The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.
A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost 20 percent of the browser market. The bank's site lists Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Netscape as acceptable browsers.
Netscape? Even AOL, Netscape's former owner, doesn't support Netscape Navigator anymore.
Of course, Firefox, which was released in 2004 and recently set a Guiness record for downloads in a 24-hour period, still works on the BofA Web site--just not officially. The issue apparently came up when a BofA customer contacted the bank about problems he was having accessing the site using Safari. "Please don't tell me to just use Firefox instead," the Networkworld.com reader told BofA customer support.
Not a problem, according to customer support.
"Please note Bank of America does not support Firefox," was customer service's reply.
When posed with the question of why the No.1 bank's Web site did not whole-heartedly embrace the No. 2 browser's 180 million users, a spokeswoman told Networkworld.com that "there is a process that we go through to 'officially support' a browser type and version, which includes in-depth functional and regression testing cycles.
"As the usage of Firefox browsers has increased with our customer base, we will be initiating a full support model for Firefox version 2.x in the very near future," spokeswoman Tara Burke told Networkworld.com.
Think "the very near future" will prove to be very soon? Don't bank on it.
With less than an hour to go in Mozilla's 24-hour attempt to set a record for the most downloads, I check in with CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland, about the launch of Firefox 3. Despite Mozilla's temporary site outage, it appears to have been a success, both with the numbers (7 million plus) and content.
As a Firefox user myself, I initially switched over for the tabbed browsing and some of the third party add-ons. Little did I know that I was building my "nerd cred" by choosing it over Internet Explorer or other browsers. As Shankland explains, being a fan of Firefox is almost like being an Apple fanboy: there's a certain cachet and a "stick-it-to-the-man" (that'd be Microsoft) attitude among its users. Who knew that the browser you chose could up your stock?
Update 12:23 p.m. PDT: The official Firefox 3 download site is live; the record-setting attempt began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Update 10:53 a.m PDT: See this separate blog post on the Mozilla download site troubles. Update 10:02 a.m. PDT: Mozilla is having some technical issues with the site but expects the download to be available shortly. Update 6:43 a.m. PDT: I added the scheduled launch time, 10 a.m. PDT.
Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser wars.
As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.
"It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich Internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's director of platform engineering, mentioning Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don't want to wait. "As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical."
The Firefox 3 'awesome bar' can give faster access to Web addresses.
Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.
Microsoft is toiling away on IE8, though, with a first beta released and a second scheduled to emerge in August. The program has been reworked to improve performance, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager in charge of IE. With no prompting, he mentioned Gmail as one area where the company has received favorable feedback, and he clearly welcomes the competition.
"IE is the browser of choice for more people on the Web than anything else," Hachamovitch said. "There's an all-around quality, whether in ease of use, reliability, the security we stand by, that makes it a better choice."
Vying for share
Mozilla is a force to be reckoned with, with 18 percent market share to 74 for IE, according to Net Applications statistics. That's enough to ensure that major Web sites have to support Firefox.
Apple's Safari--now available for Windows, too, is in third place with 6 percent share. The next contender, Opera, has less than 1 percent, but it's scrappy: "The browser is the single most important piece of software made today, so innovation is incredibly important if you want to extend the reach of the Web," the company said in a statement.
Firefox is the second-ranked browser in market share for May 2008.
(Credit: Net Applications)Microsoft knows the stakes are high, with a richer Web coming into being. "It is a particularly fertile period. A bunch of pieces started lining up magically in the last couple years to get some innovation going here," Hachamovitch said
Firefox isn't shying away from competition either. To try to heighten its profile, Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox 3, which has been code-named Gran Paradiso. The download period is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PDT.
Perhaps a more fruitful alternative to whipping fans into a lather through, though, would be to court business users.
"Mozilla needs to show corporations some love," said Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel in a recent report. "Large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox," for example by offering paid support services, he said.
Firefox 3 features
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what's known as the "awesome bar."
To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top sites on the Web then closes and opens them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory "leaks" under which Firefox 2 wouldn't relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.
But memory is hidden under the covers. Front and center is awesome bar, officially called the Smart Location Bar, which lets users type real words rather than sometimes abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.
For example, typing "maps" into the bar on my computer retrieves a list of some recent stories I've written involving maps as well as recent maps I've requested off the Internet. That's handy for retrieving recently visited Web sites quickly. Another example of how the feature worked well: I was trying to relocate a Web site I used to monitor Amazon.com's Web site performance, and typing "Amazon" into the bar showed the site--GrabPerf--as one of the options.
