Mozilla Firefox 3 Features Screencast

An anonymous reader points to a mention at MozillaZine of "a screencast by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."

Comments

Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

I'm really annoyed by the new popup history/bookmars panel. Having the history open in the sidebar by default was fantastic and if you used "Sort by Last Visited" (which you should) then you can type in kittens or whatever and find it, just like the guy did with the 'awesome bar' in the demo.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[maxume]

Ctrl+H is shorter than Ctrl+Shift+H, and it opens the history in the sidebar on FF3 here. Of course, I don't remember what FF2 did.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[snl2587]

Having the history open in the sidebar by default was fantastic...

It does if you go to View->Sidebar->History (or Ctrl+H). It's slightly different to get to it, but roughly the same otherwise.

Personally, I like the database structure implemented by FF3. Especially the speed of reviewing the history and the "awesome bar".

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Splab]

The awesome bar is pretty fucking annoying to say the least. In the last 8-10 years when I've been surfing I've been typing the first part of the domain I wanted to visit and the auto complete would show it. So if I wanted to go to slashdot I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot.

Yes this might be a nifty feature for some, but seriously, please stop changing interface behavior! Windows does it all the time and it is driving hordes of supporters nuts. Keep it consistent and let people with special needs enable it - or at least do it the WinZip way; ask the user what he or she wants! (FF3 is default browser with hardy heiron - thats why I'm actually using it, downgrading a package usually leads to nightmares and I just want an OS that isn't in the way of my work - All other OS I got is running FF 2 and is staying that way till I figure out how to make FF3 behave like FF2)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

in that case you typing "sla" should be good for most of your needs. If you need more reliable method then I suggest you use "keywords." open bookmark manager, right-click on the bookmark and set its keyword. next time you type the keyword and hit enter it will take you to the bookmarked site.

I have set "/." as the keyword for slashdot. it is a quick one-hand operation. takes a fraction of a second.

I found the awesome bar annoying for about a week but now I can't live without it. The best part is that you don't have to remember the domain name. You can match by any part of URL or by page title. To me that is awesome.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fmoc-86]

If you really care that much, you can use "s" as a keyword for slashdot.org if you have it bookmarked in FF3.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[x_MeRLiN_x]

The Firefox 2.0 history panel is damn near useless to me. It offers the convenient option to sort by date and site, but apparently one would never need to search within those results, because typing in the search box clears that filter.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[moderatorrater]

First off, you're not trolling, the mods need to get a clue. Second, I absolutely love the awesome bar. It's annoying when a visitors over and a porn site pops up, but usually I just type in part of the word and then I'm good to go. As someone else said, there are other ways to replicate what you're looking for, but there wasn't any way to get the functionality of the awesome bar.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

"awesome bar" sound like the a name given to a feature in dev by an engineer before marketing gets to it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Splab]

Just like the sibling AC comment you are telling me that I need to change my behavior to adjust for what the FF team think is right. This is just like the Pidgin team telling the world that the behavior all have learned is wrong and the new way is the right way. It's the wrong way around - programs has to help the user optimize his or her work flow, while this is what they wanted with the feature, changing behavior means the user has to relearn everything from scratch - my way of doing it was fast, reliable and worked for me.

This is by no means a unique incident, someone comes up with some thing they think is nicer, but always forget that they have taught hordes of people to do it the other way - you have to leave in options for going "old school" rather than alienating your most devote supporters - and it shouldn't be buried somewhere in the internals of the system.

Oh and to the mods, get a life - I'm stating the facts as they are from my point of view, developers needs to keep users work flow in mind when adding features.

Don't get me wrong I love FF, but the added features has alienated me from it and too much bloating could lead to switching to others like Konquerer/Opera.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[pxc]

The mods need to get a clue.

I believe it's a well-known fact that the current mod system allows users to only have mod points or a clue. ;-)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[pbhj]

... I just type s and arrow down and slashdot would be the first link since its my most visited site with S in the beginning. If I wanted to go to sinfest I'd go si and arrow down - this behavior has to change with FF3, now the browser will popup the most visited site with S in it - and that isn't necessarily slashdot. I don't think it quite works like that, I thought it "learnt" from your choice (takes a while) now when I press S slashdot comes up, if I want splatterladder I use arrow-down - that's the same behaviour as you had before, perhaps a different number of arrow-downs? It seems that it tries to guess what I'm going to choose (based on most used, bookmarks, freshness?) and makes it come up first.

I'll admit I didn't like it to start with either, but I've gotten used to it now.

Perhaps it's not as clever as I think, but it seems pretty efficient. The no-need-to-type-the-domain feature is hot for me too as my memory is very poor.

FWIW.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fmoc-86]

Well, I see your point. However, I think one can (and should) adjust behaviour--of course, not for the programmer's sake.

I mean this in the sense of Bram Molenaar (vim's main author) generic advise: 1) Detect inefficiency 2) Find a quicker way 3) Make it an habit. I think that advise is valuable and to the point.

In this case, changing behaviour doesn't mean learning *everything* from scratch. But: if you can't find a quicker way, then maybe it's fault of the program. The interface isn't accesible enough. In this sense, the way of doing it I pointed has a (from the usability point of view, severe) flaw: the user must open the Bookmarks Manager to set a keyword for the bookmark. It would be easier if such a thing were accesible from the "star button dialog". Actually, I'd prefer that to the tags thing there.

Everybody hopes transitions such as FF2 > FF3 should be as seamless as possible for the users, and programmers should try to make it happen. I've seen lots of people complain about FF3 about the point we are discussing, and of course there is a problem about that. So we agree on this.

To end: this change hasn't been such a big deal for me, but only as I adapted my behaviour. But it seems natural now.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[poetmatt]

Umm you still have this.

If you went si, unless you have a ton of sites starting with si, it'll still find it that way. This isn't any different than other autocompletes.

Your difference between 1 and two letters is the same as anywhere else. Honestly, autocomplete tracks most used links too so what's your point? Your comment seems to contradict itself a little on what your problem with how the new awesomebar works, which is same as before in your case really. an AC who got a +4 put dead on your options.

Firefox 3 in my opinion is huge improvements all around.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[The Faywood Assassin]

I agree, when I first tried the FF3 RC1, I was expecting something HIDEOUS based on all the negative review of the AwesomeBar. I have to say they were all wrong.

The new location bar is great and easy to use, and makes finding old sites a snap!

Beny

Re:Grr sidebar history

[junglee_iitk]

I personally find it incredibly annoying. Why? Because I watch porn.

You see what I mean, don't you?

Re:Grr sidebar history

[miro f]

why go to all of that effort to fix your problem when you can just complain about it on slashdot?

The vast majority of us love the new address bar, and yes, there is an extension that brings back the old behaviour (I have no idea as to the reliability of the extension as I don't use it, it took about 2 minutes with an open mind to get used to the new location bar and now everything is so much easier with it)

It's a shame developers always change behaviour without giving the option to change it back, there should be an option to revert every single user interface change ever made so that people who hate change can keep things exactly like they used to be while everybody else has to sift through a billion different options to change something important (such as the proxy settings). Or maybe those of you who hate change can just stick with IE5 on Windows 98.

For fuck's sake, it's not difficult to get used to the new location bar, and once you do I guaruntee you'll love it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[0100010001010011]

I have a site that I visit quite frequently that starts with for (forums.tdiclub.com). What comes up first?

News for nerds. My forums site is 3-4 down on the list.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[poetmatt]

depends on how you type it.

are you typing "forums", are you typign tdi? There are many ways via firefox's logic to make it show up first. One of which would be to tag it, another would be to bookmark it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

You'll love it- I guarantee it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

Yes, a seamless FF2 to FF3 is exactly what I'm looking for. Javascript is slooowww in FF2, so slow that I really can't go back because it's noticable. But with FF3 I'm stuck with this funky awesomebar, a screwy theme (for Vista/Server 08), and all sorts of weird changes like the new unified History/Bookmarks organizer. Why can't they just optimize the heck out of the existing codebase, implement new and faster technologies on the backend, and leave the interface alone? Come on, if people want all sorts of crazy URL tracking capabilities, maybe they should use a less lightweight browser like Seamonkey or Opera..

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

That's ridiculous! You start typing the URL, while glancing up to see if it's going to suggest an autocompletion. If it doesn't, then you just keep typing the full URL and shrug your shoulders.. maybe it's been more than 6 days or whatever the default is for keeping history. But if you start typing in the middle of the URL and it doesn't suggest anything, then you have to start all over, or hit Home.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Brian Gordon]

Search within those results.. who modded you up?! If you search your history for "forums" and then wanted to search those for "THE TEDDYBEAR THREAD" then -gasp- search for "forums THE TEDDYBEAR THREAD"

Re:Grr sidebar history

[0100010001010011]

Website is "forums.tdiclub.com"

My brain for the last few years is "for"+down arrow+enter.

For slashdot the top 2 hits were ALWAYS
slashdot
my slashdot page so I could see if anyone replied to me.

The latter is nowhere to be found.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously don't surf porn. If you surf porn for half an hour you'll visit dozens and dozens of sites. Unless you visit a HUGE number of non-porn sites, then many of the two-letter sequence you type in the "awesome bar" (groan) will display large, colorful evidence, clearly legible from across the room, of the fact that you have surfed porn sometime in the last month.

Sticking to the theme (established above) of what happens when you type "sl" to get to Slashdot, the first suggestion for me is actually Slashdot, but the second suggestion is a porn page. This has been bothering me for weeks. I know you'll wonder if I've hit that page a bunch of times, so I just checked: the chick doesn't look familiar or even remotely hot, so I'm sure I didn't visit it more than once.

For some reason (probably legibility and/or predictability) I didn't worry nearly as much about the history drop-down.

Fortunately, although my friends notice my reluctance to look things up on the internet when they're around, they think I'm just a Luddite, or I'm showing off my ostentatiously non-geeky preference for IRL stuff. When I'm forced to use the web in front of somebody else, I use Google for EVERYTHING because Google search results do not, thank God, advertise what I do when I'm alone. Yet.

(The third suggestion from the "awesome bar" is developers.slashdot.org. C'mon. I view that page almost every day. It would be so awesome if it was listed higher than the porn page I visited a month ago.)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[flar2]

I've used the address bar in the same way as you for years and I was very skeptical of the awesomebar. But after you use the browser for a couple days, the awesomebar gives you what you want. I still type s, and since I visit slashdot a lot, it is in the top two hits in the awesome bar. So give it a try.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[poetmatt]

so tag with "for"

This seems kinda extra nitpicky to complain about though, honestly...although I find it contradictory to my own results. Any websites that the title was set to forums, or the forums.etc were in the link show up for me as well.

