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."
I wrote a website that displays 250 or more favicon.ico website icons at a time, and the difference in loading speed/rendering quality between Firefox and MSIE is amazing. The icons are small, but each is loaded from a different website around the world, so it is a good test of loading speed for many small items. It's ironic that the icons are usually of type "microsoft icon resource" and MSIE fails to display more than half of them.
If you have Firefox, make sure to get the Linky plugin (I'm not responsible for that one, but it is a very useful plugin) if you like to open multiple links at once from a given webpage.
So the story this morning (that was pulled) and the one yesterday weren't enough? What's going on??
On why should anyone upgrade to 0.9?
The icons on the bookmark tabs disappeared in 0.7. That didnt get fixed in 0.8, the icons are still disappearing in 0.9.
If the Internet connection goes down, the page loses the address it was trying to load. And is never able to retrieve it when the connection comes back up.
Should have been fixed in 0.7, still there.
JavaScript code parses switch statements incorrectly. Who wants to guess what Firefox shows for this simple snippet?
var a = 10;
a = 9;
var b = 10;
switch(b)
{
case a:
alert('got it');
break;
default:
alert('passed');
}
I'm migrating from .8 to .9 and the speed increase feels much more dramatic.
So it s not just my computer. Interesting. I would have thought some one would have looked into that. I guess were just lucky it works at all.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Hmm... on mine the User Agent string still says Firefox/0.8. Anybody else see this?
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8
Recently, I started using Firefox on my PC because of its similarity to Safari. Has anyone else noticed this?
GroupShares.com - An Investment Community
-------
artlu.net
FYI, One Tree Hill is a suburb in Auckland, New Zealand. And apparently a couple of the code names are based on other suburbs nearby.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Who gets issues with Slashdot and Firefox. In that the main area of the page overlaps strangely with the menu area on the left.
/. html ??
It occurs some of the time, not all of the time.
Poor
any chances of it being updated to work with 0.9?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Left-side menu and main area overlap. Strangely, it doesn't happen 100% of the time. Have the same problem in regular Mozilla, too. Of course I.E. displays it properly all the time. There are two conclusions to draw from this:
1. Slashdot is written for Internet Explorer.
2. Mozilla is shit.
I've never run into similar problems on any other website with Mozilla, so logically I would have to conclude that we are dealing with the first case. Somehow that doesn't surprise me.
In my opinion, gentoo is a great (meta)distribution for people who want to
learn because it doesn't hide anything from you and doesn't do anything without
you telling it to. At the same time, it makes the uninteresting parts of
managing a machine easy to automate so that I can spend time doing things
I find interesting.
Ultimately, I see no qualitative difference between 'emerge foo' and
'tar xvf foo.tar; cd foo; configure -prefix=...; make; make install'.
The hard part is knowing what you need, not following the install recipe
from the README once you've downloaded the source.
*sigh* back to work...
Safari loads the 250 icon is serial order one at a time. Firefox loads icons in batches of i'd guess about 8 at a time and in no particular order. it must be five or ten times faster than safari. I wonder what is going on?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Everything's fine until it loads for the first time, when it says it's installing extensions. I leave it be for a while, but it's obviously not actually doing anything - no CPU cycles used etc. So I shut down the process, and load it again. Gives me an XML error. Try again, works but didn't port my bookmarks/settings and some of the buttons are missing (ie, the credits in help->about).
Needless to say I trashed it and reinstalled my 0.8 nightly. Maybe when it hits 1.0 I'll check it out again, but for me it's pretty unusable, and my system isn't anything special or out of the ordinary.
1) 0.9 RC trashed my profile. Yeah, 0.9 final migrates, but hey, now that my profile is ALREADY gone, it's too late, now isn't it? 0.9 RC should have at least offered to back up my profile for future use.
2) Pinstripe is quite ugly. I much prefer Qute, and think the Mozilla folks must be stoned to ditch Qute for Pinstripe. I will certainly be reverting back to Qute.
3) They removed the theme on the download manager. It used to be nice and themed, now it is all solid colours. This may be Pinstripes fault, however, if the theme affects the download manager too.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Firefox supporter, and have converted numerous people. However, I simply think that several crucial mistakes were made in 0.9.
I downloaded from an http link. Now how can I check its integrity before I run the installer? I looked on the mozilla.org site and could only find checksums for Solaris.
If only there were an extention to block sound in Flash animations.
As others have stated, this version is a bit faster.
The theme is fine. Just set it to use small icons and no text.
The only annoyance is that there is display loop problem when opening up the toolbar customizer (you can get around it by simply clicking firefox's titlebar...I have other apps that do this too...gtk2 issue?)
