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Firefox add-ons will soon be compatible by default with new versions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692664

Firefox add-ons will soon be compatible by default with new versions: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692664

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/

This works on all my addons, and as a benefit, speeds up whitelisting for the general public.

Luckily stuff like Firebug and NoScript routinely release versions that work even in the nightlies - have for as long as I've used them.

I believe there's some work on trying to make compatibility checks more flexible, but I'm feeling too sick and sleepy to try finding relevant bugs, if any.

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme
• Install a real status bar
• Restore the back/forward button functionality

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

Interesting, I do all of this but for the theme. I use "good old" Firefox 2 theme instead.

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme
• Install a real status bar
• Restore the back/forward button functionality

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

Interesting, I do all of this but for the theme. I use "good old" Firefox 2 theme instead.

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme
• Install a real status bar
• Restore the back/forward button functionality

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

Interesting, I do all of this but for the theme. I use "good old" Firefox 2 theme instead.

Add TreeStyleTabs.

The current Chrome analogue is a joke.

Also Bugzilla, the Thunderbird e-mail client and Sunbird/Lightning calendar, SeaMonkey suite, and several other browser projects http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ . Plus unlike Google all their internal tools to run a big software operation are open source: Tinderbox, the LXR, MXR, DXR code indexers, Litmus test system, the addons.mozilla.org source code, and contributions to other projects like dashboards, data mining, python frameworks, etc.

Plus Mozilla has contributed $$ and programming towards SQLite, Cairo and various open source/free software initiatives.

The other projects are not as high profile, but many are quite important. Plus, parts of those (and firefox) are used in many other projects not managed by Mozilla.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/

It is still possible to get most of the old UI back in Firefox. This is what I do:

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme
• Install a real status bar
• Restore the back/forward button functionality

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

It is still possible to get most of the old UI back in Firefox. This is what I do:

• Turn all of the toolbars on
• Turn off "Tabs on Top" to put the tabs back where they belong
• Add a Firefox 3 theme
• Install a real status bar
• Restore the back/forward button functionality

It's not quite the same, but it's close.

Seriously, they need to fall flat on their face. It would be ideal if they lost all people with narcissitc personality issues like Asa Dotzler in the same move.

not working

That is a bug filed in 2001 because Mozilla refuses to support XSL sufficiently.

You don't care about XSL? Well.. would you care about a CMS that is well documented, open and works in the browser instead on the server? XSL could have been that already... more than 10 years ago...

I hope Mozilla falls on its face and, then, will compete again.

The Firefox add-on system has been infected with this problem. It used to be that you could write add-ons for Firefox, put them on a web site, and let users download them. Now, Firefox has what's essentially an "app store". Add-ons have to go through an approval process which takes about two months. Then they have to be hosted on Mozilla's site. Mozilla tracks how many users are using each add-on through a back channel in the browser. Because of the new policy of very frequent updates to Firefox, add-ons have to be updated regularly, and for add-ons on the Mozilla site, this happens automatically and remotely. So your add-on is now tied to Mozilla's "cloud".

Firefox itself is slaved to Mozilla's "cloud" now. It's become much more demanding about insisting that it be updated when Mozilla issues a new version.

It's still possible to host add-ons on your own site, but warning messages appear if they're loaded, and they rapidly become obsolete and break as Firefox changes. It's still possible to turn off updates of Firefox, but by default, you get nagged. The jaws are slowly closing on Firefox users.

This is what passes for "open source" today.

The two I know of recently:

1) Installing Skype on Windows installed chrome and made it your default browser, unless you explicitly did the custom install and opted out. This seems to have stopped with the Microsoft purchase of Skype. You can see a screenshot of the custom install process here: http://people.mozilla.org/~khuey/skype-install-2011-10-3.png

2) Installing or updating the Flash plugin on Windows would install Chrome (opt out for that part) and suggest you make it the default browser (this part was opt-in).

