Slashdot Mirror

4. Both removing and restoring IE is risky and difficult. IE is complex with extensive hooks built into Windows, for efficiency and functionality. Thus unplugging it from your system may impact Internet connectivity, Windows functionality, and break functionality in Microsoft Office and non-MS products.
5. IE is more than a browser, it is the foundation for Internet functionality in Windows. If you compare the install base for IE 6 SP1 (43.5MB) to FF (4.5MB), it provides an indication IE is more than just a browser.

For those wondering why this particular version, it is the latest to support FULL msi options http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1380 33 as listed on the official mozillazine forums.

However if the people at DELL had of just gone one more click to the guys full site, they would see the latest MSIs built ready for pre-install or corp rollout needs http://www.frontmotion.com/Firefox/.

Big thanks to "DraconPern" for doing this, OEMer i been working at has been rolling this onto default install for around 14 months now, not had one gripe about bloatware, and quite a few thankyous from people for saveing them the effort :)

Asa Dotzler, who deserves a prize for "Play nice or face extinction. Seriously.", aimed at websites who have the audacity to block people thwarting their advertising revenue model.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2005/0 7/no_respect_for.html

As everyone's experience is different, here is mine:

Before 1.5 I would experience a crash when I was closing the browser and the Talkback client would pop up and I would report the incident. Since 1.5 I this has not happened. I have not experienced any crashes, I do have Talkback enabled, but when looking through my admin logs I see no evidence of a crash of Firefox. Granted it would not crash every time I closed the browser but enough times to be a bit annoying, but since 1.5's release, I have not had these problems. That is on three separate computers, two Win2k boxes and one Win98.

I have noticed an occasional memory leak, but it is not often enough for me to attempt to reproduce. I have different extensions on each machine. I went through the Memory leak thread on the Mozillazine forums and tried most of their recommendations on one of my Win2k boxes. One of my boxes is for webdevelopment, the other for surfing, while the last is with my parents.

I would occasionally check my memory usage before 1.5 and I think I maxed out around 80MB being used while having about 8-10 tabs opened. Since 1.5 I am maxing around 70MB with 8-10 tabs opened. When the browser first loads with about:blank, I am running around 30MB, which I think is normal with a few extensions installed. I have not run into any of these instances when Firefox would run above 100MB. I have noticed when sitting idle it would slowly start climbing in memory usage but it would always level out before 100MB. So nothing seems too outlandish on my machines.

Machines used:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ / Duron 1.3

RAM 1GB / 512MB

Browser cache set to 4MB on both machines.

Cookies are session only.

PDF's are handled by Foxit, so they are not done via plugin, I do have Java and Flash plugins installed.

Win2k / Win2K both updated with latest patches

Different extensions on each, but common ones are:

FireFTP, EditCSS, DownThemAll, Thumbs, Talkback, Flashblock, Nuke Anything, Print It, View Cookies. All running under 1.5.
Also most of my adblocking is done via my hosts file or my router filtering.

Not sure what OS people are running and with what extensions they are running, or what sites they are visiting. But these seem to be variables that could cause a memory leak. So although I can't help with the Memory Leak issues yet, I am having no issues with 1.5 and my experience with it is better than with 1.0.* although I did not have a bad experience with that either.

For the record, currently with two /. tabs opened and a Mozillazine tab, I am running 64MB used for Firefox, at least what is shown in Task Manager.

why isn't anyone asking why ms would want to buy another browser? They have IE all they need to do is fix it.

Well, first off, because they've reached the point of infinite bugs. Every bug they "fix" exposes another bug elsewhere, or breaks another "hack" that was put in to make something else work right.

Secondly, their idea is to eventually drop all browser support, forcing people onto dot.NET (and sticking with Microsoft) for everything. Technologies such as AJAX scare the crap out of them, because they allow people to do their stuff without lock-in. This was the real reason Microsoft had originally dropped the idea of any new browser after 6.0, then had to reconstitute the IE team in June of 2004 because Firefox was really taking off.

