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A nice trick is to set your browser to keep cookies only for the session, clear your cookies and then grab an extension like Cookie Monster or something similar to manage exceptions for the sites where you explicitly want permanent cookies.

Collusion Download/Demo. Looks like a pretty nifty tool. And completely without flash!

Next step for RIAA : sue the pant of firefox off for having the possibility of addon like this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-downl-10137/
or this one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/

Then sue the pant off any software which convert MP4 to MP3 leaving the sound track only, and finally sue the shirt off anybody else for having ears receiving sound signal, ear bones which convert that song into a new format : brain signals.

Next step for RIAA : sue the pant of firefox off for having the possibility of addon like this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-youtube-video-downl-10137/
or this one https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/

Then sue the pant off any software which convert MP4 to MP3 leaving the sound track only, and finally sue the shirt off anybody else for having ears receiving sound signal, ear bones which convert that song into a new format : brain signals.

You might also want to try:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monster/

Although having never used it, I have no idea how it handles sites that set cookies for half a dozen domains.

https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2011/11/15/deeper-discussion-of-our-decision-on-dnt-defaults/

Mozilla discussed that DNT would have no value if enabled by default -- https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2011/11/09/dnt-cannot-be-default/

Frankly, it becomes meaningless if we enable it by default for all our users. Do Not Track is intended to express an individual’s choice, or preference, to not be tracked. It’s important that the signal represents a choice made by the person behind the leopard and not the software maker, because ultimately it’s not Firefox being tracked, it’s the user.

Microsoft will undermine DNT if they enable it for everyone.

Boy, that sucks. If only there were developers working on cure this ill. Perhaps users of this very site. Maybe they could solve the problem with a firefox extension?

Too bad. Because I would have totally loved that to be a real thing.

Protip: It is, and I'm being cagey.

Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application?

These guys show real-time 2-D FFT. Admittedly, the combination of SSE/AVX and multi-threading/multi-core would have provided a 30x speedup, but I've been playing around with real-time 2D graphics in JavaScript and have been amazed at its performance. I was even guilty of premature optimization -- I started out coding for double-buffering the graphics with two Canvases and ended up throwing out the double-buffering because with just one Canvas there was no flicker.

Hmm, that doesn't open for me, so I can't see it working. But 2D FFT is one thing, Photoshop is something else.

Fast enough vs so fast you can't notice...

On today's processors, Javascript will be "fast enough" for many applications. E.g., I do scientific software for a living, and I'm partitioning the work into what has to be done natively -- mostly the acquisition and crunching of tens of gigabytes of data at a time -- vs. what can be done cross-platform -- the final post-processing of tens of megabytes of pre-processed data.

Yeah, I have the same kind of experience. Use what's suited to what you're doing. What I'm arguing is that native code is still the best option for many consumer-grade applications, even on the desktop. It's not going anywhere.

How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?

WebGL

I answered this above...

Why? I see tablet as the new clipboard in business. Any business that involves an actual atoms-based product or service (as opposed to a bit-based cube farm) involves "walking around" where tablets nee clipboards are needed.

This is where I disagreed with the GP - it's not business apps that really require high-end native code. It's scientific, engineering, and some consumer-grade functions. Most businesses don't need all that much raw speed!

I was initially excited about the UI design philosophy of Win8 Metro. But then I realized that HTML5 can do 95% of what Metro can, and also be truly cross-platform.

I see HTML5 as the cross-platform holy grail that developers have been seeking since the WORA days of Java 15 years ago. First it was supposed to be Java, then Microsoft embraced and extinguished it, and besides it had too big of a footprint download (and a clumsy download process to boot). Then Flash was supposed to be the universal small-footprint. It was just about to take off, then Apple extinguished it by not supporting it at all (completely skipping the "embracing" step). Then Microsoft finally decided to stop holding back .NET from web development -- the purpose for which it seemingly was originally designed but never delivered upon until Silverlight. But by then Windows market share was too small for Microsoft to force a Windows-only solution on the web world.

HTML5 is W3C standard. It's not Sun. It's not Adobe. It's not Microsoft. It's W3C.

HTML5 is the holy grail.

Very confident statement there!

But HTML5 has real flaws - or at least one real, huge flaw, called Javascript! Not that the language itself is bad, but it's inconsistent and needs to be re-spec'd to be a holy grail...

