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Firefox crashes for you? Read the MozillaZine Knowledge Base article about Firefox crashes and you can probably fix your problem.

Apple's hardware is generally very well-designed, and their software is solid on Macs, but they can't seem to write a decent Windows program to save their lives.

This should be fun...

For example: why does iTunes run the iPod service even when iTunes isn't running and even though I've never used an iPod?

Because they figure if you're installing iTunes on Windows, it's because you purchased an iPod? It's a daemon. They want iTunes to launch anytime you connect an iPod, whether it's your iPod or not. I doubt keeping an ear out for an iPod connection is that resource intensive. Perhaps you should look for other background apps that are real resource hogs... Google Desktop indexing, virus scanning products, spyware of any sort, etc.

Why does Quicktime automatically have your browser open MP3s in Quicktime instead of downloading them (and not give you the option of turning this "feature" off?)

Just change your QuickTime browser plugin settings If your browser was saving to disk, no plugin was registered to handle that file type. QuickTime just steps up because nothing else is doing the job. Feel free to disable that.

Why do Apple programs "break" the usual look and feel of Windows programs?

You gotta be joking right?? Windows look and feel? LOL... Besides, Apple gets lots of shit about not even sticking to their own user interface guidelines these days. Why would they bother to be any more consistent on a Microsoft OS?

Honestly, this isn't rocket science here. How hard would it have been to recompile the iPhone software for a 64-bit machine?

Actually, computer science is a little harder than that. Not every app is coded in a high level language like Java or Python. Some folks still need to use C to get low level access for performance critical operations. In some cases, if you don't code with 64 bit in mind, you're app is going to be broken. You can just throw in a 64 bit compiler flag and expect everything to just work. Be great if you could, but it doesn't always work that way.

what you're describing sounds a lot like what they wanted to do with XUL Runner. Each mozilla app could be packaged as a plugin for XUL Runner. So, you would have XUL Runner installed and then you could just download and install the firefox plugin, the thunderbird plugin, the sunbird plugin, etc... They had scheduled this for firefox 3, but it looks like it's not going to happen at least for now.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2 007/05/xul_and_xulrunner_investment.html

Getting off topic a little, but I'm surprised that during all the recent talk of Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX, no one brought up XUL or WebKit as an alternative to a rich application framework(don't know what else to call them...). Neither of these is that ready to compete (mainly because of multimedia issues) with flash and silverlight, but they're no less ready than JavaFX at the least.

Please post both problems on the Firefox Bugs forum at MozillaZine. I cannot test because I don't have access to a Mac, nor can I access your custom app. You'll need to write up a testcase for others to see that page loading problem for someone to write up a bug report about it. Thanks for helping!

No, the iTunes Store does *not* use WebKit. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004 _06.html#005666

The bundling is awful. The only technically required bundling is QuickTime with iTunes, since iTunes depends on QuickTime. At least now it's fairly public what you get - I remember when you had to hunt around for the "QuickTime only" link. Those kinds of tricks aren't just Microsoft-bad, they're Real-bad. ;)

Safari for Windows is a blessing for web developers. Up until early June, three of the four most used browsers were available on Windows (IE, Firefox and Opera), but the third most used (Safari) wasn't. The more browsers are available and popular on Windows, the more people will finally understand that "standards-compatible" doesn't mean "works like IE". Building for standards, checking in each browser and then doing horrible hacks you wish you didn't have to do to make it work in IE is a better way than the old and broken way: building for IE, checking in the other browsers and sighing about the other browsers not being standards compliant. (I wish I had a nickel for every time someone gave me that crap.)

