Mozilla Project Officially Releases Firefox 0.9

_xeno_ writes "The last release candidate was apparently good enough, because Mozilla Firefox 0.9 has now been officially released. New features since 0.8 are, of course, basically the same as in the Release Candidate, including the new Pinstripe theme for Windows and the GTK+ installer for Linux users. The biggest change since the Release Candidate is that this release should ask you to migrate your profile instead of just trashing it. So head over to the Firefox homepage and get downloading, or check out the Release Notes to find out exactly what's new." mE123 adds "You can get it from plain old HTTP or from fancy new BitTorrent", and points out that (compared to 0.8), "this release includes tons of bug/stability fixes, a %3 speed up, a new theme and plugin management system, a new standard windows theme, and a smaller windows installer."

No source though

[keesh (202812)]

The source tarball seems to be broken on the mirrors (two bad bzip2 checksums from seperate mirrors), so no ebuilds for Gentoo and no luck for anyone using any arch not on the binaries list.

Re:No source though

[DivineHawk (570091)]

"The original source was incomplete. An updated source tarball was released from mozilla.org."

It's on BT just fine Mozilla Firefox 0.9 Source Fixed [pryan.org]

Re:No source though

[FuzzyBad-Mofo (184327)]

Their binary Linux version has a minor problem too; it set root ownership of the user-specific config directory when installed, making it impossible for that user to run the browser.

To fix the problem, I did a
# chown -R user:user /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/

Firefox is great

[titaniam (635291)]

I wrote a website that displays 250 or more favicon.ico website icons [iconsurf.com] at a time, and the difference in loading speed/rendering quality between Firefox and MSIE is amazing. The icons are small, but each is loaded from a different website around the world, so it is a good test of loading speed for many small items. It's ironic that the icons are usually of type "microsoft icon resource" and MSIE fails to display more than half of them.
If you have Firefox, make sure to get the Linky plugin (I'm not responsible for that one, but it is a very useful plugin) if you like to open multiple links at once from a given webpage.

Re:Anything's better than a turd

[spectre_240sx (720999)]

Being that IE is the most commonly used browser, I have to disagree here. I think it's a fine baseline to compare to.

Re:Safari is slow too!

[Apreche (239272)]

If you change the options in firefox in user.js in your profile as such...

// Enable pipelining:
user_pref("network.http.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", true);
user_pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequ ests", 100);

// This one makes a huge difference. Last value in milliseconds (default is 250)
user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

Then pipelining will be enabled and the 250 millisecond delay before rendering will be disabled. You may not realize it, but this makes firefox render a zillion times faster even on the fastest of systems. Especially if you have high bandwith and a significant portion gets downloaded in those 250 milliseconds.

Re:Safari is slow too!

[balster neb (645686)]

There was a nice post on optimizing Firefox (or any gecko based browser) in the Mozillazine [mozillazine.org] Firefox forums here [mozillazine.org]. These tweaks can apparently speed up page load/render time by nearly 30% for some pages.

Opera

[by Anonymous Coward]

Shame that Slashdot missed covering the new release of Opera 7.5 [opera.com], another excellent web browser.

Good so far, but...

[dotslashconfig (784719)]

Release 0.9 looks pretty good so far. The new default theme looks spiffy, and basic functionality seems to be improved (rendering/loading is a tad faster, in my opinion). I also really like the extensions manager.

The one flaw I've noticed so far, though, is that the extensions options frame is a little buggy. When I finish modifying one extension and go to load up the preferences from another, the extension I just finished modifying pops up. If I go back and load the new extension prefs again, everything is fine. It's nothing major... just a little something that could be fixed for the big 1.0.

Re:Good so far, but...

[bjdevil66 (583941)]

The old extensions need to be updated to fit the new extensions theme manager. See http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246043 [mozilla.org] for details on the "bug". Essentially, the extension builders need to update the extension or it won't appear in the theme manager, even though it may install.

There's also a new extension [mozilla.org] that you can install to make the old extensions visible, but the old extensions are still not removable after installation, unlike the new extensions.

One other issue I see with the extension manager: after installing enough extensions to make a scrollbar appear, it was difficult to scroll and the manager became really sluggish. However, I imagine that this is a minor problem that will be worked out over time.

Just emerged it!

[maskedbishounen (772174)]

While not on portage (yet), Gentoo users can find an ebuild [gentoo.org] over here.

