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Frankly I just wish they'd go back to their mission statement of making a fast and lean browser because its gotten kinda ridiculous with the memory and CPU spiking, at least on Windows.

But this isn't their mission. From http://www.mozilla.org/about/mission.html: Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web.

These 3 "big bets" are perfectly aligned with that mission.

to minimize google's already too-effective data gathering... there's things like the refcontrol addon for firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

you could also build your own repo and redirect the common cdn subdomains to it.. a bit of work but could be worth it in the long run for some.... have actually been looking for some way to automate at least the fetching and organization of all those files, but haven't found anything yet (and not quite to the point of rolling my own)

as for cdn's that host libraries... google isn't the only game in town...

http://www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary/cdn.ashx
http://code.jquery.com/

we use the last one (hosted by mediatemple) for the sites that we use a cdn for libraries.

In FF, use the User Agent Switcher add-on to set the user agent to "QuickTime/7.6.2", or go to about:config and create a general.useragent.override String with a value of "QuickTime/7.6.2". Once the user agent is set, right-click and save link as.

Doesn't Firefox have a proper API for extensions that doesn't break with every single version?

They do, but didn't originally. It's not widely used yet.

I would be happier if Moz was far less dependent on the add-click.

Here is a way to make your self very happy: https://donate.mozilla.org/

Come on, now, that PayPal account has a few bucks you don't need for the holidays.
Money > Mouth.

Not to be dense, but as someone who has used Firefox and even Thunderbird Sunbird/Lightning at times, what else do they do?

If with "they" you mean the Mozilla Foundation (which should be right, considering you're talking about drumbeat), then primarily what they do is try to be the lever in whatever project comes along which furthers the mission of advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.

Wow, that sounds very handwavy. Let's try again.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit foundation, consisting of just a handful of people. They fully own the Mozilla Corporation (which makes and promotes Firefox), and give it the goal of not just making the best browser possible, but to use this to help keep the internet open. This means the vast majority of work is being done by the Mozilla Corporation. What the Foundation focuses on besides this (with limited money and people, compared to the much larger size of the Corporation) are other ways to help make the web a richer and better platform; a more versatile platform, which has a better chance of staying open. The annual report lists focus areas like identity, apps, education, etc. These are areas where it doesn't always make immediate sense for the people who develop Firefox to focus on, but which are relevant in the bigger battle to keep the web the healthy open platform it is today. Drumbeat is one way in which the Foundation tries to find and fund projects (both with money, and by gathering interested people) that work within these focus areas.

So yeah, basically what the Foundation does is try to take the long view on the web, trying to act as its protector. Where possible, it uses its most powerful tool, Firefox, to ward off threats to the openness of this platform (think of the very public stance on the next generation video codec for the web; without Firefox, everyone would have have to knuckle down to MPEG-LA and have to pay to publish H.264 video - now, there's a very good chance that video on the web will be open and unemcumbered). Where threats (or the solutions to them) are less clear, they get involved in conversations, try to incubate projects to explore options, and basically make people aware.

Not to be dense, but as someone who has used Firefox and even Thunderbird Sunbird/Lightning at times, what else do they do?

If with "they" you mean the Mozilla Foundation (which should be right, considering you're talking about drumbeat), then primarily what they do is try to be the lever in whatever project comes along which furthers the mission of advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.

Wow, that sounds very handwavy. Let's try again.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit foundation, consisting of just a handful of people. They fully own the Mozilla Corporation (which makes and promotes Firefox), and give it the goal of not just making the best browser possible, but to use this to help keep the internet open. This means the vast majority of work is being done by the Mozilla Corporation. What the Foundation focuses on besides this (with limited money and people, compared to the much larger size of the Corporation) are other ways to help make the web a richer and better platform; a more versatile platform, which has a better chance of staying open. The annual report lists focus areas like identity, apps, education, etc. These are areas where it doesn't always make immediate sense for the people who develop Firefox to focus on, but which are relevant in the bigger battle to keep the web the healthy open platform it is today. Drumbeat is one way in which the Foundation tries to find and fund projects (both with money, and by gathering interested people) that work within these focus areas.