I'm not trying to make your own sound invalid, but I'm saying you can make what you want occur, just go do so!

Windows changes = you're f'd, too bad.
firefox changes = make it do what you want. Don't like XYZ? I bet you're not the only one and people have a fix or an addon that can do whatever it is.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[SashaM]

I believe it's a well-known fact that the current mod system allows users to only have mod points or a clue. ;-)

So they can have both then? :-)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[0100010001010011]

I don't see how changing the way I've surfed the web for the last 2 years is 'nit picky'.

Another thing I've also noticed is 'sub pages' don't show up.

For example my slashdot page.

Another (it's the only one I can think of right now). YouPorn has a main site and then a "ok I'm 18" page you click through to. Now it doesn't even show up on the drop down. I everytime the cookies expire I have to click the "Enter" again.

I'm not bookmarking that (and when other people use my laptop I clear all settings/history).

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

For fuck's sake, it's not difficult to get used to the new location bar, and once you do I guaruntee you'll love it. That's not different to say "For fuck's sake, it's not difficult to get used to the command line, and once you do I guaruntee you'll love it."

  Yet that phrase was widely regarded as -The Reason- linux will never be popular.

  It doesn't matter if your nifty interface has some merits, if you have to arm-twist your userbase to accept it you are doing something wrong. I know this is what you just said but you had to screw it at the end with that "for fuck's sake"

Re:Grr sidebar history

[poetmatt]

For your second example, what are you talking about?

You just explained it for why you have to hit enter:
everytime the cookies expire I have to click the "Enter" again.

This is how they keep track of the you agreed thing. If you clear that cookie of course its going to ask you to click enter. There is no site you are routed to other than youporn.com that your browser sees. It's not like tube8 or other websites that actually take you from 1 site to another.

Slashdot certainly does get sub pages including your logged in profile page. I'm confused, it sounds like you're having a rough time personally due to whateever but not so much like the problems are firefox.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[0100010001010011]

No. You don't get what I'm saying, at all.

Slashdot Example:

FF2: I start typing in sl and the first 2 hits are
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://slashdot.org/~0100010001010011/

In FF3: I get
http://www.slashdot.org/
http://www.macslash.org/

You Porn Example:
FF2: I start typing youp and the first 2 hits are:
http://www.youporn.com/?submit=Enter
http://www.youporn.com/

FF3:
http://www.youporn.com/

They use a GET for their form submit so you can go directly to that second page. I can clear cookies, change browsers, use a different computer and that link still goes to the 'main page' and skips the "Ok".

Here's another real quick example I just tried:
new goes to "News for Nerds and not "newegg".

These are sites that I'm not going to book mark because that's not what bookmarks are for. I visit them daily or weekly and for the last X years I've know how to get to them without looking. Hell even IE does this better. If I start typing into the URL bar "new" why the hell would I want to go to a URL that starts with "slash".

I have quite a few servers on my home network. When I start typing in 192 do you think I really want to go to Fark thread 3219040?

Make it another bar, even enable it by default, but I want my url bar back.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[prestomation]

One word, Stealther

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Barny]

Yeah, but once you use it, and get really used to just having it there, THEN go and use a machine that only has IE7 on it, you will admit, it is, indeed, awesome :)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[kinabrew]

Start typing something unique.

If you want to bring up forums.tdiclub.com, start typing tdi

If you want to bring up newegg, start typing egg

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Maian]

Wow, you sound like an old geezer complaining about how things aren't like the good old days.

More seriously, you aren't "stuck" with these new features. In the time you took to write your rant, you could've found extensions and themes to revert back to FF2 behavior and look.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Splab]

but it is learned behaviour - I don't look at the address bar, slashdot has been s and arrow down for the last 5-6 years for me in all browsers.

To me it is like someone deciding Dvorak should be the new defacto layout - suddenly I'm back having to look at what the computer is doing rather than expecting it to do as I want.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[zig007]

I believe it's a well-known fact that the current mod system allows users to only have mod points or a clue. ;-) So they can have both then? :-) To those of you(the majority) that didn't realize that both generations of parent post were jokes, the GP's syntax should have been:

"I believe it's a well-known fact that the current mod system allows users to only have mod points XOR a clue.".

Re:Grr sidebar history

[miro f]

I don't see much arm twisting going on. I see Mozilla creating a feature and the vast majority of people liking it and one or two people complaining.

Not everyone is going to be happy with every feature, just like how there are those who hate the GUI and prefer to do their browsing with lynx on the command line. I've been using Linux as my primary desktop for 3 years now and I never complain about any new feature, and it's just gone from strength to strength on the basis of new features that there have been many complaints about.

Whenever anything moves forwards there are always people complaining that the old way was better, hell there are still people bitching about the metric system (and still entire countries not using it).

I will agree, however, that perhaps I did get a bit out of hand with my response. It just frustrates me to see people putting hard effort into a project and creating these great features only to have people complain that it's not like it used to be (usually without even trying it). I often hear complaints that people are too scared to move away from Windows because "it's different", yet these same people are often complaining about the smallest change to their perfect world that they spent years getting used to.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Lennie]

Maybe you should use a different profile (-P option in startup), that way you could also install all the extensions listed at the pornzilla-site.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Jerry Smith]

You could try "Oldbar", an addon that might correct some of the annoyingness you're experiencing.

Does anyone know whether the presentation is available in other format than .swf? Somehow it doesn't run, just crawls by with less than 1 fps.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[drsquare]

I don't use bookmarks except for sites I rarely visit with obscure addresses, does this mean I'm now going to have to bookmark every site I use, and add keywords for them?

And what about when you don't want to go to the site directly, but bring up the address. For example I type 'en' to bring up wikipedia, go to the end of the line, and put in the subject I want to bring up.
/
Sometimes I think these changes are just change for the sake of change.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

Several Firefox addons exist which temporarily disable various forms of history and other things that leave a trace, without clearing them entirely. For instance, Stealther.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

How about keeping your pron surfing activities to a separate login on the machine?

Re:Grr sidebar history

[oSand]

I like the awesome bar's tagging and title search capability, but I think that it should be separated from the typed urls. My gripe is that tagged results aren't grouped together. I'll type in 'js ref' and get mozilla developer center at the top and 'docs.jquery.com' right at the bottom where it is hidden from view. If I just type 'ref' I see all my reference links, except for the adobe AIR site which is 2nd from the bottom and again hidden from view. There is no way to be sure that you've viewed all tagged pages unless you've scrolled through all the results in the drop down.
Specifying a special search prefix, say a '\', would solve the problem. Good searching is about what you exclude as much as what you include. However this is a single gripe in the face of quite considerable niftiness, so the ff devs certainly deserve a pat on the back. Opera (whose 9.5 beta 2 searches the contents of all history pages), solves the slashdot problem by making '/.' automatically map to slashdot.org. That was thoughtful.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fforw]

shortcut: ctrl+shift delete. clear private data dialog pops up on default but you can even set it so that it deletes it invisibly. Thanks to the new awesome bar you don't end up in a state where typing into the address bar does not find any results but instead get your permanent bookmarks found -- perfect for me.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you create a new user specifically for viewing porn. Your home page, history and saved images/videos will be hidden behind a seemingly innocent attachment to your existing user interface: ssh -Y innocentuser@localhost

Re:Grr sidebar history

[x_MeRLiN_x]

The people who can read? It's actually worse than I claimed; you can't search within your history if you sort by date either.

1: Press Ctrl + H
2: Click View
3: Choose By Date or By Date and Site
4: Type in the search field
5: Your filter (that you wanted to keep) was cleared

If you're still missing the point, what if I read a different "TEDDYBEAR THREAD" every day for the last year? I'm only interested in the one I saw yesterday. I can sort by date and site, but if I visited a hundred other pages from that forum yesterday, I have to sift through each one until I find it.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Skrapion]

Why can't they just optimize the heck out of the existing codebase, implement new and faster technologies on the backend, and leave the interface alone? Because most people actually like these new features that you malign.

But the code is all open source, so if lots of people side with you, I'm sure we'll see a new browser branch off from FF2 that backports all of the FF3 speed improvements.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[skiddie]

I use Opera for porn, Firefox for 'clean' stuff, and Safari for work. Nobody need get embarrassed, unless I accidentally open the wrong one for the wrong task.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Sark666]

firefox 2 is in the hardy repositories.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=firefox&searchon=names&suite=hardy&section=all

Re:Grr sidebar history

[iwein]

"Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change" - Hawking(?)

Although I agree that it is nice if you don't have to be smart to use a program (so you can also use it if you've been drinking), I am glad that there are some precious software houses that take advantage of my intelligence by changing the interface to be better.

I disagree with your implication that the url is the important thing to remember about a website. Remembering tags, words, context is much more natural and the mozilla guys have done a great job to save me some work of translating the concepts in my head to an actual url. I was already using my address bar in FF2 in this manner (which routes you through google) and this saves me time and gives me more control. Great stuff.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[aussie_a]

Ctrl+H is shorter than Ctrl+Shift+H, and it opens the history in the sidebar on FF3 here. Of course, I don't remember what FF2 did. Crtl+H opens up the history in the sidebar on FF2. Its hardly new.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[aussie_a]

Keep it consistent and let people with special needs enable it Sounds like the people with special needs are the ones that need it consistent.

Interfaces change. Sometimes for the better (tabs), sometimes for the worse (grouping windows in the taskbar). But by keeping things stagnant (sorry, I mean consistent) you guarantee innovation will die.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[notnAP]

The fact that this comment was modded up to +5 funny by people with mod points is hilarious.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[arse maker]

If you think not typing S and down arrow not meaning slashdot (throught a happensake, its not ment to be that, its just because you dont visit enough S domains) is the same as a completely new keyboard layout, then you are never going to like anything that changes.

Also, what nerd cant type slashdot in under 1 second anyhow, and thats not using any smarts. This feature is good for when you often DONT know the url verbatim, if you argue that you only use 5 web sites so you dont need it, then use links on the toolbar or something, jeez!

Re:Grr sidebar history

[0100010001010011]

Why? Why should I change my browsing habits?

