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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released
elfguygmail.com writes "Firefox 1.5 beta1 is out! It includes many new features including a new automatic update system, reworked options dialogs, faster browsing, new error pages, memory and stability updates. Get your beta at Mozilla.org."
Yeah! New error pages! Finally no more of that 404 bullshit.
Yeeeeeeah ! Faster back and forward means better performance reading messageboards . Deerpark alpha wont start on my machine. I am one those that submitted a couple of bugs on this. Good job boys!
Posting on it now. Generally teh snappier on OS X, which I appreciate. Text handling still isn't good enough to switch from Camino. The drag n drop tabs are a very welcome addition. Also, it looks like the Slashdot bug has been cleared up. Sweet.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
If they've really made it more stable and fixed the apparent memory leak, I'll be really happy. Firefox is great as it is, but it seems that if you leave it open for too long it starts to take up insane amounts of memory.
For those here that run Windows in the Classic theme, here a link to info on how to fix the menu looks http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_windows_classic
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Warning, seems like most extensions won't work from 1.0x to 1.5beta1..
My employer forces us to use firefox at my job... The database front-end they had designed uses flash. Firefox segfaults quite often and the copy/paste buffer is always farked up. I really hope these issues have been taken care of :(
If it were my choice at work, I'd use Opera.
Yeah, whatever. You say that now, but I bet you were one of those jerks hating on Network Solutions for making "new error pages" last year, weren't, you?
So far the only extension that works is the gmail notifier. Not even the all-in-one mouse gestures works... I'm patient, but will all of the developers make and re-make their extensions for every version?
I smell a need for backward compatibility
Runnin' On Empty
When installing Firefox 1.5
(1) Backup your old Firefox 1.0 profile
(2) Start with a clean profile, its best to use a clean profile
(3) Update your extensions
(4) If the extensions still complain, try this following the directions from this link
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
I was hoping that they'd replace the big goofy icon buttons on OS X and Linux that just don't go with anything. Maybe next version. The upside is the preferences layout is simpler, and browsing is a little snappier.
I'm also hoping that my memory leakage problems on linux are solved. We'll see! Now back to searching for the safarifox theme to see if it'll work...
Very cool that they have a new release out, I'll be downloading it soon.
But I'm a little dissapointed it looks like the built-in SVG support isn't in there. Guess it's still alpha? (Haven't been following the Deer Park releases)
I'm really looking forward to the day where I can actually do a site in SVG and be able to expect more than 2 or 3 people to be able to see it...
And wow am I ever tired of struggling with the Flash IDE.
I do not know if this is a problem with firefox, SpellBound, or a combination of the two, but it's pretty damn annoying after a while.
... It amuses me the way people are far happier to post complaints on /., where they achieve nothing, instead of sending the same complaint direct to the developer, where they might fix the problem!
It's a mozilla dictionaries problem, I think - the dictionaries (which spellbound doesn't provide itself) install into the Firefox application folder, rather than into your profile folder - so when you overwrite that folder, you've just nuked your dictionaries.
If this annoys you, you could always ask the spellbound devs to provide dictionaries that install into your profile
I have switched many people to Firefox and have found that people I switched months and months ago will never update. They never look at the little red arrow on the top right. They stick with the same version they have unpatched. Other applications use auto update because users dont update programs, its a problem but if Firefox is to be known as the most secure, fastest, bug free browser on the internet then they have to make sure everyone updates.
I agree 100%. There are often pages that I visit which take a while to load. I load them in the background in tabs, but the whole browser grinds nearly to a halt while they load. In fact, if a flash animation takes up lots of CPU in one tab, then all the other tabs, and every other part of the user interface sometimes locks up for a minute at a time. This is just sad.
