Who's Winning the New Browser Wars?

Image by Sam Cornwell via Flickr

Who's winning the new browser wars? We are. By "we," I mean consumers.

Just look at the stuff that has happened in the last couple of years. We've got a mature Safari, based on WebKit and the Squirrelfish engine, running just about as fast as any browser. Chrome is also based on WebKit but uses a completely new JavaScript engine named V8, and it blows the doors off of just about everything else. Firefox has hit 3.0 and now 3.5, with improved Gecko rendering and Spidermonkey / Tracemonkey keeping the browser competitive and all the extensions keeping it attractive to large numbers of users. Even IE has bumped up a couple of versions to 7 then 8, and there's no reason to call it a pig, either. (Oops, I forgot Opera Unite!)

Just imagine what we would have had in 2004 if IE hadn't won the original browser wars and sat at version 6 and 95% of web traffic for five years.

Competition benefits the cunsumer.

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Upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty and Flash Doesn't Work?

Image via Wikipedia

Ignore this article: it's no longer valid.

Once you've upgraded to Jaunty and done the mandatory reboot, you're likely in for a big surprise -- Flash stops working in Firefox. This is related to a bug in Network Manager which drops the connection during the upgrade. Since Flashplugin-nonfree is really a dummy package which downloads the Flash player from Adobe, the download fails and the package shows as installed when there really isn't anything there.

The solution? There are two, one significantly better than the other.

1. Reinstalling flashplugin-nonfree will solve the problem short-term, but you're still stuck with this wonky download behavior which also breaks the package whenever Adobe updates Flash and creates a binary which doesn't match the package's checksum.
2. The better solution is to uninstall flashplugin-nonfree, enable the Partner repository, and install adobe-flashplugin instead. Flash is actually in that package, so you won't have any strange failures.
3. Of course, you could always install the plugin manually into your $HOME/.mozilla/plugins directory, but then you'd have to manually upgrade Flash, and it being the security nightmare that it is, there's almost no circumstance in which you want to do that.