On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 12:18 +1000, Greg Crawford wrote: > One of my concerns about free web browsers, if they become popular, is that of > support. If Firefox becomes the target of hackers, will Mozilla have the > resources to put to work to counter the hackers? > > Greg
Greg, Where to start? <sigh> What support are you getting from Microsoft with IE? If you found a bug in IE (and I can show you quite a few) who do you report them to. Found a bug in Mozilla (or Firefox)? File a report at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and they will take you report seriously. I've have had literally dozens of bugs addressed over the past 4 years and (in general) the support I receive from the open source community is refreshing after the brick wall you stand in front of vis a vis proprietary software support (especially free support). It's one of the reasons I stayed with Linux back in 1998 when it was a nightmare to use - developers responded to my bug reports, something MS didn't seem the least bit interested in doing. Mozilla (and it's cousins Firefox (a web browser) and Thunderbird (a mail client) make MS look decidedly tardy with regard to support and security. As far as I'm aware (and I'm part of the Mozilla community in many ways) the Mozilla developers haven't left any known hole in Mozilla, et. al open form more than a week, with most addressed in the space of 24 hours. None of these flaws come close to those plaguing IE. As for having the resources to support mozilla, there's probably more people developing Mozilla than IE. In fact, until recently MS didn't even have a development team for IE (having disbanded it to work on other things) and they only re-banded them after realizing that IE was a poor cousin to Mozilla. Neither Mozilla, Firefox or Thunderbird suffer from the virus and malware issues that plague IE and Outlook. If you want to dramatically cut down on the time you spend maintaining anti-virus software, deleting spam, blocking pop-ups, uninstalling malware, etc then switch to these great open source programs. The major difference between MS and the open source community is that MS wants to make money and the OS community just wants to develop really good software. This difference shows up in the quality of the respective product models and the support you receive. A bug report for MS is another expense, for open source software is another opportunity to do it better. Give Mozilla (or the combination of FireFox and ThunderBird) an honest try, for say two weeks without using IE and Outlook, and I'm confident that you'll thank me for all the time you've saved. All three can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org and run on Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, HP-UX and a bunch of other operating systems you've never heard of too. ;-] As a one time offer, I'll offer to support and answer any questions you, or anyone on Insights might have, but you've got to be willing to give is an honest try. Keep in mind that I still don't have any virus protection software installed on my computer. I don't suffer from viruses or malware. My email client removes almost all of my spam without my intervention. The same goes for my wife, my sister-in-law and a handful or other people I know that aren't in the least bit technical in nature but are happily using Linux. (I'll include Linux support in this offer too if you want.) regards Rodd ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
