User:Avillia/Fire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mozilla Firefox
(category)
Contents
Origins and Lineage
This box: view • talk • edit

Alongside its widespread use and popularity, criticisms of Mozilla Firefox have arisen. Some of these allegations about Mozilla Firefox address:

  • security, secure distribution, and a consolidated authoritative review for numerous new extensions.
  • a perceived lack of some built-in ("out-of-the-box") features - the Firefox developers counter this by saying that they want to supply a browser with all the essential features, and allow the user to add extra features to their liking rather than supplying a 'bloated' browser with every feature one could think of by default
  • the implementation of non-standard web technologies.
  • functioning differently from other browsers, and failing to render pages not written with W3C standards in mind in the manner one might expect.

Contents

[edit] General criticisms

The Firefox developers have not implemented some requested features. For example, they have repeatedly turned down requests for the ability to resize the search bar through the user interface, or to show alt text as a tooltip — a behavior generally regarded as non-standard.

Unlike some competitors, Firefox does not natively support searching in a textarea on a page. Users must install an extension to obtain this functionality.

[edit] Political criticisms

Free software activists argue that the Mozilla Foundation limits the user's freedom with the software by allowing proprietary versions, by licensing under the terms of the Mozilla Public License and by using trademark restrictions.

[edit] Technical criticism

[edit] Performance

Most likely due to Firefox's use of the cross-platform Mozilla XUL emulated user-interface widget set, on low-end hardware the Firefox user interface performs noticeably slower and feels "sluggish" when compared to an application using the native user interface APIs of a given platform. For example: clicking on the Tools menu and opening the Options.. dialog on the Firefox release for Windows results in a distinct delay between the time the user presses the mouse button and the time the dialog displays. Once in the Tools dialog, performance becomes worse when clicking from tab to tab. In a dialog coded with a native UI, the tabs would react instantly at the mouse depress event. XUL may also cause memory leaks due to the difficulty of programming for JavaScript closures.

[edit] Parental Controls

Out-of-the-box Firefox does not include any "parental controls" or web filters.

[edit] Shared libraries

On Unix-like systems, a number of people have pointed out that Firefox doesn't actually share its shared libraries and that other applications built on the same base as Firefox (such as Thunderbird) require the rebuilding of these same libraries, producing a larger disk footprint overall.[citation needed] This approach also affects memory consumption, since Thunderbird and Firefox load separate sets of the same shared libraries.

[edit] Criticisms from Internet Explorer users

When running under Windows, Firefox can take longer to launch than Internet Explorer when not using the unofficial Firefox Preloader. However, Internet Explorer's close ties to the Windows operating system give it the advantage of starting quickly after launching — Internet Explorer shares much of its code with Windows Explorer, which is loaded into memory on system startup. Installing a large number of Firefox extensions can also lengthen starting time .

[edit] Alleged non-compliance with standards

Unlike Internet Explorer, which contains custom code specific to Microsoft, Firefox's code aims to comply with web standards. Many websites exhibit problems caused by the website creator's failure to comply with web standards; sometimes implementers test such sites only with Internet Explorer and so they fail in other browsers such as Firefox. Common problems of this sort include:

  • misconfigured servers sending incorrect MIME types (so that, for instance, HTML documents presented as plain-text, render as plain text in accordance with the standards)
  • invalid syntax in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
  • use of a nonstandard Document Object Model (DOM) for scripting.

While Firefox supports quite a bit of "bad code", it exhibits less tolerance in this respect than Internet Explorer. To fully emulate Internet Explorer's behavior would require breaking some standards.

In some cases, sites actually refuse to operate correctly in Firefox due to user-agent sniffing (based on how the browsers identify themselves to the server) intended to reject "incompatible" browsers.

Note however that Firefox has incomplete support of the W3C standard, and even in the latest versions has several bugs, though more complete and less buggy than Internet Explorer. However, no browser in existence can claim to provide a complete and bug-free implementation of the moving target of W3C standards. For example, with the upgrade from Firefox version 1.0 to version 1.5, many sites (including Amazon.com) stopped rendering correctly due to a change in how the Firefox developers interpreted a W3C standard. [1]

It would be possible for Firefox to be modified to better understand/correct "bad" code, however doing such error-correction in some cases could result in perfectly standards-compliant documents mis-rendering if mistakenly judged "erroneous" and then "corrected". For instance, some other browsers fail to render some instances of plain text served under a text/plain MIME type properly, even when the site developer intended it to display as such, because such browsers second-guess non-standard MIME types as HTML, binary data, or something else. Firefox correctly renders such cases because of its relative unwillingness to disregard the standards.

[edit] ActiveX

While not officially supported, a plugin can add support for ActiveX controls in Firefox running under Microsoft Windows. In part due to the unofficial status of the plugin, however, it is not always compatible with the current version of Firefox.

