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Firefox Beta Touts Advanced Engine, Solves 8 Flaws
nandemoari writes "Mozilla may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Firefox 3.1. Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox — a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users.
As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Mozilla is nearly ready to release the next beta version of Firefox 3.1 to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week." It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.
Firefox 3.1 Scrapped?
...how many critical vulnerabilities have they INTRODUCED?
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Right-click is a nightmare on linux platforms (don't know if it affects others, I'm exclusively a linux shop these days).
It randomly follows an action rather than bringing up the menu about one time in ten. Opening up email programs, choosing a new window, bringing up link properties... needs fixing, badly. (Workaround for fellow sufferers - install mouse gestures add-on)
Also it seems really really processor-hungry on one of my machines. Wish I knew why.
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue and all the memory leaks. My firefox process is currently using 1.1GB of RAM and I have to restart it about twice a day just to free up some RAM. I've only got about 4 extensions installed and I've tried disabling each of them in turn to ensure the problem didn't lie in an extension.
Interesting how stories spin out differently depending on the browser in question. If it were an IE story, there would be howls of derision that the vulnerabilities existed in the first place and questions about why Microsoft didn't fix them more quickly.
Still crashes on me everytime I try to close it. 2.0 did not.
Because Acid3 only tests a small part of CSS compliance. Giving fanboys pretty number to shout about should not be a priority. Also, please don't reply to posts that you are actually not replying to. Replying to the first post is obvious attention seeking.
It's wonderful that adding a single browser to face down internet explorer has turned this into a race for speed that will make internet more usable and awesome than ever.
And best of all it's made websites more compatible than ever, meaning that we're free to use those "other" browsers! Thanks Mozilla/Firefox!
</hippie>
It seems like 3.1 has been stuck at beta 2 for several months. This is while Chrome and Safari have leapt ahead with the taps and top interface and other improvements.
I still prefer Firefox, but the difference in screen real estate between Firefox and Safari Beta 4 is jarring.
This space left intentionally blank.
Firefox 3.x is STILL straddled with the "Awesome Bar" AKA the "Awful Bar". At what point will they recognize the groundswell of DISLIKE for this part of the browser and just go back to the old 2.x behavior?
Unfortunately, the manner in which they implemented the Awful Bar means that it's impossible to go back unless you want to program your own version. You basically have to DISABLE the bar entirely, simply sacrificing the URL bar for anything other than typing URLs into.
I thought Firefox was supposed to be a "community" project? Why isn't the community getting input?
Because the only people who dislike the awesome bar are people who haven't figured out how to train it?
s = slashdot, y = youtube, i = images.google, g = google, gm = gmail. x = xkcd, etc etc
I love Firefox, I currently use it... but only one question : 8 flaws solved / how many vulnerabilities not solved?
I can't call that English
Please fix your flash plugin. Seems that once a day if I go to a page with considerable flash (which is most pages these days), the browser will crash and when I examine the crashfile, it's *gasp* always you. I've reinstalled flash and FF 3.0.6.....
So what is your complaint about the new location bar?
I switched to Firefox 3 some time ago, and I've never bothered to notice the differences (which means that the new behavior doesn't bother me or get in my way).
*sigh* back to work...
I guess because everybody who does not live in geek-land likes it.
I hated it at first too, now I don't know how I'd lived without it.
An option to disable it would be nice, but removing it entirely? *Please* don't!
Ooooooooooooor you could just go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0.
But you know, if aimlessly bitching is your thing, please continue.
Wes
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue and all the memory leaks.
I have the exact opposite experience.
My firefox currently uses 13% of my 2 GB, which is 266 MB. Sometimes it becomes horribly slow.
Even if it crept up to 500 MB, I wouldn't mind much (I'm using almost 1 GB of core and 800 megs of cache ATM). If it was always fast and snappy, I'd be much happier.
I mean, come on---I'm having 50-60 tabs open but I'm only looking at one at any given moment in time...
Also, when it restores the last session, why doesn't it load the tabs in MRU order? Does it think I want to look at the tab that's been stale for two weeks?
Fix the raw speed and be smart about CPU allocation so it does the important things first and appears faster. Then fix the memory.
Anecdote + (-Anecdote) = 0 data ;-)
by the time you install all of the essential add-ons to firefox, it becomes slow again.
a few things I can't live without are adblock, rip, forecastfox, ietab, twitterfox, firebug, foxmarks and ubiquity.
With these installed, the browser is no longer fast.
Oh well.
They're using their grammar skills there.
This article sounds like empty hype to me.
I still use Firefox, and will continue to do so for the time being. The reason being adblock and flashblock, exclusively. I am not as happy with Firefox as I was when I first used the 0.8 something version. I feel Mozilla have lost their way. Too much bloat like the awesome bar -- which frankly just does not work for me at all, it's an hindrance, not a help.
I want to use chrome, because of the multithreading. Firefox absolutely needs to have multithreading to compete. It can be a true dog to use if you have tabs that reload in the background.
The second that there is some sort of adblock and flashblock for Chrome I'm gone. No more Firefox for me.
I'm sorry to have to do that. I actually bought the firefox T-Shirt. I was active in the GetFirefox campaign. But now, I use it only because of the extensions.
Please, Mozilla get your act together. Now more useless features that should really be extensions, and get multithreading sorted. I want to be a Firefox fan again.
Personally, I like the awesome bar but I do wish there was a way to easily disable different classes of entries from getting added. I have turned off history on my machine because the awesome bar just gets too cluttered, but I use it all the time to quickly navigate to my bookmarks.
I loved it from the first time I saw it.
Maybe, just maybe, not everyone hates it. Maybe it's just a vocal minority that hates it. Maybe the 'community' -is- getting input and the problem is that you are going against the community, not them.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I love the "awesome bar" myself, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of the community in this community project gave Mozilla similar feedback.
I'll admit, the bar hasn't helped me find the really odd or obscure site I havn't visited in a while, but that's what bookmarks are for.
What's your beef with the awesome bar? I actually *like* how it searches through my bookmarks as I type in keywords. No more having to go through multiple levels of bookmark folders. I pretty much just click the yellow star to bookmark a page, then add a few custom tags to it. I got rid of the "I feel lucky" google search behavior, but I've been doing that since firefox 1.x...
Has anyone heard when or if Tamarin is going into FF at any point in time? I checked the site quite vigorously the other day and could find no estimates, time-lines, or even projected version.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.
Oh god. I thought we were passed this. It felt like only yesterday that linux distrobutions were playing the "Ha Ha we're going to one-up your distrobution with our version number" game. It really got out of hand. I anticipate seeing the same thing happening soon with the current crop of browsers.
The ACID3 test is not important. It tests for unimportant small rendering bugs, and CSS3, which isn't even a standard yet.
I like it. It lets me type part of title of a website (e.g. "Do you" or "Girls with" for http://www.dywhcomic.com/ and http://www.daniellecorsetto.com/gws.html respectively). This means I don't have to remember the obscure URL.
It brings up things from my bookmarks, even if I haven't looked at them for ages (which is good).
Etc. Just because a few people very vocally dislike the thing, doesn't mean it isn't popular.
These replies don't look like a "groundswell of dislike" to me.
Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users.
Excuse me if I'm missing something, but aren't eight critical vulnerabilities supposed to be patched in the stable branch instead of a beta branch?
(I also am not entirely sure whether fixing so many critical vulnerabilities should garner applause from Firefox users...)
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
I know all the new JavaScript engine is supposedly much "faster", but I don't see it in normal use.
Compared to Google Chrome, Firefox 3.1 is dog slow and I don't understand why? I only have a 4 add-ons, including adblock plus. I use firefox on 3 different computers, and they are all much slower compared to Chrome. Every time I use Chrome I am shocked how the pages render instantly... I would switch if Adblock for Chrome were available and a few other features I love in Firefox.
