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."

Comments

burning edge says:

[professorhojo]

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.

Changes

[Hank Chinaski]

Notable bug fixes

* 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 ::first-letter pseudo-element line is larger than between other lines (improvement in first-letter drop-caps appearance?).
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 - :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated.
o 20022 - :hover state not set until mouse move.
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

Re:Changes

[Issue9mm]

That's not necessarily something that should be fixed at the browser level. From a coding perspective, I've gotten into the habit of specifying horizontal margins and padding in ems, which is a relative unit of measure (horizontal) based on font size. Because of that, a simple document can scale perfectly regardless of text size.

If I specify a column's boundary at 150px, it isn't the browser's job to correct for it, other than to wrap the text when it gets too big.

Long story short, your complaint is with web designers, not with Firefox.

-9mm-

Re:Changes

[n0-0p]

Opera style "page zoom" should be possible in 1.5, so you may eventually get your wish anyway. It's just not really practical with the current rendering engine.

Re:fp

[miasmic]

I hope it lets you fast forward to some better posts than this one!

Extensions

[johansalk]

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.

Re:Extensions

[MynockGuano]

Perhaps they should put out a sort of "alpha release". This release would be basically a semi-official in-development build for "testing purposes only" on which extension authors and developers can "test" their code to see if there are any problems. This way, they will have time to prepare their extensions before the next release. Furthermore, to avoid confusion and prevent everyone from jumping on an unstable product and generating negative publicity, it would probably be best not to brand it with the Firefox name; maybe they could just use whatever the current code-name happens to be (like, for example, "Deer Park", a random name that I just happened to come up with).

New browser features

[darteaga]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/new-brows er-features.html

Re:New browser features

[Lussarn]

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.

Graphical History

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Two things to look out for

[linuxci]

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.

Re:Yay!

[linuxci]

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.

Many work

[glrotate]

Working:

Adblock
Launchy
Bugmenot
Spellbound
Stumbleu pon

Broke:

Forecastfox
Dictionarysearch

1.1 Extensions

[mdew]

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.

Re:Fast back

[linuxci]

They are, it's the parent post that got it wrong.

Feature off by default as it's got some bugs at the moment, see my earlier comments on how to enable it.

Not sure if they plan to implement the feature the parent mentioned in safari

Re:Graphical History, how to start

[kbrosnan]

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.