Mozilla Updates Firefox With Forget Button, DuckDuckGo Search, and Ads 327
Krystalo writes: In addition to the debut of the Firefox Developer Edition, Mozilla today announced new features for its main Firefox browser. The company is launching a new Forget button in Firefox to help keep your browsing history private, adding DuckDuckGo as a search option, and rolling out its directory tiles advertising experiment.
Bastards ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope this is optional.
Not all of us are willing to accept ads. Especially not from the open source browser which is supposed to help be more private.
Re:Bastards ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re: Bastards ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bastards ... (Score:5, Funny)
I dread to think what Pale Moon is a euphemism for.
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Yes, but not for the reason you are thinking. Some years ago, the Mozilla Foundation decided to restrict the use of their trademarks. The code itself remained open source, but derivative browsers were no longer allowed to use the names Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. Debian rebranded their browser as Iceweasel. Another rebranding project sponsored by the Free Software Foundation was originally GNU IceWeasel, and was later changed to GNU IceCat to avoid confusion with the Debian project.
References:
Debian rebrand
Re:Bastards ... (Score:5, Informative)
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You also need to disable the preloading and directory ping
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You should be disabling the new tab page anyway, setting it to about:blank.
Unless you like your recent history being there all the time. Fuck that.
Re:Bastards ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google stopped funding Firefox and started funding chrome.
Google is an advertising Giant, Microsoft is an advertising Giant, both produce web browsers not to maximize utility but revenue.
We're talking about one company that, in the IE4 days, ran windows update through IE and wondered why everyone caught viruses through it; to this day disgusting webbies are still making feature requests and design changes to the browser with exactly zero consideration for security. Chrome is the same exact thing. In the end, the end objective of advertisers is to run full-blown applications on your machine, and to do whatever the hell they want to it, and track every purchase and data-mine every action you take.
And that makes them absolutely no different then the Russian Mob\Russian Hackers in that regard. This is the reason companies have started to install ad-blocking software at the firewall on back, and why users are installing Adblock. Not because the ad's are annoying, but because of the very, very real need to protect themselves. Cryptolocker wiped out tens of thousands of projects, and thousands of businesses; criminals were not prosecuted because files were encrypted on police file-shares, and people died because the same happened to hospitals. This is why Putin arrested everyone involved, and why the newer versions of it are not as virulent.
Where did it come from? Yahoo's web advertising network. That one is well-documented.
I've moved the majority of my users onto Seamonkey which has become a standard part of our deployment, adblock is implemented via GPO and is part of our NAC policy. Whenever users complain they can't get to site content because of it, I let the website owner know what we are using it and why, and if they complain my simple answer is "Are you going to pay for my time to re-image machines? No. Find a new revenue stream.". "Trust us our advertisers would never break your computer", and my answer to that is "Fuck you, fuck your website, fuck your mom, fuck your career, and again, fuck you. I will blacklist your ass on my firewall and tell my end user to find a new source before I allow your banner ad's in.".
Now these Webbies have gotten into the standards documents, and browsers are doing things that really, they have no fucking business doing such as DRM'd Video in HTML5. The ONLY Reason you do that is you want a full-page video ad to pop up and take control of the browser for a minute. There's no other fucking reason for that; netflix can easily provide a separate app for streaming video. Why is your MAC address in your IP address in IPV6? The ONLY reason is to track the device from location to location, because it's super useful to be able to have persistence and serve ad's based upon what an IP last saw.
The result of that is networking guru's have basically said "Fuck you we are using IPV4 internally until you give us a NAT RFC". They are engineers, not advertisers, they have no patience for bullshit, and if they want to go down this path, large networks are going to seek alternatives.
Expect MS and Google to continue pushing back against the likes of ad-block with feature changes, and expect those feature changes are going to enable the next crypto-locker to hit, except this time it's going to do a lot more damage. Eventually these companies' monopoly positions will be challenged.
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AC + No references = Did not read.
