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It would be very cool to see OO.o, Firefox & Thunderbird ported over.

Which is why adblock+ and noscript are godsends for people on dialup. Most of my computer semi-literate friends can use these without much trouble at all.

Which is why adblock+ and noscript are godsends for people on dialup. Most of my computer semi-literate friends can use these without much trouble at all.

All they need is X-ray glasses, sea monkeys and a secret decoder ring.

At Sicirec, we've used Outlook (Express) with LDAP in the past. Outlook didn't even support LDAP autocompletion. So, basically, all the users went on to add all contacts to their local address books. The kind of synchronisation problems this caused were pretty annoying. But, even when the users ignored autocompletion, performing an LDAP search still required struggling through three to four dialogs.

Admittedly, Mozilla (and now, since 1.5, Tunderbird) has its inperfections too; why can't you globally set the default sort order for IMAP folders (bug 86845)? For the rest, Mozilla has served us great, though. Now, if Thunderbird's integration with server-side spam filtering would get a little more configurable, I would be even happier.

There's a very OLD bug regarding that. Bug #115174 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11517 4 It causes issues with any application that can't deal with duplicate page submits. Causing your credit card to get charged twice is a typical result of this bug.

... in the case of China, I believe that you need to trust that the first node is legit

I find that I'd rather have my home page open in new tabs. Firefox removed this functionality so I use the "New Tab Homepage" extension.

Try using the Session Saver extension. Version .2 works pretty well these days.

Ha! Meet the Firefox extension: noscript.

https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=722&application=firefox

I can selectively enable javascript and every other web plugin for websites. If I need to see a site with javascript that I don't trust enough to add to my "always allow" list, I just temporarily grant access for the browser session.

Combining that with adblock I enjoy (and pay to subscribe to) flickr and other sites, overly hyped web 2.0 apps, and such with no crappy javascript/flash ads.

I'm happy to view ads from sites that I regularly enjoy (slashdot, penny arcade, etc) but there's no way I'm allowing random sites javascript access so tough luck.

By the by, what do you do for disabled customers trying to access your site? It doesn't sound like you're standards compliant for accessability devices.

Firefox is not designed to run on constrained devices. That's what Minimo's for.

Opera, Opera for Mobiles and Opera for Devices (which is DS' opera) are different products, only the core (the rendering engine) is cross-platform, just as Gecko (Firefox' rendering engine) is completely cross-platform but not necessarily the interface itself.

On a related note, I think, the Gecko-based browser for mobile devices is called Minimo, and is currently under development. I don't think this would work out-of-the-box on a DS, but maybe with a few alterations it could.

Firefox uses a custom allocator, located in the Netscape Portable Runtime in nsprpub/pr/src/malloc/prmalloc.c , so I can tell you with certainty that it uses sbrk() and not mmap().

Firefox (or, rather, the NSPR) will attempt to return memory to the OS when the final pages are clear using sbrk() if it can.

This is really moot on most systems; don't do a lot of little allocations that you're going to keep around for a while and DO use pooled allocators that can use mmap().

Ooo boy, XPCOM uses lots of little allocations, and the NSPR allocator doesn't use mmap()...

Firefox uses a custom allocator, located in the Netscape Portable Runtime in nsprpub/pr/src/malloc/prmalloc.c , so I can tell you with certainty that it uses sbrk() and not mmap().

Firefox (or, rather, the NSPR) will attempt to return memory to the OS when the final pages are clear using sbrk() if it can.

This is really moot on most systems; don't do a lot of little allocations that you're going to keep around for a while and DO use pooled allocators that can use mmap().

Ooo boy, XPCOM uses lots of little allocations, and the NSPR allocator doesn't use mmap()...

Firefox uses a custom allocator, located in the Netscape Portable Runtime in nsprpub/pr/src/malloc/prmalloc.c , so I can tell you with certainty that it uses sbrk() and not mmap().

