Debian Sid on my laptop, due to the better hardware support than Ubuntu at the time, an X11 update came down the pipe. With this update, IceWeasel had the ability to crash X by selecting an unfocused tab. The way to get around this bug, was to start IceWeasel in safe mode, disabling any and all extensions. This was fine for the occasional here-and-there, but when it came to web development, I needed my extensions. Wondering what to do, I realized that IceApe used the same Gecko 1.8 rendering library as IceWeasel, so I installed it and gave it a try.

First impressions weren’t that great. The default theme is the same theme that Netscape and the Mozilla Suite was using back in the day. Not to terribly exciting to look at. Further, it doesn’t have any real way to manage extensions and add-ons through the browser. However, as I started fiddling with it, I noticed the insane amount of configuration options, and it actually was using less resources than the combination IceDove/IceWeasel that I was using. Getting the same amount of work done with the same or better productivity is always a plus in my book. And if it uses less RAM than previous setups, I’m all for it.

Since installing and running IceApe, it’s been flawless. It would be nice if there was a better way to handle extensions, and it would be nice if some of the extensions that I use would work with it, like Firebug. All-in-all, however, I love it. It’s snappy, powerful, and full of config’ing. Since running it, I haven’t seen the need to go back to the IceDove/IceWeasel combination. One suite, IceApe fits all my needs very nicely. I’d highly recommend it.

  

Take a good look at those two images. Someone, for the love of everything good and holy, please explain to me what part of the Earth that is supposed to represent. Oh. It’s not supposed to represent Earth? Then, why spend the time getting some design to represent land and water, but not make it represent Earth, the very planet we live on, and most likely, the same location that Firefox is hoping to lead in browser market share?

Am I the only one who has noticed this? Just curious.

Happy Holidays!

As you are fully aware, most likely anyway, I don’t use WordPerfect as: 1) it’s not Free Software, and 2) it doesn’t support ODF natively. However, with that said, this is great news, for a couple reasons. First, it tightens the competition with Internet Explorer as now, a major corporation is bundling Firefox with it’s software. Second, it means Corel has Open Source on it’s mind, which could possibly mean either opening up the WordPerfect Suite, or supporting ODF, which would put even further pressure on Microsoft Office (although, right now, it’s really no competition, except that more and more users are requesting ODF and not OOXML (Office Open XML)).

Honestly, I don’t think Corel will be opening up their WordPerfect Suite anytime soon, if ever. Rather, I see them more likely supporting ODF natively, and maybe even by default in future versions, giving up on maintaining the proprietary document binaries. This decision benefits everyone, especially clients/vendors, as they no longer need to rely on a particular software vendor for updates and support.

All in all, I applaud Corel making the move to bundle Firefox with it’s WordPerfect Suite. Nothing but good can come from this.

The icons help establish a standard for theming that establishes a consistent look and feel for Open Source applications. These 4 Firefox themes are part of the Tango Desktop Project to help establish that standard, and all 4 are compatible with Firefox 2 and later (I haven’t tested them with versions 1.5.0.* and earlier).

Click on an image to take you to the download page:

A brief summary of each theme is as follows:

Tango: Icons from the Tango Desktop Project for a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces.
Tangerine: Icons from the Tango Desktop Project. It is a variant of the “Tango” theme for use with Ubuntu themes.
Gnome: Icons from the Tango Desktop Project. It is a variant of the “Tango” theme for use with the GNOME default icons.
Industrial: Icons from the Tango Desktop Project. It is a variant of the “Tango” theme for use with Novell’s Industrial look.

If you ask me, and you’re a Gnome user, there is really no other reason to use any other Theme with Firefox 2. Thanks Nico Kaiser for making these available.

At any event, luckily, this can be changed fairly easily. Pull up about:config in your address bar, and change browser.backspace_action from ’1′ to ’0′. Any other number will have no behavior when pressed.

Hope this helps.

From the IE blog:

Just in case you missed it somehow, we released IE7 last Wednesday. In the first four days over three million of you have already downloaded the final release. Thank you!

From Mike Beltzner’s blog:

Apparently, people loves them some Firefox. Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

If I can do my math, Firefox is seeing more than twice the rate of downloads, give or take. To put a spin on things even more, both those numbers are voluntary downloads. It will be interesting to see if the numbers game continues from the IE dev team when Windows pushes it on Patch Tuesday.

Today, at our LUG Firefox release party, we went over absolute must-have extensions and a few tips and tricks for the Firefox browser, most of which came from about:config. Well, TweakGuides has a very extensive list of tweaks you can do to Firefox to make it flex it’s muscles. Although the majority of the article is written for Windows installations, most of the tweaks are platform independent.

Go here for the tweaks.

