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It seems to me a real DNT track system would be client-side only, and the setting would instruct the browser to accept and instantly (or after the session) delete the cookie, without giving any indication of the activity to the server.

That's basically what Cookiesafe and Cookie Monster" do. Firefox's default cookie manager does it a bit more clumsily, and is missing the option to allow a site to leave cookies for just the current session, not future sessions. Your only choices are always deny, allow persistent cookies, or always allow cookies for a session.

It seems to me a real DNT track system would be client-side only, and the setting would instruct the browser to accept and instantly (or after the session) delete the cookie, without giving any indication of the activity to the server.

That's basically what Cookiesafe and Cookie Monster" do. Firefox's default cookie manager does it a bit more clumsily, and is missing the option to allow a site to leave cookies for just the current session, not future sessions. Your only choices are always deny, allow persistent cookies, or always allow cookies for a session.

With Cookie Monster it's not too painful. Set it to apply to the entire domain and not deal with subdomains, and have it block by default. Any time they need to login, just click the icon and permanently allow. Any time some crappy website that requires cookies denies them, then temporarily-allow.

I'm not saying most people will do this, but a fair amount can do this if they care. I doubt there is anything we can say to show them they should care, however.

RefControl might help you here. Additionally the HTTPSEverywhere extension; then all the iframes over regular http would get converted to https and hopefully fail.

You almost need to: allow cookies for facebook.com, login to facebook, ...., logout, block cookies for facebook.com, continue normal browsing.

Try Cookie Monster for help with that.

A pain in the ass, but I wouldn't trust facebook either, even if they did claim to honor DNT.

RefControl might help you here. Additionally the HTTPSEverywhere extension; then all the iframes over regular http would get converted to https and hopefully fail.

You almost need to: allow cookies for facebook.com, login to facebook, ...., logout, block cookies for facebook.com, continue normal browsing.

Try Cookie Monster for help with that.

A pain in the ass, but I wouldn't trust facebook either, even if they did claim to honor DNT.

lolll..thanks, but I get my weather from Wunderground on their sidebar gadget and from Forecast Fox in Firefox.

Don't figure I need alerts to my cell, 'cuz when I'm dependent upon it I'm out in the weather.

However much you decide to trust the CAs your browser comes with, you can add some checks to the SSL validation process.

1. Check that others are seeing the same cert that you are.
2. Check that the cert for a site has been consistently what you're getting now.

Tools for this: Perspectives and Certificate Patrol.

Example details from Perspectives check of an HTTPS site
Brief blog entry on Certificate Patrol

I have now removed Comodo as a trusted CA on my systems, and have advised colleagues of the three known occasions on which they have failed to act as a responsible CA. The game is up.

The Mozilla inclusion policy for maintaining CAs in the default list states that:

We reserve the right to not include a particular CA certificate in our software products. This includes (but is not limited to) cases where we believe that including a CA certificate (or setting its "trust bits" in a particular way) would cause undue risks to users' security...

I hope that Mozilla now review the inclusion of Comodo's cert.

If you're using FF4 and gmail, there's a known issue (which might also be in FF3.6) where lots of memory are consumed: Bug 497808. On my system, I can start up a pristine FF4 installation, open one tab on my gmail account, and FF4 will be sucking up 1-2GB of private space (win7 x64) after a day or so (leaving it open, not minimized). From the comments, it might be a gmail bug.

Let's hope it gets addressed soon.

i use FF because of that: http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto

but it's also one of the best performing browser overall, and has excellent add-ons, so it's all good.

Awesome news. I wish it had more to do with people actively looking at boycotting News Corp.

I've been working on a firefox extension to help people boycott News Corp, NBC and others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webcott/
Also looking at alternatives to myspace here: http://bryanquigley.com/webcott/leave-myspace-for-wordpress-com

I can't RTFA. I just get to this page.

Thank goodness for this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kitten-block/

Neither of those is 100% reliable. Cert Patrol provides the user with meaningless messages that they are not equipped to understand, and so their choices reduces to "get work done" or "give up on doing any work". I also doubt that Perspectives has the critical mass needed to make its data reliable, and it's far too easy to miss a single invalid cert. The shared vulnerability is simply too large.

