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

There's now a fork called FireICE so DHS now has an additional extension to suppress.

fireICEis a rewrite that gets rid of the nag screen and addresses some of the privacy concerns the author had with the original MafiaaFire.

A link to the extension from the article:

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

I tried to search for it...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=mafiaafire&cat=all&x=25&y=23

...and got nothing. If it wasn't for a link posted in the thread I wouldn't have found it. Maybe it's just me. Dunno.

Even though this doesn't look like it's going to trial, you might want to consider saying "thank you" by donating.

for what its worth..
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/

I haven't been able to find an equivalent in Firefox 4's NPAPI documentation, but it may exist. If it doesn't now, it will soon -- it's a really obvious feature to have.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:ClearSiteData

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508167
Looks like it was added in February.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625496
And "Clear recent history" will remove the cookies once flash 10.3 is released.

I haven't been able to find an equivalent in Firefox 4's NPAPI documentation, but it may exist. If it doesn't now, it will soon -- it's a really obvious feature to have.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:ClearSiteData

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508167
Looks like it was added in February.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625496
And "Clear recent history" will remove the cookies once flash 10.3 is released.

I haven't been able to find an equivalent in Firefox 4's NPAPI documentation, but it may exist. If it doesn't now, it will soon -- it's a really obvious feature to have.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:ClearSiteData

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508167
Looks like it was added in February.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=625496
And "Clear recent history" will remove the cookies once flash 10.3 is released.

And for Firefox users there is Better Privacy.

From the Better Privacy site:

Better Privacy serves to protect against not deletable longterm cookies, a new generation of 'Super-Cookie', which silently conquered the internet. This new cookie generation offers unlimited user tracking to industry and market research. Concerning privacy Flash- and DOM Storage objects are most critical.
This addon was made to make users aware of those hidden, never expiring objects and to offer an easy way to get rid of them - since browsers are unable to do that for you.

emphasis mine

Firefox's model enables this, and I find it a fine reason to keep it that way.

Thank you! I can reproduce this, and it definitely looks very bad...

I filed bug 654028, and as I promised before, I will investigate this myself. If you want, you can subscribe to the bug to get updates.

If you're on Mac, you can use an app called "Spin Control" to figure out what's causing the pauses / CPU spikes.

My guess is that you're hitting garbage collection (GC) pauses. Firefox 3.6's GCs are global, so the more tabs you have open, the slower each GC is. Firefox 4 has GC compartments, so most GCs are per-domain or per-tab. Firefox 4 has also had its GC-timing heuristics tuned to allow smooth animations in many cases.

Firefox 5 has additional changes to limit the damage caused by having hundreds of tabs open, such as a drastic setTimeout clamp for background tabs. Firefox 5 is currently in the Aurora channel and will be in the Beta channel soon.

Consider setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0 so that after you restart Firefox, it only loads the tabs you switch to.

What do you find inefficient about Firefox 4? Did you find Firefox 4 inefficient, or only Firefox 4 betas? I hope we can figure it out and fix it before your Firefox 3.6 stops getting security updates :)

"Doing what"

Maybe you could take a look at about:memory and post it on http://bugs.mozilla.org/

It could be they have something to say about it or could fix something, they are usually very responsive, but you have to report it.

No. You are wrong. Check the link I gave - it shows Aurora is Firefox 5.0a2, Beta hasn't been released yet and Stable is Firefox 4.0.1
You can also see that Nightly is currently Firefox 6.0a1 here ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-central/

It sounds like you're asking for an option like "Firefox, please pretend my computer only has 512MB of RAM" that affects all types of caches in Firefox. Or a slider that's like "Make Firefox as fast as possible [------|--] Leave as much RAM for other apps as possible". I don't think such a thing exists.

You can install RAMBack for a "clear all in-memory caches" button. In combination with about:memory, it can help you tell the difference between healthy caching behavior and memory leak bugs. Unfortunately, it skips sqlite-based caches, which are some of the largest.

You can disable Firefox's "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" to save maybe 15MB of RAM. On the other hand, it's nice to have that extra defense against zero-day attacks.

You can disable Firefox's URL history to save maybe 35MB of RAM, but then you'll lose purple links and the awesomebar (unless you use bookmarks extensively). There used to be a way to tell Firefox to only keep a few weeks of URL history, but I can't find it now.

You can lower browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers from "8 if there's enough RAM" to 1 or 2. This controls how many navigated-away pages Firefox will keep in memory with their complete state (rather than just scroll position and form data). I'd advise against lowering it all the way to 0, because if you accidentally click a link or close a tab, restoring the page from bfcache is not only faster but also significantly less likely to lose page state (especially on AJAXy pages).

If you use session restore, you can instruct Firefox to only load restored tabs once you switch to them, by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0.

