Firefox 4 Beta 9 Out, Now With IndexedDB and Tabs On Titlebar

surveyork writes "''Mozilla today officially released Firefox 4 Beta 9 and it's a big improvement over previous betas and a parsec beyond the Firefox 3.6.x experience. At this stage, after months of development, Mozilla developers are clearly nearing the end of this development marathon.' After Firefox beta 9, a beta 10 and a single RC are scheduled (this road map can change, of course). The main features of Firefox beta 9 are IndexedDB and tabs on titlebar (just like Chrome and Opera). IndexedDB allows sites to store data on your computer (with your prior authorization). Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory. Old-schoolers can always turn on the 'show menu bar' to get their familiar GUI back. Oh, and Fx beta 9 is fast and starts fast. Firefox beta 9 available here and in lots of official mirrors."

Comments

Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it have a status bar at the bottom?

If not, then it's still EPIC FAIL.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Browsers are going the way of minimizing the amount of space taken up by the user interface and maximizing what's available to the actual content. I think it's a good thing, especially as web pages transition from something like a post board full of stickies to having their OWN user interfaces that look odd next to the browser's. I don't see what's bad about not having a status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[IB4Student]

Yes, although it's moved to a more logical spot (the URL bar)

Re:Status Bar???

[hedwards]

Is that logic, or is that training? The reason I ask is that the only reason I dislike it at the moment, apart from it blocking the favorites star, is that I look to the bottom of the screen. In a sense it probably is a more logical place since it's right next to all the buttons.

Re:Status Bar???

[TigerTime]

So when i mouseover a link, it displays the url it points to in the URL bar and overwrites the current URL? And i have several plugins that display icons in the bottom status bar currently: ForecastFox, Firebug, Greasemonkey, IETab, Delicious, Echofon, Stylish. Where would those be displayed in Firefox 4?

Re:Status Bar???

[siddesu]

Nope, even worse. It shows the current URL, a > and a part of the new one.

There is an "addon bar" for addon stuff, though, you can enable it from the toolbars menu.

Re:Status Bar???

[rudy_wayne]

Does it have a status bar at the bottom?

If not, then it's still EPIC FAIL.

The status bar is gone for good. Why? Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think and apparently have so much free time on their hands that they constantly look for ways to fix things that don't need fixing. Fortunately there's an extension that adds the status bar back in. Of course it's horrendously stupid that you now have to resort to extensions in order to get back things, like the status bar, that have existed in every browser ever made since the beginning of time. The issue here is not resistance to change. The issue here is removing functionality and actually making things less useful.

Fortunately the stupid and pointless "Tabs on Top" and equally stupid and useless big orange Firefox button in place of the normal menu bar are both optional. However, I have a bad feeling about this, given all the other stupid changes they've made, and I wonder how long it be be until they are forced on us and we will have to rely on yet more extensions in order to have a decent browser.

Re:Status Bar???

[Nemyst]

Additional advantage is that it squeezes even more space out of the UI, thus giving you more screen space for what really matters: the website.

Re:Status Bar???

[Wallslide]

Yes, although it's moved to a more logical spot (the URL bar)

When I hover over a link, there's a few things I'm expecting to see. I want to see the protocol, the domain, and finally the end of the link that would have the actual page/file that the link is pointing to. When the status bar is at the top next to the URL, there isn't enough space to display all of those things. I much prefer the status information at the bottom because the available horizontal space is much larger, and there's a better chance I'll be able to see all the info I need. In that sense, I believe locating the status information at the bottom is much more logical.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that we're not hurting for space, even on 1024 let alone higher resolutions.

Re:Status Bar???

[shadowthunder]

I've actually found the lack of the status bar quite nice. I only ever used it to see the target link and change NoScript settings. I'm liking the former being done in the remainder of the location bar, and NoScript is handled well through the context menu.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

The status bar is gone for good. Why? Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think and apparently have so much free time on their hands that they constantly look for ways to fix things that don't need fixing.

I am a Firefox dev, and I see what you mean about the status bar - it's definitely controversial. But we definitely do care what users think. If this was a mistake, then it was a mistake made in good intentions, because we thought it would be useful to our users. We're not making a browser for ourselves, but for many millions of people.

Again, I'm not defending this particular decision, of the status bar removal - I am personally not in favor of it.

Overall, though, I truly believe that the features for 4.0 are ones Firefox users like - speed, HTML5 support, stability.

Re:Status Bar???

[digitalchinky]

If LCD manufacturers would actually stop making 1900x600 screens then we wouldn't be having a lack of space for the status bar. (1900x600 was a random resolution plucked from my backside that highlights the stupidity of current low to mid range displays currently available)

Re:Status Bar???

[gfody]

there's already an extension to add the status bar functionality back

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you guys really care, or do you just say that you care?

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none. Had you guys even bothered to consult with any actual users before making this change, you'd immediately have known that it was a stupid change to make.

Re:Status Bar???

[Felix Da Rat]

^ This.

I like most of the interface, but I'm not happy about not being able to see where I'm going. We always have PDF warning here, and now my browser will no longer give me that same heads up when I'm clicking even a reasonably long link. If it was an option, that would be one thing, but not having a choice on this - it's making me mad.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

You're ignoring the millions of cheap laptops sold each year with 1366x768 resolution. It's a stupid trend but we're in a period where vertical res is shrinking not growing. Even most LCD monitors aren't truly 1080p, an underdeveloped standard.

Re:Status Bar???

[igreaterthanu]

Yes.

Right click the panel in which the address bar sits, Customize, then drag whatever you want (such as Activity Indicator) to the Status Bar, then press OK.

Personally I find the status bar to be annoying and like the new design, however.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me state it again then. We're not hurting on 1024x768 let alone 1366x768 let alone 1900x1200 and resolutions are only getting better not worse.

Re:Status Bar???

[houghi]

In general it is a good thing. But why not go a bit further. I have the line File/Edit/.../Help and there is a LOT of place right there after that. Perhaps a good place to have the status bar icons from right to left.

Or make it possible to use it for other things. Now it is just a big blank useless emptiness.

Re:Status Bar???

[EvanED]

You might want to talk to this guy

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

"Additional advantage is that it squeezes even more space out of the UI, thus giving you more screen space for what really matters: the website."

Not trying to be snarky, I just use F11 key.

Re:Status Bar???

[Soukosa]

If you guys care so much then why not leave in an option to have everything that previous versions had to remain there as they were before? Not just the status bar but also the split home and refresh buttons and non-transparent menu and tab bars. The interface was just fine how it was before. If you want something different yourself then sure, go ahead and add options for it but don't assume your users want the same and force it on to them as well. We should have to be forced to use add-ons for this stuff either, especially considering how many times it been said that too many add-ons are the reason for the slowness and memory bloat problems the browser has.

Re:Status Bar???

[nine-times]

Because the developers said so, and like many other decisions, they couldn't care less what the users think

Or maybe they do care what users think, but not all users agree with you...?

If your complaint were simply, "I don't like the design," then I think I'd say, "fair enough." But you seem to be complaining that the developers are making design decisions about the project, as though it's somehow improper. Like they're supposed to just take a vote on everything, and literally design by committee? But it's not even that, it's more like you think the developers should cede their own tastes and judgement and do things the way you would personally like them to, and if they don't, then they're committing some abusive act.

Developers need to make decisions, and no, sometimes those decisions won't adhere exactly to your personal tastes. If you don't like the decisions, maybe you could get more involved? Or you could help to create a fork somehow? If all the users are really being alienated by these changes, then it should be possible to get a fork going. A lot of people didn't like it when Mozilla dropped the old suite, and so Seamonkey development has been going on this whole time.

Re:Status Bar???

[arose]

Extension to chop out the middle instead of chopping off the end in 3...2...

Re:Status Bar???

[IB4Student]

My netbook is 1024x600, and having a statusbar blocks crucial links on my homepage. I'd have to scroll down (not as fun when you don't have a scrollwheel)

Re:Status Bar???

[PReDiToR]

Like this?

Menu is TinyMenu, Back/Forward appear and disappear depending on where in the tab's history you are, the "B" is bookmarks. User agent, ABP and a few other useful plugins make FF 3.6 a firm favourite of mine for the foreseeable future.

Re:Status Bar???

[IB4Student]

It does chop out the middle. I don't know what he's talking about; you can always see the protocol and domain.

Re:Status Bar???

[vlueboy]

You were correct until GUI standards changed. Everyone before IE7 has designed a shorter URL bar than the expected status bar's size of near-window-width. We're getting short-changed.

URL bars now give up valuable room for back, refresh, home, our obligatory search bar. It gets worse with site icons, add-to-favorites stars, RSS indicators, down arrows for history, "GO" buttons, Firefox's domain confirmation in green for HTTPS sites... and more importantly uselessly long links like: "http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/15/0238253/Firefox-4-Beta-9-Out-Now-With-IndexedDB-and-Tabs-On-Titlebar" that are made NOT to fit on the URL bar without H-scrolling, let alone on 4:3 screens.

Rarely is a link you're following going to be short enough for this new "logical spot" that is underprepared to handle the job of the original statusbar. I won't complain that much... we got back some vertical space that we lost on widescreens.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. Well, I don't mind how Chrome does it - no status bar at the bottom, but if you hover over a link, you get a small floating box at the bottom left indicating the URL. In the new FF betas, you have to look UP at the address bar to see where the link will take you, and it feels like it takes significantly longer to do that than to glance down. I really don't like it.

Re:Status Bar???

[jjohnson]

Wrong. I'm quite happy to have the status bar gone/relocated.

Re:Status Bar???

[31eq]

It is, indeed, possible to use the menu bar for other things. See View|Toolbars.

Re:Status Bar???

[Tubal-Cain]

But not the last part: the target filename.

Re:Status Bar???

[sinclair44]

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none. Had you guys even bothered to consult with any actual users before making this change, you'd immediately have known that it was a stupid change to make.

I think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Your statement is wrong. Absolutely wrong. Had you even bothered to consult with more "actual users" than yourself, you'd immediately have known that saying that everyone wants the status bar was a stupid statement to make.

Re:Status Bar???

[Sepodati]

I don't use the status bar now, so I think it's a good idea. Although I don't know why it can't just be a user option like it's always been.

Re:Status Bar???

[gstoddart]

there's already an extension to add the status bar functionality back

But, why remove it in the first place? For a decade or more, the status bas has been useful to check what that link you are about to click on actually points to. Removing it just opens people up to all sorts of things.

To me, that is kinda like having a mod to my car to add back the rear view mirror. I just don't see why removing it in the first place is 'progress' ... I am beginning to fear Firefox may have jumped the shark.

Which is annoying, because IE still sucks, Safari is annoying, and I can't even begin to care about Chrome.

The last cool innovation in a web browser that I actually found useful was tabs. Quite sad, really.

Re:Status Bar???

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Your definition of epic, makes Gilgamesh weep for our children.

Re:Status Bar???

[vlueboy]

I failed to mention here that because firefox == miriads of extensions that expect a status bar, developers just lost the natural place to show you a quick download countdown, unread e-mail status, current temperatures, adblock and noscript domain controls and maybe even translation toggle options. Guess which place is perfect for devs to want to migrate to now? Our shrinking URL bars! :)

Re:Status Bar???

[microbee]

Some extensions I installed use the status bar to display, you guessed it, their status.

Could anyone inform me how the hell would that work if the bar is gone???

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

It is displayed INSTEAD of the URL. This is the superior way to do it; FF is finally doing what Midori has done for a while now. I'm glad to see them catching up in ways like this. Over the past few years, I watched Firefox on Ubuntu become That Thing You Use to Install Google Chrome-- which indicates a very serious problem. ..Chrome should have been in the "partner" section of the software center, I shouldn't have had to launch *Firefox* and wait for it to load just to install a PGO-compiled browser. Seriously though, I hear Firefox in 11.04 is going to not completely and totally suck. I look forward to it.

...still, as long as XUL has sub-par support for things like RGBA translucency and native translations and whatnot, it'll always be one of those apps that looks and feels just a little not right, like my grandma after she had her stroke.

Re:Status Bar???

[IB4Student]

What version are you having an issue with? I'm using Fx 4 beta 10pre, and the last part is there, too.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Horse shit. My desktop PC is not a cell phone, and I'll thank the browser developers for not acting like that's their goal.

I have five million pixels spread out across three flat-panel monitors. I can afford the real estate required to render a fucking status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[aliquis]

When reading the first post I noticed my Safari 2.x doesn't have a status bar.

Turned out if pops up the location over the link in question (sadly at first after like a second or so, so you have to wait to get the information you want. I have no idea why it can't do that immediatly. Maybe you can set it somewhere?)

Re:Status Bar???

[EvanED]

But, why remove it in the first place? For a decade or more, the status bas has been useful to check what that link you are about to click on actually points to. Removing it just opens people up to all sorts of things.

I'm not going to debate the relative merits of the old approach and new approach, but as pointed out repeatedly in each of these discussions, FF4 still shows you the target URL, just in a different place. It's likely that it will be truncated fare more and far more often, but at least according to one poster, it at least does the right thing and elides the middle.

Which is annoying, because IE still sucks, Safari is annoying, and I can't even begin to care about Chrome.

Not knowing what you have against Chrome, you might try out Opera. I've been using it as my primary browser at home for quite some time, though I'm not all convinced that I wouldn't like another one better, and I might go to FF4 when it comes out for a bit. But it is a good browser.

Re:Status Bar???

[Kalriath]

Firefox smushes in a new "addon bar" if addons try to add to the status bar. Guess where the addon bar is? You guessed it - the bottom of the goddamn browser chrome. All we need now is an extension to add the URL info into the "addon bar".

Re:Status Bar???

[PitaBred]

Stupid and pointless? All of the changes are for the most efficient use of vertical space, which is even more critical given that all screens are moving to a 16:9 ratio.

Re:Status Bar???

[Bill Dog]

I figure after home 3D flops, next they'll introduce home simulated IMAX wrap-around TV, with a 16:1 aspect ratio. Look for 1280 x 80 netbooks.

Re:Status Bar???

[aliquis]

Pop-up a field which gives the link data once you hover links, make a sliding interface at the top of the screen which slides out url- and search field boxes once you raise your mouse to the top of the screen and get rid of all the buttons or do similar sliding features out on the left and right edge.

Voila, 100% website content on the screen.

And yeah, I know it can be disturbing if your mouse hit any of these areas by accident, but I wouldn't prefer a delay. I doubt your mouse pointer got much of a reason to reach all the way out to the edge though (maybe with some web apps? (Should there be any?)) Another issue could be if you don't want your browser covering the whole screen but well, just do it =P

Or people could learn short-cuts:
* Mouse over link -> pop-up location field.
* Key-G -> Draw a location bar over the content, remove after enter or at a backspace press when there's no content left.
* Key-S -> Draw a search bar ...
* Maybe instead of backspace use Key-Left and Key-Right to navigate back and forward.
* Key-B to bring up an advanced bookmark management window over the current content, complete with names, urles, groups, tags, history and live search field, ...for easy navigation to what you really want. Together with the smart bar feature of the url bar.

Now, where do I sign up for the patent?

Re:Status Bar???

[19thNervousBreakdown]

That's just not true. I have 1,200 pixels of vertical resolution, and I'm still happy for the extra space from having it gone.

That said, I can't imagine that it'd be a significant development burden to have the option to turn it back on, and if they really wanted to do it right they'd do it like chrome--the navigation bar's horizontal space is too overloaded as it is with search and everything else stuffed up there unless you want a mostly-empty additional bar to show everything that isn't the address. A small bar in the lower part of the window that's only visible when there's information to put there seems perfect.

Re:Status Bar???

[nabsltd]

It appears if you want all the other FF 4 goodness (faster Javascript, etc.), you have to live with some questionable changes to the UI.

Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes? Pretty much everybody would be happy then.

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

Re:Status Bar???

[aliquis]

there's already an extension to add the status bar functionality back

That why he said:

Fortunately there's an extension that adds the status bar back in.

What I wonder however is:

I wonder how long it be be until they are forced on us and we will have to rely on yet more extensions in order to have a decent browser.

Firefox extensions to get Chrome or Opera installed? I don't get it ;)

Re:Status Bar???

[nabsltd]

Wrong. I'm quite happy to have the status bar gone/relocated.

But, if they left the status bar in place, or gave the user an option for where the status bar should be, that would make you unhappy?

See, the problem is that Firefox has always been the browser that was easiest for the user to configure for "their way", but more and more it's becoming like IE, where the developers make descisions that remove end user choice.

Re:Status Bar???

[nabsltd]

Stupid and pointless?

Yes.

All of the changes are for the most efficient use of vertical space, which is even more critical given that all screens are moving to a 16:9 ratio.

So, use the current option to turn off the display of those elements that you don't use, but let me turn them on if I want to.

That's what this issue is about...not the lack of a status bar, but the fact that it's an option on FF3, while it's a mandate on FF4.

Re:Status Bar???

[dryeo]

Status-4-evar does exactly this. I like having a status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[DougReed]

Sorry Mister developer guy, but it really does not matter what you do with the status bar any more. Firefox started freezing three PC's in my house like a year ago if I left it open for more than a day. Chrome is an exercise in overdone minimalism, and IE stinks. So I was forced to switch to Safari, and gee... it just works like most of Apple's stuff. .. and it has a status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[Mr_Plattz]

Extended Status Bar

Re:Status Bar???

[shadowthunder]

It seems as though you picked up on this, but the only reason you look down at the bottom for the URL is training (granted, probably 10+ years training to the point of instinct, but training nonetheless). What's wrong with it blocking the favorites star? It only appears up there when you hove over the link, which means that the mouse can't also be positioned to click the star.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, although it's moved to a more logical spot (the URL bar)

If by "logical" you mean "subjective", I might agree with you. ...just how it's more "logical" to have the reload button not really be a button, at the end of the URL bar, instead of organized with all the rest of the quick navigation buttons. ...or now they got rid of the "new tab" option from the tab menu...because I never want to create a new tab after I've just been organizing some other tab that's in the middle of the set of tabs as opposed to the end.

They really messed up with the UI this time. I'm glad you can use the classic UI instead of the Chrome-style UI (or choose), but I'm pretty pissed about them jerking around with basic UI functionality.

Re:Status Bar???

[devent]

Yes, I miss the status bar. Now it's always something changing at the top and it's really distracting and annoying. I think they have even a little animation in the URL bar, which will get more distracting and annoying.

Why it have to be always with animation? It's only distracting and annoying.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

then why not put everything on the side?
None of the applications I use on my netbook (which is 1024x600; barely enough space to type a word comfortably) have any problem doing it.

I am really not digging the change, the destination of a link should not appear in a nearly invisible colour (light grey on white) in the URL bar!
I agree with the sentiment that somewhere at the bottom is a much better place for it. heck, an even better place would probably be a tooltip that pops up while you hover over said link.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised you kept the home button and added cut/copy/paste.

Re:Status Bar???

[keeboo]

Stupid and pointless? All of the changes are for the most efficient use of vertical space, which is even more critical given that all screens are moving to a 16:9 ratio.

Damn... Why they're phasing out the 16:10?! That was a reasonable aspect-ratio compromise.

Re:Status Bar???

[DrXym]

The weird thing is the status bar has become an Add-ins bar so it's still there but there is no widget to show status text. Logically (and sensibly), there should be a widget on the customize toolbar that implements status text. It's a very basic thing to add and would placate people annoyed by the status bar changes. Better yet if Add-ins is prepopulated with it.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to see the protocol, the domain, and finally the end of the link that would have the actual page/file that the link is pointing to. When the status bar is at the top next to the URL, there isn't enough space to display all of those things.

Moreover, the URL is right-aligned, which makes it cumbersome to look at the beginning of the URL. Often I just want to have a quick glance at the protocol and domain a link points to - if the link is displayed in the status bar, I can immediately detect the information I want because it is alway in exactly the same position on the screen. I have been using FF 4 beta for some time now and to me it causes some considerable eye strain to look at the beginning of those URLs in the address bar.
 

I also noticed something interesting in my browsing behavior: Most of the time I look at the bottom half of the screen and not at the top! So the status bar is much more "comfortable" to look at. Maybe this comes from programming (or general writing), when I still want to see some of the code/text I have already written. Or when answering e-mails, /. comments, or anything else, I always look at the bottom half. On many websites on top there is a banner and a navigation bar, which is not that interesting to read, so I look at the bottom half. So for me, this "status-bar-in-address-bar" thing is really a horrible idea...

Re:Status Bar???

[Fluffy Bunnies]

I've had my bookmarks toolbar in that big blank emptiness since Firefox 1.X. The UI for doing that change is kind of unintuitive though: first you go to the edit toolbars mode, drag the bookmarks toolbar into the right place, close the edit more, and then deselect the bookmarks toolbar from the View menu (to hide the now empty bar where the bookmarks used to be). But once you do it, it's kind of neat to have your most commonly used bookmarks just one click away.

Re:Status Bar???

[wvmarle]

Isn't the edge of your touchpad acting as scrollwheel? It does on my ancient EEEPC (a 701 model). Took a while to get used to but now I really like it. Works really well, and excellent alternative when space comes at a premium.

Re:Status Bar???

[wvmarle]

In FF3 it's just two clicks to disable the status bar. I've done this on my netbook, not on my desktops. Another two clicks to get it back when needed.

Why not just leave it in as option? Disabled by default maybe.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually put my bookmark-bar items there. Been doing that since forever. Just right-click -> Customize Toolbar, and customize away. No extensions necessary.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I sometimes use those smaller laptops with that tiny 1366x768 res and let me tell you, nearly every time I'm browsing on them I run into websites where an additional 312 pixels would be hugely helpful -- and that's when I'm using Chrome no less!

For things like photo or video viewing (which I never use them for) it must be outright painful at times.

Re:Status Bar???

[mqduck]

Browsers are going the way of minimizing the amount of space taken up by the user interface and maximizing what's available to the actual content.

When web browsers were new and screen real estate was limited, that might have been a good idea. What the hell is the point of removing functionality to save a dozen or two vertical pixels today?

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

The former would make me mildly unhappy, because then I'd have to continue turning off the #*(@% status bar on every machine. As for an option, while I'm not strongly opposed to it, I am kind of happy to see resources reallocated away from a feature that I don't find useful, which presumably poses design requirements and helps the test requirements spiral (plus if the option were in the GUI, that's one more option cluttering the GUI).

Funny you should say that this is more like IE. IE9 doesn't have a status bar by default but offers the option to bring it back.

Re:Status Bar???

[aussie_a]

This COULD have been fixed with a simple config option though. Why that wasn't made available is beyond me.

