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."
According to Burning Edge, there are numerous usability regressions since 1.0 on the trunk builds.
I think they need a lot of time to iron things out and this is one of those things they've decided to prolong the process!
Since Fx is a hugely successful project that is still unusual in its open-source nature, the fact that more alphas and betas and in-betweens are being released may be a good thing.
Notable bug fixes
::first-letter pseudo-element line is larger than between other lines (improvement in first-letter drop-caps appearance?). :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated. :hover state not set until mouse move.
* Web page rendering and interaction
o 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
o 238493 - Ads on Gamespot flicker into other parts of the page during page load.
o 95227 - Make it possible to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages.
o 47350 - Current scroll position not retained, reloading or going back to multipart/x-mixed-replace (e.g. Bugzilla bug lists).
o 56314 - Reverse selection colors when page background is similar to default selection background.
o 274553 - Blocking iframes either via an extension or userchrome.css breaks find toolbar search.
o 103638 - Targets with same name in different windows open in wrong window with javascript.
o 62384 - Text Zoom doesn't change dropdown height (without reload).
o 97283 - Mouse wheel scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
o 251986 - Keyboard scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
o 209020 - Meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" broken if midas was ever used in that browser window.
o 198155 - Midas html editing mode persists after leaving the page that enabled it.
o 21616 - Space after
o 273785 - Plugins not scanned/detected on startup (empty plug-ins dialog in downloads, open-with dialog for PDFs).
o 76197 - Scrollbars should look disabled when there's nowhere to scroll (not yet fixed on Mac).
o 151375 - Focus outline should be drawn outside of element.
o 133165 - Focus outline should include larger descendants of inline elements.
o 65917 -
o 20022 -
o 278531 - Generic request prioritization (loadgroup prioritization) (e.g. for each HTTP host, load images with lower priority than pages).
* Improved error pages. To enable error pages, go to about:config and set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to true.
o 157004 - Error pages should be stored in history and show the original URL in the address bar.
o 237244 - "Try Again" on XUL error pages does not repost form data.
* Downloads
o 239006 - Download manager doesn't account for filesize when presenting combined percentages.
o 245829 - Download manager progress and title do not update correctly, wrong number of files and percentage after finishing or cancelling a download.
o 249677 - Cancel does not delete temporary file in helper app dialog, if default action is save.
* Accessibility
o 175893 - Make XUL 's focusable.
o 162081 - Wrong letter is underlined as accesskey / mnemonic when widget direction is RTL.
o Many keyboard accessibility fixes.
o Many screen-reader accessibility fixes.
* Speed and memory-use improvements
o 227361 - Don't reflow documents in background tabs until window resizing is complete.
o 131456 - Memory use does not go down after closing tabs.
o Many other speed and memory-use improvements.
* Windows-specific bugs
o 16940 - [Windows] IME is now disabled for password fields.
o 255123 - [Windows] Opening URL from another app focuses an existing window before opening a new window.
o 171349 - [Win98] Firefox icon is Win98's standard icon (taskbar & upper lefthand corner of app).
o 284716 - [Win2k/WinXP] Create DDBs in nsImageWin::Optimize. (Fixes several performance bugs with large images, such as slow scrolli
IAAL
I hope it lets you fast forward to some better posts than this one!
For the record, Deer Park is not the next minor point release (1.05 is guess), but the line that will be officially released as Firefox 1.1
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
Any chance the god damned clipboard bug is fixed yet?
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/new-brows er-features.html
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.
Bug Fixes
...
o 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
I thought this wasn't considered to be a bug, and that the problem was with Slashcode's HTML?
1. Talkback (aka Quality Feedback Agent) in Windows builds is only enabled by default for a random selection of users on the Windows platform. This feature was built into the installer so that the talkback server on Firefox release builds wouldn't get bogged down.
As this is an alpha release and is a good idea to send in as much crash data as possible you may want to do a custom install on Windows and make sure it's selected.