It sounds like you're asking for an option like "Firefox, please pretend my computer only has 512MB of RAM" that affects all types of caches in Firefox. Or a slider that's like "Make Firefox as fast as possible [------|--] Leave as much RAM for other apps as possible". I don't think such a thing exists.

You can install RAMBack for a "clear all in-memory caches" button. In combination with about:memory, it can help you tell the difference between healthy caching behavior and memory leak bugs. Unfortunately, it skips sqlite-based caches, which are some of the largest.

You can disable Firefox's "Block reported attack sites" and "Block reported web forgeries" to save maybe 15MB of RAM. On the other hand, it's nice to have that extra defense against zero-day attacks.

You can disable Firefox's URL history to save maybe 35MB of RAM, but then you'll lose purple links and the awesomebar (unless you use bookmarks extensively). There used to be a way to tell Firefox to only keep a few weeks of URL history, but I can't find it now.

You can lower browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers from "8 if there's enough RAM" to 1 or 2. This controls how many navigated-away pages Firefox will keep in memory with their complete state (rather than just scroll position and form data). I'd advise against lowering it all the way to 0, because if you accidentally click a link or close a tab, restoring the page from bfcache is not only faster but also significantly less likely to lose page state (especially on AJAXy pages).

If you use session restore, you can instruct Firefox to only load restored tabs once you switch to them, by setting browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0.

Not sure how enforceable or practical it would be. Considering how central cookies are to today's web usage, I think it would be simply annoying to have to confirm each and every cookie before you get it. I like the the way Cookie Monster for firefox does it myself. Although, if the Swedish government wants to pay someone to write plugins/extensions for all the other browsers that work the same way, I'd be smiling.

Hey, kripkenstein. I agree it sounds bad. What sounds worse is that you are apparently not even using your own bug tracking system to do a simple search for “memory leak” and instead pretend that this Slashdot comment is the first and only report of a leak in Firefox 4 (it ain’t.). There are hundreds of memory leak tickets. Here’s one with a bunch of data on how Firefox enjoys leaking and crashing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639780. Please go do that thing you said you were going to do and use all your power to fix it now. Then, when you are done with that one, address the 400+ other ones. Thanks!

Hey, kripkenstein. I agree it sounds bad. What sounds worse is that you are apparently not even using your own bug tracking system to do a simple search for “memory leak” and instead pretend that this Slashdot comment is the first and only report of a leak in Firefox 4 (it ain’t.). There are hundreds of memory leak tickets. Here’s one with a bunch of data on how Firefox enjoys leaking and crashing: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639780. Please go do that thing you said you were going to do and use all your power to fix it now. Then, when you are done with that one, address the 400+ other ones. Thanks!

However according to Hommey, these new faster and less sluggish builds of Firefox for Linux will be available only from Firefox 6 onwards and we expect the first beta of Firefox 6 to available only by September - October 2011.

Note that you do not need to wait, if you are ok with running a Nightly build. Nightly builds are the latest code, so they are obviously less stable. But you can get this improvement right now if you want it.

Otherwise, you can wait just a few weeks and Firefox 6 Aurora will be released, which is somewhat more stable, and will include this code. (6 weeks later will be a Beta, and 6 weeks after that, a stable release.)

Same place as always: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

I'd call you a troll, but some people do have this issue.
For me, however, I have way better luck on Linux than anything else.
Running this stress test: http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/
gives me: 450fps* in FF 6.0A1(latest nightly), 45fps in Reconq, and about 30fps in Chrome!

(*Note: Set minimum timeout to 0 in ff prefs, also remove the two lines of code in the above test that limit the output number to 60fps)
Compare this to about 22fps on Windows XP on Firefox on my fathers machine, which is almost as powerful as mine(Phenom x4 3.2ghz vs. Phenom II x4 3.5) - No HW acceleration there.
So yea, I like Linux. I upgraded to it from XP a few years back and am loving it.

No browser I am aware of can tell you if the security status based on DNSSEC.

There is a plugin for Firefox.

I concur that browsers need this built in, and it should be an option you can enable to restrict communications with non-DNSSEC sites, or at least with sites whose DNSSEC validation has a problem (bad keys, or man-in-the-middle attack).

Firefox has an Add-on called DNSSEC Validator, which will tell you after a page loads if it is DNSSEC secured, not secured, or has invalid/bad DNSSEC information (possibly tampered with).

The problem with the add-on is that you could be redirected via a MitM attack to a bogus page (other than what you typed in or the link you clicked) and you'd never know it (since DNSSEC Validator takes a few seconds to verify and you'll never see it indicate anything for a page that you are quickly redirected from). The bogus page could easily be secured with DNSSEC, but if you don't mind the URL you'll not know. It also doesn't help if the page isn't SSL-encrypted as any of the contents could be manipulated.

