Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Released

Shining Celebi writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser, and adds further performance improvements to the new Tracemonkey Javascript engine. One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here."

Comments

Switch Proxy Tool

[wbav]

If you have the Switch Proxy Tool, I strongly suggest you disable it. Caused all sort of issues when upgrading. If you've already upgraded, right click on the shortcut and run in safe mode, there you can disable it. YMMV.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[ottothecow]

I used someones firefox with these persona things already installed...it was awful, I couldn't see which tab was what.

It was like giving myspace page designers control over your browser

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Ethanol-fueled]

I just installed the persona add-on and checked out a few of the themes. You're right, most of the non-solid ones like the Marshall Amp and the DJ one with the turntables on it are annoying because they distract the eye and add visual clutter to the workflow.

Additionally, the graphics from the themes as described above have that pixellated, dithered, low-res look to them. It's like stretching a 400x300 picture to desktop wallpaper.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Skratchez]

This is true. The new personas features are butt ugly. Use Stylish (I recommend Gradient iCool for the nice dark black and blue) and the custom /. black with green text mod. It looks like an old CRT.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

It was like giving myspace page designers control over your browser

See? This is what happens when the Mozilla people come up with their own ideas instead of just implementing the features from the previous version of Opera.

I keed, I keed!

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[ottothecow]

yup, I am typing this from freshly upgraded firefox. I put my mouse over a few of the persona styles and they had nasty dithering effects (and I am not on a large display).

This is why people complain about bloat...what is the point of this junk? Weren't there already addons/themes that let you do this kind of stuff? I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains...because I see a whole new way to make the internet an awfully annoying place...screw animated gifs and blink tags, I am going to change your damn browser.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize you can switch/disable Personas, don't you?

It's true that many Personas themes aren't really usable, but nobody is forcing you to use them. There are lots of themes you can try.

I'm currently using the relatively nice Einstein theme :)

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[lastgoodnickname]

it might be nice from your frame of reference.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[zullnero]

Awesome. I love having as much freedom to make my browser as irritating to use to my jerk friends who don't ask for permission to use my machine as possible. It's just a thing I like to do.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[chrysrobyn]

If you have the Switch Proxy Tool, I strongly suggest you disable it. Caused all sort of issues when upgrading. If you've already upgraded, right click on the shortcut and run in safe mode, there you can disable it. YMMV.

Then I'll just have to wait. At work, I ssh tunnel 95% of my traffic home and bounce it off my Apache server there. It's not fast (by design -- I need to limit my compulsive habits somehow). On occasion, I need to get to stuff fast, like big updates and PDF files. Switch Proxy and FlashBlock are my two reasons for using Firefox.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[xtracto]

This is true. The new personas features are butt ugly. Use Stylish (I recommend Gradient iCool for the nice dark black and blue) and the custom /. black with green text mod. It looks like an old CRT.

This made me smile a little. It shows the reason why we (geeks) are *different* from the majority of "normal users".

Normal users find myspace like pages OK, the more sparks and blinks and effects the better. Whereas we find green text in black background great.

I love Green on Black (DarkRoom is a godsend for me). But everytime anyone else has seen my color schemes (I tend to work [program] in Linux using Compiz META+M inverted colors) they think I am crazy or antiquated (green and black has not been in vogue in computers for about 50 years!... even my father used VGA!)

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[jesser]

This is why people complain about bloat...what is the point of this junk? Weren't there already addons/themes that let you do this kind of stuff?

It's the first step toward replacing Firefox's old theme system with a better one, where themes are smaller and easier to create. (It's not there yet, since you can't replace buttons, only backgrounds.)

While we have both systems in place, it might seem like "bloat", but in the long term it will allow Firefox to use significantly less memory and have a simpler user interface around installing themes. It's a fight against bloat.

I hope that mouseover to change style stuff only works on mozilla domains

Correct, it only works on sites that are whitelisted for extension installation. By default, the only whitelisted sites are the mozilla sites for extensions and themes.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[jesser]

Hopefully the lower-contrast, prettier ones will become the most popular and easier to find.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[pLnCrZy]

Or you could... set a password?

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Nakor BlueRider]

A very few of the simpler ones are alright. Anything sufficiently minimalistic. I like the Canucks one, and the Mahjong one isn't bad for instance. But yes, most of them try to treat it like a wallpaper, and plaster the browser with gaudy colours, making things on the menu bar, tab bar and/or status bar unreadable.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[mujadaddy]

I have SwitchProxy, and when I tried upgrading from 3.0 to 3.6 just now, I encountered the following:

• Mouse left-clicking disabled
• Mouse scroll-wheel disabled
• Gmail + Google Docs: Scrollbar appears on LEFT edge of screen
• Gmail Chat: cannot connect
• NoScript right-click menu items have no text

Bear in mind that this is all with SwitchProxy set to use *NO PROXY* ... I uninstalled and reinstalled 3.0

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[lennier]

Your persona so ugly, she warps the curvature of spacetime.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[silent_artichoke]

Yeah, because it won't be the Miley Cyrus and $American_Football_Team ones for sure!

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[FRiC]

It's not that bad, since the URL bar and the search bar takes up almost the entire width of the toolbar area, it's usually so hard to see what the stupid persona image is anyway.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Thinboy00]

That involves letting "friends" know that you don't want them to use the computer, which could get ugly.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[mindstrm]

Unlesss you have to deal with multiple proxpies, QuickProxy should do the job.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[ultranova]

Your persona so ugly, she warps the curvature of spacetime.

Your mom's so fat, she caused a curvature overflow, so now the universe is expanding again.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[ais523]

Just use xmonad, it works like a charm. (It's a rather nice window manager, but is considerably worse than vi/emacs in terms of starting it up without a manual and having absolutely no clue what to do. People who want to borrow your computer generally give up at a completely blank screen where nothing they press seems to do anything.)

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[csrster]

FoxyProxy extension works fine in 3.5 if you need an alternative.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[der_joachim]

Normal users find myspace like pages OK, the more sparks and blinks and effects the better.

Myspace is the new Geocities then. :)

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[T.E.D.]

If you really want to mess with them, do what I do: put your mouse on the left side.

I get no end of pleasure watching folks plop down to use my machine end up spending the whole time doing it with their arms crossed and a constipated look on their faces.

Re:Switch Proxy Tool

[Cato]

For those who just need to switch between a proxy and direct connection - try QuickProxy, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1557

Pretty neat.

[jayminer]

Tried on Windows, performance improvements are immediately noticeable. Wastes less screen space by default. For those who are used to the old look-and-feel can feel a little awkward at first.

Set extensions.checkCompatibility to false and you're good to go.

Re:Pretty neat.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Set extensions.checkCompatibility to false and you're good to go."

There are cases where this is worth it to people, but this isn't a good idea if you value stability. This pref is true by default for a reason, and if you're going to recommend that people change it you should warn them about the fact that this is dangerous.

Re:Pretty neat.

[dveditz]

Much better to use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003

It will enable all your officially incompatible addons just like the pref, and you can help by reporting your add-ons as working fine or not compatible (reporting is completely optional).

Javascript performance

[mallumax]

My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari-javascript-performance/432/

As usual, Firefox performance on the v8 benchmark is pathetic where Chrome is more than 10 times faster.It is 24% faster than version 3.5.4 in V8 but it is clearly not enough. In the sunspider test, chrome is 2 times as fast as firefox. In this test, 3.6 is 17% faster than 3.5.4. Safari too comfortably beats Firefox in both these benchmarks

Re:Javascript performance

[Skratchez]

It's an improvement. That's what counts, some of us don't want to trade our lovely open-source browser for a product from Google or Apple, or MS for that matter. I can wait on javascript performance, TYVM.

Re:Javascript performance

[larry bagina]

WebKit is open source. Chrome is open source.

Re:Javascript performance

[Rockoon]

Want to throw Opera in there?

For the tests linked to here the latest official release is slightly slower than Chrome, but the latest alpha build is significantly faster than chrome.

