Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released

ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."

Comments

Great

[stonedcat]

They changed the location bar again.
Now I can watch people flip out about it on the interwebs for 6 months as well as being personally annoyed with re-getting used to how it functions.

Re:Great

[Tx]

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.

Re:Great

[jgalun]

This gets brought up every stinking time we discuss Firefox. But once again - oldbar does not get you totally back to the old location bar. There are still important differences. Yes, lots of people do not like Awesome Bar. Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it.

Re:Great

[Junior J. Junior III]

Cue up the replay of the "oldbar is not a fix" flameware. Hell, it's open source, if you don't like teh awesomebar, rewrite it and recompile it. We're on slashdot, after all.

Re:Great

[youngdev]

what is the awesome bar?

Re:Great

[Daimanta]

"Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it."

Do you mean many as a lot of people or many as in a very vocal minority?

Re:Great

[Spatial]

Flameware sounds like a great name for some forum software.

Re:Great

[PitaBred]

He means people who still wear onions on their belt because that was the style then, and they'll be damned if they look for something new.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it.

Speaking of which, is there a way to permadisable the "scrolling" tab bar?

I read a lot of message boards. Many of these boards force readers into multipage views in order to ease loads on their backend databases and drive up page counts/ad impressions.

That means I'll sometimes have 20-50 tabs open at any one moment. I middle-mouse-click over each "page" in a thread, and pop the whole thread open into a series of tabs. After 5-10 threads, that adds up. That's fine -- they were all opened in chronological order, and I can read each one, closing it off, and proceed to the next thread on the right.

Problem is, sometimes I come across a thread I want to read right now. Under Firefox 1, I could Alt-T (open new tab far off the screen), then immediately close it to get back to the "right now" thread, but the array of tabs on top of the window remained unchanged, making it easy to go back to the original tab.

Under FF3, Alt-T opens a new tab off the far end of the screen... and immediately slides all tabs over, making it impossible to go back to the original tab, unless I manually slide everything back to the original position.

Yes, I've already tweaked browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose (false, dammit!), browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 (to minimize the problem), browser.tabs.closeButtons (one "X" to close the current tab that stays in the same place on the screen, not one floating "X" per tab, all of which move around as tabs resize!), and so on.

But I can't figure out why toolkit.scrollbox.scrollIncrement:0 and toolkit.scrollbox.clickToScroll.scrollDelay: 0 don't work. That makes it not scroll when opening new tabs, but a ^T to open-new-tab still forcibly scrolls the tab bar to the end of the line. Argh!

(And last but not least, WTF's up with the fugly smoothing on resized pixel art? An 8x8 .gif scaled up to 64x64 should be rendered with blocks, not with smudges!)

Re:Great

[Richard_at_work]

Nah, I just switched to Safari, thankyou very much.

Re:Great

[jaavaaguru]

They have?

Looks the same to me

Re:Great

[Ginger Unicorn]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=awesome+bar

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it.

Who cares? Let them wallow in their FF2 as long as they please.

Re:Great

[compro01]

You might look at the tab mix plus extension. It allows for a multi-level tab bar, among other handy features, like duplicating tabs and breaking a tab off into its own window.

Re:Great

[Kagura]

This guy is right. Tab Mix Plus is exactly what you're looking for.

Re:Great

[Toonol]

I think it's many.

And a still larger number that did upgrade, but are constantly annoyed by it, even with the add-ins that correct most of it's behavior.

Re:Great

[Toonol]

A still easier solution would have been for the developers to have not stripped out the old code inthe first place. They did have both versions working concurrently in an early beta, with an option to switch between them; but they wanted to push the AwesomeBar as a feature, so removed the choice.

Re:Great

[HTH NE1]

I prefer Tree Style Tab with the tabs down the left. Only problems I have with it are (1) closing a tab which is hiding other tabs closes them all (a feature), but Undo Close Tab only brings them back one at a time, and if it contained a lot, you can't get them all back, and (2) it occasionally locks up for me trying to drag tabs to new positions, but which I don't do very often.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

To hell with that. They had an about:config option right up until one of the very last betas which let users pick one or the other. There's no reason to not let advanced users pick one.

It's interface design 101. When I type in the place where URL's appear, I expect any sort of quicksearch dropdown to provide URL's. When I type the letter "C" in the box where URL's go, I want URL's I've been to that start with the letter "C", not sites who have the letter C in their title in some minor connecting word, or even worse, any random ".com" that I've visited regularly recently, because the semantic search isn't bright enough to de-emphasize "com" as a keyword.

Give me a search box. Give me a second column of semantic search results side-by-side. If I have to type the entire URL to get the search to bring up the site I want, then the inline search is a complete waste of time. If I want to search my history, I'll open up the history and search there.

Re:Great

[Wansu]

  "... oldbar does not get you totally back to the old location bar. There are still important differences."

The most important shortcomings to me are:

1. No way to truly defeat this feature.
2. No way to control this feature. (i.e. displaying bookmarks)
3. No provision for clearing the Awesome Bar.

Re:Great

[Ded Bob]

I personally use Old Location Bar. It works better for me than oldbar did.

Re:Great

[afidel]

The old location bar addon is MUCH closer to FF2 style bar wrt functionality as well as looks but since the dev's don't like the idea of people reverting the functionality they have left it in "experimental" status since June of last year forcing you to signup for a (free) account.

Re:Great

[jgalun]

Since I don't have a subscription to one of the browser market stat vendors, and Google removed their browser stats in 2004, I don't know the answer to this question. But I doubt you do either. I can't prove that it's a significant number. But you can't prove that it's only a vocal minority of cranks either.

But we do know that:
1) There was a LOT of complaining about the AwesomeBar when it came out;
2) User experience can make a huge difference in market share (see, Apple)
3) At least some people have stuck with 2.0 because of it;
4) At least some people have switched to Opera because of it.

But the best proof we have that it's not just a small number of cranks? The fact that Mozilla decided to expend effort to allow people to go back to the old location bar in Firefox 3.5. If this were only important to a very small number of people, they would not have bothered. I'm sure they have lots of other code to write over at Mozilla. But they chose to dedicate resources and time to fix this. We may not have the statistics at our fingertips, I'm sure that Mozilla does track browser usage very closely, and knows exactly how their upgrade rates compared to previous upgrades.

So you can question my arguments, and I can question yours. But I think Mozilla's actions speak loudest of all.

Re:Great

[Xenna]

Oh yes. I upgraded because I needed Firebug features that required it. But I'm still daily annoyed by it. I hate it!

X.

Re:Great

[Shining Celebi]

The most important shortcomings to me are: 1. No way to truly defeat this feature. 2. No way to control this feature. (i.e. displaying bookmarks) 3. No provision for clearing the Awesome Bar.

Then you'll be happy to know 1 and 2 are both fixed. I'm not sure what you mean by 3. You can delete whatever entries you want by hitting Delete. They've added the following about:config options in 3.1:

* browser.urlbar.match.title: Returns results that match the text in the title.
* browser.urlbar.match.url: Returns results that match the text in the URL.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark: Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.history: Returns only results that are from the browser's history.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.tag: Returns only results that have been tagged.

You can also prefix any address with @ to match it to URLs without going in in changing that option.

Re:Great

[ion.simon.c]

The fact that Mozilla decided to expend effort to allow people to go back to the old location bar in Firefox 3.5.

a) Cite?
b) 3.5?!? [1] Today, we're talking about the new release of a 3.1 beta. If we assume that this isn't a typo on your part, the Moz devs don't seem to be really concerned about the AwesomeBar.

[1] Be impressed, you made me break out the bold

Re:Great

[0xygen]

Whoa there, guess you didn't see the news...
The upcoming release of 3.1 is going to be named 3.5.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/3.5

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I have personally converted one IE user to Firefox just by showing them the awesome bar. Thus, the entire world loves it.

Re:Great

[not already in use]

This is slashdot, the same website that looks down on people who don't want to switch from Windows to linux, become proficient with the command line or learn console editors like vim and emacs. Yet these same crybabies then go on to say that it will take them 6 months to adjust to a glorified text box.

I love slashdot because I love the irony.

Re:Great

[ion.simon.c]

Ah!
I stand corrected! Thanks for the information!

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

re: tab mix plus

Sweeeeeeeeet!

Seriously, thanks. That may not have been what I was looking for... but it may be exactly what I really wanted all along. I like! ;)

Re:Great

[blind biker]

Unfortunately, oldbar just doesn't cut it:

Note that the underlying autocomplete algorithm is the Firefox 3 algorithm, not the Firefox 2 algorithm. oldbar only affects the presentation of the results.

Re:Great

[0xygen]

I have to admit, when I first saw the 3.1 to 3.5 story I thought it was a joke.

The fact some actual developement and graphics time and effort is going into adding 4 to a minor version number seems insane to me.

Crikey, why not just go ahead and call it Firefox 2010.

Re:Great

[khellendros1984]

It took me a couple days to get used to, but now it's a bummer to back to something that *doesn't* do the awesomebar stuff. What's your actual problem with it?

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority of people complaining are Windows users (yes, even on Slashdot).

Re:Great

[FlyingBishop]

I use Emacs, and I love what Mozilla's done with the location bar in 3.0. I'm actually hoping 3.5 doesn't screw it up.

Re:Great

[d3ac0n]

I got so frustrated with it I actually DOWNGRADED back to FF2 on my Win box, and just removed Firefox altogether from my Ubuntu machine, in favor of Seamonkey.

The Awful Bar sucks, and I refuse to use it. Get on the stick FF developers! Make the Awful Bar an extension and give us back a sensible location bar!