However, it does prevent against bogus DNS + fraudulent SSL at the same time. Right now if you don't have both DNSSEC and SSL, you could be sent to a bogus IP address with SSL using one of those recently issued SSL certs (which were revoked, and browsers have had updates put in to never trust them and not need to check CLRs). So going forward you'd be saved from those during a "zero day" breach of a CA. Mind you, it would only save you for sites with DNSSEC enabled and which you know to check the DNSSEC Validator status.

It's a step in the right direction, and the next step is to have it built into the tools. Mostly we need it built into the client tools because we cannot trust our ISPs and coffee shop resolvers. In an enterprise setting where you can trust your DNS resolver, you don't need this built into your client tools for DNSSEC-enabled sites.

and they trust the app store. You just need a trusted central authority reviewing everything. My Firefox Plugin has a binary component in it to make the MP3s, so every time I submit a new version it takes a week or two to show up on Mozilla's site, but the awesome thing is they review it for me so that my users don't worry I'm trying to pull a fast one.

I also didn't like "If we modify these Terms of Service, we will post the modification on the Site or provide you with notice of the modification". *Or* provide me notification? So they basically can change the terms at any time just by posting a new set to the web site, and they aren't even promising I will be notified? Yeah, let me jump right on agreeing to that.

The main options I'm aware of for hosting your own bookmark server are:

• Cutemarks. Pretty simple, but not maintained anymore I think.
• Firefox Sync Weave server. Seems like it's trying to solve way more complicated problems than I really care about, with the associated complexity that comes with that.
• Firefox Sync server on Google App Engine. Interesting proof of concept, adding another server source compatible with Firefox's API. I don't really trust Google's infrastructure either though, and this hasn't moved much beyond prototype yet.

Perhaps the terrible terms for the relocated Delicious site will finally kickstart more development in this area.

Maybe it's something similar to this code that crashes firefox
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=148963

Bug report I posted about it in 2004.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239840

Funny thing is, it used to just hang back it 2004, now it's a hard crash with firefox 4.

Maybe it's something similar to this code that crashes firefox
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=148963

Bug report I posted about it in 2004.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=239840

Funny thing is, it used to just hang back it 2004, now it's a hard crash with firefox 4.

False. Because the source code is freely available, anyone who wants to can take the whole thing and support it themselves.

That's apples and oranges. Open source, whether or not freely available or not, DOES lose support. The fact that someone can someone can download the source and change it does not constitute support, such as regular bug fixes and answers on forums. In fact, lots of open source software has no support at all... you can take it or leave it, and figure it out for yourself.

Here's an example of a support website for open source software: http://www.mozilla.org/support/

Now, just look on github or similar places for open source software, and you'll find that most of the software projects are just source code, with no support at all.

On a Windows system, try the following:

1. Find your iphone data files in the following location on a Windows system: C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[FOLDER]. Where [USERNAME] is your windows logon username and [FOLDER] could be any iphone/ipad device you've ever synced with that version of Windows. For example, I have three different folders for three different devices.
2. Locate the file named "4096c9ec676f2847dc283405900e284a7c815836" or at least it should begin with "4096...". It should also be the biggest file in the folder.
3. Download "SQLite Manager" for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sqlite-manager/ and open the "4096..." file.
4. In "SQLite Manager", expand "Tables" and click on a table, and on the right side, select the "browse and search" tab to see if you have any data (you should!). For me, the big ones were:
a. "CellLocation"
b. "CellLocationHarvest"
c. "LocationHarvest"
d. "WifiLocation"
e. "WifiLocationHarvest"
5. On the right side of "SQLite Manager", click on the Export Wizard tab.
6. Select the table you want under the "Name of the table" field, select the check box called "First row contains column names", and click OK. At this point, you can now open that .csv file as in Excel or whatever.
7. Go to: http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/
8. Under "Upload a GPS file:", select the .csv file, and click GO. If your file is not too big, it should plot all your locations.
9. If the website complains your file is too big, open the .csv file in excel and delete all the columns except for Latitude and Longitude. Save, and load again with the website.

You might want to check out Pentadactyl.

did you try -no-remote or FoxTester?

Thanks for the tip! On my mac (at home) it doesn't work, but at work I use Ubuntu, and I think it'll be very useful there.

This is the most common signature: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=637304

did you try -no-remote or FoxTester?

That would be PyDOM / PyXPCOM. It got far enough to work, at which point it died because there was no way Mozilla was going to help distribute it or market it. The underlying work to make it possible has been removed recently.

Is this at all compatible with Mozilla's Resource Packaging?

