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Firefox 3 In Alpha
illeism writes to note that, a mere six weeks after the launch of Firefox 2, Firefox 3 is now available in alpha. CNet reports that it is currently recommended only for software developers and testers. The big change is the upgraded Gecko rendering engine (the UI is unchanged from version 2). From the CNet article: "Firefox 3 will include some significant changes. It uses version 1.9 of the Gecko rendering engine — which itself hasn't been released yet but which includes the Cairo graphics layer. Gecko 1.9 has been in development since before the release of Firefox 2, and it provides vector-based rendering on all platforms. As the Gecko 1.9 road map explains, Cairo will 'bring modern, hardware-accelerated 2D-graphics capabilities to the whole of the Web without requiring proprietary plug-ins or rendering obsolete the broad and rich set of Web-authoring techniques developed over the past decade.'"
Development has been going on the trunk since the Gecko 1.8 was branched (sometime in 2005) - Gecko 1.8 was the basis of Firefox 2 and 1.5. So there's a lot of backend work been going on that's not been tested by a wider audience. While lots of frontend changes were made on the branch for Firefox 2, most of the backend work was restricted to the trunk.
Future alphas and betas will have more UI changes in them so can more accurately be called Firefox alphas.
> this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.
That's nothing. IE7 doesn't even work on Windows 2000!
Because of the new Gecko code, this release will not run on Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.
One of the great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is the ability to make use of older hardware. Not so with this new release of Firefox. But then it's the same with other "heavyweights" like KDE, so I guess there's a trend there. That's too bad...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Heard that the new Gecko engine passed Acid2, but seems like the patch wasn't included in this build.
"without [..] rendering obsolete the broad and rich set of Web-authoring techniques developed over the past decade.'" Maybe not, but it sounds like it will render obsolete most computers developed before the past 5 years. Nothing before Windows 2000 is compatible with the new version of Gecko? It sounds like something is wrong with that.
I wish they would just focus on fixing the memory leaks first. FF2 is much worse than FF1.5 (default installs without extensions), after about 2-3 days of running FF2 it will be using 1GB of RAM -- this is a complete joke. I wish for a day when we can get a modern browser which is resource efficent. Unfortuantely Opera 9 is too unstable.
Glad to hear that the rendering will now get some hardware accerlation. Does anyone know how faster this will be? Will it lead to smoother scrolling as on my Linux machine 'smooth scrolling' is very jerky - especially so with flash adverts.
Before someone else brings it up, no, this doesn't pass acid2. Purposefully, as the build from two days later does. This Gecko alpha (not Firefox alpha) was released so there'd be a good reference for people to test with before several rather major changes were landed on trunk, one of which was the reflow branch that made Gecko pass the acid2 test.
There's another quite positive review of Firefox 3 on ZDNet
The core's looking good.
http://tech.cybernetnews.com/index.php?s=Alpha%20
Bleeding edge is fine, but there's got to be a reason.
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
My understanding is that this alpha won't, but the next alpha should. The reflow refactoring branch was merged back onto trunk recently -- this is a rationalisation of the layout code that fixes a lot of bugs, which also gets Acid 2 rendering properly.
So FF3 won't be compatible with Win Me or older.. that might be a good thing. I wonder how many people are contemplating the switch, but arn't quite sure. This could cause a small influx of Linux newbies who were recently on the fence. This nicely complements users we might get because of the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting the older OSes.
This version is much faster and resource friendly - opening a test google spreadsheet page went from 52 MB of RSS to 43, and almost 4 seconds less to render it.
Lots of javascript benchmarks are faster too (depending on the benchmark - other parts are slower)
Gecko 1.9 has been being developed for a long time (the "reflow branch" is 2 years old it has been said!) so I guess it's expected that it improves things so much!
I have tested Cairo for my project and at this moment it is slower than I needed. I was looking for a good canvas to draw a graph on, but I had to settle for something else. I like the features of Cairo, the idea of being able to render to PDF or to the screen, and so on, but it is just not fast enough. Perhaps the attention from the Gecko engine will get some more development going on the Cairo side as well...
If it's "just" the Gecko engine which is incompatible with older OS', I wonder whether it would be possible to combine Firefox 3.0 (once it's out) with an older version of the rendering engine. Then again, if there are bugs found in Gecko and not in the Firefox code, this would still mean a major support commitment for somebody.
