Firefoxs users patience wearing thin

Firefox flaw found Matthew Broersma Dec 02 2005

The Mozilla Foundation may have just released its latest update to the popular Firefox browser, but some users say their patience with the software's flaws is beginning to wear thin.

One issue that has been getting attention since the Wednesday release of Firefox 1.5 is a bug that causes Mac OS X systems to use 100 percent of available processor resources in some cases, such as when scrolling in some web-based applications (such as Google Maps) and holding down the mouse button.

The bug has been known since before the release of Firefox 1.0, but has never been fixed, critics noted.

.. "I am going to have to recommend that any Mac users I know stay away from Firefox until this is fixed .." wrote one user on the Bugzilla bug-tracking site.

Another specific gripe is the lack of Acid2 compliance. Acid2 is .. designed to test a browser's support for W3C standards such as CSS1, HTML4 and PNG ..

.. Issues mentioned by users after their first few hours with Firefox 1.5 included the "reload" button disappearing ..

Firefox has had increasingly serious issues with security as its user base has exploded .. A report from Symantec revealed that nearly twice as many flaws had been discovered in Firefox as in Internet Explorer over the first six months of this year.

Comment:

A flaw in Firefox running on Linux has not the same security implications as Windows. Running as standard user behind a hardware firewall is immensely more secure than any version of Windows and Internet Explorer.