Re:Javascript performance

[causality]

My javascript performance comparison between Firefox 3.6 and Chrome and Safari http://www.manu-j.com/blog/firefox-3-6-vs-chrome-vs-safari-javascript-performance/432/

As usual, Firefox performance on the v8 benchmark is pathetic where Chrome is more than 10 times faster.It is 24% faster than version 3.5.4 in V8 but it is clearly not enough. In the sunspider test, chrome is 2 times as fast as firefox. In this test, 3.6 is 17% faster than 3.5.4. Safari too comfortably beats Firefox in both these benchmarks

They should use Slashdot for testing JS performance. Click "Read More" to load a new discussion, then hit "Reply to This", type a response, hit "Preview", and count how many seconds it takes before you see the preview. May the best browser win!

Re:Javascript performance

[amigabill]

Why hasn't anyone gotten clever and made Firefox use Chrome's faster Javascript code? Porting it to Firefox and all that?

Re:Javascript performance

[Dan667]

The problem is there are just not the plugins for other browsers. Even though some folks are obsessing over rendering times, the extensions add to block flash, malware, adblock, etc make Firefox faster and the web more usable for me.

Re:Javascript performance

[GabboFlabbo]

In your comparison, you are using a beta version of Chrome. How is that a fair comparison?

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

That delay is nothing to do with your browser - that's Slashdot scanning of a bunch of ports on your IP address. I spotted this a few weeks back when I made a post to Slashdot while running a "tail -f" on my firewall logs, although I've been aware of the lag a lot longer than that. It seems that if your firewall just DROPs the packets you get a delay while it retries a couple of times, whereas if you REJECT then it's a good deal quicker. There's some caching going on as well, once you've gone through this the lag disappears for a day or two, then re-starts. As it says in my .sig - WTF?

Re:Javascript performance

[spyder913]

Wow... good to know. I rarely post because it takes so long for the preview to show up.

Re:Javascript performance

[Anonymous Coward]

They are checking to see if you are an open proxy, and will ban you if so.

Re:Javascript performance

[xtracto]

Maybe it is possible to disable that via a Grasemonkey script?

Re:Javascript performance

[shutdown -p now]

These tests are mostly pointless anyway. They measure raw JS performance, which would matter if you'd be doing, say, number crunching. In practice, the most heavyweight operation that is likely to be done by scripts in a browser is DOM manipulation, and that's an entirely different thing. What does it matter if your super-efficient JS AOT compiler based on quantum branch prediction can call a method on a DOM object as fast as a plain native JMP, if the implementation of said method causes reflow and redraw of most of the page?

Coincidentally, it's why Opera feels so fast for actual browsing while still using an interpreter for JS (and consequently sucking in any synthetic JS perf tests) - its interpreter is an order of magnitude slower than e.g. Chrome, yes, but it's got an extremely fast layout engine and renderer, so DOM updates are instantaneous.

Re:Javascript performance

[characterZer0]

An open proxy for what? SMTP?

Re:Javascript performance

[HeronBlademaster]

TBH I stopped caring about Javascript benchmarks (and benchmarks in general, really) when I realized you can pick benchmarks that happen to reflect the result you want to "prove".

For example, someone else linked to this benchmark (Futuremark's Peacekeeper) which puts Firefox 3.6 solidly ahead of Chrome.

Honest question: are Sunspider and V8 better than Peacekeeper? What real-world scenarios are reflected by which benchmarks? If I want a benchmark that reflects performance relevant to my normal usage, which benchmark should I rely on? If you don't know, how would I find out? ("Read the benchmark code yourself" is not helpful.)

Honest question: besides Google Docs, what real-world scenario actually needs super-fast Javascript performance? For most use cases I can think of, we're not talking about noticeable delays...

Re:Javascript performance

[mystikkman]

I bet it's serverside and not easily circumvented like that.

Re:Javascript performance

[mrdoogee]

Chrome is open source in the same way that OS X is open source.

Sure they're both based on a open source project (Chromium/Webkit and Darwin/BSD) does not mean they are truly open source. Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

Remember kids, free doesn't always mean open source, and open source doesn't always mean free.

Re:Javascript performance

[SimonTheSoundMan]

But, but, all of Google's products are in beta!

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

Not SMTP; HTTP. The ports scanned are all common default ports for web proxy applications like Squid's :3128, various ":8080" type combinations and such like. I'd have to go digging through my logs to get the complete list, but I'd guess there are about a dozen ports checked in total.

What's so irksome about it is that it's a straight SYN scan done very slowly that impacts any users that have a firewall that DROPs packets with an apparently inexplicable delay of several seconds. If you really feel the need to do this, which the Slashdot team obviously does, it would be much quicker and less annoying for users do the scan at a faster rate without the two or three retries currently used. Better yet, kick the scan off in the background while the data is being entered data into the form and reject the post if necessary when the "Preview" or "Submit" button is clicked. Even if a post is submitted through an open proxy before the scan completes, Slashdot's delay between posts from the same IP will ensure that only one post can get through before the ban hammer comes down.

Re:Javascript performance

[Omestes]

I'm running Chromium on my Ubuntu box, and Chrome on my Windows box, and I honestly can't tell the difference between them, outside of the fact that Chrome phones home. Also Iron is pretty much a 1:1 Chromium port without the Google nonsense. So you CAN make a port of Chrome/ium, and no ones parents care. Webkit is a bit different, you can port Webkit to your hearts desire, but if you copy Safari's look and feel, your doomed.

Re:Javascript performance

[amRadioHed]

That delay is really annoying. If they need to do it they should start it in the background when you preview and then by the time you post it should be done and they wouldn't need to make anyone wait.

Re:Javascript performance

[mallumax]

I used to hold this opinion (benchmarks != real world speed) until recently. But I have found that the test results compare favourably to real world usage. For example Google wave is sluggish on firefox while chrome has no problems with it.

Re:Javascript performance

[shutdown -p now]

Firefox doesn't have particularly fast DOM manipulation (thanks, XPCOM), so this doesn't contradict what I wrote. How does Wave fare on Opera?

Re:Javascript performance

[shovas]

Wish I had a mod points. Great point to make about the difference between open source projects and "open source projects."

Re:Javascript performance

[Simetrical]

Chrome is open source in the same way that OS X is open source.

Sure they're both based on a open source project (Chromium/Webkit and Darwin/BSD) does not mean they are truly open source. Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

The analogy Chrome : Chromium :: OS X : Darwin/BSD is nonsense. You can't build an almost identical replica of OS X from open-source code, or anywhere close. Chromium is fully open-source, and it's essentially identical to Chrome. It's what the Chrome developers themselves use for development and testing.

Re:Javascript performance

[BitZtream]

Congratulations, you now no what happens when you break RFC. You could follow RFCs and not drop packets and it wouldn't be a problem.

Or ... you can not follow RFCs and deal with the consequences, its not hard really. Follow protocol, things are likely to work, don't and you get unexpected and sometimes bad results. Welcome to the reason we have open documented protocols.

You'll also find that the scan is much quicker if your firewall is doing its job properly.

Silently dropping all packets that you don't allow is for cluebies who don't know what they are doing. Any decent firewall can drop on flooding triggers rather than all packets and accomplish the same thing effectively preventing flooding via the response packets and still work with the protocol properly.

In short, don't try to do things you don't understand and then bitch when it breaks things.

Re:Javascript performance

[LordLimecat]

Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

You mean like how these guys do? Theyve been around for close to a year now, and google hasnt said a peep (nor could they). Its not "sort of pretend" open source, you can modify, redistribute, etc as much as you like.

Re:Javascript performance

[Eivind]

True. A competently configured firewall would REJECT disallowed connections, and only change to DROP if there's some sign of flooding. For example, you could have a rule to REJECT a maximum of 3 connections a second, with a bucket-size of 30, for one port, or from one IP.

Nine out of Ten firewalls aren't competently configured though.

Re:Javascript performance

[Zocalo]

Or, as with my case, the firewall on your router only provides one option for rejecting traffic, which is apparently to DROP. If I allow the IPs used by Slashdot through to the IPTables based firewall on my Linux box - which is on a public IP address and is configured to REJECT - then the delay become unnoticeable.

