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And, is anyone else sick of the un-"stoppable" macromedia flash ads that suck up cpu and battery life? I see one now on /. from Neumont University... and it's using 50% of my 1.6GHz cpu, and I can't turn it off....

None. Passing the Acid2 test needs some major reworking of things, which is going to take some time.

The fact that Mozilla was "ahead of the game" with some other stuff gave Safari/Opera a headstart on Acid2. There aren't the resources to be ahead of everyone on everything all the time...

The Burning Edge, one of Jesse Ruderman's pages, is a pretty good resource to get a summary of what is the latest and greatest in Firefox development.

He also has one that summurizes the differences between releases: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/. It looks like he hasn't updated it for 2.0 yet though.

The Burning Edge, one of Jesse Ruderman's pages, is a pretty good resource to get a summary of what is the latest and greatest in Firefox development.

He also has one that summurizes the differences between releases: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/. It looks like he hasn't updated it for 2.0 yet though.

See:
http://www.squarefree.com/2006/02/04/memory-leak-p rogress/

"Steve England and others have tested popular Firefox extensions for memory leaks. They found that Session saver, NoScript, IE Tab, and the combination of FlashGot and Filterset.G Updater cause leaks. Giorgio Maone, the author of NoScript and FlashGot, has already fixed the biggest leak in NoScript thanks to Steve's bug report."

So yes, people are doing something for it.

No one is denying that there are memory leaks. However, they're not common (occuring on only about 1% of visited pages) and often very hard to reproduce reliably. You can help by using the memory leak tool and reporting good memory leak bugs.

At least, it has been according to the unofficial 1.5 changelog. The list of Mac-specific bugs fixed includes:

151249 - [Mac] Middle click on link does nothing on Mac OS X (should open link in new tab).

Ben was mistaken, it's cached globally.

See this comment by Boriz Zbarsky:

Ben, those numbers are NOT per tab. The bfcache is global; there are never more than 8 pages total in bfcache (and you need to have 1GB of RAM for this to happen). Most users have 3 or 5 pages in bfcache at any given time.

and this comment by David Baron:

The point of bug 292965 was that the pref should be global, not per-tab. Is that not working correctly?

(Boris and David are back-end developers; they have much more working knowledge of this than Ben does.)

Also, there are actual memory leaks in Firefox. See this weblog post about progress on that. However, as that weblog post says as well, most excessive memory usage that people are seeing is entirely due to faulty extensions.

The Mozilla developers spend quite a bit of time on reducing memory usage and leaks. The issue is taken very seriously. All I said was that leaks exist, and that they don't indicate that Mozilla's entire codebase is sloppy. That doesn't mean Mozilla developers aren't doing anything about them or they think they are OK.

CyricZ, please stop trying to get attention by being dramatic and twisting words. Your criticism is not contructive, just uninformed and inflamatory.

P.S. Re: "the attitude of the Firefox developers" - I am only one Firefox developer. I am not speaking for any other devs.

For a look at what is being done about memory leaks, read this article

No kidding, this article is also from a well-know firefox developer, they're fixing lots of memory leaks.

Apparently the top poster is one of those people who lovse to get karma for apparently-insightful articles. "Cyricz said that firefox developers don't care about memory leaks!". I mean, who wouldn't believe someone who says that a software developer don't want to fix a serious bug in his software?

I wonder what paragraph is the "most telling". The one where the firefox developer says that memory leaks are something normal? I'm running firefox in a 512 MB machine and I have never seen firefox eat 400 MB, right now it's eating 48 MB of RAM and that looks fine to me, specially when they're improving and fixing leaks on each release. I know opera is more resource-friendly....but then, opera is far from being as featureful (call me when opera can be as configurable as firefox + thousand of extensions) so I don't really see it as an alternative, just like IE.

Firefox developers are working hard to beat Microsoft. Maybe I should remember that if Microsoft controls the web browser market it controls a big part of the internet. The firefox developers are working hard to fight that - and they're fixing memory leaks on the way.

While, memory leaks have not necessarily always been the priority of Firefox's developers, it is on their radar screen and something that they recently are putting more of a focus on. A tool was developed to allow people to test for leaks and report leaks in a manner that has allowed devs to actually do something about it. Whinning that you have a bunch of tabs open and a lot of RAM is being used does not usually help a dev make a change.

Already 1.5.0.1 has incorporated two memory leak fixes and more are on the way in Firefox 2 and 3. For more information check out Jesse Rudderman's post on the matter and if you want to report proper leaks check his write-up on the tool.