My second big gripe is just general bugginess. Yes, it takes time to iron out bugs, but Firefox has had some time. Right now, we're on 1.0.6, and honestly I'd rather see them just spend 100% of their effort on a 1.0.7 that is as close to bug free as humanly possible rather than adding more features. I'm sure the features they're adding right now are worthwile overall, but I'd much rather stay with the feature set I have now and see all the bugs disappear. The worst one is something that seems to relate to perhaps an event queue. Every now and then, something will happen that seems to cause Firefox to just stop processing events. I can press buttons and hit Command-W (I'm on a Mac), and nothing will happen. But if I hold down the mouse button inside a window, somehow this rejuvenates the event queue and these events get processed eventually. Totally, totally weird.
The worst part is that it seems that flash animations use the same thread as the user interface. So if you have a flash animation that takes a LOT of CPU, which lots of them do, then the user interface becomes unresponsive. This is just silly. You're taking untrusted code (flash from whatever web site) and letting it take CPU time away from critical stuff like being able to close the window that contains the CPU-hogging flash code!
For the hell of it I clicked on view source on the provided link...
This was a comment in the code:
Note to Editors of this Document!
I have meticulously repaired the indentation here. DO NOT OPEN THIS
DOCUMENT IN A WYSIWYG EDITOR OR (in the words of Robert DeNiro) I
WILL BRING YOU DOWN! I WILL BRING YOU DOWN TO CHINATOWN!
-Ben
nice.
-Vinod
including a new automatic update system
I am sick and tired of every application including its own update system. They all have different user interfaces, they don't handle dependencies correctly (e.g., Firefox may upgrade its own extensions, but not the download manager that they depend on), and they make random connections all over the Internet.
When will Windows and Macintosh get decent package and dependency management so that developers don't have to put this functionality into applications anymore, and that we don't have to put up with the security risks of many different update systems anymore?
Beautiful: Firefox' source finally builds with GCC4 out of the box; no mucking around necessary!
They've jumped up half a version and still no display:inline-block? Shouldn't they finish CSS 2.1 before they start on CSS 3? Every other major browser out there supports it, so it can't be that hard. Even IE, with it's dismal standards support, has inline-block.
Well, as one who manages the family computer, which runs WinXP, AutoUpdate is actually pretty useful. I haven't had to install an update manually for quite some time.
Seriously though, I can't wait until we get an OSX port that doesn't suck (Camino is okay, but what good is it if you can't use all the cool firefox extensions?).
Well, as a Mac OS X user, I feel your pain. But, I'm wondering which parts suck for you? I have issues with page rendering. Look at these rendering jobs from the LiveJournal home page (be kind! this is hosted on my personal server box):
- FireFox 1.0 (Sorry, but the "About" Dialogue blocks the effected text, so you'll have to trust me)
- FireFox 1.5 Deer Park Beta 1 the distributed Mac OS X binary, not compiled from soruce
- Camino 0.92 just for comparson
- Opera 8.02 for Mac OS X
- Safari 2 (And if you don't trust me, think about how many web browsers have a brushed metal GUI like that)
This occurs on several pages, but the only one I could produce on-demand was the LiveJournal page. Note that this is the LiveJournal home page, not user pages, and contains relatively simple and stable code. Note that Safari and Opera read the pages perfectly fine, but all the Mozilla-based browsers (all versions), even Camino, can't render the page properly. And these problems are not always so minor. On occasion, text can continue right outside of the view (and scroll) of the window. Text boxes will end up with text no longer inline with the cursor, making editing and correcting typos virtually impossible.Any one else have this problem? I know it's not too isolated since I've had this happen on both installations of OS X 10.4 and even 10.3. Or are there other problems that I don't know about?
Rawr
Faster back and forward means better performance...
Nice. Too bad its taken over 11 years for someone to optimize this in a relevant browser.
I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used. I hit 'back' and I observe network activity even when the page is entirely 100% cacheable content. The browser is probably playing with If-Modified-Since... I'd rather it just render what's cached especially when, between the time the page was first rendered and the time I hit 'back' the network flakes out and, rather than simply rendering what is already faithfully stored on my local disk, the browser hangs!
