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Mozilla The Internet

Mozilla Project Officially Releases Firefox 0.9 672

_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."
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Mozilla Project Officially Releases Firefox 0.9

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  • Firefox is great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by titaniam ( 635291 ) * <slashdot@drpa.us> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @08:58PM (#9437171) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • again? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ack154 ( 591432 ) * on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:00PM (#9437185)
    So the story this morning (that was pulled) and the one yesterday weren't enough? What's going on??
  • Not a single reason (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:02PM (#9437205)

    On why should anyone upgrade to 0.9?

    The icons on the bookmark tabs disappeared in 0.7. That didnt get fixed in 0.8, the icons are still disappearing in 0.9.

    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.

    Should have been fixed in 0.7, still there.

    JavaScript code parses switch statements incorrectly. Who wants to guess what Firefox shows for this simple snippet?

    var a = 10;
    a = 9;
    var b = 10;
    switch(b)
    {
    case a:
    alert('got it');
    break;
    default:
    alert('passed');
    }

  • Only 3%? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eraser.cpp ( 711313 ) * on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:02PM (#9437211) Homepage
    I'm migrating from .8 to .9 and the speed increase feels much more dramatic.
  • Oh. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bill, Shooter of Bul ( 629286 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:03PM (#9437220) Journal
    So it s not just my computer. Interesting. I would have thought some one would have looked into that. I guess were just lucky it works at all.
  • User Agent String? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:05PM (#9437235)
    Hmm... on mine the User Agent string still says Firefox/0.8. Anybody else see this?

    Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8
  • Safari (Score:5, Interesting)

    by artlu ( 265391 ) <artlu@3.14artlu.net minus pi> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:05PM (#9437236) Homepage Journal
    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
  • One Tree Hill (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fembots ( 753724 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:08PM (#9437253) Homepage
    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.
  • Am I the only one? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:13PM (#9437301)
    Who gets issues with Slashdot and Firefox. In that the main area of the page overlaps strangely with the menu area on the left.

    It occurs some of the time, not all of the time.

    Poor /. html ??
  • by interactive_civilian ( 205158 ) <mamoru&gmail,com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:13PM (#9437302) Homepage Journal
    I really want the Firefox0.8 OS X pinstripe theme back. Not to sound inflammatory, but these new buttons look like they were made by the same design team that came up with the default windows XP theme...

    any chances of it being updated to work with 0.9?

  • by Croooow ( 182767 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:16PM (#9437329)
    Have any other Linux users found the `-remote' argument to be broken in Firefox 0.9?
    % firefox -remote 'ping()'
    Error: No running window found

    % firefox -remote 'openURL(http://slashdot.org/, new-tab)'
    Error: No running window found
  • Happens to me, too. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:22PM (#9437367)
    Left-side menu and main area overlap. Strangely, it doesn't happen 100% of the time. Have the same problem in regular Mozilla, too. Of course I.E. displays it properly all the time. There are two conclusions to draw from this:
    1. Slashdot is written for Internet Explorer.
    2. Mozilla is shit.
    I've never run into similar problems on any other website with Mozilla, so logically I would have to conclude that we are dealing with the first case. Somehow that doesn't surprise me.
  • Re:Just emerged it! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dan Ost ( 415913 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:35PM (#9437466)
    In my opinion, gentoo is a great (meta)distribution for people who want to
    learn because it doesn't hide anything from you and doesn't do anything without
    you telling it to. At the same time, it makes the uninteresting parts of
    managing a machine easy to automate so that I can spend time doing things
    I find interesting.

    Ultimately, I see no qualitative difference between 'emerge foo' and
    'tar xvf foo.tar; cd foo; configure -prefix=...; make; make install'.
    The hard part is knowing what you need, not following the install recipe
    from the README once you've downloaded the source.
  • Safari is slow too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:42PM (#9437513)
    Safari loads the 250 icon is serial order one at a time. Firefox loads icons in batches of i'd guess about 8 at a time and in no particular order. it must be five or ten times faster than safari. I wonder what is going on?
  • Needs some work... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by chewy_2000 ( 618148 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:43PM (#9437523)
    to say the least. I had quite a few problems with the 0.9RC, but I assumed they would be fixed for this more major release. So, I download the exe (yeah, I use Windows..) and run the installer.
    Everything's fine until it loads for the first time, when it says it's installing extensions. I leave it be for a while, but it's obviously not actually doing anything - no CPU cycles used etc. So I shut down the process, and load it again. Gives me an XML error. Try again, works but didn't port my bookmarks/settings and some of the buttons are missing (ie, the credits in help->about).

    Needless to say I trashed it and reinstalled my 0.8 nightly. Maybe when it hits 1.0 I'll check it out again, but for me it's pretty unusable, and my system isn't anything special or out of the ordinary.

  • by SilentChris ( 452960 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:46PM (#9437544) Homepage
    The funny thing about Safari is that it "remembers" favorite icons better than IE (sometimes IE just turns things back to the regular icon). I thought favorite icons were an IE invention.
  • I prefer 0.8. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:51PM (#9437574)
    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.
  • by Radical Rad ( 138892 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:53PM (#9437586) Homepage
    I downloaded from an http link. Now how can I check its integrity before I run the installer? I looked on the mozilla.org site and could only find checksums for Solaris.
  • Flash sound blocking (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @09:59PM (#9437633)
    If only there were an extention to block sound in Flash animations.
  • Re:I prefer 0.8. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mriker ( 571666 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:07PM (#9437694)
    0.9 RC pissed me off by tossing all of my bookmarks and preferences as well. I was relieved to find that everything was restored when I uninstalled 0.9 RC and re-installed 0.8, however. Did you try this? I installed 0.9 on a test system (after swearing I'd be sticking with 0.8 after 0.9 RC shat all over my stuff), and everything went smoothly this time... but I've noticed almost no real changes from 0.8, so I don't really see the point.

