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If I would have been using FF2.0, I could have spellchecked my post, heh, well anyways, my friend just posted a bug to bugzilla, hope that someone reads it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35863 8

Well said. FF 2.0 is much faster, and much less memory hogging than 1.5, and as a result much more joyous to use. I have observed none of the bugs mentioned above, and every extension I used was ready to roll within a day or two of the 2.0 final release.

The only downside I see that's legit and affects everyone is the downgrade on the theme. But this, luckily, is extremely easy to fix. I recommend proceeding immediately to https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/7/ to get the Qute theme for FF 2.0. It will keep you from having to gouge your eyeballs out.

Though 2.0 doesn't have tons of stellar new features that weren't available before, in terms of heavy browsing use case stability and performance it's a huge leap forward.

You may need to install this extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/158/ but yes, you can change that behavior back to what it was like in 1.5.

The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.

Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.

I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.

Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.

The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.

Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.

I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.

Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.

Will there be one?
I'm expecting one (though that'll probably be the point I abandon FF) and am a little disturbed that I can't find anything better than "you will receive an offer to upgrade [...] over the next several weeks" (That is under "dev news" only!) on this (Jeez, I'd expect a notice on the getfirefox.com frontpage, to be honest, but then, the team is too stupid to mask a directory on public mirrors as well...) From this thread I gather that the auto-updater can't handle a major upgrade at the moment, which seems not-so-well-thought-through as well...

For instance, how about expanding the capability of the 'bookmarks' and 'history' functions of the browser? Both are old concepts which haven't been updated in years. Both are largely useless due ot the sheer number of entries in both (for me and I imagine many others). The mechanisms for accessing them is awkward and feature/function-sparse.

Sure! Let's call it Places.

The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)

Yes, it is a problem to me as well. Fortunally, I found an adaptation of the old theme for firefox 2. Yes, this was a huge blunder but it is easily fixable.

Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.

This is FUD, unfortunately. First of all the "anti phising is weak" so it is a reason to skip 2.0 since 1.5 had no anti phishing at all ? That doesn't make sense, second, firefox 2 anti phising protection takes against a blacklist that is downloaded periodically, (the blacklist is in your computer) I can hardly see any privacy concern there. You can enable google analitics or other methods that require checking against a server, that's where the privacy concern starts, but then you just switch the issue, the protection is no longer weak but there are privacy concerns, however that's not the default. In other words, the author just took the worst aspect of the methods firefox 2 brings and mixed them into one.

The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features

I am unable to see this one as certain. In my opinion it is more intuitive for the 'easy features' . You have the special things like proxy in the advanced section, the main problem I see is that some things like spell checking are in the advanced tab for no reason.

There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself

But they would eventually be updated, unless they are no longer maintained in which case the plugins have more issues than just the compatibility problem, also the problem is not as huge as the author intend it to be, there are many plugins that are already compatible with 2.0 . I guess that if for some reason the most important extension in your life doesn't work with 2.0 then you have to skip 2.0 , I can accept this a reason to skip.

The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox

I would mention that I myself never had this issue, I can keep firefox open for a long time with the most standard plugins and it simply does not happen to me, the memory goes high, yes but to an extent of 92 MB. I've seen people reporting 350 MB , even 700MB . It could mean that they are lying or most likelly that it is not just "memory leak" but some issue related to architectures.

But then this is not a reason to skip firefox 2.0, it is a reason to not use any firefox version, besides, unlike what the article likes to say, the memory has improved in firefox 2.0 , in fact the cache is now capped, and cache seemed to be the issue that caused the memory jumps, the default is now a max of 55MB of cache.

There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers. Notable among these is a continued pr

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2819/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3003/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2342/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2819/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3003/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2342/

• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2819/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3003/
• https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2342/

I had posted a few ideas to the Firefox 3.0 brainstorming wiki with some suggestions that would improve general stability. But this other guy went to town and really did a good job of explaining some really needed changes:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Csreis

Additionally this extension could also be used as a very basic SessionSaver replacement: navigate to about:config and toggle the value for extensions.crashrecovery.resume_session.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1955/

Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy.

