Incoherent mumblings
Posts tagged ‘firefox’
I received a note about the new Firefox vulnerability yesterday. I ran the proof-of-concept on my Debian machine, using first Epiphany and then Iceweasel. Didn’t work on either. Then I fired up a VMWare image running Windows, with a stock Firefox from mozilla. The proof-of-concept worked just as advertised. So, are the reports missing something (not exploitable on all OSs), or am I just lucky that Debian decided to move to Iceweasel?
I’m not a Debian Developer, so the recent Firefox/Icedove debacle hasn’t caught my attention that much. Basically I trust Debian to do the right thing. It seems in this case they are, again, doing the right thing.
GNOME’s Dave Neary says it’s ill-advised of Mozilla to care more about practicality and usability than freedom. He’s right! I read a few of the comments, and as so often people (i.e. users) say that freedom only matters to developers. That is simply not true! Please think about it! How does the freedom in source empower you to do what you want to do?
I’ve heard a few stories of people who are switching from Windows to Linux, but who can’t make a total switch because of iTunes. Since iTunes is closed (and defective by design) they have no choice but to keep Windows around in order to access the music they’ve bought. (It’s also higly ironical that Apple has written a program that keeps people using Windows.)
Consider what might happen if the Linux kernel accepted closed-source drivers.
Also, if you do care about freedom, then read this. Maybe it’ll help you in making others understand why free is better for you.
I’ve just found foxylicious and AbstractMouse.com. Jippie! now let me tell you why I’m so happy about that!
I use computers at home and at work. For a long time I kept on sending mails from work to my private email address with non-work-related links to check out at home. It also happened that I sent similar mails in the other directions with work-related links I stumbled across when at home. I’m currently using Epilicious to make it easier to share bookmarks between home and work. However, I’m forced to use Windows (as well as Linux) at work, and Epiphany doesn’t run on Windows. Using foxylicious I can now get those bookmarks into FireFox as well 
Lately I’ve started using several computers at work (well, really only two computers and a set of VirtualPC/VMWare images) and I want to share some pure-work bookmarks between them, here I’m talking about internal pages that are inaccessable from home–I don’t want them cluttering my bookmarks at home! This is where I’ve put AbstractMouse.com to work, using it I can share work-only bookmarks between all the machines/images
But all isn’t well. 
When on a Linux box, where Epiphany does run, I’m forced to use FireFox to get to the work-only bookmarks. I have two options for solving that:
The former requires some lobbying of the foxylicious author (I’ve already posted a comment on his blog ). The latter would only involve getting some information from Eric of AbstractMouse (he’s interested in adding plugins for more browsers), then the rest is up to me. The problem there though is how to map between Epiphany’s topics and FireFox’s hierarchies… I prefer the former!
I simply can’t stand editing text in the text areas using the editor in Firefox (Mozilla). Apparently there is still no edit externally command in Mozilla yet. Luckily there’s Mozex, but don’t try installing that version, use this instead (the original won’t install anymore). The original site is still useful though, since it holds a link to the arguments the different commands take.
