An Ode To Firefox

[lauralh]

Although it sucks up memory faster than a Tijuana hooker, the extensions can't be beat. I've used as many as 30 but I think I've whittled them down to more or less the bare essentials:

WebmailCompose translates "mailto" links for your favorite webmail site, instead of nasty OE.
Book Burro loads up at Amazon and shows various other stores' prices for the ISBN you're viewing. Also, you can see if your local library has a copy of the book.
DownThemAll is one-click downloading for any files on a page.
Adblock is a necessity.
Fasterfox tweaks stuff for optimal browsing.
HashColouredTabs gives each tab a different color for a different URL.
Read Easily lets you disable/enable styles on a web page.
Session Manager saves and restores ALL the tabs when Firefox closes/crashes.
PDF Download gives you the option NOT to run Acrobat, and can even render HTML.
Greasemonkey lets you (or other internet folk) write userscripts for Firefox.

Comments

Sorry, FF is dead...

[jjsaysblah.livejournal.com]

read all 6 pages, and tell me what you think.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/08/22/internet_explorer_7_v_firefox_/1.html


here's another comparison, this time including Opera

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1990859,00.asp


and a big old IE against the world article

http://internetweek.cmp.com/179101486



any case - the grief i had supporting FF for apps/users/network services looks to be over. long live IE 7.

Re: Sorry, FF is dead...

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

Internet Explorer is such a large improvement over version 6 that it's hard to imagine what would get you to bother downloading it, unless you're a Mozilla fanboy or an extensions addict.

THAT'S ME EXTENSIONS ADDICT

although honestly the ones above are all I need.

If only IE was an application

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

... but it's not, it's the actual shell you use to operate the computer. And, unlike a shell in a *nix environment, it *can't be uninstalled and reinstalled* - which, when you combine that with the fact that it's designed to be infinitely extensible *by the content you browse*, makes it unsafe at any speed.

Free Software philosophy discussions aside, IE will be unsuitable for use as a web browser as long as MS inists on both making it a godawful uninstallable, unREinstallable tangle of crap woven into the core operating system AND making it extensible.

Re: If only IE was an application

[jjsaysblah.livejournal.com]

*shrug*

my coding days are long behind me... but my msft blue badge buddies assure me the OS is IE free.

could be their lying, the bastards.

Re: If only IE was an application

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

According to the redmondmag, they're at least mistaken.

The majority of IE's notorious security flaws stem from its pervasive integration with Windows. That is a feature no other Web browser offers -- and an ability that Vista's Protected Mode intends to mitigate. IE 7 obviously won't remove all of that tight integration. Lacking deep architectural changes, the effort has focused instead on hardening or eliminating potential vulnerabilities. Unfortunately, this approach requires Microsoft to anticipate everything that could go wrong and block it in advance -- hardly a surefire way to secure a browser.

The typical MS approach - instead of fixing fundamental design flaws, just tack on more crap 'til it looks like it works again.

Re: If only IE was an application

[jjsaysblah.livejournal.com]

and a quick google gives me at least a dozen sites that say it's NOT integrated with Windows.

something tells me it's gonna be a "have to wait until it ships" to see who is bs'ing whom.

me, i'm claiming nothing

Re: If only IE was an application

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

Personally, the whole OS-integration thing doesn't interest me at all. IE doesn't have to be integrated with the OS in order to install tons of spyware on it.

I don't like MS's security history, conformance history, or design history, and I'm not using IE until those issues have been fixed *and maintained* for several months.

Re: If only IE was an application

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

If IE wasn't integrated into the OS, though, you could dump it and reload it in response to spyware issues - and spyware issues wouldn't be so immediately system-wide pervasive.

I get so tired of trying to explain to people who say "and I even get pop-ups when I don't have IE open!" that, if their computer is booted at all - even in Safe Mode - then yup, they sure do have IE open. Sigh.

Re: If only IE was an application

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure I agree with that. You don't get spyware from IE being open, you get spyware from going to webpages with IE. I've got IE on both my main computers (obviously, since they're Windows) and I don't get any spyware. On the other hand, if someone found a hole in Firefox and used that to install spyware on my computer, I would still have spyware on my computer, despite Firefox's lack of integration with the OS.

There are issues with IE's amount of integration, like the fact that other apps can embed it and could then theoretically open up evil webpages, and that you can't change that plugin to Firefox (although this is, at least partially, due to the fact that nobody's implemented the API for Firefox. A lot of people suspect it would be quite doable to swap the plugin if someone would just write the interface needed.) But on the other hand I don't think I've ever seen an otherwise-benign app get someone infected by embedding IE. And having an HTML renderer available for embedding is a damn useful feature to have.

The only real problem with IE, IMHO, is that it's basically a monoculture and that it's recurringly buggy in exploitable manners. I've never really had an issue with how embedded it was, and I don't think (besides the monopoly leverage factor) that contributes at all to the spyware problem.

Re: If only IE was an application

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

If your firefox installation gets hopelessly fucked up and corrupted - which can happen - you can simply dump and reload it. You can't do that with IE.

Regarding the malware dangers of it being open all the time, the majority of the malware you get by browsing with IE installs itself *in* IE. Thus, without IE running, the malware doesn't run. Unfortunately, since IE is *always* running, if you have malware in IE, you've *always* got malware running. By contrast, with a browser that is merely a browser, it is less likely for malware infestations to leave the scope *of* that browser.

Regarding embedded IE being a security issue - I have DEFINITELY seen apps embedding IE for HTML rendering result in spyware infestations. As an example, a car dealership I've consulted with was getting constant crippling spyware infestations on a weekly basis, until I finally got them to switch to Firefox, at which point they stopped - until suddenly, after two months, they started getting infestations again. The culprit? An employee using Windows Media Player for streaming radio. Some of the channels he was hitting - using WMP only, never opening a "web browser" per se - had malware embedded in the HTTP: streams being fed to the embedded IE rendering engine in WMP. Result: malware.

Modularity is a huge issue. I don't necessarily have a problem with a system-available HTML rendering library, my problem is that if you can't dump and reload it, it makes it dramatically more difficult to keep the system stable. If you're only familiar with Windows, it may be easy for you to accept this as "just how it is, a lot of stuff just can't be dumped and reloaded like that"; whereas if you're familiar with *nix type operating systems, you'll be used to EVERYTHING being modular, replaceable, and even do-withoutable - everything from the GUI rendering engine itself to the window manager to even the *text* based shell(s) for command-line control.

Complete modularity of the OS makes "black-box" troubleshooting and repair possible - got a problem - malware OR simple corruption - in your HTML engine? Drop it and reload it. Still got a problem? Then that wasn't it - look for rogue or corrupted services running. Find one of them that isn't behaving as expected? Drop and reload *it*. There's literally nothing there that you can't simply unload and replace with a new copy in a known good state quickly and easily. By comparison, if you get corrupted IE, you can't just dump and reload IE - you have to hunt through literally hundreds of registry entry points to *repair* your existing IE. If malware installs a rogue service on your machine, you can (sorta) easily just remove the rogue service - but what if it instead *corrupts*, say, the RPC service? You can't uninstall and reinstall RPC. Worse yet, the workstation service?

You get the idea.