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Firefox 3 for some time now, and I must disagree with your comment. There is a small amount of training involved in it, but the awesome bar is, well, awesome. You still had to train your previous browser to know that when you typed 's' then the first link should be slashdot, no? The *exact* same functionality exists in firefox 3. It's actually much easier for muscle memory as you can use the middle of a domain name, or the method from ff2 that you described. Please give it a try, dl ff3 and don't clear your history for a while (so the database can flesh out). It really is impressive.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[RiotingPacifist]

but i find it usefull it sticks all my porn in one place and even sorts it by category, just remember to use your main profile next time your looking for an analysis though.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[pintpusher]

This whole thread makes me think of the many tiling window managers and their "menu"s. I use xmonad and have used wmii in the past. They use dmenu, which matches every available executeable based on the letters typed so far.

It's a little annoying at first, especially if you have a lot of commands that start with the same several letter. You will match all those, plus all the ones that contain those letters somewhere in the middle of the word as well. One a debian sytem, typing 'apt' will get you a ton of responses, obviously. The trick is learning the shortest unique set of letters that get you the program you want. "eno" gets me openoffice. "refo" gets firefox, though I really need to come up with a better one. Probable "cew" for iceweasel would work. The point is that once you get used to it, it's remarkably efficient in that you can quickly get to what you want, yet still have available the entire list if you aren't quite sure what you want.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Tofflos]

Sticking to the theme (established above) of what happens when you type "sl" to get to Slashdot, the first suggestion for me is actually Slashdot, but the second suggestion is a porn page. This has been bothering me for weeks. A little known trick: Pressing delete when the offending address is highlighted will remove it from the browsers' history.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[ruben.gutierrez]

I agree. I've read through some of the replies to this, but it seems like they took something simple and effective and made it cumbersome. I guess I just haven't tried to learn how to use it, but damn it's busy to read through. I liked when the change to include the X on tabs (for closing individual tabs) was implemented. It actually saves me time, and it's absolutely intuitive.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

I wholeheartedly agree. Not only do I use a different profile for pr0n surfing, I keep that profile (along with the porn itself) stored safely away in a TrueCrypt encrypted partition.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[try_anything]

I disagree with your implication that the url is the important thing to remember about a website. Remembering tags, words, context is much more natural Tags, words, and context are helpful when groping for a hazily-remembered website, but is anything easier or more human than using names? If you see an actor on TV and ask somebody what his name is, what would you rather hear: "That's Ricardo Montalban," or, "He's that guy, who was in that Star Trek movie, and his name was Khan, and Kirk was like, 'KHAAAAAAAAAAN!' and he's been in a bunch of TV stuff too."

Arguably the second description tells you more about the man (what's in a name?), but as a human being you're more satisfied by the first answer. That's just the way we work. A name gives us something around which to crystallize our knowledge and our memories. Analog information fades and blurs. Without a name, similar people blur together. Is there one cute divorced brunette with glasses in the professional services department, or two? Once you have names for them, you can start sorting out their characteristics into two individuals.

Usually when people refer to a site's URL, they mean its domain name. A domain name is even better than a human name, because they are unique and are usually carefully picked to be memorable and easy to spell. It took a while for people to figure out how to choose good domain names, but they do a good job these days. Often, when a website has a long official name that doesn't match its domain name, people find it more natural to use the domain name as the name they use in casual conversation.

Domain names are also absolutely essential to disambiguate between sites with similar content. If you give somebody ridiculous directions to a web site (like "gis kitten star trek indiana third row second column" or "delicious my tags linux radius second listed") then there's a good chance they'll end up on a different site, despite the apparent precision of the directions. You'd better give them part of the URL so they can distinguish between the really cool site you're trying to send them to and all the really lame sites with similar content.

Better yet, give them a name. Giving someone a long context-sensitive algorithm for finding a site, instead of giving them a URL, is like saying, "You should really watch this movie, that has Tom Hanks in it, but he's not the main character, and it's set in Miami, and there are all these drug dealers and a pastry chef...." Don't you just want to punch people like that? Don't be like that. Just say you'll send a link when you get a chance.

All in all, tags and search terms are essential fallbacks when you don't know the name of something, but everything is easier and more certain when you remember the name. Plus, names are essential when communicating with other people (who don't have the same context and memories as you) and when you aren't sure you can recognize what you're looking for or distinguish it from similar content.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fmoc-86]

One could ask: Why don't you use bookmarks for frequently visited addresses? [keywords aside] Do you depend on the history to go there fast, or do you type the entire address?

About the second point you make: you can also do keywords for stuff like that (as searches). [You can set this in the "Manage Search Engines" dialog in the search bar, which, btw, I don't use] I have FF set up so i can type, e.g, "w war" to search "war" on en.wikipedia - it redirects me to the "war" article. I can type "w lazlo moholy-nagy" if I want to search for Lázló Moholy-Nagy but don't remember the way Lázló is written. It does a search and the article shows ups first. If I type "w moholy-nagy" it sends me right to the article.

Plus, one can set up a keyword for (it seems, arbitrary) input forms, so this is very versatile. [However, those keyword searches are separated from the mycroft ones, and this is an inconsistency on the program.]

I use to do searches and queries the way you point to, and admit there are cases where the approach I have just mentioned doesn't work: by example, if there is no input form to build the keyworded search from, or no search engine addon is available.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[drsquare]

Why would I need bookmarks? It's easier to type the first couple of letters and have the address come up. It also means I can see the most commonly visited parts of the site and go straight to them, you can't do that with bookmarks.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Omestes]

More and more I completely ignore bookmarks. I have one folder on the bookmark toolbar for frequent links, and use the rest of the bar for a quick cache for relevant links I should see. The actual bookmark menu is pretty much ignored completely. When I want to visit a site, I generally just start typing in the "awesome bar", and select the first or second item. Apparently it also learns. This is pretty much my behavior in FF2 as well, except for the ability to browse bookmarks.

The only real change FF3 has brought is the Unfiled Bookmark area, which I still find annoying, but it has its uses. I stick all the crap I might want to visit there, and then have a nice bookmark for the "awesome" bar to use.

It's sort of like Quicksilver for the internets, I suppose.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

You should obviously browse porn with Opera.

Opera has a feature where all pages that have a series of links to images, are converted to a slideshow.

So, you enter the porn site, press the 'Next' button until the menu shows, click to see the first image, and then the 'Next' button will keep showing you the images one by one.

Works in every site I have tested.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[fmoc-86]

Well, the only contact I have with my bookmarks is the "awesome bar", and yes, it is kind of like quicksilver.

I delete the history when FF exits. So my bookmarks are a list of the sites I visit most frequently and stuff I think I might use later (reference, catalogs, libraries, etc.) This way, the results the "awesome bar" gives me are uncluttered- it contains only my bookmarks and my most recent browsing history (from the current session). It works for me.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[Anonymous Coward]

Please file a bug. Seriously. You have a legitimate complaint, and if you'd like to see it fixed, you're better off filing a bug than complaining on Slashdot. Of course, you can do both, if you'd like. I encourage others to do the same.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[shellbeach]

As someone else said, there are other ways to replicate what you're looking for, but there wasn't any way to get the functionality of the awesome bar. Well, actually, there was:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1722

Doesn't work with FF3, sadly, but it was a heck of a lot faster than the bloated, somewhat-less-than awesome bar.

But that's the price of progress, I guess ...

Re:Grr sidebar history

[mgblst]

You don't have to update to the new firefox, the old one will work perfectly well.

And these is nothing wrong with learning new things, and getting improvements in software are worth the sacrifice to a lot of people. What proportion, I guess we will find out, when we start to see some usage stats for the new firefox compared to the old.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[muzip]

I've been using IE7 and I switched to FF3 starting with beta3, and for me, the most awesome feature of FF3 is this new bar :) It is more than enough to stop me reverting back to IE. Moreover, I didn't know that we could tag bookmarks, it is also a very nice feature, we can rename websites as we wish :)

Re:Grr sidebar history

[bomfog]

I like the awesome bar's tagging and title search capability, but I think that it should be separated from the typed urls. My gripe is that tagged results aren't grouped together. All this and more should arrive eventually: Bug 395161 - Make it possible to restrict the url bar autocomplete results to bookmarks/history entries and match only url/title/tags and Bug 424557 - Allow AwesomeBar to default search only urls (or history/titles/bookmarks/tags), f'rinstance.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[kehren77]

Shift+Command/Apple+H on the Mac for the sidebar history in FF3.

Re:Grr sidebar history

[kinabrew]

Because that's how the program works?

Great!

[physman_wiu]

I've got like 4,200 bookmarks...I tried organizing them a few times...that was a lesson in futility.

Re:Great!

[Threni]

> I've got like 4,200 bookmarks...I tried organizing them a few times...that was a lesson in futility.

You don't need a browser, you need a secretary.

Re:Great!

[maxume]

At what point do they go from being bookmarks to a list of webpages that you have visited?

If you can't find the bookmark that you are thinking of, it probably isn't saving you any time...

Re:Great!

[FudRucker]

my bookmarks number in the thousands, but what i did was moved bookmark.html to /home/$USER out of my profile directory and open it with a text editor and remove all the meta tags and "last visited" info and left it basically as a html file with only URLs in it and made my bookmark.html my home page so the browser has no bookmarks internally and the home button opens my bookmarks like a regular web page, if you know html pretty good you can make some tables and/or horiziontal lines and categorize them...

Re:Great!

[laejoh]

Hey, come on, be fair!

Can a secretary block pop ups for you?

Can a secretary show you naked women?

'nuff said!

Re:Great!

[felipekk]

Can a secretary show you naked women?

If you are asking this question, you got the wrong kind of secretary.

Re:Great!

[lanc]

sure. and if you invest a little more time, you could even integrate it into the browser menubar in drop-down tree-form.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Re:Great!

[Ihmhi]

Can a secretary block pop ups for you?

Maybe if she stands in front of your screen?

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can a secretary block pop ups for you?

Maybe if she stands in front of your screen?

No, that just caused another pop up...

Re:Great!

[pbhj]

Can a secretary show you naked women?

Can a tree show you wood?

Re:Great!

[tuxicle]

Can a tree show you wood? No, but some secretaries can...

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty simple man, just make a folder called pr0n and move all of your bookmarks too it. Problem solved.

Then again it is easy to get distracted with an accidental double-click in the "wrong" place.. fap fap fap

Weight in minutes?

