Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 Released

Anonymous Cow writes "Almost a month after the release of Firefox 1.5 beta 1, the second beta of Firefox 1.5 has been released. Firefox 1.5b2 can be downloaded from Mozilla.org. A changelog outlining the changes in this release is also available. The official announcement is over at MozillaZine." From the announcement: " This release does not contain any major new features since Beta 1. Improvements to automated update system, Web site rendering and performance, along with several security fixes are included in this release. Beta 1 users that want to help test software update, should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days. The incremental update from Beta 1 to Beta 2 is 700K bytes."

Comments

FP?

[Anonymous Coward]

-STW

Once again

[zegebbers]

If there are security updates, the software update should notify the user ASAP. Not everybody checks a news site that would mention FF updates.

Re:Once again

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, no. They give some people a chance at downloading the entire thing and then allow an incremental upgrade for those who already have it. Give the Mozilla foundation a few million dollars for more bandwidth/servers and I'm sure they could do both at the same time, but as it is right now...

Re:Once again

[KiloByte]

If there are security updates, the software update should notify the user ASAP. Not everybody checks a news site that would mention FF updates.

1.5beta2 is not a security update -- it's a preview of the next major release. Not stable yet (well, unless you compare it to IE/AOL Netscape/...) and not considered to be fit for the general public.
It's a release for developers and adventureous users.

Re:Once again

[UlfJack]

However, if everybody starts update at the same time, the update-site will go down and thus, noone will be able to get the update. Of course, you could build a bittorrent client into firefox...

Re:Once again

[75th Trombone]

In addition to what this reply's older siblings have said, I reckon they want to test the delta-update system. I haven't tried the beta myself, but I think 1.5's auto-update is supposed to be a self-patcher, rather than a self-complete-redownloader.

Re:Once again

[hotdiggitydawg]

Looks like it's already happening...

Re:Once again

[hotdiggitydawg]

Note to self: use the preview button, dammit!

Moztorrent

Re:Once again

[dirty]

It's a beta. It's not meant for general use. If there are security problems it's your own damn fault for using it.

Re:Once again

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked IE is more "stable" than a firefox stable release but you know, outside of that...

I haven't had IE crash on me since the days of windows98... firefox does it at least 3 times a day.

Re:Once again

[WraithRealm]

That's funny; IE crashes much more than firefox - especially on a spy/malware infested system. ...Don't think I've ever seen firefox crash... actually, now that I think about it, I never *have* had firefox crash on me. Anyone else have problems with firefox? Even the new beta hasn't rendered itself broken.

Re:Once again

[DeafByBeheading]

I need to figure out what's up with its PDF handling with Acrobat. Lately, it's been hanging (not "crashing", per se, but still dead) on 9 out of 10 PDF opens... Works beautifully on the Debian side with gpdf, though. Other than that, I haven't had any major problems with it.

Re:Once again

[Kelson]

A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's the craziest thing I've heard since--

Oh, wait, I'm posting this using Opera.

A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's a great idea!

Re:Once again

[Kelson]

Yes. I've been using the branch nightlies for the past two weeks, and each morning I click Help->Check for Updates and it downloads anywhere from 20-500K and asks me to restart the browser. Twice it's been unable to apply a patch and has automatically downloaded and installed the complete package as a fall-back.

The one annoying thing is that if I wait a few days, I have to run this cycle several times, one to go from Monday's build to Tuesday's, one to go from Tuesday's build to Wendesday's, etc. Fortunately this is only an issue for nightly testing, since the update cycle on the release version is going to be much slower. The 1.0 cycle has had 7 updates over the course of a year. At that rate, the chances of missing two are pretty low if you're paying attention or if auto-update is active. It also makes it more practical for Mozilla to create patches that skip versions (i.e. going straight from 1.5.0 to 1.5.2 without requiring you to install the 1.5.1 patch first).

Re:Once again

[BladeMelbourne]

My thoughts exactly. Even MSIE/Windows doesn't update that quickly. Nor would I want it to.

Seems like the GP still has the 90's mental addiction to having the latest/greatest software...

Nice.

[illtron]

Can anybody remind me what the name of the extension is that lets you use your other extensions? I can't stand that it won't let you use them by default until they've been updated.

Re:Nice.

[Associate]

http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/b uildid/nightly.html
That should do it.

Re:Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called nightly tester tool

http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/b uildid/nightly.html

Re:Nice.

[freak117]

It is called Nightly Tester Tools and it is available at http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/b uildid/nightly.html

Re:Nice.

[tgd]

I only had three come up as not working (GreaseMonkey, Google and FoxyTunes). All three worked fine when I went into the install.rdf in my profile directory for each one and set the max-version to 1.4+

It took about thirty seconds total. I don't have any GreaseMonkey scripts installed right now but Google Toolbar and FoxyTunes both seem to work fine.

Re:Nice.

[rahlquist]

Awesome. One of FF best features is its extensions, its worst is they break with every update until the authors fix them.

Re:Nice.

[nogginthenog]

I've had luck unzipping the extension, changing the version number in the XML file and re-zipping.

Re:Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called Nightly Tester Tools

Re:Nice.

[Val314]

breaking the extentsions with a new release is the only way. (or would you prefer breaking the whole browser by enabling an extension that doesnt work with this release?)

Re:Nice.

[appavi]

You can use Greasemonkey 06.2 beta for Firefox 1.5.

more details in Greasemonkey blog
http://greaseblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/firefox-15- compatible-greasemonkey.html

Re:Nice.

[jeffphil]

It's called having options.

Why not make it configurable, then if an extension breaks I can manually disable it.

Or at least give me the option of a context menu on a disabled extension to let me manually re-enable one that was auto-disabled.

It's freaking annoying right now.

Re:Nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

MT Tech's local install is what you want.

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=1839 67

Re:Nice.

[Henry V .009]

breaking the extentsions with a new release is the only way

HENRY: You sent for me, sir?

BILL GATES: Yes, Henry. A man down on earth needs our help.

HENRY: Splendid! Is he sick?

BILL GATES: No, worse. He's discouraged. At exactly ten-forty-five PM tonight, Earth time, that man will be thinking seriously of throwing away Microsoft's greatest gift.

HENRY: Oh, dear, dear! Backward compatibility! Then I've only got an hour to dress. What are they wearing now?

BILL GATES: You will spend that hour getting acquainted with George "Val314" Bailey.

HENRY: Sir . . . If I should accomplish this mission—I mean—might I perhaps win my wings? I've been waiting for over two hundred years now, sir—and people are beginning to talk.

BILL GATES: What's that book you've got there?

HENRY: The MCSE Study Prep guide.

BILL GATES: Henry, you do a good job with Val314, and you'll get your wings.

HENRY: Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you.

Re:Nice.

[GXFragger]

Another way to make extensions work again, apart from modifying the install.rdf files or using the previously mentioned Nightly Tester Tools, is typing about:config into your address bar. Right click on any preference and go to New -> String. Name it "app.extensions.version" and set the value of the string to "1.4+".

This should force Firefox to accept most extensions. One could set it to 1.0+, but there may be incompatibilities. If Firefox refuses to load, add " -safe-mode" to the target box in the shortcut properties or in the run parameters.

To undo this, just make the value of apps.extension.version blank or right click it and click Reset.

Re:Nice.

[Val314]

sometimes if you install an extension that isnt made for this version you cant even use the browser anymore. (you have to manually remove the files)

i dont think that you want to to this.

Restoring the extensions (at your own risk) is very simple with this extension: http://users.blueprintit.co.uk/~dave/web/firefox/b uildid/nightly.html

but it cant be done automatically!

Re:Nice.

[jeffphil]

>> sometimes if you install an extension that isnt made for this version you cant even use the browser anymore.

That's exactly why Firefox has safe mode option.

I definitely agree enabling all old extensions by default is not for everyone. But it should be configurable for others and not so draconian.

no mention of my favorite bug

[Anonymous Coward]

When opening one pikture of a pretti gurl in one Tab: I Kin't rilly go to another tab while I wait for the first pikture to show up. Some sort of lag thang...

Re:no mention of my favorite bug

[Associate]

Wipe your other hand off and type with both hands.

Re:no mention of my favorite bug

[Anonymous Coward]

All joking aside, I know what he is talking about. It happens with any large image, and only seems to happen with older video cards. Towards the end of an image loading, firefox starts to slow down. When the entire image is loaded, there is a pause while it does something. I don't know if it re-draws the entire image after it loads? Either way, my mouse will get choppy during those few seconds. This makes me think it is an issue with how firefox is using DirectDraw. The issue isn't present in IE or Opera.

Re:no mention of my favorite bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Another fine story to just switch to osx.

I've heard that

[Anonymous Coward]

it's beta than the last version 8-|

magnet and ed2k links

[Anonymous Coward]

As slashdot doesn't support those (AFAIK), you'll have to edit out the spaces yourself:

magnet:?xt=urn:bitprint:M2BVB25HHX25S7KILXV2YWVB6U 2W56RQ.OQRSV5PTLIP6PVQJDUPK2ZYFNCQR6PINCYJRHKQ&dn= Firefox%20Setup%201.5%20Beta%202.exe
ed2k://|file|Firefox%20Setup%201.5%20Beta%202.exe| 5214072|0b8daabfad80f416b988d9168991a8ed|/

If there's a nice way to post magnets and ed2k links here, please let me know.

I installed it without any problems (some extensions broke again, but that's normal).

Re:magnet and ed2k links

[bonzooznob]

Testing... Try wrapping your links in: So, like:
Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 - Magnet Link
Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 - eDonkey 2000 Link
hope this helps

Re:magnet and ed2k links

[HeroreV]

Didn't work. Too bad Slashdot doesn't have some sort of preview feature so that you could have tested it out before making a post.

Copy & Paste sorted?

[LiquidCoooled]

1.5 suffers from some serious C&P bug in windows where it won't let me use the clipboard under various circumstances.

anyone know if its been rectified?

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just switch to linux and fix a lot of other bugs at the same time...

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, noticed the fix with the first b-2 code that appeared on the nightly branch builds a few days ago.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because Linux is well known for its excellent clipboard support.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[afd8856]

Actually, in KDE...

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[The Faywood Assassin]

What kind of stupid answer is this? Does a plumber tell you to fix your own toilet? Does the city tell you to fix the pothole?

What is the point of offering BETA versions and asking for feed back if the user is going to be met with "fix it yourself"

Honestly, I feel that it is the most ignorant response to expect everyone to be fluent in computer programming!

Beny

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[flithm]

Linux clipboarding is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. It's really only people who don't understand the Linux clipboard that complain about it.

This is actually one of the reasons I loathe using Windows now. I can't believe people would put up with its absolutely horrible cut 'n paste support.

A funny point of note is that I, like many people, complained about the Linux clipboard when I was going through the steps of switching away from Windows. It was foreign and didn't act as I expected a clipboard should. But that quickly faded away once I figured out how it works and realized how much better it is.

The only annoying thing is you can't cut and paste between X and pure console mode without using something like xclip. But since Windows can't even do pure console mode (while at the same time doing graphical mode) this isn't realy a point against Linux cut 'n paste.

Anyway... all you've got to do is wrap your head around the fact that X has two (or more) cut and paste modes (depending on what WM / desktop system you use). The standard mode allows selection of text and immediate pasting of text using the middle mouse button. This is so much more convenient than Windows cut 'n paste for most things!

The second mode is basically an exact copy of how Windows cut 'n paste works. Highlight, use the copy command, then use the paste command. This is useful for situations where you want to paste over some text that needs to be highlighted (which obviously thwarts the first cut 'n paste mode).

Also note that having two separate modes is also a god send. Sometimes it's very useful to have two selection buffers.

Some WM's have an implementation of their own cut 'n paste method too. KDE has klipper which is a great tool. It can be configured to work a number of different ways, but essentially it keeps a history of your copy commands so you have access to many of them at any given time.

