Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released 273
ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."
Great (Score:2, Informative)
They changed the location bar again.
Now I can watch people flip out about it on the interwebs for 6 months as well as being personally annoyed with re-getting used to how it functions.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
As usual with Firefox features, if you don't like it, you can probably fix it. Try the oldbar [mozilla.org] extension. There is probably a way to disable it without an extension, ISTR there is a setting in about:config for 3.0 at least, but you can google that yourself. Personally I love the awesome bar, although I don't think I will flip out about the new version for a whole 6 months, but each to their own.
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Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yes, many people are actually refusing to upgrade because of it."
Do you mean many as a lot of people or many as in a very vocal minority?
Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
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And a still larger number that did upgrade, but are constantly annoyed by it, even with the add-ins that correct most of it's behavior.
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Oh yes. I upgraded because I needed Firebug features that required it. But I'm still daily annoyed by it. I hate it!
X.
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Since I don't have a subscription to one of the browser market stat vendors, and Google removed their browser stats in 2004, I don't know the answer to this question. But I doubt you do either. I can't prove that it's a significant number. But you can't prove that it's only a vocal minority of cranks either.
But we do know that:
1) There was a LOT of complaining about the AwesomeBar when it came out;
2) User experience can make a huge difference in market share (see, Apple)
3) At least some people have stuck wi
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Whoa there, guess you didn't see the news...
The upcoming release of 3.1 is going to be named 3.5.
See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3.1/3.5 [mozilla.org]
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"... oldbar does not get you totally back to the old location bar. There are still important differences."
The most important shortcomings to me are:
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Then you'll be happy to know 1 and 2 are both fixed. I'm not sure what you mean by 3. You can delete whatever entries you want by hitting Delete. They've added the following about:config options in 3.1:
* browser.urlbar.match.title: Returns results that match the text in the title.
* browser.urlbar.match.url: Returns results that match the text in the URL.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.bookmark: Returns only results that are from the bookmarks.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.history: Returns only results that are from the browser's history.
* browser.urlbar.restrict.tag: Returns only results that have been tagged.
You can also prefix any address with @ to match it to URLs without going in in changing that option.
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I personally use Old Location Bar [mozilla.org]. It works better for me than oldbar did.
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Re:Great (Score:5, Funny)
I love slashdot because I love the irony.
Re:Great (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Great (Score:4, Informative)
You might look at the tab mix plus extension [mozilla.org]. It allows for a multi-level tab bar, among other handy features, like duplicating tabs and breaking a tab off into its own window.
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I prefer Tree Style Tab [mozilla.org] with the tabs down the left. Only problems I have with it are (1) closing a tab which is hiding other tabs closes them all (a feature), but Undo Close Tab only brings them back one at a time, and if it contained a lot, you can't get them all back, and (2) it occasionally locks up for me trying to drag tabs to new positions, but which I don't do very often.
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They have?
Looks the same to me [sorn.net]
Can't get it (Score:3, Funny)
It always amazed me (Score:5, Interesting)
How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.
My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?
I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.
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Firefox 3.5 won't have support for other codecs than those that are built in (various Xiph [xiph.org] codecs (Vorbis, Theora) and Wav). Since it won't be possible to install extra codecs for use in Firefox Firefox won't contribute to "normal people" installing random codecs from the net. If/when support for [mozilla.org] system [mozilla.org] codecs [mozilla.org] land (probably after 3.5) you may get the proble
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Check this out:
https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml [mozilla.org]
You can now dump the video to a Canvas for manipulation! Which means that you can now do real-time video effects in Firefox! The example above demonstrates Chroma-Key background replacement. An impressive feat for a web browser, wouldn't you say? :-)
Source and explanation are here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas [mozilla.org]
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Screw Redmond. 67% market share and plummeting. Let's start degrading our sites for IE and see how long their market share holds above 50%.
Here's the question: - (Score:4, Interesting)
...It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."...
Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.
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I'd say Safari on iPhone vs. Fennec on Nokia is going to be the primary arena in which people see any comparison.
On the modern desktop, speed is much harder to notice.
