FLOSS News

A story by Matt Asay prompted me to look up this graph from statcounter.com

and according to this story, Firefox (v3) is now the most widely used browser in Europe, surpassing IE (v7).  Thats a fantastic achievement for the community who built, develop and maintain Firefox.  Its my browser of choice by far, its superb, and I’m really pleased to see it get the adoption it deserves.

This post by Matt Assay discussing how we got to a competitive browser market got me thinking. (Dangerous I know, but bear with me.)

… I suppose the truly intriguing thing is not that we have a competitive market for Web browsers again, but how it happened. Baker told me recently that Firefox is “an anomaly” because it managed to beat back overwhelming Microsoft market share. Can we do it again?

I wanted to share a little Joomla! hacking I did the other day for two reasons:

I know this isn’t exactly “new” news, (it’s 2 days old and has appeared on /. I understand) but to me it is really important and should be shouted from the rooftops.

VietNamNet Bridge – The Ministry of Information and Communications has issued an instruction on using open source software products at state agencies.

Accordingly, by June 30, 2009, 100% of servers of IT divisions of government agencies must be installed with open source software; 100% of staffs at these IT divisions must be trained in the use of these software products and at least 50% use them proficiently.

The last Windows computer in our house is very shortly going to be history

I have been threatening my wife’s PC for quite some time now, but there has been no real motivation to move until today… Our bank called and told her a credit card has been fraudulently used in the last few days. Fortunately they appear to have correctly and swiftly identified the misuse and are dealing with the problem.

As if the last security hole in Internet Explorer was not enough, here’s yet another reason to drop Microsoft Software. This time it’s their cash-cow, Office:

Attackers are exploiting the just-patched vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) by hiding malicious ActiveX controls in Microsoft Word documents, according to security researchers.

Ouch!

Users of the world’s most common web browser have been advised to switch to another browser until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people’s computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

So, apart from being a crap browser at actually rendering web pages according to the standards, it also opens up your computer to a “serious security flaw” (as if we didn’t know that already).

Here’s my recommendation for curing this ailment. Permanently:

Fantastic. Mozilla have clearly been listening…

These are just mock-ups but I doubt that they’d be showing something far from what will transpire. It looks nice, requires no consent, and certainly wouldn’t aggravate me.

Anyone reading this old enough to remember that line from the BBC TV Sitcom “Citizen Smith“? I think I have just seen it in action.

The creators and owners of the Open Source Firefox web browser seem to have ignited a bit of a war in the last few days.

In Ubuntu’s next development version (Intrepid Ibex) due for release next Month, Mozilla have demanded that for Ubuntu to continue to distribute Firefox, they must display an EULA.

This is the ONLY EULA I believe that is currently present in the “main” repository of Ubuntu and certainly the only one that a user would be required to accept in the default Ubuntu Desktop configuration as is currently supplied.

My regular desktop computer, Twoflower*, that I use for work and play is dying…

Twoflower is pretty old now by PC terms and is becoming quite unreliable. I built it about 4 or 5 years ago I guess, although I can’t remember exactly when, and it has been a good workhorse until quite recently. But the time has finally come to move on.

It is often said that 3 things make a 'trend' in the modern world, so here are 3 very sneaky browser bugs triggered by 3 different Drupal modules that have crossed my path in the last few weeks, all (it turns out) quite likely related. Here they are, in the hope that if you see something similar you might be able to locate the problem a little more rapidly.

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Source: http://www.civicactions.com/blog/firefox_mac_and_transparency_woes_pulling_the_foss_strands_together