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about:config browser.tabs.closebuttons http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButtons

Regarding pause issue : many reports show it linked to the places.sqlite file - see this thread on page 3 and look for the compactor tool they mention. Seems as though the "Awesomebar" is not without its issues.

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

Err. I made a mistake.

Step 2 should be:
2. Set browser.link.open_newwindow to 1 in order to open in the same tab.

Somehow I read it as open in same window. Sorry about that.

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

Err. I made a mistake.

Step 2 should be:
2. Set browser.link.open_newwindow to 1 in order to open in the same tab.

Somehow I read it as open in same window. Sorry about that.

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

Err. I made a mistake.

Step 2 should be:
2. Set browser.link.open_newwindow to 1 in order to open in the same tab.

Somehow I read it as open in same window. Sorry about that.

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

You can still do this, although it takes a visit to about:config.

1. Go to about:config
2. Ensure browser.link.open_newwindow is set to 3 (should be default in current firefox)
3. Set browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 0 (default is 2)

You can follow the links to see all the possible values.
Hope it helps!

They've added options to return everything but the appearance to the Fx 2 behaviour. For that missing part, there's oldbar.

I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.

However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.

Ignoring the odd European attitude that success is somehow evil and must be punished

I have never heard about this attitude in Europe. And Microsoft is certainly not being punished for its success. It's being punished for breaking the law!

Opera does fine as a mobile browser, but sucks (and has sucked for the better part of a decade) as a desktop browser

Opera's desktop browser is excellent, as a matter of fact.

while others (e.g., Firefox) have managed to gain significant market share in the face of Microsoft's alleged misbehavior.

Actually, Opera is the #3 browser worldwide. It is also #3 in Europe, where it's bigger than Chrome and Safari combined! So clearly, only Firefox has succeeded at gaining significant market share. Even Google with its vast advertising resources has failed to make a dent after nearly a year! And remember, Safari is the default browser on Mac.

The fact is, Firefox is evidence that the market is broken, as Mozilla points out:

"When the only real competition comes from a not for profit open source organization that depends on volunteers for almost half of its work product and nearly all of its marketing and distribution, while more than half a dozen other "traditional" browser vendors with better than I.E. products have had near-zero success encroaching on Microsoft I.E.'s dominance, there's a demonstrable tilt to the playing field. That tilt comes with the distribution channel - default status for the OS bundled Web browser."

That Opera's management couldn't succeed in the desktop marketplace, and instead co-opted some politicians to extort Microsoft into helping distribute their product is rent seeking of the highest order.

Actually, all Opera did was to report Microsoft's criminal activity to the authorities. Mozilla and Google soon joined, fully supporting the complaint and offering their help as interested third parties, exactly like Opera. Also, your racist, xenophobic argument fails for the simple fact that Opera is ahead of both Chrome and Safari in market share. Apparently it's more important for you to lie about Opera than to actually realize that companies like Google and Mozilla are fully backing the complaint as well.

It's rather like if I create a bad tasting drink in my bathtub, then get the government to force Coke and Pepsi to include one bottle of my drink in every six pack they sell.

Actually, it's like if you create a tasty drink, but a dominant player in the market uses its market power to illegaly prevent you from entering the market. You undermine the free market, you face the consequences.

Anyway, you have yet to show how a company which is the #3 browser worldwide and in Europe, and which is seeing massive growth in the market segment where you claim they have "failed" has actually failed. Desktop revenue up more than 100% doesn't sound like "failure" to me.

Google can now use On2 codecs such as VP8 in YouTube, for free. No more royalties. But the royalties are not that expensive so this isn't likely a big deal for them. (Google could save more money by using smarter settings on their H.264 encoder.)

Do you think Google will seriously try to make money by selling codecs? I don't. $100 million is small change to Google, and if that's all it cost to buy On2, then the On2 revenue stream must be trivial by Google's standards.

So, Google won't save much money and won't make much money by buying On2. I think they are up to something else.

