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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.

Seriously. All this article is making me feel is dread knowing a new barrage of requests to update firefox will soon be arriving, and I will have to ignore them for a few weeks so I don't lose any of my add-ons.

Lose them no more, young Jedi.

One other note. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ (which is the official Firefox download page right now) does not show any version numbers. Neither does http://www.mozilla.org/

So it's just some sort of weirdness with the old /firefox/new page... Chances are, someone just forgot to update the script that generates the text there.

One other note. http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ (which is the official Firefox download page right now) does not show any version numbers. Neither does http://www.mozilla.org/

So it's just some sort of weirdness with the old /firefox/new page... Chances are, someone just forgot to update the script that generates the text there.

Follow the progress of this yourself.

Of course they're going to talk about version numbers in the "Google Chrome Releases" blog. Now compare these and see which one advertises the version number: http://www.google.com/chrome/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

> It's only Firefox that's running around screaming
> about their version numbers.

Screaming where? http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/ doesn't say what version you're downloading. Updating from Firefox 7.0.1 to Firefox 8 never says anything about Firefox 8; the experience is exactly the same as the update from 7.0.0 to 7.0.1.

> I don't see Google screaming about every new
> Chrome release that comes out.

It does it just as much as Mozilla does. Compare http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/10/chrome-stable-release.html and http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/11/08/mozilla-firefox-adds-twitter-search-and-new-features-that-make-web-browsing-easier/ which are both the official announcements for Chrome 15 and Firefox 8 as far as I can tell.

What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?

I know FF is multi-platform but you cannot even make GPOs an add-on. (It kinda defeats the purpose if the user can uninstall the add-on!)

Meanwhile in bug 267888 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267888) there are still talking about creating ADM files.
ADM files are for Windows XP, when this bug was created 7 years ago!!!)
Windows 7 uses ADMX files.

But it doesn't matter now.
The people that need MSI/GPO cannot handle Full versions of FF coming out every 2 months.
They have enough trouble keeping up with "patch Tuesday" from MS.

If [Firefox] is set to Google it's a phenomenal PITA to switch--Bing isn't "built in" and you have to go to their "get more search engines" webpage, which has 17 "search providers" that noone cares about (and does not offer Bing). And to even get there you have to navigate through options under... wait, it's not in the options, you have to discover it under the small pull-down arrow at the left of the search field.

In all fairness, there is also a webpage for Firefox that provides a zillion search engines, but that is also an arcane secret you have to discover on your own.

We'd love it if you filed a bug on this issue. A slashdot thread isn't the ideal place to try and figure this out.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ Please cc ":jlebar" on the bug you file and I'll follow up.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/mail-redirect/

The CA model is clearly broken, it is a chain that is too long with too many weak links. We have hundreds of root CA's, and combined with intermediate CA's, that number could be in the thousands. That is too many points of failure, which can bring down the entire system.

The following needs to be done immediately:

First: Eliminate Intermediate CA's:
If an entity does not qualify as a root CA, why should it be allowed to issue trusted certificates?

Second: Restrict Root CA'S by geography:
It is okay to trust the Chinese Post Office for *.cn, *.hk, etc. domains, why should we trust it for *.ca or *.com of Canadian companies? Why not restrict root CA's to geographic zones and also domain prefixes.

Three: Certificate Caching & Monitoring Should be built into browsers:
Certificate Patrol is an excellent addon that does this, why isn't it built into browsers? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/certificate-patrol/

I am giving duckduckgo a try, they seem to be better at giving you the results for what you actually typed in.
They also say (who knows if that's true), that they do not track searches, and do not keep records.

https://www.duckduckgo.com/

I had it as the default search engine in firefox for about a week now, it seems to work fine.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duck-duck-go-ssl-search-plugin/

A couple searches did not give me the result I was looking for, so I used the feedback link, and they got in touch with me very quickly, and they fixed the problem (as it turns out, there was a wrong link on wikipedia which they valued too much).

Well, It's All Text!.