I agree with most of what you've said, but not quite with this. The way I remember things, Firefox's original claim to fame, at least among geeks, was not being Mozilla, as in Mozilla Seamonkey. In other words, it was Mozilla with all the extra flab cut out. Just a browser. No mail client, no composer, no newsreader, no built in IRC chat client, etc etc. This made it much faster loading, and eventually more comparable with Internet Explorer as a drop-in replacement.

It's still just a browser, but since then it seems to have been becoming a somewhat more heavy duty browser trying to meet everyone's needs, without necessarily doing everything brilliantly. The irony for me is that Mozilla Seamonkey can still be installed in modules to some extent, so it's actually possible to install just the browser. (Well, the browser seems to come with the Composer in my debian package, I'm not sure if that's standard.) I haven't done any extensive benchmarks, but anecdotally it does often feel more cut down to me than Firefox does. To be honest, it feels more stable and I almost prefer it over Firefox.

The full Mozilla Seamonkey suite seems to have been forgotten in all the Firefox hype, but the only thing that's putting me off using it more often is that it doesn't seem to have a very reliable extension handling interface. That is, I can install an extension from an XPI file, but there's not actually an extension management interface in the front end UI that I could find. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it diversity of so many third party extensions of varying quality seems to be one of the big complications of Firefox stability.

Exactly. And with regards to RSS, I think it's improved. I don't see how it can have deteriorated. There's now a feed preview instead of just showing a generic XML document. It's not brilliant, but it's OK... If you want more features, get Sage or something...

Of course, you don't need FF 2.0 to do that. Anyone who has been using Tab Mix Plus has had these features (and a few more) for a while now. And there's a bunch more extensions that fly in the same flock, just search Firefox Add Ons and live it up, without upgrading.

Of course, you don't need FF 2.0 to do that. Anyone who has been using Tab Mix Plus has had these features (and a few more) for a while now. And there's a bunch more extensions that fly in the same flock, just search Firefox Add Ons and live it up, without upgrading.

To be fair, you could do that in FireFox 1.5 using the Tab Mix Plus extension. It works very well.

Back to the topic of the article: I've upgraded to FireFox 2.0 on my XP box at home (and next week I'll upgrade my Linux box at work). I haven't noticed any ill effects from the upgrade. I haven't noticed any major differences, for that matter, other than no longer needing Tab Mix Plus because most of its functionality is built into 2.0.

Firefox users think faster? find out

Browsers and visual authoring tools need to tell users that the page they are looking at is non-conformant and warn that it may not behave correctly.

Like your GCC analogy. Web browsers are used like compilers by web developers, but unlike compilers, browsers don't warn on syntax errors. Except they do warn on JavaScript errors. Why they warn on JavaScript errors and not (X)HTML or CSS/XSS errors is beyond me.

There's a Firefox extension that does this automatically and sets a little icon in the status bar based on the validation result, but since it's just an extension, it's only optional.

Opera has a built-in validator, but it doesn't automatically inform the user whenever he or she navigates to a non-conforming web page.

Web developers need to be shamed into writing proper (X)HTML.

I think Firefox needs to start popping up warning dialogs for bad HTML.

For development, I agree with you completely. Every page I author is written in a real XHTML templating language, but I do not serve XHTML. It's just not ready and serving XHTML as text/html is bad. Moreover, both the Gecko and WebKit developers recommend against serving XHTML and Trident (IE) doesn't support it.

tl;dr: XHTML is good for development, bad for serving and will remain that way till IE6 can be ignored.

There is no automatic update from 1.5 to 2.0 yet. It will be available over the next weeks as it says here

You really ought to install Qute, a theme that was actually designed by somebody with an aesthetic sense. I'm actually using QuBranch right now, the unofficial Qute build for FF 2.0. I actually forgot how much better Qute was than that default theme in FF 1.5.

When I saw how awful the FF 2.0 default theme was (refresh? ugh!) I went out and found Qute again, and remembered what it was like to actually enjoy looking at my web browser again.

