Firefox 1.5 RC1 Released

jgaynor writes "The Firefox team took another step towards version 1.5 this morning as it made public release candidate 1 of it's popular browser. Users running 1.5 beta should have already received notice via an automated update dialogue box. New features include improved Pop-up blocking, enhanced automated update, better OS X support and faster back and forward page navigation buttons. A full list of features can be found in the release notes as well as the downloaded page." My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded ;)

Comments

1.5 Beta 2?

[aussie_a]

I got the Beta 2. Can I upgrade via it's upgrade function? If so, how? I see a button for "Upgrade History" but none for "Check Now".

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[gregbains]

Same problem here. I can't see anything to update with.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using the trunk not that branch builds but this should work for you too.

Click "Help" -> "Check for Updates.."

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[iLogiK]

Help > Check for updates

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[gregbains]

Thank You :) Updated nice and easily (with only 1 extension not working, though it did in Beta 2)

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[1336]

If I remember right, FFb2's upgrade function is accessible under "Help" in the regular menu.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[CortoMaltese]

enhanced automated update

Yeah, right. For me, it keeps downloading and installing the 1.5 beta 2 over and over!

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Andrew Tanenbaum]

Does that make much sense? I would probably put it in Tools or nest it in the Options panel.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't find a newer version of the extension use this extension to enable it.

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

~Freyr

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Professor_UNIX]

I tried to upgrade from 1.5 beta 2 when the upgrade popup came up but the install failed for some unknown reason. I just went to mozilla.org and downloaded the DMG image and installed it. /MacOS X 10.4.3.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am running 1.5 Beta 2 and the auto-updater can't find the 1.5 RC1. Neither can the "help"->"check for updates" option.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[ModernGeek]

Why would Check for Updates be under help? I'd like better user interface organization.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Sigg3.net]

Or simply double-click the digital watch icon in your down-right corner and set the date a few months forward.

I've already celebrated x-mas and New Year's. 2006 looks kind of bleak. I've decided to downdate.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

About 3-4 hours ago my firefox told me an update was ready to install, but for some reason it failed. I did it manually and it 'updated' me to Beta 2 which was what i was already running.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[bcat24]

AFAIK, updating has usually been under the help menu. For instance, take a look at iTunes and Adobe.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

--
Support free speech. Don't post anonymously. If you are anonymous, don't bother replying to my comments, I won't see it

right. because supporting free speech means pretending anonymous speech doesn't exist.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[chris_mahan]

Same here. Help is for the user, when the user does not know how to do something, or does not know what to do. Updating the software is something you do when you know what you are doing, and know why you want to do it.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Spoke]

Yep, same thing happened to me, too. Finally just downloaded the installer manually after having the updater update itself to the same thing 3 times.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[lohphat]

Oh, you men that running the update from 1.5b2 caused:

1. A ~600K update patch to be downloaded.
2. Then upon restart caused a 6MB download to update to 1.5rc1

then it looped back to step 1.

I cancelled and downloaded the 5MB installer.

I guess auto-update, can't.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[jZnat]

Well, the fun of using the Firefox Trunk nightly builds is that I get a 200k patch each day that addresses the actual files that were updated. I guess it's harder to test the auto-update on milestones as they don't happen often enough to test them well.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[aussie_a]

Damn, you must have been modded a +5 for me to see this.

Part of free speech is owning what you say. Sure, in countries where the government tries to deny its citizens free speech, they need to remain anonymous. However I've yet to see an AC post on slashdot post as an AC because their government is denying them free speech. Instead I see slashdotters posting anonymously so they can flame. By filtering out ACs, I can now surf slashdot at -1 with next to no problems.

If I'm filtering out people that have to post AC because their government sucks, I'm truly sorry, but in all the time I've been here before I started ignoring ACs, I hadn't been seeing your posts. For the rest of the ACs, own your speech. Don't be such a coward.

Re:1.5 Beta 2?

[Anonymous Coward]

3. ????
4. Go Fuck Your Self!

Yep, you noticed how I left out profit?
That's because you suck.
Your father should have never pulled his dick out of your mother's asshole. If she just walked around with his cock crammed up her ass for the rest of her life, none of his jizz would have dribbled into her cooch and created YOU.

If you're black
go visit www.gnaa.us

If you're gonna download it

[Stevyn]

Help them out and file bug reports since it's a release candidate. If everyone just downloaded and said nothing bad about it since it's firefox, the final version may still have some nasty bugs in it.

Re:If you're gonna download it

[LiquidCoooled]

Theres an annoying bug that prevents the status bar from displaying the link I'm hovering over.
I already have the tickbox for "Change status bar text" unticked - ie javascript should not change the status bar.

If the site includes onmouseover type events (even with simple return false code) then it cancels the javascript display but the URL never displays.

Its damn annoying.

and no, installing greasemonkey and using the noblindlink type scripts don't work now because nothing can touch the document.on* events (due to the new handling of the DOM within FF (They can however remove the on* events from the A elements, so is a partial fix)

Its been in bugzilla since 2000, what chance I can have it fixed before this release?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40838

(not as a direct link...)

Re:If you're gonna download it

[Xugumad]

I hear this a lot, but so far I've only found one bug in Firefox, and it was listed as already fixed in bugzilla. So, I'm testing, really I am, but it works great for me!

Re:If you're gonna download it

[jZnat]

I remember that bug. I first noticed it on tiava.com without the use of Redirect Remover (probably one of the most useful porn-browsing-enhancements Firefox has to offer other than Location Navigator). Annoying, but the bug can sometimes be fixed by simply reloading the page.

Also, the ability to change the status bar text should never have been available; the status bar is supposed to be useful to the user. Blind links and JS links are very unhelpful and should be avoided, especially when browsing "dirty" sites that could potentially lead to random pay sites or shitty ones.

Re:If you're gonna download it

[LiquidCoooled]

I found the only way to stop it happening and see every URL was to insert a line into my prefs.js file.

user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.status ", "noAccess");

This stops dead any script which attempts to access the window status bar.
If you read the discussion in the bug report I posted earlier, they talk about this as a workaround, but avoid it for a total fix because the proper action should be to simply skip over the line with the status bar change and continue with the rest of the script.

It worked wonders for me and finally made me relax and be able to see the URLs wherever I went.

I know it will come back and bite me in the ass at some point though, because there is no UI to modify this from within the program.

I use a combinition of this and a modified greasemonkey NoMiddleMan script (it just removes the onmouse events from the links themselves as part of the link cleanup loop - better to have one loop doing multiple actions than multiple seperate loops)

I can now go where I want and never have to worry about a blind link.

My copy...

[Niznaika]

$ ls -l ./firefox-1.5.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 habarnam habarnam 8442030 2005-10-31 16:15 ./firefox-1.5.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz

That makes it like almost old news...

Re:My copy...

[Niznaika]

Ok... for the untrusting:

# ls -l firefox-1.5rc1.tar.gz
-rw------- 1 habarnam habarnam 8442030 Nov 2 15:28 firefox-1.5rc1.tar.gz

That means the rtflink's rc1 version is the same with the one posted a few days ago at mozillazine.

Re:My copy...

[jack_csk]

FYI, you should prove by hash function like using both md5sum and sha1 or even sha256.

Java plugin

[geophile]

I hope the new release makes it easier to get the java plugin working in RH9 or FC[34]. I've tried a number of different documented procedures with 1.0.6 and have never been able to get it working.

Re:Java plugin

[Phantom042]

If you just follow the instructions under:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/linux.html#Java
You won't have any trouble.
The command I ran was:

ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_05/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugi n_oji.so \ <br/>
/usr/lib/firefox-1.0.7/plugins/libjavaplugi n_oji.so

Just correct the version numbers and that should work.

Re:Java plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

If you follow the instructions now provided on the Java download page (next to the download link for RH), the plugin works fine.

But does it run

[zegebbers]

on emacs?

Re:But does it run

[novus ordo]

You just need the right finger extension. I prefer the old Ctrl+Alt+F1+C.

Re:But does it run

[jonadab]

Potentially, but you'll need to compile it yourself, and there are several prerequesites, and you might need to make some adjustments. First, get a C++ preprocessor that outputs ANSI C code, plus the C => Emacs lisp translator. You'll also need the X11 libraries for Emacs, plus several other libraries that the Mozilla.org codebase uses. Run all of the libraries through the preprocessor and the translator, then byte-compile them and put them in a directory that's in your Emacs load-path. Then you're ready to start working on Gecko. As far as I'm aware, nobody has yet got Gecko working on Emacs, but it ought to be possible in theory, given the above, with perhaps some adjustments for platform issues (things Emacs handles differently than the Mozilla-supported platforms, e.g., you'll have to adjust all the clipboard-related code to utilize the kill ring). If you can get to the point where Gecko will byte-compile, getting Firefox running should be a snap after that.

HTH.HAND.

Re:But does it run

[TonyZahn]

Sure it does. We've got an eMac in our QA lab running it right now.

What?

heh

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait for 1.5, getting tired of these 1.0.x releases. I clicked some nasty link as well, and every time I re-install 1.0.7 it still comes back up, so hopefully this should help.

Kudos To The Firefox Team

[sysrpl]

Kudos to the Firefox team. My web browser notified me of this update and it was automatically applied without a hitch.

Re:Kudos To The Firefox Team

[skryche]

I first learned of the RC when Firefox told me about it. I like that.

Re:Kudos To The Firefox Team

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah. Wouldn't it be nice if your OS could do something like that?

Re:Kudos To The Firefox Team

[giarcgood]

I first learned of the RC when Slashdot told me about it. I like that.

ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[1110110001]

With bug 275519 "[Mac] Support Command+Option+Arrows for tab switching (like Camino)" they decided to drop support for ctrl+tab under Mac OS X. As it's now a RC let me give you a how-to to reenable ctrl+tab. I hope it's easier in the final release (copied from my comment in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27551 9).

1) Quit Firefox
2) Go to Firefox.app, Choose Show Package Contents (my Finder show the german
text so I can only guess what's the wording in english) and go to
Contents/MacOS/chrome/
3) Backup toolkit.jar and rename it to toolkit.zip
4) unpack toolkit.zip and go to content/global/bindings/
5) open tabbrowser.xml
6) Replace (in line 1977 in my file)
          this.mTabBox.handleCtrlTab = !/Mac/.test(navigator.platform);
      with
          this.mTabBox.handleCtrlTab = true;
7) Create an archive of the content folder
8) Rename it to toolkit.jar
9) You can now use ctrl+tab again

b4n

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[tezbobobo]

I love firefox, I really do. But the lack of easy tab switching has kept me in Safari. I downloaded Pithhelmet but it is not the same as customising Firefox. I owe you a debt of thanks, and so does any OS X user who does not know what you have illucidated.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss CTRL-Tab, but it never worked right on my Mac. I usually use Apple+1, Apple+2, ..., Apple+0 to switch windows anyway.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

On my powerbook I switch tabs to the right or left by using the key combinations:

fn + ctrl + page down

and

fn + ctrl + page up

On a powerbok, the 'fn' and 'ctrl' keys are on the bottom left of the keyboard, the 'page down' key is on the bottom right and is also the 'down arrow' key.

I think that's what I used in Firefox on Linux as well to switch tabs, minus the fn key. I noticed it when I got used to switching tabs in Gnome's tabbed terminal application and accidentally used it in Firefox.

I don't know if it works in RC1, but it does up to Beta2.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Moridineas]

Is there a way to make Command+Shift+Arrow switch tabs (like in Safari)?

Lame is it sounds, that is one of the reasons I don't use Firefox more (though I always use it when doing web dev). Cmd+Opt+Arrow IS a lot better than tabbing though.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[rainman_bc]

Cmd+Opt+Arrow IS a lot better than tabbing though.

  vs.

two keys vs. three.

Granted
  vs.
is the same...

Asking for an application to be exactly as another. Isn't that the issue that plagues KDE and Gnome devs?

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

In Opera I switch tabs to the right or left by using the keys:

1

and

2

It's easy as pie.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Moridineas]

Command+Tab makes me move my hands. Cmd+{Shift/Opt}+Arrows is much quicker for me, and easier to move back and forth (versus adding shift to the cmd+tab).

Asking for app to be exactly as another? well that seems to have motivated the change to command+opt in the first place, and what makes apps on the two major desktop OS's feel, well--standard.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Phroggy]

The reason is, Cmd-Shift-Arrow conflicts with keyboard selection in a text box. For example, while I'm typing this (in Safari), I can't use Cmd-Shift-Arrow to switch tabs, because in a text box, that key combination selects from the insertion point to the beginning/end of the current line. To switch tabs, I have to use the mouse to click outside the text box, then press Cmd-Shift-Arrow.

I like Cmd-Shift-Arrow too, but if Cmd-Opt-Arrow were standard, you'd get used to it after awhile. The difficult thing is switching back and forth (e.g. X-Chat uses Cmd-Shift-Arrow, so if you run Firefox and X-Chat at the same time, you'll be constantly hitting the wrong button).

Note that Camino has used Cmd-Opt-Arrow for a long time now.

Re:ctrl+tab on Mac OS X

[Moridineas]

Ah, I see you're right. I found myself automatically clicking within the body of a page to move the focus from a textbox before using the shortcut.

and Adium uses just Cmd+Arrow..even more muscle memory.

Either way, cmd+opt+arrows is something I'm happy to see in Firefox. Thanks for the info, it's appreciated.

IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[CDPatten]

IE 7 (beta) still has some pretty sweet features that this version of Firefox doesn't. One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs. For the common end user, another is the phishing filter, which is pretty good.

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff. MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

Maybe in the final release we will see some better features added.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[ScootyPuffJr]

You make some good points, but let's not think Microsoft innovated here! That would be news.

Omniweb is one of those innovators -- you can see the image of the tabs there, as is Shiira (tab exposé)

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

They're working on the unglamorous speed improvements and stability for the most part. They're reworking the rendering engine to speed up drawing of pages and reducing memory usage and fixing incorrect handling of CSS and HTML. I think that's more important then a new whiz bang feature.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Stevyn]

I prefer to use my short term memory to remember what the pages roughly look like since my memory is free and I don't have to upgrade it. And a phishing filter is only good for the user if it blocks every phishing scheme that will ever be created. Otherwise, they'll let their guard down over time and then get bit in the ass. A better solution may be to make the user that they are aware they're on a secure server and that the server address better match with the address in the address bar. That would be a good feature for firefox to...wait...

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[n0-0p]

The tab thing sounds interesting, so I'll give it a try and see what I think. I wouldn't use the IE anti-phishing system because it sends every URL to MS' servers for validation. I don't consider myself paranoid, but I'm not comfortable with handing over my entire browsing history to a third party.

In terms of cutting edge stuff I'd really like to see IE support SVG, XForms, more complete CSS, and other Web 2.0 features. I guess we just have different views and priorities on that one.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[tezbobobo]

Actually, if that is what it takes to win 'the war' Apple got there first. Omnigraffle has had this feature for a long, long time. Rather than flame you with a list of all the firefox perks, I'll gve the most important two, which should encapsulate all the others. 1) An extensible, non-monolithic architecture. 2) Multiplatform app.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

IE 7 has still pretty cool features, like adressbar spoofing, statusbar spoofing, domain spoofing, titlebar spoofing, SSL spoofing, keystroke sniffing, clipboard sniffing, Cross-Site-Scripting and, of course, remote code execution. No phishing filter will help you with that. In consequence, IE can only be safely used on a trusted intranet.

In contrary, Firefox can be used on the internet - which I consider as a standard feature that IE clearly lacks of.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Scoria]

IE 7 (beta) still has some pretty sweet features that this version of Firefox doesn't. One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs.

Firefox is ultimately a lightweight browser that can be easily expanded to suit an end-user's individual preferences. There are freely available extensions that will convert Firefox into the most feature-rich browser imaginable.

For the common end user, another is the phishing filter, which is pretty good.

It's funny that you would mention it. The current development builds of Mozilla Thunderbird actually have a "scam detection" filter, even though I feel that such technology does often add a false sense of security to the equation. Maybe it will be shared with an upcoming Firefox build.

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff.

This subject has been beaten to death here at Slashdot, but I'm afraid that the Trident rendering engine is still many miles behind the competition. Gecko is definitely cutting edge by comparison, even though I understand that the Microsoft team is striving to improve their engine.

MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

If there is indeed a browser war happening, Microsoft certainly has the advantage. For most people, after all, the preinstalled Internet Explorer is synonymous with "the Internet." However, I don't believe that Firefox 1.5 will be up against Internet Explorer 7.0. Instead, it's likely that Firefox 2.0 ("The Ocho") will be released alongside Vista, and that they will directly compete for the market.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Quozt]

the phishing filter in beta 1 registered my site that i was developing as a phishing site... i wonder how many sites will suffer this problem..

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

a phishing filter is only good for the user if it blocks every phishing scheme that will ever be created.

It treats any address which isn't a plain text URL (including IP addresses) as suspicious, phones home to check if it's whitelisted and if not reports that to the user. I can't think of any ways around that. I'm sure the logic can be easily updated too.

A better solution may be to make the user that they are aware they're on a secure server and that the server address better match with the address in the address bar.

You mean check the certificate? Yeah, IE's also done this since forever.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Celt]

It might be a idea for Mozilla to make a agreement with http://toolbar.netcraft.com/ as it updates and it works pretty well.
Good for both involved imho

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[DarkEdgeX]

IE7 won't be released until Windows Vista is released (late next year). Firefox 1.5 is coming out this year, and Firefox 2.0 is supposed to come out sometime next year (followed by a 3.0 even I think [???]). I know Ben Goodger has posted and/or linked to roadmaps in the past.. ahha, here it is--

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml

So yeah, I think the Firefox crew has some time to add in these new IE7 features (at least the ones that make sense) without having to worry too much.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Myen]

The first point, at least, may be possible with an extension. See here. It's still alpha-ish, though, I think.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Threni]

> I'm not comfortable with handing over my entire browsing history to a third party.

Which ISP(s) do you use? Are you satisfied that no-one who works there is dodgy?

http://cryptome.org/audio-spy.htm

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Youssef Adnan]

You can get the tab preview feature in Firefox through the following extension: (compatible with FFox 1.5RC1)
http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/ index.html

As for phishing, check out these extensions:
https://addons.mozilla.org/quicksearch.php?q=phish &section=A

IE has not innovated in a very long time while other have been trying hard to innovate to just get through the market leader-ship barrier that IE has put. It's going to be very challenging for the IE team to introduce any feature that would be outside the "catch-up" with other browser features. I'm glad to see that IE is going to introduce nifty features from all over the place, nonetheless.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[FireFury03]

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff. MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

Will IE7 feature Clippy too? "It looks like you're downloading a virus, would you like help installing it?" :)

Being serious, IE7 is still not standards complient and still doesn't support XHTML.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[octaene]

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff.

Dude, what plant are you smoking? I'm pretty sure it was Firefox who came up with tabbed browsing, extensibility for custom applications, integrated pop-up blocking, and many other 'cutting edge' features. Microsoft is just playing catch up with most of these!

I concede that the visual display of tab content you describe does sound like nothing Firefox currently offers (that is, I conceded without having searched through the thousands of available Firefox extensions). But in any case, I don't think your statement above can be uttered with a straight face.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[giorgiofr]

HA HA HA HA HA, like Opera wasn't there ages before FF!

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[artifex2004]

I wish Firefox added more cutting edge stuff. MS will win the war if this is what is going to compete against IE 7.

Cool. Can you help me find a copy of IE7 for my Mac?

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Lomby]

Firefox 1.5 has one of the coolest features you can imagine: SVG.

Everything is well integrated with XUL/Javascript.

This opens the door to many applications that were not possible before without resorting to Java/Flash/ActiveX/...

Think of a Gantt chart editor in your browser.
Think of a graphical editor in your browser.
Think of a CAD in your browser.

SVG has the potential to move the kind of operations you can perform in a browser to the next level.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[CDPatten]

My post wasn't meant to bash firefox. Seriously, I've never seen such hyper-sensitive people in my life. Not all, but most of the replies are just blind defenses of firefox.

Discussion about pros/cons of the browser will make it better. Saying IE sucks doesn't help FireFox improve, and it won't make FireFox beat IE 7 in the browser war. Stop being zealots and have an objective discussion. IE AND FireFox aren't perfect, get over it. How about try having a discussion on how to improve its functionality instead of just complaining about any flaw you find with IE.

It blows my mind that so many of you initially just attack IE, instead of talking about other things that FireFox could to be better. The glass is half full not half empty. You will never win market share just by saying the other guy sucks. I want FireFox to continue to innovate and add new features, not just "nice" things like auto-updates. At this point, security holes are a rampant in all browsers, and that feature is a given to have in any browser.

Real quick, I was speaking to the functionality with the browser, not the engine. I believe they are all fast enough for the average user, and that to win the mindshare of end-users you need to have the "features" that impress and make browsing easier. I agree with the format statements, but that isn't (history shows) relevant in winning a browser war. Plug-ins just aren't as good as native features (memory leaks, stability/crashing, integration issues, etc.).

In anycase, instead of just saying IE sucks, does anyone have any ideas to improve FireFox? The best one I saw was the timeline comment, that FF 1.5 won't be up against IE 7. I you are right.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Pieroxy]

So Google and the Googlebar is evil as well... (of course, only when pagerank is enabled, but still)

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer to use my short term memory to remember what the pages roughly look like since my memory is free...
Oh, yeah? Well I telnet to port 80 and parse the tags in my head.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of a Gantt chart editor in your browser.
Think of a graphical editor in your browser.
Think of a CAD in your browser.

