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Firefox 3.1 Alpha "Shiretoko" Released
Just as you were getting used to 3.0, those Mozilla guys have announced 3.1's Alpha release. FTA "Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an 'early developer milestone,' the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar." You can download it if you dare.
I have no problems running FF3 with 2 and 3 tabs of different Gmail accounts open. I've only done this on Win2k, XP and Vista though.
Have you tried disabling all of your extensions to see if any of them are causing the problem?
I loathed the Awesomebar too. When I first started using it I would type "s" and it would list sites I only visited once, a year ago, because they had an "s" somewhere near the end of the URL, while sites with 's' near the beginning were listed much lower. This is obviously broken functionality, but I'm seeing less and less of that sort of thing the longer I use it. The longer you use it the better it gets; it has some kind of sorting algorithm that takes a while to get going properly. I have found typing a single word of the page title to relocate a page useful on occasion, and I now go for days at a time without cursing this unremovable feature.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I could already do that in FF2. Awesomebar added nothing but annoyance.
But hey, that's what add-ons are for, right?
I, personally, do not use Ctrl+tab to switch between tabs in firefox but I do not like the idea of them changing this functionality. In various other programs I use that have tabs, from mIRC to Visual studio (no, sorry, I haven't switched to *nix yet), ctrl+tab is the natural choice to swap between open tabs/windows and I do occasionally use this command here. It just seems universally consistent between most applications and Mozilla has decided to move away from this unofficial standard.
Wouldn't it be better to give this new functionality a new shortcut key, such as the aforementioned ctrl+pgdn?
Even Microsoft created a new shortcut key combination for Flip3D in vista and left the old alt+tab command more or less in tact.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I do hope that they've made optional the terrible self-signed certificate warnings as well. They make Firefox 3 totally unusable with embedded software/devices which generate self-signed certificates every time they start up.
Fine, by default have the current set-up but allow users to revert to the old pop-up system so that they can keep their sanity if they know what they're doing!
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
And you expect it to guess what you want accurately from you typing a single character? Keep typing! That said, I've been shocked at how often it DOES guess correctly what I'm interested in on just 1-3 characters.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
I'm sure that it's not really Slashdot he's talking about, merely using it as an example.
The drop-down menu history is VERY useful as a temporary set of bookmarks which you will only need for a short period (say a month) and don't want to litter your real bookmarks with.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
For me Firefox is now bookmarking every site I visit
That's the problem. The awesome bar conflates two different and important functions, the address bar and bookmarks. If they had provided a smart bookmarks feature instead of ruining the address bar, no one would be complaining.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I can see where that would be useful, it just does not fit my personal browsing style and honestly the forced paradigm shift away from using the location bar where you reference URLs alphabetically to one where you search your history has been an unwelcome one for me at least. I have been trying to hit it with an open mind, as my love for the application is true, but I have to question the logic of making such a fundamental change non-toggleable. I personally would have preferred a more intelligent bookmarking system as I don't really need to see every redirect URL when I know exactly where I want to go.
It has also got me thinking that I am probably just a URL remembering dinosaur, and soon when the .product domains come online, no one will remember domain names anymore and we will have to search using history in such a manner.
(/local/home/curiosity)-#who -u|grep thecat|cut -c 44-49|xargs kill -9
I DON'T WANT IT TO GUESS ANYTHING. I want it to show me urls that start with the letter I typed. If I type 's' I don't want to see fucking ebay. Anywhere.
As Firefox 3 includes a Smart Bookmarks feature (by that exact name, stuck automatically in your bookmarks bar), I'm honestly unsure whether you're trolling or just ignorant.
I love the awesome bar, but that comes largely in part because all of the URLs on my company's website and intranet haven't been nicely converted to pretty permalinks and I'm not a big fan of trying to remember KB article IDs and stupid crap like that. I just type the first few letters of the article name and it's in the list.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Fair enough. You used bookmarks and so the awesomebar does not work for you. I have 5 bookmarks on my bookmark toolbar. I stopped manually keeping any more bookmarks than will fit on my toolbar because as soon as I have to keep a list of nested bookmarks I am unable to easily access most of them.
Actually, I don't use bookmarks at all. That's why the awesome bar doesn't work for me. Because it tries to stuff bookmarks in my address bar, and I don't want bookmarks at all. If I need to visit a page again, I'll google it.
Like I said, I can see how the feature is useful, it just doesn't belong in the address bar.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Just ignorant I guess. I don't use bookmarks, and I don't think I've ever clicked the bookmarks menu on my copy of FF3.
As I've been saying, it can be a useful feature. But they should provide a 'search history' bar or something, and not mess up the simple predictable behavior of the address bar.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Are you trolling? The awesomebar lives up to its name. Among all the other good stuff that came with 3, that one stands out and I wasn't expecting it to.
red pro -> programming.reddit.com
flix mem -> www.netflix.com/memberHome
s gmail -> https://gmail.com
It even pulls words out of the titles of pages I've visited, so I don't even have to remember the url.
As a web developer it makes my work easier as I can type in for example 'dev lookup 1445' and it will often pull up a url like www.longdevsitename.com/longblah/lookup.php?uid=1445, which often happens to be exactly what I was looking for. Firefox 2 doesn't even come close to this.
However, if you want to look at a Wikipedia article about Dashiell Hammett that you read last week, it makes a lot more sense to type "Dash" in the address bar than "wikip^H^H^H^H^Hen.wikipedia.org/Dash."