Re:Great

[d3ac0n]

if you don't like teh awesomebar, rewrite it and recompile it.

Some of us are networking geeks, NOT codemonkeys. While I can do some minor Win scripting, I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag, NOR would I want to learn to. It's not my thing.

So basically, I have the choice of:

a) Go back to FF2 and get a non-brain-dead implementation of a URL bar back again.
b) Spend months-years of my valuable time learning to code so I can write my own custom version of Firefox, which I will then be responsible for supporting and bug testing.

Yeah, pretty obvious which one I'm gonna pick there.

Re:Great

[ion.simon.c]

IMHO, if it takes more than ten minutes of dev time to increment the minor version number, they're doing it wrong.

OTOH, the art effort could be significant. *shrug* Whatever keeps a decent, hard-working, starving artist employed is fine by me.

Re:Great

[treeves]

Nah, then they'd have to release it in 2011 and they don't wanna wait that long.

Re:Great

[0xygen]

Ah I was working by Norton / MS Office / [substitute other commercial app here] dates, where and product name has to be set at least 1 year into the future.

A bit like magazines and cover dates really... I never did understand reading the April cover in March.

Re:Great

[0xygen]

/s/and/the/

That'll teach me to post on auto-pilot through the preview in the early hours of the morning!

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

T R A D E M A R K E D

Re:Great

[Minozake]

When I want a URL by accuracy, it returns the most recent URLs first and matches URLs anywhere. That is a no-no. That is not how I think. I like URLs matching at the beginning of the domain name.

I also have trouble going to the root domain of a website. I usually have several other links that go to child pages of the actual site I'm going with. Example: Facebook likes to link me to many pages, such as old notes, albums, and other crap. If I type in "https://" and then tab (which shows these "awesome" URLs for me, ala Vimperator), I see all sorts of URLs I do not want.

I don't use bookmarks, either, so that's a wasted feature. When I had the toolbar, it annoyed me how much my screen estate was wasted with the double-lined URL descriptions.

Re:Great

[syousef]

As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.

NO. The about:config setting got removed on purpose so that you'd have to jump through hoops if you didn't want to use awesomebar. THIS is the kind of BS that is starting to turn people off Firefox.

To get back your old behaviour you either need these extensions:

Option 1) Hideunivisted AND oldbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7429
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

OR

2) Old Location BAR (but you'll need to create an account and log in because it's experimental
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7637

Even then
A) your behaviour won't be exactly the same as pre-FF 3.0
B) You'll have to wait for updated versions of the extension to work with FF 3.1 beta or 3.5 or whatever they release it as. Currently they work with 3.0.x.

So please stop spreading lies.

Showing people who walk by everything in your bookmarks every time you type something into the location bar and taking up twice the screen realestate is not awesome. It's retarded.

Re:Great

[syousef]

Do you mean many as a lot of people or many as in a very vocal minority?

He means people who don't think it's awesome to flash random bookmarks that may not have been visited for years at passers by when typing something into the location bar, nor think it's awesome to use up screen realestate on unnecessary bling that offers no new functionality. That's not a vocal minority. That's most sane security conscious users who care about the UI design of their browser. Ridiculing people who don't agree with you or putting down their point of view as a fringe minority concern is childish and unhelpful.

Re:Great

[capebretonsux]

I still haven't upgraded because of it. When it first arrived, I did give it an honest try - for about two weeks, but I didn't find that it 'adjusted' to my activity at all. The oldbar extension wasn't the same as the old location bar either, so I eventually downgraded. Since I probably spend most of my time using a browser, it is a real dealbreaker for myself. I'm guessing that since this most recent change isn't offering a retro-alternative to the awesomebar I won't have to repeat the experiment.

Re:Great

[treeves]

Yeah, yeah. They set the date one year beyond planned release date, but it's delayed by two years, so ends up with the previous year in the name by the time it's released...

Re:Great

[Bishman]

Hm,as for me it not convenient. Google chrome is the best i have ever seen. Furniture

Re:Great

[0xygen]

Great comment spam on slashdot... just what we all need.

I even have mod points, but as I'm the GP, can't even mod it. :(

Can't get it

[amclay]

I was going to download this using Mozilla Firefox, but Microsoft told me it would be faster downloading, and it's returning a exception. Too bad I wanted to use it.

Is it officially out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm missing it, but I don't see a release announcement (not even on a Planet Mozilla blog entry). It's also not available on auto-update yet.

Did Slashdot just interrupt their release process, again?

Re:Is it officially out?

[sakdoctor]

It's a beta. You don't get auto-updated to beta versions.

This one is only news worthy because it has some cool new features

Re:Is it officially out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, yeah, you do if you're running 3.1b2. They have a beta update channel.

Re:Is it officially out?

[jorgevillalobos]

It's a beta. You don't get auto-updated to beta versions.

Yes, you do. But the auto-update is not activated until later on, usually a couple of days after having the new version available through direct download.

Re:Is it officially out?

[Bishman]

Hm, i think he must try this one ECDYSTERONE

It always amazed me

[coryking]

How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.

My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?

I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

Re:It always amazed me

[maxume]

I imagine it will, as the developers tend to emphasize speed (and native code is often faster than javascript). They have to balance against it making it more difficult to support older browsers, and needlessly changing apis.

Re:It always amazed me

[sveinungkv]

That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.

Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for system codecs land (probably after 3.5) you may get the problem you describe.

Re:It always amazed me

[xiaomai]

jQuery should use the native stuff where available (that is how their selector engine works currently)

Re:It always amazed me

[AKAImBatman]

Check this out:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

You can now dump the video to a Canvas for manipulation! Which means that you can now do real-time video effects in Firefox! The example above demonstrates Chroma-Key background replacement. An impressive feat for a web browser, wouldn't you say? :-)

Source and explanation are here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Re:It always amazed me

[Anonymous Coward]

What codecs? The required codecs are rolled into FF.
If you're referring to transcoding then I'd assume if someones knows to do that they can figure out how to do it (hint: do a google search, ffmpeg makes it trivial) without installing spyware.

Re:It always amazed me

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy shit. That's so awesome. If only I could use it, but I think our gracious web overlords in Redmond won't allow it. I wish they would though. That's a really cool feature that I didn't even know was coming. It gives me so many great ideas.

Re:It always amazed me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's so awesome! I can watch a video so slowly there's more silence than actual audio (in millisecond bursts).

The machine plays Flash video just fine. It even compiles Firefox just fine. Seriously, what sort of crazy machines are they running that makes them think this is halfway acceptable?

Re:It always amazed me

[AKAImBatman]

The machine plays Flash video just fine. It even compiles Firefox just fine. Seriously, what sort of crazy machines are they running that makes them think this is halfway acceptable?

Um... a modern one? Works fine on all my machines. And last I checked, Flash doesn't do Chroma-Key replacement. Or video data manipulation of any kind.

Re:It always amazed me

[AKAImBatman]

If only I could use it, but I think our gracious web overlords in Redmond won't allow it.

Screw Redmond. 67% market share and plummeting. Let's start degrading our sites for IE and see how long their market share holds above 50%.

Re:It always amazed me

[scarlac]

Actually, there are a lot of campaigns that are doing just that. A quick search for "stop ie" will give you a handful of results.

I started one as well on www.mijav.dk under Projects. However mine is targeted on IE6. I suggest, if you really care about your idea, that you join one of these campaigns.

Here's the question: -

[bogaboga]

...It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."...

Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.

Re:Here's the question: -

[FlyingBishop]

I'd say Safari on iPhone vs. Fennec on Nokia is going to be the primary arena in which people see any comparison.

On the modern desktop, speed is much harder to notice.

Re:Here's the question: -

[RoFLKOPTr]

Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.

Who cares about Joe Public? This is just a simple update that happens to have a ton of changes, and they're only shifting the version to 3.5 for the sake of nerdy symbolism. Joe Public doesn't care. We don't need flashy new features to attract uninformed people to an automatic update... because... well... it's automatic.

Re:Here's the question: -

[digitalunity]

Probably with respect to Javascript performance. A lot of people notice slow performance in javascript heavy websites like Facebook, Yahoo! Mail's beta AJAX interface, etc. If they see a dramatic speedup, they will notice even if they do not know why.

Re:Here's the question: -

[FooBarWidget]

Does that even matter? Joe Average doesn't complain about Firefox's speed or memory usage, only geeks do because they have 2000 tabs open and leave Firefox running for 4 years.

Re:Here's the question: -

[Anonymous Coward]

...It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."...

Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.

it's a BIG difference! the new tab button is now positioned right next to the last tab, instead at the end of the tab bar!

Re:Here's the question: -

[ACMENEWSLLC]

>>Will Joe Public be in position to notice them?

YES.

Many of my admin consoles have gone web based. MessageLabs, Zenworks, many others. In IE it can take IE up to 2 seconds after each click to go to the next page. Firefox 3.1 beta lowers this time to MS.

Users will notice.

Re:Here's the question: -

[Kagura]

Wow, it feels like you're talking right to me. That description fits my Firefox usage exactly. ;)

Re:Here's the question: -

[raju1kabir]

Joe Average doesn't complain about Firefox's speed or memory usage, only geeks do because they have 2000 tabs open and leave Firefox running for 4 years.

You make a good point. My gf always insists on quitting any program whenever she's not using it, even if she might be back in there in half an hour, because she feels it's nicer to the computer. This even after I quadrupled her RAM.

The really funny part is that it's the geeks, who actually know how software is made and therefore should know better, who even think it's reasonable to expect a browser to run well for 4 years with 2000 tabs open. I know I'm guilty of it myself; I've got 4 windows with about 50 tabs in total, Firefox has been running since my last system update a few weeks ago, and when it inevitably starts to get weird and stop loading pages I will be cursing the developers' ancestors. Meanwhile she has her three tabs from when she launched Firefox about 20 minutes ago and it will always work fine for her.