:)
OTOH, I'm glad I don't really have to care since I run neither of those legacy OS'
Hosed how? If you know of any other environment where I can run a collab suite, an office suite and as many instances of Web browser as my work requires at any given time for a smaller footprint than that of KDE, please kindly let me know. My machine here at work is an old piece of slow crap and KDE is the only environment thus far than has coped with my workload on that aging chunk of hardware.
If this means Firefox will have decent support for higher dpi displays, then I just might jump at it once it goes Beta.
As it stands, the rest of my Linux desktop is perfectly readable at 1280x1024 on a 21" monitor from 10' away. The browser is the only part of the experience that gives me trouble. Sure, I can increase or decrease my font sizes to make the text readable, but that seriously borks most sites' CSS layouts, and doesn't do squat for image-based text.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Firefox 3.0 Alpha has been available since August 31, 2006. I love posting every Firefox update as much as the other guy, but get on the ball or don't bother.
lets hope they do something about the window trails when working via remote X
Yet they leave a security vulnerability unpatched, and they are developing the next version?!
Who said that Firefox is secure?!
Ars Technica covers this story in detail about both Cairo and Acid2 issues. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061212-8409 .html
I think it means "SVG support without a plugin or other hackery", but as you said, it's market-speak, so who knows for sure?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I understand the decision to go with Cairo, but like you said, I hope it's coupled with a commitment to seriously fix Cairo.!
To get the builds that have the reflow branch landed (hence passing Acid2 (although the nose is 1px off)) you need to use the nightlies which are named Minefield.
Take note of the codename for it before trying it, though recently it has been quite stable.
4 seconds less ? What was the original time ? 1000 seconds ? Or...5 seconds ? You can better tell the percentage improvement, much clearer ;=)
Excuse me for my ignorance/laziness, but I wonder if the /. gang can give me a point to what the vector capabilities of the new engine are? Are we talking better SVG support, or a more powerful Flash replacement? Despite being busy as hell of late, the thought of developing vector-based media and supporting tools _without_ Adobe/Macromedia is very motivating...
...economical decision, which is the reason why MS stopped supporting Win98. Or perhaps a decision based on a sane choice: why support an OS with a browser that tries to be as secure as possible, while at the same time knowing the OS you're targeting is unsupported and thus prone to severe compromise ? What good would that do other than perhaps put the browser in a bad light of day ? Though I must add that is a bit of a political reason :)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Adding tabs was a huge change to the IE application model.
The rendering engine was updated for efficiency and standards compliance (which is much better now, if still not yet where you'd like it to be)
Things like anti-phishing, new security models, and a new plug-in interface are features that 'go down to the metal'
IE7 was very substantial. I'm writing this on FF2.0 and I have to say: The IE7 upgrade was far more successful than FF2. I still believe that Firefox is a better browser over all, but not by very much. The only reason I'm still using FF is the extensions. There are just things that aren't available as IE Plugins yet that I would miss too much to fix. Funny enough, FireFox has be in vendor lock-in.
I'd say that the FireFox 2.0 upgrade was a debacle. There are so many things that I dislike about this release. I know I could go back to 1.5 but thats a PITA, too. Some of the many flaws with 2.0 are:
1. The "quick find" menu. When I 'find as I type' it no longer opens-up the actual "find" bar that allows me to highlight/move next/move previous. Instead, it opens a USELESS quick find bar and I have to press ctrl-f to get the full find-bar. This is so idiotic it's difficult to put it into words. There is absolutely no good reason for this. The quick-find takes up as much screen real-estate and my guess is that it takes up just as much resources.
2. The absolutely HORRIBLE options menu. In addition to being visually unappealing, it's horribly convoluted. I now have to click 10 times to do what I used to do in 2 clicks. Changing proxy settings is an example.
3. Ugly graphics. IE7 is just clearly more beautiful. For that matter, FF1.5 is clearly more beautiful. I don't know who created these things (the 'home' icon in particular) but somebody really should have said 'thanks but no thanks.'
4. Why change terminology? Extensions are now Add-Ons. Will they be plug-ins in the next release? BHOs after that? It took me 3 minutes after I upgraded to find the extension control panel.
