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Firefox 8.0 Released
Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 8.0. The headline features this time around include adding Twitter as a search bar option, tab loading tweaks, and the default disabling of addons installed by third-parties. "Sometimes you download third-party software and are surprised to discover that an add-on has also installed itself in your browser without asking permission. At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep." Here are the release notes and download links.
Firefox 4.04
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I have Firefox fatigue.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I liked it better in the old days when all we had to deal with was huge memory leakage
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
I don't know what happened, but it looks like these guys have lost their direction.
Adding a metric shit ton of features no one asked for or cares about and incrementing the major version number every other day is not a viable alternative to bug fixes, performance issues and memory foot print.
I hope some one forks them. We need a good browser like Chrome, but with less Google.
Firefox 9.0 will be out next week.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.23) Gecko/20110920 Firefox/3.6.23 - Enough said. The latest version/series that actually matters.
Making good use of your browser I see
In space no-one can hear your vuvuzela.
My initial impression seems to be, this is very fast as compared to 7.0.1. Good work Firefox team, some of us still appreciate your hard work.
Now only if my company would switch from the horrible HP Quality Center to Jira, I would be set.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I use Greasemonkey every day. Greasemonkey is built into chrome. Not firefox. And when they auto-upgrade-without-permission to a new version that doesn't support it, I lose functionality that I use every day. Not smart.
But it was the crashing every 10 minutes that finally did me in. I could live with the "1 gig of RAM per 15 tabs", even though I knew other browsers could do 50 tabs with the same memory. I mean: Buy more ram. Restart firefox to free up the leaked memory. There were solutions.
But no solution to crashing every 10 minutes. No. The best was when I downgraded and the problems persisted.
I'm so glad I finally took the plunge and switched to google chrome. I'd been avoiding it because the plugin/extension offerings were not previously sufficient. ANd it's true, I still have to open Firefox to use DownloadHelper to download YouTube videos (almost daily). There are Chrome equivalents, but I haven't found one that doesn't require you re-typing the title into the filename, and I'm quite willing to open a browser to prevent myself from having to type a long filename.
but in general - Firefox can take its shitty browser and shove it into whatever incompatible plugin it keeps up it's bloated ass.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Is it true that headline features for Firefox 9.0 include adding Slashdot as a search bar option?
The even numbered firefoxes are the best!
... updates its major version number, or what?
Seriously, why is there such a big hubbub about the version of Firefox when they've just moved to rapid incrementations of the version number? I don't see people doing the same with Chrome.
It's kinda upsetting that the jokes on slashdot are the same at every Firefox release... shape up, think outside the box =)
Every release breaks some tools - don't even mention their own plugins and addons created by others.
For example, my Thinkpad Client Security password manager used to work well with Firefox 1/2 - for v3 I had to go to the trouble of patching some js files myself because Lenovo didn't support it fast enough. Now with this super-fast release cycle, I can't patch my software and don't even bother anymore.
It's frustrating. I would move to Chrome (being a loyal Firefox person I have not yet) - if not Chrome is more evil in other ways.
Give a bit more time and I will give up Firefox. Just plain fed up with their douchebaggery. It was us fans that installed it for our non-geek friends, and it will be us fans that uninstall them and recommend everyone something else.
By the time I compile 8, 12 will be out and that's the one I'm really waiting for.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
8.0, the one that is supposed to finally be available in a 64-bit compile for Windows? Come on, even Flash player beat you to it!
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Completely smooth upgrade, no incompatible plugins, and lazy tab loading is the best feature ever for tab-crazy people like myself. Since they got the memory use under control in v7, life is good. With Chrome taking up 2-3x more memory than FF, I just can't deal with that anymore. Plus lazy tab loading is now my killer browser feature. Gotta have it. I think FF9 (Dec 20) or FF10 is supposed to have even more substantial memory reduction applied.
I know FF is multi-platform but you cannot even make GPOs an add-on. (It kinda defeats the purpose if the user can uninstall the add-on!)
Meanwhile in bug 267888 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=267888) there are still talking about creating ADM files.
ADM files are for Windows XP, when this bug was created 7 years ago!!!)
Windows 7 uses ADMX files.
But it doesn't matter now.
The people that need MSI/GPO cannot handle Full versions of FF coming out every 2 months.
They have enough trouble keeping up with "patch Tuesday" from MS.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Yeah, they ought to be fully 64-bit by now. Incidentally, do they support HTML 5 now OOTB?
I'm still on 6, what happened to 7?
I can only imagine how pissed off add-on developers are with this batshit insane update schedule.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I very happily run FF 7.01 on Ubuntu (11.04). It's snappy, fairly light - well, in comparison with previous releases.
