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I'm not saying that this is really comparable to IE's group policy settings, but it's actually possible to lock down Firefox through GP without any add-ons. Firefox can take configuration defaults and lockdown instructions from two files placed in the same folder as the executable. At that point it's a simple matter of writing the files and then deploying them using GP or even a login script.

Somewhat harder than IE, but definitely not a non-starter.

You can actually lock down anything that is configurable from about:config. It's pretty cool. See here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences

self-signed

The problem with "signed" is that the NSA can self sign too. You know you're talking to exactly one person, but who is that one person? Keyservers don't save you, the NSA just sets up shop one hop up from the keyserver and gives you whatever key they want you to get. Signing authorities aren't helping either, they're happy to sign for whoever hands them the cash, and that's not always even the NSA.

The other problem with self-signed email is that nobody appears to have bothered documenting how to do that with openssl. It's easy to get a signed certificate from somewhere else, you just open your browser (?!) go to their webpage https://nsa.keymaster.com/mail_cert.jsp get a certain header that causes your browser (?!) to create a private key and a CSR, then send the CSR to the server where its signed and returns a certificate, that the browser can then export to be imported to your mail client. Even Mozilla's page on s/mime links to a generic google search "how to create a self signed certificate" which is great if you want to use it on a webserver. Your self signed cert is not valid in any mail client, though, even if you've already registered your CA, because there's some flags on the cert that says not to use it for email. The magic incantation to create an email certificate is left as an exercise in frustration and obtuse commandline arguments.

So set a Master Password: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-master-password-protect-stored-logins
More here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Master_password

Almost no users actually use this: http://monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com/2013/02/cant-live-with-them-cant-live-without.html
"....can be solved somewhat with master password, but only 1 out of 12K users had master password enabled"

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Permissions.default.image

Important work on Firefox doesn't get done, like providing an easy way to log out from the master password.

This is how it is done now:

If you supply the Master Password in the popup window that you see if a master password is needed, then you log in to the Software Security Device (Firefox uses: "Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Encryption: Certificates: Security Devices: Software Security Device"). If you select the Software Security Device then you notice an enabled "Log Out" button if you are logged on, otherwise the "Log In" button is enabled in that window. Access to the encrypted names and passwords is possible as long as you are logged on to the Software Security Device and you need to log out to prevent others from accessing that data if you leave your computer unattended. "Tools > Clear Private Data: Authenticated sessions" does the same, but also additionally will log you out of secure web sites. You may need to clear the cookies to log out of other sites.

Also, I don't have "Tools > Clear Private Data". Do you?

I agree and dislike this behaviour.

Fortunately others do too and there's a good addon already available:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=2141579

Kinda sucks having to get one just to hide the tab bar, but works well enough so far.

According to recent comments (continued on the next day's thread), the win32 compiler that Mozilla use is approaching the 4GB limit, after which LibXUL (which Firefox depends upon) will no longer compile.

It's currently at 3.5GB, and at the current rate, will reach the limit in approximately 6 months: Chart of memory usage of LibXUL during last 90 days

Well that's easily solvable, just run a PAE kernel... oh, wait...

According to recent comments (continued on the next day's thread), the win32 compiler that Mozilla use is approaching the 4GB limit, after which LibXUL (which Firefox depends upon) will no longer compile.

It's currently at 3.5GB, and at the current rate, will reach the limit in approximately 6 months: Chart of memory usage of LibXUL during last 90 days

While I think that Servo will produce a more decentralised design than Gecko and XUL, the memory limit will be reached well before that. With Windows XP support ending next year, Mozilla should consider migrating to x64 as soon as reasonably possible, keeping x32, but focusing on stripping large and extraneous code above new features.

Looked at the location bar... shed a tear for my "http://"

You can disable that by going to about:config and setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false.

It's old, but still a pain. Remember when Stop had a separate button?

