Firefox 3: The Flash
 

http://maxbro.files.wordpress.com/20...new_flashl.jpg

Whoa... what was that?! It was friggin firefox, and it was friggin fast.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...and-opera.html

I can attest to Firefox 3 beta being faster than Safari, in addition to Opera and IE (people still use IE?).

Firefox is where it's at.

I only use IE to update Windows XP as per the requirement.

I didn't know Firefox released 3. I will have to check it out!

Psst.... click on The Flash! I've got the download all ready for everyone.

Aw, shit! Thanks, man! (It's late, I'm tired.)

No, no, I added it after you posted. You friggin inspired me.

Just a reminder, Firefox 3 is currently beta.

yeah here are 2 things I don't like about the current beta. One.. the "home" key is now located on the bookmark toolbar. WHY? wasn't it fine where it was? on the NAVIGATION BAR? Now it pushed all my neatly organized bookmarks to the right by one margin. And two... addons/skins... it's all the chaos of patch day on World of Warcraft as everyone is going "why are my ui mods broken!?" same difference.

2 is a nag though, theyll update when v3 hits final.

I just need to figure out how to squash the home key.

you should be able to customize it just like every other button I'd think. Right click somewhere up there and choose customize. Once that is brought up, you should be able to move the buttons around. At least, that's how it works in Firefox 2; I haven't tried Firefox 3 beta.

My home key wasn't in the bookmarks, it was up on the toolbar where it was supposed to be. But I did have to go and find the forward and back buttons. And I can't get support for roboform toolbar on this one yet. Hopefully that is coming soon.

That was changed back last night (Bug 422420 – Revert home button move and related migration code).

The best part of FFx3 is the "awesomebar". They have reworked the URL bar such that you can type a few words, and it checks (1) the URLs of previously-visited pages (2) the page titles of previously-viewed pages (3) the URLs of bookmarked pages and (4) the titles you gave your bookmarks. And it isn't just a leading-word search: typing 'boing mansion' gets me a link to the page Haunted Mansion trufans party after hours in Disneyland - Boing Boing. Oh, it'll also search (5) the tags of bookmarked pages, but I don't do tags.

You have no idea how awesome the awesomebar is until you have a couple weeks of history in there and need to find something you remember seeing a few days ago.

Feel free to ask any other questions, I'm pretty well studied on the changes.

lol haaahahaha.


/flex


I bitch and the internet changes at my whim!

/leet

This.... made me laugh :thumbsup:

Yea firefox is awesome. I will be getting this version now.

And for some reason my school only lets us use IE for the site, so I use it with SAIT and nothing else.

Doesn't seem to like the Google toolbar.

FFx3 doesn't like all sorts of extensions, because the people who write the extensions haven't updated the extensions to the new version, or more likely, haven't updated the specs to note that they still work with the new version.

If you prefer to take the highway to the danger zone, open about:config and set both extensions.checkCompatibility and extensions.checkUpdateSecurity to false (if they don't exist, create them as booleans). Then you can install any extension, but don't complain if they break everything.

I am not noticing any speed increase... in fact it takes longer than the original 2.0.x.x. As for the memory foot print: I see that it uses less resources on start up but it looks to take up just as much RAM as the 2.0.

Edit: Longer start up time.

I just tested it on a second Mac (Mac Mini, 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM) and it's really fast. What machine are you on, Augi?

Windows XP Pro. When I am browsing it seems to speed up from page to page but I have a sneaking suspicion it is prefetching, making it seem faster.

3.0b4 in Ubuntu - the memory footprint is smaller, but browsing doesn't seem noticably faster (to be fair, memory footprint in Ubuntu wasn't that big to begin with). Crashed within the first minute of startup. I've restarted it and have been using it for the past ten minutes or so without issue, so hopefully it was an isolated issue. I do have my old version of Firefox still, just in case.

I gave my system a quick clean (CCleaned it) and it seems to work much better now. Maybe because that was the first time I started it combined with all the trash that accumulates on this little overused laptop.

Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz, 2.0GB RAM, by the way

Prefetching went in around 2002, I can't find any reference that it was changed since then.

If you go back, please create a new profile. Versions 2 and 3 don't mix well.

I always thought prefetching was only enabled with the FasterFox add-on.

I found "What is FireFox prefetching?", and it explains that one can edit settings not in the preference screen by opening about:config in a firefox tab. Using prefetch in the filter, one finds what the linked article describes: network.prefetch-next. I have "toggled" the set value and it now says false. To me that implies that prefetching is disabled. Am I wrong?

Sounds right to me. You might need to restart Firefox to get that setting to apply (some are only set on restart).

on my computer, opera (9.5 beta1) is still faster than firefox (3 beta 4)
who cares about memory-usage anyway? like you have 50 tabs opened up all the time.

Actually, I frequently do...probably more :| Not that that's a good thing...I need to work on my internet filter a bit :p

The speed is a side-issue for me. All browsers are fast enough, the bottleneck is the bandwith.

The functionality is what sells me on Firefox. Seriously, try the Awesomebar as I described it above, and tell me you can use any other browser after that.

I certianly care. In Ubuntu I'll typically have 8-10 programs running across various desktops, so it's important to me that the programs I run be as memory-efficient as possible.I may not have 50 tabs open, but as many as 15 isn't unheard of.

I played around with the awesomebar. It's nifty, but I'm not sure I'll have much practical use for it.

I'm currently in my Windows partition and have just updated to the beta here as well. I note that there have been some interface changes to the Windows version that weren't present in the Linux version. Maybe Linux users don't care about eye candy as much? The FF 2.x interface worked just fine for me, so it's not something I'm overly concerned about anyway.

ok, sounds reasonable from your point of view, but be sure that your situation is the exception. most people dont have multiple desktops with ~10 programs running at the same time.

In academics this is quite often the case. The moment I showed my peers Microsoft's Virtual Desktop Manager, they discovered a whole new mean to slack off in class.

The interface changes are on the Mac, Vista, and XP versions separately, if I remember correctly. This is especially noticable in what they call the "keyhole", the combined back/forward button. They decided not to do this in Linux, because the interfaces vary so much there that they couldn't establish what the base system should look like.

The Keyhole only shows up in Large Icon mode; if you hate it, try Small Icons.

edit: more details at Visual Refresh and Linux (and you?) at Zarro Boogs found.

I gotta say thanks to willravel for the heads up on the Firefox 3 beta. I downloaded it when this thread had 5 posts, and now we're up to 30. It's been an enjoyable browsing experience so far.

so on my macbook pro, the startup time is slower than Safari but the browsing speed is much faster.

On Vista its faster I would say than IE7 or Firefox2 but I can't get it to display video from Windows Media Player 11. It does it just fine in Firefox2 and when I go to the place it tells me to install the missing plugin, I download it and I already have it. I've tried repairing and reinstalling and still nothing. It's weird because it works just fine in OSX with the Flip4Mac plugin.

I think it does run and load a little faster but I can't get it to run MP either. So I'm closing out anytime I want to watch video content and opening up the old version.

Actually mine was a bit funny with the flip4mac plugin. Normally it looks like like Quicktime, but when I opened a video, there was no frame, nor was there a play button, drop down, or bar showing the progress of the video.

Hmm.

I've been using this for a few days now, and for the most part it is good. But the one thing that is aggravating me beyond belief is when I click on the down arrow on the urlbar to access sites that I have previously typed in the urlbar and it shows all of my bookmarks and has the description of the page in a big font. How do I get rid of this, and go back to the old way of just having the url names that have been typed?

How do you get rid of it? Go back to Firefox 2.

I have trouble dragging images to my desktop, actually.

Has anybody else noticed that their spell check is broken in FF 3? Is this just me? I'm very annoyed by it.

It seemed to work on Mac OS X. I'm sure it will be repaired in a bug fix considering how important a feature it is.

Bug 414201 – JPEG images dragged to the Finder have their file extensions changed to .jfif (Mac only)? It was fixed on Thursday, so try a nightly or wait for the next RC.