On W7, however, it's dog slow, eventually becoming unresponsive enough that I have to open task manager and kill it. I've eased the problem lately by running Chrome. It runs much faster than FF (on W7, not on Ubuntu, curiously), but I sure would like to be able to have the same responsiveness of FF on both platforms.
Chrome silently updates and Google doesn't trumpet each release as if it's the second coming like what happens when Mozilla decides to bump the major version for no reason.
On an old machine (8.5 years) running Windows XP 32-bit, this version is significantly faster than its predecessor. I don't care what version number they use; this is an upgrade.
I'm panicking right now. Why a new version number? I'm just not sure I can deal with this. It's just too much. Goodbye cruel world!
When I use Firefox, memory usage is still a big problem. After running it for days on end, with lots and lots of tabs open, it eventually starts using 2 gigs of RAM.
Then there's problems where Flash Player just stops working after an upgrade. That stopped me from using Aurora and Nightly, because Flash will work for a while, then it breaks after a new Aurora/Nightly version. Whenever there's Flash problems, YouTube often crashes at the end of a video.
I really don't mind the "Extension upgrading situation" in Firefox, since I disable compatibility checking anyway. But nobody else knows you can do that. Firefox needs to make it a lot easier to disable "compatibility checking". It's a worthless feature that should be expunged, since it seems like it's more for liability or "not our fault" reasons than anything else. Only a small number of Firefox extensions actually break, like CacheViewer. That was a nice extension, and nobody has fixed or replaced it.
I've also tried Chrome. Actually SRWare Iron, but they're the same thing. (Don't respond with that outdated FUD about 5 lines of code being changed, since official Chromium doesn't support "adblock.ini" like Iron does).
After running Chrome for several days on end, it develops a completely different problem. You switch to a particular tab, and it takes about 5 seconds before it responds to anything. No scrolling, no interaction, just seeing the image of the rendered web page, and you are forced to wait until it wakes up. Firefox never had that kind of problem.
Also, Noscript and Adblock aren't available in Chrome. At first, I was using the built-in whitelist feature for Javascript, but due to boneheaded design decisions in Chrome, it takes a very long time to start the browser when there is a significant number of entries in the whitelist. Also, it treated first-party and third-party content as equally trusted, so it's just bad.
Then I used ScriptNo, which seems to work much better. Kudos, ScriptNo developer!
Ad blocking still sucks. Iron has its own ad blocking feature, which works very well, but it can't hide the elements that it is filtering, so you need an element hiding extension as well. Good luck figuring out which Ad-blocking extension is the good one, and which ones are trash, I'm still not sure which one is the good extension.
Then there's the problem with user scripts waiting for the page to be completely loaded before they run. For example, I use a UserScript to hide the awful right-side panel from Wikia sites. In Firefox, the script executes instantly with Greasemonkey. But in Chrome, it takes several seconds, as it waits to completely finish loading the page before it executes the userscript. Often there's some slow third-party javascript that isn't loading, and the userscript gets delayed for several seconds until that loads.
But the most annoying thing about Chrome is how it handles focus for links. In MSIE and Firefox, whenever you click on a link, or drag a link to nowhere, the link retains focus, and you can press Tab to go to the next link. But you can't do the same in Chrome or Opera.
All addons will not be disabled due to version changes anymore.
That was changed last version, last version specific version changes no longer affect the loading of extensions.
I know since I have 2 plugins on the mozilla addon's page FTP browser extension and a ssh console tab plugin
i havent had to update them for new versions of firefox in 2 versions
and no plugin dev has to edit their plugins for new version numbers
version numbers no longer affect extentions.
only morons stuck in the 3.6 world or left firefox during 3.6 to chrome still have that antiquated notion that is how firefox works. It quit working that way long time ago, go ask a real extension developers
Since I have a lot of tabs loaded, being able to have tabs load only when I select them after (re)start is great. A browser restart now takes only a few seconds, which mitigates the need to do this for addons.
For extra points, get the Restartless Restart addon (no restarts to install, oh the irony) to quickly restart Firefox.
Firefox also feels really fast now - apparently Firefox 8 is as fast as Chrome, it certainly feels like it. And it runs all the addons I like too...
Flash runs too slow. It's fine for some things but a Facebook game I play Castle Age Heart of Darkness it runs in slow motion. Load it in Chrome without changing anything and it runs fine. So because of that I got used to Chrome and use it under Windows now too.
The problem is that that number is depended on by most plugins to remain stable. As such, every time they change the number, most plugins stop working as they haven't been "updated" for the new version. When you release a new major version, the expectation is that you changed a lot of stuff, and as such, the plugins should test on your new version and make sure everything still works properly. In fact though these major versions are very minor changes, and the plugins you had before would probably work just fine, if they had been told that nothing would be changing in this version.
I could care less if they call it Firefox 32768.0 or Firefox 0.0000001. what I DO care about is that I don't loose functionality just because someone can't figure out the difference between what a major version change is versus a small update.