Wow, these are all things that I don't want in A BROWSER!

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Xugumad]

What really gets me about these "browser wars" is that so many people think it's a good idea if one brower wins. It will be VERY bad if Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera, or whatever other browser becomes the one most people use. The only good outcome is where there are at least three competing browsers (Firefox, IE, and Opera or Safari should do the trick), or we'll continue to have the situation where lazy web developers test their stuff with one browser, and assume it's okay, because "it's the browser most people use".

</rant>

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[mikiN]

IE can only be safely used on a trusted intranet.

Perhaps not even there, unless used only by trusted operators.
Just imagine someone jotting down some javascript, opening it in IE, causing that instance to happily move off-screen, capturing everything the next schmuck types into other open instances, patiently waiting for the xyzzy password to play it all back.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dude, what plant are you smoking? I'm pretty sure it was Firefox who came up with tabbed browsing, extensibility for custom applications, integrated pop-up blocking, and many other 'cutting edge' features. "

They were not the first for any of those 3 items you mentioned. Firefox was just playing catchup to other programs out there. It's just that they implemented them properly and all in one application.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe in the final release we will see some better features added.

This is a release candidate. In theory major features shouldn't even be added in beta.

Cast your hopes for features on extensions and 2.0.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't matter.

SVG will also eventually have opengl acceleration. So that's another thing you don't have to look forward to either.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[bcat24]

Mod parent up.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Cyn]

He means make it clear at a glance that you're on a secure page. When you're on a https page in firefox, not only do you get the little lock icon in the statusbar, but the location bars background becomes yellow. It's actually convenient once you know what it means - which... the average user wouldn't have a clue of...

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[bcmm]

SVG is already available for current versions of Firefox, if you're building your own binaries. However, if it's going to be included in official binaries by default and officially supported, that's cool.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[drew]

IE7 is also not yet available to the public in any form and probably won't be available as a finished product until Firefox 2 is out (or at least well on it's way). So I wouldn't worry about Firefox losing out to IE7 just yet.

And even if it does, it has still been successful in giving Microsoft the impetus to a) release an up to date browser, and b) follow web standards. As a web developer, I don't really care if Firefox never gets above 10% market share as long as its existence is enough to keep the 80+% market share holder on its toes.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[MiliusXP]

I tested some SVG sample and Firefox 1.5 RC1 still missing some features from W3C recommendation. But, the render is better for this version in comparaison with 1.5 Beta2

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

IE never has made one innovation, they always steal someone else's idea and than brand and market it as an "innovation" to people who've never heard or used Firefox, such as most computer users who are clueless and look to MS to lead them by the nose. Just don't try passing off that lame sales pitch here. MS has never been "cutting edge". Ever.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

And a phishing filter is only good for the user if it blocks every phishing scheme that will ever be created. Otherwise, they'll let their guard down over time and then get bit in the ass.

I feel the same way about anti-virus software, which is why I NEVER use it. Yup you've got to get up pretty early in the morning to ...

*BSOD* ...

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You should get an award for best/most successful troll in this thread so far. :)

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

PLEASE do not kill my favorite browser with all that bloating junk.
It is after all a WEB BROWSER and i already have applications that can do all those things.
Integration is good as long as performance doesnt suffer.
Last thing we need is a flightsim in a speadsheet application :)

I would think VML would be another good feature to add after seeing how well google maps work with IE.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[pacc]

* Firefox 1.5 has one of the coolest features you can imagine: SVG.

They seem to have crippled SVG to use the same backend as in Linux,
now thing like printing are handled as bitmaps. Good point with a vector format.

* Everything is well integrated with XUL/Javascript.

Not XSL, most forms are hardcoded as a lot of identical
buttons or just programmed in javascript as if it was just another UI API.

*This opens the door to many applications that were not possible before without resorting to Java/Flash/ActiveX/...

I thought they closed that door for firefox, the mozilla suite opened up for a lot of applications in the browser.

Think of a Gantt chart editor in your browser.
Think of a graphical editor in your browser.
Think of a CAD in your browser.

* SVG has the potential to move the kind of operations you can perform in a browser to the next level.

You are probably thinking about XAML

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Bulmakau]

Firefox is ultimately a lightweight browser that can be easily expanded to suit an end-user's individual preferences. There are freely available extensions that will convert Firefox into the most feature-rich browser imaginable.

I love FireFox. I use it whenever I can. However, I hardly think it is lightweight. As a matter of fact, it eats RAM like crazy.it is rare to find the process taking less than 150MB on my machine. I indeed have several tabs open, but still. It is not really lightweight. (Unless you mean the program size on the disk? - which is not really an important issue, is it?) A fix for the memory consumption problem (maybe its memory leakage?) and you have a kickass browser without a doubt
I am using Firefox for 90% of what I do. Only thing I switch to IE for are AxtiveX enabled sites (like bank account), or some rare sites that don't work/render correctly on FireFox.
Other than that, FireFox is really superb.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[bobbyjack]

"Why are sig changes retroactive?"

So the slash db doesn't need to store an extra piece of data, 'sig', with every comment? Or keep an indefinitely-long 'sig history' for each user? Or limit the number of times you can change your sig? I've probably missed something ...

Anyway, I don't think it's a 'must have' and, strictly speaking, the sig is not related to the comment it was posted against, it's related to the user making the comment. It did freak me out the first time I realised it, though :)

Off-topic, yeah ...

P.S. Please don't change your sig now, or I'll look a right fool!

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[bobbyjack]

Clippy.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[tritonic]

Or how about a certain well-known Russian puzzle game?

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[The Lynxpro]

"IE 7 (beta) still has some pretty sweet features that this version of Firefox doesn't. One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs. For the common end user, another is the phishing filter, which is pretty good."

Isn't it also better at acquiring spyware? :)

Sorry, couldn't resist...the humor, the humor!

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Petrushka]

my memory is free and I don't have to upgrade it

Yet.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Kethinov]

PLEASE do not kill my favorite browser with all that bloating junk.
It is after all a WEB BROWSER and i already have applications that can do all those things.
Integration is good as long as performance doesnt suffer.

SVG does not kill Firefox's performance. The new Firefox builds are actually faster than the old ones because they've made improvements to the rendering engine. You have nothing to worry about with regards to SVG and bloat. This is a good thing.

I would think VML would be another good feature to add after seeing how well google maps work with IE.

VML is Microsoft's version of SVG in a compound document. They proposed VML to the W3C and it was rejected in favor of SVG. But because Microsoft is suffering from not invented here syndrome, they went ahead and implemented VML in IE 5.5 anyway and ignored SVG. A very Microsoft thing to do.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

True dat, nobody cares about the vectors in their browser. It's all about da bitmaps.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[ttfkam]

They seem to have crippled SVG to use the same backend as in Linux, now thing like printing are handled as bitmaps. Good point with a vector format.

"Good enough" support is better than no support at all.

Not XSL, most forms are hardcoded as a lot of identical buttons or just programmed in javascript as if it was just another UI API.

You can pass an XSLT resource as a processing instruction or perform (multiple) transformations through JavaScript. How is that not well-integrated?

I thought they closed that door for firefox, the mozilla suite opened up for a lot of applications in the browser.

No, they trimmed down the default install for Firefox. The basic engines are still there: XUL, DOM, XPCOM, E4X, etc. Firefox made applications optional whereas the Mozilla Suite bundled them all together whether you needed them or not.

XULRunner is really where it's at though.

You are probably thinking about XAML

XUL came first. XAML was a cheap knockoff. And technically, SVG (the spec) came before XAML too; it's just the implementation within Firefox that came after.

Re:IE 7 vs. Firefox 1.5

[Anonymous Coward]

What are your RAM and disk cache limits and sizes when you look at the "about:cache" URL?

Infinite Loop Problem

[1336]

I had that too (though not all people do). Download and run the rc1 installer from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/ That should fix things.

Extensions Again

[Blahbooboo3]

Watch your extensions, some seem to not work with latest release. For me, Forecastfox and IE View.... Yes, you can modify the extension to make it work, but it's a bit of a pain and later on seemed to give me problems...

Re:Extensions Again

[Anonymous Coward]

"For me, Forecastfox and IE View"

When it comes to weather, I have never had a problem with this nifty little program. I don't know who installed it, but I have been pretty happy with it. Another Firefox extension that I found most useful was this. ::thumbsup:: (y)(y)

Re:Extensions Again

[1336]

Actually, try updating those two now that you've upgraded; Forecastfox 0.8.2.4 and IE View 1.2.7 should both work in rc1 according to addons.mozilla.org

Re:Extensions Again

[tonygent]

Fasterfox seems to be compatible w/ the new version already, that's really the only extension I need.

Re:Extensions Again

[Jonny_eh]

Or use this extension to allow the installation of 'incompatible' extensions.

Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Adblock can work with RC1 which I doubt it can at the moment, I am not downloading it.

Re:Adblock?

[Galaxie]

seems to be working fine with RC1, unless my install came with extra special compatibility sauce for some reason...

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use AdBlock Plus instead. It works on FF 1.5 Beta 2, so I'm sure it'll work on this RC.

Re:Adblock?

[octaene]

Until Adblock can work with RC1...

I'm using both Adblock 0.5.2.039 and the Adblock Filterset.G Updater 0.2.6, both with no problems or issues (that I can tell.)

Re:Adblock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! That's fixed all the bugs I've been cursing about for ages with Firefox betas + normal Adblock. Things like Flash Player 8 not working when you have "Obj-Tabs" enabled, the list of elements not being displayed properly (so you have to write your filters manually), and still displaying ATL tags for certain blocked images (things like Vbulletin avatars which I block). Wasn't sure what to do with bug reports, as AdBlock seemed to be pretty stagnant :-(

Re:Adblock?

[SilentTristero]

The default adblock version does work to block ads, but clicking the Adblock button in the lower right shows nothing, and should show all the blockable elements. There's a new dev build (0.5.2.054) at the Adblock Forums which seems to work better for me with Firefox 1.5rc1.

My experience

[Zouden]

Well, I was running 1.5 beta 1, and I was about to update to beta 2 when I heard the news of RC1. So I tried the automatic update feature, and it spat at me "DIDN'T WORK I'LL DO A MANUAL UPDATE KTHXBYE" (not in those words).
After the manual update, and the usual warnings about broken extensions, I am rewarded with... Firefox 1.5 Beta 2!
The marvels of technology!

Re:My experience

[jurt1235]

Same experience, except that it claimed it would upgrade to version 1.4.1

Re:My experience

[nmg196]

Same here on two machines. It seems that the automatic update feature doesn't work. After it claimed it had updated, I still seemed to be on Beta 2. I had to download the full installer and install again to actually get it to update properly to RC1.