The Animaniacs clip with Constantinople and Particle Man always get take down notices when posted on Youtube. I can't find them. It really is a loss to entertainment's posterity - what with all these protection of creations. Let the stuff ride, if not for free, then charge us something reasonable!

It is interesting, there may be a whole new generation that listens to TMBG and not even realize it. I instantly recognized the sound of the Johns in Coraline (Other Father Song), and they do the intro for Malcolm in the Middle and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

Well, here's Istanbul (not Constantinople).

For Particle Man, just remember, there are other video sites that are not YouTube.

Voila!

And so you don't have to try to hunt them down yet again the next time these vanish from the Web, I highly recommend installing Unplug, so you can download video files from YouTube and other sites and save them locally to play back in the media player of your choosing.

1) The poor performance and the extreme memory usage. Yes, this is still a problem. It's easily reproducible with fresh Firefox installations.

We have a whole team of engineers devoted to memory usage, and a second team devoted to performance. If you have issues you can reproduce, especially on a clean Firefox install, we'd love it if you'd file a bug. We can only fix problems we're aware of, and we're not aware of any huge leaks in the versions we're shipping.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

The interesting case here (w.r.t. anti-trust issues) is not the uninstallation of IE10, or that you can use HTML5+JavaScript running on top of the Trident rendering engine for WinRT applications.

The interesting case is from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Windows_8_Integration:

    1/ Metro applications have limited interaction with Desktop applications, making switching between the two more complex (is IE10 using APIs that other apps don't have access to?).

    2/ Metro (using the WinRT API via C++/.NET/whatever) is a completely different platform. There are some common APIs (DirectX10/11, Direct2D, etc.), but there are no Win32 APIs, and different/limited APIs that replace them. For example, the socket and TCP/IP APIs don't allow you to connect to localhost when running under Metro. So the other browser makers have to port their programs to this new platform, giving Microsoft a lead-time advantage.

This is important considering that Metro is the users first experience with Windows 8 and that most users will access the internet from Metro (no need to go to the desktop to browse the internet).

    3/ Metro applications have to go through the Microsoft application store. Not sure what the implications are for this, such as how easy it is to get an application onto the store or what Microsoft's policies are for removal. May not be an issue for the major browsers, but the others may struggle (if they get to the point they have a working Metro application). What about Open Source code and browsers like Konquerer?

• Protects your privacy and doesn’t track you.. donttrack.us
• Gives back to free and open source software. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/help-me-start-a-foss-tithing-movement.html
• Is partially open source... https://github.com/duckduckgo
• Gives really awesome results... https://duck.co/topic/wow-queries-that-showcase-ddg

Yes, and the original standard allowed any site to frame any other site and access any data from it... This isn't 1999, and you shouldn't be quoting a 12-year-old spec to talk about security issues that weren't even known at the time. Read the HTML5 spec and maybe you will start to see just how many nuances there are in keeping things working while having security on top. Not even the HTML5 spec explains all the complicated shit that browsers have to do... Mozilla's documentation is the best resource for this stuff because they describe what a real browser does. Here you go, first google result:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/The_X-FRAME-OPTIONS_response_header

X-Frame-Options is a standard header (despite the "X-" part, it is a standard security feature built into *all* modern web browsers, including IE), and it is up to a site owner to choose to use it. This is the only guaranteed way to solve clickjacking attacks. Other methods require javascript enabled and some nasty hacks. See this page if you don't believe me:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/958997/frame-buster-buster-buster-code-needed

That said, it's like using a hammer to put in a staple, way overkill. Problem is, there is no way to guarantee that your page is not being clickjacked -- there are so many ways to do a clickjacking attack that browsers simply can't guard against all of them, for example, plugins, opacity, ...

Yes, users shouldn't be stupid enough to input confidential information when the address bar has an untrusted URL... but the clickjacking attack works by showing users confidential information that only a trusted site could possibly know and giving them a familiar login form... It's very difficult for all but the most trained user to distinguish this type of site from the real thing.