I don't use any of these add-ons, so I can say for sure, but after doing a quick search it seems it does. Check it out for yourself: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/mobile/search/?q=adblock&appver=&platform=

Also, I forgot to mention in my first post ... I use it on an ICS Asus Transformer, so I've got no idea how it works on phones.

f you want to try a new great browser from Mozilla, try the Firefox Mobile Nightly for Android: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

Does it support the Trinity of plugins? (Adblock, Noscript, Ghostery)

If you want to try a new great browser from Mozilla, try the Firefox Mobile Nightly for Android: http://nightly.mozilla.org/
It still has some bugs, being a nightly and all, but the performance is great, the UI is miles ahead of anything on Android, it has Flash support and IMO, the best rendering engine on Android.

Remember that Microsoft is shipping Windows RT with Office 2010 included... as in the DESKTOP version of Office running in the "Desktop app"! Windows RT is truly the complete Windows 8 stack from top to bottom with Win32 and everything else. The big difference is that Windows RT will only run code that is signed by Microsoft. As Mozilla has pointed out to quite a bit of fanfare Microsoft refuses to sign any 3rd party ARM desktop application.

Windows RT has been intentionally nerfed in the name of boosting Metro application development. Why you ask? Because Microsoft wants to leverage their dominant position in the PC market to create an ecosystem of applications for Windows Phone and the upcoming Xbox.

Have you noticed that they have gone to painstaking lengths to make is so Metro applications that use the WinRT API cannot access the win32 API or the full featured preemptive multitasking OS which WinRT is implemented on top of? Check out the WinRT API reference sometime, it gives you access to a very limited subset of what the full operating system can do. This is intentional, Metro applications are designed to be boxed in to only what Windows Phone 8 supports. Also, all Metro applications must be distributed by Microsoft's app store. How much you want to bet that once Windows Phone 8 comes out Microsoft suddenly announces that all your Metro apps for Windows 8 will run be instantly be available for download and use on Windows Phone 8 via the Microsoft app store?

Microsoft is up to the same tricks as usual. Trying to leverage their core Windows/Office monopoly to gain a dominant position in emerging market segments.

Tell me, how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application?

These guys show real-time 2-D FFT. Admittedly, the combination of SSE/AVX and multi-threading/multi-core would have provided a 30x speedup, but I've been playing around with real-time 2D graphics in JavaScript and have been amazed at its performance. I was even guilty of premature optimization -- I started out coding for double-buffering the graphics with two Canvases and ended up throwing out the double-buffering because with just one Canvas there was no flicker.

On today's processors, Javascript will be "fast enough" for many applications. E.g., I do scientific software for a living, and I'm partitioning the work into what has to be done natively -- mostly the acquisition and crunching of tens of gigabytes of data at a time -- vs. what can be done cross-platform -- the final post-processing of tens of megabytes of pre-processed data.

How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?

WebGL

Now, from the GP:

Desktops and Tablets are different and need different platforms

I don't see desktops and tablets as further apart from each other as desktop browsers are from smartphone browsers, yet website developers target both of those with HTML.

Business is still going to need (if not in fact demand) native code. I think tablet focuses heavily on consumer, and aiming the OS to be tablet and desktop second is aiming the OS to be consumer.

Why? I see tablet as the new clipboard in business. Any business that involves an actual atoms-based product or service (as opposed to a bit-based cube farm) involves "walking around" where tablets nee clipboards are needed.

I was initially excited about the UI design philosophy of Win8 Metro. But then I realized that HTML5 can do 95% of what Metro can, and also be truly cross-platform.

I see HTML5 as the cross-platform holy grail that developers have been seeking since the WORA days of Java 15 years ago. First it was supposed to be Java, then Microsoft embraced and extinguished it, and besides it had too big of a footprint download (and a clumsy download process to boot). Then Flash was supposed to be the universal small-footprint. It was just about to take off, then Apple extinguished it by not supporting it at all (completely skipping the "embracing" step). Then Microsoft finally decided to stop holding back .NET from web development -- the purpose for which it seemingly was originally designed but never delivered upon until Silverlight. But by then Windows market share was too small for Microsoft to force a Windows-only solution on the web world.

HTML5 is W3C standard. It's not Sun. It's not Adobe. It's not Microsoft. It's W3C.

