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The Chrome UI is the kind of minimalism I could never even customize Firefox to use

I disagree. Although I believe Vimperator to be even more minimalist.

I can understand claiming Firefox to be slower, more bloated, less feature full by default - but lack of customization ability seems strange, at least.

Advertising: "I don't like ads. Find a business model that works".

How about advertising: "I'll look at ads but not if they're an order of magnitude bigger than the article. Find an ad delivery mechanism that works more efficiently." Case in point: I have my Firefox browser set not to download SWF from sites not on the whitelist until I click to activate them because SWF ads are so much bigger than the article. If publishers and advertisers choose to use SWF as a site's primary ad delivery mechanism, that's their problem.

There is too little abstraction of the data so each coder writes their own linked list, red-black tree, or whatever algorithm instead of just using the methods from the OS.

On the low level, this is because of the C/C++ programmer attitude, by which you are only a “real hacker” if you re-invent your own memory management and data structure wheels for everything. Regardless of there being standardized solutions and libraries with literally decades of testing and optimizing.

Bloat is indeed a big problem, programs are exploding into GIGABYTE sizes, which is insane. OTOH linux reusing libraries seems not to have worked.

On the high level it’s only bad because pretty much all desktop applications rape the Unix philosophy with their monolithic do-all kitchensink-included approach.
I never understood the need to bundle file models with their views/controllers and with the functions to process them one a monolithic application. My GIMP paintbrush should work in every format that allows embedding pixel data. My line drawing tool should work in every format that has SVG compatibility. I should be able to combine them into one custom tool with a tiny two-line script, and make that a button on my shelf.
If Maya can do it, so can we!

Another solution is simply to bury real searches under a mountain of fake pretend searches with tools like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173/.

So am I legally responsible for profile distorting random searches or not. This addon makes searches at rates from 1 per hour to ten per minute and of course once installed no one can prove what searches you made versus what random searches it made.

Of course with it making searches at hundreds even thousands of time the rate a typical person does, the wider it's the substantially bigger and more pointless those record of searches become. Technically as it currently stands my search profile would indicate that I use AOL, BING, GOOGLE and YAHOO (alphabetical list, google is actually my equal default along with wikipedia) equally. Based upon this , you'd think that M$ would be bending over backwards to recommend this plug in and get it installed on as many computers as humanly possible ;D.

> Multi-file upload:

In the HTML5 draft and supported in Firefox 3.6, at least. See http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/multiple-file-input-in-firefox-3-6/

To summarize, you do in your source, and you're done.

many options for those obnoxious supercookies

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623/

I think YesScript is better.

If you disable all JavaScripts, sometimes you don't even know what you're missing in a website.

1. It is easy to block Flash ads. Might be much more complicated with sophisticated HTML5 ads.
2. I like the competition. It brought us SVG, HTML5 and faster JavaScript
3. It is just the right tool for some jobs. It is always nice to have a choice.

I don't get it why could not simply have both: HTML5 and Flash. Preferably with Flash that is better integrated in the browser than with the current API.

My humble opinion: On a mobile device flash should be avoided. Sometimes it consumes too much power. It does not easily cope with small screens and changes in resolution, e.g. when the device is rotated. And regarding to touch it does not integrate well with the rest of the system. And on most devices it seems only be available in a very limited version. But on "real" PCs it is a very nice tool for rich multimedia web sites.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865

I have no idea whether it’ll work in Iceweasel. It’s an element-hiding rule that blocks all <script> tags on Snopes.com and any <script href=> tags that embed a script from Snopes.com on a third-party website.

Another example:

||facebook.com^$third-party,domain=~fbcdn.net
||fbcdn.net^$third-party,domain=~facebook.com

Blocks third-party Facebook content (i.e., “Like this”) on websites that aren’t Facebook. Try visiting wimp.com with/without those filters.

Not that I don't like bitching about IE, but it would also be nice if Mozilla would fully support HTML4.

Because it's too difficult to quickly Google their release schedule which gives you upcoming notice of a release? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases

I use Xmarks too

The long term plans for Firefox Sync include arbitrary addon provided data (like settings or Adblock filter list) and installed addon/theme syncing, so I probably will switch eventually.
The sync feature will be included in a future Firefox release (I think 4?).

Here are some of the planned things: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Roadmap/Future

From their Wiki:

Does this mean Firefox will be available on the iPhone?
No. We do not have plans to ship the full Firefox browser for the iPhone. Due to constraints with the OS environment and distribution, we cannot provide users the full Firefox browsing experience on the iPhone. For details, see Mobile/Platforms.

Reading is so passé, why have YouTube if you have to read? 3-step instruction? Don't read, listen to some nerd with dweeby voice ramble about it for 10 minutes on YouTube!