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Got me thinking about the hosts option.
So I use the one listed here [someonewhocares.org]
and still use ad-block plus, script block, etc;
I'm curious why you post your info as AC...?
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Sure you do, you just phrase it slightly differently "That would be a violation of our security policy"..... the rest is all subtext that they can infer for themselves.
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Everyone KNOWS you "Open SORES" bullshitters just steal others' code like mad anyhow
Yea, fuck open source. Stop using Slashdot, Reddit, Java, Firefox, Chrome, Linux, Apache, ...
ps - what's WITH the random uppercase?
Re:Bastards ... (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, why be so negative about this? People at Mozilla provide a great browser and if that means you get to see some ads (that you can disable) every once in a while, what's the big deal? If they were injecting ads into pages you load, I would object, but seeing them on an otherwise empty page is as intrusive as default search engines they give you. Both things are perfectly fine.
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It depends on the implementation. Ads are a popular malware delivery platform. Ads are often inappropriate or offensive. Sometimes they are animated or make noise. I don't know what the Mozilla ads are like, so I'll reserve judgement until I find out.
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They're just the static tiles you get on a normal new tab page, except they're populated with sponsored sites until your browser history automatically replaces them. This isn't something that would even affect updating users, just fresh installs with an empty history.
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The only alternative is for them to offer a paid proprietary ad-free version, and I'd rather see open source + ads than taking one of the most prominent open source software projects in the world and making it proprietary.
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Not really. Mozilla foundation has gone off the rails lately, and that is a real problem. It losing most of the resources and going back to sanity is a good outcome, not a bad one.
Right now, Mozilla is ruled by UI design idiots who like to use the browser to test their inane ideas instead of fixing engine bugs and let forkers handle the UI for each individual fork to suit people's needs. This is an issue of too much resources causing unwanted hires that take over the company.
Getting rid of them will do the
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mozilla works better than chrome right now though.
Chrome does NOT work well for the last couple months. IE has never worked. Opera - no. That leaves Firefox. It gets me by. It's way better than it WAS.
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I wasn't aware of any users actively choosing a "yes, do track" option either, yet that didn't stop advertising from tracking users.
Can't wait for this! (Score:5, Interesting)
What is Firefox thinking? From the last paragraph in the article: "Firefox users should 'expect a lot more experimentation in advertising,' Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Gavin Sharp told VentureBeat."
Re:Can't wait for this! (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry. There will be a lot more experimentation in ad blocking extensions.
Re:Can't wait for this! (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla should expect a lot more fleeing users with that attitude. I just just about ready to ditch their browser anyway, and they only keep making me want to do it more. The only problem is that the the competition--Chrome--sucks, and is single-handedly the reason Firefox's interface has sucked for the last few years. Ever since Google released the crap and Mozilla decided to make Firefox a carbon copy of it.
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Give Pale Moon a try.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can't wait for this! (Score:4, Informative)
FYI: They fixed a lot of broken stuff in 25.0.1 and 25.0.2. If you haven't done so, you may want to check if your specific qualms have been fixed.
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Strange. I have no such problem with it. Adblock's "pseudo-static" version they have is simply adblock with one line of code changed to recognise palemoon's interface as acceptable. In fact, normal adblock works just fine on 25.0.x, the only problem is that it won't show interface elements on UI because it doesn't recognise PM's UI elements as FF elements. When I updated to 25.0.0, it blocked ads as usual, but I couldn't see the UI element.
Did you perhaps install it on top of old adblock without removing it
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Very strange. I can't recall ever hearing of anyone having this problem. You may have been dealt a really bad RNG in there :(
I've tried the comodo dragon one, but it was just a reskinned chromium with some minor tweaks.
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Midori is webkit based and pretty minimal: http://midori-browser.org/ [midori-browser.org]
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Why not just run it in sandboxie?
And frankly as long as you run adblock, ghostery and if you're really paranoid noscript, you're not going to get owned unless you make a point of visiting every porn site on the web. I ran 3.6.28 on several machines until finding palemoon recently and didn't get hit by a single infection.
