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Having followed this particular argument for a while, I have little faith left in the devs' ability to listen to good advice.

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1864/

Super drag and Go.

Canvas is just the sort of ad hoc extension that made the 1990's browser wars such an unproductive time for developers. If Firefox/Moz isn't going to focus on standards why should Microsoft. Check out this official documentation on Canvas.

For the most part, <canvas> is compatible with Apple's and other implementations. There are, however, a few issues to be aware of....

If fallback content is desired, some CSS tricks must be employed to mask the fallback content from Safari (which should render just the canvas), and also to mask the CSS tricks themselves from IE (which should render the fallback content). Todo: get hixie to put the CSS bits in (Bold in the original)

The branding artwork (and some third party code, too) is located in the directory location mozilla/other-licenses/. It is thus fairly clear that that stuff is covered by some other license. In /mozilla/source/other-licenses/branding/firefox/LI CENSE you can clearly see:

Lots and lots of software packages have code from different sources, and the code is not all under the same license. There is no legal, or moral, obligation that you can only apply a single (set of) license(s) to a tarball as a single atomic thing.

Debian policies are perfect and Mozilla must adjust theirs to suit Debian? Come on.

As a supporter of OSS, I like the fact that Mozilla produces OSS code, and the Debian is using it. As a supporter of the Firefox brand and community I like the fact that Mozilla is protecting that. I think that others should be using it, and that distros should be shipping it. As a pragmatist, I like that fact that distros can make reasonable customizations to Firefox and have it still be Firefox.

However, what Debian wants to attach something that is not Firefox to the Firefox brand. Debian wanted to ride on the coat tails of the Firefox brand, and the supporters of the brand. As someone who promoted Firefox to those who will listen, supported Firefox through the NYT add, and through the Mozilla store, I find the of Debian in shipping something that is not Firefox, but calling it Firefox, at best arrogant, at worst stealing. I diddn't attach my name to the promotion of what-Debian-is-calling-Firefox in an international medium. When I tell people they should use Firefox, its because I think they should use Firefox, not what-Debian-is-calling-Firefox. So mozilla.org put the smackdown on, Debian complied, and the problem is solved. I would have rather them ship Firefox, implicitly promoting Firefox, and thus making the brand stonger. But they took the other option, and thats OK too.

Except that it isnt "solved", as people continue to bitch about the evil and heavy handed folks at mozilla.org enforcing their rules.

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla_Build _FAQ#General_questions

"Tier-1 platform refers to platforms that are the primary focus for development. Major problems on these platforms are considered showstoppers. These are also the platforms that show up on the SeaMonkey tinderbox page. The tier-1 platforms are:

        * linux/x86 (gcc)
        * win32/x86 (msvc)
        * OS X (gcc)

Tier-2 platforms are platforms for which a small varying subset of developers & contributors actively try to maintain but general development does not halt for problems on these platforms. These platforms are usually referred as the Ports as most of them reside on the SeaMonkey-Ports tinderbox page. The tier-2 platforms are:

        * aix 4.3 (aCC)
        * beos 5.0.3 (gcc)
        * bsdi 4.x (gcc)
        * hpux 10.x,11.x (HP cc)
        * irix 6.x/gcc (gcc/MIPSpro)
        * linux/ppc (gcc)
        * os/2 (gcc)
        * osf1 5.x (Compaq cc)
        * solaris (sparc & x86) 2.6+ (gcc/Forte)

Tier-3 platforms are those platforms which generally are not actively worked on by the main developers of the project but have fixes contributed by third parties. Tier 3 platforms are:

        * freebsd (gcc)
        * linux/alpha (gcc)
        * netbsd (gcc)
        * openvms (?)
        * ps2linux (gcc)
        * qnx 6 (gcc)
        * win32/x86 (gcc) "

This story doesn't seem to be telling us anything new - "Mozilla and Debian are having a tussle over the Firefox name, some people have suggested Debian may rename Firefox as Iceweasel, here are my thoughts". Um, /. home page, here we come!

TFA even refers to Debian "having done this" when in fact Firefox is still called Firefox in Debian, and there is no iceweasel package in Debian as yet.