3) Installing Avast antivirus would bundle Chrome; not sure whether it was opt-in or opt-out.

There are others I've heard rumors of; but the above three I have either first-hand experience or credible witnesses for.

So, from what I understood, we were going to have releases from often so that we could get more features more frequently. We got nothing! Or almost nothing.

There have been many features added between 6 and 10. If you want to know what those features are, look at the feature tracking pages: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking/Archives The two features I'm particularly looking forward to are type inference in Firefox 9 and OpenGL acceleration in Firefox Mobile 10.

So, from what I understood, we were going to have releases from often so that we could get more features more frequently. We got nothing! Or almost nothing.

There have been many features added between 6 and 10. If you want to know what those features are, look at the feature tracking pages: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking/Archives The two features I'm particularly looking forward to are type inference in Firefox 9 and OpenGL acceleration in Firefox Mobile 10.

What happened? My guess is they either stopped caring about anybody actually using firefox for anything reliable and began toying with the source

Hi, I'm a developer at Mozilla. That part is certainly not true - but it is an amusing thought ;) All of our meeting notes are open (for example), you can see our discussions on IRC, etc., so you don't need to speculate on this or to just take my word for it. You can read everything we say as we build Firefox.

or senior developers left the project

Also definitely not true.

and were replaced by monkeys.

I'm pretty sure that one is not true either ;)

I actually had a chat on slashdot with a developer of ff. The guy was so disillusioned towards why would people ever have expectations of an open source project and he can do wtf he wants cause he's not getting paid to do it. Well he's right, but what will he do when nobody is using firefox anymore?

There are a lot of people that do get paid to work on Firefox. The Firefox dev community is an interesting mix between paid people and volunteers. It's different from say WebKit, which is almost all paid (Google and Apple, mainly), or at the other extreme a typical community open source project that is 100% volunteer.

As to "what happened to Firefox" - two parts. Regarding market share, Firefox is not gaining and perhaps losing a little. That isn't surprising - the browser market is extremely competitive now. Firefox has also made a mistake with addons and the rapid release schedule, we are working to fix it (and have been for a while - it's a complex problem), and the top people at Mozilla admitted the problem. Aside from that, we are constantly improving performance and responsiveness, and latest benchmarks and reviews are quite positive, so I think we are doing a good job. But again, the market is now (thankfully!) very competitive. I don't expect Firefox, which has far fewer resources than Google, Apple and Microsoft, to easily gain market share like before when IE was a monopoly. Even competing on the same level with those companies (the biggest in the tech industry), when Mozilla is a nonprofit, is a nice achievement in my opinion.

Version 11 is due out next week and is supposed to be faster.

Yeah, sure, if you want to use an obsolete version, go ahead, Consumer McSheep. All the cool development work is now being done on version 15... uh, I'm sorry, while I was typing, attention shifted to 17. Ooh, shiny.

I use nightly. That's right, the version that came out this morning. Every day.

It works pretty well actually, but it means more updates.

ShareMeNot for Firefox removes the Like buttons and its ilk. It also prevents Facebook, Google+ and the rest from tracking you.

You know. Using XSL stylesheets to generate (and render) the HTML in the browser and only transfer XML to the browser and requests from the browser to the httpd.

But then there are the retards from Mozilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98168 (Bug filed in 2001)

Well... one can dream.. about responsiveness...

Funny, I can't remember when the ability to be able to drag and drop files in to web apps was added

It seems to be fairly common, being used by Gmail since April 2010, and is in the Mozilla docs.

Here's what I'm using on my android phone.

1) I installed Cyanogenmod, of course.
2) I use F-Droid instead of the android market. I don't even have the android market installed.
3) I use K9mail for email.
4) I'm using Zirco as my web browser. It has adblocking. If I had a fancier phone (with >= 512mb ram), I'd be running Firefox Mobile (that link sends you to the android market; I'd get it from F-Droid instead)
4) I use OSMAnd, so I don't even have to hit google for maps. Instead, I use my locally-stored OpenStreetMaps.