It's been a long time since Windows had a leg up on Unix style clipboards.

I can't speak for OSX since I've never really used it, but I assume it has some handy things that are either on par with or better than a standard *nix/*BSD setup.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Blakey Rat]

You might have a point with text, but there are other things you can clip other than text. In OS X and Windows, you can copy parts of a Windows Media Player movie and paste them into Powerpoint. You can copy your Powerpoint slide and paste it into Word. You can copy 15 non-contiguous cells from a Excel spreadsheet and paste them into Notepad.exe... and all of these do exactly what you expect. On a Mac, you can do all the same operations... you copy Excel cells and paste into TextEdit, and it works. MacOS has had a clipboard that could handle all these operations since 1988-90ish, and Windows has since 1995.

Linux is getting better, but you still find that copy and paste does not do what you expect.

The only people who claim that Linux clipboarding is better are the people like you who, apparently, never copy anything other than text. There's a whole world of data out there, text is just a small part of it.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[hixie]

The problem isn't the design of X's copy-and-paste support. The problem is that the people who implement copy-and-paste all do it differently so nothing of what you describe actually works reliably and intuitively.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[flithm]

I've never tried cut 'n pasting a part of a movie -- this sounds pretty cool!

But you can do most of what you said in Linux just fine. Cut 'n paste non-contiguous cells, images, sound clips, etc.

Keep in mind that many of the limitations Windows clipboard has also exist in Linux, and I know what your point was -- that in certain instances you can do those types of things (which was definitely an issue in Linux for a while), but even so there are still HUGE limitations in Windows.

What happens when you try to paste a powerpoint slide into notepad? Ever tried to cut 'n paste even text (the most basic operation) from or to a command shell?

Windows has _some_ higher level functionality, very little of it Linux doesn't have, but it totally lacks all lower level functionality.

It is true though that there's much room for improvement on both systems.

But to make claims that Linux can't do those things, or that Linux clipboard support isn't as good as Window is not only not true -- it's really the opposite of the truth.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Blakey Rat]

From my experience, from the applications I've used on Linux compared to the applications I've used on MacOS and Windows, the clipboard in Linux has troubles with anything more complicated than text and even sometimes it has trouble with formatted text. I've had applications paste in gibberish, I've seen applications paste in HTML tags without parsing them, etc.

On my Macintosh, using System 6.0 in 1988, I could copy cells from Excel and paste them into Simpletext... the system was smart enough to realize that Simpletext wasn't a grid editor of any type, and pasted the image in as a bitmap.

But what really bothers me is that Linux is working towards all kinds of advanced stuff without getting the basics nailed down first. Copy and paste should have been settled way back when X11 was invented in the first place.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Ayende Rahien]

I copy & paste to the shell all the time, it's the right mouse click that does the trick.
But you need to enable the quick edit mode.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Ankle]

This has been an issue for some time, well before 1.0 was ever released.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22090 0

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[flithm]

This is totally backwards! Linux has the really basic stuff down and is now working toward the really advanced stuff.

And these statements just aren't true anymore. There was a period of a few years there where cut 'n paste of some of the higher level functions (like pasting formatted html, etc) didn't work very well... but with the exceptions of some really crazy things (like cut 'n pasting of sections of video/movies) Linux does these tasks really well!

Windows on the other hand can't even do basic cut 'n paste with even regular text very well at all.

Seriously try cut 'n pasting from a command shell :).

Try cut 'n pasting without using the keyboard or accessing a context menu.

Your opinion is outdated. Check again and see how far things have come on Linux, and see how absolutely nothing (in fact reverse progress has been made) on the Windows end of things (ie the "advanced" microsoft office clipboard features).

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Ever tried to cut 'n paste even text (the most basic operation) from or to a command shell?

All day long, every day.
You must not be a power user of the windows command shell, if you don't even know how to copy & paste :)

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Kent Recal]

Linux clipboarding is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows. It's really only people who don't understand the Linux clipboard that complain about it.

Yeah, right.
The incredibly advanced linux clipboard is also why every linux user knows this scenario:

1. Select text to copy
2. Hit CTRL-C (just to be sure!)
3. Go to the destination window
4. Hit middle mouse button... oh...
5. Hit CTRL-V ... oh...
6. Curse and go back to 1

While maybe not directly related to the clipboard itself (focus issues or whatever?) this is probably the most annoying bug about copy/paste in linux. It just sucks to repeat such a basic task, it breaks the workflow.
And don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about - I know you do.

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, certainly. It's because the basic idea that you may want to paste data from a program that you already closed seems to have been missed somewhere along the line. I can't say how many times I've opened a program to get some information, copied it, closed the program, gone to paste it, started swearing, and gone back and reopened the program, and recopied the information...

Re:Copy & Paste sorted?

[EternityInterface]

Hello and welcome to the linux mentality.

We'll offer 2 lessons today. The first would be, and I quote

computer programming

It's called "hacking", "hackers" are very sensitive about this issue. And if you use linux you should be able to "hack" it to do your bidding. It's after all it's "easy if you know how to do it".

Another valuable lesson is that the word "hacking" has a long range of applicable definitions, another very popular is "to modify", except the original "to hack code".

So what's new

[Cardinal Biggles]

Forgive my ignorance. I have not yet looked into what Firefox 1.5 is all about.

Why no 1.1 - 1.4 ? What's the major-but-not-major-enough-for-a-2.0 newness in this?

The changelog only lists the changes from Beta 1 to Beta 2 which is not very informative.

Re:So what's new

[Threni]

Yeah, I'm a regular FF v1.0.7 user - do I "upgrade" or not?

Re:So what's new

[morgan_greywolf]

The obvious answer: It's a beta. So if you want to test it and don't mind a few bugs, random crashes, etc. then you might want to try it. If you need something that's solid and stable enough for everyday browsing, continue to use the 1.0.x series.

Re:So what's new

[Anonymous Coward]

The most significant change is to update the gecko engine from 1.4 to a newer version (1.7 I think).

Re:So what's new

[I confirm I'm not a]

Yeah, I'm a regular FF v1.0.7 user - do I "upgrade" or not?

No. Well, it depends. You might want to test 1.5 to support development, or because it's got features (eg. SVG) which 1.0.7 doesn't have. But if none of these appeal - stick with what you've got.

Incidentally, I'm using 1.5b1, and it seems to work well. But I'm a serial upgrader ;-)

Re:So what's new

[Anonymous Coward]

Try scrolling down to the bottom of the change log. It includes a link to the change log for the previous version.

Re:So what's new

[Cally]

Personally speaking, I find the automatic updates rocks like a Japanese death metal group doing a Peel session. The beta checks for updates daily, and picks up a new nightly build every day as far as I can see... my Firefox install is never more than 24 hours old. Suck it up, Microsoft ;)

Re:So what's new

[m50d]

Why no 1.1 - 1.4 ? What's the major-but-not-major-enough-for-a-2.0 newness in this?

They've taken out the ads but not changed the browser itself.

Re:So what's new

[tgd]

The biggest thing I noticed versus 1.0.7 is its no longer a steaming pile of crap. 1.0.6 worked beautifully, but .7 constantly crashed, bogged down badly on large pages, and was sluggish in general.

1.5 is snappy, is using less memory and miracle of miracles, I've got almost an hour without it crashing.

I'm sure there are actual feature differences, but thats enough of a reason for me to be happy with the upgrade.

Re:So what's new

[warpSpeed]

So if you want to test it and don't mind a few bugs, random crashes, etc. then you might want to try it.

Indeed, I do not mind a few bugs, and crashes to test FF and prvide feedback... but I have yet to see any with daily use of the 1.5 beta 1.

The only big problem I see is memory consumption, lots of memory consumption. FF is a pig when it comes to RAM, slowing down my system unless I restart the beast about once every 24 hours or so. Other then that I pretty happy with it.

Re:So what's new

[prefect42]

That's certainly not my experience. I use 1.5 beta 1 at home, and 1.0.7 in the office, and I haven't really noticed much difference. I sometimes run the same copy of firefox for days and don't suffer crashes.

Re:So what's new

[willisachimp]

Very little has changed, tbh, but I'd heartily recommend it anyway.

About a month ago, the 1.x version i was running was being somewhat flakey, when I read an entry from a firefox developer's blog, saying he'd been using the 1.5 beta for some time now, and he found it much quicker and more stable than the 1.x release.

So I switched over, and have been using it constantly, and it hasn't crashed on me once. It rules :)

W.

Re:So what's new

[richwklein]

Originally this was suppose to be a 1.1 release, but since there had been almost a year worth of development on the Gecko rendering engine between 1.0 and this release, they decided to bump the version to 1.5. They've also included a lot more features than originally planned for. Such as the new software update.

Re:So what's new

[geeber]

Yeah, I have been noticing that too with 1.0.7. I have been getting lots of crashes lately. This was never a problem with 1.0.6 or earlier. It's almost like I am running IE or something.

Re:So what's new

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to assume that you are suffering from "Corrupted Profile Syndrome", which has plauged Mozilla since the early days. 1.07 may be bloated and sluggish, but no more so than any other release of FF.

Re:So what's new

[Dehumanizer]

From my experience, the 1.5 betas are at least as stable, if not more stable, than the 1.0.x versions.

I've been using only 1.5b1 since it was out (and 1.5b2 since today), and they've been great - stable, visibly faster, and (few people talk about this one, but I love it) you can reorder open tabs by dragging them. :)

Re:So what's new

[Ced_Ex]

Never had a crash?

I'm using 1.0.7 at home on Windows and I crash every time I visit this url from adobe.

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/main.h tml

Anyone have this problem? I haven't done much to my copy, except for the usual extensions.

Re:So what's new

[prefect42]

No, I don't remember a crash with recent versions that's not down to a fault with the mplayer plugin.

That URL looks fine using 1.0.7 linux, apart from the presumably flash menu looking a little odd. I've just tested it on 1.0.6 win2k and it was fine, and the menu looked fine.

Re:So what's new

[Cardinal Biggles]

Yeah then you get the changes from the Alpha version.

What I'm looking for is a list of features in 1.5 but not in 1.0.

Re:So what's new

[orasio]

Incidentally, I'm using 1.5b1, and it seems to work well. But I'm a serial upgrader ;-)


It's not that bad, I am using 1.0.7 right now and 1.5b1 in the other machine I have on the KVM switch. I guess that makes me a parallel upgrader, right?

Re:So what's new

[ptlis]

That URI works fine in 1.0.7 under both GNU/Linux and win32 - I suspect the problem is related to an extension you have installed (much like the conflict between LiveHTTPHeaders and SessionSaver which makes all file uploads crash Fx).

Re:So what's new

[ikkonoishi]

Check out "about:cache". If the Maximum storage size in the memory section is really large then set it to a more acceptable amount in "about:config".

The key's name is "browser.cache.memory.capacity". I have it set to 16000, and FF hasn't given me trouble since.

Re:So what's new

[MaskedSlacker]

Works fine in 1.0.7 Linux. You people all complaining about crashes, how many 3rd party extensions are you using? I would bet thats the problem, as like the other poster, I've never had firefox crash.

Re:So what's new

[Martin Blank]

The new code seems to dramatically improve this. When at work, by the end of the day FF 1.07 is frequently at about 150MB used. Deer Park, under similar conditions, rarely exceeds about 45MB.

Re:So what's new

[Bradee-oh!]

...and (few people talk about this one, but I love it) you can reorder open tabs by dragging them.
 
You, sir, just gave me the exact reason I needed to upgrade. I had zero interest in jumping from 1.0.7 until you pointed this one out. d/l'ing 1.5b2 now.
 
Thanks again!

Re:So what's new

[warpSpeed]

The key's name is "browser.cache.memory.capacity". I have it set to 16000, and FF hasn't given me trouble since.