"Microsoft is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of IE -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted IE users."
slashdot users laugh at the propaganda
but when a firefox shill says
"Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users."
slashdot puts it in the story summary reverently
propaganda is propaganda is propaganda. no matter the source, even if you love the source. just say "firefox fixed some bugs." and leave the sleazy ad copy out of it please
what next?
"the exploit found in firefox is a feature, not a bug" maybe?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The biggest problem with the awesome bar is that 5 or 6 sites show up all of the time, and nothing else does. Typing in 'w' or 'c' will pull up your most used "www." site or ".com" site, etc.
There are some great features with the new bar. I like some of them. But those 5 or 6 sites that always pop up are already in my link bar at the top. I'd like to be able to type in 'm' and see all the sites I visit that begin with the letter 'm' instead of "The New York Times."
The default behavior can be annoying. But that's why you stop bitching about it, install whichever extension reverts the behavior, or even better, the Configuration Mania extension and go under "Location Bar" and set to "Match only websites you've typed previously" - also, learn to use bookmarks in a temporary fashion as well as permanent fashion, so that instead of leaving the browser open all day to accumulate memory leak buildup, you can close the browser and go back to the page...
Problem solved...
I concur - the Mighty Mouse is not so mighty, Apple's worst product in a long time. I have the problem you describe in Safari 3 and 4 beta. Plus scrolling down has worn out somehow.
Right clicking on the Mighty Mouse appears to have been designed by someone who only used one-button mice before. You have to pretty much take your fingers off of the mouse and only click on the right side of the mouse. It would have made much more sense to make it signal a right click if the right "button" area of the mouse was being touched, regardless of what's happening on the left. It sucks, and they really should fix it (probably could be done with a firmware update).
As for the scroll ball, I have used the "turn the mouse upside down and run the scroll ball around on your pants leg" method with some success. It only works until you get something inside the scroll ball that won't come out. My primary Mighty Mouse (I have four, two are bluetooth and on the same desk) would not scroll right, and even throwing it at the floor and wall didn't work, so I decided to break the damned thing open.
It's actually not hard to crack the mouse open, if you don't mind breaking that little collar that runs around the bottom of the mouse. There are two flexible connections that you have to disconnect, but you can remove the scroll ball mechanism with a small phillips screwdriver, disassemble it, clean it out, and reassemble it. I did it a month ago with no further problems. There is an order to reassembling the mouse and not having one of the flexible connections pull out, but it's not hard to trial and error your way through.
Putting moderation advice in your
At what point will they recognize the groundswell of DISLIKE for this part of the browser and just go back to the old 2.x behavior?
You're assuming that the "groundswell of DISLIKE" actually exists. Citation needed.
Personally, I think it rocks.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I thought Firefox was supposed to be a "community" project? Why isn't the community getting input?
It is a community project. Definitely. But I think you belong to the vocal minority here.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Even worse, it will bring up the same five or 6 sites REGARDLESS of how often you view them. I went to 4chan ONCE on a fresh VM with FF3 installed, and FOREVER AFTER it was the first result in the Awful bar! I had to do a complete uninstall and reinstall of FF3 (including manual deletion of leftover folders) to get this to stop!
Since then the first thing I do after installing FF3 is go to about:config and completely disable all the Awful bar functions.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
But only Firefox. Somehow Konqueror and Opera manage to survive the crash* of one measly plugin while the great and mighty Firefox goes down in flames.
*Chrome's allegedly designed to do so, too. Although the one time I tried it shortly after release it almost immediately crashed when, you guessed it, Flash decided to take the day off
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
So if you want to do it, beware; if it's off topic in the thread at the top it better be a good post and worth reading.
Or else electrosoccertux will come and GET YOU!!
BINGO!
While the Awful bar would make an EXCELLENT extension, it is wrong to force it on people that don't want it. FF started out as a nice, stripped-down browser that you could customize any way you want with easy to install extensions. now it's become a bloated, slow beast that get's features put in that a significant amount of users DO NOT WANT (note I said "significant amount", not necessarily "majority". Just because users who don't want it are a minority doesn't mean we shouldn't get a say.)
The problem is that this is one part of the browser that is NOT modular. There isn't a way to REVERT the behavior back to the old way, we are stuck with it. Even extensions can't fully fix the problem. (Yes, I've tried "Old Bar" extension and all the about:config tricks. None of them return the desired traditional functionality.)
So basically I'm stuck with either completely disabling the URL bar, or the horrible new behavior. Frankly, i hate the new behavior enough that I narrowly prefer NO function to it's current function.
the lead devs for Mozilla need to listen to ALL the users and realize that NOT EVERYONE LIKES the new bar and they should make it MODULAR as it should be.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Jeez... I'm sure glad I'm not the only the only one who has been seeing this in the recent FF release. I've been seeing right-clicks ignored and then when you try again -- and successfully perform what you wanted to do -- the basic right-click menu would pop up, requiring yet another click to make it disappear. Intensely annoying. I was afraid that my beloved Kensington track ball was going bad. Glad to hear it's not a hardware problem.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Just because a few people are screaming doesn't mean it should be reverted. The rest of us are happily being more productive with the improvement it brings. It was odd at first, but now it's indispensable.
Seriously, do you really think Apple and Opera won't be upgrading their browsers for the next 9 months?
I thought that replying to the first post was a sign of horrible UI decisions. Anyone else notice the number of replies to the first post skyrocketed when the new design rolled out?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's not because of attention seeking, it's because the "real reply button" is either:
- not a button
or
- buried somewhere at the bottom of the page.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Am I the only one that likes the new bar? Searching for titles instead of URLs is kinda handy.
What's more, you shouldn't have to dig around in about:config to change a setting that doesn't actually do what you want.
The max rich results setting just means it won't display any search results. That's not even remotely the same as going back to an old-school auto-complete functionality.
To be fair, I hated it at first (and at times I still do) but while it sometimes has completely random matches, there are a number of sites that I can now get to much more easily, even without having bookmarked and tagged them. About the only thing that I do always do is use the oldbar extension as a basis for my CSS to get a slightly more sensible appearance (i.e. something that doesn't go half way down your screen with half a dozen results).
My beef with the Awful bar is precisely what you like about it.
I don't want it searching my bookmarks. I can go to my bookmarks on my own. And you know, as I am sitting here at my home PC in the family room with my kids running around behind me, it might be possible that I don't want them seeing the names and URLs some of the more Adult oriented sites that Mommy and Daddy surf together after they go to bed.
Ultimately, the main problem with the Awful bar is that it TAKES CONTROL AWAY FROM YOU. You can't tell it what to display, or when to display it, or what to search or not search. you can't turn it on or off without dicking around in the about:config. It has a very "Microsoft" feel to it. IE: This feature is "cool" (tm) and you VILL LIKE IT! VE HAF VEYS OF MAKINK YOU LIKE IT! HEIL MOZILLA!
I don't want my Browser doing things without my say-so. the Awful bar takes away some of my freedom and control. I want to keep my freedom and control.
It's that simple.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
"Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox â" a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users."
Yeah, because in the world of fanboys, this is just terrific news. Where as, if IE fixed 8 serious flaws before IE8 came out, they'd be all "LOL MICRO$OFT". Hypocrisy is grand, aint it?
If you want a secure browser, blasting IE and then looking towards Firefox is incredibly naive and shows ignorance to the facts.
I'm just so proud that more Firefox security holes have been plugged. WHY were they there in the first place?
