Re: Pop-up Prevention

[Jeff Giacobbe <giacobbej () MAIL MONTCLAIR EDU>]

Gary-

I'm not sure if I would classify Firefox as the "Fedora" of Mozilla's
offerings. IMHO, Fedora is the "free, but use at your own risk 'cause we
really don't support it offering" from Red Hat. I may be cynical, but I
view Fedora as the bone they threw to the Open Source crowd to keep them
quiet ;-) Redhat's real goal is to sell you expensive Enterprise Server
licenses. And that's perfectly fine - they're a for-profit business
after all.

Firefox, on the other hand, is Mozilla's next big thing (along with
Thunderbird.) However, as Simon Males indicated, Firefox is still in
Beta testing and thus Mozilla.org would be remiss to officially sanction
it for production use.

When Firefox 1.0 is released, I see no reason why it wouldn't be ready,
willing, and able to be used in security applications (especially if the
alternative is using IE 6 in security applications ;-)) Simon's response
did not indicate that Firefox shouldn't be used in security-conscious
environments, but rather that the current Beta versions are just that,
and should only be used for testing purposes.


BTW, our University has been one of the few holdouts in sticking with
Netscape as our officially support browser. Given AOL's disinterest in
maintaining Netscape and Mozilla.org's rapid development cycle and rich
feature set, in the Fall semester we are going to move over to Mozilla
as our officially supported browser and mail client. When Firefox and
Thunderbird have achieved 1.0 release status we'll probably encourage
their use instead of the integrated Mozilla suite. Learning curve from
Mozilla to Firefox/Thunderbird should be minimal, and having two
separate apps makes each one smaller and faster.

Regards,

Jeff Giacobbe
Dir. of Systems, Security, and Networking
Montclair State University


Gary Flynn wrote:
> I sent the Mozilla group a message asking about the
> appropriateness of the Mozilla application suite
> versus Firefox for sensitive applications last month.
> Their response is below. This leads me to think of
> Firefox and Mozilla the way I think of Fedora and
> RedHat Enterprise. However, I don't think I'd get
> many general purpose vendors today, except perhaps
> the "unbreakable Oracle", to say they're ready for
> security applications. :)

> Subject: Re: Production Use of Firefox/Thunderbird
>
> Hello Gary
>
>        Thanks for your mail. The current releases of Firefox and
> Thunderbird
> are recommened for testing purposes only, thus not commercial and/or
> production uses.

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