Anyway, since it only adds up to a few dozen syslog entries from Slashdot every few days amoungst the thousands of others coming in from script kiddies and bots I don't particularly care about the scanning so much as about the implementation. It's needlessly borked for everyone out there sitting behind a home router that either defaults to DROP or doesn't provide an option for REJECT, presumably because of the numerous "test your router" and "probe my ports" sites that were around a few years ago that promoted this approach.

Re:Javascript performance

[AntiDragon]

There is JS involved as well though. And (yes, anecdotal) the delay I get from clicking "Preview" to actually submitting since upgrading is substantially less - I'd say twice as fast on average.

Re:Javascript performance

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Sure they're both based on a open source project (Chromium/Webkit and Darwin/BSD) does not mean they are truly open source. Try to modify and redistribute either and see how long before either of their "parents" get all lawyer-ey.

You mean like Iron?

Re:Javascript performance

[larry bagina]

Firefox isn't open source either. Just ask the ice weasel folks.

Re:Javascript performance

[deniable]

That's a trade-mark issue. It has nothing to do with the source.

Re:Javascript performance

[mqduck]

Chrome : Chromium is closer to Firefox : Icewasel. For better or worse, right or wrong, Mozilla owns their brand names and protects them as proprietary property.

Re:Javascript performance

[mqduck]

TraceMonkey makes it reasonable to set Digg to automatically expand all comments. That alone makes me love it (though I'm increasingly hating Digg).

The competition is heating up!!

[igadget78]

Microsoft's patch vs. Mozilla's release. I can't wait. The Excitement is almost too much.

Re:The competition is heating up!!

[H0p313ss]

When did "excitement" become a proper noun?

The day after Enlightenment.

Re:The competition is heating up!!

[mrdoogee]

Its full name is actually "Sir Reginald Hornswaggler Q Excitement III, Archduke of the upper lower territories and really cool guy."

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox 3.6 does beat the newest Chrome on some Javascript benchmarks (and Chrome beats Firefox on others). I think it's safe to say they're in the same ballpark. http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/17199/1/

Just used Chrome

[treeves]

to download Firefox 3.6. I regularly use both. Just happened to be using Chrome when I came across this story and decided to upgrade Firefox. I used to use Opera a lot. Not sure why I stopped and why I can't stick with one browser. I guess Chrome took Opera's place as the lighter, faster browser for me while I keep using FF for the extensions.

Personas, lightweight themes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof that Firefox is heading for doom. Stop wasting time on making the browser look different than the fucking OS you idiots.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[Nick Fel]

Didn't Internet Explorer 3 have skinable toolbars in 1996? Transparency please.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[Stormwatch]

Stop wasting time on making the browser look different than the fucking OS you idiots.

Hear, hear, goddamnit, HEAR! Consistency is an essential quality of a good user interface. That's why I could never really stand Opera: you can make it look like anything, but good luck making it look like it belongs. And that's why I love Safari on the Mac, yet hate it on Windows: it looks alien to the system around it.

Here's a tip -- go to the themes page and look for something that fits your OS. Looks like custom themes are immune to this Persona shit.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[gbjbaanb]

Do you run Vista, or Windows 7? How many apps do you have now that fit with the OS now? I mean, even Office totally ignores Windows themes and gives you a choice of 3, incompatible ones - black, wimpy blue and silver.

If its good enough for MS to scrap the (excellent) Window style guidelines and allow any old UI crap in, then FF is just another first-class app on Windows.

(I'd mention Linux, but then it'd only turn into a Gnome v KDE flame :)

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[flimflammer]

Normally, I would agree. I truly loathe programs that feel the need to be unique and theme themselves accordingly.

However the "skinning" done with Persona really is lightweight and, when you're not using an over the top theme, can fit nicely into the browser. It simply blends in a texture with the stock UI theme. It doesn't really change anything, otherwise.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[UnknownSoldier]

I'm still miffed that the resizing was nuked on the Add Bookmark dialog and you have to use an extension to get it back. WTF?

At least the memory leak (not releasing memory when tabs are closed) should be gone...

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[anaesthetica]

The first fruit of the Electrolysis project is supposed to be pushed out as Fx3.6.2 (codename "Lorentz"). Plugins are going to be moved into their own process, kind of like what Safari already does with Flash.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[Draek]

Than which OS? because WinXP, Win7, OSX, Linux/GNOME and Linux/KDE all look different from each other, so obviously they can't design for all of them at the same time.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[BitZtream]

But but but but ... what would we ever do with out 14,000 'theme's that consist of nothing more than some woman in a swim suit for all of our borders and boobies for buttons?

Heres a hint: If you add 'skinning' or 'themeing' to your app, you don't know how to make a GUI that doesn't suck ass. Stop there, go do something else and find someone who has a clue about how to make a GUI or someone who at least understands consistency across applications is important.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[BitZtream]

No, but you can make it so each one looks like other apps on the OS.

Unix doesn't count, not until everyone realizes that they need to settle on one look and feel for an OS and stick to it. Until either GTK or Qt dies, Linux is never going to have a UI that doesn't suck. Until UNIX GUI apps feel consistent across applications theres no point in worrying about your theme. They'd be just as well off just using the OSX or Windows theme, it'd fit in just as well.

Re:Personas, lightweight themes?

[deniable]

Hey, at least they've made new tabs work like IE. If I wanted IE, I'd be running it. Gotta love random, unexplained 'fixes.'

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Cheburator-2]

Just downloaded it - it's just as fast as Chrome or even faster. Typing this from shiny new browser.

GPU accelerated Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the goals mentioned in the article was to improve garbage collection performance to make pauses shorter and animations smoother. Why not just use the video card to accelerate the graphical operations (plus any other GPGPU operations)? Flash and PDF readers have already done it. For that matter, Windows Vista or later UIs have already do the same. This will give performance edges over contemporary browsers.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I would assume that they either don't want(or don't have the manpower) to bog themselves down in the platform-specific and, for the moment, GPU vendor-specific, details.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

This is being investigated, in fact. Work is being done to use Direct2D for hardware acceleration in Vista and 7. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527707

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[MarcQuadra]

Firefox is based on Gecko, which uses Cairo Graphics, which has an accelerated OpenGL back-end as an output option.

My guess is that performance when using an OpenGL-accelerated renderer is actually -worse- on non-compositing window managers.

The rendering of pages wouldn't be helped by GPGPU stuff, since it's 'procedural' to parse and render HTML, it's not SIMD in nature.

Apple's been sitting on accelerated 2D rendering of the UI, glyphs, text, and primitives for over four years now, it's not a panacea. I don't think Firefox would be improved if it started depending on video drivers, 3D hardware, and was slower.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[BitZtream]

It does on certain OSes. Cairo for instance will use hardware acceleration in Windows. Not sure if FF for windows takes advantage of it, but it certainly could.

As a general rule however, browsers don't really need this sort of thing, thats changed recently though.

Its not really going to give Firefox an edge however, IE already does it in Windows.

Re:GPU accelerated Firefox?

[(pvb)charon]

They're working on it: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Layers

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Chirs]

Not sure what you're doing. My firefox has been up (and used regularly) for two days and is sitting at 550MB.

It's extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6

[wiredog]

Seethis for details.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Cheburator-2]

Maybe he is using some badly written extensions or visits some flash-heavy sites?

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[MonsterTrimble]

Sweet - I didn't get Nukemodded with an INTENTIONAL flamebait subject line.

It's a good day.

Actually I have nothing against Firefox - I just find Opera & Chrome superior.

Scrolling

[Majix]

It seems the mouse wheel scrolling has been changed in 3.6. It's moving a much larger distance with each "click" of the wheel than before and if you scroll continuously it seems to accelerate even faster. My first impression is that I don't like it at all. It feels a lot more like Chrome, which isn't a good thing in my opinion, the annoying jumpy scrolling is one of the primary reasons I prefer not to use Chrome.

Re:Scrolling

[ddegirmenci]

about:config
set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false
set mousewheel.withnokey.numlines to 3

As good as new... Wait a second.

Re:Scrolling

[Chad Birch]

Apparently it's to "make Firefox feel faster". What a terrible decision, I had to immediately figure out how to change things back.

