Another hint to IE users ;) Join us. :D

[Neo Neko]

"SANS Internet Storm Center is reporting on a new strain of IE Malware. This one targets bank customers, which in itself is nothing new. But the catch is in the way it does it: it installs a Browser Help Object (BHO) that can capture login information before it is encrypted, and 'watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries.'."

If news of a new IE vulnerabilities on a daily basis was not incentive enough this looks particularly nasty. Even secure https is prostrate before this attack. Not that it could not be cracked in other ways. It's just that the other ways took skill and time to accomplish. Before you get hit in the wallet you might take the time to upgrade your browser. And seeing as IE7 is quite a ways off if ever to be released at all that leaves you with Mozilla (http://mozilla.org), Opera (http://opera.com), and Netscape (http://netscape.com). And I would recommend them in that order.

Standards compliance may not be enough for most people to switch. But throw in money and they will considder it.

More fun and comments can be found here (http://slashdot.org/articles/04/06/29/1913222.shtml?tid=109&tid=113&tid=126&tid=187&tid=95) as always. :p

**edit grammer**
And here you go digit. This is my 1337 post. :D

[Sirber]

Already switched for Firefox :D

[Hiro2k]

<-------- Long time user of alternate browswers.

But I'm glad I'm not the only one who read that article on slashdot. ;)

About IE7, I read recently that Mircosoft had re-asembled their IE team of programmers. I don't know if that was just to patch up SP2, but I have the feeling it was to compete with mozilla. At least as far as options go, cause who knows how they will fix thier sercurity issues.

LOL your 1337 post, I hope that convinces more people to join.

[wmansir]

Coincidently, Firefox 0.9.1 (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9.1/) (aka 0.9 without the dozens of bugs it had because it was rushed out before it was ready in order to keep some ridiculous timetable) is out now.

[virus]

Long time Opera user here... (with Firefox as secondary browser. You know, sometimes Opera fails to render pages with complex and/or buggy javascript). I try hard to boycott IE-only sites, but unfortunately there are IE-only sites that I was absolutely forced to visit :(

BTW since we are into a security-related talk, can I recommend a little-known alternative to the other Big Piece of Crap from M$, aka Outlook? Since my very first days on the net from home (that was 1999) my mailer of choice has always been Pegasus Mail (site (www.pmail.com)).

This program is around since 1990 and was the first to introduce mail filters. It's completely freeware, fast, really full of options, half the size of Eudora, equipped with a complete help-system, can work in both single- and multi-user mode and very secure (does not display images from external links, does not fetch anything outside the actual email body and so on).

The author - David Harris from New Zealand - quit his job to support the development of the program, but still his only source of incomings are the printed manuals... he stated that Pegasus will live (as freeware) as long as the ideals it represents are still relevant: freedom of communication between people, mainly ("that freedom of speech is useless if nobody can hear you"). I wonder if someone at M$ is aware that a single man, with a bunch of devoted beta-testers, delivers a free program that make their much hyped project look like an enormous waste of time...

virus

[neo75903]

idd, there are sites in which they force you to use IE, but if every surfer takes a little time to send webmasters a little note about you using FireFox or Opera can change the world wide web, and pushing it towards open standards. It would be sad to see the web being M$ property :/

Pegasus looks nice, but it needs a more added value for the average user. I havent swithced tofor example thunderbird, just becoz there is no decent contact / calendar manager in which Outlook has greatly integrated with.

Maybe Firefox team should offer him a job if there is any availabe :)

and ow did i mention i am also FireFox believer? :) Opera is my secondary :)

[virus]

Originally posted by neo75903
idd, there are sites in which they force you to use IE, but if every surfer takes a little time to send webmasters a little note about you using FireFox or Operammmh, they simply ignore you or point out that they not have the time/knowledge or whatever to make them <nonIEbrowser>-friendly. Or they just say "you can download IE at that link" :(
And of course there's no hope to make a big organization (like, say, a university) to revise their big website entirely to make it work with different browsers. It's more a matter of acceptance of the software diversity.

I havent swithced tofor example thunderbird, just becoz there is no decent contact / calendar manager in which Outlook has greatly integrated with.there's a tendency in modern progs that I really hate: the willing of becoming all-in-one at all cost.
Web browser? No more: it must be also mailer, contact manager, news & irc client. Audio player? No-no-no, it must play videos, burn CDs, allow a complete skinning language and even cook your dinner :D
a simple media player? Oh, come on... it _must_ create/manage your personal library, burn CDs (again), provide messaging, run annoying popup ads :( Small, fast image browser? What a crap - it should grow to become a little Photoshop. And so on.

