Firefox 0.9.1 and Thunderbird 0.7.1 Released

Dave writes "The Mozilla Foundation has just made available interim releases of Firefox 0.9.1 and Thunderbird 0.7.1. Apparently: 'These releases are designed to address early issues found in the new extension manager and automatic upgrade system as well as making changes to the new Firefox theme based on initial feedback.'"

Has anyone installed it yet??

[Murf_E]

Does anybody know if this will require a clean uninstall first??

Thankfully

[La_Boca]

I'm honestly happy they haven't changed the name again. Trying to get your office to adapt to a new browser is hard enough when they are afraid to use software that doesn't "come in a box" much less when it keeps changing it's name.

Adblock...

[shic]

I hope this version either includes Adblock as standard or at least makes it easy to install as an extension. Adblock is a major reason to adopt Firefox - and it was a huge step backwards to find that 0.9 didn't support Adblock by default.

Re:Adblock...

[Threni]

I hope this version either includes Adblock as standard or at least makes it easy to install as an extension. Adblock is a major reason to adopt Firefox - and it was a huge step backwards to find that 0.9 didn't support Adblock by default.

Given that previous versions of Firefox didn't include AdBlock either, how does continuing to not include it constitute a `huge step backwards`?

Re:Great work

[desplesda]

But it appears you just did congratulate them..

Good job for the Theme complaints, folks

[MicroBerto]

I, among SEVERAL others, were one of those that was vehemently against a change to the dreaded new theme in 0.9. It was said that the new theme was set in stone, and that the arguments have been made.

But that's what's great about this community. We complained anyway, and kept complaining. Our voices were heard - we have access to so many of the developers and are a vocal bunch. I'm not sure if the theme is switched back to Qute, which I like, but all I know is that the 0.9 theme just wasn't professional enough to "take over the world".

Good job to all those who helped the project realize that we needed something better. Open-source is not just software - it's social too. Compared to OSS developers, closed developers don't have close to the conduits of communication to see what the users truly want. Especially when we're that passionate about such 'silly' things.

So keep making your voices heard, and don't let autocracy-like decisions harm your favorite project.

Re:Unpopular default theme

[Anonymous Coward]

The newer buttons are an improvement over the old ones. They look a bit more polished and fit the browser better. Of course none of them even come close to the origonal mac OSX pinstripe theme (not the winstripe theme they turned it into). I actually went back to an old nightly build on OSX to get it back.

screw the default theme

[Atrax]

Charamel [members.shaw.ca]

I have nothing do do with this, btw, aside from the fact I love this theme.

Re:IE troubles..

[galego]

Or better yet ... when CERT reccommends [slashdot.org] using a 0.x release of another browser over the 6.x version of IE.

Poor GUI design at places

[ville]

Dunno if anyone noticed but some of the dialogs don't have a cancel button, or similar that will close the dialog. For example the Tools>Extensions dialog. All you can do is uninstall, update or check out more extensions.

There should be a close/cancel button. How can the application assume there is a "close" provided by the WM.

// ville

Re:Good job for the Theme complaints, folks

[tunah]

Actually, what I heard was a bunch of whiners complaining about how the new theme was an abomination and they wanted their Qute back, despite the reasons for the change, the fact that it was a work in progress, and that Qute was clearly still available. The decision had been made, and still stands - the default 0.91 theme is a much-improved winstripe.

(Don't get me wrong, I like Qute, and the 0.9 theme had problems, but the venom the devs got was ridiculous).

It may be your favourite project, but the people who do the work get to make the decisions.

Re:Good job for the Theme complaints, folks

[Paulrothrock]

That's funny, I like the new theme.

And what's funnier is that you can change it back if you want to.

I'm a funny guy.

not karma whoring but

[chegosaurus]

I do just want to say that as of 0.9 Firefox is freakin awesome (I had problems with it before), especially when kitted out with adblock and singlewindow and whatever other extension floats your boat.

I think the abundance of extensions show how many capable and creative developers there are outside the cosy little Linux/Slashdot/sourceforge community. If Firefox only ran on Linux, how many extensions do you think there would be? I'm betting not many. There's a whole world full of Windows/Mac/Whatever developers just waiting to contribute to something cool that runs on their OS. We should all be trying to be as cross-platform as possible, but half of us are writing code which won't even compile if it can't include "linux/sys.h". (BSD? Solaris? Never heard of 'em. Don't even want to.)

