Firefox 2 Alpha 2 Reviewed

pcabello writes "Firefox 2 Alpha 2 was released yesterday. Check what's new in this review at mozillalinks.org with screenshots."

Memory

[siplus]

Anyone know if the memory problems that everyone was complaining about in v1.5 is fixed for 2.0?

Re:Memory

[apollosfire]

As reported before [slashdot.org], Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive. To disable this feature, do the following: 1. type about:config in you address bar 2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 3. set its value to 0 (zero)

Re:Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.

That's right, it's not a bug, it's a feature!

Re:Memory

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Uh, Dunno about windows n stuff, but Firefox on X has major memory problems, like never freeing pixbufs it stores in the X server. Your "fix" does nothing to solve this.

Re:Memory

[acm]

Sorry, but poorly designed caching is a memory leak [msdn.com]. I shouldn't have to restart my browser because it is taking 700mb of memory (no lie). Especially when I only have one window open.

Everytime a Firefox article gets posted, I see someone post a hack to fix the memory leak problem. I've tried every one of them and none of them fix it on my end. The only externsion I'm running is Google's Toolbar. Regardless though, no one except the most hardcore Firefox users would ever know to look in about:config to turn off this "feature". And they shouldn't have to either.

Re:Memory

[bunratty]

If Firefox is using 700 MB of RAM, it's almost certainly not a cache that's causing the memory use. You can check how much RAM the memory cache is uing by going to about:cache. You can make sure the bfcache is using only a little memory by visiting eight simple pages, one after the other.

I would suspect Google Toolbar, which many Firefox users report leaks memory.

Re:Memory

[SeaFox]

As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.

And as mentioned before [slashdot.org] there are bugs for memory leaks that predate the fast back-forward feature. And to say that memory probelms are all becuase of this feature is revisionist history.

Re:Memory

[westlake]

Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive

So why does this "feature" remain the default?

To disable this feature, do the following: 1. type about:config in you address bar 2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 3. set its value to 0 (zero)

This is something less than obvious or user friendly. Unlike the advanced options that can simply be checked and unchecked in IE's "Internet Options."

Re:Memory

[Bacon Bits]

So install Leak Monitor [dbaron.org]. Then you can see the cause of the most severe memory leaks: poorly coded extentions.

Whenever you close a tab or window and a leak is detected, you'll get a message about it. I used it for a few days and discovered several minor extentions I'd been using were causing some very large leaks.

Re:Memory

[Wm_K]

So install Leak Monitor. Then you can see the cause of the most severe memory leaks: poorly coded extentions.

Can anyone explain how this happens. All(?) extensions are written in XUL using javascript right? How is it possible to create a memory leak using javascript. The garbage collector of the javascript engine should get rid of unused allocated memory right? Is it the javascript engine that has leaks? Or is it just the definition of memory leak taken very broadly?

Re:Memory

[Azarael]

I believe that XUL + JS handles the interface. My understanding is that you can write the back end to the plugin in C/C++, etc.

Re:Memory

[Abcd1234]

And that would be wrong (otherwise extensions wouldn't be portable across platforms). All extensions are written in pure Javascript/XUL. The real nasty bit is that the Javascript can (and usually does) call back into the runtime using XPCOM, and as a result, the Javascript can generate memory leaks by allocating resources and not freeing them.

Re:Memory

[Abcd1234]

And now to reply to myself, the other possibility, as outlined in the Leak Monitor page, is that the Javascript code passes objects into the XPCOM layer which are not automatically released by the native code, thus creating a leak (since the Javascript object can't be garbage collected).

Re:Memory

[Abcd1234]

Sorry to contradict, but you are incorrect. Extensions can be written in any any language that supports XPCOM bindings, and many are not portable across platforms.

Then I shall amend my statement for both you and the other poster. The vast *vast* majority of extensions are written in Javascript, with a few exceptions.

It just needs to maintain references to unused objects or create cyclic references.

Certainly, but I don't believe most extension leaks are caused by such things, as they're rather difficult to trigger in practice. As far as I'm aware, most leaks caused by extensions are due to interactions with the XPCOM layer.