[clang_jangle]

Dagnabbit, I can't find the conversion chart for that one anywhere, and I really want to know what I weigh in minutes.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[DirtySouthAfrican]

Yes, the units do not make sense. Mass is more likely to be measured in inverse minutes. So take your mass in kg, multiply by c^2, which will give you your energy equivalent. Now divide by Planck's constant, which will give you the frequency equivalence of that energy. Multiply by 60 to get the rate in inverse minutes. Sticking to standard units, I have a mass of 1.017e52 Hz. Hope that helps.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[temcat]

In principle, you can measure weight in minutes - by the time it takes for a body to freely fall from a certain altitude.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I missing the joke, or are you an idiot?

Re:Weight in minutes?

[absoluteflatness]

No you can't.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[temcat]

No, I can't.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've just been awkwardly trolled.

Re:Weight in minutes?

[jasonwea]

$ units "1.017e52 Hz h / c^2"
Definition: 74.978282 kg

Cool. I even managed to get Google to evaluate the expression as well. Thanks for posting this.

2%? really?

[spazdor]

I am a seasoned Linux maven, and Flash playback works perfectly for me.

Just saying.

Re:2%? really?

[colinrichardday]

I use Flash with Firefox (I'm on youtube now), but I browse Slashdot with Konqueror, which as far as I know, doesn't support Flash.

Re:2%? really?

[427_ci_505]

Sure it does. http://linuxlab.dk/tipsntricks/flash-konqueror

Re:2%? really?

[colinrichardday]

I didn't have libflashplayer.so in the "correct" directory. Also, it still has problems.

Re:2%? really?

[bioglaze]

There are several flash-heavy sites or blogs like http://www.alexattitude.com/ that will crash my browser every time I visit them.

Re:2%? really?

[spazdor]

Damn, happened to me too! Firefox 3.0b5 even.

Re:2%? really?

[WebmasterNeal]

This is the most replies I've got on slashdot since I signed up so apparently getting a -1 mod and being a troll is the only way to have a discussion. Anyways I was being sarcastic since everyone on here always bitches about how they don't have flash installed....(remember the new dilbert website going to flash jackasses?)

Excellent!

[AtomicSnarl]

Not only will this let me I better organize my porn links, but I can avoid those Icky Malware sites, too!

Thank you Team Mozilla! The world is a better place because of your hard work.

Now, where'd I put my tube of lube...

Re:Excellent!

[Kneo24]

I stole your lube because you stole my thoughts. Turn about is foreplay... I mean fair play!

Re:Excellent!

[moderatorrater]

After reading your comment, I came to the conclusion that "lubetube" would be the greatest name for a porn version of youtube ever.

Turns out, I wasn't the only person that thought so...

Re:Excellent!

[oblivious]

eh hem... it's actually redtube.com...

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

greatest? please!
youboob FTW

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Bastards! "Due to current Australian Laws this website cannot be viewed from your ip"

Re:SWF?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok - i imagined the screencast.
Can't wait for the final version...

Addons

[Wowsers]

Looks very interesting, but will it trash all your very useful addons and have you swearing for the previous version?

Re:Addons

[Zumbs]

It will make some addons stop functioning. In my addon list, FireBug doesn't work anymore. But that is, hopefully, just a question of time ... AdBlock Plus and NoScript work just fine, though you may have to get the latest version.

Re:Addons

[somegeekynick]

Not really. It will automatically disable them if they are not compatible. You'll have to wait till the add-on programmers come up with a version for Fx3. Another new feature is that Firefox has a built-in update checker. When a new version is uploaded to AMO, you will be alerted, assuming your previous version was also downloaded from AMO. But if you really want those add-ons right now, you might want to visit the website(not the AMO page) of the add-on, they may have a beta version. Some of the ones I use are still in beta, but I don't face many problems, if any.

Re:Addons

[WiFiBro]

Firebug works for me, check it's homepage.
There's a recipe for overriding the compatibility check for add-ons.

The way for to force FF3.0.pre to accept all your add-ons, EVEN if they may NOT BE GOOD for FF3:
I have no idea how this procedure could create havoc but since you're evading proper procedures, well.. better backup your profile and whatnot.
Download the *.xpi file from a reliable source.
Rename it to *.zip
Open the zipfile.
Edit file install.rdf so maxVersion reads 3.0pre

[em:maxVersion]3.0pre[/em:maxVersion]

To evade the security check for modifications to files in the packet, delete the META-INF directory. Yes. ugly.
Rezip the files. Rename to .xpi
Open in Firefox.

Another tip: to get rid of "awesome" with the "oldbar" add-on :). I am better at remembering urls.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

um u do know there is an about:config override and the nightly tester tools addon does it to? a lot less effort i think

Re:Addons

[speilberg0]

I'd suggest you check the firebug releases page. They appear to have released a version that supports firefox 3 (1.2b3 so far). Not sure how buggy it is at the moment, but from what i recall about firebug 1.0.5 under ff3, this can't be too bad.

Re:Addons

[WiFiBro]

No i didn't know that.
thanks, coward!

Re:Addons

[lanc]

The only one you really need is Firesomething - randomly renames your http User-Agent to Firefox, Iceweasel, Hypnokoala, Turbokangaroo, Moonwolf...

Re:Addons

[Darkness404]

But who even looks at the title bars anymore.... I can install Firefox on someone's computer, import all the IE settings, add an IE theme, delete all IE links, and replace the Firefox logo with a blue E and they don't notice the difference. Well sometimes they wonder why they don't have the toolbars of spyware and adware (But I really DO want to Tazer the gnome!!!!).

Re:SWF?

[Anonymous Coward]

2%...really? You think only 2% of /. users have flash installed? Even if that is a hyperbole, it seems a bit extreme.

weighing in

[Anonymous Coward]

Weighing in at under four minutes, the screencast This morning I stepped on the scale, and to my dismay it turns out I've gained nearly 2 hours. What an eye opener...

SVG animation

[gr8_phk]

Ever since I started using SVG with Firefox 1.5, I've been waiting for animation capability. The SMIL patch is apparently working reasonably well, but it's just not getting applied to 3.0. This is really sad. I appreciate all the bug fixes and performance improvements, but it's really frustrating that plugins always seem to get higher priority than web standards. Just apply the patch guys. Thanks.

Re:SVG animation

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like there is quite a bit of stuff that was nearly ready for 3.0 but just didn't make make it. From what I have heard there should be a 3.1 soon and a 3.5 a little farther out.

Re:SVG animation

[BZ]

> The SMIL patch is apparently working reasonably well,

Which is very different from "correct". Shipping seriously buggy standards support is worse than not shipping it at all, since it poisons the standard for future use...

Patches like that shouldn't get shipped until they're working _very_ well. "Reasonably" is not a high enough bar.

Re:SVG animation

[Anonymous Coward]

You could use SMILscript, but that's not the same of course. Keep up to date on the state of SVG viewers via http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php

When the patch lands i'll have even more input for the SVG link resource: http://svg.startpagina.nl

Re:SWF?

[CraniumDesigns]

flash has a 98% installation rate, higher than any other plugin out there. but since /. users are by reputation mostly paranoid linux nerds, i'm guessing it is less than 98% among THEM, but i doubt it's 2%.

Re:piss frost!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Actually, his post was only barely on topic - replies should be on-topic to their parent, not to the original article.

Re:It's a browser ffs...

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you don't belong here.

if A picture really is worth a thousand words

[ostomator]

... then what is a 4 minute screen cast worth? 15 frames per second x 60 seconds per minute x 4 minutes x 1000 words wow 3,600,000 words!

Re:if A picture really is worth a thousand words

[Anonymous Coward]

TL/DR.

Is RC updateable to Release?

[bwalling]

If I install the RC, will it update itself to the released version, or will that be an uninstall/new install?

Re:Is RC updateable to Release?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will update automatically to the release and to future point releases.

Re:Is RC updateable to Release?

[lagfest]

From beta 5 to RC, Firefox upgraded automatically, so I'm guessing it will.

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[diegocgteleline.es]

Guess what? It works fine here, and I bet that it also works for everyone using ff3, except you, for some reason (maybe your setup is broken?). I know because breaking gmail would be a very serious showstopper for ff3, and nobody has complained.

And not only it works, it works really well and the performance improvements in ff3 are so great that the speed different is noticeable.

Good job FireFox Devs!

[Toreo asesino]

I have to say FireFox 3 has some features I can't believe have been missing up until this point. The awesome bar, looks awesome.

In fact, i find it amazing most areas of browsers haven't been "just searchable" like FireFox 3 is now, having seen how much sense this makes.

Good job guys, you're setting a high bar for the rest to follow (no doubt).

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[felipekk]

But did they fix the Slashdot b

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[felipekk]

Firefox, not FireFox.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[Jugalator]

For me, it's a lot about the little things. When he showed the thing about right-clicking on a downloaded file and being able to go back to the actual download page, that's when I thought "why haven't other browser devs thought of that before".

IMHO, Firefox 3 isn't a huge advance among web browsers, and actually catches up in some areas with some of the competition -- thinking of the site identification support. And it isn't the dominating browser in the Acid3 test either. But it does a lot of things right, and that with the extensive plugin support not found on any other browser (besides Firefox compatible derivatives). With the resource consumptions fixes (that Safari is in dire need of on Windows, and IE 7 too somewhat), it's really becoming a quite pleasant browser to use.

I'm a former Opera user, but the thing is that I feel Firefox 3's new Javascript speed enhancements and memory fixes making it so fast (and with the scrolling plugin YASS giving it the final touch of smooth "speed scrolling"), that I can't really switch back at this point. I did with Firefox 2 due to the memory issues, but I doubt I will again until perhaps Opera 10 or something is released.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[ya really]

The Awesome Bar: what you get when you allow the developers to also name the features.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[TheSpoom]

I heard they were adding a new Candlejack bar, I'm pretty exci

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[pbhj]

I thought it was quite a marketing-y name. Dev's might call it yetAnotherTextEntryFieldForPastDomain AndMetaDataSearchInstantiation or something ...

No sorry that's not a clever acronym.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[EvilSS]

I agree completely. I've used IE almost exclusively since IE 3. I'm using the current RC of Firefox 3 and I can't ever see myself going back. It looks great (glad to see that circa 1999 default skin gone), is memory friendly, fast (way faster than IE on Vista), and there are so many cool little features. So many "why didn't anyone think of that before!" features.