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I think the shit-fit we are seeing in the posts here is driven a lot by the fact that we can all see where this is going.
Where is that?
Well, we can see a day, not too distant, where we won't be able to run "safe" browsers, a day when the list of browsers will be like the list of political parties in the US or ISP's in the US: TWO
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I do. I also know that unticking one box makes it stop.
I also know that the first time I install ghostery, it specifically asks me in a pop up if I want to disable it.
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So does firefox...
You are allowed to opt out on both.
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While this is a "bloggish" site, this is still slashdot, not jezebel. I assume people around here have enough know how to be able to untick the first box on first page of ghostery's options menu.
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What is Firefox thinking? From the last paragraph in the article: "Firefox users should 'expect a lot more experimentation in advertising,' Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Gavin Sharp told VentureBeat."
If you want to raise your blood pressure and really ruin your outlook of Firefox's future, go read some of Gavin Sharp's comments on various Bugzilla bugs. Seeing the justification for the removal of features and the addition of toxic features ruins my day every time I'm driving there to try and understand why something changed.
Gavin and the others like him that simply want to turn Firefox into Mini-Chrome are the biggest threat to Firefox today.
they are thinking Google has them by the balls (Score:5, Insightful)
> What is Firefox thinking?
I suspect they are thinking that it sure was nice to have Google paying them millions of dollars for so long, but with Chrome already having twice as many users, Google won't need to keep doing that. They've built an organization that has expenses in the hundreds of millions. Close to 90% of that is for using Google as the default search. Right now, Google has the power to make the Mozilla foundation vanish. That means, of course, that Google can exercise power over them just by a vague threat, or even simply expressing displeasure with a Mozilla decision.
Each November the foundation releases their financial statement. When preparing this financial statement and the last one, they must have seen that the reliance on Google is a problem. They made some small deals with other companies, like including Bing as an _option_ users can set as their default search, but the other deals don't come close to covering their expenses. So to stop being completely reliant on Google, they need some other revenue stream. Somebody sketched a proposal for how they could run ads in a fairly unobtrusive way, in a way that doesn't seem sneaky or underhanded, and that revenue could cover their expenses.
I don't want ads in my browser. I think clumsily adding ads to Firefox could backfire in a huge way. I also think it would be stupid for the Firefox devs to NOT be looking at clever ways to include fairly acceptable ads, new ideas on how they could generate ad revenue if needed without pissing everyone off.
It CAN be done, and even without being all too clever. Slashdot users are generally less tolerant of ads than the general population, yet there are ads here. We deal with it in one way or another and those ads make money. If Firefox can find some elegant ways to place ads and avoid being dependent on Google, they would be smart to at least have that _plan_ ready in case Google stops paying.
Again, I don't WANT ads in Firefox. I also don't WANT to die, but I do buy life insurance so my family has some protection if that happens.
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And it's not this either, given that they're basically sponsored slots that pretty much only new installs see.
It'll only be a Chrome clone when they remove the ability to customize the UI via add-ons.
That sounds like the worst reason to slam the brake
Re:they are thinking Google has them by the balls (Score:3)
Though really, if Mozilla would stop fucking with the interface of Firefox and making it a Chrome clone, perhaps people would stop leaving Firefox.
Yep. I'm sure it has *nothing* to do with one of the most popular websites in the world aggressively advertising chrome at every opportunity.
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And Mozilla is probably happy to take Google's money from the Google Ad Network instead of direct grants, if that's what it takes to keep the Mozilla Foundation open. What they can't do is survive on end user donat
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Bing, Coke, Microsoft, Netflix. x00 million users (Score:2)
What you say would be true for 99.999% of web sites. Since Firefox has a couple hundred million users or whatever they can make advertising deals directly with advertisers including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Netflix, etc. For a multi-million transaction, there's no need to give a cut to a middle-man.