Re:Memory

[n0-0p]

Extensions exist in a global context for the process. They can maintain a permanent reference to objects that are never used again, and should otherwise be freed. They may also create cyclic references, in which one or more objects contains references to each other. This creates a situation where the objects are not referenced by an accessible code path, and the reference count can never drop to zero. The result is a leak, and it is an inherint weakness simple of reference counting garbage collection.

Even web pages can create circular JavaScript references that result in leaks. FF isn't alone in this area either. IE has always been vulnerable to memory leaks via JavaScript, theirs are just confined to bad pages. However, FF 3 will have a cycle detector that identifies unused cyclic references and frees the objects. But that still won't fix sloppy extensions that hang on to large objects for no goood reason.

In my experience, Plugins are pretty bad too. They operate outside the scope of the garbage collection and often don't clean up after themselves. For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page. The PDF Download extension helps, but it isn't perfect.

Re:Memory

[pile0nades]

For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page. The PDF Download extension helps, but it isn't perfect. Try the Foxit PDF Reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php [foxitsoftware.com] It loads instantly.

Re:Memory

[Tim C]

For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page.

I don't know about Linux, but under Windows Acrobat Reader stays memory resident even after you navigate away from the PDF that originally launched the plugin; look for the acrord32.exe process in Task Manager. It dies if you close the last "real" Reader window (which also kills all PDFs open in browser windows!), but not if you close a PDF open in the plugin.

Re:Memory

[Mistshadow2k4]

Poorly coded extensions definitely are the biggest memory leak problem. I was using forecastfox for a while and Firefox was leaking like a rusty bucket, even with the sessionistory fix. One day, forecastfox popped up with the latest temperature over an hour after I'd closed Firefox. I uninstalled it right then and Firefox has been pretty well-behaved memory-wise ever since; I haven't seen it's memory usage go over 85 mb.

Also, this fix helps too:
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Re:Memory-- collective? Contradictory?

[bunratty]

Yes, there are memory leaks in Firefox. However, they are generally so subtle that you don't notice them until you've had Firefox open continuously for a week. The problems people are referring to as "Firefox memory leaks" are generally not memory leaks, or are leaks caused by extensions, not leaks that exists in Firefox itself.

Re:Memory

[Isotopian]

Can you read, or not? If you don't like that feature, then turn it off!

Re:Memory

[cortana]

Even if all that memory was free(2)'d, it still wouldn't return to the OS.

Re:Memory

[bunratty]

You're having a serious problem with Firefox that the vast majority of Firefox users aren't seeing. I recommend completely uninstalling Firefox, reinstalling it, and creating a new profile. That will likely fix the problem.

Re:Memory

[arodland]

You're having a serious problem with Firefox that the vast majority of Firefox users aren't seeing. I recommend completely uninstalling Firefox, reinstalling it, and creating a new profile. That will likely fix the problem.

Er... Everyone I've ever talked to who runs Firefox on linux has told me that they've got creeping memory leaks that will eat all of their RAM given time. None of them have been able to fix it through reinstallation shenanigans. Maybe the people you've been talking to just close their bro

Re:Memory

[gEvil (beta)]

<badjoke>Huh? I don't remember anything about any memory problems.</badjoke>

Didn't they eventually say that the memory issues were intentional and that it was caching the tabbed pages or something?

Re:Memory

[jlarocco]

In 1.5? More like since it was called Pheonix around 0.3 beta. In my experience, it's always been pretty bad with memory.

Re:Memory

[cyber-vandal]

Or the "close a tab (or the browser with more than one tab) lets grab 100% cpu for 10-15 seconds" bug? Now I know that's not a long time but why does it do it at all? And a better question is it something I can switch off?

Re:Memory

[TheRealMindChild]

When is it that you can not delete what you allocated?

Couple of questions

[caluml]

Slightly off topic, but probably the best place to ask:
Is anyone having a problem with recent versions where the URI autocomplete sometimes doesn't work, even if it's an address you often go to (e.g. google.com).
Or when you click on a tab, it doesn't "release" fast enough, and start moving the tab around?

Still the best browser though.

