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Camino/Mozilla developer extradorinaire Michael Pinkerton said that Gecko was not well designed.

Seeing as how the new improvements are based on Nanojit, a component of Tamarin, the JIT ECMAScript compiler that powers Flash and which Adobe donated to Mozilla, I should think these improvements could rival Flash.

You want SVG as background-image? Here you go.

That's ROC's personal play branch, it's not in Gecko yet.

Fast enough to do this in realtime?

Some text and a few dozen control points? Yawn. Try that with something that has a few hundred control points and it's like watching a slide show.

That might be good enough if we weren't talking about a standard that's five fucking years old. These problems have been on the radar for a long time, they just keep getting pushed back because Mozilla won't devote any resources to them. Instead they talk about chasing rainbows like "Screaming Monkey" and it's pissing me off.

You want SVG as background-image? Here you go.

That's ROC's personal play branch, it's not in Gecko yet.

Fast enough to do this in realtime?

Some text and a few dozen control points? Yawn. Try that with something that has a few hundred control points and it's like watching a slide show.

That might be good enough if we weren't talking about a standard that's five fucking years old. These problems have been on the radar for a long time, they just keep getting pushed back because Mozilla won't devote any resources to them. Instead they talk about chasing rainbows like "Screaming Monkey" and it's pissing me off.

You want SVG as background-image? Here you go. Fast enough to do this in realtime? I honestly couldn't say, I'm more excited that their CSS3 support is finally catching up to Konqueror 3.5.

You want SVG as background-image? Here you go. Fast enough to do this in realtime? I honestly couldn't say, I'm more excited that their CSS3 support is finally catching up to Konqueror 3.5.

Bingo, and you can also specify the profile name on the command line to bypass the profile popup (or if you wish to make a shortcut icon to it).

And there we have it, multiple browser processes running with discrete profiles, all without switching users or sudo'ing.

Note, I can't remember my exact command but according to the documentation the -no-remote option has a single preceeding dash: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

In fact, 0.6.3.7 fixed it already, but the latest version also sorts out some account switching issue... and while you're restarting Firefox, why not update your NoScript and Flashblock extensions as well.

In other news, Firefox 3.1 and some future version of Opera, will have built-in support of Ogg/Theora:

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2008/08/why_ogg_matters.html

You can also set browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert=true and Browser.ssl_override_behavior=2 to make it easy to accept self-signed certificates.

You can also set browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert=true and Browser.ssl_override_behavior=2 to make it easy to accept self-signed certificates.

You can set browser.ssl_override_behavior to 2 to simplify adding security certificates. Remember that you actually need to verify the certificate to ensure that the encryption will prevent others from decrypting your communications.

By the way, I noticed several connections to "safebrowsing.clients.google.com" and " s.ytimg.com" which also belong to Google. I don't know what they are, does anyone have a clue?

According to mozillaZine, safebrowsing.clients.google.com is the server to get the list of malware/phising sites from Google's Safe Browsing service which is built-in to the FF Google toolbar and Google Desktop Search (and I think FF3). There is also an API for developers so it could be in more things.

Quote from http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/firefox3_privacy_faq.html

When your machine contacts Google to get more information about a specific hashed URL fragment, or to update the list, we receive standard log information including your IP address and possibly a cookie. This information does not personally identify you, and is retained only for a period of weeks.

And s.ytimg.com just seems to be a server to host content for YouTube (javascript/css/images/etc). Just check the source of a YouTube page and CTRL+F, it's all over the place.

You can fix this by changing the setting for keyword.URL in about:config back to a Google search.

Otherwise, Firefox would look and work like it did 5 years ago, with great support for Web standards, but terrible usability.

Yes, OMG so unusable!

I'm guessing you didn't use Firebird 5 years ago.

Hell, the Firefox prefs on MacOS X looks damn similar to the preferences layout in Safari, or is FireFox also claiming to be driving UI standards on MacOS X as well...

It looks better now, and does match the style of System Preferences panes of OS X. But it's actually less usable to me in that they moved connection settings (the only setting I ever have to change, to use proxies) off the main "tab". Fortunately it remembers the last tab you had open, so only a minor hindrance.

Otherwise, Firefox would look and work like it did 5 years ago, with great support for Web standards, but terrible usability.

Yes, OMG so unusable!

I'm guessing you didn't use Firebird 5 years ago.

Hell, the Firefox prefs on MacOS X looks damn similar to the preferences layout in Safari, or is FireFox also claiming to be driving UI standards on MacOS X as well...