It killed off my bookmarks, so you have been warned.

Before you complain about the new theme...

[MarkWPiper (604760)]

... right click on your toolbar, customize, and check 'use small icons.' Ahhh, much better.

Why do they bother wasting screen real estate?

Re:Before you complain about the new theme...

[RickHunter (103108)]

Hm. I found the small icons to be way too small. I did, however, remember to bookmark the Old Qute Theme [quadrone.org] from 0.8 and earlier, which has been updated to work with 0.9. IMHO, it is much nicer than the new one, at least under Linux. YMMV.

And to fix the icon spacing...

[MarkWPiper (604760)]

Check this out [grack.com] if you're so concerned. It's easy. It'll fix the icon spacing.

To get back the old Qute theme from 0.8:

[Gherald (682277)]

To get back the good old Qute theme from 0.8:

Right click this link [quadrone.org] and select "Copy Link Location."

Then left click here [texturizer.net], paste the link into the "Remote URL" box on the right, and click Install.

Ahh... feels like home again ;)

Only 3%?

[eraser.cpp (711313)]

I'm migrating from .8 to .9 and the speed increase feels much more dramatic.

Re:Only 3%?

[kryptkpr (180196)]

Want even more speed? (I did not come up with this, I read it on a forum).

Enter about:config into the title bar.

Set network.http.pipelining to True
Set network.http.pipelining.firstrequest to True
Set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to 8 (I'm told higher values get ignored).
Finally and most important, set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to 0

Enjoy the snappyness that results.

Re:Only 3%?

[jesser (77961)]

Pipelining is the same as persistent connections except that the browser doesn't wait for the response to the second request before sending the third request. Pipelining saves the server and the user a little bit of bandwidth and make the page load faster, so I don't see why a server admin would not like pipelining. I don't know where you got the idea that pipelining was "hogging" anything.

Safari

[artlu (265391)]

Recently, I started using Firefox on my PC because of its similarity to Safari. Has anyone else noticed this?

GroupShares.com [groupshares.com] - An Investment Community

Re:Safari

[Woy (606550)]

Recently, I started using Firefox on my PC because of its similarity to Safari. Has anyone else noticed this?

Yeah, we did! And thanks for those pics of your wife in the hidden "honey" folder. Those came in really handy, if you catch my drift.

Re:Safari

[hawaiian717 (559933)]

You can always hit CTRL+T on Windows to open a new blank tab automatically in FireFox, Apple(Command)+T on Mac OS X to open a new blank tab in both Safari and FireFox. I dunno about Linux to open new blank tabs, since I don't have my linux box up yet..

Control-T on Linux.

You may also be able to keep the tab menu bar visible at all times by going to the preferences... but I never cared it wasn't there

Prefrences --> Advanced --> Browsing --> Hide the tab bar when only one web site is open.

You can also go to View --> Toolbars --> Customize and add the New Tab button to a toolbar.

Re:Safari

[Quantum Jim (610382)]

In Linux, the middle-mouse is set up to cut/paste text from the clipboard and to navigate to the test in the clipboard as if it is a URL (following conventions that go back over twenty years). However, you can also set it up with Windows conventions via FireFox's advanced preferences:

1. Type about:config into the url bar.
2. Type middle into the filter area.
3. Double click the text, browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick, and replace whatever's there with true.
4. Double click the other lines of text (about four) and make them false.

Now Mozilla FireFox will follow Window's mouse conventions.

Adblock

[Verteiron (224042)]

For those of you using Adblock with Firefox under Windows and find it missing after the upgrade, here's what I did to fix it.

Check the new Extensions manager under Tools and see if it's there. If it is, uninstall it from that window.

Close Firefox and use Explorer or whatever to browse to "\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\FireFox\profile.3hd\Extensions" on your system drive.

Now you have to figure out which of these obscurely named subdirectories is Adblock. You can use Notepad or some other text editer to open "Extensions.rdf" and see. This string may be the same on all systems, if so, I'm sure someone can post it. Once you know which directory Adblock is still hiding in, delete it. Now go and install the AdBlock nightly from here: http://adblock.mozdev.org/dev.html [mozdev.org]

That took care of it on my systems. YMMV, as always.

Re:Adblock

[Dachannien (617929)]

I just redownloaded AdBlock off of the extensions page (click Get New Extensions from the extensions control widget) and it worked fine. Even kept all my old adblock settings.