Re:Scrolling

[GaryOlson]

You do realize addons exist to change the functionality of the scroll wheel?
I have been using this addon for quite a while now to modify FF scrolling functionality.

Re:Scrolling

[Tim C]

So... they're intentionally overriding the system default setting? How much to scroll per wheel notch click is set in the mouse properties control panel applet (on Windows, YMMV on other systems).

Re:Scrolling

[Burpmaster]

set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false

Sys as in "system setting" and false as in "don't use it". Which makes mousewheel.withnokey.numlines take effect. The default true setting means "use system setting".

Re:Scrolling

[Tim C]

Well if the default is "use the system setting", then why are people complaining that the behaviour has changed?

That said though, mine is set to the default and I don't see the behaviour that the OP is describing.

Re:Scrolling

[ddegirmenci]

Yeah, there's something weird. I had thought that the problem was caused by SetPoint software, but apparently it's something else.

Well anyway, the fix works, no matter how weird it is.

Re:Scrolling

[tenco]

Not here. It's as it was with 3.5.7: no acceleration. Did you update or reinstall?

Re:How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

[Hatta]

Wait until the maintainers put a package in the repository, then update like usual. It's generally not worth installing unofficial packages if an official one is forthcoming.

Leaks, plug-in leaks, or caches?

[tepples]

Cheburator-2 has a point. Does Firefox leak even when you use Flashblock, NoScript, or another extension that implements a whitelist for a popular but leaky plug-in?

Even if your web browser reaches 1 GB, does it cause your computer to thrash swap? If not, there's no problem. It's supposed to be that big; a lot of the memory is used for cached pages from history (press Alt+Left), recently closed tabs (press Ctrl+Shift+T), and recently closed windows (press Ctrl+Shift+N).

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[imnotreallynewhere]

well this can happen on a machine with no plugins and just left sitting at the gmail page.... gets worse with visits to youtube and such. Now I have 3 PCs, two with XP one with Windows 7, it happens on one XP and the Windows 7 box, one XP machine is just fine. And yes I do run add-ons and such, the same on each machine, but ive tested on clean re-installs and it does it. A bit of googling you find other with the same problem.... its not everyone out there.....but its still not enough to drive me away from Firefox, its not much of a pain to restart every few hours.

Re:How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

[Chatterton]

The simplest way to upgrade in ubuntu is to wait. Wait a long time. One day or another it will appear in your proposed upgrades.

sudo apt-get install firefox-3.6

[tepples]

Let me Google that for you: install firefox 3.6 in ubuntu karmic.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Dan667]

get the Ghostery plugin for firefox. That stops some poorly written javascript from running in the first place.

Re:Where can I download this?

[XanC]

http://www.charbonnet.com/Firefox%20Setup%203.6.exe

Open Link in New Tab changed

[bughunter]

The new tab now appears to the right of the current tab when you right click on a link and select "Open Link in New Tab."

I just discovered that after about 5 seconds of "Hey, where'd my new tab go??"

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[shutdown -p now]

Good, because that's how everyone else (i.e. IE, Chrome, Opera) have been doing it for a while now.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[Paradigm_Complex]

I prefered Firefox's older way of dealing with this. To revert, go to about:config and change

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent true

to

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent false

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[bkaul01]

Great, one less extension I have to install now! (Tabs Open Relative was usually the second thing I installed after Adblock Plus up til now).

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[GaryOlson]

Ah, thanks. I thought I was hallucinating.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[BitZtream]

So it finally works like everything else, and how you expect it to work anyway eh? Good to see they finally fix simple UI issues after several years.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[ais523]

Ouch, I hate the IE tab behaviour. (Luckily, it's not too much of a problem, due to the other repliers explaining how to change it.) I prefer to surf as a queue rather than as a stack (otherwise some tabs would never get read at all), and opening tabs at an end is an easy way to organise that. The IE way seems to promote things like getting stuck in TVTropes...

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[Dan Ost]

I've been getting that behavior from tab mix plus for several years.

Perhaps I no longer need that extension.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[shutdown -p now]

I think it makes more sense if you look at how Chrome (IIRC) does it - it looks at the domain, and uses "open after current tab" logic only when the opened URL is in the same domain as the source page. The result is that tabs end up being grouped by site, which is usually rather convenient.

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[deniable]

Randomly changing UI behavior without warning is the way MS has been doing it for a while too. Glad to see Mozilla catching up. What's next, a ribbon?

Re:Open Link in New Tab changed

[earl_sven]

Hadn't noticed that, but the new behaviour is definitely the way it ought to be IMHO, the number of times that I opened a link in a new tab and the tab bar zoomed frantically to the end so I had to scroll back to find my place in my open tabs was infuriating!

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[headkase]

I ignore all moderation here, especially down moderation as that is always disagreement. There should only be positive mods and they should not be limited to 5. Set your threshold wherever you like with that. There are no consequences to moderation any more either as the only thing it used to affect, order of comments if you used that no longer really exists.

Personas are not themes, but want to replace them

[BenoitRen]

Personas are not light-weight themes. In fact, they're not themes at all. They're more like little gadgets that you hook up to your web browser to customise one part of its UI. It doesn't even compare to a theme.

But what's worse is that Mozilla is looking to depreciate themes in favour of Personas. From the Add-ons Manager, click "Get Themes". You won't see a page listing themes, but a page listing Personas. There isn't even a link there to the actual themes listing.

I use QuickProxy

[JoshDM]

SwitchProxy stopped working for me on one of the other FF upgrades, so I gave it up for QuickProxy, which also requires less babysitting and is easier for me to use.

Re:I use QuickProxy

[kd5zex]

Same here, seems to be working ok. Although I still need to test for DNS leaks.

Re:I use QuickProxy

[Threni]

I use Linux (Ubuntu), so I look forward to this being available in about 4 months time.

Re:I use QuickProxy

[Runaway1956]

Dude - you need not wait for updates.

Assuming you have a US English desktop, download http://mirror.netcologne.de/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-3.6.tar.bz2
Choose other languages here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Use your favorite archiver, extract it to your desktop, and run the "firefox" shell script inside the firefox directory. Few things could be simpler.

I started to reply to your post, downloaded, extracted, closed Swiftfox, and opened the new Firefox, and everything reloaded, including the partially completed response to your post.

Who could ask for more? I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit.

Re:I use QuickProxy

[Threni]

Will I have two Firefoxs installed then? Will the new one keep itself up to date, or will I have to keep an eye out for new versions? Can I remove the current Firefox first or will it break something? I removed Firefox from my Aspire One netbook once and it broke a few apps. Why can't Firefox under Ubuntu have `check for updates` on the menu like the Windows version does?

Re:I use QuickProxy

[Runaway1956]

"Will I have two Firefoxs installed then?"

Nope - the FF that you just unzipped onto your desktop isn't "installed".

"Will the new one keep itself up to date, or will I have to keep an eye out for new versions?"

Nope - FF won't update itself until you tell it. What you do with your fake eye is up to you, FF doesn't care.

"Can I remove the current Firefox first or will it break something?"

Open Synaptic, and uninstall. If it breaks anything, you can always reinstall.

"I removed Firefox from my Aspire One netbook once and it broke a few apps."

Oh? Like what? I can't think of anything that depends on Firefox for libraries.

"Why can't Firefox under Ubuntu have `check for updates` on the menu like the Windows version does?"

I see two questions here. As for "check for updates", try clicking "Help" in the menu bar. FF will check for updates. As for, "Why isn't Ubuntu like Windows?" - well - probably because Ubuntu is better than Windows.

that's cool

[zogger]

I always wanted the tabs to work that way, to keep them grouped

Re:that's cool

[DanTheManMS]

That's how I've always had my tabs open, directly to the right of the current tab. Tab Mix Plus is an excellent addon for managing this exact sort of thing.

Re:that's cool

[maxume]

I'm pretty sure it is better, but learning new habits sure does hurt.

Personas...?

[Stan Vassilev]

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6 today, which adds support for Personas, lightweight themes that can be installed without restarting the browser

I think someone just jumped the shark.

I can't explain to myself how adding a theme engine on top of another theme engine was somehow near the top of their todo list.