Sadly, I'm still of the "old school": dinosaurs like me prefer to run a mailer for mail, a newsreader for usenet, a burner for burning, a contact/calendar manager for managing the day and so on. Once the small 500 KB app which became 7 MB was called "bloatware". Now it's a standard. People can't get rid of lazyness it seems :)

Of course there are strong points in sw integration. But everyone seems to forget simple things like these:
1) the number of bugs goes with the square of the code size ;)
2) the more a prog is specific, the more options it will have ("everything for a single task" instead of "a little bit for every task")
3) many ppl still have slow, costly V.90 connections so downloading 12 MB just to browse some images is not so appealing...

yours truly
virus (aka the small&fast-proggies fundamentalist :D)

[niamh]

I have joined "the Others" a few weeks ago ;). 6 minutes after installing firefox, I was converted, 2 hours on, I deleted all IE shortcuts and other annoying paraphernalia , a day on I was in love :D

IE users, join us!!!!!!

there's a tendency in modern progs that I really hate: the willing of becoming all-in-one at all cost.

I absolutely and entirely agree on this one. It's one of the reasons I detest Windoze Eggspee, and I tend to use things like WMP6.4 and win2K pro(as well as having a car with no central locking or electric windows ;))(And no, I'm not really old :p) .And this is why I never switched to opera for good because - yes it's very good, and it's the fastest, but it looks so big and feature-packed that just installing it feels like eating a ton of bricks for dinner :D. Firefox on the other hand is really bare. It's a browser, it browses (and as opposed to IE, it works). If you want to add stuff , you can too, which is perfect, because you never will have the silly plugins and add-ons that you couldnt care less about.

I've had a look at pegasus, and it looks pretty cool too, I must say, Thank you for the link, I'd never heard of it :)

[unmei]

i guess the rate of 'alternatives' using people is rather high on this forum..

Still ..i cannot detatch myself from those damn M$ operating systems, i'm probably just too lazy :(

I mean i had redhat/fedorora and suse installed a couple of times, but it never satisfied me. And with the other distros, i never got everything working like i wanted.. either i already fell on my nose while trying to run that self-complied kernel or else it started the latest when only Gnome ran, not KDE, or i could not access USB drives, not playing videos or whatever else stupid issue..

However i'm a big fan of some programs that were originally *nix and now i use the windos ports ..xchat, open office, ffmpeg (in ffdshow) a bit of gimp (not my primary picture editor tho) and probably some other i forgot.

but err, right the topic was firefox. yes i use it as primary browser. I have an old opera on the other comp tho, but i rarely browse there - it gets mostly used to view avisynth (-filter), javadoc and other manual pages :).

[jcsston]

I used to use Firefox, but switched to MyIE2 for lower cpu/memory.
Granted, IE is a lousy browser, MyIE2 only makes it bearable.
But even Firefox will not protect you from spy-ware, keystroke loggers, etc as I'm got hit three times, two times when using FireFox and once with MyIE2.

If more sites worked in Lynx I'd think that would be the best choice :D

[Doom9]

I've been using Firefox since v0.5.. great browser but sluggish if you have a few tabs open, have it in the bg and use a couple other programs until bringing it back to the fg (the amount of swapping even though there's more than enough ram available, is killing me every time). Interestingly though, all my Firefox installations are constantly bitching about an important update missing, even though they have all been upgraded to 0.9.1, but the browser still wants me to download 0.9.1. That's more penetrant than any MS program I've encountered so far.

[jcsston]

That's exactly the problem I've had with Firefox memory usage, bringing it to the foreground from the background sometimes would take longer than opening a new copy of Firefox.
Yet IE doesn't suffer from this problem, though it uses slightly less memory, depending on how long each have been running, I've gotten FireFox over 60MB with 4-7 tabs open, while MyIE2 is about 10MB less. I wouldn't think the 10MB could make such a difference in swapping the process memory to disk. :confused:

I think the reason IE does have the disk swapping problem is that most of the HTML rendering, internet protocol handling, etc are in .dll which stay loaded in memory because Windows itself uses them for various things. Firefox doesn't have the advantage of being part of the OS, all it's code is only used by Firefox so it is gets swapped earlier?

[communist]

The 'sluggish performance when called from background after long time' is common in Mozilla based browsers. IIRC it is a confirmed 'bug' - however this is a programmed behaviour -> unloading / freeing up some memory or something like this.

Also my observations as far as memory consumption is concerned is that 10 Mozilla tabs eat less memory than 10 IE windows (10 different pages in Mozilla and the same 10 in IE) - at least thats what the taskmanager is telling me ;)

Oh and with Mozilla I mean Mozilla 1.7b - not FireFox.