Thanks for the tip, but I did make the setting adjustment yesterday after doing some research about it. Current usage is 70 Megs with the above mentioned setting to 16000... I'm sure it will get corrected at some point in the future. 1.0.x did the same thing, but not as bad.

Its Beta... So I can live with it.

Re:So what's new

[aclarke]

I'm happy for you. I've been using it on Mac OS X 10.3.x and XP Pro for the last couple weeks, and my empirical observation has been that 1.5b1 crashes more on both platforms than the older version I'd been using before.

- Andrew.

Re:So what's new

[NickFitz]

Better to go for the complete download rather than the upgrade. Just make sure it doesn't overwrite your current version when installing and they'll run side by side, at least in my experience (Win and OS X).

Re:So what's new

[salimma]

You're on the nightly build, not the beta. I was on beta1 for a few days, never noticed any update, so I replaced it with the latest nightly build from branch (not trunk).

The beta release only updates to other beta releases, I think.

Re:So what's new

[hritcu]

Don't install Flash in the first place (Firefox does not come with it, does it?). Does that solve your problem?

Re:So what's new

[Cally]

Ah, right, thanks for the correction. See, F/OSS gets updated so often it's easy to forget what you're actually running in the first place ;)

Re:So what's new

[dmaxwell]

Distros tend to bundle an older version of the mplayer plugin that is flakier, feature stripped, and isn't as compatible with sites. Most of my mplayer plugin problems went away when I built a 3.x version of it myself.

Re:So what's new

[wolverine1999]

Actually I'm doing that with 1.0.7 now using the miniT extension.

Wait a minute....

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it run in my browser?

Flash fixed?

[NineNine]

Could anybody using this please tell me if they've fixed the (currently non-working) ability to disable all Flash? In IE, I just uninstall the Active X control. In Firefox, you can disable it, but it doesn't work. I certainly hope that they're fixing bugs before adding more features...

Re:Flash fixed?

[Xabraxas]

You're looking for Flashblock.

Re:Flash fixed?

[m50d]

You know, an extension system that can fix it isn't an excuse for a feature not working properly.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Monoman]

Once you go *Block you will never go bock. :-)

Flashblock, AdblockPlus (with Filterset.g and updater), Foxylicous, etc make it THE browser for me. The only thing I really miss from Opera is "paste and go".

Re:Flash fixed?

[kbrosnan]

Paste and Go - Firefox Extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=65

Re:Flash fixed?

[beardz]

Paste and Go extension : http://tecwizards.de/mozilla/

Re:Flash fixed?

[Crayon Kid]

The only thing I really miss from Opera is "paste and go".

While not exactly identical, here are a couple of suggestions for Firefox:

1) Control-L will select the address in the location bar. Just paste to replace it, then push Enter or Go.

2) Install the Diggler extension. It adds a button for the toolbar which you can use to quickly erase it. This way you can rely more on the mouse.

3) In Linux, if you activate middlemouse.contentLoadURL and middlemouse.paste in about:config, you can simply select an URL (a la mIRC) then middle click on a page and it goes to it. There's also middlemouse.openNewWindow if you want it.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

FlashBlock is better than completely disabling Flash, it allows you to selectively view Flash, but blocks it from loading otherwise.

I actually don't use FlashBlock, but use a modification to userContent.css which does the same thing but works without the need to install any extension. I haven't actually tested that in 1.5, so I don't know if it'll help or not.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Monoman]

thanks to the quick responses. I had not looked for the Paste N Go thingy for a bit.

I got one more Opera nice to have for ya ... let me choose at startup if I want to

* Start with a home page
* Start with a blank page
* Start where i left off last time (Tabbrowser Extensions does this for me now)

Re:Flash fixed?

[kbrosnan]

Let me save some time and just point you at http://firefoxopera.blogspot.com/ a listing of Firefox extensions that duplicated Opera features.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Bert64]

Can`t you just remove the plugin from firefox?
It seems to work fine on a system where there is no flash plugin atall too.

Re:Flash fixed?

[m50d]

FlashBlock is better than completely disabling Flash, it allows you to selectively view Flash, but blocks it from loading otherwise.

So why doesn't the browser do that anyway? It's like people respond to "firefox tabs suck" by saying "install tabbrowser extensions". Thanks, but firefox's tabs still suck, why can't they just include that functionality?

Re:Flash fixed?

[Zathrus]

So why doesn't the browser do that anyway?

Because, in part, that goes against the development concept of keeping Firefox an easy to use, fairly minimalist browser that can be altered via extension.

I suspect another part is that Flashblock has issues on some pages (greatly reduced in 1.5 betas; although it gained different quirks), and that blocking would be confusing to users or undesirable in other situations. All of which increases complexity, which goes back to the initial concept.

Thanks, but firefox's tabs still suck, why can't they just include that functionality?

Tabbrowser Extensions is known to have many, many problems. And, frankly, I don't think FF's tabs suck and I don't want the stuff that TBE does. In fact, the one tab-related extension I was running in 1.0.x was integrated into 1.5 (drag 'n' drop tabs). And to be perfectly honest, I would've been fine if it had stayed separate.

Re:Flash fixed?

[orasio]

That's why you have 1.0.x releases, so they can fix bugs.
I don't hope they fix bugs before adding more features. I like the current model. They add features when they feel like it, and fix bugs when they need to be fixed.
You could always do your part, search bugzilla for your bug, and file a report if your bug is not reported yet. That would be very helpful fixing your bug for 1.0.8 or 1.0.9 , but shouldn't bother the guys implementing new features like automatic updates. When they have the next release ready for release, they have the fixes for the bugs ready in the 1.0.x trunk. That way, everybody gets to work in whatever they want, and bugs are fixed too.

PS: I believe what is happening to you might not actually be a bug, but a bug search might help you be sure, too.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try TabMixPlus. It's the spiritual successor to Tabbrowser Extensions. And seemingly *stable*.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why doesn't the browser do that anyway?

Submit a feature request in Bugzilla if you think its that important it should be in the default install. Personally, I added the six lines of CSS to my userContent.css (no need for an extension) a long time ago (in the Mozilla suite, before I started using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) and haven't had to worry about it since then.

It's like people respond to "firefox tabs suck" by saying "install tabbrowser extensions". Thanks, but firefox's tabs still suck, why can't they just include that functionality?

Last time I used tabbrowser extensions it was buggy as hell. I'll take stability over superfluous functionality anyday. I would agree that Firefox tabs are suboptimal (especially when compared to Opera's MDI interface), but good enough for me. And I'd rather they add features slowly and concentrate on keeping the core stable.

Can't say Firefox is perfect. In fact I think Opera has quite an edge over it in a lot of respects. But complaining about something that is easilly fixable (6 lines of CSS) is kinda pointless.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Random BedHead Ed]

I discovered something interesting about this. I was using Firefox 1.5 beta 1 on Linux and Flash wasn't working for me either, but I decided to put in the specific URL for the SWF file and it worked fine. So I realized that the plugin is fine, but it fails to render the Flash in the context of a web page.

This turned out to be a problem with the Adblock extension. It was encapsulating the Flash elements in Adblock tags, which for some reason Firefox couldn't render. So I disabled Adblock. Right now there is an AMD ad at the top of this Slashdot page, which is a pity but Flash is working fine.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

The one indispensible tab extension I use is Focus Last Tab. It simply remembers which tab you were looking at last, so when you close the current tab, it returns to that one, instead of the default one. When I open a tab, it's almost always from a link, so the natural obvious spot to go back to is the previous tab.

That one behaviour has completely eliminated my original wish for dragging tabs around. I see now that I only wanted to drag them around so that I can control where I go next after opening and closing others.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Spy Hunter]

You've never been able to disable Flash. The idea that you could is suggested by the UI but that's really a UI bug (#236622, filed by me, I'd link it but you can't link to bugzilla from slashdot). That dialog that "disables" plugins only stops them from being used when you view a file directly; for example when you type the address of a .swf file directly into the address bar. In 1.5 that dialog's functionality has been integrated into the new "Download Actions" dialog which makes it more clear what is really going on. To really kill Flash you should use Flashblock.

Re:Flash fixed?

[theCAS]

Try this:
about:config
browser.startup.page, set it to 0

Now the browser starts with a blank page.

If you want to go the home page simply click the icon.

Re:Flash fixed?

[firellama]

You dont need to diable adblock. You could just disable the OBJ-Tabs in the Adblock preferences.

Re:Flash fixed?

[Random BedHead Ed]

Nice. That does work - thanks!

Just wait a couple more hours.

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta 3 should be out with the security fixes in just a couple of hours.

Re:Just wait a couple more hours.

[Anonymous Coward]

ba doom tish!

Re:Just wait a couple more hours.

[Maian]

To be serious, they don't do that on beta builds. Though if you really want the most secure version, just download the latest nightly (unless that particular version introduces another security issue).

Killing Karma...

[DoubleDangerClub]

I have a topic to debate, Standards.
If Firefox does get "Standards" in place, what really makes them good at all? This point is not made out of ignorance, but true question.
Firefox proposes that everyone adhere to the Standards of the W3, but say Safari and IE decide, "Ok, let's do it." Then what really sets any of them apart (other than Safari being Mac only)?
Because if it just comes down to a secure and fast browser, MS has much more money and resources to make this come true than FF, I believe, let me know where I'm wrong.
And furthermore, not even FF adheres only to the standards, as outlined in the paragraph that speaks of the w3 (do a find for 'w3') ---> Standards?

My favorite quote on there is: "Keep in mind that this is not yet part of any W3C or other official standard. At this time it is necessary to bend the rules in order to have full keyboard accessibility."
But isn't this what MS did long ago to make the better browser experience over NS?

Anyway, I don't mean to trash on FF at all, but I just wonder, who really wants the Standards implemented (I actually do), and then what happens after that? How do we get better dev tools and code to use in our web-apps (the w3 doesn't seem on top of new tech)?

Re:Killing Karma...

[MightyYar]

Users (at least of Windows) are not so concerned about standards - web developers are. The fewer differences between browsers, the less work they have to do and the more "advanced" parts of the specs they can use. Web developers write the standards, not users, so they obviously would stand to benefit the most.

Personally, I think users were best off in the Netscape 4.x days when there was healthy competition in the browsers, and none of this fancy flash/pop-up/floating box crap. The web was all about content (or lack thereof). Ah, well, the almighty dollar...

Re:Killing Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the issue was not that MS added features where no standards existed or even extended a standard but rather they ignored existing standards in favor of doing it their own way.

Re:Killing Karma...

[X_Bones]

The "Web standards" you're talking about would allow any (standards-compliant) browser to render any page in the exact same way. No more JavaScript hacks, no more broken CSS implementations. It's more for Web developers than actual end users, though of course end-users would benefit from not having to use a certain browser for a certain site.

What would then differentiate Web browsers from one another would be their interface and feature set; e.g., some would have tabbed browsing while some wouldn't, some would offer BitTorrent integration, some wouldn't, etc.

Re:Killing Karma...

[csirac]

Because if it just comes down to a secure and fast browser, MS has much more money and resources to make this come true than FF, I believe, let me know where I'm wrong.

"money and resources" aren't everything. MS can't afford to make radical changes in IE, in fact they've absolutely struggled to make _ANY_ changes at all compared to FF which has ejoyed a fairly nimble development process so far. I will speculate that the reasons include: a crusty code-base which hasn't seen much work since the Netscape war (compared to the Everything Is New (tm) enthusiasm FF developers seem to have), and a fear that any real change will break things in new and horrible ways (crusty code tends to be like this - if IE is "secure" it's only because it has stagnated so much; touching it significantly may result in a whole slew of new holes to plug).

My favorite quote on there is: "Keep in mind that this is not yet part of any W3C or other official standard. At this time it is necessary to bend the rules in order to have full keyboard accessibility."
But isn't this what MS did long ago to make the better browser experience over NS?