Ultimately I just downloaded Status-4-Evar. I think in the short-term this will become a favourite amongst geeks, while no-one else really notices.

Re:Status Bar???

[sponga]

The best thing they have done was add 'tabs', ever since than it has been chickenshit little changes. What ever happened to the revolutionary 2.0, seems like they rode the 'tabs' train and than IE9 finally added it. So nothing too revolutionary to convince people to stay with firefox, especially since IE was basically sandboxed and slowly but surely popups began to appear even on Firefox.

Just sayin....

Re:Status Bar???

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

In general it is a good thing. But why not go a bit further. I have the line File/Edit/.../Help and there is a LOT of place right there after that. Perhaps a good place to have the status bar icons from right to left.

I put the search bar and a couple of plugin icons (adblock, noscript, requestpolicy, cookiesafe) there - just right-click on the empty space, choose customize from the menu and drag the search bar and any other icons up there.

Re:Status Bar???

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes?

I'm fully expecting an add-on to do it any day now.
Seems like it should be dead simple to implement.

Re:Status Bar???

[LingNoi]

Do you guys really care, or do you just say that you care?

What a stupid question. Why would someone waste their time making a browser for you if they didn't care. Typical AC trolls killing slashdot.

Re:Status Bar???

[notmyusualnickname]

I do much the same, only I squeeze (most of) the navigation bar in there. (back/fwd, url bar, search) Nice and slim.

Re:Status Bar???

[syousef]

there's already an extension to add the status bar functionality back

And I'm already beyond fixing something that as far as I'm concerned is broken out of the box. I have better things to do than download extensions to make software behave sensibly.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Or as they are so eager to rip off Chrome and Opera, why not just do it like Chrome does. Create a small tooltip (where the status bar was) showing the full URL!).

As a long time Firefox user I started using the minefield builds but I just could not cope with the absense of status bar (and the status4ever extension was just not the same for me) so I finally changed to Chrome. For my daily browsing I use chrome and when I need somethign speciic I fire "the beast" (firefox 3) which takes considerable amount of time and resources to load.

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

Forget easy.

I, for one, would be perfectly pleased if having a functional status bar could be enabled with a difficult-to-find option: Bury it in about:config (using "status" as part of the description, so it can be found with a search), and I'd be pleased as punch.

Call me old and set in my ways, but until the recent Firefox builds I'd been using browsers with the status bar across the bottom for more than 1.5 decades. Even in 1993, when I would borrow a local university VAX dialup account just to use rlogin to connect to a far-away FreeBSD machine where I could run Lynx with my MS-DOS machine running Telemate, I had status at the bottom of the screen, taking up one entire line of screen real estate out of 25.

Rearranging things like this is like rearranging the pedals in a car.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

By using the classic compact theme + tabkit on the side, you can already gain a lot of space and readability when you have a bunch of tabs.
Also you can move around buttons and whatnot near the system menu toolbar if needed.

Re:Status Bar???

[ultranova]

A small bar in the lower part of the window that's only visible when there's information to put there seems perfect.

It is perfect, at least until some enterprising scammer makes a statusbar-lookalike appear when the real one's not visible.

Re:Status Bar???

[ShakaUVM]

Fortunately the stupid and pointless "Tabs on Top" and equally stupid and useless big orange Firefox button in place of the normal menu bar are both optional. However, I have a bad feeling about this, given all the other stupid changes they've made, and I wonder how long it be be until they are forced on us and we will have to rely on yet more extensions in order to have a decent browser.

While the devs always fall back on the old "you can always use an extension" excuse, the fact of the matter is, every time a new version of Firefox comes out, some of your extensions are going to break. I hate the unified forward/back dropdown menu, so I have an extension that restores it to seperate dropdowns for back and forward. Guess what? The 3.6.13 update killed that extension - and left me without back and forward buttons entirely. Awesome. Thanks, Firefox.

And don't get me started on tabs. Tabkiller wasn't even ported to Firefox 4 when I was testing it out, and it doesn't matter how much you tell the developers that you already have one taskbar and don't need a second one, they won't bake in a no-tab option to Firefox. They're in love with the damn things.

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

I still use my cursor keys along with page up/page down, especially on machines with badly-configured touchpads.

But even my 6-year-old Dell Inspiron lets me set up part of the Alps Glidepoint touchpad as a scroll surface. It also works fine.

Re:Status Bar???

[bami]

Also, most eee's sport a multi-touchpad (atleast my 901 does), you just scroll with two fingers (if you install the correct drivers, don't go with the ones from the ASUS site).

Re:Status Bar???

[damnbunni]

Because 16:9 screens cost less to make and people think '1080p TRUE HD' is better.

Re:Status Bar???

[Stormtrooper42]

I think this is still a good idea. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/06/1522206/Why-Are-We-Losing-Vertical-Pixels
For example, a few years ago, mid-end 15' laptops screens had 1280x800 pixels, now they're all 1366x768, so saving vertical pixels makes sense.

Re:Status Bar???

[mqduck]

But it still shows the URL of links you mouse over in the location bar. Every time it does that and I see the location bar change, I think a new page is loading or some other sort of activity is happening. It's driving me nuts.

Re:Status Bar???

[ace123]

Customizability is what extensions are for. Be glad that XUL gives you the flexibility to re-implement these features using its fast javascript engine.

Here's the one here that I'm using, and it offers more flexibility than the original status bar.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

Re:Status Bar???

[Vegemeister]

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Re:Status Bar???

[Soul-Burn666]

Oh but there are!!
I first didn't understand where it disappeared and then read the dev notes and it made a lot of sense.

With the links in the status bar, not a lot of functionality is lost. I'd even say I'd like the split to be user controllable (at least in about:config).

The only thing I miss is the little icons to enable/disable addons, but these can be placed on the top toolbars.

Regardless, Chrome *never* had a status-bar and iirc, it has a couple of users :)

Re:Status Bar???

[Soul-Burn666]

The link you are about to click on is now written on the right side of the status-bar, which is usually left unused.
Therefore, this functionality is still there.

And if you want to continue the car analogy, it's like removing the rear view mirror and replacing it with a small CCTV like done in many sports cars and trucks.

Re:Status Bar???

[Dynedain]

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

So much of a disaster that both Chrome and Safari both added similar functionality? Sometimes the /. rhetoric is incredibly narrow-minded.

Re:Status Bar???

[Vegemeister]

I'm in love with them too. Tabs allow me to have 4 Firefox windows in my task bar instead of 105.

Re:Status Bar???

[Malc]

The status bar is the first line of defence before clicking on potentially dangerous links (ok, maybe second, after commonsense). It shows to where obfuscated URLs are going, which is quite helpful if it's in a well constructed phishing email. I've had a few good Facebook forgeries, but the status bar confirms most quickly if the links go to Facebook or not. I think this is actually a really big problem in smartphones, BTW, as they tend to strip away all of these visual cues.

Re:Status Bar???

[nospam007]

If I need more viewing space, I just press F11.

Re:Status Bar???

[Joce640k]

1) You can hide it with two mouse clicks in the current version.

2) It's impossible to get in the new version.

Which of those options makes any sense to you...?

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there aren't that many vertical pixels to spare. My display has 1200 pixels of vertical space. I has not increased in more than 5 years. Many displays have only 1080px and netbooks + phones less than that.

With 16:10 and 16:9 displays it makes much more sense to spread the controls vertically, if you really need to have controls of the browser on your face all the time. Personally I sometimes even surf on full screen mode, without any browser GUI visible.

Re:Status Bar???

[Haedrian]

"Of course it's horrendously stupid that you now have to resort to extensions in order to get back things,"

Extensions are firefox's forte. Installing an extension requires very little effort. What's the problem? Install an extension and get it back. Hooray. Now people like me with limited screen size prefer it this way. If you don't agree, get the extension and everyone's happy.

Its how extensions work.

Re:Status Bar???

[Ginger Unicorn]

Speaking on the behalf of everyone in the world who isn't an utter cunt, using the phrase "epic fail" makes you an utter cunt; and if you use all-caps to say it, then it becomes the responsibility of anyone who isn't an utter cunt to immediately explain to you in no uncertain terms what an utter cunt you are.

Re:Status Bar???

[Haedrian]

Then you're using the wrong browser.

Seriously. What is so hard about installing an extension? Its one of the 'selling points' of firefox. Its not like you need to open config and play around with the values there or something.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.projectpro.com/letters/usability.html

Modern widescreens are a complete joke, especially on laptops. We need VERTICAL space, not horizontal. You don't want to read a wide line of text, you want to read many short lines of text, which of course require vertical scrolling if you have a ridiculously short screen.

And as for glossy screens, don't get me started. It just shows what happens when the 'general public' start influencing the design decisions of computer hardware companies - idiots who know sod all about computers and use them for watching DVDs on, buy a glossy widescreen laptop, just so they can watch bloody DVDs in 'widescreen' (as if that makes the film any better, or as if you even NOTICE it after one minute into a film), and everybody else, who actually want to use computers for their intended purpose - that being anything OTHER than watching bloody DVDs, has to suffer.

I've had a great idea - why don't Mozilla bring in 'The Ribbon' for Firefox!! Even less vertical real estate left! Hoorah! And no way to remember where any function is either!

Re:Status Bar???

[surveyork]

They replaced the Status bar with an Add-on bar. It lacks some features of the status bar (showing links' URLs). People who like the add-on bar but still want more browsing space can try Autohide Add-on bar http://userstyles.org/styles/37319 and Animated Addons Bar http://userstyles.org/styles/40215 .

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

OR even this http://ompldr.org/vNnp3NA

Re:Status Bar???

[Waccoon]

I had a bad feeling years ago when they removed the ability to configure the scroll wheel.

Yeah, I can still configure it by going to about:config, but I didn't realize that changing the scrollwheel lines in the GUI was a massively bloated feature that needed to be trimmed so the browser could suck up 200MB of memory and have freezing problems every 15 seconds or so (garbage collection? It started happening to me when they implemented their new JavaScript engine).

I can't stand the new forced minimalism fad, so I'll probably switch to Opera. I didn't realize how quickly common features we take for granted would be swept out of the geek demographic. Casual users make up a big bulk of the userbase, but it's the geeks that told everyone to make the switch. So much for keeping the geeks happy with just one stupid little information bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[smash]

Then do what safari does and have a fucking tickbox to turn it on/off.

Re:Status Bar???

[ShakaUVM]

>>Tabs allow me to have 4 Firefox windows in my task bar instead of 105.

I think this is the place where I link something to a funny image with "You're Doing it Wrong" attached. =)

I can't possibly imagine what sort of usage situation that you have that requires 105 open windows/tabs. You do know that Firefox allows these "bookmark" things, right? That allows you to close a window and yet still find it later?

I'm fairly OCD about keeping a minimal amount of clutter inside my UI. I do only have four Firefox windows open, too, and 0 tabs. But the point is, like with the status bar decision, it's really something that ought to just be a right-click checkbox option. You like tabs? Cool. I don't like tabs? Or want a status bar? The developers take a shit on your head.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an extension bar that appear at the same place than the old status bar when the extensions needs to inform the user of anything.
Basically, people who needed the status will still have a bar there with the same informations and the rest of the world who didn't need the status bar will regain the space it took.

Re:Status Bar???

[reboot246]

I like the status bar at the bottom, but my number one requirement is the option to not have the tabs at the top. I may be the only one in the world who likes my Windows task bar hidden at the top of my display (where God intended it to be!). Moving the pointer up to the top to click on a tab usually means going too close and making the task bar drop down. Having a menu bar and links bar with the tab bar under them makes that less likely.

Re:Status Bar???

[Vegemeister]

Hypertext syndrome. I middle-click anything that looks vaguely interesting and try to get around to it later. Today's number may be a little higher than usual, however, as you caught me in the middle of a TV tropes binge.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly this extension stopped working in beta 8 (for me anyway)

Re:Status Bar???

[TheRaven64]

When reading the first post I noticed my Safari 2.x doesn't have a status bar.

Safari 4 has a status bar, as have all older versions of Safari. It is, however, off by default. You have to enable it in the view menu (or hit command-/).

Turned out if pops up the location over the link in question

This is a very dangerous thing to trust because it only displays the URL if there is no title attribute on the anchor tag. At least you need JavaScript to override the status bar display (and then you get something flickering as both the browser and the script try to set the value at the same time)...

Re:Status Bar???

[takowl]

Actually, I prefer it. Extra space to display pages. I'm not necessarily sure that their solution to show URLs is better than the pop-up bar in Google Chrome, but I prefer either to the fixed status bar.

In other words (I see someone else agrees), you're just blindly assuming that everyone agrees with you. Has it escaped you that Mozilla might actually have done some UI testing? Or that people can have legitimate opinions that aren't yours?

Re:Status Bar???

[TheRaven64]

Speaking as someone who has released a lot of code as Free Software, there are two reasons why I do it:

• I need to use the code, and it gets done faster if other people contribute.
• Someone paid me.

What end users (i.e. people who are contributing neither code nor money) think is completely irrelevant. For a project like FireFox that gets Google Ad money from users, they might care slightly, but generally there's no reason why they should.

Do you ask proprietary software developers if they care what pirates (i.e. non-contributors) think of their software? Do you expect them to care? Free software developers let non-contributors use and distribute their code for free, but they have no more incentive to care about them than proprietary software developers do.

If you want developers to care about your opinions, contribute something that's of value to them: code, (detailed, useful) bug reports, artwork, user studies, or money.

Re:Status Bar???

[dalmor]

They do have a what happened to the status bar section in the FAQ, it includes a link to Status-4-Evar which will return the status bar to it's formal glory.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Does 16:9 ring any bells? Most 19" CRTs and larger ones supported higher vertical resolutions long before Age Dee with its mind-boggling 1920x1080 pixels. Netbooks, sub-notebooks and portable devices with internet access are additional arguments. In fact, the web or rather site layouts are typically optimized towards vertical paper-like (as in letter or A4) aspect ratios. The likely reason being that reading very long lines is rather uncomfortable.

Re:Status Bar???

[Winckle]

Handily you can also do cmd+/ to toggle it.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait until they bring in 'The Ribbon', that'll REALLY fuck things up!

Re:Status Bar???

[orange47]

blame widescreen LCDs for losing status bar

Re:Status Bar???

[Thiez]

There's always PageDown and End...

Re:Status Bar???

[wunderbus]

Additional functionality often comes with the cost of a more complex UI. "Saving pixels" isn't anyone's goal; the goal is a better user experience.

Re:Status Bar???

[daveewart]

Some extensions I installed use the status bar to display, you guessed it, their status. Could anyone inform me how the hell would that work if the bar is gone???

Don't worry. Those extensions probably won't work with Firefox 4 anyway, so this won't be a problem ;-)

Re:Status Bar???

[nutshell42]

Oh, you still use a "desktop" or a "laptop". How quaint. Modern displays are 768p or less.

You have to go with the times, connect to the Cloud, man! If your browser doesn't run on something with net or smart in the name and a random vowel as prefix, they aren't interested in you. If you don't immediately shout every lifestyle choice from the roofs with Twitter and Facebook updates you are just not relevant.

Go back to your 8-track, gramps.

Re:Status Bar???

[aliquis]

In Firefox or Opera or whatever I used to click out all the status-bar, window resize, steal focus, so on so on in the browser anyway.

Retarded that it's possible in the first place.

Everyone who makes links using java-script should be shoot.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Man, I guess my notebooks are strange beasts then. I have a 4 year old 15" notebook that is 1680x1050 (Dell D820), a 3 year old 15" notebook that is 1920x1200 (Lenovo T61p), a 2 year old 12" notebook that is 1440x900 (Lenovo X200s), a 9 month old 12" notebook that is 1440x900 (X201s) and a brand new 12" notebook that is 1280x800 (Lenovo X201). Yes, 2 of those are home machines and 3 are my work boxes. but none of them has anything as bad as 1366x768 (focusing on the 768 as that is the vertical and applies to things like menus, toolbars, and status bars taking up vertical space).

I certainly agree that the stupid "short screen" stuff does drive me to want more vertical space in apps though.

Re:Status Bar???

[LingNoi]

So open source end users are pirates? Somehow I think your analogy needs tuning.

Coders, even ones that work on proprietary software do it for more then just money. Simple way to test this. Pay people to work on software that they know will be junked and not used; then see how many stay just for the money.

You might not care what others have to say about your programs but in my experience you're in the vast minority of free software developers.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I always drag the bookmark-field to that empty space, and a separator. Don't forget to turn off the now empty bookmark status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[19thNervousBreakdown]

If it's not visible, you're not hovering over a link.

Re:Status Bar???

[Johann Lau]

Firefox has always been the browser that was easiest for the user to configure for "their way"

Nah, not by a stretch.. that would be Opera...

Re:Status Bar???

[xded]

Because most 13" and 14" laptops have 768 vertical pixel, because in Windows 7 everything is just a tad bigger to be "touch compatible" and today I can see half of the drop down menu items I was seeing 10 years ago, because people don't seem to care, and because manufacturers care even less.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

The screen real estate is getting more limited than before. A 4:3 CRT screen at 1600x1200 had 1.9M pixels, a LCD flat panel of 1366x768 has 1M pixels. That's comparable to 1024x768, something that was common in the early nineties.

Re:Status Bar???

[datapharmer]

Yeah, but there is one thing really missing by not having the status bar, and it isn't icons, it is the status. You know, like what is loading on the page... It is helpful to know at least generally what is going on (waiting, loading etc) without having to use a third party tool or monitor my network connection.

Re:Status Bar???

[Requiem18th]

Don't worry, I'm sure they'll come up with a couple dozen different and incompatible solutions.

Re:Status Bar???

[TheRaven64]

So open source end users are pirates?

No, pirates are people who don't contribute to software development. Open source end users have a subset that don't contribute. One difference between open and proprietary software is that open source doesn't discourage freeloaders, but that doesn't mean that it caters to them.

Any software, open or proprietary, is written for the customer. In a lot of open source software, there is only one customer - the original author. In bigger projects, there are companies funding development, and there are other contributors. These are all customers too. Then there are people who just grab the source and give nothing back. These people are users, but they are not customers. If they pay for support, buy the devs a pizza / beer, or even just spend some time filing detailed bug reports, they become customers.

You might not care what others have to say about your programs but in my experience you're in the vast minority of free software developers.

You're missing the point. Developers care what people making a contribution think. Some may care about what some random guy thinks, but there's no incentive to do so. I may spend some time helping people get stuff to work, but at the end of the day I don't really care about their opinions unless they are backed up by some concrete contribution. If they guy who does the artwork, or the guy who runs the web site, has a feature request then it gets a much higher priority than if some random user has one.

Re:Status Bar???

[Haeleth]

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

The FF3 Awesome Bar "disaster" consisted of a bunch of people who hate change whining about a change. Then after a month or so they got used to it, and after a few more months all but the most hardcore haters were wondering how they ever got by without it.

I know because I was one of them. I may even have complained about it here and demanded a config option. Now I rely on the feature every day. If the Awesome Bar taught me one thing, it is to reserve judgement until I've had a chance to try a feature out properly for myself.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you shouldnt expect a full computer when you get a netbook.

On another note:
Which sane website has crucial links lower than 600px from the top?

Re:Status Bar???

[Haeleth]

Rearranging things like this is like rearranging the pedals in a car.

Good analogy. Minor UI adjustments do very often lead to accidents causing tens of thousands of dollars' worht of damage, serious injury, and even death. I think Mozilla should be hauled into court to face criminal charges for recklessly endangering their users like this.

Seriously, though, give it a month and I bet you won't even notice the change any more. If you've coped with moving from DOS and 1993-vintage UNIX to modern GUIs, you are adaptable enough to cope with the URL preview moving to the URL bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[bzipitidoo]

Screen space is why I don't want the status bar around. But I still want the info on it. I use Compact Menu to get rid of the menu bar. I can use the window manager's "undecorate" feature to get rid of the title bar. I've tried several add ons for the status bar.

One was an "autohide". Status bar unhides wheneven you hover over a link. There's an endless loop problem with that. The browser redraws the web page, which sometimes moves the link out from under the mouse pointer, which causes the status bar to hide again, which moves the link back under the mouse pointer....

I'm trying one called Tooltip Plus. Puts the URL in a tool tip on the mouse pointer. It works, but also has a few issues. If you scroll the browser while a tool tip is active, the area that started under the tool tip is not redrawn. The other problem I have seen is that it can obscure popups that a web page may create when hovering over a link.

Re:Status Bar???

[Haeleth]

1) You can hide it with two mouse clicks in the current version.

But then you can't see where links lead when you hover over them.

2) It's impossible to get in the new version.

Which is fine, because the only thing it was ever useful for is seeing where links lead, and that job has been taken over by something else.

Which of those options makes any sense to you...?

(2), since it gets rid of a largely useless UI element and streamlines the interface.

Next question?

Re:Status Bar???

[Renstar]

The issue with the awesome bar was never the functionality, it was the interface. Without the oldbar plugin, the awesome bar takes up way too much vertical screen space to be useful. The extra whitespace surrounding the URLs in the list was completely unnecessary, ugly, and a pain in the ass. Also, awesome bar was (and still is) a stupid name.

People wouldn't have rebelled as much against a slight change in functionality (as you said, it proved to be useful). But massive UI changes for no real reason are going to cause fits for people as anal retentive as most /. readers.

Re:Status Bar???

[Haeleth]

This COULD have been fixed with a simple config option though. Why that wasn't made available is beyond me.

Translation: "I think the Firefox source code should be made even more bloated, just so that a handful of change haters don't have to install a simple extension."

Really, you think that makes sense?

Re:Status Bar???

[Tubal-Cain]

I forget. I installed the Status-Evar addon ages ago and moved to Chromium a few days ago.

Re:Status Bar???

[u17]

So basically you're saying that using the phrase "epic fail" is EPIC FAIL?

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears if you want all the other FF 4 goodness (faster Javascript, etc.), you have to live with some questionable changes to the UI.

Would it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes? Pretty much everybody would be happy then.

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

Well, clearly you can get an extension that will do it, so they don't need to add that option.

This post summarizes everything i hate about FF.

Re:Status Bar???

[Pascal Sartoretti]

When web browsers were new and screen real estate was limited, that might have been a good idea. What the hell is the point of removing functionality to save a dozen or two vertical pixels today?

Most people have plenty of horizontal space left, but not of vertical space.
I was also surprised at first that the status bar disappeared, but now I like it.

The same happened to me for "tab on tops".

The same happened to me for the awesome bar.