[Doom9]

IIRC it is a confirmed 'bug' - however this is a programmed behaviour -> unloading / freeing up some memory or something like this.Frankly, considering how the linewrapping issue is handled, that would not surprise me. But I'd hope they'd at least give us an option to disable this "feature".

With 768 MB under the hood, I couldn't care less if my browser used a 100 MB of RAM.. it just has to be fast.

[sysKin]

To stop it from bugging you to update, set update.app.updatesAvailable to false (type about:config, use filter to find it there).

To stop it from freeing all the memory when you minimize, eh.. I wish I coult tell you how, but mozillazine formus are down (or at least searching is disabled). Still, some other value in about:config should be set to false.

I still don't understand the development process behind firefox... all problems which are really ugly, annoying and easy to fix are simply being ignored by developers - and the explaination is "it will be fixed in 1.0". I sure hope it will be...

Radek

[edit]I wonder where the space in "about:config" comes from. It's not here ;)

[niamh]

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, thank you syskin !!!!
Done already.........now if only one could tweak M$ apps this way, we may stop whining about them ;)

[Doom9]

@sysKin: please let us know when the search works again so that we can fix our Mozilla/Firebird and teach it not to crawl when brining it back from the background.. it's the main thing that's been bugging me since I converted.

[Neo Neko]

Yeah I noticed the forums were down as well the other day. :( Bummer. And I have also noticed the slowness of bringing a window back to the foreground after being hidden for a long time. But I have learned to easily cope with it in favor of all the other things it does for me. Like closing Moz before starting UT2004. And not just leave it open when I am not using it. It does not take that long to restart. Or temporarily bookmarking a set of tabs I might want to come back to and deleting them when I am done because the bookmark feature has gotten pretty kick 455.

On a more interesting note. "I have been saying this for a long time but now it is offical. From Yahoo News: 'The Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.'" "According to Wired, the widespread Internet Explorer security exploit last week and CERT's subsequent recommendation that IE users should consider switching to another browser has resulted in a large spike in downloads of the Mozilla Organization's Mozilla and Firefox web browsers." (http://slashdot.org/articles/04/07/02/1441242.shtml?tid=103&tid=113&tid=126&tid=172&tid=95&tid=99)

Slashdot as always has the story. If the government starts switching that will put a dent in the numbers. As far as I am concerned this is one of the first real sensible things to come out of the new department. And one of the first things in a while that has made me somewhat proud of my government. They could not do this to soon. The NSA as always had them beat. But it is nice to see the less tech savvy departments catching on. Seems lately it is not a 5h!7 storm MS is riding. But rather a flood.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Doom9
@sysKin: please let us know when the search works again so that we can fix our Mozilla/Firebird and teach it not to crawl when brining it back from the background.. it's the main thing that's been bugging me since I converted.

ditto. Ever since I switched I have been wishing for a settings button labeled "Stop playing so nice and grow some nuts!!!"

I searched/googled for about half an hour this morning and couldn't find this tweak (although I did find others). If anyone finds out please post it.

EDIT: Neo, I was going to post the 'alternate' forum address from the Firefox Builds RSS, but that's not working either (the RSS). From what I saw the alt forum only contained mirrors of the build release threads, but it was useful to track bugfixes.

[niamh]

Ok, I found a tweak that seems to work. I've set it up, opened a couple of windows and 5 or 6 tabs, left firefox minimized for a couple of hours, and it's just restored beautifully (pray it isn't a fluke)
here we go:

"-type "about:config" into your address bar.
-Change browser.cache.disk.enable to false. (Note: do not change the disk capacity to 0, as this created weirdness for me like preventing me from installing extensions.)
-look for browser.cache.disk.capacity
-Set the value to however much RAM you want to use in KB. Mine's at 51200, or about 50 MB. I suggest that value for 256 MB RAM, if you have more RAM try 102400 even."

The default is at 5MB only, I set mine to 50, even though I have 512 mb of ram, and it seems to make a right difference :)
Anyway, that seems to work for me, I hope it works for everyone else, because that sluggish restore is a nuisance.

[Wilbert]

browser.cache.memory.capacity
I guess you mean browser.cache.disk.capacity?

Btw, I installed v0.9, but I can't open pdf files in my browser (it just seem to hang)?

[niamh]

well see how an error can lead to discoveries... you're supposed to create browser.cache.memory.capacity and set it to around 50 mb, instead of what I rushed to change the browser.cache.disk.capacity, because I obviously can't read, and still the sluggishness in restoring had gone :) go figure ..At least, it didn't hurt ;)

[wmansir]

Originally posted by Wilbert
I guess you mean browser.cache.disk.capacity?

