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And you just hit right on the head the biggest security measure you can do-get them off IE!

What - precisely - are the problems you see with IE 8?

Firefox has not been proven immune to attack. Security Advisories for Firefox 3.0

Is the technology of the browser still the most significant line of attack?

Does IE 8 Equal Safer Surfing?

I don't know about writing a bot to do so, but if you use Firefox there are some extensions that will help with this. I searched https://addons.mozilla.org/ and found a couple that looked pretty good:

ResurrectPages - 5 stars
CacheIt! - 5 stars

I hope that helps you.

Posted anonymously because I am moderating this discussion. Speaking of which, in my humble opinion this was not really "Off-topic" at all as what you encountered was a real obstacle that is very much relevant.

I don't know about writing a bot to do so, but if you use Firefox there are some extensions that will help with this. I searched https://addons.mozilla.org/ and found a couple that looked pretty good:

ResurrectPages - 5 stars
CacheIt! - 5 stars

I hope that helps you.

Posted anonymously because I am moderating this discussion. Speaking of which, in my humble opinion this was not really "Off-topic" at all as what you encountered was a real obstacle that is very much relevant.

I don't know about writing a bot to do so, but if you use Firefox there are some extensions that will help with this. I searched https://addons.mozilla.org/ and found a couple that looked pretty good:

ResurrectPages - 5 stars
CacheIt! - 5 stars

I hope that helps you.

Posted anonymously because I am moderating this discussion. Speaking of which, in my humble opinion this was not really "Off-topic" at all as what you encountered was a real obstacle that is very much relevant.

Firefox is completely useless for printing because it doesn't support the CSS page break styles. It has been not-supporting them since 2002.

We hear a lot of blather about ACID tests, CSS3, HTML5, etc. but how about the basics?

Of course there is no reason this is still not fixed (by being able to disable a:visited style)

If the issue were so simple, why has no major browser implemented a proper fix for this yet, despite the fact that we've known about the issue for nine years ?

A:visited is very useful to the user in some circumstances, so it's unacceptable to turn it off for every user in every circumstance. Firefox 3.5 added a hidden preference in case some users want to turn it on sometimes, but that solution doesn't work for 80% of the people out there. Personally, I think applying the "same origin" policy to a:visited is a better solution, but that hasn't been integrated into any mainline either.

Bugzilla bug 57351 was reported in October of 2000:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57351

(Bugzilla may or may not still hate Slashdot, copy and paste if clicking the link does not work).

New about:config setting in FF 3.5:
layout.css.visited_links_enabled

If "visited" is a useful feature for you check out SafeHistory:

Restricts the marking of visited links on the basis of the originating document, defending against web privacy attacks that remote sites can use to determine your browser history at other sites

New about:config setting in FF 3.5:
layout.css.visited_links_enabled

If "visited" is a useful feature for you check out SafeHistory:

Restricts the marking of visited links on the basis of the originating document, defending against web privacy attacks that remote sites can use to determine your browser history at other sites

It's not in trunk yet, but we want to get it in as soon as possible. It's not trivial, but not terribly difficult either - someone just has to take the time to do it. Unfortunately getting 3.5 out in time was a much higher priority, we just couldn't block on x64. If you're interested, a tracking bug is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=489146

The Tracemonkey JIT doesn't work on x86_64 in the Firefox 3.5 release. Apparently it works in trunk, but for those on x86_64 machines, you either have to run the 32 bit version or just deal with no JIT.

No upgrade for moi.

The Tracemonkey JIT doesn't work on x86_64 in the Firefox 3.5 release. Apparently it works in trunk, but for those on x86_64 machines, you either have to run the 32 bit version or just deal with no JIT.

and i should have been clearer, gears doesn't yet appear to work even with nightly tester tools

From http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/06/30/firefox-35-takes-you-back-to-a-time-before-browser-add-ons/

Update: Mozillaâ(TM)s add-ons director, Mike Nguyen, emailed [Ha] to say that Google had a version of Gears ready that was compatible with Firefox 3.5, but it was delayed due to some âoelast-minute bugs.â There should be a new version out next week, he said

and many add-ons seem to be fine or can be forced to work with dev builds or Nighly Tester Tools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543

I'm still waiting on google gears, myself.

