Archive for the 'Firefox' Category

Mark Pilgrim just recently patched a long-standing bug in Firefox (the fix will appear in Firefox 3). Currently, there is no way a user can disable timed redirects through META refresh elements. This becomes a gigantic problem to blind users who utilize screen-reader software. By the time the screen reader starts reporting what’s on screen, the page changes unexpectedly.

Beginning in Firefox 3, users will have the option of being warned when such refresh event takes place. A notification bar, just like the one used to alert the user of blocked pop-up ads, will appear when a META refresh takes place. The user will then be able to click a button to allow the event. Note that this new system will be disabled by default, meaning that everything will act as it does today in Firefox 2. Also note that JavaScript refreshes are not handled by this fix.

What I find most intriguing about this new system is that the notification bar appears just like an ALERT to assistive software. Mark has a blog post that goes into way more detail on the fix, so check it out if you’re interested. It’s really good to see Firefox making strides in this area. Yet one more reason that Firefox 3 will be super awesome.

A new build of Firefox is now available, so make sure you update. There are tons of fixes and improvements in this release; watered down release notes are also available.

I don’t fully understand why people get so upset about the supposed “memory leaks” in Firefox. While I don’t disagree that an application as large as Firefox could have memory management issues, I severely question the reports out there that indicate that Firefox eats up hundreds of megabytes of memory without ever releasing it. I use Firefox every single day for many hours, and I have never run into such a problem. In fact, what most people are complaining about is actually a feature.

That aside, let’s assume that Firefox does indeed leak small amounts of memory here or there. What would it matter? Sure it might be sloppy programming practice. It’s certainly not fair to eat shared resources that you’ll never return. But under what circumstances might you be hindered from doing work on your computer because Firefox is “consuming” one or two hundred megabytes of RAM? What memory intensive operations are people constantly doing that causes them fume over this perceived problem? I can think of no single instance of computing that would both consume the entire system’s memory, and be common enough that everyone encounters it on a daily basis. Granted, gaming might be one exception, but not everyone does that.

So my question is this: why care? Who cares that Firefox might use up to 200 megabytes of memory? Memory is cheap. If you’re that concerned about the memory usage of your applications, you clearly don’t have enough in your system. Just 1 gigabyte is more than enough for today’s environment, and NewEgg has 1 GB modules for as little as $80. If you’re complaining, just go for the upgrade; you’ll be glad you did.

If you’ve been holding out for Firefox 2.0 (although why would you?), you’ll be glad to know that Firefox 2.0 is now available. Lots of new goodies in this release: inline spell checking (the greatest feature yet), better tabbed browsing, session saver, and more. It doesn’t get much better than this (until Firefox 3.0, that is).

While you’re upgrading, make sure you have the latest versions of CoLT and Googlebar Lite.

With Firefox 2.0 RC1 on the horizon (the branch apparently froze last night for check-ins), I think it’s time for another of my opinionated views on the new Firefox theme. I have mentioned before that the new theme looked pretty bad, and apparently a number of people agreed. Thankfully, the theme was revamped in the September 11 nightly builds, and it looks a lot better. But people are still complaining. I like the new 2.0 theme much better than the previous attempt, but I still feel the Firefox 1.5 look and feel is ideal. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

So this leads to my main point: themes (or skins, whatever you want to call them) just seem wrong. So much time, energy, and development effort gets put into how stuff looks. Couldn’t all of that be better spent in making Firefox better than it is today? Let’s have faster start up times. The Places feature looks cool. And I’m sure there are other great ideas on the horizon. Can’t we work on those instead of arguing about the icon used for the “Home” button?

At some level, a certain look will always have problems. One can’t please everyone all the time, especially when it comes to looks; everyone’s idea of beauty is different. So, set a look that most everyone agrees on (e.g. the current Firefox 1.5 theme) and leave it alone! Put all of the development effort on cooler features, not on shinier icons. In the end, I think everyone will be happier.

The second beta build of “Bon Echo” (what will become Firefox 2.0) is nearing completion, so I am officially switching to the nightly builds for my browsing needs. And I’ve already been quite pleased. By default, the nightly builds come configured to use the nightly update channel. Through this channel, you can receive each day’s updates just by using the Help » Check for Updates… menu item in Firefox. They get downloaded, applied, and the browser is restarted. And with the new session saver feature in Firefox, you start right back where you left off when you downloaded the updates. How cool is that?

I still dislike the theme, and the list of bugs written against it continues to grow. Thankfully, the list of fixes is also seeing some growth. Hopefully things can get polished up by release time.

Sometime at the end of this week, or perhaps this weekend, I will be updating both CoLT and Googlebar Lite to work in the beta 2 builds (stupid maxVersion, grumble, grumble).

The new look and feel coming in Firefox 2.0 recently landed on one of the branch builds, so I downloaded one this weekend’s builds and tried it out. My verdict? It has a long way to go before public consumption. In other words, it’s pure crap in its current form.

A preview of the new theme is available over at the Mozilla wiki, and it looks pretty nice. Too bad the real thing looks nothing like that. Every icon looks grayed out, there are toolbar button hovering problems, widgets aren’t properly aligned, etc. A catch-all bug over at Bugzilla has been filed for the new theme and, as of this writing, there are 38 dependencies (38 other bugs) written against the new theme (and only one has been fixed so far). That list has grown steadily over the past few days, and I can only imagine that it will continue to do so. I’m excited about Firefox 2.0, but if Mozilla screws up something this basic, it will certainly be a disappointment.

In somewhat happier news, a bug that’s been around for some time has just been fixed in today’s branch build. Bug 318793, Firefox caches extension update file, has been a minor thorn in my side for a while. I’m glad to see that this issue has received the attention it so sorely deserved.