Do you see a pattern ?

Re:Status Bar???

[apoc.famine]

Tree Style Tabs - they form a tree, and you can put it on the left side. Merge another line or two at the top, and you'll find that you have seemingly lots more vertical space. I do this on my little EEE 7". But the Tree Style Tabs felt so much better once I got used to them that I use them everywhere now.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really though. Previously you could see the whole link (or most of it). The new way it displays the link in the URL bar prevents you from seeing most of the URL you're about to go.

Especially important is the end of the URL so I can see if it's an executable or something malicious.

You can't see jack in Firefox4, it's practically no different than if you couldn't see the URL at all.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

In particular, I'm interested in your survey methods.
To have a complete view of the opinions of all stake holders with 100% confidence would really help me resolve design and development conflicts where I work.

How did you get the time to do it?
How many languages do you speak?
Are you Julian Assange??

- AC

Re:Status Bar???

[LordLimecat]

Just keep in mind that every additional option like that has to be maintained, whereas if it is implemented as an extension, it gets a dedicated maintainer.

Re:Status Bar???

[LordLimecat]

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea.

Citation needed please. I rather suspect that, other than the poster who directly contradicts you below, that the only ones shouting about this are the ones who DONT like it. Its called "the vocal minority"; being loud doesnt mean that everyone agrees with you.

Re:Status Bar???

[LordLimecat]

Having tons of different GUI options increases the complexity of maintaining it; as versions progress, more and more things have to be checked for regressions and breakage. If it is implemented as an addon (as the new tab button, plugin manager, close buttons on tabs, etc used to be), it will run with a small performance degradation but will be easily maintained.

There is thus a tradeoff, and taking common requests and implementing them, while also pruning less good UI elements and letting them become addons, is IMO generally good. Choice is maintained the way it always has with firefox-- through addons.

Re:Status Bar???

[LordLimecat]

3) Additional options mean additional complexity and testing.

Its not "free code"; its subject to bitrot and maintenance costs the same as every other code, and Im kind of astonished that a community with so many coders doesnt understand this.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Because screen real estate is getting scarce again: netbooks, tablets, sub 13" notebooks, etc.
Also, pretty much all of the status bar functionality is still there, but in the URL bar now (mouse-over shows link href, activity indicator, etc.)

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

When web browsers were new and screen real estate was limited, that might have been a good idea. What the hell is the point of removing functionality to save a dozen or two vertical pixels today?

As others have pointed out, vertical space is at a relative premium today, but I don't think that is why browser makers seem to be reducing the amount of vertical UI bits and pieces. If that was the aim, stuff would move to the sides, but it isn't, it is vanishing.

I feel though that the removal of the status bar is yet more dumbing down. Firefox is in a race to the bottom with IE, Opera and Chrome, and they are fighting over market size. In the first world we are now into the point where the new users to the internet (apart from the constant supply of young people) are the ones who have been actively avoiding computers for the last 20 years, because the people are too fucking stubborn to read any instructions, or engage their brain. They demand hand holding, and shit, they are getting it.

They don't want to see "complicated junk" like URLs, and the removal of the status bar also hides the infamous "waiting for ad.doubleclick.net". Seeing messages like that are not good for business, if you are an advertiser, and all the browser makers are. Perhaps Opera isn't, but Google and MS are advertising companies these days, and Mozilla's biggest funder is Google, the advertising company. They used to do some other stuff, but it's barely worth paying attention to any more, as the advert business has ruined it all.

In the non-first world, more and more people are getting internet access for the first time, and so are very impressionable, and possibly very easily scared off. So best make sure the browser is as user friendly as possible.... but the logic is simple is friendly. Yeah, to start with, but the limitations soon become a problem. Or does it (for the vendor).... if web applications are the future, then the browser is the OS, and like how Microsoft's business works, you have as few features in the OS so as to stimulate the creation of 3rd party applications, to make up for the shortcomings in the first place.

Well fuck that, browser makers. I do not want shit dumbing down, I do not want my hand holding, and I do not want features that are optimised for advertisers or your business models. I don't want to have turn a bunch of shit off to preserve privacy, because the system is still there when turned off. A simple bug could re-enable some whole privacy fucking system. (eg I don't install flash at all, as that is safer than flashblock/noscript. Flash isn't there to even be accidentally enabled. The same should go for the offline web application bullshit in the newer browsers).

And if you haven't got it yet, and many slashdotters won't, as this place has changed over the years, web applications have similar downsides to proprietary desktop software, only the downsides are even bigger. At least with a proprietary desktop application you can maintain an old computer and OS to run the application, but when a corporation decides it is time to move the users onto a new version of their web application the users get very little choice.

With desktop software, your data is held on your computer. I really do not pay much attention to web applications, but I should think that some will have features where your data is kept on their servers. If you can't see the prospects for abuse there, then get the fuck off the internet, and take your shiny fucking browsers with you!

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

Want a better car analogy?

I'm an American. I drove American cars until I picked up a used E36 BMW a few years ago.

Everything is different. The pedals are still in the right order, of course, but from the window switches to the door locks, to the windshield wiper controls, to even the location of the reverse gear on the manual gearbox, it's all different from anything produced in modern America.

But those changes all make sense.

The window switches are located centrally next to the gearshift, which saves on wiring and switches, while also allowing the passenger to operate the four windows, whereas the typical American car has a weird cluster of them on the driver's side door. There is no separate control for power door locks, because one simply isn't needed: You want the doors locked? Just push down on the lock plunger. The wiper controls are simple, located on a stalk to the right of the wheel, and don't require one to remove their hand from the wheel to operate it (just loosen the grip a bit) -- just shove it in the appropriate direction with one's fingers. The reverse gear on the shift pattern is hard left and up, next to first, so you'll never find it by accident when traveling at speed.

The gas filler door locks. The modern American version I'm familiar with involves a cable assembly, which is often finicky, is usually hard to reach, and never in the same spot on different cars. On the BMW, it's simple: If the doors are locked, so is the filler door. If the doors are unlocked, then it is not*. And the filler itself is on the passenger side of the car, so if I were to happen to run out of gas somewhere, I wouldn't be standing with my back to the road as I poured more gas into it, whereas American cars have them wherever they feel like...

These changes are all purposeful, and make operating the car simpler (safer) than the alternatives that I've used.

Moving the status bar to the top? I'm not sure what is gained by doing so.

You're right: I am perfectly capable of adjusting, but only if the changes make sense.

(*: There's a few variations on this depending on whether the doors are double-locked or single-locked, and those variations also make sense, but this post is already quite long enough for a car analogy that nobody will ever read.)

Re:Status Bar???

[DaFallus]

Assuming you're being serious, what is wrong with just clicking on the View menu and disabling the Status Bar? Why take away the option to have it for those of us who actually like it? Completely removing the option to display the Status Bar is not progress since, as I said, you can already disable it. I agree with whoever said earlier that the Firefox devs must have too much time on their hands if they're doing shit like this.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

If you guys care so much then why not leave in an option to have everything that previous versions had to remain there as they were before? Not just the status bar but also the split home and refresh buttons and non-transparent menu and tab bars. The interface was just fine how it was before. If you want something different yourself then sure, go ahead and add options for it but don't assume your users want the same and force it on to them as well. We should have to be forced to use add-ons for this stuff either, especially considering how many times it been said that too many add-ons are the reason for the slowness and memory bloat problems the browser has.

It is possible to leave all the old code in place, with options to enable it. But if we do that for hundreds of features, we end up with a lot of duplicate code, and each user only uses half. That's a lot of unneeded code bloat. It's just like having lots of addons installed, all the time. So there needs to be a balance somewhere - some features should be changeable by a pref (so we ship code for all the options), and some things should not (but should be easily modifiable by an addon).

I am not saying that we always make the right decision what to leave switchable by prefs. Everyone including us makes mistakes. With that said, we do always leave the option for addons to change things, which other browsers often do not - I believe we care more about customizability than any other browser out there.

I realize it's less convenient to find and install an addon than it is to switch a pref. No doubt. But, the benefit is your browser doesn't ship with a lot of code you don't use, for all the other options you personally like and did not install plugins to modify. So your browser loads faster and runs faster.

(I am a Firefox developer.)

Re:Status Bar???

[Thing 1]

This COULD have been fixed with a simple config option though. Why that wasn't made available is beyond me.

Ultimately I just downloaded Status-4-Evar. I think in the short-term this will become a favourite amongst geeks, while no-one else really notices.

Yeah, either that or Chrome will become the favorite. I like this browser's handling of the status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[Thing 1]

Man walks into a bar with a captain's wheel tied around his waist. Bartender says, "Hey you have a captain's wheel tied around your waist." Man says, "Yeah, it's driving me nuts!"

Re:Status Bar???

[Thing 1]

Why it have to be always with animation? It's only distracting and annoying.

Agree completely. I rarely play Starcraft 2 for the same reason; the UI is full of annoying distractions.

Re:Status Bar???

[Ramze]

Exactly where do firefox devs get their marketing research from that tells them what features their users would like to keep and which they'd like to remove or change? I'm sincerely curious because I never voted for this, never got a pop-up questionnaire even on a beta version that does marketing research and has Feedback capabilities (What you like and don't like), and yet the status bar was simply GONE with an update. Who makes these decisions and based on what data? The devs personal feelings or actual responses from users?!?!?

I now have an extension to replace the status bar (status4ever or some such thing) and another extension to replace the capability to set my minimum tab width -- which was also removed unceremoniously so one couldn't go to about:config and set it anymore. The devs received this as a BUG and replied with "It was never a feature... just a setting we removed and don't intend to put back." So, if there weren't an extension for me, I'd be scrolling forever to see my 40+ tabs open (on just one set of Tab Panorama tabs on a wide-screen monitor).

Why are features removed rather than made optional??? Extensions to get old functionality back are inferior b/c they aren't maintained by FF and could contain buggy or insecure code -- or end development suddenly.

Honestly, it's changes like these that send loyal users to Chrome. Chrome is minimalist + extensions to do what you want. Firefox has always been defaults for most users + lots of customizations + extensions if you need/want them. Firefox and Chrome target different market segments. If you strip out features and require people to get an extension to add the utility back... those people may as well switch to Chrome.

I'm already running Chrome half the time -- I'm testing it out preparing for what may be an inevitable transition to it from Firefox. Most of my friends, family, and co-workers use Chrome exclusively now.

In my opinion, Firefox can't hope to compete head-to-head with Chrome on speed, bug fixes, release dates, etc. etc. Google has far more resources. Firefox should instead target features (especially for power users), flexibility, and security while Google targets the average person that rarely has more than a few tabs open at a time. I'm not saying Firefox shouldn't stay competitive... but when someone asks "Why should I use Firefox instead of Chrome," one of my answers used to be that Firefox was very customizable... with lots of options and you could do about anything in about:config... it's just not true now. I'm still using an about:config option to let my "close tab" button remain on the far right rather than on each individual tab. When that option goes away forever (as I'm sure it will at this rate), I'll switch to Chrome -- unless I find another extension to add that back, too.

Re:Status Bar???

[Pieroxy]

Do you guys really care, or do you just say that you care?

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none. Had you guys even bothered to consult with any actual users before making this change, you'd immediately have known that it was a stupid change to make.

You have obviously not even bothered to consult with any actual users before making this post. I am in favor of the status bar removal. Chrome has none and I like it this way.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

Simples. ;)

Re:Status Bar???

[Jay L]

it have been so hard for the Mozilla developers to just add a config option to pick where the status bar display goes?

Yes, because then they'd have to support both styles with every future code change. Pretty soon you run into combinatorial complexity where there's just no chance that any useful configuration is going to be well-tested, and code maintenance sucks up time that could be used for new features.

I have mixed feelings about losing the status bar, but I think they did it the right way: Make a design decision, make the source code conform to it, and leave it to an extension developer to maintain some alternate UI if there's enough demand (and there is already an extension for this, as others have pointed out).

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize it's less convenient to find and install an addon than it is to switch a pref. No doubt. But, the benefit is your browser doesn't ship with a lot of code you don't use, for all the other options you personally like and did not install plugins to modify. So your browser loads faster and runs faster.

(I am a Firefox developer.)

The problem is that Mozilla keeps adding features to the core of Firefox, rather than using the extension system to its fullest. Why the fuck aren't more of the features of FF extensions? Tabs could be, the awful bar, the ability to have plug ins. Maybe even the JS engine or image support?

Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox started life with a clear philosophy of being small and sleek and light and fast, but then Google's advertising money cam along, and chasing as many users as possible became the goal: the same as IE's. Whereas Firefox had a niche with power users and FOSS enthusiasts, now it may well be no. 2 browser but it is also a no. 2.

If that original philosophy had stayed, and the foaming marketing desires had been implemented via a package of browser and selected, supported, extensions, then FF could really be the best browser out there. But it isn't, because pre-occupation with chasing the mass-market has wrecked things.

OTOH, I use FF! The other choices are worse: proprietary, or made directly by an advertising company. Or no Adblock Plus and NoScript!

Re:Status Bar???

[Reziac]

In my observation it really is "Fuck the users, WE want this".

I'm reminded of a vote that was taken over another removed functionality way back in the Mozilla newsgroup era... the vote in the newsgroup was 700 to keep it, and just 2 agreed with the dev who wanted to remove it. The dev removed it, and told the users that Moz wasn't being made for THEM anyway.

Re:Status Bar???

[Omestes]

There are absolutely no users who think that getting rid of the status bar is a good idea. Absolutely none.

As a happy Chrome/Chromium user, I disagree. Also as a person who had the status bar set to auto-hide on his laptop, I disagree.

I find how Firefox 4 handles displaying links a bit wonky now, however. I like how Chrome just pops it up where the statusbar used to be, you still get the functionality, but save the real estate. Firefox 4 handles extension icons a bit better than Chrome, though.

Re:Status Bar???

[TheReal_sabret00the]

They'll be wherever you want them to be. Either on the Addon bar or on the navigation bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[TheReal_sabret00the]

An Addon for this is already out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Firefox dev, and I see what you mean about the status bar - it's definitely controversial. But we definitely do care what users think.

BULLSHIT.

If you (collectively) gave a damn what the users thought, you'd have put in an about:config to restore the functionality you removed.

You're designing an interface that's optimized for resolution-limited devices like mobile phones because that's where the action is. You've lost sight of what UX was all about, and are merely padding your CVs by doing whatever's trendy.

You fucked over your userbase with the Awfulbar, and having gotten away with it, you're doing it all over again with the removal of the status bar.

Overall, though, I truly believe that the features for 4.0 are ones Firefox users like - speed, HTML5 support, stability.

Here's my car analogy. Overall, though, I truly believe that the features of the new car are the ones that car users like: 200 mph top speed. Fusion-powered. Crash it into a wall at 60mph and you'll walk away.

Oh, and the only color it comes in is hot fuschia pink, and the only body style available is uglier than the Pontiac Aztek. And you don't look through the front windshield, you look through a tiny porthole, because the focus group demonstrated that - with the 60mph-safe bumpers - drivers weren't looking at where they were going anyways.

Guess what, I'll stick with my 3.6, even if it's half-rusted through. Because at least I can see where the fuck I'm going.

Re:Status Bar???

[marcovje]

Not the same, that space is much shorter.

I don't care that they disabled it by default, but there should be a setting to bring it back.

Re:Status Bar???

[A beautiful mind]

Flexibility to different needs and desires is not bloat.

Re:Status Bar???

[jjohnson]

I am serious, and there's nothing wrong with various solutions proposed here to address the groundswell of GRAR! at the status bar's move to the URL bar. I'm just recording my vote against the twit above who seems to think that because he hates it, everyone hates it.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

It wraps around you but it doesn't hug you. That's the primary flaw they will concentrate fixing next. Floppy-bunny liquid-proof display surfaces, wrapping around your..torso and.. hugging you.

Re:Status Bar???

[js_sebastian]

This is a repeat of the FF 3 "Awesome Bar" disaster, which also could have been averted with a choice for the user in the form of an easy-to-find config option.

Honestly, the awesome bar is.. well.. awesome. It was sometimes way too slow in the beginning, that seems fixed now. But once you get used to it, it's addictive. I hardly use bookmarks anymore (only for obscure stuff I need to remember long-term), and everytime I try to use opera (which has a very nice UI overall IMO) I get frustated by the un-awesomeness of it's address bar...

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that Mozilla keeps adding features to the core of Firefox, rather than using the extension system to its fullest. Why the fuck aren't more of the features of FF extensions? Tabs could be, the awful bar, the ability to have plug ins. Maybe even the JS engine or image support?

Almost anything can be, but it's always a tradeoff. Sometimes its worth doing, and sometimes it isn't. I might agree with you about some of those examples, and disagree about others. For example, making the JS engine modular would definitely have a performance cost. No browser today is willing to compromise in that specific area. For other stuff though, like the last status bar change, maybe it should have been done as a pref.

Personally, as a developer, I am in favor of more modularity than we currently have. But maybe most normal users aren't like you and me, and hardly customize the browser at all, so the modularity would just be bloat for them (the code to enable modularity itself has an overhead). I say 'maybe' because I honestly don't know - I'd like to know that, though, and I think Mozilla is getting better at gathering that information, with input.mozilla.com and other things.

Re:Status Bar???

[shutdown -p now]

URL bars now give up valuable room for back, refresh, home, our obligatory search bar.

The search bar is anything but obligatory - the recent trend in browsers has been to get rid of it. Chrome does it, and so does IE9. Opera does not do so by default, but since you can just as well search from URL bar, there's little point in keeping it around.

In fact, it seems that the only browser in which URL doesn't double as search, and where you actually need the search bar, is Safari. Which is probably why it feels so painful for me to use it (well, and the lack of middle-click-to-close-tab).

Re:Status Bar???

[radish]

The wiper controls are simple, located on a stalk to the right of the wheel

I'm genuinely curious - where else would they be? I've driven a bunch of cars, even a few Chevvy's and the like (not a fun experience!) but I've never seen wipers anywhere other than on a stalk. Headlights I've seen on the dash (which is weird enough) but not wipers.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Incompatibility of a given extension(for statusbar) with an newer browser version.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Vertical pixels are at a premium these days, thanks to the 16:9 and Ribbon-UI crazes.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I have CS Lite and a bandwidth monitor running in the status bar too.

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

On a GM, it's on the turn-signal stalk (along with the cruise control and a myriad of other things). It's a weird combination of twist and pull and blah that is just...bizarre, even after driving Chevy and other GM products for most of my life. It takes one entire hand to operate it, which can't be attached to the steering wheel at the same time. I didn't realize how wrong it was until I first drove this BMW.

On the BMW, it's a dedicated stalk at the right of the wheel. Tap down with your fingertip, and the wipers operate once. Push up, and they'll operate intermittently. Another notch up is slow. Another notch up after that is fast. The notches are clear and distinct, and it's clear from feel alone what -- exactly -- you've just instructed the car to do. (An option for the E36 BMW was programmable delay, but mine doesn't have that, and I can't say that I've missed even the simple variable delay from a GM.)

Pull the thing toward you, again with a fingertip or two (thumb and other fingers still grasping the wheel), and it sprays monkey piss on the window. Keep it that way for a second, and you get monkey piss with slow wipers. This makes it easy to spray deicer on the window and let it soak in a bit, without operating the wiper blades (which is impossible on a GM), while not making it difficult to wash and wipe the window without applying deicer.

Cruise control is similar. Another dedicated stalk, again to the right. Push forward to set, or accelerate. Pull back to decelerate. Up or down both cancel. And in resumes. Again, using just the fingertips.

On a GM, with the all-in-one widget on the left, these operations all require a whole hand to avoid activating the wipers, modulating the high beams, or setting a turn signal. It does work, but I've learned that there are better ways.....

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

Yes, AC. I found that after I posted my rant, and it does work well.

I still want an option in about:config, though, since it's just dumb. :)

Re:Status Bar???

[adolf]

And since you're curious:

The Chevy Beretta had its windshield wiper controls to the right of the instrument cluster, on the dash. In both variations on that car (and wiper-control arrangement), it took one entire hand away from the wheel to make the wipers wipe. At least they were up high, and visible...

On my '79 Pontiac Firebird, the wiper controls are hidden on the dash just behind the left side of the wheel. May God help the poor unfamiliar soul who finds themselves in the hills of West Virginia while encountering a cloudburst in this car -- it's hidden from both the driver and the passenger by the wheel and the steering column, respectively. (*I* know where it is, but that doesn't exactly mean that it is easy to find without craning around and looking for it for those who are unfamiliar.)

Re:Status Bar???

[syousef]

Then you're using the wrong browser.

Seriously. What is so hard about installing an extension? Its one of the 'selling points' of firefox. Its not like you need to open config and play around with the values there or something.

Extensions are for adding optional advanced functionality not everyone needs or expects. I shouldn't need 3-4 extensions just to get sensible behaviour. I'd be happy to play around with default config. The extensions you install also tend to need to be configured.

Re:Status Bar???

[complete loony]

If you separate the UI for the two main functions of the status bar, "where does this link go" and "I'm still loading something" (which doesn't need that much room). Just put the link url in the address bar in a lighter shade of grey.

Re:Status Bar???

[goonerw]

Overall, though, I truly believe that the features for 4.0 are ones Firefox users like - speed, HTML5 support, stability.
Is that at the expense of HTML 4 features like the Title tag? Currently, FF4 only shows the title in the tab and when you have more than 3 tabs open, it's impossible to read it. At least FF3.6 shows the active tab's title in the main FF Title bar so you could at least read the current one.

Re:Status Bar???

[complete loony]

When it clutters the options window, or the menu's, yes it is.

Re:Status Bar???

[webheaded]

You know, it actually shows you all that. It will take up a pretty large portion of the address bar to do it. If I recall correctly, the status bar frequently cut these off short as well. When I hover links, I notice that it basically puts ... in the middle allowing you to see the protocol, domain, and file extension pretty well. I've been hovering over a whole bunch of links after you said this and this universally seems to be the case.

So actually, there IS enough space to display all these things and they SPECIFICALLY display actually every single thing you said you wanted to see. I'm not sure if you're just knee jerking or if you actually tested this yourself, but yeah. It works exactly the way you say you want it to work.

Re:Status Bar???

[PitaBred]

I'm using the 64bit 4.0b10 and I've got the option to turn on the add-on bar, and menu bar, and so on.

So, it's pretty much NOT stupid and pointless (it's got a very good use) AND you can still turn them back on like you want.

What are you bitching about again?

Re:Status Bar???

[hedwards]

Because it seems to often block the star when I need to know if I've bookmarked the site. Usually because I end up on another link after I get to the page.