So yeah, basically what the Foundation does is try to take the long view on the web, trying to act as its protector. Where possible, it uses its most powerful tool, Firefox, to ward off threats to the openness of this platform (think of the very public stance on the next generation video codec for the web; without Firefox, everyone would have have to knuckle down to MPEG-LA and have to pay to publish H.264 video - now, there's a very good chance that video on the web will be open and unemcumbered). Where threats (or the solutions to them) are less clear, they get involved in conversations, try to incubate projects to explore options, and basically make people aware.

It takes some tweaking to get it to look like Firefox 3.x:

1. Right click one of the toolbars to bring up the context menu and enable "Menu Bar" and disable "Tabs on Top"
2. Right click the navigation toolbar and select customize. Drag the home button to the left of the address bar and add the stop and reload buttons*
3. Download the Status-4-Ever extension to get a proper status bar
4. Set browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled to false in about:config (this disable url highlighting in the address bar)
5. Set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false in about:config (this will show the protocol name in the address bar, i.e http:/// )
6. Download a classic theme (Optional)

*Note: The behaviour of the stop and reload buttons depends on the order in which you place them next to each other. If you place the stop button to the left of the reload button they will appear as two seperate buttons, but if you place the stop button to the right of the reload button it will appear as a single reload/stop button with combined functionality.

My point was not that window.navigator doesn't contain the information you need, but rather that iterating through every property is a stupid way to test for specific features.

If you want to know whether the window.navigator object contains certain keys, you check for window.navigator.key1, window.navigator.key2, etc. You don't just iterate through the whole thing to find what you're looking for.

The window.navigator object contains this finite list of properties and methods (on Firefox - similar lists can be created for any other browser) - and not even all of them are of interest to you. There's absolutely no reason to use "for...in".

Download link for Firefox 9.0 (en-US): http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-9.0&os=win&lang=en-US

Unfortunately, they also decided to go ahead with an update to Firefox 8 which disabled the user's custom theme for the large majority of users upgrading, even if the custom theme was compatible with Firefox 8. Of course, most users thought that it had been disabled because it was incompatible. As far as I know there are no plans to undo this damage, and so now every major theme has experiences a massive drop in the number of users who have it enabled.

Try installing Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ to solve all the nasty transparency effect issues of the default theme and returning the look (largely) to that of Firefox 3.

bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

Forgot to mention: both bugs "Assigned To: Nobody; OK to take it and work on it"

bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

Forgot to mention: both bugs "Assigned To: Nobody; OK to take it and work on it"

I'm still waiting for them to fix bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
Not to mention bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

I believe that pages with lots of images or thumbnails (in particular Google image search et al.) exacerbate the problem.
Add AutoPager to the mix and you got yourself a memory hog that:

1) Pauses every 10 seconds or so for about a second (or even more), affecting videos, typing, everything...
and, more importantly, uses 100% CPU so it impacts other programs as well. I have to close it in order to watch a video.

2) Eventually exhausts memory and hangs forever at 100% CPU usage.

Seriously, it's like a car engine that keeps overheating while the mechanics are concerned with the equalizer controls on the sound system.

I'm still waiting for them to fix bug 490122. Opened over 2.5 years ago, 296 comments.
Not to mention bug 484964, also over 2.5 years old, recently marked as a duplicate of the above.

I believe that pages with lots of images or thumbnails (in particular Google image search et al.) exacerbate the problem.
Add AutoPager to the mix and you got yourself a memory hog that:

1) Pauses every 10 seconds or so for about a second (or even more), affecting videos, typing, everything...
and, more importantly, uses 100% CPU so it impacts other programs as well. I have to close it in order to watch a video.

2) Eventually exhausts memory and hangs forever at 100% CPU usage.

Seriously, it's like a car engine that keeps overheating while the mechanics are concerned with the equalizer controls on the sound system.

That will be in Firefox 12

New releases usually are though.

