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Tabbrowser Extensions is a great add-on to Mozilla/Firefox but it's just that--an add-on. When Firebird 0.7 was released, people were misled to believe that Firebird did not have tabbed browsing capabilities built into the browser and had to install TBE. TBE attaches itself deeply into the browser and as a result, it was often unstable when changes were made to the core of the browser. When Firefox 0.8 came out and people were still running their outdated versions of TBE that weren't updated for Fx0.8, they encountered the "No XBL Binding" error. The developers are avoiding this problem with 0.9 by automatically disabling all extensions and themes on the first run, requiring users to redownload and install compatible versions of their extensions/themes.

Firefox is a great browser and is constantly improving. Although the developers aren't implementing all of TBE's features due to fear of bloat, they are listening. We got the confirmation dialog for closing a window with multiple tabs and we may just see a single tabbed window option one day (first step = open external links in tabs, bug 172962 recently marked blocking1.0+ by Ben Goodger).

that graph is exactly why i think everyone here with their own website/blog/whatever should pick a firefox button and put it where everyone will see it. firefox is probably the best browser in the world right now, but what good is it if nobody knows about it?

The latest 0.9 Firefox binaries ARE available at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nig htly/latest-0.9/

Take a look over at bugzilla on the bugs still remaining in .9. Bugs Nominated to block .9

You can see there is a bug there that firefox when uninstalled wipes out non-firefox folders!!

Firefox is Mozilla without the email client, right? It can accept the same modules/plugins and everything, right? Or am I way off?


Firefox is based on mozilla code. They created a stand alone browser that was better, smaller, faster than the mozilla one. They also want to redo the concept of mozilla proper where all the components can either be stand alone application or extensions to FireFox. Chec out the roadmap for a better explanation.

From the release notes:

7. Is Firefox just Mozilla with a couple UI tweaks?

Firefox is substantially different, featuring a number of exclusive features and countless refinements. Well over 120,000 lines of code have been added or changed in the browser and toolkit CVS directories since the project began.

Firefox is a web browser and does not do email. For email, use Thunderbird. Plugins for Mozilla generally work with Firefox but the extensions are usually not compatible with each other.

...take a look at Jesse's more detailed and informative list

On the Mozilla main page, there are links to download Firefox 0.9 RC.

If you go to the main page, you can see that 0.9 RC has been released. Mozilla has a habit of updating their main page when a new firefox is out, but not updating their firefox page.

I think it should be noted that the Firefox homepage makes no mention of 0.9 yet. Though, there is a release notes page for it, the links point to 0.8 still. Also, there is nothing in the releases folder on the Mozilla.org ftp for it yet.

I think it should be noted that the Firefox homepage makes no mention of 0.9 yet. Though, there is a release notes page for it, the links point to 0.8 still. Also, there is nothing in the releases folder on the Mozilla.org ftp for it yet.

It seems like a commercial comparative grid designed to make your product look good.

JS has debuggers and full featured interpreters at least on MS (try 'cscript /x foo.js').

Also what about OOP/COM? Is it too much to ask? JS supports XPCOM and ActiveX on MS.

If you'd like to try scripting with Java, then I suggest looking into Mozilla Rhino, which allows one to script Java via JavaScript.

I got the reference, but what does it have to do with "Firefox"?

Here we go...

for instance showing the login screen for Windows 2000 and its successors BEFORE the system has finished loading and all daemons have started running.

This is true. True more so for XP than 2000. But that doesn't make it any faster because there's still a couple of seconds where you can't do jack shit even though the screen is already "drawn". Never fooled me, really. But then again, I've never seen Linux (any distro with any window manager or not) boot faster than Windows. I'm sure you can boot Linux in about 3 seconds if you spend 4 months tweaking it and that's been done as a cool geek experiment, but the average Linux user (if there's ever such a thing) probably won't go there anyway, and neither will the major user-oriented distros.

