Fire Fox 3...

[Imakeholesinu]

Using at work and now at home. Not sure if I really like it.

[Tessian]

I've been using it in both locations since it's release... only thing I don't like is it's not as compatible as they lead you to believe. Otherwise it's a great solid efficient platform

[Kupek]

I installed it at home and it was slooooow on my five-year-old laptop. I reverted back to 2.x. I'll wait until I get a new laptop before using it.

[Lox]

I haven't had any issues with 3.x. I actually found it to run a bit faster on my desktop and laptop, both of which are about 4 years old. At first I didn't like the way the history worked, though that's easy to change, but now I'm used to it and love it.

[Shellie]

Im with Lox. Ive used it since it had the public beta. I didn't like the expanded history AT ALL when I saw it, but now I don't mind. When you type in part of a URL in the address bar it not only searches your history URLs but also the titles of websites.

[Flip]

I use it. Way faster than IE for me at work and home on the laptop. I dont even remember how 2.0 looked anymore i'm so used to it.

[Zeus]

What is the benefit over 2.0?

[Tessian]

What is the benefit over 2.0?

Well for starters Mozilla is going to stop supporting 2.0 at the end of the year. 2nd it's a much cleaner and efficient product; I myself don't really notice it but then again I never had a problem with 2.0 either. I really like it over 2.0, but really if you want a list of New Features just go to mozilla's website

[Zeus]

What is the benefit over 2.0?

Well for starters Mozilla is going to stop supporting 2.0 at the end of the year. 2nd it's a much cleaner and efficient product; I myself don't really notice it but then again I never had a problem with 2.0 either. I really like it over 2.0, but really if you want a list of New Features just go to mozilla's website

Fine, I'll upgrade by the end of the year.

Maybe it's Microshaft training me, but I have a simple philosophy when it comes to upgrading apps: if it ain't broke, don't upgrade. Too many times I've tried to upgrade to the next version and been burned. I was just trying to determine if I should with Firefox.

[SineSwiper]

Maybe it's Microshaft training me, but I have a simple philosophy when it comes to upgrading apps: if it ain't broke, don't upgrade. Too many times I've tried to upgrade to the next version and been burned. I was just trying to determine if I should with Firefox.

People like you tend to piss off tech support. Does that mean you're still running Edgar's Virus Scan version 0.001? :)

[Imakeholesinu]

I went to 3, reluctantly on my home PC. I have noticed a slight performance hit. Also I have noticed that it uses different ports to access pages I browse frequently (IE stat tracker for yahoo sports) versus IE. For example, I can access stat tracker at work just fine via IE but over FF 3 it craps out. Now we've gone ahead and made a firewall rule to change this behavior but it isn't so much compliant with our certification policy so it is at best, temporary.

Zeus, you are like my father. He has yet to upgrade to service pack 3 and any other subsequent MS patches past Sept of last year due to compatibility issues. You and my father, unfortunately, do not understand that the integrity of the operating system comes first over application functionality. If the developers of your apps do not understand the guidelines set forth to develop and design an application on the MS platform and take shortcuts around things that Microsoft has to "patch" then that is a mistake and laziness on your developers part and not MS's fault. They set the standard, the developers deviated from the standard, and shit broke. There is a rhyme for the reason behind the method of Microsoft and its patching philosophy and I apologize if your vendors do not get what exactly is going on.

This is exactly what happened to one of our customers at work. They opted out of patching 5 quarters in a row and then they were hacked. They were hacked mainly because of a flaw within the OPEN SOURCE application they were running. It was a bad choice on the side of their application team. But further damage could have been avoided if if only they had done what we had e-mailed them to do which was to allow us to perform quarterly MS patch maintenance to their machines. This would have possibly saved them the 48 to 72 hours of down time and 5 manual machine re-builds and a complete overhaul of their production and staging environments for said hosted application. Then again it only takes one fuck up for someone to wake up and smell the roses.

My advice as a windows system engineer. Just because everything works now does not mean it is SECURE! There is a reason why Microsoft designates the second Tuesday of each month as "Patch Tuesday".

The one thing my father does do is updates his virus scan software and spyware religiously. This does not include RENEWALS this includes complete updates as in, when the Norton, Mcaffee or Trend engine for 2009 is released he gets that, he does not renew his 2007 engine license. The engine definitely is different. I suspect you know this already but just in case I wanted to make you aware. Virus definitions can continue to be updated but if you are running Norton 6.5 engine, versus 11 MP2, you are probably missing a shit ton of vulnerabilities.