Re:Here's the question: -

[FooBarWidget]

Then I must be an exception. I've never had more than 15 tabs open at the same time. I usually only have 3 or 4. Once I get past 6 I have the tendency to close as many tabs as I can because I don't like how it clutters the screen.

Re:Here's the question: -

[kv9]

My gf always insists on quitting any program whenever she's not using it, even if she might be back in there in half an hour, because she feels it's nicer to the computer. This even after I quadrupled her RAM.

hey baby, you wanna go back to my place so I can quadruple your RAM? rawr.

Re:Here's the question: -

[Obyron]

I've certainly noticed that having three tabs open with nothing but text and a few simple banners or inline jpgs causes it to use 1 gig of RAM... Sadly it seems the Firefox Memory Leak Days are back upon us, assuming they ever really went away.

Re:Here's the question: -

[BZ]

Joe average web developer will certainly notice a big difference, not just in terms of performance but various features as well.

New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?

More importantly, have the Firefox devs realised that downloads can fail yet? Or does it still report downloads as successful if they are interrupted before they reach Content-Length bytes, or how about reporting as successful because they successfully downloaded a 404 error page? Supporting incomplete standards and reimplementing an already existing feature is all well and good, but reaching version "3.5" of a web browser without having the most rudimentary capability of detecting a failed download is nothing short of obscene.

Re:New location bar?

[argent]

I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?

F*** yes.

And having "sl" pull up "slashdot.org", followed by half a dozen unrelated sites that happen to have "sl" in their name, followed by the site that I was looking for that actually starts with "sl" but is "below the fold" because it's not awesome enough... really ticks me off. If I want to "search", I'll enter the name in the "search box". If I want to go to a website, I'll enter the site name in the location bar. I don't mind you searching titles as well, but list them below the URLs, OK?

Re:New location bar?

[FishWithAHammer]

What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?

Highlight in bar. Press delete.

Re:New location bar?

[Richard_at_work]

Weirdly enough, that didn't work for me, on any of the installs I had.

Re:New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? If you want to just type the address, the awesome bar won't get in your way. The suggestions below don't steal focus, so just keep doing your thing. If, in fact, you want to go to slashdot, and you think it would be faster to hit the down arrow and enter than type the rest, do it.

I've heard complaints about the awesome bar regarding privacy, and I can understand that, but I don't understand your complaint.

Re:New location bar?

[DittoBox]

AwesomeBar is not search. AwesomeBar is made so you can make shortcuts that don't require you to enter the URL. It gets smarter over time. Just use it some.

I can't understand why people are so pissed over it, I love it. It really did change the way I use the browser.

Re:New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

He meant to highlight it in the dropdown from the bar.

Re:New location bar?

[Inda]

So type "Server 500: Internal Error" in the bar > hover over one of the results > hold the delete key until they are all gone.

Bookmark slashdot as normal and it will move higher up the list.

And it'd not a search box - behave yourself - use the search box for searching (CTRL+K).

Re:New location bar?

[Kugrian]

And having "sl" pull up "slashdot.org", followed by half a dozen unrelated sites that happen to have "sl" in their name, followed by the site that I was looking for that actually starts with "sl" but is "below the fold" because it's not awesome enough... really ticks me off.

Try typing "x". *shudders*

Re:New location bar?

[Richard_at_work]

Yup, and I'm saying that didn't work for me, on any of the installs I had - sure, it disappears from that instance, but open up a new tab or close the browser and reopen it and it pops back.

Re:New location bar?

[Alakaboo]

Try Shift-Delete on OS X.

(OS X.5.6, Firefox 3.0.7)

Re:New location bar?

[RebelWebmaster]

Is it starred by chance? (To my annoyance,) entries can't be deleted unless they're un-starred first.

Re:New location bar?

[Richard_at_work]

I've tried it on Linux, Windows *and* OSX. I've just retried it on all three platforms and it *still* doesnt permanently get rid of it.

Re:New location bar?

[Tenebrousedge]

I did. It brought up nothing interesting. Perhaps you've been browsing pr0n without using Distrust or some similar add-on?

I believe the FF beta introduces a 'porn mode', so this add-on should be obsolete very soon. Clearly that and the AwesomeBar should have been introduced concurrently.

Re:New location bar?

[cuby]

Mod parent up. The dam thing is really awesome!!!

Re:New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

It gets smarter over time.

No, it doesn't. It uses a heuristic. Heuristics are often wrong. The nongs who called it "awesome bar" are in denial about that simple fact.

I use the "awesome bar" but that doesn't blind me to the fact that it often gets it wrong compared to the previous "first few letters" heuristic.

Re:New location bar?

[dbug78]

http://ed.agadak.net/2008/07/firefox-31-restricts-matches-keywords You can both stop crying now. Mozilla has a new glass of milk for you.

Re:New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like its time you bought a shiny new mac.

Re:New location bar?

[Anonymous Coward]

AwesomeBar is not search. AwesomeBar is made so you can make shortcuts that don't require you to enter the URL. It gets smarter over time. Just use it some. I can't understand why people are so pissed over it, I love it. It really did change the way I use the browser.

Some concrete examples, please, of why you'd ever do that?

I used it for a week, and was cursing at it every day until I killed it. I don't want "shortcuts that don't involve the URL". If I wanted that, I can search for the TITLE tag in the URL history or in the bookmarks folder.

Maybe that's a mental block on my part, but the purpose of the URL bar is to display URLs. When I type the first letters of something in a URL bar, I expect the browser to go to the URL I'm typing. (Just like the purpose of the Google/Wikipedia/etc box is to search Google, Wikipedia, etc. When I type something in there, I expect the browser to perform a web search.) The Awful Bar seems to be trying to replace the URL bar with an AOL-style keyword search, and that's Not. What. I. Want. (It might be a useful feature, but it doesn't belong in a toolbar that displays URLs, and not AOL keywords.)

Sorry to flame on you like this. There's something I just didn't "get" about it. Tried it for a week. It "got smarter", but it was never doing what I wanted it to do, and the change made things even more confusing -- just when I thought I'd got it trained to do the right thing, it stopped doing the right thing the next day. I want to type a few keys and hit ENTER. Not mouse up, or arrow-down, through a randomly-fluctuating series of options that vary depending on the browsing I've done over the past few weeks. It's like MS Office's "automatically-self-reconfiguring menus"; they defeat the purpose of muscle memory and get disabled immediately on any PC I use.

Anyways, you say you like it and it changed how you browse. Gimme some real-world play-by-plays. What are you thinking, what are you typing, and what is it doing that you like? (And as a corollary, what were you thinking/doing before the feature appeared, and why don't you want to do that now? How did you make the shift from a URL-based browsing paradigm to a whatever-the-hell-the-Mozilla-team-browses paradigm?)

Re:New location bar?

[broken_chaos]

...That sounds needlessly confusing. Why is it not at least somewhat obvious how to make use of this "feature"?

Re:New location bar?

[argent]

What are you talking about? If you want to just type the address, the awesome bar won't get in your way.

I want to type part of the address and then select the rest of the URL from the pulldown. Like I used to be able to do before the Awesomebar.

Re:New location bar?

[argent]

So the squeaky wheels DO get some grease occasionally.

Re:Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

[stonedcat]

Choking would require said wang to be long enough to pass the teeth, I think firefox is safe from your wrath.

No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Firefox was going to be implementing the same type of preemptive threading and memory protection that Chrome and, I think, IE 8 have?

So far the latest FF beta all seem horribly slow with multiple pages. The more tabs the worse the overall performance.

Also, the latest FF betas still have the awful performance rot where overall performance degrades over time as you continue to open and close tabs.

After using Chrome for a while it is hard to keep using FF when I've been able to keep Chrome open for a couple weeks and it still feels as lightning quick as it was when first started up.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

FF isn't EVER going to have a pre-emptive threading and protected memory for tabs. Anyone who has taken a look at the stinking pile of shit that is the FF codebase can see that. It would require effectively rewriting the entire FF codebase from scratch. And if you were going to do that you might as well just go with Chrome that already has all of that fundamental work done and working incredibly well.

It is absolutely pathetic that Microsoft now has a browser that is the constant source of ridicule from open source users and developers that leaves their main browser technologically in the dust.

Chrome - pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs
IE 8 - pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs
Firefox - monolithic address space and all tabs are part of the same thread

Absolutely embarrassing.

What that means is Firefox will forever be riddled with memory and resource leaks over time as each tab gets opened and close leaving crap behind. And as more and more websites become more application like the lack of pre-emptive Javascript for Firefox is just going to become more and more painful. With Chrome and IE 8 you can have massive numbers of tabs with huge amounts of Javascript in each one and every single tab and the overall browser UI will remain lightning quick.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could say essentially the same thing about Linux. It's an ancient monolothic design, implementing a still-more-ancient system. Its I/O scheduling is still completely fucked up, making it just painful to use as a desktop. But like Windows, it's popular because it's popular. It lacks all the cool security features and other possibilities available to microkernels, and yet its performance still sucks. Because -- surprise! -- losing a few CPU cycles to IPC doesn't matter so much these days (and see L4 for super-fast IPC), not nearly as much as properly sharing resources. Which Linux totally sucks at.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[shutdown -p now]

You could say essentially the same thing about Linux. It's an ancient monolothic design, implementing a still-more-ancient system. Its I/O scheduling is still completely fucked up, making it just painful to use as a desktop. But like Windows, it's popular because it's popular.