There's always been a separate stop button, you just have to customize the toolbar so that the stop button is ordered before the reload button, otherwise it "combines" them into a single reload/stop button. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2142587

Basically you right click the toolbar, select customize, then drag the stop button to the left of the reload button, and viola... separate buttons (yes it's retarded).

I love java, and about a year ago starting writing little programs in java, although I usually turn javascript off in the browser or run noscript.

lot of people tend to think javascript == java but it's 2 different creatures all together. http://kb.mozillazine.org/JavaScript_is_not_Java

I've made a few little fun gadgets for personal use, a winamp type clone using the jlayer library to stream shoutcast/icecast stations as well as my own playlists. Spent weeks learning java swing mainly manually before I started playing with Eclipse windowbuilder plugin for swing/awt/etc. the windowbuilder plugin made it so simple for me to make my little winamp clone skinnable. :)

course i've spent a year or little more learning Java and have just now started playing with opengl 3d graphics but can't make up my mind which opengl library I like best yet, so far I've played around with JOGL and LWJGL, which I think are the 2 most popular libraries, Minecraft and most the indie steam games use LWJGL.
So I've sorta been sticking with it.

Anyhow you have the option to uninstall Java browser plugin and just keep the SDK installed, but I usually just disable it in browser just in case I ever do come across a need for it I can enable it for a specific site if need be.

Hopefully this will mean a complete rewrite of their click-to-play setup, including fixing this incredibly annoying misfeature of Firefox 19:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=2644157
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=820678

As far as I can tell, this whole aspect of firefox was never designed properly. It grew into an unmaintainable mess, and now they're having a hard time finding their way out.

http://noscript.net/faq#qa1_3

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=1586359&highlight=flashblock+noscript#1586359

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/faq.html#fbNojavascript

But anyway I think the real problem with noscript is the untrustworthy behavior of its author.

Let me know when zoom using the scroll wheel can be made to work in Autocad on Winodws 7 Dell laptops, without (regularly) disabling the scroll-bars.

Assuming you're trying to zoom/scroll using the touchpad, this is a problem I've fought with the Synaptics driver for years. I came across this solution:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1524405

Where using

taskkill /im SynTPEnh.exe

added to startup fixes the problem.

Apparently it was implemented for compatability with IE (Why????) but at least it can be turned off.

I use it constantly on both linux and windows. Only time i use firefox is the rare case when something doesn't render properly in seamonkey.

Sometimes extensions will be nominally incompatible, but there may be workarounds, or you may just get a link to xpi file and it will just work. For example, this will make flashblock work with seamonkey:

http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

I also use:

• flashgot
• ABP
• https everywhere
• noscript

They work with no changes.

From what I have seen seamonkey has not benefitted so much from the newer JS improvements in firefox. This may be accountable for some overall performance loss, as much of the mozilla interface is dependent on JS i believe. But my info may be out of date as I'm running behind a few minor revisions.

The number one reason I use seamonkey is retaining the status bar. That's where some of my permanent extension icons live, so I need it.

Also, linux users see here to fix middle click behavior.

Anyone else remember when browser preference windows actually had a "load images" option, which you turned off sometimes? And remember when it wasn't even a checkbox, but a three-way switch, where the middle one was something along the lines of only loading images from the same domain as the page?

Naturally, with current tech, this switch is not just applied to images, but any other external resource, such as scripts or iframe or SWFs or .. hey, wait a minute. I can't find this browser preference at all!

Chrome: not there. Safari: not there. Firefox: not there, seriously?! Et tu, Firefox?

The setting's still there. There's just no configuration ui; Ff has gone the motherfucking GNOME route, only it's about:config instead of gconf-editor.

