Category: Mozilla

After reading Blake’s entry about Foxfire, I did a little bit of Googling and found the following two articles from respected (no longer) publications:

Infoworld: Foxfire gets patches

eWeek: Mozilla is Dead; Long Live Mozilla, which contains the following gem:

Given the group’s resources, I think that was probably the right move. And, back in November, Baker made it clear that Foxfire and Thunderbird would be on the front burner, but sudden shifts like this one make me wonder about Mozilla’s long-term planning and management.

Can you say dyslexic? Personally, I think the name is fine. If there are people around who can’t remember a simple name, chances are that they won’t be able to figure out tabbed browsing either.

Computer World Hong Kong (CWHK) recently ran an article about alternatives to the Microsoft platform, focusing on Linux and Firefox.

The article mentions the browser wars and quotes the WebSideStory statistics that we’ve all read so many times. When discussing the adoption of other open source software, it points out that the Singapore Ministry of Defence (MinDef) has already installed OpenOffice on 5,000 desktop machines (20,000 by March 2006), running alongside Office 97. MinDef had this to say about it:

“With our limited budget, we are always exploring opportunities to maximize the value for every dollar spent…We also intend to experiment with Linux desktops, but there are no concrete plans to replace the Microsoft Windows OS on the desktops at this point in time.”

Linux vendors are thrilled at the prospect, and MandrakeSoft’s Francois Bancilhon believes that as soon as customers start using OpenOffice and Mozilla, a switch to Linux is a no-brainer. Microsoft naturally maintains that Windows plus Internet Explorer is more compatible [me: okay, I can give them that], more secure, has a lower TCO, and that Internet Explorer remains the choice [me: emphasis mine] of customers and businesses worldwide.

CWHK examines Linux adoption amongst Hong Kong companies, and talks to Yusuf Goolamabbas of Outblaze, who also happens to be an avid Firefox advocate:

“We started our business in 1998,” said Yusuf Goolamabbas, managing architect for Hong Kong-based outsource-messaging provider Outblaze. “And we’ve been using Linux since Day One.” Goolamabbas noted that at that time, Windows 98 wasn’t suitable for his firm’s needs.

At work, Goolamabbas said that his firm’s engineers use Linux exclusively, while the marketing department uses Windows machines to stay in step with the firm’s 35 million users.

But Goolamabbas uses Red Hat Linux on his desktop machine at home. “My five-year-old daughter uses it without any problems,” said the Outblaze IT architect. Goolamabbas remains wary of IE’s reputation for Swiss-cheese-security and bemoaned the productivity lost as users spend time “killing viruses, squashing worms and keeping out Trojan horses.” He also declared that the HKSAR government could do more to promote usage of open-source software among its Netizenry. “The Hong Kong government says, ‘oh, everyone uses IE, but it’s not the case.”

The article is very detailed and covers a lot more topics as well. It’s well worth a read for anyone who is interested in learning about both the challenges of adopting open source software in Asia and the extent of its deployment there.

I recently set up an OS X machine, installing 10.3 to start with (base install plus BSD subsystem), and then upgrading to 10.3.7 and installing the required security updates. Having a completely clean system, I decided to install Firefox. I tried to do the install from an end user perspective, seeing what kind of experience they could expect. I figured I was in a position to do this, since I know little about OS X. Here is that tale:

I fired up Safari (great browser, clean interface) and head over to GetFirefox.com to download Firefox 1.0. In true end user style, I decided to forgo reading any documentation whatsoever and just hit the large “Free Download” link.

A few minutes later, I had a Firefox 1.0.dmg.gz file on my desktop, which I double clicked on. I was greeted with the following dialog:

I chose the ‘Choose Application…’ option and tried to find something that could reasonably be expected to open .gz files, but I wasn’t able to find anything that matched that description.

Having now reached the point at which most end users give up, I decided to be a more savvy end user, and go and read up on some docs. So, off I go and I end up at the Firefox 1.0 release notes, which have install instructions:

Double click the Firefox 1.0.dmg.dz Disk Image to uncompress and mount it. Your browser may have already done this for you. Double click the Firefox Disk Image to open it in Finder and drag the Firefox application onto your hard disk. Do not double click the icon in the disk image! Be sure to drag the Firefox application out of the disk image and onto your Hard Disk before running it. Drag the icon to your Dock if you want it to appear there.