More people need to learn about this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890 "This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. New tabs opened from links (or etc.) are automatically attached to the current tab. If you often use many many tabs, it will help your web browsing because you can understand relations of tabs." It has really made keeping ~100 tabs open in a single windows a breeze for me, and helped to improve the organization of this massive amount of tabs!

Tree-style Tabs FTW!

You need Morning Coffee -- it allows you to have a different set of bookmarks for different days of the week. For example, if you have a webcomic that only updates on M/W/F, then it won't open on T/TH.

Quick way - just grab the nightly tester tools addon and override the compatibility check on a per-addon basis.

If you like, Tab Mix Plus has that as an option, among many other nice things. Unfortunately, the main version hasn't been updated for 3.5 yet, but you can find the development version here, or simply override the compatibility check, which seems to work fine.

I just wish they had a 'purge cache' button somewhere easy. Until then I'll just quit and restart.

Stuart Parmenter made a RAMBack extension that may do what you're looking to do.

At least in Firefox 3.0 on Linux, this bug causes crashes almost every day: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160 - Linux specific and a major issue for those of use who like lots of tabs open at once and are trying not to use Windows - anything over 50 tabs runs a risk of crashes it seems.

Let's see if 3.5 has fixed this - I do hope so, as the new features sound good.

Firefox 3.5b4 was released on 04/24/2009 11:07:00 PM, according to the checksum dates. Enjoy.

According to the official working schedule, FF3.5b4 is going to be coming out in the near future--on April 24.

Some may have noticed that April 24 (and 3.5b4) has already passed. I find it sadly ironic that the weekly FF3.5 meetings have talked about branding, evangelizing, and marketing; and yet they can't be bothered to update their own schedule.

I will still run with noscript installed because I've yet to see a good XSS-preventing implementation that will allow *me*, as a user, to easily define what sites can run scripts on the sites I visit.

Combine RequestPolicy with YesScript

I will still run with noscript installed because I've yet to see a good XSS-preventing implementation that will allow *me*, as a user, to easily define what sites can run scripts on the sites I visit.

Combine RequestPolicy with YesScript

This might be what you're looking for.

This might be of use: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4476

Now the comment field is about 3cm wide.

Not for me, it isn't.

(and it does work with 3.5RC2 if you hack maxVersion in install.rdf)

Password Hasher has that facility.

With this extension built into every web browser security would improve in leaps and bounds.
For lazy people you can mix it with Secure Login or the Opera Wand.

After all, once an attacker has local access to your machine all bets are off right? Password Hasher makes guesses/brute forcing passwords as close to impossible as it needs to be. 26 characters should be enough for anyone, surely?

Password Hasher has that facility.

With this extension built into every web browser security would improve in leaps and bounds.
For lazy people you can mix it with Secure Login or the Opera Wand.

After all, once an attacker has local access to your machine all bets are off right? Password Hasher makes guesses/brute forcing passwords as close to impossible as it needs to be. 26 characters should be enough for anyone, surely?

The Intel compiler can't actually (correctly) compile the code in question, last I checked. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386840 for an example. Also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412829 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483283 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403224

So people really are working on it; it's just not there yet.

The Intel compiler can't actually (correctly) compile the code in question, last I checked. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386840 for an example. Also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412829 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483283 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403224

So people really are working on it; it's just not there yet.

The Intel compiler can't actually (correctly) compile the code in question, last I checked. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386840 for an example. Also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412829 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483283 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403224

So people really are working on it; it's just not there yet.

The Intel compiler can't actually (correctly) compile the code in question, last I checked. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=386840 for an example. Also https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412829 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483283 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403224

So people really are working on it; it's just not there yet.