And also we have the thing with IE and lots of other MS software being loaded in the background wether you ask or not

OK, let's do a little experiment. Load up Windows. Download Geoshell and reboot. Now, load up Process explorer and try to find a single instance of a process mapping the IE render library (mshtml). No? OK, now load IE. How fast was that? Now load Mozilla or Firefox. This whole "oh teh M$ is teh cheat" is absolutely bogus. IE is simply fast, and Mozilla is simply slow. Period. That doesn't make one a better browser than the other, but I'm not going there.

and only hiding the icons instead of unloading them when the user tries to "close" them thereby sacrificing memory to gain percieved speed for the user.

What exactly do you mean? When I close a window I expect the process to go away and be unloaded. If anything the executable image will remain in memory and it will load without swapping next time, but are you saying that Windows "hides" windows instead of unloading their processes when I ask it to? That's nuts. Or are you referring to this? Heh. You really don't believe the argument that this problem is a Microsoft issue, right? Because the only application that has that problem happens to be Mozilla.

If you are like me ( and others) who absolutely hate the "download manager", and how there is no way to turn this damn thing off in Firefox, please vote for Bug 233122 (note I think bugzilla will block URLs from slashdot).

For me, the download manager is simply unusable. I *need* to have my downloads in the taskbar, in seprate windows. I do *not* want them all grouped in a hodgepodge window.

When you receive a message with an attachment, you should be able to right-click on the attachment in the attachment box and choose "Delete" from the popup menu. That would mark the attachment as deleted and if the message is moved or the folder is compressed, the attachment data itself would be removed, but the rest of the message would remain unmodified.

Beats me. I use Opera.

Since the link on the mozilla.org homepage is still pointing to 0.8, here's a link to the official
Firefox 0.9 RC Release Notes.

The stable branches are the ones that will have bugs backported to them. A bug fix for 1.6 will not make it back into 1.5 but will make it to 1.4. This means if you are a 3rd party wishing to use mozilla as a base for you application, you should use 1.4. Nescape 7.1 was based on 1.4.

1.7 is the new stable release.

It seems to be running fine now since running from the .zip version, and I took the liberty of installing the Qute theme as posted by serveral people here. It was just the initial shock of my favorite browser shitting the bed that got me. At home, I'll prolly wait until 0.9 final since this version is largely lackluster (as it should be, I suppose, as it matures).

Sadly, the fix for the Slashdot rendering bug doesn't appear to be included :(

But konqueror does a very good job with these fonts (provided they are installed locally), and what's more the anti-aliasing in Konqueror imakes fonts much cleaner and easier to read than firefox. And I have compiled firefox from source with GTK and what not.

But at work where I have to use firefox, as there is no KDE, I'll be eagerly awaiting the 0.9 build for solaris, for they have fixed these 3 bugs which have annoyed me for quite some time.

205893 - Loading lots of images makes Firefox stop repainting.
229600 - Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions.
For a comprehensive list see bigger-picture

Btw, for all Solaris users, Althought the download page of Firefox has a link to Solaris tarballs, they are non existant, i.e. 404.

But konqueror does a very good job with these fonts (provided they are installed locally), and what's more the anti-aliasing in Konqueror imakes fonts much cleaner and easier to read than firefox. And I have compiled firefox from source with GTK and what not.

But at work where I have to use firefox, as there is no KDE, I'll be eagerly awaiting the 0.9 build for solaris, for they have fixed these 3 bugs which have annoyed me for quite some time.

205893 - Loading lots of images makes Firefox stop repainting.
229600 - Installing 2 extensions without restarting re-launches extension-installer for previous installed extensions.
For a comprehensive list see bigger-picture

Btw, for all Solaris users, Althought the download page of Firefox has a link to Solaris tarballs, they are non existant, i.e. 404.

There's a zip of Mozilla for windows here.

I was looking for the ZIP files... Found here

This is a discussion about vulnerabilities in IE. Nobody is debating its power as an intranet applications appliance; that's well known and understood. Its lack of suitability as a web browser, however, is not generally known outside of certain tech circles.

The Mozilla Foundation is fully aware of a need for an intranet applications appliance, and is developing technologies to address it. Its solution will run on nearly every platform in current use, not just MS Windows. Lets see Microsoft do that.

BTW, the 'hippies' crack is not conducive to reasonable discussion.

