Firefox 1.1 Boasts New Features

Distro Jockey writes "The Fedora Core Blog gives a review of the features we can expect from Firefox 1.1. Many uses have been running the latest trunk builds and seeing dramatic improvements in page rendering, managing many tabs quickly, and the much-anticipated fix for the /. layout bug. From the article: 'One major new feature in Firefox 1.1 is the "Sanitize" feature. This enables secure browsing with much more ease. Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences).'"

Comments

What I'm curious about

[Anonymous Coward]

(1) Does it finally fix that bug where sometimes images from certain hosts will stop displaying until you restart Firefox?

(2) Does it finally start to reverse the recent trend for firefox to become a huge RAM hog, or does it continue this trend?

Re:What I'm curious about

[Guy LeDouche]

I REALLY hope that something is done about resource usage. We are constantly told how much lighter, and faster Firefox is, yet it's still just as slow and bloated as Mozilla. Yesterday I was browsing with 4 tabs open and the RAM usage for Firefox was ~98MB This is not a good thing.

Re:What I'm curious about

[billieja2]

It isn't actually using that much ram. Minimise it then check the RAM usage. That worked for me. I think this bug has been reported.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Shook18]

I... have 6 tabs open right now and 29mb ram usage with the 1.1 release. Don't know if that is because the new release is so good, or yours is so bad, however.

Re:What I'm curious about

[FuzzzyLogik]

That's why i switched to Opera. the ram usage and responsiveness of the interface is great. it took a little getting used to, but i use Opera on my windows machine, safari on my mac, and firefox in linux. granted i got opera for $20 with the edu pricing.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Ark42]

While it's true that the "Mem Usage" in task manager can easily show much more memory than the program is actually using, an minimizing a program will make this number drop, the number it drops to is still not the accurate memory usage figure. You really want to go to View/Select Columns and look at VM Size, not Mem Usage.
VM Size is the actual amount of memory the program thinks it has, between whats swapped out and what is actually being used. Mem Usage can be higher than VM Size if memory was freed but not yet flushed by the OS, or it can be lower than VM Size if some memory hasn't been touched in a while and is swapped out to disk. Minimizing an application just gives Windows a hint that it should flush freed memory and swap out pages that have not been touched recently, which is why the Mem Usage figure drops when you do that.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Guy LeDouche]

I'm still using 1.0, so I don't know how much has changed with regard to resource management in the maintenence releases so far, if anything. It may also depend on how image intensive the pages are, but even then it shouldn't use so much.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Citizen of Earth]

Yesterday I was browsing with 4 tabs open and the RAM usage for Firefox was ~98MB This is not a good thing.

Mine is presently using 229MB. Of course, my X server is presently using 303MB, which, together is more than the amount of physical RAM that I have. Does Firefox map the video RAM into its address space?

Re:What I'm curious about

[glazed]

That's why they make faster computers.

Re:What I'm curious about

[CTho9305]

The memory usage depends heavily on your browsing patterns (what you have open, what you had open, whether you use tabs vs. windows, etc).

Re:What I'm curious about

[kbrosnan]

bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456 Memory use does not go down after closing tabs (resources not released) - Resolved:Fixed

Re:What I'm curious about

[Teja]

Firefox's memory usage is part reason why I ditched it and went Opera mostly full time. (Of course, Opera's innovative features are hard to beat so that is why I mainly switched). Being on a really old machine, Firefox would often use 112 MB of RAM with only around two-four tabs open, now with Opera at that many tabs, It'd only use around 25 MB of RAM with the same pages open. When Firefox is started up with no pages open, it'd be around 21 MB of RAM or so, with Opera, it is only around 13-14.

Re:What I'm curious about

[jesser]

David Baron, a Mozilla Foundation employee and one of the strongest Gecko hackers, has been spending a lot of his time fixing memory leaks in Gecko and Firefox.

Re:What I'm curious about

[ergo98]

and is a completely and totally useless statistic that reflects nothing particularly interesting about how much memory a program is actually using

You have that complete bass ackwards. Memory usage shows how much physical memory (something which is usually somewhat limited) is currently allocated to the process, while VM Size shows the virtual memory (something which is practically limitless).