The design of it has changed slightly, the bold is gone and the font size is a bit smaller, but it is still 2 lines tall. And it still has your bookmarks and visited pages listed as well.

Instead of just hitting the down arrow, begin typing some words; either URL or page title or something. It should show up very quickly. See my link above regarding the Awesomebar.

Also, they just changed the frecency algorithm to give more weight to manually-typed URLs, but that's post the current RC, only in nightlies.

I have not heard any issues with spellcheck on the Mozilla forums. What OS?

Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10). Upon further investigation I have discovered that the spell check works in Pidgin and Thunderbird (v 2.0.0.12) as well as having worked in Firefox 2.x, but does not appear to work in Firefox 3.0b4 or in Openoffice.org; I'm suspecting it may be a dictionary issue and will look into that.

EDIT - I have resolved the issue with Openoffice.org (it was set to use a Canadian dictionary, which isn't available) but am still having problems with FF 3.0b4 when it comes to spell checking. I've been unable to find a similar option in either the Preferences menu or about:config, so it turns out it may be something specific to Firefox after all.

EDIT #2 - Switched back to FF 2.0.0.12 to confirm, spell checking works fine here. I think I may just stick with the release version and leave the beta for now, at least until the next RC.

I'm using Vista, basically against my will. It came with my laptop and given the option I'd switch back to XP. I download the 3 beta and encountered so many issues I gave up and switched back to version 2.0.0.12.


I'm certain some of these issues are things I could solve given time and effort, but I think I'll wait until they come out with a non beta version.

I'd be happy to help you through, but if you want to wait, feel free.

I've never heard of Firefox before. Is this good? Right now i just SBCYahoo. Can I use it with that...

Hehehe....

Shh, don't scare him! Internet noobs are an endangered species, and this is a rare opportunity to observe one in the wild...

I wouldn't call myself a noob... I just used AOHell for so long I didn't realize there was anything else. Now I use SBC Yahoo! yep no more dial up for me.

I still have AOL (The wife prefers it) and I have had it since oh about '97 or so heh.

I just loaded FF3 and so far, so good.

I will be happier when this gets out of Beta so my add ons will work.

What's "dial up" mean? Is that AOL's Internet on your cell phone?

Being a noob is not related to how long you've been 'online.' It's a description of how knowledgeable (or unknowledgeable, to be more accurate) one is.

I was under the impression that the SBC browser was basically a reskin of IE, although I could be mistaken. In any case, I wouldn't trust AT&T to provide you with a high quality browsing experience. AT&T are net nazis.

You'd probably be better off with FF 2.0.0.12 rather than 3.0b4, since betas are generally more buggy than release versions (hence why they're betas).

Agreed. During my 3.0 experiment I sorely missed forecastfox. I want my weather at a glance, dammit!

It is possible to use your extensions with Firefox 3.0b4 by overriding the compatibility check. You can do it by editing about:config, but it's caveat emptor; most extensions should be fine, but there are no guarantees.

In that case I am a noob. I never much played around on the net because dial up was always so damn so.

I may just have to tryout firefox. Are there lots of plug-ins and stuff? I like lots of gadgets to play with.

DB

It's funny... I don't need a weather report. It rarely changes. 30c with a chance of thundershowers.

I'd use this in a heartbeat however I've fallen quite in love with my NASA theme which unfortunately isn't compatible at the moment. Nothing in the address bar appears when I type in an address. By the looks of things, its all in white text. :(

I have too many extensions installed to play with the beta, but will give it a try when the final is out long enough. FF will always be on my list with that wonderful Noscript, weather one, and some others.
Of course this is the same person happily using Opera 9.23 still with no plans to upgrade that soon. I just wish that the 'neanderthal' theme from opera 6.x was updated.

Forecastfox is 3.0b4 compatible without tweaking anything. Noscript has a development build that is also compatible.

Firefox 3 beta 5 now available for download, if anyone is enjoying the betas.

I'm having a blast with them.

BTW, why is redmelon a yellowcitrus?

