Slashdot Mirror

This annoys me but at least it's been announced and I will switch however I've had two Firefox machines that had their keyword search and default searches set to Bing.

I don't know if it's Mozilla or MS doing it. I know Mozilla told people to switch but never said they would do it and apparently I'm not the only one. http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=tr&comments_parentId=361018&forumId=1#threadId368122

Does anyone know who's responsible for going ahead and changing Firefox's search from Google to Bing? I'm not impressed either way. I would not be impressed if it was the other way around too.

It feels like it's an underhanded tactic to try and force Bing on people and I don't think most people will be happy. If it is Microsoft doing this, they won't make people fans of Bing by forcing it on them behind their back.

Mozilla Corporation's goals are substantially to do activities which bring in revenue, as with Microsoft. Mozilla's main vehicle for doing so is to package and distribute a browser through which income is generated via Google searches. To maximize revenues, they need to maximize both market share and usage of their browser.

The new focus, maximizing market share (quantity), could help, but not as much as a new strategy which maximizes both market share and usage (quality). Under those 30 MB or so of binaries, libraries and other stuff, I'm sure exists a small feature subset set which would give all Internet users a compelling reason to switch to and stick with Firefox, if that feature subset were promoted correctly.

Based on their list of "new features", http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/, they don't seen to know what makes Firefox special.

Private Browsing - "Surf the Web without leaving a single trace." Which inaccurately describes the functionality. Safari and Chrome can forget things in the browser, but the Firefox feature as stated requires third-party anonymising proxies or such.
Password Manager - "Remember site passwords without ever seeing a pop-up." - Most browsers have had features to remember form fields since the 1990s?
Awesome Bar - "Find the sites you love in seconds (and without having to remember clunky URLs)." This is better than bookmarks/favourites?
Super Speed - "View Web pages way faster, using less of your computer’s memory." OK.
Anti-Phishing & Anti-Malware - "Enjoy the most advanced protection against online bad guys." ... Using substantially the same database as IE and Chrome.
Session Restore - "Unexpected shutdown? Go back to exactly where you left off." Tires unexpectedly fall off? Can I have a browser that doesn't need to have this feature?
One-Click Bookmarking - "Bookmark, search and organize Web sites quickly and easily." It doesn't trouble me to click once or twice to bookmark something in any other browser, but OK...
Easy Customization - "Thousands of add-ons give you the freedom to make your browser your own." OK. But there's a handy guide to navigate those thousands, right?
Tabs - "Do more at once with tabs you can organize with the drag of a mouse." Like every other browser?
Personas - "Instantly change the look of your Firefox with thousands of easy-to-install themes." Instantly change the look of your windshield with thousands of ... No thanks. We got here without bringing MySpace all the way to the desktop. Also does not enhance the functionality of the browser.

Wrong. There is no reason you can’t write games in HTML5.

There are 3 parts needed to create a video game:
- A canvas. Check. <canvas> And SVG adds a whole vector library too.
- A programming language. Check. JavaScript. In fact Flash’s ActionScript is just JavaScript with data types.
- Enough performance. Pure JS should already be faster than ActionScript. Only the rendering is a bit slow right now. Which will change soon.

In fact, with WebGL coming soon, HTML5/JS will seriously beat Flash out of the water in terms of what it can do. Because as soon as the textures, models and shaders are loaded into the graphics card, rendering last-generation graphics quality will perform just as well as with pure C/C++. (Only world updates, events, etc, will be slower.)

Look at this, to see what can be done nowadays:
http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/tracker/tracker.xhtml
I wouldn’t call this a lightweight algorithm at all.

Javascript + svg?

Photo demo
Blobular

Photo demo converted to video demo
Info on video demo

Dude - you need not wait for updates.

Assuming you have a US English desktop, download http://mirror.netcologne.de/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.6.tar.bz2
Choose other languages here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Use your favorite archiver, extract it to your desktop, and run the "firefox" shell script inside the firefox directory. Few things could be simpler.

I started to reply to your post, downloaded, extracted, closed Swiftfox, and opened the new Firefox, and everything reloaded, including the partially completed response to your post.