If a process starts up, allocates 100MB, and then never touches it, the VM Size will be significantly larger than the real memory usage, and in the real world this makes a big difference - having some seldom-used space in a paging file set aside for a task is a lot less relevant than having a block of physical memory set aside. If, on the other hand, a process allocates 100MB and then perpetually scans through it looking for Waldo, it won't be paged out and it'll consume real physical memory.

Of course memory usage can include shared memory blocks, but overall it is the best indicator of the real, practical memory usage of an application. No one cares how many new statements exist in the code - they care how much finite physical memory is practically used by the app.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Inigo Montoya]

I've been using Opera 8 Beta for several months now, no problems. I have 60 tabs open and it's using about 58MB of memory. It's really great.

For Ad-blocking I use Opera Ad Filter which is donationware and works great! However, you have to separately configure the ad sites to block; FireFox's right-click ad-blocking is much easier to use and wins here.

I've never had any CPU issues with Opera 8, and maybe 2-3 crashes in several months of use, but these kinds of interactions can be very dependant on what your system is running, and that's clearly different from mine.

When it crashes, as the parent said, it maintains the tab list and open sites and gives you the choice to resume from the previous saved session, start a new one or recall any old one. I have several saved sessions with pre-configured tabs that I like to recall when I am doing specific work online. This feature is awesome to me.

Opera 8 has always rendered Slashdot perfectly, unlike FireFox. It even feels faster than firefox, but I admit it's all subjective when feelings come into play. I've never scientifically benchmarked these two browsers.

Opera 8 also has a pretty decent mail and news reader built-in, that auto-learns your mailing lists, contacts and subject threads.

I just wanted to point this out because Opera 8 does not have "a long way to go" as the parent says.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Ark42]

You are just making that up. Look at the commit charge on the performance tab, which corresponds to the memory graph. Commit charge is the sum of all processes VM Size, not memory usage. VM Size is the amount of memory the process has allocated in memory and swap combined. Mem Usage is like RSS (resident set size) under top/ps, which is the amount of physical RAM being used, which is meaningless because of the fact that the amount of RAM being used is NOT the amount of memory the process has allocated, because it depends greatly on how the OS manages memory behind the scenes.

Even the Task Manager help file is pretty clear here:
Memory Usage: In Task Manager, the current working set of a process, in kilobytes. The current working set is the number of pages currently resident in memory.
Virtual Memory: In Task Manager, the amount of virtual memory, or address space, committed to a process.

Again, the amount of memory allocated (committed), is the number anybody cares about. Whether or not the OS has decided to swap some of the memory to the paging file or not is completely useless when all you care about is the amount of memory the program has gobbled up.

Normally, one might think that the RSS/Mem Usage should never be higher than the VM Size, because a process should never have more RAM being used than it has total memory being allocated, and I believe under Linux this is true, but under Windows, Task Manager will frequently show the Mem Usage as being higher simply because it hasn't subtracted freed memory yet, because the OS hasn't used those pages for anything else yet.

Re:What I'm curious about

[ergo98]

You are just making that up.

Astoundingly you start off with this, and then basically repeat exactly what I said.

However your conclusion, that VM memory is more important, is absurd - if an app has large swaths of memory that it basically doesn't touch, and thus can be paged out, that reduces the real memory load of the application - basically it's free memory management for apps (which a lot of apps rely upon). However if Windows deems that the memory shouldn't be swapped out, keeping the memory usage high, because a process keeps touching the pages, then that matters. That really bogarts real live physical memory.

You see, perhaps this might be the reason that those crazy Microsoft folks put that crazy mem usage on the task manager, and left vm memory as an extra option. Or maybe they just didn't consult with you.

Re:What I'm curious about

[BillyBlaze]

Click "Bookmarks," "Add Bookmark Here," and check "Bookmark all tabs in a folder."