Personally, I'd rather they gave us the option of having the status bar right below the URL bar along with the addons bar. That way you don't have to look all the way down to the bottom to see it.

It's funny how such a minor detail when they decided to put the status bar down there has become a pain years later when it requires physically moving your head to see.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time I look at the bottom half of the screen and not at the top! So the status bar is much more "comfortable" to look at.

Isn't it funny how that works? The Mozilla devs cheerfully rearrange their UI from one nightly build to the next, seemingly, without spending a trivial amount of time on the eye-tracking studies that every professional UI designer relies upon.

In this case they didn't even need to run a study, they only had to use the sense God gave a retarded weasel. Of course your eyes are usually looking towards the bottom of the browser screen... because that's where new content scrolls in.

I'm pretty much done with Firefox. The lack of customization, the lack of professional development practices, and the steady stream of reactionary, poorly thought out UI design decisions has placed them a market segment where there's a lot of competition.

Re:Status Bar???

[tkprit]

I did the add-on thing to make my browser look more basic, and I swear it took up more memory than just leaving all the crap (menus, tabs, whatnot) as is. I think with those add-ons, firefox still draws everything, we just don't see it, plus it draws the compact menu, using up more mem even though it looks like less.

So I just uninstalled most of the add-ons and hit F11 to have more screen (though it makes me IRATE that F11 kills the status bar but auto-hides the title bar and tabs).

Re:Status Bar???

[tkprit]

This is so funny; I'm an American, and have only had German cars. Ever!

But I have rented Hertzes, and we find ourselves looking all over to find where stuff is; would almost rather use public transportation.

Good analogy.

Status bars go on the BOTTOM. I don't care either way about the progress meter, but I'm sure as hell going to know what's loading on a site by looking down at the status bar.

Re:Status Bar???

[quickOnTheUptake]

Regardless, Chrome *never* had a status-bar and iirc, it has a couple of users

Chrome's status bar pops up when there is something to display.
So when I mouse over a link, for example, a little blue bar pops up with the URL. If I click on the link, it says something like, "Sending request" and then "Waiting for [host name]" etc.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, with screens becoming more and more wide, we started having _less_ vertical pixels, not more...

Re:Status Bar???

[nine-times]

I don't know, do you really have a quote from one of the major Mozilla developers that says, "Fuck the users"? Something like that? Or are you just assuming that's their attitude because they aren't giving you what you want?

Developers can't give everyone what they want. They have to make decisions based on a lot of different issues. In this case, I'd assume Mozilla is trying to manage limited development resources and develop a clean and consistent UI across all platforms that can also seem native within each OS. Devoting their time toward allowing complete customization to everyone's preferences would preclude other improvements, and the result would probably be a mess.

It's the nature of these things that the developers have to make some kind of decisions. Some users won't like those decisions. If they're actually saying "fuck the users," then I'm surprised and disappointed. If they're just trying their best to make Firefox better and some people like the changes while others don't, that just seems normal to me.

Re:Status Bar???

[wvmarle]

The 701 (the first incarnation of the EEEPC) doesn't have that yet. It has a traditional single-touch pad.

Re:Status Bar???

[Reziac]

That's what I thought too, back in the early days of opensource and community coding projects -- it was supposed to be all about being the most useful product to the majority of users, right? And design choices have to be made, sure, but they follow what most users want, right??

Sad to say I was soon disabused of that notion, and the 700 to 2 vote that the lead dev told us to go fuck ourselves with was the capper. Since then I've never again been surprised when features are changed or removed despite protests from a large segment of users.

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the only computer I've been able to afford in recent years is a Netbook, and so saving a few dozen pixels is a big deal to me. It's already bad enough I have to shrink text size and such just to fit all the content I want to see on the screen.

Believe me, if I could, I would upgrade to a larger laptop.. but right now I'm stuck with this.

Re:Status Bar???

[cavebison]

*hurls*

Why would "old-schoolers" go back to the original menu? This reminds me so much of Windows 95, it's a keeper.

Re:Status Bar???

[devent]

I don't think a game is the right comparison. A game is designed to be a distraction (from the hard life). But an application should just blend in the work process and don't distract.

The worst kind of distraction are unnecessary animations because the human eyes can perceive animations very good, animations are always staying out and we concentrate more on the animation.

But in the URL bar it's not important that the user is hover over a link. The user known already that he is hovering over a link and he probably have a good idea where the link is going. So why distract him to look up at the URL bar?

Re:Status Bar???

[Ginger Unicorn]

you utter cunt

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbooks and tablets say, "Hi."

Re:Status Bar???

[Anonymous Coward]

I desire / need a text editor in my browser. I desire / need at least two file explorers in my browser. Flexibility to different needs CAN be bloat.

Re:Status Bar???

[nine-times]

No, developers shouldn't simply take a poll and do whatever most users want. The majority can be wrong. There's a reason why saying something was "designed by committee" is a bad thing.

Now I'm not saying developers should ignore the needs of their users or literally tell users to "fuck themselves". If developers want to earn/keep a user base, they need to address the needs of those users. Still, developers are going to need to use their own judgement. Following user requests blindly will cause disaster.

Re:Status Bar???

[alexo]

But we definitely do care what users think.

No, you do not. Otherwise you'd make it optional.

If this was a mistake, then it was a mistake made in good intentions, because we thought it would be useful to our users.

And since it was a mistake that you are now aware of, your good intentions dictate that you would fix it, right?

We're not making a browser for ourselves, but for many millions of people.

Show me the survey where those millions of people indicated that the status-bar should be permanently removed.

Little tyrants always justify their pet decisions as being "for the greater good".

Re:Status Bar???

[alexo]

> 2) It's impossible to get in the new version.
Which is fine, because the only thing it was ever useful for is seeing where links lead, and that job has been taken over by something else.

It was very useful to me.
Here's an example of my statusbar at work. At home, I have more indicators on it.

> Which of those options makes any sense to you...?
(2), since it gets rid of a largely useless UI element and streamlines the interface.

The fact that you fail to use it to its full potential does not mean it is useless.

Next question?

Were you born a dick or did you have to work at it?

Re:Status Bar???

[alexo]

Some extensions I installed use the status bar to display, you guessed it, their status.
Could anyone inform me how the hell would that work if the bar is gone???

To elaborate:

Almost every application that I use, displays status indicators on its status-bar. That's what it is for.
Now, if I switch to FF4, I will have a single application whose UI is incompatible with the rest of the system.

I am used to look at the bottom of the app's window for this information. Whether I use office applications, IDEs, editors... Hell, almost anything that I use regularly. That's the point of having standard UI conventions - everything seems familiar and "natural" and you don't have to fight your learned habits every time you switch app windows.

FF4 failed in this respect.

Chrome...

[xTantrum]

I just switched to Chrome from using firefox for the last what 4, 5 years? I gotta say chrome just seems to make sense. not trying to troll just saying.

Re:Chrome...

[Soukosa]

Same here. Was using Firefox since it was Phoenix 0.x and all of these idiotic changes like the removal of the status bar disgusted me so much that it finally pushed me to try another browser. I might be called out as a troll on this too but what's wrong with sharing thoughts on a browser that I used to love to death? It saddens me that the devs feel they have to do things like this rather than fix the much more serious issues the browser has...

Granted on the plus side I can finally use a browser that properly frees up memory after closing a shit load (80+ tabs) at once. So I guess I could thank the thoughtless devs for that! [/troll]

Re:Chrome...

[aliquis]

I just switched to Chrome from using firefox for the last what 4, 5 years? I gotta say chrome just seems to make sense. not trying to troll just saying.

Uncomfortable or unfitting comments is always trolling, flamebaits or off-topic as far as moderators go.

Sorry for the disconvenience. And you even dropped one more point until I pressed reply ..

(Off-topic I can get, but not everything off-topic is "uninteresting" and I like reading Slashdot comments much more than I like reading the actual articles. But the harsh moderation removes much of the "forum fun"-feeling of Slashdot.
Things should IMHO only be moderated troll/flamebait if the intent really WAS to troll/try to upset, and the poster got no intention to care about or read the comments. If it's only "I don't like what the posted said in this comment" then it's not necessary a troll post ... )

But whatever. Guess people don't even want freedom of speach even where the government doesn't limit them.

Re:Chrome...

[smash]

You're a bit of a stalwart then.

I abandoned firefox around 3.0 (phoenix / firebird user since 0.x) because it just grew too bloated, unstable and unresponsive. Compared to chrome, stability and responsiveness to user input was like night and day.

And Safari has the funky visual bookmarks/history browsing in 5.x (maybe earlier). I have no reason to bother with it any more.

Re:Chrome...

[commodore64_love]

>>>not trying to troll just saying.

So of course the Mods marked you troll. Well I think your post was insightful and interesting. Anyway: Chromium is really just a clone of Opera 10 and 11..... it has the same kind of interface, speeddial of websites, "paste and go" interface at the URL bar, et cetera. However Chrome is lighter weight (no email, newsgroups, HTML/java composer).

Mozilla SeaMonkey will soon be releasing Beta 2 if anyone's interested.
SeaMonkey is essentially Firefox 4, Thunderbird 3, Chatzilla, and Composer merged into a single package.

Re:Chrome...

[cpu6502]

Other browsers don't have the huge numbers of Addons that Firefox has. For example I still haven't found a 3GP Youtube downloader for seamonkey or opera, but firefox has several of them*. So..... advantage firefox.

*
* When they work. I notice none of the 3GB addons have worked since thanksgiving. Youtube altered their video code to block downloads. :-|

Re:Chrome...

[hkmwbz]

However Chrome is lighter weight (no email, newsgroups, HTML/java composer).

Actually, Opera is lighter than Chrome. Opera is a (less than) 7 MB download. Chrome is 30+ MB! Mail just reuses what the browser is already capable of with some tiny stuff to put it together as an email client. The HTML composer is just the regular contenteditable field you see on web pages. So as you can see, Opera is much smaller than Chrome. Much more tightly coded.

Re:Chrome...

[aliquis]

Not to troll but you're fucking retarded as shit and I hope you get raped to death.

Personally I would like to be able to say things like that without chicking out as AC and hence have the freedom to do so without having moderators moderate me as troll :D

Now when they do it doesn't matter much since you can just post the same crap as AC anyway.

Re:Chrome...

[koona]

Just like aliquis (678370)said.

I will also add that I am sick of wasting my time composing, to the point, reasoned, comments, and getting mod 1.

It's like there is nobody reading it. Then some inane, vacuous, poster does a master obfuscation of the point leaving me baffled and bewildered, and gets modded 5 or something. Phew.

I still look for the fun parts like the old days, but with increasingly decreasing returns.

Re:Chrome...

[mick232]

You could have switched to Seamonkey. Same rendering engine as Firefox, similar but more conservative GUI. I've been using it for like 10+ years and I still do.

Re:Chrome...

[mick232]

Seamonkey 2.1 Beta. Seamonkey 2.0 stable has been around for a while. I use 2.1 beta daily and have no issues whatsoever.

Re:Chrome...

[icebraining]

Chrome includes Flash player and (now) a PDF reader. Unless you don't use them, I'm pretty sure that Opera+Flash+PDF reader is a bigger download than that.

Re:Chrome...

[datapharmer]

Go back to start and try again when they have a good firebug alternative and an adblocking plugin (not special themes and javascript hacks)

Re:Chrome...

[aliquis]

I tend to only post with [x] No Karma Bonus, mostly by mistake since I added it at some time, but I started doing so because of all the stupid moderation and less "fall" down to -1. But yeah, that leaves me at 1 to start with and maybe less chance of getting noticed / get high moderation as well.

The high point posts are the ones which comes early, starts a thread of comments even though they may not have much to do at all with the first post in the thread and become higher moderated early. Because no-one bothers to read the eventually just as insightful comments further down.

Hence and that's why you have/need to throw in your post in some of the early threads instead of post a completely new one because no-one will give a shit.

Also I guess there's too many chefs, eventually you'll get many posts saying the same thing and the reason there's no-one reading down below and so many shitty posts is that there's so many reading and commenting on Slashdot. Obviously.

Was better back in the days when it actually _WAS_ news for nerds to, and you got insightful comments on hardware, OS, programming languages and so on.

Now it's closer to those "omg-I-think-this-videoclip-is-funny-so-I-add-it-to-your-portal-of-funny-video-clips"-sites but with articles instead.

Let's keep it nerdy please :/

OSnews was and could had been a solution but with Thom as main poster I don't know.. Kinda shitty.

Eugenia may have been herself but at-least she posted some cool stuff. Now it's mostly Thoms why-I-hate-H.264-and-why-everyone-should-agree-with-me-on-everything blog.

Re:Chrome...

[Anonymous Coward]

I love people who think that choosing a pseudonym on the Internet somehow makes them not anonymous and thus superior.

Re:Chrome...

[commodore64_love]

>>>Opera is a (less than) 7 MB download.

Yeah. I was talking about the actual RUNNING of the programs. Opera11 starts-up around 150 MB (same as seamonkey and much less than firefox) while Chromium7 uses a mere 30-40 MB. Since my laptop is old it matters to use as small programs as possible.

Re:Chrome...

[commodore64_love]

>>>Seamonkey 2.1 Beta[1]

Minor fix.
Beta 2 is coming next week.

Re:Chrome...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the Glimmerblocker proxy.

Re:Chrome...

[Johann Lau]

Go back to start and try again when they have a good firebug alternative and an adblocking plugin (not special themes and javascript hacks)

1. Dragonfly (now *you* find me an FF extension that is even just half as good as that one...!)

2. Right click the page, select "block content", click the staff you want blocked and/or enter wildcard patterns for that. I don't get the bit about "special themes", but I sure hope you are aware that firefox add-ons are nothing more than "javascript hacks"? And now Opera has those too by the way ("extensions"). Not that I care, because while I do surf a lot, I simply don't visit sites that are plastered with ads... so the whole "oh ad-blocking is such a must" strikes me as odd. Unless you're into warez or porn of course.

3. Don't even get me started on all the stuff Firefox sucks (or even is a joke) at, which Opera mastered like 5 years ago... not even a contest. "Go back to start" haha? Get a clue...

Re:Chrome...

[Johann Lau]

Flash isn't that big... and if they included a 20mb PDF reader, how would that not make them utter idiots? You seriously believe what you just wrote? "I'm pretty sure.." followed by something which isn't even remotely true and which you didn't even test... *sigh* there are two kinds of people, noobs and people who like Opera.

Re:Chrome...

[icebraining]

"I'm pretty sure.." followed by something which isn't even remotely true and which you didn't even test...

Says the guy who wrote that Opera is a download of less than 7MB.

Re:Chrome...

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped looking for Youtube-downloading browser extensions when I discovered this python script that is updated regularly.

Run it straight from the command line, or build a wrapper around it for your browser, whichever you prefer.

Re:Chrome...

[icebraining]

By the way, I don't dislike Opera, I don't use it as my main browser because its advantages are not enough to surpass Firefox's:

1. Being OSS
2. Extensions I use daily:
    - Vimperator (this alone is enough to justify using FF)
    - DownloadHelper
    - DownThemAll
    - NoScript
    - TorButton
    - Firebug + YSlow
    - Semantic Radar
    - User Agent Switcher
and a few more I keep disabled, but use now and then.

Re:Chrome...

[Johann Lau]

1. how would me posting something false make something incorrect you posted not incorrect?

2. no, I am actually not that guy, so don't even bother to answer "not at all" to question number 1.

3. right now, the windows version of Opera is 8.9 MB, Mac is 13.2 MB, linux ranges from 9 to 14 MB with the average somewhere around 11 MB -- you do realize that this is MUCH closer to 7 MB than to 30 MB? And that Opera has about a trillion features Chrome doesn't have, making this even more poignant?

So basically you're saying, Chrome included a PDF reader weighing 16 MB instead of 20 MB to this skeleton they call browser, and this makes my reply somehow invalid? Look, I'm just trying to help you. If you must use shitty software feel free, but the world isn't just you, so if you wanna spread bullshit do it out of my earshot at least, so not on the internet for starters. Thanks.

Re:Chrome...

[Johann Lau]

those are not firefox's advantages. those are plugins. I know the end result is the same (ignoring perfomance and startup times of course...), but let's be fair. also, Opera just (very) recently added extension, so I guess give it a few years and you won't miss anything important...

but still, just to humour you:

- vimperator sounds like something I'd like as much as a fork in my eye. I guess that's down to personal preferences.
- downloadhelper? I'm happy with Operas download manager. which firefox doesn't have.
- downthemall? are you aware that browser has a shortcut to show a list of all links on the current page? assuming you can infer what you want from the url, it's just a matter of clicking them and pressing "save to download folder".
- noscript? opera has that built in. so all the features you say opera is lacking, are really just knowledge of opera you are lacking, is that right?
- torbutton sounds like a simple enough extension to make. but personally I would consider that pretty much a waste of time for various reasons.
- firebug and yslow are also builtin! press ctrl-I to start Dragonfly, switch to the network tab to see the waterfall chart etc... click at CSS elements and actually get why stuff is (or isn't) the way you expect/want it to.... does firefox even have something that comes close, not to mention that not being scattered across various plugins...?
- semantic radar sounds nice, I guess that's an extension I'd like to see for opera too.
- user agent switcher... is also builtin for Opera... you can even set it on per site basis, just right click the page and "edit site preferences"... *sigh*

now, on the other hand, when will firefox have a bookmark manager that doesn't suck?! maybe I have too many bookmarks, but I can not do without opera's "split view" (bookmark folders in the upper pane, bookmarks in the lower pane) and them being there when I need them and gone the instant I want to... and don't even name any plugins. bookmarks are *essential* to a browser, and they can't even get that right, they just don't fucking care because Joe Schmoe doesn't know what a bookmark is. gah. sorry, I really tried to like it, but for me it's, just like chrome or IE, just something to test webpages with, and only because I have to.

Re:Chrome...

[icebraining]

those are not firefox's advantages. those are plugins. I know the end result is the same (ignoring perfomance and startup times of course...), but let's be fair. also, Opera just (very) recently added extension, so I guess give it a few years and you won't miss anything important...

Firefox's advantage is having an extension infrastructure sooner. Opera didn't thought it was that important. Well, to me it is.

- downloadhelper? I'm happy with Operas download manager. which firefox doesn't have.

You don't know what it is, do you? It autodetects when the URL of the video which is being played by Flash, so you can download it with one click. It was called "Video Download Helper", but they added more media types, so it didn't made sense.

- downthemall? are you aware that browser has a shortcut to show a list of all links on the current page? assuming you can infer what you want from the url, it's just a matter of clicking them and pressing "save to download folder".

DownThemAll let's me define regular expressions to select the links and saves such expressions for later use. If you are downloading from multiple pages, after you selected the config (expression + destination folder) when you save the first page, the other pages are one-click download.

- noscript? opera has that built in. so all the features you say opera is lacking, are really just knowledge of opera you are lacking, is that right?

Is it built-in? Where is the nice GUI where I can enable or disable scripts per-domain on a single page with two clicks (or in my case, CTRL+J, since I made a Vimperator script to control NoScript), either temporarily or permanently? Does it have Plugin blocker with click-to-activate? XSS protection?
BlockIt seems the closest thing, yet it still isn't the same.

- firebug and yslow are also builtin! press ctrl-I to start Dragonfly, switch to the network tab to see the waterfall chart etc... click at CSS elements and actually get why stuff is (or isn't) the way you expect/want it to.... does firefox even have something that comes close, not to mention that not being scattered across various plugins...?

I'll give you that, I haven't tested Dragonfly.

- user agent switcher... is also builtin for Opera... you can even set it on per site basis, just right click the page and "edit site preferences"... *sigh*

Right, ok. My list wasn't "extensions that only exist in FF", it was "extensions I use". As I said, Vimperator is enough to keep me on Firefox..

now, on the other hand, when will firefox have a bookmark manager that doesn't suck?! maybe I have too many bookmarks, but I can not do without opera's "split view" (bookmark folders in the upper pane, bookmarks in the lower pane) and them being there when I need them and gone the instant I want to... and don't even name any plugins. bookmarks are *essential* to a browser, and they can't even get that right, they just don't fucking care because Joe Schmoe doesn't know what a bookmark is. gah. sorry, I really tried to like it, but for me it's, just like chrome or IE, just something to test webpages with, and only because I have to.

I don't really care - I don't use my mouse, and I load bookmarks by typing something about the site and tabbing to auto-complete.

As I said, I don't hate Opera - it's actually a nice browser.

Re:Chrome...

[smash]

The only addon i've ever used / found useful for firefox was downloadhelper. i can live without it. I'd much rather have a stable responsive browser, personally.

Re:Chrome...

[thejynxed]

Yes, it's nice if you don't mind every 5th web page not rendering.

Chrome > Opera just for rendering reliability alone. What use is the rest if it can't even do THAT? /endrant

yeah but is it snappy?

[Anonymous Coward]

should i uninstall safari in my windows machine and use firefox instead?.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[iammani]

It is definitely snappier than safari on Windows!

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Ethanol-fueled]

Safari is a piece of shit even on its own Mac platform.

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all*?

* Those of you who got the reference without Googling it have true grit.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[cbhacking]

Dear $DEITY, why would you use Safari on OS X, much less Windows? Terrible UI, serious security issues, and all the shit that Apple shoves onto your system when you install any of their software on Windows.

Use Chrome, or even Konqueror, if you need WebKit.
Use Firefox if you want a browser that looks exactly like you want and has exactly the features you want, while still being fast and regularly updated.
Use Opera if you want stupidly fast and standards-compliant, plus *all* the features.
Hell, use IE9 beta if you want fast and generally excellent standards compliance and don't mind pre-release code.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Suki I]

No picnic on an iPhone either.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Dear $DEITY, why would you use Safari on OS X

The UI is clean, its responsive on my system, and I like the RSS reader.

Yours truly,
$DEITY

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[rudy_wayne]

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all*? .

Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[ivucica]

I don't see anything wrong with the UI. I haven't experienced a problem with security. On Windows, I like that it provides Apple's font rendering; much neater for me. Here's an anti-list for you.

Chrome installs GoogleSoftwareUpdateAgent on Mac, which cannot be configured in any way, and can barely be uninstalled. Through Terminal which, while adequate for me, isn't adequate for the average computer user. I don't have broadband and I don't want Google deciding when they can fetch and unload 30mb packages on my machine (doing so when I'm on 125mb-capped cellphone connection is not a good time).
Firefox wasn't fast until 4.0. Plus I ran into a bug on Firefox 3.5 that blocks one key feature of a project of mine with its buggy sessionStorage implementation.
Opera is wonderful, but its Dragonfly is a remotely-hosted joke which I cannot use while offline or on slow connection. Plus, as of early 2011, I cannot continuously sync bookmarks with any other browser.
IE9 is IE.