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I also don't WANT to die
Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
I don't think it's controversial to ask if all those Google millions really made the program's development arc better than it was in the more fallow old days.
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> Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
I'm afraid it's gotten too large to maintain as a normal freeware project. It has too many platforms, with far too much extraneous bloatware that must be tested and operate correctly to run on a normal freeware shoe string.
$5.8 mill in 2004, $17B Netscape before that (Score:2)
Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
Specifically, the Mozilla foundation had revenue of $5.8 million in 2004, when Firefox was launched as a branch of Seamonkey, the Mozilla browser. They still had some support from Netscape, who had developed the browser while they were worth as much as $17 BILLION. Really, Firefox was created by Netscape, a mutli-billion dollar company.
Re:Can't wait for this! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are civil rights theoretical, or do they deserve some sort of societal protection?
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The first paragraph is even better:
10 years ago we built Firefox to give you a choice. The Web was a monoculture and the only way in was through the company that controlled your operating system.
There was no such time as described.
Re:Can't wait for this! (Score:4, Funny)
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
Alternative browsers? (Score:1)
Please share here ways to get away from ad loving, privacy sucking browsers.
I'm still on Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090624 Firefox/3.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729) with adblock/scriptblock/grease monkey :)
Re:Alternative browsers? (Score:5, Funny)
How about Safari?
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How about Safari?
Or Opera
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Gnu icecat
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Given that pretty much every major browser other than IE is either open source or uses an open source rendering engine there's plenty of alternative browsers out there.
Off the top of my head, on the Gecko side there's Palemoon, IceCat (was IceWeasel), Comodo IceDragon, and WaterFox.
On the Blink/Webkit side there's SRWare Iron, Comodo Dragon, Comodo Secure Browser, Opera, Midori, Torch Browser, CoolNovo (was ChromePlus), Superbird Browser.
There's also some that are basically wrappers around IE, such as SlimB
Fedora (Score:1)
I assume Fedora will be dropping FIrefox and replacing it with IceWeasel as Debian did long ago. Pretty sure adverts won't fit into Fedora's philosophy very well.
What was that new feature again? (Score:5, Funny)
(I don't need a button to help me forget things!)
duckduckgo (Score:1)
Good for the chumps who believe the marketing fodder.
But as the saying goes... if you're not paying, you're the product, not the customer.
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DDG's search has become very close in quality to Google's these days, so whatever the reality of their privacy protection claims at least they no longer have reduced functionality compared to the market leader.
They are a worthy competitor on the merits now in a way they were not even 1 year ago.
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Their index is tiny though
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Contradiction (Score:5, Insightful)
They added two new features:
1. A "Forget" button for your privacy, and
2. Ads, that remember everything forever.
Sounds like a case of giving with one hand, and taking with the other!
More like... (Score:3)
Sounds like a case of giving with one hand, and taking with the other!
Advertizing a free handjob, while it is actually a part of a reach-around.
Free yourself from this SHIT - Get Palemoon (Score:2)
I did it when they force-fed us Australis and have never looked back. I'll never go back to "Fireplop" now. Liberation is available at www.palemoon.org
Re:Free yourself from this SHIT - Get Palemoon (Score:4, Funny)
Your stunning eloquence has me convinced. Sign me up!
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Think of it as Imodium for the Internet.
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Nope, their FAQ says they took out the accessibility features. I don't want a browser lead by someone who thinks "if it isn't used by me then screw it". If anything all applications need more accessibility features. Guess what, they make the whole program more accessible! Accessibility is a good thing even if it adds a little more complexity and resource usage.
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It's open source, learn to code and do it your way then.
Click "Blank" to win (Score:1)
Fuck advertising
WTF (Score:1)
It was good while it lasted. (Score:1)
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Sounds like I should just "forget" Firefox (Score:3)
...and stay with Pale Moon.
At the very least I'm disabling automatic updates on Firefox.
Fork it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please look into Pale Moon [palemoon.org].