Both sides were guilty of making up and/or bastardising standards. Most people are angry at MS's "abuse" of standards to achieve standardised functionality in a non-standard way. What you've just described there from the Mozilla page seems to be a new feature that has no standard to go by.

Anyway, I don't mean to trash on FF at all, but I just wonder, who really wants the Standards implemented (I actually do), and then what happens after that? How do we get better dev tools and code to use in our web-apps (the w3 doesn't seem on top of new tech)?

The w3 and other standards bodies for that matter, aren't perfect. For example I've read plenty of threads about SVG (Scaled Vector Graphics) to get the impression that some standards are written before the technology they describe is even useful let alone implemented... standards writers require collaboration with implementors and users (or at least, an understanding of the users). But it does depend on which standards body you're talking about... they're all guilty of something, it seems (ITU, IETF, etc).

Re:Killing Karma...

[esme]

Because if it just comes down to a secure and fast browser, MS has much more money and resources to make this come true than FF, I believe, let me know where I'm wrong.

IE is insecure mostly because of Microsoft's philosophy, not because of development resources. Public statements and publicity stunts to the contrary, Microsoft is more interested in building and maintaining their monopoly, adding new features, etc. than providing a secure browser (or OS, for that matter).

And furthermore, not even FF adheres only to the standards, as outlined in the paragraph that speaks of the w3

First, the whole standards process assumes that, in addition to supporting the standards, implementors will also support non-standard new features. These new features are supposed to be tried out in practice, and then submitted to the next version of the standard when all the kinks are worked out. When there are multiple implementations, and one of them gets picked for the standard, you're supposed to implement the new version.

Microsoft's problem isn't that they added non-standard features. Their problem is that they used non-standard features to tie web pages to IE, and failed to fix broken or incomplete implementations of standards. This combined with IE's massive market share made a lot of people develop non-standard websites that only worked with IE.

-esme

Re:Killing Karma...

[Iriel]

Here's how the Standards issue can work for FF whether everyone adheres to them or not (in my opinion anyway):

True, FF isn't a truly standards compliant browser, but it's damn close compared to the alternatives at the time that it was really popularized. At the time Firefox was booming, Opera was still a commercial product, and Safari still is (with the price tag of a mac computer: ouch!), IE was/is hideously broken, and FF was the closest thing most users could get to standards compliance for free. Not to mention that FF helped become a nice standard browser for Linux desktops instead of worrying about the 30 million others that someone could choose from.

But FF wasn't and isn't still only about standards. It's also about extensibility. They have more to their popularity than just standards, because if that was the driving goal, then everyone would obviously switch to Opera (because that's closer to passing Acid2 than FF) or just buy a mac for Safari2 (please pick up on my sarcasm here ^_^).

Lastly, when it comes to what the W3C finally gets around to approving as a standard: that's just a complex issue. Honestly, if something can stay on someone's desk at W3C long enough as a candidate, it usually becomes a standard, if for nothing else but the fact that the status of 'W3C release candidate' is usually enough to get people using a good technology. If it takes them 5 years to say no, all they have to do is look out the window to realize that the rest of the world has been using it while the W3C was looking over the specs! No, I know it really isn't that haphazard, but there are ways to develope with new technologies without breaking the currently set standards. It's not easy, but it can be done.

But that's just my opinion.

Re:Killing Karma...

[i23098]

If Firefox does get "Standards" in place, what really makes them good at all?

If televison makers could adhere to a standard so one could see any thing broadcasted in any tv then what's the point of having several tv makers?

Re:Killing Karma...

[m50d]

My favorite quote on there is: "Keep in mind that this is not yet part of any W3C or other official standard. At this time it is necessary to bend the rules in order to have full keyboard accessibility." But isn't this what MS did long ago to make the better browser experience over NS?

Implementing something that isn't in any standard is one thing - an analogous thing with IE would perhaps be introducing activex (which is rightly trashed for the security holes it creates, but no one blames MS for its non-standardness). Not implementing the standard properly or implementing it incompletely (e.g. MS-Java, IE's broken CSS, transparent PNGs), or redoing something for which there is a perfectly good standard (did this happen with javascript? I can't remember), is something different, and it's the latter that's a problem.

and then what happens after that? How do we get better dev tools and code to use in our web-apps (the w3 doesn't seem on top of new tech)?

It's perfectly alright to introduce something that there isn't a standard for - if it succeeds, it will be adopted as a standard, and if it fails, it will just disappear. However, I don't think the web needs new standards - it's fine for what it's meant to do, other things would be better done via plugins or new protocols than kludging them into the web's standards.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Rocketship Underpant]

The standards are always expanding. New approved and proposed features and technologies are being proposed to the standards committees. A browser like Firefox, which is under constant development and unafraid to test new features, will always be a better, more advanced web platform for developers and tech-savvy users. The dynamic, open attitude of Apple's Safari team also results in that app being a cutting edge browser. The two are different, though; Safari is more focused on the best possible user experience, while Firefox gives you great flexibility with its extensions.

IE, on the other hand, is produced by a sluggish software bureaucracy known to let its flagship browser go years for a time without improvement. Even if Microsoft tries to follow web standards, IE 7 a year from now will be a less complete browser than Firefox or Safari are today.

We will never reach a point with any browser where we have all the web standards implemented and there's nothing more to be done.

Re:Killing Karma...

[DoubleDangerClub]

"We will never reach a point with any browser where we have all the web standards implemented and there's nothing more to be done."

Which I think is sad, but also true. It would be a dev dream come true.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between the CSS extensions "-moz-border-radius" in FF and "filter" in IE is that the first one is correct according to the W3.

Re:Killing Karma...

[generic-man]

What "web standards" do popular AJAX applications use? I don't recall ever running GMail or Google Maps through a JavaScript validator. They're all JavaScript hacks, and people love them.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite quote on there is: ...

  I used to say you must be perfect when dealing with the standards, but there are just a lot of situations where the W3C just hasn't defined anything. Take a file input field. Say you want to change the style to have a border of 1, or change the width. IE actually seems to make the best decisions in this case. Firefox has various disaster rendering scenarios depending upon what OS it's on. The W3C has always been behind on developments and where the web is going. When they don't define something, it's up to the browser. Often times that can come back and bite you in the ass when the W3C comes back and says "Okay NOW we decided, and it's different than what you did". It sucks, but that's the nature of a standards body.

Re:Killing Karma...

[cloudreader]

The browser can support any number of programming languages/scripts/technologies like javascript,vbscript,AJAX,FLASH,applet,activex .....etc.

But the point is
*If the resulting rendered HTML code follows standard, then the browser should render it according to the standard*

for example in gmail or google maps, new data is brought from the server using xmlhttp and inserted into a place using DOM manipulation, but as far as the resulting HTML is standard, the page should be also rendered according to standard.

Re:Killing Karma...

[cortana]

ECMA-262 (ECMAScript Language Specification).

The XMLHttpRequest class that fashionable web applications use is not a standard, but it is pretty simple; it looks like the only difference between using it in IE and Mozilla/KHTML is how you create an instance of it.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

> The "Web standards" you're talking about would allow any (standards-compliant) browser to render any page in the exact same way.

HTML (even with CSS) isn't designed to be rendered in One Correct Way, there are many valid ways to render the same code. If you want your design to look the same everywhere use PDF instead of abusing HTML.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Bert64]

If every browser adheres to the standards then it benefits web developers and end users..

It becomes much easier to develop a website, you can develop a single site according to standards and it will display in any browser, if a browser cannot display a standards compliant page then the browser is broken and a responsible browser vendor would fix it.. It is not the responsibility of web designers to modify their page to be compatible with buggy browsers..

End users have a choice as to what browser they use, you can choose from many different browsers depending on your individual requirements (small, fast, fully featured, screen reading support, customiseability etc) rather than being forced to use a browser which may not be your first choice.

New platforms (set top boxes, mobile devices etc) which aren`t supported by mainstream browsers, can more easily implement a browser themselves and be safe in the knowlege that it will be able to display content from the web by adhering to standards.

Competition, it`s not about microsoft winning or losing.. If there are standards and microsoft are forced to produce a superior product in order to win back market share, then that only benefits people in the end.. Providing that they stick to standards, and people are still free to use other browsers.
This is exactly what microsoft don`t do, and why a lot of people hate them, they improved IE until netscape was no longer a threat, and then let IE completely stagnate... Improvements completely stopped for a couple of years once the competition was eliminated, and now that they face competition from mozilla improvements are coming again. Also a lot of people use IE because they have to in order to display non standards-compliant pages, not because they`ve tried a multitude of browsers and chosen the one that best suits their needs.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Anonymous Coward]

An uninsightful comment.

Re:Killing Karma...

[tidewaterblues]

It has always been my opinion that, in the limit, (once all of the nastiness of not supporting current and stable standards like CSS2, proper DOM, XSLT and whatnot has been ironed of IE) the only significant advantage that Firefox will have over IE will be that its shorter release cycle allows it room for more advanced experimentation. In other words, its things like XUL (which I have great faith in) and browser-as-platform orient innovations that will set Firefox appart and put IE into a perpetual catch-up cycle, not Standards.

Re:Killing Karma...

[X_Bones]

I never claimed that all JavaScript was for the sole purpose of browser detection. I'm well aware that it can be (and is) used for lots of other useful things.

What *would* go away with complete conformance to Web standards is developers having to jump through JavaScript hoops to determine the user's browser version, turn certain features on and off, and display annoying dialogs saying "sorry, you need Browser X version Y.Z to access this site."

Re:Killing Karma...

[generic-man]

GMail said "sorry, you need Internet Explorer or Firefox to access this site," before adding Safari support months later. The reason was because all the JavaScript they used (even if it was valid) didn't work with all browsers. Now, Google uses JavaScript to detect what JavaScript to send you.

How, exactly, can "conformance to Web standards" go along with something like JavaScript? I don't think it can, and I think there are far more people saying "OMG TEH NEW WEBMAIL IS SO L33T"* than "Hey, I can't use this with my screen reader."**

* Google l33t-speak beta reports 40,000 results for this phrase
** Google blog search reports 0 results for this phrase

Re:Killing Karma...

[iamlucky13]

To build on what you said, in fact, Microsoft does not appear to be making any significant changes to IE 7 to bring it closer to standards compliance. From the discussion I've heard coming from MSDN beta users, it sounds like only very small improvements are being made to the CSS 1 support, virtually nothing for CSS 2, and no fix to the IE box model. I suppose what they're doing when they say they're re-writing it from the ground up is re-writing the framework, but leaving the rendering the same.

Re:Killing Karma...

[MegaFur]

You're weird and strange. Where did this obsession over standards come from? I'm using Firefox because it was super-easy to start using it and because progressive search/find within a page is oodles better than IE's dorky pop-up search window. If it *happens* to be the case that Firefox also adheres to some W3 standards more than IE does, then so much the better, but it's not reason I switched.

Re:Killing Karma...

[Rocketship Underpant]

What's funny is that Microsoft's MSN department actually built a new highly standards-compliant web browser from the ground up for their proprietary MSN browser. It even ran on both Windows and OS X. If Microsoft was smart, they'd put that engine into IE7; but instead, the MSN browser seems to have been abandoned.

List of improvements in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.5 b2.html

Re:List of improvements in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done, you managed to copy a link from the article summary.

Re:List of improvements in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't this moderated to -23, Idiotically Redundant? The link is in the goddamned summary.

Re:List of improvements in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

[Anonymous Coward]

to spite you :)

Feature request

[Hard_Code]

Yes, this is the wrong place to post this but I'm going to do it anyway.

Since pre-1.0, Firefox has had a bug whereby sometimes typing in the search field completely locks up the machine (I believe by spiking the CPU). I believe this happens on both Windows and Linux, although I am mostly using a Windows desktop so notice it more there. I can't seem to find some criteria to reproduce it. It seems random. It locks the machine (all applications unresponsive as well as OS control sequences) for about 5-15 seconds at a time.