Who could ask for more? I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit.

Anyway, Firefox 3.6 (which was released today) works fine with youtube html5. I just tried it out. So this entire discussion is moot anyway.

Good to know! I don't see this anywhere in the FF 3.6 release notes.

I don't understand why it won't work with Firefox 3.5.7 though :-( I am running Ubuntu and have the free (if patent-infringing) x264 codec installed. I can play H.264 videos fine in Totem or Xine or VLC... why can't FF use this codec?

Pick a large, active open-source project and try to help with the problems its developers have. You will be loved.

Here are some of the problems I'm aware of within the Mozilla project.

Speed of development

'make' doesn't scale. An incremental build, even with no changes, takes at least a minute. (In contrast, just checking whether any files have changed takes 'hg' less than 10 seconds.) Maybe help us move to 'scons', or help improve 'pymake', or just help us get our dependency generation right.

'ld' is slow. Once a developer makes a change to any c++ file, the incremental build is going to take several minutes while the linker uses up all her RAM. Maybe help us move to another linker such as 'gold', and contribute any necessary changes back to the 'gold' project.

'hg' merges are confusing. hg's developer-facing user interface could be improved, both while doing a merge and after doing a merge.

Automated testing

We've built an interesting interface around hg-pushlog (which is itself a Mozilla extension to hg) and buildbot that lets us see which tests failed after each change. I'd love to see these tools generalized to the point where other open-source projects can use it and contribute back to it.

As we require unit and integration tests for more and more components of Firefox, we're finding that a small number of tests failing intermittently can make it difficult to move quickly. We could use better tools for tracking test failures, and for record-and-replay debugging to help us figure out the intermittent failures, and probably for other things we haven't thought of.

Programming languages

We need a decent low-level programming language. Something that lets programmers implement sneaky fast algorithms, but lets programmers do it without constantly shooting themselves in the foot with security holes. Something you'd want to write (difficult parts of) a web browser or OS in.

I don't know if the answer is adding more and more to the type system (like in Cyclone), or integration of assertions with static analysis (like in D), or simply making it easy to integrate low-level code with high-level code (like in C#, or with ctypes or jsctypes).

Mozilla is doing interesting things with custom static analysis of C++ code.

Making collaboration tools support workflow and GTD

We have a crash analysis system and a bug-tracking system with lots of information, but the workflow is poor, so much of the information is not acted upon.

It's hard to come up with a good workflow (and make the tools support that workflow) in a large project where many of the contributors are volunteers who decide themselves what to work on, but I think we can do better.

The difference is whatever they want to make of it. The advantage of not promising anything is that no management is necessary.

It seems to me that Mozilla Foundation is badly managed.

Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox? The Mozilla foundation has been getting more than $68,000,000 each year to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. See this article, for example: Google Deal Produces 91% of Mozilla's Revenue.

In return for that enormous amount of money, Firefox is for many the most unstable program they use. Every new version of Firefox includes "stability improvements", but the instability has gotten considerably worse since version 3.5.2. Firefox is so unstable it regularly crashes the Windows XP OS, although not Linux, apparently.

The instability and resultant memory hogging of Firefox has been reported many times by many people for many years, according to discussions online. For just one small example, see the comments tab for this crash report ID: 67f332db-205a-4944-8f88-1bb7a2091220. (Not a crash from one of our computers.) Typical comments from that comment tab:

"I can't believe how often firefox is crashing recently on multiple computers!!!"
"This is ridiculous! It happens everyday!"
"Mozilla crashes on average 10 a day. Can you help?"
"firefox is crashing on me twice a day. any advice please? thanks Graham"
"This new version of Mozilla sucks. It crashes on my multiple times each day."
"I keep going from tab to tab and after a while Mozilla crashes.."
"please fix this crash problem, thanks"

Want to see your own Firefox crashes? Enter about:crashes into the Firefox address window, and press the Enter key. You can substitute the numbers obtained from your crashes in the link above to get more information.

There is more about Mozilla Developer Center Crash Reporting on their web site. (That web site may be overloaded or not loadable from Slashdot.)