While, memory leaks have not necessarily always been the priority of Firefox's developers, it is on their radar screen and something that they recently are putting more of a focus on. A tool was developed to allow people to test for leaks and report leaks in a manner that has allowed devs to actually do something about it. Whinning that you have a bunch of tabs open and a lot of RAM is being used does not usually help a dev make a change.

Already 1.5.0.1 has incorporated two memory leak fixes and more are on the way in Firefox 2 and 3. For more information check out Jesse Rudderman's post on the matter and if you want to report proper leaks check his write-up on the tool.

For a look at what is being done about memory leaks, read this article.

If your Firefox is buggy, it's you at blame. Not Firefox. Either you or your extensions, but never the fox!

Sheesh. What needs work are the Firefox trolls. Maybe do some research next time so your trolls are at least convincing?

Have you been here? http://dbaron.org/log/2006-01#e20060114a
and helped do something about it?

Also see here
http://www.squarefree.com/2006/02/04/memory-leak-p rogress/#comments
about progress made and being made.

Adding a ping attribute to links isn't anything resembling spyware, and it doesn't, as a lot of people seem to think, make the web a worse place to be. It adds a polite way for websites to ask for click information. They don't intrude any more than redirects do, but instead of seeing:

http://www.example.com/tracker.cgi?go=http://www.e xample.com/nextpage

or the more obnoxious:

http://www.example.com/go?id=fluffernutter

in the status bar, users will see:

http://www.example.com/nextpage

and in addition, they will have the ability to easily turn off the pinging. There are javascript bookmarklets that get around the first style, but nothing that gets around the second style. The third style will make it a browser preference. Anyone who thinks that most users spend a whole lot of time thinking about the urls of links that they are clicking on probably isn't thinking right.

max

Memory leaks in some situations but I can't put my finger on what is causing it.

If memory leaks bother you a lot, you might consider switching to Firefox trunk, where

* Some of the bigger memory leaks have been fixed.

* There is a tool you can use to track down (or help Firefox developers track down) what causes the remaining leaks.

Unfortunately, Firefox trunk is a bit crashy right now, at least for some users. You could follow The Burning Edge for a while and then download a trunk build once the most frequent crashes are fixed.

This wiki page also talks about some non-leak causes of high memory usage.

You have to partly disable video acceleration for some types of content to play properly in some pages.

I have neither noticed problems like this nor read bug reports like this. Can you file a bug, including information about your graphics card and driver, with at least a URL and preferably with a reduced testcase?

It's cure rather than prevention but when I'm faced with these things (and animating ads that pull the eye away from whatever I'm trying to read) I use this nifty Zap Plugins bookmarklet which I keep within easy reach on my browser's toolbar. Apparently it works on IE, Firefox and Opera.

Auto-population of userid and password is not something that all browsers support, so these sites use cookies to provide this feature for all browsers. Not only that, but some websites include HTML that specifically tells the browser NOT to remember userid and password. Banks typically do this, although the HTML can be overridden with Javascript.

Actually, Firefox is a good choice for that... Pornzilla recommends it. :-)

Firefox had a white-on-orange RSS icon (http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/rss-old.png ) but it got changed for being too geeky, too big, and looking like it said "ASS". I agree that it's a stupid icon, but could be better for the average windows user who knows what a "web feed" is.

Copy and paste https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26135 4

It annoyed me enough that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it.

Once you install Greasemonkey and my script, Firefox will automatically click the "Stop" link for you. For good measure, it also hides the slideshow-related links (slower / stop / faster), and copies copy the "previous" and "next" links to below the text so you don't have to scroll back up to click them.

Soem comment and direction to work taking place about 2/3 way down

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/2005/12/04/2 005-12-04-trunk-builds/#comments

A large percentage of Web users rely on history to make visited links appear differently than unvisited links. (On most sites, visited links appear purple and unvisited links appear blue, but only if you have history enabled.) A smaller percentage uses history for other purposes, such as recovering from a crash or accidentally closing a tab or window, remembering how they found a page, or determining whether their son looks at porn.

IFrame refresh hacks are not "asynchronous" because the user can see them happening, just by watching the browser load icon.

That's not quite what being asynchronous means. Asynchronous means not sitting idly by waiting for a (remote procedure/http) call to finish. For example; while you're loading one thing, you might be sorting a table of data (even if the javascript isn't even on the page, check out the handy sort table bookmarklet).

