Finally bumped to firefox 1.5 beta and predictably lost a lot of extensions. I knew this was just a conservative compatibility mechanism, and not real breakage, but wasn’t immediately sure how to work around it. This post is a particularly clear presentation of what’s going on and how to fix it. The comment stream mentions another extension that simply does a workaround (for all extensions) without showing any details.
I found a fine article about Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, one of the few people to manage to interview him. Along the way, I discovered the New America Foundation, which looks like a place where I could seriously spend a lot of time reading; check out the list of the best articles of 2005. Its Board of Directors is chaired by James Fallows. And from its mission:
Now, more than ever, our nation needs a robust public debate, one that does justice to the complex challenges and opportunities of this unfolding era. […] The purpose of the New America Foundation is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation’s public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy ideas that transcend the conventional political spectrum.
The Talbot article was originally published in the New Yorker, but they seem to have very perishable links.
I’ve noticed for a while that Firefox browser share at sites I visit is much higher than the 5-10% we’ve been hearing; this InformationWeek article tries to find numbers for the blogging community, and they are considerably higher — in some cases Firefox is exceeding IE:
At Boing Boing, among the most popular blogs, the most recent statistics for the month of March indicate that 35.9% of visitors are using Firefox, compared with 34.5% using Internet Explorer.
[…]
Kottke.org, another popular blog, reported on Feb. 27 that 41% of visitors sported Mozilla-based browsers (one of which is Firefox), while 31% of visitors arrived with Internet Explorer.
I find the productivity boost, just to pick one thing, so compelling with Firefox that I never understood the 90/10 numbers. Now I’m hoping that blogger browsing is somehow a leading indicator for browsing in general, and that Firefox won’t remain a weak minority for the duration.
Regarding the IDN exploit, Firefox has a security patch release that shows punycode in the status and location bars. It has a new config parameter network.IDN_show_punycode that is enabled by default.
To see the new behavior, I had to remove the unicode filter that I had in adblock (a persistent fix to the IDN problem); with the filter in place, any click on an IDN link would be ignored. I then had to re-enable the network.enableIDN parm, my original (and non-persistent, due to a firefox bug); with that set to false, I get this message from the handy test page for spoofed links:
http://sitefinder.verisign.com/lpc?url=www.theshmo%25D0%25BEgroup.com
&host=www.theshmo%25D0%25BEgroup.comNetwork Error (dns_unresolved_hostname)
Your requested host “sitefinder.verisign.com” could not be resolved by DNS.
For assistance, contact your network support team.
Here again is a handy test page, where you can see punycode in both the mouse-over URL in the status bar, and in the location bar after going there.
(again via this article on the reg).
All the stuff on the IDN thing intro’d me to punycode; here’s a wikipedia def. Okay, it took me a minute to see the pun. And another to see the irony of punycode making longer urls. Can’t use tinyurl because then you’re obfuscatin’ again.
Wikipedia quickly became my primary definition database: the quality is excellent, I’m usually finding what I want, it’s pretty to look at, and I get to spend a few more minutes in wikiland each day. I’ve even got direct location bar wikipedia searching using firefox keywords: I hook the ‘wp’ keyword to ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s’ in bookmarks. Now at any time I can ctrl-l to the location bar, and
wp punycode
to the wiki page.
I’m putting some energy into wikis the last few weeks, but wikipedia’s own mediawiki needs php/mysql which is more than I want to do just now. Instead, I’m using moinmoin for the work wiki experiment, and just starting with the ruby instiki for my personal wiki. Ever closer to a dive into ruby–if I can’t quite tool up yet, I can at least sit next to it.
ExtremeTech does a roundup that introduces me to the IE rendering Maxthon, reminds me of Avant (also IE rendering), confirms my suspicion that Netscape is just a bad Mozilla, and gives me little reason to go see the latest from Opera. They let us know that 35% of their own hits are giving firefox user agents, but say nothing about the other alternatives.
The penultimate (Ms Bogart are you still out there?) page comments on browser security, and rightly highlights behavior; for example, the firefox extension mechanism, while super-powerful and a great differentiator, does scare me a bit. A lot of this is up to us. Following ET’s advice (but not reading the issues themselves nor comparing numbers for other browsers), I went to Security Focus and found 40 issues for firefox, dating back as far as last May.
Finally, I’m disappointed by the touting the advantage of using IE’s rendering engine. Standards are important, way more important than special features in MSN Spaces or some corporate intranet function. And the reviewer completely misses the obvious answer for me: it’s not either/or but and. Why not use the strong, light browser platform that is firefox, extend (or not) as and when you like, but do install the IEView extension. Whenever you do hit a page that seems to prefer the other guy, simply right-click the page itself to open it in IE. When done, close it and continue in firefox. And I’m surprised now how seldom I need to do this.
Lots of stuff out about the IDN exploit that is in firefox and lots of other modern browsers but not yet in IE; the register has a good short intro here.
As I’ve had adblock since the beginning, I can solve this by simply adding a short regexp to my block list; here’s the complete procedure for those who don’t have the extension installed yet.
And here is a handy test page.
It’s curious to see anyone use this case to defend IE. The relative openness and configurability of firefox enables a number of workarounds that aren’t there for a blackbox like IE. Downloads are available as soon as fixes are in; if it takes some time this time, it’s because IDN needs a rethink and not because of the development model. Curious minds can read the code and submit a patch if they like. I’m not one of Bill’s new red-scare commies, but on this kind of issue I don’t see how closed source proprietary dev models can ever compete.