5. More in-built functionality that I don't need. Like a phishing filter. This shouldn't be in IE, either, but DEFINITELY not in firefox.
6. I dislike having close buttons on each tab. I thought I would like it, but in reality, when I want to close multiple tabs now I have to keep moving my mouse to do so. Before, I could just click, click, click and close 3 tabs. I liked that much better.
What's even worse is that they didn't actually fix the things that would really make this browser better:
1. Memory Foot print. Right now, I have 2 tabs open (one is gmail) and about a dozen extensions. Firefox is using 101MB of RAM.
2. Extensions are not in a 'protected' mode. A misbehaving extension can still leak memory and bring down my entire browser. This infuriates me to no end when it happens.
3. No ability to see what extension has crashed. The recommended solution is to disable extensions one at a time. I should not have to do that.
4. When one tab is 'busy' (opening a PDF, for example) the entire browser window freezes. This is a tough one, I understand, but not impossible.
In summary, FireFox 2.0 was a step backwards for the browser. I sincerely hope they produce better results with FF3.
Will Firefox 3 be capable of running on Windows NT 4.0?
"Why is it that I don't have these same memory leaks that everyone else seems to have?"
;)
Same here, FF currently using 62,504 KB. I wouldn't know about the memory leak issue unless I read about it whenever Firefox is mentioned on slashdot.
I like $some.opensource.app except it doesn't have $some.random.feeture
was Re:fix the memory leaks first
davecb5620@gmail.com
Recent nightly builds for Mac OS X feel much snappier than Firefox 2.0. One of the obvious culprits is that Cocoa widgets are now used on Mac OS X builds. I don't know if there are other changes affecting the performance on Mac OS X, but the difference is fairly dramatic.
I love Firefox on Windows, but I have stuck with Safari on the Mac because Firefox has always felt porky and slow compared to Safari on the same hardware. The newer builds of Firefox 3 for the Mac are much better: windows, tabs, menus and other user interface elements have a nice immediate feel to them. And the page rendering is more performant than Safari on certain Web 2.0 type sites like digg and Slashdot's new discussion system. It's buggy alpha code, but early indications seem to be good for a nice improvement on the Mac when Firefox 3 comes out.
iCab weill run on the older osx stuff. I always found it better than either navigator or explorer when I was still running classic. I just checked on their page, he still even has a build for 68k macs.
http://www.icab.de/dl.php
moz gets the press, but there are always alternatives
The great thing about OSS is that if you don't like the direction a project is taking, you can branch it and write your own. If there are really that many people who want an updated Win9x version of Firefox, then I'm sure someone will maintain a branch (perhaps using the newest security/features but utilizing the older rendering engine). There are people trying to port Firefox to the Commodore Amiga for crying out loud, and I'm sure the Amiga user base is a lot smaller than Win9x.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
You should try the 1.3.x preview release series on cairographics.org. There are a whole bunch of performance improvements, including a new tessellator. Also, cairo's performance on linux is heavily dictated by how well your video card driver supports XRender. I have found that r200 radeons with the new EXA driver acceleration mechanism accelerates cairo, among other things, quite nicely. If you can't use a driver that supports EXA, you can try rendering to a image backend first(which forces software fallbacks) and then drawing that onto your xlib surface, which is usually many times faster than drawing directly to the screen if you don't have decent xrender support.
thisnukes4u.net
Are you dumbasses SERIOUSLY complaining that an alpha release is slow?
It's more fair to say that if FF developers drop all further support of the 1.x and 2.x lines and never add Win9x support to the FF 3.x tree, then they'll be no better than Microsoft developers. This isn't a case of the developers removing existing support for all future releases. This is a case of developers not having the resources to surmount a technical obstacle for the next generation of a product. And, unlike Microsoft's IE group, I don't see any indication that the FF project is going to stop maintenance of the 1.x and 2.x lines any time soon
Personally, I'll wait for Chicago.
"Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters"
... are nerds really interested to get informed about every alpha release of firefox, but at the same time find it OK if a major final release of a major Linux distro, OpenSUSE 10.2 is not even mentioned on slashdot?
I wonder
Is this actually reflecting the interests of the readers here or is the fact that all news submissions about OpenSuse 10.2 were ignored while the alpha 3.0 submission about Firefox was immediately published just a pathetic attempt of the editors here to influence the opinion of the readers?