I don't think your comparison is all that apt, but if we go by it, there's still a crucial difference between it and the situation with browsers, and it is that there are mainstream browsers other than Firefox now that offer, or are soon going to offer, multi-process tabbed browsing. Also, the true benefit isn't performance, it's stability. Let Flash or Adobe Reader slow down or even crash or hang, it will only bring down that single tab it runs in...

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

The memory protection side of the multi-process implementation in Chrome results in incredible stability.

But, the preemptive threading of the multiple processes for tabs gives it a massive performance boost above Firefox in real world conditions.

It doesn't matter how much is going on in other tabs and Chrome will feel just like a single tab is open. What is most amazing about Chrome is I've left it open for close to a month and it still feels like I just started the app up with a single tab.

Firefox you pretty much have to quit a few times every day or you start to notice that the UI begins to get slower and slower as more tabs are opened and closed.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[mattkime]

>>It is absolutely pathetic that Microsoft now has a browser that is the constant source of ridicule from open source users and developers that leaves their main browser technologically in the dust.

Unless you account for rendering web pages. ....which i guess not everybody does. *shrug*

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[trawg]

What that means is Firefox will forever be riddled with memory and resource leaks over time as each tab gets opened and close leaving crap behind

I solve this problem through the mind-bogglingly complicated method of closing and reopening my browser!

I see your point, but I'm not going to go hatin' on Firefox for technical reasons (I would have once, probably). But I would argue that Firefox has changed the web for the better and some relatively minor (at the moment) under-the-hood complaints are a small price to pay.

I have used Firefox all day every day as my primary browser of choice since about v1.0.7 and have not yet found a browser that matches it. I have probably had the thing lock up 3-4 times in all the years since, and it's crashed maybe 10 times in total (across all the machines I use it on). I'm pretty happy with it, especially for what I paid.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your use case must be much different from mine. It's been a while since I've seen frequent crashes -- that ended around 3.0 -- but perma-hangs are certainly a weekly occurrence if not much more, and ~10 second delays that are not permanent are fairly frequent. I am a heavy user, and, to be fair: I haven't moved to another browser in all that time, so there's something that brings me back :).

I just have to say, your "mind-boggling" method is unacceptable. Just as rebooting your Operating System when it hangs is unacceptable.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[ion.simon.c]

I've seen perma-hangs when using the official Adobe Flash plugin under Linux. Changing to the Gnash plugin eliminated the hangs.

Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox?

[DarkEmpath]

Seriously?

Netscape died because they decided to rewrite their codebase from scratch. From the ashes we received the Mozilla Suite.

The Mozilla Suite was abandoned for a complete rewrite, but it took until v3 before Firefox was able to match the speed of the old Mozilla Suite (now Seamonkey). Firefox still hasn't matched Seamonkey's stability.

Now you're saying Firefox needs another rewrite? Christ almighty. What is going on?

Version Numbers

[blincoln]

I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.

It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than .15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.

I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too :).

Re:Version Numbers

[Daimanta]

Well, I understand your position but no system is perfect.

Example:

You release the game "Dungeon Plunderers" and you give it the version number 1.0 at release and increment(to 1.01 or 1.1, whatever is the liking) when releasing updates.

Now you release the sequel "Dungeon Plunderers 2", what should its version number be? 1.0? 2.0? Both things could be argued for. 1.0 because of the fact that it has no direct software connection with "Dungeon Plunderers 1" and may use things like a new graphics engine or even a total overhaul of the playstyle. 2.0 can also be argued for since you are talking about "Dungeon Plunders 2" and not the first game and naming it 1.0 can create a lot of confusion.

Every numbering system has its pros and cons and as long as the system is consistent and there is some sort of clear indication what version you are talking about (like the difference between 1.0 and 1.00) I personally think it shouldn't be that much of problem.

Re:Version Numbers

[oodaloop]

This is why I like Ubuntu's method of using sequential letters. I can never remember the version number, but if anyone asks me what version I use, I just say Intrepid Ibex.

Re:Version Numbers

[jaavaaguru]

I think I'm missing something. I see 3.1b3 in my about box. Not 3.1.150. When 3.5 comes out, that's a higher number than any of the 3.1x versions. No confusion.

Re:Version Numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I like Ubuntu's method of using sequential letters. I can never remember the version number, but if anyone asks me what version I use, I just say Intrepid Ibex.

But then, they have infrequent and scheduled releases with no minor revisions in between (since the interim upgrades do everything necessary). And personally, I think Ubuntu's version numbers (usually x.04 and x.10) are easier to remember than its names. ;)

Concerning numbers, the same goes with my favorite desktop distribution, Sidux (four releases each year, this year's will be 2009-01 to 2009-04). They have names, too, but I tend to forget.

But you can't compare this with the individual software packages Ubuntu and Sidux are composed of, which need frequent security and feature updates to keep the system appealing.

Re:Version Numbers

[compro01]

The versions are just the year.month of the release (8.04 is April, 2008). The animals are before they know the release date firm (it may slip due to a major bug being discovered at the last moment or something.), though I do like just "version letter", even though I still find the names silly.

Re:Version Numbers

[oodaloop]

I just have to wonder what they'll do when X comes up.

Re:Version Numbers

[compro01]

There's a fine selection of animals they can use. And there's some adjectives too.

Re:Version Numbers

[mgiuca]

"Dungeon Plunderers 2" is the title of the second game. Its version number should be 1.0. I don't know of any game (commercial or non) which started the version number of the sequel with the series title.

"Dungeon Plunderers II" would mitigate this further :)

"Welcome to Dungeon Plunderers II: The Curse of the Dungeon's Sword, Version 1.0".

Re:Version Numbers

[DocHoncho]

Hmm, Xenophobic Xanthareel has a nice ring to it...

Re:Version Numbers

[bhiestand]

His complaint is nothing... we should be discussing Macs here. I have a MacBook Pro. Which version, you ask? Why, the early 2008 model... Which one, you ask? The one with 15.4" display and a Penryn processor. As opposed to the MBP with the black keyboard or the all black MBP with the black keyboard.

Re:Version Numbers

[franki.macha]

yeah, I think that Apple avoid telling you version numbers because they're not user friendly :(

HTML 5

[Anonymous Coward]

is back!

Re:HTML 5

[Anonymous Coward]

<BLINK> is back!
NNN . . . NOO . . . OOO . . . Ooo . . . ooo . . . ooo . . . ooo . . . oo! . . . !!!

Re:HTML 5

[AndrewNeo]

I think you meant NNN . . . NOO . . . OOO . . . Ooo . . . ooo . . . ooo . . . ooo . . . oo! . . . !!!!

Not officially out yet!

[bunratty]

It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.

The release linked to in the summary may not be the final, completed version, as Firefox 3.1 beta 3 has not been officially released yet. Download it at your own risk. You should wait until it's available through the links I give in this post.

Re:Not officially out yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot really listening to its visitors. People complained that Slashdot was too slow in its reporting, that Reddit and Digg were always ahead.

Well no more, now Slashdot is so fast at reporting the news that it reports before the news happens. Suck on that Reddit!

Re:Not officially out yet!

[cp.tar]

Well, I've downloaded it. The Mac version.
It may be that my 3.0.7 profile is a bit buggy, but 3.1b3 simply crashes again and again. And that after disabling (nearly?) all of my extensions, too.

Back to 3.0.7, at least for now.

Re:Not officially out yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.

if you really wanted firefox 3.1 beta 3 then you'd be using it like i do since march 6th, since build2 of this beta release candidate has been published onto the ftp server (fx3.1b3 is really _that_ folder):
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/3.1b3-candidates/build2/

Re:Not officially out yet!

[kbrosnan]

If the Mozilla Crash reporter appears try and get a crash id for the report. If you have any questions you can email me at ./_username at gmail or reply to this thread. http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Mozilla+Crash+Reporter

Re:Not officially out yet!

[cp.tar]

The Crash Reporter did appear and I had it submit the crash info to Mozilla. Three or four times in a row, in fact. However, I do not recall the crash ID; I might try it out again in a day or two.

Re:Not officially out yet!

[kbrosnan]

You can just type about:crashes in the address bar to view the crash ids.

Re:Not officially out yet!

[cp.tar]

Ah. I didn't know that.

Here you go:
40c4e0d1-2b73-4102-9705-7ee2d2090312 3/12/09 6:20 PM
d4962b88-6952-4738-8ee1-8b6df2090312 3/12/09 6:19 PM
b7b9da6a-a640-41ff-af86-091452090312 3/12/09 6:19 PM

Re:Not officially out yet!

[kbrosnan]

We think this is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=480975 Do you have javascript.options.jit.chrome set to true in about:config?

Re:Not officially out yet!

[cp.tar]

No, I do not. The option does not even exist.

Javascript performance improvements for *nix

[rwa2]

I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty

Re:Javascript performance improvements for *nix

[Anonymous Coward]

just download source and do a pgo build yourself! oh does anybody have an x86 build as im clearly to lazy and hypocritical to do this myself!

I dont get why canonical, debian and that lot dont PGO their builds though?

Re:Javascript performance improvements for *nix

[tqft]

Yes I have one and no I am not going to share - but they can be found easy 3rd party builds mozillazine should answer your question (x64 pdoed even)

"I dont get why canonical, debian and that lot dont PGO their builds though?"
Good question - relatively easy even for slackers like me

Re:Javascript performance improvements for *nix

[rwa2]

I dunno, I've never even seen an explanation of how to do this. Even on the Swiftfox / Swiftweasel pages, both of which make no mention of PGO.

Anyone on a Gentoo box want to chime in? :P

definitely feels faster, but ...