What I think is more interesting is the possibility that Google will give On2's latest technology to the Theora guys. Just as Sun started giving away OpenOffice.org after buying StarOffice, it's likely that Google will give away some or all of the On2 technology.

Despite being based on technology that is nearly a decade old, Theora is already fairly competitive for web video. (Theora is better than H.263, which has actually been used for years, so it's difficult to argue that Theora is not usable for web video.) Now imagine that Theora gets the best technology bits from a modern On2 codec, and integrates those, such that Theora really is as good as H.264, or even better.

Now imagine that this improved Theora is bundled with Google Chrome and Firefox, bundled with Android, and bundled with Google Chrome OS. Within a few years, Theora could become firmly established everywhere as a baseline standard that anyone can use.

Google likes things that make it easier for Google's customers to use Google's services. They like their customers not being locked into proprietary technologies not owned by Google. It will be impossible for Google to take the market away from H.264, but it is very possible that they could make sure their customers can always easily access their services.

Note that this scenario utterly depends on the new Theora being free software. Google could try to sell a proprietary On2 codec and gain a significant market share; well, if they try it, all I can say is "good luck with that." It's hard to push out an established standard; to do it, you need to be significantly better, not just a little bit better. Better technology, with Google behind it, completely free (and with no need to even keep track of how many codecs you ship out) might succeed.

steveha

Not to mention they are beating a dead horse.

Not at all. Their violations of the law have continued to this day.

We have seen in version after version the share for IE erode since the days of IE6

Yeah, but not because Microsoft isn't breaking the law and abusing the market, as Mozilla points out:

"When the only real competition comes from a not for profit open source organization that depends on volunteers for almost half of its work product and nearly all of its marketing and distribution, while more than half a dozen other "traditional" browser vendors with better than I.E. products have had near-zero success encroaching on Microsoft I.E.'s dominance, there's a demonstrable tilt to the playing field. That tilt comes with the distribution channel - default status for the OS bundled Web browser.

Frankly I honestly don't think it is gonna matter what MSFT does one way or the other anymore, the EU is gonna keep hitting them up for big fat checks.

You are an idiot. Microsoft broke the law. Don't whine about laws being enforced by the government.

who got brave, and installed FF 3.6?

I've been running Firefox nightly builds for years. I recently switched from Windows to Kubuntu, found a 64-bit build (I think http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa/ubuntu), and got right back on the nightly rough edge, currently called Firefox 3.6a1pre and codenamed Namoroka.

It's definitely not for most people; you have to watch planet.mozilla.org to track what's going on, you give up on some extensions, and there are occasionally snafus where you have to look at the firefox builds forum on mozillazine to find out what's up and maybe revert to using an earlier browser for a day or so. But by and large nightly builds work. Mozilla's investment in build farms and try servers and test suites means most stuff that's checked in to the trunk is working.

Tip: use /path/to/old/firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager to simultaneously run a second instance using a blank profile to see if it's just the new version or your profile or a particular extension that's causing problems.

You can unzip the xpi and edit the actual "version identifier" to bump it to 3.5.1 if you're impatient :)

Nice article on how to do this here

Yes, they were. TraceMonkey was started in earnest in early summer 2008. Chrome was (accidentally) announced 1 September 2008.

Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.

It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-facing announcements are made about it to the community, and the wiki page is dormant. All the work and focus seems to have been poured into Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx3.5) and now 1.9.2 (Firefox.next).

One element of Eich's vision for Mozilla 2 was implemented in 3.5 – the new faster javascript implementation. But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal? Who knows.

Now it seems they're attempting 'Electrolysis' (the codename for process separation) in parallel to the development of Firefox.next (Gecko 1.9.2), which is already ostensibly being done in parallel to the Mozilla 2 refactoring. Makes you wonder if there's anyone at the wheel.

Here's an essay I wrote about Mozilla's direction back in 2007 when Mozilla 2 was supposed to kick off.