The only truly secure option is a petname system used to build a web of trust. At least here the window of vulnerability is small, and phishing and spoofing attacks are impossible.

Have your browser monitor for when certs are updated. And use public notaries to tell you whether others are seeing the same certs for the site.

Certificate Patrol

Perspectives

An example of who else is seeing the addons.mozilla.org cert you're seeing.

Here are a couple Firefox addons that can help you avoid compromised certificates/CAs:

• Perspectives - crowdsourced cert recognition
• Certificate Patrol - tells you when certs change

Not an ETA yet; just a plan.

The problem is that there is no system API for low-level accelerated 2d graphics on OS X. So the only way to do it is to roll your own. The plan is to do just that on top of OpenGL, but that's a big project.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:2DGraphicsSketch has some details.

Why exactly wouldn't it be a good idea to remove it? It was an almost-always-nearly-blank toolbar that mostly just took up space

Said the person who uses no addons. My status bar has Noscript, Auto-pager, proxy settings, a Dilbert button, and of course conveniently displays load progress and most importantly link locations (this is not including the whole set of addons disabled by FF4). I don't know why FF devs think they need to copy Chrome, there are reasons some of us don't use Chrome and lack of things like status bar is one of them. And as of this moment, about 97k other people agree with me.

Someone else reminded us of the multiprocess tab project. A year ago, we thought FF 3.7 (now 3.6.4 and up) would unveil Electrolysis' "Multiple content processes" but the wiki has been stranded with no clear timeline updates for 9 months since July 2010.

The main FF4 page mentions JS speed increases, but MCP seems nothing other than some difficult bulletpoint under-the-hood that they can't figure out how to market. It feels like when Vista and Seven cheated us out of a new unhierarchycal database filesystem that was promised several years before 2006. What makes me lose hope is that even FF's summary page for 2011 is mum about MCP. Their detailed roadmap does promise Electrolysis and "Process-per-tab to mitigate effects of crashes." I'm more surprised they have a goal of extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists. It also will hopefully tackle the lag to undisplay current tabs and begin to switch to another, especially when some of them have flash loaded.

Besides implementing WebGL (see google body), FF4 doesn't present a substancial under-the-hood improvement for normal 3.6 users, let alone your average home/office drone. I have an idea! Wait till FF5 comes out in 3 short months, and FF6 in 6 months, or FF7 in December. Meanwhile, I have higher chances of test-driving IE9 to see how much it's grown. FF has reached its aimless teen girl phase, and thinks life is nothing but trying new emo makeup every month :)

Someone else reminded us of the multiprocess tab project. A year ago, we thought FF 3.7 (now 3.6.4 and up) would unveil Electrolysis' "Multiple content processes" but the wiki has been stranded with no clear timeline updates for 9 months since July 2010.

The main FF4 page mentions JS speed increases, but MCP seems nothing other than some difficult bulletpoint under-the-hood that they can't figure out how to market. It feels like when Vista and Seven cheated us out of a new unhierarchycal database filesystem that was promised several years before 2006. What makes me lose hope is that even FF's summary page for 2011 is mum about MCP. Their detailed roadmap does promise Electrolysis and "Process-per-tab to mitigate effects of crashes." I'm more surprised they have a goal of extension-independent cookie/popup blacklists. It also will hopefully tackle the lag to undisplay current tabs and begin to switch to another, especially when some of them have flash loaded.

Besides implementing WebGL (see google body), FF4 doesn't present a substancial under-the-hood improvement for normal 3.6 users, let alone your average home/office drone. I have an idea! Wait till FF5 comes out in 3 short months, and FF6 in 6 months, or FF7 in December. Meanwhile, I have higher chances of test-driving IE9 to see how much it's grown. FF has reached its aimless teen girl phase, and thinks life is nothing but trying new emo makeup every month :)

Current releases of 3.6, 4.0 and 3.5 have the fix for this problem
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-11.html
http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2011/03/22/firefox-blocking-fraudulent-certificates/

Neither of these are perfect, but here are two different firefox add-ons that can significantly reduce the chance of you falling victim to a compromised certificate authority:

Network Notary - sort of crowd-sourcing approach
Certificate Patrol - remembers the certs of sites you've visited in the past and tells you when they change

Before the official release, I ran the various betas to check on my extensions, and virtually all of them worked in the final release, which was a pleasant surprise (and I have over 30+ extensions loaded). Also, I was using Palemoon as my main browser, and being able to run that, alongside the FF4 beta, helped, too. Of course, few extensions worked at first, but they were ported in the weeks up to the final release. The only major one which didn't work was Scrapbook Plus, but the original Scrapbook is still well-maintained (and working with FF4), and so I just went back to that.