Re:Personas...?

[zullnero]

It's a path towards creating themes that don't require a browser restart, which is and has been an annoyance since they started doing themes several years ago. Unfortunately, a huge number of themes already out there don't work that way. It seems like a preliminary step towards transitioning to how Firefox 4.0 will be dealing with themes. 3.5 and up are pretty much transitional upgrades to wean people onto 4.0 when it's released. Pretty ordinary release strategy, really.

Re:Personas...?

[maxume]

They spent $30 million on development in 2008 (I haven't found a public link to 2009). That allows for a pretty wide todo list.

Re:Personas...?

[BitZtream]

Its a shitty path since you can already do it with the right configuration settings and an extension. I've been doing it since 2.0 while working on overlays for my extension.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Gordo_1]

Brring, brring...

You have an annoying ringtone. Oh and by the way, stop basing your performance expectations on javascript benchmarks and actually go out and use your browser to browse real websites. Call me back when you discover one that doesn't load in the same "ballpark" as Opera and Chrome.

Re:How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

[Knuckles]

How can I upgrade on Ubuntu?

It won't appear in the main distribution until the new distro release 10.04 (current Codename Lucid Lynx). Possibly someone will stick it into the backports repository (which you would have to enable) or into a PPA (likewise).

If you can't wait, install into /usr/local from mozilla.com (use checkinstall to create a basic deb package so that the package manager knows about it).

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[DamageLabs]

You must be lucky. My instance is using 1.5GB, after about a week of runtime.

Oh well, Chrome does top it at over 2 gigs.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[drinkypoo]

Next time close your failbook tab. They have memory leaks in their javascript.

Upgrading Firefox?

[YankDownUnder]

What - does this mean I have to get rid of my linux version of Internet Exploder? Dang.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[zullnero]

Ha, and you got tricked by a Opera or Chrome fanboy into replying. You know that's not going to make them change.

Just updated...

[zullnero]

Nice. Noticeably snappier. I like the idea of a path to themes I can apply without having to restart the browser. Browsing for the perfect theme will take a whole lot less time. The browser still takes up a bit of memory, but it's about what I expected. Just wish I could properly compare it to IE8 in Win7 without feeling like Microsoft is artificially deflating its memory usage numbers by offloading work into "operating system" processes.

Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3.6 for USB, too

[CritterNYC]

The portable version of Firefox 3.6 from PortableApps.com was just released in 15 languages, too:

http://portableapps.com/news/2010-01-21_-_firefox_portable_3.6

how about making FF fun again

[cinnamon colbert]

The GUI that pops up when you want to bookmark something - case study in bad design
How about a real editor for bookmarks, with some minimal feature like export this folder (when you need to send someone a bunch of stuff)
How about mozilla not being a jerk about extensions, and getting rid of the spam that makes it hard to see anything but the top 5 extensions big brother mozilla thinks you should have

How about a stable platform for extension developers

How about letting the world know how awesome FF+noscript+adblock is when you go to a site like YAHOO
I hadn't been to YAHOO wihtout my little protectors, noscript/adblock/flashblock for some time and was astonished at how much ads have taken over the front page - how can people stand it

how about giving the users some control over privacy, so we have the wipe things clean on exit menu again

how about giving some users an idea of how much info the SOBs of the web, like google, are collecting

Re:how about making FF fun again

[cinnamon colbert]

The take home of your complaint seems to be that mozilla should be for all of the worst commercial aspects of the web.
Fair enough, that is our opinion
one of the great things about FF, that made me a FFFanboy and got me to get all my friends and family and cowerkers to switch from IE to FF - ipersonally and responsible for like 30 switches - is that the extensions did a lot of neat stuff; in particularl, they give you a tool to fight the companies that want to suck all you money out of your wallet and control the web.
If you are on th side of the corporate leeches, that is your priveledge,

my complain about private browsing was not well worded; what i object to is the change in how the user can control privacy.
in old FF, you got this menu on exit - do you want to clean stuff
this is GOOD because it gives the user pos feedback; which users like
new ff has automated this in a way that is not entirely, at least to me, satisfactory, cause i am not sure that it is happening

Easier, Competitive with Chrome

[CritterNYC]

Folks like being able to customize their browser. Chrome had been using this as one of its selling points in their online ads. Personas are simpler than themes and can be easily switched in and out. They don't require a reboot to apply. And you can try them out right on the site. So, we're likely to see more work going into personas than themes. You can see that there are about 400 Firefox themes available. And 35,000 personas. So, that's where the work is going.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[zullnero]

I've installed FF on a LOT of machines over the years, and not once have I ever seen it suck up anywhere close to a GB of ram. In fact, I don't even understand why people leave their browser up for 3 days anymore...it's not like you're downloading DVDs through your browser on a slow ISDN connection...I hope. In fact, with several tabs open, I'm hitting about 90 megs right now on Win7.

If you're searching for other people having the same problem, have you noticed there is a fix for it?

All In One Mouse Gestures LiveHTTPHeader

[BigFire]

Fails for me. I kept on trying to use gesture to close tab.

Re:All In One Mouse Gestures LiveHTTPHeader

[Paradigm_Complex]

For what it's worth, firegestures works for me on 3.6. It seems to be updated sooner than all-in-one does; I had the same issue during the 3.0->3.5 transition with all-in-one, when firegestures worked.

Re:All In One Mouse Gestures LiveHTTPHeader

[BigFire]

OK, there's a way to get around the version check, and All in One Mouse Gesture doesn't exactly totally work, but here it goes:

at the address bar, type in:
  about:config
Right click and add a new boolean:
  extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6
and set the value to false.

This will allow the extension to run, albeit, no guarantee.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[bonch]

Unused memory is wasted memory.

CSS Updates

[WebmasterNeal]

The intro is forgetting the best updates of all, support for CSS gradients and multiple backgrounds in CSS.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[phantomcircuit]

Chrome still has bugs

For example it's handling of importNode on <input type="file" /> elements.

Re:Firefox will never have what Chromium always di

[BZ]

The chromium code Google wrote is BSD.

However, Chrome depends on Webkit, and parts of Webkit are LGPL-only. Much more restrictive than Chromium or Gecko...

No Tab Preview

[CodeInspired]

It's a shame they didn't support the tab preview options on the Windows 7 task bar. I know many Windows 7 users that switched back to IE just for that reason.

Only a Minor Update - but major features

[darthcamaro]

the best part of the Firefox 3.6 update is that it's offered to existing 3.5.x users. Not one of those weird 'major updates' like 3.5 was - which is why there are still 3.0.x users out there running old browsers.

Re:Only a Minor Update - but major features

[EkriirkE]

a 10MB minor update? That's what the download screen said. I just took a peek at the primary download site and Windows download is listed as 8MB on the front page.

I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

Personas could work AND WAS ALREADY WORKING as a lightweight theming replacement without being tied to the browser code as an addon.

REPEAT: It already works as an addon.

This is essentially an unremovable addon like that MS .NET addon that MS shoved down our throats.

Look, I have for the most time defended Firefox ever increasing features as progress. I already don't think they managed their "awesomebar" well at all, I like it but many loyal users didn't and instead of making it an option or an extension they gave it a hip name to add insult to injury.

But now they are taking an already working addon into the browser.

The thing I liked about FF was it's modularity, it's what caused the browser to split form the mozilla suit in the first place. This is a step into the wrong direction, into a more monolithic application.

Why do FF developers hate their own extension framework dammit!?

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[ottothecow]

I am also not a huge fan of the awesome bar (though the new IE bar also sucks).

Sometimes it is nice but other times I will be typing part of a domain (which is what I still do...since I am used to thinking about domains and not title tags) and it will decide to give me shit that it thinks is more relevant than what I am currently typing.

If I start typing a domain, odds are I am looking for something in that domain and the best way to handle that is to give me increasingly deep directory tree entries in that same domain...not some random smattering of junk that I happen to visit more often or recently than what I am actually typing.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Thinboy00]

This is essentially an unremovable addon like that MS .NET addon that MS shoved down our throats.