> Why? No clue.

Because gcc falls down and dies if you try to actually use its profile-guided optimization feature with Firefox. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418866

I'd love to be able to enable this and get some profiles of things like sunspider and DOM-heavy pages with it, but I'm blocked on the gcc suckage. If you happen to know some gcc developers who could help here, that would be very nice.

Usually they profile the windows versions, and don't profile the linux ones.

Why? No clue.

Because GCC is throwing weird errors when we try to enable PGO building on Linux https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=418866

See bug 418866 for some guidance.

But on Linux, it is inherently ugly. The beast looks ancient and the fonts and dialogs make matters worse

Part of that is Gnome but a lot of the ugliness is the native XUL theme used on Linux which goes out of its way to emulate Gnome's worst characteristics. You used to be able to download the XP on Vista theme for Linux but they've stupidly blocked Linux users from doing that anymore.

I would recommend you the Treestyle tabs addon for firefox. (see a screenshot)

The plugin moves your tabs to the left (similar position as the history panel, but without replacing the panel, that way you can open other left-panels like scrapbook, history, etc in addition).

Doing this achieves three things:
1. You get more vertical space which usually is limited in today's "wide screen" computer craze.
2. Your tabs get "ordered" in a hierarchy (I like CTRL+clicking on the slashdot stories I want to comment/lose time, they get opened as sub-nodes of the main slashdot page)
3. You can have more tabs opened and see the more of the title (about 30 on a 1024 veritcal res.)

I have found this extension quite useful. The only drawback is that you must get used to move the mouse to the *left* when looking for your tabs, I got used to that after about 1 week of usage.

To be fair, MozHacks included a link to a non-Javascript method after the article. To learn how to implement HTML5, webcoders should read the HTML5 spec anyway, not some semiofficial blog by someone at Mozilla that may not even be an HTML5 expert.

TRWTF is
* that video fallback is broken in Firefox and
* Mozilla's dismissive handling of the issue:
#487398 <object>-element within <video>-element is not ignored is about fallback content being played even when the surrounding <video> has loaded. In other words, when you wrap an OGG object into an OGG video, the object starts playing in the background and you hear its sound. Mozilla inexplicably marked this RESOLVED INVALID after Anne commented that the HTML5 spec is a bit loose on what is required at that point. Not rendering fallback content when the wrapper can be rendered isn't strictly enforced by the spec, more likely by oversight than choice. It only says

User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browser informing them of how to access the video contents. (HTML5 spec draft)

So apparently "should not show" can be interpreted as "but may play the audio if they feel like it", and if something can be interpreted as conformant with a loose reading of a spec that makes it "not a bug" for Mozilla.

I will still use the standard method of scriptless fallback chains, because I value accessibility and I respect people's choice to disable javascript. Please do HTML5 a favor and bug Mozilla about acknowledging a bug as a bug and debugging it.

To be fair, MozHacks included a link to a non-Javascript method after the article. To learn how to implement HTML5, webcoders should read the HTML5 spec anyway, not some semiofficial blog by someone at Mozilla that may not even be an HTML5 expert.

TRWTF is
* that video fallback is broken in Firefox and
* Mozilla's dismissive handling of the issue:
#487398 <object>-element within <video>-element is not ignored is about fallback content being played even when the surrounding <video> has loaded. In other words, when you wrap an OGG object into an OGG video, the object starts playing in the background and you hear its sound. Mozilla inexplicably marked this RESOLVED INVALID after Anne commented that the HTML5 spec is a bit loose on what is required at that point. Not rendering fallback content when the wrapper can be rendered isn't strictly enforced by the spec, more likely by oversight than choice. It only says

User agents should not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browser informing them of how to access the video contents. (HTML5 spec draft)

So apparently "should not show" can be interpreted as "but may play the audio if they feel like it", and if something can be interpreted as conformant with a loose reading of a spec that makes it "not a bug" for Mozilla.