Last time i checked it eats less memory than chrome and i haven't seen anybody complaining about chrome being a hog

Firefox calculates the size of cache for back button and shit based on the amount of RAM available. Go to about:config and change it if you don't like it
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

Modern websites are running ridiculous amounts of javascript, huge flash objects and what not. about:memory claims that the single tab with main page of fb (no content on the wall/newsfeed, not subscribed to anybody) sits at 40M (no idea what it contains). Some pages are bundled with so much crap that NoScript showing the list of 3rd party jscript sources doesn't fit in 1200px high monitor. NoScript is a must.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=491557

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved#User.js_file_locks_certain_preferences

  Maybe that is it. Google was used.
about:config settings not saved

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=491557

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Preferences_not_saved#User.js_file_locks_certain_preferences

  Maybe that is it. Google was used.
about:config settings not saved

The problem with Thunderbird is you can't push tasks to other people, which would probably be the #1 thing you want to do in a small business (delegation).

Seems like that's possible - just a matter of assigning which calendar it goes on, and with Lightening you can have multiple calendars. Of course, you might run into the issue where the Calendar software you are using doesn't support tasks. There is a bug open for Google Calendar Task Support though...and there is a plug-in - haven't tried it though.

That said, as a small business you're probably not doing a lot of that stuff on-line - you're probably doing it mostly in meetings where things will be a lot more fluid depending on needs, etc and you don't likely have a secretary that can go in and update everyone's electronic copies. So it's probably more productive to not do the on-line task management thing regardless of what you're using.

Then, as a admin: about:config app.update.auto = false

I wish they'd just get it over with and fully disown Thunderbird so that others who do give a damn can do something with it.

You seem rather unclear on the concept of open source. Anyone who cares can contribute to Thunderbird development. Anyone who has a better idea for its direction can take the code and fork it, even turn it back into a commercial product. And they have, there's a list of e-mail clients based on Thunderbird on Wikipedia, one of which is Postbox for $30.

Only in the minds of entitled armchair whiners does Mozilla paying salaries for Thunderbird engineers and even a messaging team for years somehow equate to "not giving a damn." The reality is there's little interest and clearly no money in a standalone e-mail client, and it's somewhat tangential to Mozilla's mission. As users moved to web mail and ISP-provided clients, Mozilla's various experiments to do cool collaborative and communication things with Thunderbird didn't have much impact.

(I've used the SeaMonkey browser-editor-mail-IRC suite since it was Netscape Navigator 2.0. SeaMonkey 2.11 remains a solid useful product with all the performance and memory wins of recent Firefox, and I really appreciate the talented few who keep it going with the aid of Mozilla's infrastructure.)

I know:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=1708

So, how do I stop Firefox from syncing except when I hit CTRL-D?

For starters, you should disable Session Restore and the Awesome Bar. Both of these features are 'auto-saving' and probably require I/O. I would then start experimenting with something like strace -e trace=sync,fsync,fdatasync and looking at stack traces to find further configuration options which can be disabled. Disclaimer: I have not tried this, as I don't have a Linux desktop at the moment. You may need to use ltrace for fsync/fdatasync.

The other way around? Google started promoting Firefox because they were the default search engine in Firefox, and it was a way to combat IE. Then Firefox started growing thanks to, among other things, being aggressively pushed by Google.

For the $1 thing, I found this with a quick Google search. And from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Instead of a dedicated extension you can use Greasemonkey to add a button and register a protocol to call the script.

Every time someone talks about Firefox instability, someone else gives excuses. In this case, Mozilla Foundation changed the Firefox version number more than once a month and broke a lot of the extensions. That should not be listed as an excuse, as the parent comment does, it should be listed as a fault of Mozilla Foundation management.

Mozilla Foundation
Top 20 Excuses
for Not Fixing the
Firefox Memory and CPU Hogging bugs

These are actual excuses given at one time or another. They are not all the excuses, just the top 20.

1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build. [The same memory and CPU hogging bug has been reported many, many times over a period of seven years.]

2) Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important. [The bug eventually takes 100% of CPU power, and makes Windows XP unusable, even after Firefox is killed. The bug affects the heaviest users of Firefox.]

3) Yes, this bug exists, but it is not a common occurrence. [Numerous users have reported the bug. See the links.]

