Friday, March 6, 2009

PC sales to decline 11.9% in 2009

The PC industry will experience its sharpest unit decline in history, with PC shipments totaling 257 mln units in 2009, an 11.9% decline from 2008, according to Gartner. Previously, PC units experienced their worst decline in 2001 when unit shipments contracted 3.2%. Up to this point, emerging markets collectively recorded their lowest growth in 2002, 11.1%. Mature markets recorded their lowest growth in 2001, negative 7.9%. Both emerging and mature markets will handily surpass these previous lows in 2009, with emerging markets expected to post a decline of 10.4% and mature markets a decline of 13%.

Worldwide mobile PC shipments are expected to reach 155.6 mln units, a 9% increase from 2008. Desk-based PC shipments are forecast to total 101.4 mln units, a 31.9% decline from 2008. Mobile PC growth will be substantially boosted by continued growth in mini-notebook shipments; excluding mini-notebooks, other mobile PC shipments will grow just 2.7% in 2009. Worldwide mini-notebook shipments are forecast to total 21 mln units in 2009, up from 2008 shipments of 11.7 mln units. Mini-notebooks will cushion the overall PC market slowdown, but they remain too few to prevent the market’s steep decline. Mini-notebooks are forecast to represent just 8% of PC shipments in 2009.

Firefox 3.0.7 fixes 47 bugs, 17 critical...

The latest update to Firefox pushed out to users last night via automatic update addresses 47 bugs and enhancements, according to Mozilla. 17 bugs were marked as “critical” or higher.

Five potential security vulnerabilities were patched including these 3 that were marked as “critical”:

* MFSA 2009-10 Upgrade PNG library to fix memory safety hazards
* MFSA 2009-08 Mozilla Firefox XUL Linked Clones Double Free Vulnerability
* MFSA 2009-07 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.7)

Glenn Randers-Pehrson, Martijn Wargers, Jesse Ruderman, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, and Timothee Groleau were credited with identifying and reporting the problems.

Most of the issues involve common C/C++ memory management bugs such as freeing uninitialized memory or memory that has already been freed. If Firefox were written in Java or C# or any language with automatic garbage collection they wouldn’t have these problems, I’m just saying…

Mozilla has been updating Firefox 3 approximately once a month since its release in June of last year. Here’s a list of all the updates so far:

* v3.0.7, released March 4, 2009
* v3.0.6, released February 3, 2009
* v3.0.5, released December 16, 2008
* v3.0.4, released November 12, 2008
* v3.0.3, released September 26, 2008
* v3.0.2, released September 23, 2008
* v3.0.1, released July 16, 2008
* v3.0, released June 17, 2008