Btw, I installed v0.9, but I can't open pdf files in my browser (it just seem to hang)?

I hate opening PDF files in a browser. I haven't tried it yet with 0.9.1, but with the 0.8+ builds it would often crash, and the setting to lauch a seperate reader exe wouldn't stick (just like with .wmv files, which FF 0.8 would try to open as plain text).

[niamh]

I just tried to open one, and it does work, but it's an absolute drag, and you can go make coffee while it's loading and hanging. While we're on about adobe, is there any way at all to get the "save as pdf" option in the context menu? I've looked everywhere and I can't find anything better than the workaround with launchy> open in IE> save as pdf

ps: Have you tried the very latest reader, 6.2? it seems to be noticeably faster to load.

[gldblade]

To prevent Firefox releasing memory unnecessarily:
Type: about:config in your URL bar to get to the "hidden" Firefox preference settings.

Change the setting: config.trim_on_minimize to false.
If it doesn't appear in the list, add it (right-click; beware of typos).
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=92892&highlight=memory

*EDIT*
Hm, apparently that setting doesn't work anymore.
The config.trim_on_minimize pref seems to no longer work in 0.9, which is reported in bug #248423.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by niamh
ps: Have you tried the very latest reader, 6.2? it seems to be noticeably faster to load.

Nope, but I read a blog tip about dramatically decreasing load time by removing most of the plugins that load automatically at start up. It 'breaks' some of the features (that I never use, like a web print ordering service), but startup was almost instantaneous.

[sysKin]

Originally posted by wmansir
I hate opening PDF files in a browser. I haven't tried it yet with 0.9.1, but with the 0.8+ builds it would often crash, and the setting to lauch a seperate reader exe wouldn't stick (just like with .wmv files, which FF 0.8 would try to open as plain text). Tools -> options -> downloads -> plugins -> uncheck PDF plugin (and you might also uncheck quicktime plugin, which is even more evil).

@gldblade yes that was it. Too bad it doesn't work anymore :(

BTW, lots of tweaks & tricks here (http://texturizer.net/firefox/tips.html).

Radek

[Soulhunter]

Cant find a working spell-checker for firefox 0.91... :(


Bye

[Neo Neko]

Originally posted by wmansir
I hate opening PDF files in a browser. I haven't tried it yet with 0.9.1, but with the 0.8+ builds it would often crash, and the setting to lauch a seperate reader exe wouldn't stick (just like with .wmv files, which FF 0.8 would try to open as plain text).

That arises from bad or no mime handling. Most times we don't like mimes. With their pasty white faces and silent treatment. But server mimes are different. Server mime types tell your browser what to expect and have long been a part of web standards. Unfortuantly IE relies on extensions and not mime types as much. Which is part of why IE is so vulnerable. And why when you visit IE specific sites and hosts; files often open wrong. On my Apache servers loading a PDF will either use the plugin or open in the correct external app [my personal fav] in any gecko or khtml based browser. The behavior breaks down when no mime type is sent. It is not a flaw of Mozilla or Firefox. Crashing OTOH may be. But that is exactly why adobe et all are getting together to standardise, extend, stabilise, and open plugin specification.

[Doom9]

The config.trim_on_minimize pref seems to no longer work in 0.9, which is reported in bug #248423.Argh.. just when I thought my Firefox problems were finally (mostly) over.

The PDF reader is unfortunately very crash prone, but I've noticed that even in my IE days. I ended up just downloading PDFs and opening them in the standalone reader. There's also something else about the reader: the standalone and browser version seem to be interconnected.. have a PDF open in your browser and one in the standalone app, then close either of them.. you'll get a warning that both will be closed, which is really not what you want.

[Piaf]

joined already from 0.6,atm Firefox 0.8,tweaked some settings in about:config its verry good browser :)

btw about acrobat/pdf files no problems for me(acrobat 6.0) they load pretty fast

you guys must try this tool for faster loading acrobat reader:
get it here/ar-speedup (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bootblock/files/misc/ar-speedup.zip)
extract to ur adobe acrobat folder and run it,you notice assap the change :cool: ;)

[sysKin]

I checked this bug 248423 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=248423) and it's alread marked as fixed in firefox "trunk" (which is a mix between firefox 0.8, 0.91 and mozilla 1.8alpha). Since I'm visiting #firefox channel on mozilla's irc sometimes, I'll be bugging the people there to add this patch to branch (which is the "official" firefox).

We'll see what happens.

[edit]oh I see, it was fixed a couple of hours (or maybe even minutes) before my post. That explans things.