Seems slashdot didn't post this story I submitted, but State of Colorado Calls Firefox insecure, IE Safe.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, YOU GET ELECTROSOCCERTUX.
We shall see how long electrosoccertux's reign of terror can last!
The meetings notes says they are "considering" changing the numbering. Until there's an official announcement saying that they are changing the numbering this shouldn't be taken as anything other than "yup, we discussed it".
From the wiki page:
"Version numbering
* considering 3.1 -> 3.5 to indicate increased scope
* will need to figure out how to update all our tools effectively (build, bugzilla, AMO, etc.) -- detailed plan coming this week
* beta 3 will still be shipped under 3.1 moniker
* labels existing increase in scope vs original 3.1 plan, not a willingness to further increase scope
* next step is to take it to dev-planning "
So yeah... it sounds like they are serious about changing the numbering but it looks like they need to finish crossing all the t's and dotting the i's first.
Insert Sig Here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_browser_usage_share.svg
if/ when the bulk of that piechart is firefox, rather than ie, revisit what you just said
you think microsoft doesn't patch bugs it finds first? really?
more ie bugs are found in the wild, simply because the rewards for finding such bugs are much larger
i'm sick of mac and firefox fanboys claiming their browser/ os is somehow more secure. its not more secure, its just less attacked, because less people use it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Check out about:config and the settings that begin with places.frecency. You will probably have to google them to figure out what they do.
Problem NOT solved.
As I stated in another post. There is NO WAY to revert the bar to it's old behavior. Extensions won't do it, about:config won't do it. The only thing that you can do is cripple the bar to do NOTHING but accept typed-in URLs. That's it.
Perhaps you should actually TRY to do a full revert before posting?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/05/1328244
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
God damn it, I'd have bet there would be a comment like this.
I think there is only one thing Mozilla got wrong with this bar: when migrating from FF2 to FF3, the initial behavior of this bar should have matched the database of the previous version. Because, like you, I were also annoyed when the list they presented what not was I used to see.
But, at one point I stopped bitching and decided to give it a (real) try. Guess what? I'll never come back to original behavior, to the point where it is painful for me to use a browser that do simple matching like FF2 do (or earlier version of Safari, IE, ...).
It depends on how accessible control of certain features should be.
If the UI designers crammed every about:config option into preferences it'd be information overload for most users. Presenting the most commonly used options and using about:config to modify the rest is perfectly acceptable in my opinion.
Now, whether or not the Awesome Bar should be configurable through preferences is another debate. Personally I am fine with it as is, and think most users probably wouldn't notice a difference or care. The only people I've noticed grouchy about it are die-hard FF 2.x users.
FF started out as a nice, stripped-down browser that you could customize any way you want with easy to install extensions. now it's become a bloated, slow beast
This is the way software seems to evolve, and it's interesting that free software is subject to it as well. Proprietary software adds new features as part of the forced upgrade cycle that they use to generate revenue, and they use proprietary file formats to virally propagate the need to upgrade even amongst users who hate the new features (I'm looking at you, Autodesk).
For proprietary software the feature bloat is necessary to justify marketing of the new version. But even free software is subject to this process of bloatification, so some of it must be due to other factors.
My best guess is that real users have diverse needs, and you can either try to satisfy all of them with an increasingly complex and unstable modular/plugin architecture or hugely complex configuration system, or you can adopt a philosophy of "this is what our software does, if you don't like it you should use something else."
Because browsers are universal they tend to go in the first direction. Slackware is a nice example of something that takes the other approach.
The problem with investing in configurability is that it eventually becomes too complex and annoying for people to use, and there are always going to be users for whom existing configuration facilities aren't quite configurable enough (see comments in this thread as to why existing workarounds for the Aweful Bar aren't doing it for them.) Every additional dimension of configurability makes testing harder and adds a layer of abstraction that makes things more bug-prone and slower. Eventually development grinds to a halt.
FireFox is a long way from that point, but I bet in a decade we'll be saying, "Remember FireFox?"
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I have found AwesomeBar to be indispensable for fighting against the horrible UI changes happening at Slashdot. I used to click my username up in the corner to check on my comments, but now one gets that Firehose-like page, and you would need to click on the comments section to get to them. With AwesomeBar I just need to start typing 'comments' and the URL will come up.
There's a real simple workaround for this. Type out something in the bar, wait for the list of sites to display. Use the down arrow key to highlight the site you want to delete, then press Delete.
That's it. It's gone from the list history.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
When I initially saw the awesome bar, I didn't like it - mainly due to when I went to navigate to gmail it showed me the titles of the mail for accounts that weren't mine.
It does expose the history alright, and to be fair that is something that was in the history list already. There is a extension that lets you filter sites from storing in your history. And I have this set to filter gmail which solved my problem.
Now I think it is brilliant. Just for finding sites I have been to or navigating bookmarks, It is excellent.
And as for the history, if it forces you to change your behavior to not leave traces of browsing you don't want other people to see in the history, it is probably a good thing - The kids were maybe already snooping into what Mommy and Daddy were looking at!
Problem solved...
Well, sure, if you're inclined to actually be proactive about modifying the things you dislike rather than whining that others should fix them for you. Unfortunately, the OP has the UPPERCASING TENDENCY that comes with extreme cases of entitlement.
I also have to go to about:config to change the close tab button off the tabs and into the left side of the tab bar, as it were on previous firefox versions, and you don't see me bitching.
They can't put ALL of the options in dialogs, or else you end up not finding anything.
Until you visit that site again, OR that site is in a bookmark.
Obviously, in that situation i didn't have the site bookmarked. but at home i have several sites bookmarked that i don't necissarily want to pop up when my kids are sitting there with me, or grandma is over visiting. the old URL bar would allow an auto-clear of it's contents every time FF was closed. So I never had to worry about last night's porn and sex session with the missus to show up the next day when my kids want to go to noggin.com.
Now, while I can manually delete url's that I surfed to, if I have them bookmarked, THEY SHOW UP ANYWAY.
Are you getting it now? the "Awesome Bar" TAKES AWAY CONTROL. You no longer have control over it's behavior. This doesn't need to be fixed, it needs to be REMOVED and made into an extension for those that want it.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
We've changed this user's browser from Mozilla Select Grain to Microsoft Premium Blend, let's see if he notices;
Microsoft may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of IE -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted IE users. As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Microsoft is nearly ready to release the next beta version of IE to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Next time, try selecting the item in the list and pressing the delete key.
Oh, and how about, next time just deleting the profile folder?
Sounds like you're ignorant.
That's your opinion. Feel free to spout it, but don't act like you speak for all Firefox users. I happen to like it.
Wow, I hope you're trolling.
a) If, when you type a letter that brings up 4chan, but then subsequently choose another item from the list, it learns to show that one first next time
b) Did you seriously think you had to uninstall to get rid of it? Just highlight it and hit delete... It won't show up again.
I loved it from the first time I saw it.
Same here. That and the overall speed increase gained by Firefox 3 was what made me switch from IE7.
I really hate the fact that I need to type the first 3 or 4 letters of a website in before all the pr0n entries disappear of the list... I'd like to be able to flag certain websites or keywords from *ever* showing up. It's annoying as hell if people are watching you navigate to a website.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
It also coincided with the introduction of threaded comments on Digg, where the same thing has become common practice.
Most people do.
There will always be conservative types whining about how things were so good back in the days.
Get over it.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Firefox_s_Private_Browsing__AKA__Porn_Mode__Arrives
My firefox has been running for 8 days, has adblock, flashblock and firebug running, and it using 230 MB of RSS at the moment. Have you tried removing all your extensions and seeing if it improves? I expect you saw this article last year:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2008/03/firefox-3-goes-on-a-diet-eats-less-memory-than-ie-and-opera.ars
I don't pretend to speak for all Firefox users. But I'll bet you I speak for a significant amount of them.
