Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Project Officially Releases Firefox 0.9
_xeno_ writes "The last release candidate was apparently good enough, because Mozilla Firefox 0.9 has now been officially released. New features since 0.8 are, of course, basically the same as in the Release Candidate, including the new Pinstripe theme for Windows and the GTK+ installer for Linux users. The biggest change since the Release Candidate is that this release should ask you to migrate your profile instead of just trashing it. So head over to the Firefox homepage and get downloading, or check out the Release Notes to find out exactly what's new."
mE123 adds "You can get it from plain old HTTP or from fancy new BitTorrent", and points out that (compared to 0.8), "this release includes tons of bug/stability fixes, a %3 speed up, a new theme and plugin management system, a new standard windows theme, and a smaller windows installer."
The source tarball seems to be broken on the mirrors (two bad bzip2 checksums from seperate mirrors), so no ebuilds for Gentoo and no luck for anyone using any arch not on the binaries list.
Shame that Slashdot missed covering the new release of Opera 7.5, another excellent web browser.
Release 0.9 looks pretty good so far. The new default theme looks spiffy, and basic functionality seems to be improved (rendering/loading is a tad faster, in my opinion). I also really like the extensions manager.
The one flaw I've noticed so far, though, is that the extensions options frame is a little buggy. When I finish modifying one extension and go to load up the preferences from another, the extension I just finished modifying pops up. If I go back and load the new extension prefs again, everything is fine. It's nothing major... just a little something that could be fixed for the big 1.0.
It killed off my bookmarks, so you have been warned.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
The two previous articles were both talking about the release candidate, not the actual 0.9 release, which just came out today.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Why do they bother wasting screen real estate?
For those of you using Adblock with Firefox under Windows and find it missing after the upgrade, here's what I did to fix it.
Check the new Extensions manager under Tools and see if it's there. If it is, uninstall it from that window.
Close Firefox and use Explorer or whatever to browse to "\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" on your system drive.
Now you have to figure out which of these obscurely named subdirectories is Adblock. You can use Notepad or some other text editer to open "Extensions.rdf" and see. This string may be the same on all systems, if so, I'm sure someone can post it. Once you know which directory Adblock is still hiding in, delete it. Now go and install the AdBlock nightly from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html
That took care of it on my systems. YMMV, as always.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Extensions
Themes
Keep in mind that the packaging requirements changed for this release, so not all of your old favorites are 0.9 compatible (yet).
If you want the old 0.8 theme back, you can find it here: Qute
Check this out if you're so concerned. It's easy. It'll fix the icon spacing.
To get back the good old Qute theme from 0.8:
;)
Right click this link and select "Copy Link Location."
Then left click here, paste the link into the "Remote URL" box on the right, and click Install.
Ahh... feels like home again
The unofficial
Using it now, and it's waaaay faster and more reliable than 0.8. No more reloading poorly rendered Slashdot pages!
If you think the new theme is a step backwards, you can get the old theme back by going to the designer's site.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
Easy fix:
Go to about:config and set to True. You will then have a page showing an error message if the address couldn't load, with a link to try loading it again.
On another note, a few days back someone mentioned a way to to prevent Firefox from compressing its memory in Windows when minimized. What was that preference name again?
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
--The new default theme...well, I'm in the "damn, that's ugly" camp. I went to Tools -> Themes -> Get More Themes to download Qute, and was taken to Mozilla Update, where there was a link to "install Qute now." I did that but it didn't work. I ended up having to manually download the .jar file and use the theme installer on texturizer.net to get Qute working--It seems like something's broken here, I dunno. Anyone else had a similar experience?
--FF's interface seems a bit snappier now, as well--it doesn't slow down a ton with multiple tabs open. It remains to be seen whether it still has 0.8's nasty memory leaks, though.
--I wonder if anyone else has noticed this: the menus now are rendered a little bit...differently. They no longer look as "Windows native" as they used to, and now resemble Mozilla 1.5 on my Debian machine. I wonder if this was done for cross-platform compatibility (So FF doesn't look as out of place on Linux?)
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with the new FF's performance. It's a bit of a pain to go around and re-obtain all your extensions and such, but once you get it set up, it works very well. Great job Mozilla dev team!
This can be fixed in about:config.
Change general.useragent.vendorSub to 0.9.
Well, is it just me or does the slashdot bug is till there?
To reproduce:
1. type in www.slashdot.org
2. Hit refresh until you see the main part overlapping the left part. Should be pretty quick (2-3 retries on my machine)
Oh well... Mozilla 1.7 out and that bug still there...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4 843
config.trim_on_minimize -> false
Makes Firefox and Mozilla always responsive. More details here: Link
Prog.
Let's see, do you mean Phoenix? 'Cause here's the versions:
Phoenix 0.1
Phoenix 0.2
Phoenix 0.3
Phoenix 0.4
Phoenix 0.5
Phoenix 0.6
Firebird 0.7
Firefox 0.8
Firefox 0.9
Firebird was actually the SHORTEST lived name for the Mozilla standalone browser formerly known as Phoenix.
I stupidly put off switching for the same reason, but with a little customization you can do it in even fewer keystrokes with Firefox.