It's OK for the user to know things are going on in the background; for example, when you press the Print button in Microsoft Word, it doesn't make you wait for the print job to finish, it continues in the background. You won't get your hardcopies any sooner (so you might still have to wait for that job to finish to do the next thing you have to do), but the program isn't stuck waiting for the call to finish.

The Gmail interface is actually not such a good example of asynchronisity. It makes you wait while it's sending mail, for example..

An (I)frame refresh hack might be slightly more visible, but if you can still use the application (i.e. its javascript functionality), it's still asynchronous.

The release notes at http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5 -comprehensive.html say that bug "131456 - Memory use does not go down after closing tabs" has been fixed.

However if you read the bug text you can see that this years old bug has been closed only because, in the eyes of one developer, perpetually increasing memory usage is only a symptom of a memory leak, not the cause. Presumably users should only report problems for which fixes already exist.

Developers explain that the cause of the problem is actually due to several underlying hard bugs, so a "meta bug" like this one should not be open. Separate bugs should be filed instead on all of the undisclosed problems.

Users were also haranged over and over into providing specific test cases for the general problem. Amusingly, when one user suggested using http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html as an example (try loading and closing it into a multiple tabs a few times and look at your virtual memory utilization or the about:cache built-in page) he was berated by a developer for reporting a problem with a website and not the memory leak the website triggers!

If you're using Firefox for porn, you should check out some of the resources at the Pornzilla project. Also I highly recommend this modified linked images bookmarklet, because it's so useful and the original from Pornzilla has all the visual appeal of bleached oatmeal.

Firefox is already better than IE (unless you look at a lot of p0rn)

What advantages does IE have over Firefox when it comes to porn? Pornzilla's page about "Why Firefox is the best porn browser" lists some advantages Firefox has over IE, but I can't think of any advantages IE has over Firefox.

Unofficial changelogs for Firefox releases

How great of both TFA and the Firefox 1.5 "What's New" page to not mention the Unofficial Firefox 1.5 RC3 changelog from The Burning Edge.

How great of both TFA and the Firefox 1.5 "What's New" page to not mention the Unofficial Firefox 1.5 RC3 changelog from The Burning Edge.

I agree. That color scheme causes some eye strain. Thank goodness for the fuctionality provided by the zap colors bookmarklet.

If you're going to copy information from The Burning Edge without attribution, at least get it right. You included several bugs that were only fixed on the trunk.

Pornzilla.

Really. I'd probably be using opera if it weren't for the pornzilla suite.

Windows users can make the Firefox 1.5 prefs panel even more MacOS-like by toggling the following prefs in about:config:

browser.preferences.instantApply - apply prefs immediately, and show only a "Close" button instead of "OK" and "Cancel".

browser.preferences.animateFadeIn - resize the prefs window when you switch panes and use a quick fade-in animation

A while ago, I wrote a mostly useless extension that lets you toggle those two prefs without using about:config.

If anyone's curious, here's the changelog from 1.5 Beta 2:

New browser features
* 313529 - Support importing home pages from (some) other browsers and multiple versions of Firefox Start.
* 220590 - [Mac] Delete (backspace) key should go back on Mac, too.

New web developer features
* 302188 - Support :-moz-read-only and :-moz-read-write pseudoclasses.
* 230909 - Make the dom.max_script_run_time pref work. (This pref controls the "this script is running slowly" dialog.)

New extension developer features
Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

Notable bug fixes
* 313300 - Change default for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 0 to 2. (Make "Force links that open new windows to open in... new tabs" not apply to window.open with specified width, height, or other features.)
* 312527 - Need to reduce padding for bookmark menu items.
* 245418 - Menus and contextual menus open on wrong screen when using dual screens.
* 312227 - Not able to type in textbox of the main window after download completes.
* 309027 - Saving image does not open the save location window sometimes.
* Many reliability fixes for software update.
* 284474 - Converting to UTF-8 a url with an unescaped non-ASCII chars in the query part leads to an incompaitbilty with most server-side programs. (Fixed by backing out the change for 261929, Send urls in UTF-8 by default (images/links with non-ASCII chacters not displayed).)
* 245392 - Installer options for shortcuts don't work (update/install adds unwanted icons to desktop/quick launch, creates empty folder in start menu).
* 282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com.
* 310825 - window.focus() in a background tab can steal focus from foreground tab.

This will cost every Internet banking customer money, time, and convenience. (RSA fobs are not free; if your bank gave you one for free, it will have to pass the cost on to you in some way.) Meanwhile, it will not significantly reduce the impact of phishing or pharming attacks; it will just force attackers to use the information gleaned from such attacks before the fob's digits expire.