Re:My experience

[pintomp3]

ah, i thought i was the only one. i thought maybe i had some weird combination of extensions. anyway, we should file a bug report about it.

Re:My experience

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's why it's Beta

AutoUpdate Issues

[Sv-Manowar]

I've been running 1.5 beta 2 since it was released, and for some reason the autoupdate to 1.5RC1 got stuck in a loop where beta 2 would just keep downloading and applying the upgrader, without actually having any effect. AutoUpdate is one of the key new features in 1.5 to keep users browsers up to date (and hence, patching holes rapidly, keeping FireFox's security edge over IE).

Hopefully this is just the result of issues in beta 2 and older profiles, rather than an indicator of problems in the AutoUpdate code.

Re:AutoUpdate Issues

[osssmkatz]

>Hopefully this is just the result of issues in beta 2 and older profiles, rather than an indicator of problems in the AutoUpdate code.

What does that matter if it is dysfunctional in certain situations.

A bug means that it does not perform as expected.

File a message in the 'bugs' forum:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/ (or bugzilla)

--Sam

Re:AutoUpdate Issues

[Lord Flipper]

"File a message in the 'bugs' forum"

I'm on an aluminum Powerbook. I did file a bug report and had it accepted and passed back to me as if I was capable of saying, "yeah, I'll take this one". [laughs] Sorry, wrong guy. Anyway, the Macintosh is way down the totem pole for what is, essentially, the Greatest Windows Browser That Actually Runs Better On Linux.

But this "auto-update" thing: hey, "Check for new version" has NEVER worked on the Mac, in any version of Firefox, bar none. Period. It's a joke. As a matter of fact, the prefs are setup for "Check for new version:", followed by two lines: "Firefox", and then,next line: "Extensions". and from day One onward, with "Extensions" disabled, and "Firefox" enabled, it always does the check and comes back with a short list of various extensions that have updates.

Tonight, after being in Ubuntu Linux for most of the last couple months, I just realized there's a 1.0.7 Firefox...I'm running 1.0.6. Great auto-updating, sure.

And now there's folks here asking for an "auto" phishing site alert? I love Firefox, use it 90% of the time...but, You've got to be fucking kidding.

Re:AutoUpdate Issues

[osssmkatz]

Don't worry. Things will get better. Mozilla just hired a Mac guy, the Camino guy, right?

What's the bug number?

--Sam

Re:AutoUpdate Issues

[Lord Flipper]

Ah yes, Camino, there's a real Mac app. very nice. Thanks for the reply, I should have included the ID number of the bug report,of course, but here it is: 295081

All the main browsers have something really going for them. I like features in Omniweb, sometimes use Opera [I paid for it, way before it went freebie]. Camino is very quick. I use Firefox and Epiphany over in my Linux install, etc. Even the latest Netscape seems to have ironed out a lot of sluggishness, and I'll always have a soft spot for the old 4.7.9 Communicator Pro [full install]...but Firefox is extensible, has the great search bar additions, etc, and it's flawed, like anything is, but on par, it's great.

Firefox, on the Mac, also had that deal where, if i was, say, looking at a very long URL up in the address bar, reflecting my current page, and wanted to just delete the end of the URL, back to its root locator, [before all the sub-directory /blahblah/,etc], I wasn't able to place the cursor at my new 'breakpoint', and move the mouse 'down' slightly to select to end of line, instead, i would place the cursor, and then drag through [Wwindows-style] the entire line til the end was reached. Not a Mac GUI or HIG thing, at all. but that's fixed now. But the updating,in preferences, very broken.

Well, that was ...

[gus goose]

... very easy.

I'm now on 1.5RC1

Thanks

gus

SPAM

[Zouden]

What?
I hope this isn't the warning signs of imminent slashdot spamming...

Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Dies not pass acid 2, however, they ain't the only ones. That company in Redmond has issues too.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[HeroreV]

They've stated that they feel that there are more important features to work on than passing the Acid 2 test. There has been no attempt to pass it, so I don't understand why people are continuously surprised that it still isn't passing it yet.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[kbrosnan]

There were no plans to make 1.5 pass the Acid2 test. Firefox 1.5 is based on Gecko 1.8. Firefox trunk builds have made some progress as can be seen in bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=198232 part of bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=289480.

DO NOT use 1.5 and a trunk build on the same profile.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[kbg]

Ok so that means all the sites that are being built now are using Firefox broken standards. Which means when Firefox finally (ever?) passes Acid2 no one can use Acid2 features because sites have to be backwards compatible with older Firefox browsers.

This is Internet Explorer broken standards all over again.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Bogtha]

I don't understand why people are continuously surprised that it still isn't passing it yet.

Because the number one thing people have harped on about since Gecko was first open-sourced is how it's the greatest thing to ever happen to web standards. Now along comes a test designed to highlight flaws in standards support, Konqueror passes, Safari passes, even iCab passes, but Firefox not only doesn't pass, but there are no plans to make it pass for the next version (or even the version after that, IIRC).

If people have been believing the standards compliant rhetoric that Mozilla advocates have been pushing for the past seven years, then I don't blame them for being surprised when the only mainstream browser that isn't kicking their arse in standards compliance is Internet Explorer.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't blame them for being surprised when the only mainstream browser that isn't kicking their arse in standards compliance is Internet Explorer.

(a) Konqueror and iCab aren't mainstream browsers. Safari only scraped into the mainstream because MS discontinued IE on Macs - and among the Mac users I know, the last one only eventually switched to Safari a few months ago.

(b) I see you're conveniently ignoring Opera, which is much more mainstream than Konqueror and iCab - and which also fails Acid2 miserably.

It's amazing where truth-stretching and careful selection of data can get you, eh?

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Bogtha]

Konqueror and iCab aren't mainstream browsers.

Well use whatever word you like that differentiates between specialised browsers like Lynx and everyone else then. I used "mainstream", which seems reasonable enough to me. Which word would you suggest?

I see you're conveniently ignoring Opera, which is much more mainstream than Konqueror and iCab - and which also fails Acid2 miserably.

I didn't ignore Opera. I didn't include it in the list of browsers that passes the Acid2 test because it doesn't. Yet it still kicks Firefox's arse with Acid2, and you are completely wrong when you claim that it fails miserably. Tim Altman's weblog has an article with a screenshot of the latest rendering, which is rendering Acid2 almost completely correctly.

It's amazing where truth-stretching and careful selection of data can get you, eh?

Indeed. However, it appears you are the one bending the truth.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Kjella]

Ok so that means all the sites that are being built now are using Firefox broken standards. Which means when Firefox finally (ever?) passes Acid2 no one can use Acid2 features because sites have to be backwards compatible with older Firefox browsers.

Acid2 is not a standard. It's a compliance test to the W3C standards, and a nasty one at that. The only way your site would be incompatible would be if you used non-standard code which happened to render the way you want in Firefox. In my experience, Opera and Firefox have been close to pixel-perfect identical twins in development, so I doubt there's many deviations to speak of at all. Part of what it tests is presedence and error handling, which happens only in pages with conflicting instructions or invalid code. If you're writing good code, they shouldn't occur at all.

For an example of a deviation: I have a <div> defined, and I place an <img> too large to fit inside, without height or width. Of the three browsers I test (Opera, Firefox and IE) one will display it out of bounds, one will scale it to fit inside the bounds and one will expand the css area to fit the image.

No matter what the "right" answer is, it is ambigious. I might mean for it to float above and beyond the div, I might want it to flow inside the div. I should specify what I want. That kind of good coding will make sure your sites render perfectly on all browsers (but IE).

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[jZnat]

What the hell are you smoking? The Acid2 test is one of the most duplicated bugs, and active work is being made to fix the problems related to it. Other things are more important than passing a test to see how well you degrade gracefully, but compliance with said rules is still on the list of P3 or P2 items (forget which) that is being worked on whenever possible.

Re:Posting this from RC1 and ACID2

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Gecko is a complicated codebase, which is a bit harder to maintain than the KHTML, Webcore, and Presto engines. They are working on ACID2 support, but it will take time to get ACID2 to render correctly. I personally would rather see Firefox get ACID right instead of getting it done quickly.

What I am waiting for is an ACID3 test which demands full CSS 2.1 compliance.

Re:PLEASE

[Tetsugaku-San]

it's actually 'their', as the subject was the team who released it .. .

Wish they'd fix bug 270553 (E4X - DOM)

[Nicolas MONNET]

Kind of makes E4X useless for extension writing goodness.

Here's the URL (no link since they block /. referrers)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27055 3

Re:Wish they'd fix bug 270553 (E4X - DOM)

[Nicolas MONNET]

Yeah, that's weird isn't it?

And it's not even a criticism, merely a feature request ... duh. I'm developping an extension that would make good use of this. Sigh.

Pop-up blocking

[Rinnt]

improved Pop-up blocking

I am *really* looking forward to pop-up blocking improvements. It seems that when I first started using firefox (back in the early days) it caught the vast majority of pop-ups. That situation seems to have gotten worse lately. For example, I visit a certain guitar tab web site. Let's say I want to view 10 different tabs at once... using Firefox's tabs, I just click away. Unfortunately, this also means I'm greated with 10 new pop ups. This happens every time and has really brought back the days before firefox (and no pop-up blocker).

Re:Pop-up blocking

[lpangelrob]

By and large, this is because the website uses at Flash plugin to generate new windows of a specific URL and size. Some websites seem to hook Javascript onto links so that when you click on a "Next Page" or equivalent, a popup appears, but this hasn't happened to me in ages.

If 1.5RC1 doesn't solve this issue, I highly recommend installing Flashblock, which ensures no Flash executes unless you specifically click on it. For these "hidden" Flash animations, you can never click on them, so no more popups for you.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[wazootoo]

I've been using RC1 for a while and pop-up blocking seems to work fine. I think it previously had something to do with Flash movies being able to create pop-ups. Mind you, I haven't had time to visit any porn sites yet.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Professor_UNIX]

Can't you just disable Javascript or are they opening the popups some other way?

Re:Pop-up blocking

[sabit666]

Try middleman: http://middle-man.sourceforge.net/

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Zathrus]

Can't you just disable Javascript or are they opening the popups some other way?

Far too many websites utilize JS to simply disable it. And yes, I'm aware of the NoScript extension, but last I checked it had binary behavior on websites (enable/disable JS per site), which still doesn't help.

How's about disabling the new window call if it refers to another site? That would stop them... at least for a short time.

Or, alternately, disable onClick being able to create a new window... Yes, I clicked on the website. I didn't click on a link though. Shoo!

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Dalroth]

No it's not. I visit guitar tab sites all the time, and I'm constantly hammered with popups on them (as well as many other sites). I use Flashblock. Either Flashblock doesn't work, or there's some new method out there for creating popups that Firefox DOES NOT catch.

Bryan

Re:Pop-up blocking

[bigsimes]

Might be something like the 'Guaranteed Pop' product from http://www.falkag.com/ ?