Anybody who is *still* wondering what this is, there is a leetkey plugin for firefox that can "decrypt" such messages for you:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/770/

Googlepedia Firefox extension. Haven't tried it myself yet, it seems to replace Wikipedia search with Google, would be handy to have one of those standard Firefox search address bar plug-ins that uses Google on Wikipedia also.

Does it, in Linux?

There is a great deal of spin in these answers.

1. (Would you want to make IE for non-Windows systems)
We did make versions of IE available on other operating system for a pretty long time, up through IE5 on Unix and the Mac. At the time we developed them, those offerings made sense. I don't see a good reason to make IE available on other operating systems at this time.

Then it made sense. Now, it does not make sense. I don't see a good reason to make our work on IE7 available to Mac and Linux users. They are not worth it.

2. (Why so long since IE6?)
Basically because we were doing a lot of other things before we started work on IE7: a few releases of MSN Explorer, a lot of work on what turned out to be Windows Presentation Foundation, a lot of investment in what turned into IPv6 support in Windows Vista, and lot of security response, a pretty intense effort on Windows Server 2003 (and IE's "Enhanced Security Configuration"), and then a pretty intense effort on Windows XPSP2.

We've done all these other things! Instead of hiring other people to do those things, my company chose to reassign the IE people to those projects. For some reason, I dunno, I think I remember them saying "strategy" or something. No more important enemies there to drive before us, no more women there to hear lament.

3. (Fluffy question.)
Fluffy answer.

4. (How does IE beat Firefox?)
I think IE7 is the first browser with integrated real-time anti-phishing functionality, with an RSS platform and support for Simple List Extensions (see below), with "QuickTabs," with support for OpenSearch, and with shrink-to-fit printing on by default. In Windows Vista with Protected Mode, IE7 is the first browser to "put itself into a sandbox" and run with low privileges.

Buzzword! Buzzword buzzword? BUZZWORD!
Buzzword uses Snowjob! It's super-effective!

Firefox has anti-phishing (groan) technology when used with Google Toolbar. IE had it with Google Toolbar long bfore IE7. But, although there are multiple Firefox extensions that do phishing checks, IE does have it built-in first. Of course, I'm super-cautious about sites I enter my financial information into, so I might say that my browser doesn't need phishing protection bloating it up and sending in all my URLs to some mothership....

Well, let's be fair, IE *does* say that their protection respects user privacy. Although I don't have the details of their protection, that could be some good they've brought into the world. But it still seems, to me, to be more of something for a plug-in to do.

RSS, Firefox has had it for a long while, even before Live Bookmarks. QuickTabs seems to be just a CamelCase rename for a Firefox feature. Oh sure, there may be something to differentiate Firefox's tabs, but it doesn't seem to have been important to generate any outside excitement other than "OMG IE's got TABS!" And Firefox 2.0, according to Wikipedia's article on OpenSearch (as of 10/27/2006 4:31EST), does have OpenSearch -- if IE7 had it first, it was by a matter of days, and without counting the RCs as releases.

For him to crow that IE7 is the first browser to put itself into a low privilege sandbox is ludicrous. Before Internet Explorer came along a web browser was just a damn process like any other! A user --well one on a more sensible operating system that Windows at the time-- could very well run it with whatever privileges he chose! Microsoft doesn't get to congratulate themselves for solving a problem they created, dammit!

I think that during the IE7 beta process, you've seen other browser vendors copy some of these features and/or deliver add-ons for others. (IE has also delivered some functionality - like spell-checking in forms or in-line find, as add-ons; you can read more here.

I'

I think IE7 is the first browser with integrated real-time anti-phishing functionality, with an RSS platform and support for Simple List Extensions (see below), with "QuickTabs," with support for OpenSearch, and with shrink-to-fit printing on by default. In Windows Vista with Protected Mode, IE7 is the first browser to "put itself into a sandbox" and run with low privileges.