[Frag-A-Muffin]

I just downloaded and am using it now .. it definitely feels faster, however, will it crash less on a Mac? :(

I love firefox, and I use it everywhere, but man, is it awful on a Mac.

Please don't flame, just an honest opinion from a long time firefox user/supporter/evangelist.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[ColdWetDog]

I love firefox, and I use it everywhere, but man, is it awful on a Mac.

Really? What sort of bad? I use it on all four Macs of various ages and abilities at home. The only problem I've noted was that stupid Flash 9 would lock the system after a couple of hours. Flash 10 works fine (well, as well as Flash ever works...)

The "Awesome Bar" should be renamed the "Awful Bar", but that's apparently a feature, not a bug.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[Frag-A-Muffin]

Really? What sort of bad? I use it on all four Macs of various ages and abilities at home. The only problem I've noted was that stupid Flash 9 would lock the system after a couple of hours. Flash 10 works fine (well, as well as Flash ever works...)

Like after a day or so of usage, it just decides to not render pages properly (not just little minor things, but complete failure to fetch/load CSS files etc). I have to quit and reload it, and even then, I have to sometimes force quit it because it won't respond to the apple-q. I know it's not just me, because a friend of mine sees the exact same behaviour. He's moved to Safari. I prefer to have the same browser on all my platforms (mac/linux) with the same 2 add-ons (flashblock, web developer) for consistency when developing.

On my linux laptop, (or even linux in vmware on my mac) I can leave it running for days and days and it never seems to behave badly at all.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[jbeaupre]

Firefox 3.X being awful on a Mac is an understatement ... when running OSX 10.3.9

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Like after a day or so of usage, it just decides to not render pages properly (not just little minor things, but complete failure to fetch/load CSS files etc).

Glad I'm not on crack. I've seen this ever since "upgrading" from FF1 to FF3. Page loads, 99% of the images load, and the remaining two or three just sit there, HTTP connections open, forever. Hitting F5 to reload doesn't fix it - you have to break the HTTP connection and forcibly restart it to attempt to reload the image. Even that doesn't always work. WTF?

(And yeah, chalk up another brickbat for the Awfulbar. Spent the better part of the first day disabling it to restore most of the old bar's functionality. I remember URLs, not "title" elements. Please, for the love of Dobbs, if you're not going to back out this monstrosity, at least give users the option to ignore the title element while "searching" the URL history. The web is not AOL, and some of us do not navigate by keywords.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Same behavior here. Thanks for reminding me to look it up in Bugzilla.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[FishWithAHammer]

(And yeah, chalk up another brickbat for the Awfulbar. Spent the better part of the first day disabling it to restore most of the old bar's functionality. I remember URLs, not "title" elements. Please, for the love of Dobbs, if you're not going to back out this monstrosity, at least give users the option to ignore the title element while "searching" the URL history. The web is not AOL, and some of us do not navigate by keywords.

You're probably in the minority on this one. Firefox is targeting normal people, not nerds, and normal folks don't remember URLs particularly well.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[PitaBred]

Man, and here I was thinking the awesome bar was pretty awesome, letting me find old links and such without having to remember exactly the google incantations I used. Thanks for setting me straight on that!

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[ColdWetDog]

Do you, perchance, have Flash 9 loaded? I ask because that is extraordinarily similar to the one problem I had on my wife's 15" MBP. Did all sorts of the usual OS X things - flushed caches, cleared permissions, stuck pins in my Wozniak doll. I had even done a couple of Google searches without any useful hints. Then one day after getting the Evil Eye once again ("it's always MY computer that breaks!"), I must have had a burst of good Googlefu and out popped this post with the same problem and the suggestion to upgrade to Flash 10.

Hasn't bothered her since. Now, if she could only figure out the iPod interface... Women, sometimes.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[ColdWetDog]

Man, and here I was thinking the awesome bar was pretty awesome, letting me find old links and such without having to remember exactly the google incantations I used. Thanks for setting me straight on that!

Of course, glad to help. Obviously, somebody likes the Awesome/Awful bar - but it really annoys me. Oldbar works well enough. Or just set the memory depth (or somesuch setting in about:config) to zero. Still, Mozilla could have accommodated old cranky folks like me without too much difficulty, it seems.

Re:definitely feels faster, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

since it doesn't run on 10.3.x....

otoh, i can't run safari 2.x+ here either.

at least i could run firefox 2.x.

Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[feelafel]

Hey everyone - glad you're excited about the new beta, we're pretty excited to release it. We actually haven't finished the QA on the download page, the update snippets, etc, yet. What you're seeing here is that last night we started sending out the final bits to our mirror network. So yes, you could go get it directly off the FTP servers, but that can overload mirrors and make it hard for other people to download it.

We'd prefer if you waited a few hours until about 2pm PDT when we'll be ready to update:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html

which uses our mirror-rotation script to ease the load of downloads.

Mike Beltzner
Director of Firefox Development

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Mod up! I can wait a few hours for the awesomeness.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[hattig]

PDT - is that Pre-Download Tension?

I'm sure it's building up here. Some geeks might have to take the afternoon off work because of it.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[TheUni]

This link works, and seems to use the rotation script so I hope I'm not making things worse:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.1b3&os=linux&lang=en-US

(insert your OS of choice in the link)

TheUni

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[fprintf]

Pacific Daylight time. This is 5 pm Eastern Daylight time for those of us on the wrong coast.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Milamber_Cubed]

I don't suppose you feel like responding to the post a couple above yours about Linux Vs Windows performance for Firefox? http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Anonymous Coward]

This is something I wish there was more of.. official acknowledgement from the developer on sites like Slashdot of a story.. so often you see "posting anon as I'm involved in the project" Really shows the dif between Mozilla and Commercial entities like some of your competitors.

Anyways, Kudo's, looking forward to the final build.

AC

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Anonymous Coward]

Mike Beltzner
Director of Firefox Development

Hi Mike, any idea when Firefox will implement the multiple process stuff found in Chrome?

Google are going to destroy Firefox unless this happens pretty sharpish.

Also, 'PDT' means nothing to people outside the US. Use GMT/UTC in future. Thanks.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[sd.fhasldff]

any idea when Firefox will implement the multiple process stuff found in Chrome?

I'm probably in the minority, but I actually prefer MOST of my apps to be single-threaded (or at least sticking to one core). I can only imagine what it would feel like to have Firefox (Javascript or plugins, typically) completely max out ALL my cores the way they are one now.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Anonymous Coward]

How about using this link?
http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.1b3&os=linux&lang=en-US

Worked for me, and it should use the mirror-rotating.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[spacefiddle]

Hi! That's good, but i'm afraid i have to be annoying now.

2 years ago, there were rumours floating around that "Firefox 3 will release official .msi files for enterprise deployment." 3.0.7.. or 3.1... or 3.5... is here now, and the only source for central management i can readily access are third-party packagers.

Some provide this free - tho rebranded - and others charge for the service. There are of course also commercial solutions to build my own packages. Any of them, especially the free ones, release new updates when they get around to it, leaving any central deployment behind on disclosed vulnerabilities and bugfixes.

All of them work against the purpose of this great FOSS app and its adoption in the workplace. .adm support is varied as well (tho i did learn a bit from poking around and modifying someone else's). As it is, i have yet to find a free packager that will let me deploy with the extensions i choose.

What happened to the rumblings of simultaneous .msi release? Was it a technical decision, or a business decision? None of the packaging services i've seen claim any affiliation with Mozilla, but who knows.

Thoughts?

PS: let's assume a nonprofit with a limited budget here, shall we? Hope that heads off anyone who wants to chime in with "go buy stuff!"

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[evilbessie]

or 8pm UTC for those of us in proper countries...

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[evilbessie]

That should have been 9, curse me for being an idiot.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[feelafel]

We released early - go get it.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Tenebrousedge]

<evilwizard>
 
I curse you! You shall henceforth only be able to read AC posts!
 
</evilwizard>

(It's the fearsome slash2digg curse.)

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Snaller]

I've hoped you've added the ability to save a file + name it + open it at the same time (like with msie)

and a way to see what password credentials are logged for a site (since i experience firefox saving the wrong login, so i always have to go and check what it actually stored, which is very annoying)

and when you bookmark the page, that you get a bigger bookmark window instead of that tiny little window

and better inbuilt tab handling so we don't have to use addons.

and a faster url bar.

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Eighty7]

Ever heard of torrents?

Re:Official release will be around 2pm PDT today

[Wolfier]

any idea when Firefox will implement the multiple process stuff found in Chrome?

I'm probably in the minority, but I actually prefer MOST of my apps to be single-threaded (or at least sticking to one core). I can only imagine what it would feel like to have Firefox (Javascript or plugins, typically) completely max out ALL my cores the way they are one now.

You can set core affinity to your entire application. It's not a concern.

Re:Microsoft

[twotailakitsune]

Stop WINE'ing about Linux!!!

Mmm, bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2, they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!

Sorry, but first off, Firefox has supported video - well, since it existed. It's called a PLUGIN. That means that if I don't want it, I can not install it and save myself the bloat. No more.

Secondly, video?! From a web browser?!! I want something that can browse the web, I don't want Firefox to pretend it's freaking iTunes. If I want video playback, I'll install Flash. At least that will actually work with video on the web, rather than the bloated and useless Theora crap they're dumping into the browser.

On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON. I was unaware that eval() didn't work in Firefox. Right, I know, "security." Except that you're already limited to loading JSON from the original domain, and if the original domain is serving up malicious script as JSON, you're already hosed.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

the video tag is part of html5, it will have to be supported by all browsers with video capability someday.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Randle_Revar]

>So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2,

yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.

>they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!