Re:What I'm curious about

[dustman]

I'm using the 1.0.3 for windows from getfirefox.com

Two windows, each with 8 open tabs, basically I started on slashdot in one window and randomly hit links for tabs, and started on my homepage in another and did the same.

So, 2 windows, a total of 16 tabs/pages, and task manager says I'm using 43M... Doesn't seem too bad to me...

If I restart firefox, 1 window and 1 tab is 23M, so you can complain about that maybe.

Re:What I'm curious about

[Ark42]

Again, though, what I am saying is that physical RAM usage is not important compared to the VM Size. I don't particularly care what portion of the programs memory is actually in RAM and what portion is swapped out. I care how much memory it has allocated total (VM Size).

Another example of why people should be looking at VM Size instead of Mem Usage is that many people run a program, open something then close it, and repeat a few times, and expect that each matching close operation should bring the Mem Usage back to the value it was before the open operation, otherwise they get all fussy and claim the program has a memory leak. The VM Size will typically settle after a few iterations, while the Mem Usage will not. If the VM Size grows after each iteration and can grow continuously, you might just have a memory leak, but if the VM Size remains relatively constant and the Mem Usage increases after each iteration, it means nothing! Just minimize the application and all of a sudden the Mem Usage is back to normal.

back/forward

[Ark42]

And back/forward can cache the rendered layout instead of having to re-render everything: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 567

Re:back/forward

[Anonymous Coward]

It's also a nice feature that IE has had long before Opera, so whats your point? It's hardly an original idea, and there is no need to get into a pissing match about Opera, since obviously any good idea one browser has will make it into the rest, given enough time.

Re:back/forward

[Saeger]

back/forward can cache the rendered layout

YES! Finally!

Instantaneous back/forward (with mouse-rocker) navigation is one of the major killer features that has kept me using Opera as my main browser for years now. And if the tab switching and general snappiness of Firefox v1.1 has also improved to Opera's level, as some attest, then I can ditch Opera for good...

...well, as soon as Firefox gets the one last feature I can't live without: opera-like image AND text zooming (+/-), instead of just text scaling (Ctrl+/-).

Yep. That's it. I can live without the rest of the kitchen sink.

Re:back/forward

[Saeger]

Yeah, Ctrl-Shift-N/M, but it's way too slow to be usable; takes about 3 seconds to zoom in/out each step (and I've got 2GHz to burn.)

Re:back/forward

[aftk2]

They can release their copy for free.

Re:back/forward

[slyguy135]

Perhaps you'll be needing this

Works great here. Fair enough, it only zooms images one at a time, but isn't that enough?

If it's about what we can expect...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's called preview, not review.

Umm Sanitize

[thundercatslair]

So this will clear all my tracks automaticly when I, say look at the hardcore of porn?

Re:Umm Sanitize

[Ride-My-Rocket]

So this will clear all my tracks automaticly when I, say look at the hardcore of porn?

Yes, but it won't hide your posts on Slashdot from your girlfriend.

Re:Umm Sanitize

[Ed Thomson]

Yes it does, It also works for softcore and midget porn.

Re:Umm Sanitize

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but it won't hide your posts on Slashdot from your girlfriend.

I have a hard time believing that that will ever be a problem for anybody, anywhere, ever.

Re:Umm Sanitize

[Rakshasa Taisab]

No, you still need to manually apply tissue paper.

Re:Umm Sanitize

[xstonedogx]

Well, there are (a few) girls on /., and I have a hard time imagining them with non-geeky guys.

I know what you mean. I usually imagine them with other girls.

Does the status line work properly now?

[British]

Try hovering over a link in fark. It seems the text to display it is so complex, it overhwelms Firefox.

Re:Does the status line work properly now?

[rebug]

Preferences > Web Features > Enable Javascript > Advanced > Allow scripts to: [x] Change status bar text.

Re:Does the status line work properly now?

[RotJ]

Try hovering over a link in fark. It seems the text to display it is so complex, it overhwelms Firefox.

