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Facebook Blocker [mozilla.org]

Not available for Firefox 7.0.1 and not available since before 4.

Maybe you should check your facts a little. They appear to be outdated, or just wrong...
On the PC I'm posting from (posting via Opera 11.51), I have Firefox 7.0.1, and on its Extensions page, it says I have Facebook Blocker 1.0 which was released on 26 July 2011. Both Firefox 7.0.1 and Facebook Blocker 1.0 say that it's enabled, BTW.

Ive never run into that situation except (I think) in an addon, where it did. Im not sure I would be boasting that your browser's userland was asking a user if they wanted to terminate some of the code that the browser uses; that seems like that should get caught in qa. That seems a pretty good time to halt the browser and relaunch it.

I ran into this situation on an 8 year old office PC. The QA dept probably doesn't have any of those. Restarting wasn't an option because it would've taken ages.

No argument. They also allow massive memory leaks, hence the complaints for the last umpteen versions about firefox using gigs of memory (HINT-- its your addons). And honestly, as we now have before-the-resource-loads adblock now (yes, it works the SAME as it does in firefox), Im not sure what Im missing with Chromes extension API.

Don't install crappy add-ons then, same as with Chrome. Not loading most javascript (NoScript) and unnecessary images (ABP, RequestPolicy) helps to reduce ram usage.

Thats NOT a safe assumption, as you can install NPAPI plugins without restarting the browser, too (worst case, tab reload is needed, sometimes not even that).

Because it was a design goal to allow run-time loading of netscape plugins, they can be created and destroyed at any time and only represent a single DOM element. Plugins solely communicate through a defined API, they don't have the same access add-ons do.

Not being a webdev, im not the person to argue this in detail, but about 1 month ago I was doing some site troubleshooting, and in order to do in Firebug what I did in Chrome's web dev tools, I did need to download an additional piece-- I believe it was JS related. Anyways, I gave you my reasons why I prefer Chrome's tools (much easier live editing, much better performance), and your retort is "youre wrong"? No reasons, or explanation? Care to expound on that?

I was writing from meat memory. It does seem to have been improved in Webkit, but I haven't attempted any serious debugging with it lately. The profiler is nice, though.

Compared to a C++ implementation, yes, they do, and youd be foolish to argue that interpreted code could possibly outperform compiled code.

Chrome extensions are written in HTML, Javascript and CSS. FF Add-ons can be written in any language, but what are you trying to argue here? That browsers should implement all the functionality in all add-ons/extensions available? Or that from now on all add-ons should be written in C++? Rewriting a program in another language doesn't automatically make it faster and most add-ons/extensions aren't programs of their own but depend heavily on the browser. Thus, they may spend more time in the rest of the browser rather then in their own scripts. A C++ rewrite won't achieve anything except to make it more difficult to maintain and increase the download size. SpiderMonkey already has a JIT compiler anyway.

When I just want to do some quick research or whatever, having a responsive browser that wont pause for 30+seconds checking if my plugins work with a new version, or waiting for the tabs to load is worth a whole lot more.

By default, as of FF 5 IIRC, tabs from a previous session aren't loaded until you select them.

Not sure we're talking about the same thing. Im talking about addon-induced leaks, which the devs have LONG talked about (I remember an Asa Dotzler post from v3.0 about plugins being the cause of leaks). This isnt a hypothetical thing; its a real problem. Its also why when troubleshooting they ask for a clean profile with no addons.

Plugins and add-ons aren't the same thing. Also, so far I've found an issue in FF and

Although you can always turn off cookies. But I can't say I've done that lately to know how that would affect today's web experience like turning off JavaScript does.

Switching off all cookies is overkill for the issue described by GP. If you're using Firefox, it's sufficient to install an add-on such as Facebook Blocker, which explicitly blocks all requests to Facebook which originate from non-Facebook sites. This obviously blocks tracking cookies from Facebook like-buttons on other sites, but does not interfere with your use of Facebook (if any; better to avoid Facebook sites completely).