Users have discovered numerous security holes in ActiveX in the past, and some exploits can execute malicious code or install malicious programs onto user's computers. Although end-users can often easily reduce their potential vulnerability to these exploits by denying untrusted web pages the ability to use ActiveX controls, less computer-savvy users (especially those without virus protection) may fall prey to the traps more easily. Note that relatively few public websites require ActiveX; the Windows Update site is probably the most well-known exception. ActiveX remains non-portable to a wide variety of browser platforms in any case: non-x86 systems and systems based on Mac, Linux, or BSD typically cannot run ActiveX controls. Considering these points, the value of adding ActiveX support may remain questionable. It could even cause harm, and Firefox has been praised for excluding ActiveX support for this reason.

[edit] Digital signatures and authenticity of downloads

Peter Torr, a program-manager at Microsoft , wrote an essay "How can I trust Firefox?" on December 20, 2004. It sparked a firestorm of discussion on his own blog's forum (including postings from notables like Peter da Silva [2]); a discussion on Slashdot; and a follow-up summary from Torr.

Torr pointed out that university (or even high school) campuses often hosted the many mirrors for Firefox downloads, and offered no guarantee against potential tampering with the installation files. He also noted several flaws in Firefox's user interface.

Torr also claimed in the original essay that Firefox users possess no obvious way to disable plugins (such as Flash). (The Download panel of Firefox's options window provides this facility.)

With regard to security, Torr expressed concern that Firefox does not make wide use of digital signatures — since Authenticode digital signatures form the basis of Internet Explorer's approach to security. Peter da Silva and others countered that Internet Explorer's extreme dependence on digital signatures is actually a flaw — anyone can sign code simply by paying money. They cited Gator e-Wallet to demonstrate that many spyware programs use digital signatures. [3] [4] Digital signatures do not and cannot designate code as benign or as vulnerability-free; they are designed to prove the origin of the software. However, as with all cryptographic keys, this requires proper control of the certificates. In 2001 VeriSign issued two "Microsoft" digital certificates to people who fraudulently claimed to represent Microsoft. Malicious attackers could have used these certificates to forge material signed by Microsoft [5].

Also, people can create companies and get certificates with arbitrary, misleading names, causing users to give unwarranted trust to signed programs.

[edit] Criticisms from Opera users

Opera makes many features available without the installation of extensions. Firefox has a different philosophy, offering only core features by default to avoid possible bloat. Despite this, both installing and running Opera uses fewer system resources than the equivalent operations using Firefox. Some Opera users distrust extensions, stating that adding extensions can slow the load-up of Firefox and that adding third-party extensions can potentially cause problems.

Firefox lacks a built-in cross-session browsing function for automatically restoring all windows and tabs at browser restart time. If the page changed or disappeared since last connection, Firefox will show the latest version (or nothing at all if the page is gone). Opera saves the cached page and restores that rather than an updated version.

Firefox lacks a built-in means to re-open closed tabs (short of hunting through the session history), while Opera offers a droplist for easy access.

Opera offers an interface which users find easier to customize: they can place toolbars, buttons and fields anywhere on the screen. Opera also allows user-defined menus, keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures without the need to add extensions. Firefox, on the other hand, requires fully-coded extensions to adjust the interface. The official Mozilla Update website hosts most extensions, but all development comes from third parties.

Opera fans also regard Firefox's Gecko rendering engine as inferior in some ways to Opera's Presto rendering engine, especially in the areas of navigating forward and back [6], smooth image resizing [7], page zooming [8] or small-screen rendering[9] (which fits entire webpages in small mobile or desktop screens). Gecko-watchers expect the switching of the graphics infrastructure in Gecko to Cairo to bring improved 2D graphics capabilities to the browser. They expect this change to roll out in version 1.9 of the Mozilla base code, which Firefox 3.0 will utilize.

Opera has the ability to resume downloads from a previous session, which makes it useful for those with relatively slow Internet connections to finish a large download. The Firefox development plan has repeatedly pushed back the introduction of cross-session downloading: plans for Firefox 3.0 [10] now include this feature.

Finally, the OperaShow mode (a media:projection implementation) is considered superior to Firefox full-screen mode.

[edit] Criticisms from SeaMonkey users

Many advanced configuration options available in the SeaMonkey Suite remain hidden in Firefox: users can only access them by hand-editing configuration files or through the about:config interface.

Firefox under Linux has also received criticism for changing the keyboard shortcuts used in the old Mozilla Suite, which used Emacs keybindings in some situations, to settings that more closely match those of Windows. CTRL-A does a "mark all" instead of moving to the beginning of the line. CTRL-K doesn't delete to the end of the line anymore, but moves to the web search field. CTRL-W closes the browser window unconditionally, even when mouse and cursor operate inside an editable field (Google search field, address bar, fields in forms inside the page, etc.). Also, the separation of search field from address bar can leave both Seamonkey and Opera users uncomfortable with the new interface.

Firefox lacks built-in support for the LINK element of HTML, which in the SeaMonkey suite can be displayed as a toolbar with links to related pages designated by site authors using this element.

