Posted on 12/18/2004 6:19:26 AM PST by mathprof
FIREFOX is a classic overnight success, many years in the making.
Published by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit group supporting open-source software that draws upon the skills of hundreds of volunteer programmers, Firefox is a Web browser that is fast and filled with features that Microsoft's stodgy Internet Explorer lacks. Firefox installs in a snap, and it's free.
Firefox 1.0 was released on Nov. 9. Just over a month later, the foundation celebrated a remarkable milestone: 10 million downloads. Donations from Firefox's appreciative fans paid for a two-page advertisement in The New York Times on Thursday.
Until now, the Linux operating system was the best-known success among the hundreds of open-source projects that challenge Microsoft with technically strong, free software that improves as the population of bug-reporting and bug-fixing users grows. But unless you oversee purchases for a corporate data center, it's unlikely that you've felt the need to try Linux yourself.
With Firefox, open-source software moves from back-office obscurity to your home, and to your parents', too. (Your children in college are already using it.) It is polished, as easy to use as Internet Explorer and, most compelling, much better defended against viruses, worms and snoops.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Thanks for the plug!
I ran Mozilla on a Win 95 platform with no problems. Firefox should run on Win 95.
It is actually smart to run old operating systems. Most new viri are being written for newer operating systems and will not affect the older ones.
bookmark
I actually sold personal computers back in the mid-80's and dealt with this stuff on a daily basis - here's the short version on all this:
The 8-bit Apple II ran Apple DOS, which was developed to make use of the "incredibly cool" floppy drive (Disk II) which Steve Wozniak had created. The Apple III (and the improved 16-bit Apple II) ran Apple DOS's replacement, ProDOS. Then along came the Lisa in about '83, which used a GUI (graphical user interface) "inspired by" the work at Xerox PARC. Xerox also developed and sold a box using their GUI (the Alto, as in "Palo Alto"), but they didn't really see it as a core part of their business. Apple learned a lot from the Lisa effort and the result (January, 1984) was the first, "insanely great", 128K Macintosh. I actually owned one of these (autographs inside the case and all) and eventually donated it to the Computer Museum.
MS DOS was based on QDOS (written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products), while MS Windows was one of at least two PC GUIs (the other that I remember was Digital Research's GEM) developed in the mid-80's to compete with the Mac. If you think Windows is a pain now, you should have seen v1.0. I was very glad I had a Mac at the time.
If you're at all interested in the early days of the "revolution", I recommend Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It was first published in 1984 (which is the copy I have) and then revised in the late 90's according to Amazon. A great read with lots of insights into the "players" like Jobs, Gates, Wozniak, and many others.
This may be of interest...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1304168/posts
I found an older version of window washer which will work fine. Just send me your email address & it's yours.
Actually, it's Kildall, not "Kildare". Sad story. Brilliant guy with a great product (CP/M), misses the meeting with IBM, his wife wouldn't (or couldn't) sign a non-disclosure, IBM went elsewhere. Very, very sad.
There's alot of useful information in that thread.
I should collect these up and add them to my FR homepage. I've got a few people(mostly outside of FR) who reference my page when they come across a machine all loaded up with spyware doo-doo. It'd be useful to have all the tips in one place for my own edification if nothing else.
One other complaint: when it imported my favorites, it didn't keep the sort order I had. It alphabetized them. I've spent quite a bit of time resorting to the order I want....
Thanks.
Foxmail (independent email program, no relation to Firefox) is a pretty good alternative to Outlook Express. It has been around for years and has a pretty good following. And it is still free, too.
Thanks for the tip. Made the changes and can see the diff in speed. Also saw another example of how intuitive Firefox is: to alter a boolean, you just right-click and select "Toggle". Very user-friendly.
Deleting IE was one of the smartest moves I ever made computing wise.
I'm curious as to how you use Widows Update without IE? I know Fire fox has a plugin that will allow you to open a page in IE but how would you do that if you deleted IE?
I use Ad Muncher on Internet Explorer. I get no pop-up ads ever, standard banner ads are eliminated, and most other ads as well. It gives you an ad-free internet, resulting in much faster downloading of web pages.
( "If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model.")
This is a dumb analogy my older systems running 98se with freeware security have actually been slightly more secure and trouble free than my newer XP system.I know several people who have actually improved thier machines performance by switching from Me or 2000 to 98se.
