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They are all important, because they all fix critical security vulnerabilities.

The WebGL is buggy and most of Mozilla's demo's wont run and the aquarium webGL experiment does not render properly.

I downgraded back to Firefox 4.01 and the problems went away. I have an ATI 5750 with the latest drivers under Windows 7.

The good news is Microsoft's IE fishtank demo topped 60 fps just like IE 9 with DirectWrite enabled. I am going to wait until 5.01 before I upgrade.

And that doesn't even consider how this crap breaks plugins... Literally half the plugins I currently run, I had to edit the install.rdf just to get around the damned version check (after which, they all work just fine of course).

And that's because Mozilla requires a max version in the addon .rdf file, and they also say this:

This number needs to be less than or equal to an announced version of Firefox.

At the moment, the highest on that page is Firefox 7.

The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)

I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).

It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.

They don't work or got disabled?
This should solve it if it's the latter.

I spent a few minutes looking for the same thing, and found that Firefox includes a check. If you visit an HTTPS site that is not secure, you will get a message in the Error Console under Messages saying something like this:

site.example.com : server does not support RFC 5746, see CVE-2009-3555

For more information, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security:Renegotiation

Firefox doesn't use that much RAM under normal conditions.

Yes it does. Mozilla know this and have an entire team of people addressing Firefox 4 memory usage issues. They're looking at 18 P1 bugs, 84 total.

My Firefox is has 1.3GB mapped, but is only using 300MB right now (according to the very useful about:memory)... that's a serious fragmentation problem, because as far as my operating system is concerned, that's a 1.3GB program, not a 300MB program.

I think they are using Mozill Audio Data API and that must be the reason it only work currently with Firefox, until the API advance from experimental to something more standard

Actually there is a project doing exactly this: Rendering pdf using Javascript! Take a looky here and at the demo.

That is why you upload your content on the site several times or use a service which does the conversion for you (like the Internet Archive or vid.ly: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/01/simple-html5-video-encoding-with-vid-ly-interview-first-impressions-and-invite-code/ ).

So ones for HTML5-video and one fallback for Flash.

That way, when HTML5-video does not work a fallback is available.

This is just like everything else in webdevelopment, if a older browser doesn't support a new feature. You add a fallback or leave it out (like some many animation which isn't really needed).

I've been waiting for Google Maps to be able to save the route I chose on the desktop Maps and sync it with Android for two years-ish

You can save the route with the Link button on top right of the map. Then paste that into the url bar and load it before using Chrome to Phone (or Firefox equivalent) to sync with the phone. Yes, a single button would be nice, but it is still easier than starting from scratch again on your phone.

Based on "would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it", I agree with the parent's suggestion. Drupal comes to mind too.

If you want your site to look a little more original than what a CMS offers by itself, all you need to do is edit the CSS. To do that, I suggest Firefox, Stylish, and It's All Text to give you a nice editing environment (e.g. Vim). Put together, they let you change any or all of your CSS and see results with a single click (well, two clicks if you use It's All Text).

Based on "would rather spend my time editing my web site rather than code it", I agree with the parent's suggestion. Drupal comes to mind too.

If you want your site to look a little more original than what a CMS offers by itself, all you need to do is edit the CSS. To do that, I suggest Firefox, Stylish, and It's All Text to give you a nice editing environment (e.g. Vim). Put together, they let you change any or all of your CSS and see results with a single click (well, two clicks if you use It's All Text).

I've been using FF since version 2 and there are two problems that persist (and apparently gather no interest from the devs)

1. Every n seconds (n varies), FF CPU usage spikes up, even if it's idle.
It makes it impossible to e.g. watch youtube in FF or in any other browser if FF is concurrently open.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122 (open over 2 years ago, not worked on).

2. FF's memory usage grows until it reaches ~1.5GB, then it hangs forever with 100% CPU usage.
The easiest way for me to trigger this behaviour is to go to Google Images, set the image size to "Larger than" 1024x768 (or even higher) and start checking various search terms, scrolling down, hovering on thumbnails and making sure to use "show more results".

I still use FF because some of my favourite addons are FF-only, but the majority of the time I use other browsers.

I wouldnt leave it up to $_megacorp to decide what is best for my kid unless I vetted their content first. Stuff from websites like NickJR, CatroonNetwork, PBS, Disney and the like all offer kids content that i find appropriate for my 5 year old niece, and its stuff that she is interested in.