Some SeaMonkey users have also become disgruntled because the Mozilla Foundation discontinued active development on the Suite in order to pursue development on Firefox. (As a result, a community of users has adopted the suite - rebranded as "SeaMonkey".) Some of their points, such as the suite taking fewer resources to run than a combination of Thunderbird and Firefox, have appeared in published form on the SeaMonkey website.

[edit] Criticisms from Safari and Camino users

Firefox also attracts criticisms from users of Safari, and to a lesser extent, from users of Camino. A key criticism involves Firefox's use of non-standard user interface widgets, though work has commenced for Firefox to emulate the way Safari and Camino handle such phenomena. [11]

One criticism of Firefox's user interface points out that Firefox tabs lack individual close-buttons, a feature found in both Safari and Camino. Firefox features a single one tab-closing button at the far right of the tab-bar, directly opposite the tabs in the window, which stack left-justified. Firefox aficionados justify this placement by the argument that users close fewer tabs accidentally when switching tabs, especially when they have many tabs open. Also, Firefox users can close tabs using the context menu and by middle-clicking the tab (although many Mac OS users would not have a second or third mouse button on their mice to take advantage of this capability). However, critics of Firefox claim that the arrangement seems too Windows-like, and by its nature, breaks Mac OS user interface guidelines (which dictate positioning the close button on the far left instead).

Firefox uses a non-native implementation of form controls. This means that Firefox does not offer Mac OS X features such as built-in "spell check as you type" and speech services.

Because Camino uses standard Cocoa widgets instead of the cross-platform XUL widgets found in Firefox, fans of Camino think of Firefox derisively as "the best browser that just happens to run on a Mac" while claiming Camino as "the best Mac browser".

Firefox is also percieved to run slowly on Macs - several unofficial Mac-optimised builds have been developed to combat this. [12]

[edit] Criticisms from Internet suite users

Internet suites like Mozilla and Opera offer the same features as Firefox (and many other features which Firefox lacks by default) in a unified package with less memory consumption. In order to get all such features, Firefox users must install literally dozens of extensions.

[edit] Obsolete criticisms

Some criticisms have become obsolete with later versions of Firefox resolving the issues raised.

[edit] Fixed in 1.0.x releases

The Firefox 1.0 release, in its attempt to implement Internet Explorer's behavior of requesting favicons, requests an icon file with every page view [13], despite the server's response that the file does not exist. In consequence, server administrators had either to accept the unnecessary traffic increases, to add a favicon.ico file under the root directory, or to refer to a favicon image file within pages. (This bug no longer affects current versions of Firefox.)

[edit] Fixed in 1.5.x

When Firefox 1.0.x couldn't load a page (for example, when it couldn't connect to a server), it displayed an error dialog-box instead of an error page, as Internet Explorer does. Though Firefox users could change this behavior, the implementation constituted a bug [14] in the sense of having an entry in the Bugzilla database (though, as Bugzilla also contains feature requests, this does not necessarily actually make it a "bug" in the standard computer-science sense). Version 1.5 fixed this by displaying a clean error page instead of an obtrusive dialog box.

When users hit the "back" or "forward" buttons Firefox 1.0.x, sometimes pages loaded slowly. This stemmed from coding in the Mozilla Suite, which Firefox adopted. The Firefox developers made the necessary fixes in Deer Park Alpha, an early developmental version of Firefox 1.5 [15].

For minor updates in Firefox 1.0.x, users had to download the entire Firefox setup file. Firefox version 1.5 alleviated this issue: users can download smaller update packages through Firefox update.

[edit] Response to Criticism

  • No close button on tabs - Opera and Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 have close buttons on their tabs. In Firefox, users can close a tab by pressing the middle mouse button on the tab, but when using mice without three buttons, closing a tab by clicking on it requires an operation on the right-click context menu. Firefox users also had the option of closing a tab by left-clicking the close tab button on the right side of the tabbar. An extension exists which puts close buttons on the tabs in older versions. The latest Bon Echo Alpha nightlies now implement close buttons on their tabs.
  • Extensions - Firefox's robust extension capability has prompted a boom in the development of new add-on software. Such extensions can address concerns requiring added functionality, as the designers of Firefox intended (and largely achieved) a streamlined interface and a small footprint. The Mozilla Foundation separated the Firefox project from the larger Mozilla Application Suite mainly to counter Mozilla's software bloat while providing a platform whereby all users could customize their browsers based on an open platform for any number of new extensions.
  • Extension Functionality - The writing of extensions has addressed some common requests from the Firefox community. Issues patched by these addons include adding a resize option to the search bar, showing alt text for tool-tips, and restoration of lost sessions, among other things.
  • Download Security - Firefox install packages now use digital signing, hashes, and other methods to verify the security of Firefox distributions. Additionally, Mozilla now hosts Firefox on a limited basis.
  • Image Mouseover Text - Firefox developers note that the alt attribute is only used as the alternative text to display if the graphic cannot be, and that the title attribute is the correct way to define tooltip text.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^  Is 1.5.0.1 a step back or forward, Mozillazine Forums
  2. ^  The one and only memory usage thread, Mozillazine Forums