There's also an extension that makes your old-style extensions from pre-0.9 show up in the control widget. Some of the old extensions (Nuke Anything, for example) don't seem to have been updated, but they still work fine in 0.9 if you enable them. Once you restart Mozilla you have to right click the dimmed extensions to enable them.

One Tree Hill

[fembots (753724)]

FYI, One Tree Hill is a suburb [wises.co.nz] in Auckland, New Zealand. And apparently a couple of the code names are based on other suburbs nearby.

Re:One Tree Hill

[LadyLucky (546115)]

Yep.

Ben Goodger went to Auckland Grammar school, he was in my class :-)

Mirror links and other stuff

[Patik (584959)]

update.mozilla.org was slow earlier today. If you can't get in there, try these out:

Extensions [extensionsmirror.nl]
Themes [mozillazine.org]

Keep in mind that the packaging requirements changed for this release, so not all of your old favorites are 0.9 compatible (yet).

If you want the old 0.8 theme back, you can find it here: Qute [quadrone.org]

Moz Googlebar Pagerank

[iserlohn (49556)]

They really need a proper pagerank feature in the moz googlebar. There was a recent hack to googlebar that showed pagerank for a page by querying a central server which returned a gif image. That doesn't work so well and is really slow.

Getting the old theme back

[sbszine (633428)]

Using it now, and it's waaaay faster and more reliable than 0.8. No more reloading poorly rendered Slashdot pages!

If you think the new theme is a step backwards, you can get the old theme back by going to the designer's site [quadrone.org].

My thoughts:

[ajutla (720182)]

--Firefox 0.9 really is a bit faster than 0.8. It's probably not noticeable to all you lucky bastards with broadband, but I can tell over 56k. I think FF is now about on par with, perhaps even faster than, IE, which was previously a lot quicker (for me).

--The new default theme...well, I'm in the "damn, that's ugly" camp. I went to Tools -> Themes -> Get More Themes to download Qute, and was taken to Mozilla Update, where there was a link to "install Qute now." I did that but it didn't work. I ended up having to manually download the .jar file and use the theme installer on texturizer.net to get Qute working--It seems like something's broken here, I dunno. Anyone else had a similar experience?

--FF's interface seems a bit snappier now, as well--it doesn't slow down a ton with multiple tabs open. It remains to be seen whether it still has 0.8's nasty memory leaks, though.

--I wonder if anyone else has noticed this: the menus now are rendered a little bit...differently. They no longer look as "Windows native" as they used to, and now resemble Mozilla 1.5 on my Debian machine. I wonder if this was done for cross-platform compatibility (So FF doesn't look as out of place on Linux?)

Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with the new FF's performance. It's a bit of a pain to go around and re-obtain all your extensions and such, but once you get it set up, it works very well. Great job Mozilla dev team!

I miss from Mozilla...

[RedVortex (535518)]

The thing I miss the most from the Mozilla is the ability to type something to search directly in the address bar press the down arrow (selecting: search google for...) then [enter]... No need to add another space wasting thingy just for searches.

Sorry but I really can't get over it, I loved that feature. I was using it all the time...

Also, I still have some rendering problems with slashdot, sometimes the page renders on two side-to-side pages, very weird, it's happening right now, when I click preview, I have to scroll right to see the preview and the post comment boxes, all the rest is at the left, very weird...

Well, we're still under 1.0 ... Then again, just check MSIE, they are at 6.x and they still can't get everything right, hehehe

RedVortex
-- Please direct all bugs reports to /dev/null...

Re:I miss from Mozilla...

[mpsmps (178373)]

The thing I miss the most from the Mozilla is the ability to type something to search directly in the address bar press the down arrow (selecting: search google for...) then [enter]... No need to add another space wasting thingy just for searches.

I stupidly put off switching for the same reason, but with a little customization you can do it in even fewer keystrokes with Firefox.

Enter about:config in the location bar, set keyword.URL to http://www.google.com/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=

Now typing any non-url in the location bar brings up the google search results. No need to press the down arrow!

I prefer 0.8.

[Guspaz (556486)]

1) 0.9 RC trashed my profile. Yeah, 0.9 final migrates, but hey, now that my profile is ALREADY gone, it's too late, now isn't it? 0.9 RC should have at least offered to back up my profile for future use.