As for a feature request, I tend to be very strict about cookies, which unfortunately means that I am forced to endlessly click through "do you want this cookie?" "huh?" "how about now?" "how about this cookie?" "you wanna cookie?" dialogs. It would be really cool if these could be queued to some docked pane which allowed the site to load asynchronously. Unless a site is doing something really funky with frames or javascript, it shouldn't expect to immediately receive a cookie it just sent, so in the majority of cases I don't think these requests actually have to be acknowledged before the page is rendered (or simply block any pending pages - in the case of no frameset, say, 95% of the time - this will mean totally asynchronous rendering).

Re:Feature request

[mgkimsal2]

It's gotta be firefox/mozilla *plus* some setting or other program on your computer??? I've used firefox/mozilla since pre 1.0 days as well, on laptops and desktops under RedHat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows XP and have never experienced that behaviour. I'm certainly not saying it's not happening to you, but there's more to it that just 'Firefox' itself, otherwise I think I'd have seen it. That's also not to say FF/Moz don't have bugs, or even bugs that crash the system, but I've never experienced that, and I've not met others who mentioned that bug either.

Re:Feature request

[Nasarius]

I tend to be very strict about cookies

Why? If it's such a big deal to you, just use Privoxy and be done with it. Personally, I think it's a non-issue.

Re:Feature request

[NutscrapeSucks]

Completely agree about the Cookie Manager, it is way too annoying.

"The site foo.com wants to set a cookie. You already have 3 cookies from this site." -- WTF exactly is the point of this dialog? Is there really anyone who is sitting there rejecting cookies on a one-by-one basis?

Or, "The site foo.yahoo.com wants to set a cookie" "The site bar.yahoo.com wants to set a cookie" -- IE's approach of allow/deny cookies on the TLD is good enough here.

I also would love to see an async approach that you outlined, but imagine it would be difficult with javascript, etc. Maybe FF could just temporarily accept the cookies until the user makes a decision on them.

Re:Feature request

[CaptainPinko]

"rejecting cookies on a one-by-one basis"

I do. It maybe annoying at first but after a week almost all of the sites you visit have been set to ignore or allow. It's not a tinfoil hat thing... I just don't want to help advertising companies. I just wish there was a quick way to change it from the main browser window if the page won't load w/o cookies. Ditto for AdBlock.

Re:Feature request

[Anonymous Coward]

Try looking for the extension 'permit cookies' fellers....

Re:Feature request

[Sigma 7]

As for a feature request, I tend to be very strict about cookies, which unfortunately means that I am forced to endlessly click through "do you want this cookie?" "huh?" "how about now?" "how about this cookie?" "you wanna cookie?" dialogs. It would be really cool if these could be queued to some docked pane which allowed the site to load asynchronously. Unless a site is doing something really funky with frames or javascript, it shouldn't expect to immediately receive a cookie it just sent, so in the majority of cases I don't think these requests actually have to be acknowledged before the page is rendered (or simply block any pending pages - in the case of no frameset, say, 95% of the time - this will mean totally asynchronous rendering).

Mozilla had a feature where it would display an icon whenever a cookie was received. You can remve cookies based on that, keeping websites that require cookies (e.g. Session tracking for logging in.)

Of course, it was completely useless since:
- It raised on any cookie, even "accepted"
- The intermediate state, "flagged" was no different than accepted.
- There was not much control within that cookie manager - you could only remove cookies - no visible option to "accept" them or do other fancy stuff with them (e.g. Modify - no reason not to, since cookies can be changed anyway by playing with cookies.txt).
- There was no "supressed" option - similar to flagged but it doesn't send it to the webpage (and it gets junked).
- You could remove cookies... but blocking sites that set cookies required you to delete only the cookies you want to ban and nothing else (it only takes effect after you close the *PREFERENCES* window.)

The FF beta might make things different - but it's a beta, not a released product.

Re:Feature request

[Anonymous Coward]

>As for a feature request...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53354 #c30

Re:Feature request

[NutscrapeSucks]

But the question remains why you would accept one cookie from a domain and not another. Everything after the first cookie is technically superfluous.

Re:Feature request

[Jisakiel]

Maybe this is what you want...

Permit Cookies Extension. You press Alt-C and it shows the status of the current cookie. I leave them disabled by default, and when some site breaks you press alt-c and set it on session, always or maybe remove. Only with the major buggers as yahoo mail I need to choose "ask me" in the preferences because the cookie is some intermediate one. And works with 1.5b1, by the way.

I wonder how was I able to deal with my cookie-related paranoia before :D

Re:Feature request

[jonadab]

> sometimes typing in the search field completely locks up the machine (I believe by spiking
> the CPU). [...] It locks the machine (all applications unresponsive as well as OS control
> sequences) for about 5-15 seconds at a time.

There may be a bug in Firefox that *triggers* this behavior, but the the problem you're seeing without question must involve either an operating system bug (probably in kernel space (but not necessarily in the scheduler; it could be in the memory management or a device driver, for instance)) or *possibly* a hardware problem (but an OS bug is far more likely). If the operating system were doing its job 100% correctly, on stable hardware, Firefox *itself* could lock up hard, but other applications would still be responsive (although they could be a little slower than usual, especially if the system is I/O bound). This is called "preemptive multitasking", and all major operating systems are *supposed* to do this, but sometimes there's a bug that allows an edge case to slip through, usually because the code that's looping or otherwise unresponsive is exempt from pre-emption, probably because it's part of the OS itself, usually kernel-space code. This can happen in any multitasking OS, at least potentially, but you wouldn't normally expect the same Firefox bug to trigger it in completely different OSes. (Are you sure it happens in both Windows and Linux, and that other apps become unresponsive on both? That's not totally impossible, but it would definitely be unusual. OTOH, it would not be unusual for Firefox itself to become unresponsive on both OSes, but only one of them experience the OS bug that makes other apps unresponsive as well. That seems much more likely...)

With that said, Firefox obvously should, to the greatest extent possible, avoid triggering such a thing, if nothing else because even if only the browser itself locks up that's still a very palpable bug. If the firefox developers can figure out what's causing this thing (or if you can *help* them figure it out... since it happens to you, you're potentially in a good position to do that), then the triggering bug should get fixed in Firefox. (As for the underlying OS issue, well, that's another matter.)

If you can't come up with a set of steps that always triggers it, perhaps you could at least capture stack traces or something. (I know, I know, capturing stack traces is a *pain*... you have to use a debugger... ugh. However, somebody needs to do this if the bug is to be tracked down and fixed. So, umm, how *badly* do you want the bug fixed? As for me, I've for one reason or another never seen it happen, so I'm not a good candidate for tracking it down.)

Or you could wait for someone else to track it down. It is, however, hard to predict when someone else will run into the issue and have the gumption to do that.

Incremental Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybodys automatic incremental update feature started working yet? When its ready, it will be one of the best features of 1.5 .

How does it handle people skipping patches? In windows, hardly anybody has the same combination of XP/IE because of all the different overlapping patches.

My mind reading captcha for this post is unstable. I'm starting to think its deliberate (or they only have a small dictionary with always relevant words like Monopoly in them)

Re:Incremental Update

[dumdumdum]

Yes incremental update does actually work. If you skip an update or 2, at the time of update it will download all those incremental updates on after the other. If the total size of updates is greate than some specified value it will download the full update

Crahes...alot

[SethEaston]

I am web applications developer and just for the heck of it I tried our app on the Beta 1.5 release just last week...and it kept crashing, over and over and over. I cleared the cache, ended the process tree, restarted, all to no avail. I think the internal memory structures are somehow getting corrupted. We use lots of JavaScript and images, so there is alot in the client-side memory. When I switched back to the stable version, it stopped crashing.

Does anyone remember how in the old Netscape 6/7, you could tweak the memory and the disk cache? That's something I've missed since Firefox has been out. I think that would've helped in debugging the crashes.

Re:Crahes...alot

[cerberusss]

Does anyone remember how in the old Netscape 6/7, you could tweak the memory and the disk cache?

FWIW, you can at least disable in-memory cacheing:
go to about:config
Search for "cache"
Set "browser.cache.memory.enable" to false

Re:Crahes...alot

[Linker3000]

Funny old world innit: I've had the beta on my laptop for about a month and it's been working fine even when kludged to run adblock, forecastfox and googlebar. The only weird thing I found was that typing an apostrophe would sometimes fire up the find (CTRL-F) feature.

Re:Crahes...alot

[Antifuse]

This isn't new... I've been seeing this problem since 1.0.

Re:Crahes...alot

[SethEaston]

Would someone please tell me how commenting on a user *experience* with a product mods it down as 'troll'? So in /. you can't say ANYTHING negative without being modded down to Hades?

Re:Crahes...alot

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, duh, it's still in beta, it's bound to have bugs. Instead of whining about it here, go to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and tell them the steps that you went through that lead to the crash. Just some advice before going over there, don't just whine about it like you did over here, otherwise they will just simply write you off and do absolutely nothing about it and/or tell you "You have access to the source code, why don't you go in and fix the bug yourself"

Re:Crahes...alot

[bloodstains]

Maybe you're missing the ' key and hitting the / key instead, which brings up find "the unix way"?

Re:Crahes...alot

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been seeing this problem since 1.0.

Actually it's a feature. If you want to search for links you type apostrophe ('), for text you type forward slash (/).

Re:Crahes...alot

[mrchaotica]

The only weird thing I found was that typing an apostrophe would sometimes fire up the find (CTRL-F) feature.

Not just the apostrophe; it happens to me with the forward slash too.

Re:Crahes...alot

[Anonymous Coward]

' is search links.
/ is search all text.

Re:Crahes...alot

[Linker3000]

By design or is this a known bug? I'd be happily typing a search criteria like "tom's hardware" and the find box would appear.

Re:Crahes...alot

[Anonymous Coward]

by design

Re:Crahes...alot

[mrchaotica]

Well, in that case the bug is that it still happens when I'm typing in text boxes (such as right now). Half the time I can't close my HTML tags, and have to write in a text editor and copy it back in. It's incredibly annoying.

Re:Crahes...alot

[ikkonoishi]

I don't think its in the default list, but you can set the memory cache amount with the key "browser.cache.memory.capacity" put the amount you want in KiB

Re:Crahes...alot

[Kelson]

Forward slash bringing up the find toolbar is intended behavior -- unless you mean you're typing it in a form field or the address bar or something, in which case there's some sort of focus bug in the app.

Re:Crahes...alot

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying there's "some sort of focus bug" in firefox is an understatement.

Re:Crahes...alot

[BZ]

> and it kept crashing, over and over and over

This is exactly why we ship a beta -- so people will tell us about this stuff. You did file a bug so it'll get fixed for final, right?

Re:Crahes...alot

[mrchaotica]

It's not a feature when it happens in text boxes, when you're actually trying to type apostrophes and forward slashes!

They've got to sort this out before the final

[tritonic]

I'm looking forward to the new version as much as anyone, but I do have some concerns about the amount of unfixed bugs in the codebase. How does a bug like Bug 115174 get overlooked for three and a half years? A quote from the comments:

...the form may be being sumbitted again when "Save Page As, HTML Only" is selected. What really concerns me about this is that, on a less smart web page, a user's payment may be submitted twice, when all the user wanted to do was save a copy of the payment receipt. This is more than just annoyance, it could cause people's checks to bounce unexpectedly.

I know this has happened to several people (me included - luckily I managed to cancel the transaction in time). Surely the mozilla guys have a responsibility to fix this one...?

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[seweso]

Websites should account for pages which are send in twice, because when you refresh the page or go back and forward the page is also resend to the server.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[Anonymous Coward]

why don't you just print the page as a pdf?