I also like Safari's Speed Dial implementation (I like it better than Chrome's and Opera's). Nonetheless, I have all of the above on my Mac, except Chrome, due to its background malware being required for it to run. Malware because it actively hurts my wallet.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[jo_ham]

The UI is nice, it has the same "security issues" as Chrome since they both use Webkit (ie, "I've solved all my crime problems by moving into my neighbour's house! It's identical, but the door is painted blue!").

It's faster than Firefox 3.6, it actually has a fucking status bar unlike Firefox 4.

I don't care about "shit installed on Windows*" since I don't use Windows while using OS X, so why that would be a factor in my choice of browser on OS X is totally beyond me, since I'm not some blind zealot that cuts off their nose to spite has face.

* although the "shit" installed is optional, but useful if you want to view quicktime content, and not necessary if you already have Quicktime installed.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dragonfly always worked offline... http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2008/05/07/opera-dragonfly-is-here-and-it-works-offline

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[ivucica]

Oh, they couldn't have made it work out of the box, could they? >: (

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[hkmwbz]

Dragonfly works offline. It downloads and caches it the first time you run it.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Mr Z]

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all*?

Don't crush that dwarf, hand me the pliers.

I could have sworn I said the same thing on the other side of the record. . . . !thgir er'ouY !tfel eht no sdneirf tog t'nia ouY !rissseY . . . It's OK, they're speaking Chinese.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Mr Z]

How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all*?

Antelope Freeway, one half mile
Antelope Freeway, quarter mile
Free Armenia, get a hairlip!
Antelope Freeway, one eighth mile
Shallow Valley Condoms: If you lived here, you'd be home by now!
Antelope Freeway, one sixteenth mile
18 Holes Underground Parking
Antelope Freeway, one thirty-second mile


(or something like that...)

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can wait in the sitting room, or sit in the waiting room..."

"As I sat on the cold marble floor of the waiting room..."

Nick Danger RULES.

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[Mr Z]

"Melanie Hayber. . ." "Melanie Hayber?"
"Audrey Farber. . ." "Audrey Farber?"
"Betty Jo Bieloski. . ." "Oh! You mean Nancy!"

Re:yeah but is it snappy?

[makomk]

The UI is nice, it has the same "security issues" as Chrome since they both use Webkit (ie, "I've solved all my crime problems by moving into my neighbour's house! It's identical, but the door is painted blue!").

Chrome puts Webkit within a very restricted sandbox to mitigate any security issues. Safari does not. Your argument is like saying that there's no point getting a house with locks on the doors because it's still in the same neighbourhood as one without.

Tabs on top was already there

[Anonymous Coward]

A few betas at least... and disabled via addon for me at least.

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[Mystiq]

Tabs are REALLY on top now. My only gripe is I can't drag the title bar of Firefox any more in Windows 7 to get it out of a maximized window unless I click in empty space. It only does this when it's maximized.

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[IB4Student]

change your userChrome.css. I've had the tabs in the titlebar ever since the first beta was release ;D

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[shadowthunder]

What change(s) should I make to take it back?

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[hedwards]

Not on XP, unless there's some sort of a bug, the position hasn't changed.

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click in a menu/bookmark bar and uncheck "Tabs on Top." It was the first thing I googled for after the upgrade. Now I just need to find a way to put the link hover text back in the status bar. (You can put the status bar back - it's called "AddonBar" or something like that in about:config. It's just mostly useless now.)

Re:Tabs on top was already there

[aussie_a]

Right Click and deselect "Tabs on Top". Problem fixed.

... in lots of official mirrors

[jackdub]

http://mirror3.mirrors.tds.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9 hasn't been hammered yet...

Re:... in lots of official mirrors

[uolamer]

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:csaNGT3VYK0J:www.mozilla.org/community/mirrors.html

Some (not all) direct Links

North America
http://mirror3.mirrors.tds.net/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

Europe Mirrors
http://ftp.halifax.rwth-aachen.de/mozilla/firefox/releases/4.0b9/
http://napoleon.acc.umu.se/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/
http://mirror.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/pub/mirrors/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

Asia
http://jp-nii01.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

Japan Mirrors
http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/
http://kyoto-mz-dl.sinet.ad.jp/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

Mid East Mirrors
http://mozilla.saudi.net.sa/firefox/releases/4.0b9/
http://mirrors.isu.net.sa/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

South America
http://mozilla.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

Belarus
http://ftp.byfly.by/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/4.0b9/

The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it blend?

Tabs on titlebar

[Zexarious]

Tabs on titlebar does not work on linux. Are these clowns for real?

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[Vlijmen Fileer]

On my system, the tabs ONLY go to the title bar when the whole window is maximized. Possibily because some drunk developer thought we would only need the extra vertical space if we indicated we would need extra spcae by maximizing the whole window?
Another bad choice.
Far worse is that I always have my browser vertically maximized only, because I'm specifically missing VERTICAL space. But this braindead behaviour only gives me the extra vertical space if I also horizontally maximize my window (so the result is total maximalization).

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[Noughmad]

You can always use windows instead of tabs, and have Oxygen's window grouping. Looks the same, only consistent with the rest of the desktop.

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[surveyork]

http://userstyles.org/styles/42402 This Stylish style implements tabs on titlebar when window is NOT maximized. I think there's some talk amongst Fx developers about implementing this feature (tabs always on titlebar). Apparently, they worry about leaving some space for dragging the window, that's why they don't put tabs on the titlebar when not maximized. Might be relevant: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572160

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[DavidRawling]

They apparently also forgot that some OS's (eg Win7) allow you to drag the window titlebar even if it's maximised. So on Windows if you have more than a few tabs and a maximised browser, you can no longer drag the title bar away from the top edge of the screen - because there IS no titlebar. I don't get it - I thought rule 1 was "don't fucking change the way the application looks and behaves just because you changed the window size". Now I need to have the menu bar showing and re-organise all the chrome so that I have a title bar and consistent UI again. Not to mention the 18 years or so of looking at the status bar for the next URL/action (NCSA Mosaic, 1993, and every other fucking piece of software written for almost ANY platform).

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[surveyork]

Yep, apparently the mainstream browsers broke the classic GUI, starting with Chrome -I guess-. Now it's a trend: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1951640&cid=34888476 I think you might be interested in this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=624129

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[shutdown -p now]

On my system, the tabs ONLY go to the title bar when the whole window is maximized. Possibily because some drunk developer thought we would only need the extra vertical space if we indicated we would need extra spcae by maximizing the whole window?

They're simply copying Chrome in that regard - Opera also did that when they moved tabs to top. The supposed rationale for that is so that you have something to click on to drag the window; when maximized, you obviously don't need to drag. But it really only applies to Windows, so far as I can see, since you can always Alt+drag on Linux.

Too bad that Opera is the only one which allows you to fix it...

Re:Tabs on titlebar

[DavidRawling]

Well yes and no. Yes, because it reinforces my feeling that I'm not alone in this. No because the Mozilla developers sadly have a history of doing stuff and saying "we're not undoing it or giving you an option, it's the better way, we know best". See awesome bar (of which I'm a fan), lack of statusbar (not a fan) and tabs in titlebar (not a fan). MS used to have UI guidelines for Windows - seems those are ignored now too.

It's funny/sad - I refused to switch to Chrome because I disliked tabs in the titlebar and the ridiculously minimal UI. With FFx4 going that way I may as well go back to IE. Really.

3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Chas]

Literally, 1 second on my SSD RAID-0.

Not sure how much faster it's going to be and it won't really make any difference.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, riiiight.

So because it starts in 1s on your 300+mb/s RAID-0 - it is therefore fast enough for everyone?

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Lehk228]

a full 1000ms on an SSD? that's pretty slow is it an IDE SSD or something? i could swear i only took ~300ms to load and i didn't even spend much on my kingston SSD

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[flimflammer]

I wish I could even remotely get that sort of performance out of Firefox on my machine. I finally switched over Chrome because of how slow Firefox has gotten over the years. I feel like they lost one of their original and most important design goals.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

3.6.7 takes a good 15 seconds to start for me. It might be because I keep a 365-day history, but really, the developers should have thought of that. The thing that annoys me, is that when it is starting it only uses 25% CPU, I would like it to use closer to 100% and start 4x as fast.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

honestly even on my ssd its not fast. even b10 nightly. chrome is instantaneous. ff needs a couple of seconds. it makes all the difference to users

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[trentfoley]

This new Firefox beta loads in just under 2 seconds on my 2007 Macbook Pro w/ Intel X25M 160GB SSD running latest OS X. But, Safari loads in under one second. Chrome loads just as fast as Safari. So, unfortunately, Firefox is still the slowest choice for me. I have no idea how javascript performs compared to Chrome (not even going to compare it to Safari).

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

The beta 8 was intoxicatingly fast to start compared to 3.6, even from a single ordinary ide drive. You would probably be GPU limited there.. ;)

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[BZ]

> I have no idea how javascript performs compared to Chrome

Anywhere from 4x slower to 4x faster, depending on what you're doing, in my experience.

That's the best part with jits, especially the sort of multipass jits that both Spidermonkey and V8 are working on. If you happen to be doing something that the non-baseline compiler can handle, you win big (well, for some values of "big"; I get times comparable to C compiled with |gcc -O0| on simple stuff). If you don't, you only win somewhat.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[aliquis]

Personally I spend time _IN_ my browser, not starting and quitting it all the time.

And there Safari 2.x and 3.x really sucked, haven't used 5.x so I'm not bashing it. However there are better or worse browsers when it comes to dealing with multiple tabs, load, memory and tendency to crash/stall.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[trentfoley]

Benchmarks make baby Jesus cry

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably bottlenecked on reading itself and your profile off the disk, not computing something...

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

300ms!? What is it, made out of twigs and sticky tape? On MY SSD, it loads in Planck time and this is one I just found lying by the side of the road.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[trickyD1ck]

Firefox 4 launches in 1-2 seconds even on my 1.5 year-old Intel X25M G2 SSD (under Windows 7). Solid state drives are increasingly mainstream, so for those who value speed, Firefox should be fast enough.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Rozine]

Mine started instantaneously on a fresh install, but now can take several seconds (!), and nothing's wrong with my SSD. I seem to remember reading about some issue with the awesome bar DB that causes FF to get slower and slower as it goes along...

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Fnkmaster]

Javascript performance - I don't know about on a Mac specifically, but in generally, it's much faster with FF 4's latest betas than it was with 3.6.x. For general comparisons from a few months back trunk code during TraceMonkey+JaegerMonkey integration, see http://arewefastyet.com/ . It's fast now. The extra second of startup time is confusing as an argument either for or against something - this is one second, once every few days or so. Seems kind of irrelevant to me - performance of rendering is the most important thing, Javascript performance secondary, and stuff like startup performance tertiary unless it's really bad.

Not sure about Mac rendering performance, but on Windows, FF is much faster than Chrome or Safari and has been for ages. Javascript performance lagged signifcantly until recently, and they are now all so close as to be irrelevantly different unless you like compiling kernels in your web browser or similarly silly activities.

Re:3.6 Starts pretty damn fast.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.
Chas sounds like a regular Slashdot jackoff, who only comments to brag about his computer hardware. Never mind that the hardware between his legs is limp as a wet cigarette butt (if there is even something there, hah).

I thought the final would be out now.

[harmonise]

I really thought the final release would be out by now. Remember last year when Mozilla said they were moving away from big releases and adopting a fast release cycle with mixed bug fixes and new features? Whatever happened to that plan?

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[asa]

The plan you're talking about is Mozilla's post Firefox 4 plan.

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember last year when Mozilla said they were moving away from big releases and adopting a fast release cycle with mixed bug fixes and new features? Whatever happened to that plan?

The plan is to do that after 4.0. 4.0 was always planned to be a *big* release, with tons of new features. Post-4.0, they will switch to the model you mentioned, of more rapid and incremental releases, sort of like Chrome.

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[hedwards]

They apparently made a mistake. But at least they're not releasing a final release that's buggy and not working properly. I've been using the betas for a while now and they've gotten a lot better, not that the first betas were that bad.

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[harmonise]

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for bringing me up to speed.

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[harmonise]

Yeah, I'm excited about the final release. The web browser landscape is pretty awesome right now. I can't wait to see the final release. If only all my favorite add-ons will finish updating for 4.0. :-)

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[Anonymous Coward]

This plan was a disaster so they gave up on it.
Every time mozilla wants to make a major release they need to make all addons incompatible (and hope addon makers respond in reasonable time, if only to update compatibility data) and they have to pursue every translation team to get new translations (even if very few things changed).

It's just not viable to do this very often.

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[Anonymous Coward]

> they've gotten a lot better

We have the perfectly acceptable and well-understood verb IMPROVED, so why do you insist on using slang such as "gotten better"?

Re:I thought the final would be out now.

[bill_mcgonigle]

I really thought the final release would be out by now. Remember last year when Mozilla said they were moving away from big releases and adopting a fast release cycle with mixed bug fixes and new features? Whatever happened to that plan?

They wanted to give all of their users time to switch to Chrome. Then they can win them back with how super-awesome Firefox 4 is and really feel the love.

At least, that's the only thing I can think of that makes any sense at all.

Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

Why is this touted as a feature/benefit? In Windows (7, specifically) when the window is maximized, the tabs are so flush with the top of the screen that it makes Firefox almost unusable for snapping (left, right, or down from top). I understand that pushing the tabs up save pixels - a scarce asset in netbooks - but are five or ten pixels so valuable that it's worth rendering one of the best features of Windows useless?

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[asa]

The trade-off is between using Aero Snap, something users do only rarely, and not repeatedly during a browser session, and benefiting from Fitts's Law as you switch between tabs, something users do all the time. The current thinking is that it's better to optimize features for the overwhelmingly common case at the expense of the exceedingly rare case.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[hedwards]

You do realize that they let you disable it, right? Probably the easiest way is to right click on the menu bar and uncheck the option for tabs on top. Personally, it isn't something that seems to have changed, but that might just be an XP thing.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[rudy_wayne]

but are five or ten pixels so valuable that it's worth rendering one of the best features of Windows useless?

YES!! Why? Because the Firefox Developers said so!! That's all you need to know. They will NEVER NEVER EVER admit that one of their ideas wasn't so great.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

but are five or ten pixels so valuable that it's worth rendering one of the best features of Windows useless?

YES!! Why? Because the Firefox Developers said so!! That's all you need to know. They will NEVER NEVER EVER admit that one of their ideas wasn't so great.

Hello, Firefox dev here. I'm sorry you have that opinion of us, but I for one definitely will admit that we have had ideas in the past that were not great. We make mistakes like everyone.

I do not have an opinion on the specific feature you are talking about in this thread, since it is just on Windows, and I run Linux.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

I do. Tabs on top made sense - the forward, back, home, etc. buttons apply to the pages within the tab and therefore belong there - so I have no desire to move those back below. I've read some Mozilla bug reports saying that the placement change has either already been implemented in an earlier version or has yet to be implemented (I don't remember which), so that's likely an "XP thing".

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Then about:config, browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar = false.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[arose]

Yeah, just look at awesomebar, people hated it, people still hate it.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Mr. Vage]

That's not the issue that he's talking about. The problem is that when when the window is maximized, it aligns the tabs with the Firefox button in the titlebar. If you have enough tabs open to go all the way across the titlebar there is no space where you can grab the window since the whole titlebar is covered with tabs. There is no problem with the tabs on top when the window isn't maxmized because the tabs are not in the titlebar, they are in their own row below the Firefox button.

Fortunately this behavior is easy to disable. Just open up about:config and change browser.tabs.drawInTitlebar to false.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[amRadioHed]

I've no problem with awesomebar. It works fine for me.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not have an opinion on the specific feature you are talking about in this thread, since it is just on Windows, and I run Linux.

This sucks. The tabs in titlebar feature is WHY I downloaded this release. And I find out that it doesn't actually work on my platform.

Balls.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

I do spy the "@mozilla.com" address, so I'll take what you're saying with a grain of salt. I would expect that among Windows 7 users (admittedly, not anywhere near a majority of Firefox users), Aero Snap usage - essential for multitasking, especially with multiple monitors - is quite high. Though I do see your point, Fitt's Law only mentions the width of the target. My issue with using Fitt's Law in support of this change is that you're not going to push then let your mouse glide in a general direction and hope it lands on the target tab; I just don't think it's applicable for that aspect of this situation. Wouldn't it be easier from a user's standpoint to go to the edge of the screen where, instead of landing on a tab, it lands on the small, 5 px space above them, then move the mouse pointer back down a little? According to W3 Schools, the most common resolutions are between 1200 and 1400 pixels wide. With the tabs up against the top of the window (maximized), it takes five tabs open before the entire title bar is filled, leaving no more than five (okay, no measurement was taken, but I'm having a hard time finding _anywhere_) consecutive pixels (horizontally) by which to grab the title bar. Fitt's Law says that you have completely alienated Windows power users (that is, to say Windows 7 users who have a fair number of tabs open) who use one of 7's best features. As time progresses, more people will upgrade to Windows 7 and have increasing numbers of tabs open. When I use Chrome (which, coincidentally, isn't often exactly because of this gripe), I waste more time hunting for slivers of free space in the title bar to drag the window around than I spend in Firefox clicking tabs. As I see it, this change makes it _impossible_ to us one feature under some conditions in order to make it _slightly_ more efficient to perform a standard action. I don't think that's a fair trade-off.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

That post was supposed to be formatted, and I'm unfamiliar with editing posts on Slashdot, so please excuse the block text.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

Thanks; that's immensely helpful. What's the equivalent of an upvote here at Slashdot?

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[aliquis]

Awesomebar rules. Except when someone else is watching and it puts up all sorts of weird crap which I've visited frequently.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[aitan]

Correction: some people hated and still hate it. For the rest is a godsend.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[aussie_a]

I liked the awesomebar from the start. I dislike the lack of status bar or the moving of my tabs. I've fixed both.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[jo_ham]

As the first non-AC mozilla dev I have seen here, can I address this to you? Please put the status bar back, at the very least as an option.

Sure, many people may be happy to lose it, but they were perfectly able to do that on 3.6 by disabling it from the menu. I can't re-enable it in FF4, which is extremely annoying. I can't be the only one. Now whenever I scroll down with my my mouse pointer over the main page, every time a link sweeps past the pointer the top of the screen flashes (as the URL is displayed up there, (and utterly uselessly *partially* if it is a long URL) which is extremely distracting.

I can see that "bloat elimination" must have been high on the list of things to achieve, but the status bar?

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[msclrhd]

I haven't had a problem using Aero Snap with the new FF on Windows 7 to switch the window between screens as of yet. I've only been using it for ~3 days, so time will tell.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[msclrhd]

I find the awesome bar extremely useful. Especially if I can remember part of the title and not the url for something.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[macshit]

I love the awesome bar; the name is really the only problem with it. [It's also vastly better than chrome's poor copy of it...]

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Soul-Burn666]

I use Aero snap a lot. But almost never by dragging.
It's easier for me to use Winkey-left/right/up/down...
However, it is also easier for me to use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab for tab navigation.

As for a solution to snapping, instead of taking 5 pixels out of the vertical space, leave a few pixels on either side of the list of tabs so that it never completely fills up.
I'd even go so far to suggest a stipple texture which is pretty standard for grab handles :)

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually miss it having switched to chromium, where the url bar theoretically has the same functionality, but doesn't actually find sites you've visited most of the time.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesomebar is one of those features that keep me using Firefox (another is that I've no problems with Fx).

"Normal" URL bars are much more inconvenient.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[takowl]

And other people like it. It's just that haters shout louder.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[nyctopterus]

Just adding to the chorus of "I like the awesome bar". Stupid name, but I like what it does.

There is a very loud bunch of people on Slashdot who hate it, but I suspect they are in a tiny minority.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you are why people who actually make stuff don't tell anyone on the web that they make stuff. We get sick to death of the constant off-topic whining.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[jo_ham]

I make stuff too, and I like the feedback - it helps me to make better stuff.

If you can't handle the feedback, perhaps making stuff is not for you. But then, you are posting AC, so I am going to assume that you've never made anything before and are just going for some cheap trolling because you disagree with me.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[LordLimecat]

You wont find the large body of people who love it complaining on slashdot; that doesnt mean they exist.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

And in the newer versions it has become more configurable, so there is less reason to hate it now. I hated it at first because I couldn't control its behavior, but now I just have to set a couple of options and it behaves like I want it to.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[shadowthunder]

I make great use of the keyboard commands for both Snap and tabbing around, too, but I often find myself with one hand on the mouse. Fitt's Law says no to that suggestion: it's MUCH easier to aim for the title bar (almost 100% of the top of the screen width) than it is to hit a grabby area on either side of the tabs. Through observation, I instinctively go for the center of the title bar.

Re:Tabs on Titlebar Issues

[Homburg]

Seriously. I just switched back to Firefox after using Chrome for a while, and one of the main reasons was how much better the Awesomebar is that Chrome's address completion. Why is it quicker for Chromw to get me search suggestions from Google than URLs from my own history? Why does Chrome randomly seem to find URLs from my history, then lose them, then find them again?

Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory.

I really need someone to break that down for me.

Re:Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tabs on titlebar... The tabs are on the titlebar

is self-explanatory. This part is self-explanatory.

Still busted

[Anonymous Coward]

Now up to Firefox 4.0b9 and STILL you can't watch Flash videos with 64-bit Flash on 64-bit Firefox on Mac OS X. It's been two or three betas now since they broke this, and they just refuse to fix it. The videos play fine in Safari and in Firefox in full-screen. But in a Firefox window, the video freezes (while the audio is okay).

Re:Still busted

[rudy_wayne]

Now up to Firefox 4.0b9 and STILL you can't watch Flash videos with 64-bit Flash on 64-bit Firefox on Mac OS X. It's been two or three betas now since they broke this, and they just refuse to fix it..

In November 2010 they fixed a bug that was originally submitted in November 2000. That's Not a typo. 10 years ago. So just get in line and wait your turn.

Re:Still busted

[Gordo_1]

Now up to Firefox 4.0b9 and STILL you can't watch Flash videos with 64-bit Flash on 64-bit Firefox on Mac OS X. It's been two or three betas now since they broke this, and they just refuse to fix it. The videos play fine in Safari and in Firefox in full-screen. But in a Firefox window, the video freezes (while the audio is okay).