2) Pinstripe is quite ugly. I much prefer Qute, and think the Mozilla folks must be stoned to ditch Qute for Pinstripe. I will certainly be reverting back to Qute.

3) They removed the theme on the download manager. It used to be nice and themed, now it is all solid colours. This may be Pinstripes fault, however, if the theme affects the download manager too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Firefox supporter, and have converted numerous people. However, I simply think that several crucial mistakes were made in 0.9.

Re:I prefer 0.8.

[Quantum Jim (610382)]

0.9 RC trashed my profile. Yeah, 0.9 final migrates, but hey, now that my profile is ALREADY gone, it's too late, now isn't it? 0.9 RC should have at least offered to back up my profile for future use.

Release candidates are unstable. They are released to find issues that were overlooked by the developers. If you tried it without backing up your old profile folder, the fault is with your own inadequate computer security and safety policy.

Pinstripe is quite ugly. I much prefer Qute, and think the Mozilla folks must be stoned to ditch Qute for Pinstripe.

Pinstripe is not very ugly! I agree that is needs polish; however, there is little wrong with it.

The backlash is mainly due to inertia; most users - like myself - just got used to Qute. When the Phoenix switched from Orbit to Qute, I first thought it was a horrible, horrible decision! However, I grew used to it and eventually preferred the new theme. After a few days of Pinstripe, I have similar feelings. Qute is pretty good, but not irreplaceably as I once thought. A few tweaks to my user chrome override-file (not the changes making the rounds) satisfied most of my objections.

You people are seriously overreacting!

They removed the theme on the download manager.

The theme was never in the download manager. Some erroneous entries used to be listed in the theme manager, but that bug seems to have been squashed.

There were license problems between Qute and Mozilla.org's tri-license policy. Therefor, they will not be able to bundle the popular theme with the oncoming stable version of FireFox Browser. :-( However, I feel the new theme is OK.

A little disappointed

[89cents (589228)]

I have been using Pheonix -> Firebird -> Firefox for a while now which much adore, but I am skepitcal of this release. I do not like the new theme so much but changing to small icons is better.
I not so sure about this new "Software Update" section under Tools -> Options -> Advance.
"Periodically check for updates"? No thanks.

"Allow websites to install software"? Is this now another IE? No thanks. Well, maybe it's much more secure.

"Select new tabs opened from links" What does that mean? Oh, I think it was the old "Open new tabs in the background" option which was more intuitive.

Well that's just what I see on the front end so far. As long as they fixed some of the bugs, like "the page / can not be found" when hittting the back button. I also hope mouse over text for the tabs no longer gets in my way of pressing a tab. I have seen many websites freeze the browser which is very annoying, so hopefully those bugs are fixed to.

Too bad...

[Trillan (597339)]

I love Firefox on Windows, but it's just really too bad they can't match Mac OS X's look on Mac OS X. In particular, the boxy little Windows-like buttons and ugly popup menus have to go.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned about themes...

[Trillan (597339)]

At last, Firefox does not require a restart to switch themes.

As a recent convert

[quantax (12175)]

I recently switched to Firefox from MyIE for a couple reasons, mostly doing with spyware & its ability to exploit holes in IE. After installing some of the 'must have' extensions, such as Tab Browser Extensions and Linky, Firefox is easily configured to give me the same experience and better than MyIE, which imo is still a strong browser (even if it uses the IE engine). My main complaint is a simple one, and that is that there is no option nor extension that allows me to minimize Firefox to my system tray instead of closing it, when I hit the close window button on the browser. This allows Firefox to re-open a tad bit faster than if it wasnt running at all, and is nice to have quickly ready to go. Given the relative simplicity of this option, I think the Firefox team should seriously consider adding such a function, which I was hoping to see in this 0.9 release. Hopefully they will 'fix' this in the next release, but otherwise its a job well done all around.

PS. To those who would tell me to use a system addon such as AllToTray or PowerMenu, no thanks, but thats not quite the same as being able to click the close-window button and having it minimize to the tray. Close, but no cigar.

best. plugin. ever.

[glwtta (532858)]

I just came across the Web Developer [chrispederick.com] plugin - I think this just may be the happiest day of my life. From little things like resizing the window quickly to popular resolutions, to the live CSS editing, it's hard to overstate how useful this plugin is for web development.

configs

[baadger (764884)]

there has been some mention of preference/config files. an easy way to edit these in firefox .9 is to goto "about:config"

Nope.