Google Browser Sync is an extension for Firefox that allows you to save you bookmarks, preferences, saved information, browsing history and current session over multiple computers using you Google account. Of course, everything is stored on Google’s servers, and the connection between you and Google when transferring data is 100% encrypted. An absolute must have for Firefox. Goodbye del.icio.us.

• Firefox 2 released on Tuesday, October 24th.
• Fedora Core 6 released on Tuesday, October 24th with Firefox 1.5.0.7 shipped.
• Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft released on Thursday, October 26th with Firefox 2 final shipped.

Now which distro do you want to use? Note: Ubuntu is the first, and so far, only GNU/Linux distro to ship with Firefox 2.

A note on the naming: it’s Firefox 2, not Firefox 2.0. Just to clear any confusion.

Enjoy!

P.S.: It still has yet to pass the Acid 2 test.

• Mozilla wants to protect their trademark. The browser should be used in conjunction with the image.
• Debian doesn’t want to use the images as they claim this makes the software non-free. They have a valid concern, but Debian has a trademarked logo also, although I don’t think it’s found anywhere in the operating system. I could be wrong. I don’t know, as I’m not a Debian user.
• As an Ubuntu user, I am using their trademarked logo in the operating system itself. Does this mean the Ubuntu operating system is non-free? Heavens no, it just means that Ubuntu is interested in protecting themselves, their name and their product.

So does using the non-free logo that Mozilla ships with Firefox make the browser non-free? Certainly not. You are free to do with the code as you wish, you just aren’t allowed to modify the image or take it with you.

So, here’s my solution to the longstanding debate between Debian and Mozilla. Debian: rather than make Firefox your default browser, make Epiphany or Galeon (or Konqueror if using KDE) the default. Put Firefox in your non-free repositories. Just like any other operating system, if the user wants it, they have to manually install it.

This way, you’re not alienating users by forking the project, you allowing the maximum amount of freedom giving everyone the choice whether or not to have trademarked browsers installed, and you can keep Mozilla happy by using the trademarked image with the browser. Everyone wins.

Firefox: you’re back to being my browser of choice. Sorry I ever left you. With that said, I’m excited for your 2.0 release in 7 days. And hopefully, you’ll be in Edgy.

Nothing to see here. Please move on.

Mozilla: get over it. Open the logo and realize that no one is interested in putting Mozilla or your product under a bad shadow. The advantage of free software is people modifying it, and making it better. Which ultimately leads to your benefit as there will be patches and bug fixes coming upstream. But you don’t do upstream, so I guess ultimately, it’s your loss.

But even if you don’t open the logo, let Debian, and others still continue to release Firefox without the logo. For crying out loud, it’s a logo we are talking about. I thought that Firefox was OSS anyway. So by pissing and moaning about the logo, you ultimately want control, which is contrary to the tri-license that you have it under.

So I’m glad to see Debian and GNU take full advantage of the GPL’d code, and release a new browser without any of the restrictions of Firefox. I also love the name: IceWeasel. It’s snazzy. I hope Ubuntu drops the Firefox package as well, and puts in IceWeasel as the default. Between Debian and Ubuntu, I’m confident that Mozilla will see a drop in market share with their browser, seeing as though IceWeasel is a different browser, and probably will have a different User Agent String.

At any event, way to go GNU and Debian, and shame on Mozilla. I’m already using IceWeasel, and it’s great.

First, a Do Not Intrude Registry (DNIR) has been created with email addresses. By joining the community, your email is added to the list. Now, the DNIR is hashed, so thus, it is not in readable format, and not hackable.

Then, the registry is forwarded to the spammers worldwide with a message to “Opt Out”. The spammers check their email addresses they are spamming in their system with the hashed copy of the DNIR. If there are matches, the spammers are encouraged to remove the email from their spamming lists.

If they do not comply to the DNIR, then the Blue Frog community takes matters in their own hands. By registering your email address with Blue Security, you become a member of the community. If spammers are not removing your email address from their lists, then every message they sent to you, is forwarded back to the spammer. This effectively and ethically created a Denial of Service attack against the spammers. With only one person forwarding the message, this isn’t much of a threat, but when there is a community of 474,672 users, this DOS attack is very threatening.

Of course, if the spammers still refuse to remove your email from the list, then a few things will happen eventually. Either their ISP will increase their rates due to the high amount traffic (more powerful than the Slashdot effect) or the stress on the servers will begin causing hardware failures, which means they will have to spend more money to keep their servers running. In any case, the spammers will be forking out more money just to keep their business in order. Eventually, the cost will catch up with them, and they will comply to removing your email from their lists anyway. Which is what we are after.

Okay. So now that WE are in control of our inbox, and not the spammers, what does this mean? It means spammers are getting frustrated, and they are beginning to whine. Because of the DOS attacks that they are receiving, there is no doubt they are at their wits end. So what better way than to put a cloud of doubt on the Blue Frog software, and scare the Blue Frog users? Here, for your reading enjoyment, is an email I received from a spammer trying to downplay Blue Frog. After which, I provide a response.