> we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission
how will they do this, technically? from what I understand, on windows, as long as the program installer can write to your firefox directory (unfortunately this is highly probable), it can put what it wants there, even modify the firefox binary. The only solution I can think of is some kind of hash-based solution where modified files are detected, but that stinks of a flawed DRM-style approach. How will they mitigate ill-behaved 3rd-party installers?
The Mozilla team is committed to user control over their browsers: we are proud to announce in Firefox 9 the ability to change version numbers on the fly.
Firefox 9 will be released this Friday for both of you not playing Skyrim on that day.
Make SELinux enforcing again!
... watching old music videos.
Thumbs up if you're still running Firefox 3.6 in 2011!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You know what would be nice? Sharing Panorama among windows, or rather having a "Global" panorama view that allowed you to move tab groups between windows (and sessions, with sync.)
But... the future refused to change.
The addon that my fingerprint reader uses to fill in passwords for me broke. Time to downgrade to 7.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
FF8 ? WTF !
I wanna get FF7-2 !
:'(
... stup!d square !
I don't know what your environment looks like for all you who claim instability, but I keep FF open for weeks at a time without any issues lately.
Those of you who claim it is so unstable, you better check your operating environment or which addons/plugins are crashing it because I'm just not seeing it!
That a addon is being installed without your permission then why not just pop up a message box and ask if you want to install this addon?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I'm not switching back to firefox until they catch up with IE (9) and Chrome (16).
I mean come on, even Microsoft is up to version 9 and 10 is coming soon!
And Chrome 16? That just makes Firefox look archaic!
Its no wonder Chrome is so much better!
Catch up, Firefox!
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
we are negative because it still can't scale to more than 1 core when you're rending multiple tabs.
When someone has 6 cores, there's no reason they should have to enable GPU acceleration to keep smoothscroll on the foreground page smooth while other pages render in the background.
Is there a current highest version number record?
We used to run DOS/VS version 34 on da mainframe years ago.
"At Mozilla, we think you should be in control, so we are disabling add-ons installed by third parties without your permission and letting you pick the ones you want to keep."
It took 8 major (and countless minor) releases for Mozilla to realize this? Sheesh!
--
Joe
My plugin uses a binary component and it still worked in FF 8.0 w/o me lifting a finger. I gotta admit I was worried at first, but so far, so good.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It was updated to work in Firefox 4. The author hasn't had time to catch up yet on all platforms. So instead, I've switched to Chrome which doesn't have problems with all of my plugins breaking every 6 weeks. It's faster, anyways.
From what I can tell, your plugin interface is still using version number to determine plugin compatibility, causing plugin authors to do a lot of extra work. The plugin interface should be frozen and versioned and changed infrequently, so plugins could go more than a month without updates. Yes, Chrome updates frequently, but it never disables half of my plugins on update every month and declares that they don't work like firefox did before I ditched it.
Why not stabilize the plugin interface for some long time period (more than a month) and version it?
So, wait until next week to upgrade.
I'll skip this one and get Firefox 9.0 instead.
I can wait a few days.
Just pick Chrome's current version and +1 it. All done.
(it's just a game of dick-size comparison at this point)
Firefox has been less and less dependable ever since Firefox 4.x. Every other day it seems like I get some update pushed at me that breaks some or all of my extensions, some of which are actually pretty important to my workflow. On an update all extensions I had loaded should be reloaded if at all possible. Period. Firefox doesn't get to make decisions whether I mean what I already decided in the previous version. That is parternalistic crap to hide the fact they have managed to define an extension API they can manage to keep from breaking almost every release. I have even started using Safari again on my Mac to get away from Firefox. They both get slower and slower the more tabs you have opened and don't recover regardless of how many of them you close. On linux I use chrome when at all possible. Who is making decisions on the Firefox team, Microsoft employees?
Things seem to have settled down in the Firefox world. I did the update, it worked very smoothly with all my extensions supported without requiring any hacks. I think most extension developers have finally understood the need to future-proof their extension's compatibility with Firefox when it does get upgraded, which is probably why there were no issues for me.
Personally (and I do mean personally, just in case someone thinks I'm talking for them) I do not have an issue with the Firefox versioning system anymore. The updates are appreciated, and ranting about it seems less about practical issues and instead people preferring to complain instead of just going with it.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
That is where we are headed with 'jetpack' addons. Those have an API like you said. But most addons today use the older interface, which doesn't work that way - and it will be a long time until most addons are rewritten to the new API.
Will upgrade as soon as the Pale Moon project release the 64bit version.
Firefox Crash Info
about:crashes
Put into your URL bar and press ENTER. Shows a list of crashes of your copy of Firefox.