Adblock
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
use https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2108 with http://userstyles.org/style/show/299

Especially using Firfox plugins like this one. Personally, I only use about 5 Firefox plugins, and this is one of them.

I posted a super-quick one-benchmark review of IE 7 here:

http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/664690/

I think it's only fair to do the same for Firefox 2.0.

I loaded about 40 tabs that I am currnently using in Firefox 1.5 (two windows) into Firefox 2.0. The memory usage was about 170mb, while Firefox 1.5 is ~140mb. (These are still mostly the same tabs as with IE 7, and that used over 400mb). 30mb increase isn't a big deal for me, but I would like to know what causes such an increase, and if it's worth it. The browser was still rather fast and responsive, so I don't really mind.

On an unrelated note, I installed Tab Mix Plus testing release in FF2 just to be able to make the tabs smaller and get SessionSaver to work. It's good, but I don't like the way the tab scroll buttons can sit on top of a tab. Plus I actually liked the default FF2 method of having one button on each end of tab bar, depending on whether I wanted to scroll tabs to the left or right.

Overall, I'm not sure if I'll be switching or if I'll stay with 1.5 for a while. 1.5 has been really stable for me lately, and I don't necessarily want to mess with that.

Oh, and it's beyond me why FF2 bittorrent isn't up on http://bittorrent.mozilla.org/ yet, but that's a totally different issue. They must have too much bandwidth. I went there to download the installer, and I was offered the file from a Japanese mirror! (I'm in US) And on a related note, I thought that including a bittorrent client in Opera was a little overkill, but I've now changed my mind. I believe that bittorrent should replace ftp and http as a default large file transport method. I would really like to see a very light bittorrent client built into FireFox. (Not an extension - with the default download)

m

what about the jajah extension? anyone know if it's any good before i install it and muck things up?

http://www.mozilla.org/download.html

No, unfortunately the final release uses the old "notchy" scrolling. When the "Smooth Scrolling" option is enabled it simply provides a smooth transition between each notch, but I've always found that to be slow and laggy, even on the latest MacBook.

True pixel-resolution scrolling, on the other hand, allows you to scroll as little as one pixel at a time if you scroll slow enough. The end result is that it gives you much finer control over scrolling if you use trackpad scrolling, and the implementation was very good and very fast; I couldn't tell the difference between it and native OS X applications. It goes a long way towards making Firefox feel at home on OS X. And once you're used to it it's hard to go back, which is why I was quite disappointed when it was removed in RC1.

The problem was that one scrolling pixel in the browser translated to one line of text in the bookmark manager, causing it to scroll way too fast. If you're curious, see bug numbers 319078 and 347626 on bugzilla.

Where's the bittorrent? Mozilla has a bittorrent page, but it hasn't been updated.

Not that there's anything wrong with editing about:config directly (I've done it plenty), but I found that just fine in Tools/Options/Tabbed Browsing/Display Options/Show Tab Closure Button On:[Combo Box]

The GP's other complaint that tabs always open to blank pages was an option in Tabbed Browsing/User Interface/When loading new tabs, load the:[Blank Page* | Home Page | Current Page]

It's quite possible that I only see these options because of the Tabbrowser Preferences extension (which auto-updated with the install), though. It's a pretty good extension, adds a lot of extra options to the Tabbed Browsing part of the options menu. Sometimes it's nice to be able to see a list of things to edit without having to look up what number means what.

PS: The setting for "One close button on the right side of the bar" is 3

The Throbber extension enables you to click on the Activity Indicator (throbber), which takes you to the web site of your choice:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2821/

1. about:config
1.1 browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3
1.2 browser.backspace_action = 0

2 Getting alt+[pse...] working as in 1.X series

Short answer: Use alt+shift+[pse...]