For the first time I think IE is really in trouble of loosing it's dominance. So kudos to the FF developers! This browser rocks!

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[EvilSS]

er..I mean "...losing its dominance."

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[nxtw]

I'm a former Opera user, but the thing is that I feel Firefox 3's new Javascript speed enhancements and memory fixes making it so fast (and with the scrolling plugin YASS giving it the final touch of smooth "speed scrolling"), that I can't really switch back at this point. I did with Firefox 2 due to the memory issues, but I doubt I will again until perhaps Opera 10 or something is released.

Opera 9.5 is coming soon. Test builds are available. I've been using the Opera 9.5 betas for the past few months and find it to be much faster than Opera 9.2.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the day, '99 or so, Internet Explorer for Mac saved the URL of every downloaded file in the file's "comment" field (a system property of every Mac file). That was very useful, and I'm glad to see similar fearures get picked up.

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[philpalm]

I tried one download resuming feature but it effected the whole downloading experience so my brother made me take it off (from megadownload)

Re:Good job FireFox Devs!

[mentaldrano]

Everyone knows Candlejack always presses the submit button for you, but now he has to press Preview then Submit. Maybe he browses oldsch

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[dark whole]

Why use IE? Opera would be a better and safer option. Also, is there a way to see a list of "reported attack site" sites, or to add to them, because I want to be sure goatse and on.nimp are on there.

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as firefox 3 is officially released,
gmail will work with ff3, or be fixed in
a millisecond.

Re:It's a browser ffs...

[ZerdZerd]

It's probably the software I use the most. And I'm not a web developer.

Mouse back/forward button mappings moved!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the bone headed dumb ass things to do, some complete retardo moved the mouse back/froward buttons from 6/7 to 8/9. There was already massive confusion amongst users about configuring xorg.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Mouse+buttons+do+not+work+as+Back+and+Forward

Now this stupidity!

Why take a great product and screw up the most basic usability features?!! This is in the same league as Mr Clippy.

It's almost enough to make me want to use IE.

Treadmill Kittens

[Evil Closet Monkey]

This sneak peak at Firefox wasted an hour of my life, watching treadmill kittens on You Tube!

Re:Treadmill Kittens

[urcreepyneighbor]

watching treadmill kittens on You Tube! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVjzd320gew

Re:Treadmill Kittens

[Barny]

You win the thread, congratulations.

Getting a post with a youtube link of kittens on a treadmill marked informative...

Wow, actually creates interest

[rkohutek]

Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.

Normally you just download the software and are sort of pleasantly surprised when you find a new feature, or similarly disappointed when there are none. In this case, it actually makes me /want/ to download FF3 and get to having some of those neat widgets.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[owlnation]

Wow, the summary is totally right for once - watching the screencast makes the features actually seem desirable.

Not sure I'd go quite that far... however, I am less concerned about some of the new features now. The name "awesome bar" and the description of what it did had me worried. Originally it looked like a feature for a feature's sake, with a stupid name to boot.

Now, I admit I am more open minded about the Bar (except the name, that remains stupid). I'm open to seeing how it behaves in practice. If the searchable aspects of it are returning good results then maybe it's useful. If, however, it's like the built-in dictionary in Fx 2 that seems only to recognize words in Webster's 1893 edition, then it may be beyond irritating.

But, the Site Identity thing -- and it recognizing how may times you've visited a site, looks like a whole bundle of trouble waiting to happen. At best a divorce, and at worst a 1st class ticket to Gitmo when they impound your laptop at an airport check-in and you forgot to clear it.

I'm also thinking the fact that this changes color might be potentially distracting and irritating. Almost all of the extensions I add to Firefox are about stopping things distracting me on a webpage or browser. I'm not MTV generation, I need to focus when I read, and I only use a browser to read (and for pr0n too obviously, but I don't want distracted then either).

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree on the number of visits thing. Why would one want to have this info on himself?

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[Jester99]

If you clear your browsing history (ctrl+shift+del), it resets the page visit counts to zero.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[teslatug]

I agree about the site identity stuff. Plus they've taken out the padlock (moved to status bar) and yellow highlighting on the address bar for https sites.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[pavon]

But, the Site Identity thing -- and it recognizing how may times you've visited a site, looks like a whole bundle of trouble waiting to happen. Uhm, that info has been available for years, they just made the interface a bit more user friendly. If you really don't want the browser to track where you've been you should disable the browser history. If you just want to clear out a specific site after visiting it, bring up the history side-bar with CTRL-H and delete it. If you have old stuff you want to clear out without completely nuking your history, you can search your history in the sidebar.

Although if you know that you are going to be browsing a site that you don't want tracked the best thing is to have a separate browser that is configured not to track anything.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[Anonymous Coward]

If you clear your personal data then it doesn't know how many times you've visited a page. The awesome bar does nothing for my because my cookies, history, and temp files are deleted when I close my browser.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[miro f]

it's called browser history, and every browser has it. You can, of course, quickly erase your tracks by pressing ctrl-shift-delete. The site info gives you information in the hopes of being able to identify the site you are visiting. If it looks like your usual site but firefox says you've never visited it before, then you might get suspicious.

Also telling you if it stores cookies and being able to quickly see those cookies is fantastic, imo.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll still search your bookmarks and the history of your current session for matches, which you may or may not find useful.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[tuxicle]

The name "awesome bar" and the description of what it did had me worried. Originally it looked like a feature for a feature's sake, with a stupid name to boot. What if they named it Planet Express bar?

Whatever it's called, I don't see it as a big improvement either (at least not in the FF3 that's included in Fedora 9), maybe it'll grow on me in a while. Larry seems kinda nice though :) The searchable download list, along with being able to open the parent webpage is quite handy. I wish that the downloads would "age off" like the Browser history, because users would otherwise end up clearing the download history manually all the time. Speaking of Fedora 9, the FF dictionary is replaced by a system-wide one, which is also shared with Thunderbird, OOo, etc. Would be a step beyond 1893, methinks.

Re:Wow, actually creates interest

[jez9999]

One exception.

I know they like it, but that favourites star on the right of the URLbar is very annoying. Several times I've found myself accidentally clicking it and bookmarking the page, then you have to click twice to remove the damn bookmark. That's why in my extension, there's an option to remove it.

Apart from that, yeah FF3 is mostly improvements over FF2, and noticable faster to load too which is great. They should've left a pref in to get the old URLbar dropdown behaviour back, though. :-(

Re:SWF?

[Anonymous Coward]

You would think a /. user would be smart enough not to link directly to a flash file when submitting a story on /. considering 2% of users in Slashdot's Free Software Reality Distortion Field(TM) have flash. Fixed it for you.

The idiots amongst us

[tqft]

test this stuff for the rest of you

I haven't had any real problems and flash and gmail work well for me and more importantly my wife who if she can't get her jokes and animations gets cranky with me.

Those of a DBA bent or with frequent bookmarking habits may want to look at the SQLite extension to manage the SQLlite db.

When FF3 is released - am upgrading to 3.1 to make life hell for myself for a month or two.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9pre) Gecko/2008060222 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre ID:2008060222

hoping for help

[globaljustin]

I use ff2 and i have the same issues with gmail loading in its 'standard' view...the ff help page says "delete your cookies" which works but it slows my browsing down alot after I do it b/c each page has to upload their cookies to me...(esp. b/c i have to go to the NYTimes registration generator all over again every time i delete my cookies)...

is there anything that can be done? i'm not switching browsers...

ff3 looks good, but I hope that some of those 'awesome bar' widgets can be turned off individually...don't want all that taking up my cycles...

Re:hoping for help

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, you can delete cookies individually; there's a list under Tools > Options > Privacy.

Re:hoping for help

[Kirkoff]

I believe that since they're doing the lookups for that kind of stuff with SQLite, it should be rather processor efficient. This is especially the case when compared to some of the other methods that are traditionally used such as flat files or XML.

Re:hoping for help

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks very much for giving me the idea. I deleted my cookies and now Gmail loads. Instead of mod'ing me as a troll, it would have been a lot more useful to have constructive suggestions. But then this is Slashdot, do what do I expect?

Re:hoping for help

[globaljustin]

yeah, i hear ya...i mean, no one has replied with any help for me...heh

another thing i noticed, if i restart my computer when gmail starts acting up, the problem goes away for an indeterminable ammount of time

deleting ALL cookies works, but i tried just deleting google and gmail cookies and it changed nothing..so yeah...there's that

as far as /. goes, you can usually get good discussion going here, and help, but you have to fight through alot of bullshit. in your posts, don't say anything bad about a non-Microsoft product in strong terms...you have to beat around the bush, because at least 10 people reading it love it...unless it's microsoft. and try to make it clear that you have tried all the 'obvious' fixes and shortly describe why they didn't work (this was my problem in my post, should have mentioned right away that I deleted google and gmail cookies).

if you're going to say something controversial, people will listen (some at least) but you have to be skillfull about it. if you have good logical reasons for hating Gentoo or whatever and you want to talk about it, say so, but make sure you don't do anything that could be perceived as flame or trolling. Note: no matter how careful you are, trolls and flamers will say shit. Actually, no matter what you say, if it gets modded up, someone will flame or troll you. it's a near certainty, and usually they won't get modded down unless it is a very lively thread.

I've only had 3 or 4 mods that i disagreed with, otherwise, the moderators have been pretty fair to me. I love /. why don't you go ahead and make a profile and try it out?

Slow down

[Matt Perry]

Holy crap. This guy is talking WAY too fast.

Re:Slow down

[Jeff321]

Once I noticed that he was using google.ca, the fast talking didn't surprise me as much anymore.

Re:Slow down

[lanc]

Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.

FCAALAB? not quite the fitting backronyme to SLASHDOT. you were close though.

Re:Slow down

[pembo13]

Listen faster

Re:Slow down

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, it's beltzner. Listen to the Os on that fool.

Re:SWF?

[Anonymous Coward]

2%...really? You think only 2% of /. users have flash installed? Even if that is a hyperbole, it seems a bit extreme. It would explain why YouTube is such a dismal failure...

Says

[deesine]

the organized guy to all the just-barely organized guys.

There's more of us, so watch it!

Re:Says

[maxume]

I'm not very organized. To control the number of bookmarks that I have, I use big categories that I go through and delete stuff out of once and a while. Longer term stuff gets posted to delicious, at which point it usually gets some tags, which are only sort of organization.