MS didn't write the browser in the first place.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[visualight]

Man for some years now they've been just doing shit for the sake of doing shit (I've heard all the arguments, they're all BS). They have a bunch of "UI Engineers" that just can't leave anything alone. Every new version sends me on a two week hunt for hacks and about:config settings to undo it all. And that's not working anymore for everything. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm almost resigned to moving to opera or chrome with this one -unless they've finally fixed the address bar so I don't have to type 'www' to make tab completion work, God knows why they thought they needed to break that.

Every 3.x version has been worse than the last, so, they've set my expectations.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Ant P.]

Why do FF developers hate their own extension framework dammit!?

Be careful what you ask for...

Let's imagine for a second that you're writing a HTML web page with some scripting. If this were Chrom(e|ium) you could stop reading here; this is how their extensions work. But as a FF extension writer, you don't get the luxury of preserving your sanity.

Take away all the HTML you know and replace it with XUL, a completely different XML language with a different box model. Actually, you can keep the HTML in addition. You can keep your CSS too - along with getting to learn a metric assload of browser extensions to the syntax and creative ways to hack the existing vocabulary to get results. Want to display an image? XUL doesn't have the <img> tag, or a box model with sufficient control to embed a background image, but hey you can use "list-style-image"! Oh and since it's XUL you get to have fun with overlays, which are like includes except they work in an XML/XSLT way.

At this point, I'd like to mention the average human brain can only hold 7 items in short term memory at once. So far I've only named the bare minimum necessary to make a UI that does nothing. Now to make that clusterfuck do anything, you have to use a dialect of Javascript that makes COBOL look terse. Still not scared? Then you might survive extension-writing long enough to get around to the RDF stuff...

I really don't blame them for hating it.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[BitZtream]

This is essentially an unremovable addon like that MS .NET addon that MS shoved down our throats.

Right, because deleting a registry key is something that can't be done. It was hardly unremovable, and could be done by anyone who would want to remove it. Grandma doesn't give a shit that its there, and probably would rather it be there so websites 'just work'.

Its clear that you've never had any involvement in usability studies for software.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[LordLimecat]

Because everyone who installs 30 addons turns around and bitches about all the memory leaks in firefox. And then when Mozilla does something to STOP the leaks (integrate buggy addons as properly written code), people bitch about bloat!

Seems like if you had your way wed still be at v1.0 in terms of features, and id need addons for the new tab button on tab bar, moveable tabs, undo close tab, tab Xes on the tabs, plugin management, session restore, etc. Not sure if you remember what it was like having to use 15 addons, but it was a MAJOR PITA-- updates breaking everything (and having to wait several weeks for that addon to work again), leaks, instability, addons being abandoned (and having to hack them to work with newer releases), conflicts, not to mention having to go back to vanilla on every new machine.

The stuff that has been pulled into core has for the most part been a good call, and involves features that are STANDARD on all the other browsers-- chrome has built in theme alteration, whats the beef? Why is it bloat in firefox? Has it occured to you that one of the reasons people like chrome is because they dont have to spend 3 hours dicking with it to get it how they like it?

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Tim C]

Then they should fix the extensions framework, not cram already existing extensions into the core browser.

(Yes, I do realise what fixing the framework would entail, but if it's as bad as you say it is, then it needs to be done, as part of a major version release of course)

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

Wrong. Whether core or extension, FF's UI is XUL all the way down, FF's can't stop dealing with XUL, they of all people have no reason to avoid XUL.

You make a good case for jetpack and you know what? I support jetpack, I don't think it should be the *only* way to extend FF, but it's true that most extensions would work better in jetpack.

But Personas was already working as an extension and it was and still is written in XUL, the only result of this move is making it mandatory.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Ant P.]

They're doing that now, via (drumroll)... another extension! Which is going to be built into the browser!

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

What? I DO work in web development, I know that if my pages depended on installing themes into users without their consent I'd like to be guaranteed they are using Personas.

What I find shit-scaring is that you think that random developers need to ensure they can install themes into my browser even if I don't want to have anything to do with it.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

That's a good argument for autoinstalling it, not for making it unremovable or hard to remove. Although I'd agree that Mozilla is also at fault for introducing the mechanism in the first place.

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[tsa]

I love the awesome bar. I only have to type a 'w' and I get the weather page I always watch. I type a 'b' and I get the 'buienradar' (shower radar) where I can see when the rain will start. It knows I use these pages often so it puts them on top of the list of suggestions. Even on a freshly installed firefox I hardly ever have to use the 'bookmarks' drop-down menu. Awesome!

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[AmiMoJo]

Mod parent up. This is why a lot of FF extensions, including my own, are so badly coded.

My extension (Tabs Open Relative Modified) changes the way tabs work. There are two ways of doing that - the right way which involves understanding how the browser works internally and then carefully attaching your code to it, and the wrong way which is to simply overwrite the relevant Javascript function and call the original in your code.

So I had a choice. Spend a long, long, long time figuring out how to do the former or just do the latter and if it breaks other add-ons or in future versions of FF then I'll worry about that (or not) when it happens. Basically the only configuration that is supported is mine. The add-on itself is actually just two other add-ons which don't work well together and one of which stopped working with FF3.5 and was abandoned. Hack on top of hack on top of...

I write assembler and C every day. I write my site's HTML/CSS/Javascript by hand. I'm not clueless about programming, it's just that I don't have the time to invest in making the add-on better than "works (for me, most of the time)".

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Gerv]

Lots of current Firefox features started life as addons. That's a normal way in the Firefox community to prototype something. Are you arguing that if a feature _could_ be implemented as an addon, it _should_ be? Because there's a whole bunch of stuff in the browser I'm sure you use regularly which _could_ be addons. But I bet it would annoy you to download Firefox and have to install 10 addons before it was usable.

Firefox 3.6 with Personas is faster in startup and rendering than Firefox 3.5 without them. If speed is your issue, you don't have an issue. If you don't like the feature, don't use it. It's not intrusive.

Gerv

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[Requiem18th]

Why yes! There are some stuff that should be extensions by default, but that doesn't mean I have to install 10 addons myself, Firefox could easily ship with "default addons", in fact I wouldn't mind *at all* if FF shipped with the Personas addon preinstsalled, that way All I had to do to remove very pixel of the Personas UI is uninstall it.

If you don't like the feature, don't use it. It's not intrusive.

For starters, Personas adds a menu to the status bar for changing the so called themes. That's one widget more than I want in my browser, you may think, "yea but it only a menu", but my point is that I don't want it, but I won't have an option for it, nor for the bloat and memory it will consume, what really bothers me is that it already works as an addon so they went to spend the effort of not giving me a choice in installing it, like I said, a step in the wrong direction.

But probably it is not going to matter, I saw the projected UI for Firefox 4 and it simply appalls me. It disregards any attempt at UI standaristation, it won't fit with Gnome anymore, besides, it's going to become a literal ripoff of both Chrome *and* IE.

FF 4 probably won't be main browser anymore.

PS: Then again integration with Gnome won't be much of a problem since Gnome Shell is also making sure that I switch to KDE even with the ridiculous "Folder Views".

Re:I'm sorry but this is pure bloat.

[HouseOfMisterE]

There's an extension for Firefox 3.x named oldbar that makes the address bar work like the one in Firefox 2.x. I don't know if it works with Firefox 3.6, though, as I have not yet upgraded.

And yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

"One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar. You can read the full set of release notes here."

Ironic, then, that the "awesomebar" and the UI both became exponentially more-unusable, really-laggy on my PC, forcing me to revert to 3.5.7.

Re:Personas are not themes, but want to replace th

[gbjbaanb]

someone said that they are the first step in making themes a bit more lightweight and extensible, that a theme is a collection of 'personas' which are individual UI modifications.

So today, we have a background modification, tomorrow a font or tab or scrollbar or whatever.

Maybe its a good idea, maybe bad, but that's the way it is with FF - you pays your money and you get changes. Its why you're using FF in the first place. I think we should stop giving them such a hard time over it sometimes - if they didn't try anything we wouldn't get the good stuff they come up with, even though we have to pay the price of having to accept the not-so-good. (and no, I use the awesomebar, I think its great now I've gotten used to it)

Re:Personas are not themes, but want to replace th

[BenoitRen]

Its why you're using FF in the first place.