Can't try it, (No affiliation)

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you post a URL for us to try?

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Clock Nova]

Unfortunately, Flashblock is one of the extensions that is currently broken uner RC1. Hopefully that issue will be addressed soon. Until then, I remain with the old version.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Malc]

Try looking up some words on m-w.com. I get pop-ups from there, and I have Flashblock installed. I also see the yellow bar telling me that a pop-up has been blocked, but a new window appears anyway.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[iabervon]

Personally, I just have the plugin removed normally. If I go to a site that requires flash, the pain of reinstalling the plugin is rarely as bad as the pain of using the site, so it's not a big deal to me. Or, if it's a good site, the flash thing is good enough to be worth dealing with the plugin. Of course, I have to remember to disable the plugin again when I'm done, but that's a minor issue.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[anethema]

Adblock, which some of you may have heard of..makes a wicked complement to the pop up blocker. I havent seen a popup in forever (including cited websites like m-w.com above). i almost never see adds either

Just install adblock and the filterset.g updater. makes the web sooo much nicer.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[xgamer04]

You could also try Fasterfox, which has some heavier-duty blocking.

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Alsee]

No, reading their site "Guaranteed Pop" does not appear to be any technique to create a popup. What they say it does is detect if you have popups blocked, and if so it uses javascript to slap a substitute advertizement *into* the webpage over the current content. Almost as bad as a damn popup.

However when I went to their demo page to see how it works I still got no ad at all, chuckle. Apparently I must have run into their bullshit several months ago... I already had *falkag.net* in my FireFox AdBlock filter so the javascript never ran. Grin.

-

Re:Pop-up blocking

[Alsee]

I get no popups from m-w.com.

Install the AdBlock extension (if you haven't already) and add *fastclick.net* and *tribalfusion.com* and *_ads.* to the filter. I'm not sure which of those three matches the popup itself, but those are the three elements I have have blocked on my system, and they are all good filters in general.

-

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[account_deleted]

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I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[puppetluva]

It was impressive to see that Safari can now pass the acid2 test. . . Now it is the most standards compliant browser:
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

I'm rooting for firefox to catch up -- it is usually the heavyweight in this area but it has been passed up.

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[gus goose]

Uhmmm.. It did not pass.

gus

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[tezbobobo]

Have you actually tried the Acid2? I updated last night and my Safari Version is 2.0.2 (416.12) and it will not work. Has anyone else had this problem? Has my update not worled properly?

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[nmg196]

> Now it is the most standards compliant browser

No, it is the most acid2 test compliant browser. Acid2 is not a standards compliance test and by it's own admission, "passing the test does not guarantee compliance with any standards".

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[Jugalator]

It was impressive to see that Safari can now pass the acid2 test. . . Now it is the most standards compliant browser

Whoa whoa...
I doubt the Acid2 test tests *everything*?

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[Anonymous Coward]

The Acid2 test measures how well a browser copes with crappy, invalid CSS. It is approximately the most useless test ever devised, and I have no idea why it has so much currency around these parts.

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[nmg196]

Safari does NOT pass the Acid2 test.

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[varmittang]

The latest update to Safari, which was two days ago, is suppose to be able to pass the Acid2 test.

Re:I hope it passes the acid2 test like Safari

[cbiltcliffe]

It is approximately the most useless test ever devised, and I have no idea why it has so much currency around these parts.

Because Safari passed it (apparently??) at one point, so the Mac zealots shouted from the rooftops:

"Passing Acid2 means you have the ultimate browser!! Acid2 success means standards compliance! Safari rules!! Jobs is teh c0|V|pu73r 60d!! !!! ?? !?"

And some (lots of??) people who knew Jack Schidtt about web page design saw Acid2 and Apple in the same sentence, concluded that Apple is fantastic (because Apple always is, right?) therefore the Mac maniacs must be correct, and Acid2 is the ultimate test of standards compliance.


It's been all downhill from there.




(Put down the flamethrowers and napalm. I'm not bashing Macs, or Mac users. Grow a sense of humour. Exactly how boring is life for you when you can't laugh at anything?)

Not any more...

[cakesy]

My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded ;)

Tempting fate, hey?

Re:Not any more...

[Reality Master 201]

Do you mind if I ask where in the country you're from?

Is it kind of in the West Virginia/Western PA/Maryland area? Linguistic curiosity; I haven't heard hey used at the end of a statement like that from speakers outside that region.

Moderators, mod me down. Also, get a fucking life.

Re:Not any more...

[LordSnooty]

Do you mind if I ask where in the country you're from?

Hint: The poster is not necessarily in the United States of America...

Re:Not any more...

[cakesy]

Australia actually...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Changelog

[Zouden]

If anyone's curious, here's the changelog from 1.5 Beta 2:

New browser features
* 313529 - Support importing home pages from (some) other browsers and multiple versions of Firefox Start.
* 220590 - [Mac] Delete (backspace) key should go back on Mac, too.

New web developer features
* 302188 - Support :-moz-read-only and :-moz-read-write pseudoclasses.
* 230909 - Make the dom.max_script_run_time pref work. (This pref controls the "this script is running slowly" dialog.)

New extension developer features
Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

Notable bug fixes
* 313300 - Change default for browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 0 to 2. (Make "Force links that open new windows to open in... new tabs" not apply to window.open with specified width, height, or other features.)
* 312527 - Need to reduce padding for bookmark menu items.
* 245418 - Menus and contextual menus open on wrong screen when using dual screens.
* 312227 - Not able to type in textbox of the main window after download completes.
* 309027 - Saving image does not open the save location window sometimes.
* Many reliability fixes for software update.
* 284474 - Converting to UTF-8 a url with an unescaped non-ASCII chars in the query part leads to an incompaitbilty with most server-side programs. (Fixed by backing out the change for 261929, Send urls in UTF-8 by default (images/links with non-ASCII chacters not displayed).)
* 245392 - Installer options for shortcuts don't work (update/install adds unwanted icons to desktop/quick launch, creates empty folder in start menu).
* 282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com.
* 310825 - window.focus() in a background tab can steal focus from foreground tab.

Re:Changelog

[bilgebag]

312227 being fixed is fantastic, I was constantly considering going back to 1.06 or 1.05, security issues notwithstanding, as it was massively irritating on WinXP. Every time I clicked on an attachment in our issue tracking app, the focus went screwy, cut-and-paste stopped working, sometimes textbox entry wouldn't work and the search bar started popping up if you hit / ' or ?

I could never work out what was causing it.

Thanks guys!

Pulldown menus still messed

[Anonymous Coward]

The pulldown menus still don't display properly in XP classic skin and by looking at the bug report, probably won't in this release because "It was found too late"... ugh.

Sick bastard

[Iriel]

My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded ;)

Sure, brag about it because you got to post the story. Now that I'm reading about it, mine's 24,000 seconds.
<griping>Curse you slashdot effect</griping>

Re:Sick bastard

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I downloaded it in less then 30 seconds. ha ha.

The Mozilla Project has some impressive download servers. However, it still seems like they could take advantage of using Bittorrent, but the Mozilla tracker doesn't host 1.5.

Download

[odin1415]

And after posting the news on Slashdot it willl take a lot longer...

24 seconds?

[dancallaghan]

Holy sh*t, Taco's still on dialup? It's only 6MB!

Re:24 seconds?

[Nimloth]

No way, he was just considering on pressing the download button 15-18 seconds after writing the blurb :/

Re:24 seconds?

[TurboStar]

5MB in 24 seconds needs around a 2Mbps connection. Dialup might be 0.05Mbps on a good line. How soon we forget.

Re:24 seconds?

[dancallaghan]

Of course you're right, I was just whoring for the +5 Funny (and got it, woo hoo!).

Even 2Mbps is only pretty average in a lot of countries nowadays though (I managed to get the update in about 10 seconds on my 8Mbps home connection), and I kinda thought that Slashdot itself might have a little more downstream than me ... But then I suppose he doesn't live at the colo ... or does he?!?

Killer feature

[Begemot]

Praise the Lord - ...Answers.com added to the search engine list...

I wouldn't be bitching but it comes placed up high in the changelog before Improvements to product usability and Better accessibility...

Autoupdate sucks!

[sheepoo]

Users running 1.5 beta should have already received notice via an automated update dialogue box

No notifications for me :(

Re:Autoupdate sucks!

[Anonymous Coward]

Likely due to staggered upadtes, maaaan. Keep the server running by gradually alert people to the new version.

problems w/ first 1.5 beta

[AgentPhunk]

My experience with the first release of 1.5 was good overall, with the exception of one bug that forced me to roll back to the stable 1.0.7. For some reason, some hyperlinks would 'crash' a tab and the page on that tab would be all grey, nothing else. I couldn't close out the tab and it just stayed there until I finally closed out the entire browser window. I could continue to open other tabs and work, but I usually keep Firefox going for a week+ with all of the websites I've been visiting in tabbed windows, and having 'dead' tabs got really frustrating. (not to mention that, if I really wanted to get to that website, I had to open up *shudder* IE.) anyone else have this problem (and/or do you know if it was addressed in RC1? I didn't see anything specific in the release notes.

Re:problems w/ first 1.5 beta

[Misch]

What's the bug number in bugzilla?

General comments...

[lpangelrob]

I generally do not test software until the release candidate stage, so this is my first experience with 1.5. Here are my thoughts:

1. Nicer looking menus. A nice little visual bonus.
2. Half my extensions are busted. TargetAlert, Flashblock, SessionSaver... those are the three most important disabled ones right now. Fortunately, it appears I no longer need SlashFix or Tab Mix (try dragging the tabs around).
3. Finally, I can update more than one extension at a time.
4. What's with the OS X-like preferences panel? It seems as though in the last year, more Windows applications have been going in that direction.
5. Haven't tested out the memory leak issue yet. Leave Gmail open for a night, you'll see what I mean.

Re:General comments...

[octaene]

What's with the OS X-like preferences panel? It seems as though in the last year, more Windows applications have been going in that direction.

I believe that this new schema aligns with some kind of GUI development standard that's been gaining popularity in the open source world. I fail to remember what that standard/method is called, but I'm sure a Slashdotter smarter than me will post a reply.

Re:General comments...

[Jeff Carr]

A nicer and newer version of Session Saver that works with this release is available from it's homepage or at ExtensionsMirror.

A newer version of Flashblock is available at MozDev.

It's a pain, but they do work much better than the versions available on Mozilla.

Re:General comments...

[lpangelrob]

That's one of those things that's always bothered me. If Mozilla's going to have a "safe" extensions library, why not use it?

I'm not sure if it's a "more freedom" thing or what restrictions are placed on newly developed extensions. I am interested in knowing why the authors chose to host their extensions on their own sites.

Re:General comments...

[bigbigbison]

Someone on here suggested the Nightly Tester Tools Extension to force old extensions to work. I found it to be a lifesaver and works with just about every extension I've tried.

