Firefox improved on Vista, but still no protected mode

Since our last article on Firefox's problems with Vista, considerable progress has been made to improve the browser for Microsoft's newest operating system. We caught up with Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering at the Mozilla Foundation, to bring us up to date.

[ZDNet] When Vista first came out, users reported a number of problems running Firefox on it. Have these issues been worked out now? For example, Users were unable to set Firefox as the default browser for all applications.

[Schroepfer] Vista changed the way in which default applications are registered. There are many applications currently shipping which do not use the OS provided API's to launch the default application and instead try and read the registry directly to determine the default application. These applications will not correctly launch Firefox until they are updated to use the existing APIs. We are currently investigating some workarounds for this - you can track the progress here: bug 369703 (Add protocol / file handler registry keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER to workaround apps that read reg keys directly).

[ZDNet] How about the problem where you couldn't install the browser to a directory name other than the default one?

If you installed a directory other than the default the Microsoft provided Vista compatibility shim would not have applied. This was fixed in 2.0.0.2.

[ZDNet] Problems with the browser window shaking?

This affects a small number of users and has been very difficult to track down. You can track the progress here: bug 372590 (Screen "jiggle" and Firefox lockup while loading tabs).

[ZDNet] Problems with Firefox updating itself?

There were some problems if you're running as a low rights user with UAC involved. This was fixed in 2.0.0.2, see bug 351949.

[ZDNet] In terms of Vista integration is there anything that IE7 does that Firefox doesn't do yet?

IE7 has better integration with the Vista Parental controls, and supports Protected Mode (IE is the only application I am aware of that uses protected mode).

[ZDNet] Is Protected Mode a priority for Firefox? After the animated cursor attack, Protected Mode became important in user's minds. Microsoft claimed that IE was more secure than Firefox because of Protected Mode.

The animated cursor attack would still allow for reading of any files on the local system - so protected mode is no panacea. We believe pro-active and rapid patching of security vulnerabilities is still the best defense. Having said that we also believe in defense in depth and are investigating protected mode along with many other techniques to improve security for future releases.

[ZDNet] In December I wrote that Microsoft had added a "shim" in Vista to let Firefox run in a backwards-compatible way, but that shim was set to expire with version 2.0.0.3. Well, 2.0.0.4 is out now, so presumably the shim has expired. What effect does that have on users?

None. Versions of Firefox prior to 2.0.0.2 were compatible with Vista through a "compatibility shim" that Microsoft provided. This worked around many of the compatibility issues that we resolved in version 2.0.0.2 and forward. If you want to look into this in more depth you can follow the bugs here: bug 352420. This is the main tracking bug for Vista support.

The work we did for Firefox 2.0.0.2 and beyond added the Vista specific functionality and removed the requirement for the shim.

[ZDNet] In August last year it was reported that the Firefox team accepted some help from Microsoft. Were you involved with that, and if so what did it involve? Was that a one time thing or is there a some back-n-forth still going on?

[Schroepfer] Rob Strong, myself and two other engineers attended the Vista compatibility lab. We listened to a few presentations about porting applications to Vista, had access to a Vista computer lab, and spoke with several teams at Microsoft regarding Vista compatibility. The trip was a one-time visit but there have been several discussions engineer-to-engineer since then.

[ZDNet] Does Mozilla or Firefox have an answer to Adobe Apollo, which allows you to share code between zero-install Web apps and conventional fat client apps? What's holding it back from being more widely adopted?

Mozilla's focus is on continuing to push the capabilities of the open web. For example, Firefox 3 includes standards-based support for offline web applications, allowing web site developers to take existing applications and make them available offline.

[ZDNet] What should web developers be looking forward to in the future?

In addition to offline applications, mentioned above, we are continuing to lead the way in standards support. Firefox 3 will pass (the ACID2 test), includes improved SVG support, includes many CSS 2.1 fixes, and improved Canvas tag support.

For the future we expect to continue to improve the offline experience, richness of graphics on the web, and the performance of the overall web platform. We've been working on the standardization of ECMAScriptV4, or Javascript2, which will improve both performance and developer productivity in building web applications. Javascript2 is one of the largest evolutions of the main programming language on the web.

[ZDNet] Given that Mozilla and XUL have been out there for so long why is something like Apollo such a big deal? What will it take to make the "Mozilla platform" be seen as a comparable or superior alternative to Eclipse RCP, Netbeans RCP, Adobe Flash/Flex/Apollo, XAML/WPF/Silverlight/XBAP, etc...?

There are already dozens to hundreds of shipping applications built on top of the Mozilla platform serving hundreds of millions of people: Firefox, Thunderbird, Joost, Songbird, Camino, SeaMonkey, Sunbird, Lightning, and Flock. This is something none of the other stacks you mention come close to. Why? It is an open stack that allows all participants to contribute to and improve the platform. They can build with their choice of development tools and are not dependent on support from a single vendor. They get both leverage from shared investment and control of their own destiny.

You can read here for more information on the improvements to the platform.

[ZDNet] Now that Sun's Java is open source, are we ever going to see some kind of Mozilla/Java bundling? With fast applets, JFX script, and the ability to run real Java logic instead of JavaScript in the browser?

Nothing planned at this time.