2. This release comes with a tool you can use to report broken websites. This can be found in the help menu.
This data is stored in a serpate database to bugzilla so that you can report any broken sites without having to worry about clogging up bugzilla with duplicates.
It's not like all these changes just spring up overnight. Use nightly (or hourly) trunk builds and you'll be up to date long before these releases or preview releases. I fully understand there's a reason for these sorts of dev previews, but the real testers and developers have been using these features and fixes for quite a long time now.
g htly/ - Nightly builds
t - Latest bug fixes
Trunk builds are quite nice for even the regular user, so long as you're willing to put up with a few issues from time to time. The tradeoff for bug fixes and new features is well worth it, if you know what you're doing. If a really big bug comes along, just use an older build for a week or so. You extensions will usually be A-OK from build to build, but if something breaks them odds are you would have had to version-bump or reinstall them anyway on the next release. Give it a shot. It was fun using livemarks and find as you type before the release, and it's fun using things like fast back and the improved rendering before every else.
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ - Not updated much anymore, but still a decent resource.
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/ni
http://bonsaibugs.org/pyblosxom.cgi/firefox/lates
I thought this wasn't considered to be a bug, and that the problem was with Slashcode's HTML?
Although Slashdot's HTML is old and bloated by modern standards this was actually a bug in the Firefox renderer. Although I'd like to see Slashdot clean up their HTML in the future this time it wasn't their fault.
This bug was actually fixed before Firefox 1.0 was relased but they pulled the fix from 1.0 as it caused some regressions, lucky that they got ironed out.
Working:
u pon
Adblock
Launchy
Bugmenot
Spellbound
Stumble
Broke:
Forecastfox
Dictionarysearch
whilst slashcodes html is pretty damn horrid this was definately a bug in firefox.
iirc firefox could render the page fine if it did so all at once but sometimes fucked it up when rendering incrementally.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Finally an imitation of Safari's SnapBack!
I love that thing, I've been missing it when using Firefox.
It lets you go back to the last adress you specified to the browser (by typing it in or using a bookmark), quite usefull when you let yourself wander semi-randomly through clicking links.
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.projects1.com/firefox/exthacks/FFnightl yextensions.html
something to help with the coversion to 1.0->1.1, also best to try a new profile too.
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
I thought this wasn't considered to be a bug, and that the problem was with Slashcode's HTML?
Are you fucking kidding me? EVERY TIME Firefox gets mentioned on Slashdot this comes up. And EVERY TIME, a FUCKING MORON like you says this.
It's a bug in Firefox.
What, the valid HTML testcase attached to the Bugzilla entry isn't enough? The FIREFOX DEVELOPERS saying it's a bug in Firefox isn't enough? The fact that the next version of Firefox will fix it isn't enough?
What will it take for you fucking fanboys to realise that YES, YOUR PRECIOUS FIREFOX HAS A BUG?!?
I started pointing this out in a reasonable manner last year. I get slightly louder and more aggressive each time I post this. I don't tolerate idiot fanboys. Nobody should.
But I thought they outlawed internet hunting?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Does anybody know the status of keychain integration on Mac OS X?
I know that Camino exists, but I really like the nifty Firefox extensions. Unfortunately, keychain integration is really a killer feature for me.
Anyone else wish there were keychain integration? Maybe somebody has already started working on this?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
So far, the only way I've found of solving this is to download the miniT extension and then modify a text file. This is 2005, not 1995.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
So did Deer Park water pay them for the naming rights to this release or what? Or is it just a coincidence? That could actually be pretty funny, if there was product placement in open source release names.
I noticed that phpBB forum sites often have the same issue for their right column. A real fix should notice the problem during layout and rework the layout assumptions that are proven false as it goes.
[
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.
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
I think the fix addresses the root of the problem, check with these forum sites and see if they now display correctly too. If they don't then it's a good opportunity to try out the new reporter tool in Firefox.