Ultimately, the change was unnecessary. The old URL bar function worked well. Why not simply introduce the Awesome Bar as a new Extension and promote it heavily if they thought it was good? They HAD to know that not everyone would like such a drastic change.
My suggestion: Revert to the old URL bar in a default FF install. Offer the Awesome Bar as a "recommended" extension in the existing Add-Ons chooser window, and let people freely decide if they want it or not. Those that want it will still be able to have it. Those that don't will not be forced to take it. Everybody wins, most especially software freedom.
Even if you are orgasmic over the awesome bar you MUST ADMIT this is the most "free" method of handling a not insignificant groundswell of dislike over a feature.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
offending line.
Step 2: press "DEL".
There is no step 3.
Everything it tests has had a call for implementations out for at least five years. In W3C land to become a recommendation there must be two completely interoperable implementations -- fundamentally they will not become recommendations until they are implemented, so the "not even a standard yet" argument doesn't fly.
Maybe you shouldn't bookmark your porn sites. Or even better, use a different firefox profile for them. Or even better yet, don't use a single user account for every user of your computer. My firefox is MY firefox, and that includes all bookmarks and settings, etc.
How do you determine which parts of a proposed standard are and are not important?
As in, I find that programmers good and bad are vexed when they follow an API/standard to the letter and it doesn't work as advertised.
The reason these new rendering things are important is that flash/silverlight/ will live on forever until HTML/CSS/ closes the gap.
And as far as "not being a standard yet," it has to start somewhere right? I mean, you can't code to CSS3 until a major browser supports it.
So you don't like the Awesome Bar because your kids will see your porn? Ever heard of profiles?! Your kids are extremely likely to stumble on a url with the old-fashioned auto-complete, too. And you're too lazy to turn the Awesome Bar off using a 10 second config tweak? What a whiner. Also, a Nazi comparison? Really?!
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
You could have just deleted the url from your bookmarks and history. The awesome bar isn't so awesome that it can use data that doesn't exist.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Acid3 doesn't "only" test a small part of CSS compliance. It tests things that a purely standards compliant browser would not implement. For one, CSS3 is largely still in development. Acid3 also tests non-standard features like Data URIs.
Whine whine whine...
Seriously. If it was a "regular" config option, you'd still complain it wasn't the default. And if it was the default, you'd still complain that the feature was there and that your browser process was wasting memory by including code you're never using. And so on, and so on...
At least it IS configurable. And believe it or not, some people, like me, actually LIKE the AwesomeBar (although I still think the name is a bit on the silly side).
And you know, as I am sitting here at my home PC in the family room with my kids running around behind me, it might be possible that I don't want them seeing the names and URLs some of the more Adult oriented sites that Mommy and Daddy surf together after they go to bed.
This might help:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1306
And I like the bar because I frequently click the star on pages I want to be prioritized in the search, but don't need to be bookmarking.
I like the awesomebar.
I love it too! I never even use the bookmarks menu anymore. Just type a couple letters in and I find exactly what I want.
Now I'm just waiting for Seamonkey to put their bookmarks in places. The 2.0 builds have history in places, but not bookmarks yet.
I think everyone who uses Firefox and receives the very regular updates fixing critical issue after critical issue knows just how rubbish the Firefox security is!
As so many others have said, it's hard to see how fixing horrendous buffer overflows that allow arbitrary code execution is something to be celebrated.
The speed boost is attributed to TraceMonkey. I've been testing nightly builds for a while now with TraceMonkey enabled and they're generally outperformed (barely) by Webkit nightly builds, and pretty much trounced by Chrome. So if the author is betting on TraceMonkey to give Firefox as massive lead in Javascript performance then he may be in for an unpleasant surprise.
He then raves about how eight critical flaws will be fixed in the upcoming version. Say what? That means there are eight critical unpatched flaws in the current released code that have yet to be repaired. That's a bad thing, not a good thing.
I thought Firefox was supposed to be a "community" project? Why isn't the community getting input?
Until Chrome came out, I thought Firefox was a Google project.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I know it is horrible. But I discovered that it is the duration that spoils the fun. If you keep the right mouse button down for a fraction of a second longer, it works as expected.
I hope that the kids never discover "about:cache", then.
æeee!
We have used Firefox since before version 1, but firefox 3 has a serious problem that forces us to use other browswers for gaming. About every 20 minutes it locks up and pages to the hard drive for about 30 seconds. A pain when your typing, but death in a game. Every one of our Windows boxes exhibit this same Firefox "feature", with no hope in site.
Because Acid3 only tests a small part of CSS compliance. Giving fanboys pretty number to shout about should not be a priority. Also, please don't reply to posts that you are actually not replying to. Replying to the first post is obvious attention seeking.
That was a glass half empty response. While the Acid3 test is not meant to be a total test for CSS compliance, it was designed to poke at the weaknesses of the current generation browsers. Not to mention if a developer does makes an effort to to raise their grade, it's a great way to boost goodwill for your company among web developers because it looks like they are trying to improve things. You can only half-ass the ACID3 test so much when it was made to poke at some of problems in your browser specifically.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
i r attention seeking
portfolio
Yeah.. I found it uncomfortable when it first came out. The first few rounds of tweaks fixed everything that really bothered me.
What I want now is for the autocomplete bar to auto-index every site I visit and offer me URL auto-complete based on the contents of the webpages I see. I always get that "I remember seeing something a few weeks ago that talked about Y, but I can't remember where"..
æeee!
I'm not saying the Awesomebar is awesome. I hated it too when FF3 first came out. I've since grown to sort of grudgingly admit its occasional usefulness. I agree with you on it being mishandled. They should have at least left in a checkbox somewhere like "Use FF2 addressbar behavior". But they didn't, and I doubt they ever will, and I like the rest of Firefox too much to switch away from it at this point.
So I'm at least letting you know there ARE fixes to some of its more annoying behaviors. You can prevent it from displaying bookmarks through about:config (google for it), and you can clear your browsing history when FF closes by mucking around with the privacy settings.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
LOL you are Offtopic. Irony at its finest ^___^
Firefox isn't leaking memory, it's storing lots of pages in its cache so that when you go back from slashdot.org/story to slashdot.org, it can satisfy the request out of cache. If you would like to disable this, navigate to about:config and set
"browser.cache.memory.enable" to false. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.memory.enable for information.
For my part, all of my machines have way more RAM that they can possibly use (4GB = $25, average usage ~50% even with Vista SuperFetch). RAM is cheap, network access is expensive -- it makes sense to use as much caching as possible.
Yeah, you're right - it's all unimportant shit. Totally irrelevant. Come to think of it, the Mozilla folks should not try to implement any of the stuff ACID3 tests at all. You know, 'cause they are just that cool.
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
The "options" dialogs should not include a billion elements each of which will be used by 5% of the userbase. There are basic UI limits to what can be graphically presented while still being reasonable navigable.
Ugh. "-1 missing the point" moonbender.
The point is the loss of Freedom and Control that the Awful Bar introduces. I used porn as a dramatic example. But one could easily substitute just about anything else that a given person might not want some other people to see. Why should I be forced to give up control of the behavior of a KEY portion of the UI of Firefox? I can control pretty much EVERYTHING else, why should this be any different?
My God, if this was IE I was upset about 90% of /. would be UP IN ARMS over this! As it is, as at this moment my initial post has been modded -1 Troll! (as if bringing up a legitimate but slightly off topic complaint was EVER a problem at /. !) is the "groupthink" that strong here that people can't have a single problem with an otherwise good application?