It looks better now, and does match the style of System Preferences panes of OS X. But it's actually less usable to me in that they moved connection settings (the only setting I ever have to change, to use proxies) off the main "tab". Fortunately it remembers the last tab you had open, so only a minor hindrance.

That'll work as well as Flash (which is pretty good and your idea has merit) but it would be better if it were integrated into the browser so that we could do like we do in Firefox/Safari/Opera and use SVG with HTML.

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 analysis tools recently used to find Firefox bugs, and many have been found: 1) A special tool designed by a Firefox developer. 2) Software by Coverity. 3) Klocwork's K7.]
19. Your bug report was not specific enough. [Numerous conditions were listed which provide reliable ways to reproduce the problem.]

...are things like declarative animation so that well produced sites continue to degrade gracefully when the whopping security hole known as javascript is disabled. I know the ajax alliance aren't the best group to discuss that one with but some of the items on the list are odd. CSS gradients and blur have been implemented in WebKit but the work on CSS animation is far more important. Why wouldn't they just ask for SVG in IE instead of lumping it with canvas support?

For other stuff like coroutines in javascript, Brendan's already talked about that extensively.

Unimpressed.

...and you *could* run FF2 AND FF3 at the same time as this forum post shows.

Use portable versions.

Install them all over the frigging place. FF2, FF3 clean, FF3 experimental, etc.

You can install the password importer/exporter on all of em, if that's your dilemma.

(Oh wait your on linux?)

Script it,
intercept the icon call to the executable,

#!/bin/bash
mv ~/.mozilla ~/.mozilla.2.NOT && mv ./mozilla.3.NOT ~/.mozilla

Crashed?

Add some logic,
cp ./ backup on startup
rm -rf ~/.mozilla

God I am a retard windows user, and I could work it out.

There's ways to do it. THINK. TEST. TRY. LEARN. /usr/bin/firefox -ProfileManager

Or
search for fp.tar.gz

Maybe you have IceWeasle? duh....
$ mv ~/.mozilla/iceweasel ~/.mozilla/iceweasel.hold
$ mv ~/.mozilla/firefox ~/.mozilla/iceweasel

If all else fails use wine + portable firefox

Then again you could rebrand it to some predetermined name.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Rebranding_Firefox
I'd also search for the ~/.mozilla/profile and change that path...

Okay.

Peace

Hmm.. That's odd. If I go to the URL, it renders. If I save it to my desktop and drag it back, I get an "Opening butterfly.svg" dialog with options to "Open With: Internet Explorer" and "Save File".

I had assumed from this that this was because SVG wasn't supported.

There's no entry for SVG in the Options->Applications window. If I choose "Open With:" and browse to Firefox, it opens a new tab and re-displays the "Opening" dialog.

Oops, wrong link, the page that gives the 8 maximum number is at: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.http.pipelining.maxrequests Sorry about any confusion.

If you set your firefox to enable pipelining and set max pipeline requests to a value like eighty (yes 80) you will find that you are a most efficent and therefore quite spunky web citizen.

FF3 is gorgeous, memory efficient, but as long as they don't fix the scrolling issue (scrolling a page with fixed background image) it is pretty much unusable. Link to the scrolling issue: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=675935&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Firefox 3.0 rarely crashes for me. You might want to follow the instructions for fixing Firefox crashes from the MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.04 looks like ass. Apparently subpixel hinting for LCD monitors isn't compiled correctly in the Ubuntu package. Most of the posts online are over a month old and, as far as I know, this hasn't been patched yet. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem:

Here

Here

"I have found the solution to this problem. The reason you have no subpixel hinting is that Fx3 uses the in-tree cairo library, which has no LCD-filtering patches applied. You, or your distro's package maintainer, will have to compile it with following option in .mozconfig: -enable-system-cairo. You'll also need to use this command: export LDFLAGS='-lX11 -lXrender' "

And here

The fonts are so blurry and unreadable that I get a headache just browsing Google News. Until this is resolved, Firefox 3 will remain unusable for me in Hardy Heron.

Firefox 3 on Ubuntu 8.04 looks like ass. Apparently subpixel hinting for LCD monitors isn't compiled correctly in the Ubuntu package. Most of the posts online are over a month old and, as far as I know, this hasn't been patched yet. Apparently I'm not the only one with this problem:

Here

Here

"I have found the solution to this problem. The reason you have no subpixel hinting is that Fx3 uses the in-tree cairo library, which has no LCD-filtering patches applied. You, or your distro's package maintainer, will have to compile it with following option in .mozconfig: -enable-system-cairo. You'll also need to use this command: export LDFLAGS='-lX11 -lXrender' "

And here

The fonts are so blurry and unreadable that I get a headache just browsing Google News. Until this is resolved, Firefox 3 will remain unusable for me in Hardy Heron.