It's in the Help menu under Report Broken Website
Something I haven't seen mentioned that has quietly slipped in is the new extension-installation support. You can place .xpi files directly in the 'extensions' directory of either the program or your profile, and the next time you start it, Deer Park will automatically recognize and install the new one. This would seem especially noteworthy at this point in time, since many "broken" extensions can be hand-updated by bumping the version numbers in the extension's install.rdf and re-zipping the .xpi. You can just stick a manually-bumped .xpi directly in one of the above-mentioned 'extensions' directories and restart the program. You no longer need to use a web installer, make a dummy webpage, or drag-and-drop the file to the Extension Manager (something that I've found--at least under Linux--to be reliably unreliable most of the time).
It's actually memory leaks; there's a whole bunch of the buggers. Lots of leaks have been found and fixed, so I'm betting it won't be as bad as it used to be, but I doubt they've got them all, alas.
# 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
I believe that some applause is nessisary.
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
Is there anything else in end-user land worth checking out?
Forgot to add - check out the Session Saver extension. Makes closing and re-opening a tab-heavy session pretty much painless.
Tab mix http://tab-mix.info.tm/
p ?id=625
Tab opening - Open new tabs next to the current one with a customizable order
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
...providing a toolbar button for the new Sanitize feature? Several features surprisingly lack toolbar icons (like Print Preview, Sanitize, etc.)
Also, be aware that many extensions do NOT recognize the latest Deer Park build.
As an Alpha, it looks pretty good. My only fear is that the likes of Microsoft use these Alpha builds as templates for their new releases...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I've gotta say that I'm a little skeptical about the need for some of the 'fixes' in this build.
The attraction of FF is that it's sleek and lightweight. I don't want it to start making all kinds of allowances for bad formatting and adding 'features' like the Sanitize option. This is what optional extensions are for.
Let's focus on keeping FF slender. I don't like to think of a senario in, say, a couple of year's time when FF3.0 has become bloated.
Am I alone?
Pro:
* An old xml text webpage of mine, first I clicked on, showed an xlink image. Inline images were the one thing I knew of preventing 100% XML webpages.
* SVG. When I finally converted from seamonkey for all the gorgeous features I didn't realize firefox had, the lack of SVG hurt, hurt badly.
Con:
* Alot of extensions seem to be broken. Waiting for updates will be hard.
* Greasemonkey. Yes, I know it's just another extension, but at work, this one is a lifesaver. Going without it means using IE for our stupid webapps.
* The GrayModern theme is broken. The realization that this theme existed convinced me to switch from seamonkey. God I hate the default theme. (Are there any compatible themes at this point? I'd take anything other than the default!)
Strange:
* Even though it disabled the FavIcon Picker extension, alot of my links still have the icons I set for them. Wondering if a single click on them will undo the handywork.
cant even find "browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers" on about:config
I found it by right-clicking, selecting "New->Integer" and typing in "browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers" in about:config.
tried a new profile?
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
The <canvas> is cool. Safari compatibility or not, this could be the LOGO of the noughties. JavaScript is a fun language when you're not trying to be cross-compatible with every browser under the sun.
However, the last paragraph reads:
(emphasis in the original). While I commend Ian's commitment to standards, I can't imagine he will be very pleased with this tasks (for those who don't know him, he's victriolic against violations of the standards. He's a first-rate purist). I predicts the flames will be very pretty to look at.
bookmark folder not showing
nav buttons disabled (dead)
some (important) plugin not compatible
cant even find "browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers" on about:config
reverting to old 1.04
worst waste of 30 minutes
reading lame post on slashdot from anonymous coward
whining about alpha software
because too dumb to use new profile
reverting to kuro5hin
worst waste of 30 seconds
Deer Park is so that it ISNT CALLED FIREFOX. If anything is badly wrong and it bears firefox branding then it is bad press but if it is an alpha build that is called by another name then there is no risk.
If you have nothing useful to say post as AC.
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.
Make sure to backup your firefox data in your home directory. The last beta I used messed up my settings to where it reset everything to default lost all my themes, extensions, cached field entries etc. When I switched back to the stable version, firefox would just lock up.
If I set it to -1, does it eat up IE?
