Archive for the 'Firefox' Category

Last night I posted a Firefox profile tutorial over at Born Geek. The guide describes what profiles are, what they are good for, and how you can make use of them. I’ll probably add to it over the next week or two. Some troubleshooting tips would make a good addition, and hopefully some readers will have suggestions on ways I can improve things. As always, let me know of any problems you might find.

Bug 343825, “Enable official branding and set version to Firefox 2 Beta 1 for upcoming release”, was recently checked in to the 1.8.1 branch. This can only be good news, and a sign that the first beta build of 2.0 is on the verge of being released. Perusing through the change logs over at The Burning Edge, as well as the nightly build notices in the Firefox Builds forum at MozillaZine, yields some cool new features and fixes. The ability to undo closing a tab has recently been added, although you should be forewarned of bug 343801, which causes the history menu to intermittently disappear. Also, passwords are now auto-filled before all images are loaded. This is a great bug fix; no more eBay login trouble!

I am really excited about Firefox 2.0, and when the first beta is officially released, I’ll certainly switch over. The nightly builds have been getting more and more stable, and they’re certainly a joy to use. Thankfully, release day is only getting closer.

Bug 242207 was recently fixed on the Firefox branch, which means it’ll make it into Firefox 2.0. This is great news, especially since I run into this problem all the time. The issue is that removing an entry from your address bar using Shift+Delete occasionally nukes your browser history. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into this and then wondered what was causing my history to get lost. It’s nice to see that someone has found the problem.

I’ve just installed the latest alpha build of Firefox 2.0, and things are looking real good. The Burning Edge has a change log for this latest release, displaying what’s new between these alpha builds and the current 1.5.0.x line of Firefox browsers. Alpha 3 adds session saver support, anti-phishing support, search suggestions in the default search box, and more. If it proves stable enough, I might just switch to this alpha build for my main browsing platform. The inline spell checking feature is great!

It’s rare that I have a problem with Firefox. But I can consistently make it fail when loading up a Java applet. I use the official Java distribution from Sun (version 5 with fix pack 6) to no avail. One particular applet that resides locally on my machine causes my browser to lock up instantly, every time. Perhaps the problem is with the applet itself. Or perhaps it’s “just Java.” But the applet works in (yuck) IE. Shouldn’t Firefox yield the same results?

I have yet to poke around in Bugzilla to see if there are any bugs filed on this problem. I can’t believe that I’m the only person who runs into this on a semi-regular basis. Granted, I do my best to avoid Java at all times. But every so often, I have to make use of this technology, regardless of my level of disdain.

I’m making this post from the Bon Echo Alpha 2 build of Firefox. The greatest new feature by far is the inline spell checking feature for textarea elements. It works exactly like the spell check feature in Thunderbird, and it makes blog posting that much easier.

The new tab UI is nice, but I haven’t yet opened a ton of tabs to see how they handle overflow and the like. I also like the new “Addons” window, which is essentially the marriage of the “Themes” and “Extensions” windows from current Firefox releases. Other cool features include an improved default search box (although Googlebar Lite is still the greatest one around … ), session saver (in case of a browser crash), greatly improved feed discovery capabilities (I really like this), and more. All in all, Firefox 2 is starting to look really good. I can’t wait to get my hands on a more mature release; I will definitely make the switch once the public betas arrive.

The only gripe I have is that the few extensions I have tried to install all fail (the maxVersion isn’t set high enough), so I’m currently extension-less.

On an entirely unrelated note, I have added a new Extensions category here to this blog, and I have placed all Firefox extension related discussions under that category.

It looks as if Firefox Places will be disabled for Firefox 2.0. This is a disappointing turn of events, but the developers apparently feel it needs more polish before it can be let loose on the public. I’ve only briefly played with the latest implementation in recent trunk builds (it has since been disabled), and what I saw seemed pretty good. Live bookmarks need work, and accessing the Places window is still a little clunky. The feature set for 2.0 is still fairly interesting. Hopefully, 2.0 will be an exciting release.