Archive for September, 2008

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 ?

Everybody is talking about that these days, since information on Google Chrome leaked. But the fact is, this is what is going to happen with Google Chrome: stupid people proving that 2 + 2 = 5.

I haven't tried IE8 nor am I willing to, but one of the rare things I read about IE8 when people were discussing how not innovative Google Chrome was, is that it uses a process per tab.

Now let's assume IE binary code + libraries fit in 10MB (which is probably a small estimate), and you open 10 tabs. Here you are : 100MB RAM consumed. OH MY GOD!

Except that memory is shared between the processes. That's 100MB virtual memory.

Reality is that you'll have a hard time calculating the actual amount of memory used.

Update: It has already started.