It's more in the name of making them more useful than it is in the name of organization. The organization that I do end up doing is fighting a constant battle against the organization that I don't end up doing.

Re:It's a browser ffs...

[laejoh]

I hope this feeling will subside quickly.

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[Ihmhi]

Right, because a browser that obviously has serious partnership ties with Google would release without working with Google's e-mail service.

You need del.icio.us

[Colin Smith]

HTH.

My good deed for the day. Now I have to go rob a blind child to keep the universal karma in balance.

Converting to Weight in minutes

[Tumbleweed]

Dagnabbit, I can't find the conversion chart for that one anywhere, and I really want to know what I weigh in minutes.

It's a sliding scale.

Time = money.
Multiply how much your time is worth by the length of the video.
Weigh that money (in cash, no coins; round off to the nearest paper bill).
Et voila, le profit!

My consulting fee is in the mail...

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[thetoadwarrior]

Works fine for me.

Google reporting

[teslatug]

I noticed in the screencast that they went to google to see why a site was reported as a malware site. Do they constantly forward stuff to Google to do these checks? That wasn't explained. What do they send and when do they send it? I'd like to be told if they're doing that.

Re:Google reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if you can pick some other entity to do the checks, but this checking can be turned off in preferences under security.

I don't know what the default settings are though.

Re:Google reporting

[Anonymous Coward]

The browser periodically downloads a list of known malware sites from Google (same source as the list of phishing sites). If you press the 'Why was this site blocked?' button, it takes you to the relevant report at StopBadware.org (which is supported by Google). It doesn't send every URL you visit to Google (the phishing protection in Firefox 2 had an option to do that for real-time checking but it's been removed in version 3 because no-one used it and it was too resource intensive).

Re:awesomebar

[WiFiBro]

You're so lucky, it's there already! Look for "oldbar".

YouTube link

[calhawk]

The SWF from Mozilla doesn't seem to be loading. Here's a YouTube link to the same video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q_JBKNiRRJ4

fast forward?

[Anonymous Coward]

When will the firefox team steal opera's "fast forward" feature?

Re:fast forward?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just install the Instant Gallery add-on: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/3791

Find dialog

[ThePhilips]

I still want my "Find..." dialog back. :(

Re:Find dialog

[WiFiBro]

ctrl+f for the bar and to start automatically go to menu tools/options
icon advanced tab general
accessibility block
tick the find as you type checkbox.

Re:Find dialog

[ewhac]

Type / (slash), followed by the text you want to search for in the currently displayed page. Press ^G (CTRL-G) to find subsequent occurrences.

If you're a vi user, this will seem quite natural.

Schwab

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[moderatorrater]

And not only it works, it works really well and the performance improvements in ff3 are so great that the speed different is noticeable. The speed improvements for javascript are significant. We use an application at my job that's heavily, heavily into Ext with hundreds of stupid little objects being manipulated whenever a change is made (it's an awful app). With FF3, it works with less than a 1 second pause. With FF2, guys can sit there for upwards of 15 seconds between changes.

What is this supposed to do?

[frisket]

The article links to a .swf file, but all it does in my Ubuntu FF3b5 is bring up a screenshot. I have the flash-nonfree plugin installed. I'm obviously missing something, but what?

Re:What is this supposed to do?

[WiFiBro]

can't you click on it?

Re:What is this supposed to do?

[bencoder]

I think it displays that screenshot while it's loading, try just leaving it for a while and it should change to a smaller image with a play arrow on it.

Re:What is this supposed to do?

[frisket]

Clicking has no effect, and I did wonder about loading, but after 30 min (on my 6Mb connection) I gave up. If they can't be bothered their ass to provide it in a form that FF users can view, the hell with them.

Re:What is this supposed to do?

[frisket]

Turns out that the flash-nonfree plugin is broken. I uninstalled it (and gnash as well) and installed the flash player 9 from Adobe and it works.

Re:awesomebar

[lagfest]

The Awesomebar can't hear you over the sound of how awesome it is.

Re:Larry = Clippy?

[WiFiBro]

That's all just the visible stuff they need to convince people this is not 2.6. I liked the warning bar better. Also more compatible with IE.

Good news is that under the hood more important stuff happened though hardly visible, such as a new rendering tool, way more stable memory handling and if I understand well that has to do with javascript bug fixing.
One showstopper left for me: Firebug & Web Developer cannot outline anymore.

Re:awesomebar

[moderatorrater]

They did. Firefox 3 uses half the memory that 2 did and it doesn't become unusable after keeping it open for a while.

Screencast and confidence

[Radyair]

Interesting in these days of web marketing.... These guys are confident enough in their market research and execution that they are willing to demonstrate the new features in a 'cast like this. Most companies (unnamed, cause the list is so long..) would rather: - release some text, maybe a screenshot or two (thinking games software now) - repeat the same story over and over and over... and then - leave it up to the community to generate the hype for them. Things may not be perfect, but this is marketing I can appreciate. Try that with your favourite brand of gasoline.

Reported Attack Site

[dark whole]

Is there a way to see a list of "reported attack site" sites, or to add to them? I want to be sure goatse and on.nimp are on there.

Oo?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Due to its visual nature, the screencast shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words."

or, you know... you could just install it and see for yourself.

Unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

I mostly miss the feature "as fast and stable as konqueror". At least in linux is as unstable as a 4 years old win95, and crawls to death trying to scroll down this webpage's comments.

Re:Unstable

[Anonymous Coward]

And 15 seconds after saying it, it crashes again, and even the error reporting app doesn't work.

*sighs*

Re:SWF?

[fan777]

you got trolled!

about:mozilla

[RavenChild]

As long as about:mozilla shows up, I'm happy.

Re:awesomebar

[cduffy]

If you hate the awesomebar, use vimperator! It's made just for people like you, who want those damn kids off their lawns and think that mice are the worst thing to happen to usability since keyboard overlays went out of style.

(Admittedly, though, every so often I actually do a :set menuoptions+=T, because on occasion the Awesome Bar is actually... ya know... useful).

Screencast

[Anonymous Coward]

You kids and your fancy screencasts. When I was little, all we had were videos and we liked it that way.

s/menuoptions/guioptions/

[Anonymous Coward]

[no text]

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[lanc]

that would be quite unrealistic - it's like saying that with a flying reindeer powered sleigh you can not only solve the travelling salesman problem in no time, but also visit every household in a single night - not to mention the intrude-problems ensured by electrical heating systems. So I absolutely dare to say that no software prob can ever be fixed in a millisecond. That is highly inprobable.

'Downloads' - missing button to open parent folder

[Anonymous Coward]

FF2 had "Open parent folder" in the downloaded window. This button is missing in FF3. I want to annotate websites and save them locally. Browser should display them automatically next time I visit that website! Didn't Mosaic have this feature?

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[moosesocks]

that would be quite unrealistic - it's like saying that with a flying reindeer powered sleigh you can not only solve the travelling salesman problem in no time, but also visit every household in a single night Quantum Santa?

eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is a "screencast"?

Re:eh?

[Nullav]

A video in the hands of a buzzword-happy PHB.

Re:eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with "screencast?" Unless you are also annoyed by constant references to "screenshots," rather than the more generic "image." Precision of language FTW.

Seriously though, I'm assuming that's not your position, and you're more annoyed at the choice of the word than you are that a word with a specific meaning exists. I don't find "screencast" to be as annoying as the more-than-a-handful of overused other buzzwords. cf. vlog and podcast.

Re:eh?

[Nullav]

a video by Mozilla developer Mike Beltzner, demonstrating some of the new features in Mozilla Firefox 3, which is due out very soon. Weighing in at under four minutes, the video gives a concise overview of why you should be excited about Firefox 3. Due to its visual nature, the video shows Firefox's features far more clearly than the many written previews that have been published. A picture really is worth a thousand words. Is that in any way harder to understand? You don't need to make up new words for something implied by the context.
In the same vein, 'screenshot' adds nothing over 'image' or 'picture', other than signifying that it's an image of a screen. (I so wouldn't have noticed.) I probably would bitch about that under the right circumstances, but I suppose I missed the window for that. Also, there are no 'podshots', 'textshots', or 'vodshots' to annoy me further.

clip doesn't play video

[Anonymous Coward]

audio but no video in mplayer. doesn't play in the browser either in linux. dumb.

Google search different ?

[dbcad7]

In Firefox 3 (with Linux Mint) when I type a search in the google box, I get my web results as normal.. but there are none of the links at the top that I find handy... For example in FF2 I could type "Sacramento" in the google search, get my results and I would have links at the top.. "News" "Maps" .. so I could click on "Maps" and get the google map.. To do the same thing in FF3 I actually have to go to google first... not a major problem, but I was used to the other way... Is this a Mint thing or a FF3 thing ? ... the options in managing the search engines doesn't show an alternate google search.

Re:Google search different ?

[dark whole]

works fine once you set up this

Re:awesomebar

[PunkOfLinux]

Because enough people like it in the main product?

Re:awesomebar

[cduffy]

Ya know, there's a reason I suggested vimperator. It wasn't to make fun of you -- it was to suggest a way you can hide all the built-in widgetry, save tons of UI space, and make the browser more usable (in the sense that vim is usable) at the same time. Keyboard-only navigation is exceedingly nifty, and if you're fed up with the current direction... hey, it's another approach.

Outside that, though... I think the awesomebar is useful. Deciding what belongs what belongs in an extension and what doesn't is a judgement call, and not everyone makes the same calls.

Is there sound?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all you fedora/pusleaudo ( and maybe ubuntu ) users don't forget to install libflashsupport for the flash sound!

Re:Is there sound?

[miro f]

actually libflashsupport on ubuntu just causes flash to crash the browser. I uninstalled it and it works perfectly now, with sound.

awesome bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who likes the idea of an address bar that just goes exactly where you tell it to?

While I'm sure that there are about:config enteries that will fix all this stuff, I wonder if this sort of thing is really such a good idea.

I want to enter and address and have it fail if I mistype it.

I don't want want browser pulling up anything I didn't explicitly tell it to. I don't want an address bar that guesses anything. I don't want a browser to list links to "sugested" sites as I start typing anywhere.

It seems like more and more firefox wants to take control (and privacy) out of our hands. At least by default anyway.

Firefox has all kinds of ways already to send your input to some 3rd party website or "service" (usually google) to make "helpful sugestions" etc.