Firefox (or, rather, the NSPR) will attempt to return memory to the OS when the final pages are clear using sbrk() if it can.

This is really moot on most systems; don't do a lot of little allocations that you're going to keep around for a while and DO use pooled allocators that can use mmap().

Ooo boy, XPCOM uses lots of little allocations, and the NSPR allocator doesn't use mmap()...

Why can't browsers share as many preferences and other data as possible. I want all my browsers to have the smae history, bookmarks, cookies and so on. However, Camino doesn't even read its sibling Firefox' data.

I know that Camino uses Mac OS X specific technologies like the Keychaing and the built in spell checker. However, I think that solution is less than ideal, to ease migration, both to and from Camino, I think it should at least offer the user to share prefs and other data with Firefox. Or, the other way around, share data with Safari.

At least one of these ways should be possible - Firefox because it has the same foundation, Safari because they utilize the same frameworks and functionality built in into Cocoa. I feel that this issue suffers a slight NIH-syndrome.

There is a request in bugzilla for this functionality but it is marked as WONTFIX https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30154 7

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18430 4

I had the text overlap problem myself. For me, the solution was to check for duplicate fonts in your ~/Library/Fonts folder. There were several Microsoft web core fonts (like Arial) which duplicated OS X fonts of the same name. I dragged the extra .ttf files out of the folder and both Firefox and Camino have looked great ever since.

The relevant links are 316366 and 288047. Links to bugzilla from slashdot are blocked, so you might have to copy/paste the urls.

I had the text overlap problem myself. For me, the solution was to check for duplicate fonts in your ~/Library/Fonts folder. There were several Microsoft web core fonts (like Arial) which duplicated OS X fonts of the same name. I dragged the extra .ttf files out of the folder and both Firefox and Camino have looked great ever since.

The relevant links are 316366 and 288047. Links to bugzilla from slashdot are blocked, so you might have to copy/paste the urls.

The article has been corrected. Note that the maximum number of cached pages, regardless of the number of tabs, defaults to 8, and that's only if you have at least 1 GB of RAM. RTFSC:

http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/docshell/s history/src/nsSHistory.cpp#161

If you're unhappy with the memory usage with 50 tabs open, I advise the following workaround:

DON'T DO THAT.

Firefox has some other outstanding bugs and issues. Personally, I just want to print.

Unfortunately, the bug #154892, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15489 2 (you'll have to copy-n-paste that URL -- bugzilla won't allow hyperlinks from Slashdot) makes Firefox useless for me and my company.

This bug dates from at least 2002, but may be older. Still, not only is it not fixed, it seems no more likely that it will ever be fixed that it did four years ago. I've given up hope. It's critical failure that prevents Firefox from being useful in an office environment where people might need to print general web sites.

This is symptomatic of the problems with Firefox and some open source projects. Really basic stuff never gets fixed because no one cares or knows how. There's no effective pressure to get this kind of thing fixed.

To reiterate: this is a debilitating four year old bug that for which no fix is even on the radar. I'm totally confident in predicting that four years from now this same bug will still blight the Mozilla source. It's a sort of awe-inspiring problem: a huge cock-up in the way Firefox prints hasn't even been prodded at with long stick since it cropped up years ago!

How many other flaws like it still exist, untouched, for years upon years?

The Firefox developers seem really good at fixing the little glitches and security flaws, yet ill-equipped or unwilling to tackle these old, deep, flaws that don't directly affect their daily use of the product. I wonder how many other organizations haven't deployed Firefox because of these kinds of problems?

I like Firefox in many ways and would like it to succeed, but for that to happen the developers will need to see more things from the perspective of the browser's users, or better respond when users find un-sexy usability nightmares in real-world day-to-day deployments.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28679 5. I opened a bug on this exact behaviour a while back. Pile in.

Looks like you need the duplicate tab extension...
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=28&application=firefox

At least on Mac OS X, Firefox has some very specific problems that can contribute to this perception.