For the lazy, you can check your addon compatibility here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/report

So, you're saying that the Google funded, closed source, web browser "Chrome" is capable of quickly catching up to the features that the free donation & ads supported Firefox took so long to develop.

Last I heard that "ads supported" Firefox made $104 million USD in 2009 while spending $61 million USD in operating expenses.

That's a net profit of $43 million USD.

Basically you're saying: more money and developers == Faster Development. Thanks for your input Mr. Obvious.

Except I've already shown from Mozilla Corp.'s own statements that they made $43 million USD in 2009. Why is the non-profit Mozilla Corp not spending that money to hire developers to add new features to their browser?

With your nick, you may also be interested to know that Pentadactyl is working just fine with Firefox 4, and will help you not see those weird new forward/reverse buttons ever again.

Same here. The performance difference for me is huge. Its so big, its instantly obvious from the second it starts, which even includes a much faster start for all my tabs. Its instantly snappy and I'm an extremely heavy tab user too. Flash sites are slightly more responsive and now I'm even running greasemonkey (didn't before) which should further slow things. And yet, things are definitely faster. I'm even observing a reduce memory footprint, which I didn't expect, of roughly 200M for the same tabs. I'm extremely impressed. Version 4.0, by far, exceeds my expectations.

As for plugins and add-ons, everything I use is already available for 4.0 so I'm pretty pleased. The only gotcha I've run into is the default linux release is 32-bit and you have to dig to find the 64-bit download. If any cares, you download the 64-bit linux release here.

Oh ya, am observing an extremely annoying issue with 4.0 and slashdot in that entry fields get pushed past the bottom of the screen when making posts, with the new slashdot interface abomination, truly a pain in the ass. Yet another reason to continue to use the old interface. Works great with the old interface. New interface is broken with 4.0.

According to their roadmap, Firefox will be up to version 7 by the end of 2011.

They say that they want to "ship our new technology to users in smaller bundles, more frequently" but personally, I just think they want more cake.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what any of this article said, because I was too busy being mesmerized by the blinky lights on the Firefox download stats page.

On OS X 10.6 Firefox 4 runs 64-bit by default. The download includes both the 64-bit and 32-bit binaries on Mac.

On Linux, the builds are there but not officially supported, apparently. See http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0/linux-x86_64/

I use tree style tab to get my tabs to the right, that are invisible until I move my mouse to the left of the browser, or hold ctrl.

Which looks like this: http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/2443/firefox4.png

It's OK so far, I guess, but it doesn't have an OMGPonies plugin yet.

But it does have a Side Saddle plugin. Is that close enough?

Want to give the Add-on compatibility report a try?

Yeah, but isn't it the V6 processor? There's tons of stuff that won't run on that :(. You need the V7 (Cortex) processor to do cool stuff. I want to port my Firefox Plugin, but I can't afford a $200 phone + $100/mo + 2 year lease (I don't care what they call it, with those cancellation fees it's basically a lease).

The ARM tablets I've seen are either really, really expensive ($500+), or they're running the V6. I don't think there is a cheap alternative for Android hobbyist dev.

What marketing does the Foundation do for the Corporation? Keep in mind what the corporation is. It is the arm that produces and markets Firefox and the other software

Really?

I don't want to search my bookmarks through my url bar. I already have my bookmarks sorted by category.

Simple fix:
1. Preferences
2. Privacy
3. Location Bar
4. Select "History"
5. Install this Add-on (optional)
6. ???
7. Profit!

Ahh, preference menus! What would we ever do without them? ;)

Try Anti-Aliasing Tuner.

You can get most of the old GUI back without any add-on with just a few clicks. For the status bar, Status4evar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/ or wait for Pale Moon 4 to be released in a few days.

Bug 119490 - Implement SVG fonts: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490 There has been some movement on that bug lately.

