I love the Links text web browser and have been using it on FreeBSD, Linux and OS X shells, terminals and whatnot for years but I’ve never once felt the need to customise any builds because it Just Works® so gosh darn well. Checking out the variants (-v) for the Links port in MacPorts on a whim I noticed something interesting:
links has the variants: universal: Build for multiple architectures gcs: Grilled cheese sandwich headers x11: Include X11 interface
@Oliyoung on Twitter shared a link from the IE team’s blog about what they’re focusing on for IE9.
Whenever Mozilla has released an update for the Firefox 3.0 series recently they’ve advised us on the Welcome screen and in popups that we should consider moving up to the Firefox 3.5 series, but as far as I know the welcome screen for their latest Firefox 3.0.14 update is the first where they imply sticking with the 3.0 series may be a security risk.
Decided to try Firefox 3.5.2 again now that I formatted and installed Snow Leopard fresh on my machine. Took even less time to crash this time. Back to 3.0.13 again.
The problem is Firefox is often shown as the poster child for the free and open source software movement and an alternative to unstable, slow and expensive software with vendor lockin. They’re not doing the cause much good with these repeated problems.
It’s affecting lots and lots of people on Windows, Mac and *nix, but fortunately it’s not affecting everybody who uses it.
Moving back from Firefox 3.5.x to 3.0.13 was probably one of the smartest things I’ve done in a while, but that’s not to say 3.0.13 is perfect either. For some reason whenever my master password is required at the moment the above dialog box will pop up followed by the actual authentication dialog box. Not quite sure what it is, when I typed "grilled cheese sandwich" or "Senjougahara is insane" nothing happened, so I’m assuming this means its a dummy of some description.
Microsoft were always fabled for having the most cryptic error messages, but what’s more cryptic than a dialog box with nothing whatsoever? Elwood Blues would probably dig it.
After posting a few weeks ago about how I’d downgraded back from the Firefox 3.5.x series to Firefox 3.0.13 because of serious stability problems I’ve been overwhelmed by the feedback I’ve got from people here on the blog and through Twitter and email saying they’ve had the same problems. Not since I started using Phoenix 0.2 when I was in high school have I ever had to downgrade Mozilla software, it really is that bad.
The problem is Mozilla has (possibly intentionally) made it difficult to locate the downloads for the 3.0.x series which is still being maintained and supported. I admit when I gave up and decided to downgrade I used a copy of 3.0.6 I still had on an external drive then used its internal software update feature to bring me up to 3.0.13.
Fortunately since then I found my ISP here in Adelaide has a globally accessible mirror for Firefox 3.0.13 which you can find here:
http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/mozilla/firefox/releases/3.0.13/
I think it’s safe to say the 3.5.x series is still beta quality software and should be treated as such, meaning when I advise people about what software they should use on production machines I’ll be strongly suggesting they use 3.0.x.
Another great reason for using NoScript in Firefox if you didn’t think it was useful before is that it blocks embedded media such as Flash unless you specifically choose to unblock it on individual pages (which for me is almost never!). With HTML5 elements like <video> and <audio> now being supported in Firefox 3.5 I was worried I’d be losing this control and that there would be an unguarded vector for attack… not to mention being annoyed and irritated by pages that start playing jingles and animated advertisements!
Suppose Firefox employed an external library to play media which turned out to be vulnerable; it’s happened in the past. Any malicious hacker could embed a specially crafted video or audio file into a page and your browser would start playing it automatically when you visited the page. By the time you realised what was going on, it’d be too late.
Well it’s time to breath easier again (that sounded like an introduction to a cheap infomercial). I just noticed this evening after updating to version 1.9.8.1 that NoScript now blocks HTML5 media elements on pages that aren’t on your NoScript whitelist just like JavaScript, Flash and the like which is fantastic news. I understand selectively enabling JavaScript may be a bit troublesome for some people to cope with, but HTML5 media filtering should be a mandatory part of Firefox in my opinion.
In any event, it’s one less thing to make me nervous and to worry about, which for someone always buzzing with social anxiety and caffeine is a good thing :).
That mouth on their site has always scared the crap of me!
As I’ve said here in the past, the primary reason why I use Firefox isn’t for the superior browsing experience any more but rather for the security and privacy extensions, though sometimes they do break some sites.
In the case of the Australian Central Credit Union online banking site (try saying that three times in a row really fast!), simply enabling cookies and scripting with PermitCookies and NoScript on the accu.com.au address still generates "you need to enable cookies in your browser" errors, and if you get past them you then can’t enter in your unique personal icons combination because they don’t appear!
As with some other sites that uses frames, the problem is the ACCU frame is hosted on their primary domain, but one of the pages in the frame references an external site which means your whitelists don’t include it.
The solution:
I’ve been told by more than a few people on Twitter that I’m paranoid by going to these lengths to block cookies and scripting, but to be blunt we are talking about dealing with bank accounts online and I’d rather be safe[er] than sorry. And besides, once you’ve set it up once, you’re good to go each time you visit. For me, the minor initial inconvenience is offset by the security and privacy of only having cookies and scripting I explicitly authorise running on my machine.
Now if you’d excuse me, my tin foil hat fell off and I ran over it with my computer chair. Might need to make a new one.
Despite being released during the last ice age, Internet Explorer 6 is still choking innovation and standards on the web, perhaps just as Microsoft intended. We need to get Internet Explorer 6 users off the net and onto newer browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or if they’re okay with companies calling home then Chrome might also be feasible. Heck even Internet Explorer 8 or Windows Internet Explorer 8 or Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Home Premium Online Edition 2009 would be a start.
Fortunately there is a way to encourage users on corporate computers who aren’t allowed to install or modify the software on their machine and inexperienced users who don’t know how to install or modify software in the first place to move over to a different browser, and it’s so breathtakingly obvious I’m kicking my left shin with my left foot for not coming up with it myself.
By going to Twibbon you can add an Internet Explorer 6 must die badge on your Twitter profile and let the entire world see it! I suspect once such a movement reaches critical mass even the companies still on Windows 2000 will start to take notice and upgrade.
Okay I admit it, I was being sarcastic (no, really?) but the truth is we do need to get Internet Explorer 6 off the net. Even if only one person changes their browser in response to seeing my Toblerone nose that happens to have an indecipherable graphic that I assume is a tiny Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Home Premium Online Edition 2009 icon with a strike through it, then I know it was worth it.
As far as Firefox releases go, I’ve been so unimpressed with the latest 3.5.1 version I’ve done what I’ve never done before and reverted to an earlier version. For me it’s been more agitating than the memory leak issue from back in the 2.x days because instead of just steadily getting slower this release is close to being unusable.
First of all, it crashes. A lot. On a good afternoon it will crash around 5-10 times an hour. It can restore all my tabs after a crash without any problems other than the mild irriration of re-entering in my login credentials for each page that were closed, but it’s still obviously a pain. The second issue is tabs will sometimes ignore mouse input, meaning I have to use keyboard shortcuts to reach certain tabs.
I’m not sure whether it’s something to do with my extensions, my Core Duo MacBook Pro platform or a combination of the two, but I’ve moved back to the 3.0 series with 3.0.12 and everything has been working beautifully since.
I rely on Firefox because of all my privacy and security extensions that no other browser even comes close to matching (perhaps that will change), but ironically such plugins might also be it’s archilies heel when it comes to reliable performance. Bummer.
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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