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Probably with respect to Javascript performance. A lot of people notice slow performance in javascript heavy websites like Facebook, Yahoo! Mail's beta AJAX interface, etc. If they see a dramatic speedup, they will notice even if they do not know why.
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Does that even matter? Joe Average doesn't complain about Firefox's speed or memory usage, only geeks do because they have 2000 tabs open and leave Firefox running for 4 years.
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>>Will Joe Public be in position to notice them?
YES.
Many of my admin consoles have gone web based. MessageLabs, Zenworks, many others. In IE it can take IE up to 2 seconds after each click to go to the next page. Firefox 3.1 beta lowers this time to MS.
Users will notice.
No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox? (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought Firefox was going to be implementing the same type of preemptive threading and memory protection that Chrome and, I think, IE 8 have?
So far the latest FF beta all seem horribly slow with multiple pages. The more tabs the worse the overall performance.
Also, the latest FF betas still have the awful performance rot where overall performance degrades over time as you continue to open and close tabs.
After using Chrome for a while it is hard to keep using FF when I've been able to keep Chrome open for a
Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox? (Score:5, Interesting)
FF isn't EVER going to have a pre-emptive threading and protected memory for tabs. Anyone who has taken a look at the stinking pile of shit that is the FF codebase can see that. It would require effectively rewriting the entire FF codebase from scratch. And if you were going to do that you might as well just go with Chrome that already has all of that fundamental work done and working incredibly well.
It is absolutely pathetic that Microsoft now has a browser that is the constant source of ridicule from open source users and developers that leaves their main browser technologically in the dust.
Chrome - pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs
IE 8 - pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs
Firefox - monolithic address space and all tabs are part of the same thread
Absolutely embarrassing.
What that means is Firefox will forever be riddled with memory and resource leaks over time as each tab gets opened and close leaving crap behind. And as more and more websites become more application like the lack of pre-emptive Javascript for Firefox is just going to become more and more painful. With Chrome and IE 8 you can have massive numbers of tabs with huge amounts of Javascript in each one and every single tab and the overall browser UI will remain lightning quick.
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>>It is absolutely pathetic that Microsoft now has a browser that is the constant source of ridicule from open source users and developers that leaves their main browser technologically in the dust.
Unless you account for rendering web pages. ....which i guess not everybody does. *shrug*
Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox? (Score:4, Insightful)
You could say essentially the same thing about Linux. It's an ancient monolothic design, implementing a still-more-ancient system. Its I/O scheduling is still completely fucked up, making it just painful to use as a desktop. But like Windows, it's popular because it's popular.
I don't think your comparison is all that apt, but if we go by it, there's still a crucial difference between it and the situation with browsers, and it is that there are mainstream browsers other than Firefox now that offer, or are soon going to offer, multi-process tabbed browsing. Also, the true benefit isn't performance, it's stability. Let Flash or Adobe Reader slow down or even crash or hang, it will only bring down that single tab it runs in...
Re:No Preemptive Javascript In Firefox? (Score:4, Interesting)
The memory protection side of the multi-process implementation in Chrome results in incredible stability.
But, the preemptive threading of the multiple processes for tabs gives it a massive performance boost above Firefox in real world conditions.
It doesn't matter how much is going on in other tabs and Chrome will feel just like a single tab is open. What is most amazing about Chrome is I've left it open for close to a month and it still feels like I just started the app up with a single tab.
Firefox you pretty much have to quit a few times every day or you start to notice that the UI begins to get slower and slower as more tabs are opened and closed.
Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame people (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone remembers FF devs flaming people in those FF memory leak stories from a few years ago. The anger comes from the fact they know they have a huge problem with the way FF is architected. Lashing out is a very common reaction from developers who are aware of some fundamental problem with their code that they know would require massive amounts of work they are unable or unwilling to fix.
The FF devs got away with it because they were compared to the horrible mess that IE was back then. Now IE has really gotten its shit together now with it great leaps forward with javascript performance, threading, and memory protection.
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism from the "IE sucks! I use FF so I'm cool" days.
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Only when Google decides to shoot its revenue foot and release adblock, I might consider Chrome.
