Closer To The Ideal

What the hell? I thought restricting XMLHttpRequest to the current domain was one of the central security features Javascript enforced? Of course, I’ve found it a pain to always use the script tag hack to get info from other domains. So I’m surprised to see this in Gecko/
FireFox:

XMLHttpRequest
Cross Domain XMLHttpRequest
Allows XMLHttpRequest to other domains

Tragic. There is a suite of tests that measures how much each web browser complies with web standards. IE 9, to be released next year, still measures lower than even FireFox 2.0, which was released back in 2006.

FireFox can crash any machine. Not “crash” in the sense of “blue screen of death” but crash as in “uses up all memory so the machine becomes unresponsive”. This is a reliable fact of using FireFox, regardless of whether you are on Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP, or Mac OS X (I can’t speak of Camino, as I don’t use it).

Sometimes I say this to other programmers and they respond “It’s not FireFox that is the problem, it is the plugins that you use – it is FireBug and Session Manager and all the others.” Of course, any programmer who reveals this attitude needs to be re-educated. If you offer a plugin system that is unable to manage the plugins, then maybe you should not offer that plugin system? It suggests a (possibly frightening?) willingness to shirk responsibility if a programmer defends a plugin system that can crash a computer.

I wonder what Brendan Eich is thinking?

One suggestion for others: if you use FireFox, every time a new version of FireFox comes out, FireFox will ask you if you want to upgrade. I used to always say “yes”. Now I realize, if your computer is more than a year old, you should say “no”. Each version of FireFox tends to be heavier and slower than the previous version. My Ubuntu machine is from 2006, and that is part of the reason why FireFox is so slow on it.

On my Windows machine, I just switched over to Google Chrome as my new default browser. I’m giving up on FireFox. On my Ubuntu machine, I am stuck with FireFox for now. I’m not aware of any other serious browsers for Linux.

For email, I would love to give up on Thunderbird, if I could find a substitute. I run Thunderbird on my main desktop machine which runs Ubuntu. Thunderbird has had a persistent bug that has survived several upgrades (of both Thunderbird and Ubuntu). The bug is with the address auto-completion. If I type an address fast, hit “Enter” to accept and start typing again fast, Thunderbird crashes. This can lose a lot of work for me (Where “work” might simply mean “Opened email and left them open because I found some that were important and so answering them will take some time.”). Apparently there is no equivalent of SessionManager for Thunderbird, no way of remembering which emails were open, waiting for a response, when Thunderbird crashes. No, instead, after Thunderbird crashes, I need to re-start it, go back 3 days, and then read through all my email again, looking for the important ones.

At work we had a deadline today, and I worked through the weekend to meet it. I kept getting feedback from various people testing the site. Some of the email I got was thoughtful, and offered intelligent suggestions about what we should do next. By this morning, I had about 20 emails open, waiting for me to have the time and focus to write a reply. Then Thunderbird crashed and they all vanished. I yelled so loud my throat was sore. Now I have to go back to Friday and read through all the email again, to find the ones that I wanted to respond to.

If I could find something better than Thunderbird, that runs on Linux, I’d switch immediately.

I find this hard to believe, but W3 Schools statistics suggest that, as of January 2009, FireFox is in wider user than all versions of Internet Explorer. For the month of January, they show Internet Explorer as now having only 44.8% market share, whereas FireFox is now up to 45.5%, a gain of 1.1 percentage points over the previous month.

If these statistics are true, or even within 5% of being true, then we are back to a world last seen in 1996, when no one web browser dominated the scene.

I am confused why Microsoft is allowing this to happen. They still have the old advantages – dominance of the desktop and therefore an easy way of distributing their web browser. Why are they not doing more to push IE?

Brendan Eich invented Javascript back in 1994, when he was working at Netscape. He’s since been busy with Mozilla. He is on the board, and he is a leading voice arguing that Thunderbird must be cut off from the rest of the Mozilla organization:

Turning this into a “I doubt MoCo ‘cares’ for other XUL apps than Firefox” is both:

1. irresponsible — sayrer’s right, we have to favor Firefox, “we” being the whole community, but especially MoCo (as distinct from MoFo); and

2. categorically confused — emotional when the topic here is technical: how to do Mozilla 2 so that all XUL apps have a better future, without serializing with 1.9 or taking on impossible workload in keeping to the current tree rules every day we develop Mozilla 2 in the new repo.
…
Money is not the issue. Hiring is one issue. Management bandwidth is another. Build infrastructure is yet another. Organization focus is yet another, and it’s a vague term, but obvious to anyone who has worked at a startup that grew into a big company. I could write about it at length and define it concretely, but I’m out of time here.
…
I’m focusing on Mozilla 2. That’s necessary and overriding. Thunderbird will have to fly free. If it does not reach a promised land, even with a good plan and some investment, I will be sad. But I will not jeopardize Firefox and the platform, which depend on Mozilla 2, by spending more time on it than my MF board duties require.

So again, apart from my board duties you won’t hear from me on this thread. And I’m not going to speak for the Mozilla Foundation board, or preempt them in any way. All the above is my opinion, which I’ve shared before. I’ve given my reasoning. I hope it’s both sound and valid, and that it can overcome raw feelings and help others, so that we can all improve the situation.