Do readers actually want this kind of opinionated news-shaping or are they just not aware of it?
PS: please note that I am not questioning the relevance of the alpha release news -- I am just really, really annoyed about how news that is certainly even more relvant gets suppressed on Slashdot and I wonder if readers really find that OK.
Go to
p age=lesson4
http://www.wolf5k.com/
and play the game. Then go to
http://code.icarusindie.com/index.php?section=js&
The graphics from your wolf5k session will replay until the frames run out. Then the tutorial may or may not work.
You can also simply reload the wolf5k game and your previous game will replay until the frames run out and then you'll actually be able to play the new game session.
IE hasn't supported the XBM format since early version 6.0 (unpatched install of Win2K). A patch for 6.0 removed XBM support. Prior to that, IE was one of the few browsers that could correctly run the code.
Since FF is the only browser I know of that supports XBM, it'd be nice if the developers would fix this problem.
Work Safe Porn
Not if you're still running: Windows 95, 98, or ME, or OS X 10.2 or earlier.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
One of my biggest web design pet-peeves is when someone takes a really large photo and changes the dimensions in the html, requiring the browser to scale it down. One of the possible improvements that Cairo would be able to provide is better image scaling. In my testing, this alpha does only slightly better than Firefox 2.0 (or IE7 for that matter). When the scaling is minor, it is difficult to tell the difference between the Cairo scaled image and one that is scaled using a good algorithm (say imlib2 or the gimp). However, when the source image is much larger the scaling artifacts are still pretty noticeable.
Opera is still the clear winner here. Hopefully there is more room for improvement from Firefox. Of course, it is still a waste of bandwidth to not prescale.
Put the following in your userChrome.css to revert to the old Find Bar:-
/* Use the old-style / and ' QuickFind Bar behaviour */
#FindToolbar > * {display:-moz-box}
I have no sig yet I must scream.
TB gets no love. I heard there was supposed to be a TB2.0 coming out in December. I hope that's true. It's in great need of an update and a ton of new features, especially fixing the font issue.
Can I bum a sig?
I'm a writer working from home. As much as I hate WinME, I'm not upgrading my computer until it dies. And I'm certainly not upgrading simply to use a new web browser. It's a shame Firefox is abandoning support for computers that are perfectly capable of viewing 99% of web sites in existence. It's a shame Firefox has the viewpoint that progress means leaving people behind. If Firefox supported as many computers as possible, it would be a monstrous advantage over Internet Explorer. IMHO, a growing number of home users who don't play cutting edge games are getting tired of upgrading to a newer computer which offers little functional advantage over their old one. I saw nothing in this announcement that provided incentive for me to spend hundred of dollars (or more) to use Firefox.
There's a plugin to help you with that: NoSquint remembers on which sites you customize the font size and adjusts it accordingly when you return to that site.
One of the benefits is that new tabs automatically get the correct size too.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
Why does Thunderbird still have its own copy of Gecko and XUL?
I understand Thunderbird needing to be separate from Firefox. We don't want a "browser suite" again. But would it kill them to at least use a shared library, or something?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> The rendering engine was updated for efficiency and standards compliance (which is much better now, if still not yet where you'd like it to be)
Yeah - I believe it actually implements something over 30% of CSS 2 now!
Whereas every other browser is over 90%.
After getting fed up with XP because of it complaining about me not having antivirus (apparently you can switch that off, but I don't know where), I switched to Ubuntu
Wait a minute. Wiping your hard drive and installing Linux was easier for you than finding the control panel (it's usually on the "start" menu) or downloading one of the many, many free virus scanners?
But, seriously, tho. You were running a Windows machine without a virus scanner?
DATABASE WOW WOW
I'm typing this on Firefox 3 Alpha, the rendering engine feels faster, other than that, this realease looks exactly the same as Firefox 2, but is nice. I really doubt cairo is HW accelerated right now but maybe betas will do.
C-x C-c
I sure hope v3 is multi-threaded...as to stop FF from choking when I open 15 tabs at one time.