The randomness of failures suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. That's crucial in an unstable, poorly designed OS like Windows XP. Linux merely throws Firefox off the system.

Definitely the way events are handled in Firefox has degraded in the last few versions. Firefox often takes a long time to process a mouse event, for example, even when Firefox has been the only program in use for a long time.

Firefox is popular because of its add-ons, apparently. People don't want to watch abusive, flashing ads that assume that the reader is stupid, so they use AdBlock Plus. When the same extensions exist for Google's browser, it seems likely that Firefox will lose popularity.

Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years. Apparently Firefox developers don't know how to debug that kind of failure. Apparently the more than $200 million has not been enough.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Then you are ignorant.

I have been able to reproduce the Firefox memory leak on dozens of computers. All you need to do is open Firefox, a blank page will do, and leave it running. After about 1 or 2 weeks, memory use will have slowly risen until the browser becomes intolerably sluggish and must be restarted.

Mozilla Foundation themselves ACKNOWLEDGE that there is a memory leak bug. Look specifically at the part where they suggest a workaround "solution" that involves restarting your browser. About as elegant as when we used to restart Windows 9x computers to "fix" problems.

BTW, if you were such an in the know geek, you should have been able to specify an exact file and registry hive. You're just a poser.

Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox? The Mozilla foundation has been getting more than $68,000,000 each year to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. See this article, for example: Google Deal Produces 91% of Mozilla's Revenue.

In return, Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. Every new version includes "stability improvements", but the instability has gotten considerably worse since version 3.5.2. Firefox is so unstable it regularly crashes Windows XP, although not Linux, apparently.

This instability has been reported many times by many people for many years, according to discussions online. For just one small example, see the comments tab for this crash report ID: 67f332db-205a-4944-8f88-1bb7a2091220. (Not a crash from one of our computers.) Typical comments from that comment tab:

"I can't believe how often firefox is crashing recently on multiple computers!!!"
"This is ridiculous! It happens everyday!"
"Mozilla crashes on average 10 a day. Can you help?"
"firefox is crashing on me twice a day. any advice please? thanks Graham"
"This new version of Mozilla sucks. It crashes on my multiple times each day."
"I keep going from tab to tab and after a while Mozilla crashes.."
"please fix this crash problem, thanks"

Firefox is popular because of its add-ons, apparently. People don't want to watch abusive, flashing ads that assume that the reader is stupid, so they use AdBlock Plus. When the same extensions exist for Google's browser, it seems likely that Firefox will lose popularity.

It seems to me that Mozilla Foundation is badly managed.

Opera/Firefox (whichever has a newer version that still supports 98)

That would be Opera. Firefox, as of Firefox 3, no longer supports Windows 98 (this caused a lot of grumbling on Firefox's support forums), but the latest Opera happily runs on Windows 98.

I can also write my own apps for it in Delphi7 (Delphi does not work on Linux)

If you're an old-school Delphi programmer, you might look in to Lazarus. It's 95% Delphi, but FOSS software.

While I'm mainly a C programmer these days, I've quite impressed with Delphi: There is an excellent tiny little Civilization clone, C-evo, out there written in Delphi (that fits on a single floppy if you remove the sounds and 7-zip compress it), as well as a free (beer) office suite called SSuiteSoft.

> Why is Spidermonkey implementing non-standard Javascript extensions?

Uh... every single JS impl has implemented these for years; different extensions in different impls. Some of these are making their way into standards; some are not; some are going to end up in standards in a modified form. That's how the standards get written.

In this case, the non-standard extension is the 'g' option for the replace() call on strings. Try this in your favorite web browsers:

    javascript:alert("aba".replace('a', 'x', 'g'));

Sunspider uses this flag on some of its replace calls; in Sunspider the string happens to have only one instance of the substring being replaced, so behavior is the same whether the 'g' flag is honored or not. Honoring it obviously takes more work. The particular test using this flag became about 3x faster in Gecko when the flag was removed. See details at http://blog.mozilla.com/dmandelin/2008/10/06/squirrelfishing-in-regexp-dnajs/

The best part is that Apple has removed the flag from their Sunspider core repository, but is refusing to actually update the public test...