"The memory leak was not fixed, but it was finally addressed it seems. The
memory usage still creeps up very high, but it takes much longer to reach the
point of a performance hit than before."

It's actually not just a memory leak. It is a CPU hogging bug, also.

Since that bug is now 7 years old, and still not fully
fixed, I suppose I should post my list of Firefox developer excuses again. The list
is not complete. There have been other excuses that I haven't had time to add to the list.

Firefox Developer Top 20 Excuses

for Not Fixing the Firefox Memory

and CPU Hogging bugs.

These are actual excuses given at one time or
another.

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

actually MS beat Mozilla for language support.[1]
Its just that mozilla dont do language support as a function of popularity but because its OS as a function of who cares.

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 bu

According to the forum here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&p=3435575

RC3/RC2 and the 3.0 release are all the SAME for windows and linux. It just got respun for OSX (only) for an OSX bug(!)

So under windows the about: page should read:

Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

I believe Asa cited Bouncer.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2008/06/download_day_in.html#comment-2538373

I hate the awesome bar too.

In the version of FF I'm running (3.0), I don't have a boolean browser.urlbar.richResults, I have a browser.urlbar.maxRichResults, which is an integer.

Here's a summary of what I've been able to figure out about how to get rid of the awesome bar:

• To revert to the old-style graphics, use the oldbar addon. This has no effect on the actual completion algorithm, just on the way the results are displayed.
• Set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true. This is supposed to make it only match results that you've actually typed before. However, it will not stop it from matching titles of pages.
• Setting browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 does not change it back to the old behavior. It just prevents results from being shown in a pop-up menu at all. Setting it to less than the default of 12 can, however, reduce the amount of screen space taken up by the menu.
• Setting browser.urlbar.matchBehavior to 2 makes the matching algorithm slightly more like the old one. It will only match things that lie at the beginning of a word boundary. This cuts down on the number of stupid matches, e.g., it will no longer match "ebay" with "thepiratebay."

What I really want is a way to make it search only on urls, not titles. When I type a url in the url bar, I have a url in mind. I don't want it to match titles.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.matchBehavior

If you set the value of this to "2", you will get what you're looking for. Sort of... This will cause Firefox's "awesome" bar to match "LIKE 'foo%'". However, it will still look at page titles, not strictly URL. Still, this is the closest Ive been able to come to replicating old behavior.

That top crashers report is generated from Breakpad reports, which are sent automatically. The user does have to agree to send the report, but this is as easy as clicking OK. The list also shows only the most common 100 crashes. So let's say that instead of the 177561 reports of crashes over the past two weeks, there were 500000 crashes over the past two weeks. With 2 million active daily users, that comes out to an average of one crash every two months for each daily user. Checking my about:crashes info, I see my last Firefox 3 crash was in March and the one before that was in January. I have been an active daily user since last year, so my frequency of crashes seems typical. My conclusion is that your experience of "multiple daily crashes" is very unusual, not typical of the experience most get with Firefox 3. Crashing once every two months for the most active users doesn't seem too bad for a point-oh release to me.

You guys need to read the f'ing link you paste, those release notes are general FF3 notes, not RC1->RC2 items.

Perhaps if you read his question you'd know that's wasn't what he asked.

PS: Normally you can get such info from the developer forum but I don't see it
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23

This link may help: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Some way of reverting to the old functionality would be nice.

A quick google turns up:

browser.urlbar.richResults - to switch from the sucky new dropdown list to the old one

Has an effect in

        * Mozilla Firefox (nightly builds from 2007-11-29 to 2007-12-17)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.urlbar.maxRichResults

It's just a different setting now!

I don't yet use Firefox 3, but does this help? For pretty much anything in Firefox you can think up of there's usually some kind of configuration option available through about:config.

Obviously tips like this take a long time to filter through to Slashdot, for some reason. I saw that tip when first using Firefox 3 betas, and according to the Mozillazine knowledgebase it has been there since Firefox 2! It also covers an extra bit that the summary doesn't that might still stop extensions working in Firefox 3.

And after all that, I originally used the Nightly Tester Tools to check the compatibility of some extensions. Some of the simpler ones worked, but AdBlock Plus couldn't just have the FF2 version enabled (it wouldn't auto-fill the filter address, but they have an update) and neither could the Web Dev toolbar (the edit CSS tab wouldn't close, amongst other things). Both of them have now been updated for the RC.

I think this one is definitely tagged right - "!news". Now all it needs is "badidea".

If you're using firefox, create or edit user.js in your profile folder and add this code to stop websites from launching the print dialog.