Long answer:

This cannot be done ATM, as even the workaround only makes alt+s work, not alt+p, for example.
For the curious, you can try setting: ui.key.contentAccess = 4. But it will only get you there
half way. More information: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34971 6. Sam things
said over here: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php? topic=122226.msg780638#msg780638

A new version of TabMixPlus that works with FF2 will be released within the week according to the author's note here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1122/

In the meantime, you can install a pre-release version of the extension here:

http://tmp.garyr.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3515

To get rid of the close buttons on all tabs, go to about:config and set

browser.tabs.closeButtons

to 0 if you only want the close button on the active tab

or to 0 if you want the close button only at the right hand side of the tab bar.

1. Firefox 1.5 users will be happy to know that Firefox 2.0 includes numerous performance and usability improvements over v1.5 specifically for the OS X platform, bringing the Mac version closer to the Windows version in terms of quality. You'll want to upgrade immediately. If you thought that Firefox 1.5 sucked, give 2.0 a try. Big improvements on the Mac.
2. If you're a fan of the smooth, pixel-resolution scrolling that comes with two-finger touchpad and Mighty Mouse scrolling, and you lament the lack of this smooth scrolling in Firefox, well lament no more! Smooth pixel-resolution scrolling was introduced in Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, and it rules. Unfortunately, this feature was removed because it made the bookmark manager scroll too quickly. If you're like me and do a lot of scrolling (and don't care about how the bookmark manager scrolls) you'll want to stick with Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 on OS X, like I do.

Adblock works just fine. It's even in the list of recommended extensions: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1865/.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/recommended/ Get AdBlock Plus

How can I get rid of those annoying ads?

How can I get rid of those annoying ads?

Yes, it does.

The auto-update system will automatically apply security and stability updates. We're planning on providing an "optional" update to Firefox 2 through this system, and that will likely happen in a few weeks. In the meantime, please do download through getfirefox.com. As long as you do not use a direct ftp.mozilla.org or releases.mozilla.org, we're pretty confident in our ability to handle demand, thanks to our volunteer mirror network.

firefox has a dtd bug in xml it hasn't fixed for years: it doesn't reference external entities

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69799

and opera flat out just doesn't support xsl formatting

http://www.opera.com/docs/specs/#xml

nevermind ie7, ie6 does both, just fine

in my book, as an xml/ xsl programmer, ie is light years ahead of firefox and opera

Apache added support for RFC 2817 to mod_ssl about a year ago, in Apache HTTPD 2.2. Admittedly, not many people are using 2.2 yet; a lot of servers are still running 1.3.

I could not find any indication that Mozilla/Firefox support RFC 2817. (I read one email archive that said it did, but bugzilla says it has not been implemented.)

I found the answer to my question regarding IE7 support: it will not support RFC 2817. It will however, support RFC 3546 (SNI) in the Vista version, which is apparently a better method of getting the same functionality. (The reply to the above Slashdot comment includes some info and links on SNI.) Mozilla does not yet support SNI. Apache does not support SNI out of the box; the mod_gnutls module does, but it's not included with Apache, and is not yet production quality. There is a patch for Apache mod_ssl.

Summary: It appears that SNI will be the way forward, but consensus and implementations still need to catch up. IE7/Vista is the second browser implementation after Opera. Apache and Mozilla do not yet support it, but are working on it. Here's a decent write-up about the situation.

Apache added support for RFC 2817 to mod_ssl about a year ago, in Apache HTTPD 2.2. Admittedly, not many people are using 2.2 yet; a lot of servers are still running 1.3.

I could not find any indication that Mozilla/Firefox support RFC 2817. (I read one email archive that said it did, but bugzilla says it has not been implemented.)

I found the answer to my question regarding IE7 support: it will not support RFC 2817. It will however, support RFC 3546 (SNI) in the Vista version, which is apparently a better method of getting the same functionality. (The reply to the above Slashdot comment includes some info and links on SNI.) Mozilla does not yet support SNI. Apache does not support SNI out of the box; the mod_gnutls module does, but it's not included with Apache, and is not yet production quality. There is a patch for Apache mod_ssl.

Summary: It appears that SNI will be the way forward, but consensus and implementations still need to catch up. IE7/Vista is the second browser implementation after Opera. Apache and Mozilla do not yet support it, but are working on it. Here's a decent write-up about the situation.