I wouldn't call it overwhelming Firefox (nor would I call it overhwelming Firefox). You probably have Firefox set to disable javascript from changing the status bar text. If you enable having javascript change the status bar text in options > web features > Javascript Advanced or if you completely disable javascript, the links show up fine in the status bar.

Fark formats its links like this:

<a onMouseOver="w('http://www.planetark.com/dailynews story.cfm/newsid/30692/story.htm'); return true;" onMouseOut="c(); return true;" href="http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?IDLink=147 5780&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.planetark.com%2 Fdailynewsstory.cfm%2Fnewsid%2F30692%2Fstory.htm" target=_blank>(Some Guy)</a>

It uses onMouseOver to hide the click tracker from the status bar. The appropriate behavior for Firefox would be to show the actual url the link points to when you disable status bar text changing, so it's still broken.

Another "hope they fix this" post.

[antizeus]

I for one hope that the MacOS X version properly supports the middle mouse button (apparently the nightly builds have before the 1.0.3 release, but that release doesn't). Additionally, I hope it also uses Emacs key bindings.

Re:Another "hope they fix this" post.

[CTho9305]

The reason releases that come after a given nightly don't have the same features is branches. Before each release, a branch is made (usually at the beta) so that the code is stable, and rapid (dangerous) development can continue on the trunk. Firefox 1.0.x were released off the 1.0 branch - branches usually only get very important bugfixes and security fixes. The trunk is where the day-to-day stuff happens, but as a result it can often be in pretty bad sahpe.

Funnyfox

[anandpur]

http://www.funnyfox.org/

Copy?

[sammykrupa]

From the article: 'One major new feature in Firefox 1.1 is the "Sanitize" feature. This enables secure browsing with much more ease. Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences).'

Sounds something like the "Private Browsing" feature in Safari.

Kill IE7 before it gets going

[Anti-Trend]

I'm glad Mozilla.org is keeping the pressure on the Redmond-based behemoth. The fact that IE7 will continue to ignore established web standard makes me sick at the very thought of it.

My wife is an exclusively Linux user, and she does business with Candle-Lite. Unfortunately, their site is rife with IE-only garbage which makes it impossible for her to submit her orders online. If more people were using standards-compliant browsers, we really wouldn't have situations like this to begin with.

-AT

erm

[Turn-X Alphonse]

But does it fix the memory leak? That's the biggest issue for me right now.

Re:erm

[kbrosnan]

bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456 Memory use does not go down after closing tabs (resources not released) Resolved:Fixed One of the many core changes that are going to be in Fx 1.1.

How About That Memory Leak, Fixed?

[BRock97]

So, how about that Firefox "feature" that keeps dynamically grabbing RAM as new images are displayed (at least that is where I am seeing it). Being a weather guy with my image looper adding new images every 5 minutes (and deleting the oldest one; the memory still isn't given up), I hate to see my browser using 500MB of RAM after a couple of hours. I was able to fix it with an entry in about:config called browser.cache.memory.capacity, but it would be nice to know if it is fixed by default since we will be rolling out Firefox on a bunch of desktops where I work in a few months.

Firefox also boasts remote code execution.

[wschalle]

I haven't confirmed it myself, but this report says that firefox V1.03 is vulnerable to remote arbit. code execution.

Safari's builtin RSS reader and Firefox

[konmaskisin]

The Tiger version of Safari truly does load faster than Firefox now (this must have been a priority for Apple!) ... not sure if it's preloaded like IE is but it is quick now. Generally though Firefox is jus a better and more convenient browser.

There's only *one* area where Safari truly has a usabilty edge and that's RSS. The reader is *really* nice. Mozilla/Firefox could do something similar by improving Sage marginally (the article length slider is all that's missing it seems).

Is better syndication support (rss atom etc) being considered?

Re:Rendering Bug?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Bugzilla has banned links from slashdot.

I've been using the nightlies and haven't had a problem with Slashdot for a while.

That said, if you really do feed a copy of any slashdot page to a web validator, it comes up with 100+ errors. The problem is that direct linking of Slashdot to validators have been banned by Slashdot maintainers.

