# Firefox 10 is available on FreeBSD



## overmind (Feb 3, 2012)

Firefox 10 was released just few days ago. I've noticed that is already available in FreeBSD's Ports. Just cvsup/svn your ports tree.

Here's an article on Ars Technica on Firefox 10:

http://arstechnica.com/business/new...es-with-new-dev-tools-and-full-screen-api.ars

"Mozilla has officially released Firefox 10. The new version of the open source Web browser includes a handful of improvements and new features. The browser's built-in tools for Web developers got a particularly significant boost in this release. The new version also offers better support for a number of Web standards."


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## gkontos (Feb 3, 2012)

After years with firefox on every OS that I use, I finally tossed it in favor of  www/chromium

It wasn't an easy move because browsers are addictive :e


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## overmind (Feb 3, 2012)

bad bad boy!!!


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## jrm@ (Feb 3, 2012)

> The new version of the open source Web browser includes a handful of improvements and new features.



Too bad one of the improvements wasn't reduced memory usage*.


```
PID USERNAME    THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
 7836 jrm          23  44    0   843M   536M ucond   3   9:21  0.00% firefox-bin
18314 jrm           3  44    0    98M 76848K ucond       0:04  0.00% opera
```

Opera's keybindings are quite customizable, but it's not nearly as powerful as what you can get with the firefox addon pentadactyl.

* This memory comparison isn't really fair.  Firefox was running longer and on a host with more memory, but this is generally what I see.


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## OH (Feb 3, 2012)

Somehow www/firefox-i18n will not function anymore with the update to 10. I have yet to investigate...


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## gkontos (Feb 3, 2012)

One of the reasons I stopped using firefox was because of it's excessive RAM & CPU utilization.


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## throAU (Feb 3, 2012)

I like how they think that extended service release for enterprise customers is realistic at 12 months.


And to touch on what gkontos said, I just downloaded FF10 and ran it back to back with IE9 on my work PC.

IE9 used 20mb less ram with 4 tabs open.... (129mb vs 149mb).  I'll also add that the copy of IE9 had been open all day, and Firefox had been running for about 15 minutes...


If Safari isn't available on the box I'm using, I'll stick with Chromium too, thanks (I'm addicted to cover flow history )


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> And to touch on what gkontos said, I just downloaded FF10 and ran it back to back with IE9 on my work PC.
> 
> IE9 used 20mb less ram with 4 tabs open.... (129mb vs 149mb).


Much of IE's functionality is part of the operating system and other running dlls and aren't listed with the running program in "task manager". Firefox had a large reduction in memory usage beginning with FF4 and specifically those following.

IE is an incompetent browser. Years behind all others in modern standards and practices. It's the worst browser on the planet. It holds back the web. No one should use IE.



> If Safari isn't available on the box I'm using, I'll stick with Chromium too


As someone showed earlier, Chrome can use as much, if not more, memory as the others because each tab runs in its own process and as they add up it can become larger. The advantage is a tab can crash without affecting the whole browser in some cases.


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## overmind (Feb 3, 2012)

Regarding Chromium, some people do not like this: http://chromespot.com/forum/google-...ernet-belongs-to-them-will-you-uninstall.html


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

That was from over three years ago and that EULA changed significantly. It was boilerplate.


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## bbzz (Feb 3, 2012)

What about opera? I remember while ago it was fastest from all three. Any reason to switch to chromium instead of opera?
Firefox is way to sluggish for me even on high end hardware compared to opera.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

Nowadays browser choice is personal preference. All browsers work pretty much the same from a user point of view. Even as a developer, they're all pretty close except for IE which, as I implied, is a steaming pile of crud.


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## bbzz (Feb 3, 2012)

Ofcourse, I'm not trying to start browser flamewar here. It's just that opera always felt more faster with smallest footprint than all others. Frankly I'd try using other browser so I can try OpenBSD again, which doesn't work nicely with Opera, but I can't. Opera is where it's at for *nix. Firefox is rubbish.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

Opera is an excellent browser. Firefox is bigger cause it can do so much more. It's highly configurable and programmable. Kind of like comparing vi to emacs.


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## throAU (Feb 3, 2012)

bbzz said:
			
		

> Ofcourse, I'm not trying to start browser flamewar here. It's just that opera always felt more faster with smallest footprint than all others. Frankly I'd try using other browser so I can try OpenBSD again, which doesn't work nicely with Opera, but I can't. Opera is where it's at for *nix. Firefox is rubbish.