Re:General comments...

[jesser]

Windows users can make the Firefox 1.5 prefs panel even more MacOS-like by toggling the following prefs in about:config:

browser.preferences.instantApply - apply prefs immediately, and show only a "Close" button instead of "OK" and "Cancel".

browser.preferences.animateFadeIn - resize the prefs window when you switch panes and use a quick fade-in animation

A while ago, I wrote a mostly useless extension that lets you toggle those two prefs without using about:config.

Re:General comments...

[Riturno]

Noia Extreme Theme is also broken.

Re:General comments...

[Earlybird]

• Half my extensions are busted. TargetAlert, Flashblock, SessionSaver... those are the three most important disabled ones right now. Fortunately, it appears I no longer need SlashFix or Tab Mix (try dragging the tabs around).

SessionSaver ".2d1 nightly 30" works on the recent Firefox betas/nightlies. I believe this is the new home page.

(This extension's history is a study in chaotic development; several forks with the same name, appended version numbers, different authors, patches, posted across a bunch of web forums containing hundreds of complaints and comments. You have to wonder why they didn't just create a wiki page somewhere, or at least a web page on some free hosting service, and tie the damn threads together.)

Extensions better than in beta

[QuaintRealist]

Just upgraded from Beta, and Adblock now works correctly again. Customize Google and NoScript have worked from Beta 1, at least on my Ubuntu machine at work. I presume the same will hold for my slackware box at home.

Can't speak to IE view, I'm afraid.

Spoke too soon

[jgaynor]

Worked on all of my home machines well - choked to death on my work machine. Here's a nice screen:

http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jgaynor/images/ff.bmp

Google shows others (if only a few) have had this issue with older moz builds.

Re:Spoke too soon

[fostware]

Same issue here...

Have been going through my extensions list one-by-one, but haven't found one to disable that fixes this.

Back to an old copy methinks...

Re:Spoke too soon

[moonsorrow]

Check for the colliding extension, it happened to me too but I don't remember the offending one.

Re:Spoke too soon

[jgaynor]

Ehh - I just did a reinstall overtop (as opposed to the automated upgrade) and it fixed the issue for me.

Re:Spoke too soon

[r00k123]

Did you really just post a link to a 1.3MB BMP?!

Re:Spoke too soon

[fostware]

Yep. Fixed it first time!

Thanks.

It HAS to be a symlink, I think....

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a copy of the .so (so it can figure out where the rest of the jre is?). This was the problem I had, and it took me a while to figure it out.

-- ac at work

1.5 release?

[u2boy_nl]

When can we expect the final release? I'm tired of constantly updating, i'll just wait for the final if it won't take too long...

Firefox & OpenDocument

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Firefox 1.5 (or later) be able to read the OpenDocument files?

Such ability would make much easier the introduction of OpenDocuument-ready apps (i.e. OpenOffice 2.0).

Is there any technical problem to create such feature/extension?

Re:PLEASE

[Reality Master 201]

Actually, its or their is acceptable. Collective nouns are often referred to using singluar pronouns when referring to activity or properties of the group as a whole, i.e., "The team's release of its browser - Firefox."

Here's a small problem...

[WWWWolf]

This is kind of off-topic but also very much on topic, because it does involve firefox update.

Does anyone know how to make SVG files, you know, scalable?

If I put images to web pages with <img> tag, and specify width and height, the image gets scaled.

But if I do what is recommended for SVG - that is, I create a PNG rendering of the image for backwards compatibility, then use <object data="foo.svg" ...><image src="foo.png" .../></object>, with width and height specified on both img and object tags, I get a properly scaled PNG image in Firefox 1.0 (which can't interpret the object type in question, so it falls back to the <img> tag, it as it should), and an improperly scaled SVG image in Firefox 1.5 and all other SVG browsers. Some SVG-enabled browsers (MSIE with AdobeSVG, FF1.0 with Inkscape plugin) show original-size SVG images, FF1.5 seems to be really nice and shows scrollbars on the image.

I tried making a small SVG file which uses <foreignObject> to scale the picture, but it didn't seem to work at all with SVG images in FF1.5, plus, it was an awful hack!

So what's supposed to be the web-standards-compliant trick of placing and arbitrary-sized SVG image on a web site, then having the browser scale the frigging scalable vector graphic file to the specified width and height?

I've looked around everywhere, nobody seems to know - anybody here know?

Re:Here's a small problem...

[jeff_schiller]

It's possible I misunderstood you, but I think the problem may be that the SVG image itself is specifying the size. Look at the element and see if the width/height are being specified. Ideally, the <svg> element should state width="100%" and height="100%". Then this should allow the user agent to properly scale the SVG image inside an <object> tag by specifying the <object>'s width/height. However if the <svg> element specifies width="400px", then maybe you're stuck because the author of the SVG has stated the width is 400 pixels, end of story.

I can't remember what the behavior of the SVG or HTML spec say with respect to this when conflicts occur... Specs like CDF will help to clarify some of these issues.

Re:Here's a small problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried CSS?

<object style="width: 100px; height: 100px" ...>

Re:Here's a small problem...

[Bogtha]

I tried making a small SVG file which uses <foreignObject> to scale the picture

Firefox 1.5 only supports bits and pieces of SVG. It doesn't support <foreignObject>.

I've had a similar problem to you; I can't seem to find a way of scaling inline SVG (i.e. a mixed XHTML+SVG document) at all. <svg width="5em"> doesn't seem to work, nor does sizing it with CSS. The specification doesn't shed any light on the matter, and any tutorials or examples I find all use either external SVG images, size things in pixels, or uses absolute positioning to scale it in relation to the viewport.

Re:Here's a small problem...

[roca]

Can't you wrap it in an with a transform?

Grammar Nazi

[dentar]

Of IT IS popular browser?? Is that what you meant?

Re:Grammar Nazi

[panic_smooth]

default release is British English! Hooray!

Re:Grammar Nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

no, "of it's popular browser" it's implying ownership..

Re:Grammar Nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

> no, "of it's popular browser" it's implying ownership..

Then they should not have used the contraction for "it is", but instead used "its", which properly implies ownership.

Here in the U.S. our education system is a bit lacking...

Re:Grammar Nazi

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people who get all the other apostrophe rules right get this one wrong.

Posessive pronouns are an exception. They don't get an apostrophe. eg its, yours , mine, theirs, ours, his, hers.

Therefore, "it's" is always short for "it is".

First Impressions

[tito13kfm]

Failed to update automatically. Everytime the update would download and be applied, firefox would restart and do it all over again. Updated manually by downloading directly from http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/

One feature I wish they would include that was present in 1.0.7 was opening a new tab when I click with my scroll button on the tab toolbar. Does anybody know a good work-around or solution to this?

Popup blocker with Adblocker extension and a good list of stuff to block has transformed the internet in to a productive time waster again :).

-----
11100001000110000011

Re:First Impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

Try double-clicking on an empty spot in the tab bar.

Re:First Impressions

[tito13kfm]

Thank you. I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out what they changed it to.

Safari does pass acid2...

[Anonymous Coward]

and you're an idiot.

(not a safari user, but, goddamn it, it would have been ridiculously easy to check your facts before being a faggot and spouting unsubstantiated misinformation)

You called it.

[VxJasonxV]

"Users running 1.5 beta should have already received notice via an automated update dialogue box."

And I did, and it was good.
And updated!

Re:PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

'Team' is singular. A plural pronoun such as 'their' is always incorrect.

Anyone else have trouble updating

[varmittang]

Windows 2000 and Beta 2. Did the Help > Update, and it downloaded 600Kb file, did the install, FF restarted and then it prompted me to download another update, which was 6Mb, and that got installed. Then FF restarted again and is asking to check for an update again, and while its looking it is just scrolling and not getting or finding anything to download.

Re:Anyone else have trouble updating

[daviee]

Same here but on XP. At the end I gave up and downloaded the full installer directly from the site.

All I want is...

[frankcow]

1. Plug that stupid memory leak that has FireFox occupying 175MB of RAM after a few hours, and pushing me towards Opera
2. Hurry up and release Minimo 1.0!!!

Beta's are great but..

[Spleen]

did they forget about the DOS exploit in 1.0.7? I've been watching daily for an update and there still isn't one. Firefox sells itself on security. Everyone rails on microsoft for being slow to respond or ignoring threats in IE, but it seems like the firefox team is taking a page out of that book. At very least they've dropped the ball here. I can see not being quick to fix (and release an update) for a security hole in Beta software, but 1.0.x is supposed to be the stable production version.

Re:Beta's are great but..

[dylan_-]

I've been watching daily for an update and there still isn't one. Firefox sells itself on security.

This isn't a security hole, it's code that crashes the browser. There is no exploit here. On the other hand, you shouldn't have been modded down there, since it's that security page you linked to hyping themselves that lead to this kind of confusion...

Re:Beta's are great but..

[Anonymous Coward]

The effect of this 'DOS' exploit is exactly that of clicking the 'X' in the top right corner.

There are no security implications of this exploit, as it just crashes the browser, it doesnt give the remote user control of your PC, doesnt reveal any data, doesnt allow them to serve a page pretending to be from your bank.

If you are so concerned about this bug, then go back to IE

Re:Beta's are great but..

[Spleen]

Thanks for the support, after reading a bit more this morning, I agree. A simple, and rare crash probably isn't worth the extra effort of pushing a new version. The /. comments made it out as if it were something more.

Somedays I wish we could mod Anonymous Cowards down to Anonymous Jerks...

Download

[Frankie70]

My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded

So you will be reading Zonk's dupe of this story on your
newly downloaded & installed shiny Firefox.

Just in case you forgot

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go

CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

I switched back to Mozilla solely because Mozilla uses a single text input field for both URLs and search (eg. Google). That field is like a commandline - not only can I type (and edit) URLs, but I can Google searches on those URLs (with site:), do math, unit conversions, definitions, etc. All of which produce linked webpages in the pane below. I want more CLIWWW action, like the idled XMLterm project, not less. Firefox splits the URL/search field in two, even making the search field only a few characters wide. That crimps most of my most productive webbing. Now, a "reunification" patch to Firefox would get me to switch back...

Re:CLIWWW

[Anonymous Coward]

1. go to google.com
2. right-click the search input box
3. select "add a keyword for this search..."
4. type Name: "Google", Keyword: "g", Create In: "Quick Searches"
5. type "g KEYWORDS" or "g 2+2" in the address bar
6. optionally, use toolbar customization to remove the extra search box.

Re:CLIWWW

[Misch]

Set up a quick search for google then.

Create a new bookmark, enter:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%25s

for the location, and a short keyword... like "gg"

Then when you go into the address bar, just type "gg search terms"

Re:CLIWWW

[WuphonsReach]

I switched back to Mozilla solely because Mozilla uses a single text input field for both URLs and search (eg. Google).