Re:Couple of questions

[ezdude]

I have some similar problems, but not exactly those. I often find that when I click on a previously visited link from the URL drop-down list, it doesn't go to that site. Also, one thing that annoys the heck out of me is that when I try to close PDF's, which are in separate tabs, it takes forever. I don't know if this is a Firefox issue or Adobe, but it seems worse in more recent versions of Firefox.

Re:Couple of questions

[bigbigbison]

I have totally had the click a link in the dropdown adress bar and it only reloads the page you are on. Frustrating as hell. I've had it happen on two different computers so either it is something in firefox or one of the extensions i have on both machines.

Re:Couple of questions

[aussersterne]

Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.

I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...

Re:Couple of questions

[caluml]

I'm on an AMD 64 machine with 'nuff RAM, and it's still doing it. It's obviously a problem with the code.

this is nice,

[SpatialJ]

but it will not filter postings that are the first ones automatically, will it?

to beat IE

[Anonymous Coward]

This release must be renamed Firefox 8 to be better than IE

Browser Speed

[reporter]

For many users, speed is the most important aspect of a browser. A certain Mark Wilton-Jones [howtocreate.co.uk] has done an exhaustive comparison of browser speeds [howtocreate.co.uk].

He concludes, " So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features. "

Wilton-Jones tested both version 1.0 and version 1.5 of Firefox. Does anyone have any thoughts on the performance of version 2.0?

Re:Browser Speed

[Tx]

Interesting, I hope sure someone will do such a comparison at some point, just to satisfy curiosity. However I have to say that speed is way down on my list, behind security, functionality, reliability, and extensibility. The time spent reading a page is much so greater than the time taken to render it that I really couldn't care less about whether one browser renders a particular page half a second faster than another.

Re:Browser Speed

[jesser]

Firefox 2 won't have many performance improvements over Firefox 1.5, since Firefox 2 is a frontend release [typepad.com]. Most of the speed improvements that have gone into the trunk since Firefox 1.5 won't be shipped to end-users until Firefox 3.

One major exception is the work on memory leaks. Firefox 1.5.0.x releases have been getting [mozilla.org] the simpler (less risky) leak fixes, and it looks like Firefox 2 will get most of the less simple memory leak fixes that are going into the trunk, including the nsIDOMGCParticipant work [mozilla.org]

Re:Browser Speed

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I run a lot of tabs in Firefox, but never pegged unless several of them are running Flash animations at the same time, which is one reason why I like FlashBlock.

Re:Browser Speed

[mattyrobinson69]

Then rearrange it that way, you can.

Re:Browser Speed

[Dlugar]

View: Toolbars: Customize

Then click on whichever toolbar ("control bar") you want to change, and change "Placement" to top/left/right/bottom/off. I have the tab bar at the top, then the address bar, and the status bar at the bottom. (No other toolbars visible. Since the address bar has forward/back/reload I don't like wasting screen real-estate with a "control bar".) Opera is probably the most configurable UI I've used--I guess you just have to know.

Re:Browser Speed

[toddestan]

I guess it depends on what metric you want to use to measure speed. I've been using Opera for quite a while, and what really annoys me about just every other browser is how they like to redraw/reload the page when you use the back and forward buttons. Opera doesn't do that - rather the back and forward buttons are instant because Opera has the rendered page still in memory. Because of this, Opera overall seems a lot faster to me than the other browsers, despite the fact that is a bit slower to load, and it really isn't any faster when it comes to rendering pages.

Re:Browser Speed

[wheany]

There is Adblock in latest Operas. Right-click on the page and select "block content".

CoralCDN - just in case

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]

Here's something to fix

[handelaar]

Early versions of FF allowed me to Find text anywhere on a page, including inside textareas.

That's been broken for years now. I don't care about how it renders RSS, I want basic functions to unsuck.

You are looking for RetroFind

[MarkByers]

Here it is: RetroFind [onlinehome.us].

Re:Here's something to fix

[EvanED]

Doesn't work for me (1.5.0.3). If I hit ctrl-f and type "doe" (start of "doesn't work") the find field turns red. What bulid are you using?

Re:Here's something to fix

[Paul Crowley]

Mozex [mozdev.org] is a great boon to Wikipedia editors. Load the entry in a real editor, then you'll have not only search but replace and other such nice features.

