Archive for the 'firefox' Category

The Firefox EULA debacle is over. While this is nice, especially because they retracted, there are several things at stake here.

• Something is obviously fishy in all this. On one hand, Mark Shuttleworth claims:
  

  Mozilla Corp asked that (the EULA) be added in order for (Ubuntu) to continue to call the browser Firefox.

  On the other hand, Mozilla claims all over the place that the EULA text was a mistake. Couldn't they think more about what they're demanding from distributors before asking them stupid things ?

• It's not the first time Mozilla approaches a distro to ask them to comply to new demands, and create a controversy, a burden or a real PITA. What is going to come next ?
• From my bug reporter point of view, the way Mozilla handled it can be seen like this: when the Debian nutcases complain about the EULA being shown in "Open Source builds", it's not a problem, and the EULA is actually necessary. When bad press comes about the same EULA because the big player that Ubuntu is starts rebelling, it becomes an important mistake. I just hope this feeling is wrong.

Update: there is a nice article on the EULA issue on Groklaw.

Recent news are confirming that Debian's choice to not comply with Mozilla's trademark policy and rename Firefox to Iceweasel was a good one.

When the issue came up two years ago, most people focused on the wrong issue of Mozilla demanding to review the patches we apply, and while two years ago that would have been an actual burden, I must say they have improved in the last months on the patch review (and even inclusion) side. If they had changed the license for their logo (which was the actual uncircumventable problem), I might have considered changing the name back.

That would obviously have been a mistake, as Mozilla has found another creative way to badly behave. I'm so glad we chose the Iceweasel road.

Now, speaking of this infamous EULA, I filed a bug a while ago, because the EULA would also show up on unbranded builds, which was "resolved" invalid. Apparently, the main reason for keeping the EULA is because of the use of services that require an EULA, such as safebrowsing. The only terms related to this that I can see are:

5. WEBSITE INFORMATION SERVICES. Mozilla and its contributors, licensors and partners work to provide the most accurate and up-to-date phishing and malware information. However, they cannot guarantee that this information is comprehensive and error-free: some risky sites may not be identified, and some safe sites may be identified in error.

Does that really require to read the rest of the legal boilerplate ?

There seem to be some heat about the new Firefox feature that only allows you to open https urls with untrusted certificate after 5 clicks.

The situation is actually worse than what is depicted. Why? Because not only did they put crap to their users, and actually, if they want to, that's their problem, but they also imposed their crap on embedders.

Yes, this means applications such as epiphany, kazehakase, galeon, and others *must* use this crap. I know, there is a browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to disable the error page (note it also disables standard network connection error messages). But, the alternative is not any better: It opens a dialog, with raw HTML in it, allowing to... do nothing. That's it, you can only acknowledge you've been denied access to the so-called untrusted site.

The best part is that these applications can't (or maybe they can, but in several months nobody found how) make the exception dialog work properly: the user will have to enter, himself, the url to add the exception for. And before even reaching the state where you can get the dialog to open from the error page, or even get the buttons to be displayed in the error page itself, you have to add clutter to your application code.

For those still wondering what happened to the Gecko platform or whatever you call it (xulrunner, libxul, mozilla-embed, etc.), here is your answer: Gecko evolves with what Firefox needs. If your application needs something else, well, too bad for you. Firefox developers obviously have a big problem taking embedders into consideration when they change the Gecko API, and while it can be fixed afterwards, it's not a good thing to "tag" a Gecko milestone at the same time as a Firefox release under such conditions.

Anyways, what I did in the xulrunner-1.9 package is to forward-port the old interfaces (nsIBadCertListener) allowing embedders to have their own UI for this. While it was certainly far from perfect (and displaying as many dialogs as different errors on a certificate is definitely not something nice), it is still better than something not working at all.

It seems some people don't like the new about:config warning in Firefox 3.0. The sad thing is this message was not intended to piss people off.