How about requiring banks to use https correctly, which would at least reduce the impact of pharming attacks?

I hate those things, too. That's why I have the zap plugins bookmarklet on my nav toolbar. I just click that and the most annoying ads disappear.

I don't block popups so much as a I hold them.
When Firefox blocks a popup, it tells you - in a short margin at the top of the screen, or, depending on my settings, they pop under in a background tab.

The point is that in case I *do* want or need them, I know they're there, and I can bring them up selectively.

I use flashblock on flash ads for the same effect. if I want to play some flash, there's just one extra click. Very convenient.

I also have a javascript bookmarklet "page tamer" that I frankensteined out of several annoyance zapper bookmarklets. If animated gifs or oversealous embeds, colors, or plugins get my goat, one click takes them all out at once, leaving only the text I wanted to read. This gives me a chance to see how the page was intended to be viewed, so I don't miss anything, while giving me the power to focus on what I choose too, instantly.

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5 b2.html

it's not working when I post it here.

I tried tt and ecode, but they both didn't work, so I had to add spaces here and there to avoid slashdot braking the declarations. You can reformat it if you like.

(you need an extension to use a different CSS in Firefox? Unbelievable!)

I guess Mozilla thinks that it's complying with the spec because you can add styles to userContent.css and it will cascade them, but this is inadequate. There should be a way to override the authors styles according to the accessibility guidelines. Most people don't recognize the power of User CSS unless they're long time Opera users, so might not have occurred to Mozilla.

I tried one of your .css files using one of the extensions you nicely linked to... the site look even worse!

The first two were geared towards the Original Light slash that used Tables. NeoSlash is the new one. I'm probably not going to do advanced layout because all the current HTML needs adjusting, so it would be a waste of time when they fix it.

The first few pages are now a column on the left containing what should be evenly distributed along the full width of the page!

Are you talking about how the side bars turn into list items? That's because people think it's semantic and accessible to put groups of links inside UL and LI, then use styles to change them from block to in-line elements that flow. Interesting theory, but ultimately it causes more problems when the style is removed, disabled, or unsupported.

CSS lets you put things anywhere, so those links should be at the bottom of the source, but I think that makes it hard to position in IE.

I just want a sort of light, text only display with no little columns of space wasted on either side of the screen.

Then use my stylesheet and ask slash to move the slash-box code to the bottom of the source... Or hide them.. Well, my sheet does add colors, but they're not too high contrast so they don't hurt my eyes.

I'm updating my NeoSlash Stylesheet to .block{display:none;} and that should get rid of most of the slashboxes, but login is in a .block, and some other sites use .block so it may interfere if you use it at other sites, and I try to design my sheets universal. If there was just a body class=slashdot I could make it apply only to .slashdot .block{display:none;}.

Fine details again:

If you're using EditCSS, you have to:

Action, Clear.
File, Open...

If you Open without clearing, you will just cascade (Join) all the styles together. I tried to make my CSS work cascaded, but it's too much work to undo everything. Therefor, you should clear the styles in order to remove slash's layout.

3. With Web Developer extension it's more involved:

Disable, Styles, All Styles.
CSS, Add Style Sheet...

1. Bookmarklets are the faster way:

First go to squarefree.com...#zap_style_sheets and bookmark zap styles And then paste the styles at the User Style make-bookmarklet page and it immediately creates a bookmarklet from the stylesheet, so simply bookmark the link that it creates. The link is the text with the border that says zap colors. You should change the text to NeoSlash or what ever you want.

I will put another style up in my journal since posting CSS in comments gives errors. This time I removed all the '!important' from the declarations because It was hurting, not helping much, so you're going to have to clear the styles first or you might get author

it's not working when I post it here.

I tried tt and ecode, but they both didn't work, so I had to add spaces here and there to avoid slashdot braking the declarations. You can reformat it if you like.

(you need an extension to use a different CSS in Firefox? Unbelievable!)

I guess Mozilla thinks that it's complying with the spec because you can add styles to userContent.css and it will cascade them, but this is inadequate. There should be a way to override the authors styles according to the accessibility guidelines. Most people don't recognize the power of User CSS unless they're long time Opera users, so might not have occurred to Mozilla.

I tried one of your .css files using one of the extensions you nicely linked to... the site look even worse!

The first two were geared towards the Original Light slash that used Tables. NeoSlash is the new one. I'm probably not going to do advanced layout because all the current HTML needs adjusting, so it would be a waste of time when they fix it.