Indeed. It's something that I don't even think about until I go and use Firefox on one of my other machines. Then I remember why I'm still using Mozilla for mail/news/web rather then using the split Thunderbird/Firefox.

Re:CLIWWW

[Bob of Dole]

Try turning off the search-field in firefox, then doing something like "g foo" in the address bar.

Yep, the search bar is useless. The address bar does everything it can do.

Re:CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

That is totally hot!

*kisses Mozilla goodbye*

Is there documentation somewhere I can use to explain that feature to others? And what other tricks will you share, oh wizard?

Re:CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

Other replies to my post show how to set a keyword (like "g") in the Firefox URL field that will query Google (or other searches, presumably) with the subsequent arguments. So we get our unified text interface, just with an extra couple of keys after <Ctrl>-L, and without down-arrowing (possibly through a long list of cached URLs) to the search entry at the bottom of the dropdown list.

Re:CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks. AC posted first with an all-GUI technique. But yours shows the API. Are there other parameters than %s available? Where is the API documented?

Re:CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

Sure, as others in this thread have suggested - thanks. But apparently we have to config the "g" keyword by right-clicking the Google homepage search input text field first.

Re:CLIWWW

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed the point of the parent. The suite offers all of the features of Firefox AND Thunderbird without being two separate, resource hungry applications. And the suite has supported bookmark keywords just as long as Firefox has. It's simple to set up keywords google, wiki, msn, whatever and use the address bar to search.

Re:CLIWWW

[Doc Ruby]

I'm not so sure I missed the point of that post:

Me: "I switched back to Mozilla solely because Mozilla uses a single text input field for both URLs and search (eg. Google)."

WuphonsReach: "Indeed. It's something that I don't even think about until I go and use Firefox on one of my other machines. Then I remember why I'm still using Mozilla for mail/news/web rather then using the split Thunderbird/Firefox."

"It" that WR doesn't even think about is the combined URL/search field. Until they use Firefox, when they remember why they're still using Mozilla. Sure, it's ambiguous whether WR remembers the split field, or something else (like perhaps the tangentially-related "split" suite of Thunderbird/Firefox). But the most direct reference is to the split field.

Moreover, if I'm missing that ambiguous point, it's because I don't care about the Mozilla suite beyond the browser. I don't use Thunderbird, either - I use other MUAs and newsreaders. Until someone introduces a point about the split suite, either explicitly or in the clearest implication, I'm going to stay on topic in this subthread of the split URL/search field.

Re:CLIWWW

[Misch]

%s is the only parameter. It accepts a string, and that's it.

I hope they fixed the plugin in manager

[Anonymous Coward]

So what ?

All I want to know is have they fixed the plugin manager ?

Man am I getting pissed at the little fucker popping up every time I visit a site with Flash on it.

Don't the devs get it ? There's no way am on earth I'm installing Flash coz I don't want no Flashvertising.

Firefoxs' plugin in manager stinks.

Re:I hope they fixed the plugin in manager

[crimperman]

Man am I getting pissed at the little fucker popping up every time I visit a site with Flash on it.
Don't the devs get it ? There's no way am on earth I'm installing Flash coz I don't want no Flashvertising.

Couldn't you just Adblock the swf files or install Flashblock?

Re:Woo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot. Updates are not counted. If you download from FF, they do not count you.

No QT version?

[zlogic]

Around a year ago they promised a QT version of Firefox, and it was in beta. Now all progress on it has been stopped for around half a year.
If only they had a QT version of Firefox, I'd get rid of Konqueror this instant.
It doesn't seem too difficult to port it to QT because not just plugins but also Firefox's core is built upon XUL. Port XUL to QT and I think that's all you need.
And it's not an ideological issue(Trolltech makes $$$ etc.) either because the Windows version of Fx relies on Microsoft's widget set.
And Gnome apps look bad in KDE and don't connect well with other kde apps. For some app I launch twice a week that's ok, but for a browser that's unacceptable. It's probably the most often-launched app on loads of PCs.

Re:No QT version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox doesn't look that much like a native Gtk+ app.

You can install a GTK+ engine that uses Qt to draw widgets. I'm sure your distro has it available if it's new enough. :)

Link: http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/gtk-qt

Re:No QT version?

[zlogic]

It (SUSE 10.0) has the theme but I can easily distinguish Gnome from KDE. It behaves differently (shortcuts, copy-paste, drag-drop, keyboard layouts etc) and it looks differently. Even the mouse cursor changes when it moves from a KDE app to QT and this drives me mad.

I don't have that option...

[dhasenan]

I'm on 1.5b2, and the "Check for updates" option is greyed out.

I suck.

Re:I don't have that option...

[kbrosnan]

The account that is running the firefox process needs to have administrator rights on the computer to preform updates.

And coming soon...

[GroeFaZ]

Coming soon: a /. story about how the next Firefox download milestone of x millions has been passed, with a distinctive spike...today. SURPRISE!
Note: I-for-one-have-downloaded-Firefox-3-bazillion-time s-so-this-number-is-without-(+5 Insightful)-posts not included, but inevitable.

Is the Mac version still confused about tab focus?

[penginkun]

I stopped using 1.5b2 because it seemed like the tab focus issue was getting WORSE as time progressed. I'd be working and suddenly the current tab wouldn't respond to keypresses or clicks. Then I'd switch to another tab and see that IT had been getting the input.

I was assured this had been fixed in b2, but it clearly had not. I'm not about to trust RC1 until someone can tell me for SURE this problem has been fixed, once and for all.

About extensions (Re:Changelog)

[interactive_civilian]

so quoth Zouden:

New extension developer features
Nothing new since Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

Forgive my ignorance, by if nothing has changed since Beta 2 in this respect, then why do some extensions still break?

Namely the "Farkit" extension in my case...

I assume there will be an update soon, but still...why the breakage?

P.S. does anyone else think it would be nice to have something similar to Farkit for Slashdot? i.e. when you do "Reply to This" and then select some text from the quote you are posting, right click, select "SlashdotIt", and have it bold, blockquote, and italicize in the text box? Anyone more knowledgeable than I care to try and hack something like that out?

Re:About extensions (Re:Changelog)

[godEcho]

[disclaimer: I am not an extension hacker. Please correct me if I'm mistaken]

I believe this is a result of the internal version number of firefox changing. Extensions determine whether or not they are compatible with the installed version of firefox based on this number. i.e., if your extension says its compatible with 0.6-1.4, and the new version firefox is 1.5, it will report itself as incompatible (irrespective of an unchanged extension api). IIRC, they have recently made a change where an extension developer can use a kind of wildcard on the version number. This allows them to claim that they are compatible with 1.5+ so future revisions under the 1.5 branch will still be recognized as compatible.

Re:About extensions (Re:Changelog)

[godEcho]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2005/0 9/extension_revving_for_firefox.html
This isnt exactly what I meant to reference in my previous post, but it still may shed some light on the subject.

Re:About extensions (Re:Changelog)

[jesser]

The changelog says there are no new features for extension developers, not that none of Firefox's internal APIs have changed in signature or behavior.

i was supposed to get a dialog box?

[VoiceOfRaisin]

what i got today was all of my extensions disapeared. i didnt even know there was a new version out. my extensions list was blank. while fiddling around i tried to update and it then told me there was a new version and so i installed that, but my extensions are still all gone. im in the process of redownloading them all again now. nice bug..

Re:i was supposed to get a dialog box?

[pembo13]

Please remember to file this bug with Mozilla on their Bugzilla

Portable Firefox 1.5 RC1

[CritterNYC]

I've also released a test version of Portable Firefox based on the new release for anyone that would like it portable... or anyone that wants to try it out without messing with their local profile or Profile Manager.

Portable Firefox: Deer Park 1.5 RC1:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/ deer_park/

For the unfamiliar, Portable Firefox allows you to carry your whole web browser along with all your bookmarks and extensions with you on an iPod, USB thumbdrive, portable hard drive or any other portable media. You can plug it right into any Windows computer and use it just like you would on your own. It is a repackaged version of the popular Mozilla Firefox browser designed with portability in mind, so it has all the same great features of Firefox, but there's nothing to install.

Dear lord it took a while.

[mysterious_w]

Anway, was talking in #firefox yesterday asking if RC1 was delayed, when some TrooperBob guy asks me what the heck an RC is, then quotes me a news post from Oct 27th 2004 about 1.0RC1, saying it was out days ago.

There has to be freedom talk too.

[jbn-o]

If Firefox proponents don't begin to mention software freedom, there will be another reason for MSIE 7 users to stick with MSIE and not download the latest version of Firefox. After all, on Microsoft Windows it is easier to use MSIE than to download and install a replacement web browser. Microsoft can implement all sorts of features that Firefox has today or will get soon, but Firefox respects the user's freedoms to run, inspect, copy, and modify the software and MSIE doesn't. It would be a shame to let this advantage go as if it is less important than feature lists. Paying attention to software freedom is what got us the community that has given us so much. As the FSF has warned us:

Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea--and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the ``keep quiet'' approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

Me thinketh it not working

[krewemaynard]

I tried the "Help | Check for updates" option. It downloaded the update and prompted me to restart Firefox. I did, but FF wasn't updated. I tried 2 or 3 times to update it through Firefox's new update feature, all to no avail. I finally downloaded the full installer, and I'm now (finally) running Firefox 1.5RC1.

w00t?

Re:Me thinketh it not working

[java.bean]

I had the exact same experience. It was in a loop, downloading the file and restarting the browser. After I manually downloaded the installer it went through fine.

Re:Me thinketh it not working

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing here...
After 2 or 3 times I manually downloaded it and installed fine..

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

sweet, thanks for the tip. for non-laptop users, omit the fn key.

RIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, after all these years, we can use RIP graphics right in our browser!

Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn away from the evil that is RPM and solved will your problems be

Google Toolbar

[Drew2d2]

I'm so dependant on the search features in the Google toolbar that I'm reluctant to update FF until they make GT compadible with this new FF. I hope they get on it soon.

faster buttons?

[Jouser]

"... and faster back and forward page navigation buttons."

How exactly do you make the buttons faster? The shadowing toggle time of the buttons has decreased or what? This makes absolutely no sense.

Re:faster buttons?

[The One KEA]

They're referring to the bfcache, a mechanism designed to retain the DOM of a webpage and regenerate it when going back or forward. It was added by Brian Ryner during the 1.8 development cycle.

I was disappointed - will it be better?

[Elixon]

I'm hard working on the 100% remote XUL CMS (the very first one)... it works OK with 1.0 branch but they did change something in XUL for the 1.5 beta so it didn't work properly with my long-developed project... :-(

I was so disappointed and exhausted developing the XUL front-end for the 1.0 that I simply resign to fix the incompatibilities with 1.5 now. I rather wait for final release and then fix it... :-( I'm not going to test it now to don't be depressed too much ;-)

Re:PLEASE

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope,

their would refer to "the entire team/the members of the team" and therefore would be correct too. Depends on what the submitter finds more important, the fact that the team released it as a team, or the fact that all the members released it.