If you look at the longterm trends reported by Net Applcations, something that StatCounter doesn't offer, it's hard to conclude that anything dramatic has just happened.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html

These longer trends are steady and smooth and there's nothing that's happened in the last couple of months that would cause IE to fall off the cliff.

That being said, there is a lot of churn in the various browser versions. IE is really a collection of browsers with measurable share, IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. Looking at these versions, it's clear that a lot is happening.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/07/a_browser_prediction.html

It's likely that IE 7 and IE 6 will fall to under 10% global share by the end of this year and that IE 8 will grow to approximately 40%. That would give IE 60% overall, Firefox about 25%, Safari about 10%, and "other" would hold the remaining 5%.

If you look at the longterm trends reported by Net Applcations, something that StatCounter doesn't offer, it's hard to conclude that anything dramatic has just happened.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/06/historical_view.html

These longer trends are steady and smooth and there's nothing that's happened in the last couple of months that would cause IE to fall off the cliff.

That being said, there is a lot of churn in the various browser versions. IE is really a collection of browsers with measurable share, IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8. Looking at these versions, it's clear that a lot is happening.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2009/07/a_browser_prediction.html

It's likely that IE 7 and IE 6 will fall to under 10% global share by the end of this year and that IE 8 will grow to approximately 40%. That would give IE 60% overall, Firefox about 25%, Safari about 10%, and "other" would hold the remaining 5%.

You might be interested in http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2009/06/directshow_and.html

That workaround is a myth. See here for all about:config entries: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries So by using that method, not only is the user not protected, but he _thinks_ that he is protected. That's worse.

Great story, except it is a KNOWN zonealarm issue. 20 seconds on google would've told you that. But this is slashdot, so let's blame Microsoft!

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=759555&sid=3ece4d689adbaac6cb9dd8a75d47843f&start=30

Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to a small number (when FF detects 1 Gig or more of ram, it defaults to 8) should give you something in between (i.e., the pages will need to be pulled from the cache and rendered, but the number rendered pages in memory will be much smaller and the data will not have to be pulled from the network). More detail here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to something other than -1 should make memory use somewhat less aggressive (I haven't dug into it very deeply, but I don't think FF adjusts the number of pages any when the number of open tabs gets huge, and as I understand it, the setting is per tab, so you might actually have several hundred rendered pages in memory when you have 120 tabs open).

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity

"When images are loaded, they can be cached so they don't need to be decoded or uncompressed to be redisplayed. This preference controls the maximum amount of memory to use for caching decoded images and chrome (application user interface elements)."

It defaults to 32 MB on an 8 GB system. Opera will use 0.8 GB in that scenario... And will cache tab history, HTML, CSS and JS as well, not just images. Again, not comparable. Firefox just doesn't do what Opera does, even if you give it the same amount of RAM for the cache.

One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version".

Actually, that's not "one of the results." That's a blog post I made where I offered my personal opinion after viewing the comparison tests. If you're going to quote my, please be a bit more honest about it. Thanks.

Google search for various Theora vs H.264 comparisons.

Because you provide no URLs, I'll assume that you mean the top ten Google results from http://www.google.com/search?q=various+Theora+vs+H.264+comparisons, as viewed in the United States. One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version". Another implies that Theora doesn't scale to high resolutions: "Theora does have a major weakness with regards to HD video: the maximum motion vector length is only 16 pixels." Another result implied that Google would rather pay the royalties than the bandwidth.

"My experience of Firefox is over the course use for a week it becomes the biggest resource consumer on my machine and needs to be periodically shutdown"

You actually ran XP for a whole week without rebooting ?

Reducing memory usage - Firefox

would be a lot easier if I could run two separate instances of Firefox simultaneously.

Send Firefox developers a polite nasty-gram, telling them that you want the ability to open a second, third, or even fourth instance of FF in seperate memory space.

This functionality already exists.

"%programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P "profile to use" -no-remote

Yeah, this one is at HKLM/Mozilla/Firefox/Extensions.