Actually it makes more sense to just put "Dashiell Hammett" into the search bar. It makes no sense to put anything other than addresses into the address bar.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I wouldn't say I hate it, but I do find it gets in my way fairly often.
When I'm developing a website, I'm likely to have a couple of subdomains up for testing: dev.example.com (on my local machine), test.example.com (on the server) and www.example.com (production site).
This really tends to screw with the awesomebar's search algorithm.
dev.example.com will most dominate the top of the list, since I'm visiting and reloading pages on it most often. I'm so used to being able to type example.com into the location bar to go to the production site that it catches me at least half the time with the autocomplete, and I find myself on the dev or test site (usually when I'm typing faster than I'm thinking).
I'm getting more and more used to it (and to typing in www), so it's starting to happen less.
Recently, however, I was working on a site that had something like www.example.com (production) and examples.example.com (for testing). This drove me crazy enough that I did most of my work/testing with FF2.
Most of the time I find the awesomebar fairly useful, but I would love to be able to exclude specific sites (or patterns) from the 'rich results'.
Because if the OP doesn't find the feature useful, then no one is allowed to either, dammit. Otherwise his worldview is shot because he'll be forced to confront the fact that he is not, in fact, the arbiter of taste for the population at large.
Having the choice to disable a such controversial feature is the freedom developers give to the end users. I wish they continue listening to the customers. How much I hate it when a supposedly "addon" features become sticky behaviors of an application. I often do not type the url bar. Google does a better job when I want to find a website
You should at least update to 2.0.0.16. It works the same.
although it has a painfully stupid name that makes me want to hate it already
That's really the -biggest- strike against it. The presumption that I or anyone else would think its awesome immediately triggers the hate response. If they'd simply called it 'enhanced address bar', made it optional but default, and described it as 'awesome' there wouldn't have been this massive resistance to it.
The reality is that its really good. I can reliably pull up a LOT more url's with a lot less effort. It is true that some of the mnemonics for urls that I was used to in FF2 don't work, and I've had to expand to 2 characters or 3. But after using it since release, 's' brings up slashdot first again. But what's even more interesting, is that the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th results are all also sites I frequent regularly, and FF3 has made it easier to get to them. I don't use bookmarks nearly as often now. One of my clients has a page listing its branch offices that I need to refer to frequently for contact information... i used to pull up their site and browse to the locations page, or use a bookmark... in FF3 i type 'loc' and its the first match. The next few matches are the list of locations for a couple of other businesses I've looked up recently... which is also useful.
I really have nothing negative to say about FF3's address bar.
To those people who are finding a couple of their most frequently used sites have moved 'down' the list, the benefits do outweigh the cost. Push through it, so that FF3 can learn or choose a new mnemonic for that url; it -is- worth the trouble.
Its pretty amusing really on some level. This is the sort of thing we routinely ridicule our less nerdy counterparts for... we mock them for their refusal to use a product called 'firefox' because it doesn't sound 'professional' like 'internet explorer'... we ridicule their inability and/or blind refusal to cope with even a slight deviation in user interface... we tell anecdotes about how we had to set Windows XP's theme to classic before our bosses could/would use it...because it was scary and different... or because it looked like 'candy' and they didn't want to use a childish OS.
And yet here we are... its comical to see how many of us 'enlightened' people are hung up on the feature name, or the fact that a couple keyboard shortcuts are working a bit differently. Aren't we the same people who are supposedly able to effortlessly transition from platform to platform, from distro to distro, able to pick up any pieces of electronics and figure it out. Last time I checked, we weren't known for buying a new phone and rejecting/hating it simply because the menu arrangement wasn't identical to the old one, or because it had to 'learn' our preferred autocompletions for text messaging all over again. People we mock and ridicule do that. How does it feel? :)
Anything I've visited within the scope of my history is easily accessed via the address bar. Anything new I want to find is best accessed via the search bar. This is much the way its always been, except now the address bar is better at it. For me, it has completely supplanted bookmarks, as the sites I go to most often are shown by default, and any that don't make the cut are showing within 1 or 2 letters.
You seem very anti-awesomebar, as I was at first, but I'm curious if your complaint is more philosophical (I don't like the idea of it) or practical (it doesn't do what I want it to). Because I'm almost positive that you can get the awesome bar to act very much like the old bar if you continue to use it that way. If you hit 's' to get to slashdot often, slashdot will quickly become the first result when pressing s. If you like to hit 'so' to go to "someotherwebsite", that will quickly become your top 'so' result. The behavior of the awesomebar can be as predictable as your browsing habits.
Why exactly is that convenient or logical?
If you want Youtube you should type a 'y', not 't'.
Don't even get me started on Flickr showing up when you type a 't'... The damned letter isn't even in the word.
Convenient or not, this is counterintuitive behavior which will just confuse new users of Firefox who you've been trying to convince to use it for security reasons.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
So basically, eBay is doing SEO tactics, and hey, they're working! I guess it's irresponsible for a browser to assume users don't purposefully visit scummy SEO pages?
For context, click Parent.
Um, you're doing it wrong, you should be enjoying that stuff WITH your wife =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
News flash, just type a *SECOND* or even *THIRD* character and amazingly watch as the awesome bar figures out much more accurately which website you are attempting to visit. Its like me only entering 1 character reply to your post and expecting you to know what I'm talking about, you, and the awesomebar can only act on the information its given, and if the information is incomplete then mistakes will happen.