Yes. The web is a different place than it was even 5 years ago. Video is the norm, and once the video tag takes off, this will be very valuable to most users. Those that may not need or want video are probably smart enough to find a different browser that is more suitable to their needs.

>On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON.

JSON has been supported in FF since 3.0. FF 3.1 drops JSON.jsm for native JSON. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JSON

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

And when will they move the image decoding stuff out of the browser? JPEGs and PNGs should be handled by a plugin too. And CSS.

More seriously: anywhere you draw the line, is arbitrary. Counterpoint: If video is part of HTML, then a program that claims to display HTML should be able to play video.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format

Let me clarify something: it's not brain-damaged; it's braindead. Even the original author claims as much (specifically, it's the "zany" serialization it used to use)!

Re:Mmm, bloat

[LionMage]

yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.

In fairness, the real utility of the database will be enabling client-side storage for web apps that utilize HTML 5 features (since the client-side storage stuff is mandated by HTML 5 -- this is the same API that Palm's new phone is going to use). In addition to basic key-value pair storage, there will be fully realized structured/relational data storage.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[AaronLawrence]

I agree that Mork is extremely bad technically, yet the end result is that I like using FF3 less than FF2. Although they improved the db greatly, they also decided to do a lot more with it and this negated most of the gains.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[BZ]

SQLite replaced an existing database (non-SQL, but still a database) that was already there. That was Mork. SQLite is a vast improvement.

As far JSON, you can get JSON from wherever you want, and sites commonly do. XHR is not the only way to get JSON. People pass it around in query strings, for example.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Although they improved the db greatly, they also decided to do a lot more with it and this negated most of the gains.

No, it didn't.

See? I can play the game too. Please expand your reasoning and point out how the gains were negated, if they indeed were.

Re:Mmm, bloat

[Nicolay77]

Well, if the porn industry adopts the video tag, both Firefox and Opera will rise in usage. A lot.

Re:Too bad about the performance, though

[Anonymous Coward]

That totally depends on the site - for someone such as yourself who is usually only using the web for viewing Microsoft's site, Firefox is the fastest, according to Microsoft themselves. Other people's mileage may vary, but hey, speed only matters if you don't care about things like viruses, worms, general crashes due to poor code, and overall crap. (Which is why I won't be using this beta until it's finished, any more than I'll be using IE.)

Wait

[AnonGCB]

Why is it that every time a new version of Firefox comes out, we need to have a news story about it? Same with any other browser, but at this point it seems like the nightly builds are being posted about. It's getting ridiculous.

Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame people

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone remembers FF devs flaming people in those FF memory leak stories from a few years ago. The anger comes from the fact they know they have a huge problem with the way FF is architected. Lashing out is a very common reaction from developers who are aware of some fundamental problem with their code that they know would require massive amounts of work they are unable or unwilling to fix.

The FF devs got away with it because they were compared to the horrible mess that IE was back then. Now IE has really gotten its shit together now with it great leaps forward with javascript performance, threading, and memory protection.

With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism from the "IE sucks! I use FF so I'm cool" days.

Ogg Video Codec Builtin Support

[sam0737]

Finally..finally!

Now I think I an transcode my snapshot video footage into a format that I don't have to worry about for ...at next 5-10 years.

Hey Mark, How's It Feel To Be Humiliated By MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not feeling so smug anymore are you Firefox devs?

You had years to get your shit together and fix the stinking pile of shit that is the Firefox code base. Instead you clowns sat around in forums running your mouths off and flaming anyone who dared complain about the absurd resource leak and performance rot problems with Firefox.

So while you sat on your asses, Microsoft has gotten their shit together and Google has come out with a technological masterpiece with Chrome.

So now both Chrome and IE 8 have modern preemptively threaded and memory protected tab architectures and Firefox is the same stinking pile of monolithic shit it was years ago. One tab crashes, everything goes down. One tab sucking up performance, the entire UI degrades in performance, one tab leaves behind leftover memory and other resources and it never goes away until you quit the entire app.

Congrats retards!

Why don't you dimwits go grab the Chrome source and see how a modern browser is written. Dump the piece of shit Gecko layout engine that no one but you wants. And learn how a modern app implements threading and memory protection.

Don't worry, the Google guys working on Chrome are very friendly and will help you out with the hard to understand bits you Firefox devs obviously are too incompetent to handle.

Re:Hey Mark, How's It Feel To Be Humiliated By MS?

[Evanisincontrol]

Sounds like someone got a little upset when they had their patch rejected by the Firefox dev team. :-(

Re:Hey Mark, How's It Feel To Be Humiliated By MS?

[RebelWebmaster]

Particularly funny since there's a pretty nice-size contingent of ex-Firefox developers on the Chrome team.

Re:Hey Mark, How's It Feel To Be Humiliated By MS?

[xenolion]

HAHAHAHA ok the fact that you had to hide who you are means this rant is useless, and you have nothing better to do with your time then wine from behind a computer screen, or you just like to say crap and start a fight. I want to see some of your work send us some your own code for anything you have written. Im not defending anyone MS, FireFox, chrome. I just want to see if you have talent to write code or just run your mouth..

Re:Hey Mark, How's It Feel To Be Humiliated By MS?

[ion.simon.c]

How do *you* think that one goes about "preemptively" threading something?

Re:what the hell

[Anonymous Coward]

Right you are. The decision to change version numbers was made in a meeting last Friday, and it was already pretty much a sealed deal going in.

Seriously do we need mroe features?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they keep adding crap in that has remote relevance in order to make their product appear fresh until the whole thing (which already is a pretty good resource hog) balloons and becomes as slow as old IE?

Do I need a location bar? WTF is it anyway?

Anyone can step up to the plate

[bunratty]

You do have a good point. There has been talk about supporting additional image formats (JPEG 2000, TIFF, MNG) using imagelib extensions. They could do the same for different video codecs, as well.

I notice that Firefox is an open source project, so all it takes is someone to come forward to do the work. I also notice that the Google Summer of Code will be starting over the next several months. Are there any students out the that want to make some extra $$$, get great software development experience, and add a significant new capability to one of the most popular browsers?

The feature I want...

[Brandybuck]

Here's the feature I want: bug fixes! Everytime I turn around there's a new Firefox packed full of new features I don't need. I wondering how rock solid it could be if they spent half that energy on fixing bugs. No new features until the bug queue is empty!

Re:The feature I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen! I'm sick of having to remember to shut down Firefox before I leave work everyday. When I forget, there's about a 20% chance that Firefox will have gone nuts at some point in the night and pegged my processor all night while somehow figuring out how to use 2G of RAM. When this happens, the system becomes almost unusable since Windows seems to happily swap its own ram out to disk so that it can give Firefox everything. Only a reboot seems to fix things.

Firefox developers simply deny that there's a problem. Yet this problem doesn't exist in Safari, Chrome or even IE. Fix the bugs. Use less memory. Work on policing misbehaving extensions and plug-ins. If that part works, people will write extensions to implement new features. And browser users can decide which features we want in our browser.

Re:The feature I want...

[BZ]

What's your estimate on the number of changes made between Firefox 3.0 and this beta and the number of those that are new features?

Trust me, bugfixes are happening too. They just don't make the release notes for the most part, because most people don't care to have long boring release notes.

Re:Too bad about the performance, though

[Dishevel]

The Minefield beta is really fast.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[SharpFang]

Only when Google decides to shoot its revenue foot and release adblock, I might consider Chrome.

Firefox by itself - I'd be grateful if they scaled back. Do you remember the origin? There was this bloated hog called Mozilla Suite, and there was this little-known neglected wild branch called Phoenix, which was meant to be the Mozilla engine with a minimalistic, customizable frontend - cut on all the bloat.

And suddenly people switched en masse to the small, lean "just a browser" thingy while the monstrosity died.

Now Firefox becomes the new monstrosity full of bloat. It really needs another "phoenix branch" - something that will take all the lean mean backend stuff and do away with "awesome bars", "intelligent bookmarks" and all this cruft people don't give a shit about, and move it ALL to extensions, from which you'd take what you like while not being encumbered by all the rest.

PPL still use FF?

[Sun.Jedi]

1. Speed: Slowest browser on the planet.
2. Reliability: 1 tab crashes, they all crash -- and they will crash, guaranteed.
3. Coolness: FF is like a fat girl or a moped ... fun to ride until your friends see you on one.

I do like the massive plugin support, themes and such, but eye candy doesn't make up for the reasons I don't use FF anymore. I'm using Chrome right now, and on my work PC I am stuck with Windows, but I was able to get IE8, which seems (very subjectively) more robust to me.

Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in the big picture, than an IM client.

Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Abcd1234]

Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.

I believe you mean your very unpopular, entirely off-topic opinion here. Yes, it's true! Trolling about Chrome on a story about Firefox's latest beta is, in fact, off-topic.

Re:PPL still use FF?

[swordgeek]

Hmm. My experience seems to be a bit different than yours. I find firefox to be fast and solid. Maybe Chrome has improved since it was first released, but a dozen people here installed it on release date, and dumped it within two days because it was unusable. Besides, it's apparently Windows only? That's what Google tells me at least.

A big reason to use firefox for me is that it runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without issue.

"Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in the big picture, than an IM client."

Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).

To be fair, I've not looked at ff3.1(5) yet, nor IE8. Sometime after they've hit final release, I'll be interested. Advertising betas just seems silly, even for /..

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.

I believe you mean your very unpopular, entirely off-topic opinion here. Yes, it's true! Trolling about Chrome on a story about Firefox's latest beta is, in fact, off-topic.

I will never understand why some people care SO much about mod points or flags... dumbest thing ever... who cares!