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[tritonic]

Try pressing refreshing on a page with POST data. You'll get a warning dialog. But there's no warning if you save the page.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[tritonic]

Yes, you can do that as a workaround. The problem is the vast majority of people who don't read slashdot or bugzilla, and don't know about the bug.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[Anonymous Coward]

and how about 5 years old bugs about supporting CSS2.1 inline-block display (IE does, partially) or supporting hyphenation with soft hyphen? (IE does that one best of all browsers).

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

It's not a browser bug.
It's a website bug.
You want a browser workaround for a web application bug.
They guy is proposing a user workaround for the _web_application_ bug.

Of course, the browser workaround you suggest would protect more people.
Anyhow, it's a problem of education. Either you have good websites, or you have users who understand the intricacies of web interaction.

I believe that a warning when repeating a POST for saving, like the one used on refresh, would be nice, though. I still believe it's not a bug in firefox.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[grangerg]

I don't agree it's a web site bug.

If I save a page, I explicitly do NOT want the browser to go back and refetch the page. It's already in the browser's memory; I'm looking at it on-screen; that's what I want. If I want to assure I've got the most up-to-date version before I save, I'll refresh on my own. Likewise, if I use "back"/"forward", the browser already has it; I wish the browser would leave the network alone!

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[tritonic]

If it's a website bug, it's a very common one. It's even on slashdot: when you post your next comment, save the next screen that comes up as HTML only, and open it up. You'll see that firefox tried to repost the comment without prompting. (Chances are it won't succeed because of the barrage of anti-troll defences.)

Silent reposting of forms is a very bad thing, and I'm pretty sure it violates one of the RFC's.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

You wish.
But the browser is not a web application client.
The browser is a browser of websites.
It caches what it wants to cache, and what it doesn't want to cache, it doesn't.
You even have a configuration setting in firefox to not let it cache pages in memory, so using that preference might make impossible to save pages without reposting.

If the web aplication has secondary effects associated with the different behaviours that different browsers might have under different circumstances, it's a problem with the web applicaction, and not with the browser, because the browser has no responsibility in taking care of secondary effects of the usage of the browser as a web application client, it doesn't guarantee any correctness in its behaviour, the web developer is the one who should take care of unintended consequences of bizarre behavior of clients.

I am not saying that it wouldn't be helpful that FF did something about it, but it's not their fault to begin with.

I am rigt now developing a web application, and I am taking special care especially in that point, that bookmarks, refresh, reload or back triggered reposts are avoided. It can be done, of course. I know because I am doing it that way. It's ok to have a sloppy web application when that is all you need, but you can't blame its sloppines on the web browser. After all, it's too thin a client to have any responsibility on your web application. And don't get me started about security in those apps that can't even handle an unintended reload. Just replaying packages would be lots of fun.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[Anonymous Coward]

The workaround for this bug is to use a 303 See Other redirect to the receipt page. Any reloads will resubmit that request as a GET request. This is what web developers must do, regardless of whether firefox does it or not, because it's not the only browser in the universe.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

You're right and you're wrong.

You're right in that a web application should be able to handle whatever crackpot thing the browser *cough*user*cough* tries to do. However, from an application standpoint (the browser not the web application), there is absolutely no reason that the browser should refetch a page on a save. From the user's point of view, when they save, they expect to get exactly what they see on the screen. If the browser refetches, this may not be the case as a dynamic page might have changed. And no, user settings about caching should make no difference, if it's on the screen, it's in memory.

That being said, I've never noticed this particular bug and have no idea how FF actually handles saving web pages.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

The fact that it is in memory doesn't mean anything.
The only thing that is in memory is the parsed document, not the original html/gifs/jpegs/everything. That would take much more memory.
The original html is in cache, that can be easily reused.

I haven't read the RFCs, but I believe that there is no standard about saving a page, so a web application/user, whoever uses the browser, shouldn't assume anything about it. Assuming that the browser will cache everything just in case you need it later is too much of an assumption, if not backed up by some standard, at least.

It's not a stupid policy not to cache posted stuff. Anyhow, the web developer can avoid the user need to refetch a post.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

You misunderstand my point. I agree that it should be no problem for the *web application* to recieve post after post. It should be able to handle anything anybody can throw at it. That's up to the web developer to sort out.

But the browser itself should definately NOT refetch a page for a save. No, there is no web standard which covers this behaviour. I'm speaking completely about the expected behaviour from a user's standpoint (something not often understood by developers, myself included). It is possible for a web page to change between when a user first downloads a page to when he saves it. Therefore, a save should be rendered soley from the current copy the client has.

Regardless of how the browser uses it to render the page, retrieving the html from the in memory content is trivial. Don't believe me? Try it for your self. Make a webpage. Add a button with an onlick event that looks like this:

onclick="alert(document.documentElement.innerHTML) "

TADA!!! The entire html of the current page (save the HTML element itself), from memory, no cache/refetch involed.

To repeat, I'm not saying that it's the browser's job to protect users from stupid web applications, but refetching the page to save it is a stupid waste of resources.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[aftk2]

This has been the most frustrating thread I've read on Slashdot in months.

I am viewing a web page. I want to save that web page. I don't want to save it's "rendered contents" - meaning the need to inexplicably re-render them, thereby creating problems with data submission on lesser coded websites. I just want the contents of that page saved locally.

Therefore, if I attempt to save that page, and Firefox - instead of immediately saving the page that I am viewing - does anything else, like reload/resubmit the page, crash, make coffee, anything, then that's a bug. Pure and simple. It doesn't matter that the web application should be coded in such a way to prevent form resubmissions from causing unforeseen consequences. That is a separate issue. Per your advice, the browser should be a browser. When I instruct it to do one thing, it should do that thing, and stop.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely the mozilla guys have a responsibility to fix this one...?

Everyone let them know. Create a bugzilla account if you don't have one and vote for this issue if it's important to you.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[BZ]

> TADA!!! The entire html of the current page (save the HTML element
> itself)

No, that's a serialization of the DOM, not what was actually sent over the wire (which is what users saving HTML only want to save). In particular, the innerHTML can be affected by scripts...

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

I am well aware of this. Futhermore, I'd say that this is exactly what the user wants to save. When a user saves a page, they expect it to be exactly as they see on their screen. So if it has been altered by script, those alterations ought to be saved as well.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

I didn't answer you in the first place, because I wasn't completely sure about what the GP said. I thought it was that way.

The user does not want to save the dynamic html. The user wants to save the actual html. The actual dynamic html might be changed in a way that reders better in the particular browser, rendering it useless for other browsers.

Anyhow, the issue is whether caching everything twice, or not, just for the sake of letting people save html. I believe a warning dialog would be nice, but caching everything twice is overkill. And saving the serialized DOM would be such a dirty hack, it wouldn't even be cool.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

I just don't see it that way. Unless your parser or serialization function is broken, the serialized DOM will match the "actual" html.

As for dynamic verses original, I think we'll have to agree to disagree. My position is that the user wants what they currently see. If that happens to be browser specific then "Bad developer! No cookie for you!" But if a page has been modified in some way and the user saves it, I believe that they will expect to get the updated content. If you were going to print a page, would you want the updated content or the original html? It's really the same thing, one just goes to paper, the other to your desktop.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

You don't need to see it that way. It _is_ one way, and _isn't_ the other way.
Identity is a very strong relationship, but easily broken. As soon as you change the format of an html document, it's no longer identical. It might be equivalent, but in the space of the particular browser, and not in every aspect. You are sayng that a DOM serialization is "close enough" to an actual HTML saving. Well, it might be close enough for _your_ needs, but not for the needs of everyone that might use it.

When you save an html, it wouldn't be nice that the original formatting, or the comments are lost, or even some non-conformant characteristic you will want to show the developer.
Saving the original html is a feature you do need. If you want to save the representation of the document, then you should have some new DOM format, at least some XML should be nice (because DOM has a predictable structure as opposed to some HTML). When you parse the document, some data might even be lost, think about new HTML specifications not covered by the browser. Of course, if what you want is a printed copy, a "render to PDF" feature would be great. But remember that not every html user is a desktop user. I don't even use a "desktop" filesystem metaphor myself. As a matter of fact I use the "save to html" feature to see the actual html generated by my web applications. It's different from DOM, it has comments, and my own formatting. I'm not saying that firefox should cater specifically to me, but I am using myself as an example that not everybody uses the browser the way you think they do, and that maybe some things are the way they are because changing them to suit some specific need, might ruin it for others.

You are not talking about saving html, you are talking about some new "save rendered document" feature that you would like to have. That _would_ be nice, but that's not what the feature does. Of course some users might expect that, when using it, but their expectations would be based in an incorrect interpretation of what web browsers are and do. Maybe a clarifying statement might be put under the functionality access.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

Let me reiterate... unless your parser or serialization function is broken, the serialized version and the "actual" html will be identical. Given it hasn't been modified after the fact, of course. ;-) Comments, formatting, spacing, etc. should all be preserved. Browsers which do not carry these things into the DOM are BROKEN. The DOM specification even allows for "expando" attributes and elements. It is very flexible.

Now, I will readily admit that the serialization functions of some browsers are, in fact, broken, but that is not the point. The point is that you are looking at this in the way you are accusing me of looking at it: from YOUR point of view. As we've covered before, this is a design issue, not a standard. Saying that this is an "incorrect interpretation of what web browsers are and do" is entirely inaccurate. There is no "correct" way to save an html file from your web browser. There is only the way it's done in your browser of choice. In my browser of choice, the Save functionality would be as you say: "Save Rendered Document." If I wanted the "real" html, "View Source" would be were the browser can refetch the document from the server.

You're looking at this from the developer's standpoint and not the user's. Your comment about your non-use of a "desktop" illustrates this point. 99.998% of your users (assuming you work on non-ubergeek website) do use the desktop paradigm (I hate you forever for making me use that word :-P). They don't care about your poorly formed html. They don't want all your comments. They just want to get what they see. The functionality you want is easily accomplished in other ways. Save should do what the normal user wants and expects.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[orasio]

I read you the first time, without the bold letters.

The DOM is not the html. The html is one thing. The DOM is another.
Your definition of a broken DOM serializer is, to say the least, very creative.
For example, a mobile/lean/sensible browser might get rid of stuff it doesn't need, so it can be fast. Heck! even Firefox should do that! What are some web developer comments doing in my browser working memory?? _That_ is broken! In fact, the "correctness", by _any_ definition, of the parser, shouldn't affect the possibility of a user to save data.

The good thing about web developers is that we are web users, too. I have friends, I watch them. I have _some_ insight about what they think about browsers. Not a lot. But _some_.
Just because you think that the WWW reduces to some desktop users, it doesn't make it so. There are mobile users, lynx users, developers, curious people, _future_ users that might have different usage patterns. You can't change the meaning of "save page" to "save rendered page" because they don't mean te same thing. They do have some relationship. They could be the same in some implementation, BTW, in _your_ ideal implementation, but they are _not_ the same thing by every metric. They are the same thing by _some_ metrics that _you_ chose to generalize to the whole universe of people who might use firefox. That doesn't make them the same.

You seem to think that "save page" doesn't mean _exactly_ "save page", and that it means "save the browsers interpretation of the page and make it perfect", but it just isn't the way it works.

Re:They've got to sort this out before the final

[deserttrail]

I never said that was the way it works, I said that was the way I think it should work.

So you want the browser to drop comments? Ok, fine by me. That doesn't change the way the page renders. What would you like to drop next? Borders? Bolds? Fonts? Go ahead. Some document has 500K comments, drop them, I don't want to save them on my mobile anyway. Hell, I don't want to save them on my desktop! Neither does my mom. For the intents and purposes of this discussion the WWW does reduce down to desktop users. We're having a discussion about a desktop level browser (not to browse the desktop, you know what I mean). What kind of market share does even Firefox have verses Lynx? How often do you browse eBay on your mobile? When browsing eBay on your mobile, how often do you save a page? How often do you expect to transfer that page from your mobile and view it in a desktop browser?