When I started this post I thought I'd get modded up for being a fanboy, now I'll probably get modded down for being "anti linux". Cool!

Re:Adblock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I hope those pages you're blocking the Banner Ads on find a way to completely block you from their site soon.

Seriously. You enjoy the services that some sites provide, the least you can do is to view their banner ads. That is still where a lot of revenue comes from. If everyone on the internet at one instance adopted FireFox with Adblock installed we would lose thousands of sites, or gain the most annoying advertising we have ever seen because someone thought they would be cool and block the banner ads.

While not the only cause, blocking of banner ads is one thing that has made these new cover-up-everything flash ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, and so on come around. People blocked the banner ads, revue went down, more revenue was needed.

It really comes down to this, if you block the banner ads, don't even both going to the site. If you can't simply let them get the fraction of a cent by some banner ad loading (yes CPM are still being used) you really have no right to use their free service. More and more sites will go away, employ more advertising that gets in your face, or go to a subscription model where you're going to have to pay your own hard earned money instead of just viewing an image.

View the banner ads. If you do that, blocking pop-ups, flash take-over ads, that's fine, at least you're letting the simplest and least annoying advertising load and actually giving back for the free sevice you are using.

Re:Which sites?

[Pedrito]

Which sites are you refering to?

Actually, Slashdot is one of the sites I had problems with. Sometimes different regions would overlap giving a pretty ugly display.

There were about a half dozen other pages.

You wrote: You have to remember, new Mozilla versions won't magically make broken markup/css work.

If IE magically makes them work, then I expect Mozilla to make them work. Keep in mind, I'm saying this from a user's point of view. Most users don't care if it's the fault of the person that designed the page. They're going to say, "Well, it worked in IE, so Mozilla must be broken." Even if the page designers screwed up, you'll never convince the users (except the technically proficient ones), that it's the fault of page designers, not if they see it working in IE.

Hurry up already!!!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

0.9.1.
Come on guys. I need 1.0 pronto.

Everyone at home is using IE6 which as we all know has major unpatched holes which have already been exploited by the russian mob [slashdot.org].(P.S. do you think that had anything to do with the Akamai DNS outage [slashdot.org])
Now this would not be a huge problem, except they're using their credit cards online, passwords etc. I've got some pretty critical stuff on that windows box and I don't want some jerk from Russia or the NSA snooping about my account, which of course on a windows box is everyone's account!

Yesterday I finally decided to get Firefox 0.9(.0 >:|) for the XP computer. I was influenced in no small part by CERT's recommendation. If they've actually noticed other browsers, then something must be VERY wrong. I'm trying to get the family to use it, but you know how it is. "This isn't the proper internet!" . "What happened to the internet?" etc, etc, etc.
But I'm past caring. The fact that MS haven't fixed the problem yet really was the last straw. I'm going to make them give up IE if it kills me. However Firefox on windows is still a little buggy, paticularly with autodissconnect. So Version 1.0 would be nice ASAP.

My reasons for switching are of course manifest, but on top of all of that I have a hunch that MicroSoft are going to drop IE in the near future. I know, I know they've re-constituted the IE team [slashdot.org] but that doesn't mean the team will work exclusivly on IE. I figure since IE is so full of holes, MS will just prefer to start from scratch, maybe develop new goodies/lock-ins. Tellingly IE still runs on 'number' versions; IE4,IE5,IE6 instead of the usual MS versioning; 95,98,2000,XP,2003 etc. Think about it. Hmm?

Well I'm not waiting around for them to dump the only windows browser I use, so I'm going to make a switch now. Hopefully I can keep the pain to a minimum, but it will mean downloading the ENTIRE Java runtime enviorment on a dialup... I'll see you in 2020.

Re:Good job for the Theme complaints, folks

[FauxPasIII]

> So keep making your voices heard, and don't let autocracy-like decisions harm your favorite project.

You listening, spatial-nautilus guy ?

dons flame-retardant suit

It's no Qute.

