Firefox 2.0 Posted a Day Early

A number of readers alerted us to the [link removed] day-early [accidental] posting of Firefox version 2.0. At this writing the top page at mozilla.com still doesn't mention its availability. One reader pointed us to [link removed] a mirror and another recommended a comprehensive review of Firefox 2.0, with many screenshots, over at mozillalinks.org. Update by RM: - links above removed at request of Mozilla release people. They asked us to link to this note instead. They're only asking us to wait until Tuesday Afternoon (U.S. Pacific Time) for the official 2.0 download, which isn't long. (Patience is a virtue, etc.)

I'll upgrade if

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

1) it quits crashing all the time with the mplayer plugin when playing videos

2) it finally has a sensible cookie blocking interface, à-la Mozilla, and not that atrocious settings tab that I have to scroll through to find the site I just blocked cookies from that I need to re-enable.

Otherwise the current 1.x version works well enough for me.

Wikipedia Support for Firefox 2 Added

[yurik]

There is now Firefox 2 support enabled on all Wiki*edia sites. To use, navigate to http://en.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] (or any other language/project), click the search engine selector button in the upper right corner, and click "add wikipedia". The added bonus is that auto-suggest is also working - as you type you search, it will provide a list of page titles that begin with the typed letters.

One note - the timeout is set to 500ms, which is not too long (especially when the entire slashdot visits wiki). To make it longer, open firefox_install_dir\components\nsSearchSuggestions .js, and edit the "_suggestionTimeout: 500" line. Something like 2000 works fine for me.

--Yurik / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Yurik [wikipedia.org]

New version

[Dan East]

The latest version is quite nice. The integrated spell checker is worth it alone (I had been using an extension, but having it integrated is so much nicer).

I thought I might could do away with Tab Mix Plus now, however it was quickly apparent that the extension is still a must. As a developer I'm too used to switching through multiple documents by history, not by some arbitrary linear order. So with Tab Mix Plus I can easily CTRL-TAB back and forth between a couple specific tabs, even if there are a dozen other tabs open. So I'm waiting for the author(s) to update it because it is no longer compatible.

Happily, the other extensions I use all had upgrades for 2.0. That was my biggest gripe about FireFox in the past. Especially a previous upgrade that I think was security-related. The version went from like 1.5.0.2 to 1.5.0.3 and suddenly 90% of my extensions weren't compatible. That was unacceptable, especially with such a seemingly small change in version number.

Dan East

This old exploit still crashes v2.0.

[antdude]

See this demonstration [coredump.cx] (do NOT go here unless you are willing to crash your Web browser). It still crashes Firefox v2.0. This is related to this old security isssue [mozilla.org]. :(

Re:New version

[gad_zuki!]

>The latest version is quite nice.

As someone who is used to 20+ tabs at one time, I disagree. The new tab limitation is a pretty lousy UI change. Its like Mozilla and MS are trying to outcrap each other in the UI department. At 1024x768 I get 10 tabs. Now I have to scroll tabs (!) or use the tab selector (ugly hack) to see the rest. I know there's a config item I can change to restore 1.5 like behavoir but I shouldnt have to do this in a browser that advertises the advantages of tabs. The old system worked fine: tabs would dynamically shrink as you add more. If a user wants to have nice big tabs they know not to open more than 8 or so. Those who dont need to be reminded that the green slashdot favicon is actually Slashdot.org could open 20-30 tabs. I paid for this RAM and I like using it. Now everyone gets big tabs no matter what.

Also, why are extensions called "add-ons" now?

Re:Actually it's 45.6 Mb

[Jherek Carnelian]

If you don't think so, let us know which drives use powers-of-ten sector sizes

I don't know what, if any, drives use power of ten sector sizes, but I guarantee you that no modern drive uses powers of 2 for its sector size. They often use it for sector payload size, but the actual sector consists of many more bits than just the payload.

For example, a DVD sector has a payload of 2048 but a total length of 2064 which includes 4 byte ID, a 2 byte IES, 6 bytes of CPR MAI and a 4 byte EDC. But, if you take it even further, the data gets reed-solomon ECC data included for each frame of 16 sectors (a frame being the smallest possible piece of data to write to a DVD) plus it all gets encoded in EFM with the end result that each sector is 38688 bits long, but interleaved with the other 16 sectors in that frame. See here: http://pioneer.jp/crdl/tech/dvd/2-3-e.html [pioneer.jp]

Hard disks have similar funky layouts, although I don't think interleaving is usually part of it and the specs aren't so easy to hunt down because they are often unique to each model from each manufacturer.

You might argue that sector payload is what "counts" - to that I say you are making up an arbitrary distinction. If that were an acceptable argument, then one could say the same thing about networks - that it is the packet payload that counts and not the raw packet itself. After all, with the earlier MFM and RLL drives, the entire sector contents were exposed to the disk controller card on the system just like the entire packet contents are exposed to the network interface cards on current systems (presuming you don't have a tcp offload engine or the like, that is).

which filesystems read/write powers-of-ten block sizes.

Here you are correct. But the reason has nothing to do with the nature of disks, but rather with the binary nature of RAM and the data types used to keep track of the data on disk.