I don't care about it, so I have no idea if deleting that key is sticky or not (perhaps some watchdog or another puts it back...).

Mozilla has, for some value of documented, documented this:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_extensions#Windows_Registry_extension

And Again is Bleeding Market Share.

Actually, even Net Applications reports it as being pretty steady.

As for holding people back, If your talking about Web Devs, IE8 makes great strides in compliency as well as allowing Legacy designs to run.

And yet the mess continues. For example, IE8 was originally going to default to the IE7 engine, and you had to opt in to the new "better standards" mode. Only after the EU got ivolved did Microsoft change to default to standards mode (and basically admitted that it was because of the EU antitrust case).

But they are not doing anything, and this is not a "silly" Comparasion as you like to call it. ITunes has already taken out multiple competitive services. Hell, Microsoft alone has already lost two fronts (playsforsure and URGE) and are most likely going to lose with Zune as well.

So? Can you show that this is because of anti-competitive behavior by Apple? If so, feel free to report them to the authorities. Although didn't they already look into it and conclude that Apple had not violated competition law?

It's done more damage to competitive products than even IE did to browsers.

Maybe it has done damange (irrelevant when discussing whether Microsoft is guilty or not), but it most definitely has not done more damage to the competition than IE.

What Open Competition? Everything is Free and the only competitive edge anymore is features and performance.

There are several companies out there making money from browsers, including the Mozilla Corporation, Access, and Opera Software. There was a browser market before Microsoft started messing up things, and there is one now, which suffers because of Microsoft's actions.

But Yet, Firefox share is still rising.

Firefox is an anomaly, as Mozilla puts it:

"When the only real competition comes from a not for profit open source organization that depends on volunteers for almost half of its work product and nearly all of its marketing and distribution, while more than half a dozen other "traditional" browser vendors with better than I.E. products have had near-zero success encroaching on Microsoft I.E.'s dominance, there's a demonstrable tilt to the playing field. That tilt comes with the distribution channel - default status for the OS bundled Web browser."

If you offer a better product then people will choose it.

Why didn't they choose it for all these years? IE6 kepts its dominance for several years despite better browsers being out there.

but didn't in the US antitrust trial, when the browser WAS the focus of that trial, and if they did, I never heard about it.

Didn't do what?

I guess they were too busy making Swedish Chef Translators instead of suing.

Again, Opera didn't sue Microsoft.

Because when you see a competitor down, you kick it. Did you See how fast Nvidia jumped on the Intel antitrust bandwangon with their ION platform as soon as the antitrust ruling came down? Thats what Corporations do.

We are discussing your claim that Opera sued Microsoft, which they didn't. Neither did Mozilla, Google or anyone else. They reported Microsoft's illegal actions to the EU and asked the EC to look into it.

Onestat.com if you don't like Net Applications

Sorry, but OneStat is useless as well.

Opera has been around for almost a decade, is available on two of the most popular game consoles today, and still has barely any share.

Actually, Opera has only been free of charge for 3

For firefox you can do quite a few of these things you listed already.

The Flashblock Addon prevents flash from starting automatically.
The Stop Autoplay addon prevents audio playing automatically.
Turning off css transparency can be done using instructions from this web page: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=521126

The master volume control would be difficult because most of the sound comes from flash in my experience so the browser would need to interface with flash for this to work.

Also turning off Javascript transitions is also very difficult since there aren't any predefined javascript transition functions so you would randomly break stuff. This should be implemented by the website programmer.

I found the advanced config page for firefox.
Instead of going Tools->Options->Advanced Options
you go address bar -> about:config

And here is the helpful help file that goes with it
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:config_Entries

Quit bitching

Why not just read this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

After spending some time looking into this, here's some info I've collected about a possible fork or alternative tool.

There are intros here and here on how to write extensions for Firefox. You use javascript and XUL (an XML grammar that describes GUI widgets).

TFA has comments by Wladimir Palant saying "I have pity with anybody who tries to fork NoScript, the code is a huge mess. It is much better to rewrite it from scratch."