I assume you already have a strategy for wiping LSO Flash objects ("super cookies"), such as Better Privacy or equivalent Firefox plugin. Some browsers don't need an add-on to do this. For instance in Opera, the delete private data action can also remove LSOs.

All joking aside, the sad reality is that Firefox 10 builds actually are available from the Firefox Nightly channel at this very moment.

I'm curious to see what benchmarks like this will look like in a year from now. Based on how so many users seem to be getting upset with Firefox recently, and moving to other browsers, maybe it's market share will be so minimal that it won't even be worth considering.

Speed the death of Flash and speed the adoption of HTML5+JS as the goto client-side software development platform for most things. The Joystick API is amongst the greatest things coming out of this effort:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/JoystickAPI

Mozilla is doing good stuff here, buck up ppl!

One single memory allocator has been rounding up to the nearest factor of two, with bugs that make it request double the amount of space. This was resolved Aug 2011. Example, I allocate a string for 1024 bytes but didn't consider the additional null-term, so it comes back using 2048 bytes.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=676457

Several other bugs have been known for 3-5 years, the whole time that Mozilla has blamed anything but the code for memory problems, and are just now getting fixed.

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/08/05/clownshoes-available-in-sizes-2101-and-up/

Does anyone know if this proposal has any legs? Or was this just blown off in lieu of the current, ridiculous release cycle?

Technically, Firefox 9.0 is scheduled to enter Beta at the same time they release Firefox 8.0.
That means November 8. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases
Why yes, just 6 weeks after Firefox 7.0 release...

Seriously, calm down on the major releases, Mozilla.

You could always go back to the older browsers. You can still download Phoenix 0.5 (aka pre-firefox firefox) right here, and Firefox 1.0 here. Im pretty sure you will discover that its a case of "the grass is always greener", though.

And of course, theres always lynx.

Not that obvious, apparently! I do watch incoming core bug reports and haven't seen one about this.

Thanks for the mozillazine link; I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690806 on this.

And you're very much welcome!

It may have been a controversial decision, but IMHO a brave and necessary one for Firefox's long term survival. Mozilla are keenly aware that they've been outdone in a number of areas by Chrome. Their market share is decreasing and it'll take time to slow the momentum even if they come out with some big improvements. Their old release cycle could well have meant the improvements needed to bring Firefox back into the game would have been too late. Firefox wasn't ready for the switch, unlike Chrome that was built from the ground up with rapid release in mind. Trouble is, I don't think they could afford to wait until it was. My guess is that Mozilla were well aware that the new rapid release cycle would (a) cause people pain when it comes to outdated extensions, and (b) annoy enterprise IT departments. They just saw what great things Chrome are doing, together with their falling market share, and decided that the couldn't afford to wait until they could solve these problems before moving to a rapid release cycle. Enterprise users and users with lots of extensions are in the minority when it comes to Firefox. There's no doubt in my mind that a browser with a slow release cycle is going to loose out to a browser like Chrome in the long term, all other things being equal. Remember I'm talking mainstream here. Not enterprise users, or geeks.

Yes, the regular update cycles are going to piss of a few enterprise types for obvious and very valid reasons. But let's face it, the enterprise is definitely not Firefox's core market. Faced with having to make some tough decisions in an attempt to ensure Firefox's survival, enterprise users were put to one side. The right decision in my opinion bearing in mind the urgency implied by falling market share. However, Mozilla is hearing enterprise concerns and is proposing what they would call 'Extended Support Releases,' which are basically the same concept as Ubuntu's LTS (Long Term Support) releases. See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal for details. I've thought this was a good idea since the start, and I have a feeling Mozilla knew all along was something they were eventually going to have to do.