If you have any sort of programming knowledge there are a few resources on the web that detail writing simple web crawlers in $lang_du_jeur. Create your own solution that grabs content from sites you approve of and organizes them on an intuitive and kid-friendly web page. Personally, I find this to be a bit too much work, because there are simpler methods to get content for kids

I set up a special firefox install for my niece using Firefox Portable, a carefully configured whitelist add-on, and of course AdBlock Plus I set up bookmarks that link to the flash-game pages of her favorite sites and put them in their own toolbar. This last one is a bit iffy, but i bookmarked youtube searches for her favorite music artists like "hannah montana lyrics" I havent done any research yet, but i also wanna look into creating an image overlay for the youtube video so it'll play audio but she wont see video. Something like Stylish or a Greasemonkey userscript should accomplish that with ease. The setup is easy for her to use. She only has the occasional problem when a site changes its layout and she cant figure out how to start a game.

I wouldnt leave it up to $_megacorp to decide what is best for my kid unless I vetted their content first. Stuff from websites like NickJR, CatroonNetwork, PBS, Disney and the like all offer kids content that i find appropriate for my 5 year old niece, and its stuff that she is interested in.

If you have any sort of programming knowledge there are a few resources on the web that detail writing simple web crawlers in $lang_du_jeur. Create your own solution that grabs content from sites you approve of and organizes them on an intuitive and kid-friendly web page. Personally, I find this to be a bit too much work, because there are simpler methods to get content for kids

I set up a special firefox install for my niece using Firefox Portable, a carefully configured whitelist add-on, and of course AdBlock Plus I set up bookmarks that link to the flash-game pages of her favorite sites and put them in their own toolbar. This last one is a bit iffy, but i bookmarked youtube searches for her favorite music artists like "hannah montana lyrics" I havent done any research yet, but i also wanna look into creating an image overlay for the youtube video so it'll play audio but she wont see video. Something like Stylish or a Greasemonkey userscript should accomplish that with ease. The setup is easy for her to use. She only has the occasional problem when a site changes its layout and she cant figure out how to start a game.

Bug 660577 - Image-heavy sites are slow and often abort due to OOM; regression from 3.6 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577 Bug 661304 - Not discarding images that are not visible on the current tab causes a memory usage problem https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661304

Bug 660577 - Image-heavy sites are slow and often abort due to OOM; regression from 3.6 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577 Bug 661304 - Not discarding images that are not visible on the current tab causes a memory usage problem https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661304

Sorry I can't help more, but it seems that bug 660577 could be relevant to your problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577 (Image-heavy sites are slow and often abort due to OOM; regression from 3.6). Cutting down from 120 secs to 10 secs alleviates the problem... sometimes, depending on how much RAM you have.

Nope, FF4 definitely has some memory issues. It doesn't matter if it's a real leak or a matter of memory not being freed, but people are definitely seeing process growth over time. Here's one example for windows: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645633

Things to note:

1. This is reproducible on a fresh/brand new/vanilla installation of FF4. No extensions are needed. None. It depends upon the URLs visited; unfortunately, gmail seems to be one of them.
2. Due to way FF is designed, the process size will grow somewhat over time. However, the size should eventually stabilize (stop growing). In some cases, unfortunately, the process size just grows and grows. I've personally seen an average growth of around 1MB/minute. This may not seem like a lot, but it's an huge issue if you leave FF4 running all the time.

There are some bugs related to sqlite memory use, bug 411894 and bug 650649.

I don't know why we bother caching parts of the sqlite files at all. That's what mmap and OS filesystem caches are for.

The good news is the sqlite memory use won't keep growing. At worst it will grow to about the size of the database, and then remain steady. It's only a significant fraction of Firefox's memory use when Firefox isn't using much memory.

There are some bugs related to sqlite memory use, bug 411894 and bug 650649.

I don't know why we bother caching parts of the sqlite files at all. That's what mmap and OS filesystem caches are for.

The good news is the sqlite memory use won't keep growing. At worst it will grow to about the size of the database, and then remain steady. It's only a significant fraction of Firefox's memory use when Firefox isn't using much memory.

This is a known problem, due to some changes in FF4 regarding the discarding of decompressed images. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=660577

Is this per-tab or global?

It's global memory usage at the moment. I'm working on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=661474 which will give JS memory usage per "compartment", which roughly means "per domain". So if a page at foo.com has a Twitter feed and some Google Analytics stuff, there'll be three compartments, one for foo.com, one for twitter.com, and one for google-analytics.com. It's not quite per-tab, but in that direction. about:memory is evolving, keep an eye on it.

Bayesian filters learn. Mark too much legit looking email as spam and legit email will end up as spam. Consider that before marking anything as spam, you might be condemning your future legit mail to your spam folder. It's exactly for this reason that there is a "reset training data" button in Thunderbird. As these Bayesian spam filters are pretty much black boxes, it makes it really hard to find why exactly a legit email has been marked as spam. I use JunQuilla now, because it gives me a bit more insight.