Not all sites use this, but Google decided it was worth adding the header to protect themselves. That's their decision to make. For my web page, I'm considering the javascript-based solution because it allows a more clear message and lets users override the check if necessary, but this may compromise security in one or two cases, so it's a tradeoff.

Personlly, I've never had the issues you seem to have. I have a 1ghz pentium M tablet that I use occasionally, and I don't see the problems you do. At work, we've got a mix of 2.4ghz P4's and Intel Quads, and it seems reasonable on both: IE7 is an absolute nightmare on the P4, whereas FF7 is merely slow.
I haven't tried Chrome here for obvious reasons.

On my main quad, while I haven't done any core-limiting, I can tell you that Chromium/chrome(I've had both) is signifigantly slower to load pages(No pipelining?), and I lack any acceleration with the chrome-based browser: The CSS animation demo( http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/ ) with the /limiter removed/ gives me around 300fps in FF, and 40 in chrome-based systems . FF is also around 40 with HW accel disabled.
I also run a number of extensions including NoScript, and end up with 500mb of memory used with my usual 40+ tabs, and it responds pretty well to random tab switching(switching within 50ms typically).
I do have slight issues with the JS GC algorithm and it making webm video skip slightly, but oh well .

Also, Chrome refuses to use my .fonts.conf file for font rendering, resulting in blurry, anti-aliased fonts. FF respects the settings I've chosen, so I get my usual clean fonts at 16px, with AA above that(I.E. like windows XP fonts). This is, for me, a *huge* problem.
That being said, I do use it - I can't get FF to use the Google Talk plugin, so Chromium is kept around for free calls via it.

As far as disabling extensions go, What I'm saying is disable everything until you get improvement, then figure out what's causing the issues. Could it be ABP poorly written or with a bad set of filters? All those filter regular expressions aren't free, you know...

Google Cached links re-exposed using Stylish (in Chrome & Firefox)

Here's your simple recipe:

1) Get Stylish, the CSS modifier plugin/extension for Chrome or Firefox
      Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe
      Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

2) Make this one-line script/style (Click Stylish's icon -> 'Manage installed styles' -> 'Write new style' & name it "Expose Cached+" if you like):

.vshid{display: inline !important;}

3) Save
4) Enjoy

For bonus enjoyment you can make the Cached link really stand out with this:

.vshid{
display: inline !important;
color: red !important;
text-shadow: 1px 1px 4px #ff0000;
text-transform: uppercase !important;
font: italic bold small/1.4em Comic Sans MS, sans-serif red !important;
}

Voila Cached happiness returns :) (as well as 'Similar')
Enjoy!

p.s. I thought I'd gone nuts when the cached link disappeared and looked in the source and it was still RIGHT THERE but hidden! by the css ... a little digging into css tricks lead to this recipe -- the extra emphasis bit was made me feel even better now that the cached links REALLY STANDS OUT.
  I hope gives you as much pleasure as it gave me ... & Big thanks to Stylish's Jason Barnabe!!

# google cached link links missing disappeared gone lost
# solved solution fixed fix answered answer
# bring back google cached link links
# solved solution fixed fix answered answer google cached link links missing disappeared gone lost

Fox not-News(I refuse to repeat a lie), is basically a news organisation target at two groups, psychopaths and narcissists. Not surprising as it is run by psychopaths and staffed by narcissists. They are the greed and ego network, they run adds by the greedy to sell products to the greedy and truth, well, truth is just to darn unprofitable.

It is "Insanity TV" and the only real saving grace is, it is pretty much a bug loser on the internet and is dying a slow but sure inevitable death. In the meantime do the right thing https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/5827264/?src=api.

And seriously, if tab position is your determination for what browser you use, then you are pretty useless.

For me it is. Chromium won't ever be anything more than a toy for me without Tree Style Tabs. My screen is wider than it is tall and I can understand hierarchy.

I keep using Firefox despite its speed issues so I can navigate tabs effectively.

