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Linux Pipeline Newsletter www.LinuxPipeline.com Wednesday, December 14, 2005 In This Issue: - Wikipedia Hoaxer Apologizes For Joke Gone Wrong - Massachusetts OpenDoc Backer Cleared In Conflict-Of-Interest Probe - Firefox 1.5 Launch Sparks New Gains Against IE - More News... - Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? - SCO Raises New Funding -- And Experts Raise Questions - Taiwan-Based Firm Agrees To Build $100 Linux Laptop - More Picks... Join InformationWeek for a FREE, OnDemand TechWebCast on Sarbanes Oxley and the Role of IT Asset Management. Please join Peregrine and Protiviti for this TechWebcast where you will learn from leading industry experts in the area of IT Asset Management and Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance. Register and view this TechWebCast today! "http://www.techweb.com/webcasts/sarbanesoxley120805" ----------------------------------------- Editor's Note: Fixing The Fox I know what happens when one dares to ass-u-me something . . . yet I did it anyway last week, when I pronounced Mozilla 1.5 a major improvement in its handling of some very old, persistent, and highly annoying memory management bugs. Not 12 hours after sending out that newsletter, I found myself staring at the Windows XP Task Manager, gaping at firefox.exe as it blew through 400MB of RAM and another 400MB of virtual memory without so much as a burp. I took the screen shot you'll find in Scot Finnie's article, started to dash off an email to Scot with the shot attached to it, but finally broke off to put Mozilla's mad dog out of its misery before it had a chance to take Windows XP out with it. The final score: just over 1GB of combined memory, including a little more than 500 MB of physical RAM out of the 1GB installed in my system. I had assumed that the quick work I did with Mozilla earlier in the week, along with a bit of Web surfing in some of the more popular tech forums, would give me enough information to decide whether Firefox 1.5 had kicked its habit of grabbing enough RAM, given the slightest opportunity, to keep any five normal desktop apps purring like a sack of drunken kittens. Boy, was I wrong. If you want to read more about this, check out Scot's article above, or visit my blog entry on the subject. I can also recommend a couple of online discussions that demonstrate the disturbing -- and, it seems to me, rapidly growing -- extent of a problem that is both more obvious and more severe than it was in Firefox 1.0.7. Look at these discussions, and you'll also notice that clearly, some Firefox users simply don't have these problems. (You'll also notice a scattering of people who deserve a spanking and some time in the corner wearing a dunce cap, but that's a different rant.) There is no doubt that these bugs -- the memory management issues are just one of at least two or three that Scot covers in his article -- will cripple some systems after a few hours of uptime, yet leave other systems completely, inexplicably, untouched. Is the problem platform-specific? No, I've now seen the same memory-hogging behavior on two Linux distros, Windows 2000, and OS X, all of which sucked up between 300 and 700 MB of physical memory before going belly-up in various, highly annoying ways. Are extensions, plug-ins, or Flash somehow involved? Apparently not, since the same behavior will cripple some Firefox 1.5 installs running in safe mode and without access to a Flash player. Other users who see these problems echo my own experiences on both counts. This is undeniably ugly stuff, as software bugs go. If you're a developer contributing to an open-source project, this sort of whack-a-mole bug hunting is not what you signed on to do. Fortunately (in a not-so-fortunate ironic way), instead of picking on poor, non-profit Mozilla Foundation, we can pick on Mozilla Corp. -- still poor and still profit-free, but very definitely an entity created to handle exactly these kinds of problems. And let's face it: We'll all be snowboarding in hell before a memory-hogging Firefox gets any kind of traction in the corporate market, where snide advice to buy an extra gig or two of RAM won't get you anything except an IT exec's footprint on the seat of your pants. I like Firefox. I still use Firefox on every one of my systems, every day of the week. I respect Mozilla, appreciate what it has done and look forward to what it will do. But the day when a desktop application -- any desktop application, under any circumstances -- behaves as if memory management is something the cool kids just don't do, is the day when it's time to start talking about this, as plainly and as bluntly as possible, in the hope that Mozilla deals with this before Microsoft deals with them. I don't want to see Internet Explorer 7 turn Firefox into a wet spot on the Infobahn. Have a good week -- and by all means, email me with your thoughts, complaints, screen shots, stories, or whatever else you want to share about your own Firefox experiences.
Matt McKenzie
Don't let future editions of Linux Pipeline Newsletter go missing. Take a moment to add the newsletter's address to your anti-spam whitelist: linuxed@techwire.com If you're not sure how to do that, ask your administrator or ISP. Or check your anti-spam utility's documentation. Thanks. Top Linux News Wikipedia Hoaxer Apologizes For Joke Gone Wrong A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations steps forward and apologizes, describing the incident as a joke gone "horribly wrong."
Massachusetts OpenDoc Backer Cleared In Conflict-Of-Interest Probe
Firefox 1.5 Launch Sparks New Gains Against IE
Business Objects, MySQL Expand Partnership
IE7 Slated For Early 2006 Public Beta
VMware Partners With Mozilla On Virtual-Machine Player
Firefox 1.5 Bug Not A Security Risk, Says Mozilla
Open-Source SmoothWall Turns Free Foundation Into Corporate-Market Success
Microsoft To Stay In Korea, Appeal Antitrust Ruling Editor's Picks Firefox 1.5: Not Ready For Prime Time? Scot Finnie puts the latest version of Mozilla's open-source browser in the doghouse -- and recommends that other Firefox users follow suit, until Mozilla fixes some significant bugs that it should never have allowed to remain in Firefox 1.5.
SCO Raises New Funding -- And Experts Raise Questions
Taiwan-Based Firm Agrees To Build $100 Linux Laptop
SugarCRM Turns Satisfied Customers Into Open-Source Partners
IBM Puts Startups In Fast Lane With Patent Initiative Cast Your Vote Now! We've got a new poll question this week, and it's self-explanatory. Let us know what you think about Firefox 1.5, and in a few weeks we'll round up your votes and share the results. Cast your vote today! Get More Out Of Linux Pipeline Try Linux Pipeline's RSS Feed Linux Pipeline's content is available via RSS feed: Get RSS link. The feed is also auto-discoverable to many RSS readers from the Linux Pipeline home page. Note: RSS feeds are not viewable in most Web browsers. You need an RSS reader, Web-based service, or plug-in to view RSS. Find out which RSS readers the Pipeline editors recommend.
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