To sync contacts, calendar, and SMS, I'm planning to set up a Funambol server and use the Funambol sync client. But I'm only on Day 3 of phone ownership, so I haven't gotten that server set up yet. But at least the contacts can be exported into .vcf files, to copy out manually.

One thing I'm concerned about is that the Calendar app won't let me even start up the app until I've put in a server. So I don't have the option of using local-only calendar and exporting the ical files by hand. I'm hoping to fork the Calendar app to make one that compiles with only the Android SDK, and lets you use it in local-only mode. Apparently, k9mail started as a fork of the standard mail app for android.

The youtube thing is really frustrating

No, there's a plugin for (against) that; see here (in German; "Hilft beim Umgehen der Videosperren auf YouTube").

Plus, these bug fixes are all esoteric crap. I'd like to see fixes for some of the bugs that affect me every browsing session, such as:

1. The whole app becomes unresponsive when any tab is waiting for a response from a host.

If this were a widespread problem, then nobody would be able to middle-click on a link to open it in a new tab and then use the browser while that tab loads. This works for most of us. What's likely happening isn't that Firefox freezes while waiting for a response from a host, but that it hangs while running JS from a site. This is a known problem, and it's unfortunately incredibly complicated to fix. We're working on it, and we have been for years.

If you think the problem doesn't have to do with running JS, I'd love it if you filed a bug so we could investigate. (cc me, jlebar) If we can reproduce this as you describe, a lot of people would be very interested in fixing it.

2. When the context menu is drawn close to the right edge of the screen, it results in automatic selection of the option drawn under the mouse. (Since about 5.0, fixed and regressed at least once.)

I don't see this on my Linux box, but this sounds like a bug. If you cc me, I'll make sure the right people see it.

3. When you save content from a page, such as an image, it downloads the content again instead of simply copying it from the cache. (Since about 3.0, fixed and regressed at least once.)

I'm not sure this counts as a non-"esoteric" bug. Just because it affects you every time you use the browser doesn't mean that it's necessarily a high-priority bug. And understand that the cache is pretty complicated, with a variety of obscure HTTP-related rules it has to follow. We do accept patches, though. :)

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

You may want to check that you're running the latest version of Flash. There's only so much we can do when Flash screws up. Plugins are hard; let's go shopping.

But you're welcome to file a bug (cc me, jlebar) and I'll have a look.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Why not have bug fix patches for older releases? The problem isn't that these new releases are mostly just bug fixes, but that they're the ONLY release that's supported.

This is only a problem if

1. * we break stuff that used to work, or
2. * we make changes you don't like,

right?

In the first case, we rely on people testing our aurora and beta builds to find regressions. (Remember that Mozilla is a non-profit; we simply don't have the QA resources that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have, and even Google relies on community testing.) You can help by running Aurora.

In the second case...we try to make good changes, and we try to give people the option to revert their UI back to the old way, either through options in the browser or extensions. I understand that our track record here is mixed.

I don't claim it's perfect, but understand that we have limited resources. If we could, we'd love to support every version of Firefox we ever released forever. But the browser space moves quickly, and supporting just one release frees up engineering resources for things everyone wants, like MemShrink.

Why not have bug fix patches for older releases? The problem isn't that these new releases are mostly just bug fixes, but that they're the ONLY release that's supported.

This is only a problem if

1. * we break stuff that used to work, or
2. * we make changes you don't like,

right?

In the first case, we rely on people testing our aurora and beta builds to find regressions. (Remember that Mozilla is a non-profit; we simply don't have the QA resources that Microsoft, Apple, and Google have, and even Google relies on community testing.) You can help by running Aurora.

In the second case...we try to make good changes, and we try to give people the option to revert their UI back to the old way, either through options in the browser or extensions. I understand that our track record here is mixed.