Up until FF4, there was never a single feature added that I didn't like.

I generally agree with you, but you forgot about "AwesomeBar" in FF3.

Ironically, AwesomeBar was/is horrible and was foisted upon users under an arrogant developer echo chamber landslide of, "if you don't like it, you are wrong." In one stroke the AwesomeBar completely broke my ability to find sites as I normally did, ie. by remembering the URL (starting with the domain). The AwesomeBar now "helpfully" reported suggestions based on page title (which I never remember) or substrings *within* the URL (seriously, who thinks this way?). People who complained about this were told, "You are wrong if you think this way. The AwesomeBar is awesome! (see what we did there?!) BTW, we helpfully obliterated any way for you to change location history mechanics back to the way it worked before, so all of those 'How to Disable AwesomeBar' guides will never actually work the way you expect."

In retrospect, it was the first sign of impending doom, a "we don't care what you want" that has become a common refrain at Mozilla. This misfeature, by itself, was the impetus for me to download and start using Opera instead of Firefox exclusively. The trend has continued over time and as Mozilla has engaged in their slow motion (but accelerating) trainwreck. Now I primarily use Chrome and Opera, with FF relegated for use at sites that don't work properly in those other two.

PS. I loathe AwesomeBar so much that I completely disabled suggestions in the FF location bar. Now the location bar suggests nothing, and I just run a Google domain-restricted search to find the URL I want. How's that for a "win"? Fuckers.

I dunno. I tried out Debian and for the life of me, could not figure out how to get Firefox. (Iceweasal is NOT Firefox).

You couldn't figure out how to go to the Mozilla website and download the installer?
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

And how is Iceweasel not Firefox, exactly (not that I particularly like the name, either)?

Keep your eyes on Electrolysis.

These problems all exist because Firefox stubbornly clings to the antiquated and idiotic notion of having all tabs and windows run in a single process. [snip] When is Firefox going to stop wasting time on useless UI changes and actually fix their architecture?

I think "stubbornly clings" is not supported by our actions. The multiprocess Firefox project is called Electrolysis. It's been going on for about two years now. We moved plugins to a separate process back in Firefox 3.6.4, in June 2010; that was part of the project. Firefox for Android uses two processes, to improve UI performance. Bringing multiprocess Firefox to the desktop is a priority, but it's hard.

We're working on it, but it's a false dichotomy to suggest that we need to choose between improving our UI and improving our architecture. Indeed, if we choose one over the other, we lose. We have to do both.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Seriously, this extension is a must: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

I have always liked google and I still do, but their browser is not for me.

And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.

I've had loads of friends ask why I don't use Chrome. Shit like this is why.

The worst thing I've had to deal with is tear-off tabs/tear-away tabs, which seems to be a highly unwanted feature by many people (and yet no configuration option exists in vanilla Firefox.) Bug 489729 is a wonderful addon which pretty much does what Mozilla was (in this one instance) too lazy to do - disable a new option they added that a whole lot of people didn't want.

In the Mozilla case, if they fuck stuff up there's other people out there who will unfuck it via addons, mods, scripts, etc. If Google fucks stuff up... well, you're just fucked.

Moreover, every C standard library that I have ever tried is able to resolve this bigger number to the correct address. If I ping a 10 digit number in that address range, the C standard library will figure it out. It is my position that this is a feature and not a bug.

It seems that the OSX Firefox Guys don't agree with me. Admittedly they do have an RFC on the subject, but their browser breaks a known behavior that every other TCP/IP client program on the planet exhibits, including other operating system versions of Firefox!

Would you kindly bludgeon one of us into submission? I don't really care which side of the argument you come down on, but one of us has to be able to say "Because Vint Cerf said so!"

Oh, and while I've got you, I'm sick of writing stateless http applications. May I have your permission to go back to writing plain old socket servers on other ports, providing data based on whatever query format I feel like implementing? It kind of looks like REST, I suppose, except that I don't have to load 14 layers of frameworks to get to that point.