Close button at same tab

[omeg]

Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.

There's no reason to not let the user be able to pick the old way of handling a UI functionality that a reasonable amount of people don't agree with.

Re:Close button at same tab

[fm6]

Turn off the automatic update now, before you forget!

I'm strongly resisting the temptation to start another "it's more natural" argument....

Re:Close button at same tab

[ElleyKitten]

Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching

There's an extension for the alpha already that turns it off.

I like extensions, but sometimes it seems like you have to have 80 of them just to get options that seem like they should be common sense.

Re:Close button at same tab

[Tx]

Because one man's common sense is another man's stupidity, and they want to avoid having the million configuration options necessary to cater for everybodys views. Having some people need a handful of extensions to tweak the things that bother them, while only having a small number of core configuration options is actually a much neater solution IMHO.

Personally I've been using the TabX extension to get a close button on my tabs since I started using Firefox, having the close button attached to the thing it

Re:Close button at same tab

[Anonymous Coward]

"Having some people need a handful of extensions to tweak the things that bother them, while only having a small number of core configuration options is actually a much neater solution IMHO."

Pardon, but are you fstupid? The number of people who hate the completely redundant, spacewasting, cluttering and annoying usage of close buttons on every tab are hardly counted in the "some" people category. Try "lots" instead. I bet you are one of those gnome-heads, since this smacks of the "You-will-use-the-spatial-v

Re:Close button at same tab

[Tx]

I suspect they made that particular change because a large majority of users wanted it, so although I was actually speaking in general terms, yes, the rest are indeed "some people". And BTW I prefer KDE as it happens, Mr Coward.

Re:Close button at same tab

[Ramze]

I open about 50 windows at a time, and I like being able to close them all as i read through them with one button in a static position. I don't know where you get the assumption the developers let everyone vote and the majority of the users picked a close button on each tab. No one ever asked my opinion or gave me the option to vote, and I think having a close button for each tab is horrendous. I'm only guessing, but I bet the developers looked at other tab implimentations and went with this because it's

It's a conspiracy...

[Belial6]

It's a conspiracy between IBM and the Firefox team in their eventual move to completely replace Firefox with the Notes client.

Re:Close button at same tab

[Blakey Rat]

If they added an option for every single thing people "might not agree with", the preferences dialog would be a 8 MB download on its own.

Got to love slashdot

[SmallFurryCreature]

Right above the parent is a post asking for exactly this feature. Now what is a developer supposed to do eh?

As for there being no reason not to give both options, well there is plenty of reason. The two most significant, it ads complexity to the project to support yet another feature and it asks the user yet more question about how to configure the browser.

Personally? I like it the way opera does it. On the tab. More logical.

Questions . Features.

[zymano]

1. Is there a way to make the 'goback' response as fast as opera's ? It could be a little faster.

2. Why does firefox need XUL gui ? Why not use gtk or something else ?

Updating the plain default gui would be cool.

Re:Questions . Features.

[zlogic]

XUL is a layer, allowing Firefox and its extensions create widgets. All the widgets that are requested from XUL are rendered with the appropriate toolkit: GTK on Linux, MFC (I think) on Windows and Cocoa (not sure) on OS X. This allows Firefox to use the native toolkit on all platforms and allows extension to be used on any platform without rewriting anything.

Re:Questions . Features.

[_xeno_]

Nope. XUL is rendered using the same rendering engine that renders the webpages.

Simplest way to prove this is to install the DOM inspector and poke around the various XUL elements and corresponding CSS rules. Another way is to note the differences between how Firefox widgets work on Windows XP and how actual Windows XP widgets work.

First off, Firefox menus do not fade in and out like Windows menus do. When you open a menu, it's supposed to fade in. Selecting a menu options should cause the menu to f

The big question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

..will 2.0 be released before 1.5 is marked stable for x86 in portage? Seriously, how's SVG support comming along? Last I checked they couldn't add SVG to the accept header because of issues with the rendering backends.

Good Work

[Nicolay77]

Although I vastly prefer Opera, anything that can help decrease market share of IE and its broken everything is good.