MailRedirect may do that for Thunderbird: http://mailredirect.mozdev.org/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/mail-redirect/ though comments sound like it doesn't work with the recent Thunderbird build.

Here's the relevant bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662264

Finally someone in this discussion is making sense.

Here is something which might be of use:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Identity/VerifiedEmailProtocol

A lot of stuff is webbased, why not have the browser authenticate in your name (probably with the use of an extra locally stored encrypted database of keys)

Government attempts at censorship only make those sites more popular in accordance with the Streisand Effect. I suggest using the MafiaaFire Redirector Addon for Firefox. Since the US Government starting seizing domains I've found some excellent torrents sites I never before knew existed. Roja Directa is still up. You can access it here http://www.rojadirecta.es I for one am thankful my government is clueless as to how the Internet works.

The recent /. article on what ails Microsoft is relevant here. They can no longer sustain their numbers as a regular, non-dominating competitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg

Five years of rank stagnation of web technology thanks to IE's domination of the market, what I call the Great Languish.

Please do your part to remember the fiasco and to ward against it by discouraging monopolies both with your actions and your advice to others. If you're sticking with the dominant browser/platform because it's more comfortable than using the game-changing upstart, you're part of the problem.

Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003
From: Concerned Netizen
To: Friends
Subject: browser war upset

I get the feeling that Microsoft is about to lose the browser war.
Everyone thought it was over.

        http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/

Try it out:

        http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/releases/0.6.1/MozillaFirebird-0.6.1-win32.zip

Commoditize the platform. It's good for us all.

The recent /. article on what ails Microsoft is relevant here. They can no longer sustain their numbers as a regular, non-dominating competitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg

Five years of rank stagnation of web technology thanks to IE's domination of the market, what I call the Great Languish.

Please do your part to remember the fiasco and to ward against it by discouraging monopolies both with your actions and your advice to others. If you're sticking with the dominant browser/platform because it's more comfortable than using the game-changing upstart, you're part of the problem.

Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003
From: Concerned Netizen
To: Friends
Subject: browser war upset

I get the feeling that Microsoft is about to lose the browser war.
Everyone thought it was over.

        http://mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/

Try it out:

        http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/releases/0.6.1/MozillaFirebird-0.6.1-win32.zip

Commoditize the platform. It's good for us all.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92165

I hope not... I wouldn't want to take away Wayne Lydecker's amusement before the bug's 10th Anniversary.

( The bug concerns renaming a folder from "Foo" to "foo" on a filesystem that does not differentiate between uppercase and lowercase, resulting in a "Foo already exists!" error, rather than the case change. )

It seems like this release doesn't really bring anything the user will want bad enough to upgrade. I like the new speedier release schedule because it always seemed like we never got new versions, but I'd also like to see more than just minor bug fixes rolled into a major release.

On a personal soapbox: We've been promised for a while now that sqllite would replace mork for address books. Has it? Being able to synchronize address books between mutt and thunderbird (or an iphone or android contact list) without the use of ldap has been something I've wanted for years. LDAP has never been a complete solution because it was read only from most (all?) common mail clients.

Linkies for reference:
http://www.ceveni.com/2009/03/thunderbird-addressbook-mork-format.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)

5 year old bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382876

Perhaps this whole idea can be replaced with mozilla sync/weave if they integrate that. I've been worried about the direction of thunderbird since mozilla "spun it off" though. It seems they don't want it/don't want to work on it, but don't really want to let it go either.

After installing and playing with the new version, it looks like mostly a UI change.

There are lots of changes under the hood. Thunderbird Conversations [1] was almost useless on Tbird 2.x, 3.0 and 3.1. For about a year now the extension has been developed with the next generation Tbird in mind (I think that it was called 3.4 internally, until yesterday). You are going to like Conversations!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/

For the short term, you can use MafiaaFire Redirector, which maintains a list of ceased domains and redirects you seamlessly to a working page.

64-bit binaries:
Firefox 4.0.1 release
Firefox 5 beta-3
Firefox 6 alpha-2
Firefox 7 alpha-1

64-bit binaries:
Firefox 4.0.1 release
Firefox 5 beta-3
Firefox 6 alpha-2
Firefox 7 alpha-1

64-bit binaries:
Firefox 4.0.1 release
Firefox 5 beta-3
Firefox 6 alpha-2
Firefox 7 alpha-1

64-bit binaries:
Firefox 4.0.1 release
Firefox 5 beta-3
Firefox 6 alpha-2
Firefox 7 alpha-1

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/3.5_EOL

It's dead, Jim.

