Friday, February 17, 2012

Dangeresque 4: This time, it's Chemspill 2 (*)

In a bid to release a chemspill just about every week, here we are at 10.0.2. This one wasn't Mozilla's fault; this was a serious flaw in a major library and everyone took this up the orifice, including Google Chrome. It also affects Firefox 3.6 and products based on it such as Camino 2.1, so you holdouts should update as well. Yes, we are vulnerable too. Because it would be more work to pull the new JS hotness out, and because I've gotten uniformly positive results from you, the beta testing audience, we're gonna have to jump shipping it in this release also. For that reason, the changesets are exactly the same.

This was supposed to include the "black image" fix (Mozilla bugs 720035, 689962 et al., tracked for us as issue 132) but the patch Mozilla currently has for review in M689962 dragged the browser down enormously and I backed it out before release. I'm going to try a smaller scoped custom patch that simply disables image optimization if the image is all black and this should not have the performance impact of the "bigger" fix. That will be in 10.0.3pre or final, depending. If this seriously affects you, you can disable image optimization entirely for now and this is explained in M720035.

In the "I told you so" department, since we're talking about security, the latest flaw discovered in Adobe Flash can be used in a platform-independent manner to steal account information from the browser using malicious scripting. The Power Mac version of Flash 10.1 is vulnerable, and can be used to exploit the browser without special considerations for Power Macs. There will only be more of these in the future.

Release notes and versions:


UPDATE: Just read that the Frieden bros. got a updated version of Timberwolf running on AmigaOS 4. This is a fork of Firefox (much as we are also a fork of Firefox) for PowerPC Amigas, mostly targetted at the (object of my lust) PA6T-based AmigaOne X1000, but works on SAM boards and the like. While they still have some work to do to get it up to current, it's good to see PowerPC-based Firefox alive and well on other platforms besides the usual suspects.

(*) Yes, I did watch a whole bunch of Homestar Runner and Strong Bad DVDs while working on this. Why do you ask?
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14 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 17, 2012 at 12:21 PM

    German langpack installer at
    http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/issues/detail?id=61#c95

    ReplyDelete
  2. ClassicHasClassFebruary 17, 2012 at 3:24 PM

    Just noticed that the Frieden bros. got Timberwolf updated for AmigaOS 4. Nice work, guys! It's still an older version of Firefox but it is coming along nicely. I'm still saving my pennies for an X1000. Link in the edit.

    ReplyDelete
  3. GTFebruary 17, 2012 at 4:00 PM

    FYI..
    B/W G3 450Mhz server, 984mb

    TFF 10.0.1
    Sunspider 4918.3ms +/- 0.3%
    Peacekeeper 77
    Dromaeo V8 11.99 runs/s

    TFF 10.0.2
    Sunspider 4550.7ms +/- 0.05%
    Peacekeeper 100
    Dromaeo V8 16.29 runs/s

    Nice!

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousFebruary 18, 2012 at 8:52 AM

    I didn't know there were Amiga fans here. I used an Amiga 500 for all my browsing up to 2008. Browsing is certainly a hell of a lot easier with TenFourFox. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousFebruary 19, 2012 at 7:12 AM

    Also, it seems noteworthy that VLC still supports PPC, so there's at least one mainstream video player available with recent security updates (downside: 10.5 and up).
    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

    ReplyDelete
  6. ClassicHasClassFebruary 19, 2012 at 10:52 PM

    @mr_a500, hence your name, eh? :)

    I'm sitting next to a Commodore 128 and kitty-corner to my own A500.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousFebruary 20, 2012 at 2:15 PM

    Yep. I've got my A500 on my left, C128 on my right, PowerMac G5 (with IBM Model F keyboard) in front of me. (NeXT, Mac SE, Kaypros, 800XL, etc. in various other spots)

    About the VLC - I'm totally disgusted with the new version 2.0. The new layout, which you can't change, is crap and just a simple column resize will cause a crash. The thing crashed so many times, I had to uninstall. It looks like even though PPC is still supported, 1.1.12 is the end of the line for me.

    ReplyDelete
  8. AnonymousFebruary 20, 2012 at 5:39 PM

    >About the VLC - I'm totally disgusted with the new version 2.0.
    Same here. The crash bugs and terrible performance are one thing. They can be sorted out, and I'm trying to help doing this. The new interface is completely unusable, though. Back to version 1.1. Very sad, but that's how you ruin an application.

    ReplyDelete
  9. niu techFebruary 21, 2012 at 6:47 PM

    Will it be possible to port the Australis UI to TenFourFox?

    ReplyDelete
  10. ClassicHasClassFebruary 21, 2012 at 8:23 PM

    Dunno yet. Possibly.

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousFebruary 22, 2012 at 6:27 AM

    French langpack installer for TFF 10.0.2 at http://code.google.com/p/tenfourfox/issues/detail?id=61#c96

    This installer needs testing. It should be alright, but I'm not a native speaker of French.

    ReplyDelete
  12. JuEeHaFebruary 23, 2012 at 5:33 AM

    @mr_a500 Wow. That is an accomplishment. What browser did you use? How you connected? (I have two A500s with 512KB extra memory modules and I have actually used one of them for a few weeks on 2009 because GPU on my main computer broke. I loved the look of my friend when I explained my situation to him(He had one GPU unused that would work in my computer)"What?! Did you really say 1MB of RAM, 7MHz processor and Floppy disks?!")

    ReplyDelete
  13. AnonymousFebruary 23, 2012 at 6:29 AM

    Wow, and I thought my 400 MHz Pismo PowerBook was low-end.

    ReplyDelete
  14. AnonymousFebruary 23, 2012 at 3:01 PM

    @JuEeHa

    I used IBrowse. You can see a screenshot browsing with my A500 here: http://eab.abime.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=22102

    I also ran MacOS 8.1 on my Amiga 500: http://www.amiga.org/gallery/images/2187/1_2550.png

    ..and the A500 itself is here (has 33Mhz accelerator):
    http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/2856/a500j.jpg

    (but this is a development blog, not an Amiga forum so I won't ramble on ;))

    ReplyDelete

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