The end of the world as we know it. Again.
If I may get diatribal for a moment, there are a few things that have turned up in the last day or so that need comment: IE7 bugs, the ‘Kama Sutra’ worm, and Firefox upgrades.
IE7 Beta 2.0 is buggy. So what?
So someone has gone and found an IE7 bug - in record time, apparently. No doubt much will be made of this - plenty of nyah-nyah-nya-nyah-nyah from the Firefox cheersquad I expect - but is it really such a big issue? It is a beta release, which implies that Microsoft want people to find bugs so that the development team can fix them. It’s when the browser becomes a full production release and Microsoft takes its foot off the pedal - like it did with just about every other major release of IE - that bug fixing really becomes a problem.
Kama Sutra worms its way in
We’ve got the usual periodic media hysteria over an old-school “trash your Windows PC” worm that goes variously by the name “Kama Sutra”, “Nyxem-D”, “Blackworm”, and “Grew”.
Apparently it’s the end of the world as we know it. Again.
But it ain’t exactly news, places like Sophos and The Register have had reports available for several weeks and even yesterday Sophos was urging calm on the issue.
My guess is that if people keep their virus definition files up to date they should be fine. However I must say that I’m inclined to think that you’re asking from trouble if you don’t simply delete email offerings of porn, especially when they come from such dubious senders as ‘crazygirl’, ‘badboy’ or ‘wizzard’. If pr0n is your thing, surely you can find it on your own without the help of some would-be spammer?
Firefox 1.5.0.1
Finally, Firefox 1.5.0.1 has been released, which is great. But for such a minor version change, how come it broke so many extensions? From a quick look in the release notes, I can’t see why this would be.
Extensions are an important feature that attracts people to Firefox and they become an integral part of the experience of using the browser. Users will delay or avoid upgrading if every piddling little incremental change is going to leave their browser feeling brain-dead.
So now we’ve got to wait until the extension authors can fix their work - and who likes to constantly go back over the same stuff over and over again? I reckon an increasing number of extensions will simply be abandoned unless there can be more stability between incremental version changes. And that’s got to be a sad thing.