This is a discussion about vulnerabilities in IE. Nobody is debating its power as an intranet applications appliance; that's well known and understood. Its lack of suitability as a web browser, however, is not generally known outside of certain tech circles.

The Mozilla Foundation is fully aware of a need for an intranet applications appliance, and is developing technologies to address it. Its solution will run on nearly every platform in current use, not just MS Windows. Lets see Microsoft do that.

BTW, the 'hippies' crack is not conducive to reasonable discussion.

My main gripe with Mozilla is that when you leave it alone for about 30 minutes or so and come back, it takes like 15-50 seconds to be active again, which is extremely annoying (loading it from virtual mem ?). They really need to fix that.

Lookee here - it's fixed already:

Users experiencing bug 76831, a very long delay restoring Mozilla after it has been minimized for several hours (Windows machines only), may find relief by setting the config.trim_on_minimize preference to false. See comment 0 and comment 303 in the bug for details.

(If you read that bug, you'll find a knowledge base article from Microsoft that shows that unconditionally swapping out minimized applications is standard windows behaviour... *ugh*)

np: Autechre - Gelk (Peel Session 2)

... features the new default theme ported from Mac OS on Windows ...

Does that mean the next release of Camino will have the Windows look/feel ported to MacOS X? (I hope not!)

Also, didja notice that someone's already squatted mozzila.org?

Since spyware has gone cross-platform thanks to the XPI extensions, they've now implemented a whitelist (see What's New) in retaliation.

This really is open source at its best. Microsoft has not responded to the same problems involving ActiveX.

Yeah, get back to me when they decide to fix that Mozilla/Firefox resource leak that's been around for over a year. According to the Firefox developers, it still won't get fixed in time for 1.0. This and other reasons are why I'm a strict Opera user.

If you want recent flaws, visit Bugzilla sometime.

There is another list that includes things like:

- Script.prototype.freeze/thaw could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code your computer.
- *.hta files were not treated as executable, and could be used to gain full access to a user's system
- POP3 account passwords are saved to disk even when the user explicitly requests them not to be.
- A bug in XBL handling, and the feature that external applications create files with known names in well-known locations can be exploited to read local files
- IMG tags can be misused to load and run arbitrary JavaScript on a page

These are just a few examples of the security flaws listed. Why is anybody still using this browser? Local file access, arbitrary code execution, and more. I think we should all switch to Mozil--oh, wait. Those examples were taken from the Mozilla Security Advisory list of known vulnerabilities.

A list of known Mozilla vulnerabilities.

I did this with Firefox last Friday, by installing it to My Documents. As long as a program doesn't write to the registry than you can likely install it anywhere.

And if you experience problems with the fix, try the fix for the fix here.

You can download a fix for this here [Mozilla].

First you should read this (which is known to be incomplete), and this, a rather strange policy.

Mozilla is a very nice browser, but it's not the kind of fortress most users think it is.

You can download a fix for this here [Mozilla].

First you should read this (which is known to be incomplete), and this, a rather strange policy.

Mozilla is a very nice browser, but it's not the kind of fortress most users think it is.

Honestly, Mozilla has all that extra 'email' and 'news' stuff that IE doesn't. The real fix is here.

Install FireFox

I though it was a feature... (*sarcasm*) The bugfix i recomend is this...

You can download a fix for this here.

Or here, for that matter. But seriously, when I started running Opera at work a couple of years ago, people would see me using something other than IE and they'd just shake their heads. Why would anyone want to use a "non-standard" browser?

Yesterday, I had to download some MS software, and my co-worker still laughed a bit when I had to copy the URL out of Opera to IE. But there's definitely more respect now... especially since the Data Security folks just sent a company-wide email telling us to high-tail it to windowsupdate.com... again...

And as per usual switch to Mozilla as your primary browser, or the lean and mean Firefox if all you need is the browser.

And as per usual switch to Mozilla as your primary browser, or the lean and mean Firefox if all you need is the browser.

can be found at this link.

You can download a fix for this here.

lack of plugins for mozilla (come on, no shockwave? weak!)