Crash Info for all users and all versions
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox
Crashes per 100 Active Daily Users, version 7.0.1
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/7.0.1
Top Crashers, version 7.0.1
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/7.0.1/14
Notes:
1) The lists of crashes are ONLY the ones that Firefox caught. The lists do NOT include crashes that don't start the crash reporter.
2) Version 7.0.1 often stays in memory even though the GUI was closed.
3) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.
4) Crashes are most frequent for those who do a lot of online research, and open many Firefox windows and tabs, and leave them open while putting the computer into standby or hibernation.
5) The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 9 years. Not much has improved, even though the change reports for every version say there have been "stability improvements".
They need to stop this before we get to Firefox 27, sometime in mid December.
Yeah, but, what's the problem with this?
Basically after launching FireFox 4.x they've determined that firefox is mature enough that it won't see any major overhaul before a long while, everything now will be frequent small incremental upgrades (Firefox 27 will be rather different than Firefox 3. But no version will show jumps like FireFox 1->2 or 2->3).
Given this, does it really makes sense to keep a number "4" that won't change in any foreseeable future ?
And what's the big deal about the new numbering system ? Why is a "version 27" scary ?
The only problem was that until recently, extension compatibility was based on version numbers, but even that was fixed recently.
Maybe they should stop calling them "versions" and instead call them "releases". You know, just to avoid that some geeks get a hearth infarct when the versioning reaches into 3 digits number. Sometime in March 2012. :-D
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
What exactly makes the latter "screaming" while the former is not?
Answer: the reaction that /.ers have to it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There used to be a time when version numbers actually meant something.
Then marketing took over and discovered numbers as a means of advertisement.
Now, they've lost their meaning. Mozilla is aware of the fact that they'll be releasing versions with double-digit version numbers shortly, yes?
Maybe the ordinary consumer is fooled by a "bigger is better" thing, but even I don't think so. Seriously, go the logical step and dump the version numbers altogether, show a build number somewhere in the "About" dialog for bug reporting purposes, and otherwise consider it a constantly evolving product.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
3) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows, it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.
Ok, but I'd consider that a Windows bug as well. It should be caught as a segmentation fault if it is actually stepping on memory it shouldn't be touching. Either that or the system running it actually has some problems of its own.
I've pretty much abandoned Firefox already, but it would be nice to see them at least provide a little competition to keep the other browsers moving ahead.
Fear is the mind killer.
I don't have the time to spend a few days making a adm/admx file to modify the registry keys to make security configuration changes for widgets run from 0: My computer, 1: the local Intranet, 2: The Intranet, 3: untrusted Sites, etc...
I have five pages of settings on how to configure IE on my network. Almost every one of those security settings is applicable to Firefox, or any other browser. I have personally posted this to bugzilla, slashdot, etc... and the answer is: "Do it yourself (TM)" or use an obselete adm template for an old version of (Mozilla, Seamonkey, Firefox 2.x) - they should work.
I want to use a non IE browser at work. Yes, I will also have to use IE due to IE only applications we have - but at least not 100% of the time. The developers want to use Firefox outside of the sandbox. SECURE says: You have to implement the same security settings on every browser.
If I had to guess, I would say that Google will implement adm/admx files for security settings for Chrome on XP/7 before Firefox will. At that point, Chrome will get a large % gain in browser share because it will be implentable on corporate networks.
oops: http://dev.chromium.org/administrators/policy-templates they allready did it. Guess that's why Chrome has surpassed Firefox share.
Dev's requesting Chrome for their department in 3,2,1....
Installation removed my working FF3.6.24. I backed it up but, for some reason, I can't move it back into the Applications folder. sudo cp -r {source} /Applications doesn't change the Applications directory.
So know I'm using Safari and lost all the plugins.
Does anyone know a way to go back to 3.6? I'm otherwise happy with the 10.4 macos.
FF 3.6 here
Sleeping w/ 109 tabs open.
That's how I roll. It really indicates the failure of 'bookmarks" or any other reasonable way to keep information at hand.
I run Linux - and it was browsing that drove me to 64-bit. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Firefox needs to go on a diet. It's getting way too bloated now compared to what it used to be. I see that the memory leak and high cpu issues are STILL not fixed. Way to go Mozilla - maybe by version 99 you'll get it right ?
Updating to v.8 also popped up a dialog to disable extensions...
Wha...?
If you are dealing with a user, do not meddle with his settings unless the extension doesn't work (and providing a compatibility layer for old extensions would have been the right thing to do)
If you are dealing with a luser, expect his choice to result in calls of help.
What did Firefox gain from all of this? losing extensions? Does firefox team realise that the extension ecosystem is the main thing that sets firefox apart?
If you go on in concentrating only on performance, like chrome and all the others, websites will then deliver more pointless if not harmful scripts and effects in the pages. What will have the user gained then?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol