On Friday 23 May 2008 01:16, Victor Denisov wrote: > Recent emails to the support list reminded me of something. > > Early this week, I've covered Freenet 0.7 on a seminar on P2P > technologies I'm leading at my University. Several students had > installed it to try it out, and so far I got three reports, all sounding > like "OMG IT MADE SOMETHING TO MY FIREFOX PLEASE HELP". > > Mind you, they're studying at the department of computer science in one > of our best Universities for 3+ years, at least one of them runs Linux > on his laptop, so all in all they're quite above the average level when > it comes to using a computer.
If you ignore the warning to not close the main firefox window before the customised one, you WILL end up with your firefox profile default set to the freenet profile. Which is BAD. > > However, it seems that change to Firefox behavior wasn't something they > were expecting or were able to quickly remediate. I personally hadn't > had this problem, since I was following mailing lists and knew what to > expect - but still was scared a little when I saw Freenet skin for FF > for the first time :-). The problem is not the customised theme, the problem is that it can become permanent. Also that it crashes more often than the base browser, and that when it does it can get "stuck" with a lock on the profile. > > I'm not pushing for any immediate changes, but perhaps being more > user-friendly regarding the custom FF profile is something to consider > for 0.7.1? I'd welcome any suggestions. So far, afaics the options are: 1) Fix the Firefox bug that causes the profile resetting. -no-remote should cause it not only to not coalesce with an existing Firefox copy, but also not to write to the default profile. Also find a new skin that works with FF3, and ideally is a little more stable! 2) Build something using XULRunner. I believe this is the recommended way of doing things according to the Firefox devs. They provide a sample browser implemented in XUL, but it's *really* minimal, no right-click-go-back for example. 3) Bundle a "portable" browser. In any case we should make it obvious to the user that the freenet browser has something to do with Freenet. > > On a somewhat related note, I also got several reports that Freenet > works very well. Interestingly, many students have discovered and began > using FMS, but no one had mentioned Frost so far. Some have also found > Thaw and told me that "it's not working", I know that Thaw's not without > its share of bugs, but it *did* work for me when I was trying it out. > Could it be DoSed now just as Frost is? I doubt it. Maybe it's just not very user friendly? > > Regards, > Victor Denisov. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20080523/17b8a4c5/attachment.pgp>