A newspapper so utterly *awful* that there exists a firefox extension to prevent you clicking on it's pages.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/kitten-block/

Now we just nee an addon for our tv's to stop us flicking past Jermey Kyle.

I am not on the JS team myself, so I am not up to date on everything they are doing. But I have heard they are currently considering generational GC, after recently adding compartments. See this tracking bug and the links in it, for example.

Some add-ons are known offenders: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/ You can also try 'Configuration Mania', 'Bar Tab', creating a new profile...

I'd really like to know where these ideas come from, and what the vetting/decision process is.

Well, first of all, these are just ideas someone had - the article isn't reporting on concrete plans for anything. It is very possible these features will not be decided upon, and something else will be.

Second, I do platform stuff and not frontend, but basically discussions are done in IRC, and in publicly open meetings (like this), where anyone can dial in and listen or interact. Eventually decisions are made, however like many open source projects, often code decides in the end (if no one writes code for a feature, it dies, and vice versa).

the cache is force released when there is memory pressure aka when you're running out of ram for other things. For 20megs, its hard to say, but that's far from 1.3GB
So it sounds like it might be an extension. I'm not intimate with FF's exact cache management but "per tab" is a quick approximation, in reality most likely keep cache per page (except there's only one page per tab so its a bit like "per tab")

I've seen they started to to be more careful about extensions and list the "bad extensions" for startup time, i guess they will analyse for memory as well.
Many of the most used extensions are actually in that list ;-)

Personally the main reason I use firefox, beside that it works fine for me is that: http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto of course if it was worse than the rest by a fair margin i wouldn't use it - but - for most things it's actually still better than the rest imo, including memory actually (despite the fact that it wont release memory without pressure or if there's a leak. in chrome you can't see it since by closing the tab the process is killed. It will end up like that in FF too anyhow, while it uses more memory, it just makes things more simple)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=asnumber

I have been reading about firefox leaks for years, yet I have never seen them. I have always thought it must be a problem with some configurations, or a myth/antifirefox propaganda

Ok, how about this one.

Firefox eats your memory in safe mode by doing absolutely nothing but opening it.

If you're concerned about vertical space, then you should install Tree Style Tab. Tabs on the side is incredibly useful, especially on widescreen monitors.

For some reason, that extension is in some sort of extension backwater -- it can only be installed by going to the addons site and scrolling way down to the bottom. It cannot be installed through FF's addons dialog/page.

If you still want more vertical space, move the bookmark bar to be to the left of the menu bar. You can do that just by customizing the toolbars in FF.

5 isn't so bad. Mozilla is planning to release both 6 and 7 this year, too!

Now that I've installed oldbar I really like the new location bar functionality (although calling it the "Awesomebar" is still dumb). It keeps all the functionality, but displays results in a much more condensed, FF2 like fashion (hence the name), which is a lot nicer to work with when going through long lists of entries.

I'm sure that there are lawyers who remember the exact patents and dates better than I, but I'm pretty sure that there are patents that read on the mp3 file format that won't expire for several years. How is Mozilla going to ship with support for mp3 files without putting themselves and their users at risk of patent litigation?

I think the answer is that they're not going to ship MP3 support. I don't see anything about MP3 support on the proposed features page for Firefox 5, 6, and 7:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Features

MP3 support would only come to Firefox if the MP3 licence holders decide to licence MP3 under open, royalty-free terms. I also don't see anything on the features page about built in PDF support. It would be better if ConceivablyTech cited their sources.

My main issue with Firefox right now is not a lack of Facebook integration (-_-) but the obvious memory leakage in the released FF 4 with AdBlock/NoScript, which was present through the entire last half of the beta cycle.

Hi, I'm a Firefox dev. We are constantly working hard on memory issues, you can follow this meta-bug for example, to see how progress is going.

The fact is though, that the people that work on frontend stuff like app tabs and so forth, are different from the people that work on more hardcore things like memory usage. It isn't as if we can say, everyone should work on memory usage now. So we will always have a lot of work going on on both frontend and platform stuff - but, by the nature of things, the press and blogs will report on frontend stuff. So you might get the idea that Firefox devs are all working on things like app tabs and panorama - but that is very untrue! It's just that platform improvements under the hood are, well, under the hood ;)

Btw, a long-term solution for all these memory issues will likely be when we switch to one process per tab. Then we'll have something similar to what Chrome has - higher baseline memory usage (overhead of processes and duplication, etc.), but more predictable memory freeing when tabs are closed and a very easy way to see which tabs are responsible for which memory. We are already working very hard on this, and a version of it shipped with Firefox Mobile just now, actually (separate processes for the UI and for web content) - so while it's not done yet, it's making very good progress. A release of desktop Firefox late this year should add the same functionality.