I'm a Mac OS X user. Firefox is great on Windows, but on Mac OS X it's sticking out like a sore thumb, and it's much slower than the other alternatives. My primary browser is OmniWeb, which uses a variant of WebKit and offers and pioneered some interesting functionality like site-specific settings, a vertical list of tabs with thumbnails, workspaces where sets of windows and tabs are persisted. Even if OmniWeb is an odd choice - it costs money! my god! I must be a complete moron! - almost no one I know use Safari because of the wide ecosystem of good browsers, like Firefox, Camino (a Cocoa app embedding Gecko), Shiira (an alternative WebKit browser) and OmniWeb. Safari has never been considered really good against this background, but it's starting to turn competent in 3.0. Inline Find, draggable (and de/re-attachable) tabs and something as simple as asking when you quit and have tabs open and finally, only took them four damn years, AppleScript tab support means Apple has done a lot of basic tackling and is really listening to people beyond gluing on RSS support and working on WebKit alone. I had almost given up hope.

Well if you go back a bit they reached this number more than twice as quickly as Firefox did with their Fahrenheit 1 million campaign.

I think you're thinking of the RC releases. 1 million people downloaded FF 1.0 on the first day of release.

Firefox 2 changed the way the cookie preferences worked. You can only choose to allow or disallow all cookies through the options menu. To actually block just 3rd party cookies the way you could in 1.5, you have to fool around with obscure about:config settings.

Set network.cookie.cookieBehavior to "1"

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.cookie.cookieBeh avior

Quicktime is not ugly, it is well architected. Where do you get this?
Windows isn't friendly to Quicktime, and that's an understatement.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2062 10
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=607 65
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304 405

since the iphone is based on safari, you will be getting more than your usual ajax (read javascript + simple networking). Most ajax apps cater to the lowest common denominator of internet explorer.

Webkit on the other hand exposes a number of features such as raster graphics (through the canvas tag), slider controls, composite image attribute, search fields (see http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004 _07.html). If you look at dashboard widgets they are quite a bit more advanced than most ajax stuff.

Apple seems to be just wrapping a bunch of cocoa API's and exposing them through javascript, so if they continue this trend in future revisions of Webkit, javascript will become an increasingly attractive platform for application development. It will, however, never be as *fast* or as lean in memory usage as an objective-c application; however, this is not a concern for many applications.

Additionally, I do suspect that apple will eventually release an SDK complete with objective-c crosscompiler for iPhone. They probably don't want to release such a thing in the first iteration, as they are worried about settling on things like ABI's and API's for multitouch. Probably some of the input handling code in the initial apps were hacked together pretty quickly for a quick release and it will take some time to factor out a reasonable class library. They may also want to build some kind of sandbox for security purposes, or they may just want to make people write applications in java.

Yeah, only. You can get Opera and IE to use more memory than that within just hours.

There's most definitely memory leaks there. Even the memory leak detecting extension popped up for me so often that I had to uninstall it.

So here's a promise about threads, one that I will keep or else buy someone a trip to New Zealand and Australia (or should I say, a trip here for those over there): JS3 will be ready for the multicore desktop workload.

I'm not very clueful on such matters, but it seems like maybe the most important statement is:

A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support. In all the fast yet maintainable MT systems I've built or worked on, the key idea (which Will Clinger stated clearly to me over lunch last fall) is to separate the mutable unshared data from the immutable shared data. Do that well, with language and VM support, and threads become what they should be: not an abstraction violator from hell, but a scaling device that can be composed with existing abstractions.

The ultimate reason why Linus dislikes SVN, CVS, etc. is that it is centralized. Everyone checks out source from a central server and commits their changes to the same centralized area. This has problems: your workspace is not versioned. By this I mean, you cannot track local changes to your workspace without committing them to the central server.

A common pattern in development is to try one approach, test it, tweak it, and possibly try another approach if the first did not work out, perhaps reverting to a prior approach. With decentralized version control, you can commit your changes to a local repository and work from there. All the locally changes you make are versioned, and be committed, checked out, examined all without contacting a central repository. This is ideal, because you often want to try various options to find the one that works best, before pushing your changes to the rest of the world. In centralized version control, you can use a branch for this purpose, but often branches in these systems are difficult to either create, merge, or maintain, so they are rarely used. The end result is that with centralized version control, developers version their workspace in their head. DVCS systems remove the mental burden.

