Upgrading to Firefox4

I downloaded Firefox 4 yesterday (and apparently I’m not alone, Mozilla have already racked up over 7 million downloads at the time of writing) and have been genuinely impressed by a) the speed of opening from a cold start and b) improved page load time.

Of course I’ve not done any benchmarks so I’m not entirely sure how much of this is psychological (ooh shiny new product must be faster, that sort of thing) and how much is actual, but there we go.

My biggest gripes so far:

  • Support for browser.tab.tabMaxWidth and browser.tab.tabMinWidth has been deprecated. It took rather a lot of Googling to discover that a) it now needs to be done in userChrome.css and most importantly you need to set browser.tabs.animate to false otherwise you end up with ghost tabs. See: Firefox 4 Beta: Tab width CSS for more information
  • You can’t trial personas by hovering over the images on the Persona page now. You have to install, and then remove if you don’t like it. It’s not a major pain in the butt, just a bit of added inconvenience.

Err, and that’s about it. Not bad so far.

Posted on: March 23, 2011 · Category: Geek

My Own Little Browser War

If you’d have asked me lately what browser I’m using, the answer would have varied on an almost daily basis. I’ve been trying to find THE perfect browser for me but each one has pissed me off in varying degrees of time…

  • Firefox – my browser of choice since about 2005ish (possibly longer? it was still Firebird back then). I know, crazy long time to be loyal to a piece of software. Why did I ditch it? Because the latest version seemed to be causing memory hogging issues, instability, etc
  • Chrome – my browser of choice for about 2 weeks. Why did I ditch it? Chrome’s add-ons are not as good as Firefox and the lack of NoScript was annoying. Google need to stop blocking the technology that is required to make a NoScript version for its browser.
  • Namoroka – the unofficial 64-bit build of Firefox. My browser of choice for a few months. Why did I ditch it? Lack of Flash support, didn’t like some Firefox add-ons. Otherwise speedy and less hoggy than normal Firefox; I would have stuck with it if it hadn’t required me to constantly open Opera/Chrome to play Flash stuff.
  • Opera – 10.61 is much less irritating than previous version of Opera, and although it seems to use more memory than Firefox overall it’s faster opening and at rendering web pages. I like the integrated IRC client. Why did I ditch it? Widgets run as separate programs, instead of like FF add-ons. Some web pages render incorrectly. Doesn’t save login details for sites properly.
  • Flock – yuck! Didn’t even use it for half an hour. Why did I ditch it? I found it buggy and annoying. The Facebook sign in thing didn’t work and it was bloated with crap I didn’t want or need.

So where am I now? Well, it occurred to me this morning that I upgraded my RAM not long back (from 2GB to 4GB) so I’m giving Firefox another spin. If it doesn’t work out for me now, who knows where I’ll go from here… the future looks Internet Explorer shaped, and I’m not that insane!

Update 31 Aug: After posting this last night, I discovered the whole Opera key login thing and how it remembers passwords. I’m now back in Opera :D

Posted on: August 30, 2010 · Category: Geek

Downgrading Firefox

While everyone is busy upgrading their WordPress, I spent this morning downgrading Firefox.

As most of you will likely remember, I upgraded to Firefox 3 on download day and was “quite happy” with it. The excitement was fairly short-lived, unfortunately.

I’ve been having problems with Firefox for a couple of months. I’d close the browser — either to shut down for the night or because I wasn’t using it at that precise moment — only to find when I tried to re-open it that the process had hung. This required a manual CTRL ALT DEL -> kill process to be able to try again (sometimes I’d have to repeat this 2-3 times before it’d finally open).

After an hour or so of use, memory usage typically shoots up to the 300,000K+ stage, which is 3 times what I predict it should be at (I very rarely have more than a few tabs open at once; my Firefox is not themed).

Most annoyingly, every time I load a web page that is even slightly “multimedia heavy” — i.e. uses flash, JavaScript, multiple images — Firefox would crash and burn. Earlier this week, after the 9th time of crashing in one day, I used to Mozilla Crash Reporter to send a profanity-filled rant to the Mozilla team. I’d apologise for sending it but it wouldn’t be sincere… I meant every word I said.

So, to cut my rambling rant short, I downgraded this morning. I downloaded Firefox 2.0.0.11 from OldVersion.com, uninstalled 3.0.4 and did an install and upgrade to 2.0.0.18. It’s a miracle… I’ve not had a problem since.

Posted on: December 12, 2008 · Category: Interwebs

Firefox 3 – Bugs, Tweaks and Opinion

I’ve been using the new browser for nearly 48 hours now, so I thought it about time I share my thoughts.