Actually, I don't use Firefox. I use SeaMonkey. No biscuit! :P

I think we should stop giving them such a hard time over it sometimes - if they didn't try anything we wouldn't get the good stuff they come up with, even though we have to pay the price of having to accept the not-so-good.

This constant drive to (often needlessly) reinvent the wheel, and forcing it on the users without the option to get the old back is one of the big reasons why I'll never use Firefox, and stay with SeaMonkey.

The only reason I'm following this at all is because Firefox controls Gecko, which the other Mozilla applications are also built on. Removing themes from the back-end will adversely impact all the others.

Re:Facts ARE FACTS (in Opera's favor)... apk

[hairyfeet]

Ahhh....I know I shouldn't slap the fanboy, but I'm bored people, and therefor can't help it. Opera sucks dude. How does Opera suck, let me count the ways...NO NoScript...And NO Mr. Fanboy, that lame ass completely useless disable the entire site and then whitelist don't work. What if I want to allow ONLY one script on a page? Lame.

Opera extensions suck. Sorry, but they do. What makes FF the "must have" is I can have the web MY way, NOT your way, or the way the Opera devs deem worthy, but MY way. For me that is FEBE(must have) Downloadhelper/downloadstatusbar, ABP (and NO the lame ass hack you Opera guys use ain't squat compared to the ease of ABP) Noscript, iMacros (must have, great for scripting) ForecastFox,Nightly Tester Tools, Distrust, Image Zoom (must have, great for resizing images on the fly). Most of those there are either NO Opera equivalent, or there are bad hacks like the download "extension" where you have to feed it the entire video URL with a copypasta just to grab a video. If it is flash based Downloadhelper will grab it AND convert it to the format of my choosing. So extension support in Opera? Lame.

So yeah, Presto is a fast engine. But if my browsing experience sucks frankly I don't care if it sucks really fast or really slow, the word sucks is still in there. Mobile? Yeah Opera is good there. The desktop OTOH...yuck. If all I wanted is raw speed with very little features I could run QTWeb or Kmeleon. There is a REASON why Opera scores so low in the USA even though it is free. It is because we do NOT like it! Sure it might be #1 in Russia, where I'm sure the machines are as slow as Xmas (Opera is good on power starved systems) but here in America we like our PCs like we like our cars, big and bad.

So I'm afraid you can spam those links all you want Mr. Fanboy, Opera ain't gonna gain squat here in the USA. It was a niche when it was for pay, it was a niche when it was ad supported, it is a niche now and I don't see it getting any bigger. FF works just fine, the extensions let us have the web OUR way, it works on Windows, Linux, and OSX, is easy to customize, in other words for us it "just works". And if it ain't broke...

got it

[zogger]

got it, thanks, but I'm having a retardo brane phart here, maybe you can help one more time, and TIA if you can. I've gone all through that involved menu, and cannot get the new linked tab to show up exactly to the right of the original tab where the link came from. That's really all I want, nothing else. I have checked and unchecked what looks like that option, and nothing changes, both ways a new tab being opened shows up at the far end of the set of tabs that are already there.

Re:got it

[DanTheManMS]

I think the option you want is Events - Tab Opening - "Open other tabs next to current one" and leaving "change opening order" unchecked. Try restarting Firefox if nothing changes. Note that I haven't tried it in the very latest version that this article is about, so I'm not positive if it works correctly there.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[AmberBlackCat]

I did the download and update from the Firefox menu. It crashed during the update and corrupted Firefox. Ironically, I had to use Opera to download Firefox and reinstall.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[shovas]

+4, Funny, pfst, that's actually quite insightful.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[Runaway1956]

How about you let us know when Opera and Chrome catch up to Midori? In my experience, Midori beats them all, for speed. YMMV, and I haven't even looked for benchmarks - I'm just going by personal experience. Oh yeah - Midori has been passing the Acid tests for quite a long time. It was the first, as far as I know.
  http://s217.photobucket.com/albums/cc226/Runaway1956/?action=view&current=Midori_Acid3.png

And, my primary browser is still Firefox. Customizations are worth the loss in speed, IMHO

My biggest complaint with Firefox is that it freezes occasionally. Just kinda fades out, and hangs for awhile. After several seconds, it brightens back up, and away I go. But, speed? My ISP limits my speed more than my browser does.

Re:Perfect

[anaesthetica]

The Firefox team is aware of the problem and they're working on eliminating as many of these as possible.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[TangoMargarine]

Only 32 minutes seems a bit premature...

Still having a fine time with Firefox 3.7a1pre

[haaz]

A.k.a. "Minefield." Despite the name, it's been completely stable for me. In fact, I'm using it right now. Works fine. I sometimes miss the History function, though it remembers the sites I've visited. So I have no complaints. The speed gain over 3.5 is phenomenal. Between Mac OS X 10.6 and Minefield, I'm a happy camper.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[mrcaseyj]

There seems to be a bug in the moderation filter. The only way I can get it to display only the comments, and all the comments, above a certain threshold, is to use the classic discussion system and select nested along with my threshold. Nested is the key.

Re:There's YOUR opinion, and then there's facts

[hairyfeet]

Ahhhh...I just love to fart in the general direction of lame anon cowards...And the BEST you can come up with is a fricking HOSTS file? HOSTS? BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA...Damn, that's funny. But I do thank you for pointing out your own big can o' fail. What were my words? what did I say about Opera? Lame hacks I do believe? So your el smello browser has to have a fricking HACK HOSTS file just to do what FF does, and on top of that? Lame as hell! can decide you which sites can come and go with a simple right click? can you decide that if a site has ads you do NOT want, along with content you do, to simply filter with a simple click? No? How sad...

And your big selling point is "faster Jscript"? Remember what I said about fast sucking? Well suck at the speed of light baby, yeah! And who in the fuck cares about fast jscript anyway? It already loads as fast as I can click, is there a "faster than you can think to cl;ick" option in Opera? No? Then WTF should anybody care anyway?

And Good Jebus Christ, you had to go for the "My ePeen is bigger than yours" BS. Damn that's funny. You DO know what they say about compensation, right? Lacking a little something downstairs are we? But as if it matters my baby is an AMD 925 Quad, 8Gb RAM, and 1Tb of HDD running 2 500Gb SATA. Not that it matters since we are talking web browsers and it is pretty much common knowledge that Opera runs on less resources, because it don't have diddly dick for extensions or addons or...well anything else worth having, hence popular in places like imbrokeistan. Since even the "slow" computers here are 3Ghz+ with a gig or better of RAM Opera running well on old shit don't really make a damn.

How's video downloading working for you? Have to use that lame ass "add on" where you have to copypasta the entire video URL and hope to Jebus it actually works? Is that fun for you? Maybe you think that is a fun game! Hey, does it automatically convert the videos for you into the format of your choice and place it into a nice separate folder just for videos? No? Well maybe you can label its lack of features as a "feature"!

Sorry Mr Lame Ass Anon Coward, but you can click your heels together three times and say "there's no place like home" and wish upon a star and dress as the Big O for Halloween, it still ain't gonna change the fact that your browser of choice is DEAD LAST. As in bottom of the heap, teeny tiny itsy bitsy nobody would notice if it blew away tomorrow, little bitty niche? Want some proof? Notice how your "super browser" barely, and I mean just barely, beats "other"? Meanwhile FF, Chrome, and Safari all have much bigger chunks, and getting bigger every day. And you know what they say, if you ain't busy growing you're busy dying. And since I don't see Opera growing...well I guess that means they are the other, huh? don't worry after mommy EU adds the browser ballot to Windows 7 maybe...just maybe...you might actually get up to 3%! Yay! Maybe one day, if Opera works very very hard and eats its vegetables, it will be 1/6th the size of Chrome, a barely two year old browser! How long as Opera been out again?

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[pjbgravely]

You would shake you head at me. I always have firefox up, and right now I have 100+ tabs.

As for memory usage system monitor is reporting firefox as 406MB so 3.5.7 doesn't have any memory leakage on this system.

That did it!

[zogger]

Thanks a lot man! Wanted that for *years* now.