Another thing that I haven't gotten around to submitting a bug report for is that the prefs window assumes your screen is > 480 pixels high, and comes up off of the screen. Easily remedied using windowmaker's ability to resize with the meta key, but this bug is a little annoying, as the prefs info fits perfectly fine after I resize the window to fit on my screen.
Other than that, great stuff!
"It is strongly recommended that you exit all Windows programs before running this setup program"
no problem, I'm in linux.
I guess that's what I get if I use the installer... sad. You'd think they'd change the wording. But then again, under linux you probably dont have to close anything....
I refreshed 10 times and didn't come across that problem once.
Is it open source or free? Surely you realize that blinky, flashy things embedded in the UI is a bad thing. The Mozilla offerings don't have these distractions, probably this is why Slashdot didn't feature it.
The firefox 0.9 windows installer crashes my NT 4 machine (blue screen of death) shortly after launching. Anybody else experiencing this?
I don't know if I've got some beta release of 0.9 on Windows, but "spiffy" would be the last word I would use to describe the default theme. Butt ugly springs to mind. It reminds me of Netscape 1.0. I had to download Qute to get it to look decent again. Presentation is everything, and the default theme just makes it look like a crappy browser (which it isn't).
I recently switched to Firefox from MyIE for a couple reasons, mostly doing with spyware & its ability to exploit holes in IE. After installing some of the 'must have' extensions, such as Tab Browser Extensions and Linky, Firefox is easily configured to give me the same experience and better than MyIE, which imo is still a strong browser (even if it uses the IE engine). My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser. This allows Firefox to re-open a tad bit faster than if it wasnt running at all, and is nice to have quickly ready to go. Given the relative simplicity of this option, I think the Firefox team should seriously consider adding such a function, which I was hoping to see in this 0.9 release. Hopefully they will 'fix' this in the next release, but otherwise its a job well done all around.
PS. To those who would tell me to use a system addon such as AllToTray or PowerMenu, no thanks, but thats not quite the same as being able to click the close-window button and having it minimize to the tray. Close, but no cigar.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Holy crap! This is weird! I haven't even tried to pull my bookmarks back in or anything, but everything is there!
So here's the revised installation instructions:
1. Try to install Firefox. It doesn't work.
2. Uninstall Firefox, delete your folders.
3. Reinstall Firefox. You profile information is magically whisked from out of Firefox's ass and appears where it should be.
Privacy Issues about the favicon.ico File
This give to web servers admins a way to know that someone has bookmarked it's site; the info includes the date and time of the operation plus the address IP of the machine which bookmarked the site, which can be used to identify you.
Ummm, what, like *every single page served*? Riiiight... If you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't really be using a computer at all, let alone use the internet. I'm surprised you're even allowed out of the house.
Although the icons from the new standalone Qute are obviously the same, one annoying thing is the absence of the horizontal line below and above the icons. Aside from making the vertical icon-spacer lines look out of place, this also makes the toolbar mesh in with the browsing window itself.
Am I the only one having this problem, or does anyone notice that the theme isn't 'exactly' (even significantly) as it was in 0.8?
Can someone with a regular CRT tell me whether that Windows theme screenshot looks discolored on the font antialiasing? It is a screenshot of a machine that is using ClearType to enhance the appearance on an LCD monitor, because you can see a slight red coloration on the left edge of the font and a slight blueness on the right, if you zoom in.
I don't think it's a good idea to publish screenshots taken from machines using ClearType. They look better if the viewer has an LCD monitor with matching subpixel arrangement, but probably worse for other users.
The problem of not importing data happens when there are more than one user, and you happen to pick the wrong one.
In my case, inexplicably, I had two profiles: 1) Default User, and 2) Default. I picked the wrong one. After that, uninstalling FireFox and beginning again does not present the user with the same choices, so it becomes necessary to know where the files are located.
I've wasted several hours of my life looking for files when Mozilla or Mozilla FireFox have changed the folders where files are stored. (This has happened in the past, too.)
How not to waste the user's time: When changing directory structure, put a message on the web site with installation instructions so that anyone having problems can know what changes have been made in the folder and file structure. We also need to know what files to copy, and how to merge them.
Making changes without informing users is a Microsoft gig, and not one to imitate. (But Microsoft makes hidden, unwanted changes to network security, and that's a LOT worse.)
For those who read their comments newest-first, allow me to summarize 99% of the comments for this article:
1) "The new default theme sucks."
2) "It trashed my profile, crashed my computer, and lewd gestures at my wife."
3) "It seems 149x faster than 0.8."