IIRC, Shockwave (as opposed to Flash) is Windows-dependent. However, if you don't mind parting with a little money (and you're running on an x86, which I suspect you are), I suggest you have a look at what CodeWeavers offers.

As far as your other problems are concerned, I use Debian GNU/Linux almost exclusively, and I can say that I don't have any of the problems you've described. (Although, I use Mozilla Firefox, not Mozilla itself.) I suspect your problems might be related to driver bugs.

I don't think Linux is perfect (far from it), but it's currently the best tool I've found so far that allows me to get stuff done.

Then I made the mistake of connecting to windows update... Suddenly all my programs started crashing,

Perhaps there was a specific issue with one of the patches and another piece of software you had installed? I find it extremely hard to believe that your entire system would begin to constantly crash for some unknown reason.

If you're savvy enough to use SSH and VNC and all that, why didn't you at least educate yourself about the updates a bit before installing them?

Yes, some of the patches have caused problems that were not disclosed or known beforehand, but this is relatively rare, and you can generally either uninstall the patch or fix whatever issue it has caused.

the windows on the desktop would pick a stacking order and not be convinced to alter it,

This is so inane, it's funny. What, you couldn't figure out how to move through/around your various program windows? Give me a break...You sound like one of those people that equates everything they don't understand about computers to ghosts or magic or something.

Windows may have some odd quirks, but unless you're infected with a virus or trojan or have some extremely rare issue that i'm not aware of, your program windows do not pick screen positions and refuse to move.

and the new and improved active-X made all of my favorite games (diablo) unusable.

Utter rubbish.

First of all, what you're referring to in this context would be DirectX, not "active-X".

Secondly, your claim that it suddenly made all your games stop working is even more laughable. More specifically, i've been using Diablo, Diablo II, and Lord of Destruction under 3 different versions of DirectX (including the most current) over the years with absolutely no problems at all. So have thousands and thousands of other people.

I cannot recall more than one or two old non-DOS-based games that do not work now, and several that new DirectX versions actually improved.

Oh yeah, I occasionally boot windows to see how crappy my various websites render under IE.

God, could you be any more determined to ignore and twist the facts to suit your ranting?

I'll help you out on this one - if you don't like IE, try this. Works as good or better than IE for pretty much everything except Shockwave and Flash. There's a Windows version of Mozilla, too. And Opera.

So final answer: I keep off windows because it sucks. Also I do not want to support an abusive monopoly.

Judging from the complaints you bring up, I find it extremely hard to believe you have used Windows recently, if at all.

Feel free to respond, I have a feeling i'd enjoy it.

For Mac OS X, I recommend the following free software:
Audacity . Audio Editor.
Colloquy. An IRC Client.
Cyberduck. FTP client.
Fugu. FTP client.
Shiira. Web browser written in Cocoa.
Camino. Web browser.
Firefox. Web Browser.
Mozilla . Browser/E-mail/Composer/Address/Chat.
Thunderbird. E-mail Client.
GnuPG for Mac. GNU Privacy Guard for Mac = Encryption for the people!

Give the kids choices. All of the above are free as in freedom as well as gratis.

For Mac OS X, I recommend the following free software:
Audacity . Audio Editor.
Colloquy. An IRC Client.
Cyberduck. FTP client.
Fugu. FTP client.
Shiira. Web browser written in Cocoa.
Camino. Web browser.
Firefox. Web Browser.
Mozilla . Browser/E-mail/Composer/Address/Chat.
Thunderbird. E-mail Client.
GnuPG for Mac. GNU Privacy Guard for Mac = Encryption for the people!

Give the kids choices. All of the above are free as in freedom as well as gratis.

For Mac OS X, I recommend the following free software:
Audacity . Audio Editor.
Colloquy. An IRC Client.
Cyberduck. FTP client.
Fugu. FTP client.
Shiira. Web browser written in Cocoa.
Camino. Web browser.
Firefox. Web Browser.
Mozilla . Browser/E-mail/Composer/Address/Chat.
Thunderbird. E-mail Client.
GnuPG for Mac. GNU Privacy Guard for Mac = Encryption for the people!

Give the kids choices. All of the above are free as in freedom as well as gratis.