No, use TabKit and put tabs on the side (grouped, colored, and nested) where they belong.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with FF4, but the next best thing seems to be either: Tree Style Tab or: Vertical Tabs.

No, use TabKit and put tabs on the side (grouped, colored, and nested) where they belong.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with FF4, but the next best thing seems to be either: Tree Style Tab or: Vertical Tabs.

No, use TabKit and put tabs on the side (grouped, colored, and nested) where they belong.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work with FF4, but the next best thing seems to be either: Tree Style Tab or: Vertical Tabs.

To oversimplify, there are two kinds of hardware acceleration that Firefox implements. There's acceleration of drawing ("2d" acceleration) and acceleration of compositing ("3d" acceleration).

On Windows Vista and Windows 7, both are implemented. On WinXP, Win2k, and Mac OS 10.6, 3d acceleration is implemented, but 2d is not. On Linux, 3d acceleration is supported with the binary nvidia driver, and 2d acceleration happens "for free" if your driver's XRender implementation is good. This last part also worked on Linux in Firefox 3.6, I believe.

If you're testing on http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ then you're gated on the speed of drawImage, which is 2d acceleration. Hence you'll get fast performance on Windows 7/Vista and on Linux with a good Xrender, but not elsewhere.

Have they caught up yet? A few weeks ago half my extensions didn't work so I reverted.

Most popular extensions have caught up. The Compatibility Dashboard has more details. However, we can't force all developers to update and inevitably some add-ons will lag behind or be abandoned.

The interface is somewhat streamlined.

If by 'streamlined' you mean 'tiny icons with all the colour sucked out of them, apparently so they could copy Chrome/Safari/IE9', then yeah. :-)

Personally I much prefer the larger 24x24 colourful icons you could have with the earlier Firefox versions. Luckily there's a theme that reverts the toolbar look and feel to that of Firefox 3. If anyone's interested; it's here:
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4

Not that I think your comment is without merit (Firefox codebase is somewhat more secure than IE codebase) but that is without significance when plugins are not sandboxed. DOM-related bugs aren't exploited nearly so much as plugins are, and NPAPI-Flash is hilariously insecure.

Firefox on Linux with SELinux/AppArmor is at least as secure as Windows' MIC sandboxing - but the problem here is Firefox on Windows.

Firefox should just abandon Windows imo - it's too much trouble - but whatever.

I like quite a few things about Firefox 4. Its Javascript performance is clearly improved. The one thing I'm not a big fan of is the new minimalist GUI. The icons are too small, they have all the colour sucked out of them, and there are no 24x24 icons on Windows/OSX anymore. It does seem a lot like copying Chrome for copying's sake.

Luckily there's a theme that gets back all the Firefox 3 colourful toolbar goodness (and includes its larger icons), if anyone's interested. It's here:
Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4

Here's my FF4 upgrade plan:

1. Use FEBE to create a backup of my entire user profile
2. Bookmark All Tabs to preserve as much of my running session as possible.
3. Upgrade to FF4.0
4. Note any incompatible extensions, decide whether or not to roll back.

If I decide to roll back:

1. Remove FF4
2. Reinstall 3.6.15
3. Install FEBE
4. Restore FEBE backup

First of all, I love the "AwfulBar". It works a lot better than the older bar to me. If you, for some reason, absolutely cannot use the new location bar, you do know that an Add-on to fix it is only a quick search away, right?

Presentation only: OldBar
Presentation and features: (not marked compatible with Firefox 4, though you can force add-on compatability) Old Location Bar

I don't see how the new location bar is so bad. I love it! Yeah it takes up more space, but that's what scrolling is for ;)

First of all, I love the "AwfulBar". It works a lot better than the older bar to me. If you, for some reason, absolutely cannot use the new location bar, you do know that an Add-on to fix it is only a quick search away, right?

Presentation only: OldBar
Presentation and features: (not marked compatible with Firefox 4, though you can force add-on compatability) Old Location Bar

I don't see how the new location bar is so bad. I love it! Yeah it takes up more space, but that's what scrolling is for ;)

And to get the statusbar back you can install status-4-evar.

The visualization looks like some virus outbreak :))
If this is so, Europe got a Firefox epidemic on its hands :D