Bollocks are they, check the FTP server ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/. I've just downloaded the 64 bit version of Firefox 9.0 for Linux from there.

The build tends to be available by FTP a short while before the update all the documentation and front-end sites...

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/9.0/

post-install:
"Welcome to Firefox Beta"
"You are now running Firefox Beta"

Actually 3.6 currently still gets security updates, but don't count on that remaining true for long.

Possibly until April, then they're talking about a new LTS-style 'extended support release' supported in parallel with the crazy dev cycle of the main product as a sop to 'enterprise' users:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

'Extended' seems to mean a year at best, though, and they won't exactly be encouraging widespread use ('The ESR will not be marketed through mozilla.com properties other than the Enterprise wiki page, staging servers, and/or blogs.').

This plugin has been really useful to fix this problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/is-it-compatible/

At https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yslow/versions/ I read "Version 3.0.4 Released August 8, 2011 212.0 KB Works with Firefox 3.0 - 10.* "

The build tends to be available by FTP a short while before the update all the documentation and front-end sites... ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/9.0/

You probably mean version 7.

"Firefox 7 now uses much less memory than previous versions: often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less."

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast

That's because of the memshrink project (earlier report on /.). You can read a weekly status report on Nicholas Nethercote's blog.

Another project that's recently started is called 'Snappy', which aims to increase the responsiveness of users' interactions with Firefox. There's a thread on Mozillazine tracking updates on Snappy.

That's because of the memshrink project (earlier report on /.). You can read a weekly status report on Nicholas Nethercote's blog.

Another project that's recently started is called 'Snappy', which aims to increase the responsiveness of users' interactions with Firefox. There's a thread on Mozillazine tracking updates on Snappy.

We already have Documentum which is supposed to be able to use Firefox and the like but thanks to Mozilla's insistence on their INSANE version escalation practices, every update is an X.0 update meaning Documentum thinks it can't support it.

Try the User Agent Switcher add-on. I use it to spoof versions all the time. It won't spoof some of the version information that is only accessible within javascript, but it is very rare for an app to check that - almost all of them just check the user-agent header.

Two seconds of Googling found this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uacontrol/

Depending on the number of users, either this add-on or a reverse proxy might be easier.

First, bring back the fucking menu bar and the status bar by default!.

Go to the Firefox button, Options and check Menu bar. For the status bar, install the status-4-ever extension

I also thought at the beginning that not having the status bar would mean a lack of UI that I will miss very much, but the fact is that I only really need it while I'm hovering a link and in those cases it automatically pops up, so I'm perfectly happy of not having those pixels wasted.

If you look at other comments, people still complain that there's still too much UI in Firefox, and all the browsers have been focused on cleaning up the UI. There's no reason to keep the same metaphors and UI elements than 20 years ago, browsing the internet should be easy and focused on that: browsing the web, not looking at the UI of the browser. I don't mean that the current trends are perfect, but rejecting any changes doesn't help us to move forward; of course sticking to a very old version and then jumping to the latest one will mean lots of changes but staying updated helps to take the changes little by little.

An example of something that I don't like/understand about the current Firefox is that Panorama thing. It could be useful if it could handle all the Firefox windows and tabs, but instead it just allows to group the tabs inside a window and hide the rest so I did test it a little and then forgot about it. The problem might be that someday they fix it and start behaving really well but I will miss it because they introduced it in a broken state and so I no longer have any interest about it

Read my comments elsewhere in this subthread, and you'll see some of the other things I do with tree tabs. I really do find it incredibly useful and powerful, to the point where anything else is like a kid's-toy-version of the web. The only drawback is when I sit down at a computer that *doesn't* have these features, I'm hampered.

The other two extensions I live and die by are:
* BarTab - Unload tabs that you aren't using
* Session Manager - Save/restore tabs between browser sessions

I will warn you, that once you try out these things, you likely won't be able to surf the web happily without them.