It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.
There's probably some profoundly crucial and subtle reason for all this and I've foolishly revealed my ignorance. Apply the necessary flames, but only if you have credible answers.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I understand that IE isn't standards compliant, but it is dominant. As such, many people will be viewing the FireFox web site in IE. But IE doesn't render many of the FireFox site's pages correctly! Rounded corners don't work on every page and some pages (such as the "Mozilla FireFox 1.5 Beta 1 Release Notes" page) have much larger issues. However, IE renders the content at full width and FireFox leaves a substantial margin on either side (I have a wide screen display, I want to make use of it!).
Blame Microsoft all you want, but this is inexcusable. If you want people to switch to FireFox, they need to believe FireFox is better. Seeing as most web sites are built for IE, users coming to FireFox's web site see a page that doesn't render correctly and they assume the makers of the page are to blame. Why would they blame IE? Every other page they go to renders just fine in IE.
Since the same organization that made the page makes the software, it is conceivable that people would be turned away from FireFox on the assumption that people who produce broken web pages also produce broken programs.
Whether the FireFox web site doesn't properly support IE out of laziness, or out of malice. It should be fixed.
http://brandonbloom.name
No, this still doesn't fix bug #154892: "Splitting Absolutely positioned frames not implemented - Missing second page of content when printing or print previewing this site"
9 2
This bug prevents many web sites from printing in any useful respect from Mozilla browsers.
Its existence keeps me from rolling out Firefox as the default. It probably keeps any organization that frequently prints web pages from considering Firefox.
But what really irks me is that this bug has existed since 2002!. The bug has been duplicated in dozens and dozens of bug reports. It has at least 70 votes in Bugzilla. Yet no one has fixed it, and there is NO INDICATION that it will be fixed in the foreseeable future, yet it directly affects the user's browsing experience.
The history and severity of this bug does not reflect well on the Mozilla browser or its open source development model. NOTE: I am actually, personally, quite impressed with the Mozilla project, but someone who wants an excuse to banish free software might start with something like this.
Finally, as a Firefox user, a personal plea: Somebody, please fix this! Please?
For more information:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548
So, the big deal here is maintaining consensual state. I'm sure you know the basics here. Best practice is to POST when changing state on the server, and GET when reading. But, not everone does that. And it also took a long time to come up with that simple rule. The upshot is that when using browser based C/S apps, there is no good way to tell if the last action changed the state of whatever it is you're looking at. (For a simple example, think of confirming a bank transfer, and hitting back from the "it worked" page.) And even the POST means change rule doesn't always work or apply. Good app design has to play a role, but a browser has no idea if what is going on with the server.
There are other reasons why back can't always be exactly "what you got a page ago", but the above is the main killer (from the perspective of what I do, at least). Developers can make this better by playing tricks with the last-modified header and whatnot, but you're either going to sometimes get broken info or at least do a HEAD when going back, take your pick.
It is notable that the whole AJAX obsession usually completely kills the back button, and many web developers are very hot on the idea. If global state, session, and sometimes transaction can be bound that much more tightly, it does make life easier for a coder, at the expense of some great client side functionality. (Again, depending on how you think of it.)
Doesn't mean I'm not using XMLRPC - I don't mind bragging that we were doing some of this a few years ago. Having a community to trade ideas with kicks ass, and I've learned a lot from other's experimentation. But we shouldn't lose track of basics, like "the browser is not just a window frame; inbuilt functionality is important and if you make your own back buttons, you're missing the point."
I forget what 8 was for.
Well, there goes my karma, I WILL be modded as troll for this, but had to get it out
Consultant: No, what I'm asking is, do you want us to build the method that works, which you hired us to discover and spec out for you, or the broken one, for which you're now asking?
Client: The broken one!
Consultant: You're sure.
Client: Are you billing me for this conversation?
I forget what 8 was for.