Letters to the editor

Firefox browser review -- missing features?

Greetings,
 
I appreciated your front-page review of the various Free web browsers in the
February 12 edition of LWN. I too gave Firefox a try this week, but I think I
must have spent a few more minutes reading the accompanying documentation,
because the various limitations and quirks you mentioned posed no problems for
me.
 
Firefox is intended to be lean and mean -- by your own admission, the
developers have accomplished that, as it is the fastest of the browsers you
tested. To get there, one presumes, they left out some of the features that
bloated the traditional Mozilla browser. However, they made sure that it
would be easy to add specific features back in using lightweight,
user-installable extension modules.
 
Your listed concerns were:
 
> [...] some things are missing. At the top of your editor's list is the
> ability to control image animation.
 
This is the very first control provided by the "Things They Left Out"
extension. It provides a lot of useful preferences settings:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/ttlo
 
> The download manager is a little strange; it provides no way to place a file
> in an arbitrary directory at download time.
 
The regular preferences/options screen includes an "Ask me where to save every
file" option. It's just not the default.
 
> Control-T creates a new tab, as one might expect, but it comes up blank;
> Galeon's practice of bringing up the home page in new tabs seems preferable.
 
The "Tabbrowser Extensions" provides this preference plus a ton of other
tab-related features. I previously hated tabs and disabled them as soon as I
installed any browser, but Firefox (with this extension) has converted me into
a tab user. It's here:
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/tbe
 
There are lots of other extensions available, some useful, some less so. I
think it would be safe to say that if you can think of a feature missing from
Firefox, someone else has already thought of it and implemented it as an
extension. Just check
http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/
before complaining :).
 
Charles
--
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Charles Cazabon <web-letters-lwn.net@discworld.dyndns.org>
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Comments (none posted)

MSFT Code and BugTraq

Jonathan,
 
Like you I had and have no desire to see the stolen and revealed Windows
source code. Actually, it makes me ill that this has occurred. But
today I realized that it will be very difficult *not* to see the code --
in snipits, anyway. The reason is that I subscribe to BugTraq.
 
Revelations of vulnerabilities usually are accompanied with proofs of
concept and, when available, analysis of the code in question. Today's
revelation of a bug in bitmap handling (!) in Internet Explorer 5.0 was
accompanied by a supposed (supposedly, because how could I know for
sure?) portion of Internet Explorer's source code.
 
Thus, from illegitimate means surely, begins the cultural assimilation
of Windows source code. Not by me, not by the vigilant, but by the
general programming population.
 
How far do those not wishing to be tainted with knowledge of illicit
code have to go to remain pure? Will BugTraq subscribers now be banned
from Open Source development?
 
This is disastrous and puts Microsoft in a strong position to challenge
everyone involved in every Microsoft-competing project, Open or Closed.
 
Worried,
 
Robert J Taylor

Comments (3 posted)

Please take down or alter this page

The following page contains a false claim, and several misleading ones:
 
    http://www.thescogroup.com/5reasons/
 
Point 5, "SCO UNIX® is Legally Unencumbered", is a false claim for two
reasons.
 
The first is that Novell actually owns significant portions of it, which
The SCO Group (TSG) are using only under license. Novell group is
currently in litigation with TSG on one hand, and supporting IBM who
are in litigation with TSG on the other.
 
The second is that a number of device drivers from SuSE Enterprise Linux
8 appear to have turned up in UnixWare recently.
 
Point 1, "SCO UNIX® is a Proven, Stable and Reliable Platform" and point
4, "SCO UNIX® is Secure" are misleading in that they tell lies of
omission. It would be less so if the page title were not "5 reasons to
choose UNIX instead of Linux".
 
Linux is proven, stable and reliable: in use in spacecraft, military
applications, testing of jet engines and so on ad infinitum around the
world.
 
One significant feature which contributes to this is that anyone can do
an audit for themselves to verify what has been said, whereas with
TSG's UNIX offerings, one either has to take TSG's word for it, or hope
to negotiate access to code which may or may not be exactly the same as
the code you'd be running day-to-day.
 
Linux is also secure, in fact it can be considerably more secure than
either UnixWare or OpenServer can ever dream. As well as minor security
advantages built into the base system, and options like GRSecurity,
there are significant security benefits to be had in SELinux which are
simply not available in any form on any TSG Unix product.
 
Since I'm speaking to the page anyway, I think it's worth mentioning
that the remaining two points are actually significant disadvantages.
 
"SCO UNIX® is backed by a single, experienced vendor" is slightly
misleading as well, since TSG is not the Santa Cruz Operation which has
accumulated all of the experience in question.
 
That aside, a single vendor is a major disadvantage for two major
reasons, the first being that you open yourself to control by that
vendor, and the second being that when IBM's lawyers have finished
turning TSG into a greasy spot on the corporate bitumen, where does one
turn for UnixWare support?
 
"SCO UNIX® has a Committed, Well-Defined Roadmap" implies that TSG have
their own ideas about where they're taking their Unix, whereas a
product without a rigid roadmap is much more open to control (as "our
Unix") and customisation by the purchasers.
 
In other words, an inflexible roadmap locks customers out of the
development cycle to some degree, which is likely to result in a
product less well suited to their needs.
 
Cheers; Leon
 
--
http://cyberknights.com.au/ Modern tools; traditional dedication
http://plug.linux.org.au/ Vice President, Perth Linux User Group
http://slpwa.asn.au/ Committee Member, Linux Professionals WA
http://linux.org.au/ Past Committee Member, Linux Australia

Comments (2 posted)