The first few pages are now a column on the left containing what should be evenly distributed along the full width of the page!

Are you talking about how the side bars turn into list items? That's because people think it's semantic and accessible to put groups of links inside UL and LI, then use styles to change them from block to in-line elements that flow. Interesting theory, but ultimately it causes more problems when the style is removed, disabled, or unsupported.

CSS lets you put things anywhere, so those links should be at the bottom of the source, but I think that makes it hard to position in IE.

I just want a sort of light, text only display with no little columns of space wasted on either side of the screen.

Then use my stylesheet and ask slash to move the slash-box code to the bottom of the source... Or hide them.. Well, my sheet does add colors, but they're not too high contrast so they don't hurt my eyes.

I'm updating my NeoSlash Stylesheet to .block{display:none;} and that should get rid of most of the slashboxes, but login is in a .block, and some other sites use .block so it may interfere if you use it at other sites, and I try to design my sheets universal. If there was just a body class=slashdot I could make it apply only to .slashdot .block{display:none;}.

Fine details again:

If you're using EditCSS, you have to:

Action, Clear.
File, Open...

If you Open without clearing, you will just cascade (Join) all the styles together. I tried to make my CSS work cascaded, but it's too much work to undo everything. Therefor, you should clear the styles in order to remove slash's layout.

3. With Web Developer extension it's more involved:

Disable, Styles, All Styles.
CSS, Add Style Sheet...

1. Bookmarklets are the faster way:

First go to squarefree.com...#zap_style_sheets and bookmark zap styles And then paste the styles at the User Style make-bookmarklet page and it immediately creates a bookmarklet from the stylesheet, so simply bookmark the link that it creates. The link is the text with the border that says zap colors. You should change the text to NeoSlash or what ever you want.

I will put another style up in my journal since posting CSS in comments gives errors. This time I removed all the '!important' from the declarations because It was hurting, not helping much, so you're going to have to clear the styles first or you might get author

A quicker way to apply a style with FireFox is to use bookmarklets.

Copy and paste at squarefree's make-bookmarklet.

This method simply cascades or adds the styles with the existing styles, so the sidebars are still going to be there, along with any existing browser unfriendly code. If your browser just plain fails with the new slashdot, try to strip the styles using zap style sheets bookmarklet.

If you want to get rid of some of those side bars, some of them are in .block so you can .block{display:none;} and if you want to get rid of all of them, just look up the class= that they are inside and .whatever, .foobar{display:none} them.

Check my journal for a new stylesheet, it's not working when I post it here.

A quicker way to apply a style with FireFox is to use bookmarklets.

Copy and paste at squarefree's make-bookmarklet.

This method simply cascades or adds the styles with the existing styles, so the sidebars are still going to be there, along with any existing browser unfriendly code. If your browser just plain fails with the new slashdot, try to strip the styles using zap style sheets bookmarklet.

If you want to get rid of some of those side bars, some of them are in .block so you can .block{display:none;} and if you want to get rid of all of them, just look up the class= that they are inside and .whatever, .foobar{display:none} them.

Check my journal for a new stylesheet, it's not working when I post it here.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is vulnerable to some of the holes fixed in Firefox 1.0.7. You should upgrade to a newer build from the Firefox 1.5 / Gecko 1.8 branch, preferably today's.

Most die-hard firefox users will know this, but since Taco threw down the gauntlet, those mere firefox mortals who wish to muck with the CSS and "win a prize!" can take a look at: Jesse Ruderman's page on using local style sheets (good links there) and there's always the style sheet chooser plus add on (yeah, the site's in French and I haven't tried that extension in a while since I use Safari mostly, but it should work).

I'm the Firefox fanboy in my company for sure, but I have a growing trust issue with Mozilla here. Firefox 1.0.7 was released this morning, and http://www.mozillazine.org/ said to expect the list of known security vulnerabilities at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vul nerabilities.html#firefox1.0.7 would be updated soon. With every other previous minor release this page was swiftly updated with all the security bulletins. Since its been two months since the previous minor update, what is Mozilla not telling us? A quick check of the new build announcements at http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ shows a lot of security updates and a lot of regressions. So where are they?

http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/

Firefox does everything better than Opera, including the ads!

If you don't want to disable IDN, or if you want to help test the change so Mozilla can release updated versions faster, try these nightly builds:

Today's Gecko 1.8 branch nightly - Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 plus the fix for this security hole.

Today's Aviary 1.0.1 branch nightly - Firefox 1.0.6 plus the fix for this security hole. There isn't a Linux build here; I don't know why.