Actually, Firefox 3.5 hit EOL (at least from Mozilla) as of the last security update. They will not be updating it further.

Crazy rules for var? Like every child object of the object in which var is declared has access to that variable?

No, the fact that it's always function-scoped rather than block-scoped, while the syntax still permits you to write it inside a block. This breaks the established rule for all C-family languages out there - in every other case, either in-block declarations are scoped to the block (C99, C++, C#, Java, D, ...), or else you can only declare variables at the outermost block in function body (classic C).

Using "let" instead of "var" is a workaround that Mozilla provides, but it's a non-standard extension which only they currently support (albeit slated for inclusion in EcmaScript Harmony).

Until then, please install the MafiaaFire redirector, it handles some of domains stolen by DoJ. You probably won't need any of them and can search for the new URLs in seconds, but it's more about spreading the word.

Yeah, projects with dorky names don't go anywhere.

Additionally: JS does not have any numbers except 64 bit floats!

Did not. Does now.

Depends on how you define "cool" - this is very different from what GWT Quake did. GWT quake is port of Quake 2. This was created by recompiling the Doom source. Granted, Doom didn't originally use SDL, but I suspect it is much closer to the original source than what GWT Quake was. The ability to take unmodified C/C++ and compile it to Javascript is fundamentally amazing.

Take a look at their how-to

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?

Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...

For now I'll just keep typing things like:

http://google.com/search/?q=AI

http://google.com/search/?q=site:slashdot.org+AI

http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=ai

-- or --

Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...

Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:

javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0;
for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match( /\bAI\b/ ) ) window.open( a[x].href );
if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; }
void(0);

(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)

But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.

I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.

Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).

Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....

You are making it a lot more complicated than it has to be. It's not hard already to do certain parts. The problem is it would take a lot of code to do it right. You don't need to use screen shots because we are talking about strings here.

It's not difficult to work with strings and regular expressions. There are a lot of capabilities already. The problem is there isn't a unified framework or backend to make it simple enough that everyone could do it.

And no I haven't decided that this will be MY project, but if nobody sees it as valuable, and I do, then at some point I will write some code and see what can and can't be done. Robots are easy to write, and so are webcrawling robots. Screen shots aren't necessary. It would have to rely on a framework from which applications run on top of.

Python scripting for example can already allow a lot of stuff. The way unix is designed, applications can communicate with each other in that the output of one application can be made into the input for another. If the framework is designed under the methodology that all applications should be able to communicate with each other, then all robots should also be able to communicate with each other. If each robot is sufficiently specialized, you can have fairly complex operations broken down into highly specialized simple tasks.

It's easy to write a bot which bro

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Since no one else has thought of this, or precisely your specific "isn't that hard" implementation, I take it you are actively working on the system of which you speak?

Please let me know when I can download the beta version of your product. I would also like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I would like to see this scripting environment of yours, it sounds revolutionary... I would settle for just being able to write & run scripts myself... if only I could write the scripts faster than I can click the mouse...

For now I'll just keep typing things like:
http://google.com/search/?q=AI
http://google.com/search/?q=site:slashdot.org+AI
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=ai

-- or --

Just using the search bars on those sites homepages...
Then a JS URL bookmarklet like this:

javascript:var a = document.getElementsByTagName( 'a' );var b = 0; for ( var x in a ){ if ( a[x].href.match( /\bAI\b/ ) ) window.open( a[x].href ); if ( ++b >= 6 ) break; } void(0);
(open the first 6 links that have AI in the URLs, probably should be a[x].innerHTML.match(\bAI\b), meh...)

But honestly, I usually just middle button click on the interesting article links (open in new tab) faster than I could write the script or explain to my robot what I want.

I think the reason no-one has this "robot" system you speak of, is that the computer gives you what you want fast enough -- hint: "[ctrl+L]googe.com[enter]AI[enter][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click][mid-click], browse away... IMHO, adding a generic all powerful robot layer would make that more complex than it needs to be.

Maybe I'm wrong -- I look forward to being proved so, having a computer system that satisfies my deepest desires without me having to use any input has only ever happened When I use XP -- It regularly reboots itself (update, crash, whatever) and my boot-loader boots the GNU/Linux partition by default (The computer somehow knew I'd rather be using Linux than MS/Windows).

Perhaps you could use Rhino to create a JS environment with the functionality of Java.awt.Robot, and OpenCV to interpret the screenshots for the AI -- now if only you had an AI to feed the data to....

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/long-url-please-mod/

Better to use the fork with security fixes:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fireice/

And this is just a band-aid fix. You need to redirect more than just your browser.