I hope they are also working on FireFox for Android.

Yes, they are: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/Platforms/Android

> Will it require something on my desktop that then sends all the information from my
> browser to their servers?

Yes (though note https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Crypto for details; the only data the server sees is an encrypted blob).

> Does firefox do that currently now?

Only if you install the relevant extension. See https://mozillalabs.com/sync/

I guess that's what I mean. That thing used to be annoying, now I've forgotten it existed and am using JS on here.

Funny how that works.

I hadn't seen Nuke Anything, I use Aardvark for that sort of thing.

It's more easily CSSed away, so yes, exactly. That it floats annoyingly is still an abomination worthy of Star Trek 2's ear-bugs.

Gotta love Firefox addons :).

And it's ironic that someone complains about floating bars of fail on Slashdot of all places. Or is it intentional, to encourage people to setup accounts, because you can turn it off then?

>Why not just make the image go straight to the image link, and put a URL under the image that goes to the page its hosted on Your wish has been answered: OptimizeGoogle https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498/

1. Install Stylish
2. Install the Google Left Navigation Panel Popup style
3. ???
4. Profit!

Chrome is a world-wide-web (read: HTTP) browser, not a (remote) file explorer, shell client, or telnet prompt. Adding protocol support besides HTTP(S) is bloat.

Windows Explorer is decidedly not a local file manager. It's the desktop shell, storage interface, filesystem browser, network share browser, FTP browser, URI forwarder, archive & picture & games viewer, control panel, fully extensible, and dozens of more things. Explorer is basically the entire user front-end of Windows, massively componentized.

FTP support in a web browser is a bad idea exactly because it's a file managing task, better handled by the native file browser. Compare ftp.mozilla.org in Chrome and Explorer. In Explorer, it seamlessly responds like any local file location, allowing right-click operations and drag-and-drop abilities. In Chrome, it's a proprietary and severely limited, read-only hardly-functional implementation.

Correct response for any URL-accepting application in this instance is to forward an unrecognized protocol (such as ftp://) to the OS for it to handle.

You would have the annoying "Firefox Freeze" waiting at 99% for the page to finish loading. However, this is so common that nobody would notice.

Please comment on this Firefox bug, the Mozilla folks just don't believe me that this bug exists:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434180

Thanks!

You see this, and think "Why didn't someone think about this before?"

Tab Mix Plus has had locked tabs for a while now. I'm not entirely sure if this fixes the issue of tabnapping, but it looks like it might.

SHOULD. It is a recommendation; not a requirement. I just checked FF 3.6.4 & it does send the referrer but only the https://www.google.com/ part. it did not send the query itself. Some might not like that but I think that it is a good balance. It at least informs the target what website linked to it. For the paranoids there is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/953/

Whether Google blanks the referrer completely or just blanks out the search portion (which is what my largest concern would be) it's still a TWO FOLD win, actually! :D

Imagine you're a site owner and rely on keyword analysis. You want that referer data, and suddenly more and more people who use Google SSL aren't giving you the data on what they searched for.

What do you do?

Implement SSL on your site as well! :D Then the referer data comes to you cleanly, and still remains out of the hands of eavesdroppers.

If Google ends up pressuring a greater adoption of SSL for standard web surfing across SEO-conscious websites, then I would call this a significant win. Yes, I realize Google is still raeping my data. But that has not gotten demonstrably worse by this change while many many other benefits appear to be cropping up. xD

Petname helps verifying that the SSL certificate is the same you found earlier.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161901/

[...] In other words, is this really any different than, say, building quicktime playback natively into the browser rather than needing a plug-in? [...]

You get better integration with the DOM. This enables thinks like CSS video effects (example on WebKit).

See it like this: Where you had animated GIFs before, you can now have embedded videos. This should be especially nice for browser games, etc.

With the new pepper API currently developped by Mozilla and Google plugins might gain the same degree of integration. But until then a native tag integrates much better in the DOM as a plugin, with repect to layers, scritability, etc.

NoScript? Me too :-)

According to this link:

    http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-youtube-and-webm/

"Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting everything."

If true, the implications seem pretty deep. Personally, I'd be less intimidated by MPEG-LA FUD knowing that YouTube, the world's most popular source of online video, is walking the WebM walk. Add to that the fairly impressive list of supporters mentioned in the WebM announcement, and it would seem to be time to put-up (show your real legal teeth) or shut-up (no more FUD) for the MPEG-LA (and recent FUD'sters like Mr. Jobs).