NoScript is actually pretty complex. It does a lot of complicated stuff to try to guard against XSS attacks, etc. It also has something called "surrogates." The idea is that some sites serve up ads, and use javascript to detect whether the ads have been served. If the ads haven't been served, then it uses javascript to prevent the content of the page from being displayed properly. Surrogates are scripts that set the same flags or whatever that would have been set by the ad script, making it appear that the ad has been served. This requires that Giorgio Maone engage in an arms race with the people whose sites do this kind of thing.

So AFAICT the only sane thing to do would be not to fork NoScript but to write an alternative version from scratch. At least initially, the alternative version should be nothing more than a whitelisting mechanism for javascript. If that was done, then one could look at whether to go on and reproduce the security and surrogates stuff that NoScript has. My guess would be that that would simply be a bad idea. Better to avoid the bloat, and also to avoid the situation where one has to spend a huge amount of time actively maintaining it. I'm guessing that the reason Maone feels justified in his actions is that he really does have to devote a lot of time to actively tending all the bells and whistles, and that suggests that the OSS model may just not be well suited to biting off that much. Eliminating surrogates would break some sites, but only those that use aggressive measures to try to force you to view their ads.

If you look on the NoScript forums and FAQ, there seems to be a huge amount of support work involved. Someone reports that some feature on foo.com breaks, and then Maone has to look into it and see if that's really a bug in NoScript. The need for intensive support is probably another thing driving Maone's sense of entitlement to his ad revenue, and it's probably another good reason that an alternative project should avoid all the fancy stuff and just concentrate on making a simple and well-designed whitelist for javascript.

I've clicked around for a long time on the noscript site trying to find the source code, and I can't find it. I've seen posts by others here on slashdot saying the same thing. It must be publicly available somewhere, but I'm darned if I can find it.

It's a problem with the Acid2 test that is exposed when a browser supports two background colors as specified by CSS3. All recent Firefox 3.6 builds seem to fail Acid2 for this reason.

Oh! right, right... it was the fanboys! What was I thinking.

As for how the developers reacted... it was fine, I supposed. The problem was it took them a LONG time to react.

I am not terribly interested in your further replies, but if you feel it contributes to the overall thread, please feel free. We can agree to disagree.

Firefox 3 runs just great on RHEL4. RHEL4 is looking pretty old these days.

In a sense, RHEL4 is not old. Update 7 came out in July 2008 and includes Firefox 3. According to Red Hat's support schedule, RHEL4 left "Production 1" phase just two weeks ago, meaning it will no longer recieve "Software Enhancements".

Red Hat has the resources to make the latest things things work on their distribution without replacing everything. And Firefox 3 didn't work easily in RHEL 4 until Red Hat provided support...

If I want to get at a Windows user's address book, I'll use MAPI.

Unless your Windows user is using Thunderbird. (Or one of the "million" other mail applications that are sure to have broken MAPI support.)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/MAPI_Support

Self-plug: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=110239

VerifyURL is a simple Firefox addon that puts a "location.hostname" bookmarklet into the browser UI. I started it when the exploit came up where the whole Fx UI was spoofed and I couldn't get to my bookmarklet (since the bookmarks menu was a spoofed fake). After I made VerifyURL, SpoofStick's interface got a lot better, and I actually installed that for my parents instead (just set to show the hostname in one of the UI bars). It's similar to the latest versions showing the domain name for secure sites, but this was always there. The act of showing it doesn't inherently make anything more secure, but it provides a visible clarification of the URL for non-geeks. Locationbar, linked by Henry Pate, seems to be the same sort of thing, done right in the address bar.

I'd like to see a "real" hostname spoofing a valid URL with unicode "slashes", to see how well VerifyURL handles it. It does work on the IDN spoofs.

Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from "fast and simplified feature set" to "include lots of features to make the web fun & easy." They're working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome & Safari—the new javascript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.

The Mozilla 2.0 project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone's attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.

