Bitten by Firefox, Not In A Good Way

Interesting little problem that just turned up with using Firefox on Linux. If you use Firefox on the Mac instead of Safari, you might consider looking into this problem for yourself, before it bites you in the same way I got bit.

Firefox, if you don’t know, is by Mozilla. Their email app is called Thunderbird, although it is all called Firefox. If you use the free browser and email app, you might want to consider this problem which I discovered, and take action to protect yourself. This is a major flaw, in my estimation, and one that is largely being ignored by Mozilla.

Actually, I was using Linspire, a Windows-type operating system in Linux, running it on a sweet little mini-ITX motherboard using a fast AMD CPU, which I built myself, into a mini desktop computer a couple of years ago. Linspire has always worked fine, and I used an older Distro, which means I was not using the cutting edge version that was in Beta, but a more refined, stable, and well documented version. This is the platform where the problem occurred.

Never had much of a problem with that OS. It was much more stable and secure than Windows ever was.

Many of the companies I did tech work for required Windows, and I usually worked from my house, using VPS over a cable modem to do all my work for the company. You can imagine the nightmares I had in that computing environment. If not for their company tech support, my own computers running Windows might have been even worse. This was never a productive environment, even though it needed to be. Of course, you know that it was not just the Windows OS. It was also all of the Microsoft applications too. Word would not port between machines without distorting or destroying the format of our documents. Powerpoint was a running joke, as no one in the company ever got completely through a slide presentation without dying somewhere before the end. Excel was the only bright spot in their Office suite. . .

But, this blog is about Linspire, and in particular, using Firefox, the browser and the email app, in Linux.

What happened last week was that suddenly the OS, or Firefox went crazy on the desktop, opening hundreds of copies of itself, or of browser windows. It was hard to stop. I actually had to remove the power cord from the computer to make it quit. The keyboard and mouse were locked up, and the power and reset buttons were also disabled.

What I found after I turned the computer back on, was that everything came back on and worked fine. Nothing seemed amiss. But I soon discovered that my browser had no Favorites any more. All of my hundreds of Favorite links were totally gone. A new, clean and unused brower was setting on my desktop. Further fervent searching found that I also had a new version of my Thunderbird email app too. All my email, and all my accounts that were there a few minutes earlier were gone!

A quick check of the other apps on the computer showed that everything was there, and all my documents in the Documents folder were in place. The only thing that was gone were my Favorites and all my Email.

So I did a search for these files in Linspire and in Linux. Nada. The problem was that there are few search or recovery options internally with these two OSs.

Part of the problem is that in Linspire, your apps can be automatically uploaded off the Net, and rewritten over your older version of the app, all without your permission or knowledge. Evidently, this is partly what happened to Firefox. However, it was not a newer version, and it was not off the Net. It was off my hard drive, where the Firefox app was written over itself as if it were a fresh install. I have never heard of any app doing this before, and I have been around all kinds of computers for several decades.

More than this, I found that there are no automatic backups of the Firefox/Thunderbird files I was looking for, nor were these files protected in any way from being overwritten by a new install of Firefox. Especially one you didn’t ask for.

People are turning to Firefox in droves, leaving Windows Explorer like it was a sinking ship. I don’t blame them. 25 million people have switched in the past six months. There is every indication that many more will follow. Whole corporations and even some state, county and federal systems are also switching.

On the surface, all this is fine. But I know there is a real bug in Firefox, and it is not addressed at all by the company that produced it. Nor are there any real helps out there online. There are a lot of blogs about the problem, but almost no answers for a solution for a full recovery of your lost files. A lot of people have lost their email and favorites, but this is generally being treated as something trivial, and there is no solution for it.

“You got a new version of your browser installed. It wiped out all your old files? Get over it and get on with life. You should have been faithfully backing those files up somewhere else on your hard drive, naming them something obscure so the browser wouldn’t find them and wipe them with a new empty file for you. What? No one told you that you had to do this? What do you mean that Firefox is a lousy browser for doing this to people? Don’t you know people love the look and feel, and the security from virii and spam it gives them? Who cares if it is a bit buggy in losing your stuff? Get over it or go back to Windows and Explorer.”

As far as I am concerned, Firefox, and Linux/Linspire have a major flaw that is neither addressed, nor handled in a way that protects the user. This makes it a second-rate software package in my book, no matter how much better it is than Windows.

As a result, I have quit using Linspire and Linux for the time being. Opera is another browser I could have kept using on Linspire, but it could not read some websites I used. Explorer definitely remains a inviable option on any platform. Only Firefox had the capability to mimic Explorer on some websites, thus to gain access. This means that some places online are unreachable now, since I am using the Mac exclusively, but I can live with that for now.

On the Mac, I have removed Firefox from the hard drive completely, and am currently using Safari instead. It doesn’t have the same look and feel as Firefox, but it takes care of your Favorites and your Email in a much better way. The single feature I think I miss most in Firefox, is the automatic spell check that highlights suspect words and gives you an automatic little popup list of suggested words that you can highlight and fix, on the fly, anywhere in the browser or email. Safari has such a feature, but it is a bit clunky to use, IMO.

Too bad all these people out there, switching to Firefox using Windows, or using Firefox on Linux, haven’t heard of OS X and Safari. Especially the ones who have yet to be bitten by Firefox, and not in a good way.

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