People, Mozilla is not perfect. They made a MISTAKE in forcing people to use the Awesome Bar. The best way to fix the mistake is to REVERT to the old URL bar and offer the Awesome bar as an extension. YOU WOULD STILL BE ABLE TO HAVE IT and all it's "Awesome" functionality. But those that didn't want it would not be FORCED to take it.
Oh, "-1 reading comprehension" as well moonbender. If you read ANY of my other posts you would see that I always completely disable the Awful Bar, rendering my URL bar as nothing more than a place to type in addresses. I hate it that way. But I hate it LESS than I hate the Awful Bar.
One last thing. I was attempting to make a somewhat humorous Nazi/Soviet Russia comparison. (You know; "Ve haf veys of makink you talk!) but I guess that was lost on you. Next time I'll try James Bond: "Do you expect me to USE the Awful Bar?" "No Mr. Bond, I expect you to DIE!" No? Whatever.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Yet another reason to revert to the old URL bar and offer the Awesome Bar as an extension to the base FF install.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
You'd be right if CSS3 was anywhere close to done. It's moving at a snail's pace.
Probably because the "Reply" button of the first post is the one that people see first, and automatically assume it's the reply button for the whole article.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Look at what the test tests. It's about little quirks that barely have an impact. ACID2 was much more relevant.
CSS3 has to start somewhere, but to put it in a test that tests for web standards is not it.
Maybe it should've been an extension then? Since some people hate it, and some people love it, maybe it could be one of those included-by-default extensions that people can either disable, remove, or not install via the advance installation process.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
you lose the war: firefox is exploitable, regardless of the technicality you use differentiate how it is exploitable from how ie is exploitable
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the "unimportant small rendering bugs" are exactly what make web developing hell at times.
I was not advocating that all about:config settings should be available through options UI. Try again.
So what if it's not a button?
It's perfectly accessible.
http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9287/picture1h.jpg
Am I the only one who, to this day, compulsively deletes my history, a habit started in my youth to keep my parents from discovering certain browsing habits of mine?
The solution to this problem is to use your own user account, or your own Firefox profile, or to clear your history, if you want your browser history to be private.
The list mentions which standard the bug/quirk that is tested belongs to. They don't test the entire standard, obviously.
Test Driven Development is a very useful practice. The test suite describes the standard unambiguously (and, hopefully, accurately :-) and then you develop until all the tests work.
I hate the "awesome bar" too. Oh, I can see where people might like it. But I hate it.
My beef with it (not the OP though) is that you can't control it. I don't want some piece of software trying to guess what I probably want to see. Show me where I have been, and as I type auto-complete for me. That's all I ask.
For example: I read XKCD. XKCD was near the top of my awesome bar, and guess which title stuck in there for the longest? Here it is: http://xkcd.com/487/ So I go to demo something to my boss, or do a netmeeting to demo a change I made to a client's website. I pull it from my history, and guess what's there? Something talking about sexual positions. I read that XKCD once, as well as all the others. So why would that title stick in there? Software: don't think for me or try to guess what I want. You'll be wrong.
Even if I could just have more control over the content in the "awesome" bar that would be OK. Don't present me with some piece of software that behaves in a less-than-predictable fashion, and then allow me no control over it. That pisses me off.
blah blah blah
I don't know; look at his posting history. Almost every single comment of his is a reply to a first post (and many of them are highly moderated as a result of the visibility). Either the UI is horrible and he's an idiot OR he's just an attention seeking douchebag.
Read slashdot a bit. You'll see many people who dislike the "awesomebar" and several more who outright hate it.
Absolutely. I love the awesome bar.
It's the best new browser feature ever.
It's awesome!
From TFA:
"The beta Firefox 3.1 will still have a few bugs to work out, but Mozilla officials have promised that eight of the security flaws found in the current browser, six of which have been rated critical, will be fixed in the updated version. The most serious of these vulnerabilities are already being repaired, and can be downloaded as patches from the Mozilla website."
Only six critical flaws, not eight.
Anyway, I couldn't find any information about those flaws. Could you?
I didn't say ACID3 tests full compliance with all those standards. I don't think I even implied that. What I pointed out, though, is that the test is about much more than "small rendering bugs, and CSS3". And although, yes, the ACID tests do test quirks, often not even covered by the respective standard, its goal is an important one - to make sure that all browsers are equally quirky.
Will they remove that stupid "feature" that doesn't allow you to empty a "file upload" box? Hate that so much.
Also, the option to turn off (or at least diminish) the AwesomeBar.
Yes, there are add-ons for both problems, but these shouldn't be problems. I should need add-ons to enhance an application, not "cripple" it.
Actually hobosapien,
Your reasons for disliking the Awful bar are exactly the same as mine. I think we just have different ways of saying it. But I agree with you totally.
The browser is my slave. Not the other way around.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The awesome bar isn't so awesome that it can use data that doesn't exist.
Good thing that there is no charge for awesome, otherwise I'd be asking for my money back.
which is totally what she said
The glass isn't half empty, it was simply designed to hold twice as much water as necessary!
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
What I've found is the best is if I accidentally close a tab and don't remember how I got there initially, if I can remember just a little bit about the page title or location, the awesome bar will let me find it again. That was never really an option with the old version.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
+5 insightful ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
erm yes you should, its a feature acording to the people that make the browser, they are being nice offering you a way to disable it. If you want it off by default then in the words of slashchan "fork or GTFO". (p.s if you just want a light gecko browser try epiphany)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
What's more, you shouldn't have to dig around in about:config to change a setting that doesn't actually do what you want.
But it *does* do exactly what I want, so I don't see the issue.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What's more, you shouldn't have to dig around in about:config to change a setting that doesn't actually do what you want.
The max rich results setting just means it won't display any search results. That's not even remotely the same as going back to an old-school auto-complete functionality.
Exactly. (Mod parent up.) There is no way to disable the Awesome Bar in the sense that d3ac0n means, i.e. returning to a sensible autocomplete dropdown rather than the search-based algorithm it uses now. And there apparently won't be, given that this bug is "RESOLVED WONTFIX".
To be fair, I hated it at first (and at times I still do) but while it sometimes has completely random matches, there are a number of sites that I can now get to much more easily, even without having bookmarked and tagged them. About the only thing that I do always do is use the oldbar extension as a basis for my CSS to get a slightly more sensible appearance (i.e. something that doesn't go half way down your screen with half a dozen results).
I don't hate it as much as I used to, and I recognize that 95% of users love it, but I'd still switch back if I had the option. I have miscellaneous usage problems I could rant in detail about (and yes, I have "trained" it--I've been using FF3 since Download Day), but my biggest problem is philosophical: it breaks expectations. The location bar is for typing locations. If I start typing a location, if it employs any kind of "smart" searching technology, then I can't predict what will be in the dropdown--whereas a bar that simply autocompletes rather than searches is predictable and useful.
In the WONTFIXed bug, the developers encourage feedback about how to make the awesome bar customizable, how to change the weightings applied to the search function, etc. They completely miss the point that no amount of tweaking and preference-weighting will make an algorithm that can exactly predict what I want 100% of the time. The entire premise of "search" in the location bar is flawed.
Admittedly, that's my opinion. And as I mentioned above, I recognize that the vast majority of people like it. I don't ask for it to be removed, or for it to not be the default. All I ask is for the option to revert to the old behavior.
I also see this, very often, and while I didn't file a formal bug, I brought it up in the developer's forum.
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=999035
Unfortunately it was mostly ignored and some people have pointed out it could be related to running FF in a non-admin mode although anybody with an ounce of security on the brain isn't running their browser as root/admin.