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

Sorry! Here's the link. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-android/fennec-10.0a1.multi.android-arm.apk

Sideload by the method of your choosing: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mobile/releases/7.0.1/android/en-US/fennec-7.0.1.en-US.eabi-arm.apk

When mentioning adblockplus you should also mention BetterPrivacy

ABP rocks for preventing most ads and cookies.. but BetterPrivacy controls flashcookies - LSOs.

Ghostery is also a must.

When mentioning adblockplus you should also mention BetterPrivacy

ABP rocks for preventing most ads and cookies.. but BetterPrivacy controls flashcookies - LSOs.

Ghostery is also a must.

FireSSH is better. The client runs locally on your machine through FF. No server plugin required. And you don't have to worry about the server hosting the HTML5 frontend going down with FireSSH, unlike this Gate One's 404 and 500 errors.

I always get rid of it by installing the Google SSL search add-on, and then I use that as my default search engine in Firefox.

"I don't know" == "Doesn't exist". Beautiful logic.

First, Opera's still popular in exUSSR countries, though Chrome takes over now.

Second, surely, no one wants those gestures. Because it's so much faster to move your mouse accross the desktop to back button than just swiping to the left, for example.

Why so biased? Did Opera devs bite you?

FlashBlock (for Firefox and Chrome) is a pretty good alternative. it doesn't block xss or clickjacking, but it does prevent malicious plugin exploits while leaving most of the rest of the web fully functional.

Sites do badly enough at splitting up content, I doubt this would improve the experience at all. I already use the Firefox Extension to undo all that.
Also, I'd not be able to utilise my time-honed skill of remembering where I want to get to visually on the scrollbar for really long pages.

You all make good points but you forget that only one browser has native HTML5 support

This just in, all our competition sucks, news at 11.

On the other hand, what surprised me was the download links for Chrome, and Firefox on the browser comparison page.

The only thing that would have surprised me more would have been links to the Chrome and Firefox security features.

Agreed, though progress is being made. Both Mozilla and Google have submitted proposals to the W3C, and already have some support in their browsers. Firefox uses the Audio Data API, and Chrome the Web Audio API. Obviously it'll be a while before one gets standardized (given the W3's track record, could be a very long time) and support becomes universal across browsers, but it's a start.

I guess we should be grateful we don't have to dismiss a "Congratulations!" dialog...

You mean like this one?

There's no other check that the browser performs.

My browser has Perspectives and Certificate Patrol. This way I know if other network locations are seeing the same cert that I'm seeing, and whether that cert's changed recently.

There's no other check that the browser performs.

My browser has Perspectives and Certificate Patrol. This way I know if other network locations are seeing the same cert that I'm seeing, and whether that cert's changed recently.

Mozilla announced they were actively working on separating the browser into multiple processes back in Summer '09

It seems to have stalled at Phase II within a year. Or nobody updates the Wiki.

and have already delivered some of the first fruits of that project to us in the form of of out-of-process plugins (OOPP).

Yeah, which was great in Firefox 3.6 (I stopped using nspluginwrapper which also solved the same problem) but even Electrolysis only aims to give each tab's content its own process, not to multi-thread Firefox's UI (itself in another process). I'd be thrilled to be proven wrong on that, of course.

Then you don't recall correctly.

Mozilla announced they were actively working on separating the browser into multiple processes back in Summer '09, and have already delivered some of the first fruits of that project to us in the form of of out-of-process plugins (OOPP).

If you want to keep tabs on how the overall work is progressing, I think this is the bug group you want to watch:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=516518&hide_resolved=1

If you can reproduce that behavior in Firefox 7 with all your extensions disabled, I'd very much appreciate if you filed a bug at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org./ I'll have a look if you CC me (jlebar).

You can disable add-on compatibility checking in the about:config settings or by installing the "add-on compatibility reporter" extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/ ). More than half of my extensions (7 of them) are listed as "incompatible" FF8beta but are working perfectly fine.