Re:Good Work

[suv4x4]

Although I vastly prefer Opera, anything that can help decrease market share of IE and its broken everything is good.

You're lucky then, a new browser is coming out, which has better security than IE6 (especially on Vista), a lot better standards support, good RSS support and a fresh compact interface.

It's called IE7...

Slashdot will never be the same

[Anonymous Coward]

A new spell-checking feature has been added. Text entered in multiline text boxes is automatically checked for mistypes words, for single line text boxes, you must ask for it (right-click, Spell check this field). Words not found in the dictionary are marked with a red underline.

It's about time they incorperated a spell checker! Vary nice.

But...

[Avogadros Letter]

... I use spell-check and it doesn't help me at all, you insensitive cold!

Download manager still broken?

[edxwelch]

Fixfox and mozilla are unable to resume downloads across sessions. In other words if you have to reboot the PC for any reason, you will have to start that 300mb download from scratch.
This bug has been outstanding for several years.
There are numerous other missing features in the download manager, just compare to the download manager in Opera.

Re:Kill The Download Manager

[Tim C]

it gets dog slow if the list gets long

In my experience, it gets pretty damn slow after the list hits a couple of dozen items; not what I would call long by any means.

Firefox with extensions

[spudnic]

Just about everything in the review is available now, and has been for quite awhile, through extensions?

It seems that future development of firefox should be on the core application and let the extension developers handle the pretty stuff.

Re:Firefox with extensions

[Surt]

I think the problem with that philosophy is that downloading the 'right' set of plugins to get a good experience is too challenging (for most users). You really do want your users to download, once, a package of stuff that yeilds a great experience, so that your reviews will be nice an glowingly positive. Hence, we'll always want to see the best features of the most popular plugins make their way into the core browser.

I just went trhough the changelog...

[giorgiofr]

... and there's not a single feature in FF 2 that hasn't been in Opera for ages. The FF team is slacking - they're not innovating anymore. Not that they OWE me anything, of course. Just saying.

Re:I just went trhough the changelog...

[chrisgeleven]

Question is, does Opera do these features better or will Firefox?

It isn't so much who had what feature first, it is who does it best. How hard is it to understand that?

Re:I just went trhough the changelog...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

If history is anything to go by, then probably Opera will. Sometimes, you do get what you pay for, and while Firefox is a great improvement over IE in many respects, it's been trailing Opera for several years IMHO.

Re:I just went trhough the changelog...

[jb.hl.com]

Sometimes, you do get what you pay for, and while Firefox is a great improvement over IE in many respects, it's been trailing Opera for several years IMHO.

FYI, Opera is free (as in beer for the pedants) now.

Re:I just went trhough the changelog...

[Lisandro]

Question is, does Opera do these features better or will Firefox?

    It does. I like Firefox a lot, but i'm not blind - every single feature that it's available in both and works better in Opera. With a fraction of the memory usage, and much faster to boot. Much more stable too - i only had Opera hangning on me a couple of times (both on Windows and Linux) - when it happens, it promptly apologizes and offers you to open the windows you were browsing at the moment of the crash. Priceless!

    Also, Oprera has a shitload of functionality not available on FF or not needing extensions (gesture browsing, searches in the url bar, etc...). Those are the reasons it has been my main browser of choice for years now.

Re:I just went trhough the changelog...

[xigxag]

Too bad there's no way to mod a post as "potentially life changing." I've been putting off trying out Opera since before it went free. Your post made me decide to give it another try, and so far (admittedly only an hour or so of heavy surfing) I love it. I was able to get it to connect to my banking site. It does phpbb better than FF. My machine seems about 50% faster, and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation.

Most importantly, I didn't have to install any extensions to get it to work acceptably.

If there's one functionality that should be built into FF 2.0, there should be a brainless way to export and import your extensions, forms, passwords and bookmarks in one "FF2go" zipped bundle so that when you reinstall it on another computer, you can get started right away with your old configuration.

use a permalink...

[Val314]

like this one
http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com/2006/05/bon-echo- aka-firefox-2-alpha-2-review.html [blogspot.com]
if you want to link to an article of a blog and not just point to the main page...