Mozilla have said they're well aware of the incompatible extensions issue and plan to get on top of it. I also get the impression they want to follow Chrome in hiding version info and pushing out updates without any user intervention. Both in my opinion important if you want to have a rapid release cycle without seriously annoying users. For the vast majority of users, I think pushing updates without confirmation is a good thing. Most people really don't care about having maximum control over exactly what gets installed on their machine. They just want something that works well and stays secure. Trouble is they don't appreciate that means regular updates. Much better to do it for them in my opinion.

There's an extension for that.

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

Everything I used that worked in FF7 still works for me in FF8. Even one that hasn't been updated since FF6.

After installing the Add-on Compatibility Reporter, your incompatible extensions will become enabled for you to test whether they still work with the version of Firefox or Thunderbird that you're using. If you notice that one of your add-ons doesn't seem to be working the same way it did in previous versions of the application, just open the Add-ons Manager and click Compatibility next to that add-on to send a report to Mozilla.

Even if your add-ons all work fine, if they're marked incompatible, please let us know that they work fine by submitting a success report so we can encourage the add-on developer to update their compatibility information.

We'll collect all of the reports and let add-on developers know what users are having problems with, or if their add-ons seem to work just fine in future versions of the product.

It's already been submitted 1,000 times.

Yep: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=memory+leak

That's mostly because the API is so crippled that it's easy to keep it stable. Firefox has the Jetpack/Addon SDK with a similarly stable (and hence, crippled) API, but addons would at least require a rewrite, if they could be done at all (something like NoScript, AdBlock or Pentadactyl probably wouldn't).

There is a nice add-on I used before switching back to 3.6, it works well. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

But, considering that I have 8 GB in my computer, who gives a shit how much memory Firefox is using?

People who are not you.

In my experience, Firefox 7 does stall less, but when I restart it memory usage halves, so there's still room for improvement in the GC.

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

Slightly off-topic: I don't want to move away from FF 3.6.x... I don't like Chrome's UI, and I don't like how FF is just copying it. I hope somebody forks FF 3.6 to give it support for HTML5. I might if I ever find the time.

Anyhow.. lightning is beta so i guess thats why they though its "ok" (i think it sux)

Nope:

Lightning 1.0 beta7 is the latest stable release built for Thunderbird 7 and contains 39 bugfixes and improvements over the 1.0b5 release, that improve the add-on's stability, performance and memory consumption.

You can get latest lightning here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/ [mozilla.org]
download manually, upgrade manually. Bang, works.

Updating from within the add-on manager worked, too. I assumed there was no update after the automatic add-on updating screen that always appears after a Thunderbird update didn't find anything.

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

The Mozilla Enterprise Working Group are considering this proposal at present: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal

This would provide a 42-week 'stable' release of Firefox, with incremental backported security fixes "just like the old days".

Whether this will come to fruition or not is unclear at this stage, but at least it's being discussed.

Start with a vanilla Win7 x64 installation. Install FF, no addons, no plugins, no nothing.

Start FF and login to gmail. Leave FF alone. That's it.

On FF6 and earlier, FF will slowly grow and grow and grow, until it finally runs out of memory and dies. I haven't measured the memory consumption rate recently but, on FF4, the memory consumption rate was approximately 1MB/minute, on average (sometimes it wouldn't grow for a while, and sometimes the usage would spike upwards, but the overall average was around 1MB/min).

Yes, something that google is doing is triggering an issue with FF. However, this memory growth doesn't appear on chrome.

I haven't used FF7 long enough to be sure, but the FF people claim that this has been fixed (bug 645633).

you're entirely right.
quite disappointed at the thunderbird team lately, there's many other issues.
Firefox works just fine tho.

Anyhow.. lightning is beta so i guess thats why they though its "ok" (i think it sux)

You can get latest lightning here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/lightning/
download manually, upgrade manually. Bang, works.

Bullshit! AdBlock Plus is listed for compatibility all the way up to Firefox 9.0a1.