Wait a second, didn’t I just do this? Safari had no earthly idea what to do with the .dmg.gz, so it didn’t open it, and obviously MacOS X had no idea either. Dead end.

The Camino download page had some instructions that looked potentially useful:

Once you’ve downloaded the .dmg.gz file, drag it onto Stuffit Expander to decompress it. If the disk image doesn’t mount automatically, double-click on the .dmg file to mount it. If that fails, and the file does not look like a disk image file, do a “Show Info” on the file, and, in the “Open with application” category, choose Disk Copy. In Mac OS 10.2, you can use “Open with” from the context menu.

But, my install of OS X didn’t have Stuffit Expander, nor did it have the Disk Copy application. After a little further research, I found out that starting in OS X 10.3, the functionality of Disk Copy was integrated into Disk Utility, but I was unable to get Disk Utility to do anything useful with the .dmg.gz file. Another dead end. This is way more than the amount of work we can expect 99% of end users to do, and I still hadn’t got Firefox installed.

Now, I realise that OS X has a BSD base, and has command line utilities to un-gzip files. But really, do we expect an end user to have to do that? I hope not. This install routine assumes too much about users’ systems and the tools they have at their disposal. This is not good.

There is an easy solution, which is to make Firefox available as a .dmg file rather than a .dmg.gz. We should be doing this anyway, because the standard way of distributing Mac software is via .dmg files. Presenting the user with a familiar install process will result in a much better user experience, with more completed installs. It’s rather unreasonable to expect end users to have to troubleshoot getting the installer disk image mounted.

UPDATE: The relevant bugs are as follows:

• Bug 169602: [Camino] Use compressed disk image instead of gzip’d dmg for installer
• Bug 242845: Firefox disk image should use .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz
• Bug 268074: [Suite] Mozilla DMGs are redundantly compressed with gzip
• Bug 276571: Thunderbird disk image should use .dmg internal zlib-compression, not .dmg.gz

UPDATE 2: Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla are all now distributed in compressed DMG format!

UPDATE 3 (11 May 2005): Camino nightlies are now distributed in compressed DMG format! Also, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) no longer ships with Stuffit Expander installed by default, thus making this change even more important.

In a monthly web standards newsgram, HP recommends testing webapps in Firefox. They note that after IE6, Mozilla based browsers are the second most popular UAs that hit HP.com. That’s very interesting, since that means we must be beating out even older revisions of IE.

They put it pretty well: “Make sure your Web Section is as smooth and polished in Firefox as it is in IE. Don’t let your customers find your bugs first!”

It’s great to see this kind of enterprise adoption catching on.

The NYT Firefox ad has gone live. I’m not going to cover it in great detail, since that’s been done already by plenty of others. Instead, I offer you a sample from my Inbox:

Woo!

My name is in the New York Times ad as one of the Mozilla Firefox donators. Ali’s name is listed also.
Here’s the sample ad URL:
http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf

Thanks Ali for spreading the word. I’m going to buy the poster for this thing!

When the NYT ad was still accepting signups, I posted a note about it to an email list consisting of quite a few of my friends from high school, and the above email was seen today on the same list.

As it turns out, Firefox is back in the NYT again and getting more attention, this time in an article by Randall Stross. Some choice quotes from there are reproduced below:

Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla’s Firefox must prove it can smoothly move from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed “a bit of a free ride.” If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company’s browser free on every Windows PC, I’d be more careful about using the phrase “free ride.”

[snip]

Mr. Schare of Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer. By the same reasoning, the security problems created by a car’s broken door lock could be solved by buying an entirely new automobile. The analogy comes straight from Mr. Schare. “It’s like buying a car,” he said. “If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model.”

In this case, the very latest model is not an ’01 Internet Explorer, but an ’04 Firefox.

Looks like Mr. Schare has a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth. 🙂