Tag: Mozilla

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The waiting is over!

Most of the changes since 1.0 have been under the hood. The most noticeable are probably the vastly-improved update system, rearrangeable tabs, a one-button function to clear all private data, and a new preferences setup. There are also improvements to Mac OS X integration (though not as much as one might have hoped for), performance, pop-up blocking, etc. From a web developer’s POV, there’s a lot of neat stuff including partial SVG support and the new <canvas> element from WHATWG (and of course improved HTML/CSS/JavaScript support).

If you’ve already installed Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 3, this is exactly the same program. Nothing’s been changed except the name on the installer.

On the annoying side, they’ve temporarily closed Spread Firefox to prep for their video marketing campaign. I hate it when people close down a site to prep for a relaunch. It’s not like a building, where you have to keep people away so you can remodel. You can do all the remodeling on a copy, and just drop it into place when it’s done.

Then there’s the drag-n-drop/save-as bug in Linux, where the first time you try to rearrange tabs or bring something up with a file picker, it decides the GTK theme has changed and hangs while it redraws everything. They’ve fixed it for the long-term, but the fix just went in yesterday, so it’s not in the 1.5 release. I’d guess the Linux distros will apply the patch when they build their own packages, and with luck the fix will show up in 1.5.1.

And on a completely unrelated note, this is the 1,000th post on this site. *whew*!

Upgrade to Firefox 1.5!

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Since upgrading to Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 beta 2, I’ve seen a number of messages slapped with a warning label that “Thunderbird thinks this message might be an email scam.” It appears at the top of the message, in the same style as the junk mail notice bar or the warning that remote images have been blocked, and there’s a button to mark the message as “Not a Scam.”

There’s only one problem. Since SpamAssassin and ClamAV do such a good job of catching the phishing scams before they reach my inbox, Thunderbird has yet to catch any actual phish. But there’ve been a lot of false positives. It’s hit LiveJournal reply notices, newsletters from IEEE and Golden Key, a Spam Karma notice from my own blog, and I’ve seen it on both outbid notices and updates to saved searches from eBay.

I found myself wondering just how Thunderbird’s phishing detection decides that a message is suspicious—and how to teach it that the next LJ notice isn’t a scam.

The Thunderbird support website doesn’t seem to have been updated yet. Most of the articles I’ve found only talk about TB adding the feature, not how it works. The best information I found was this Mozillazine forum thread, which included a link to the actual code that makes the decision, in phishingDetector.js. Thunderbird looks at the following:

  • Links that only use an IP address, including dotted decimal, octal, hex, dword, or some mixed encoding.
  • Links that claim to go to one site, but actually go to another. (Phishers do this to fool you into going to their site. Legit mailing lists sometimes do this with redirectors for tracking purposes.)
  • Forms embedded in the email. (This explains the LiveJournal notices.)

It also appears to trap text URLs containing HTML-escaped characters, which explains the Spam Karma reports. In this case the report includes a spammer’s link with &#8203; in the hostname. The message is plain text, so Thunderbird leaves the entity as-is when displaying it…but decodes it when it creates the link. Result: a link where the text and URL don’t match.

The easiest way to prevent it from freaking out over the next message? Add the sender to your address book. I’m not sure that’s a great idea, since a phisher could guess which addresses you have saved and spoof them, but it’s at least simple. I guess I’ll find out whether it works the next time I get a reply notice from LJ. Update: Adding the sender to your address book doesn’t seem to have any effect.

Update 2 (July 12, 2006): The comment thread’s gotten long enough that I can see people might miss this, so here’s how to disable it:

  1. Open Options or Preferences (this will be under the Tools menu on Windows, Thunderbird on Mac, or Edit on Linux).
  2. Click on Privacy (there should be a big padlock icon).
  3. Click on the E-mail Scams tab.
  4. Disable the “Check mail messages for email scams” option and click on Close.

That’s it.

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The Mozilla Corporation has counted 100 Million downloads of Firefox!

Firefox: 100 Million Downloads!

Even if the numbers don’t correspond exactly to users, they show that despite concerns of slowing interest is still high. 100,000,000 downloads in the first year is an incredible number!

Congratulations to Mozilla, to Spread Firefox, and to everyone who has contributed to building or promoting Firefox!

(Image and link courtesy of Spread Firefox.)

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Don’t you just love it when a publication gets things wrong referring back to their own articles?

On Wednesday, Information Week published a TechWeb article called Firefox Momentum Slows. Citing various sources, they noted that Firefox’s growth is much slower now than it was a year ago. And yes, that’s likely due to using up the early adopters and the anything-but-Microsoft crowd. But at the end of the article, it adds this odd postscript:

WebSideStory isn’t the first Internet measurement vendor to highlight Firefox’s slow down. In fact, rival NetApplications’ August numbers showed a small decline in the Mozilla browser’s share.

There are two problems. First, those numbers aren’t for August, they’re for July. That’s obvious from the first line of the article. Secondly, Information Week itself published an article three weeks ago about NetApplications’ actual August stats: Firefox Regains Market Share Against Internet Explorer. So not only did they cite the wrong month, but the following month’s data—which they had access to—contradicts their conclusion!

Now, the “slowing” article and the July stats article come from TechWeb, and the August stats article comes from InternetWeek. But TechWeb, InformationWeek, and InternetWeek are all different faces of the “TechWeb Business Technology Network” (as shown in the sites’ mastheads)—and the two stats articles were written by the same reporter! Bad enough that they can’t properly research other people’s articles, but they can’t even research their own?

I’ve written a letter to the editor, but based on my past experience, I don’t expect a correction. Just, at best, a published letter several months later with no link from the original article.

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A tale of the Browser Wars on the high seas.

Harken, lads, and listen to my tale. It is the tale of the FyreFawkes, a vessel that turned the tide in the never-ending battle for the high seas.

In this day, shipping lanes criss-cross the ocean like a Web, and in years past, that web was commanded by the Fleet of the Navigators. Wherever ye wanted to go, a Navigator ship was there to take you. But the wealthy My Crows’ Loft Company controlled the ports, and knew that if they did not take command of the high seas, someone might use the Navigator Fleet to build their own harbors, outside My Crows’ Loft’s sphere of influence.

So My Crows’ Loft built their own fleet, a fleet of Explorer craft, and after a great trade war, their fleet dominated the ocean. The Navigators’ fleet shrank, nearly forgotten.

But My Crows’ Loft grew complacent in their victory, and the Explorer fleet aged. Worse, the vessels had weak spots and leaks that pirates and brigands of all sorts knew how to attack. What was once a pleasant voyage across the sea became a journey fraught with danger, with spies, phishermen, and great wyrms lying in wait for the unsuspecting voyager. Continue reading →