Firefox by itself - I'd be grateful if they scaled back. Do you remember the origin? There was this bloated hog called Mozilla Suite, and there was this little-known neglected wild branch called Phoenix, which was meant to be the Mozilla engine with a minimalistic, customizable frontend - cut on all the bloat.
And suddenly people switched en masse to the small, lean "just a browser" thingy while the monstrosity di
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Give me a browser that can run on a Commodore 64-sized computer times the 8-to-64 bit word conversion..... .....somewhere around 1/2 or 1 megabyte in size. That would be slick.
Yeah I know. "Impossible." (sigh). Right now my FF3 browser is using ~150 megabytes and I don't know why it needs all that room just to display one single page.
Firefox memory problems were fixed (Score:2)
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I don't remember any Firefox developers flaming people about memory issues. I remember fanboys doing it, but there's a big difference there. The only "official" response I know of from any Firefox developers was Ben's "It's a feature, not a bug" blog post from 2005, which is long-obsolete. Ben doesn't even work for Mozilla anymore (ironically, he's on the Chrome team now).
Re:Should be obvious why FF devs use to flame peop (Score:5, Informative)
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism
It's easy to have a clean codebase when...
* No fullscreen mode.
* No detection of click-through
* Cut and paste uses icon-shape style instead of dragging an image
* Can't grow selection using cursor
* Not cross platform
* History is just a list of titles (can't even get URL info)
* History looks like a webpage, but you can't do text search or select or right-click on links
* Downloads looks like a webpage, but same problems as history
* Closing a window with multiple tabs nukes them with no warning.
* No 'view page info' showing links, media, etc
* No 'page style' css choices
* Poor handling of many tabs (they shrink forever).
* Can't control what sites are in the screenshots on start page
* Can't search inside and outside a text field at once (either or)
* Can't see pages that are in the cache (work offline mode)
* Print... just silently does nothing if no printer installed
* No rss support at all
* No multiple profiles
* With lots of bookmarks, it doesn't remember where you were in the list so you have to scroll to the bottom again to click more than one
* Can't allow/prevent pages from choosing their own fonts
* No whitelist for cookies
* No clearing of cookies on closing browser
* No separate proxy settings, have to use OS ones
* No settings for enable/disable Java, Javascript.
* Can't restrict Javascript behaviors, such as moving windows
* Can't disable image loading
* Can't modify MIME type mappings
* Can't set max history time in days or entries
* Can't set cache size
* No master password
* No whitelist to avoid site warnings
* No support for security devices
* Can't control update behavior
* Poor accessibility
* No autoscroll (fixed?)
* Can't clear all transfers (have to remove one by one)
* Buggy UI, for example Text Encoding menu doesn't autoscroll up despite having arrows (have to click arrow, can autoscroll down if wiggle mouse)
* No firebug equivalent.
* No mouse gestures.
* Plugins perform badly and/or fail
* Has bad rendering on many non-perfect sites (same with all WebKit browsers)
Oh yeah, and they stole the name 'chrome' from Mozilla, which is pretty scummy. They don't even give props to Mozilla for the name.
Let me know if these are outdated... I don't have my Windows vmware image handy.
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Version Numbers (Score:3, Interesting)
I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.
It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than .15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.
I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too :).
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Well, I understand your position but no system is perfect.
Example:
You release the game "Dungeon Plunderers" and you give it the version number 1.0 at release and increment(to 1.01 or 1.1, whatever is the liking) when releasing updates.
Now you release the sequel "Dungeon Plunderers 2", what should its version number be? 1.0? 2.0? Both things could be argued for. 1.0 because of the fact that it has no direct software connection with "Dungeon Plunderers 1" and may use things like a new graphics engine or even
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The versions are just the year.month of the release (8.04 is April, 2008). The animals are before they know the release date firm (it may slip due to a major bug being discovered at the last moment or something.), though I do like just "version letter", even though I still find the names silly.
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I think I'm missing something. I see 3.1b3 in my about box. Not 3.1.150. When 3.5 comes out, that's a higher number than any of the 3.1x versions. No confusion.
HTML 5 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:HTML 5 (Score:4, Funny)
Javascript performance improvements for *nix (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty [tuxradar.com]
definitely feels faster, but ... (Score:2)
I just downloaded and am using it now .. it definitely feels faster, however, will it crash less on a Mac? :(
I love firefox, and I use it everywhere, but man, is it awful on a Mac.