Their problem is they can't keep people locked in with their browser any more (people *are* switching), so the browser has outlived its usefulness. Unfortunately for them AJAX came along and put a huge gaping hole below the waterline in their plans for "planned obsolescence" of browsers. Google maps and gmail showed the masses that browsers can support web apps - no need for dot.NET.

If the market is smart (and they appear to be smartening up - are there still people still use IE as their default browser?) we're seeing the other key "lock-in" product - Office - also under fire.

Longhorn/Vista/Whatever will be the final nail in the coffin. If Microsoft thought adoption rates of XP were "disappointing" (and how they couldn't have predicted that, with businesses telling them they didn't want forced upgrades is beyond mortal comprehension) they haven't seen anything yet.

Remember - they make a profit on only 2 products - the OS and Office. Everything else is just there as window dressing or to "get the brand out", or, in the case of the XBOX, "oops - its not as easy as we thought, we need a few billion and a few years more, and MAYBE if we get lucky and nobody else does anything right ...".

Time was, people would get all excited about any new stuff ("oh, wow, Windows 95 - gonna buy me 10 copies"). There's nothing in their 2 core profit centers - Windows and Office - that can't be done with other products. They are almost totally reliant in 3rd-party apps to keep people tied to Windows ... and those 3rd-party apps aren't magically going to break compatability with existing versions of Windows when Vista comes out.

You mention that Netscape 6 was bloated (which was based on Mozilla 1.6, an already bloated piece of software). Then you mention you liked Firebird. Sounds a lot like Ben Goodger (one of the lead engineers for Firefox).

Just thought you might like to know.

No, it's not an overreaction. In fact, it's very simple: images in unsolicited advertisements are evil. Unless I'm searching Froogle, Amazon, or some other product site, and then I get images for the products that turn up in the results, images to advertise anything are inherently evil.

Although I might be saying this because I use Firefox, and Firefox does have that memory leakage with images. Then again, I also can't use any other browser for more than a few minutes before I want to kill -9 it due to the awesomeness that is Adblock Plus and No-Script.

I availed myself of Web Schools from W3C, which is pretty straight from the horses mouth

w3schools.com has nothing to do with the W3C, and from a quick glance at their tutorials, they get a number of things utterly wrong. I think it's pretty sleazy for them to take advantage of the W3C's name to get credibility they don't deserve, especially when they do it to foist a load of adverts and diploma offers on you.

Didn't you think that it was a bit odd to go to a "W3C" tutorial site and read all about code that only works in Internet Explorer? I'm not the only one who doesn't like it. Selected quotes:

"the site's content itself is highly IE centric (W3 my arse, IE-only apis and samples everywhere)."

"It took me a couple of months of correspondance to get them to make a few simple changes to give their SVG (and any SVG written by their readers) a half chance of working in Moz."

"w3schools is a very lacking site."

"They don't even test their simple code samples."

"What good is a school that teaches the wrong content?"

The boxes CSS tutorial you link to is fairly dated now, there have been quite a few improvements to it, and this set of techniques is probably the best approach these days.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q= usercss+firefox

yields as its first result:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=8817 3
which talks about usercss
and http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?co ntentid=181195
talks about EditCSS plugin which apparently makes it easier to edit Usercss, but Firefox isn't exactly promoting this ability.

Still early in development, and I don't know how excited big phone companies would be to use OSS (especially if using an Microsoft OS), but Mozilla has Minimo coming down the pipe. The existing preview builds already work in many Windows Mobile devices.

Sadly, my PDA isn't one of them.

Ben Goodger is being paid by google to work on Firefox... http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/007366 .html

And is supporting them in other ways: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39189475,00.htm

Perhaps they wish to buy (and then bury) the Opera browser?

The Firefox 0.x branch included a separate copy of Gecko 1.7, and some changes were made only in the Firefox branch, leading to slight differences between Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 1.0. The purpose of Mozilla 1.7.5 was to merge the two Gecko 1.7 branches (basically bringing the Suite's version up to speed with the Firefox version), so Mozilla 1.7.5 and up should display sites identically to Firefox 1.0.