[Doom9]

is there a build that contains the fix?

Also, while we're at the topic, does anybody know when you try to add an url to the bookmarks via Bookmarks - Bookmark This Page, the Create In dropdown list only contains a limited selection of all your folders without the root folder and you have to press the down button to get a full list, including the root folder where I initially save most of my bookmarks. Once I have saved the first bookmark in the Bookmarks folder, then as long as the browser is running I get to see that option right away, but after a restart it's hidden again.

[wmansir]

It will be in today's trunk build, but it's not out yet. It should be out within the next 4-5 hours.

Here's the release thread:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=93511

Here's where the release will be:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

[niamh]

Nice one! though my homemade workaround has fixed the problem for me anyway :)

as long as the browser is running I get to see that option right away, but after a restart it's hidden again.
I don't get that problem myself, after restart(and reboot), the bookmark folder appearing is the one I last saved in, even though it wasn't shown beforehand (if that makes sense)

[Doom9]

weird.. in my case it's always the first subfolder of the first top level folder. And funny enough, the 2nd subfolder of the first top level folder is also shown, but then it stops.

[sysKin]

When you're adding bookmarks, the window shows a dropdown with 5 recently used "folders". It was a brain-dead idea but developers stand by it (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=229768).

Now, because of the bug 232467 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232467), this works except for the root folder, which is never remembered.

[MfA]

So are there any plugins which change that behaviour?

[leadman584]

I miss my favorites menu. Got a toolbar full of bookmarks, like to have in a single dropdown menu, how?

took the advice of many, and now use firefox 9.1. Blazing fast page loading on cable. Still would like to have a dropdown menu, IE favorites
list is 2 pages long, actually visit most daily.

[niamh]

I don't see what you mean.... I have a sidebar and a dropdown on bookmarks, at the top, I just checked and it looks the exact same as IE, with a search button included in the sidebar, the dropdown has the same folders..... You have lost me here..maybe your navigation toolbar isn't showing, right click at the top and customize it as you wish?

[sysKin]

Perhaps you're looking for "Bookmarks" menu - they're called bookmarks in most browsers ('favorites' is windows/ie term).

[sysKin]

Originally posted by MfA
So are there any plugins which change that behaviour? LOL guess what, I just (a moment ago) found one that does: OpenBook (http://update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=42&vid=44) seems to fix the weird "Add Bookmark" behaviour by simply opening the bookmark tree by default.

Huh, I'm using 8 different extensions now. That's definitely more than ever.

Radek

[wmansir]

The devs have been on a tear lately, the last 3 days have had 50+ bugfixes. If your encountering bugs you might want to check out a new build.

[Hiro2k]

Here's a sweet extension that I think will be useful for the forums. A spell checker!!! One nice feature is that it uses multiple dictionary files so you can check your spelling in various languages!

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/

[sysKin]

Also, FF version 0.9.2 is out - and fixes the first serious security problem in FF ;)

Good thing it's still not useful to exploit such problems...

Oh, and going back to original topic - did you know that one of the three IE bugs that (when used together) were responsible for recent attacks wasn't fixed at all? The functionality was simply disabled.
But don't feel safe yet, because another bug can be used in its place (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1620825,00.asp).

Radek

[Neo Neko]

It was not so much a serious flaw as it was a questionable feature. A very Microsoftesq feature. Actually IIRC it is not a bug at all but an interface to MS Windows to handle unknown protocols. IE does it all the time. Then again IE has piss poor security.

[Doom9]

about the memory releasing again.. I suppose it should be in the 0.9.2 build I just installed, but I don't even find the config.trim_on_minimizeparameter in about:config. What am I missing?

[sysKin]

Originally posted by Doom9
about the memory releasing again.. I suppose it should be in the 0.9.2 build I just installed, but I don't even find the parameter in about:config. What am I missing? That's OK, just add it manually.

It will still not work though, 0.9.2 is just like 0.9.1 but with shell: protocol disabled.
The patch didn't make it into branch yet, anyway.

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by Hiro2k
Here's a sweet extension that I think will be useful for the forums. A spell checker!!! One nice feature is that it uses multiple dictionary files so you can check your spelling in various languages!

http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
You are my hero... :D


THX n' Bye

[Mug Funky]

who needs spellcheckers? hehe.

but seriously, i upgraded to mozilla a while ago. not for security reasons (i personally aren't worried about that, though i'll change my attitude if i ever lose buttloads of data to Malware), but for the simple reason that it's not MS. i'm willing to put up with some oddities and slownesses for that.

it's like walking that extra 10 metres in a food court to avoid going to McDonalds.