> Do they use these extensions on every sub-test, or just some of them?

Only some; I thought I was pretty clear on that.

> It looked like Chrome beat Firefox on all of them.

I never claimed that Chrome isn't very fast on Sunspider. It absolutely is! That just doesn't mean they aren't slow in other cases not covered by popular benchmarks. The same is true in general, of course.

"... cross platform stability..."

Firefox is NOT stable. It is the most unstable program in common use.

See the comments tab for this crash report ID: http://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/67f332db-205a-4944-8f88-1bb7a2091220
Typical comments from that comment tab:
"I can't believe how often firefox is crashing recently on multiple computers!!!"
"This is ridiculous! It happens everyday!"
"Mozilla crashes on average 10 a day. Can you help?"
"firefox is crashing on me twice a day. any advice please? thanks Graham"
"This new version of Mozilla sucks. It crashes on my multiple times each day."
"I keep going from tab to tab and after a while Mozilla crashes.."
"please fix this crash problem, thanks"

The underlying problem is that the Mozilla Foundation is very badly managed. People have filed Firefox crash reports for more than 8 years. Although Firefox became a little more stable during that time, the latest versions have progressively become far less stable.

It's obvious that Firefox, if it continues to be mis-managed, will eventually become obsolete.

A recent new version of Thunderbird eliminated important features: Quick searching for messages and listing all recipients of an email. That version also disabled the Lightning calendar! Whoever manages the Mozilla Foundation is not sufficiently competent.

Mozilla Foundation has been receiving more than $50 million each year from Google.

Sorry .. Real link -> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/

There.

WTF? It's like saying somebody should buy an F1 car just because it's fastest

I agree 100%. People should buy a machine to suit their needs. Anyone who blindly buys the fastest model available is just being egotistical and foolish.

which does not cost them their house and children

A new Mac mini goes for $599 and a MacBook is $999. This is hardly "house and children" figures. Pick a reasonable Mac then go to Dell and spec out a similar machine. The PC prices will be in a close neighborhood.

not require special fuel and can run on ordinary road

This article is not about the iPhone. It is about Apple systems running OS X that can utilize Boot Camp.

Hardly any "special fuel" required on OS X systems. Take your pick from any of the great open source apps available for the platform: Firefox, Thunderbird, Inkscape, Gimp, VLC, Eclipse, the list goes on. Wanna write some code? Xcode comes free with OS X. Don't wanna use Xcode, then use another IDE or directly use make, gcc, gdb, and vim.

As for your "ordinary road" comment ... I'm writing this on a four year old iMac. Over the years I've upgraded the memory (Crucial has great prices) and hard drive (1TB was only $99 at Fry's). My mouse of choice is a five button Logitech scroll mouse. I hardly feel "locked in" or "abused".

Way to go on a tangent!

Way to spread FUD. How about we just let people use the computer that best suits their needs.

Getting back on topic, I've been running Windows 7 in both Boot Camp and Parallels 5 with no problems. I don't know what the damage is with this "article".

Works in Firefox 3.5.5. Remember to allow pop-ups for the site.

Perhaps of interest: how many Firefox users currently use AdBlock Plus? According to this reference (search for "AdBlock" to find the spot), the number is around 12%.

The machine are supposed to be locked to prevent custom OS

... I heard something about a "developer" switch which would disable the lock. Whether this would make it to free handout machines, I don't know.

and to have no hard drive. No hard drive implies no data which implies useless in offline mode.

No hard drive, but possibly an SSD.

And how do you do [games], [IDE developent] through a webbrowser ? The machine is supposed to only run a webbrowser...

Games: Flash, DHTML, and in future, in-browser 3D engines.
IDE: Something akin to https://bespin.mozilla.com/ - maybe not ready for prime time now, but we're talking about the future.

Just do your compiles on a remote google-hosted developer box with 12 CPUs.

I very much doubt that even on the hypothetical free box, you'd be restricted to Google services.
You could do your compiles on Amazon hosted developer boxes, or even your own server.

It might not feel all that different to using a desktop IDE, Bespin won't be the only browser based IDE.