I liked the "Awesome Bar" when I first installed 3.x
Then after Chrome came out, I tried that. I liked it, it even had something similar to the "Awesome Bar". But then after switching between FF3 and Chrome, I noticed that Chrome would bring up what I would want, but FF3 not so much. Then add in the fact that the "Awesome Bar" can be very slow some times, I have stopped using FF3 except for FireBug and testing.
The "Awesome Bar" was a good idea, just not implemented well.
there's no point in arguing. people dont like change. it's a shame really, but generally speaking, people are idiots. they will always find some ridiculous reason to complain about some change even if it's brilliant.
Such an important feature like that should have an option to turn it off. Other features of Firefox can be turned off easily, why shouldn't this one?
I'm not proposing to have it disabled by default either.
I use SeaMonkey, by the way.
I loved it from the first time I saw it.
Maybe, just maybe, not everyone hates it. Maybe it's just a vocal minority that hates it. Maybe the 'community' -is- getting input and the problem is that you are going against the community, not them.
They're not all that vocal, really. Just a handful of complaints on Slashdot and a few other forums don't count as statistically significant. I agree that they should allow users to configure the behavior more, all the way from a FF2 bar to a tuned FF3 bar. Still, the FF3 bar is pretty easily gamed into submission.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Ha ha. I have coworkers who, as far as I can tell, hate the Awesome Bar because the "community" does. I'm with you-- it works for me.
That said, I think a feature that causes so much divisiveness might be a cause for a checkbox somewhere.
And here I thought that the right-click issue was something that only I enjoyed. Wow.
I found that in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu,) you can get the Windows right-click functionality by holding down (not releasing) the button. The menu pops up, select function, and then release the button.
Yeah, it is kind of wonky to do it this way, but I've learned to use it pretty quickly so as to get around the random saveas-showlink-email-etc behavior. Note that this same method doesn't work in Windows, where you need to release the button before the menu pops up. *shrug*
This has nothing to do with mouse quality, btw. Unless this MX is an expensive AND POS mouse.
I develop on the browser platform for a living, and I have to tell you, there are some important improvements to the status quo in ACID3, like the ability to finally use a font face - and Kudos to MS for having supported that particular feature for like ever.
I can't see how having more browsers pass that test is not important. It's so important, that it should have been done a long time ago now.
When (and if - in the case of IE) enough browsers support the technology tested in ACID3, every web developers life will become easier - and thus development cheaper. I can't really see how that isn't important.
BTW, why does MS hate their web developers enough to drag their feet on this stuff the way they do? Is support for addEventListener really too much to ask for? At least they are giving us css query support, that's something big. I guess a lot of the rest of us will just spend a lot of our time (and our money) fixing the rest of Microsoft's missing features.
http://www.unfocus.com/
It lets you go back to the old-school method of letting Firefox suggest URLs based on auto-completing rather than a search within the URL and title? Wow, you must have got one of those "extra special" builds that they only gave to a small number of people then.
Yes, setting the value to 0 stops Awesome bar (which is a terrible name, IMO) being visible. No, it doesn't give you Firefox 2 functionality. Yes, it does just hide something rather than making any difference at all to the actual behaviour. No, it isn't a mystical fix-all that more people should know about.
That was a good chunk of my argument at the time - it may be a "smart search", but it's still never going to be perfect and because it's a search rather than an auto-complete then I can never guarantee what's going to be in the list (NameCheap still ranks high when I type "sl" for Slashdot because their title includes "SSL" - WTF? When am I ever going to want to find NameCheap by searching my history for SSL?)
Still, it has its uses. I've got several projects on a Trac install on dev.ibboard.co.uk that runs from a "projects" folder. To get to my project pages I can type "dev wa br" and even though I've never done it before the "source code" browser for the WarFoundry project is first. Much shorter than what I'd have to type to get to dev.ibboard.co.uk/projects/warfoundry/browser :)
Oh, where to start?
First of all, Chrome's functionality stems from a multi-process architecture, not just multithreaded. Second, the Awesome Bar is just a small snippet of JavaScript and markup. Removing it would save only a few kilobytes of hard drive space, if that. Hardly bloat. Third, you can disable the Awesome Bar or limit its results with about:config, thereby removing any "bloat" it might inflict on CPU or memory usage.
If you don't want to use it, fine. Me, I go back and forth between the Firefox nightlies and the WebKit nightlies. I have no argument with playing favorites or using what works best for you, but if you're going to cite technical reasons, at least get those technical reasons correct. Otherwise, you just sound like yet another misanthropic teenager trolling Slashdot thinking they sound enlightened or insightful just because another misanthropic know-little teenager modded them up.
Somehow I believe your gripe is not against Moz developers for ignoring some users. I believe it's because they are notably ignoring YOU. Poor baby. The browser you downloaded for free and have not contributed code to doesn't have its development tailored to your whims. Surprise surprise.
Get used to it, do without, write an extension, build your own, switch to a different browser, or whatever. Just grow up and stop complaining like a spoiled child who hasn't been given enough ice cream for dessert.
I thought that replying to the first post was a sign of horrible UI decisions.
Yes, the third post should never appear to be the 100th. I've had many 3rd posts end up half way down the page. *sigh*
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Part of the Acid3 failure comes from the inability to render SVG fonts and webfonts. Opera and Webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari, Arora) support font embedding. This is a nice feature that could make web pages look much better (especially for math formatting, but let your imagination fly). Unfortunately, the large market share of Firefox is holding webfonts back. (Yes I know IE is much worse).
A few whiners does not a groundswell make.
Or, to state it more traditionally, "the plural of anecdote is not data".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Or you can just right click on the tabbar and select "Undo close tab".
No, you'll just see the same 2 people posting over and over again. d3ac0n has 10 redundant posts on this story all complaining about the awesomebar.
Font face? That was part of CSS2 from 1998, which has since been replaced by CSS2.1, which doesn't have font face. It's CSS3 that supports it again.
So Microsoft doesn't deserve kudos at all. It's only there because they never followed up on CSS2.1.
ACID 2 is a rendering test. ACID 3 tests far, far more than that. Please take the two minutes to read up on what you're whining about before you speak.
Often in the open source world "community" means "people who submit patches" more than it means "people who bitch about the end product."
I don't consider myself part of the Linux Kernel community just because I use one.
Memory leaks were horrible in Firefox 2, but they fixed those with Firefox 3 and I don't know of anyone who's had an issue since updating to the new version. Are you sure you're using Firefox 3?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Oh, guess what - it turns out that of the 8 tests, which Firefox 3.1b2 fails (at least on my machine) exactly zero are CSS3 related. firefox fails:
#26 - on performance (I can live with this one)
#70 - check for well-formedness of UTF-8 encoded XML
#71 - HTML 4.0 Transitional
#75 through # 80 - a bunch of SVG tests (SVG fonts and SVG animation stuff)
Not only is the argument of you lot mighty hypocritical - ACID matters when Firefox passes it and IE doesn't, but it's irrelevant when Firefox fails, but you also don't seem to know what the hell are you talking about.
The first one says, "General, we've designed a new gun! It's better than the ones before it, and best of all, it only misfires-- thus killing the gunner-- one out of every 100 shots!"
The second engineer says, "General, our new gun is even better! It only misfires-- thus killing the gunner-- one out of every {x} shots! Where {x} is a number we do not know, because it hasn't been tested in battle enough"
Honestly, now, which gun do you pick?
The devil you know? Or the devil you don't?
firefox hasn't been tested to the extreme microsoft has been in exposure to hackerdom, simply because it doesn't warrant as much attention, simply because it has a fraction of the market compared to ie
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
> In W3C land to become a recommendation there must be two completely interoperable
> implementations
This is a recent development, and wasn't in place when the specs ACID3 tests were written. None of them have two interoperable implementations, and none even come close. Some are impossible to implement a written due to self-contradictions. It's great fun.
