14 February 2008
Along the lines of what this guy had, Firefox 3.0 is broken for me at the moment. I’m getting the following error:
jeremy@rillian:~$ firefox-3.0
Could not find compatible GRE between version 1.9b3pre and 1.9b3pre.
…which apparently means my XULRunner is out of date. (Don’t ask me why they couldn’t just say XULRunner is out of date, instead of that cryptic message.)
I guess I’m just going to have to wait for the Hardy repositories to un-stuff themselves. (Oh, and the KDE4 packages are broken, too — the libokularcore1-kde4 package has the wrong version on a dependency.)
Tagged: aargh, firefox, Linux, Ubuntu | 3 Comments »
26 January 2008
Corey, I saw your post about the Firefox 3 SSL error:
Well, I have tried Firefox 3 and I really like a lot of the things that I saw. The “awesome” bar really isn’t that awesome for an Epiphany user, but hey, it is a first cut. The GTK integration really makes me happy. Mozilla has been working on Linux support. Then I hit this dialogue:
Now I am very angry. Not only did Firefox prevent me from going to site I know is safe, there is no easy to way to say “I trust this page”. And yes, that defeats the point of this dialogue, but the reality for the Web consumer is that I have no control over these kind of websites. Now what do I do?
Corey, I actually support this redesign. Part of the reason the web is so broken at the moment (poor adoption standards, lack of alternative browser support, crappy accessibility) is because web browsers have historically been tolerant of bad coding. In the same way, the main reason viruses plague the Windows world because people are trained in bad practices like Googling for a program, downloading a .exe, and then running it.
Clicking through self-signed SSL warning dialogs is much the same as the aforementioned situations. Make self-signed certificates not seem so insecure, and being able to just clicking through dialogs mindlessly in order to get to the site, is bad from a user trust point of view. The user is being trained to just trust every certificate that they come across, regardless of how reliable the certification authority is.
If you make users aware that these sort of certificates are not good at validating identity, and make it difficult for users to force open these sites (in the same way, I believe browsers should refuse to display pages with invalid HTML in the case of the broken web), then website owners will actually bother shelling out a few dollars for a proper certificate from a reputable certification authority.
Or, even better, you can lobby the Mozilla Foundation for the inclusion of the CAcert root certificate in Mozilla browsers. CAcert is an organisation that offers free signed SSL certificates.
Tagged: aargh, firefox, web | 6 Comments »
21 January 2008
Well, I thought I’d try out Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu Hardy today. It’s much improved from the previous alphas, and many of the widgets and menus look far prettier, and better integrated with GNOME. The alphas previously had some statically-linked Cairo for drawing text, which made colour fringes on antialiased text. However, the Ubuntu dudes have now fixed that, and the text is as sharp as it was in Firefox 2.0.
However, I did notice some striking similarities between certain operating systems and some dialogs in Firefox.
This is probably a result of the new Vista and OS X integration in Firefox 3.0. It looks like the Vista styles are leaking over to the Linux version, which isn’t really a good thing.
Tagged: firefox, Linux, Ubuntu, Vista | No Comments »
