WhistlinDixie

Vista and Firefox

Overall, I have been very happy with Vista on my new laptop. It has been much more stable than my old Windows XP-based laptop. (And no, Microsoft didn’t pay me to say that.) However, I have run across one rather nasty problem with XULRunner-based apps (or at least Firefox and Thunderbird).

Yesterday, I had to reboot my computer after installing a program. All seemed normal at first as I launched the programs that I start manually at boot (Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, FeedDemon, Winamp, and Pidgin). After a couple of minutes, I noticed that Firefox had not started, even though the rest of the programs had been running for almost a minute. Normally, Firefox would start up at just about the same time as the other programs. I clicked the Firefox icon again since I figured that I had missed when I clicked before or perhaps the click had not registered with Windows for some reason or another. I waited a couple of minutes, but still nothing had happened.

I opened up Process Explorer and looked at the task list to see if maybe the program had loaded, but just not showed its window yet. I quickly found firefox.exe in the list. I then noticed that it was on the list again. Normally, Firefox prevents multiple processes of itself from being opened at the same time. I looked at their memory usage and noticed that one had normal memory usage for a new window (~35MB) and the other seemed to be stuck at about 5MB, which is the amount of memory used by Firefox when it first opens before it starts loading anything.

I figured that I would stop both firefox.exe processes and start a new one and that would be it. I closed the 5MB Firefox process without issue. I then told Process Explorer to end the other Firefox process. I looked at the process list again and noticed that firefox.exe was still there, seemingly untouched. I tried many more times to kill the Firefox process, all unsuccessful, eventually being forced to restart the computer.

After restarting the computer, I opened up my normal set of applications and was happy to see that Firefox started normally. I then noticed that Thunderbird had failed to start. A quick look at Process Explorer revealed to me that Thunderbird was having the same problem as Firefox was having. It appeared to be time to Google for the answer.

I eventually ran across a solution on the mozillaZine forums posted by nik.tech. It ends up that the problem lies in Vista’s new networking stack. To solve the problem, I just needed to reset the stack. To do this, I had to run three commands in an elevated command prompt:

netsh winsock reset catalog
netsh int ip reset reset.log
netsh int ipv6 reset reset.log

According to nik.tech, this issue should be solved in Vista SP1, even though it might not yet be fixed in Vista SP1 RC1. (While the problem is fixed, the fix currently causes Firefox to blue screen randomly while surfing the net.) I hope this is true or that Mozilla is able to work around this issue in Firefox 3.

Firefox Finally Plays WMV

The Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft has released a plugin that finally makes Firefox consistently play WMV files. The plugin requires Firefox 2.0 and Windows Media Player 11. (Sorry to all of you who refuse to upgrade from WMP 10.)

Prior to this plugin, getting WMV files to play in Firefox was a crapshoot at best. I’ve personally never gotten it to work, even with trying it on multiple computers and on multiple Windows installs on my laptop. I guess some people have, but the success rate was not exactly great. I’m glad to see that MS actually put the effort into making Firefox, the biggest competitor by far to Internet Explorer, work consistently with their video formats.

Episode III: Best Sports Movie Ever?

According to Kenny Mayne of ESPN’s SportsCenter, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the best sports movie ever. Better than Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, any of the Rockys, or Caddyshack, to name a few. His biggest disappointment was over the small number of football scenes. George Lucas, the man behind the Star Wars saga, said that originally they had a lot of football scenes in the movie, but they had to cut them because they were too gruesome for the theater. Now, Kenny only has to convince the original R2-D2 and Chewbacca.

Ok, way OT, but to continue on what I was talking about on Friday, IBM has announced that it will be switching to Firefox internally as the supported browser for the company. I’d just like to say, I’m pretty sure that with IBM’s track record, they can’t be wrong on this.

Changing of the Guard

What great news for this Friday the 13th: IE’s market share slips below 90%! I guess that is what you get when your newest browser is at least four years old. It’s no surprise, really. After all, it sometimes takes Microsoft months, and in a few instances, a year or more, to release critical patches for its browser. On the other hand, last weekend, three new vulnerabilities were discovered in Firefox. By Thursday, they were already pushing the bugfix out to users. Talk about a fast reaction. Microsoft could never turn out a patch in four to five days. Instead, they would have you wait for their monthly update release schedule, and even then, there would be no guarantee that the bug will be fixed. And the best thing to look forward to is that come v1.1 of Firefox, there will be an actual patching system implemented, so you won’t have to make a 4.5+ Mb download to get every bugfix. So, in conclusion, join the browser revolution by choosing the most secure, most extensible, most feature rich solution on the market: Mozilla Firefox. After all, I still have yet to have someone visit my website using Firefox, except me, of course.