I fail to see what functionality you're missing here. If the 64-bit builds are not yet properly optimized to be faster than 32-bit and Flash 64 is not faster than 32-bit Flash, what exactly is the point in rushing toward 64-bit support other than to satisfy your obsessive compulsive need for uniformity?

Re:Still busted

[Bueller_007]

64-bit Flash ~is~ better than 32-bit because it's also the only build that's optimized to use the GPU rather than the CPU as part of the "Square" pre-release. But don't let your ignorance prevent you from commenting. Fucknugget.

Re:Still busted

[surveyork]

The oldest bugs in Mozilla are ~12 years-old (from Netscape times). There are quite a few 11, 10, 9, 8... years-old bugs. A curious case: There was a 2002 or 2003 bug about implementing 'Paste & go' functionality. That bug was abandoned for years, well, with lots of discussion going back and forth. Finally, the bug was closed as won't fix or invalid. Then, the GUI team asked in Reddit about what the users wanted. Paste & go was one of the things they wanted. A few months later, Paste & go was implemented. Now I want to see the faces of all those who argued for years that this feature was not needed/too complicated/etc. Of course, there was at least one extension that added paste and go to Firefox. Thank $DEITY!

Re:Still busted

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years?! Are you telling me that I'd better be prepared to wait another 4 years to see a fix for the 6 years old bug #280661? You insensitive clod.

Re:Still busted

[Anonymous Coward]

...and? Are you trying to say that bug age is somehow representative of its priority or severity?

Developer resources are always scarce, that is a fact in all software development. Thus bugs are prioritized. This priorization can go wrong, and often does, but implying that bug age alone is proof of a problem shows a deep lack of understanding of how software development works.

Re:Still busted

[Anonymous Coward]

Or fix it yourself.

Re:Still busted

[Pteraspidomorphi]

Really? That's bad news for my tables in divs bug from 2003 :( World ends next year after all...

Re:Still busted

[oddfox]

I'm not trying to say you're wrong or anything but that sounds the exact opposite of how the Square pre-release is on Linux platforms right now. HW Accel is only supported in the 32-bit flash and is supposed to be available for 64-bit users when the next Flash release is finalized. If it's the other way around, then I find it pretty strange that I still don't have 1-5% CPU usage with 1080p under Linux w/NVidia while I have no issue whatsoever under Windows w/NVidia. As it is I can expect a 1080p flash video to eat about 40% of one of my four cores under Linux. Actually, just tested now in my Chromium nightly (32-bit) with the latest Flash and I'm getting about 10-20% CPU usually for the 1080p playback.

If things are really that way in Mac-land, the opposite of how it is in Linux-land, congratulations on having a better 64-bit plugin than the 32-bit plugin. Seems you are unable to really make use of it though.

Re:Still busted

[The End Of Days]

The funny thing about ignorance is by definition you just don't know, but don't let your personal lack of societal integration prevent you from being a douchebag on a public forum.

Download link on mozilla is not working

[parallel_prankster]

May be that page needs to be upgraded too?

The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to use

[barrkel]

The more it copies Chrome, the less reason there is to use it, and more motivation to switch to Chrome instead.

I don't even use tabs at the top; I use tree-style tabs. Hopefully they'll still work.

In other news, I do like the status bar being visible. The primary reasons I don't use Chrome are the missing menu and status bars.

Confused by Tabs on Top

[harmonise]

One thing that confuses me about tabs on top is that it implies that everything below the tab is associated with that tab. Ok, I get that part. I watched the video by Alex Faaborg and it makes sense.

But I therefore expect that if I rearrange any items below the tab, such as customizing the layout by adding or removing buttons or moving the home button to the right side, or resizing the size of the address bar versus the search bar, that those changes would be limited only to that tab and be sticky for that tab. That doesn't happen and visually it's confusing. All of those elements are grouped underneath the tab and when I switch tabs, the changes are there too. Huh? It's completely counter to what I was expecting and doesn't make sense. The only thing that changes from tab to tab is the text in the address bar.

I would think this would be very important due to the ability to save app tabs. I might want to save an app tab to a specific site and have the navigation toolbar customized a certain way just for that tab.

Note: I'm using beta8 and haven't upgraded yet so maybe this bug has been fixed.

Re:Confused by Tabs on Top

[shadowthunder]

I'll choose to not be an ass in my response, unlike the other two. I think that if I changed the layout of buttons and bars in one tab, then changed tabs and everything moved around again (back to however the new tab had things configured), it would be more confusing. This might make a little more sense for session-persistent app-tabs (I still wouldn't like it, but it would make a little more sense), but it would confuse the hell out of me when I'm switching tabs during a regular session. Also, how often do need to change your tried-and-true, personalized button layout for one site? What would make you do that?

Re:Confused by Tabs on Top

[Anonymous Coward]

This would be extremely frustrating if you wanted to change one small thing, and had to change it in every open tab!

And no, beta9 works the same way. I'm pretty sure it's not considered a bug.

Re:Confused by Tabs on Top

[Anonymous Coward]

But I therefore expect that if I rearrange any items below the tab, such as customizing the layout by adding or removing buttons or moving the home button to the right side, or resizing the size of the address bar versus the search bar, that those changes would be limited only to that tab and be sticky for that tab.

Chrome has solved this little problem you have noticed: no customizations below the tab. Do you like this better?

Well, if not, then don't nag people about the little semantical discrepancies you find, but look at the big picture.

Re:Confused by Tabs on Top

[noidentity]

I think the best solution to this would be to extend the window on top, adding a new bar above this new tab bar, with this new bar having the forward/back buttons and the title of the web page. The implementation might be difficult, but I'm sure they can pull it off.

Re:Confused by Tabs on Top

[Art3x]

Chrome's difference was not so much that its tabs lay above the address bar but that they lay in the title strip --- thus reducing vertical real estate by one control strip. You have just two strips of controls, the tab strip and the strip with the address field.

Firefox 3 or IE, on the other hand, have four or five control strips at the top (title, menu, address, tabs, bookmarks). You can hide and rearrange things until you're down to two strips like Chrome as long as you have open only one tab. Open a second tab, though, and in pops the tab bar, and you're stuck with at least three strips. Firefox 4 did not combine the tab strip with the title strip, so there is no gain in real estate for the actual web page content. Plus, Firefox has the ever-present status bar at the bottom, while Chrome has a transient status bar that fades in just when it has something to say.

Small matters, you might say. But these things are a big part of why people feel Chrome looks cleaner. Small differences, but if you're staring at it all day, it may be worth it. And in my experience designing user interfaces, a thousand tiny decisions are the path of an okay or slightly irritating interface and a great, delightful one.

Persistent data storage?

[sgunhouse]

Persistent data storage for web apps is something other browsers have had, so I'm surprised that FF is only now producing versions with this feature ...

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[jfengel]

As long as Chrome lacks NoScript, there will continue to be a reason for Firefox. Fix that dealbreaker, and all of the rest is negotiable.

Insane CPU load solved yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You open a hundred or so tabs and your laptop melts.

Why do background tabs use any cpu at all?

None of this other junk matters when browsers are basically unusable once a few tabs are open.

My performance test

[stimpleton]

Mozilla.org is 404'd for me so I will post my "performance testing" and hope beta 9 is beta.

I developed a javascript script to resize an image. about FF4 Beta 4 it would take about 45 seconds to start the js. All other browsers(FF, IE, Chrome bot home and work) it was instant to a second or so.

I hope this is fixed. I have a little game I have made, and the 45 seconds is a show stopper.

*crosses fingers while mozilla,org is 404

Re:My performance test

[BZ]

Did you file a bug on Mozilla? If so, can you link me to that bug? If not, can you point me to the script in question?

Sucks

[countertrolling]

Leaves us Tiger (10.4) users on PPCs out in the cold.

Re:Sucks

[517714]

Don't worry, it doesn't work on my Macbook 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo OS X 10.6.6 either.

Re:Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Works for me ... Flash just crashes like crazy.

Re:Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Camino is worth looking at for you then. The PPC version is still downloadable.

Re:Sucks

[Haeleth]

Yeah, I can't believe it won't work on my Mac LC II either. Why doesn't System 7 get any love? :(

What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[hacker]

I haven't used titlebars on any app in almost a decade (sawfish). I also don't use icons, docks, wharfs or menubars. I prefer my environment to be clean, fast, functional and uncluttered.

As long as the browser's default behavior remains the same, and the 'tabs-on-titlebar' is an optional feature that can be enabled, that's fine.

Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[EvanED]

Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.

If that were true then you'd turn on the computer and get "C:\>" (or "$" as appropriate). Clearly absolutes are not so absolute.

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[haus]

What is this C:> and $ of which you speak?

When my computer is done booting, it tells me "READY." and I know it is time to get to work.

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[shadowthunder]

I also don't use icons, docks, wharfs or menubars

Sounds like that may very well be true.

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[Waffle Iron]

Frankly, your "interactive" "prompts" scare me.

When I apply power to my computer, I am faced with 8 LEDs and 8 toggle switches, and I start keying in my familiar sheet of boot sequence opcodes.

I have not altered this default behavior in almost four decades, and to change it, ever, would would be bad.

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[Malc]

Be careful dude: if you become too agitated, you might come unstuck from the mud

Re:What about those that don't USE titlebars?

[alexo]

> Changing the default behavior is always bad. Always.
If that were true then you'd turn on the computer and get "C:\>" (or "$" as appropriate).

On my WinXP machine, the "C:\>" prompt (or the equivalent) is just one click away. While it not visible by default, it is still there for when I need it.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Isaac Remuant]

Right. Because that was Firefox has been all along. Visuals and some interface decisions. The incredible amount of useful Add-ons have nothing to do with it's popularity.

All in all, Firefox is probably the most customizable browser around, which might benefit users who know what they want.

Finally, nothing prevents people from using several browsers for different things.

Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try It

[CritterNYC]

As always, we've packaged it for portable use (USB, cloud drive, etc) which also lets you try it out right on your desktop without installing it and impacting your local Firefox install at all.
http://portableapps.com/news/2011-01-14_-_firefox_portable_4.0_beta_9

And it really is noticeably faster than previous released.

Personas broken?

[vlueboy]

Can anyone running the beta tell me if the "Personas" skins they mainstreamed in 3.6 are broken in 4.0 ? It would be sad to see them go, since I love monochrome themes for myself and colorful ones for the family. The latter allows me to tell from the other side of the room that they're using the correct browser when an issue is "called out" to me. I digress... any brokenness means that they went from 3.6 support to abandonment in a single release, where 3.7 is AKA 4.0. Chrome changes version numbers all the time, and they rarely update their general GUI.

On another topic, summaries sometimes make you "pause" slashdot to seek clarification, though not always not for the articles. I tried to link to personas, but mozilla seems to be slashdotted or something/i>

Re:Personas broken?

[zyzko]

For me my "persona" skin transferred from 3.6 to 4.0 beta. Few plugins reported to be broken, mainly the Firefox Sync (it is now built-in, installer should notify about this) and some obscure plugins which some websites I use (Ovi Maps from Nokia...) - the really used ones (Web developer, Adblock) do work just fine.

Re:Personas broken?

[Tacvek]

I will point out that only a development version of greasemonkey works for now, which is not available on addins.mozilla.org. For those that prefer Firebug over Web developer, you will need to wait (there is only an alpha for the Fx4beta10 prerelease).

Why the need to become other browsers?

[KarlIsNotMyName]

I'm using Firefox because I prefer it over Chrome and such. I don't want the layout changed every major release.

Re:Why the need to become other browsers?

[surveyork]

Mike Beltzner says that the trend for mainstream browsers is a minimalistic interface in order to give more room for web pages. The web content is important, the browser must remain in a discrete supporting role. http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/firefox4.ogg

Re:Why the need to become other browsers?

[surveyork]

Sorry for the spam, I forgot to say that, apparently, the sleeker the interface (minimal design) the faster the browser seems. Look at around 6:10 in the video mentioned above.

Re:Why the need to become other browsers?

[KarlIsNotMyName]

I honestly don't worry that much about speed. If they need to literally cut corners to boost the speed further, okay, but make that optional for those of us who don't want to sacrifice and good interface for a tiny boost in speed. As has been mentioned to a degree, if all the browsers look the same, there's fewer reasons for there to be more of them.

Re:Why the need to become other browsers?

[surveyork]

Well, in Firefox 4 you can easily get the Menu bar back and I'm sure there are extensions/styles/scripts to get the Title bar and the status bar back in all their glory. But note that the minimalistic design isn't designed to make Firefox faster. It's designed to make Firefox (and the other browsers) _seem faster_. There even were some pages at Wiki.mozilla abut making Firefox faster and also making it _look_ faster. And yes, the mainstream browsers do look a bit alike. At least IE9, Fx 4 and Opera 11 look similar to me.

Re:Why the need to become other browsers?

[Thing 1]

I'm using Firefox because I prefer it over Chrome and such. I don't want the layout changed every major release.

Yeah, if I wanted that I'd just stick to Microsoft products.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[after.fallout.34t98e]

For me the module is Firebug. Chromebug is not nearly good enough yet (it is getting there).

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Tubal-Cain]

For Chromium there is NotScripts. At first there is some BS about needing a password of sorts entered in a config file, but once you're done with that it's pretty much the same.

css

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like some CSS stuff is broken between 3 & 4 though...maybe the code needs to change but sites are not all working in beta

Old-schoolers need the menu bar? Honestly?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they used the keyboard shortcuts like "/" or Ctl-C without even looking or using the mouse...

(But since when did "Esc" become "go back a page"?)

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Tubal-Cain]

Here's their screenshot. And the firstrun page.

firefox, dumber than a box of change

[Anonymous Coward]

take the dildos out of your ears, don't change the UI
you want to add an improved as an option GREAT,
but don't force turds upon your user base

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, something like this?

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn

That, too, was the final missing piece I needed to switch...

Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[AbRASiON]

What a complete and utter disconnection between summary and data, who the hell made this UI decision?

Seriously now, try to imagine a proper filing cabinet with the files containing the data, only the labels per file are 4" higher than each file, with stuff inbetween obfuscating and disconnecting the information?
Thank christ this stupid, stupid option is able to be disabled.
Furthermore, the status bar being on the address bar - ok I tried to like it, I tried not to be 'backwards' and old fasioned (as I am with classic UI in Windows) but I just can't do it, I like to see a huge, giant URL down the bottom - I want to see the full thing incase it contains something dodgy. I'm a tech, I need to know what I'm clicking - I find it an utterly stupid design decision.

Furthermore the performance is better but hardly sufficient, the performance is the only thing chrome has going for it in my opinion, sorry but I'm not going to bow down and love it just because it's googles product. Firefox has and continues to serve all I need in a browser, even then with a couple of addons ("tabs menu" - "tab mix plus" etc)
I will continue to adjust FF4, FF5, FF6 to look like FF3. (Oh and I'm not too old fasioned, the awesome bar is bloody incredible)

ALL firefox needs, the ONLY thing it needs in my opinion is speed, I have a quad core 64bit machine with 6gb of ram, I browse between 3 and 18 hours a day,.. I absoloutely don't care how much resources my browser takes, I just want the best performance possible, period.
Fuck copying Chrome, ugh - don't latch on to fads which are stupid but popular (see: white plugs on everything after the ipod, see: fucking glossy screens on laptops)

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[shadowthunder]

For me, there are two important things about the target URL: the main site (whether I'm being sent to a different, potentially untrusted site) and (to a much less extent) the file extension of the linked file. Often, that latter reason can be left until after I've clicked.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK YOU!!, have an +1 insightful from me. This exactly has been my sentiment since I started using the minefield builds.

My guess is that the time to fork firefox again is coming, because the idiots who are working on it are completely clueless and just adding "features" like crazy.

IMHO Firefox has got to the point where it suffers feature creep. Anyone remember the story about "the cycle of a commercial app" where at the end, the developer starts adding shit just for the sake of being able to call a new version??

I don't want tabs on title-bar, I dont want no-status bar, I dont want "hide-my-windows" feature. I just want to reduce the memory use and increase speed.

xtracto.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[aztracker1]

The funny thing is it wasn't the minimal UI that finally witched me o chrome... it wasn't IE and uses many of window's/ie's network & proxy config, so it works at the workplace... and the zoom in/out work better, so it's better on netbook, and htpc. That's what id it... 90% of my non work browsing is from my couch. I used a netbook for a year, and surf from the couch, its amazing what perspective those two experiences give you.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[Nemyst]

You're the perfect example of the minority who appears to dislike the new changes. Let me guess, you also hate the Office 2007+ UI, assuming you've ever used it?

I'm not trying to be an ass, but really, the Firefox devs are going by the majority here. I love the new changes - give me as much space as possible for the website, let the browser get the hell out of the way. Tabs on top and no status bar shave off pixels that can be used for the website, the actual content. If they could find a way to combine the search bar without breaking functionality, I'd be happy with that too. You see, in my view it's streamlining the interface as much as possible. Having tabs on top is in fact a more logical layout since it encompasses the URL bar too, which is related to the tab you're on. I'm not even trying to make an analogy because sometimes, guess what, a UI doesn't have to reflect a real-world thing. It can just be the optimal solution to the problem.

The status bar, I don't really see the problem. Unless your URL is some sort of behemoth, you'll see it entirely. If it is in fact THAT long, then it'll cut off the middle section, giving you the really important information anyways: the site's domain and the page you're going to. It's also not there when there's nothing to be shown, which is good - less clutter is good. If you want to see more of the URL, just remove stuff in your main bar. I have the previous button auto-minimize when it's unavailable, I've moved the Home button to the tabs bar, I have the very minimum number of buttons and my search bar is very small, so my URL bar is basically maximized, thus allowing me to see all but the most cumbersome of URLs.

And that's the thing, really: I like the changes. I'm sure I'm not alone. It's probably even that there's an overwhelming majority of people who like the changes. I'm sorry that you don't like the changes, but thankfully the developers are fully aware that there will always be people to whine on any and all change and they make sure an extension can always be built to address this. You can say they could build the extension themselves or incorporate it in the actual build, but I say they have better things to do than to cater to a minority and that building the option in would probably just cause more bloat. Ironically enough, those who complain of the changes also often complain of bloat.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[Anonymous Coward]

The status bar, I don't really see the problem. Unless your URL is some sort of behemoth, you'll see it entirely.

You really don't see the risk inherent in chopping out the middle of URLs of the form:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/finance/external/tsmfe/SIG=12uoas7kn/*http%3A//www.-some-sort-of-goatse-link-here-.com/_yahoo/story/12345678?irrelevant=1&ignored=1/and-a-bunch-of-noise-here-that-looks-legit/

I mean, that's a perfectly legitimate Yahoo redirect, which they themselves use on their own web pages, to some story about finance, isn't it?

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because everyone has a nice big beefy machine like yours. So it makes sense to make it consume as many resources as possible.

You do realize they're not building the browser for you, rather everyone? Some people even use FF on netbooks! (Screw those guys, right?)

FF is pluggable. Don't like the way links show up in the address bar? Write a plugin to fix it...or use someone else's as someone will design one.

As far as tabs on top goes. It works for Chrome, as Chrome only has 2 small bars. FF has address bar, bookmark bar, menu bar, and they're a bit larger than what Chrome does.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[noidentity]

I really like this new change; it saves 20 pixels of vertical space on my 640x480 monitor. I'm just waiting for them to put the entire web page into the title bar. Imagine the space savings then!

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[lennier]

For me, there are two important things about the target URL: the main site (whether I'm being sent to a different, potentially untrusted site) and (to a much less extent) the file extension of the linked file. Often, that latter reason can be left until after I've clicked.

Even if the file extension is a .exe?

I'd rather know first and not click. I don't trust my antivirus THAT much.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[AbRASiON]

You're completely misinterpreting.
The problem is I have the kind of machine that I do, yet it's still not fast enough, let alone for people with machines half my specs.
Considering how cheap hardware is, it would be nice if the software used multiple cores better and at least had the option to use 1gb of ram or more purely for speed purposes.

Re:Tabs in the title bar are a disgrace.

[Daetrin]

"I love the new changes - give me as much space as possible for the website, let the browser get the hell out of the way. Tabs on top and no status bar shave off pixels that can be used for the website, the actual content."

Okay, i can understand the argument you're making here. I disagree with it; i feel that sacrificing what is in my opinion good UI in order to add a few pixels to the website view is being penny wise, pound foolish. However you're entitled to your own opinion. (If you're interested, i prefer economizing on how much i have to move my mouse, and i switch between doing stuff in the window to clicking on tabs a lot more than i switch between doing stuff in the window and doing anything with the URL/Navigation toolbar.)

However, tabs on top does NOT actually save any pixels. In fact i've installed the beta on a virtual machine, and i just went and checked. Switching from tabs on bottom to tabs on tab actually _subtracts_ two or three pixels from the viewable area. It's kind of dumb, but it's true. And even if it was designed properly i can't see why tabs on top would inherently be any better than tabs on bottom in terms of vertical pixels. Getting rid of the status bar, yes, getting rid of the menu bar yes, but just reordering existing elements? I don't see it.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[barrkel]

Frankly, most of my addons already exist for Chrome, save perhaps a FoxyProxy equivalent.

It's all about the mobile

[rsilvergun]

and tablet computing too. A status bar, address bar, book mark bar, menu bar, search bar and wet bar all make sense on a 1600x1300 res screen. Less so at 800x600...

It's about consistency. FF on your computer should behave like FF on your phone and your tablet.

Re:It's all about the mobile

[Fjandr]

FF on your computer should behave like FF on your phone and your tablet.

Yes and no. In general, consistency is a good thing. When you take consistency to an extreme across vastly different platforms though, you are working at the lowest common denominator. You have to remove any functionality that does poorly on any platform in order to get perfect consistency.

Leave in options that allow you to take advantage of platform-specific benefits. There's absolutely no downside to leaving customizable options in place, even if you change the default behavior. I'm perfectly fine with the status bar being removed by default, but removing the capability entirely for the user to keep that functionality has no arguable merit. It gives me another reason to not only avoid installing FireFox but to actively lobby against its deployment by others. I've always been strongly anti-IE, but I have to say, sadly, that IE now tops FireFox in my list of secondary browsers.

Acid 3

[sltd]

It still gets only 97% on the Acid 3 test, and doesn't render the blue box.