Please don't flame, just an honest opinion from a long time firefox user/supporter/evangelist.
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Really? What sort of bad? I use it on all four Macs of various ages and abilities at home. The only problem I've noted was that stupid Flash 9 would lock the system after a couple of hours. Flash 10 works fine (well, as well as Flash ever works...)
The "Awesome Bar" should be renamed the "Awful Bar", but that's apparently a feature, not a bug.
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Really? What sort of bad? I use it on all four Macs of various ages and abilities at home. The only problem I've noted was that stupid Flash 9 would lock the system after a couple of hours. Flash 10 works fine (well, as well as Flash ever works...)
Like after a day or so of usage, it just decides to not render pages properly (not just little minor things, but complete failure to fetch/load CSS files etc). I have to quit and reload it, and even then, I have to sometimes force quit it because it won't respond to the apple-q. I know it's not just me, because a friend of mine sees the exact same behaviour. He's moved to Safari. I prefer to have the same browser on all my platforms (mac/linux) with the same 2 add-ons (flashblock, web developer) for consist
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(And yeah, chalk up another brickbat for the Awfulbar. Spent the better part of the first day disabling it to restore most of the old bar's functionality. I remember URLs, not "title" elements. Please, for the love of Dobbs, if you're not going to back out this monstrosity, at least give users the option to ignore the title element while "searching" the URL history. The web is not AOL, and some of us do not navigate by keywords.
You're probably in the minority on this one. Firefox is targeting normal people, not nerds, and normal folks don't remember URLs particularly well.
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Official release will be around 2pm PDT today (Score:5, Informative)
Hey everyone - glad you're excited about the new beta, we're pretty excited to release it. We actually haven't finished the QA on the download page, the update snippets, etc, yet. What you're seeing here is that last night we started sending out the final bits to our mirror network. So yes, you could go get it directly off the FTP servers, but that can overload mirrors and make it hard for other people to download it.
We'd prefer if you waited a few hours until about 2pm PDT when we'll be ready to update:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html [mozilla.com]
which uses our mirror-rotation script to ease the load of downloads.
Mike Beltzner
Director of Firefox Development
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PDT - is that Pre-Download Tension?
I'm sure it's building up here. Some geeks might have to take the afternoon off work because of it.
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Pacific Daylight time. This is 5 pm Eastern Daylight time for those of us on the wrong coast.
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This link works, and seems to use the rotation script so I hope I'm not making things worse:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.1b3&os=linux&lang=en-US [mozilla.com]
(insert your OS of choice in the link)
TheUni
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Hi! That's good, but i'm afraid i have to be annoying now.
2 years ago, there were rumours floating around that "Firefox 3 will release official .msi files for enterprise deployment." 3.0.7.. or 3.1... or 3.5... is here now, and the only source for central management i can readily access are third-party packagers.
Some provide this free - tho rebranded - and others charge for the service. There are of course also commercial solutions to build my own packages. Any of them, especially the free ones, release
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We released early - go get it.
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Re:Bzzzt! (Score:4, Informative)
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I'm probably in the minority, but I actually prefer MOST of my apps to be single-threaded (or at least sticking to one core). I can only imagine what it would feel like to have Firefox (Javascript or plugins, typically) completely max out ALL my cores the way they are one now.
Ogg Video Codec Builtin Support (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally..finally!
Now I think I an transcode my snapshot video footage into a format that I don't have to worry about for ...at next 5-10 years.
The feature I want... (Score:2)
Here's the feature I want: bug fixes! Everytime I turn around there's a new Firefox packed full of new features I don't need. I wondering how rock solid it could be if they spent half that energy on fixing bugs. No new features until the bug queue is empty!
64bit binaries? (Score:2)
Couldn't they provide 64bit binaries? That would be very useful, at least to me...
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Interesting! But... what about localized builds? I like my Spanish speaking Firefox...