**Actually, I think Windows was ripped off from Xerox. I believe Xerox had a graphical interface, network, and mouse before anyone else even dreamed of these. Xerox believed these things were a novelty. Microsoft and Apple realized the value. **
Xerox did'nt invent the mouse, but PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) reseachers did invent Ethernet, the laser printer and Postcript (the founder of Adobe left PARC when they showed no interest in Postcript), and developed several key proprietary interface elements that were part of the Alto computer OS, which later evolved into the Star. (http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/alto.html)
Xerox (as usual) had no clue what to do with it, were hemming and hawing about getting into personal computers, and just showed it in dog and pony shows (there were several versions of the demo - the full monty with all top secret technology displayed for VIPS, or more fluff shows for the rest). While a lot of it was top secret, the existence of the Alto was well known in the then-small computer industry, Xerox researchers had published papers about the technology, and many people had seen it before the execs at Xerox stopped the demoes, when the executive suite finally realized what they were sitting on and could produce themselves as a heavy competitor to the Apple II and PCs in office environments - the Alto was conceived and produced as a business tool, not a personal computer.
Apple and Xerox were in talks early on, for Apple to produce a Xerox-branded computer or to get guidance from Apple on how to enter the field. Apple had Xerox invest in 100,000 shares of Apple stock, with the stipulation by Jobs among others that Apple's engineers get a demo of the Alto and associated technoloy at PARC, and to pick the PARC engineer's heads about their technology. As Jobs later put it, they'd get a serious "peek behind the Kimono". Jeff Raskin, the "father" of the Mac, who'd started the Mac project as a continuation of his college research in GUI and a truly user-friendly computer, an "everyman" computer, knew guys at PARC, had already seen the Alto, and pushed Jobs to get the demo. Jobs was'n on board 100% the Mac wagon yet, and Rasking wanted the demos as a proof of concept for Jobs.
There were two demos of the Alto. There were some major fights within Xerox about the demos, some saying that since Xerox was going to be using Apple to build computers, they should share technology, others saying the demo would be a daylight raid of their crown jewels, some at PARC refusing to be part of the demo, and refusing to show even a fragment of code - but a compromise was made, giving Apple the fluff show. The Mac team, with Jobs, showed up, watched the demo, asked some pointed questions, and left.
Apple returned two days later, asking to see more (remember, Raskin had seen the secret stuff), and after considerable pressure from above within Xerox, Apple got the full top-secret Alto demo with Smalltalk (a precursor to object oriented programming) and all associated technologies like the mouse, windows based interface, networking, documents with text and images, etc... They were allowed to talk programming with the Alto team, and while they still saw no code, they got a huge, huge insight into how they accomplished the Alto GUI, which had things nobody had seen before, like overlapping windows, and smalltalk, a revolutionary programming concept. The Apple/Mac team had done their homework, and their questions by all accounts were very targeted and specific, and they also saw things that were never seen before - and they also saw things they already had, and saw it as a proof of concept for their own ideas.
The story goes, Jobs left the meeting, went back to Cupertino, and demanded that they scrap all work on the Mac so far and incorporate most of what they'd seen in Palo Alto. However, it's been said most of the concepts had already been developed concurrently in Cupertino, and while the Mac team was heavily influenced by the demos, it was more conceptual than actual execution, or so it's told. At the very least, by his own admission, the demo lit the lightbulb over Jobs' head, and he became the Mac champion and started diverting as many resources within Apple to the Mac as he could. Apply as much of the Jobs Reality Distortion Field to that as you wish.
Later, after Xerox had (stupidly, IMHO) divested their stock position (before the run-up, losing Xerox millions), Jobs approached Xerox to license Smalltalk, and he was denied. So, in ever-so-Jobsian arrogance, he hired the head of Smalltalk, Tesler, to work for the Mac team, along with many other key PARC engineers. While Apple never saw actual code, he did eventually get many of the minds behind the ideas.
The whole story is more than a bit murky - Raskin, the true "father" of the Mac, knew many of the engineers on the bleeding edge of GUI concepts, having gone through college with them. Many of them ended up at PARC, and he'd visit and see the PARC technologies. Raskin was developing similar concepts at Apple, who knows, possibly some of his ideas were used at PARC. The world of the GUI was very small then, most of them knew each other, and "overlap" of ideas and concepts common. Who knows what belonged to whom, who invented what, and where ideas ended up.
