Just reading Bill Thompson's recent posting for the Radio show 'Go Digital'. He quotes the company Secunia - who said:
The Firefox open source browser is full of bugs, some of which are rather serious...
In fact the little red button that tells you a "critical" update is available appears almost weekly, sending users off to the website to get the new version and fix yet another bug or security hole.
Which I have a problem with. Yes, Firefox has bugs (doesn't everything). Yes, the update process leaves a lot to be desired. But No - the little red button has only appeared on my machine (Mac OS X) a couple of times with reference to an update to the actual Firefox engine... excluding any updates to extensions.
I've got a feeling, Bill, that this is somewhat unbalanced for Secunia to say this (and I understand that Bill was trying to be ironic) - lets face it, Microsoft offers updates to the Windows kernel/Outlook Express/Office (which usually has a knock on effect to IE) several times a month.
I also think that the audience for Firefox usually are experienced enough not to click on dodgy phising schemes, or such like. So once more people start using Firefox, no doubt more problems will appear. Also - let's not forget that Firefox is built on Mozilla... and Mozilla came from Netscape... and many ex-Netscape employees work on the codebase - so, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Firefox's pedigree is a good one considering that Netscape invented many of the underlying services that even IE leverages.
In terms of the update procedure - yeah, it would be good to provide some sort of patching software to update code incrementally (a la Microsoft's installer service that runs under the Update service). But then it would have to work across all the platforms that Firefox works on - not exactly easy perhaps. Right now, I can live with it - that's why you have a profile directory that is different. Currently when a new Firefox comes out - all I do on my Mac is open the image and drop the new Firefox file on top of my old one. Simple as that. Ah... no DLL hell!
More about Bill's article on his blog.
[Edit: minor rewording based on comments - 2005-04-25 20:49 GMT]
2 comments:
Hey there - you didn't read the rest of the article, I fear, where I go on to point out that the bugs aren't a problem in an open source environment - the intro was supposed to be IRONIC :-)
But on my WinXP machine I've been seeing the red button rather a lot... my own fault for using Micro$oft I suppose, but then it helps me understand what the people are going through.
Certainly, I agree with most of the rest of your article. (I liked the bit about applying the Open Source methodologies to other things - remember the 'Open Source Car'?) ;-)
I was more irritated with Secunia's comments. However, I have made one slight change to the wording - just to clarify this.
Bill, you say that you are 'seeing the red button rather a lot' - could you clarify whether this is because a third-party extension to Firefox is triggering it rather than the actual underlying Firefox application requiring an update? On our WinXP test platforms we have only updated 3 times since original install of Firefox 1.0. Mozilla Foundation has only released 3 updates - so since the original release of v1.0 (and assuming you installed it on the day of release, and you have updated every time an update has become available) then it isn't possible for the little red button to appear, according to Secunia, 'almost weekly'. (Again - not a dig at Bill, but rather a dig at Secunia.)
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