Can you not see a team using Bespin on this platform? https://bespin.mozilla.com/

There is no functional difference between ActiveX and Mozilla plug-ins, other than a half-assed white-listing system.

Pages that attempt to install Firefox plugins are quite a bit more well presented than ones that want to run some ActiveX control. IE users when confronted with the ActiveX installation prompt: “wut.” Perhaps it’s mostly an issue of educating the users, but I think Firefox does a better job at it.

FF has no security system in place to deal with this.

Sure it does. I doubt it will be very long before those plugins are listed.

Then maybe you should have a look at this: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Updating+Firefox Although you probably also check the fuel and oil-level of your car and tire-pressure, just so you know you can have a safe ride. It's just standard maintenance and it is (unfortunately) needed. Hopefully there will come a time when all software is 100% safe out of the box. For now that is an utopia.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/mobile/

I have no idea why you decided there's such a list. Was it something in the article?

You mean this?

Firefox has a "master password" feature. Use it, and remember just one password. It'll prompt you for the master password the first time it visits a site that has a saved password.

GP is confused due to this sort of news. Parent is correct in that there will be no such interface.

I am all for web based, but you need to use Mozilla Prism, not Firefox. http://prism.mozilla.com/
Firefox is too easy for some clever punk to trick into closing down or to install plugins into though it probably does have a Kiosk mode switch but I am too lazy to Google that.

All the addon did was to add a piece of text in useragent that told the website .NET version. How do you manage to fuck up that?

For anyone curious as to the real state of affairs behind this MS plugin issue, you might be interested in a few things. For everyone else just enjoying a good anti-Microsoft circle-jerk, ignore this post.

The plugins being discussed do more than just change the User Agent of the browser. They allow for XAML applications to run in Firefox and ClickOnce program distribution. For everyone that normally cries about Microsoft pushing IE and trying to lock users into their browser, this is an attempt to allow people to use an alternative browser while still having access to their other Microsoft-centric technologies (.NET in this case). Isn't this a good thing?

This is the bug in question. There is a lot of interesting comment there, including the fact that while everyone is crying about Microsoft "secretly" adding the plugin and preventing users from disabling it, Mozilla doesn't even give users an option to enable it! Their blocklist is all or nothing. Why doesn't that bother anyone here? One poster is very insightful:

Many corporations have begun implementing Firefox and telling their users that it is an equally if not more capable but more secure browser. For a subset of those corporations, the action of removing necessary tech without consent or a secure method for re-enabling it will result in the removal of the browser from the system completely. It will be called a failed experiment. The following day, sys-admins around the world will be left explaining to the non-enthusiast employees that the reversal came because certain business apps would not function in FF. Those users will only hear that FF is not as capable.

But perhaps the best thing about this entire issue, is that Mozilla didn't block the plugins until AFTER they were patched and the mechanism of the block is retarded. Mozilla is claiming that Microsoft agreed to issuing the block of the affected plugins, and that might be true, but only to an extent. Mozilla is currently blocking the plugins based on the name of the plugin, not the version, which means users who have installed the patched version of the plugs (at this point almost everyone using Windows Update) are still unable to use the plugins and have no way to re-enable them.

So essentially, by issuing this patch, Mozilla is doing nothing but hurting its business customers. Slashdotters can scratch their heads trying to figure out who uses these technologies, but the answer is a lot of businesses do. This absolute, non-scriptable and non-changeable block of these plugins will just remind corporations that open source isn't ready for the big leagues and they should just stick with Microsoft and IE. The sad thing is that if this kind of knee-jerk, carte-blanche blocking behavior becomes the norm for Mozilla, they will probably be right! Taking this kind of control away from the users is simply unacceptable, doubly so for businesses.

If you're wondering what MS says about this, you might take a look at this:

First we'd like to make it clear that any customers that have applied the update associated with MS09-054 are protected, regardless of the attack vector. And most customers need not take any action as they'll receive this update automatically through Automatic Updates.

So there it is -- pretty much everyone

As I said elsewhere, a lot of plugins seem not to report their version information. Why don't you disable them too?