Built from Firefox sources, it is the closest thing to the lightweight and flexible browser that Firefox promised to be that I'm aware of.
Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, etc.
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I like Palemoon too, but new users should be aware that the switch will probably cause problems because - despite some claims to the contrary - it isn't 100% compatible with Firefox add-ons. Admittedly, this is more often the fault of the add-on developers, but since the add-ons are usually the primary thing keeping people on Firefox, some extra consideration should be given before switching to its competitor. Especially since it has problems with so many big-name add-ons
Some examples: AdBlock Plus & Ad
The Ads Can Be Disabled (Score:5, Interesting)
The Ads only occupy unused thumbnail tiles i believe..so it's not obtrusive. As long as us techies can turn it off, I'm happy. Everyone else will hardly notice, and it'll pay the Mozilla devs.
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I don't want to pay the Mozilla devs. They just like to masturbate their egos rather than fixing huge/serious privacy flaws with sqlite.places, the decay frecancies algorithm, monitoring experiments that have no privacy oversight, etc. Their "privacy team" is supposed to meet once a month - ONCE. Last time I checked it'd been 3-4 months since they actually did it.
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Kind of like Slashdot.
I used to not disable ads on Slashdot, you know, a site's got to make money somehow. But lately the ads have gotten SO annoying that I have to disable them, just to make the site usable!
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Re:The Ads Can Be Disabled (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, I mean who cares about the truth as long as we can run around screaming bloody murder and probably soiling ourselves in the process. The "ad tiles" are placed on quick dial instead of empty ones until users get them filled with their browsing history or just drag and dropb pinned stuff from their bookmarks. That's it. But everyone and their dog are starting to whine and threatening to go to Chrome or Pale moon, which is twice as funny as just the wining, because if first browser was built by an advertising company for tracking users and increasing ad efficiency, while the other is nothing but a measely fork, sucking on Firefox codebase and proud of removing a lot of features (websockets anyone? Nah, who needs direct calls from browser, let's all use proprietary Skype), while it is Mozilla that keeps improving JS and HTML rendering engines and yet still keeps all the customizability that was there to begin with.
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Yeah, and I bet you believed your boyfriend when he said he'd just put the tip in, too. ;-)
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I judge by what's been actually done, not by hysteria, that a lot of people like to fuss up around any issue as long as it has trigger words that get them going. They see an article titled "Mozilla adds ads" and they start running around with a sign "The end is nigh" without even familiarizing themselves with the issue and coming up with "ad absurdum" arguments.
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Let me guess. Phrases like "mission creep", "nose of the camel" and "give them an inch and they'll take a mile" are utterly foreign to you. Or perhaps you believe they came into existence to describe situations that don't happen all that often?
So, Moz has gone to the dark side. What about DDG? (Score:2)
Seems Mozilla has sold out. Which makes their choice of DuckDuckGo as default search engine interesting: have they sold out too?
The thing with DDG is, I'd be happy to believe their no-tracking pitch, but I can't quite understand how they're gonna make money out of a free search engine without it...
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I remember finally making the switch to IE from the Netscape 4.76 series that summer after my friend asked why I didn't use IE and showed me it was better. To be fair, IE had surpassed Netscape at that point. I believe that was IE 5 or 5.5. Prior to that Netscape was better hands down but it stagnated after Netscape 4.
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Firefox: Add SQLite Manager addon - take a look at the data that's being stored that shouldn't be. Experiments that are downloaded to gather data without your consent/knowledge. Data submissions if you go to the health report page, regardless of your settings not to participate. All sorts of crazy stuff.
The doubleclick thing is easily remedied in Firefox just install the opt out extension
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Yeah, that's a tough one. About the only thing I can think of would be to just disable them entirely, as you said, breaking 'much' of the 'Net, just so you can be an informed data consumer.
But I'm the kind of person who disabled Flash entirely and uses Hosts & NoScript to break the 'Net already, so that would be a small step for me.
Good luck to all of us.