I don't claim it's perfect, but understand that we have limited resources. If we could, we'd love to support every version of Firefox we ever released forever. But the browser space moves quickly, and supporting just one release frees up engineering resources for things everyone wants, like MemShrink.

I believe 3.6 is still supported, I expect they'll pick another release for long(ish)-term support when they stop supporting that one.

This is a possibility, but there's a lot of debate within the organization as to whether we want to do this.

There are a variety of problems with supporting a version long-term. Among them:

• * It's a lot of work for relatively few users.
• * Some security fixes require architectural changes which we simply can't backport.
• * It fragments the codebase against which extension authors code.

See [1] for the long-term support proposal, but note that it hasn't yet been adopted in any formal sense.

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

Perhaps this might help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wired-marker/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/coolpreviews/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/coolpreviews/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/coolpreviews/

Yes, they're focusing now on reducing "jank"
Once that's done, they'll continue work on the Electrolysis project

Finally abandoned FF at v8 (Score:4, Insightful)

How is this insightful?

browser started completely freezing and crashing after 60 seconds.

The guy doesn't even bother locating what the problem is. For all we know, it could be some crap that has nothing really to do with Firefox, but say Norton Toolbar ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680274 ), which is one of the leading crashers on the Firefox statistics ( https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/7.0.1/14 ).

With no information on where the problems are being experienced, you can't make an informed opinion on whether or not it's even the FF developers at fault here.

Switching software over a crash problem without first finding out what it is really isn't something I expect to see from Slashdotters.

Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation.

Question: Where does their money come from? Would you say they have a "reliable income stream"? If you would, you probably dont know very much about them at all, since 90% of their income comes from search engine deals with one or two companies.

No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/careers.html#feature-team
Thats the team. Anyone's guess how many people that is, and how many of them actually code, but I would wager far far more volunteers work on firefox than employees.

Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in 2008?

And seriously, im not sure where youre going with this. Is this some "fight the man" thing? You can always vote with your wallet, by not paying for their free browser, I guess.

Honestly, what are you complaining about? It cant even be considered your money in a "trickle down" sense-- its coming from third parties for setting a default search engine. If its such a big deal to you, use IE9 or Opera or Chrome or Safari. Switching isnt hard, really-- I promise.

One condition of instability: Windows XP 32-bit with Service Pack 3, for example, becomes unstable when Firefox has taken all the available memory, and is beginning to require the OS to use virtual memory. It seems a reasonable guess that Microsoft will be slow to fix Windows instabilities since poor experiences encourage people to buy new versions

Yea, Mozilla should totally get right on fixing a Windows problem. Or are you just going way off topic, or speculating wildly? How do you even know whether this is a Windows, Firefox, or third party issue?

2) Version 7.0.1 sometimes stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.

Give it some time to flush and close the sqlite database. It should leave memory after about 10 seconds, tops, unless your computer is really awful.

Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started.

Its sounding more and more like youve managed to hose your windows install, and are blaming it on firefox. Seriously, how is a userland app running with non-admin privileges going to "corrupt Microsoft Windows", hmmm?

4) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite [evolt.org], before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".

And apparently you never read the replies from the devs starting around 3.0--
Fix your damn plugins, extension memory leaks arent Mozilla's responsibility

Seriously, I have oodles of computers that I use, and I simply dont see this issue. I have a large suspicion that these few complaints I constantly see on slashdot are from people who either use messed up extensions, are blaming mozilla for wonky plugins, or have hardware / OS issues outside of Mozilla's control. Scores of people try to track down these "memory issues", and the verdict time and again seems to be "it doesnt look substantially different than any other browser".

FWIW, one of my coworkers used to run Firefox 3.x on XP with about 9 instances going, with about 20 tabs each, for days on end. Must have been working for him, one would think, and I dont think he had more than 2gb ram (Im sure he had some serious paging going on).