Spell Check

[dark_requiem]

Thank god they're putting in an automated spell check for multi-line text boxes. This site should become that much more bearable to read now.

Re:Spell Check

[drfireman]

Your right! It's hard to bare all the miss steaks people right on this sight, the new firefox will help a lot!

Search plugin order

[cpt kangarooski]

Fucking dammit.

Why the hell are there buttons ('Move Up' and 'Move Down') for reordering the search plugins. They should be able to be dragged and dropped. It's not like the developers can't do this; the bookmarks can be. Why not this?

(It would also be nice for Firefox and Mozilla to understand URL files generated by IE. Safari seems to manage.)

Re:Search plugin order

[hswerdfe]

yes, one of these things is topical in the current thread.

Download link

[b0rk b0rk b0rk]

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/bonecho/alpha2/ [mozilla.org]

Firefox focus problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox has numerous serious focus problems that continue to be ignored.. I hope they fix them in version 2 but I don't hold out much hope given that they've been ignoring them for years. It seems the devs are mouse-only users. A lot of the problems occur when keystrokes are used to open windows, close windows, etc.

Firefox steals focus constantly under enlightenment. Older versions of Firefox (0.8) do not have the problem.

XUL in Python?

[Dausha]

So, does the 2.0 series allow XUL coding in Python instead of Javascript. I have heard about this for some time. However, I've not heard what 'live' Firefox version would start offering this sweet gem.

so I'll just keep asking...and getting no answer

[Tumbleweed]

Multi-threaded UI yet? Anybody? Anybody?

Bueller?

The longer this is put off, the harder I suspect it's going to be to put it, due to a more complicated codebase.

Lay the foundation first, folks, PLEASE.

Re:so I'll just keep asking...and getting no answe

[The One KEA]

Darin Fisher did this on the trunk in bug 326273. The complexity of the repair, as you surmised, means that Firefox 3.0 will be the first consumer release to contain these changes.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32627 3 [mozilla.org]

So why version 2.0?

[Trogre]

Where are the major changes to warrant a full major version increment?

We've just had a massive jump from 1.1 to 1.5 with little improvement. Why aren't they calling this version 1.6?

Re:So why version 2.0?

[Gogo Dodo]

Because version numbers don't mean anything nowadays. Back in the day, they used to mean something. Now the version numbers are just marketing.

If the bugs are not fixed, why roll out 2.0?

[Wolfier]

Here are the important ones.

1. plugins should have their own thread priorities.  Ever wonder why a lot of Flash applets can slow down Firefox but not IE?  IE runs flash applets in a lower priority thread than the UI.

2. actions on file types should not have anything greyed out.  people should be able to choose custom actions based on MIME type, extensions, or both, and there must be a text box to type the application path, plus its parameters.

3. cancelling a save of a file over something with the same name should take you back to the dialog to rename the file, not cancelling the action altogether.

4. Find toolbar closes on its own after a *hardcoded* 5 second timeout.

If you check the conversations on bugzilla, the developers don't seem to like to listen at all.

Re:winter release

[n0-0p]

Scheduled for sometime this winter (or summer in the North Hemisphere)

Don't forget that your summer is somebody's winter.

Re:Public Download?

[yogikoudou]

Yes, get it here [mozilla.org].

Re:Dumbed down again

[Kroc]

"I don't care that I'll get modded down for criticizing Firefox."
No, you're trolling. Criticizing would mean you had some semblence of an idea about what you were talking about, which you clearly do not.

"Too bad neither the fanboys nor the development team realizes this"
Yes they do. Firefox is being simplified in order to appeal to the greater market. You know, the ones who make up 85% of the market and matter alot more than you do. IE is a simple browser, it's one of its successes, and Firefox aims to be s

Mod Parent Up

[Vidar Leathershod]

The parent was unfairly labelled a troll. I love the Firefox browser, and use it all the time. But it and Thunderbird have a lot of annoying, quick to fix problems that could have been fixed, and are often actively ignored. If you want a real list of stuff that is broken, we could start with the parent poster's list, which seems somewhat valid, and continue from there...