The red is now in the background. I feel more lemony than red these days.

And get that perscription checked, Ghandi - it's LEMon , not MELon. :lol: Although some people have read my username as RedleMon, which sounds rather rasta.

D'oh! Damn dyslexia!

I don't know about anyone else but I am getting killed when I try to go to seeqpod.com. The site itself tells me that I am not running adobe flash with java enabled (I was at the time), and when I try to go the new "Introduce People to a new Genre" thread, Firefox just chokes and kills itself. The embedded seeqpod show up but one will just start to randomly play, no song in particular, it will pause and start again... just for fun.

Hmm. I'm having no issues with SeeqPod or the thread in question, and I don't see any Seeqpod issues listed on either Bugzilla or Mozillazine.

Have you tried starting with a new, clean profile? Perhaps there's a bad extension mucking things up for you or something.

I've been using FF 3 for a couple weeks now and I am VERY pleased with it. It is noticeably faster and seems to hog less memory than FF 2. I also love how it will resume your previous browser session when you start the program... very convenient.

The only extensions I have are IE Tab and Flashgot. Neither I can imagine are messing with it.

Trying it out, that thread works absolutely fine when emulating IE through FF.

It was still having problems with my profile, so I created a new clean one. I then one by one put back my two addons and it worked fine...

Deleted both profiles and made a new fresh one, have it back to normal and it works fine...

My computer has moods, if you didn't know. That is what the tech guys figure. I have the ability to make computers have AI.

That's odd; I'm running Firefox 3 beta on a Vista machine without any problems. I know, it surprised me too!

no issues with beta 5, they pretty much fixed all my nags with the leap from 4 to 5 so, i'm satisfied.

Problems are back. It occurs after I try to access the seeqpod home page with FF. Worse the webpage still says that I don't have Adobe nor java enabled- wrongo.

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e2...5bardem188.jpg
Friendo?

I'm using Beta 5 here at work and I'm enjoying it. The only peeve I have is the lack of a button for homepage. Though I know I can add it if I wanted.

:orly:

I have a homepage button.....

thats odd.

If you used an earlier beta, it might be on your Bookmarks Toolbar instead of the Navigation Toolbar. If you have hidden the Navigation Toolbar, then you won't see it.

Just right-click on the navigation toolbar and choose Customize.

(The first thing I do with a new installation is to remove the homepage button.)

Just thought I'd mention that I finally upgraded to Hardy Heron last night (Ubuntu 8.04) and it comes with Firefox 3b5 pre-installed. Fortunately they've sorted out all of my issues, so this is something I am pleased with.

Woot! The latest RC1 has fixed all problems I was experiencing before. And surprisingly... my PDF Printer works properly now!

Excellent (but somewhat dry) analysis of Firefox RC1: Firefox 3 RC 1 full review.

Much less dry analysis by Dria; seriously, these are great writeups on the new features and just why they are so cool:
AwesomeBar is awesome
Firefox 3 Bookmarks (My god, it’s full of stars…)
Firefox 3: Color profile support (oh the pretty, pretty colors)
Firefox 3: Site Identification button
Firefox 3: Password management

i have one of the release candidates as of last night. up to then i was an ie user. on the about this is what it gives me: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

it´s taking up nowhere near as much VM as ie BUT the HDD is wrking constantly and pulling my system to a near standstill. suggestions? it´s actually runnign WORSE than ie for me at this stage, even if it uses 50mb of memory where ie would use b/w 120mb and 300mb. any suggestions? at this rate i´m going to head back to ie as having my music stop start like in city traffic is driving me mad :(

Let it run for a couple more hours. It'll probably be done with whatever it is doing soon. (edit) Try Periodic heavy hard disk activity with 3.0 RC1? - MozillaZine Forums for more information; could be your RSS feeds, could be the initial update of the Safebrowsing database.

eh, I went back to 2.0

basically I was running in to an issue with RC1 where some pages would just start turbo reloading/refreshing, like someone was jamming enter over and over

seemed to happen with flash driven sites or sites with flash ads more than anything, so it may be related.