Bug 141710: Holding down mouse button forces 100% CPU on Macs is a real stinger. It it seems from discussion on this bug and a number of others that the real solution is to move Firefox on OS X off of Carbon and onto the Cocoa framework (Bug 111230: Use Cocoa for Widget instead of Carbon. That effort has an independent dev working on a port, but there seems to be little official impetus to make OS X into a first-class platform for Firefox. In response to the obvious cries of "go write code", I don't have the time and/or Cocoa knowledge to efficiently pitch in on this one. Or put another way, I don't have time to be a developer on every app that I use... %-/

I used to like Camino, and I might give it another whirl, but I've really gotten to like Firefox in many ways. I'm particularly hit by the lack of extensions or search plugins in Camino. In particular, the Web Developer Extension and Live HTTP Headers extension for FF are awesome if you have use for such things. The Sage RSS reader extension is also fairly nice.

At least on Mac OS X, Firefox has some very specific problems that can contribute to this perception.

Bug 141710: Holding down mouse button forces 100% CPU on Macs is a real stinger. It it seems from discussion on this bug and a number of others that the real solution is to move Firefox on OS X off of Carbon and onto the Cocoa framework (Bug 111230: Use Cocoa for Widget instead of Carbon. That effort has an independent dev working on a port, but there seems to be little official impetus to make OS X into a first-class platform for Firefox. In response to the obvious cries of "go write code", I don't have the time and/or Cocoa knowledge to efficiently pitch in on this one. Or put another way, I don't have time to be a developer on every app that I use... %-/

I used to like Camino, and I might give it another whirl, but I've really gotten to like Firefox in many ways. I'm particularly hit by the lack of extensions or search plugins in Camino. In particular, the Web Developer Extension and Live HTTP Headers extension for FF are awesome if you have use for such things. The Sage RSS reader extension is also fairly nice.

Check out the Firefox Petname extension for a solution. This lets you mark the sites you trust, then checks that their cert fingerprint hasn't changed. So it also traps MITM and DNS poisoning threats.

So rather than depend on an external service to black-list all fraudsters, and do it accurately and promptly, this lets you white-list the small number of sites that matter to you.

Check here for settings.

I'm a bit late to the game and have no personal perspective on XUL (I'm a youngin'), so forgive me if I seem out of touch.. I'm not sure why it -hasn't- taken off.. But what I do know is that I have been experimenting with it a lot lately, and I greatly enjoy it! Currently, popular Mozilla-based applications such as Firefox and Thunderbird are on track to be integrated with XULRunner (which recently achieved version XULRunner 1.8.0.1 as a developer preview!), so hopefully this will give XUL a little kick in the pants, something I would love to see :)

From one of the XULRunner pages, "The goal of XULRunner is to provide a solution for deploying XUL applications (primarily Firefox and Thunderbird), as well as providing an embedding mechanism."

> Well, considering that Mozilla, Thunderbird... do not do "just basic calendar".

Wrong :) http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

Frankly, "enterprise calendaring" (i.e. Exchange) is so popular in business because it allows people to look like they're working when really they're just updating their "away/present" status or forwarding spam to 42 of their closest friends. "Sorry, I'm really busy now. As you can see I'm looking at a window with appointments on it." "Oh."

Personally M-x calendar handles all of my calendaring needs (i.e. none. I have a good memory), and looking behind me tells me whether or not my co-workers are around. The thousands of dollars saved not having Exchange go directly into my pocket, theoretically.

gee. it still works.
http://webtools.mozilla.org/buster/
Differences between Firefox and Seamonkey: The latter still has Debug menu with lots of cool stuff.