The Awesome Address Bar

I think the name is somewhat exaggerated, and I hated the look of the new address bar so much that I installed the oldbar extension, nonetheless the new functionality is nifty. It took some getting used to, but is now increasing my efficiency (a teeny tiny bit).

I don’t like, however, the fact that the bar no longer changes colour when you visit a secure website. The critics of the critics point out “it’s spoofable”, but that doesn’t change the fact that I *need* that visual indicator just to make me feel safe. Sure, it’s psychological and means nothing really, and there’s a tiny padlock on the status bar if you care to go looking but that doesn’t matter: if I’m going to part with my hard earned (well, let’s say earned) cash I want to feel safe about doing so. Searching for ways to change it back have returned fruitless.

The “go” button — which doesn’t say Go on it so I’m not sure why I’m referring to it as such — is far too small. Although I am for the most part a keyboard jockey, I do frequently right-click paste URLs into the address bar which means it’s quicker to click -> than hit the enter key. However, I’m now having to mash around with my mouse until I activate the button because the clickthrough area seems ridiculously small.

Increased Speed

Many users are reporting increased speed, both in loading the application and in running websites (particularly JavaScript heavy games and the like). Personally, I’ve not noticed a stunning difference but then I never had problems with Firefox in the first place. I have always found that if you don’t bog it down with 50+ unnecessary extensions and dodgy looking themes, it runs at a more than sufficient speed.

The World Record

Firefox 3 topped over 8 million downloads as the 24 hour period was brought to a close, hitting 14,000 downloads a minute at its peak, with the total still climbing as I write this. Despite a rocky start, I think it’s pretty amazing to be able to clock up that sort of almost instantaneous user-base, and I’m not surprised that the reported market share for FF3 is some 5.8—6% or so. Not bad for a browser that’s been out for about a day.

Facts and figures aside, the cynics are already calling foul. Ryan Stewart, a “Rich Internet Application Evangelist” dismisses the achievement in his entry “Break the Guiness World Record For Downloads? Flash Already Did It” saying “we get 8 million installs of the Flash Player…on an average day“. Personally I think this is an unfair comparison — I download Flash because I have to, not because I want to — so I left a comment summing up my thoughts:

Given that you have little choice whether or not to download Flash — if you don’t, a huge percentage of websites don’t work — it’s hardly a fair comparison to Firefox. I could choose not to download FF and still have a variety of browsers at my disposal.

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I’d ditch Flash plugins in a heartbeat if only Flash were less commonplace on the web.

Dislike for Flash aside, it sure will be interesting to see companies making and breaking more web-related records now that the Mozilla guys have started on it.

…perhaps I’m a Firefox fangirl at heart.

Tweaking it Up

Once I’d settled into FF3 I set about making customisations that I couldn’t do via the normal Options route (about:config is your friend). Those that come to mind are:

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth — I have a small default Windows font enabled so my tabs didn’t need to be a minimum of 100 pixels. I changed this to 75.

layout.spellcheckDefault — set to 2, the spell-checker also checks single line input fields in addition to textareas, etc.

network.prefetch-next — this option basically makes assumptions about which links you’ll be clicking next and preloads the page to make the page load more quickly. I don’t like the idea of using up bandwidth by loading pages I might not even visit so it’s set to false.

I reset the back button to normal size; to do so, right-click the toolbar somewhere and choose “Customize”, tick “Use Small Icons” and click “Done”.

You can now change the size of the search/address boxes by over the gap between the two. This brings up a slider cursor… and I’m sure this doesn’t need explaining, because y’all know how to resize something. :P

Minor niggles aside, I am quite happy with what FF3 has to offer, and I’m sure that there’s a whole horde of features I’m yet to find. If you’ve not downloaded it yet, why not?

Posted on: June 19, 2008 · Category: Interwebs

Firefox 3 Download Day

It’s Firefox 3 Download Day today. It is effectively marketing hype and a viral campaign, although the less cynical among you may call it Mozilla’s attempt to create a world record. The idea being that after 3 years of development, the “new and improved” (oxymoron?) browser will not only revolutionise the browser market but will set a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads of an application in one day.

Three (how apt) problems so far:

  1. Their download day notification e-mail contained a link to download Firefox 2
  2. The only working site I can find with a Firefox 3 download keeps timing out due to stupidly high server load
  3. Thousands of people across the world downloaded Firefox 3 after midnight only to discover that Mozilla, in their infinite wisdom, set the record start time for 10am (PDT)

Still, hopefully I’ll be able to get my Firefox 3 before the 24 hours is up and help to set a new record.

Update (19:21 GMT): Melissa just posted a link to a Mozilla blog entry on the subject. Apparently their servers were overwhelmed… no shit! :P

Update (20:12 GMT): the download link is now working, although a tad slow to respond as to be expected.

Posted on: June 17, 2008 · Category: Interwebs