Mozilla uses its own formula to determine what results pop up in the list, weighting by factors such as how recently and how frequently you visited various sites. Typing "n" gets me to News.com in no time flat, but your own results will vary according to your browsing habits.
Firefox 3 has been steadily climbing in usage through its testing period.
(Credit: Net Applications)The awesome bar has its detractors who'd like the feature to be optional. (Tweakers can disable the awesome bar by editing their Firefox configuration.)
Among other features in Firefox 3:
• A prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware such as viruses or spyware or that's involved in phishing--the attempt to fool people into entering personal information into a counterfeit Web site.
• Offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable even when the network is unavailable. That's a potential boon for Web apps, but future versions of IE 8 and Safari also support the technology.
Web-based protocol handlers, which lets the browser launch a Web application rather than a PC program for certain actions such as a Web site "mailto" link that otherwise would create an e-mail in software such as Outlook.
• The Cairo graphics engine that lays the foundation for better direct integration with a computer's video hardware. "Video inside the browser is coming," Sicore said.
• animated PNG (Portable Network Graphics), another nail in the coffin of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image type.
• A better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser. Moving the mouse pointer over a thin strip across the top of the screen temporarily pulls down the browser controls.
• A star button to quickly add bookmarks; double-clicking opens a dialog box that lets users describe bookmarks with tags.
• Support for Windows Vista's parental controls.
• And better support for Mac OS X. For example, it has a Mac-native appearance and has been re-plumbed internally to use Apple's Cocoa technology, a necessary step on the road toward 64-bit support.
Plug-in problems
One of Firefox's claims to fame is the wide collection of add-ons that are available. It's been a bumpy ride coaxing coders to support the new browser, though.
Some major add-ons now have arrived, including Yahoo's Delicious and the Firebug tool for Web site developers.
However, not everybody made the leap. One is Google Browser Sync, which synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and other settings across multiple installations of Firefox 2. "Phasing out Google Browser Sync was a tough call, but we have decided to focus our efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, that also extend the capability of multiple browsers," Google said of the Labs project in a statement. Happily, there are other alternatives--I like Foxmarks.
Of the top add-ons, "the majority have upgraded 3.0," Sicore said. The laggards will have a grace period "on the order of months" before Firefox 2.0 versions will automatically suggest installing the upgrade.
I'm a Firefox user, how about you? If you're part of the roughly 20 percent market share using Mozilla's free, open-source Web-browsing software, you're probably looking forward to Tuesday, June 17th's release of version 3. In fact, the company is hoping that 1 million of you are excited in hopes of setting a record for the most downloads in a 24-hour period.
In Friday's edition of the Daily Debrief, I chat with CNET Webware.com's Rafe Needleman about what to expect with this version. He's been using the release candidate for a few weeks and says we can look forward to faster browsing, the "awesome bar," and more security features.
Someday, browsers will make it easy to retrace our Web steps by providing total recall of every page we've opened. Until then, we get the imperfect history features in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
They're imperfect because they seem to remember every page I've visited except the only one I actually need to return to. At least Firefox gives you a few more options for changing how it records your surfing history. With Internet Explorer, the only two options you get are to 1) change the number of days your history is stored and to 2) clear your history completely.
Tweaking Firefox's history settings
To adjust the history settings in Firefox, click Tools > Options > Privacy. Here, you can reset the number of days the browser remembers the sites you visit (the default is nine), or tell Firefox not to record the data you enter into forms and the search bar. You can also erase Firefox's memory of the files and programs you download. The default in both cases is to remember.
Reset the number of days Firefox remembers your browsing history via the Privacy Options dialog box.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)When you press Ctrl-Shift-Delete to clear Firefox's private data, you're shown seven options, five of which are selected. I usually just want to clear the cache--Gmail sometimes balks at downloading my in-box unless I clear out the browser's store of temporary files.
To change the defaults, reopen the Privacy Options, and click Settings in the Private Data section. Check the items you want to clear, uncheck those you don't, and click OK. The next time you open the Clear Private Data dialog box, your new defaults will be the only ones checked.
Customize the categories of private data that Firefox deletes by default when you click Clear Private Data.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)By default, Firefox shows up to 50 entries in each history folder. You can reduce Firefox's memory consumption (and possibly slow some page reloads) by reducing this entry via the browser's configuration options. Type about:config in the address bar, and press Enter. Scroll to and double-click browser.sessionhistory.max_entries, and enter the maximum number of pages you want Firefox to remember for each site you visit.