    I agree that Pinstripe is ass-ugly. Using Noia (which I prefer by far), the download window is themed.
  • by SCHecklerX ( 229973 ) <greg@gksnetworks.com> on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:16PM (#9437754) Homepage
    Even more reason to put off replacing the little guy with a newer sony sub-notebook :)

    As others have stated, this version is a bit faster.

    The theme is fine. Just set it to use small icons and no text.

    The only annoyance is that there is display loop problem when opening up the toolbar customizer (you can get around it by simply clicking firefox's titlebar...I have other apps that do this too...gtk2 issue?)

    Another thing that I haven't gotten around to submitting a bug report for is that the prefs window assumes your screen is > 480 pixels high, and comes up off of the screen. Easily remedied using windowmaker's ability to resize with the meta key, but this bug is a little annoying, as the prefs info fits perfectly fine after I resize the window to fit on my screen.

    Other than that, great stuff!

  • windows (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:30PM (#9437854)
    "It is strongly recommended that you exit all Windows programs before running this setup program"

    no problem, I'm in linux.

    I guess that's what I get if I use the installer... sad. You'd think they'd change the wording. But then again, under linux you probably dont have to close anything....
  • Re:Got it (Score:0, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:34PM (#9437879)
    I refreshed 10 times and didn't come across that problem once.
  • Re:One Tree Hill (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LadyLucky ( 546115 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:42PM (#9437954) Homepage
    Yep.

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

  • Re:Opera (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pipingguy ( 566974 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:48PM (#9437999)

    Is it open source or free? Surely you realize that blinky, flashy things embedded in the UI is a bad thing. The Mozilla offerings don't have these distractions, probably this is why Slashdot didn't feature it.
  • Windows NT 4.0 Crash (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:59PM (#9438097)
    The firefox 0.9 windows installer crashes my NT 4 machine (blue screen of death) shortly after launching. Anybody else experiencing this?
  • by TheRealSlimShady ( 253441 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @10:59PM (#9438101)
    The new default theme looks spiffy

    I don't know if I've got some beta release of 0.9 on Windows, but "spiffy" would be the last word I would use to describe the default theme. Butt ugly springs to mind. It reminds me of Netscape 1.0. I had to download Qute to get it to look decent again. Presentation is everything, and the default theme just makes it look like a crappy browser (which it isn't).

  • As a recent convert (Score:5, Interesting)

    by quantax ( 12175 ) on Tuesday June 15, 2004 @11:58PM (#9438480) Homepage
    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.
  • Re:"SOLVED" kinda (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @12:36AM (#9438690)
    Holy crap! This is weird! I haven't even tried to pull my bookmarks back in or anything, but everything is there!

    So here's the revised installation instructions:

    1. Try to install Firefox. It doesn't work.
    2. Uninstall Firefox, delete your folders.
    3. Reinstall Firefox. You profile information is magically whisked from out of Firefox's ass and appears where it should be.
  • I love this... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @03:05AM (#9439422) Homepage
    From one of the replies to his blog post:

    Privacy Issues about the favicon.ico File


    This give to web servers admins a way to know that someone has bookmarked it's site; the info includes the date and time of the operation plus the address IP of the machine which bookmarked the site, which can be used to identify you.


    Ummm, what, like *every single page served*? Riiiight... If you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't really be using a computer at all, let alone use the internet. I'm surprised you're even allowed out of the house.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @04:08AM (#9439652)
    Although the icons from the new standalone Qute are obviously the same, one annoying thing is the absence of the horizontal line below and above the icons. Aside from making the vertical icon-spacer lines look out of place, this also makes the toolbar mesh in with the browsing window itself.

    Am I the only one having this problem, or does anyone notice that the theme isn't 'exactly' (even significantly) as it was in 0.8?
  • ClearType screenshot (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PhilHibbs ( 4537 ) <snarks@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @04:49AM (#9439810) Journal
    Can someone with a regular CRT tell me whether that Windows theme screenshot [neilturner.me.uk] looks discolored on the font antialiasing? It is a screenshot of a machine that is using ClearType to enhance the appearance on an LCD monitor, because you can see a slight red coloration on the left edge of the font and a slight blueness on the right, if you zoom in [hibbs.me.uk].

    I don't think it's a good idea to publish screenshots taken from machines using ClearType. They look better if the viewer has an LCD monitor with matching subpixel arrangement, but probably worse for other users.
  • by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @08:30AM (#9440565) Homepage

    The problem of not importing data happens when there are more than one user, and you happen to pick the wrong one.

    In my case, inexplicably, I had two profiles: 1) Default User, and 2) Default. I picked the wrong one. After that, uninstalling FireFox and beginning again does not present the user with the same choices, so it becomes necessary to know where the files are located.

    I've wasted several hours of my life looking for files when Mozilla or Mozilla FireFox have changed the folders where files are stored. (This has happened in the past, too.)

    How not to waste the user's time: When changing directory structure, put a message on the web site with installation instructions so that anyone having problems can know what changes have been made in the folder and file structure. We also need to know what files to copy, and how to merge them.

    Making changes without informing users is a Microsoft gig, and not one to imitate. (But Microsoft makes hidden, unwanted changes to network security, and that's a LOT worse.)
  • summary (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Wednesday June 16, 2004 @01:46PM (#9443854) Homepage Journal

    For those who read their comments newest-first, allow me to summarize 99% of the comments for this article:

    1) "The new default theme sucks."

    2) "It trashed my profile, crashed my computer, and lewd gestures at my wife."

    3) "It seems 149x faster than 0.8."

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