HTML5 is the holy grail.

how do you use Javascript to write a fast, efficient signal processing application?

Audio Data Library

How do you write 3D graphics in HTML5?

WebGL

things like image processing

Aviary

HTML5 and JavaScript is pretty damn fast these days, it even outpaces Flash in some areas.

There's even a x86 emulator written in JavaScript. Sure it's not as fast as native, but these apps are not particularly latency-sensitive (arguably an audio library is the most timing-sensitive). Sure, native is faster, but who really uses native code (assembly) outside the codec, compiler or embedded spaces anymore?. Everything else is just differing layers of abstraction.

You mean https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/

"Protects privacy in web-search. By issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines, including Google, Bing, and Baidu, TrackMeNot obfuscates users' search data profiles"

If everyone used this we all would have a lot less to worry about it.

Even better, have two instances of web browser installed on your PC: FF installed locally with your usual configuration and trackmenot .. and FF Portable run from a mounted encrypted drive share .. so if the computer is taken or powered off they can't get anything and the 'local' install looks like your 'normal' web activities

Also install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/ to delete flash cookies

You mean https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/trackmenot/

"Protects privacy in web-search. By issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines, including Google, Bing, and Baidu, TrackMeNot obfuscates users' search data profiles"

If everyone used this we all would have a lot less to worry about it.

Even better, have two instances of web browser installed on your PC: FF installed locally with your usual configuration and trackmenot .. and FF Portable run from a mounted encrypted drive share .. so if the computer is taken or powered off they can't get anything and the 'local' install looks like your 'normal' web activities

Also install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy/ to delete flash cookies

For Firefox I use the Request Policy add-on to block 3rd-party requests. This helps prevent cross-site request forgery (CSRF) as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/unplug/

Get yourself a programming project. I do a plugin and I did a few projects at work. Those helped a lot. It's hard work (maintaining that plugin can be tough), but worth it.

Also, keep an eye out for stuff at your job that adds value to the company but lets you learn. Let the rest of the guys around you do the easy rut stuff. Take on the challenging stuff so you can get paid to learn.

I've seen your name come up (well, I'm assuming it's you based on you Slashdot user)

Yep, same guy. You have me to thank for most of these changes. :)

You mention image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms. I've already set that one pretty high (1 hour (which really means, 30-90 minutes, right?))

I think it ends up being 1-2hr.

but was wondering if it applies to closed tabs as well as background tabs

As of this bug being resolved, it does not.

Can you describe just briefly what image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb and image.mem.max_bytes_for_sync_decode control?

max_decoded_image_kb is the soft cap on number of bytes that decoded images can consume. We'll try to discard decoded images so we get under this value, with the unfortunate proviso that we'll never discard images on the current tab.

max_bytes_for_sync_decode affects our behavior when decoding previously discarded images. If the image's *compressed* size is less than this value, we'll decode it synchronously. Otherwise we'll decode async. From a practical standpoint, tab switches are blocked until all sync decodes complete, so if you set this too high, you'll observe slow tab switching. If you set this value too low some images may "flicker" into view when you switch tabs.

Fast tab switching is a key goal for us right now, so our plan is to set max_bytes_for_sync_decoded much lower in the near future. (It too is blocked on some stupid things.)

I haven't had much luck finding documentation for these options

Yeah, these prefs are intended to be internal knobs for us to tweak. You're welcome to modify them yourself, but if you notice that Firefox is acting up six months from now, it might be worth resetting them to their default values.

Yeah, I did hear about that and modified "browser.sessionstore.interval" to 5 minutes. Unfortunately, the pauses were still there, so I have a feeling that Firefox just calls a "general cleanup" function every 10 seconds, and Session Store was only a part of the problem. This was in Firefox 3.6, though. Newer versions of Firefox don't allow you to customize the session interval anymore, and after 15 minutes of browsing, the pauses become unbearable.

Firefox uses a garbage collector and a cycle collector internally. The Cycle Collector is known to cause pauses (the collector walks every allocated object on every web page in the entire browser which causes page-file thrashing and gets slower with more memory usage), cycle collection happens every 10-60secs.

Either you've got way too many tabs or you're using a broken add-on that keeps closed tabs alive even though you can't see them in the UI any more.

