David and Katherine Goodwin

This whole issue is quite weird to me. Clearly the solution is to use a different name for Debian's compilation of the Firefox source code. Especially as their version doesn't work quite the same the "official" one. Another alternative would be for them to put the unmodified Firefox code in non-free and defaulted to Epiphany for main.

Either option would be much easier for users who can't work out why Ubuntu Firefox doesn't work the same as Mozilla Firefox (otherwise the ColorZilla extension would work and it doesn't!) Also, I've noticed that Ubuntu Firefox appears to crash more often on my system. That could be just that it's not as compatible with the extensions I use as the office version.

(Obviously, I replaced Ubuntu Firefox with Mozilla Firefox on my box.)

What I find really odd is that people are upset. Every big free software group enforces its trademarks including RedHat, SusE, OpenOffice.org and Debian. Now the question becomes, should the Firefox logo be trademarked, or should anyone be able to attach it to any software they like? i.e. should I be allowed to compile up Firefox and alter say the SSL implementation slighty and then call it "Mozilla Firefox"? Personally, I'd say no I shouldn't be able to do that. I should call it "Rob's Browser". Alternatively, I could ask the Mozilla guys to check my change out and then if they are happy, I can call my amended version "Mozilla Firefox". To my mind, it seems reasonable.

But then, I've always been a fan of Open Source software.

Having said all that, I wouldn't wish Ubuntu's default Firefox on anyone! Firefox isn't the only game in town. Epiphany is pretty good, as is the SeaMonkey. I periodically try Konqueror but just can't seem to get on with it. I wish someone would put the KHTML engine into a better UI so I could actually compare it with Gecko seriously!

Regards,

Rob...

(I am quite aware that he is mixing and matching Debian's version with Ubuntu's version; I assume that they are the same base code with a different theme.)

Well, as I understand it, Apple took the rendering engine used by Konqueror and used it to form safari (as the LWN article discusses anyway); there are now attempts to bring the two code based back into sync wit the KDE Unity project.

I have safari on my ibook, but I can't figure out how to open a new tab with it, so it seems quite useless.

I wish I had a Mac... triple booting would require a big hard drive though!

I've not been too impressed with this Dell Inspiron as its screen has gone wrong once already within 18 months. I quite like the look of the MacBook Pro or ThinkPad next. Depends if Lenovo has kept up the quality or not. Either way, it'll be expensive, so I might have to go back to a desktop.

To get tabs to work in Safari, there's a setting to enable them in the preferences. Then Cmd+T will open a new one.

Regards,

Rob...

To be honest; I think it's very comparable to Firefox.

I like the fact the that the bundled extensions are very easy to turn on/off; the browser works well (all pages I visit render fine), it integrates well with Gnome and seems quicker to start.

However, it does behave very like Firefox (which is to be expected after all - they both use the Gecko rendering engine).

On the other hand, I think it will be harder to manually update Epiphany - whereas with Firefox I can just download a binary tarball.

I've seen a number of people mention that Ubuntu's Firefox (and Thunderbird) are relatively heavily patched - and perhaps this is the cause of some of the problems I have with them.