Internet Explorer's meager history options
When you click Tools > Delete Browsing History in Internet Explorer 7, you're given five options: Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form data, and Passwords. Or click "Delete all" to clear all five.
Internet Explorer 7's Delete Browsing History dialog box gives you five options.
(Credit: Microsoft)To change the number of days IE stores your browsing history, click Tools > Internet Options, click Settings under "Browsing history" on the General tab, and click the up or down arrows in the History section at the bottom of the resulting dialog box.
Change the number of days Internet Explorer 7 retains a list of the sites you've visited via the Browsing History Settings dialog box.
(Credit: Microsoft)Tomorrow: a Firefox add-on that shows all the files downloaded by the current page.
The initial release candidate of Firefox 3 is ready for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.
Among the major improvements are changes in the look and feel on the various operating systems, major security enhancements, and increased performance and stability. It is based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which includes 14,000 updates to the code.
On the performance front, the documentation states that applications such as Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3, compared to Firefox 2, and memory usage has been improved. In addition, bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are less susceptible to data loss.
A list of all the new features is available on the Mozilla Firefox site.
Any task you perform on the Web can be automated by writing a script. But you don't have to know how to use Javascript or some other scripting language to create your own custom scripts. The Chickenfoot add-on for Firefox makes it easy for nonprogrammers to devise scripts that do their bidding.
Chickenfoot was developed by MIT's User Interface Design Group. It's similar to the Greasemonkey scripting extension for Firefox, but its scripts tend to be simpler and easier for nonprogrammers to customize.
After you download the scripting engine, click View > Sidebar > Chickenfoot (or press F8) to open the Chickenfoot Script Editor. Enter the script in the top pane of the sidebar, and click the Run icon to activate the script for the current page. You can also run scripts by copying and pasting them into the editor, or by clicking the sidebar's Open icon and navigating to the .js file. By placing the scripts in the Triggers window, they will run as soon as the target page opens in Firefox.
A silly example of a Chickenfoot script is one that changes the image on the Google home page. First you copy the script from the Chickenfoot site, and then you paste it into the Chickenfoot script editor, swap out the image-source URL for the one of your choosing, and click the Run icon. Gone is the universally recognizable "Google" icon, and in its place is whatever image you chose. Not especially practical perhaps, but a neat little trick nonetheless.
Run a Chickenfoot script that changes the "Google" image on the site's home page with the image of your choice.
(Credit: Chickenfoot)Another Chickenfoot script places an icon at the end of URLs that lead to a PDF download or anywhere other than a Web page. But the real power of Chickenfoot scripts is in customizing those in the various Chickenfoot libraries.
Keep in mind that malicious scripts can wreak havoc on your system, so be judicious in your use of scripts from unfamiliar sources. Likewise, Chickenfoot may be susceptible to cross-site scripting (XSS), so the developers recommend that you create a separate Firefox profile for Chickenfoot, and use the scripts only on sites you trust.
Tomorrow: top online scanners and speed testers.
Mozilla Europe's founder, Tristan Nitot, has no problem with free software. Indeed, his organization has created some of the best of it. But when software technologies like Adobe Systems' Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight are free but proprietary, they can create all sorts of problems. "Free" without "open" can become a one-way ticket to technology prison.
Adobe has recently taken steps to open up its Flash technology, but Nitot's concern is still valid:
... Read moreHe described the nature of the Web at the moment as open but suggested that "proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over"..."So far, there has not been a problem," Nitot said. "Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money."
Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft's discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe's long-standing refusal to "provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users." He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are "sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms."
Compared with Outlook and other commercial e-mail programs (are there any other commercial e-mail programs left?) Mozilla's free Thunderbird e-mail client has a lot going for it. Not the least of Thunderbird's time-saving features are its search capabilities.
If you don't see the search toolbar directly above the main Thunderbird window, click View > Toolbars > Search Bar. By default, you can view all your mail, all your unread mail, all mail with one of Thunderbird's five built-in labels attached (Important, Work, Personal, To Do, Later), mail from people in your address book, messages received recently, mail with attachments, and mail that the program has identified as "Not Junk."
Thunderbird's View options let you sort your mail into several prefab categories.
(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)To create your own message view, click Customize in the View drop-down menu, and choose New in the Customize Message Views dialog box, or select one of the existing views and click Edit. In the Message View Setup window, choose either "Match all of the following" or "Match any of the following," and make your selections in the location and parameters drop-down menus. Enter the text you want to search for in the text box, and click the plus sign to add additional parameters. When you're done, click OK twice. The view you just created will appear in the View box, and messages matching your selected parameters will display automatically.