Re:google maps

[Ark42]

Might be related to http pipelining being enabled or disabled on one of your installs. It makes a HUGE difference in the speed all those little tiles load for me.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

[Anonymous Coward]

Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences)

Sounds like the "delete all private data" feature that Opera has had for several years.

Going down! Since this is Slashdot, I'll be modded flamebait for making an honest observation.

Ridiculous

[GarfBond]

This isn't really so much a review as a description of features currently in the nightly. Firefox 1.1 isn't expected until June at the earliest. The roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.h tml) gives a rough overview of the timeframes involved right now, though it is not always accurate as it isn't updated frequently.

Honestly, Firefox 1.1 isn't even in alpha-release yet. To take some highly unstable code and to "preview" it is a bit premature right now. I would call 1.1beta a better time to 'preview' things, as hopefully by then there will be a feature freeze and things will have stabilized a bit. I'm not kidding about the unstable bit either: up until a couple days ago themes and extensions wouldn't install in the nightly builds.

In fact, an article like this does a disservice because it's misleading the /. crew. Yes, an incredibly fast back/forward feature has been checked in to the latest nightly builds, but what they won't tell you is at present this feature is DISABLED. While that doesn't mean it won't be enabled in the future and might be enabled for 1.1, as it stands this feature is off by default and only accessible through a custom pref, so in its current state it changes nothing for the average end-user.

This forums post gives a better idea of the new features to be expected in 1.1 with one line sentences: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2577 66

/. Rendering

[leapis]

I actually found a "fix" for the /. rendering problem. If you go to https://slashdot.org, it never displays incorrectly. Curious that SSL should have any affect on what is displayed, but I've been using it for weeks with no ill effects.

Pornzilla

[Citizen of Earth]

Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences).

Pornzilla lives!

A few setbacks, UI wise

[erikharrison]

I think there are a few setbacks, UI wise, in the latest builds.

The new preference dialog sucks. I suspect it's design is an attempt to match what OS X users expect, since Firefox devs have this (IMHO) crazy notion that the product should look as identical as possible across OSes.

The whole thing looks much more cluttered, and it has the same bugs that the UI did in pre 1.0 where the text was rendered inside of windows all the time (Like in the toolbar customization pallete, or in the current prefs). Which makes me worry that actually it's an XUL problem. If text placement is a thing that's hard to get right in XUL, it makes me worry about it as a platform.

However, performance did increase noticably for me, and the sanitize feature could be handy. I don't offhand find it much more useful that the "Clear All" button under privacy now. But it is nicely customizable, and not loosing my login cookies is kinda nice . . .

Re:Rendering Bug?

[Anonymous Coward]

How to evade referrer bans:

1. right click link, "Copy link location"
2. paste into URL bar
3. press enter

Warning: This is illegal in the United States under the DMCA.

The REAL news: Firefox 1.03 remote .exe execution

[Anonymous Coward]

wait for the spyware slags get hold of this one
full remote execution of an exe with no user interaction
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/397747/2005 -05-05/2005-05-11/0

catching up with MSIE

Cool thing about OSS projects is I can ask you...

[msimm]

Did you report it along with your fix? Because not everyone uses the image looper quite that much and this could slip through the cracks without someone pointing it out.

I'm sure they'd like to have as much working flawlessly as possible, so they'd probably really appreciate this kind of feedback. I'll assume you did report it (or at least verify someone else already had) and leave it at "this is the beauty of OSS" even the users have their part in the process (is IE displaying PNG's or CSS properly yet?).

"Private Browsing" and "Sanitize"

[Aqua OS X]

Really "Private Browsing" and "Sanitize" should be renamed "Porno Privacy Browsing."

I'm sure people will use these new features to protect sensitive data and whatnot... but come on... most folks will use this new browse mode to keep their filthy habits on the DL .

/. bug

[kinema]

"the much-anticipated fix for the /. layout bug"

I for one think this is great but is it really the job of the Mozilla devs to bring Slashdot into the modern times with a valid XHTML/CSS layout?