Subject: RE:Vida Guerra is in your neighbourhood
From: “APRYL BDLLAMY”
Date: Mon, 01 May 2006 08:01:27 -0600
To: <REMOVED>

You are being emailed because you are a user of BlueSecurity’s well-know software “BlueFrog.”
http://www.bluesecurity.com

Today, the BlueSecurity database became known to the worst spammers worldwide. Within 48 hours, the database will be published on the Internet, and your email address will be open to them all. After this, you will see the spam sent to your mailbox increase 10 – 20 fold.

BlueSecurity was illegally attacking email marketers, and doing so with your help. Many websites have been targeted and hit, including non-spam sites. BlueSecurity’s software has been fully analyzed, and contains an abundance of malicious code. This includes: ability to send mass mail to users; the ability to attack websites with Distributied Denial of Service attack (DDoS); the ability to open hidden doors on any machine on which it is running; and a hidden auto-update code function, which can install anything on your computer and open it up to anyone.

BlueSecurity lists a USA address as their place of business, whereas their main office in the Tel Aviv. BlueSecurity is run by a few Russian-born Jews, who have previously been spamming themselves. When all is said and done, they will be able to run, hide and change their identities, leaving you to take the fall. YOU CANNOT PARTICIPATE IN ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES and expect to get away with it. This email ensures that you are well aware of the situation. Soon, you will be found guilty of computer crimes such as DDOS attacking of websites, conspiracy, and sending mass unsolicited bulk email messages for everything from viagra to porn, as long as you continue to run BlueFrog.

They do not take money for downloading their software, they do not take money for removing emails from their lists, and they have no visible revenue stream. What they DO have is 500,000 computers sitting there awaiting their next command. What are they doing now?

1. Using your computer to send spam ?
2. Using your computer to attack competitor websites?
3. Phishing through your files for your identity and banking information?

If you think you can merely change your email address and be safe while still running BlueFrog, you are in for a big surprise. This is just he beginning…

Where to begin? Oh this is just so much fun. Why don’t we start from the beginning?

1. Your email subject line does not match the body of the message. Clue #1 that this is spam. Of course, I already knew that.
2. Threatening to publish my email address to the Internet is the reason I am receiving spam in the first place. If I didn’t knowingly and willingly put my email address on websites, I wouldn’t be receiving your garbage. So don’t threaten me with something that is already in place.
3. Also, threatening that my email will increase 10 – 20 fold will be your downfall, not mine. Because a community of nearly 500,000 users waits for your garbage, just so we can report it back will absolutely kill you. Think about it. If you are complaining about the traffic and stress on your server now, wait until 500,000 users start reporting 10 – 20 times the amount of spam. I think “you are in for a big surprise”. Can we say 5,000,000 email
4. Yes, the software does create the ability to send mass mail to “users”, A.K.A. spammers. Yes, the software does create Distributed Denial of Service attacks. If you would just remove our email upon the first request, you would have to worry about DDoS attacks. The “hidden doors” you refer to are what we call “extensions” for Firefox and Thunderbird. And if the extension is listed on update.mozilla.org, then I hope it’s updating itself. I certainly don’t want to. In other words, I guess it does contain “malicious code”- malicious enough to get you to complain. By the way, if anyone is concerned about “back doors” or serious malicious code, they can be rest assured that Blue Frog is Open Source Software, and the code can be looked at by any developer.
5. I love the anti-semitic reference to “Russian-born Jews”. Boy, that just adds a soft touch to the email, and makes me want to believe you even more. Please. If anything, you sound like German-born Nazi’s.
6. You’re absolutely right that I can not participate in illegal activities and expect to get away with it. However, Blue Security is hardly “illegal”. Quite to the contrary, actually. If you wouldn’t take over people’s machines to create your zombie boxes, I wouldn’t be attacking personal computers. So maybe you should stop creating zombie machines. Just a thought.

At any rate, I took great pleasure in reading your message today, as well as the 6 other variations, and even more pleasure in posting your idle threats. I will remain undaunted. If I start receiving 10-20 times more spam email, I will continue to report them. Every. Last. Message. The best part, however, is your advertising for Blue Security. Thanks for the plug on the greatest extension for Firefox and Thunderbird users. If anything, you have cemented my resolve to bring spam to a complete halt. The spammers will die.

So, for those reading my blog, get the extension. It is obvious that the spammers are feeling the heat, and they are beginning to pull out all the stops. The more we can bring on the heat, the more that we will reduce spam to a trickle. If you have any questions, contact me, and I’ll help you as best I can. BTW- the extension works just fine and has been tested on Linux, Macintosh and Windows.

Good night, and good luck.