Some people HAVE to use old windows, because the old proprietary controlling software that came with a given hardware (say a robot in bio-medical lab), only runs on old OS (I've even seen spectro-photo-meters that only run on DOS. Yeah. Thank goodness FreeDOS is our friend in such deprecated cases). The company has dropped support for newer OS for this peice of hardwre and is only doing hardware repairs. You either have to keep a deprecated OS for your machine, or you have to buy a newer model (Which most of the time is out-of-question because the prices are horribly expensive and the older one still does its job).
The good thing with open source software is, compared to proprietary software like IE7, is that users aren't necessarily stuck with this "won't support anymore situation".
In the IE7 world, whatever Microsoft decides, you'll have to accept it. They decide to drop support for everything before WinXP ? Upgrade to a newer more expensive software is your only hope.
In the opensource world, if there's a big enough userbase (and there is surely a big enough userbase in the scientific community), some users will start tweaking and hacking. As the source is open, nothing stops programmers to start a new separate fork that will support a separate platform that won't be supported anymore in the main line.
Once FireFox 3.0 official is out, be sure that you'll see separate Win9x branches : either FF3.0 with a patched Cairo support. Or FF3.0 with a retro-fitted (non cairo-based) Gecko 1.8 engine. Or a separate continued 2.0 branch that is kept up to date and security-patched for users who can't use FF3.0. Or a completly different Gecko-based browser specially tailored for Win9x users (K-maleon 9x ?)
The only drawback is that, because of registered Mozilla Foundation's trademarks, they'll surely have to call it IceWeasel. Or SnowCat. Or FrostBear. Or LavaBadger. Or whatever else.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's probably just your distro compiling KDE poorly. My little sister runs KDE on a Pentium III 500mhz box just fine. Plus KDE shares components, for a smaller overall memory footprint. Try konqueror vs firefox sometime.
The other great strengths of OSS compared to proprietary software is that their source is indeed open, and you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, as long as your respect the GPL/BSD/whatever license the project uses.
You're always entirely free to fork code and start developing a new branch if that suits better your needs that the mainline.
And if there's a big enough community of interested users (which is highly probable in the scientific community. I mean, they even developed FreeDOS), you're bound to see such a fork.
Maybe, it'll be called IceWeasel, SnowTiger or LavaPanda (or whatever pleases Mozilla's trademark) but it'll surely run on deprecated OSes.
This has already been seen before. I've mentioned FreeDOS. But there's also stuff like xfce (in answer to the "Gnome eats up too much ressource" problem) or DamnSmallLinux (because most modern distros won't run on 486 anymore).
In that background, a Win9x gecko-based solution is bound to happen.
Something that couldn't be done with a closed source IE7.
Yes, there's a trend that newer version will be more ressource hungry than previous, in the opensource world too, even if it isn't as marked as in the proprietary world. But OSS gives you choice, and one of such choice is to be able to run less ressource-hungry variants on older hardware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Thank you. that is incredibly useful, and I didn't now about it. I expect I will use that on a daily basis.
Been using just the alpha for about a week. Not a single crash or even a bug, which strangely enough is less than my average for FF2.0 in a week, although that could be due to not using many extensions. No bugs in a week of testing is very good for an alpha.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
You might not care, but I think you'd smile ear-to-ear if you upgraded to XP Pro, or even 2000.
I ran ME for a year or so and while it felt to me like status quo, I was stunned at how much better XP was. XP is evolutionary compared to 2000. It's revolutionary compared to ME.
I think that Microsoft tries hard to forget that ME never existed. I know I do.
Cairo is NOT in alpha - the current version is 1.3. It is used in many GNOME programs, and every single one of them has gotten slower since switching to Cairo. I seriously doubt that cairo will be improved to the point where it does not negatively affect firefox performance by the time they release firefox 3.
The common way is to hover with a mouse, seeing the URL in the status bar.
This method is unavailable for 'mouse-less' environments - one cannot hover with a stylus.
When I ran Win 9x, I never ran any untrusted software, so permissions were largely irrelevant. And since I didn't have any services listening to the internet, there really wasn't much there to hack me via.
Yeah, if you need multi-user systems or things like that, properly administered Win XP can be made to work (kinda sorta... you still need secure software, which is pretty hard to get), but if I were running a box that I intended as a server or something, it'd probably be Open BSD, anyhow.