Again, I have to protect Microsoft of on this. It is not the operating systems fault when the development guidelines have been set to inform the developers of a proper procedure on how to go about developing their applications to work on the multiple windows platforms (See technet, MSDN library and MS Books online). That is why Microsoft is able to release hotfixes and patches specific to error codes that are known in its knowledge base based on failures. So if you get a message that an app failed and it wants to phone home to the mothership, I say go right ahead and do it. At least you are letting Microsoft know of a) that it could have a problem with how the operating system interacts with an application or b) microsoft can let you know what action needs to be taken to run this particular application properly on the windows platform.

Forgive me, I do not mean to sound harsh in all of this but as someone who deals with these types of issues on a daily basis I wanted to let you know my point of view on the subject. I hope this helps clarify some of the reasons as to why MS does what it does. I apologize if this came off as offensive as that was definitely not my intention. I respect you very much on this board and your opinion in valued greatly.

[Tessian]

As someone who has to clean up the mess when someone doesn't patch (and gets compromised) I say AMEN BARRET.

Back when I started at my company 3 years ago, we were told that an Enterprise Patch Management system was too expensive; manual patching was just fine. 2 months later we get hit by a virus that prayed on a known and patched vulnerability in Windows 2000 workstations. Somewhere around 800 PC's had to be manually patched and cleaned. We had a patch management system implemented by the end of the year Nowadays we deploy out each batch of patches within 2 weeks of patch Tuesday (gotta test first) on every windows machine in the environment. Is it any surprise that the only systems that fail vulnerability scans now are AIX/Linux servers?

[Kupek]

In Zeus' defense, all of the other sysadmins I know avoided Firefox 3 when it came out for security reasons - it's a .0 release, so who knows what problems it has.

[SineSwiper]

Back when I started at my company 3 years ago, we were told that an Enterprise Patch Management system was too expensive; manual patching was just fine. 2 months later we get hit by a virus that prayed on a known and patched vulnerability in Windows 2000 workstations. Somewhere around 800 PC's had to be manually patched and cleaned. We had a patch management system implemented by the end of the year ;)

Despite the work trying to clean that up, that must have been a great "I told you so!" moment in business history with great timing. Stuff like this is easy to write a business impact doc on:

[cost of system] < [cost of your entire business going down for a week]

Fucking companies want us to implement everything that makes us safer and more reliable, but doesn't want to spend a dime on the tools that make that happen.

On the subject of AIX/Linux, well, AIX is old shit, and Linux is just like any other OS. If you don't patch it regularly, things are going to get hacked.

[Zeus]

Maybe it's Microshaft training me, but I have a simple philosophy when it comes to upgrading apps: if it ain't broke, don't upgrade. Too many times I've tried to upgrade to the next version and been burned. I was just trying to determine if I should with Firefox.

People like you tend to piss off tech support. Does that mean you're still running Edgar's Virus Scan version 0.001?

I haven't had a virus scanner - or a virus - in over 5 years :-)

I randomly grab Kaspersky (updated one) or something now and then just to check but that ain't really an issue for me. What I have that's done a much better job for me have been popup blockers, startup guards, and anti-hacking programs. They stop the random "I'm poking around" shit or the stupid fucking annoying ad programs without slowing the entire system down with their resource-hogging programming, like Norton. And I'll run a trojan finder here and there but it's not like I'm a warez nut.

Barret, until I got this computer a year and a half ago. Before that, I was actually running on SP1 and never had any "integrity" issues. I ain't a business, I'm a small fish in a very, very large sea. I'm concerned with "does my comp do what I want it to do without any issues?" not trying to secure the files on my computer. Honestly, I don't buy into this computer Culture of Fear crap. It's different when it's a business vs a personal computer, too. You can't really compare. It's far different.

And it's not necessarily a "Microsoft sucks therefore I ain't upgrading thing" either. I just see no reason to fix it if it ain't broken. Again, we're talking about my home computer which I use to surf, read emails, grab torrent files (from certain sites only), and share the media with my 360. I haven't had any issues stemming from my habits yet and it's been a good 5 years since I had a virus or any real issue with my comp (after SP1).