Fortunately Firefox

I have been running Firefox 2 since the hour it came out.

I am really impressed.

The upgrade was smooth and easy. I figured I would all but have to start over from scratch - reload all my bookmarks, reinstall all my extensions, re-enter all my usernames/passwords, and set up all my cookies again.

I was wrong.

All I had to do was replace the Firefox.app file I had in my Mac /Applications folder with the new one, and that was it.

After I launched the new version (from /Applications) it walked me through the upgrade process. I barely had to do anything; just a couple mouse clicks.

It runs like lightening. People are not expressing how fast it is.

Safari is fast on the Mac.

Firefox seems just as fast as Safari on the Mac.

This time around, the conversion of extensions seems to have been done virtually all in advance. Going from Firefox 1.0 to 1.5, I waited days, weeks, and in one case months for the authors to upgrade their extensions. This time extensions being Firefox 2 ready when Firefox 2 was ready was the rule, not the exception.

Even the developer tools I run all the time were ready to use.

Some websites, like TV.com, work way better with Firefox 2 than they did with Firefox 1.5. Particularly, the WYSIWYG editor for posting blog entries and forum posts.

Upgrading to Firefox 2 was a really great experience.

Firefox has a couple of edges on IE, according to an article at the InformationWeek website.

IE7 Vs. Firefox 2.0: InformationWeek article:

Working in Firefox's favor are more than 1,800 free extensions that can be downloaded to customize the browser, including ad blockers, development and testing tools, and different types of tab management.

The article also points out that the RSS display in IE is more friendly than RSS display in Firefox 1.5, something I would have to agree with.

However, in about 7 months (May 2007) Firefox 3 will come out and remedy that.

Eleven months after that, it says, Microsoft will release another new version of Internet Explorer.

Guess the race is back on.

Firefox 2.0 RC2 (release candidate 2) is already out. Looks like they really will get a release out by Halloween.

Read the Mozilla Firefox 2 RC 2 Release Notes for details.

I wonder what could cause people to falsely claim that there were vulnerabilities in Firefox, when in fact they were not there and they just made them up.

But that is apparently what happened according to article titled Mozilla duped by hackers humorous demo.

Man.

I wonder if money changed hands that made these amateur comedians professionals. Interesting question, eh?

First of all, there was the use of astroturfing back in the 1990s, when a computer company convicted of monopolistic trust activities, a pattern of them in fact - paid a marketing company to pen letters to federal politicians saying they did not care about the problems, and forge names of fictitious (well, one hopes they were fictitious) people to them.

Around that time it came out that the same company paid computer industry journalists to write articles aimed at time to get the corporation off the hook in terms of sentencing. Without the journalists were paid to write that, of course.

Then, there was the claim a few months ago that there was a vulnerability in Apple's wireless networking, that was retracted by the company whose employees made the claim.

Now, we find out that the Firefox flaw frenzy over the weekend was a big put on. In a familiar pattern, these individuals were motivated to make these claims to the benefit of one company and the detriment of others at a strategic time for the company who benefits from their actions.

And is this a new pattern - or a continuation of an old one?