Category: Web Browsers

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Sorry for the misleading title, it’s sort of an homage to CNET’s recent coverage of Firefox.*

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, excited by the response to Opera 8.0, promised to swim from Norway to the US if Opera 8.0 managed 1 million downloads in 4 days. (By comparison, Firefox 1.0 managed 1 million in less than a day, and hit 2.5 million by the end of day 2.

Well, they did it, and von Tetzchner has donned a wet suit [CNET].

Tetzchner entered the “freezing Oslo fjord” on Monday and started swimming toward the United States, the company said. Opera’s public relations manager, Eskil Sivertsen, is rowing an inflatable boat alongside Tetzchner “as an act of guilt after making the CEO’s statement public,” according to the Opera Web site.

Full details, photos, and a map are at Opera.com/swim. [archive.org]

Update two days later:

Let me tell you, those PR folks at Opera know how to set up a publicity stunt.

In a “dramatic” update to the saga, Opera’s CEO won’t finish swimming to America after all, as his PR manager’s raft deflated an hour into the day’s swim.

Some choice quotes:

“As much as I don’t want to talk behind a colleague’s back, there is no doubt that we would never have let Eskil assist Jon in the raft had we known he can neither swim nor read maps,” says an embarrassed Tor Odland, Opera’s Communications Director. “I feel partly responsible for letting Jon down, as he cannot possibly continue without the raft.” [emphasis added]

A local farmer spotted the drama from his kitchen window and took surprisingly sharp photos with a remarkably powerful telescopic lens.

“And my mother [in Iceland] will be so disappointed when I call and tell her that I won’t be stopping by for hot chocolate after all.”

The tongue-in-cheek tone of the whole thing is right up there with the Opera Bork Edition that translated the MSN website into the Swedish Chef’s unique form of gibberish. That was to point out the ridiculousness of MSN singling out visitors using Opera and sending them a broken—or perhaps we should say borken—page.

It’s kind of funny how Opera can get away with stunts like this. Microsoft or Apple would be embarrassed to even consider it, and Mozilla wouldn’t dare. These days Mozilla/Firefox is too busy fighting uphill for respect. They wouldn’t risk sanctioning the “Always use Protection” poster, and they wouldn’t try something this wacky. Whatever happened to the days when the IE team deposited a big blue “e” on Netscape’s front lawn?

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*Things like “Mozilla flaws could allow attacks, data access” which didn’t just bury but actually omitted the fact that a fixed version had been released three days earlier, and that the disclosure was made as part of the release. The second-to-last sentence, “All versions of Mozilla Suite prior to version 1.7.7 and all versions of Firefox prior to 1.0.3 are vulnerable.” sort of hints at it, if you know that these are the newest versions, and if you don’t misread it as “through” instead of “prior to.” And the original article on the Opera swim promise misstated the Firefox download numbers using one of the preview releases instead of the big launch, claiming it took 5 days to reach 1 million. They’ve “corrected” it to “within days,” which is technically true—but wouldn’t “in less than a day” be more accurate and better convey the contrast? Compare this to other articles from last week like “Apple patches iSync flaw” and “RealNetworks fixes ‘highly critical’ flaw” and you have to wonder whether there’s a misinformation campaign some editorial bias involved.

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At the end of a post on SSL/TLS and just how much security a “secure” site really gives you, Eric Lawrence of IEBlog posted an interesting thought:

The so-called “browser wars” have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys.” The “bad guys” are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public.

We’re all in this together.

I’m not sure I agree entirely. It’s more like a second war has started, one in which former enemies are (or at least should be) allies. I do still think competition is necessary, as evidenced by Microsoft’s sudden reversal on updating IE once Firefox became popular—but more cooperation on security may be something MS/Moz/Opera/Apple should consider.

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Opera BrowserOpera 8 is out, and their website is swamped so badly they replaced their home page with a stripped-down version pointing to download sites. That’s a first.

Unfortunately I can’t get the Linux download link to get me anywhere except back to the splash page, so I’ve only managed to grab the Windows version so far.