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Sun.Jedi]

I wasn't trolling specifically about Chrome, I was asking (in the subject) why ppl still use FF. There are other UNIX/LINUX choices available, netscape/mozilla come to mind.

Although my opinion and subsequent sidebar about how much I think FF is crashware (which it is) may have been off-topic ... I felt like pushing some buttons.

P.S. this time I'm posting from Opera. :P

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Sun.Jedi]

I only meant to imply that I understood (and expected) the tender feelings of FF users^H^H^H^H^Hfanatics would cause my main point to be lost under a negative moderation.

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Sun.Jedi]

Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).

We have different priorities. All the fancy 'cloud' apps provide exposure and risk that I (as a SysEng) cannot assume. As long my data will not be under my direct control in the cloud, there is no chance of the web ever replacing my dmz'd 3-tier app environment. it is merely a connection path to a Java/PHP webserver. YMMV.

WRT news, knowledge, and reference, the web is clearly the best option out there, but again, just a connection method to resources.

Re:PPL still use FF?

[Abcd1234]

I wasn't trolling specifically about Chrome, I was asking (in the subject) why ppl still use FF.

So you where just trolling in general?

Look, it was an article about a friggin' FF beta. And you come on and say "Hey, FF is shit, why do you like it?!?" How is that not a troll? I mean, let's face it, in all probability, you weren't actually looking for an honest, thoughtful answer to that question (and yes, believe it or not, there is an honest answer... I just don't think you're interested in it).

If, on the off chance, you *were* looking for an honest answer, let me know, and I can explain to you why I use FF as my primary browser.

I felt like pushing some buttons.

Ah, see? Like I said, a troll. But, hey, at least you admitted it eventually.

Re:PPL still use FF?

[treeves]

Well, it's not offtopic if you consider that there is an ad for Google Chrome on the page along with the article about Firefox. Kind of ironic, actually.

64bit binaries?

[Nicopa]

Couldn't they provide 64bit binaries? That would be very useful, at least to me...

Re:64bit binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't they provide 64bit binaries? That would be very useful, at least to me...

YES! Binaries for x86_64 would be GREAT!

Re:64bit binaries?

[dapantzman]

This might tide you over.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/mozilla-1.9.1-linux/1236876773/firefox-3.1b4pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

Re:64bit binaries?

[Nicopa]

Interesting! But... what about localized builds? I like my Spanish speaking Firefox...

Re:64bit binaries?

[dapantzman]

That is the only one I could find. En will have to do for now. I also forgot to mention that you have to do the Help->Check for Updates. To actually get the 3.1b4 version as an update.

Something wrong with Firefox/Linux

[digitalhermit]

I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser. I'm having a huge problem with random slowdowns, however. It seems to be fairly random, exacerbated when multiple tabs are open, and possibly related to Flash. When the slowdowns start occuring Firefox will start eating 99% of CPU and become unresponsive. A strace will show dozens of gettimeofday() calls every second.

A google search for "firefox getttimeofday" will show many people with similar problems.

This is on CentOS 5.2 with the latest packaged firefox...

Anyone seeing similar problems?

Re:Something wrong with Firefox/Linux

[RebelWebmaster]

See bug 273310 (not that there's much there to help)

Re:Something wrong with Firefox/Linux

[david.given]

I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser. I'm having a huge problem with random slowdowns, however. It seems to be fairly random, exacerbated when multiple tabs are open, and possibly related to Flash. When the slowdowns start occuring Firefox will start eating 99% of CPU and become unresponsive. A strace will show dozens of gettimeofday() calls every second.

I had something similar to this and managed to fix it by changing my X configuration --- either from EXA acceleration to XAA acceleration or vice versa, I forget exactly. The issue was that my X server was claiming to support a particular kind of 2D acceleration that Firefox wanted to use, but the support was buggy and very slow. Using the other acceleration method fixed things.

A key symptom was that Firefox would be horribly slow at rendering a page with fixed items on it. e.g., Slashdot's comments section with the floating comment control panel in the top left corner (that I'm looking at now). Firefox would be perfectly fine at the top of the page, but slow to a crawl as soon as you scrolled down enough to cause the control panel to detach.

Re:Something wrong with Firefox/Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

ime, gettimeofday = flash

Re:Something wrong with Firefox/Linux

[ooglek]

I too was getting frustrated with Firefox. Daily restarts, things slowing down, etc. So I decided to learn a bit more about how to troubleshoot FF.

My first problem was having to shutdown and restart Firefox every time I wanted to enable or disable an Addon. Addons are EXTREMELY useful to me, both as a web surfer and a web developer. Firebug, Web Dev tools, mouse gestures, undo close tab, session savers... they all improve my web surfing experience.

So I learned about Profiles, and how to run multiple instances of Firefox SIMULTANEOUSLY each with different Profiles. This way I can run ALL the addons I want in one profile, a known-stable set of addons for daily surfing, and a set of addons for when I need to be doing web development. The fact that I can run all three simultaneously with the --no-remote flag makes this fabulous.

I took out the Firebug addon, as well as a few others, and Firefox 3.1b2 and now b3 have been much more solid and speedy than before.

The other useful thing about Firefox is the Session Manager Addon. Instead of having 4 windows each with 15 tabs open, I keep one or two Auto-Save Sessions. What does that mean? It means, I can have context-based sessions, and quickly switch between them. It even saves the text I've typed into the comment box on Slashdot but haven't submitted when I switch sessions. It means I can have a personal surfing session, a consulting session (individual sessions for each client even!), a work session, and even other specialized sessions. And I don't have to save when switching -- just choose a new session, and your current session is saved and stored away, and your new session is opened exactly where you left it 5 minutes or 5 weeks ago.

Between Profiles and Session Manager (and 1Password, but that's mac only), Firefox allows me to surf quickly, do complex tasks, and work efficiently. That is why FF is my primary browser. Sure Chrome is super-fast, and so is Safari 4, which I do use in addition to FF for simple surfing. But at the end of the day, the powerful addons are what make Firefox rock.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism from the "IE sucks! I use FF so I'm cool" days.

that, or the wealth of useful add-ons that makes FF more useful than the others you listed, esp Chrome.

Firefox memory problems were fixed

[bunratty]

The Firefox devs got away with it by fixing their memory problems. They made Firefox use less memory than other browsers. What was it they were unable or unwilling to fix again?

Re:Bzzzt!

[RebelWebmaster]

uh...looking at the Google Chrome team page, I can immediately pick out the following people as being ex-Mozilla employees or contributors: Ben Goodger, Darin Fisher, Brett Wilson, Peter Kasting, Mike Pinkerton, Jonathan Haas, Pam Greene, Jungshik Shin I'm sure there are more that I'm not aware of, but those are all certain.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[maxume]

The initial goal of the Firefox project was to create a user oriented browser. Making it small was a side goal, but it was never a primary goal for the people involved.

Ubiquity crashes beta3

[hinosenshi]

Looks like the ubiquity add-on crashes beta 3 (which, I suppose, is to be expected). I had to disable it just to get Firefox to open up properly... Just an FYI in case anyone else is using ubiquity.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[RebelWebmaster]

Everyone remembers FF devs flaming people in those FF memory leak stories from a few years ago

I don't remember any Firefox developers flaming people about memory issues. I remember fanboys doing it, but there's a big difference there. The only "official" response I know of from any Firefox developers was Ben's "It's a feature, not a bug" blog post from 2005, which is long-obsolete. Ben doesn't even work for Mozilla anymore (ironically, he's on the Chrome team now).

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[commodore64_love]

Give me a browser that can run on a Commodore 64-sized computer times the 8-to-64 bit word conversion..... .....somewhere around 1/2 or 1 megabyte in size. That would be slick.

Yeah I know. "Impossible." (sigh). Right now my FF3 browser is using ~150 megabytes and I don't know why it needs all that room just to display one single page.

Re:Bzzzt!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what is it like being completely retarded?

3.1 Beta 3 Firefox

[boogahboogah]

really brings up the MSN page fast. No really. Really really fast.

Re:3.1 Beta 3 Firefox

[colinrichardday]

So does 3.0.4-3.1.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[broken_chaos]

A lot of the bullshit surrounding Firefox is the reason I avoid it where I can. Even if that means just using the unofficial or Iceweasel branding. I don't particularly like Mozilla Corporation's obsessiveness with income (see the other Mozcorp story on the front page - "Hey, look, we might be able to get more money from someone else!"), their stance on trademark names/icons (see Debian vs. Mozcorp), or the way their developers tend to come off as, sometimes, elitist (such as the memory leak "feature" discussions).

Now officially out!

[bunratty]

Now it's been released. It's available for everyone through the links I gave, and through Check for Updates... for Firefox 3.1 beta 2 users.

Re:Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

[icannotthinkofaname]

The only thing funnier than that comment is the fact that the parent post got modded "Informative". :D

XSS XmlHttpRequest Functionality

[justinlindh]

My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.

It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.

I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.

Re:Too bad about the performance, though

[bishiraver]

Beg to differ.
http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-ie8-benchmarks/

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[bishiraver]

Pretty sure Lynx will.

Resolved

[Anonymous Coward]

WORKSFORME!

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[0xABADC0DA]

With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism

It's easy to have a clean codebase when...