Enter about:config in the location bar, set keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q
Now typing any non-url in the location bar brings up the google search results. No need to press the down arrow!
Yeah, that gets me too. The slashdot bug is bug 217527 and as seen in comment 81 was backed out of the aviary (Firefox 0.9 and 1.0, and Thunderbird 0.7 and above) branch because it caused a regression (bug 246382). If you get a trunk build, the bug will be fixed.
* You'll have to copy/paste those links into your Address Bar, because bugzilla blocks links from slashdot.
Get Firefox!
Well, noting the fact that Mozilla Firebird was used for the 0.6 release, some dates might be appropriate. From the roadmap:
Phoenix 0.1-Firebird 0.6 release 9/23/2002-5/16/2003
Firebird 0.6-Firefox 0.8 5/16/2003-2/9/2004
Firefox 0.8-present 2/9/2004-???
So, by actual timeline, Phoenix was used for less than a year, while Firebird was used for nearly a year, and Firefox is indefinite. Firebird did only comprise two releases, it just so happens that those two releases took a damn long time.
Want even more speed? (I did not come up with this, I read it on a forum).
Enter about:config into the title bar.
Set network.http.pipelining to True
Set network.http.pipelining.firstrequest to True
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 (I'm told higher values get ignored).
Finally and most important, set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0
Enjoy the snappyness that results.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Control-T on Linux.
You may also be able to keep the tab menu bar visible at all times by going to the preferences... but I never cared it wasn't there
Prefrences --> Advanced --> Browsing --> Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open.
You can also go to View --> Toolbars --> Customize and add the New Tab button to a toolbar.
End of Line.
At last, Firefox does not require a restart to switch themes.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You didn't specify the platform, but under Windows your old data was stored (for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix <= 0.8) in the directory
\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Phoenix\
So you can grab your bookmarks from there (that directory should not have been deleted). Alternatively, you could try copying that folder to "Firefox", but you may find wierd things happening with your extensions if you try that (that said, it seemed to work for me OK). The old nightly builds from a couple of weeks back imported your IE settings rather than your old Firefox settings - I guess that bug's still there. (Although how on earth it got to be released with such a stupid bug I don't know!)
If you were using Firefox 0.8 under linux then your settings were already under ~/.firefox - so you shouldn't have lost any data but there's not much you can do if you have. It's a good lesson in backing up your home directory, I'm afraid!
Pipelining is the same as persistent connections except that the browser doesn't wait for the response to the second request before sending the third request. Pipelining saves the server and the user a little bit of bandwidth and make the page load faster, so I don't see why a server admin would not like pipelining. I don't know where you got the idea that pipelining was "hogging" anything.
The shareholder is always right.
In Linux, the middle-mouse is set up to cut/paste text from the clipboard and to navigate to the test in the clipboard as if it is a URL (following conventions that go back over twenty years). However, you can also set it up with Windows conventions via FireFox's advanced preferences:
Now Mozilla FireFox will follow Window's mouse conventions.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Lots of Firefox 0.9-compatible extensions found here, including Tabbrowser Extensions and Googlebar.
Release candidates are unstable. They are released to find issues that were overlooked by the developers. If you tried it without backing up your old profile folder, the fault is with your own inadequate computer security and safety policy.
Pinstripe is not very ugly! I agree that is needs polish; however, there is little wrong with it.
The backlash is mainly due to inertia; most users - like myself - just got used to Qute. When the Phoenix switched from Orbit to Qute, I first thought it was a horrible, horrible decision! However, I grew used to it and eventually preferred the new theme. After a few days of Pinstripe, I have similar feelings. Qute is pretty good, but not irreplaceably as I once thought. A few tweaks to my user chrome override-file (not the changes making the rounds) satisfied most of my objections.
You people are seriously overreacting!
The theme was never in the download manager. Some erroneous entries used to be listed in the theme manager, but that bug seems to have been squashed.
There were license problems between Qute and Mozilla.org's tri-license policy. Therefor, they will not be able to bundle the popular theme with the oncoming stable version of FireFox Browser. :-( However, I feel the new theme is OK.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
It didn't delete anything, probably. For Windows XP:
The data is still in the old installation folder. You need to copy the History.dat file, the Bookmarks.html file, and the formhistory.dat file to the new folder. After searching, I found that the old files were in:
Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\Application Data\Phoenix\
They must be copied to:
C:\Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile s\default.uh4 >
The problem is that the FireFox people don't provide any installation instructions, and the installation sometimes fails to copy those files, and once installed, you cannot do the installation again.
As I said before: Clearly the FireFox team has some former Microsoft employees, because the team sometimes promotes frustration. Crazily, there is no way to import FireFox data, only a way to import IE and Netscape data.
On the other hand, Mozilla FireFox is certainly the best browser, if the best isn't Mozilla itself.
There was a nice post on optimizing Firefox (or any gecko based browser) in the Mozillazine Firefox forums here. These tweaks can apparently speed up page load/render time by nearly 30% for some pages.
there has been some mention of preference/config files. an easy way to edit these in firefox .9 is to goto "about:config"
Use about:config and set the options in there, it'll do it for you.