The length of the pauses is directly proportional to how much memory Firefox is using, and since I browse a lot of image-heavy web sites, memory usage goes up tremendously in a short time. I'm guessing the memory manager and garbage collector are just broken. My impression is that Mozilla is tweaking a number of things, but they aren't fixing the core. Every time I update, performance just gets worse.

Memshrink (Reduce memory usage, fix leaks)
Snappy (Reduce UI pauses)

Yeah, I did hear about that and modified "browser.sessionstore.interval" to 5 minutes. Unfortunately, the pauses were still there, so I have a feeling that Firefox just calls a "general cleanup" function every 10 seconds, and Session Store was only a part of the problem. This was in Firefox 3.6, though. Newer versions of Firefox don't allow you to customize the session interval anymore, and after 15 minutes of browsing, the pauses become unbearable.

Firefox uses a garbage collector and a cycle collector internally. The Cycle Collector is known to cause pauses (the collector walks every allocated object on every web page in the entire browser which causes page-file thrashing and gets slower with more memory usage), cycle collection happens every 10-60secs.

Either you've got way too many tabs or you're using a broken add-on that keeps closed tabs alive even though you can't see them in the UI any more.

The length of the pauses is directly proportional to how much memory Firefox is using, and since I browse a lot of image-heavy web sites, memory usage goes up tremendously in a short time. I'm guessing the memory manager and garbage collector are just broken. My impression is that Mozilla is tweaking a number of things, but they aren't fixing the core. Every time I update, performance just gets worse.

Memshrink (Reduce memory usage, fix leaks)
Snappy (Reduce UI pauses)

I'm glad to have caught your eye with my comment! I've seen your name come up (well, I'm assuming it's you based on you Slashdot user) on several of the Bugzilla threads I found looking for answers to these issues. Since you seem to be familiar with it, I have a quick question regard image handling, if you're willing.

You mention image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms. I've already set that one pretty high (1 hour (which really means, 30-90 minutes, right?)), but was wondering if it applies to closed tabs as well as background tabs. If it does, then that might be something to consider changing. I'd suggest that closed tabs can have their images discarded pretty quickly, but background tabs should keep them longer (honestly, I'd prefer to have a setting that prevents background tab images from ever being discarded).

Can you describe just briefly what image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb and image.mem.max_bytes_for_sync_decode control? I haven't had much luck finding documentation for these options, but have seen several people (yourself included) suggest modifying their values. Deciding how to adjust them is much easier if I had an idea of what they are doing.

One last thing -- I've seen mention that Firefox has a (possibly soft) cap set on the total number of bytes that decoded images can consume. Is that true, and/or related to image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb?

I really appreciate you letting me bend your ear over this issue. While I don't love many of the recent changes to Firefox, the way images are decoded and discarded has been one of the biggest annoyances by far and was the first problem I noticed when I finally went from 3.6 to 10. It's nice to see someone is working to improve the situation :)

Why aren't they concentrating on just making a seriously good browser engine and then leaving the extra stuff to the extension developers

Believe it or not, 90% or more of our engineering effort goes into "the browser part" (that is, Gecko, our rendering engine, and SpiderMonkey, our JS engine). Have a look through the list of bugs fixed in FF13 to see what I mean.

It's just that these back-end improvements are not things most people can understand -- I work on Gecko and I don't understand most of the changes that go into it -- so PR and the press instead focus on highly visible UI stuff.

No, seriously. We really need to have two separate versions of Firefox. The current one which gets a new version every other day can be for morons who see "ZOMG BIGGAR NUMBAR MUZT BEE BETTAR!!!!!" (seriously, there are *tech writers* who think that Chrome is better because it has a higher version number. These idiots should be hanged with a power cable)

There is the Firefox Extended Support Release versions. The current one is based on Firefox 10.

You may want to check out the Extended Support Release (Firefox ESR). It's up to 10.0.5 now with the latest security and stability fixes.

Plugins make vulnerabilities go away? I think I've heard everything now.

Which plugin makes the Firefox buffer overflows go away? The drag-and-drop XSS vulnerability? The out-of-bound memory access? The "code installation by holding down enter"? Unsafe library loading? Using memory after calling free in the html parser? libpng buffer overflow?

Please, please tell me how a plugin fixes any of those. Because this is obviously revolutionary security technology that everyone should know about.

