As someone who has been unpleasantly (but not critically) affected by the drama that ensued during the weekend after Mozilla’s decision to forcefully block .NET Assistant add-on and WPF plug-in on ALL Windows/Firefox installations around the world, I’ve been following a Bugzilla thread on the subject. Quite a fascinating reading.

A comment from Peter Schaefer perefectly summarizes how I feel about this unfortunate situation:

As understand the issue, Mozilla could have used its blocklist mechanism right if Microsoft had been smart enough to update the version number or name of the installed plugins along with their security patch. A solution would be to do this now and thus make the functionality work again for those who want it.

If you want to assign blame, which doesn't help anyone, Microsoft first messed things up, but now when trying to fix it both Mozilla and Microsoft have made suboptimal decisions, IMO.

As I see it the only reasonable way to resolve this satisfatorily and ASAP (which is really needed in the world utilizing affected technologies) is for Microsoft to release a dummy WPF plugin update with an updated version number that wouldn’t install on unpatched Windows and for Mozilla to unblock that version and leave the old one blocked.

I can only imagine what admins and helpdesks of affected companies are going through Today. My deepest condolences to you guys.

Update: the block on .NET Assistant (ClickOnce enabling add-on) has been removed on Sunday, so the problem is partially resolved. However WPF in-browser (XBAP) apps are still affected.

Mozilla is aiming at Guiness record by trying to force as much people as possible to download Firefox on a certain "Download Day" with actual date not set yet. The idea is brilliant marketing move and lame flashmob in general but that's not important. What's important is that the use my friend's Antanas' amMap interactive map control on the site's front page.

I bet he's biting his elbows right now guestimating how much pageviews/downloads/sales he would get if they've used a free version (with link back to amMap.com) rather than bought a commercial license :)

I've developed a system for a client where among other things he was able to export a certain product list as CSV file to import it into Excel/OpenOffice etc. I did it the usual way: created an ASPX page which was outputting data in CSV and pretending to be XLS with code like this:

Response.ContentType = "application/vnd.ms-excel";
Response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "filename=\"catalog.xls\"");
...

It all worked fine but then we ran into the Opera's dumb-caching issue, so I added

<%@ OutputCache Location="None" %>

to all sensitive pages. "Excel" export still worked fine. Then we moved the app under https and suddenly export stopped working in IE with the message box claiming

Internet Explorer cannot download file from server.
Internet Explorer was not able to open this Internet site. The requested site is either unavailable or cannot be found. Please try again later.

In Firefox and Opera it still worked fine.

I found this article in Microsoft's KB explaining that caching should be allowed in order for IE to save the file to temporary folder and then open it from there (hence the file not found error). This solved the problem. Hope this helps someone or myself in the future.

How do you create a fastest browser in the whole world? You just CACHE everything in a dumb way!

I just ran into a problem when a client reported anomalies with shopping cart functionality in a project I'm working on. Apparently when you add a product to a cart using Opera and then just navigate to a shopping cart page you see the (client) cached version of that page. If you refresh you see the actual version, then you remove a product from the cart using POST and you still see the actual version, then you just navigate to cart.aspx page and you see the cached version again.

I had no time to investigate the deep causes of this behavior but it looks like Opera by default is pulling from cache any page requested with GET and having no question mark in the URL if it was already requested less than 5 minutes ago.

Since I had no time to research the roots of this behavior I just solved (hopefully) the issue by adding

<%@ OutputCache Location="None" %>

to every sensitive aspx page.

Maybe I should do this all the time just to stay safe but neither IE nor Firefox were behaving in this crazy manner without this. So I'm guessing it's just because they are not after the "fastest browser on the market" crown and can justify creating a smart caching system sacrificing "speed".

So, I guess now I can declare that I hate all of the 3 major browsers (haven't spent enough time with Safari to start hating it). I hate MSIE for lack of support for standards and being slow in adding new features (thankfully there's IE7Pro plugin). I started hating Firefox while developing Gecko support in SPAW 1.x and running into some Gecko bugs that were known for more than 3 years and publicly ignored and for overall stubbornness of Mozilla developers and... I just don't like how it "feels" as a user. I discovered that you can crash Opera with JavaScript while working on Opera support for SPAW 2.x but they've fixed it by now which is nice, but now this...

Update: No caching results in back button not working... hmm... I hate these issues...