Re:Acid 3

[CyberDragon777]

That is because Mozilla doesn't want to spend resources to implement old stuff that never really gained traction and already has a never and better alternative.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119490#c38

The current status is that SVG fonts don't seem to be very important for the
Web. Opentype fonts loaded via CSS @font-face are more useful than SVG fonts in
almost every way. By far the biggest reason to support SVG fonts is to pass
Acid3. I don't think it's a good idea to add an otherwise-unnecessary feature
just to pass a test.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

NotScripts (noscript-like extension for Chrome).

er

[Blymie]

Tabs on titlebar is self-explanatory.

No. No, it isn't.

What the hell is tabs on titlebar? The only titlebar I have, is the actual x.org title bar managed by my window manager. If the tabs are up there, I'll be mightly pissed!

Why would I want to move my mouse that much further up the screen, past the url bar, the quicklinks, and what not?

How would that even save space?!

Re:er

[Nirvelli]

Well then, it would seem that it was self-explanatory after all.
You have figured out exactly what it means.
And by the looks of the rest of the comments, most of Slashdot is "mightly pissed."

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people I know already switched to Chrome, so these similarities open the door for us to consider leaving Ubuntu's default browser alone instead of immediately installing a vastly superior alternative. The solution to a lack of innovation at one point in time certainly isn't NOT copying your competitors to keep up. That'll kill your project.

Best Feature Not Mentioned

[QuantumG]

ummm.. TabCandy? It's in the main tree now ya know.

Re:Best Feature Not Mentioned

[shadowthunder]

It's called "Panorama" now, so you've likely seen it mentioned somewhere. My issue with Panorama is that it forces you to leave the browsing interface completely to change groups. Just because I want to group tabs together, that doesn't mean that I want to work exclusively in that group at a given time. I think Opera's approach to tab-grouping is better: grouped tabs move as a set, but you're not restricted only to one group at a time.

Re:Best Feature Not Mentioned

[surveyork]

I mainly use Firefox, but I prefer Opera's tab stacking to Panorama. As parent says, Panorama makes you leave the main browsing interface. I think it's a bolted-on feature and the bugs at bugzilla seem to confirm that suspicion.

Re:Best Feature Not Mentioned

[Haedrian]

Interestingly enough I prefer Firefox's grouping because I can work on one set at a time and not get distracted.

If I see /. in my tabs I will want to check it out. I tried Opera's and I was rather disappointed - I group my tabs so that my tabarea looks cleaner and I don't need to see stuff which I know will distract me from my work.

To each his own eh?

Re:Best Feature Not Mentioned

[hkmwbz]

Interestingly enough I prefer Firefox's grouping because I can work on one set at a time and not get distracted.

So... Like Opera's sessions, or using separate windows?

If I see /. in my tabs I will want to check it out. I tried Opera's and I was rather disappointed - I group my tabs so that my tabarea looks cleaner and I don't need to see stuff which I know will distract me from my work.

Sounds like you are rationalizing...

Re:Best Feature Not Mentioned

[Haeleth]

Yeah, and last FF4 beta I tried it was bloody annoying, being assigned to an unchangeable keyboard shortcut that I kept hitting by accident while typing. After the third time I managed to lose data without knowing how I'd done it, I gave up and went back to FF3. Hopefully there'll be extensions to change the keyboard mapping by now ...

Thank for the information

[aepervius]

I now know I have to stick to firefox 3 no matter what. Removing status bar at the bottom ? Putting it at a place where you can#t see long URL ? What the heck the firefox dev were SMOKING ? They are supposed to add useful functionality in, not remove VERY useful functionality out.

Re:Thank for the information

[u17]

Try switching to seamonkey instead. It has a traditional interface and uses the gecko engine underneath.

Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[TheABomb]

You're ignoring the fact that it wasn't all that long ago when 480 pixels was the vertical standard. Hell, I'm not even 30 and I can remember CGA in all its 640×200 glory. So what if the resolution bubble burst and we're finally finding a happy medium? There's still plenty of reason to make an intelligent use of space.

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't 'burst' for any technical or preference reasons; lcd manufacturers are using the high-definition train as a reason to abandon further research and development, and even to go backwards from 1920x1200 to 1920x1080.

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[TheABomb]

And if you took six VGA displays and stacked them 2x3 (something I tried to do in my college dorm, which I deny was that long ago), you still wouldn't have 1920x1080. In fact, you could have the status bar right below the cutoff that your 1080 still has. Given that there are still plenty of websites "optimized" for 800x600 or 1024x768, you're not really missing that much.

I think I see your real problem here: the hi-res porn you're looking at is in portrait, rather than landscape. That's a problem you should be taking up with the photographers, not /.

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm over 30, am neither a medium nor happy, and can remember using 1600x1200 as standard over 10 years ago. The "HD" low-def marketese has pretty much killed resolution these days, but hey there's always more morons willing to spend based on a name.

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're under 30, then we're looking at what, 1998? At that time VGA was an 11 year old technology, and consumer graphics cards could handle 1920 x 1200, 32bpp @ 72Hz.

I personally have two old 22 inch CRT monitors that would have been 8 years old at that time and can both handle that resolution. And I bought them on a budget.

I'd conclude by saying that kids really don't realise how crap their res is these days.

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wanted to add that they're like 30kg each and taking up space. So if anyone wants them...

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[Anonymous Coward]

80 columns? luxury!

ah those were the times

Re:Kids today don't know how good a res they got

[shutdown -p now]

Resolution is not good for as long as I can see ragged pixels in diagonal lines. iPhone 4 got that one right.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[macshit]

Not really true. There are tons of little detail differences that favor FF over chrome.

It's a good thing that they're copying each others' best ideas; they're both still vastly different implementations, produced by very different teams, with different priorities, and will always have many differences.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[cameronl]

The primary reasons I don't use Chrome are the missing menu and status bars.

Chrome has a status bar: it pops up when you hover over a link. It's not there when you don't need it. And it's on the bottom where a status bar should be.

IndexedDB

[mwvdlee]

What can IndexedDB do that Cookies can't?

Re:IndexedDB

[gblues]

Store more than 4KB of information?

Re:IndexedDB

[Mr Z]

Cookies have to be sent with every web request in the domain of the cookie. Store too much in that and the cost of making requests goes way up. There could be good reasons to store a lot of information locally on one's hard drive (imagine, your email inbox, for example) that you don't wish to communicate back to the web server with every click, but perhaps do want to make available to scripts running locally (such as the mail software). Make sense?

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

Boom, baby! No more reasons for Firefox:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/odjhifogjcknibkahlpidmdajjpkkcfn

It Talks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh $DEITY it talks.... Delete.

Good logic

[ciaran_o_riordan]

And my new year's resolution is to make important resolutions in 2012.

Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[Futurepower(R)]

"It saddens me that the devs feel they have to do things like this rather than fix the much more serious issues the browser has..."

Such as... "Granted on the plus side I can finally use a browser that properly frees up memory after closing a shit load (80+ tabs) at once."

Are the memory gobbling instabilities of Firefox fixed in version 4? I have 12 tabs open in 5 windows now in Firefox 3.6.13, and Process Explorer tells me that Firefox is slowly demanding more and more memory, even when I am only watching Process Explorer, and nothing is happening in Firefox.

Eventually, the memory gobbling of Firefox reaches a limit, and Windows XP SP3 becomes very unstable.

I've filed bug several reports about that particular instability of Firefox over about 9 years, but the problem has not been fixed.

Those of use who need to do research on the internet often have many windows and tabs open. That makes the instability in Firefox much worse.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[smash]

How about fixing the DHCP proxy auto-detection that even had a patch submitted in 2006?

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[maxume]

Try running Flashblock. I have a couple dozen tabs open in 1 window and Firefox is not allocating memory. After about 6 days, the process is using 300 MB.

I have the usual assortment of plugins and add ons running.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[datapharmer]

Not as of the last beta I tried (6 I think). It slowly grinds even macs to a halt if you have very many tabs open. I finally gave up and switched to chrome which has it's own set of glitches and annoyances but is so much faster it is generally more tolerable.

Mozilla, here is what you can do to get me back:
1. handle extension support better between versions - assume it works instead of assuming it breaks. Let me report it without having to install a special extensions to test "incompatible" plugins
2. Bring back the option for a status bar. You can leave it off by default but it is annoying as hell for a web developer to not have a status bar. 3. Independent memory on a per tab basis. I often go to one particularly script heavy site that locks firefox for a good 15 seconds. The tab locks in chrome but I can keep on working in another tab while waiting.
4. And most importantly, fix the memory leaks!

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Status-4-Evar add can be a solution for missing old status in firefox 4 beta x. It's not the same functionality as in firefox 3.6 but it's solution.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[jorgevillalobos]

Bring back the option for a status bar. You can leave it off by default but it is annoying as hell for a web developer to not have a status bar.

The statusbar is still there, but it is now called the Add-on Bar, and it's empty and hidden by default. Like the other reply states, some add-ons exist that move previous statusbar UI back to its original position.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[mspohr]

I now have 17 tabs open in Firefox and it has been running for a few weeks (I forget the last time I rebooted my laptop or closed Firefox... Linux). Memory use is 287 Meg. That seems reasonable. I think you need to come up with a new meme for Firefox... the memory hog meme is really out of date. However, so is Windows XP and that is probably your problem.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[TheThiefMaster]

Strange, the memory use of my Firefox 3.6.13 is stable at ~200MB. If yours is leaking, it's quite likely some difference between my FF and yours, say an extension you have installed that I don't.

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[alexo]

Are the memory gobbling instabilities of Firefox fixed in version 4? I have 12 tabs open in 5 windows now in Firefox 3.6.13, and Process Explorer tells me that Firefox is slowly demanding more and more memory, even when I am only watching Process Explorer, and nothing is happening in Firefox.

Eventually, the memory gobbling of Firefox reaches a limit, and Windows XP SP3 becomes very unstable.

I've filed bug several reports about that particular instability of Firefox over about 9 years, but the problem has not been fixed.

Those of use who need to do research on the internet often have many windows and tabs open. That makes the instability in Firefox much worse.

Same thing here. FF eats more and more memory until it reaches about 1.5GB and then locks hard.
Interestingly, if I close FF when it's at about 1.3GB and still usable (but very sluggish), it will take it several minutes to shut down properly, presumably taking all that time to free the memory.

I noticed that using Google Image Search makes the problem worse (i.e., FF leaks memory faster).

Re:Did they fix Firefox's memory gobbling problem?

[alexo]

Strange, the memory use of my Firefox 3.6.13 is stable at ~200MB. If yours is leaking, it's quite likely some difference between my FF and yours, say an extension you have installed that I don't.

Most people install extensions because they want (or need) to use them. At least I do. The only reason I use FF and not Chrome or Opera is because it has the add-ons that make my online life easier.

Unfortunately, there is no tool to tell me what extension, add-on or tab is responsible for the memory leak(s).

F.ck Tab Bar API

[Furkan]

So this means that i won't open a new tab with mouse "middle" click by default. Cheers and goodbye.

Re:F.ck Tab Bar API

[Furkan]

And also i won't double click somewhere on title bar for a smaller window. At last, there's no title bar nor tab bar in Firefox 4 from now on. Then wtf is that bar on the upside?

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

Could also be the other way around. Since you like Chrome interface but there's a lack of add-on, you can switch to FF 4.0 and you won't be lost.

cap: morning
Yeah.

Tabs on top are fantastic

[Anonymous Coward]

I think tabs on top are excellent, and now that they are where the titlebar is, like in Chrome, I can change tabs much more quickly. Now that they touch the top of the screen, they are effectively infinitely big! This is a point Opera has completely missed, the top two pixels aren't clickable in the latest version.

Sucks if you're on a Mac and have that fixed menu bar there.

"Tabs on top"

[ivucica]

Looks the same on OS X as it did in 4.0b7, b8.

Re:"Tabs on top"

[surveyork]

Sorry, the Tabs on titlebar feature is for Vista/7 and somehow implemented in XP & 2000. I think Linux is lacking them too.

Re:"Tabs on top"

[Haedrian]

Linux is lacking them because GNOME apparently doesn't support you putting stuff in the title bar - not sure about the other window managers though.

  Unity is going to be another problem when it comes out...

Re:"Tabs on top"

[loufoque]

That's weird, since it works fine in the linux version of chrome, which is GTK+-based.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[__aailob1448]

As a chrome user, let me offer a couple of compelling reasons:

Adblock plus
Segmented downloading (downthemall)

Fast is good, right?

[GNious]

Its fast? Good
Does it stay fast? After ca 5 hours light usage, beta8 uses more resources than my virtual machine with WinXP running various MS-Office, meaning I have to stop it.
Firefox 3 (latest) does not show the same behaviour even after running a couple of days, with the same browsing pattern (me) and same plugins (+ a couple that doesn't work under FF4).

Waste of space

[Zalminen]

Because it's a waste of space?

I have a netbook with a resolution of 1024x600. I routinely have to hide the status bar already to get a little more vertical space. If I can get rid of the status bar and still retain the functionality in other ways, then great!

Re:Waste of space

[Renstar]

So the seven of you with a netbook can have an extension or a FF version that optimizes the UI for netbooks. There are more real computers than netbooks; things should be optimized for real computers, and then people can waste their time making extensions to make it usable for netbooks.

It's already easy to hide the status...

[Joce640k]

The status bar can be hidden with two mouse clicks. Were people really having so much trouble with the "View->Status bar" option that the devs needed to take matters into their own hands?

Worse, they knew it was controversial and was going to piss off a lot of people but they did it anyway.

Re:It's already easy to hide the status...

[shutdown -p now]

I think sometimes that there are some kind of secret meetings between Firefox and Gnome UI designers where they share skills.

Come to think of it, KDE guys must have been invited recently, too - that would explain a lot.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[surveyork]

Well, I think Firefox looks more like Opera than Chrome. In my system, the main difference between Fx and Opera is the orange Vs. red menu button. YMMV, though.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[emgarf]

Does Chrome offer the option of a persistent bookmark sidebar/pane yet? Until it does, FF4 wins.

OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah Firefox 3.6's status bar was sooo useful, whatever will I do without...whatever was on the old status bar that isn't on the new add-on bar?

(I just loaded up 3.6 and double-checked, the only thing missing is the "loading/waiting/done" status text, now replaced with animated icons used on the tabs)

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[loufoque]

Information of what actually is happening.

With the status bar, you know whether the browser is trying to resolve the host, establish a connection, or is downloading data.
With some animated weird progression thingy, you don't really know anything. You barely know that it is loading, and that's it.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[GameboyRMH]

The animation is grey for connecting and resolving, and red for downloading.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[loufoque]

That's still less information.

And replacing practical, explicit information, displayed in the idiomatic way users are used to, by some unintuitive color codes placed up rather than down, breaking typical workflow is hardly a good idea.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[GameboyRMH]

Very well, but users without addons are just wasting space down there. I think it's the same reason modern cars don't come with an ammeter or oil pressure gauge. Since I still use the addon bar I would have preferred to keep the old status information, but to me it's a tiny detail not worth spergin' over.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[loufoque]

Gaining five pixels of horizontal space (0.5% of your typical screen) does not justify that major usability deterioration.

Content is not always more important than the application to manage it.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[GameboyRMH]

And I argue that showing such a small amount of information, only very slightly more useful than the animation in the tab icon, is not worth a 27 pixel tall strip of screen real estate (the height of my addon bar, roughly equal to the old status bar in size, which is like adding another horizontal toolbar to my screen).

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[loufoque]

Sorry I meant vertical space, of course.

Re:OH NOES TEH STATUS BAR!!11ONE

[Haeleth]

Do you seriously think that even 0.0001% of Firefox users have "typical workflows" that rely on "practical, explicit information" about whether the browser is currently performing a DNS lookup or negotiating an HTTP connection?!

Wow.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[suv4x4]

In other news, I do like the status bar being visible. The primary reasons I don't use Chrome are the missing menu and status bars.

But... Chrome does have a status bar. When it's empty it doesn't render. When you hover a link or have other status information to display (i.e. during page loading for ex.), it renders on bottom left. The menu bar is easily accessible via Alt, then Space or Alt, then Enter, or Alt, then Down Arrow...

I understand when people say removing functionality they use is bad, but when they just react like you, calling a less obtrusive status bar a "missing status bar", I realize they just miss the empty rectangle down there, and want their empty damn rectangle and that's it.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[ian_from_brisbane]

Multi-row tabs

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[bgarcia]

This comment needs to be modded up.

Chrome's status bar shows a shortened URL when you first hover over a link. If you leave the mouse pointer over the link for one second, the status bar then expands to display the entire URL.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[suv4x4]

As long as Chrome lacks NoScript, there will continue to be a reason for Firefox. Fix that dealbreaker, and all of the rest is negotiable.

It does have a functionality that works EXACTLY like NoScript. Are you guys even trying?

Menu > Options > Under the Hood > Content Settings > JavaScript > Do not allow any site to run JavaScript

Now when you visit a site that needs JS, you have a "JS is needed" little icon right on the address bar. Click it, and you can whitelist that site for now, or for the future as well.

Under the same options dialog above you can do the same for plugins as well, like Flash.

Worst experience so far...

[Tasha26]

The latest epic fail was "copy & paste." After hibernation, the browser literally stopped providing Copy/Cut-paste functionality, and page printing too. If you don't believe me: http://input.mozilla.com/en-US/search/?product=firefox&q=copy+paste

The end of Firefox

[loufoque]

With this version, it becomes apparent that the end of Firefox is coming.

It has a very strong bias towards Microsoft Windows, which they justify by saying that's where most of the market is. Virtually all recent features are only available on Microsoft Windows, some of which are even only available on Windows Vista or Seven.
As far as I'm concerned, Firefox has only seen regressions on Linux and Mac OS X since version 3.5. It's clearly become slower with each release, despite the announced performance improvements for Windows.

That bias is hurting them much more than they realize : they're alienating the open source community on Linux, which is where they originally came from, and all the cool and techies, the influential people, are either using Mac OS X or Linux. So if they stop using Firefox, how long before they relatives see that and try to copy them?

Also, the fact they only work on Windows is a demonstrator of their technical weakness. It seems Mozilla has now become an aggregation of marketing people and inane UI designers, with Q&A testers on top, instead of the coding gurus it used to be.
Good code is portable code. Good programming practices are to organize your code in such a way that you never have to write platform-specific code more than you have to, by isolating the strictly platform-specific parts. The fact that Firefox on Windows and on other platforms is so different is a testament that a significant design mistake was made somewhere.
Other platforms are not even prioritized for testing. That's also against good practices. The best way to find bugs is to make code run in separate environments, as the differences in those environments are what might trigger some otherwise rare code in the "main" environment.

What's that with using Direct2D for accelerated 2D rendering? All rendering is done by Cairo, which should be exploiting hardware acceleration. If Cairo cannot use Direct2D, it should be extended, rather than modifying Firefox itself to support Direct2D.
What happened to the projects of modernizing the Mozilla codebase, which is written in C with classes and macros crap? Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO, had ambitious projects to do that. He has had them for what, almost ten years now? It was due for Firefox 2. Why was that delayed? So that we could have personas and tabs on top instead?
Adobe, one of the world's greatest software companies, GAVE them a JIT virtual machine designed for Javascript (i.e. the hard part in getting a Javascript JIT compiler) FIVE years ago. They're still not using it in Firefox, which makes it the ONLY modern web browser lacking a Javascript JIT engine. With all the money they've got, they could have hired a couple of compiler engineers and created a new Javascript compiler from scratch that targeted that virtual machine in a couple of years at most. Google certainly didn't have any problem doing that plus the virtual machine in less than a year.
What's up with HTML5? They're clearly lagging behind Webkit and Opera, even though they were clearly at the front a couple of years ago.

Firefox has lost its appeal, is lagging behind, and is now desperately trying to copy Chrome so that it has new things to put in new releases. The highlight of releases are now useless gimmicks that are really regressions, instead of the major innovations they used to be in the past.
It is clear to me there is a real problem in leadership, with too much "rethinking the web experience" buzzing and not enough technology. Coders have deserted Gecko in favour of Webkit, since the codebase of the latter is much more modern, streamlined and nice to work with. They're losing all that made them what they were bit by bit.
The only thing holding Firefox together is that before it became popular and amassed a ton of money, which unfortunately killed it, it used to be high-quality open-source software, the state of the art of web technology. They lost that, and with that, their end is ineluctably coming.

Re:The end of Firefox

[Ash-Fox]

If Cairo cannot use Direct2D, it should be extended, rather than modifying Firefox itself to support Direct2D.

Cairo isn't controlled by Firefox developers.

Why was that delayed?

Different priorities, a lot was done.

They're still not using it in Firefox, which makes it the ONLY modern web browser lacking a Javascript JIT engine.

Firefox has had a JIT for a few years now.

What's up with HTML5?

It's a draft and w3c urges against standardizing against the draft. The gap between HTML5 draft support and other browsers isn't really that significant from my observations.

Re:The end of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, the fanboys don't like your perfectly valid criticisms, do they. You're on 2 Flamebait currently.

Apart from your claims that Adobe is a great software company, you are fucking right in your criticisms. Adobe are fucking bunch of cunts, who make nothing but bloated shit, and have far too many fanboys - watch this:

Photoshop can be replaced by any number of cheaper or free or Free products. Most of the resistance to change comes from those who wouldn't want to change because it would cost them time, and if PS is their livelihood, then they make less money. They don't actually understand what they are doing, so cannot easily transfer their artistic skills to another piece of software, yet do not want to admit their lack of understanding. Or they do not recognise their lack of understanding - which is expected. A kid who hasn't learned their times tables is unlikely to recognise their lack of understanding of multiplication.

The only thing that keeps me on Firefox (and Seamonkey) is NoScript, Adblock, and the other bits and pieces that preserve privacy and keep the awfulness that is the web today in check. Can the other browsers do this? I don't know, and when the alternatives to a Mozilla browser comes from proprietary vendors or advertising companies, Mozilla's products do appear to be the best of a bad bunch.

I guess there's one place left to go, Konqueror (heh, FF's spell check doesn't know that). Webkit based, has advert blocking. Just need to reign in the scripts, referrers, user agents, etc. and things should be good.

Re:The end of Firefox

[bigtrike]

Event as an Adobe hater, I must disagree with you.

There is absolutely nothing that comes close to Photoshop in terms of functionality or usability. GIMP is about as good as Photoshop from 15 years ago. If Photoshop saves them 2 or 3 hours over the course of an entire year, it's worth the cost.

Re:The end of Firefox

[lennier]

If Cairo cannot use Direct2D, it should be extended, rather than modifying Firefox itself to support Direct2D.

Cairo isn't controlled by Firefox developers.

