I falsi miti di Firefox

Non intendo esprimere un giudizio personale con questo post. E’ giusto però che il fanatismo venga stroncato, ovunque esso sia.
La razionalità e l’imparzialità sono criteri e metodologie di pensiero che andrebbero seguite sempre e comunque, nonostante i dissensi.

Quindi, buona lettura e buona riflessione all’interno di un semplice ma accurato articolo che smonta tutti i (falsi) miti di Firefox .

Alcuni estratti (in inglese):

Not for Profit

Myth – “Firefox and Mozilla are Not for Profit” – Example

Reality – “The foundation has used a for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, to collect tens of millions of dollars in royalties from search engine companies that want prominent placement on the browser. According to Mozilla’s 2006 financial records, the foundation had $74 million in assets and last year it collected $66 million in revenue. Eighty-five percent of that revenue came from a single source – Google, which has a royalty contract with Firefox. In the same year, it paid the corporation’s chief executive, Mitchell Baker, more than $500,000 in salary and benefits.” – The New York Times

“The Mozilla Corporation pays its employees from the revenues we receive from our product. We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.” – Source

“Now, the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit entity that develops and distributes Firefox, is forming a for-profit subsidiary that will eventually capitalize on the browser’s popularity. The Mozilla Foundation will announce today that it has formed a wholly-owned subsidiary, Mozilla Corp.” – Forbes

“Firefox, which is produced by the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, made $72 Million last year and is on target to have 120 employees this year.” – Source – Source 2 

System Requirements

 Internet Explorer
486/66 MHz CPU
16 MB of RAM
11.5 MB of hard drive space
Windows 98

Reality – Internet Explorer 6 has much lower minimum System Requirements than Firefox

Minimum:

Notes – Anyone who claims Internet Explorer 6 will not run on these requirements has never tested it.

- Internet Explorer 6 SP1 System Requirements (Microsoft)

 Firefox

Minimum:
Pentium 233 MHz CPU
64 MB of RAM
52 MB of hard drive space
Windows 98

The Recommended Requirements for Firefox are much worse:

Recommended:
Pentium III 500 MHz CPU
128 MB of RAM
Windows XP
- Firefox 3 System Requirements (Mozilla) 

Myth – “Firefox has lower System Requirements than Internet Explorer 6” – Example

Memory Usage

 Memory Usage Firefox 3

Reality – Internet Explorer 7 uses much less memory than Firefox 2.

- Browser Memory Test: Firefox vs IE7 vs Safari vs Flock vs Opera (Life Rocks 2.0)
- Firefox Excessive Memory Usage (Coding Horror)
- IE7 vs Firefox 2: The memory usage showdown (Lifehacker)
- Web browser memory usage (digitalinsane.com)

Myth – “Firefox 3 has low memory usage”

Reality – Firefox 3 still uses a lot of memory.

- Firefox 3 Hogs Memory Like Crazy (PCMech)
- Firefox 3 is Still a Memory Hog (The NeoSmart Files)
- Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All (TechCrunch)
- Firefox 3 Beta 1 Review – Memory Usage Is Worse! (Lockergnome)
- Firefox 3 vs. Opera 9 re: memory usage (nonzero)

Myth – “Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7” – Example

Bugs

 Myth – “Firefox is Bug Free” – Example

Reality – Firefox is like any other software application and has plenty of bugs and problems.

- Most Frequently Reported Bugs for Firefox (Bugzilla)

Stability

 Myth – “Firefox is Stable” – Example

Reality – Firefox can be very unstable and suffer from problems relating to Corrupt Preference Issues, Profile Issues, Plugin Issues, Theme Issues and Extension Issues that sometimes requires a clean reinstall to resolve.

- Standard diagnostic – Firefox (MozillaZine)
- Firefox crashes (MozillaZine)

Faster than Internet Explorer 7

 Myth – “Firefox is Faster than Internet Explorer 7” – Example

Reality – Internet Explorer 7 is clearly faster than Firefox 1 and 2 in 4 out of 7 measures of performance.

- Browser Speed Comparisons (How To Create)

 Security

Myth – “Firefox is Secure” – Example

Reality – Firefox is anything but Secure with multiple unpatched vulnerabilities allowing exposure of sensitive data to local users. You only need one vulnerability to be insecure. Since Firefox v1.x was released, users have been exposed to over 295 security vulnerabilities and counting.

Reality – A Highly Critical vulnerability was discovered only 5 hours after Firefox 3 was released. – Source – Source 2

Myth – “Firefox 2 is more Secure than Internet Explorer 7”

Reality – Internet Explorer 7 has been more secure than Firefox 2 in 2007. – Source

Myth – “Firefox is More Secure because it does not use ActiveX” – Example

Reality – “ActiveX gets a bad rap as the cause of all of Internet Explorer’s security woes. But it’s just not so. Old myths die hard! There’s no doubt that Internet Explorer has more than it’s fair share of security holes, but very few of them have to do with ActiveX. ActiveX controls are packages of code that can run in the context of the browser. They are installable through a link on a Web page. Exactly how different is this from having a link to an executable file that you have to explicitly run? Essentially not at all, except that the ActiveX version is more convenient. Even with Firefox you can download and run an executable file. Does this make Firefox unsafe? In fact, Mozilla and Firefox’s support for XPCOM, a plain text and platform-independent software model, is very comparable to ActiveX once you get the user to click “Yes.” The complaint against ActiveX has always centered around the ability to install native code from across the Internet, but this is less unusual than it seems, and ActiveX arguably makes things more secure. When you encounter an object tag referencing a control that you do not have installed, you then have the opportunity to install it. Under the default security settings, you will be warned before this happens and given an opportunity to approve or reject the installation.”

- The Lame Blame of ActiveX (eWeek)
- The Lame Blame of ActiveX (Dave Massy, Microsoft Software Engineer)