Either that, or you really don't know what you're talking about and haven't seen the list of vulnerabilities in 3.6.

http://www.mozilla.org/security/known-vulnerabilities/firefox36.html

I tried Chromium. There is a problem: I've become addicted to tree-style tabs, courtesy of the Firefox extension.

Chromium/Chrome had this feature natively for a long time, until the developers disabled it in a sneaky-Pete maneuver that pissed off a bunch of people.

The obvious response, to write a Chromium extension for Tree-Style Tabs, is not an option. The Chromium plugin API does not expose the functionality necessary to do so.

Webkit (Chromium/Chrome's layout engine) seems to be a little faster than Gecko (Firefox's equivalent), but I would prefer to use a browser that gives the user (ME!) control over it, even at the cost of some rendering speed.

The time I would gain in rendering efficiency would probably be lost trying to scan this, as opposed to this.

Live bookmarks no longer show favicons for bookmarked sites, and "Open All in Tabs" no longer seems to work.

/me is sad...

Now if they would drop the silly numbering that would be the icing of the cake.

If it helps, you can now run the Extended Support Release. Currently it's FF10 which gets just security updates, next ESR will be version 17, and so on.

Is there any framework that automates some CSS tricks like swapping "tabs" in a webpage using :checked pseudoclass like I saw here?

When users opt in, anonymous data can be sent for analysis to software vendors. Often this data needs extra analysis from its raw form. This is called telemetry analysis and would be perfect for someone with a math degree. Here's an example: http://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/2012/05/24/5358/

Just write to the standards. WebKit happens to support them, as do several other browsers. The one left in the cold? IE.

The current "target WebKit" movement happening is not about just supporting standards, people are increasingly using webkit specific prefixes and other tricks, and it will often be a suboptimal experience for FireFox, Opera and others too (and IE10 is, thank god, starting to come along quite nicely on standards support, look at the W3C test cases)

Especially in mobile. See this blog post about the problem on Mozilla: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility

"Best (or only) Viewed with WebKit" is a huge step backwards from an open standards based web to the days of Best/Only viewed in IE6..

Browser and Add-on

In Preferences, on the General tab, check the box to prevent tabs from loading until they're activated. Almost makes Firefox feel like a lightweight browser.

Also, this add-on helps mitigate Firefox's chronic memory leak problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-restart/

Wow so now we all are lawyers? I mean give me break, what has this world come to when copying a photo causes a deluge of DMCA takedowns. If you want to share, post it on the internet. Otherwise stay off of it and go to law school.

Does that include free software like Linux, Firefox, etc? So Microsoft should be able to download that software and do whatever they want with it? If you disagree with that statement, what's the difference between Linux, Firefox, and this guy's photograph? What makes the first two copyrightable and the last one not?

CertificatePatrol offers 80 percent of what this extension will do without the requirement for server participation. Given how many SSL sites don't even support the newest SSL/TLS protocol, it would seem to be more valuable. I get that adding offline signing keys which are supposed to be invariant helps but I can't see most sites going to the hassle to be honest.

Working only in one browser is fine if you only are using tech from that browser (although you really should offer at least a degraded experience).
Also is fine if you're too bloody lazy to add the alternative prefixes for other browsers, although that is kinda lame.
Heck. Also ok to say "Use Chrome" even though Firefox works fine, or sometimes even better. That's kind of lame, but ok.

What's evil is this blocking of other browsers and saying "download chrome" even though there is nothing wrong with the other browsers apart from you blocking their UA.
This is Chrome specific behaviour. This as well as the above behaviours are common on their demos.
Mozilla has occasionally made demos that used something like the sound specification they were proposing for the web. Those demos *never* blocked other browsers though, and in fact worked fine in Chrome, just w/o same performance or sound synchronisation.

Ditto Chrome's app store. Support for other browsers is crap in terms of outright blocks, use of chrome specific stuff all over the place, and no attempt at cross-browser at all.
Compare that with Mozilla's app store.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Marketplace/Compatibility

Where compatibility is actually a priority.

Basically, Google *is* breaking the web which is why this is relevant to the parent post.
I fear for the state of the web if they get supremacy. I don't see them being any better than Apple with their closed demos or Microsoft with their proprietary apps.

Same should go for WebOS or Tizen, there the browser is the interface. Or Android for languages, where it is meant to run java apps. But in both cases you can still run core OS apps, and/or apps not from the included market. So don't rule that out from Chrome OS itself.