This does not fix the general problem, but you can work around it by deleting such history entries: press "ctrl+H", type in "numerical sex positions", and delete the history entry. Then the awesome bar will not have it in its database to pick up as an option.
Does this summary read like shameless propaganda to anyone else? I'm such a big Firefox fan I have been running bleeding edge nightlies of Tracemonkey for months, but this Slashdot story summary has left a bad taste in my mouth.
Think of all that's happening right now: Safari keeps gaining in popularity. Chrome was released not terribly long ago. The Gnome crowd is moving away from Gecko into the open arms of WebKit.
Yet this summary would lead any reader to believe that this was the greatest and most triumphant moment in Firefox's history!
Reading this even manages to make the fixing of eight "critical vulnerabilities" sound like such a great achievement that we should consider creating a new one for every one we excise, just so we have something more to celebrate about in the future!
I love Firefox, but damn! Shame on nandemoari. Shame on CmdrTaco. Shame on Slashdot!
This has nothing to do with mouse quality, btw. Unless this MX is an expensive AND POS mouse.
In my personal experience, this seems to be distribution-specific.
I experience the exact same problems in Ubuntu (and seems to be reversed by pressing a few times the crtl+alt+shift buttons - as if Ubuntu had lost track of the status of modifier keys), whereas I have no problems at all under openSUSE.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Indeed. unfortunately, Firefox has garnered enough of a user base that the overwhelming majority of it's users are now non-technical and non-programmer. Which means that every change made away from modularity is one more change that will start to drive away people who don't have the knowledge and skills to alter the browser themselves.
Personally, this entire discussion made me realize just how much I HATE the Awful Bar and it's Freedom Stealing. Enough that I just spent some time downloading the last version of F2, exported my bookmarks in HTML format and un-installed FF3, leaving all my settings in place. I then reinstalled FF2 and imported my bookmarks. the only extensions that didn't work were all the ones designed to try and fix the Awful bar, and one skin. Everything else worked beautifully and I could literally FEEL myself relaxing and de-tensioning seeing the nice neat FF2 bar.
I made sure to click the "feedback" option when uninstalling FF3 and gave the devs an eyeful on how much I hated the Awful Bar in the comment form. I'll be sticking with FF2 until the Awful bar is made Optional, scrapped, or there is a better alternative to FF2 available.
Oh, and in case the Mozilla Dev that made the Awesome bar his/her baby is reading this; Your bar sucks shit and you should be fired for forcing it on users.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
For my part, all of my machines have way more RAM that they can possibly use (4GB = $25, average usage ~50% even with Vista SuperFetch). RAM is cheap, network access is expensive -- it makes sense to use as much caching as possible.
On the other hand, Linux is quite good at caching and buffering.
Under it, I prefer turning off the ram-caching and only use the on disk cache and rely on linux caching ability.
Also, Flash under Linux sucks. Since I have noscript running my firefox seems much more stable and a lot less memory hungry.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Uh, 3.1 has web fonts.
"Uh", I just tried 3.1 beta 2 running on linux with the webfonts test page: http://www.w3.org/International/tests/test-webfonts-1 Firefox does not render the text as in the reference graphic. Opera does.
Did you actually use MS's implementation of web fonts? They made some proprietary font for no reason at all. They are trying to open it as a W3C standard now but that will hopefully fail completely. We already have enough font standards without introducing yet another format.
I don't think that web fonts are really being held back by any specific browser. If you want to use a non-standard font on your site as the default, make the appropriate declaration in your CSS, set is as the default body font, and have a couple of web-safe fallbacks. Browsers that support @font-face will grab the font and use it, and the others will just skip to the next one it sees. Graceful degradation if I've ever seen it.
No, you won't have pixel-for-pixel accuracy across browsers, but is it really worth it? My IE users get square corners since IE doesn't do border-radius (and -ie-border-radius doesn't exist) unless it's absolutely critical to the design; likewise, they won't get nice fonts unless it's critical to the design. This isn't ideal, but it saves me a tremendous amount of non-critical work, and it also allows me to avoid non-necessary hacked-together markup (<span class="corner-top-left"> kind of stuff). Could I get identical rendering across all major browsers? Sure - but for a lot of the CSS2/CSS3 niceties, it's simply not worth the extra effort, not to mention all of the extra markup and images that you'll need to get it working consistently.
That said, I do a lot of back-end work where I can set system requirements like any other piece of software. So I can say that you need IE8, Firefox 3, or Safari (or Opera, Chrome, etc.), which obviously isn't an option for public-facing stuff. I'd never do a public site that has browser requirements or falls apart completely in IE6, but I'm also no longer going to obsess over a few pixels for people using an 8-year-old browser.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Good call. But it's more of "Crap... I closed that tab an hour ago, and now I need the info again" situation with me. Or I read an interesting article I want to send to a friend when they come online, in which case the "undo close tab" does me exactly jack squat.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
From my understanding, most of the delays relating to @font-face were due to concerns over font licensing*, not the implementation of the standard (I imagine that as far as developing a browser goes, it would be one of the easier tasks). It's still a concern for that matter, but I think the Webkit team basically said "fuck it", implemented the proposal, and hoped that the other browsers would follow suit. Doing a bit more searching, it also looks like the biggest issues lingering (once Firefox 3.1 hits) are in .otf Open-Type fonts vs .eot Embedded Open-Type fonts. Those who care, this article might be worth a read.
*You can bet that some font designers would want some sort of per-domain licensing system that would attach a license key to the @font-face declaration. I'll leave you to imagine the myriad problems that could go along with that.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
I'm still browsing with "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2a1pre) Gecko/20090305 Minefield/3.2a1pre"
So I guess it'll take at least a day for the decision to be reflected in the trunk build ID (who'd have thought! :P )
The behavior is nice IMO, but the UI change is horrible. ~341,000 people agree.
www.isoHunt.com
True. If I actually think about when five years before Acid3 and not when Acid3 was written, things start to be more sensible. :)
Whoever cleared this for the front page?
If a free software team announced "our current stable version is insecure, but if you install our test version, you'll be safe", there would be serious hell. If you have security holes in your current stable branch, you bloody well fix them immediately instead of asking users to download a beta version. (Well, unless you're Google, in which case the whole universe is in beta.)
Just to be sure this wasn't the case, I traced the source through this poorly researched blog entry on infopackets.com back to CNet, and lo and behold:
Nope, no mention of a beta. Yes, a beta of 3.1 was released at the same time as a stable 3.0.7, and yes, 3.1 has an advanced JS engine that will boost performance. I'll even wager that if the 3.0.6 bugs were also in the 3.1 branch, then this beta fixed them as well.
But no, users do not have to download a beta version to ensure security, and to mislead them otherwise is pretty irresponsible as there is already enough FUD going on about Mozilla.
recognize the groundswell of DISLIKE
You are not a groundswell.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Parent-guy, you should give your post better titles so people will not assume it's not just the millionth empty riff.
Someday we'll all be negroes
The entire point of the Acid test is to be a great measure of browser compliance.
The Acid3 test was developed by WaSP, which receives input from all the major browsers (from microsoft to mozilla).
Opera and OmniWeb already had comparable functionality (without boasting about it) for some time. I think it's the single biggest improvement in Firefox 3.
I did look into using it a few times. The main barrior has been the garbage tool that you need to use to create the .eot file format, and the lack of crossplatform support.
The alternative file format that Firefox et al are starting to support (raw .otf files) will never be legal for professional font licenses - and they are also technically impractical because they are ginourmous.