1. Under the XP home theme (reduced functionality without reason) - No "Block images from this server" in context menu - available in Mozilla forever, this prevents kids from seeing the constant AdultFriendFinder crap that comes up on some non-pornographic sites.

2. On my system, it does seem to be smaller and faster than Mozilla, though I am not sure about the new Seamonkey developments. I tried it when they first started, and their first task was apparently to introduce lots of bugs and change the icon to something they created in Microsoft Paint. Not impressed with their priorities.

3. Renamed to Firefox - Wow. This was a bad move. I get a questioning look almost every time I bring up the "better browser to use" argument to businesses. Plus, everyone ends up calling it Foxfire. There are too many "cool" names involved. Mozilla was hard enough to explain, but at least I could connect it to Netscape's mascot (since people still remember Netscape). But Firefox, Firebird, Phoenix, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey? Surely someone came up with something better, but it was turned down as too practical. Think about the words "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape". The title describes the function.

4. Memory leaks - Running latest Firefox Stable build for Win32, one window, no tabs, no extensions, haven't visited any sites with Java, one Live Bookmark (default BBC World News thing). Browsing around for a few hours, memory use creeps up by several megs. Even as I type this (watching Task manager, memory has gone from 37,??? to 39,132. Weird.

5. Incomplete, annoying interface - Well, I would call a "resume button that has not ever apparently worked an annoying interface feature. I would also say that losing favicons for no apparent reason is annoying. No built-in function for removing or re-ordering search engines (you shouldn't need an extension for this simple task.

6. Offtopic Thunderbird complaint - Signatures now have a stupid "--" in grey that cannot be turned off, and the signature is in grey too (no option to disable) which has annoyed countless customers. Some people don't feel like typing their own name 50 times a day. Email is not Newsgroups. Don't try to make it that way.

7. Memory usage is now up to 40,648. Eventually, Firefox will crash on me. Not a huge deal for me (I used Mozilla M9, M10, etc. all the time). But pretty lame for a browser that has had this much development time. No, it's not just this machine either. 40,860 now.

So stop modding people as troll, just because they didn't feel like they should have to type all this junk out, when the accusations hold water.

Vidar

Re:Mod Parent Up

[dcam]

I'll add one:

8. Bookmark sorting. Mozilla from about 3 years ago (or more!) used to do this perfectly. I'd like to sort bookmarks by name, with all the folders at the top. Firefox doesn't support this. The only way to do this aside from manually editing the bookmarks file is to import them into Mozilla, sort them and export to Firefox.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[complete loony]

"... quick to fix problems ..."
Right, written any complex software lately?

Something that might look easy to fix from the user's perspective may break assumptions that have been made in the code and require a significant amount of rework / refactoring to change.

If you really think it's that easy to fix the problem, hunt down the bug in the code and fix it. While I know this sounds like the typical linux developer reaction, I can sympathise with the sentiment. Most open source devs are not paid to fix bug

Re:Except

[giorgiofr]

A link's tooltip will show both the title of the link and the URL it links to. That's the way Opera's been doing it for ages.

That's easy

[cliveholloway]

Hold down Shift while you mouseover a link.

Oh wait, you want a way to do this with one hand. Err, can't help you there, I'm afraid.

Re:Firefox too slow...

[joe 155]

might I interest you in Dillo? it is crazily fast and has a few of the important firefox features... it has some drawbacks, but it you really want it to be small, use very little memory and quick then it is a jolly good choice

Re:For new users

[plover]

Currently, there is no way to close a tab without first selecting it.

I used to think this too, which is why I used to use the TabX extension. However, since at least Firefox 1.5 I've been able to "middle-click" a tab to close it (without giving it focus.) Once I learned that, TabX was gone.

Re:I'll switch, but only ...

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

Just a note to TBE users: Anyone using Tabbrowser extensions should stay silent when the next Firefox-is-a-memory-hog flame fest ensues -- it has been one of the worst culprits in that area...

Re:Did I miss this feature?

[corrosive_nf]

Tools --> Options --> General. type your favorite urls in the homepage box seperated by |

http://www.google.com/ [google.com]|http://www.slashdot.org|htt p://www.fark.com

And when you open firefox, the urls you put in the home page box will be tabbed.