Then shouldn't they submit patches to upstream, and fork it in the meantime, just like Ubuntu does to Gnome?

Re:The end of Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the "inane UI designers" part. One example: First, they say: "let's change the GUI and make it more Chrome/Opera-like so we can _save precious space_, but let's leave the title bar empty except for the Menu button and the Close, Restore, Minimize buttons. Yes, we want to save space, but we leave a screen-length bar almost empty, not even showing the page title." Then comes the feedback: "Put the f***ing tabs on the title bar! You're wasting space just for the lulz!" And then comes the rationalization: "Our tests indicate that putting tabs on the title bar saves space and it is a nice feature because Fitts' law and blah, blah, blah." And people are left wondering: "My God! It took them about a year to copy Chrome/Opera... And they can't even do it right!!!" Yep, they can't even do it right: Now tabs are on top, but this feature has generated more bugs and regressions that Mozilla devs are dealing with now... 2 releases away from final... Panorama? It's something half-cooked that they threw in the mix in order to keep "being innovative and empower the user" and attached with rusty bolts to Firefox' code. Mozilla: Fix your years-old performance, standards-compliance bugs first, add fancy features only after you've fixed them for good.

Re:The end of Firefox

[Morris von Habsburg]

I am sorry but you seem misinformed. Have you followed Firefox in development at all in the last three years? Let me correct a couple of factual inaccuracies and you can draw your own conclusions.

* "Virtually all recent features are only available on Microsoft Windows, some of which are even only available on Windows Vista or Seven."
Incorrect. By naming Vista and Seven you are obviously thinking of hardware acceleration as that is the only feature that doesn't work in XP. However, hardware acceleration is fully supported on OS X making them both first class citizens. Linux hardware acceleration does exist but is disabled currently because of the abysmal quality of 3D drivers in Linux. Mozilla has stumbled on so many bugs that all will have to be fixed by the Nvidias, AMDs and Intels of this world that it is simply too buggy to use currently.

When it comes to 64bit support, Windows is definitely the third class citizen of the three. 64bit is default on OS X, experimental on Linux but currently unsupported on Windows. You want to run a 64bit build on Windows? You'll have to rely on third party compiles.

* "Adobe, one of the world's greatest software companies, GAVE them a JIT virtual machine designed for Javascript (i.e. the hard part in getting a Javascript JIT compiler) FIVE years ago. They're still not using it in Firefox, which makes it the ONLY modern web browser lacking a Javascript JIT engine."
Incorrect. Firefox has had a JIT compiler for years now. And frankly, Mozilla, Google and Apple have squeezed the most out of JIT some time ago and have been focused on more advanced technologies for JavaScript speedups for quite some time now.

* "Other platforms are not even prioritized for testing. That's also against good practices."
What makes you think that? 24/7 continuous tinderbox testing (http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/Firefox/) takes place on all platforms but with a strong focus on Linux. Considering actually a lot of development of Firefox takes place on Macs you could say that Windows is the third class citizen here although there is not really a large difference due to automation.

* "What's that with using Direct2D for accelerated 2D rendering? All rendering is done by Cairo, which should be exploiting hardware acceleration."
Hardware acceleration of many elements is done using Cairo and OpenGL on all platforms. However, the quality of OpenGL implementation on Windows is far from ideal because the GPU manufacturers focus their driver optimisation on DirectX and not OpenGL. Therefor, Mozilla could choose between mediocre performance using OpenGL or good performance using Direct2D for some pieces of the hardware acceleration effort. They chose best performance, perhaps not a very idealist stance but certainly the most user-friendly. The good news is that Mozilla is uncovering so many bugs in video drivers at the moment, in all three major OSes, that the quality of those is rapidly improving.

* "What's up with HTML5? They're clearly lagging behind Webkit and Opera, even though they were clearly at the front a couple of years ago."
Incorrect. A couple of years ago, the term HTML5 wasn't even coined and we were in the middle of the W3C/WhatWG controversy. Currently, the various compliance test show Firefox as the best, or one of the most compliant HTML5 browsers, certainly not lagging. Firefox was the first major engine to replace their existing HTML parser with a HTML5 compliant one. (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/05/firefox-4-the-html5-parser-inline-svg-speed-and-more/) Webkit followed some time later but we are still waiting on Opera for that one.

I a sorry to say but your clear lack of knowledge of the current browser development landscape make me think that it is you who is a few years behind on what is going on, not Mozilla.

Re:The end of Firefox

[loufoque]

Cairo isn't controlled by Firefox developers.

Doesn't prevent Firefox from modifying Cairo; Cairo refusing to include the patches upstream (which seems unlikely) should not limit modifying the version used by Firefox in any way.

Different priorities, a lot was done.

Yes, as I said, we got personas and tabs on top instead.

Firefox has had a JIT for a few years now.

Not quite. JIT doesn't come before JägerMonkey, which comes with Firefox 4, which isn't out yet. And it's not really a full JIT engine like Tamarin, it's just SpiderMonkey which some localized optimizations.

Re:The end of Firefox

[loufoque]

Incorrect. By naming Vista and Seven you are obviously thinking of hardware acceleration as that is the only feature that doesn't work in XP.

Or tabs on top etc., where support on XP is experimental.

When it comes to 64bit support, Windows is definitely the third class citizen of the three. 64bit is default on OS X, experimental on Linux but currently unsupported on Windows. You want to run a 64bit build on Windows? You'll have to rely on third party compiles.

If Firefox was well written, 32 or 64 bits wouldn't change anything at all.

hat makes you think that? 24/7 continuous tinderbox testing (http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/Firefox/) takes place on all platforms but with a strong focus on Linux.

I'm talking about real testing (as in done by Q&A testers), not regression testing or unit tests.

Hardware acceleration of many elements is done using Cairo and OpenGL on all platforms. However, the quality of OpenGL implementation on Windows is far from ideal because the GPU manufacturers focus their driver optimisation on DirectX and not OpenGL. Therefor, Mozilla could choose between mediocre performance using OpenGL or good performance using Direct2D for some pieces of the hardware acceleration effort. They chose best performance, perhaps not a very idealist stance but certainly the most user-friendly.

Support for Direct2D could have been added in Cairo directly, as an alternative to the OpenGL backend.
Also, sorry, but saying that OpenGL support isn't as good as DirectX is just Microsoft-spread FUD.

The good news is that Mozilla is uncovering so many bugs in video drivers at the moment, in all three major OSes, that the quality of those is rapidly improving.

Right, because we all know how a web browser has so much more advanced graphics than games.

Currently, the various compliance test show Firefox as the best, or one of the most compliant HTML5 browsers, certainly not lagging.

I've seen a lot of demos that only worked in Webkit and not in latest Gecko, and when they worked in Gecko they were buggy, slow, and the text wasn't correctly antialiased.
By HTML5, I mean the whole lot of "new web 2.0" technologies, with CSS3, video, SVG, and whatnot.

Re:Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try I

[markdavis]

>"which also lets you try it out right on your desktop without installing it and impacting your local Firefox install at all." Looks broken to me, says something about "Windows", whatever that is. OH! There is an assumption that everyone uses MS-Windows????

Some people don't experience the problem?

[Futurepower(R)]

I'm running the latest version of Flashblock. Maybe the problem only happens when there is more than one window?

Re:Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try I

[RobertLTux]

No this is a feature of portableapps

In similar fashion to complaining that you can't buy a boat in a Ford Dealership The Portable Apps Platform is yes my friends WINDOWS (xp/vista/7) only.

You want to port it to say Linux?? then the source is availble have at it oh btw if you can port the code to C or something else cross platform that would be actually helpful.

Hey John we are still like 3 days away from Platform 2 launch right??

What are the changes to Composer?

[Futurepower(R)]

What are the changes to Composer? I like Composer a lot.

I'd like to have Composer as a separate program.

Re:What are the changes to Composer?

[jorgevillalobos]

I believe Blue Griffon will interest you.

Any news about acid3 results?

[Anonymous Coward]

My current firefox and opera browsers are 92% and 99%, respectively.

Javascript under opera is still occassionally fuxx0r3d, and I wonder if it's a case of refusing to implement kludges of some sort of another (I'm not a browser programmer).
 

Intense agreement

[Futurepower(R)]

Most of the reviews of Status-4-Evar ("Status Forever" if English is a second language for you.) say the status bar should not have been removed.

Disagree

[bcore]

I disagree.

Turn your argument on its head: If the controls are above the tabs, that seems to imply that they apply to all tabs. Does that mean that if I click "reload", all tabs should be reloaded? If I enter a new URL, should all tabs go there, since the URL bar is outside the tabs as well?

I would argue that actually interacting with controls is far more important than rearranging them, so their placement should agree with the latter, not the former.

Re:Disagree

[harmonise]

Your example gives the impression that I don't like tabs on top and that's not the case. I do like it. I'm not advocating going back to tabs-below style. I am not arguing about the placement of the controls. Please re-read my original post with that in mind.

The problem I have is that tabs group UI elements and objects together. If I modify objects within a specific group then only those objects in the group should be affected. It's confusing to to go another group (in this case a tab) and see that others were affected. The rest of the GUI for the OS doesn't work this where tabs are used. Take a look at something like the Windows display properties window or Gnome Nautilus preferences window.

None of the following has anything to do with my argument. I think you're discussing a separate subject but to point out something anyway...

Does that mean that if I click "reload", all tabs should be reloaded? If I enter a new URL, should all tabs go there, since the URL bar is outside the tabs as well?

If I select a file on my computer and click the delete button, should it delete all files? If I select a bit of text in my word processor and choose italic, should it make all of the text in the document italic?

The answer to all of these is "no" because we select objects and perform actions. In the browser a tab is always active. Clicking reload affects the selected tab in the same way as clicking delete affects the selected file. Where a control is placed doesn't change that.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[apoc.famine]

Ditto on the Tree Style Tabs. They're a godsend on small screens that happen to be fairly wide.

They also make more intuitive sense to me - everything on the top bar is static, save the URL. The tabs are on the left, in trees showing where each was spawned from. You can close a single tab or a tree easily. They are far easier to organize in my head that way. I really don't know why that hasn't become a standard feature in a browser yet.

Update

[Anonymous Coward]

It almost seems the FireFox dev team is taking lessons from MSFT and doing oddball things. I have been using FF as my IE replacement, but with all the changes, IE9 and FF4 are almost going to be similar except that FF offers the plug-ins that IE doesn't (yet) I really like FF 3.6 but still in doubt about 4 especially with some of the things being removed

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[jfengel]

Well, that's much better, thank you.

Just one more thing I need: the ability to stop animated gifs. But that's less common, and I can now switch to Chrome for more stuff than I currently use it.

Nice, very nice

[Zelgadiss]

Impressive. I just might switch back from Chrome.

It's fast and responsive.

The UI feels less cluttered, I have always been a fan of Chrome's minimalist UI, although the Firefox title bar and menu bar feel like a bit of a waste of space.
It also feels much neater.

Still Chrome might be safer though, Firefox is still single process correct?

Nonetheless I'm impressed, very impressed.

Re:Nice, very nice

[Zelgadiss]

OK never mind, I'm an idiot who left "show menu bar" on.

Disabling that and it looks almost exactly like chrome.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Reziac]

Doesn't it have the option where you can set looping to ONCE? that's been in other browsers for years. Takes right care of the animated GIFs.

Re:Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try I

[cbhacking]

No, but there's evidence that A) most people do, and B) you are a douche. Seriously, dude, if you don't appreciate the work somebody has done just because they didn't do it for your 10%-or-less-market-share platform, that's fine, but why the snark? Do you feel entitled to use this, for some reason? Did the developer ask anything from you? Have you done anything for them?

For that matter, you probably *could* run it in [Dar]Wine just fine. If you really want it native, why not ask about a native port, or offer your expertise in creating one? Open source doesn't entitle you to a version usable on every platform, but it does entitle you to the code and the right to port it, if you're willing to put up the effort. It's easier to just snark from the sideline, though...

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[jfengel]

Not as far as I can tell, after some assiduous googling.

What I do find repeated complaints that you can't stop them even with the ESC key, and as far as I can tell that still holds. That's going to make some web sites completely unusable. But it's less common than Javascript and Flash based annoyances, which exist on major web sites, not just blogs.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Reziac]

Well, that sucks... yeah, animated GIFs are not as common as other dancing crap, but if users can't turn it off, watch for a comeback.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[barrkel]

I need the status bar, because it tells me (a) which proxy I'm using, (b) which set of cookies I'm using (easier account switching), and (c) gives easy access to firebug and greasemonkey.

I don't really use it that often to see where a link is going; but the problem with Chrome's hover-only status bar is that it *truncates* the URL (snips a bit out of the middle) and you have to wait several seconds to see the whole thing. It's actively anti-expert-user.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[barrkel]

You speak as if the purpose of the status bar is to show where links go. That's not what I use it for.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[barrkel]

My rectangle isn't empty; I don't use it to preview links, I use it to monitor the status of my plugins. It's the status bar, not the link preview bar.

Re:Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try I

[markdavis]

I think such a project is just fine. You need to take a chill pill and think of other reasons why I would complain (and apparently others agree)...

What I don't appreciate is the assumption in the original post. A kind of "Hey, this is great for everyone, just use this." Had they said it was Windows-only, I would not have wasted time investigating it. Why would anyone think a cross-platform application like Firefox would be repackaged in an MS-Windows-only way?

Point being- there are more than MS-Windows users out there. We are not "entitled" to have everything. Nor should we be told "if we want something, do it ourselves". But postings, especially on Slashdot, should not make the assumption that everyone uses MS-Windows. ESPECIALLY when the topic is about something that is multiplatform. Get it now?

Just a warning when uninstalling FF4 beta 9

[joshier]

When uninstalling the beta 9, do not make the same mistake I made by clicking 'delete personal preferences' because despite what I thought would only delete it's own profile, it actually annihilated my 3.5.15 FF profile removing everything including passwords, bookmarks and history.

What's this IndexedDB crap?

[gr8_phk]

Cookies got abused enough and should never have been introduced. Now we're going to let them store arbitrary quantities of data locally in a full blown database? That's just fucking stupid.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Johann Lau]

Copy Chrome? Firefox was on the "keep it simple, keep it stupid" bandwagon long before Chrome was even around.

Yet, I just love how people keep mentioning Chrome as if it's a fully featured browser.... it doesn't even have print preview, or anything else for that matter. But sure, it does what is intended to do efficiently and quickly, which is to look pretty and phone home, by default at least, and that it does with all the lavish luxury the user-facing parts are lacking haha....

Windows 2000-7, Wine under Linux, Darwine on Mac

[CritterNYC]

Well, the simple fact is that most people do use Windows. 94% at the moment (and 5% Mac and 1% *nix/bsd). So, realistically, it's a safe assumption to make. And, if you choose to run an alternate OS (I also run Ubuntu, for instance) you're familiar with this. The page where the app is available very clearly says that it is for Windows. It's not some kind of sneaky "gotcha".

Now, if you can hold back on the snarkiness for a minute, you'll find that you can also run it under Wine on *nix/BSD and may run under Darwine on Mac as well. We recommend setting the Windows version in Wine to Windows 2000 if your Linux drivers don't handle Wine's DirectX 9 stuff well (this works for me in VirtualBox for instance) so Firefox doesn't try and do hardware acceleration, leaving you with a window that won't redraw.

We actually test and make specific code changes to allow our products to run under Wine properly with our launchers, our portable installer and menu/platform.

Works in Wine

[CritterNYC]

It works just fine under Wine. We just recommend setting Wine to Windows 2000 in the version so Firefox doesn't try and do DirectX 9 hardware acceleration (as it does on XP) for most users. I know on my Ubuntu test VM, you wind up with a black window that doesn't redraw if it is set to XP, but it works just peachy set to Windows 2000.

Windows is generally a safe assumption as 94% of the market is using it (then 5% Mac and 1% *nix/BSD).

Re:*I'm* Spartacus - Status Bar Back Please

[Tetch]

+1

Your post articulates the argument perfectly (and is well-mannered and polite to boot), such that I can't see how the Moz Devs could possibly respond unfavourably.

Unless ... perhaps they think you're a lone weirdo .... so here's my "me too". Maybe it would help get the message across if everybody who wants the status bar back where it used to be (as an option if need be) piles in here and says so.

So come on, status bar fans ....

Re:Windows 2000-7, Wine under Linux, Darwine on Ma

[markdavis]

I kudos you for supporting FOSS!! And thanks for the informative reply.

My beef was just with the mantra like "Your Digital Life, Anywhere".... well, no, your digital life on MS-Windows machines only (which in MY life is essentially nowhere). Or "Pick a PC. Any PC."; again, I suppose it depends on the definition of "PC". Even "portable" to me means multiplatform, although I know in this context it is meant in the "transportable" way. And finally- "Open Platform..." but only one real "platform"... and a platform that is, ironically, not "open" :)

I am not accusing you/them of hiding the fact that it is [essentially] MS-Windows only... it does say that on the main page (but it is tiny and only mentioned once on the page). But it is somewhat inaccurate to claim "anywhere" and "any pc" and "open platform".... WINE not withstanding.

I apologize if I came across to negatively. It was meant to be somewhat witty.

Re:awfulbar

[amRadioHed]

Wow, I'm awestruck by your cleverness. You truly are as superior to everyone as you think.

great except for optimus atm

[yakumo.unr]

I like FF4 a lot but I can't use it as my main browser until fullscreen Youtube videos work properly with acceleration on an Nvidia Optimus system on win7 x64. In ff4 nightly builds (minefield) at the moment they just show up black, in 3.6.13 they are fine (though the OSDs flicker)

I've tried the flash 10.2 beta and that is worse, it crashes the 32bit builds when going fullscreen with Youtube and they then refuse to be terminated even by task manager :(

The 64bit ff4 does the same with the flash square x64 beta, but that does at least terminate.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[yakumo.unr]

There is a reasonable bit more to NoScript than simply javascript yes/no per domain.

java, flash, silverlight, can be blocked
audio/video, iframe, frame, font-face tags can be blocked
then there is clickjacking prevention and the Application Boundaries Enforcer

(Though some may not be necessary on Chrome I admit I don't know the ins and outs of it's in build security features)

Overall Picture

[CritterNYC]

I suppose it does depend on your definition of a PC. Most people think Windows, because there is PC (Windows) and Mac. Outside of our geek community, *nix doesn't really exist (some netbooks notwithstanding) in terms of what most people think of. Even on phones, people have no idea that Android is Linux-based.

When outside of our sphere, the world is Windows. If you have your portable apps on a USB drive, you may use them at a local library, a net cafe, a hotel business center, at work or at school. All of those are generally going to be Windows (though a small number of primary and smaller number of secondary schools may be Mac only). Where most of our users wind up using their apps on Wine is on their home computer (or work PC in sysadmin roles or similar), which serves them well as they really only need to configure it, sync some bookmarks, install/update some apps, etc.

In terms of the 'platform being open', we're talking about our platform (menu, backup utility, application updater) as well as our format, installer and launcher/portablizer. All are open source (GPL) and available to all. And they aren't artificially tied to hardware (like Sandisk's now-defunct U3 platform).

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. It's not exactly the same. All you can turn is turn on everything on a page or turn it all off. NoScript gives you more granularity, letting you run scripts from only certain domains.

Re:Firefox Portable 4.0 Beta 9 - Easy Way To Try I

[Mr Z]

you can't buy a boat in a Ford Dealership

Well, maybe you need to find a better Ford dealer then.

I tried Firefox 3 on Windows 7: Memory gobbling.

[Futurepower(R)]

What you said translates to: "I don't need to pay attention to the what was said about the problem to evaluate it" and "If it doesn't happen on my computer, then no one is having problems."

I tried Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7. The problem is exactly the same. The problem is much worse when there are several Firefox windows open.

Perhaps it is foolish to buy Windows 7, because Steve Ballmer has said Microsoft will release another version of Windows next year.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 on Windows 7: Memory gobbling

[mspohr]

It is true that my anecdotal "evidence" for "no memory problem" is not worth much but this issue was addressed literally years ago and has been tested rigorously. It is truly an old meme that should be put to rest.

As for your problem with Windows... if you are still using Windows I just don't know what to say... it always has been a malware ridden pile of bull_ and I pity you.

Tabs on titlebar in Linux

[mgiuca]

I've got the Linux version of FF4B9, and I don't see anywhere to turn on this feature. (Using Ubuntu / Gnome). Is this feature not included in the Linux version?

Cannot download without Javascript...

[Christopher Fritz]

I must have spent about five minutes on the download page (third link in the summary) trying to find the download link. Turns out the download link only appears if one has Javascript enabled.

I will admit, I'm curious to see how they're handing the status bar's relocation. Guess I can enable Javascript for one page reload here.

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the extension NotScripts, which is sometimes even better than NoScript.

Firefox 4 wonderings

[lsatenstein]

Ever since Chrome came out, I have flipped between Chrome and FF. What I noticed with Firefox was the interface that I appreciated versus that of Chrome. What I liked with Chrome, was the fast execution, and no stalls, stalls that I think occur in Firefox when it does garbage collection, or memory defragmentation. Hopefully, this FF browsing delay (noticable on my dual cpu desktop) will have been reduced significantly in the new version.

Demonstrate the problem for yourself:

[Futurepower(R)]

I like the latest version of Kubuntu. But that is a separate issue.

It is easy to demonstrate that Firefox has memory problems. Run the free Microsoft Process Explorer. Watch the memory required by Firefox climb, even when you aren't using Firefox. As soon as it climbs to the limit of available memory, Firefox and Windows both become unstable.

Open several Firefox windows, each with several tabs. That makes the problem more severe.

Firefox does not cause OS instability under Linux. Linux just throws Firefox out of memory, in my limited experience.

Interesting.

[Futurepower(R)]

Interesting. Is Blue Griffon generally usable now, or still in beta?

Re:Interesting.

[jorgevillalobos]

It's still in development. I don't really know how usable it is at the moment.

My big beef.

[n6kuy]

Does it still lock up the whole browser while downloading Flash and PDF files?

Re:The more it copies Chrome, the less reason to u

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it is an "all or none" choice? That isn't much of an option. NoScript allows quite a few flavors of blocking (subdomains, etc) as well as whitelisting sites you trust.

Re:I tried Firefox 3 on Windows 7: Memory gobbling

[alexo]

It is true that my anecdotal "evidence" for "no memory problem" is not worth much but this issue was addressed literally years ago and has been tested rigorously. It is truly an old meme that should be put to rest.

This "old meme" still causes me to restart FF at least daily, lest it completely freeze after claiming 1.5GB.