Javascript 2 is part of mozilla's roadmap, actually. ^_^ Check out some of Brendan Eich's blog entries.

Javascript 2 is part of mozilla's roadmap, actually. ^_^ Check out some of Brendan Eich's blog entries.

Unfortunately, Firefox 1.5 is also affected by the bug. Granted, it only freezes up and has to be killed manually, so it's not as severe as remote code execution. Still...

For those on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP non Luna, you can get the classic menus back with the classic menus extension at: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_windows_classic Click the "Original site" link.

Perhaps Apple just love Acid?

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2005 _04.html

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3469 26

MozillaZine Forums
Big red letters, you can't miss it: Firefox1.5 is not yet out

Acid2 checks a bunch of relatively obscure cases that had remained unimplemented or incorrectly implemented in every major browser. The intent wasn't to determine a browser's level of CSS support, but to encourage browser vendors to fill in the gaps in their implementations.

At the time it was released, no browser passed it. Since then, Safari, beta versions of iCab, and CVS versions of Konqueror have passed. Opera's in-house development versions are getting very close -- they basically have one bug left. Opera was finalizing the 8.0 release when they developed the test, so they put all the Acid2 effort into 9.0 -- just as Firefox was basically frozen for 1.5, so all of Firefox's Acid2 work is going on in the trunk that will eventually become Firefox 2.0.

It's theoretically possible for one browser to pass Acid2 but actually implement less of CSS than another browser that does not, if the missing features don't impact the rendering of the Acid2 page. Just looking at W3C's CSS Test Suites should give you an idea of how complicated CSS compliance is.

• Are you using the Flash plugin?
• Are you using Sun's Java plugin?
• Why are you complaining here instead of reporting this on the Firefox help forum?

Turns out there's a great answer:

From http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/qa/archives/2005/10 /beta2_candidate_builds_availab.html

[...] try setting the "config.trim_on_minimize" pref to "false"

1. Open new tab.
2. Go to "about:config".
3. Right-click, select New, Boolean.
4. Type the variable name, "config.trim_on_minimize", hit Enter.
5. Type "false", hit Enter.
6. Exit and restart Mozilla.

Now it won't free memory when it minimizes, which it generally takes 30-60 seconds (sometimes longer!) to restore when the user clicks on the task bar icon to bring it back up.

OK, in my grandparent post, s/web browser/web-like XML interface/, but the general point about URL handling remains.

To quote Asa Dotzler,

For those wondering why this is called Firefox 1.5 and not Firefox 1.5 RC2, it's because this is a genuine release candidate. The build you have, if no problems are found, will be Firefox 1.5. If we called it RC2 in the actual client, it wouldn't be a real release candidate because we'd have to make changes to the name and then create new builds.

They haven't officially announced a date, but they are expecting to release 1.5 final by the end of this month. But of course it depends on feedback from testing RC3, sorting out the publicity stuff, localisations, etc etc.

Ah, thanks. I'll check these out...

I read also that there is a python for mozilla firefox in the works (http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/0 08865.html, by Brendan Eich.

Interestinger...

In Linux the GTK only filepicker (right click -> save page/link as) is awful
(IMO). Forcing this change on every Linux user because some folks at red
hat think it is a good idea to more fully comply with Gnome is awful.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3188 60&highlight=filepicker

How about giving those of us that have been using Mozilla for five years a
pref to use the XUL filepicker that we are used to?

I save upwards of 20 files a day and am very used to the defaults the way
they are.

I'm staying with Firefox 1.0.x at this point.

Kindly discuss this sort of things on the appropriate forum (http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23) .