Create a custom view in Thunderbird to filter your messages with a single click.
(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)
Save time with Thunderbird's Quick Search
Custom views are great if you know ahead of time what you'll be looking for, but you can also create a "view" on the fly by converting a search into a virtual folder. Press Alt-I, Tab to move the cursor to the search box, press Alt-down arrow to display the search-parameters drop-down menu, use the arrow keys to navigate to your desired parameter, press Tab again to select it, and type your search term. When the results appear, choose Save Search as a Folder, rename the folder and make other changes (or accept the defaults), and click OK. The folder appears in the left pane in whichever location you chose for it in the New Saved Search Folder dialog box.
Tomorrow: The perils of trying to break the Microsoft habit.
As new Web applications debut, and older ones are enhanced, we spend more of our work time in a browser. Unfortunately, we also seem to be spending more time trying to figure out why our browsers aren't displaying the sites we visit correctly, or at all.
These days it's tough being a Web designer. Even if you create sites that comply with the latest HTML and other Web standards, you can't be sure that the pages will open or function as intended for all of the site's visitors. The fact is, Internet Explorer plays by its own set of rules, so in effect sites need to be designed twice.
Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 8--currently in beta--will support more standards, but this itself could cause problems as sites designed for IE7 don't load correctly in the new release. Web designers will be able to add a "meta element" to pages that allows them to open in the new IE release as they would in IE7.
Get Internet Explorer 7 back on track
Microsoft offers an IE7 troubleshooting guide, but I can save you some time by summarizing its advice: First, check for Windows updates; second, scan your computer for viruses; third, if you don't mind losing your customizations, reset the browser to its default settings by clicking Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Reset (a last resort); and fourth, disable your add-ons and toolbars, and enable them one at a time to find the one causing the problem.
Before you resort to option 3 or 4, try what Microsoft describes as options 5, 6, and 7: Delete your temporary Internet files, browser history, and cookies. Doing so is simple, relatively painless (sites you revisit will load more slowly), and most importantly, the likeliest source of the problem. Choose Tools > Internet Options > General, click Delete under Browsing History, and select Delete files under Temporary Internet Files, History, and Cookies. Click Yes at each warning, and then Close and OK.
If the problem persists, go the no-add-on route. To open IE7 with no add-ons or toolbars enabled, click Start > Run (in XP), or press the Windows key (in Vista), type iexplore.exe -extoff, and press Enter. If the problem disappears, close IE and reopen it normally. Disable all your add-ons but one to determine if that's the source of the problem: Click Tools > Manage Add-ons > Enable or Disable Add-ons, select the add-ons one at a time, and click Disable for each, but keep one enabled. If IE works OK, enable another and test the browser again. Enable the add-ons one by one until the problem recurs. When it does, you've found the troublemaker.
Disable all the add-ons in Internet Explorer except one, and then re-enable them one at a time to find the source of the problem.
(Credit: Microsoft)In the event that none of these steps cures what ails IE7, it's time to break out the big guns: Boot into Safe Mode with Networking, log into a different user account, or go the clean-boot route. Microsoft offers step-by-step guides for these and other IE7 advanced-troubleshooting techniques.
Diagnose Firefox failures
Figuring out what's wrong with Mozilla's open-source browser is similar to the troubleshooting steps for IE, with two big exceptions: First, you can search for solutions at the Bugzilla service; and second, if you think you've discovered a bug in the program, you can report it (Bugzilla account required).
As with IE, start your Firefox troubleshooting by updating to the most recent version of the browser by clicking Help > Check for Updates. Next, update your add-ons by selecting Tools > Add-ons > Find Updates. MozillaZine provides a list of problematic extensions.
Recently Firefox refused to load my Gmail in-box. I fixed the problem in a jiffy by clearing the browser's cache: Click Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Clear Now > OK. MozillaZine describes other standard Firefox diagnostics, and it also provides a Firefox support forum.
Clearing Firefox's cache can be a quick fix for many common problems.
(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)Bonus tip: All the attention paid to Firefox and Internet Explorer makes it easy to forget that there are many other worthy browsers available--for free. One of my favorites is Opera, currently at version 9.26. This browser has a reputation for being lightweight but full-featured. I've also been spending time with Apple's version of Safari for Windows, but I prefer browsing with Firefox on a Mac, and I haven't seen anything in the Windows version of Safari that would make me want to switch. If you spend a lot of time on social-network sites, you may find the Firefox-based Flock Browser to your liking.
Monday: better ways to search Outlook, Thunderbird, and Gmail.
