Tradeoffs for Mozilla's Goals
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| flufferbeer Aug 07, 2006 5:11 PM EDT |
Let's see: Aren't there some serious tradeoffs for Mozilla's, as this article does mention? OT1H, FF needs to quash its ever-present bugs and become even more stable. Witness the quote "Firefox itself, which is now thought to have between 13 and 16 percent of the global browser market share, has recently been the subject of malware attacks." Seems that its increasing popularity is making it a better and better target for crackers, and better attention has gotta be spent discovering&fixing those bugs! (continuously being worked on in FF1.5x even now). Same applies to the security of all F/OSS software, even GNU/Linux. OTOH, James Governor wants to push out FF more to the enterprise market. "One of the things I'd like to see us do here at Spread Firefox is to transition away from counting download clicks, and build tools that let us celebrate our very real and swiftly growing user base." "Build tools" means that more new features must be added. Possibly good for end-users, unless or until the next stable FF 2.x becomes another work of featuritis/bloat. Bad press with the "leaks in the armor" could be what Caitlyn Martin's LX piece addresses. IMHO on this, Mozilla developers are not out to throw away the Linux FF user, but are rather predominantly focusing (or are encouraged to focus) upon new tools for FF 2.x's surpassing IE7. No, of course Mozilla's two above goals are being dealt with simultaneously. Just a question of the extent to which resources are being traded off. |
| dinotrac Aug 07, 2006 6:26 PM EDT |
>Just a question of the extent to which resources are being traded off. I would hope that the design allows a nearly automatic sync-up of the two platforms...but... I can understand (if not like) the focus on Windows users. There's a whole lot more of them out there, and network effects really do matter. In the short-term, Windows users will provide market and mind share. No matter how loyal Linux users are (and we're not very -- witness all the Mozilla v Opera v. Konqueror talk, and we won't even get into the assorted other niche browsers ) there just aren't all that many of us out there. Getting 15% of the browsers isn't going to happen on the back of Linux any time soon. |
| flufferbeer Aug 07, 2006 7:11 PM EDT |
Minor point to add on the first Mozilla goal of better security and stability. Brief defn: For those who do not know (such as this writer awhile ago), "the basic idea [of fuzz testing] is to attach the inputs of a program to a source of random data ("fuzz"). If the program fails (for example, by crashing, or by failing built-in code assertions), then there are defects to correct" Quoted area from the Wikipedia on Fuzz tesing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing Seems to me that both FF 1.5x and other major advancing OSS apps (e.g., OOo) could really use much more Fuzz testing before their next stable versions get rolled out. Apparently, this is an ongoing issue even at the current Black Hat Briefings, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/04/hackers_bypass_os/ The external links on the bottom of this 'Fuzz testing' Wikipedia address several OSS categories, and seem to me to be well worth looking into for areas besides just browser vulnerabilities. |
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