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Firefox Deer Park Alpha Available

The Mozilla folks have made available the newest release of the Firefox web browser. This release is for testers and developers only, and should not be used if you have no interest in trying out the latest build. The release notes cover the recent changes. From the what's new document: "Fast back (and forward) - This very experimental feature allows much faster session history navigation. The feature is off by default but can be enabled for testing purposes by setting the browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers preference to a nonzero number."

10 of 330 comments (clear)

  1. Extensions by johansalk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm often late on adopting firefox new releases and the reason is simply that extensions often need time to be updated by their authors. I wish the Mozilla foundation would somehow remedy this problem in the future, so updating the browser need not break extensions.

  2. Graphical History by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When will Firefox implement a graphical representation of the history for the user?

    Thumbnails of where the user has been, linked in an easy to follow graphical manner. It would make finding sites of interest (where one has forgotten where they found them) so much easier.

  3. Re:Fast back by Overzeetop · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Darned, I was hoping they were implementing the Opera back/forward action, where the page is simply redrawn, for lack of the proper term, as the page you saw, rather than re-executed or re-downloaded. In Opera, the page redraws were so fast as to be unnoticable, and there were no data-post limitations. It was a snapshot rather than a reload. Of course, if you wanted to, you could just reload the page manually to re-invoke the post (or whatever actually happened on the page)

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  4. Re:Graphical History, how to start by kbrosnan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When someone writes some writes some code to implememt an API that Robert O'Callahan wrote for the upcoming release. The API renders web pages to images.

    Right now Mozilla/Firefox use a rather crusty history file format, Mork. There are plans to replace this history file with sqlite (Bug 245745, not until Gecko 1.9) which would make an extension writer's job a bit easier.

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  5. Re:Firefox 1.1 by mdew · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I was thinking how they would implement such a feature, considering theres numerious "optimised" compiled binaries, so each firefox binary will be different (apart from the official mozilla.org release).. how would you make a binary diff against the unofficial packages? is it possible?

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  6. Re:Tabs: go extension hunting by kbrosnan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Tab mix http://tab-mix.info.tm/
    Tab opening - Open new tabs next to the current one with a customizable order

    https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=625

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  7. Re:New browser features by linuxci · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not bad. 3 out of 6 new features are copied from Opera

    So what? Some people prefer the Opera UI and will use that as their default browser, others prefer the way Firefox is designed. What's wrong with copying the best features off other browsers? There's not one browser fits all.

    I think Firefox is better designed for users that want a relatively simple interface whereas Opera comes packed with just about everything but the kitchen sink (it'll be in version 9.0).

    So to me Firefox and Opera appeal to different people. They both support standards and provide competition to the browser world so I like to see both grow.

  8. Re:New browser features by Lussarn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's a god damn mystery why opera has close to zero marketshare and Firefox has 5% when according to some opera fanbois all features of every browser is copied from opera. So where is opera lacking? Why isn't marketshare larger? Maybe you should ask yourself that question instead of picking on successfull browsers such as Firefox.

  9. CSS 3 by Epeeist · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Interesting that they have already started to implement some of the proposed CSS 3 features and are fixing some CSS2 breakages.

    That other browser can't even get CSS 1 right, and won't be implementing CSS 2 features in the edition that is supposed to be out this summer.

    Speaking as somebody who has come close to throwing his PC out of the window this morning because IE doesn't do z-indexes properly, which means that I have to look for a yet another workaround to cope with its breakages.

  10. Re:New browser features by generic-man · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In my experience as a registered Opera user, Opera has lots of features and is very compact, but crashes more often than Firefox does. Granted, Opera can recover from crashes by saving its state -- something I wish Firefox can do -- but I'd rather it not crash quite so much.

    Firefox is fairly stable, more so than most of the alternative browsers I've tried. It still leaks memory, but you can afford to restart your web browser every day or so.

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