"Sometimes the truth is stupid." - Lawrence, creator of Prime Intellect
How can they enforce that? I'm neither, and so far nothing's happened t
Thanks for the info. I use FF in a "production" environment, so I won't be trying it just yet, but its good to know that this "feature" is on the horizon. There have been times the going back and printing an invoice page with a discount which was mystriously not included in the final payment invoice has asved me some cash. Not to mention the doing page searches from a slow server...I hate having to wait for the re-post and server-side app to execute again.
(We've come a long way from the early 90s, when you actually had to wait for jpgs to load 'cause the processors could do the DCTs only so fast)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, its called Kate or Wordpad or better yet a text editor with a spellcheck.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Does it pass the Acid2 test yet?
See bug #9458 from July 1999. (You might have to copy the link and open it by hand since the Mozilla-Bugzilla does a referer-check to filter out requests from slashdot links...)
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
IE is really behind now. Firefox is starting to implement CSS3 and IE dosn't even have full CSS2!
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
We've found a Dupe poster!
The legal representatives of Mr A. Coward, whose copy rights you have infringed will contact you shortly.
-
- cant even find "browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers" on about:config
- right-click
- new
- name it browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers
- OK
- enter a value other than 0 (like 1)
- OK
- restart
- Done
boRight, it's not supposed to be there, but it's simple to add. Pull up about:config:
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
Try the "delete the Chrome directory in your profile directory trick".
I say this for the people who may find themselves in a similar position; you're posting anonymously becuase you're a troll. [mutters: sign up, log in, be part of the community, be accountable for the words you post]
I bought opera for 3 operating systems, yet I hardly use it due to lack of adblock.
Also: its client certificate handling is clumsy to say the least.
And it is less stable.
Speaking of which, as long as Slashdot blocks validator.w3.org (you get a 403 Forbidden), the "Report Broken Website" feature should refuse to report problems with rendering Slashdot.
If you try to hide your bugs, don't expect help when other's bugs bite you.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Reposting while logged in. Personally I don't want things messing with my clipboard data, but here you go. Use Grease Monkey with Mozilla and install this . You may need to navigate to about:config and changed signed.applets.codebase_principal_support to true in order to allow Mozilla to let a script mess with vital bits like your clipboard. And it may prompt you on every page it tries to run on. May be a way to fix that, didn't look. But the end result is what you want. Be warned though, granting access to scripts from an entire domain to mess with this data is probably a dangerous idea. Note: copy function stolen from http://www.krikkit.net/howto_javascript_copy_clipb oard.html
Tried that, and it's not working.
This is a serious bug!
The best thing about bundles and disk images is that I can try the program out without installing anything. Works on all other programs I use.
What kind of crippled code runs differently on one filesystem than on another? (Well, at least it doesn't need write permission to its own directories)
Sometimes when I move the mouse over the browser main display pane it triggers a "back" event. This is with the mouse pointer no where near the back button. It's very annoying. It it possible that FF 1.0.4 has some kind of gesture control turned on? If so, how can I turn it off?
are you sure you had to do Integer? i mean, the OP says any non-zero number. i was thinking of trying something irrational or imaginary....
Just raise the taxes on crack.
That's not how to spell sarcasm
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
This name conjures up several images in my mind. .
1. A game reserve filled with hunting stock. The psychological message here seems to be one of many fat and juicy users all ripe for the plucking by the various predators of the web.
2. Dear Tick. The sound is similar enough to make my emotional muscle twitch just a little bit. If everybody else is like me, then that's a hundred thousand gallons of stress micro-siphoned from your brain into the Matrix.
What's going on over there at Mozilla?
-FL
Dunno if this has been mentioned, but I've been using a Deer Park alpha bild for a while on OS X and it has much better three-button mouse support, which the older Firefox seemed to be lacking.
Scrolling with the mouse wheel still sucks though.
I installed Deer Park Alpha 1 last week sometime. Was a newer build released today or is this the same thing?
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
I had no problems validating this page via http://validator.w3.org/check. It reported 166 errors on this page.