But, the important issue is this: Apple had a business agreement with Xerox that included the sharing of technology - specifically the Alto. Was their utilization of the concepts "theft", when they had ostentiably paid for it? Several key players at PARC have since stated that they knew letting Apple in was a bad, bad idea - but if the executive suite ordered them to show Apple, was it really Apple's fault? Xerox never said 'Okay, here's the Alto, but you can't use anything you see". It's true that no license was ever agreed upon, which i believe was the basis for the lawsuit Xerox later brought, but Xerox lost. Both sides knew what was happening, and while there was some dispute, in the end, Xerox voluntarily showed the technology to Apple.
Apple even told the Xerox folk at PARC about the Lisa, a ultra-top secret project at Apple at the time (the Apple III, or Lisa, had an embrionic version of the Mac OS, but was very klunky and buggy, and the Lisa failed, soon eclipsed by the Mac). They told Xerox they were working on a GUI. It's not as if Apple showed up for a free lunch and a cool computer demo to fill out a slow day.
It's hard to say "theft" in this story. Apple paid for access, knew what they were paying for, were up front who was going and what they were working on. They did'nt swipe code, and all they did was watch a demo, and ask some questions. Theft? Or mind-boggingly stupid decision from a company (Xerox) that has the most talent of any other corporation of shooting itself in the foot?
Windows was a similar tale of Apple pointing the gun right their own foot and pulling the trigger, all the while saying "This won't hurt a bit!". Microsoft had received two prototype Macs at their Redmond campus for the developers working on Excel for the Mac before the Mac went public (by some acounts the two machines were locked in an office with papered over windows, and the access was VERY limited), with an oral agreement between Jobs and Gates that MS NOT steal any ideas from the Mac OS. MS had the working code for the Mac, and Gates immediately started the Windows project, he himself said he was a huge, huge fan of the Mac when he first saw it, and he wanted the GUI for MS - and he got it.
This may have been one of Jobs' worst mistakes in a long line of big mistakes, if true (and by all accounts it is), trusting Gates/MS with prototype machines and source code without an army of lawyers and paperwork locking Gates into what he could use and what he could'nt - or bringing the MS programmers to Cupertio and carefully controlling what they had access to. Gates laughed his way all to the bank, and his comments later about it are even worse when you realize Jobs gave him the keys to the house so Gates could help himself while Jobs was away.
The whole Xerox/Apple story is now the stuff of urban legends, but I was lucky to have a father who worked for Xerox as a corporate officer in CA who knew many of the key players, and got some insight into the story from him, and I believe the version told in the book "Dealers of Lightining, Xerox PARC and the dawn of the computer age" by Michael Hiltzik is the closest one to the version my father told me, and I tried to relate above. The book is a fascinating read about a very unique campus, and any computer fan should get a copy.
(Newbie screen name, been reading FR for years, you'll be seeing this screen name now, i can't remember the old one)
And yes, I use a Mac, a dual 2 ghz G5 and 23" Cinema, and I also have a Toshiba Satellite running XP, and I like them both. Mac vs. Windows arguments are pretty boring, having heard them for over 12 years now. They're tools, it's what you do with them that counts. A lousy artist is still a lousy artist even if you give them $150 brushes, and a Mac or Xp machine or Linux box in the hands of a clueless operator is a doorstop.
I downloaded FF and like it a lot. No pop ups ever. I also have the Avant Browser which sits on IE but has a lot more bells and whistles. Lately I have been using it a lot and in some ways I prefer it over FF. Both are good browsers and each have pluses and minuses.
1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time.
When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30.
This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0".
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
To be fair, Xerox came up with PARC and didn't know what to do with it. Woz went to Xerox and bought it for a song (and maybe a dance, I'm not sure), because he DID know what to do with it. Apple's creative team designed the specific look of the interface, which Microsoft decided they liked and deserved to have created first, hence, Windoze.
By the way, I use a Mac with Safari, which I love (please no debate on this. I'm NOT switching to a PC and I'm not trying to get anyone to switch to Mac). I just downloaded Firefox and so far I like it as an alternative.
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