[gumpish]

Still no comparison to the refined elegance of Qute, not to mention Qute more nearly matches IE's theme, making converting the average IE user much easier.

What changes to the theme? No changes on the Mac!

[argent]

I see no changes to the theme, at least not for Mac OS X users, it's still got the same garish icons that showed up inexplicably in 0.9, and the original Pinstripe theme is still not available.

I don't care if the icons have square boxes around them or not, but they should at least make the low-intensity monochrome Safari-style symbols available for people who prefer them.

Re:Has anyone installed it yet??

[random_static]

Then the splash screen would disappear without a trace.

sounds like a feature to me. or did you mean the rest of the application disappeared also?

Re:Hurry up already!!!

[SenseiLeNoir]

Chill out, give the guy a break, and stop giving the usual slashdot "stiff upper lip" to those who are not developers!

Basically he is on dial-up (remember that?) and one "feature" of some dial-up/IE combinations is that it will automatically ask your/disconnect when you close the remaining browser window (i think netscape 4.7 did it too).

This is usefull for those who are on pay per min dialup, especially when family members are using the internet who dont understand enough about windows to right click the connection icon on the systray and select disconnect.

Firefox does NOT implement the signalling required to disconnect.

I would NOT like having autodisconnect on *MY* computer, but when you carefully read what the original poster is saying, he has some less capable users in his family, who assume IE *is* the internet. Having autodisconnect will definately make things easier.

Re:Adblock...

[jesser]

The most common argument against including adblock by default is code bloat / UI bloat, but I have another reason. If enough people start blocking ad URLs based on regexps, sites will start mangling all of their URLs to make ads difficult for software to spot, and that type of ad-blocking will become useless.

Note that this is not an issue with pop-up blocking. If the browser blocks pop-ups correctly, there is no way a site can pop up a window except in response to certain events (like clicking a link).

Re:Yes!

[Seek_1]

Luckily I don't have any mod points... otherwise I'd be torn between modding this Informative or Funny.. or maybe Redundant? ;)

Re:New theme

[SenseiLeNoir]

yes, and this is probably why mozilla/firefox is so "snappy" in comparison. All user layout is done by the gecko engine (including dialogs and chrome). this runs in a thread or two. then another thread for Network, and another for the scripting (i think).. etc..

Given the maturity of gecko, it nicely renderes its queue withotu havign to "wait" for something else.

An intresting point, because when mozilla was first previewed, everyone thoguht the whole idea of havign a XML renderer rendering the whole interface as a path to slowness!

Congrats to Team Mozilla for sticking with their plan, despite all naysayers. Just over Three years ago, Mozilla was seen as a "Bad example" of an OSS project. Now its seen as a shining example. The thing is, the roadmap and direction of Mozilla has never changed, its just the developers had faith in what they were creating.

Re:Has anyone installed it yet??

[cloudmaster]

For Linux/GTK2 Users

* Installer

Firefox now comes with an installer for Linux/GTK2 users. The new installer makes the installation process much simpler."

Before - "sudo tar xvzf" the downloaded file, run ./firefox/firefox.

After - give root permission to access your X display, start the installer as root to install to a system-wide location, wait for the GUI to ask you some inane questions, like whether you want to install any of teh 0 optional components or not. Run /crazy/path/to/firefox/firefox

Just how is the "after" step simpler? It was pretty darned simple before, IMHO, whereas it's a pain now to remote pugrade (I know there's still a tarball available, but I *like* to complain)...

Re:Adblock...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

You can set adblock to download the image but not display it. If you never clicked on banner ads anyways, this is the exact same as downloading banner ads but not displaying them as far as the sites concerned. Its still counted as a banner view and thus the site is still credited.

Re:Good job for the Theme complaints, folks

[OneFix at Work]

Here's an idea. Themes are generally not much bigger than 256k. There's already one included with Firefox. Why couldn't the Mozilla group include say the top 4 or 5 themes and extensions. That way, you would get Qute, WinStripe, Noia, maybe a version of Orbit and a Modern theme. They could also install few extensions like AdBlock, SingleWindow, etc...the default for these would be OFF, but this would certainly help folks trying to convert IE users over...

Re:IE troubles..

[galego]

that one's easy ... yes!