Although the interminable feeling the author had while waiting for Firefox 3.5 to start up mirrored my own feeling of waiting for him to get to the f'ing point, he's absolutely right: Firefox should just be using the system's secure random number generator on each platform. If you have a vulnerability in /dev/random or CryptGenRandom(), you have a massively more important finding than Firefox crypto.

To summarize for those who have less spare time than I:

Some firefox developer had a Very Bad (tm) idea to seed a random number generator by scanning the Windows Temp folders, which is now causing a 30 secs to over a minute pause in start up for a lot of users (particularly those that use IE, which creates a LOT of temp files). Yikes.

As soon as I see eye filth like that I go right to my readability bookmarklet:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

80% of the time, it works every time.

Fuck AT&T.

My wife told me that some of her coworkers will use their Yahoo homepage to search for Google, and from there they will search for Facebook. She even tried to teach them about the address bar, and they don't care.

I think for many people it doesn't really matter if there is a better way. They find a way to get what they want, and as long as they can remember that, there's no need to think about it anymore.

"Basically, if some HTML/CSS works on Safari, the chances are very high it will work on Firefox 2 and higher, and on IE 6 and higher (with minor tweaks)."

I don't get it. A lot of the hardship that comes with web development is that stuff that works great in modern standards-based browsers like Safari doesn't work when you try to view it in IE. I can't count the number of times I've taken a webpage that I developed to work in Safari (or Firefox) and seen it break completely in IE. And it often takes more than "minor tweaks" to fix it.

This is the 10,000 eyes of open source catching the mistake. It happens in public because there is very little "private". Working As Designed.

How often do you see a forensic analysis of this type on commercial software? Not zero, but less often.

This is going to get ugly very fast. Just last week we had people coming out of the woodwork to say they could clone StackOverflow over the holiday weekend.

There can't be a debate about this because the article doesn't mention any specific improvements.

There could potentially be a lot that goes into this. There could be new hardware costs, integration of existing systems so ease the publication of information, new payroll costs, office space, etc. For all we know they could be putting together a whole team of people to run this thing. They could be doing something that's basically like starting a new company. Or they could be paying way too much for a Wordpress theme. The point is we've got nowhere near enough information for people to make the argument that it could be done better and cheaper because we really don't know what "it" is.