Chrome Improves While Firefox Slides

[James]

The following article (one of several that I've read so it's not just this one techie who is complaining) illustrates why Chrome is steadily improving in areas of security and usability while Firefox has been in a downward spiral. And interesting enough, it's because of issues we've been discussing here on this forum. The article is found here:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/238525/c ... k.rss_news

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0

[Antony]

Google does spend real money on advertising (including TV ads), and to best of my knowledge, Mozilla (a rich company/organisation) does not spend money on advertising, instead, they employ all sorts of preaching by using devoted users for free.

Recently, I've seem many great ideas from Google, and some were being copied by Firefox.

Speaking about Mozilla who is too cheap to pay for advertising, I can't help myself not to recall the ridiculous price charging at Mozilla Store, a ripping off! (In short: they wanted to charge UD$109.81 for just one t-shirt to ship to Australia, that included “duties and taxes” which the item was clearly under tax-free/duty-free limit.)

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.20

[James]

I remember your experience and in fact experienced the same thing. I wanted to have a t-shirt sent to my son in Canada. The final price was a little over $70. Needless to say, I shopped elsewhere and determined to never again shop at the Mozilla store.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/15.0.854.0 Safari/535.2

[Antony]

The t-shirt was priced at USD 14.95, well below the then threshold of AUD 400. The Australian Government would not charge duty and GST for that, but Mozilla was very happy to charge USD 17.99, which translates to an outrageous 120% tax rate (and I am pretty sure that they wouldn't pass any fraction to the Government). Nothing but ripping off people in Australia.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5

[James]

I hear you. And again I re-iterate, that sending a t-shirt to Canada and being expected to pay over $70 for something that couldn't cost more than $15 is little more than a rip-off as well. Mozilla really needs to get its act together if they expect to maintain user loyalty.

Getting back to the intent of the thread... doing away with version numbers is asinine. Having Chrome ask before running Java applets is a security measure Mozilla needs to emulate. And this portion of the article is pertinent as well. Evidently Dotzler was reported as saying:

"When a user opens the About window for Firefox, the window should say something like "Firefox checked for updates 20 minutes ago, you are running the latest release ... If a user needs the full version information they can get it from about:support."

The writer of the article says:

"I've used Firefox for years and had no idea there was a hidden "about:support" page.

To me, this is symptomatic of user interface problems with Firefox. Frankly, I found the redesign introduced with version 4 a step back, not forward."

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0

[Antony]

The writer of the article says:

"I've used Firefox for years and had no idea there was a hidden "about:support" page.

To me, this is symptomatic of user interface problems with Firefox. Frankly, I found the redesign introduced with version 4 a step back, not forward."

Back to topic, I did not know there was a hidden “about:support” until now.

So the geeks (or open source extremists) like the hidden settings, somehow, it does not seem very open at all.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110803 AlexaToolbar/alxf-2.14 Firefox/3.6.20

[James]

The "about:support" page came as a surprise to me as well. Amazing what you can learn from reading a few reviews. It would appear that Mozilla majors in keeping things hidden.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:7.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0

[PaulD]

Also see:
- about:about
- http://www.livinginternet.com/w/wa_browser_about.htm --- old; various Netscape, IE, Mozilla, Firefox
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/About_protocol_links --- recent

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1