* No fullscreen mode.
* No detection of click-through
* Cut and paste uses icon-shape style instead of dragging an image
* Can't grow selection using cursor
* Not cross platform
* History is just a list of titles (can't even get URL info)
* History looks like a webpage, but you can't do text search or select or right-click on links
* Downloads looks like a webpage, but same problems as history
* Closing a window with multiple tabs nukes them with no warning.
* No 'view page info' showing links, media, etc
* No 'page style' css choices
* Poor handling of many tabs (they shrink forever).
* Can't control what sites are in the screenshots on start page
* Can't search inside and outside a text field at once (either or)
* Can't see pages that are in the cache (work offline mode)
* Print... just silently does nothing if no printer installed
* No rss support at all
* No multiple profiles
* With lots of bookmarks, it doesn't remember where you were in the list so you have to scroll to the bottom again to click more than one
* Can't allow/prevent pages from choosing their own fonts
* No whitelist for cookies
* No clearing of cookies on closing browser
* No separate proxy settings, have to use OS ones
* No settings for enable/disable Java, Javascript.
* Can't restrict Javascript behaviors, such as moving windows
* Can't disable image loading
* Can't modify MIME type mappings
* Can't set max history time in days or entries
* Can't set cache size
* No master password
* No whitelist to avoid site warnings
* No support for security devices
* Can't control update behavior
* Poor accessibility
* No autoscroll (fixed?)
* Can't clear all transfers (have to remove one by one)
* Buggy UI, for example Text Encoding menu doesn't autoscroll up despite having arrows (have to click arrow, can autoscroll down if wiggle mouse)
* No firebug equivalent.
* No mouse gestures.
* Plugins perform badly and/or fail
* Has bad rendering on many non-perfect sites (same with all WebKit browsers)

Oh yeah, and they stole the name 'chrome' from Mozilla, which is pretty scummy. They don't even give props to Mozilla for the name.

Let me know if these are outdated... I don't have my Windows vmware image handy.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[theantipop]

Plugin support?

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

No, codebase isn't clean because lack of features. It's clean because it's designed well. You can add tons of features easily to a clean codebase and keep it clean.

Compiling with Python on Ubuntu 8.10 fails

[tvlinux]

nsPyContext.o: In function `nsPythonContext::Deserialize(nsIObjectInputStream*, nsScriptObjectHolder&)': /home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src/nsPyContext.cpp:728: undefined reference to `PyMarshal_ReadObjectFromString' nsPyContext.o: In function `nsPythonContext::Serialize(nsIObjectOutputStream*, void*)': /home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src/nsPyContext.cpp:682: undefined reference to `PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString' /usr/bin/ld: libpydom.so: hidden symbol `PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString' isn't defined /usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Nonrepresentable section on output collect2: ld returned 1 exit status make[1]: *** [libpydom.so] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src'

Re:Compiling with Python on Ubuntu 8.10 fails

[BZ]

Bug filed? The pyxpcom stuff is not tier-1 (or even tier-2), so not maintained or supported by anyone on a regular basis. That said, if there's a bug report, better yet a patch, I can see what I can do about getting that dealt with.

Re:Compiling with Python on Ubuntu 8.10 fails

[Anonymous Coward]

No Bug Filed

I am very anxious to see python supported.
Ubuntu 8.10 64 gcc 4.3.2
I have checked libpython2.5.so.0.1 and both function are in it.
If there is any thing I can help, please let me know

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[SharpFang]

Maybe an early version. The recent Lynxes got quite monstrous.

Tracemonkey - nativecode JavaScript compilation.

[refactored]

Hmm. Should speed things up....

Hmm. I bet there will be a mini-flood of "Oh Shit! Some bastard has worked out how to make the browser crash (yet again) (or leak the sandbox) by doing something truly evil and unexpected with JavaScript again."

It's hard to get that sort of thing really secure. If they do it truly securely, well... my hat's off to them.

If they support JSON...

[clickety6]

If they support JSON shouldn't they release the beta tomorrow on Friday the 13th ?

Poor OS X performance

[macffooky]

Lots of spinning beachballs and hangs when scrolling compared to beta 2.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[AdamTheBastard]

* No multiple profiles

--user-data-dir='path/to/profile'

You can even simultaneously run two instances using different profiles. My partner and I use this on our shared desktop so we can stay logged in to all those sites we don't care if the other person sees.

http://www.chromeplugins.org/tips-tricks/how-to-create-profiles-in-google-chrome/

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

Plugin support would be nice. A set of useful working plugins is even better.

Konqueror has plugin support. But where are the good plugins?

Nonconsole text editor?

[colinrichardday]

What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?

Re:Nonconsole text editor?

[beguyld]

What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?

Not a terminal window. vim is a console editor. Gvim is not, as it won't run in a telnet session. (never mind that virtually no one uses straight telnet anymore... but saying ssh opens too many possibilities...)

Yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

And I can't use anything else (like, Chrome) other than FF because of the awesome bar (wish they had not come up with that awful name though).

Took me just two days to get used to it, and now I don't have to remember / bookmark more than 90% of the sites I use regularly.

THREADED.SELFCONTAINED.TABS!

[AbRASiON]

Sorry to yell but Firefox is damned near perfect for me, bar 2 minor issues.

1. a crappy web page which locks up a tab, I want to be able to ignore that tab / process and continue browsing, without locking up the entire browser.
Full honesty: I'm not a coder so I can't appreciate how difficult this might be, but I don't care - I'm an end user, I feel this would be a very very welcome addition to Firefox.
1a. performance increases from 1, ideally also

2.
Applications and plugins 'stealing focus' of firefox keyboard controls.
Control W
Control tab
Control shift tab
Control shift N
etc etc
Some of these awesome and handy keyboard controls simply don't work properly when using FFox on pages such as youtube and other flash based pages, the plugin itself 'takes focus' of the keyboard and for all the ALT D, ALT TAB or any other combination of keystrokes you simply can't get the browser to listen to the commands, you HAVE to click the current tab up the top and re-highlight it / select it (try it now, you'll see a faint outline circle the tab)

I really wish that could be addressed as I'm a 'high end' keyboard user and it really gives me the niggles to have to go up and click on that.
Anyone know a way around it?
I tried to document the issue on youtube but it's hard to put in to words, or visually.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLk0MBSxb-A

Re:Bzzzt!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Brett Wilson and Pam Greene were already at Google while they worked on Firefox (on Places, to be specific)? And I have no idea who Jonathan Haas is - his LinkedIn profile (helpfully on that page!) says he was ex-Microsoft / ex-Bungie? (Were you thinking of Josh Aas?)

Goodger, Fisher, Kasting, Pinkerton, and Shin indeed did all work on Mozilla before. I think they were all ex-Netscape? Also, I'm pretty sure Mark Mentovai worked on Mozilla too.

I think Tony Chang also worked on Places for Firefox 2, but Chinese names are common enough that it's hard to tell...

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming Firefox's horrid code base is an inevitable result of its many features. I believe it's a direct consequence of it choosing technologies with bad trade-off like XUL and XBL. Get rid of them both and I suspect the code base would become way cleaner.

A lot of what's in your list are not difficult at all to be added to Chrome without uglifying the code base, so they're irrelevant (e.g. URL in history, cookie whitelist, clearing cookies, max history times, close tab warnings, clearing transfers, RSS support, multiple profiles, printer check, image loading disabling...).

And then there are other features on your list that I'm totally happy for them to get rid of to have a cleaner code base.

I call them the "who-the-fuck-cares" features for non-developers:

> * Cut and paste uses icon-shape style instead of dragging an image
> * Can't control what sites are in the screenshots on start page
> * Can't see pages that are in the cache (work offline mode)
> * Can't set cache size
> * No autoscroll (fixed?)
> * No firebug equivalent.
> * No mouse gestures.

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of what's in your list are not difficult at all to be added to Chrome without uglifying the code base, so they're irrelevant (e.g. URL in history, cookie whitelist, clearing cookies, max history times, close tab warnings, clearing transfers, RSS support, multiple profiles, printer check, image loading disabling...).

A lot of those things need their own UI elements. That means translating to other languages. Making sure the UI elements still look ok with 40 pixel-wide asian words vs 40 character wide German words (I kid ;-) vs right-to-left words. And so on.

Firefox has 54 full, localized versions. Chrome has what, a handful of robo-translations?

Maybe if you aren't a programmer you can't appreciate it, but even lots of "easy" features can end up taking a lot of time and effort (which is why Chrome doesn't have them yet), and cause the code to go downhill really fast. Programs always tend to become more and more disorganized and chaotic over time and the more code you have, even if it's "easy" code, the more this happens.

You can always start over from scratch, like Chrome, and do things the 'right' way. But it always ends up as a huge mess unless a huge amount of effort and care is taken. On top of the natural tendency toward chaos, the requirements change over time and invalidate assumptions in the code. Like for instance having each tab be a separate process is great... until something changes like for instance if each page starts needing to keep a much larger amount of state around and duplicating this dozens of times becomes a huge problem (like running a dozen JVMs on your system... how wasteful and slow is that!).

Use Firefox Portable 3.1 Beta 3 to try it out

[CritterNYC]

As always, you can try it out by downloading the portable version - Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - from PortableApps.com. It won't affect your local 3.0.7 install, so you can try out the features of the new beta without worrying about it affecting your extensions or settings.

http://portableapps.com/news/2009-03-12_-_firefox_portable_3.1_beta_3

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to disagree. Autoscroll is huge and "regular users" use it. The rest can go (I'd really like mouse gestures...but I can admit that it's not for the masses).

Re:Bzzzt!

[RebelWebmaster]

hmm, I think I was thinking of Dave Haas. Oh well. Thanks for clarifying.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop

[Anonymous Coward]

However, the original poster assumed that Firefox's horrid codebase is primarily *due to* it's features.

It's not the case here. If you strip off from Firefox all of these features that don't exist in Chrome, the codebase is still crap.

Reason? 3 letters: X-U-L. This technology doomed the Firefox codebase right from the start, even before all these features were added vs. Chrome's clean codebase.