Please could people now just shut up about this issue until some actual news comes through of what is actually going to happen. "Debian releases iceweasel package, announces timeline for phasing out firefox" is a story. "Debian decides to rename it 'Firefox Community Edition, Debian' and dares Mozilla to argue it's not complying with Mozilla's policies" is another story (the one I, personally, would like to see). "Some guy on a blog links to a few other people who are yakking about this", isn't.

Actualy people how been wondering why Firefox is humping Earth for some time now.

Proxy Autoconfig - lets you write code that looks somewhat like this -

function FindProxyForURL(url,host) {
var local_socks = "SOCKS localhost:10801";
if (shExpMatch(host, "*.mail.yahoo.com") {
return local_socks;
}
....
return "DIRECT";
}

"The Mozilla trademarks include, among others, the names Mozilla®, mozilla.org®, Firefox®, Thunderbird(TM), Bugzilla(TM), Camino®, Sunbird(TM) and Seamonkey(TM), as well as the Mozilla logo, Firefox logo, Thunderbird logo and the red lizard logo."

The policy says that if you change it, you can't use their name or logos, so I would guess new agent.

Yes, Leto, but tell me where the FUCK the preference is so I can turn it off 100% of the time and click a button to load images when I want to

I recomend you use tor http://tor.eff.org/ combined with Firefox with the torbutton extension https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2275/. It will save you a lot of headache looking for proxies. Ofcourse if you use public computers, this won't be possible...

Every couple months I'll encounter a shoddy page with horrid gobs of javascript (myspace profiles, I'm looking at you), which is the only thing which has caused a fuck-up since I-can't-remember-when.

And that's when NoScript comes to the rescue.

I used to think that FF had memory leaks (and I also have a Toshiba Portege Tablet PC!), but it all turned out to be due to plugins.

Google's plugin for FireFox is the worst offender, but others do it as well.

This add-on detects a lot of leaks, but only of one particular type. It can give you a good idea if you have a plugin that is leaking emmensly though (as the Google plugin does...)

I *love* the Google plugin's features, but it leaks memory so fast... It does a damn good job of giving FF a bad name though!

You can get multiple signatures with "signature switch", a free extension for Thunderbird: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/611/

If you read the Penelope page at the Mozilla Wiki, you'll see that the six core members of the project are Qualcomm employees. "QUALCOMM continues to have a keen interest in the users of Eudora, and is being kind enough to donate the time of the above staff members to the Penelope project." Rather than becoming faceless contributors to Thunderbird, they chose to continue the Eudora legacy.

Penelope is the project name at Mozilla for those that are interested:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Penelope

I don't know about him, but I'm currently using Mozilla Turboseal.

The reason that this doesn't support Safari is almost certainly the same reason FCKEditor and others don't support it or have limited support: Safari's implementation of designMode is very buggy. Apparently most of these bugs have been fixed in webkit, so it may just be a case of waiting til Safari is updated.

You know, you don't have to use these web applications in a normal web browser... I wonder how long it will take for somebody to make a dedicated viewer program based on XULRunner or similar.

> How does that work exactly? Can the end-user decide which license to use?

Yes, exactly. See the actual license text at http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri -license-html -- it pretty much spells it out.

The following changes are permitted within Community Editions:

        * Change certain preference settings
        * Change the default start page
        * Change both the structure and the contents of the default bookmarks and personal toolbar
        * Change the default search engine and other search engines in the search engine pulldown box
        * Include extensions that are also available through updates.mozilla.org
        * Include plugins, provided they can legally do so
        * Porting the software to different operating systems
        * Custom builds created using options to configure

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri -license-txt other versions

See the last paragraph starting with "Alternatively". LXR query for the text... And it's this option to use GPL/LGPL instead that makes the license "compatible". As far as I can tell, MPL itself really isn't for the distros, it's the option to use GPL instead (which the distros exercise) that make it possible.

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri -license-txt other versions

See the last paragraph starting with "Alternatively". LXR query for the text... And it's this option to use GPL/LGPL instead that makes the license "compatible". As far as I can tell, MPL itself really isn't for the distros, it's the option to use GPL instead (which the distros exercise) that make it possible.