I'm really having a hard time seeing where you're coming from. If you "save page" and the browser goes back to the server and gets a possibly different page, how is that the proper behavior? On top of that, how is it any better than just serializing the page you have? The content can still come out different.

It's really easy to say users just don't understand how things work and be done with it, but that's not the right thing to do. For the purposes of this discussion, you can't save a cached copy and going back to the server is NOT the ideal solution, you don't want to keep two copies in memory, so what do you suggest?

Memory hog?

[Antifuse]

Have they at least fixed the problem where if you use Windows FF in a "one window" mode (tabbed browsing, all new windows in new tabs instead) and leave it open for a couple days, the memory never seems to get released? That's my only real quibble with Firefox (and it doesn't prevent me from using it, I just have to shut down FFox every morning when I get to work and restart it). It's kinda concerning to have one tab open, look into process explorer and see the FF is using 180mb of RAM.

Re:Memory hog?

[Bert64]

Strange, doesn`t do this for me... I`ve had it running on my machine for nearly a month now.

Re:Memory hog?

[Antifuse]

Are you running in Windows? Do you leave your Firefox up and running at all times? I'm sure this isn't a huge issue for most people, but I always have Bugzilla sitting open on my work machine, and I rarely log out, so Firefox NEVER closes... And I've noticed this on every XP machine I've used.

Re:Memory hog?

[fool36]

I would love to see this cleared up. I am told that people don't normally leave a browser open for any extended period of time, but i do - and have to restart FF every 3 days or so.

I blame Microsoft for creating an OS that is now stable for days and even weeks at a time.

Re:Memory hog?

[rincebrain]

I've been using nightly builds for a few months, and the memory issue doesn't seem to come up for me, ever.

I have yet to see Firefox leeching exceedingly large amounts of RAM if I have one tab open, even after I left it open for days. :)

Linux 2.6.12 kernel, various nightlies (I roll up nightlies once a week, roughly, barring any unforseen bugs noticed).

Re:Memory hog?

[Maian]

Right now after a good dose of heavy browsing without restarting the browser for several hours, Fx is taking up 200mb (including virtual mem) even after I close all the tabs.

However, I use session saving and undo close tab extensions, which probably use a non-trivial amount of memory. Even so, I don't think that accounts for 200mb...

Re:Memory hog?

[Antifuse]

I'm at 78 megs in 1.5b2, with about 3 hours in my current browsing session. I'm at work, though, so I haven't been browsing as heavily as I normally do. And I *don't* use session saving or undo close tabs.

Re:Memory hog?

[ikkonoishi]

about:config

key "browser.cache.memory.capacity"

value "16000"

Re:Memory hog?

[cpeterso]

I have the same problem. As an experiment, I used about:config to reduce the memory cache to 0 bytes (silly idea, I know, but it was an experiment). That did not reduce Firefox's memory footprint and it revealed a bug where some HTML pages would not render if I had the memory cache at 0 bytes but the disk cache at > 0 bytes. If I increased the memory cache to exactly 1 byte, then the problem pages would render. Yes, I reported this bug in Bugzilla, but I doubt it will ever be fixed.. :\

Re:Memory hog?

[MegaFur]

As a potential workaround, there's an extension named SessionSaver that saves all your current tabs when you close the FF window (assuming you have just one window open that is).

In this way, you could shut down FF periodically, then restart it. Of course, since I've never looked at the memory situation, for all I know, it might restart FF with exactly the same memory problem you seem to have had before, but it's worth a shot.

Firefox Plugin Management

[LiquidCoooled]

Firefox plugins (not Addins..) are the hidden automatic way to handle extra file extensions, and are similar to ActiveX plugins for IE.
You can remove the flash plugin fully without resorting to letting the Flash load and then hiding it from the DOM model (as flashblock does - i hate the "flash" flicker it does and would rather a broken box appeared instead, i never ever want or need flash...)

Plugins are listed in firefox by browsing to about:plugins
(a very nice report actually)

If you open about:config and change the setting "plugin.expose_full_path" to true, you can see where each plugin is located for removal.

To remove a plugin, you must delete it, or move it into a new folder.

I just removed the files:
NPSWF32.dll
flashplayer.xpt

All flash now comes up with the green jigsaw "click here to download the plugin" and doesn't even attempt to load.

Hope this helps :)

Plugins list and info: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/

Uninstalling Plugins help page: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/uninstall.html

newsreader?

[timeOday]

Is Mozilla's usnet news reader being updated at all? I'm still using the "suite." They still have it on their website, but I can't tell if the browser is kept up to date with firefox, and if the newsreader is updated at all.

Re:newsreader?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Mozilla's usnet news reader being updated at all?

Yeah, the Mozilla Corpor^WFoundation has made it a policy to allow the suite to wither and die. Fortunately the Seamonkey folks will take over and update it, including the newsreader. So I guess you could wait until Seamonkey comes out of alpha or just use the bloated, overrated Thunderbird instead.

Re:newsreader?

[twbecker]

If you mean the newsreader functionality in Thunderbird then no, not really. TB is a great mail client but the newsreader functionality is still pretty much an exact copy from the suite. The devs don't seem to place a lot of emphasis on enhancing it =/

Re:newsreader?

[twbecker]

Uhh, Thunderbird is bloated but the suite isn't? Seriously man lay off the crack.

Re:newsreader?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bloated when you have Firefox and Thunderbird open at the same time. Why the hell do I need a half a gig of memory to keep them running together without swapping? The memory leaks get worse when their uptime stretches for more than a day. If that's not bloated I don't know what is.

Re:newsreader?

[Kelson]

The newsreader is now in Thunderbird, which combines email, newsgroups and RSS/Atom feeds -- and I mean a real feed reader, not the LiveBookmarks half-implementation that Firefox has.

That said, I have no idea what work has been done on it, since I haven't used a regular news reader in years.

Source code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't the source tarball available? I'd rather compile my own to avoid SVG bloat and to turn on spatial navigation.

Greasemonkey for Deer Park

[mavenguy]

Versions of Greasemonkey in the 0.5.x series (including the current, stable release) will not work in Deer Park, nor will any future 0.5 release. Support for GM in DP is being developed in versions 0.6.x, which is now in beta. This is discussed here. It includes a link to the current beta (0.6.2 as of this writing).

I installed this beta this morning, and, so far, the only problem I encountered was that, when I close some tabs, a JavaScript alert pops up with a diagnostic message. I'm not sure if this is a real error or just being used by the Greasemonkey development team to monitor some condition that might be handled without effect in a future, offical release of 0.6. There do not seem to be any harmful effects after dismissing the alert; the tab gets removed and FireFox can continue to be used as normal.

Automatic update, in a few days?

[amrust]

I just now tried to force a manual update (using Beta 1 now), and it won't update. Why would waiting for the incrimental automatic update to kick in work in a few days, if asking manually right now will not?

Maybe they don't have the Beta 2 on the server that autoupdate looks at, or something. Probably to avoid congestion?

Re:Automatic update, in a few days?

[chrisnewbie]

They are victim of their own success!

I guess they will have more and more people complaining about mozilla since it's a widespread browser now.

Re:Automatic update, in a few days?

[Anonymous Coward]

The update doesn't seem to be turned on just yet.

When it is live, and you setup 1.5b1 on Linux using the installer (rather than unpacking the tar.gz), you'll be getting a 7.6MB update rather than the 700KB one. This is a known bug.

Bug-specific

[dmccarty]

Does anyone know what this bug means or what it solves?

New extension developer features: 310976 - Treat 1.5.* as 1.5.infinity.

(In this case, "inifinity" is 2,147,483,647 ;-)

Also, my favorite bug:

Linux-specific bugs: 287523 - [GTK] Insensitive (disabled) check/radio buttons can't be distinguished in some GTK themes.

I DON'T USE RADIO BUTTONS YOU INSENSITIVE, uh, oh wait nevermind.

Re:Bug-specific

[Kelson]

Firefox extensions include version compatibility info so that if a browser upgrade changes functionality that an extension relies on, the now-broken extension won't take down the browser. That's why when Beta 1 first came out a lot of extensions were disabled: They were marked as being compatible through 1.1 (Deer Park Alpha) and 1.5 beta 1 was 1.4. Similarly, beta 2 is internally 1.4.1, and so now that all those extensions are marked as compatible through 1.4, the new beta disables them just in case. (The Nightly Tester Tools extension has a nice feature which will relabel your extensions as compatible with your current Firefox version.)

A workaround has been to mark an extension as being compatible through some high number -- 1.4.99 for example -- though most extension developers don't seem to be doing this. I expect the "Treat 1.5.* as 1.5.infinity" feature is designed to resolve this problem, since actual extension-breaking changes won't be intentionally introduced in a maintenance update. An extension developer can test with 1.5, label it as compatible with "1.5.*" and no one will have to worry about updating that compatibility flag until they start working on 2.0.

Re:Bug-specific

[anaesthetica]

My guess is that this way, when you download a security update (1.0.6 to 1.0.7 for example) all of your extensions won't be disabled. This way, an extension writer can just specify that the extension is for the 1.5.* releases, and not have release an updated version of the extension every time FF is patched for security.

If 1.5b1 is any indication...

[green pizza]

The memory issue seems to be improved, but not fixed. I upgraded from 1.0.2 to the nightly builds and most recently to 1.5b1. I use FF on Mac, Win, Linux, and Solaris. Performance of 1.5b1 is a bit better than 1.0.2 and memory usage is a bit better as well. With 1.0.2, leaving FF running with several tabs as you describe will easilly eat hundreds of MB after a few days of running. With 1.5b1 it's down to about 100 MB. Still too much, but slightly better.

I know it's a pipe dream, but I am hoping 2.0 will once and for all make the memory and CPU usage a good 33% lighter.

Re:If 1.5b1 is any indication...

[Antifuse]

God I hope so... it seems as though when you open tabs and close them, those tabs are just hanging around somewhere in the background... Phantom tabs!! :)

MOD PARENT DOWN --- FLAMEBAIT

[Anonymous Coward]

(well, unless you compare it to IE/AOL Netscape/...)

Just had to thow a jab in there didn't you.

IE 7 is an awsome product. Fuck IE6 is fine.

I personally hate tabs so the biggest plus of FireFox is worthless to me.

Plugings seem to work much better with IE for me.

How about you do a point to point comparisson to tell me how Firefox is more stable then IE.

(Disclaimer I know WTF I am doing so security is not a concern when your browser is configured correctly)

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN --- FLAMEBAIT

[mpontes]

God, I hate you trolls more than GNAA first posts and Anti-slash people. At least they admit they're trolling.

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN --- FLAMEBAIT

[orasio]

Remember, you are an anonymous poster.
Anonymous posters can't use the word "me", or "I", because they don't actually exist.
We know that you are just agents put in the Slashtrix by the Oracle^H^H^H^H^H^HSQL Server so slashdotters don't disrupt their own environment.

IE needs to support standards

[psyon1]

Thats the biggest thing I hate about IE. All these wonderful wonderful features of CSS I want to use, but because I make web pages for the masses, I have to work around IE's lack of compatibility. I am in no way referring to moz/ff specific extensions, just the css standard.

Where's my update icon?

[skryche]

One of the things that's appealed to me the most about 1.5 is the ability to update itself automatically. Until now, one would have to download a whole new installer for every release.

Well, I'm running 1.5b1. Where's my icon to offer me a b2 update? Have I misunderstood this function?

Re:Where's my update icon?

[skryche]

RFA!

“Beta 1 users that want to help test software update, should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days. The incremental update from Beta 1 to Beta 2 is 700K bytes.”

Don't forget SVG

[bigpat]

Yes, most of us have been getting along with Flash just fine for many years, but the open standard for Scalable Vector Graphics promises some really good graphical and animation capabilities without being under macromedia's control and offering an easier ways to integrate dynamic database driven content.