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

I imagine it's because most of the features for the newer versions since 4 have been pretty tame in comparison, so no one wants to photoshop up a graphic for 'fewer memory leaks!'. They probably also want to keep their main page advertising some of the features people new to firefox in general might care about, too, but that's just my conjecture.

FWIW, you can find what you were looking for on their wiki.

Yes, I noticed the same thing then when I went looking for the change log. I couldn't find a way to navigate to it from the download page at all, which sure is irritating. Eventually I just Googled "Firefox release notes" and found this page, which has them all:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

The actual v7.0 release notes are here:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/7.0/releasenotes/

Yes, I noticed the same thing then when I went looking for the change log. I couldn't find a way to navigate to it from the download page at all, which sure is irritating. Eventually I just Googled "Firefox release notes" and found this page, which has them all:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/

The actual v7.0 release notes are here:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/7.0/releasenotes/

Don't worry, they're still showing the release notes from version 4. When I look at http://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/features/, nothing has apparently changed for a long time. The feature list starts with the "awesome bar" (it's still a nerdy childish name after all this time), and doesn't introduce anything newer after that. They've made it damn hard to find any kind of release notes or new feature list, or any explanation of why you'd want to upgrade from FF4. Talk about the inmates running the asylum.

Dude! At least get 3.6.23, if you don't want the latest version. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/3.6.23/releasenotes/ It was released today as well.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/

64-bit versions have been available for a while if you know where to look (nightly builds). The reason they aren't advertised is because they break 3rd party plugins something awful.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-9.0a1.en-US.win64-x86_64.installer.exe , as linked from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

64bit nightly installer. I've been running it a while now, fairly nice.

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-9.0a1.en-US.win64-x86_64.installer.exe , as linked from http://nightly.mozilla.org/

64bit nightly installer. I've been running it a while now, fairly nice.

It's a real problem but it doesn't affect everyone the same way. Many of the issues are related to extensions holding on to references in long gone tabs and Firefox 7 is the first version that will see results from the MemShrink project (you can read about the details in the wiki).

I've had Firefox break the userspace memory barrier (3gb on windows x64) and becoming slow many times before, mostly because of Firebug.

Tell that to Firefox devs. They keep creating a browser with bugs that allow for that.

Click on a specially crafted page in Firefox... drive by exploit. Couple that with morons who run as root, boom instant botnet. Most botnets are clever enough that when they take over a computer .. they disable OS and browser updates. Noone can fix the machine remotely.

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-29.html

[...........] we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code. [.....]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-26.html

[......]The second crash was the result of an invalid write and could be used to execute arbitrary code. [...]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-12.html

[....]. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.[...]

and these are just a few I picked at random from dozens..

I thought using Firefox was supposed to help guard against all that? Guess not.

Tell that to Firefox devs. They keep creating a browser with bugs that allow for that.

Click on a specially crafted page in Firefox... drive by exploit. Couple that with morons who run as root, boom instant botnet. Most botnets are clever enough that when they take over a computer .. they disable OS and browser updates. Noone can fix the machine remotely.

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-29.html

[...........] we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code. [.....]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-26.html

[......]The second crash was the result of an invalid write and could be used to execute arbitrary code. [...]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-12.html

[....]. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.[...]

and these are just a few I picked at random from dozens..

I thought using Firefox was supposed to help guard against all that? Guess not.

Tell that to Firefox devs. They keep creating a browser with bugs that allow for that.

Click on a specially crafted page in Firefox... drive by exploit. Couple that with morons who run as root, boom instant botnet. Most botnets are clever enough that when they take over a computer .. they disable OS and browser updates. Noone can fix the machine remotely.

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-29.html

[...........] we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code. [.....]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-26.html

[......]The second crash was the result of an invalid write and could be used to execute arbitrary code. [...]

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2011/mfsa2011-12.html

[....]. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.[...]

and these are just a few I picked at random from dozens..