I used to be a big fan of Opera back in the days when Mozilla was still in beta, Netscape was obsolete, and IE was… well, a security hole waiting to happen and the dominant browser as a result of monopoly abuse instead of just making a better product. But then two things happened: Mozilla got a lot better, and Opera started to get bloated. And by bloated I don’t mean in code size, I mean in user interface. It was so cluttered that after a while it was just a pain to use.

I still buy new versions as needed (The reg code for 7.x seems to work fine on 8.0), and I’ve got active licenses on both Windows and Linux. But in the last few years I’ve mainly used it for testing (compatibility, small-screen rendering, etc.) and for keeping multiple accounts logged into the same website.

The 8.0 betas have been very nice, though. With all the extra toolbars hidden, I can just use the web. This is one of their selling points: their press release is titled “Speed, Security and Simplicity,” and states “The default UI design is cleaner, more intuitive and allows for easy navigation.”

I don’t think it’ll get me to switch from Firefox just yet, but I may find myself using it more often. And while it’s nice that I don’t have to pay for the upgrade, I wouldn’t mind it if I did.

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Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove Internet Explorer from Windows (you can hide it, but it’s always there…waiting), just using an alternative browser isn’t enough to protect you.

Of course, the obvious solution here is don’t let it install anything. That’s what the Java sandbox is for, after all: applets run in their own little world and can’t touch the rest of your system unless you let them (or they find a hole in the sandbox, which is why you need to keep Java up to date—just like everything else).

Time to emphasize the fact that while Firefox is still safer than IE, it’s not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. You can minimize risk, but never eliminate it.

(via SANS Internet Storm Center)

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The WaSP Buzz points out that Netscape 8’s ability to switch between IE (Trident) and Mozilla Netscape (Gecko) isn’t exactly new: Maxthon apparently does this already. Maxthon is essentially Internet Explorer on steroids, and since I’d rather use Firefox anyway, I’ve never tried out any of the browsers that wrap a new user interface around IE.*

MozIE has a similar ability, but is aimed squarely at web designers: it gives you two panes, one embedding IE and one embedding Gecko, and synchronizes the views. You get a side-by-side comparison of how each browser will display your page.

And a few years ago, Konqueror could switch between KHTML and Gecko. I’m sure it still can, and the only reason I don’t have Mozilla in my list of alternate views anymore is that I didn’t install the relevant bindings, or Fedora Core stopped including them in their KDE packages.

Is it new? Of course not. But this is Netscape. It’s kind of like Apple deciding to ship all new Macs with Virtual PC and Windows XP pre-installed. Or maybe France making English a second official language.

*My main interest in trying out different browsers is to see how they display websites. In theory, Maxthon and any other browser of its ilk should be identical to IE in this respect.

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I installed the just-released Netscape 8 Beta. It imported most of my settings from Firefox, including bookmarks, cookies and even history. One of the first things I always check with a new browser is how it identifies itself, which in this case is as Firefox 0.9.6. (Presumably they’ll get on this by the time the final version is out.)

First impressions: importing was clean and worked well. UI is a bit freaky, as things are spread all over the place—like the main menu, which is in the upper right and in line with the title bar instead of where the menus are on every other Windows application. The multiple toolbars seem confusing at first (it took a while to dig up my bookmark bar, for instance). Then I looked at the site trust/rendering choices, the big exciting feature of this release. And I’m not impressed. Or rather I am, but not favorably.

The current tab shows a shield icon indicating the trust level of the site: Green if it’s been verified by a “Netscape Security Partner,” yellow if not, and I would presume red if it’s a known phishing/virus/etc. site. There’s also an icon indicating the trust level: a check mark if it’s trusted, an ellipsis for “not sure” and an exclamation point for not trusted. Unverified sites are, by default, in the “not sure” category. So far this makes sense.

Clicking on the shield icon opens a site controls dialog box enabling you to choose to what extent you trust the website, and below that, whether to display the site using the Mozilla Netscape or Internet Explorer engine: Continue reading →

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