For plain internet use, Firefox + Win 98 SE + don't download programs / run servers works just fine in terms of security for the most part.
Windows 95 is neither modern, nor developed over the past decade.
Cairo also won't run on Windows 3.11, Windows/286, Xenix, or CP/M-80. Cry.
As a developer, I don't feel any sympathy for people running ancient systems who expect modern apps to support them. (It's often hard enough testing and maintaining software to run on all the modern versions of MS Windows.) I have a C=64 at home but I don't complain that modern databases don't have SuperBase-64 compatibility.
I might feel a tiny bit of pity if you couldn't get a decent modern operating system for free, but you can. And I might feel a tiny bit of pity if FF2 itself was being made incompatible or discontinued, but it's not -- keep running FF2 if you want. FF3 is going to be sweet, but FF2 isn't going to magically stop working just because something newer exists.
If you want to call "fraud" on anybody, do it on Microsoft, who claimed "With Microsoft Windows 95, everything you do now will be faster and easier, and everything you've always wanted to do is now possible". If that was really true, why are developers abandoning it? (See also: irony.)
Couldn't FF have a feature which would allow the sending of stats (on the users active behest) to Mozilla on the "add-ons" used. That way they could issue a request for stats via the same system that is used to say that updates are available. Then FF could include the most prolifically used add-ons (possible after they've been checked over for stability, compatibility and low resource use).
Just a thought.
pbhj
32-bit Windows will run out of Page File after 4096 MiB of the stuff; I suspect Windows x64 wil run out of page file after 2^48 bytes as per the AMD64 memory addressing capabilities. Consequently, running out of memory to page RAM-resident programs into is the same as running out of RAM.
There is a bug about this but it was closed as WONTFIX. :(5 9
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3472
If a lot of people vote and leave comments perhaps someone will reopen it.
It's tougher than that. Let me preface that by saying that I'm a developer (like 1/2 of slashdot).
The problem is the many components needed to run a browser. The rendering engine. The XUL engine. Everything. If each tab ran in a separate thread, as FF is currently designed, it would mean loading multiple instances of those components in each thread, thus bloating the memory all to hell.
That's a very simplistic explanation, but it's the gist. And it's why this is a difficult problem to solve.
Try this distro.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I am on firefox2 on ubuntu edgy. I find th rendering of hindi/indian languages really bad. the previous version had decent rendering(was it 1.5?). There is this patch lying around . do everyone wanting indic support, patch firefox ?
I hope firefox (whatever version) takes care of its default rendering engine.
If programs are spending 50 percent of time blocked on swap file access for page faults due to capacity misses, then the computer has practically "run out of RAM".
i'm still using 1.5.. i've tried 2.0 it was good but extensions, settings themes, ect all are not worthy of losing for 2.0.. 1.5 was a HUGE step up from 1.0, 2.0 was just interface changes, ... which all the changes could have been done with extentsions, it sucks they'll drop updates for 1.5 in a few months though.. i hope 3.0 brings in something worthy of downloading
Good luck finding some non-link text in a big grid of links.
then hit Tab or Shift-Tab until the link you want is selected.Good luck hitting Tab or Shift-Tab on a tablet PC.
Unless the proprietary plug-in uses non-thread-safe legacy APIs. Then it would have to be forked into a separate process, and by that time, you could just uninstall the Adobe Reader plug-in and have PDFs open in Foxit Reader or something.
No it isn't. SANE still lists my hardware (Microtek Scanmaker 4850 scanner) as unsupported, and Microtek doesn't return my e-mails.
Unless there exists only one operating system (namely Microsoft Windows) that runs on a commodity PC and has drivers for peripherals connected to the computer. Switching to Linux would require replacing the scanner; switching to Mac OS X would require replacing the computer.
ive been using this for over 2 months it is called minefield. which they have now changed the name to gran-paradizio (sp) it has not given me any problems.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20061118 Minefield/3.0a1
Is it me or is Firefox looking more like a OS then "normal" application?
Maybe they should be drawing on concepts from the OS community in deciding how to allocate resources and give permissions to processes^H^H^Hscripts?
Maybe having a firefox "top" and "ps" utilities would be very helpful.
Cheers
Ben
this has been around since before Firefox 2 was released. I remember trying it out, it was known as "Minefield".