readwriteweb.com — Read/WriteWeb spoke to Chris Beard, Mozilla's vice president of products and discussed how Firefox 2.0 is going to be marketed via mainstream marketing tools and techniques - television, advertising on mainstream websites, partnerships with big companies, etc. Will open source also be part of the mix, as Chris Messina suggested?
Oct 19, 2006 View in Crawl 4
srlncltOct 20, 2006
He has a point, even if you don't like it.Say its a couple years ago and you are writing some malware code. The breakdown is something like IE - 90%, Netscape 2%, MoZilla/Firefox 2%, Opera 1%, Others 5%. Its much easier to write code to get around vulnerabilities in one program. Which would you pick to have the greatest impact?Now if its more like IE/FF/Opera 60/25/15 in a year or two, you may pick something besides IE, or maybe take to the time to write a second/third set of code for the other browsers.Also helps explain why there seems to be less virus and spyware issues on OSX and most linux distros. It exists, even if you dont want to admit it.
clarkeeeOct 20, 2006
That is the dumbest thing I have heard all week. Is good software an exclusive club? Do you have to show your geek credentials when you download Firefox? You stuck up, OSS people annoy me. Good software, is FOR EVERYBODY. I don't care how they find out about it
denver80203Oct 20, 2006
"10's of thousands of unresolved bugs"source?*crickets chirping*right.
jinexileOct 20, 2006
Linux, MacOSX, Firefox and Opera are all inherinantly more secure than Windows and IE. Marketshare has very little to do with it, yea focus is there but the fact is that Linux and Mac are built so that the only way a virus can do real damage to a system is for a user to explicitly let it, Opera has a huge focus on security, it's second only to performance and Firefox has thousands of people reveiwing it's code so even if someone finds a vulnerability there is a good chance someone else has also seen it, and submitted a report for $500 dollars. If you were a malicious hacker what point would there in being trying to exploit Firefox, which has a turn around time of a few days to a week when a vulnerability becomes know, as opposed to IE which at worst you get a month or two worth of exploitation, sometimes up to a year? You'd probably make more money from MoFo by advising them of the bug rather than trying to turn a computer into a zombie spammer.
Closed AccountOct 20, 2006
<a class="user" href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.com">https://bugzilla.mozilla.com</a>They're there whether you mod me down or not.
nekoOct 20, 2006
So tired of this argument... "No one writes viruses for OSX and Linux because it's such a small percentage".Think about it this way then. You're a blackhat. What better way to impress your blackhat peers and gain worldwide recognition, than to write a virus that wipes the smug grin off all those Mac and Linux zealots? Go on, write the next Code Red or Melissa to target those guys, put a little fear o' hackers into them.The temptation to write a killer virus to attack all those Apple and Linux fans must be overwhelming. So why hasn't anyone succeeded yet?
Closed AccountOct 20, 2006
The point is, Firefox has a less than perfect history. People want to heap s**t all over IE and that's fine but at least attack it for the right reasons - bug for bug they're both more than ordinary.