Read my comments elsewhere in this subthread, and you'll see some of the other things I do with tree tabs. I really do find it incredibly useful and powerful, to the point where anything else is like a kid's-toy-version of the web. The only drawback is when I sit down at a computer that *doesn't* have these features, I'm hampered.

The other two extensions I live and die by are:
* BarTab - Unload tabs that you aren't using
* Session Manager - Save/restore tabs between browser sessions

I will warn you, that once you try out these things, you likely won't be able to surf the web happily without them.

The one thing that keeps me off Chrome for serious web browsing is the lack of a **full** equivalent to Tree Style Tab. I've found various attempts, but until something with all the critical features is available, I can't leave Firefox.

And yes, it's that important. I find serious web browsing without tree tabs is basically unusable.

Some analysis of Chrome extensions I've tried follows below, along with a longer explaination of why tree tabs matter.

-----
Why tree tabs are important

Critical features:

* Arrange tabs in a hierarchy (subordinate/superior relationships)
* Links middle-clicked to open in a new tab, open under the current tab
* You can collapse branches of the tabs tree, like a folder tree in Explorer/Outlook
* You can drag tabs around to restructure the tree

  For example, my current top-level hierarchies at work are "PVI clusterfsck", "vern buerg list", "to read", "vmware ctrl alt del", "new server", and "training". "training" has four immediate subtabs, each for various training providers we use at $WORK. Each of those is an exploration of their course hierarchy. I can expand or collapse any section or subsection as my focus changes. I can also bookmark branches for later.

  For me, at least, knowledge isn't linear, it's tree structured. The Back/Forward paradigm is totally inadequate for the task.

-----

Tree Style Tabs (Beta)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ffididlaalcoegfcalmeldjfnihmoech

  Unfortunately, it's lacking some features. The biggest is that it
doesn't actually replace the tab bar across the top of the screen.
Rather, it gives you a new toolbar button, which, when clicked, drops
down a tree structure. No way to make that appear permanently, that I
can see. (TreeStyleTab appears much like a "side bar" in Firefox.)
The tree structure does reflect which tab opened from which. But I
can't drag tabs or branches to organize them, nor can I
collapse/expand branches.

-----

Tab Sense
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiabeebnmckkdjloeofbfladabfhedlg

  Similar to the "Tree Style Tabs (Beta)" above. Same
button-not-a-sidebar issue. Does allow collapse/expand, which is
good. It opens up a new Google Chrome window to hold collapsed tabs
(with the message to minimize it and forget about it), which is rather
kludgey. Still can't drag tabs.

-----

Tabs Manager
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ioigddmjfpphkbamgbaolfkpifddnaje

  Same button-not-a-sidebar issue. Tab structure doesn't appear to
reflect browsing history. Seems to have only two levels, a "folder"
it creates, and all your tabs. Does allow dragging of those tabs, but
I'm not sure what the point is. Can't find a way to create a folder.
I'm not quite sure what the point is.

-----

  Some of these limitations might be due to Chrome's architecture,
rather than the extension programmers. In particular, I suspect
Chrome just doesn't let extensions have enough access to the UI to do
anything really useful. Which is a shame, because Chrome feels so
much faster than Firefox.

Apparently in the technological computer and internet age, this is no longer true. It has become apparent, who has the most hacking and cracking power wins.

The frustration of the corrupt have the most money and who has the most money wins, when you are trying to work together to achieve a fairer system, points to using methods to achieve change that are outside that system.

The occupy wall street movement is now shifting from being a protest to a rebellion against corruption and a demand for justice. A demand that corporate and political criminals be investigated and prosecuted. With Unions joining in with OWS and other protest vehicles like "Anonymous" adding to the effort, perhaps it can spread to more generally conservative nerds and geeks.

In the digital age, digital protests can be truly powerful and very effective. How effective can something like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/murdoch-block/?src=api when spread far enough. How much change can be achieved by outing http://www.occupythegame.com/lieutenant_john_pike/ the thugs of corruption. Can sites that release those dirty dark secrets like http://wikileaks.org/ really bust the system wide open.