Anyhow, fact of the matter is, the sumbitter chose to use "its", albeit with a common typo.

Bloated

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera is much leaner, which is why FF will not be getting installed on any of my slower and lower memory machines.

What is with open source projects and bloat these days?

Re:You forgot to list the old features

[Finuvir]

* 666999 - Still deletes your old bookmarks on updates.

Making up bug numbers is hardly helpful. Nor is making up bugs. If you do encounter a bug that resets your bookmarks on update then I suggest you make sure the developers know about it. That means try to find the bug in Bugzilla and, if you can't find it, file it.

Re:Is the Mac version still confused about tab foc

[The One KEA]

It was fixed. See the following bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31082 5 - mind the /. filter.

ESPN.com as a notable bug fix O_o

[swordstaind]

282750 - Extremely slow scrolling of ESPN.com

well this just goes to prove that even the sports jocks like firefox either that or they threatened to beat sombody up if they didnt get what they wanted

Re:ESPN.com as a notable bug fix O_o

[Breakfast Pants]

Don't confuse sports jocks with sports nerds. The two do not form a dichotomy, but they are also not one and the same.

Pathetic

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"My copy is 24 seconds away from downloaded ;)"

Pathetic. My copy downloaded in 2.92 seconds at 1701KB/s.

Re:Pathetic

[An Onerous Coward]

Not really. Here's how it all went down:

0-3 seconds: Click super-duper "Submit to Slashdot Front Page" button
3-18 seconds: type in http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox
19-22: click on "Try Firefox 1.5RC1"
22-26: right-click and save to desktop
26-24: Downloaded in -2.00 seconds at (inf+1)KB/s.

CmdrTaco would never settle for a connection that obeyed the laws of physics. You know it, I know it.

Re:You forgot to list the old features

[ElectricBrain]

Quit your whining and just back them up. http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/#bb

Good idea

[LeonGeeste]

Let's promote a browser that everyone must independently find and install additional software for just so they can keep bookmarks between upgrades.

Full update vs. small update

[skadus]

Did anybody else have to get the full 6 MB version? I seem to have this problem with every computer I run XP Pro on.

XP Pro, SP2, NTFS drive, I can't update or reinstall any program that's been run in that Windows session. Gaim, Winamp, Firefox, and several other programs (hell, it was one of the reasons I quit WoW - in WoW's case I had to boot into safe mode to update the program). I have to reboot or rename the main executable file (the one being overwritten) to get the install to work.

Luckily, for some reason FF didn't do that this time, but for all the 1.0.x updates I had to do this, and for all the beta releases the small patch always failed, defaulting to the larger patch.

It's frustrating as hell, and when I mention it to tech-savvy friends or on message boards, nobody has any idea, and it looks like it's a problem only I have - even though it's a problem I can replicate on my desktop, my laptop, and my work computer.

Does anybody else ever have this problem? Is it Windows File Protection, or what?

Re:Full update vs. small update

[Anonymous Coward]

XP Pro, SP2, NTFS drive, I can't update or reinstall any program that's been run in that Windows session. Gaim, Winamp, Firefox, and several other programs (hell, it was one of the reasons I quit WoW - in WoW's case I had to boot into safe mode to update the program). I have to reboot or rename the main executable file (the one being overwritten) to get the install to work.

Maybe it's a permissions issue? Try looking at Firefox's folder properties to see if you have write permission.

SVG

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't think I'd want all those things in a browser. Then again, since there's rather more to CAD than the graphics (which is a tiny portion of any serious CAD package), I don't think I'll stress over my job writing libraries used in CAD software just yet.

What will be cool about SVG, assuming it works in practice, is having all those CGI scripts that do simple database look-ups able to render simple but effective graphical representations, rather than just displaying data in ugly and/or unhelpful tabular text formats. As long as major sites don't do a Flash with it (must... make... everything... use... cool... new... feature) and stick to the same niches where things like Flash are actually useful (presenting graphical data where this actually enhances the user's experience) this should be great.

Once the browser with 90% market share supports it too, of course. ;-)

Document.write was my problem

[BobPaul]

I haven't seen any websites that use flash to open popup windows, but then, I have a small set of sites I daily frequent.

What I've noticed is webpages use document.write("<scr" + "ipt> new.window.code.for.popup(location, whatever) </scr" + "ipt>")

which is what I assume this new version protects against... Whenever I get popups in firefox on a new page I check the source, and this is what I've continually seen.

Holding left-click still pegs the Mac's CPU

[sleepcountry]

Try clicking and holding left-click on a webpage. Zoom, 99.60% CPU usage.

If you had been paying attention...

[Anonymous Coward]

...you'd note that these sort of updates don't count toward the download total.

More fun to post snark without facts thought I suppose...

Re:You forgot to list the old features

[Finuvir]

If you want to use another browser, go ahead. No-one's trying to stop you. If you want a bug in Firefox fixed, make sure the developers are aware of it. If you want to sound like a whiny child, complain about things in a forum where you have no hope of making things better for anyone.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, a chance to install more bugs and security vulnerabilities on my system. Already found one serious security issue, but will made public after the final release... hahaha! Gone to the dark side.

Built-in updater didn't work for me

[Lexic0n]

The built-in updater prompted me to upgrade from 1.5 Beta 2 to 1.5 RC1. However, after asking me to relaunch my browser twice, and telling me it had upgraded to RC1, nothing had actually been upgraded. I had to download the installer directly from the web site in order to get it to update.

Anyone else experience that?

Re:Is the Mac version still confused about tab foc

[penginkun]

Well, those bugs are dated from early October, and b2 was supposed to contain the fixes. No matter what they said, b2 most definitely did NOT contain the fixes.

I'll give RC1 a go. It's been OK on my PC at work so far (though the PC itself is having other problems) so maybe the Mac version will be similarly stable.

Re:Installer stinks

[epohs]

Auto-upgrading from Beta 1 to RC1 won't work.

"Users of Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 will be offered RC1 through the software update system. More details can be found in the Firefox 1.5 RC1 Release Notes."

Quote from mozillazine

I guess the autoupdate feature wasn't mature enough in Beta 1.

Obligatory mod parent up post.

[jZnat]

That's how to do it. Just do a symlink of the libjavaplugin_oji.so file within your JDK/JRE files inside ~/.mozilla/plugins/

This browser is very slow.

[infoterror]

I don't know where else to complain, but it's very slow. Slower than Opera. Slower than IE, but everyone will say "Dat's cuz IE iz built into Windows!x16" even though that's not the whole story (why be honest when a lie is better propaganda?). I like Firefox, mostly. I've learned to use it as intuitively as any other browser. I can even overlook its utterly slug-stupid cache handling. But... ever hear that Bob Marley song "Waiting in Vain"? Yeah, well, that's Firefox.

onmousewheel, fix please kind firefox hacker?

[Anonymous Coward]

onmousewheel event is still not supported after four years. IE, Safari, opera, etc support this please fix :)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11164 7

Please some firefox hacker fix this before 1.5 comes out.

Re:Woo!

[Marthisdil]

Lemme know when you can prove it. Sorry, but I don't take THEIR word for it.

And the memory leakage

[Captain Entendre]

If that ain't fixed, the rest doesn't matter.

Much as I like Firefox and all the goodness it offers, I had to switch back to Mozilla to bring my system back to a usable speed.

Is it the Tab feature from Omniweb?

[grandmofftarkin]

One of the coolest is the feature that lets you quickly see an image of all open tabs.

I must admit I haven't seen the Firefox interpretation of this yet but it sounds like they just ripped off Omniweb.

A Question of Priorities

[Millennium]

The problem is that the Gecko team seems to have decided that CSS support is no longer a priority. Frankly, the big reason for this -as far as I can tell- is that they finally got bored with CSS and wanted to move on to implementing NEW, EXCITING standards like SVG which aren't seeing a lot of Web use yet, rather than the standards people are already using and want to use more.

I consider this to be a problem. Acid2 is horrible as actual testcases go, but as a benchmark it's a very important step, and the development team which once led the push for standards doesn't consider it a priority. This position brushes uncomfortably close to hypocrisy, given their loud (and completely justified) cry for standards support in browsers. New standards are good things. I have no intention of arguing otherwise, and I don't think most technical people would either. SVG will eventually be a very useful thing to have in a browser, and I don't think anyone is going to argue against that, but note the word eventually.

Isn't getting existing standards right more important than implementing new ones? To start on the new before perfecting the old sounds like a marketing-centric perspective, rather than a technology-centric one. This isn't even to say that marketing isn't important -it is- but the Gecko team should know better than to let marketing dictate what to prioritize. That's what led to Netscape 6 being released before Gecko had even reached the 1.0 stage, which is in turn what really drove the last nail into Netscape's reputation. Netscape 7 was a valiant attempt at reviving it, but by then it was too late.

I hope the Gecko team gets its priorities straight after the 1.5 release. I still use it on Windows, and I want to go back to Gecko other platforms. But they've rested on their standards-support laurels for too long; one of the other major engines (KHTML) has beaten them to the punch, and the second (Opera) is not far behind. Even the IE developers have announced that Acid2-compliance will eventually be coming to IE, though not in the IE7 release, but we have yet to hear any real commitment from the Gecko guys. This is -or should be- not just embarrassing, but outright humiliating for the Gecko team, and yet every time they're asked about it they either brush it off or get all defensive -even rude- about it.

It's the standards, stupid.

Re:PLEASE

[Reality Master 201]

Absolutely correct. The acceptability judgements for plural vs. singluar pronoun in that case are centered around semantic rather than syntactic concerns. A review of relevant sentences in common usage would reveal that the collective nouns such as "team" are used in singular context and plural form in a reasonably specific contexts.

Typical of a situation in which the plural is more likely to occur is when the team is being considered in terms of its individual members, such as when such members might be in disagreement with one another. The agreement seems to be sensitive to semantic intent rather than the purely syntactic/distributional categorization features of the word "team."

Netcraft Toolbar anti-phishing

[kandresen]

The great thing about Firefox is that it is plugin based. You can simply extend it as you please. For anti-phishing I have installed the NetCraft Toolbar Netcraft Toolbar

It would be great if anyone would add a comparison between the various Anti-phishing tools for the various browsert. I personally think the one from NetCrafts will be a strong candidate to beat, and I do also belive it is available for IE...

My own take is that Firefox is much better off being as simple and small as possible - the opportunity to AVOID every function you never need is among my reasons for selecting Firefox together with the easy of extending it the way I want.

Maybe it would be ok to bundle certain plugins with the browser, but please make them easy to remove!!! Even though I installed the NetCraft Toolbar, I don't believe I have any reasons for having it - other than that the curiosity of seeing how it reports some of these bad sites...