I thought using Firefox was supposed to help guard against all that? Guess not.

That's odd, I was able to view the video in perfect webm just fine without having anything Adobe installed.

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Also, if you're on MS-Windows and using Oracle Java JRE, you can remove webstart and the netscape/msie plugins after install. To check, visit about:plugins or Plugincheck Make sure jnlp files are opened with notepad and jar files with an archiver (or anything except "java.exe -jar"). Any programs written in Java you've installed will still work.

Add to that Cookie Monster to operate in whitelist only mode. (Also supports temporary allows like NoScript which then purges those cookies on restart.)

Also add Better Privacy which I use to simply wipe all non-whitelisted LSOs (flash cookies) on browser stop/start.

Only PITA is forcing myself to restart my browser on a regular basis. With session saving and Tab Kit, it's really not too painful, but still annoying.

Add to that Cookie Monster to operate in whitelist only mode. (Also supports temporary allows like NoScript which then purges those cookies on restart.)

Also add Better Privacy which I use to simply wipe all non-whitelisted LSOs (flash cookies) on browser stop/start.

Only PITA is forcing myself to restart my browser on a regular basis. With session saving and Tab Kit, it's really not too painful, but still annoying.

Add to that Cookie Monster to operate in whitelist only mode. (Also supports temporary allows like NoScript which then purges those cookies on restart.)

Also add Better Privacy which I use to simply wipe all non-whitelisted LSOs (flash cookies) on browser stop/start.

Only PITA is forcing myself to restart my browser on a regular basis. With session saving and Tab Kit, it's really not too painful, but still annoying.

• use the requestpolicy addon; whitelist fbcdn.net on facebook.com only. facebook.com is blacklisted for other domains automatically.
• don't accept third-party cookies
• set cookies and cache to clear when closing the browser (whitelist a couple of sites like slashdot)

The end. No tracking, "evercookies" etc. Even blocks google tracking via google-analytics.

...with a script for Greasemonkey called Unfriend Finder. You have to install Greasemonkey addon for Firefox first.

+1000 been using for two years now, I guess they want to make it for the ~85% of people on IE6....

...with a script for Greasemonkey called Unfriend Finder. You have to install Greasemonkey addon for Firefox first.

HTML5 has worker threads. Javascript does have prototype inheritance.

Hello FF dev,

Please stop trying to change the paradigm and go fix some bugs.

Sincerely,
An ex FF user.

The Provider for Microsoft Exchange works well for me.

Seems they might be fixing that in version 9.

So add a 5th or 6th branch for "FF3", "FF4", etc.

There is one for FF3.6. Firefox 3.6.23 will be released September 27th: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Firefox_3.6.23
This is being maintained due to user pressure, I think. But it is nonetheless.

So what if a fix in FF73 breaks a feature in FF72, as long as the users of FF72 don't upgrade. There was nothing wrong with the old Mozilla plan.

There were more than a few firefox4 betas and in the meantime all new development nearly stopped. The road to even get to a first beta was full of dropped features, nightly versions that were unusable for a long time. And it took years to release......

In the case of Firefox the changes are not that small between FF4 and FF5 for instance, FF4 was a massive change from FF3. I don't know about FF6 because I'm not upgrading to it (I'm clicking "no" on their pop-up spam asking me to upgrade more than once a day to get it out of my face). I'll downgrade to FF3.6 when I get around to it. I know FF3 was slower and sucked up more memory than FF4 but I'd rather have that than support what they have now.

Unless you need FF3.6 because of some internal website or some specific add-on there are no reasons (other than personal preference) to be using 3.6 instead of 6.

Or grab the addon compatibility reporter and ignore the bit about alpha and beta testers, and keep on trucking. It vaguely annoys me that they haven't really publicized that addon yet, because it's saved me a fair lot of annoyance since they accelerated the release process.

Between Firefox 4 and Firefox 6. Are they even doing releases anymore or just bug fixes?