I will still use the standard method of scriptless fallback chains, because I value accessibility and I respect people's choice to disable javascript. Please do HTML5 a favor and bug Mozilla about acknowledging a bug as a bug and debugging it.

I am not defending SoThink in any way and hope that FlashGot takes action but instead of opting to sue SoThink, I hope he first tries to force them to open up their own tool under the GPL...

I don't think the SoThink people are interested in being civil as you imply:

Someone previously mentioned the fact that this add-on sends you to a third party site IN CHINA to download the videos. Well, shortly after installing this add-on I was surfing the net, chose a site and was "hijacked" to an IP in CHINA. Imagine that! Not a good sign if they have included a nice trojan horse for you to have sitting on your computer with this add-on. Be Careful!

- Ref. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/6541.

Latest public Firefox: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5rc2/win32/en-US/ (7.9 MB, a hefty 1.2 MB bigger than even Opera's bloated MSI, and 2.4 MB bigger than the classic installer)

And you were saying again?

Latest public Firefox: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.5rc2/win32/en-US/ (7.9 MB, a hefty 1.2 MB bigger than even Opera's bloated MSI, and 2.4 MB bigger than the classic installer)

And you were saying again?

My work has standardized on IE 6 as well due to the mountains of IE6 specific code in their web applications.

I'd like to know if has anyone tried migrating slowly installing Firefox with IETab and using Firefox for normal browsing and IE for the internal apps only?

If so do you have any advice?

Like it or not, IE8 does include a lot of security features that other browsers do not, or do not to the same degree.

Do these security features include being secure. If not, then perhaps you begin to see the nature of my complaint.

I'm using Firefox right now; please point to me where the private browsing feature is. I don't see one.

Take your pick. Installing and running any of these add ons is only marginally more complex than using InPrivacy, and far more useful and effective to boot.

Are they valid test cases? If so, it's not a lie.

They are not valid test cases because there are no tests. There is a "Pre-Alpha" suite of tests which the IE team have crammed solid with their own tailored submissions, and which have not been vetted by anyone.(Indeed with so many, they probably never will).

So unless you accept such unofficial an unvetted submissions as proper impartial tests (whilst simultaneously ignoring the legitimacy of addons), and ignore the universally know, documented and lamented inability of IE to render properly coded web pages correctly, the no, IE does "draw even" if a Web standards comparision. THAT is the lie.

You've allowed yourself to become distracted by "facts" presented to you without stopping to asses the reality. IE is less secure, offers less privacy protections and is far less compliant to web standards than BOTH Firefox and Chrome, not to mention Opera and Safari, conveniently excluded from this thorough presentation of the "facts".

These are not facts. They are "anti-facts". Half truths and distortions devised to sweep away real facts and present a totally false version of reality. Their purpose is make a lie appear true. Apparently they've succeeded. And, they always will with people who shut their eyes and senses to everything except what is literally put before them.

This is factually incorrect. Firefox has three compatibility modes: "Quirks" for non-compliant documents, "Almost-Standard" for certain transitional HTML/XHTML DOCTYPEs, and "Standard" for standards-compliant pages bearing other DOCTYPEs.

See Mozilla's Quirks Mode for more information.

That's disappointing because it's a good idea whose time has been very long in coming.

Erm ... hasn't Firefox had a browser-based webserver for at least a couple of years?

Perhaps the difference is the already-built-in-nature as compared to the-user-must-install-it? There is definitely something to be said for teaching the general public and making standard useful tools.

here is the link to download Firefox RC1 for English (British)

http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5rc1&os=win&lang=en-GB

Indeed, performance is the top priority for Firefox.next (presumably Fx3.6 although you never know). Codenamed 'Namoroka,' the developers have selected several common tasks which they want to perceptibly increase the speed of, including:

• Startup
• Opening a new tab
• Loading a bookmarked page
• Autocompleting a location in the Awesomebar
• Play rich media content
• Animation and other interaction techniques to reduce lag between action and feedback, and to improve perceived speed