As reported in Slashdot there’s a flaw in the password managers of Firefox and to a certain extent IE. It’s reported to Mozilla as bug 360493, the severity of the bug depends on your usage of passwords and the password manager.
Corel plans to distribute Firefox alongside the next release of their WordPerfect Office suite.
It’s a good move for Mozilla because it’ll expose the browser to a group of people who may never have used Firefox before, although it’s important to remember that WordPerfect is now rather a minority office suite so it won’t impact browser usage stats too much. But as Tesco say “Every little helps”.
Mozilla are looking for testers using Windows Vista (a recent release candidate). If you are interested email marcia (at) mozilla (dot) org and you’ll be notified of any areas that need testing.
It looks like Firefox 2 will have a point release to improve Vista compatibility, this should occur before Vista hits the streets for public consumption in January. It’s likely that this release will have the same toolbar layout as under XP so it won’t look like a native application, however, the support for native themes in Mozilla apps means that the widgets and colour schemes will still look correct.
It’s likely that Mozilla will work on making Firefox and Thunderbird look like native Vista apps in the future (maybe Firefox 3). This will be good as long as they keep the traditional look for XP and earlier as otherwise, like IE7, the browser will not fit in with the platform conventions.
Ideally when under Vista I’d like to see Firefox comply with the platform conventions, which would mean a different toolbar layout, but it’d be good to make it customisable enough to make the XP layout also available to Vista and vice-versa. But the defaults should be right for each platform.
Even if you’re not using Vista there’s still plenty you could do to help the QA team. If you’re an experienced tester your skills would be welcome and if you’re new to testing this can give you very useful experience with writing good bug reports, working on a large project, working with bug tracking systems, etc. A good place to keep an eye on is the QA blog. Events called bug days are frequently held to help newcomers get started.
As promised earlier I asked an IE 6 user to try out Firefox 2 for a week and to let us know their opinions. Thanks go to Ian Charlton for this review - A Week with Firefox 2. This review is from someone who has not used Firefox previously but with the changes up ahead with IE7 decided this was as good a time as any to try out the other options. Ian has had good experiences with Firefox and this has motivated him to try Opera too, maybe we’ll get another review if he’s not too busy.
As for other reviews, I’m still writing my review of Firefox 2 on Mac OSX and if you’ve not seen it already, there’s the “A Week With IE7” review that I’d written following the launch of IE7.
listvine.com lists 9 reasons not to upgrade to Firefox 2. Here’s my comments on the points raised in the article: (more…)
Firefox 2 had over 2 million downloads in the first 24 hours with demand as high as 30 downloads a second at times.
The Firefox team are well on the way to overshadowing the 3 million in 4 days that downloaded IE7. It takes a few days to update the stats as they need to get the figures in from the mirror sites.
Of course download stats don’t equal users. Some people may need to download the browser simply to test their websites with, others may be curious to try the browser out but then go back to their usual browser, others may download multiple copies for multiple machines and others may just download one copy and share it with many.
However, one thing the stats show is that interest in Firefox 2 remains very strong, although the download figures will spike in IE’s favour once the automatic updates kick in during November.
Two Firefox 2 reviews are on their way. I’ve managed to convince a current IE6 user to try out Firefox 2 for a week under Windows XP. I will also write a review of Firefox and Camino under Mac OS X.
Any people who usually use IE willing to download Firefox 2.0 use it for a week and write a review of their experience. I’m really looking for someone who has stayed with IE in the past, but any interesting reviews would be welcome.
If you’re writing your own review then post the link in the comments section. I’m also interested in views of Firefox from users of other browsers such as Opera.
Firefox 2.0 is here and I’m sure the Firefox team are happy with the cake they got from the IE team!
I’ve been using Firefox 2.0 since the alpha (Bon Echo) releases (except for my week with IE7) so writing a review will be more difficult as 1.5 is a distant memory for me. But overall I do prefer 2.0 or I’d have gone back to 1.5 months ago.
A week with IE7 review has been slashdotted. I will comment on some of the points raised on slashdot in a future post. Currently time restraints mean I have no time to comment directly. Got an amazing 50724 visits in the space of 4 hours after that was published. That shows that a lot of people do read the linked articles on slashdot even if many of those that comment don’t. Good thing is there’s no reports of the site running slow despite this higher load, so my current hosts, Siteground, are doing quite well for less than a fiver a month.
According to the counter on Planet Mozilla there’s 12 hours to go before Firefox 2.0 is officially released.
Mozilla build engineer Paul Reed lists the reasons why downloading 2.0 before it’s officially released is bad.
Also if you’re running one of the 2.0 betas or release candidates you should really wait for the automatic updates to kick in as these are incremental updates so will be smaller - also RC3 is most likely to be the final version so there’ll be no update needed to users of this version.