Firefox 1.5 will offer integrated support for at least a subset of the SVG standard. So, no longer will you have to download a plugin to see svg content and it will be viewable inline with html content on a web page. To me this is an often unheralded addition to Firefox 1.5 which could really be a market differentiator. So in this case, being one of the first to adopt an open standard that has the potential to add so much functionality can be of real benefit to both the product and user.

Does it work with Google Maps now?

[BrotherZeoff]

I've actually started using Avant (after using Firefox for over a year) because of rendering problems on some websites, most especially Google Maps. It fails to load chunks of the maps, and there's no way to fix it, even by zooming in and out and sliding the screen.

Re:Does it work with Google Maps now?

[nutshell42]

Try changing your browser identification.

At least with Konqueror the standard identification never worked for me, posing as Mozilla worked until recently but doesn't now while setting the user agent to Safari didn't work then but does now.

More about that here (well more about GMail support but afaik it's the same problem)

Changelog

[drange_net]

What's new in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

This page lists the improvements in Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 over Firefox 1.5 Beta 1. Last updated October 6, 2005.

New browser features

• 235204 - Web Search (Ctrl+K, etc) should show a search dialog when search bar is disabled.
• 296827 - Dragging text into the Find text box does not enable search buttons or initiate search.
• 309860 - Dragging a URL to the tab strip should respect the Shift key (use Shift to control whether the new tab is selected immediately).
• 303279 - Safe Mode: Use "safe" localstore.
• 304403 - Safe Mode: Better UE.
• 283598 - [Mac] New .dmg artwork with diagrammatic instructions.

New web developer features

• 309242 - E4X should be on by default, while preserving the comment hiding hack. (Specify e4x=1 or JavaScript 1.6 if you want to include XML comment literals.)
• 302462 - Support :valid, :invalid, :out-of-range, and :in-range pseudo-classes.
• 84400 - Support :disabled and :enabled pseudo-classes.

New extension developer features

• 303727 - Supply a supported way to access the nsIEditor of HTML input/textarea.
• 310976 - Treat 1.5.* as 1.5.infinity.

Notable bug fixes

• Fixes for several security holes.
• Fixes for several software-update bugs, including several that prevented updates from working.
• Web page rendering and interaction
  • 300453 - 'Disable common annoyances' prevents focusing of designmode iframes. (Disallowing scripts from raising and lowering windows also prevents them from focusing frames. Also, sites like Gmail that focus iframes also focus the window even though they're not trying to.)
  • 295074 - POST responses remain in the memory cache when using XMLHttpRequest.
• Back/Forward cache (fastback)
  • 305462 - "Clear Cache Now" doesn't clear bfcache.
  • 292965 - Improve eviction algorithm for bfcache.
• Windows-specific bugs
  • 310957 - Switch Win32 SVG renderer from GDI+ to cairo. (This improves cross-platform consistency of SVG rendering and eliminates the requirement for Windows 98 users to download gdiplus.dll before they can see SVG content.)
• Mac-specific bugs
  • 171680 - [Mac] Modifier keys have no effect on mouse wheel.
  • 309730 - [Mac] Tweak wheel+modifiers preferences on OS X.
  • 255415 - [Mac] Scroll wheel doesn't work after selecting bookmark from toolbar until you move mouse.
  • 307340 - [Mac] Disable "Full Screen" UI for 1.5.

line spacing

[oldmacdonald]

Does anyone know why firefox puts significantly more space between lines of text than mozilla does? Aren't they supposed to render the same? This seems to be true regardless of font.

Re:line spacing

[NanoServ]

That's a default style property you can set in your userContent.css (do a Google search to find out where it's stored). The default is line-height:1.3em or something around there. To make the line spacing smaller, add this to your userContent.css:

body{
  line-height:1.2em;
}

Re:line spacing

[oldmacdonald]

Sweet. Thank you so much--that was driving me nuts. I couldn't find anything about it on bugzilla, probably because it isn't a bug.

Re:line spacing

[oldmacdonald]

Strange though, it still doesn't render exactly the same. For example, with the line height set smaller, descenders inside headings on slashdot
get cut off. With mozilla, they don't. Maybe this is more than I want to know.

Oh, grandpa...

[yoyhed]

Users were best off in the Lynx 0.x days, none of this fancy image/mouse/tables crap. The web was all about content! Well, content and ASCII porn. Lots of ASCII porn.

Re:Oh, grandpa...

[MightyYar]

LOL, point taken. But honestly, there are very few non-advertising applications of the new browser features. I suppose gmail and google maps are nice, but on balance I'd say that flash ads, popup ads, and those new hovering tidbits that fly all over your screen make the experience a downgrade from where it was before.

Even the silly sites over-do it with tech these days. Remember "Hamster Dance"? How is "Badger Badger Badger" any better, other than using flash instead of irritating gifs?

Great, now I'll be saying Badger Badger Badger all day again...

Re:Oh, grandpa...

[yoyhed]

Well, I mostly posted for the joke. I actually agree fully with you, and I think IGN.com and GameSpot.com are perfect examples of your point. :-)

A simple solution

[jetmarc]

> I tend to be very strict about cookies, which unfortunately means that I
> am forced to endlessly click through "do you want this cookie?"

A simple solution to this problem can be seen in Opera. Opera allows
you to "accept all cookies" "from all sources", but then "silently
delete all new cookies on close".

That is, web sites with cookies work fine throughout the browsing
session. There is not a single annoying dialog, not even when sites
request permanent cookies (Opera pretends to store it permanently).

Whenever you want to break the trackable session, close the browser
and re-open it. I think this is a lot easier than having an advanced
cookie manager (while there exists one for Opera, the only use I ever
made from it was to verify that the "silently delete new cookies"
actually works as advertised).

Marc

Question from a Hockey fan

[rynix]

Is there anyone out there who is creating torrents of the hockey games yet ?

CPU usage...

[Spy der Mann]

I'm still using Firefox 1.07, but for those testing, i have this question (for Windows users):

Does Firefox 1.5 solve the Flash 99% CPU usage problem? Everytime I browse slashdot, the Flash(TM) banners pump up the CPU to 99%. If I'm playing some videogame, even if i set the firefox process to "low priority", my game or processing application gets REALLY slow. I have to adblock the flash banners to return to normal.

Any ideas?

CPU Spiking Fixed?

[Badlands]

Can any of the brave-early-adopters report on whether version 1.5 fixes the CPU-hogging bug?

I was running version 1.something-or-other for a long time until I couldn't pretend anymore that the CPU-spiking to 100% every 8 seconds for 2 seconds, didn't really bother me.

I have since downgraded to version 0.9 and am much happier. But I long to join the "cool club".

Autopackage Available

[tajmorton]

An Autopackage of 1.5-b2 has been created and is available at http://wildgardenseed.com/Taj/autopackage/firefox- 1.5-b2.x86.package.

This package will overwrite your existing Firefox install unless you install it into a different location. To install into a different location, run this command:

./firefox-1.5-b2.x86.package --prefix /opt/firefox

firefox beta

[goarilla]

i think firefox 1_5b1 was equally stable as 1.0.7 i only had 2 crashes; segmentation faults if u must know, and they all happened when i kept on hammering www.isohunt.com
so i will really try this one it feels pretty damn good to be on the cutting edge :D

Spellbound

[cocoamix]

I hope someone manages to get Spellbound working with recent versions of Firefox.

I haven't found a spell checking extension that works as well.

Re:Spellbound

[Anonymous Coward]

Spellbound already works with 1.5b2. Just choose to "Install SpellBound for Firefox 1.0+ (e.g. trunk / nightly builds after the Deer Park Alpha 2 Release)".

I already updated

[tecker]

Last night the Congratulation page came up after I loaded my browser again with the new Beta 2. Automatic updates should have happened or are happening now. Just do a check for new extensions and it should trigger.

Alow me to be the first please

[AssTard]

to put my palms on my cheeks and make a big loud fart noise. LIke a big juicy fart, because thats what I feel like doing when I read about this Firefox. What, internet explorer's not good enough for you? It's free, come on, what?

Does the beta stay in the taskbar after closing?

[Create an Account]

I've used FF since 0.9.3 and I have an ongoing problem with it. On Win XP SP2the Firefox task remains in the taskbar even after the application has been closed. Sometimes I will have five or six instances in the taskbar. Most will only have about 3 or 4 megs of Ram, but one will always have between 15 and 30 megs. I tried to report it as a bug, but they wanted me to read all of their ongoing bug reports to see if it had been reported already. Before I could do that, I needed to learn to navigate their bugtracking software and I don't have time for that right now (I am not extremely technically skilled, sorry.)

I do kind of wish there was a way for non-technical people to submit bugs that would not involve wasting hours and hours of the dev team's time on duplicate bug submissions. Ah, well, I love FF anyway.

that sounds like an isolated case

[Anonymous Coward]

i use firefox 1.0.7 regualrly on about 10 machines (work, laptop, desktop, girlfriends desktop, moms, dads, grandads, etc) and i've never seen 1.0.7 crashing or being sluggish.

offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a problem with Acrobat 7 vs Acrobat 5, nothign to do with Firefox.

Most exportes do not honor strict adobe standards.

save the PDF's to disk and then open them. Many will give you an error 109. (hold down ctrl when you click ok to get more info on the error)

THis is because many exporters lack a closing tag (can't remember which of fthe top of my head)

If you do not get errors when loading from a saved PDF then you can try to tun off "fast web view"

(edit --> prefrences --> internet --"Fast web view")

ope this helps.

Where I work

[Mad Ogre]

We all use Firefox... We have no spyware problems. But since we are a computer shop, we make our bread and butter out of removing spyware from machines running IE. Firefox might not be the most secure browser out there, but it sure is a lot more so than IE. IE7 is just nasty.

Re:CPU usage...Re: Memory Usage?

[Lawrence_Bird]

And how about making it less of a memory pig? Wasn't that one of the
original intents of it? Faster and sleeker?

Where is the source code?

[jbn-o]

I see binaries for various platforms: GNU/Linux, MacOS X, and Microsoft Windows but I don't see source code on the download site. Where is the source code for this version of Firefox?

Thanks.

Re:Where is the source code?

[jbn-o]

It's in CVS, but there's a warning that one should get the source package instead—the source package that is not available. Apparently, others noticed this as well.

Firefox @ Toyota.com = bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is pretty off topic but today I was shopping around online looking at new cars and I was using Firefox 1.0.7 at Toyota's website and it just sucks. I'm not sure if it's the website or the combination of Firefox and linux, but it seems like it must be the website because I generally don't have a problem elsewhere. Does anybody know what the problem is with the website. Obviously, they use a lot of flash elements and that seems to be part of the problem. But I don't even know what to say to the Toyota people to encourage them to fix their website.

Have they fixed the 1.0.7 Freeze-up problem?

[honestmonkey]

I've had to remove Firefox 1.0.7 from my machine. If I use it, eventually the system becomes unstable and will freeze for seconds at a time, then start up again, only to freeze again. I know for a fact that it was FF causing this. Opera and IE and even Mozilla don't do this. It sucks too, because I really liked FF.

Please DON'T spam the bug

[tritonic]

I should have said:

Please don't comment on the bug unless you have something *constructive* to add. It already has 84 comments - more complaints won't help get this fixed, they'll just make it even more unreadable. (If you feel the need, vote for the bug, but don't spam it with complaints.)

More reading: Bugzilla Etiquette

Correction

[GXFragger]

Set the String Value to 1.4 rather than 1.4+. Sorry about that.

Broke Search Bar for me!

[Spunk]

I upgraded to 1.5 Beta 2 recently (automatically! though the updater called it by the internal name 1.4.1) and then the search bar stopped working for me. I use that thing all the time, so I had to go back to 1.5 Beta 1. :(

Does anyone else have this problem? I'm on a Mac Mini running Tiger.

w00t!

[Just-some-person]

Finally Firefox isn't such a resource hog and actually runs fast! Now I'm not switching to Konqueror so I still have extensions!