Re:Where can I download this?

[BitZtream]

Maybe you should not install it then? Its not your computer, its theres, perhaps you should not go out of your way to break the rules?

Re:Non-admin updates?

[BitZtream]

Yea, everyone that installed it as a normal user so they had full permissions over it. Of course, we were able to do it all along.

threads

[jdc18]

Does this one supports threads per tab like chrome or opera or even ie8

What other extensions aren't ready yet?

[billstewart]

The ones that really matter are AdBlock and NoScript - if they're not ready I'm not switching.

I also use a few others, like Ghostery, and I'm assuming the restore-most-recently-deleted-tab button will still work, but it's the basic safety ones that matter.

Re:Personas are not themes, but want to replace th

[gbjbaanb]

This constant drive to (often needlessly) reinvent the wheel,

That's a problem with modern computing in general, I blame MS for always making different APIs and frameworks and never quite making their mind up about how to do something (DB access is a great example there). As a result, everyone, everywhere is always trying to do the same damn thing in a different way, using a different set of tools. Maybe one day computing will mature to be a more stable industry, focussed more on the final product than the toys used to build it, but we're still a far way off that.

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[Dan Ost]

If you're seeing similar memory consumption for both FF and Chrome, perhaps you should consider that this isn't the fault of any memory leak, but rather the result of your surfing habits.

Every time there's a firefox story on slashdot, I see posts complaining about memory leaks in firefox. I have yet to actually see a post that makes an even remotely convincing argument that what they're seeing is the result of a memory leak.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[m85476585]

You mean like Digg?

Re:I'm confused...

[cinnamon colbert]

I notice you don't address my #1 whine, the bookmark gui. Are u conceding that it is bad ? Given how long FF has been around, and how much programming horserpower they have, that the can't get a critical user function like the book mark gui right says a lot.

1) Firefox does let you export bookmarks. Granted, it exports all of them, but how hard can it be to crack open the HTML file and strip out the ones you don't want to send?
It's a matter of opinion, so there is no right or wrong, but I thought computers were supposed to reduce repetitive actions; surely the ability to click on a folder and export it is something that people need to do often.

2) "Not being a jerk about extensions"? In what way? Just go to the web page and look around, it's not like the add-ons window is the only place you can get them.
I, and i imagine most people use the mozilla site (which is built into FF) to find extensions. It used to be that you could search that site prett easily and see all the diff extensions.
Now, it is hard to see extensions beyond the "top rated" ones, tht is, mozilla has taken away people's freedom; for many people, having less choice is not doubt good; for many of us, and esp those of us who ar FF evangelists, it is bad - why should I have to do extra work to see thing mozilla doesn't trumpet ? and it is extra work.

3) "Letting the world know"? Am I being wooshed? You're saying they should beat their own chests? Maybe run some cocky TV commercials that says FF is cool and provide no actual info to back it up?
what seperates geeks and nerds (which i am,and a poor speller to boot) from geeks and neerds who get htings done is the understanding that marketing, even the most stupid marketing, has value.
What do you think the response of most people would be if they could test drive FF on www.yahoo.com with all the distracting stuff disabled ? they would say "WOW"

4) "give users control to wipe things clean": it's still there. Or just tap Ctrl+Shift+Del before you exit.
but it is not as good as it use to be; they have made it less user friendly; they have given you and me less control; they could have done this in a manner that gave us a choic, but the they didn't

5) "SOB web collectors": who isn't these days? Personally, I'm tired of being warned that every food I can possibly eat is decreasing my life expectancy in some way.
well, you are right that the media hypes stuff endlessly. However, we have an epidemic of diabetes in this country - as one doc put it, america dies on dunkins.
as to web privacy, its a value issue; i, personally, think privacy, in and of itself, is valuable, and that optin should be the default value; if companies want to collect, for free, valuable marketing info on yuo, you should have to give your explicit permission

Re:How about fixing the Memory leaks?

[DamageLabs]

Oh, it is definitively my surfing habits.

But, that has no connection with the fact that leaving FF with open tabs alone for a week nearly doubles its memory footprint.
That also has no connection with the fact that on my 3GB RAM + 3GB swap Windoze XP machine Chrome constantly thrashes, and my memory usage without open browsers is less than 1 gig total.

Now, I do realise than my habit of running multiple browsers with around 50 tabs open is not a socially accepted behaviour, but constantly adding features without addressing old issues seems futile. FF 3.0 did show a big improvement in memory management, and even bigger in stability. Yet, I am still seeing issues from years ago with plugins and memory.

Considering my browsing habits, I still haven't found a bookmark / tab tool that saves context - history and opened child tabs, let alone the content of the tab as it was when saved. With something like that, I probably would have no need for 50 tabs, and would stop complaining. One can dream...

Re:I'm confused...

[TangoMargarine]

No, I'm not. What's wrong with it? It works just fine for me. If you hate the Awesomebar, then yes, I suppose it probably does suck.

1) Er...why would an average computer user need to export bookmarks *ever*? I would think the vast majority of computer users (read: not Slashdot readers) have a single-boot Windows XP/Vista with a single browser that they use. So why would they need to export bookmarks to begin with? Slashdot readers, yeah maybe. I copy all my bookmarks to Firefox whenever I install a new copy of Linux on my machine, but that's only once every several months.

2) Are you referring to the "Add-ons" option under the Tools menu or addons.mozilla.org? Because a.m.o has categories on the left side. Maybe they don't have "all addons alphabetically" but that's not really going to help anyone anyway...

3) Sadly, yes, you're correct. The average consumer falls for the dopiest ads, apparently.

4) How so? I've been using Firefox since like 2.0.6 or something and they added a whole bunch of options to it in 3.5: Clear last X hours, today, this week, etc. They've given us *more* control as far as I can tell. And it actually gives you all the options when you Ctrl+Shift+Del, you don't even have to dig in a menu for it. How is it less user friendly? Should they just clear stuff without telling you what it is that's being deleted? Because you can get that same effect by just hitting Enter without looking at the popup box.

Agreed about the privacy thing. I don't even have a Google account because Gmail doesn't interest me, but more importantly, I don't *want* them to try to tailor their search to fit me specifically. For one, I want the results to be the same every time so I don't do the same search twice and the result I want moved so I have to find it again or something. And second, I don't know how good their predictive algorithms are, but it's like driving a car: I find driving a manual transmission more "fun" sometimes because you're more in control, you don't have to ease off when you're headed up an on ramp and the engine is still roaring in 2nd gear at 45mph because you've had your foot down steady for the last 15 seconds :-)

Ugh

[rantingkitten]

One of the major goals of the release was to improve startup time and general UI responsiveness, especially the Awesomebar.

What would really improve responsiveness of the Awesomebar is to get rid of it, or at least let me turn it off. I find it utterly and completely useless, and detrimental more often than not. I just want the old, sane behavior of checking the first few letters I'm typing and matching against sites I've been to recently where the URLs begin with those letters. I don't want it to search for "do those letters appear anywhere in the URL string, anywhere in the title, anywhere in the bloody bookmarks". Really, there is zero percent chance, whatsoever, that my typing "g" into the address bar means I want to go to a bookmark I stashed away years ago which has "Complete Listing" in the title because, hey, "listing" has a "g". What kind of brain-damaged behavior is that?

Sure, it claims to learn over time, but it doesn't seem to actually do this, and in any event, clearing out your history complete ruins that. Plus, since its suggestions are wrong so often, I end up going to the wrong site, which it of course counts as a hit on that and adds to whatever asinine "learning" routine it's using.

None of the about:config tricks or plugins actually work to remove this abomination either. For the love of god, let me and the millions of others who hate the Awesomebar turn that garbage off.

xkcd viewers thank you

[Phorion]

Best new feature: title text (the tooltip that appears when you hover over an image) no longer disappears after a few seconds. Now I can read xkcd without the fear that comes from knowing I'll soon have to wiggle the mouse around to get the tooltip back.

Re:Speed Kills (play it safe - buy a Chevy)

[mqduck]

I don't know about getting rid of all down moderations, but Overrated and especially Offtopic should go away. They provide no benefit.