Quality is quality, and education is education.
I can't stress how much this figure impacts people who DO NOT have the money to upgrade their systems. Firefox is a boon to these people.
While Microsoft is demanding more money for more protection, it is a reassuring thought that at least there is one benevolent group willing to make strides for all computer users.
As a note, Katrina victims/poorer folks who survive disasters need internet access to get maintain any sort of life period. I've seen it first hand. They do not have the time to hunt, peck, and spend on software that is defective.

I found it. Yeah. Actually I have seen it before - it's just this is top dumb keyboard configurator I have ever seen. That's probably why I have forgotten about it - it's of no use anyway (unless you are Opera's long time user, I suppose). Compare to Ff's keyconfig extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1537

The point: what I'm supposed to type in the keyboard configuration? Opera's help is no help at all. Huh? How me a casual end-user may to guess what to put in there instead of standrd "Close Page,1"? And what that ",1" means???

Again and over again. Opera has to stop that practice of closed community. At moment Opera's community looks just as bad as Mac-fanatic community. Proper easy-to-find documentation might be the good first step.

E.g. Googling for "opera keyboard", bring lots of useless articles on how great Opera to use from keyboard. Without *ANY* hint on how to chage the default settings. And how to discover available possibilities.

I think in its striving to be slim browser Opera dropped its user frindlieness...

P.S.

Just for the balance the view. I've tried on numerous occasions installing Opera to people with slow/old computers. (Long time ago. In times of Netscape 4.0x) I most of the cases next week I was coming to check the PC for virii/etc - I was discovering that people ditched Opera in favour of IE 4.x. They were saying IE is easier to use. In one case I found people have downloaded beta of Netscape 6 - and said that it was more robust to them. Go figure. I have tried to use Opera on modem line just to find that Opera 3.x (thou it was loading pages ultra quickly) was failing to render them properly in every second case... Go figure.

I'd love to have fast slim browser I can tune to my needs 100%. But it happened that no such browser yet appeared. What people say about Opera is something like people say about Emacs - you can have everything in Emacs, kitchen sink included. But in most cases people would choose what's suited for them from the start - not something they need a very big hammer to iron out from. Once I have spent two weeks tuning Emacs. Now I have spent two hours googling for "proper" Opera documentation. Both times I have failed. Nor have I managed to make emacs doing thinkgs the way I like, nor have I found (blantly missing) Opera keyboard configuration documentation. The hint from another post - is just it - hint, not a proper documentation. We are *not* going to start Opera discussions for every keyboard shortcut I might happen to need.

basically it's the only platform available for developing real SVG applications.

It's actually a pretty significant milestone for Mozilla because Songbird (AFAIK) is the first major product released that is built on the XULRunner platform.

XULRunner is exactly what it sounds like -- a small runtime to allow deployment of XUL-based applications on machines that may not have Firefox installed. Think of it as a JRE for XUL.

Until XULRunner, there was no practical way to build full-fledged apps using Mozilla tech that didn't run inside one of their products (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Seamonkey) because that was the only way to get access to a XUL interpreter. Songbird is an interesting demo of how XULRunner gets you beyond that.

Nothing can stop Google from loggin everything you do over their servers. What you can do is make it pointless:
- use Gaim with
- OTR for all your chat, routing it via
- TOR by TORifying Gaim

Furthermore you better create a fresh account for this, using an invite that you got through a non-traceable route (for instance using Firefox with the Switchproxy plugin according to Tor's guidelines.) Don't forget to install Privoxy for this and configure your browser correctly or your DNS requests are still going over open channels. For more information you can refer to the documentation on the TOR website.

Yes you miss out on the new coolness, yes you have to have alternative channels to verify fingerprints to really be certain there's no man-in-the-middle and yes I'm really paranoid.

Questions?

Use Firefox 1.5 for now...

This is a Mozilla enhancement.
You'll have to manually copy the URL since Bugzilla disables Slashdot links.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10164 2

Go vote for it ...

If you use the Adblock Filterset.G Updater, you can go to Tools>Adblock>Whitelist this whole site to disable Adblock for Google only.