On the other hand, Dark Shikari (the x264 developer) said this in his analysis: "Though I am not a lawyer, I simply cannot believe that they will be able to get away with this, especially in today’s overly litigious day and age". His comments comprise a rather more elevated class of FUD. Could this be the mother of mistakes (by Google) that will allow MPEG-LA to find themselves a mother-load of riches in such a deep pocketed infringer?

Interesting times ahead!

Like the bookmarks editor...

Being redesigned. Not to worry. Here is the project page for the redesign.

Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ?

Here you go: old releases all the way back to version 0.10!

Like the bookmarks editor...

Being redesigned. Not to worry. Here is the project page for the redesign.

Ever try to find an old release of FF on the FF website ?

Here you go: old releases all the way back to version 0.10!

Wow, who the fuck upvoted this drivel? I am sorry to hear about your trust issues with others using your computer though.

and Mozilla had extensions since at least 0.9
http://www-archive.mozilla.org/news.html#p197

Source

The Mozilla development team released Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, on 21 January 2010 after some anticipation; Firefox 3.5 was a step forward in features but two steps backward in performance. As a minor update, Namoroka was a chance to optimize the last release.

So, now that it's out, did it alleviate some of these problems? Well, let's find out by looking at what 3.6 offers over 3.5.

First and most visible is support for skins, called personas. Firefox developers have been tinkering with the XUL format and they cite its power. They also claim that it has been under-utilized, so personas were a "natural addition."

TraceMonkey received a performance boost, caching more bytecode in RAM using the new "Stored History Integration Table" system which dynamically stores each JavaScript routine as an object in memory in order to more quickly access it during execution.

Firefox's plugin system also received an overhaul, and now lets the user know when a plugin is incompatible. Mozilla also included support for full-screen Theora and WOFF, the Web Open Font File format, as well as additional but otherwise unspecified performance and security enhancements.

Overall, it's a nice list of bullet points for the bump from 3.5 to Nakamora, but the fact that performance wasn't a priority already points away from optimization and to new features. And the features are actually not new at all, but fixes for issues that should have been taken care of during the initial design stages or other numerous upgrades.

For instance, Firefox has been skinnable for years using XUL, and personas are just a hack to this system that allows the user to use bitmapped images as toolbar backgrounds. You are not mistaken if you just had a flashback to Internet Explorer 3.

These personas also slow the browser down, negating any advantage from the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. One writer on the web even suggests that the TraceMonkey enhancements were done in anticipation of new-feature bloat. Talk about the tail wagging the fox!

Plugin incompatibility usually occurs when a plugin was written for an older version of the plugin system, which demands a question about the wisdom of upgrading the plugin system for Nakamoru the first place. But that's just how Firefox developers roll.

Now, if you're running an incompatible plugin, Firefox alerts you at startup and launches the plugin manager, a JavaScript-based app that contacts Firefox's plugin server and swaps all kinds of metadata in a frantic attempt to update your third party add-ons.

Several of the changes are plainly just developmental masturbation. For example, Theora is the least-used web video codec, with the penetration that the newer QuickTime X has. And WOFF is an open standard that Mozilla wants to support for political reasons that isn't actually in use anywhere.

So what exactly are Mozilla development managers doing?

If a private company with an opaque development model like Apple can apply the breaks and optimize an entire operating system, à la Leopard to Snow Leopard, why can't a public, transparent development team be bothered to do the same for something much less complex like a web browser?

> What firefox needs is optimization/cleaning, not new features. Exactly my thoughts. There are very old open bugs regarding (lack of) speed, crashes, hangs, standards compliance in mozilla.bugzilla.org. An examle: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915 Filed on September 1998.

Finally, Mozilla developers have acknowledged there really is a problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490122 Apparently, these micro-pauses are related to garbage collection, cycle collection and other synchronous I/O activity. The folks at Mozilla are working on garbage collection and I/O improvements. This should help with the micro-pauses.

Old versions: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Don't like auto-upgrades? Turn it off. Most users are happy that things like security fixes, etc are handled automatically.
If your extensions are breaking, complain to the developer - they can easily ensure compatibility so that your extensions are ready by the day of release.

But if you're using unmaintained extensions (legitimate concern), you can take matters into your own hands. Instructions are all over the internet, but here you go: make a key in about:config called 'extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6' and set it to false.

No, there's no central extension tool. Should there be?
And you're absolutely, completely wrong about the addons website. I *just* opened Safari and tried to download some random extension. Download now was grayed, but I clicked on it anyway. "To install this addon, get Firefox - or download anyway". Download anyway was a direct link to a .xpi, which addresses another one of your complaints.

I can only conclude you're talking out your ass. Every single one of your concerns is either not a concern, or easily fixed in about 10 seconds. Play again next time.