A list of extensions working in 1.5:
http://www.projects1.com/firefox/exthacks/FFnightl yextensions.html

I had the same problems on RC1, but this post on the adblock forum sorted it:

http://aasted.org/adblock/viewtopic.php?t=2264

Also check out this post on Mozillazine:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3208 38&sid=6a88fd3644153617e8c93f553fb29044

Switch to Adblock Plus http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2662 91

I use all of these: (the disabled ones are not compatible with 1.5rc1) Enabled Extensions: [20] - ChatZilla 0.9.68.5.1: http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/chatzilla/ - ColorZilla 0.8.3.1: http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla/ - Console 0.2.5: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3181 02 - CuteMenus - Crystal SVG 0.9.9.20051027: http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic =4360 - DOM Inspector 1.8: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/inspector/ - Download Manager Tweak 0.7: http://dmextension.mozdev.org/ - eReader 0.3: http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Forecastfox 0.8.2.4: http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/ - FoxyTunes 1.1.5.3: http://www.foxytunes.org/firefox/ - FoxyTunes Skin - OnyxOrbs 1.14: http://www.foxytunes.org/firefox/skins/index.php?s kin=9 - GooglePreview 1.1.2: http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview/ - MR Tech Local Install 4.0: http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/ - Right Encoding 0.2.1: http://heygom.com/extensions/ - ShowIP 0.7.11: http://l4x.org/showip - Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.7: http://216.55.161.203/theonekea/tabprefs/ - Talkback 1.5: http://talkback.mozilla.org/ - Translate 0.6.0.8: http://ctomer.com/ - x 0.6.3: http://cdn.mozdev.org/ - x.xpi : http://www.google.com/search?q=x.xpi - About Firefox: Soviet Edition 2005.0606.1555: http://mithgol.ru/Mozilla/Firefox/ Disabled Extensions: [9] - Bandwidth Tester 0.5.5: http://www.roundtwo.com/product/bandwidthtester - Customizable Toolbar Buttons 0.1.5: http://www.google.com/search?q=Customizable%20Tool bar%20Buttons - fireFTP 0.88.3: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ - Launchy 4.0.0: http://gemal.dk/mozilla/launchy.html - Leet Key 0.4.4: http://leetkey.mozdev.org/ - PONG! 2.16: http://www.captaincaveman.nl/ - ReloadEvery 0.6.1: http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/ - Tab Mix 0.2.2.3: http://tabmix.blogspot.com/ - Tab X 0.9.1: http://clav.mozdev.org/

"Users of Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 will be offered RC1 through the software update system. More details can be found in the Firefox 1.5 RC1 Release Notes."

Quote from mozillazine

It also passes the International Color Consortium ICC version 4 test again, which also worked on Safari 1.3. Prior to Safari 2.0.2, Safari 2.x only passed ICC version 2 test.

Javascript speed seems a hair faster and gives Opera a good run.

Javascript benchmark

Mac Mini 1.25 GHz w/ 512MB RAM
OS___________Version _______Trial 1_________Trial 2
Mac OSX 10.3.8 Safari v1.2.4___ 85.28 seconds___86.28 seconds
Mac OSX 10.3.9 Safari v1.3____ 10.97 seconds___10.39 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.0 Safari v2.0____ 09.48 seconds___09.30 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Safari v2.0.1___ 09.41 seconds___09.07 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Safari v2.0.2___ 08.41 seconds___08.54 seconds

iMac G5 1.8 GHz w/1GB RAM
OS___________Version _________________Trial 1_________Trial 2
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Opera 8.5__________ 07.45 seconds___07.39 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.3 Safari 2.0.2_________ 08.51 seconds___08.79 seconds

Mac OSX 10.4.2 Opera 8.5__________ 07.31 seconds___07.88 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Safari 2.0.1_________ 09.02 seconds___09.12 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Camino 0.8.4_______ 15.13 seconds___15.33 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Firefox 1.0.7________ 21.04 seconds___20.84 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Internet Explorer 5.2.3 40.87 seconds___36.94 seconds
Mac OSX 10.4.2 Mozilla 1.7.12_______ 44.11 seconds___43.54 seconds

Mail.app 2.0.5 fixes the annoying problem with replicating new messages twice or thrice for IMAP email.