Anyway, ruling out the browser choice in that context have no meaning. It is a browser based OS, not an OS where the browser is just another app. The choice would be given if you could install in those devices a full OS, or i.e. Mozilla's B2G

Mozilla websites on the other hand I can't complain about, from the top off my head

Try this page... :-)

http://grouek.com/ctrlpaper/ is a good example.

No, nothing on that site is an example of Google encouraging anything, except demonstrations of web technologies that work in Chrome, independently of whether they are Chrome-only or not.

Google could pretty easily prevent this for its "chrome experiments" via a simple policy of requiring capability sniffing, not UA sniffing for them

Arguably so, but there is a big giant excluded middle between "preventing" and "encouraging"; absence of the former is not the same as the latter.

the way other UAs do for branded demos.

Please provide evidence that other UA's require capability sniffing for branded demos. I can't, on a very cursory examination, see any. For instance, Mozilla DemoStudio's only firm requirements appear to be providing source code under an open license, packaging in a zip file and certain file organization requirements in that file, and using client-side technologies. Supporting multiple browsers is a "should", and there is no stated requirement or recommendation regarding UA and/or capability sniffing.

> But did Google *pay* for Angry Birds to do that?

I have no idea what their contract, if any, with Angry Birds looked like.

But they have certainly been encouraging web developers to do just that, yes.

> And what is your source for that Skype behaviour?

Personal experience, for one thing. You can see a screenshot from the advanced install at http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png if you want.

As far as a Google search not finding anything.... https://www.google.com/search?q=skype+chrome+bundling shows http://www.webmasterworld.com/goog/4135280.htm and http://www.winrumors.com/skype-for-windows-updated-to-remove-google-product-bundling/ and http://mynetx.net/6494/skype-removes-google-integration

It also finds, not coincidentally, http://www.osnews.com/comments/25184 (do read the first response too!) and http://www.salsitasoft.com/2011/09/23/wonder-how-chrome-is-growing-market-share-ask-adobe/

A similar search on Bing also finds http://www.quora.com/Just-got-a-Skype-update-and-they-wanted-me-to-install-Chrome-Why

Then, the sync should be conditional on the OS it is running on, and disabled on Linux.

I'm not sure if this is still relevant, but at one point it was the major culprit for excess syncs and it is indeed configurable. It's probably more informative to read the bug comments and see the diff than for me to paraphrase.

However, application developers cannot rely on the OS to sync data in the background, because e.g. on a laptop where frequent disk access is both expensive (battery life) and risky (physical motion), the OS will cache as much as possible.

Good point. And as a user, I don't want firefox to waste battery power and to expose my harddisk to unneeded risk due to access during physical motion. So how can I, as a user, disable these excessive sync()s in firefox?

It doesn't sound like a big deal, but I can tell you that it is infuriating as a user to see a browser say, "whoops, I lost your tabbed windows, hope you weren't using the WWW for anything important!".

It's more infuriating to lose all the data on my hard disk because the car I'm riding in shook a little during one of those many unneeded syncs.

Why o why do firefox developers think that they have to second-guess both the users and the OS developers? Guys, if you're that concerned about preserving the precious browsing history, start by not tossing it away deliberately just because the site happened to use SSL.

• Adblock plus
• Sharemenot, stops like-buttons from facebook and so on
• Cookie white list, allows you to block cookies by default and only allow where you really want to. Turns out that it's not many sites.. I have approx. 50 sites in the white list, and you can white-list allowing only for session cookies or forever.

The tools are there for those who want. And it doesn't take much work to use them.

I am curious: do you intend to install a Firefox plugin for each one of the 900+ tracking cookies that Ghostery references?

Even if you don't sign up to Facebook, they are tracking you because of their little F icon and/or scripts/cookies are being loaded up by your web browser on any webpage you are visiting.

Nobody says you have to click the little F icon!

Even if you don't click that F icon, they still track you.

Blocking referer on third-party requests helps (and should be mandatory in all decent browsers! (ext for FF)), but really, unless you adblock all of {facebook,fb,fbcdn}.{com,net} and probably more, Facebook will get a lot of data about you and your browsing patterns even if you don't use it.

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Firefox does. One can safely assume other browsers do too.