4) Works for me. [The bug is complicated to reproduce, so the developers did a simplified test, which didn't show the bug.]

5) No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated. TalkBack does not generate a report if Firefox is hogging the CPU. TalkBack cannot generate a report if the bug takes 100% of the CPU time.]

6) If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug. [They didn't bother to reproduce the bug using the detailed information provided.]

7) This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]

8) You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash any version of Opera.]

9) I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, he didn't read it or think about it.]

10) You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. [Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.]

11) Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.

12) If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.]

13) Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]

14) Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile. [The same bug has been reported many times over a period of five years. One of the reports discusses an extensive test in both Linux and Windows that used a completely clean installation of the operating systems, not just a clean profile. The CPU hogging bug and instability was just as severe.]

15) If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours (or days) trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox. [Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics". It has become accepted that some users will have severe problems. !!! ]

16) I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some complicated technical speculation. [This pretends to be helpful but, on investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.]

17) It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users report so many problems.

18) To spend smart developers' time going over reports of bugs generated by analysis tools would be a waste. [There have been 3 anal

Yes, it's 1%. Back in 2009, there were ~270 million Firefox users. Only 150 thousand of them care about the status bar.

Given that not even 1% of Firefox users care about the status bar, I think the UI designers are entirely correct to say to say, quote, "fuck you, you exceptionally whiny bitches."

I don't do much to manage them; it's more due to neglect than anything else.

They were in about eight browser windows spread across 2 displays and several virtual workspaces, on a work machine. It has ample RAM for development and running VMs so space wasn't an issue. The tabs were the usual mixture of issue tracker tickets, related wiki pages, google searches, relevant mail-list posts or blog pages, and things to read "when I have a spare minute". I just opened tabs far more often than I sorted through or closed them, and after a few months they'd collected.

Finding tabs wasn't particularly hard, thanks mostly to the fact that the so called "awsome bar" autocompletes on open tabs (in fact with the % shortcut it completes against just open tabs). Performance didn't seem particularly poor either. Maybe slightly less snappy, but not noticeably so.

I only realised how many tabs I had when an add-on started leaking memory in large amounts. While tracing down what was causing the leak, I was copying the info from about:memory and using the "copy tab URLs" extension to export lists of what was open. I was rather surprised, but very impressed with firefox, when I ran it through wc. Though I did then spent a whole afternoon reading/closing/bookmarking until I brought the count down to double figures.

I have seen some discussion by firefox devs on blurring the line between tabs and history. Once the (already planned functionality) to evict non-recently-used tabs from memory is in place, the distinction between tabs and history item becomes mostly a matter of UI anyway. I think that rather fits my disorganised browser usage.

This is still reactive damage control to foolish arrogance by Asa "we don't give a crap about enterprises" Dotzler. That's what you get why you hire a fanboy to become the voice of your company.

Indeed. Let me provide a link to go with your insight.

By the way is the about box still showing the version number?, I'm still on 3.6.

Many took this as charity, and for the purpose of advancing the web.

Which is absurd. Chrome and Firefox are competing for the same users. Chrome helps Google display ads by directing users to Google services, such as with searches in the address bar. Google and Mozilla are competitors. Remember, you are the product, and advertisers are Google's customers.

David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS, had a more likely hypothesis, which is that Google is protecting itself from increased antitrust scrutiny. Remember that they often display a message on Google.com trying to convince people to download Chrome. Along with Android, Google needs to appear like it's not too dominant.

Peter Kasting at Google posted a response, but it focused on claims about Google killing Firefox and didn't actually contradict Ulevitch's thesis on why they paid so much to be Firefox's default search provider. Firefox usage is falling because of Chrome, so it's not like Mozilla (a non-profit) is best pals with Google (a for-profit, multibillion-dollar advertising megacorp). And Mozilla has questioned Google's motives in the past over their refusal to implement Do Not Track in Chrome when all the other major browsers committed to it.

