Firebird^H^H^HFox 0.8 is out

Get it here.

Hopefully FireFox will be the last name change of it.

I wonder if our very own FireFox31 was compensated fairly for this obvious abuse of trademark?

I wonder if Clint Eastwood will be able to steal it this time!

Naaa he's too old to think in Russian anymore.

Grr.. the main themes and plugins website seems to be fscked.

This mirror seems pretty responsive still. Looks like a ton of people downloading thig, guess thats a good sign of how popular it has gotten now.

Looks good, although it didn't seem to migrate my extensions and I can't see any way of manually moving them! At least it doesn't vape your Program Files folder which was a recent "bug".

Thunderbird 0.5 is also out - much quicker at listing folders etc.

The only real gripe I have with MozillaPhoenixbirdFox is that it sometimes takes an age to view the history list.. very annoying...

Gareth

I downloaded the Max OSX version. It is very nice thanks for posting the link I wouldn't have known about it otherwise.

Good name!

Let's see how it RUNS..

Me.

yn0t: Yeah, I'm only asking $0.05-per-download royalty for ::ahem:: likeness rights.
(Holden: "What's a punk like you know about likeness rights?"
Jay: "I got clients in high places. Lawers and ****") or something like that

cushman: Yeah, and Craig Thomas too.

::highfives foxtrot_xray::

Well, now I have no reason NOT to upgrade my Netscape 4.75.

I'm using IE 6.x with WinXP. Quick, other than tabbed browsing, top reasons to bother with FireFox...

And not its logo either - which I think is phenomenal and somehow entrancing. I do know that I'd be giving up my excellent Google bar at its custom settings for what looks like some cheap imitation (does it only allow Feeling Lucky searching?)

Also, is there a link with screenshots for Windows? If you want to get a browser war going, you need screenshots. Why so many application developers don't understand this is beyond me. I do mean shots that are bigger than thumbnails - I saw plenty of those stamp[-sized cut-outs on their "What's New" pages.

Bruno

Reasons I use FireFox over IE on a Windows box:

1. FireFox is quicker for me to get into and use compared to IE. Why? Well, IE seems to like checking all my drives and network shares when I type in a URL, locking it up for a decent amount of time. At both work and home, I have a decent amount of mapped drives and virtual CD drives. IE also seems to do this randomly later on accessing a site as well.

2. Extensions. I like one browser window, so I use an extension to ensure that even links that try to pop up in new windows are instead opened as a new tab.

3. Lack of major security vunerabilities. Sure, it doesn't affect me too much, but honestly, I dislike having popup windows, and I also dislike having popups from IE asking if I want some new spyware.

4. Form saving. IE has a bad habit of loosing what you had in a form. Firefox seems to hold what I typed in, so even if the BBS glitches, I can just hit back and try again.

5. Ability to not only stop popups, but also other annoyning javascript like resizing windows for no reason, playing with my status bar text, and other things.

6. Right click, block images from this server. Comes in handy for stopping ad banners.

7. If the above is not good enough, grab a custom .css to apply to pages to stop almost all ad banners.

8. The new download manager is rather nice. I like keeping multiple downloads in one window as well (can you tell I dislike taskbar clutter?)

Well, IE seems to like checking all my drives and network shares when I type in a URL

One of my pet peeves about IE right there. It's spinning up the freaking CD-ROM drive to grab the freaking autorun icon off of whatever freaking CD is sitting in the drive. God I hate that.

In fact, I'd pay good money to find a hack which globally prevented Windows from ever trying to retrieve the autorun icon. I've already turned off the ability for it to autorun discs, but it still grabs the icon anytime the browse tree in Explorer is invoked. Anyone?

(Sorry to hijack the thread, but you hit a nerve. )

Well, IE seems to like checking all my drives and network shares when I type in a URL

Doesn't appear to do this for me.

I've been using firebird for a while now, and just installed firefox...
if you want a full google bar for the mozilla browsers you can get it from here
I think the only thing missing from this version and the IE one is page rank.

Now does anyone know how I can get rid of the simple google search box (installed by default) that's next to the address bar?

Now does anyone know how I can get rid of the simple google search box (installed by default) that's next to the address bar?

Yup, View > Toolbars > Customize then drag it back into the window.

Gareth

cool thanks..

Another fantastic thing about mozilla (I don't think you can do this in IE but then i don't use it much so maybe you can), is the ability to assign keywords to bookmarks.

So for example you can create a bookmark to
http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?client=public&db=pc&addr1=&client=public&Submit.x=0&addr2=&advanced=&Submit.y=0&addr3=&pc=%s
with the keyword 'map'

and then just type 'map EH1 2AB' into the location bar and up pops a map of the area.

i've also done this for dictionary lookups, bugzilla bugs, MS KB articles - it's so handy:

adict: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=%s
g: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
dict: http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/chref/chref.py/main?query=%s&title=21st
kb: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-UK;%s

A little tip is to try out the AdBlock extension, it is great for blocking sites/adresses etc.
For example I have blocked:
*.ad.*
*/ads/*
*/banner/*
*/banners/*
*adserver*
*doubleclick*
etc...

