said by Matt :

said by SUMware :

If you are seeing abnormally slow start up times when you first start Firefox delete the temporary internet files in I.E.

said by Mozilla :

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Windows only - If you are seeing abnormally slow start up times when you first start Firefox delete the temporary internet files in I.E.

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said by Matt :

I yearn for the days when MS went at it alone and developed their own standards.

While Firefox is a great browser (and it's my primary, I detest IE7 and IE8) it hasn't brought anything new to the table. Yay, we have an alternative to IE, yay it has neat plugins, but other than that, nada. It hasn't changed the web landscape one iota and I would argue has slowed progress down.

The new 3.5 feature that seamlessly integrates video and audio is more akin to what I'm referring to, but again they are trying to reinvent the wheel. We have other things that do that already like Flash that are in widespread use, yet they waste time reinventing it with Ogg Vorbis and Theora support. Really? Ogg Vorbis guys? Theora? I actually had to Google that last one as I've never even heard of it. Why not one of the myriad of ubiquitous open codecs out there? They picked two of the most obscure formats out there, almost as if on purpose.

quote:

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Among squabbles and disagreements, specific codec requirements for the and tags may be removed from the proposed HTML 5 standard. Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) made his concerns and decisions known saying that without a general consensus among browser makers he could not make any codecs mandatory in the standard, for now.

Most browser makers and experts would prefer using the open-source, royalty-free Ogg Vorbis codec for audio and Ogg Theora for video. These are currently supported by Mozilla in Firefox 3.5, Opera 10 and the latest Google Chrome builds.

With none of the browser makers willing to change their views there will be no codec requirements in HTML 5 for now.

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said by Matt :

I can understand that they want to focus on making the BROWSER better, but they aren't doing anything to make the WEB better. Deride Microsoft all you want, but they have done more to advance the state of the web than (arguably) anyone else to date.

Open Source too often has to compromise quality and features to please the community of developers or to hold to some absurd sense of "openness," which results in things like Ogg Vorbis support when absolutely no one uses Ogg Vorbis.

said by Ryan Paul :

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The patent licensing requirements mean that H.264 codecs can't be freely redistributed, making the format a non-starter for Mozilla and most other open source browser vendors.

Microsoft, which has no plans to implement the HTML 5 video element at all, is also still an impediment to bringing open Internet video to the masses.

It's unfortunate that this debate is threatening to derail the adoption of standards-based Internet video solutions. The dominant video solution today is Flash, a proprietary technology that is controlled by a single vendor and doesn't perform well on Linux or Mac OS X. There is a clear need for an open alternative, but the codec controversy could make it difficult.

My inner pessimist suspects that Microsoft will finally get around to implementing HTML 5 video at the same time that the H.264 patents expire, in roughly 2025.

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said by Matt :

You may despise the way Microsoft gained their initial market share, but they did do things that were good with it that Linux is still unable to achieve like provide a develop once and run on any machine platform. I can still run code on Windows 7 that was release in 1998. No fussing with RPM, APT, source code, etc. Microsoft built a browser that was BETTER and easier to use than Netscape. Sure if was full of security holes, but even Firefox borrowed from ActiveX with their XPI installation packages. The only difference is Microsoft made the mistake of tying IE into the operating system.

Microsoft made the desktop computer ubiquitous, affordable, and standards-based. Sure you can argue that they weren't "open" standards, but when you control 90%+ of the market, I'd argue that if you develop a standard, that *IS* the standard.

said by Matt :

You mean yesterday's: »Critical: 0day Microsoft DirectShow Vulnerability exploited.

quote:

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Microsoft yesterday confirmed that hackers are exploiting an unpatched bug in DirectX. The 'browse and get owned' attack on Internet Explorer (IE) is the second such exploit in six weeks.

Microsoft's security team issued an advisory late yesterday acknowledging reports of in-the-wild attacks and providing more information about who is vulnerable.

Earlier today, security researchers at a pair of Danish firms had announced that thousands of legitimate websites hacked over the weekend were conducting drive-by attacks on IE users with an exploit of a critical unpatched vulnerability in Windows' DirectShow, part of DirectX.

"A browse-and-get-owned attack vector exists," Chengyun Chu, of the Microsoft Security Response Center's engineering team, said in a blog post.

"A user needs to be lured to navigate to a malicious website or a compromised legitimate website to be affected ... [but] no further user interaction is needed."

Although Microsoft promised it would patch the bug, a company spokesman declined to say whether that patch would be ready by July 14, the next regularly-scheduled security update release day.

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