It's like how Microsoft keeps releasing Office for Mac and various other utilities to make sure the Mac is out there just enough to keep antitrust regulators off its back.

That's because of the memshrink project (earlier report on /.). You can read a weekly status report on Nicholas Nethercote's blog.

Another project that's recently started is called 'Snappy', which aims to increase the responsiveness of users' interactions with Firefox. There's a thread on Mozillazine tracking updates on Snappy.

Yea I know:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=1708

real release schedule, just FYI.

So you could [...] run the browser in itself?

Old news. Try chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox (doesn't seem to work as a clickable link, though).
See here for more options.

Finally a way around the Unity app-menu!

So you could [...] run the browser in itself?

Old news. Try chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox (doesn't seem to work as a clickable link, though).
See here for more options.

Memory:
noscript, adblock, flashblock to cut down unnecessary bullshit
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

Bring back the protocol in the URL bar:
about:config -> browser.urlbar.trimURLs = false

Indeed, I suggest watching The Deathbed Vigil , a documentary about the last day at Commodore. It explains how they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Reading this piece also explains some things. It's disturbing, they had some truly good tech, all destroyed by the absolute incompetence of those at the very top.

Firefox discussion thread on TLS issue. The primary counter point seems to be that it largely doesn't matter at this point in time as few servers are currently supporting TLS 1.1 and 1.2. Until such time servers are configured to sanely provide modern TLS support, client support doesn't matter. Furthermore, as is pointed out in the thread, the exploit of TLS 1.0 requires a fairly sophisticated attack (MTM + code injection).

Basically, stories like these are needed to get lazy server admins off their butt. It appears all of the browsers either support current TLS implementations or are actively working toward TLS 1.1 and/or 1.2 support; but few if no one has TLS 1.2 enabled by default. So if you run a server, make sure it supports TLS 1.2 else its you're the weakest link.

Sorry, I didn't file a bug report. I thought it was so obvious that surely someone would file one. It's been there since about two releases ago.

I did find a link tough.

Oh, BTW, thanks for all the work you and the FireFox team do.

Are you guys talking about this feature?

That's not it.

And reading through it, as couple of years ago, I do not see any way to disable the awesomeness bit they have added.

I do not mind it at home, but I can hear my office laptop's HDD cringe and Fx freeze every time I try to type/search something via URL bar.

The problem is not the "awesomeness bit" itself - the suckage is inside the SQLite used in the background, degrading performance by hitting HDD way too often and with high latencies. As if it can't cache the few MBs of the history/bookmarks in the RAM... Just like all browsers did it before and all sensible browsers go on doing it right now. But Mozilla IIRC is dead set on using the SQLite... Well, I'm on 3.6 - time will tell what my next browser would be. Not FireFox, that's much I'm sure of.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments
this may help to spread the word.

Apparently some in the blind community have issues with rapid release, but accessibility is for the weak, right?

Apparently some in the blind community have serious issues with Rapid Release. But accessibility is for the weak, right?

Many Firefox extensions can be hax0red to work on Seamonkey. See here.

Seems like Asa has been known as a troll for a while now in fact. For example:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2279891

As stated below you could use the compatibility reporter extension or you can just do the following.

  1)Type about:config into the URL field.
  2)Context Menu > New > Boolean
  3) type: extensions.checkCompatibility.X.x
  4)Set the value to False

  Where X.x is the version number of the browser you want to override (e.g.. 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 or 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, etc..).

  See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.checkCompatibility for more details.

  That is essentially what the compatibility reporter extensions does though it also allows you to report to Mozilla whether a flagged extension works or not.

Do you mean plugins or add-ons? If you're referring to addons / extensions, do they work if you turn off version checking?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Extensions.checkCompatibility

I don't understand your remark. There was a lighning version out just after TB5 just to make TB+lighning users working.
See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/2011/07/lightning_10b4_has_been_releas.html