Fortunately, FOSS developers are realizing the usefulness of DVCS and major projects are converting to some form of DVCS. Mozilla is switching to Mercurial. The Pidgin project, which just released 2.0.1, is using Monotone. (Linus favorably mentioned both of these distributed version control systems in his Git talk, as they are both are distributed).

Once you accept that DVCS is better than the centralized model (which may not be true for some situations), only a few (but growing number of) version control systems are viable. This is currently a hot area in open source development, with software such as GNU Arch, Monotone, Mercurial, Git, Darcs, Bazaar, and more paving the way. Many open source DVCS's are still in development and not ready for general usage. I can't speak for Mercurial, but Monotone doesn't have the greatest performance, instead preferring integrity over speed. This led Linus to write git, since speed is very crucial for a large project like the Linux kernel.

Whatever the actual program (git, Mercuial, or Monotone), more and more open source developers are realizing the advantages that distributed version control can offer. I encourage all developers that haven't used any DVCS to try it -- once you do, you won't go back.

http://www.mozillazine.org/about/

Why is is that when I click the on the main slashdot page, it takes ages and hangs...

My question is simple: Is there good, concise documentation of the about:config page and its options?

Yes.

If yes, where is it and is there an an easy why to find it?

MozillaZine Knowledge Base Article on about:config entries

It is the first page Google finds when you search for "about:config". I'll let you decide whether that's easy to find.

If no, why not? If this is all about choice, should people be able to learn about their choices?

"If the tweaks are worth doing, shouldn't they have first-class support in the main configuration GUI?" - by DoofusOfDeath (636671) on Tuesday May 29, @08:08PM (#19316193)

If how it is currently in FF is not to your liking? Then, I suppose you should try FIRETUNE:

http://www.totalidea.com/content/firetune/firetune -index.html

If you want "GUI point-N-click easy" for tuning FireFox then I suppose... it works well!

APK

P.S.=> I've used it over many versions of FireFox & it has yet to 'screw me up' & iirc, it is based off of this page @ "the horses mouth" here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

Which is in & of itself, a great reference to the settings in the "about:config" url in FF!

apk

" http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries " - by wizardforce (1005805) on Tuesday May 29, @08:10PM (#19316205)

Nice link! Good reference point for understanding... but, there is something based on it that does the job, so consider it, & it's called "FireTune"!

(After all, it's doing the tweaks/tunings manually using that page (a good idea, so you can understand what it is that is being tweaked/tuned) & notepad (or in FF itself) OR, just use "FIRETUNE":

http://www.totalidea.com/content/firetune/firetune -index.html

As it makes short work of doing ANY tweaking to FireFox, & it works (GUI point-N-click easy).

APK

P.S.=> FireTune is based off of the materials on that page you pointed out & it has yet to "mess up firefox" on me thru I don't know HOW MANY VERSIONS... good stuff, try it out! apk

Some of FF's default settings change depending on how much ram you have, like this one:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.m ax_total_viewers

You could try searching for such settings and turning them back down 1-gig-of-ram levels.

about:config options related to the Firefox UI (e.g. tabs, but also other features that necessarily have a different implementation) will generally have no effect in Camino. The reason they show up at all is that purging them would be a lot of work. However, most options dealing with page rendering, javascript, etc. work the same across all Mozilla browsers. As for the missing browser.tabs.closeButtons (and undoubtedly others), the latest Camino release is from a branch made long before the introduction of said options.

The list of about:config entries has lots of info on what the various options do, and some of the detail pages specify whether the pref has an effect in Camino. I can't vouch for the thoroughness of the "has an effect in" sections however, and AFAIK there's no list dealing just with Camino-compatible prefs.

And how many of these Firefox parameters are like SL:BB?

Last time I checked, a web browser should never require the absolute latest system for day-to-day operations

I agree, this "article" is utterly retarded drivel written by a windows ricer.