Holy hell man, fix your English. If you want previous releases, they're all right here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/ . Starting from .08 .

As for the rest of your criticisms, I don't see what you're talking about. Maybe if you explained what's wrong with the bookmarks editor, the privacy settings, and the stability of the platform...

It runs faster because it runs independently of the all the work going on in other tabs: running scripts, rendering layout and loading stuff from the cache/web. But it can be done with threads instead of processes. It's less secure and prone to crashing, though.

From the project page it looks like they're going for a flexible model, so a lot of options are possible: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

This is right on the nose. Chrome is nowhere close to Firefox feature-wise, if you factor in the plugins. Much has been said about separate processes and the UI lift, and I agree that at this very moment Chrome has some some things at the state of the art, while Firefox is playing catchup. But separate processes and the UI lift are coming, after all, they just take time to program into the platform that is Firefox. Notice their obsession with the mobile branch, which is crucial, IMHO. Chrome is also a sneaky turd that reports to the mothership, and that is one "feature" that I don't want my Web browser to have, ever. Thanks, but no thanks.

Step 1: Install Wireshark

Step 1.5: Install HttpFox (Firefox on any OS) or HttpWatch (IE or FF on Windows).

For HTTP traffic, both will supplement WireShark by giving you a clear browser-level picture of what data your browser is sending and receiving.

For HTTPS (or other SSL/TLS tunneled protocol spoken by your browser), it's also the practical way to get a cleartext version of the communication.

Ironically, all of your examples are protected by IP laws.

In fact, some of the largest contributors to Open Source software have said, explicitly, that IP laws are needed.

Here's a nice complicated page detailing the licensing agreement for FireFox.
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/

Do you have any examples that actually support your claims?

..could Firefox devs not offer a means to pipe the video stream to the player of the user's choice? Eg, vlc or mplayer running as a content-transparent plugin?

There's a patch floating around if Firefox's bugzilla that uses GStreamer as the backend for the <video> tag, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422540

How about procedural audio? Say I want to write a speech synthesizer in JavaScript. How do I send the samples to the speaker?

Well, it depends on if you mean "in the browser" or "in JavaScript." If you mean that latter, I'd probably fire up Mozilla Rhino and put together something using the libraries that ship with Java. Some of those are still available in the context of the browser via applets in a lot of cases, too, so with some work, you could probably do it in browser as well.

If you mean in-browser, no Java libraries, I'd probably have the samples in an array of bytes which I'd base64 encode and stuff into the src attribute of an audio, embed, or object tag as a dataURL. This likely wouldn't work in realtime, but then again, you didn't ask for a realtime speech synthesizer. :)

(FWIW: I know Flash 10 has an audio buffer explicitly for writing to programatically in realtime, and I agree it's awesome I agree a lot of the people going on and on about how great Ajax was and HTML5 is and how it all renders Flash totally unnecessary are generally not thinking about features like this. Just pointing out that there is in fact more than one way to do it and some of the other approaches have their merits.)

Awesome!

For those who dont know, there is a Firebug addin called "CSS Usage". Get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10704/

It's not like that is likely to fail in every non-IE browser

A cleaner way to reverse the Evil: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/161661

Thanks for the suggestion: Vacuum Places Improved. Soon I'll be trying it with Windows 7 64-bit.

Article: "Vacuum Places Improved" Speeds Up Firefox with a Click of Your Mouse

Article partly about "out-of-control memory use" in Firefox: Five Features We Want to See in Firefox.

It would be nice to say these 10 pages help me when working on project X, and these 7 on project Y, and these 12 on project Z, so let me assign a button to each group so I only have the relevant tabs running at any one time and can close the rest down without facing a nightmare when I need to restart them.

You can use the Session Manager add-on to do this by saving groups of tabs as named sessions. If you need multiple sets open at once, you can put each session into a separate window.

Mozilla has used an extension called Test Pilot to study user behavior. One study focused on usage of the menu bar. The results show a kind of power law in menu item usage. This suggests that you can probably ditch most of the menu items, and provide alternative methods to access the top used functions. I think this is broadly what they are going for in the proposed 4.0 UI redesign.

As with most bits of Firefox, if there's some functionality missing or that you simply want to change, there's probably an add-on that provides it.

I use Update Notifier to manage browser/add-on updates. If Mozilla wants to natively add this functionality, I'd suggest that they follow this add-on's design.

It runs only when Firefox is open (because it's an add-on, of course), and it suppresses any "There are new updates! Want to install them before we open up the browser to do what you really wanted to do?" messages. It downloads and installs (based on your configuration) any new updates, and they go into effect once you restart the browser (which you can do whenever you want -- it doesn't prompt you).