Okay, so I downloaded "The Flash" and I'm not impressed. My 2.0 loaded pages faster and didn't eat 90-100MB of RAM. More like The Bloat.

not to get too off topic but were you ever on a board called Polycount ?

about 8 years ago I was on there as n8....just curious.

I've got this really annoying behavior when I click the RSS feeds. It always puts feed://... in front of the feed URL

http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/...t/HomePage.xml
becomes
feed://http//www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

And to top this off, I can't remove RSS feeds from the feed manager. I delete it, it disappears. I reopen the manager, and it is (null)--- restart the Boid and it is still there but with no properties.

Nope, this is the only board on which I am Redlemon.

Oh man, I practically lived there when I played Quake 2 online. Sooo many awesome skins.

just following up. thanks for the tip redlemon, i did that and it seemed to work then uncovered another problem which was svchost.exe was maxing out the cpu constantly. most forums said it was a worm or virus but i was sure it wasn´t and one one forum some guy mentioned going to windows update and changing from "microsoft update" to "windows update" and that seems to have everything running normal again...

In my previous Firefox version a clicked link opened in a new tab. How do I get V.3 to do so?

I've gone to options and checked "pages should be opened in a new tab" but still it doesn't work.

Any suggestions?

My FF RC3 behaves properly. It should be under Tools > Options > Tabs > "New Pages Should Be Opened in" > * "a new tab"

I love FF3 - it has saved my computer!

The usual setting is "left-click is within the same tab, middle-click is a new tab". Do you want every left-click to make a new tab? It probably can be done, but before I research it, let me know if that's what you meant.

(Release date on Tuesday!)

Now installing Firefox 3, the real deal. Awesome.

I like it. nothing much different but it is faster than 2. It seems new.

I almost forgot that today is the official release. I am now upgrading to 3.0; I don't expect to see massive changes from Beta 5, but hey. Release versions are always nice.

EDIT - Interestingly, just as I finished downloading and decompressing the archive, the release version came out on livna (or at least my box checked the repo and found it). One click and about 90 seconds later, it was installed. So far, I don't see any major differences from the beta. To be honest, though, I'd be upset if I did. Don't mess with what works.

See my post on May 18th above; that's what's new. Or the single page Field Guide to Firefox 3, also from dria.

Redlemon-- thanks: I didn't know that middle-click would bring up a new tab. This is all I need. Thanks again.

when i said: nothing is that different, it was because it ran just as good as 2. even better except for 1 addon that I need everyday. so for now, it's really good.

I started using this yesterday. So far it's seems much quicker and I've not had any issues.

One thing that seems missing is the "back" button, seems a "refresh" has replaced it. Am I blind?

I have a big green back button to the left of the refresh..

The back and forward buttons are combined to form the 'keyhole' on Mac and Windows.
http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/f...wComposite.png
If you managed to keep a theme that isn't up to date, that might be your issue. Or, right-click and customize the layout and add that button back.

And if you don't like the large back button, you can always make it smaller!

one minor aesthetic issue I find mildly annoying is how the addressbar is curved on the left side but has right angles on the right side.

just thought I'd note that here.

And the boring Linux version strikes again!

My address bar (excuse me, awesomebar) is not curved on either side.

I feel left out. So far as I can tell, we got no visual updates whatsoever. We may be nerds, but that doesn't mean we don't have a sense of style!

And yeah, I know Linux is different, since it has to fit in umpteen different environments. I still feel left out anyway.

I think it looks cool. The asymmetry of the back/forward is quite unique and stylish. The curve in the address bar makes it look less Windows 95 and more Mac.

The problem (according to the developers) is that you Linux guys have *too many* senses of style. There was no single good "Linux theme" to adopt that would work well in each flavor of Linux, and so they didn't make a keyhole. Seems like a weak argument to me, but whatever.

I like the asymmetry as well of the large buttons, but I really hate large buttons being a minimalist when it comes to interfaces. I prefer the stuff on menus to be as small as possible especially when it comes to me getting the most porn- ... website content on the screen.