Get Info and Finder now shows Architecture the application binary runs on. Guess this will help with the transition to x86 to identify which applications are PowerPC only or Universal. I assume people aren't going to be writing exclusively for Intel X86 Mac OS X applications for a long time.

The bad:

Quartz 2D Extreme is still not part of Tiger. Hopefully it will make it in Leopard.

"Disables Quartz 2D Extreme--Quartz 2D Extreme is not a supported feature in Tiger, and re-enabling it may lead to video redraw issues or kernel panics."

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2005/0 9/extension_revving_for_firefox.html
This isnt exactly what I meant to reference in my previous post, but it still may shed some light on the subject.

# ls -l firefox-1.5rc1.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 habarnam habarnam 8442030 Nov 2 15:28 firefox-1.5rc1.tar.gz

There were no plans to make 1.5 pass the Acid2 test. Firefox 1.5 is based on Gecko 1.8. Firefox trunk builds have made some progress as can be seen in bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=198232 part of bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480.

There were no plans to make 1.5 pass the Acid2 test. Firefox 1.5 is based on Gecko 1.8. Firefox trunk builds have made some progress as can be seen in bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=198232 part of bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480.

The first point, at least, may be possible with an extension. See here. It's still alpha-ish, though, I think.

>Hopefully this is just the result of issues in beta 2 and older profiles, rather than an indicator of problems in the AutoUpdate code.

What does that matter if it is dysfunctional in certain situations.

A bug means that it does not perform as expected.

File a message in the 'bugs' forum:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/ (or bugzilla)

--Sam

When the Justice Department and other anti-trust parties asked Microsoft to separate IE from the OS, Microsoft said the same thing on withdrawing Windows 98/2000 running out there. Well, back then Desktop Linux wasn't ready to challenge it (remember, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla/Firefox didn't reach 1.0 until 2002).

Now, Microsoft wants to pull the same feat again; should Korean government back down? Hmm, tough call. But if I were to make IT procurement decision for Korean government, it should be a sign that they should NOT upgrade to Windows Vista and instead forming a task force to strengthen desktop Linux development. No government should be prey to a mega-corporation of this type of blackmail. They are already striving to support Firefox/W3C standard in all government websites, maybe it's time to consider go further than that.

Hilarious: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3339 72

It would be revolutionary if web browsers in general could break the monopoly of JavaScript and introduce other script languages (python, ruby,...) on the client side.

See this mozillazine article. The counter doesn't include downloads from the software update system.

According to this page http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2062 15 the problem was "incorrect coding on the web page itself. If the type attribute is not specified as "audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin" in the html embed or object tag, ra, rm and ram file types will not play."

Ir provides you with a link to a modified problem that get's around this problem.

Anyway I installed the latest version of realalt 1.43 (which contains the modified plugin) and it works in FF fine now. IE now back to its one true use.

It's time to ditch that realplayer.

I am curious if there is some other method that you use, or if that's it.

I would love to be able to use Thunderbird. It is really neat, has some nice features, and is easy to use. But (mostly) because of the HTML based e-mails, I simply can't.

Then set Thunderbird to display the message body as text. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plain_text_e-mail_(Thund erbird)

And although this really shouldn't be necessary on /. - here are instructions for finding your profile.

MT Tech's local install is what you want.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1839 67

The first I heard about "Rome" was right now, on this story.

You mean you weren't one of us real geeks who sat repeatedly hitting refresh on the HBO site, waiting to download the exciting new ROME Firefox skin the moment it became available? 'Cos that's what all us hotgrit^H^H^H^H^H^Hardcore nerds were doing thoughout the heady month of August.

Speeding up Acrobat 6 by disabling (unneeded) plugins:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2005 5
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2347

It's also worth noting that when you start Acrobat/Acrobat Reader, by default it phones home to check for application and plugin updates. You can block the application from getting 'net access, but in comparison to the plugin issue, this delay is so minor, why bother worrying about it?