Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

As far as days go, I was quite let down today. Mozilla let me down.

Mozilla’s big plan on Tuesday to set a world record for downloads with the Firefox 3 browser hit a snag when its Web site would not work properly.

Though the big “Download Day” was set to begin at 1 p.m. ET, Mozilla’s Web site was down or working sporadically all morning on the East Coast, and users still could not download Firefox 3 from the site more than an hour later.

Was it because of their “downtime”? No. Was it because Firefox 3 is no good? Of course not. What was it then?

As of 5pm I was still trying to download a “new” copy of Firefox. You see, I have been downloading the betas and release candidates, so it’s not like I have been “out of the loop”, but I was quite disappointed when I downloaded Firefox the first time today.

Before I started, I wrote down the information on the about screen, and then after the new install had downloaded, I installed it, of course. The first thing I noticed was the end-user license was dated “May 2008″. An easy mistake yes?

After installation, I checked the about screen. Same exact thing. Nothing changed. Here is my post on Slobokan’s Site O’ Schtuff, with the screenshots of the firefox website and installation.

Were there no changes between release candidate 3 and the final release? If not, why the hype today to set a record? Why bother with a “final” release if nothing changed? I just don’t get it.

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While it never should have happened in the first place, it’s good to see Mozilla doing something about this. Then again, with all the different sources of code out there in the hundreds if not thousands of plugins for Firefox, I am surprised we haven’t seen more of this already.

Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months.

Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 was polluted with adware, Mozilla security chief Window Snyder said in a blog posting. “Everyone who downloaded the most recent Vietnamese language pack since February 18, 2008 got an infected copy,” she wrote. “Mozilla does virus scans at upload time but the virus scanner did not catch this issue until several months after the upload.”

Mozilla is now going to add additional scans of its software to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, she said.

Maybe next time they will send the code to drug rehab before releasing it to the public? The sad part is, they have no idea how many people’s computers might be infected already. Yikes.

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Mozilla has released alpha 8 of Firefox 3 and there is finally something worthwhile to mention.

Mozilla Corp. updated the preview of Firefox 3.0 to alpha 8 Thursday, unveiling for the first time to users several security features it’s talked up for months.

Among the security provisions debuting in the new alpha of “Gran Paradiso,” the code name for Firefox 3.0, are built-in anti-malware warnings and protection against rogue extension updates, according to documentation Mozilla posted to its Web site.

Wow. After all the talk it’s finally here. Of course, it’s still alpha so I won’t be touching it for a while, but wow. Just think back a few years and you’ll realize how far web browsers have come in such a short time.

Heck, if this were a few years ago, I would prefer running the alpha over Internet Explorer anyday. Nothing said you enjoyed a good colon cleanse like powering up the older versions of Internet Explorer.

The last time I tried Flock, I was uite impressed. It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but the social features wrapped into the Flock browser make it quite an outstanding piece of software.

I noticed this morning that the Flock 0.9 Release Candidate is available, so I downloaded it. I haven’t had time to install it and test it out yet, but I will be doing that sometime today.

So, which browser are you using? And why?