Re:/. bug

[shobadobs]

There's nothing great about XHTML. Valid HTML works just fine.

Re:/. bug

[CTho9305]

The validity of the HTML is irrelevant - the bug was a type of bug known as a "reflow bug". Reflow bugs are timing-dependant, in that they only occur when things happen in a certain order. This is a large part of why people with fast connections were less affected by the bug. You could likely construct a page with 100% valid XHTML which would demonstrate the same bug.

Re:/. bug

[Shinglor]

Actually that's not correct, the bug is only triggered when Gecko is in quirks mode. It is a browser bug but it can be avoided by using standard code.

Re:What I'm curious about PDF!

[Fussen]

Whenever I load a PDF in firefox it hangs somewhere during the initilization of Acrobat. It also hangs equally as long if I leave the pdf, and having firefox 1.0x shut down the acrobat engine.

But if I launch Acrobat as a separate program and just have it sitting empty in the taskbar, Firefox goes through PDFs just fine.

A strange bug. A frustrating one. One I hope they catch.

Thing about FireFox I don't like...

[PocketPick]

I really enjoy FireFox, but I still have two peeves:

1.) If I hit the middle mouse button and use auto-scrolling for something like this slashdot page, Firefox will use 30 to 40 percent CPU. And I wouldn't classify my system as slow(Athlon64 3200+ w/512Mb of RAM). Hopefully the can do something about this.

NOTE: Prior to making this post, I observed that IE holds at around 7 percent for the same action.

2.) Unexpected browser closing in v1.01 and above that wasn't present in the pre-v1.0 releases, such as when I'm holding down several keys or typing something in the browser and then switch to another page with the mouse, causing the browser to close (or crash, though I don't get an error message).

Make Firefox Look Like Maxthon?

[Munna2002]

I'm all for open source and competition to IE7. But Maxthon seems to take less resources, can save flash files, and have little usability tweaks for tabs (i.e. activate or deactivate tabs for new windows, etc., location of new windows relative to original tab, and so on). Is there any tweak to make Firefox look like Maxthon since its UI is very "meh". Tips anyone?

The big question is...

[MyLongNickName]

Will it support ActiveX?

URL history sort in address bar

[guacamole]

Will we have this old mozilla feature back? I want the URLs to be sorted based on the time they were last typed in the address bar as opposed to whatever sorting scheme that's being used right now in Firefox 1.0.x.

Some good and some bad

[Quattro Vezina]

The Good:

- Back/Forward Cache: Yes! Yes! Yes! This brings Firefox one step closer to the way I feel caching should be done. Back/forward should always pull pages from the cache (ignoring meta expire), and clicking links should always load the page from the server.

- Interface speedups: Great news. I love Firefox's rendering power, but the UI is slow as hell. This should help.

- Rendering errors fixed: More good news. While I can count the amount the number of times I've seen the Slashdot bug on my hands, better rendering is always a good thing.

- Focus follows mouse: One of the best changes. I've had so many issues with the focus not being where it's supposed to be. For example, I'll switch to another window or tab, but the focus is usually still in the old one. If this gets fixed, I'll jump for joy.

- Sanitise: More privacy == A Good Thing.

The Bad:

- Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom (the sole reason I installed TabBrowser Extensions was to get the browser tabs to appear on the bottom), but I don't mind them on the left side. But having them on top is just horrible. It looks prettier on the left too, especially with my theme, which places an image of a gecko in the background of the left pane. I'm also worried that my theme won't work with 1.1--I've been using an old version of the theme, as the author made a change a while back that uglified the icons, defeating the purpose of the theme (the version I use only uses two colours in the icons...). Officially, my theme only supports up to 0.9, but I've hacked it to allow 1.0 to install it--if 1.1 has any major UI changes like this one, it may cause my theme to choke.

- Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion. I like to be able to dick around in the preferences and not have to worry about screwing something up. It pissed me off to no end back when I used Galeon, and it'll piss me off in Firefox too. But, hey, I can tell that the Firefox devs have an agenda to screw up the preferences dialog as much as possible. They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?), they already flipped the OK and Cancel buttons, and now they're adding these shitty changes too. If I wanted to use a browser with Gnome's horrible HIG, I'd use Epiphany.

Re:Some good and some bad

[abulafia]

Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom

Personally I agree with the hate, but not the placement - give them to me on the left or the right, and leave more vertical real estate. But see below.

Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion... They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?)

I'd prefer no live prefs, too.

But, the deal here is being consistent. They're trying to make the app work like other apps. So, the theory goes, even if they don't make your personal favorite UI choice, at least you know what it will do.

The Edit->Preferences thing is a long standing Mac standard from the pre-OSX days. Back then, most apps followed it. The strength of the convention was most noticable when you used a Microsoft app, which hung them off of Tools->Options. If you haven't noticed, non-OSX MacOS is where a lot (but obviously not all) of Gnome's UI sensibilities come from.

So, I generally agree with your behavioural preferences, and weirdos like you and me and always dick with the undisplayed options in the config file, fiddle with the chrome, etc.. Meanwhile, everyone else gets consistency. Which is a good thing.

Re:Some good and some bad

[LadyLucky]

Back/Forward Cache: Yes! Yes! Yes! This brings Firefox one step closer to the way I feel caching should be done. Back/forward should always pull pages from the cache (ignoring meta expire), and clicking links should always load the page from the server.

While this may at first glance seem like a good idea, the browser absolutely must respect no-cache headers.

A trivial example is if you go to an online bookshop say, and you order a book. If you hit the 'back' button, you may get very confused if you start to see out of date information 'huh? It says that I haven't ordered this book yet, but I did'.

Then extend this further to more critical areas that web applications are getting used for these days. Bringing up medical information, for one. Say you order a drug through a web interface, and then hit back to go to the summary screen of all the meds the patient is currently taking, to print it out for your ward rounds. In this case showing the incorrect cached data is very very bad indeed.

MOD PARENT UP (and another suggestion)

[Quattro Vezina]

Here's another suggestion: use a browser, such as Opera, that supports disabling the referrer field. Granted, the last time I really used Opera was in the 6.x days, so I don't know if it still has that feature. Worst comes to worst, find an old copy of 6.x.

Re:MOD PARENT UP (and another suggestion)

[Anonymous Coward]

No need, in Firefox:

1. Go to about:config
2. Type "referer"
3. Set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0

Re:time for a new icon?

[fbjon]

Hm, I think it definitely looks more like a colourful sphere of some sort. Looks better than the small Opera icon, but perhaps not as recognizable. Where's the nice looking "W"?

google search

[goat_of_wisdom]

I've recently switched from mozilla to firefox and it's really frustrating not to be able to google search by typing my query into the url field and hitting the down arrow (like you would in mozilla). I'm sure this has been addressed before, but does anyone know how to make this work?

Kiosk mode

[tqft]

Have you seen this stuff?

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/tips

https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/showl ist.php?application=firefox&numpg=10&category=Kios k%20Browsing

http://tln.lib.mi.us/~amutch/pro/phoenix/kiosk.htm

http://malektips.com/firefox_0007.html

Maybe use moz instead
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/showl ist.php?application=mozilla&version=1.7&category=K iosk%20Browsing

You might also want to vote for this:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3341

Enabling Back/Forward Cache Usage

[jcm]

As can be seen in this mozillaZine article the Back/Forward Cache is not enabled by default in the nightly build. If you want to test it, then you'll need to enable it by going into about:config and adding a new integer for:

browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers = 5

You can see the full instructions in Chase Phillip's weblog post.

Re:Acid2

[kbrosnan]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/0 4/acid2.html

There's been lots of speculation about which browser will get Acid2 working first. I'd put my money on Safari. The problem is that we're late in the Gecko 1.8/Firefox 1.1 release cycle and there are a couple of bugs that would be quite a lot of work to fix, and introduce significant risk, and they're just not as important as other work that we have long planned for 1.8 and some other strategic work that I'll blog about soon. We will get to it in 1.9.