And you can choose to either hide or remove the ads.

/Fredrik

You can do this with IE, although you need to download a tool to maintain the relevant settings.

Specifically you need TweakUI.

For example I have blocked:
*.ad.*
*/ads/*

Cool, that's the premise under which AdShield functions. Good to see it built in to a browser finally.

OmniWeb has had this for ages.

Cool!
But how do I install Omniweb in linux? :-)

Mozilla has got it for quite some time also, but through css...

/Fredrik

Another extension tip is FlashClickToPlay, then no flash-animation is played until you click on it....

When I installed it I realized how little flash is used for actually usefull stuff... :-)

/Fredrik

For some reason, Flash under Solaris sucks up an insane amount of CPU. That extension was a godsend.

There's an excellent userContent.css file on the texturiser.net tips page site - it blocks a helluva lot of ads, much more than anything else I've seen. Lots of other neat tips there too.

Gareth

Texturizer.net isn't responding to me at the moment. I want to read the FAQ there...

Anyone know where Firefox stores all of its history, cookie, and cache data?

In linux:
~/.phoenix/default/[8 random chars].slt/

In windows it should be under a similar place...
Something like c:\Documents and settings\tfabris\Application Data\Phoenix\ etc...
Dont have a windows machine at home..

/Fredrik

Yup, that's it, thanks.

I see it still does not handle IE style div layers correctly. They have had plenty of time to fix this and haven't so I guess they have decided, for political reasons probably, not to support them. And I guess I will decide not to consider their browser as an option until they do.

I would just like to point out that MYIE2 has both bookmarks like Stuart mentioned, and ad blocking with wildcards like Memil mentioned, along with tabs and mouse gestures and a whole bunch more. And the underlying browsing is done with IE, so more pages will be formatted and work correctly than with the alternatives.

How, exactly, does Mozilla/Firefox not handle divs correctly?

Please point out the section of the w3c spec where it deviates. I'm sure if it does you could submit a bug and the authors would fix it. Otherwise, it's an IE-specific "feature" that does not adhere to web standards.

> Otherwise, it's an IE-specific "feature" that does not adhere to web standards.

Oh, I am sure it is. Alas IE sets the standards now and w3c is pretty much irrelevant. You either play along or get left behind.

Edit: That came out a bit strong. Let me elaborate. The fact is that most pages on the Internet are made for and tested with IE, since it is the leader by far. For most pages that is not a problem, but for a certain percentage that will make Firefox fail to render it as intended. If the people at Mozilla want to make their browser usuable on as many pages as IE is, they need to support those extensions. But it appears they would rather make a statement by ignoring them, which is their loss, because most people will not even understand why it doesn't work right, they will just see that it doesn't. And that will ensure that Firefox never gets anywhere.

I see your point, Ninti: Yes, it's wrong for Microsoft to go deviating from the standard, but if the Mozilla people have any real interest in competing with IE, they might want to consider making sure their browser renders properly even on sites that were only tested against IE...

I know, it's the principle of the thing...

Most of the problems I have had with browsers other than ie is when webmasters cant write javascript's, so some menues dont work as intended...
I know that ie accept some errors in the javascript-code(I wont even begin talk about what think about that). Most other browsers dont.

I do it the hard way, I write the webmaster a email telling them about the errors...
I would like to fire them from their work - but unfortunately its not in my powers...

/Fredrik

I decided to try the widows version too and it works pretty good. It loads the start up page faster than IE. One problem though is that after I open it no matter how long I leave it open the first address I type into the address bar takes a while to show up like the typing lags.

Ok, does anybody know how to disable the "I'm feeling lucky" search in FF? It happens when you type something in that doesn't resolve normally, then doesn't resolve with com/net/org.

I changed my users.js at home and it now does a normal search but the final straw was here at work when I went to the Cumbria Safety Camera Partnership forum. I thought I had typed the first three letters and selected the URL in my history list but obviously not! I switched back to the tab and couldn't remember visiting a site offering "private access to thousand's of f*** movies". I did consider the possibility that the partnership hadn't quite issued enough tickets to pay for their wood-panelled gilded offices, and perhaps XXX popups were one of their ideas to boost finances.

Gareth

Because I'm a geek, I'm bumping this thread up.
Spoke to the nice gent who did the logo for Firefox.. Considering my middle name, I love the little graphic. It so happens that he just released a desktop of the logo. Very well done..
http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/downloads/firefox/
(Add the Style "Windows Recall" (from www.themexp.org) to your desktop, and you have a nice blue theme. Windows only, of course..)

Me.
/geek

Oh, it's a fox. As tiny as the logo is on the icon, I thought it was a gecko. Or a newt. Or something.

Yeah. It's strange how that works out.

Me.