There's something very wrong with the idea of a browser connecting to a 3rd party to "guss" at what I wanted and then rendering whatever it finds there. It's not like googles "i feel lucky" search hasn't been used by malicious folks before.

Am I the only one who finds this sort of thing creepy?
Am I alone in wondering why we should have to modify about:config settings disable things like suggestions, keywords, fixup, browser.send_pings, autorefresh, etc after every fresh install just to get a browser that isn't taking me where *it* thinks I should go and tracking me while I'm there!

Re:awesome bar?

[miro f]

just type the URL and hit enter, the awesome bar and its features are only accessed when you press down on your keyboard.

If you don't like it, don't use it, it's simple.

They haven't seen my art...

[Anonymous Coward]

"A picture really is worth a thousand words."

Anyone who says that hasn't seen my art.

My picutres are worth about 3 letters. I'll let you figure out which 3...

Re:awesomebar

[siddesu]

regretfully, that extension doesn't remove the "awesome" bar, it just renders it differently. there is no way to have it work as it used to work, and the search logic that is applied is the new one.

i still can't wrap my head around the fact that searching in the address bar doesn't search in the address history, but searches in ... err not exactly sure where.

i suppose this is search-engine friendly -- remove the site identity (URL and domain) from the user view; actually remove site identity importance, and have the user rely on search services instead.

Or, in slashdot terms:

1. have the user rely on visual clues provided by the search engines
2. give them a pre-configured search engine bookmar
3. profit

Aww, whatever.

Re:Larry = Clippy?

[The Faywood Assassin]

The icons remind me of the Customs signs at the new Terminal 1 at Pearson International Airport in Toronto, ON

Is the artwork the same, or is it just me?

Thanks,

Beny

Awesome bar

[spandex_panda]

is such a geek term for something, I feel ashamed recommending it to 'normal' folks. "Hey guys, come and look at the new Mozilla Firefox 3 RC2, its got an AWESOME BAR!!!"

Browser is your desktop!

[sas-dot]

Its going to be a wonderful tool to tag the files, folders in the hard drives locally and retrieve them back using the awesome toolbar. Many a times i keep all the files i am working on the desktop, then i organize them into folders, and put a shortcut to the folder on the desktop to retrieve it fast. But firefox 3 might change the way i am going to organize. I always wonder when the browser would become the desktop, this is one step more towards it.

Re:Browser is your desktop!

[Daimanta]

So Emacs should include Firefox 3?

Opera in trouble ?

[giorgist]

My only measure of this is I have gone through all the comments and I have yet to see a comment of the form
"Opera had this 16 months ago" In fact this is the first mention of the Opera browser that I noticed ...

I Hate the Awesome Bar.

[morari]

It's basically auto-complete, but impossible to disable. Furthermore, isntead of keeping addresses that I actually typed into the address bar, it shows frequented sites. That is stupid. I have a bookmarks folder for a reason, it can be searched. Take away the awesome bar!

Re:I Hate the Awesome Bar.

[Anonymous Coward]

As many people hate the awesomebar more people love it, and well there is an option in the about:config prefs that changes the search behaviour to only match addresses you have actually typed, it is something like browser.urlbar.matchonlytyped set it to true and it will only search addresses you have actually typed.

What the hell is a screencast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a video?

Why not call it a video?

What is it with people making up nonsense words all the time.

Re:What the hell is a screencast?

[deanston]

Couldn't agree more. Call it what it is - a Flash video. Did it only struck me that the fact that a browser company requires a 3rd party PLUG-IN to show off its new product instead of using a next generation web standard is just moronic? What's next, convert the Mozilla site to ColdFusion? While you're at it, why not just use AIR instead of FF? It's exactly pointless use of Flash like this that perpetuates that format that has begin to fall out of favor with more and more Windows and OS X users, but seems to be openly embraced and craved by Linux world.

Re:What the hell is a screencast?

[Nullav]

Quite the interesting textcast you have there.

It's about the plugins

[oblivious]

I tried Firefox 3 for a while. It's great for general browsing. There are 2 major downsides, though --

First, it's butt ugly. Installing themes helped some, but not completely.

Second, half of my plugins don't work. I use Firebug, WebDeveloper, and Selenium all the time. Selenium and Webdeveloper don't work yet, and Firebug for FF3 is not yet ready for prime time. I downgraded to FF2 so I can continue to work.

Re:It's about the plugins

[Admiral Justin]

Web Developer does work.

Re:It's about the plugins

[NoMaster]

Thirdly, the 'Awesome Bar' is retarded, as countless others have pointed out upthread. Sorry to the lovers of it, but when typing 'as' consistently brings up slashdot.org and youtube.com as the first 2 choices before a URL actually starting with those 2 letters (like ask.metafilter.com - and yes, before you ask, all 3 are in my history and bookmarks), then you need to sit down with the developers and explain that it'd be kinder for all concerned if the feature was taken out back to visit the Yearling and Ol' Shep...

(Actually, it's even dumber than that. Typing in "me" brings up www.theage.com.au as the first choice - c'mon, an unbookmarked URL which I last visited about a week and a half ago ranks higher than two other sites starting with those same 2 letters which I visit multiple times a day, and are actually in my bookmarks?. The letters 'me' don't even appear in that first entry until about 10 words into the friggin' description! )

Fourthly, it's butt-ugly. Oh, you already mentioned that. OK, let me pick on the forward/back history. Quick, don't look - up and down; which is forwards and which is backwards in the history? Screwing with the original logical design - individual history dropdowns on the back and forwards buttons - has left users with a confusing non-obvious UI, and the Firefox team with an ongoing argument amongst their own UI "designers" (yes, scare quotes are necessary...) over which of the competing keyhole/buttonhole designs is the least fugly.

Yes, I've tried all the FF3 betas. Yes, I'll be sticking with FF2, potential exploits be damned, until I see signs that the FF devs are thinking of users, not features.

Re:It's about the plugins

[BZ]

If you type "as" and select "ask.metafilter.com", that gets remembered. The next time, "ask.metafilter.com" will be higher in the list. If that's always the site you mean when you type "as", it'll end up at the top of the list pretty quickly.

That is, this feature adapts the browser to the way you happen to browse. It just takes it a little bit to learn how you browse. Which means that there's effectively a break-in period....

Re:It's about the plugins

[NoMaster]

Uh, no it doesn't. How long do I have to wait for this to magically happen? Because it's been several weeks now, visiting that particular site several times a day (& /. only every few days), and it steadfastly refuses to move from the 3rd position on the list.

Note that, as I mentioned in another reply, this isn't the only case where this happens. Currently, typing "sl" for me brings up "qut.edu.au" first, "www.visibledust.com" second, then "slashdot.org". At worst, that's WTF terrirory - at best, it's like FF3 has decided "OK, I know enough, I'm not going to learn and adapt anymore", and just sticks with its chosen ordering whether the user wants that or not.

Note, also, that highlighting and deleting the offending entries isn't the answer. Nor is "just type 3 letters - sla". What, do I now have to modify my behaviour to fit in with a "feature" who's purpose is supposedly to modify its behaviour to fit in with me? Or do I have to delete and rebuild my profile every time it gets stuck?

Fundamentally, FF3's behaviour violates the 'principle of least surprise' - that stuff should be where you left it last time. Remember when people were bitching about MS's introduction of the stupid "personalised menus" in Windows? Last non MS-sponsored survey I saw on that, 30-something % of people had personalised menus turned off, and better than 50% of the people who didn't were glad to find out they could be turned off. And yet, like the MS devs before them, FF devs & fanboys seem to think that the gee-whiz-ness of an 'intelligent' UI 'learning' like this outweighs the annoyance of UI inconsistency.

It doesn't - it's just dumb. Worse than that - it's annoying. Annoying enough to stop this little black duck from adopting FF3. Hell, I'm even starting to think "Y'know, despite it's ugliness and lack of a decent ad-blocker, Safari isn't that bad..."

Re:It's about the plugins

[NoMaster]

Addendum: I've been using FF since ... oh, I dunno, 0.6-something? Certainly well before it was considered 'mainstream', or even 'stable' or 'ready for full-time use'; back when it was just a little side-project called "Phoenix" (actually, come to think of it, it may have even been before it was given a name...). I haven't always agreed with their development decisions, but this is the first time I can point at something (several things, actually - the "keyhole" buttons and new forward/back history list are further examples) and say "that's retarded". Retarded enough for me to start seriously looking at other browsers.

Re:It's about the plugins

[BZ]

> Because it's been several weeks now, visiting that particular site several times a day (& /.
> only every few days), and it steadfastly refuses to move from the 3rd position on the list.

You're typing "as" and then selecting the site, I assume?

In that case, that sure sounds like a bug. Just so I have the pertinent data when I file it, which (if any) of those sites are bookmarked? They should be marked with stars in the search results dropdown. As I recall, whether a site is bookmarked factors into the ordering.

Re:It's about the plugins

[NoMaster]

OK, this is what happens for me (tested on a different machine, so I'm not polluting the results with all of today's viewing of /. - results from this machine are either the same, or very similar):

Type "as", get:

1. slashdot.org - bookmarked
2. youtube.com (page title "YouTube - Broadcast Yourself") - not bookmarked
3. ask.metafilter.com - bookmarked

Type "me", get:

1. www.theage.com.au (page title "The Age - World News, Finance News & Breaking News - Melbourne, Australia | theage.com.au") - not bookmarked
2. ask.metafilter.com - bookmarked
3. metatalk.metafilter.com - not bookmarked
4. www.metafilter.com - bookmarked

Another example - type "sl", get:

1. qut.edu.au (page title "QUT | Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane Australia") - not bookmarked
2. www.visibledust.com (page title "VisibleDust - DSLR Camera Sensor Cleaning") - not bookmarked
3. slashdot.org - bookmarked

Note that this has occurred, with variations, for me on 4 different machines (2 x OS X, 1 x WinXP, 1 x Vista), in all FF3 versions since b2, and across multiple new profiles.

Look, honestly, I don't expect this to be fixed to a useable satisfaction for me - I've read enough of the FF/Moz dev mailing lists, blogs, forums, and WONTFIXed Bugzilla reports to know that the devs and their fanboys think the awesomebar is awesome, and they're not going to back down on it (embarrassed to admit they were wrong?) - but I do appreciate your effort (and, if my guess is right - Boris? - I know where you fit in Mozilla's scheme of things). And as I've also outlined elsewhere, I think sticking to this new behaviour is fundamentally wrong, at least in a URL bar - you want autocomplete behaviour there, not search behaviour.

