firefox 3

"We did it! We set a Guinness World Record."

Little over 8 million copies downloaded in 24 hours after its release.

 

It's doing quite well, I'm seeing it more and more. I'm also quite happy with it in terms of performance.

There was a browser test in the Dutch C't magazine though, and it proved what I already thought - Opera is the most fully featured of the lot out of the box. It just has just about everything that you want a cool plug-in for in Firefox (and it's cool all those plugins are there) by default, so when you do a new install somewhere, Opera is a great and quick solution. My mother was at my grandmother's place the other day and the IE browser was borked. I just told her to install Opera and bingo.

Sometimes Firefox still performs better though.

Opera made some good progress from the beta to the final 9.5 release too. I just did the Acid test, and the beta scored 61, final scores 81/100. For reference, latest version of Firefox scores 71/100, Safari a respectable 75/100. I think IE7 scored a 5/100 IE8 apparently better, but I know better than to install that in a beta phase.

 

Just had to come back to this, now that Opera's 10 beta 2 scores a perfect 100/100. Pretty cool to see that finally happen!

 

Meanwhile, FF3.5 is out with some nice improvements like tear-away tabs.

 

It also scores 93/100, so we're getting there. Much more important for me is the add new tab icon in FF 3.5 - not having a button to add a tab when just one tab was opened was my biggest annoyance with FireFox.

 

There has always been a button, just for some reason they disabled it as a default button. Had to enable it via Customise.
I don't really like the button being on the end of the tabs like that.
Its bad GUI to have buttons moving round like that & I keep opening new tabs instead of getting the dropdown for offscreen tabs

Also, the drag off to a new window bit is maybe a little sensitive, its fairly easy to accidentally hold the mouse button & move the mouse when opening a new tab -> new window instead.

 

Yeah, the Google Chrome version of that functionality has the exact same problem. Especially if you're doing something processing intensive on your machine, that can cause enough lag to trigger accidentally dragging rather than the intended selecting.

 

One of the super-duper annoying things in 3.5 is its insistence of re-opening all tabs whenever I load it. Previously it asked as soon as I restarted if it should re-open or start a new session.

I use *A LOT* of tabs - usually anything upto 200 at once. Because of this, FF will start using anything up to 2GB of RAM. So I open task manager and end the Firefox process. Then I restart FF and choose "Start new...". Now though, the first time I restart it it automatically opens all the tabs I had open. These can be anything from text forums, javascript heavy pages, large (2MB file size) images, Youtube etc videos and password protected sites. Imagine opening 100-200 tabs all at once of that lot...

Firefox hangs as it tries to drag a load of large images from cache, but slowed down by the JS heavy pages, but it manages to reload the Youtube videos all at once (which by the way can sometimes max out my 50Mb line) and automatically plays them, but I cant search through the tabs because its hung. Sometimes the insta-zomg of the reload pushes my quad core to 100% and I cant even open Task Manager to shut it down again... so Im left with 10-20 Youtube videos playing all at once, which if my speakers are on, is just about the most annoying thing ever.

Is there a way to turn this off? Ive looked through the options, but I might have missed it. For the record, sometimes I *DO* want it to be able to reload tabs, but it should ask me every time, like < 3.5 did.

 

WHAT!!!!!

 

I think I got the option after I upgraded to no longer ask this question, and I took it. But that might be a 3.0 compatibility thing. I can't find it in the settings either, but what I did find is an option to have FF notify you if your tabs are causing you to boot FF slowly. Do you have this option enabled? You'd certainly be a good testcase for it!

I would never use that many tabs, personally. It just seems sloppy, but then of course I'm used to more modest machines, and I don't know what you do with them ... !

 

Tools > Options > Main > Startup > When Firefox Starts drop-menu > Show a blank window.

Also, I'm with Davros.

 

So Firefox 3.6 is out.

New javascript engine is supposed to be much faster & my first experiences are definitely that it seems much snappier than 3.5

Not so happy about new tab behaviour though
It opens the new tab directly right of the tab its launched from.
Doesn't suit my browsing style at all, I need the new tab to be added to the extreme right.
Can't seem to find an option to change this.

 

about:config -> tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent -> False

 

Cool, thanks. Dunno how I missed that when looking through about:config

Slight correction though, its browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

 

Firefox guys, make sure you know about the right-click, explorer crapping out deal...

It had me frustrated for a while...

http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=59649

I still love Firefox.

 

It's a Microsuft bug and it has been worked around.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=518412

 

The boys just confirmed with me that the issue is resolved...

Thanks for the post.

 

So time for a bit of thread ressurection, I just saw this
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/23/firefox_tab_candy/

I typically have 200+ tabs open at once across 6 or more windows so being able to have that managed by a nice GUI designed for this kind of use makes me super excited
Particularly like the ability to file stuff away as 'to read later' & have it unloaded from memory (I guess its mostly just making a bookmark but nicely integrated with the tab management so you don't notice).

Sharing browsing sessions between multiple users has potential privacy issues depending on implementation but should make a bunch of stuff vastly easier. I'm very excited about implications in my workplace.

This is the sort of UI improvement that I'd sort of been expecting & sadly disappointed at being missing in Vista, a bit surprising (pleasant?! or maybe not really all that surprising?) that its coming from the browser rather than the OS.

Now they just gotta work out how to make the damn thing not crash regularly with much over 200 tabs
That might be a plugin thing though which on that topic, 3.6.6 or so now runs plugins in a separate process to help with not having Firefox crash (albeit for me apparently not overly successfully) & they released 3.6.8 today.

 

Weird that nobody seems to have looked at this yet?
At work I was raving about this & my colleagues were looking at me blankly until I convinced one of them to actually start watching the video & then suddenly we had a crowd of excited people hanging round

Fudzilla take on it here with a quote that fits my immediate response

Also a pic of what we're talking about

 

I is pretty cool, especially since Firefox 4 doesn't save multiple windows for saved sessions. I thought I was weird having many tabs open.
Such stuff can be done on the tabbed window managers too (i Linux only?) I suppose.