According to your plugin checker the following plugins on my system don't report version information:
        Java(TM) Platform SE 6 U13 Java(TM) Platform SE binary
        Microsoft Office Live Plug-in for Firefox Office Live Update v1.4
        Java Deployment Toolkit 6.0.150.3 NPRuntime Script Plug-in Library for Java(TM) Deploy
        ActiveTouch General Plugin Container ActiveTouch General Plugin Container Version 104
        Adobe Acrobat Adobe PDF Plug-In For Firefox and Netscape
        Microsoft® Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin np-mswmp
        Google Update Google Update
        iTunes Application Detector iTunes Detector Plug-in

See this screen shot.

Many of these have had vulnerabilities in the past.

Can someone please fix the SSL problem associated with https://en-gb.www.mozilla.com/en-GB/blocklist/ kthx

You have JavaScript disabled or are using a browser without JavaScript. This Plugin Check page does not work without the awesome power of JavaScript. Please enable this Content Preference and reload the page. Or disable all your plugins and keep JavaScript disabled... you'd be in good company, that's how RMS rolls.

You're post is awesome

Well, the Mozilla ribbon isn't quite what comes to mind when you hear the word nowadays:
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2009/09/24/no-ribbon-planned-for-the-firefox-ui/

Granted, it *is* still a pretty big change from the current setup. I probably should have said "very seldom see" instead of "don't see". TBH, I was really thinking about the WM changes when I made that statement. I didn't mean for third-party apps to get lumped in (since the Mozilla change will affect both operating systems).

And I hear ya on KDE. I never cared for gnome, but KDE 4.x is even less appealing, IMO. They've made some major strides since the 4.0 release, but I still don't care for it. So now my nice shiny 4GB RAM, 1GB video card system is running XFCE. Such a waste of video memory =)

So all of the following are now illegal in Brazil, since they can be used to assist copyright infringement: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Filezilla, the cp Unix command, etc.

On the verge of dumping firefox after years of use. 3.5.2 was horrible. 3.5.3 crashed within the first 5 minutes of use.

I suggest that you look up your Crash Report to see why it's crashing. The automated crash report will link to the bug report and support articles, if they exist.

The most common crashes in Firefox are caused by third party spyware, by plugins (Flash, old versions of Java, etc), and by extensions that are misbehaving. Mozilla actively works to correct these problems by warning users to upgrade and by blocklisting extensions that cause the most problems.

On the verge of dumping firefox after years of use. 3.5.2 was horrible. 3.5.3 crashed within the first 5 minutes of use.

I suggest that you look up your Crash Report to see why it's crashing. The automated crash report will link to the bug report and support articles, if they exist.

The most common crashes in Firefox are caused by third party spyware, by plugins (Flash, old versions of Java, etc), and by extensions that are misbehaving. Mozilla actively works to correct these problems by warning users to upgrade and by blocklisting extensions that cause the most problems.

Do you use youtube? It will lock up firefox for me pretty regularly, and closing it makes the window disappear but doesn't stop it. When you run again it says "firefox is already running but is not responding..." Then you either have to know to go to the shell and "killall firefox" or "killall firefox-bin", depending on the distro. I've always wondered how nontechnical users can tolerate this. On my home family setup, I put a "kill all firefox" button right on everybody's menu.

Well, with SVG and the video tag, that is about to change! Big time!

I'm a professional, and man, watch those demos in at least Firefox 3.5 (or something comparable): http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/

The ability to integrate Flash-like FX, Video and Audio SEAMLESSLY with (X)HTML and CSS (and every other supported XML language, like MathML), is just beyond words... It's what I'm waiting for, for at least a decade! And the performance of both environments gets closer and closer to being equal.
With that, soon nobody needs or even wants Flash anymore.

I'll just use those features, and frankly, I can stand "losing" even 50% of the users for it. Those are the dumbest part of the population anyway. You only have problems with those. They can go to AOL or whatever. I have enough clients. :)

Even as a long time FF user I keep going to the Plugins menu, looking for and wondering why there isn't a "check for updates" button, just like there is for extensions.