Something wrong with Firefox/Linux (Score:2)
I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser. I'm having a huge problem with random slowdowns, however. It seems to be fairly random, exacerbated when multiple tabs are open, and possibly related to Flash. When the slowdowns start occuring Firefox will start eating 99% of CPU and become unresponsive. A strace will show dozens of gettimeofday() calls every second.
A google search for "firefox getttimeofday" will show many people with similar problems.
This is on CentOS 5.2 with the latest packaged firefox...
An
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I had something similar to this and managed to fix it by changing my X configuration --- either from EXA acceleration to XAA acceleration or vice v
XSS XmlHttpRequest Functionality (Score:4, Informative)
My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control [mozilla.org]). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.
It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.
I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.
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It's a beta. You don't get auto-updated to beta versions.
This one is only news worthy because it has some cool new features
Re:Is it officially out? (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, yeah, you do if you're running 3.1b2. They have a beta update channel.
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Yes, you do. But the auto-update is not activated until later on, usually a couple of days after having the new version available through direct download.
Not officially out yet! (Score:5, Informative)
It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas [mozilla.com] page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes [mozilla.com] page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.
The release linked to in the summary may not be the final, completed version, as Firefox 3.1 beta 3 has not been officially released yet. Download it at your own risk. You should wait until it's available through the links I give in this post.
Re:Not officially out yet! (Score:5, Funny)
This is Slashdot really listening to its visitors. People complained that Slashdot was too slow in its reporting, that Reddit and Digg were always ahead.
Well no more, now Slashdot is so fast at reporting the news that it reports before the news happens. Suck on that Reddit!
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Well, I've downloaded it. The Mac version.
It may be that my 3.0.7 profile is a bit buggy, but 3.1b3 simply crashes again and again. And that after disabling (nearly?) all of my extensions, too.
Back to 3.0.7, at least for now.
Re:New location bar? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
F*** yes.
And having "sl" pull up "slashdot.org", followed by half a dozen unrelated sites that happen to have "sl" in their name, followed by the site that I was looking for that actually starts with "sl" but is "below the fold" because it's not awesome enough... really ticks me off. If I want to "search", I'll enter the name in the "search box". If I want to go to a website, I'll enter the site name in the location bar. I don't mind you searching titles as well, but list them below the URLs, OK?
Re:New location bar? (Score:5, Insightful)
AwesomeBar is not search. AwesomeBar is made so you can make shortcuts that don't require you to enter the URL. It gets smarter over time. Just use it some.
I can't understand why people are so pissed over it, I love it. It really did change the way I use the browser.
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Bookmark slashdot as normal and it will move higher up the list.
And it'd not a search box - behave yourself - use the search box for searching (CTRL+K).
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Try typing "x". *shudders*
Re:New location bar? (Score:5, Informative)
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
Highlight in bar. Press delete.
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Try Shift-Delete on OS X.
(OS X.5.6, Firefox 3.0.7)
Anyone can step up to the plate (Score:2)
You do have a good point. There has been talk about supporting additional image formats (JPEG 2000, TIFF, MNG) using imagelib extensions [mozilla.org]. They could do the same for different video codecs, as well.
I notice that Firefox is an open source project, so all it takes is someone to come forward to do the work. I also notice that the Google Summer of Code [google.com] will be starting over the next several months. Are there any students out the that want to make some extra $$$, get great software development experience, and add
Re:Mmm, bloat (Score:5, Informative)
>So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2,
yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.
>they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!
Yes. The web is a different place than it was even 5 years ago. Video is the norm, and once the video tag takes off, this will be very valuable to most users. Those that may not need or want video are probably smart enough to find a different browser that is more suitable to their needs.
>On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON.
JSON has been supported in FF since 3.0. FF 3.1 drops JSON.jsm for native JSON. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JSON [mozilla.org]
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Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.
I believe you mean your very unpopular, entirely off-topic opinion here. Yes, it's true! Trolling about Chrome on a story about Firefox's latest beta is, in fact, off-topic.
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Hmm. My experience seems to be a bit different than yours. I find firefox to be fast and solid. Maybe Chrome has improved since it was first released, but a dozen people here installed it on release date, and dumped it within two days because it was unusable. Besides, it's apparently Windows only? That's what Google tells me at least.
A big reason to use firefox for me is that it runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without issue.
"Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in