Opera is fast, however its interface is a little quirky, and enough webpages fail to function properly that its a pain to use in real life.

It doesn't matter that its more standards compliant or not, if my pages don't work then i can't use them.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

@throAU - What sites don't work in Opera? In almost all cases, it's a problem with the site and not the browser.


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## gkontos (Feb 3, 2012)

I strongly believe that browsers are addictive, no kidding! 

I admit being a Firefox addict for at least 5 years.

Below you can see last month's browser stats from my blog. I am very encouraged by the fact that IE is last 


```
[B]Browser	Visits[/B]

Firefox	2758
Chrome	2267
Safari	853
Opera	490
IE      274
```


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## jrm@ (Feb 3, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> Opera is an excellent browser. Firefox is bigger cause it can do so much more. It's highly configurable and programmable. Kind of like comparing vi to emacs.



I'm not trying to be rhetorical, but what can firefox do that opera can't?

This is one of the reasons I stick with firefox: Opera's End User License Agreement.


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## bbzz (Feb 3, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> This is one of the reasons I stick with firefox: Opera's End User License Agreement.



Why what part is wrong?

Anyone used both chromium and firefox? Anything you can share please.


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## jrm@ (Feb 3, 2012)

bbzz said:
			
		

> Why what part is wrong?



Have a peak at 3. LICENSE RESTRICTIONS AND THIRD-PARTY SOFTWARE.  I understand their motivations, but I would prefer to use software that I can, if I choose, "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for the Software".


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 3, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> I'm not trying to be rhetorical, but what can firefox do that opera can't?


There are more add-ons for Firefox but Firefox also can be coded using XUL, the interface is customizable, and other stuff I don't have time for now.


> This is one of the reasons I stick with firefox: Opera's End User License Agreement.


Opera is a for profit corporation while Mozilla is not.


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## shepper (Feb 3, 2012)

I carry two browsers (actually 3) on my OpenBSD desktop.  Firefox 5.0 in OpenBSD5.0, xxxterm 1.9.0 because it uses an alternative rendering engine and gives me more fully supported html5 (h.264, WebM and Video Tags).The xxxterm user agent is set at Apple Webkit. Lastly, the Lynx Browser that comes with the base OpenBSD install.  My FreeBSD box is setup the same way but with FF 9.01 (I would upgrade but would prefer binaries in FreeBSD-release) and I did not bother to put in Lynx.


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## UNIXgod (Feb 3, 2012)

Wow 10!

seems like 3.x was just yesterday... Oh it was =)


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## jb_fvwm2 (Feb 4, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> Opera is fast, however its interface is a little quirky, and enough webpages fail to function properly that its a pain to use in real life.
> 
> It doesn't matter that its more standards compliant or not, if my pages don't work then i can't use them.



Using past versions, many pages would not render properly. v11.nn, everything seems to be fixed, but that did not happen until the install crashed, reinstalled itself, etc. Tried to upgrade past  this 11.nn but had issues (another post maybe). I use it for nine/tenths of the pages, the other part in seamonkey. (Past versions I used the workaround authormode > usermode toggle button which is on the toolbar still but I hardly ever use now. )  (Also have 
	
	



```
opera-next
```
 (/opera-devel/) installed. )


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## throAU (Feb 6, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> @throAU - What sites don't work in Opera? In almost all cases, it's a problem with the site and not the browser.



Internal intranet style apps.  Device configuration webpages.  You can sometimes work around the problems, sometimes not.

I agree it is probably a problem with the site, however the cause of the issue doesn't really matter to me as an end user.  If the browser doesn't "work" with mission critical stuff, then I can't use it.  Irrespective of where the root cause of the problem lies.


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## overmind (Feb 6, 2012)

Is this still true regarding Chrome/Chromium:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncerhCLi2o0&feature=player_embedded?


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## OH (Feb 6, 2012)

OH said:
			
		

> Somehow www/firefox-i18n will not function anymore with the update to 10. I have yet to investigate...



In case you stumbled upon this via a search, a workaround for this problem is suggested here

I'm going to give Konqueror with webkit a shot, flash seems a lot slower than under Firefox, but that's just a minor issue for me.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 6, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> Internal intranet style apps.