In the long term, they're planning to implement that also: http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/09/04/helping-users-keep-plugins-updated/ This is only the first step in a multi-step process that weâ(TM)re going down: 1. The first is to do a check when we update the browser. This is what weâ(TM)ll include with 3.5.3. 2. Second, weâ(TM)re going to have a regular page that you can go to to check the state of other plugins as well. This will happen sometime this month. 3. Firefox 3.6 will check for newer versions of plugins just like we check for newer versions of Firefox or extensions. If it sees that you have one thatâ(TM)s out of date, youâ(TM)ll be sent to that page. 4. Weâ(TM)re going to try to get to the point where you can upgrade the plugin via the plugin service that we currently use for installations. 5. Weâ(TM)re also talking about using Adobeâ(TM)s Express Install system, which can update flash from the flash plugin without having to use a separate installer. So thatâ(TM)s the long term plan for now. Some of it will be in 3.6, some of weâ(TM)ll be doing in parallel and some of which is longer term.

We're working on multi-process too, and also hoping to have it in Firefox 4.

Some users experience very few crashes and some users experience many. This is true for most software. Why would you categorically call people in the first category "trolls"?

According to my calculations, the average Firefox user only sends 1.5 crash reports per year. Based on this, I'd say that for Firefox, more users are in the first category.

I hope they make integrating the search box in the URL box optional. One of the things I really like about FF is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to select specific search engines or sites. Of course with Ubiquity http://labs.mozilla.com/ubiquity/ progressing nicely I may be in the minority.

Try this... Firefox does exactly the same thing that Chrome does. I can't get IMDB but I created a smart bookmark for Google and it doesn't automatically select the top result so I don't know why it would for IMDB. (I suppose I could manually change the bookmark to add "&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky", but...)

Also, does Chrome let you use whatever you want for the keyword? I don't have to type "wikipedia.com" in Firefox; I can just set the keyword to be "wiki" and all I have to type is "wiki article".

I've installed the beta of Weave across all my Firefox installations, including at work. I've noticed a couple of 'interesting' items of history coming up in the awesome bar, having synced with my home PC... Might need to tweak my Weave settings.

I love the Awesome Bar! Chrome's equivalent doesn't come close. Seriously, I get urges to get back on Firefox because I miss the Awesome Bar so much.

It's pretty easy to restrict Awesome Bar searches to just bookmarks, history, page titles, or URLs. Granted, that's not a very discoverable feature. But I hardly use it, the default behavior works great for me.

It _does_ work unless you hit some bug (and there have been some that affect some people). If you were an early adopter in particular there were some database corruption issues. If that's the case deleting the places database is often the best fix (especially if there's nothing in there you care about -- you're clearing private data, right?). Instructions at http://support.mozilla.com/ for this and other common problems.

The other issue is that the url bar shows both history and bookmarks. Obviously people don't want to clear their bookmarks so some data still shows up even after clearing history. This issue has been addressed in Firefox 3.5 with an option to not show bookmarks in the URL bar (on the Privacy tab in Options).

Despite the video being very very dry, there was an interesting link in the middle of the presentation: http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

That site features real time download statistics for FF3.5. The interesting part is, that the map at the top is rendered in real SVG combined with canvas (for the dots).

About this flash based library: it's strange. At the demo page the native rendering of SVG failed and only the flash version worked on my FF 3.0.x.. Not a problem with my browser though, as the site I mentioned at the top as well as Wikipedia SVG's work fine. Something is not right with this library, but interesting non the less.

Too late.
http://labs.mozilla.com/prism/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
http://silverlight.net/
http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop.html
http://desktop.google.com/plugins/
http://widgets.yahoo.com/
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/sidebar-gadgets.aspx
http://www.screenlets.org/index.php/Screenshots

# How do I spell Firefox? How do I abbreviate it?

Firefox is spelled F-i-r-e-f-o-x - only the first letter capitalized (i.e. not FireFox, not Foxfire, FoxFire or whatever else a number of folk seem to think it to be called.) The preferred abbreviation is "Fx" or "fx".

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/releases/1.5.html#FAQ