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/boilerplate-1.1/mpl-tri -license-txt other versions

See the last paragraph starting with "Alternatively". LXR query for the text... And it's this option to use GPL/LGPL instead that makes the license "compatible". As far as I can tell, MPL itself really isn't for the distros, it's the option to use GPL instead (which the distros exercise) that make it possible.

Mozilla people have stated that the Community Edition Policy (listed as draft) is still valid. In the Debian bug on this issue, some Debian devs are considering it. A lot of the Mozilla marketing people seem to be unaware of it & didn't list it as an option.

This policy seems to be a good fit--Debian MUST NOT include the image which is under a non-DFSG copyright to conform to this policy (they don't want to and currently don't include it, but the NEW "standard trademark policy" is that it must be used if the Firefox name is used). And they must rename it "Firefox Community Edition, Debian." This seems preferable to Ice Weasel for both the majority of Debian users and Mozilla's image. OpenBSD already follows this policy, as do others. If the CEP is ever dropped, there will be many more distros who will be forced to switch to "Ice Weasel."

> Is it available for Debian?

Sure.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rele ases/2.0rc1/linux-i686/en-US

Good luck!

M.

There is another extension that allows you to install extensions backwards from your current version - it's called MR Tech Local Install. It also lets you install extensions from your local disk so that you can keep a directory full of your favorite extension xpi files and install them at a moment's notice without having to search Mozilla's addon pages.

I'm saying I don't see the memory leak that others are reporting. Most other Firefox users never see it either. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. However, people who complain about the problem need to explain in detail what the problem is so we have an idea what they're referring to. Remember that even if only 0.1% of the tens of millions of Firefox users see a problem, that's still tens of thousands of people seeing the problem. Just because many people are complaining about the problem, that doesn't mean that we have any clue what they're referring to.

Bug 213391 does have some example pages that use lots of memory in Firefox. This is because Firefox stores all images on the page uncompressed in memory. For pages that have lots of large images, that can take quite a bit of memory. But when you leave the page, the memory is released. If you can demonstrate a way in which the memory is not released, causing a large memory leak, be sure to describe step-by-step how to see the problem, and it can be fixed.

I've never had problems with Yahoo Mail through Firefox, or my Internet banking sites, or any others.

On the rare occasion I come across a 90's style "this site only works in IE, you're using something else" message from an idiotic website, the User Agent Switcher extension lets me pretend to be IE on XP with a couple of clicks and a page refresh, and happily use the site.

The new "yield" and "let" keywords only work if you specify version 1.7. The other new features (array comprehensions, destructuring assignment, and maybe catchguards) are always enabled. Trying to use them in an older version would cause a syntax error, so you shouldn't have to worry about incompatibilities.

I wonder why the New in JavaScript 1.7 page doesn't say anything about this.

The finally got around to fixing the bug where FF would consume 100% CPU on Mac OS X when you press and hold the left mouse button. This was a major issue for everyone with a laptop (it goes through battery much faster) and also annoying on the Mac Pros (the CPU fans spin up when you select text).

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14171 0

What about when I want to restart firefox for the fourth time today because I can't enter text into any text fields, or it's sucking up 1GB of memory?

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3458/

This extension was written to solve that exact problem. (as have several others, see comments on the extension)

Disclosure: I wrote that one. Or at least, I cobbled the relevant code together. If you look at the bug I referenced you'll see that restart is supposed to be getting some permanent UI in a later release.

Actually, Mozilla has decided to keep most of the rendering upgrades waiting for Firefox 3. (See the Gecko branch plan).

Well, large parts of Firefox are written in Javascript (which is garbage collected), and they are propabaly responsible for many memory leaks. One of the reasons is because of cycles between JS and C++ objects (through XPCOM) which cannot be collected with the GC technologies used on both side. Avoiding cycles require very tricky uses of weak references, which is itself error prone.

There is an ongoing project to add a cycle collector to XPCOM:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33307 8

For a web browser written in a garbage collected languages, there is MMM ;-)

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~rouaix/mmm/

LOL @ the sexual reference

The bug was listed as FIXED quite a while back. Are you sure it's still broken?