Most corporations are the worst when it comes to marking up web sites and typically gear it toward one browser (Internet Explorer is the worst) then can't figure out why it doesn't work in modern browsers.


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## throAU (Feb 7, 2012)

To be fair, most corporations have an SOE, and run stuff like sharepoint, because plenty of third party apps use it as a platform. But *I*'m not just including that sort of stuff.  I'm talking about embedded web apps for configuring network/storage devices.  Job tracking tools, etc. Not everything out there is open source, and it's an unfortunate fact of life that you need to be able to open non-standard pages.

If I am going to need a browser to be able to do that sort of thing, I may as well use it for everything else. Firefox works with most stuff. Chrome works with most stuff.  IE works with virtually everything in the corporate space.  Opera has more problems than the others. Which is a shame, because its probably coded better than the rest of the browsers out there, it just doesn't fulfill the browser function for all the pages I need it to render without hassle.  

For home use it's fine though, barring the weird "Scroll pages way faster than every other app" I've seen on OS X.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 7, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> IE works with virtually everything in the corporate space.


That proves what I said. IE is technically, by far, the worst browser on the planet, yet you'll find most corporate apps designed using it. A huge mistake they are now paying for. 

They'll look at something running in IE, but not the other browsers, and point at the other browsers thinking there is something faulty with them when the whole issue was really that they designed to a broken browser. It's like using a broken calculator to test a math problem, then complaining about a working calculator giving a different result.

Fortunately most professionals have learned not to trust IE to do anything right once they started noticing that anything tested in a modern browser (never IE) almost always works in every other modern browser. 

IE is always a generation or two behind every other. Until IE8 came out, it was 13 years behind.


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## throAU (Feb 8, 2012)

You don't quite get it.  I'm not disputing the fact that IE is a generation or two behind in terms of standards support.  I agree, in terms of standards support, it sucks (though IE9 is a lot better).

In the real world, where getting the job done without screwing around to work around web-ui problems is the goal, IE beats Opera.  Both Firefox and the Webkit browsers beat Opera in that respect, also.

All the standards support in the world doesn't matter, if your standards compliant browser can't be used to get work done. Firefox and Chrome appear to work better in these troublesome pages than Opera does. They work with virtually everything on our private network.

Whether or not that is due to the page detecting the non-IE browser and sending different HTML to it, or Firefox/Chrome emulating IE quirks is not really my concern.  They work.  Opera doesn't.

This is why I have Firefox / Chrome / Safari installed, but not Opera.  Every time I try to use Opera I run into too many problems with it rendering pages I need to use for my job to bother.

I'm sure I'm not alone.  Opera isn't in a position to dictate what pages they will support due to strict standards compliance (only) with their current market share.

Like it or not, "IE quirks" are a de-facto standard in the corporate space.  Don't work with them, and your browser is, for many users, broken.


I guess to sum up:
Corporate types mostly know IE is crap, but the less-crap alternatives don't function with business-critical web apps.  Hence they can't be supported in the business.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 8, 2012)

I "get it" just fine. My point is, you are saying the browser doesn't work with the software. I'm saying the software doesn't work with the browser. It's the software's fault, not the browser.

That said, I don't know what your pages look like so I can't comment about any particular issue Opera may be having if it works in FF and Chrome. 

Quirks mode is a bug. It's an error committed years ago and promulgated by Microsoft and Internet Explorer. No one should be using quirks. Unfortunately people did and that's what has so much corporate software stuck in the 90s to this day.


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## throAU (Feb 8, 2012)

No. What I am trying to get across is this. It doesn't matter that it is the page's fault. That software is not going away. It is far simpler to just not use opera, than rewrite every app on the corporate intranet. Thus, Opera gets dumped. 

Doesn't matter who's fault it is from an idealistic point of view.


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## bbzz (Feb 8, 2012)

@throAU

Essentially what you are saying is: Religion is not going anywhere, might as well convert to one right now.

No, thx.
Even if it takes us another 1000 years, we'll get it right.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 8, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> It doesn't matter that it is the page's fault. That software is not going away. It is far simpler to just not use opera, than rewrite every app on the corporate intranet.



I understand that. I just didn't want anyone to think this was any one browser's fault.