I guess it's possible to modify some key/value pair in about:config to tell Firefox how long it should keep the entries in its hostname cache. But I'm too lazy to search for that ;)

One Google query (probably done faster than typing that paragraph) found:

Network.dnsCacheExpiration

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.dnsCacheExpiration

...constantly switching profiles takes time and effort that's essentially wasted.

Must be nice to have an employer that lets you "waste" time with surfing that you'd rather not let your cow-orkers and/or customers see. :)

Isn't it fantastic that you have the OPTION of using Awesomebar since you like it so much?

Yes.

...an address bar that takes up twice as much room as any sane bar needs to.

* Your definition of "sane" seems to be different from mine.
* If you actually *used* the Awesomebar, you'd probably want to look into [1] and [2]. (Please don't remind me that you don't want to screw around with Firefox configuration settings. *I* already know this. These links are more for the benefit of those who might come across this thread via google.)

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
[2] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=685365

...constantly switching profiles takes time and effort that's essentially wasted.

Must be nice to have an employer that lets you "waste" time with surfing that you'd rather not let your cow-orkers and/or customers see. :)

Isn't it fantastic that you have the OPTION of using Awesomebar since you like it so much?

Yes.

...an address bar that takes up twice as much room as any sane bar needs to.

* Your definition of "sane" seems to be different from mine.
* If you actually *used* the Awesomebar, you'd probably want to look into [1] and [2]. (Please don't remind me that you don't want to screw around with Firefox configuration settings. *I* already know this. These links are more for the benefit of those who might come across this thread via google.)

[1] http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
[2] http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=685365

"Firefox 3 includes "security" functionality .. This behaviour is turned off if browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone is set to false"

In Firefox 3, if a Windows user has an antivirus program installed, it is launched to scan files when they finish downloading. During testing of the feature, concerns about delays and double-scanning files surfaced. As a result, this preference -- controlling whether the virus scan is automatically triggered -- was created.

"Somehow infected with pop-up window Spyware (Advertisemen) that only affects firefox .. have since included information on this spyware in the info files"

What info and where?

I also see this, very often, and while I didn't file a formal bug, I brought it up in the developer's forum.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=999035

Unfortunately it was mostly ignored and some people have pointed out it could be related to running FF in a non-admin mode although anybody with an ounce of security on the brain isn't running their browser as root/admin.

Firefox isn't leaking memory, it's storing lots of pages in its cache so that when you go back from slashdot.org/story to slashdot.org, it can satisfy the request out of cache. If you would like to disable this, navigate to about:config and set
"browser.cache.memory.enable" to false. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable for information.

For my part, all of my machines have way more RAM that they can possibly use (4GB = $25, average usage ~50% even with Vista SuperFetch). RAM is cheap, network access is expensive -- it makes sense to use as much caching as possible.

Are you running flash (without some sort of selective blocker like Flashblock)? In my experience, it is a hog.

If you are already limiting flash, you might want to look at the rendering cache settings. There is a reasonable explanation here:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers

I have browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers set to 3 and go for days, with dozens of open tabs, and firefox stay below (a still rather hefty) 500MB.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.capacity . I think the autodetected default values are too low.

MS bundles for ease of use, not to prevent competition.

At best, a combination. Documents revealed during the US antitrust trial clearly showed that Microsoft used bundling and lock-in as a conscious strategy to destroy other browsers.

How can you look at the existence of 4 of 6 third party browsers, all of which arose AFTER msie, and stand there with a straight face and claim bundling prevents competition?

As Mozilla's Asa Dotzler puts it:

"When the only real competition comes from a not for profit open source organization that depends on volunteers for almost half of its work product and nearly all of its marketing and distribution, while more than half a dozen other "traditional" browser vendors with better than I.E. products have had near-zero success encroaching on Microsoft I.E.'s dominance, there's a demonstrable tilt to the playing field. That tilt comes with the distribution channel - default status for the OS bundled Web browser."