The localization note intended for translaters reads:

<!-- LOCALIZATION NOTE: aboutWarningTitle.label should be attention grabbing and playful -->

It's not even necessarily talking about warranty in other locales:

<!ENTITY aboutWarningTitle.label "Attention, danger !"> (fr)
<!ENTITY aboutWarningTitle.label "¡Zona hostil para manazas!"> (es-ES)
<!ENTITY aboutWarningTitle.label "Here be dragons!"> (en-GB)

Seems like the en-US version has a strange definition of playful.

While digging what was happening in bug #473557, I happened to get just in the right place of Iceweasel's code to fix the longstanding issue of it proposing "less" and other terminal-only applications as helpers for some MIME types.

The upstream bug is 6 years old.

The fix is 3 lines.

One of these lines is "}"

It will be in next xulrunner upload to unstable.

Josselin thinks it's the most stupid world record, my take is that it is only a useless one.

World records are interesting when they are challenged, not when they are set. And the fact is Firefox will become the world most downloaded software in a day in the world because nobody else tried to set this record before. Most Guinness records are such records, by the way: they're set, not challenged.

Speaking of stupid records, and how they are set (... or not), I quite like the following story, which happened live on french television. Some years ago, a guy wanted to set the record for spitting a greenpea as far as he could (*that* is a stupid record). The Guinness records guy was there, obviously, so that the record could be homologated. I don't remember the numbers, but it's not very important after all. Anyways, the guy sets his record, he is happy, and for fun, the TV show host tries. First try, first win, he broke the record that had been set a few seconds before ; without even trying to beat it.

Coming back to the Firefox record, it's useless to set a record you already know is not an absolute record. Microsoft service packs and affiliated are downloaded massively the day they are released, Microsoft just never considered submitting it to the Guinness book. And if they'd have tried, they would have set it at least an order of magnitude higher than Firefox will set it. Then Firefox would have needed to come up with a catch phrase like "the most downloaded free (as in free speech, because a MS service pack is free as in free beer) software" to get its moment of fame.

So, how long before Microsoft tries to break it, with, say, IE8 ? And what will be the new marketing trick for Firefox 4.0 (after a full page in NYT for 1.0, "get your name in Firefox" for 2.0 and a Guinness record for 3.0) ?

The fact is, the 3.0 release is just exactly the same code base as version 3.0rc3, which only has a MacOSX-only fix more than 3.0rc2, which is what we have in unstable, already.

As MJ Ray reports, ftp.mozilla.org now has "Free software" Firefox tarballs. While they are truly free and don't contain the non-free logo nor Talkback, they are not Firefox either. Only the tarballs and the executables are named Firefox. The product itself is "Bon Echo". And the name is going to change at every major release. This is why we changed for a "static" name.

Ars Technica has recently posted an article about the new Opera alpha release, with some Javascript benchmark results showing it is quite faster than version 9.23. It also goes to compare with Firefox and IE7, but omits some other not so unimportant browsers. I think the main reason is because they seem to have only tested Windows browsers. Sure, Safari has been released recently on Windows, but it is still quite marginal.

Anyways, I was wondering how all this was going under Linux, and also, how (good?) WebKit would perform compared to others.

So, I tried the same Javascript speed tests on various browsers under Linux on my laptop, which happens to be a Pentium M 1.5GHz.

And the winner is...

So, It seems the speed gain Opera got on Windows doesn't happen much on Linux.

An interesting result, is that Iceweasel, with a bunch of extensions installed, is slower than Epiphany, despite both using the same rendering engine and Javascript library. Running Iceweasel in safe mode makes it the same speed as Epiphany, though. So having extensions does not only clutter the UI, but actually has an impact on how fast the Javascript code in web pages is going to run.

And well, WebKit is the fastest for this testcase, though it stays behind Opera on some specific tests.

So, after having dumped Mozilla Suite, the Mozilla Foundation is now pushing Thunderbird out to pursue its goal of an "open web" (understand: MoFo only cares about Firefox).

Why is it called the Mozilla Foundation, again ?