On a side note, this is why web developers preach coding to web standards and not to any one browser.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Feb 8, 2012)

I would like to reemphasize the post I made earlier in this thread, stating that the page rendering problems in opera here have largely dissipated. For instance, in earlier versions every third page would not render correctly, and I would use the authormode (default) > usermode toggle button. VS this week/month/year, maybe one in fifty sites do not render well enough, across a wide variety. (I have however applied a few tweaks, fixing unwanted loading of TTF fonts.)


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 9, 2012)

You can't compare how a browser renders pages with random web sites and fault the browser. There are so many sites made by incompetent people and businesses on the 'net. Just because a site works in one browser does not mean it will or should work the same in another browser. 

I get these questions all the time on a web dev forum. In almost all cases, the page was coded wrong and the fact that it worked in browser X was either luck or black magic.


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## throAU (Feb 10, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> I understand that. I just didn't want anyone to think this was any one browser's fault.
> 
> On a side note, this is why web developers preach coding to web standards and not to any one browser.



Oh I agree, it's not strictly the browser's fault, if the browser's aim is to be 100% W3C standards compliant.

In an ideal world, this is fine.  

In the REAL world, many of these apps were written before standards were defined or before standards compliant browsers were commonly available. People need to use various apps to get their job done.  At home, you can tolerate/spent time working around compatibility issues between browser and server app.

At work, time is money.  Telling someone you can't do the job (or your new SOE will not work with the company's environment) because some corp application is not standards compliant will get you laughed at/fired.

A browser being standards compliant, but not working properly with mission critical apps means nothing to a business.  Getting the job done comes first, and expecting a company to rewrite/test/deploy new versions of working apps simply due to the ideal of standards compliance is not going to fly - pretending it is and not attempting to inter-operate with broken web pages is only going to cost market share, perpetuating the problem (by making corp types reluctant to roll out new browsers).

If the choice is between the latest version of IE, which has security updates/better standards compliance (than earlier IE) and still works, or an alternative that doesn't work with internal apps/may break in future with the company's apps, guess what gets rolled out?

Anyway... back to FF10.

I'm running it now, seems to be a vast improvement on 4 and 5 which were the last versions I used (and, unlike Opera, I haven't found an app on our intranet it doesn't work with, yet).  Extended support duration still needs to be longer though.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 10, 2012)

Extended support has been, or will be, stretched to 12 months for enterprise users.


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## jrm@ (Feb 10, 2012)

overmind said:
			
		

> Is this still true regarding Chrome/Chromium:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncerhCLi2o0&feature=player_embedded?



I don't think most of these problems are specific to Chromium.  When I open Firefox and go to google.com, despite have instant search turned off, when I start typing in the search box suggestions appear under the search box and I can see transferring messages to google sites in the status bar.

Here is a concern that I think is specific to Chromium.  If you use their browser sync for all your data (browser history, passwords, cookies, etc) this information is sent to the google servers unecrypted.  Of course you aren't forced to use browser sync.  Firefox encrypts the data locally then sends it up.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 10, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> Here is a concern that I think is specific to Chromium.  If you use their browser sync for all your data (browser history, passwords, cookies, etc) this information is sent to the google servers unecrypted.


Not quite. Passwords are encrypted.


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## sossego (Feb 13, 2012)

I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.


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## jrm@ (Feb 13, 2012)

sossego said:
			
		

> I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.



Maybe you could volunteer.


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## pkubaj (Feb 13, 2012)

sossego said:
			
		

> I think the Mozilla developers need to get their heads out of their arses and support more architectures than the basic i386 and amd64.



But they support arm, ia64, mips, s390 and sparc, besides i386 and amd64. What more architectures do you need?


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## throAU (Feb 14, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> Extended support has been, or will be, stretched to 12 months for enterprise users.



For decent sized enterprises, perhaps 6 months is about how long full compatibility testing will take.  SOE re-spins will typically be at least 12-18 months apart.

12 months is not long enough.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 14, 2012)

It took enterprises 10 years to get rid of IE6, and some still haven't, so I guess there is no hope for them. IE10 will begin a 12-month cycle for Microsoft so I guess they're screwed.


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## sossego (Feb 14, 2012)

jrm said:
			
		

> Maybe you could volunteer.



I had volunteered. I've talked to the maintainer of 10-4 fox. 