The best thing for us all would be for the other browser makers to support .eot files, since those are the only ones likely to be supported by font makers (though they are a stubborn bunch, it'll still take convincing - one or two of them making a boat load selling .eot fonts would do it) - and are the only ones MS will ever support.
http://www.unfocus.com/
This is Slashdot, not Adobe's bug reporting system. Please fix your bookmarks. They won't fix the problem if you don't post it where they will read it.
But someone did post the bug report in Adobe's bug tracker. What's the next step?
By the way, Chrome doesn't do multi-threading. It has a multi-process architecture.
Same difference. Processes and threads can both preemptively multitask open pages. The big difference is that "threads" are more likely to use shared memory to pass information between tasks, while "processes" use a serialized byte stream.
I seem to be unusual. I like the idea (mostly) but dislike the implementation. The first time I open the browser and start typing, the awesome bar search engine grinds into life and thrashes the disk for a while ... meanwhile preventing me from typing for a few seconds.
After the first time, it's better, although still a bit sluggish.
So it's usually quicker to actually type the first URL in full..
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Well, there are the ones who hate it because they have a slower computer and the awesome bar freezes the browser for several seconds everytime they try to type something into it.
a nightmare on linux platforms (don't know if it affects others, I'm exclusively a linux shop these days).
And you bid us welcome to your nightmare? LOL!
No thanx, Alice- I'll stick with Vista --> Win7
Ubuntu 8.10, current as of 23:59Hrs PST last night & Firefox 3.0.6 [Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009020911 Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.6].
I tried right-clicking various elements of the page & the pop-open menu stays open until I click an entry in it, or click away elsewhere on the screen.
I couldn't MAKE it close prematurely, or pick the wrong entry.
I feel so deprived...
=} *errrrr*
So when are they going to fix the obnoxious shit where firefox jumps on top of all my other windows when it finishes rendering a page?
Seriously you guys, this was in firefox 1.x and fixed in 2.x Regressing over a timescale of years is kind of mindboggling.
-josh
Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich has taken the stance that Acid 3 is not a particularly valid test, in that the author of the test was specifically asking the community to find tests which would fail in Firefox, thus making it unfair for Firefox and in his opinion it was a "missed opportunity" to focus on rendering errors which were truly representative of what you might find out there.
I was unable to find a link to his statements in thirty seconds of googling, but that is what I remember were their reasons. So to paraphase, they aren't going to allow any amount of Acid3-fail to prevent them from releasing the next version, because Mozilla's higher-ups think it's a biased test.
Despite that, all the bugs highlighted by Acid3 have been entered into the Firefox bug tracker, and there has been some progress on the Acid3 front, they now score over 90 as opposed to less than 70 with 3.0, so it's not as though they're twiddling their thumbs.
As an aside - I'm not aware of any browser that actually passes Acid3 "cleanly" by displaying the whole lot at 30fps.
As far as wanting to get rid of money, I'm spending work money, and I have to spend it all by the end of the funding contract period of performance. The real truth of it is I wanted systems that "just work" (and for my purposes these do), and I have the budget for it. Not everyone on Slashdot is poor.
Most computers these days come with a mouse. In the case of a Mac, it's a Mighty Mouse.
I do have one iMac, it's not used for much other than monitoring a security system and running Windows XP under VMWare Fusion to run a CD duplicator/printer. It works great and takes no more desk space than an equivalently sized LCD monitor. The other systems are Mac Pros and an old G5 Quad (with really cool sounding fans).
Apart from the flaky scroll ball and the backlight on my 30" Cinema display that wouldn't work on the first try on cold winter mornings (warranty took care of it) the Apple hardware has all been rock solid and worth the money.
Putting moderation advice in your
And then you get modded "Redundant" to a discussion that happened three hours after your post. Sigh. Happens all the time. There's only one real thread in most people's minds. Then there's the stuff at the bottom of the page.
Put identity in the browser.
When dealing with hairless monkeys, you're eventually going to learn that providing a number to shout about is one of the best ways to nudge them towards proper behavior.
In July 2005, Chris Wilson, the Internet Explorer Platform Architect, stated that passing Acid2 was not a priority for Internet Explorer 7, describing the test as a "wish list" of features rather than a true test of standards compliance.
5 March 2008 - Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 passes Acid2.
Firefox on GNU/Linux leaks memory like there's no tomorrow, something I've never noticed with it on Windows. By leaks I mean huge leaks, at some point Fx 3 gallops +300MB, especially if left overnight.
Konqueror by no means a lightweight browser, but at least in my experience it doesn't leak memory endlessly, memory consumption usually peaks at around 100MB.
Konqueror does have quirks and issues, the UI feels sluggish and at times stop responding for a couple of seconds, but I did notice improvements going from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2.
Site compatibility is a complain of mine, thankfully most sites I visit Konqueror has no problem with.
Konqueror 4.2 allows me to switch between KHTML and WebKit without restarting it. Currently, the version of WebKit included is a bit behind, but that should change with Qt 4.5, I think...
In short all browsers suck, Konqueror though uses less memory.
I can't wait for Google Chrome!
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's a prominent feature, yes, but I don't think that that many people would be interested in configuring the bar where you type URL's in. Actually, it made it much easier to show FF3 to my family, who now have adopted FF3 as their default browser.
I think the awesome bar is pretty good, I definitely like the way it works. And as a programmer and Linux user, you can bet I'm downright skeptical when considering new "user friendly" features (e.g. I hate personalized menu's, my brain is set to remember *locations*, thank you very much). But I think this change is great for > 90% of FF3 users, with only a vocal minority hating it with a vigor. And much of that vocal minority will know how to use about:config.
After some getting used to I also like the new security agent. It's hard to miss, using the whole screen, and I really like the way that people interact with it.
All set and done, FF3 is much easier to use and configure in this respect than both Opera and IE (all versions). With IE, when I run into trouble, I frequently give up. The advanced options of IE are a pain to scroll through, and nothing seems to be in the right place. Opera is also quite OK, but I think the FF3 configuration is less intimidating and easier to use.
Nope, too many people like it too much. Some things that are prominent features should be in the base install, otherwise you will see that the FF3 uptake will be less. If people are going to have to look through the plugins (hoping to find anything, you can hardly tell them to look for the "awesomebar") then it's already too late.
Maybe they could make an advanced "custom" install that figures this option, but the savvy users will find about:config anyway. Or someone could host a stripped firefox version with all the recent additions switched off.
Firefox 3 doesn't display JPEGs without massive banding effects on a 16bpp X display. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/249436 Firefox 2 handles them fine. It would be nice to see this bug fixed.
Yeah, because a functional system that promotes quality free software is the same as rape. To paraphrase the great Feynman, you're not even an idiot.
Specs are large and ambiguous, almost by their nature as documents to be written by humans. You can usually argue the nature or degree of your support in many ways, and browser makers have often done exactly this, even in the case of contradictory implementations. Test suites remove this ambiguity: either you pass a test or you do not, and collections of these tests can be scored in a clear and certain manner.
Make no mistake: the future of standards-compliance is not in specifications, but in the test suites based on them. The Acid tests, as existed and in terms of their successors, establish a platform that developers can reasonably depend on, and while this platform does not include the whole of the specifications, it is valuable because it is known and reliable in ways that the specs are not.
This is why the Mozilla team needs to get on the ball and start taking these tests seriously. This is real standards-compliance: not when you can say you've implemented parts X, Y, and Z of a spec, possibly based on creative interpretation, but when someone can put your browser to the test and see for themselves that stuff works.
To you, another "functional [web browser] that promotes quality free software" has greater value than a worry free fuck. To me, the worry free fuck has greater value. That's how humans work, you see: some of us prefer sex, others of you get all moist over open source.
Your problem is that you are egocentric and not stating your premises.