Can nerds and geeks in the digital age, become leaders and enablers in the rebellion against the corruption of the 1%. The reality is, nerds and geeks combined pretty much have access to every secret that's out there, have their fingers upon every keyboard that can make or break the machine. How powerful can the online protest become, in highly technology bound societies can it become far more powerful than the street protest.

Can MIPS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_instructions_per_second kick monies arse?

This is exactly why Mediaafires Firefox-plugin "Piratebay Dancing!" was created:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-piratebay-dancing/
  Or is there some circumstance here that cripples the plugin?

(And still there is no notes about how to 'properly' link a word with an URL in slashdots help below writing comments)

You can install a 64-bit nightly build of Firefox on windows right now, and work is underway for a 64-bit official release.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the problems of the 32-bit compiler. The 64-bit compiler can compile 32-bit Firefox only for Windows XP SP2 and higher, which would leave Windows 2000 and pre-XP2 users without updates beyond Firefox 12.
Now the next time I see a comment about this from you winspear, it should actually be worth reading.

You can install a 64-bit nightly build of Firefox on windows right now, and work is underway for a 64-bit official release.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the problems of the 32-bit compiler. The 64-bit compiler can compile 32-bit Firefox only for Windows XP SP2 and higher, which would leave Windows 2000 and pre-XP2 users without updates beyond Firefox 12.
Now the next time I see a comment about this from you winspear, it should actually be worth reading.

> Why in God's name would you need more than one
> computer to be automatically doing the nightly
> build

First of all, there are 4 different nightly builds on Windows (optimized and debug, 32-bit and 64-bit builds).

But we're not talking just nightly builds. There are per-checkin builds and test runs, for all major browsers; otherwise at the end of the day you'd probably be in a world of hurt with test failures.

So for each checkin, there are two Windows builds created (debug and optimized) then run through a variety of test suites. And this happens not just for the main integration branch but also for various development branches. It also happens for changes people just want to test (there's a service where you can submit a patch and have it build the patch for you and run tests).

So the net result is that as of March 2011, there were about 44 build jobs being kicked off per hour according to http://oduinn.com/blog/2011/05/24/infrastructure-load-for-march-2011/ -- that's across Win32, WIn64, Mac32, Mac64, Linux32, Linux64, and Android, so figure about 18 builds per hour on Windows. Each build takes more than an hour, so you need more than 18 build machines to keep up. In practice, there are about 40 at the moment for Windows; you can see the list near the bottom of http://build.mozilla.org/builds/last-job-per-slave.txt

That's assuming that only the build machines, not the test machines, need to be upgraded, which is a good assumption in this case, I think.

I am a Mozilla guy.

There's an official 64-bit version for Linux. We've been shipping that since before I can remember. There are also nightly builds for 64-bit Windows, but we're not shipping these even as Aurora at the moment.

64-bit Linux isn't listed on most of our download pages. I'd argue it should be there, but I'm not in charge. :)

Anyway, here are links to get all the builds we produce:

Nightly builds: http://nightly.mozilla.org/ (has win-64 builds)
Aurora builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/
Beta builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/9.0b6-candidates/build1/ (I don't know the directory for the latest beta build, unfortunately, so you'll have to update this URL each time you go looking.)
Release builds: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/

I am a Mozilla guy.

There's an official 64-bit version for Linux. We've been shipping that since before I can remember. There are also nightly builds for 64-bit Windows, but we're not shipping these even as Aurora at the moment.

64-bit Linux isn't listed on most of our download pages. I'd argue it should be there, but I'm not in charge. :)

Anyway, here are links to get all the builds we produce:

Nightly builds: http://nightly.mozilla.org/ (has win-64 builds)
Aurora builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/
Beta builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/9.0b6-candidates/build1/ (I don't know the directory for the latest beta build, unfortunately, so you'll have to update this URL each time you go looking.)
Release builds: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/

I am a Mozilla guy.

There's an official 64-bit version for Linux. We've been shipping that since before I can remember. There are also nightly builds for 64-bit Windows, but we're not shipping these even as Aurora at the moment.