I'm sure some will seize on this as an opportunity to say "Gecko developers don't care about standards" ... they're simply wrong, as anyone can tell by looking at the huge number of standards compliance bugs we fix in every release. And keep in mind that if everyone's #1 priority was always standards compliance, Firefox would never have happened. -Roc

Part 2
Use about:config to modify browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete
http://mozillazine.org/misc/about:config/

Uh-oh

[XanC]

I hate to report this, but I uninstalled Web Developer, just to see... And it was like getting a whole new computer. FF is fast. And it's holding at 22MB resident. Normally by now it'd be at 75 at least, and climbing forever and ever.

Maybe I'll see if I can send some info to the developer... It's such a useful extension. But I've never seen FF fly like this.

Re:Uh-oh

[HorsePunchKid]

Whoa, that's quite a difference! Of course, one has to wonder whether that's a static difference, or whether the difference is actually proprotional to the total amount of memory being used. If Firefox is still going to be using 250MB at the end of the day, a 50MB difference isn't going to matter that much. However, if Firefox will stay 1/3 as big throughout the day, that could be very significant!

If the latter ends up being true, perhaps it would be worth creating a separate profile that contains the Web Developer plugin. When you say you "uninstalled" it, do you mean you actually totally uninstalled it, or did you just disable it?

Re:Uh-oh

[XanC]

Another profile... That could work.

I totally uninstalled it; I didn't want to make my test messy. I would imagine that disabling would give the same results though.

I've posted on the Web Developer extension forum.

x64 version too?

[mnmn]

I certainly wouldnt mind an x64 win64 version. A proper one, not one that says "Gecko Browser" where extensions dont work, and plugins dont work (maybe it needs x64 plugins i which case I'm complaining about the lack thereof).

Re:Rendering Bug?

[unother]

You have to keep in mind: these things affect forward-compatibility, and thus standards. In XHTML, unquoted attributes and bare ampersands are verbotten.

A REAL download manage

[Torin Darkflight]

I think Firefox should have a REAL download manager, one where you can pause the download, DISCONNECT from the internet, RECONNECT at a later time, and resume the download. As it is right now, you cannot do this! Yes you can pause the download, but if you disconnect then reconnect, when you tell it to resume, the download dies and you have to start all over again. Firefox should have this functionality built-in without the need for an extension, for us who are forced to use dialup.

Return of any pre-1.0 features?

[matt me]

Remember the fresh madness of blind feature destruction before Firefox 1.0 as the Mozilla team tried to relaunch their geeky browser for use by the average windows/IE user?

They took out the Javascript console, the stylesheet switcher, and even view source in some trunk builds. There was a huge uproar at this betrayal. Ditching the needs of the majority of the current userbase, loyal geeks, to make Firefox 'easier' for new users switching from IE. Petitions with hundreds of names were signed, and eventually, some of these were put back in.

We won some features back, but not at all. Many compromises were made, with features such as "find as you type" disabled by default (despite later winning browser feature of the year (even more impressive since it's not at all new)). These appalling default options make Firefox a pain to reconfigure a new profile from scratch. They don't make it easier for anybody. The navigation bar comes with giant icons, links are all underlined, and extensions are now a mission to install unless it's from update.mozilla.org And extensions are needed just to restore expected functionality - proper (XUL) error pages, a full tree in the add bookmark menu, copy image to clipboard, resumable downloads.

An old post, commenting on the fall of Firefox.
http://glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?2004/ 08/24/513-is-firefox-going-nuts-or-what

We need a Firefox forwards not back campaign. Firefox is in danger of becoming a dumbed down browser for Windows/IE users and perhaps no better (default prefs / no extensions) come IE 7. The Mozilla suite (Seamonkey) remained safe for geeks, but now it's discontinued and they don't even provide .rpm's for Firefox.

We need a community fork of Firefox where the voice of the user is valued above media attention. Else we rely on the last remaining working Firefox developer not owned by Google to save us all.