Funnily enough I saw this just today.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

1) Are you saying sqllite is already in firefox 2.0? I haven't looked at the source code for firefox 2, though I use it, but it would be news to me.

The current implementation keeps bookmarks.html in sync with the sqlite bookmarks database. See Places bookmarks have landed! for details. Most notably from that post is this tidbit.

I don't install Flash in Firefox, but I routinely reach 200MB use by the end of the day with an average of about four tabs open; I've only had it running today for about 2.5 hours and it's at 135MB.

How to fix firefox. http://www.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/domain-guessi ng.html http://kb.mozillazine.org/Keyword.enabled Short answer is... Disable: browser.fixup.alternate.enabled keyword.enabled

Sure.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/archives/2 007/01/the_mozilla_foundation_achievi.html

- A

You can't fix what you don't acknowledge. How convenient for you.

The problem seems to be the same problem users complain about on the Opera forums with Opera.

Mac OS X provides spellchecking services automatically

I do wish Windows would do this, especially if they would repurpose the Word spell check code. It gives pretty good suggestions almost all the time and very good suggestions not uncommonly; Firefox not only has a really shitty dictionary (missing, for instance, "repurpose" and even "okay"), but tends to be very unhelpful with suggestions.

I don't get it, because, for instance, ispell is an OSS spell checker that works really well. This post seems to indicate that they know about the problem but can't fix it because of licensing...

It's no coincidence that the Reducing memory usage article mentions extensions, themes, and plugins as the main source of memory problems for Firefox users.

Try some of the suggestions in the Knowledge Base:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Try some of the suggestions in the Knowledge Base:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Try some of the suggestions in the Knowledge Base:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_hangs
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

How can it be that storing visited pages takes so much memory that it only makes sense with more than 1GB of RAM?

Better yet, try the browser memory benchmark, which shows that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Opera 9 or IE 7. Again, now it's up to someone else to explain or demonstrate what Firefox's horrendous memory problem is. I still don't know anything about it yet, and apparently neither does anyone else.

I use Flash Shockwave and Shockwave for Director plugins all the time, and I never see the problem you're referring to. Did it ever occur to you that most other users don't see the problem, and that it could be a problem with your installation? Try looking in the Knowledge Base for a solution to your problem.

Anyone with any serious skills, history in the industry, or not really in need of a job is not going to (probably wouldn't legally be able to, due to conflicting contractual obligations, say if they were an author or regular speaker for conferences) agree to this.
Looks like Google is on their way to being yet another mindless company run by lawyers for wall street.
Kind of explains why the google toolbar and browser sync are such memory leaking, system crashing , pigs.

You may want to try creating a new profile. That quite often fixes serious problems. If that doesn't help much, try the standard diagnostic, including a clean reinstall of the latest stable version of Firefox from downloaded from mozilla.org. It certainly sounds like something is borked on your computer if you're regularly seeing memory usage that high.

You may want to try creating a new profile. That quite often fixes serious problems. If that doesn't help much, try the standard diagnostic, including a clean reinstall of the latest stable version of Firefox from downloaded from mozilla.org. It certainly sounds like something is borked on your computer if you're regularly seeing memory usage that high.

keyconfig should be able to do what you want. Of course, staying with Opera is a valid option too; choice is good. But Firefox is not Opera, nor is Opera Firefox. :) (So "make it be exactly the same as Opera" isn't exactly something they can do)

Help->Mozilla Thunderbird Help -> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders.

First paragraph:

To compact all folders in an account, click the account on the left, and then click "File -> Compact Folders". Compacting an account may take from a few seconds to 20 minutes or more, depending on how much mail you have and how recently you last compacted the folders. If you have trouble doing this and the process stalls, try compacting one folder at a time by right-clicking on the folder and choosing "Compact This Folder".

Is this too deep...?

Cheers,
Richard

• Automatically place my replies to messages in the same folder as the message I'm replying to.

From the much more detailed summary from the Rumbling Edge, 301084: Option to file replies in folder of original message is fixed.