[irokitt (663593)]

The two previous articles were both talking about the release candidate, not the actual 0.9 release, which just came out today.

Re:Not a single reason

[Dr. Mojura (584120)]

If the Internet connection goes down, the page loses the address it was trying to load. And is never able to retrieve it when the connection comes back up.

Easy fix:
Go to about:config and set

browser.xul.error_pages.enabled

to True. You will then have a page showing an error message if the address couldn't load, with a link to try loading it again.

On another note, a few days back someone mentioned a way to to prevent Firefox from compressing its memory in Windows when minimized. What was that preference name again?

Re:Not a single reason

[by Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4 843

config.trim_on_minimize -> false

Makes Firefox and Mozilla always responsive. More details here: Link [mozilla.org]

Prog.

Re:User Agent String?

[CeleronXL (726844)]

This can be fixed in about:config.

Change general.useragent.vendorSub to 0.9.

Re:Got it

[Pieroxy (222434)]

Well, is it just me or does the slashdot bug is till there?

To reproduce:
1. type in www.slashdot.org
2. Hit refresh until you see the main part overlapping the left part. Should be pretty quick (2-3 retries on my machine)

Oh well... Mozilla 1.7 out and that bug still there...

Re:Got it

[SimplexO (537908)]

Yeah, that gets me too. The slashdot bug is bug 217527 [mozilla.org] and as seen in comment 81 [mozilla.org] was backed out of the aviary (Firefox 0.9 and 1.0, and Thunderbird 0.7 and above) branch because it caused a regression (bug 246382 [mozilla.org]). If you get a trunk build, the bug will be fixed.

* You'll have to copy/paste those links into your Address Bar, because bugzilla blocks links from slashdot.

Re:Firefox

[bhtooefr (649901)]

Let's see, do you mean Phoenix? 'Cause here's the versions:

Phoenix 0.1
Phoenix 0.2
Phoenix 0.3
Phoenix 0.4
Phoenix 0.5
Phoenix 0.6
Firebird 0.7
Firefox 0.8
Firefox 0.9

Firebird was actually the SHORTEST lived name for the Mozilla standalone browser formerly known as Phoenix.

Re:Firefox

[GarfBond (565331)]

Well, noting the fact that Mozilla Firebird was used for the 0.6 release, some dates might be appropriate. From the roadmap:

Phoenix 0.1-Firebird 0.6 release 9/23/2002-5/16/2003
Firebird 0.6-Firefox 0.8 5/16/2003-2/9/2004
Firefox 0.8-present 2/9/2004-???

So, by actual timeline, Phoenix was used for less than a year, while Firebird was used for nearly a year, and Firefox is indefinite. Firebird did only comprise two releases, it just so happens that those two releases took a damn long time.

Re:IMPORTANT ! Save your bookmarks. IT DELETES!!!!

[shellbeach (610559)]

You didn't specify the platform, but under Windows your old data was stored (for Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix <= 0.8) in the directory

\Documents and Settings\[user name]\Application Data\Phoenix\

So you can grab your bookmarks from there (that directory should not have been deleted). Alternatively, you could try copying that folder to "Firefox", but you may find wierd things happening with your extensions if you try that (that said, it seemed to work for me OK). The old nightly builds from a couple of weeks back imported your IE settings rather than your old Firefox settings - I guess that bug's still there. (Although how on earth it got to be released with such a stupid bug I don't know!)

If you were using Firefox 0.8 under linux then your settings were already under ~/.firefox - so you shouldn't have lost any data but there's not much you can do if you have. It's a good lesson in backing up your home directory, I'm afraid!

Great product, cruel installation.

[Futurepower(R) (558542)]

It didn't delete anything, probably. For Windows XP:

The data is still in the old installation folder. You need to copy the History.dat file, the Bookmarks.html file, and the formhistory.dat file to the new folder. After searching, I found that the old files were in:

Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\Application Data\Phoenix\

They must be copied to:

C:\Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile s\default.uh4 >

The problem is that the FireFox people don't provide any installation instructions, and the installation sometimes fails to copy those files, and once installed, you cannot do the installation again.

As I said before: Clearly the FireFox team has some former Microsoft employees, because the team sometimes promotes frustration. Crazily, there is no way to import FireFox data, only a way to import IE and Netscape data.

On the other hand, Mozilla FireFox is certainly the best browser, if the best isn't Mozilla itself.