Yes, it is a cool concept; no, it's bloody annoying in a URL bar where it shouldn't be matching on whatever random crap appears anywhere in the URL or page title; yes, I'd be happy if they put it somewhere else - the search bar, perhaps, or maybe the history sidebar?

Re:It's about the plugins

[BZ]

For what it's worth, I filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=438282 on this. One of the folks familiar with the weighting algorithm was interested in seeing the output of pasting this string:

C=Components;c=C.classes,i=C.interfaces;m="@mozilla.org/";f=c[m+"file/directory_service;1"].getService(i.nsIProperties).get("ProfD",i.nsIFile);f.append("places.sqlite");q=[];s=c[m+"storage/service;1"].getService(i.mozIStorageService).openDatabase(f).createStatement("SELECT input,use_count,url FROM moz_inputhistory JOIN moz_places ON id=place_id WHERE input LIKE
'sl%'");d=[];a="%0a";g=s.getString;while(s.executeStep())d.push([g(0),g(1),g(2)].join(a));open('data:text/plain,'+d.join(a+a))

(with all the linebreaks replaced by spaces) in the "Code:" field in the Error Console and clicking "Evaluate". That basically lists the entries in the database that match the string, with their weights, as far as I can tell (from running it myself, and by code inspection).

> to know that the devs and their fanboys think the awesomebar is awesome,

My own perspective on this is that it really is, when it works as it should. Which it has for me, so far. I can definitely see how it would really suck when it doesn't rank things right, though, hence wanting to get to the bottom of this....

> and they're not going to back down on it
> (embarrassed to admit they were wrong?)

I think it's more that it does tend to work better than the other for most people, from all indications. Not to say that indications are never wrong, of course. ;)

> (and, if my guess is right - Boris?

Good guess!

On another personal note, I do agree that making the jump from expecting autocomplete to expecting search takes some adjusting and is quite jarring at first. I found that once I got used to it I could get to things faster, but given the wide variety of learning and information processing styles people have, I can certainly see that this might not be a universal outcome. If this setup really just doesn't work for you, I'm sorry... and it might be worth filing a bug to have more control (either via preferences or via an extension) over the exact SQL that gets executed here. It could be an interesting space for extensions to experiment in, and an SQL tweak to do old-style autocomplete ought not be that hard to write, I would think.

Let me know if you'd rather not file such a bug yourself and I'll do it.

Not impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

So they made the URL bar more annoying and even less like a URL bar, moved the bookmark button into the URL bar, made the favicon display the name of the company that owns the site, and added a bookmark search.

Am I missing something? How is this a point release?

Re:piss frost!

[Anonymous Coward]

well, technically that last post was on topic then and is modded incorrectly as such.

IPv6 hiccups

[multi io]

For the last couple of months I couldn't install updates for my FF add-ons, neither on FF2 nor 3. The download would always hang indefinitely. I never cared enough to investigate this -- until today. It turns out that releases.mozilla.org (the server where the updates are hosted) has an IPv6 address (2001:4f8:0:2::1f), and since my box has one too, FF tries to download the updates via IPv6. Unfortunately, the webserver at 2001:4f8:0:2::1f, when asked to get the update's .xpi file, only sends the header and then hangs indefinitely without closing the connection.

If you ask me, this is inexcusable. Shouldn't many more people have this problem? Doesn't Vista by default try very aggressively to set up a v6 connection automatically?

Re:piss frost!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Mine was ontopic too, since I was discussing the topic of ... topicness as begin by spazdor.

What I love about this is that we very likely made some fool mod waste 3-4 mod points just to mark a clearly offtopic thread as 'offtopic' :D

New UI is great, your face still isn't

[vegitto]

I swear I am just amazed (I'm not sure if I should be anymore however) at the amount of idiotic hypocrisy that I have found on Slashdot recently. Changing the User Interface is ALWAYS going to happen and just because you got used to some pre-1990s feature doesn't mean it should get in the way of the new users coming on board. It also by NO MEANS WHAT SO EVER, should come in the way of the natural evolution of software. Exactly the same thing happened with Office 2007 came out with their brand new UI. For Christ sake, how can anyone think the old UI was better than the new one? It just ISN'T. Likewise with the new "awesome bar". Its far more uniform with technology of today (tagging, searching and relevance) than the old location bar.

Re:New UI is great, your face still isn't

[NoMaster]

Last year people were carrying on about the importance of muscle memory, and how internal consistency - that things should be where they were last time you used them - was the most important feature in a UI for enhancing usability and efficiency.

Now, people are raving about Firefox's 'Tardbar, which throws consistency out the window and can't even consistently decide whether bookmark status, last visted time/date, or whether the letters you've typed even appearing in the URL it wants to present you with is important. Sorry, that's not a "natural evolution", or even "uniform with technology of today" - it's a big "WTF?!!?!"

already tried that

[globaljustin]

I tried that...i deleted all the google and gmail cookies individually and it changed nothing...

Re:One of the most interesting new features

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dickhead, don't blame me. I tried as well as I could to delete the old Firefox, delete the program folder, and install Firefox 3. But the fucking thing doesn't work. Maybe its Bill Gate's problem. All I know is that the god damn thing doesn't load Gmail.

Re:awesomebar

[Barny]

Ok, for those unable to opperate google.com

Add a custom entry in about:config named "browser.urlbar.richResults"

Set it to false

Restart browser

Hard isn't it :)

Augh! Flash does not scroll

[sentientbrendan]

Watching this video *on* firefox 3 on my laptop with 1024 x 768 resolution doesn't work!

For some reason if the whole flash doesn't fit on the screen, firefox won't let me scroll to see the rest of it. Bug?

The biggest reason to use FF3

[professorfalcon]

The biggest reason to use FF3: they finally fixed the stupid memory leaks.

Re:awesomebar

[siddesu]

thanks, i'll try it.

Re:piss frost!

[Anonymous Coward]

so if I actually started talking about how I like the new features of Firefox 3, would that now be considered off topic given that we're off topic here?

passport clippy... i mean larry?

[Hut_tuH]

at first glance.. i despise the fact that the favicon or "identity" button can change color and grow to show more information.

if its not Broken don't fix it. The Location bar was fine, all the "new" features of it basically does what the search bookmarks/history sidebar already did...

an "awesome sidebar" would have been good....not being given the choice of how to use something as fundamental as the location bar,or even the adjective to describe it is .... microsofty.

what makes(made?) ff great was that it was a simple browser without any of the stuff you didn't want or need.... and if you CHOSE to have crap you wanted or needed, thats what the addons were for.

History cleaner

[kop]

We need an extension that checks visited sites against netnanny and erases the naughty ones from the FF history.

Delete in Awesomebar

[irp]

It took a couple of days getting used to the awesome bar (I also had the problem that "sl" for slashdot gave a lot of irrelevant sites).

However, either it learns, or I'm unconsciously getting better typing the right words.

And best of all - you can delete the items displayed by hovering above them and pressing "delete".

So you *can* clean the embarrassing porn links away :-)

Re:Delete in Awesomebar

[BZ]

> However, either it learns, or I'm unconsciously getting better typing
> the right words.

It learns. That's the whole point: without that, matching on all sorts of data would really suck.

Re:piss frost!

[uberphear]

Let us all hail the glorious staircase of mod-downs.

Re:piss frost!

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

In my opinion you would be - because that's not the topic being discussed in this thread.

A picture really is worth a thousand words...

[Anonymous Coward]

so at 25fps for 4 minutes, the video is worth 6 million words. That's almost 2x "War and Peace".

The new address bar is incredible

[AbRASiON]

That address bar is brilliant.

I've seen several complaints across the web about it and I simply do not know how.
I am the first person to complain when something changes un-necessarily (Windows Vista's explorer in classic mode is nothing short of an abortion, a filthy disgusting abortion and I mean every goddamned word of that, you'd be surprised how many little bugs are in it)

That being said, this firefox bar is virtually flawless, it seems to remember what I normally open based on what I type, how often I go there, how many times I hit the down arrow for another option etc.
As a hardcore keyboard user, I love it.
The only flaw is one of the benefits and that's how it hunt and pecks through your bookmarks.
If you share your machine and say you have bookmarks like 'tranny gets railed by 15 guys' it could be kind of bad if your co-worker jumps on your PC and starts typing in 'tran' for transmission or transformers in the address bar :/

Baring that though, it truely is gold.
Oh and it's genuinely and substantially faster.

Now just fix google browser sync, tabs menu and we're good to go.

Re:awesomebar

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we're not! It sorta makes it look like FF2, but the whole database thing looking through all the history bookmarks and the rest is there to stay.

If this were microsoft it would be decried by all you lot as the privacy nightmare that this thing is.

Cool Delivery of Information, and Educating

[LifesABeach]

There were two things about the demo that stood out as an "Ah-ha!", to me. The front man was using a screen recorder with audio attached to show how a product worked. This technique could be modified to teach a lesson that is taught in school. Kids that miss a day because of some other activity scheduling could get the lesson on their time, not class time. Then another "Ah-ha!" happened. This could be bundled with open source products to show how the product is envisioned to work. One of greatest short comings of software in general is its learning curve. This concept could lower the learning curve Geometrically.

Re:'Downloads' - missing button to open parent fol

[Anonymous Coward]

Browser should display them automatically next time I visit that website!

No it shouldn't. Get an extension.

Fenghuang

[Zoxed]

> But the code is all open source, so if lots of people side with you, I'm sure we'll see a new browser branch off from FF2 that backports all of the FF3 speed improvements.

Or you could fork the feature-bloated Firefox to create a leaner, meaner, cut down browser. Maybe it could be called Fenghuang ?

Re:awesomebar

[macdaddy]

Ok, for those unable to actually READ any of the results given by Google...

browser.urlbar.richResults has not worked since 3.0b3 when the Mozilla devs intentionally removed the ability to go back to using an URL bar for actual URLs and instead turned it into this god-awful search the world thing. And don't try to suggest using Oldbar. It does not bring back the old method. It only changes how the new search algorithm is displayed. Awesome bar is an awesome cluster fuck and an awesome example of the Moz devs not listening to the userbase. Goodbye Mozilla, hello something else.

Re:awesomebar

[WiFiBro]

thanks, so I won't try it.