64-bit Linux isn't listed on most of our download pages. I'd argue it should be there, but I'm not in charge. :)

Anyway, here are links to get all the builds we produce:

Nightly builds: http://nightly.mozilla.org/ (has win-64 builds)
Aurora builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/
Beta builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/9.0b6-candidates/build1/ (I don't know the directory for the latest beta build, unfortunately, so you'll have to update this URL each time you go looking.)
Release builds: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/

I am a Mozilla guy.

There's an official 64-bit version for Linux. We've been shipping that since before I can remember. There are also nightly builds for 64-bit Windows, but we're not shipping these even as Aurora at the moment.

64-bit Linux isn't listed on most of our download pages. I'd argue it should be there, but I'm not in charge. :)

Anyway, here are links to get all the builds we produce:

Nightly builds: http://nightly.mozilla.org/ (has win-64 builds)
Aurora builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla-aurora/
Beta builds: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/9.0b6-candidates/build1/ (I don't know the directory for the latest beta build, unfortunately, so you'll have to update this URL each time you go looking.)
Release builds: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/

I agree with this. I created a template for our Helpdesk to use in gathering information for tickets that get escalated. I used https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Bug_writing_guidelines as a base, and customized it into a template that matched our ticketing system's fields and the apps we use. If you want them to give you information, you need to let them know what information you need, preferably with examples of good and bad submissions.

Sometimes bug reports are just feature requests. e.g.: a Thunderbird bug report is rapidly approaching its 10-year birthday because nobody at Mozilla thinks it's a bug, despite it operating contrary to most user expectations - and because it's behaving according to RFC definitions.

SimpleBlock, a nice little extension that in many ways is better than ABP but requires a basic understanding of FF error console and Javascript regex.

By default only addons from addons.mozilla.org are installed without additional warning. What you see is basically a security warning, you can still install addons from third party sites, but you have to explicitly tell Firefox you wanted to. And of course you can always install Adblock+ from addons.mozilla.org.

Gonk!

Apparently they're not the only person that's been seeing this, and it sounds like the installer with Google Chrome bundled doesn't gives any option to not install it or warn you that it's going to. You're meant to download a different, non-default and somewhat hidden installer .exe from the Flash website if you don't want to end up with Google Chrome automatically installed. According to that bug report, it can even railroad you to install Chrome if you got there from a prompt in Firefox warning you that Flash is out of date!

Many of the security issues mentioned in the paper for Firefox come from the fact that Firefox is, for historical reasons, a single-process browser. It's the last of the single -process browsers.

This is both a performance problem and a security problem. Even add-ons aren't yet running in separate processes. The Mozilla project to make Firefox multiprocess is behind schedule and in trouble.

"Fennec", the Mozilla browser for mobile devices, is already multiprocess. But getting that machinery into the main line of Firefox has run into problems, and, after two years of effort, multiprocess Firefox is now on hold. "Converting an established product, like Firefox, from a single- to multi-process architecture requires the involvement and coordination of many teams. ... Electrolysis requires a large investment of resources and time and has a long timeline for completion. How long? At this point we do not have a definitive answer...."

In the meantime, use Firefox 3.6.

I was surprised to find that it still gets updates (3.6.x) and all the newest versions of my extensions still work with it. Your mileage may vary.

Maybe if netcraft reports that enough users are refusing to run their painted whore of a browser, the Firefox devs will see the light.

I never would have thought to look for it under bookmarks.

Well.. the user-friendly way to do it is to right click the search box and click "Add a keyword for this search".

And you can put the bookmark into "Unsorted bookmarks" so it won't show up in your regular bookmarks menu.

Being able to highlight anything, right-click, and choose any custom search to send the selected item to is a massive time saver for me.

So... like this? Okay, not available in vanilla Firefox, but there's an addon for it.

Granted, that lets you pick from installed search engines, and adding a search engine to Firefox isn't quite as easy as adding a keyword search bookmark.