I am very curious, is there an effort to focus on speeding up the UI, or decoupling UI responsiveness from the pages/plugins active at the time?

Yes there is. Electrolysis

I count more than 1200:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/8.0/releasenotes/buglist.html

Are they addressing the outstanding bugs that came with the new features in version 8?

These are the bugs fixed for FF 8. And these are the bugs fixed for FF 9.

Are they addressing the outstanding bugs that came with the new features in version 8?

These are the bugs fixed for FF 8. And these are the bugs fixed for FF 9.

Please stop releasing new versions of firefox and fix the version you have

You do understand that the new releases have bug fixes, right? Probably the majority of patches going into any given release are bugfixes.

The main cause of random freezes should be fixed in the latest release, Firefox 8. If you're still seeing freezes, please file a bug and cc me (jlebar) and I'll follow up.

http://blog.bonardo.net/2011/09/30/is-your-firefor-freezing-at-regular-intervals
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Get it here https://nightly.mozilla.org/

It's daylight here on the other side of the world, can I still download the nightly version or do I have to wait 12 hours?

I block everything. I have the following in my hosts file

# Block Facebook
127.127.127.127 www.facebook.com

The 127.127.127.127 points to a seperate web site so it does not disturb my other logs. You could use 0.0.0.0

Even better is to filter out all facebook.com and fbcdn.net stuff.

Use the Ghostery addon and it will do this for you. Much easier to handle.

Actually, the Flash file format is published openly and the entire Flash VM is open source. The fact that no one else seriously tried to create a Flash implementation doesn't mean it's not possible (although it's maybe a testament to the fact that what Adobe built was a lot harder than most people give them credit for).

Google "Get Firefox"
Click on first link
Go here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Version 8.0 proudly displayed

FF 3.6 here

Well Aurora is a pretty nice browser :)

Plugins is a bit odd. They've had plugin process isolation like Chrome even in Firefox 3.6. If you're using Firefox for Android, the latest alphas also have process-per-tab.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
I found this out when trying a WebGL demo. Apparently WebGL is the new way to create crashes.

Hell. The only thing bringing down Firefox these days for me is my having force enabled WebGL on this video card with its sucky fglrx driver, and that crashes Chromium too (actually, Chromium crashes a lot more often on WebGL, and even on those fairly innocent javascript demos like those from emscripten that *don't* use WebGL - not sure what's going on there. V8 being fragile I guess).
Well, luckily WebGL crashing isn't horribly frequent. Seems related to how long compiz has been running.

Haven't had a plugin crash on my Linux machines in, well, years? I can't remember the last time.

You can try about:crashes if you are getting some, and link the world to them.

Firefox 10 or 11 will assume add-ons are compatible by default, which is more or less what you're asking for :)

There will be a few exceptions, such as add-ons with binary components and add-ons that are known to not work.

My plugin uses a binary component and it still worked in FF 8.0 w/o me lifting a finger. I gotta admit I was worried at first, but so far, so good.

Oh I don't know, how about ignoring the need for MSI installers and Group Policy support for seven fucking years?

Every time there's an article in Slashdot about Firefox, there's at least one highly voted comment from someone complaining about Firefox being basically unmanageable on a corporate network.

I'm not talking about some massive effort to resolve complex issues like performance or memory, which have hundreds of subtle causes that have to be chased down and individually fixed. Creating an MSI requires simply an open source toolkit and a configuration file for the build process. For Active Directory Group Policy support, only a text file is needed and some minor tweaks to configuration parameter loading. The main installer doesn't even have to change! Just have an "enterprise downloads" section on the webpage.

The solution is simple and quick, it would massively increase the potential market for Firefox, but these feature requests will not be implemented. Not now, not ever, just no. The Firefox team doesn't do icky and boring technical stuff. Instead, they spend their valuable time on important things that clearly a lot of people need, like 3D graphics in the web browser.