How naive. See bug 18574.

Geez, what happened to FF being a lightweight alternative to the suite?

A fucking SQL engine ...

... and more bloat for JS!

What next, OpenGL, ...

From TFA: "The extremely useful Nightly Tester Tools extension has an excellent little feature that enables users to circumvent the version checks typically performed during extension installation." It's a great extension that any nightly user could never live without. I've already got a few other people to user it that were hesitant about upgrading to 2.0.

Are you saying that it's impossible for your browser to grow to more than 100MB? Or that your pattern of usage typically causes the browser to grow only that large?

Imagine a web page that refreshes itself periodically and uses any of the examples in this bug -- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21339 1 (Necko/Gecko needs to enforce a maximum for total size of image/memory cache). One of the sample pages can use almost 1GB on its own!

Full and native SVG support would be a big feature to have. Sure most big sites would still stay away without IE support, but being able to do flash like things without a plugin and having vector graphics that are xml based and scalable would be enough to entice some smaller sites and application developers to start making some cool applications. Which would spur developement further. So far the basic SVG support that they have has been very good since 1.5, but there is still a lot to do apparently:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/svg/status.html

I kind of find it a little ridiculous that Firefox is one of the browsers that made tabs a hit new feature, yet for it to work in any kind of consistent, sane manner, I still need an extension for it even in 2.0.

Not really looking to start a flame war, but jeez, an addon should not be necessary for this kind of functionality. It makes the default tabbed browsing behavior look half-assed without it.

One of my favorite aspects of Firefox 2 is the new features for developers, including storage with SQLite. This enables neat things like the new Zotero extension, which stores bibliographic data (a'la Endnote, but with automatic recognition of metadata by programs like refbase and on sites like google scholar).

One of my favorite aspects of Firefox 2 is the new features for developers, including storage with SQLite. This enables neat things like the new Zotero extension, which stores bibliographic data (a'la Endnote, but with automatic recognition of metadata by programs like refbase and on sites like google scholar).

Better download what you can while there's still content, then.

/* Destructuring assignment example - swap two values */
[a, b] = [b, a];
 
/* You can return multiple values from functions now */
function f() { return [1, 2, 3]; }
var [a, , b] = f();
document.write ("A is " + a + " B is " + b + "<BR>\n");
 
/* Easier fibonacci sequences with generators */
function fib() {
  var i = 0, j = 1;
  while (true) {
    yield i;
    var t = i; i = j; j += t;
  }
}
 
/* Array comprehensions */
var evens = [i for (i in range(0, 21)) if (i % 2 == 0)];
 
/* New scoping semantics with 'let' expression/definition/declaration */
if (x > y)
{
  let const k = 37;
  let gamma : int = 12.7 + k;
  let i = 10;
  let function f(n) { return (n/3)+k; }
  return f(gamma) + f(i);
}

/* Destructuring assignment example - swap two values */
[a, b] = [b, a];
 
/* You can return multiple values from functions now */
function f() { return [1, 2, 3]; }
var [a, , b] = f();
document.write ("A is " + a + " B is " + b + "<BR>\n");
 
/* Easier fibonacci sequences with generators */
function fib() {
  var i = 0, j = 1;
  while (true) {
    yield i;
    var t = i; i = j; j += t;
  }
}
 
/* Array comprehensions */
var evens = [i for (i in range(0, 21)) if (i % 2 == 0)];
 
/* New scoping semantics with 'let' expression/definition/declaration */
if (x > y)
{
  let const k = 37;
  let gamma : int = 12.7 + k;
  let i = 10;
  let function f(n) { return (n/3)+k; }
  return f(gamma) + f(i);
}

Install NoScript plug-in and allow Javascript only for the sites you trust.

- SessionSaver, again this should have been built-in a long, long time ago.
- Tab Clicking Options, because the default way of dealing with tabs in Firefox is ridiculous.

These two can be consolidated at least, Tab Mix Plus takes care of both of them quite nicely for me. Requires some config on first install, but since then I've never had a problem with it.

If you like using aspell, then you can always use the AspellFox extension.