You can thank me now, bbzz, for something I worked on and asked about six months ago. I also tried asking it to be implemented- powerpc use- on the mozilla developers' mailing list.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 14, 2012)

Like many open source projects, they are limited by the number of people available to work on such things and have to devote more of their work where it's most needed. I know those on Macs that still run PowerPC are still in abundance but the future of PPC on Macs is no more and might be in doubt elsewhere, at least on the desktop.

Boris Zbarsky tried to recruit me at one time and was very grateful of my time when I started to get involved. It didn't go anywhere because I never had the time I wished to put into it. 

Nobody works harder than the folks at Mozilla.


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## throAU (Feb 15, 2012)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> It took enterprises 10 years to get rid of IE6, and some still haven't, so I guess there is no hope for them. IE10 will begin a 12-month cycle for Microsoft so I guess they're screwed.



IE9 still works with IE6 designed sites just fine (haven't tested IE10 yet), and IE updates are included in the OS.  IE7 and IE8 are still supported.

Why a company would take on the *additional *workload of testing for support with Firefox on an annual basis when there is a browser (that works for the work apps) that will be supported with security updates for multiple years is anyone's guess.  It does not make economic sense, and thus it will not happen.

Until the FF guys get that, they aren't going to make inroads into corporate space.

It doesn't matter how much better you are than IE, if you are not supportable.  You need to be MORE supportable than IE to make anyone in corporate land care.  That means group policy (or equivalent, centrally controlled configuration) support, multi-year timeframes for support, and corporate deployment/upgrade tools.  Even chrome has group policy tools, and it's a lot newer than Firefox.

Being shiny isn't enough.


edit:
Note, this is a fairly windows centric point of view, but consider this as "phase 1" of getting rid of IE on the desktop.  Once IE is irrelevant, that's another reason to run Windows, gone.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 15, 2012)

throAU said:
			
		

> IE9 still works with IE6 designed sites just fine (haven't tested IE10 yet), and IE updates are included in the OS.


IE9 does not run on XP. IE10 won't work on anything less than Windows8 (or is it 7?).





> IE7 and IE8 are still supported.


Not for long. IE9 will be pushed soon.


> Until the FF guys get that, they aren't going to make inroads into corporate space.


They already have made inroads which is why they are extending the support to 12 months. Like I said before, they aren't doing anything different than what Chrome does now and Microsoft will be doing shortly.


> Note, this is a fairly windows centric point of view, but consider this as "phase 1" of getting rid of IE on the desktop.  Once IE is irrelevant, that's another reason to run Windows, gone.


About eight years ago, I said IE would be a minor browser by now. I was almost, somewhat correct. Back then it had 95% market share. Today it's hovering just above 50% and falling. Not too shabby a prediction. 

If you visit web developer sites or tech sites that show their visitor browser usage, like ArsTechnica, you find that IE visitors number around 15% or so. The people who know how the web works don't use IE. A large number of them also use Macs, too.

My second prediction was that if ChromeOS turned on NX (now the name escapes me), it would be the death of Windows but I think I see a trend toward the every man switching over to Apple computers to go with all their other Apple products. It happened to my son just recently. All of his classmates had Apple notebooks (ALL of them). He was impressed by them so much he bought a Mac to replace his desktop. Then he stole my iPad. Now he wants an iPhone, too.

Wait a minute! Did I go off topic?!


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## Bentley (Feb 17, 2012)

overmind said:
			
		

> Is this still true regarding Chrome/Chromium:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncerhCLi2o0&feature=player_embedded?


Most of these are issues with Google viewed in any browser, not Chromium specifically. In the video, the guy even says â€œThis issue is not specific to Chrome, as the feature works on all browsers the same way.â€
Google autocompletes no matter what browser you use.
IP address geolocation can be done by any website youâ€™re visiting.
The â€œtypos in web addressesâ€ feature can be easily disabled in Chrome preferences: uncheck â€œUse a web service to help resolve navigation errorsâ€ in â€œUnder the Hood.â€
Google Analytics works no matter what browser youâ€™re using. If you worry about it, use NoScript or something to block it specifically.


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## drhowarddrfine (Feb 17, 2012)

Yep. I didn't look at that until now but remember it (from over 3 years ago, btw). These are wonderful features that only help and do no harm but make excellent videos for the paranoid.


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