Some examples:

• Added in March 2005, still unresolved: The "Search Messages" feature sucks because you can't select multiple folders to search (Bug #288046)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: No progress bar for downloading mail - (Bug #61139)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: You can't paste a screenshot from the clipboard when composing an e-mail (Bug #47838)
• Added in 1999, still unresolved: The "new mail" alert is triggered every single time a mailing list message arrives (Bug #11040)

-Gonz

Some examples:

• Added in March 2005, still unresolved: The "Search Messages" feature sucks because you can't select multiple folders to search (Bug #288046)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: No progress bar for downloading mail - (Bug #61139)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: You can't paste a screenshot from the clipboard when composing an e-mail (Bug #47838)
• Added in 1999, still unresolved: The "new mail" alert is triggered every single time a mailing list message arrives (Bug #11040)

-Gonz

Some examples:

• Added in March 2005, still unresolved: The "Search Messages" feature sucks because you can't select multiple folders to search (Bug #288046)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: No progress bar for downloading mail - (Bug #61139)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: You can't paste a screenshot from the clipboard when composing an e-mail (Bug #47838)
• Added in 1999, still unresolved: The "new mail" alert is triggered every single time a mailing list message arrives (Bug #11040)

-Gonz

Some examples:

• Added in March 2005, still unresolved: The "Search Messages" feature sucks because you can't select multiple folders to search (Bug #288046)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: No progress bar for downloading mail - (Bug #61139)
• Added in 2000, still unresolved: You can't paste a screenshot from the clipboard when composing an e-mail (Bug #47838)
• Added in 1999, still unresolved: The "new mail" alert is triggered every single time a mailing list message arrives (Bug #11040)

-Gonz

So, I am thinking about a layer of encryption on top of the chat interface, that can be done even now with my Leet Key FF extension (DEC for now,) but I am thinking of modifying the extension to allow the encryption to work on the fly, like the other transformers/editors that are part of that extension.

Hmmmmmmm.

Correction: Minifox not Littlefox.

The reason why these so-called "usability bugs" don't get fixed is because the users, upon finding out about the bug, scream and holler and fill up the bug report with lots of useless spam, advocacy, and flaming.

This of course turns off the people capable of fixing the original issue, and it thus gets ignored. A good first step would be creating a new Bugzilla bug, containing a distilled report of the pertinent issues surrounding the problem, and ensuring that it does not get spammed.

A perfect example is Bug 38486.

@echo off
set NSPR_LOG_MODULES=DOMLeak:5,DocumentLeak:5,nsDocShe llLeak:5
set NSPR_LOG_FILE=C:\Documents and Settings\ME\Desktop\nspr.log
cd "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox"
start firefox.exe

AdBlock is buggy and leaky, especially with FF 1.5 -- uninstall it and use AdBlock Plus:
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1865

I'm not a statistician, but the average is sometimes a poor way to describe data. It's often useful to look at modes, standard deviations, and so on.

For example, the standard deviation for 2005 had Microsoft with a 80.87 stdev and Firefox with a 97.5 stdev.

Firefox had one flaw that took 674 days to fix, nearly twice the max of Microsoft's 357 days. Does that make up for such a larger average? Dunno. I suppose you could look at the issue and decide for yourself.

Averages are important, but it's not always the single most important thing to consider.

There's a FireFox extension call YakAlike that does chat per-website. It's still a bit new and could use some enhancing, but if you want to get an idea of what something like this might be like... try it out.

Wokrs fine for me. WinXP/sp2, Ff 1.5.0.1, AdBlock 0.5.3.42

There are several addon filtersets for AdBlock. I wonder could they be the problem. e.g. "AdBlock Filterset.G Updater" - https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1136

P.S. Thou I recall spotting report on Bugzilla report about Ff crash related to AdBlock. I thought it was fixed in 1.5 - it seems not. Bug like that: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31650 7