I have even been contacted by “Security Professionals”, saying my comments are idiotic and dumb. They even told me to delete my entry, I told them to stop visiting my blog, but for some unknown reason, they simply won’t give up — they keep sending me mails, sounding more and more fascistic for each mail.

What they apparently do not understand, or take the time to comprehend, is that I was right. There is nothing more to it. I was 100% correct in saying that disabling IDN support was a mistake, and Mozilla came to the same conclusion and implemented a much better way of handling the spoofing problem (by displaying links as punycode). It doesn’t really matter if the solution is not that pretty, because it solves the problem and leaves IDN support working like it did before. You don’t have to remove features, that people depend on, in order to solve a problem.

So please stop sending me idiotic mails about how wrong you think I was, how I don’t give a damn about security and how I made a bet with the devil for the souls of all mankind.

I personally have been able to get dozens of people to convert to Firefox because it supports IDN domains, by disabling IDN without notice you are not only making my life a living hell (because people will complain and I have to listen), you are also taking away one of the key reasons for people to use Firefox.

Many domain registries and hosting providers even recommend Firefox on their websites because it supports IDN.

I realize it has been disabled for “security reasons“, but I suspect it will take years for domain registries to find a solution to IDN spoofing.

Big mistake Mozilla, this one will come back to haunt you.

What ever happened to just promoting a good project? Do people really have to get something in return before they’ll pay their respects?

Note: No affiliate links can be found in this entry.

Now, one whom uses Mozilla will get an all-around nice experience of browsing these domains since he will not notice any “Install this plugin” dialogs etc.
I myself was rather supprised to find out that mozilla supported this.

E-mail is another problem with IDN domains.
Webmails such as hotmail and a large amount of other webmails does not support sending to these types of domains, thereby if your primary domain is an IDN domain you are not likely to be getting a whole lot of email (and no spam?).
You can however send e-mail to IDN domains if you are the owner of Outlook Express or Outlook (not Outlook 2003).
Again the use of IDN domains in Microsoft programs is 100% dependent on the IDNplugin, Microsoft did show some interest in supporting these domains by default at some point, but then backed out – leaving the whole IDN concept dead in the water. Strangely enough Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird does not support the use of IDN domains in emails, yet.

Another problem is internationalization, since an English keyboard does not come with æøå on them they will find it hard to visit your site or send you email. It’s not very polite to require them to know the ALTGR + [0-9] combination for the chars.

I can understand why someone would want an IDN domain to be their secondary domain, since it’s a nice feature to both own rene.com and rené.com – but only owning rené.com would be silly, since e-mail support is rather non-existent with IDN domains.

Its popularity is largely dependant on e-mail, therefore I think Microsoft should get out of the starting holes and put some effort into supporting these new domains. So you don’t have to download some silly plug-in to use them as normal domains.

The whole concept seems to be somewhat broken :)

[ end rant]

The Firebird developers needs to realize that while THEY may like that the title does not contain ” – Mozilla Firebird” the rest of the world doesn’t…

And instead of saying “no comment” or closing bugs filed about the issue.. they should make their case for this change, because I see NO LOGIC in it’s existence

It should be noted that I wrote this right after watching “revolution OS”, which sparked this post. While it may seem harsh, I really do not understand why developers ignore the tons of comments and objections about this “feature”. The very least the developers could do was to make their case about the change, but no…

Update: Dave Hyatt argues that since nobody ever saw the “Mozilla Firebird” part in their taskbar anyway, there was no need for it.. At the same time he says it caused problems on Mac… Well buhu! Then make it go away on Macs… I don’t want my favorite product spoiled by Mac…

If it ain’t broken.. DONT FIX IT!

I’ve long put it of because I never felt Firebird was userfriendly enough for my newbie parents to use.

So I started out by installing version 0.6.1 ( To avoid that AutoComplete bug ), using the windows installer. I then asked them if they wanted to learn how to block popups and my dad quickly started talking about how he hated all the spam he was getting and all those popups he got in his face when he visited his daily sites.
And so, I pulled the rabbit out of the hat and showed him Mozilla Firebird.
I showed him how it would block popups and how he could use tabs for smarter browsing and get a better overview. He really liked it, all he asked was that I imported his Internet Explorer bookmarks. I had to create a new Firebird profile to do that, that could be made easier?!

Anyway, my dad told my mum and now they are both giving Firebird a good and fair try on their computer…

I guess i Firebird Conversion Score is 8 now :)

I could care less that there will be no further standalone IE version, but I do however think it is poor attitude by Microsoft to just throw away PNG support.
I was also hoping to hear that Microsoft would think about making their browser standard compliant, but there is also little chance of that.

Use Firebird!

I wish people would start to use a Gecko based browser, Internet Explorer is just starting to bug me way to much! :(

*btw* I know the images are causing some problems, I just can’t get it to work right… But I’m working on it :)

*UPDATE* ok, so why the hell is Firebird having problems, when IE has none… The world is up-side-down

Very funny, and true, so I wanted to share…

You call things names, you end up being called names: that’s just the way these things go.
First there was the hyper-active farce of Firebird (the Mozilla browser) versus Firebird (the database).
For those of you not bothering to keep up, Firebird the database was a fork of software that was called Interbase which was owned by Borland a company which used to be called Inprise and before that used to be called Borland, deep breath.
You’d think the Firebird developers would by now be accustomed to the transitory nature of names, but nooo. They were *shocked* when Mozilla started using the term Firebird, and insisted they were the *only* Firebird on the block, even though
a) there were dozens of software Firebirds before them (including BT’s short-lived games division) and
b) the only thing anyone can remember about Firebird the DB was that it had massive security hole wired into it by Borland/Inprise/Borland that took them six months to find.
Dire threats were hurled, until Mozilla pointed out that the Firebird name was just the semi-internal *project* name, and since no-one calls the current browser “Seamonkey” (*its* project name), they should calm the motherfirebird down – nobody cares about you or your weirdo legacy software…
Couldn’t agree more

I read an Interview with an unknown Mozilla Developer. I quote
“When referring to Thunderbird or Firebird before or during the 1.4 release cycle, make sure to use the project name with Mozilla pre-pended as “Mozilla Thunderbird” or “Mozilla Firebird” instead of Mozilla alone or Firebird/Thunderbird alone.”
Jee, I wonder why. It should be rather obvious that The Developers are trying to make those sick Firebird SQL people happy… Anyway, “Mozilla Firebird” also sounds better than “Firebird” or “Firebird Browser”.

Firebird 0.6 is close to release, the lastest builds are somewhat bug-free, but there are still a number of small bugs – which are just annoying :)

BTW, check out the Reasons for changing to Firebird