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
Why not Opera? Well, two things: it's: not open source and it's not free. Ok, so #2 can be disputed a tad, but who wants to see ads as part of their browser (for the "free" version, that is)?
Heh. That Mr A. Coward is me :-P Just forgot I wasn't logged in.
That way you can spin the page around and exclaim "It's a Unix system!!" while your associates nod sagely at your precociousness.
This was all done on my crappy old P3-600 MHz laptop running XP Pro. So Deer Park looks pretty fast so far.
No, they're two-letter capitals only. The other way is how grandma writes it.
Before adding new features, I would like to see optimizations be performed on FF, after surfing a while and the process just takes a huge chunk of memory. Granted memory is cheap nowaday but it make user's computer faster with a smaller footprint.
Son Nguyen
Oh, looks like they're catching up with Opera, finally. Wonder when will it be that they'll catch up with the download manager too?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
does anybody know whether it matters what the non-zero number is? does it determine the number of times you can click back or anything?
I recently replaced Tabbrowser Extensions with TabMix, and while the immense slowdown when typing in forms is gone, a new problem of crashing upon opening the browser from a link from another application has now appeared.
:)
Other than the crashing, Tab Mix is great.
Do you still want to press charges? :-P
On Windows 2000; :)
Pros:
- Overall much faster, page seem to load and render much quicker
- The forward/back feature works really well, pages snap up from history, no more waiting for them to load before the browser seeks to the history pos in the page
- The DOM inspector loads much faster
- I like the new icon much better
- No crashes so far
Cons:
- Most of my extensions no longer work - to be expected though.
- Nothing else so far
First make sure that you uninstalled Tabbrowser Extensions. If that does not work the a manual clean up of the extension is needed.l .en#uninstall # Uninstalling_manually
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/doc/installation.htm
or
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Uninstalling_extensions
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
I was using the WebDeveloper toolbar extension for Firefox and despite being called a lier [sic] I stand by what I wrote.
Alright! I know I'm in there! If I don't come out, I'll have to come in after me!
It seems nice, but when will the Gecko engine pass the Acid 2 test?
Yes. It's in fact the bug #217527. The actual bug is a combination of table layout and javascript layout trickery. Slashdot was almost the only place to hit it.
The issue is hit with the following code:
<TABLE CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" BORDER="0">
<TR>
<TD width="1" bgcolor="yellow">
<TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="0" CELLSPACING="0" ALIGN="LEFT">
<TR>
<TD>
xxx
<script type="text/javascript">var foo = document.body.offsetHeight;</script>
zzzzzzzz
</TD>
<TD></TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
The reason is that querying document.body.offsetHeight while the page is still loading caused element dimensions to be computed from partial page source. The results were then incorrectly cached and used later instead of recalculating the values once the page was completely loaded. In the example above, this causes the "zzzzzzz" part to fall out of table cell that is sized to fit only the width of "xxx". If the document.body.offsetHeight is not embedded inside the table or it's used only after the document has been fully loaded the bug can be avoided.
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
If you're in Linux, this build is worth getting, WHATEVER it may break, because it finally renders pages as they download. Firefox 1.0 was impossibly slow.
I was hoping for some long-needed features such as cross-session downloads. Single-window mode is more reliable. Bookmarks are better though. And XUL error pages work. So that's two less extensions I need.
"Deer Park" was the place where the historic Buddha, Shakyamuni, gave his first Dharma talk ("sermon") after becoming enlightened. It is also a very popular name for Buddhist temples, monasteries and Dharma centers. However, I don't know if the person(s) who gave it this code name are Buddhists or even realize the connection.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try. - Jedi Master Yoda
He mean foreign as in not from central Missouri or Missourah as they call it in them there parts.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Extension writers don't have to parse history.dat. They can access History using RDF (example 1, example 2).
The shareholder is always right.
It figures that Ben Goodger blogs about this very idea the day I post this.
0 .html h umbshist2.png 0 00100.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/archives/00825
http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/xtech2005/t
http://everybreathdeathdefying.com/blog/archives/
These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson