Sicore called on all developers for their input. "If you disagree with a blocking call, say so loudly. Do not be timid. This is your product, we need you to own it," he wrote.
Developers should not disable Flash, Silverlight, or other major plug-ins because Mozilla needs as many people as possible testing on these programs, Sicore said. Windows users also need to report instances of hardware acceleration causing crashes or other issues. "Don't just assume that someone else has filed a bug already," he said.
"Firefox 4 is gonna kick ass, and you should be fiercely proud of it," Sicore concluded.
Mozilla released Beta 8 of Firefox 4 in late December. It sported a trimmed-down user interface (as has been the trend started with Google Chrome and followed by Opera and IE9 beta), and made some significant internal changes, with a new add-in system, a faster JavaScript engine, and lots more HTML5 compatibility.
Mozilla is almost ready to ship Firefox 4 and is working toward a late February release, Damon Sicore, Mozilla's senior director of platform engineering, said in a Tuesday note.
"We've worked tremendously hard on Firefox 4, and it's time to ship it," Sicore wrote to the developer mailing list. "We have to reach Release Candidate status as quickly as possible, ideally finishing the hard blockers by the beginning of February and shipping final before the end of February."
At this point, Mozilla has about 160 hard blockers - or bugs - to address. "Historically it has taken us six weeks to reach RC once we have 100 blockers left," Sicore wrote. "We must press hard now."
Those bug counts "demand another beta," he continued. "We'll drive the beta bugs to zero and ship another beta. If we can't get them to zero in reasonable time, we'll repeat, deliberately."
Addressing these bugs is priority number one, he said, "since it pushes the rest of our schedule." (story: PCMag)
Showing posts with label Mozilla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mozilla. Show all posts
Jan 16, 2011
Mar 9, 2009
Why Can't I Add Bookmarks in Firefox?
Q: I cannot add new bookmarks in my Firefox browser. This just started a few weeks ago. Any suggestions? —Harry I.
A: There are a number of reasons this might happen. First, before anything else, make sure you're running the very latest version of Firefox. You can download it from www.getfirefox.com. According to the Firefox knowledge base, an add-on called Bookmark Duplicate Detector can cause this problem. So if you have that installed, remove it.
Still not fixed? You may need to reset the local store. Close all Firefox windows, then click Start, click Run, and enter firefox-safe-mode. In the box that pops up, check the option Reset toolbars and controls and click the button Make Changes and Restart. You can accomplish the same thing by deleting the file Localstore.rdf from the same folder where you found the bookmarks file.
I hope one of these techniques solved the problem. If you're still in a bind, though, Firefox's own support site has a page devoted specifically to troubleshooting bookmark problems. (story Link)
Mar 8, 2009
Firefox 3.0.7 fixes 47 bugs, 17 critical
The latest update to Firefox pushed out to users last night via automatic update addresses 47 bugs and enhancements, according to Mozilla. 17 bugs were marked as “critical” or higher.
Five potential security vulnerabilities were patched including these 3 that were marked as “critical”:
- MFSA 2009-10 Upgrade PNG library to fix memory safety hazards
- MFSA 2009-08 Mozilla Firefox XUL Linked Clones Double Free Vulnerability
- MFSA 2009-07 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.7)
Glenn Randers-Pehrson, Martijn Wargers, Jesse Ruderman, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, and Timothee Groleau were credited with identifying and reporting the problems.
Most of the issues involve common C/C++ memory management bugs such as freeing uninitialized memory or memory that has already been freed. If Firefox were written in Java or C# or any language with automatic garbage collection they wouldn’t have these problems, I’m just saying…
Mozilla has been updating Firefox 3 approximately once a month since its release in June of last year. Here’s a list of all the updates so far:
Mar 1, 2009
Apple's New Safari 4 Beta
Like every new browser released of late, the Safari 4 beta, released Tuesday, claims faster HTML and JavaScript performance, powered by a new JavaScript engine called Nitro. Safari, however, claims to be the world's fastest browser. It's not, but in real-world service it's close enough not to matter.
One instance of these is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's little more than eye candy, but it's both stylish and useful at the same time. Another highlight of the new Safari include its Smart Address Field, which jumps on the smart-address-bar bandwagon pioneered by Firefox 3 and has been emulated by every browser release since—Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, and Opera. Add to this its revamped Smart Search Field, greater support for emerging Web standards, full-page zoom, and new tools for developers, and you can see that the Safari team has had their hands full.
I had a minor temporary issue when installing the browser on my Vista test machine, with a dialog box asking me to uninstall or repair the installation; clicking the latter got the browser up and running in short order. The download is bulkier than Chrome's, at 26MB versus just half a megabyte; then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS X 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.
If you've upgraded from an earlier version, you'll next see the new Top Sites page consisting of a curved 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited websites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any of the minipages to a spot of your choice, and "pin" it so that it always appears in that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue page dog-ear with a star will show up in its top right corner. In some ways I prefer Opera's handling of this: It only adds sites you specify to the speed dial thumbnails, but I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.
Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari does bring a very handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon a the top left of the window. You can switch the sidebar's function between History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and an RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices take advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can adjust the relative height of these two panels with a grab bar in the center of their divider – for example, you could have either one take up the whole area. The mouse wheel scrolls back and forth through the Cover Flow images, or you can use a slider beneath the images. (story Link)
Soon, majority of users will no longer use IE
The reign of IE is coming to an end.
The bulk of that loss comes from users of IE 6, an eight-year-old browser that many users appear to be replacing with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, instead of the latest version of Internet Explorer.
What’s more, 20 percent of web users still use IE 6 — and could, too, defect to Mozilla, Apple or Google’s browsers instead.
With the news that Microsoft’s latest incarnation of its browser, Internet Explorer 8, won’t address speed and “lightweight” concerns the way Firefox and Chrome do, the #1 browser’s market share with regard to cheap laptops and Netbooks may erode even further.
Is the king on its way toward death? (Long live the king?) (story Link)
Feb 28, 2009
Firefox Trojan Steals Passwords
A new Trojan horse program identified by anti-malware company BitDefender as Trojan.PWS.ChromeInject.B works as a Firefox plug-in.
Two files, one Javascript and one Windows executable, conspire to steal user logon credentials whenever you log on to one of 103 domains, largely belonging to banks (see the BitDefender link for the complete list). The sites are largely out of the US.
BitDefender identifies ChromeInject as "...the first malware that targets Firefox." It's the first we've heard of as well. The writeup has no information on how the file is being distributed or if it's mislabeled as something else, but they give it a spreading factor of "very low".
Take this as a warning, in case you thought otherwise, that Firefox is vulnerable to all the usual forms of attack. Use common sense when surfing even in Firefox, and especially when installing plug-ins. (story Link)
10 Bugs Fixed in New Mozilla Apps
The final version of the Firefox 2 generation made it's debut with a series of updates from Mozilla to address 10 vulnerabilities in their products. New versions of Firefox 3, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey are also out now for the same reason. Firefox 2.0.0.19 has no phishing protection anymore.
[Update: Well, turns out Firefox 2.0.0.19 will not be the last. A "clerical error" caused the omission of one of the updates for this version from the release. Sometime in the next few days Firefox 2.0.0.20 will be released to address this one vulnerability, which we are told is not an especially serious one.]
8 of the 10 vulnerabilities affect Firefox 3 which is now up to version 3.0.5, and 3 of them are rated Critical:
- MFSA2008-69: XSS vulnerabilities in SessionStore—Content could be injected into the session restore data, causing the browser to violate policies. This one also affects Firefox 2. Sounds difficult to exploit to me, but there aren't any details provided.
- MFSA2008-68: XSS and JavaScript privilege escalation—It's possible to attach commands to an unloaded document that will cause the browser to run Javascript with Chrome privileges. Serious. Affects all 4 apps, although by default Javascript is disabled in Thunderbird.
- MFSA2008-60: Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.5/1.8.1.19)—A common scenario in Mozilla disclosures: As the title says, there is memory corruption and they are reporting the worst-case outcome from them, which is entirely plausible. All four products affected.
Another vulnerability, rated High for severity, is interesting to read. MFSA2008-65: Cross-domain data theft via script redirect error message—. In this bug a special error condition is deliberately caused, exposing potentially sensitive data from the first domain session through the DOM.
The remaining errors in Firefox 3 are of either Moderate or Low severity.
There is one more Critical vulnerability, although it affects only Firefox 2: MFSA2008-62: Additional XSS attack vectors in feed preview—A previous bug fix in Firefox 2 turns out to be incomplete, and this fills the gap.
And we should add that actually, a new version of Thunderbird (version 2.0.0.19) may have been announced in the security bulletins but, as is usually the case, the software is not yet available. As of Wednesday morning 2.0.0.18 is still the version available for download.
Finally, and to repeat, Firefox 2.0.0.19 is the last of that generation of product. The official policy is that there will be no more updates, even for security issues. It's time to move on to Firefox 3. (story Link)
Feb 2, 2009
Can Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 Beat FireFox
Times are tough for Microsoft, with job cuts, the European Union breathing down its neck again, and Firefox slowly but steadily encroaching on Internet Explorer. More than ever, Microsoft needs IE8 to succeed if it wants to maintain its dominant position. Fortunately, the beta looked good. And while this first release candidate is little changed from the beta, the few adjustments made definitely improve the product. The most significant differences come from InPrivate browsing, the Compatibility view, and improved performance. The browser has also been made more secure, and it gives users convenient new ways to use Web resources. IE8's color-coded tab system, improved address bar, and enhanced privacy protections are noteworthy. Based on this code, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend that any IE7 user upgrade to IE8. PCMag.com got early access to RC1, allowing us to bring you this full review. You can get the code at www.microsoft.com/ie8.
Installation of the 13.5MB (16.5 for 64-bit) download requires a reboot. Versions are available for both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista and Windows Server 2003, though only for the 32-bit version of XP. Note that if you do take the plunge, IE8 becomes your only version of IE. You can't run 7 and 8 side by side. Also, don't try installing this version if you're running Windows 7—you'll just get a message that says "Internet Explorer 8 is not supported on this operating system." This makes sense, because although IE8 will be the browser that comes with Windows 7, the RC1 installers are for Vista (in both 32- and 64-bit flavors) and XP. It does, however leaves us in the unusual position of running a newer version of the browser software on the older OSes.
Terrific Tabs
Internet Explorer 8 makes some unique and welcome strides in tab handling. When you have several tabs open and launch a new one from within one of the open tabs, the color of the just-created tab will match that of its parent. All like-colored tabs are grouped together, so your new tab may not appear all the way to the right the way you're used to. Once you've gotten used to the change, it's a helpful visual cue not found in competing products. A Firefox extension allows tabs to have different colors, but without the logical grouping. When you close the tab of the page you're viewing, the new focus will be a related tab, not just the one to the right or left. (full Story)
Jan 6, 2009
MORE THAN A BROWSER: 19 Alternative Ways to Use Firefox
Browsing? That’s so 90s. With the myriad of available Firefox plugins, you can do pretty much anything with your favorite browser, and many of these don’t have anything to do with browsing the web. From managing your groceries with Firefox to playing classic arcade games offline, we present 19 browser extensions that have nothing to do with, well, browsing.
Time Killers
Cards - A collection of solitaire card games including such games as Aces Up, Double Klondike, Double Solitaire, and many more.
Clines - An addictive game in which you must build colored lines to win.
Froggr - Relive the classic arcade game, Frogger, from the comfort of your favorite browser.
Mines - Another classic game - Minesweeper - in your browser window.
Mozteroids - A variant of the classic arcade game Asteroids you can play in your browser.
Pag-Man - A Pac-Man clone with a two-player mode.
PingPong - For those people who find playing Pong against other people too difficult, you can just play against the computer.
PONG! Multiplayer - Play a game of the classic game Pong while chatting with people online.
Snake - A clone of the popular game Snake and Worm.
Xoom - A top-down car racing game.
Xultris - Bringing the love of the colored block game Tetris to your browser.
Utility Tools
A Contacts Manager - Import your contacts and manage them from your browser.
Calculator-Bar - Adds a calculator above your status bar.
Converter - Turn your Firefox browser into a handy metric/Imperial distance converter. It can also do temperatures and time zones.
cYMStatus - Change your status on Yahoo Messenger without changing programs, or even add the site you are currently visiting to your status.
eQuake Alert - Feed your earthquake phobia with this handy earthquake alerter.
FoxSaver - Turn your idle Firefox into a screen saver with daily updated pictures.
Grocery List Generator - Store grocery lists by recipe, or other items you need
ReminderFox - Lets you add date-based reminders and to-do’s directly into Firefox. (story Link)
Dec 30, 2008
50+ Google Reader Extensions and Scripts For Firefox
Don’t get us wrong, Google Reader is our favorite feedreader. But sometimes, we just wish it was a little…better. Here are 50 Firefox extensions and scripts to make Google Reader your own.
Note: some of these require the Greasemonkey or Stylish extensions. Also see Google Reader on the iPhone.
Notification
Interface
Reading
Search
Integration
Dec 29, 2008
How to Not Buy a New PC
'Tis the season for spending. But between the economy and the environment, do you really need a new PC? Here's how to eke a bit more life out of your older machine.
Tis surely the season for spending. But between the economy and the environment, do you really need a new PC this year? Maybe you do, and maybe you don't! Before blowing your budget on a new desktop or notebook PC, take a few minutes to see whether PCMag.com's library of performance enhancers can eke a bit more speed and reliability—a bit more useful life—out of your older machine.
Clean Out the Gunk
...and dust, pet hair, and everything else that accumulates on and in your keyboard, monitor, printer, fans, and CPU case. This is a pretty simple fix that can lead to dramatically improved performance—and it's not too time-consuming, although if you haven't ever physically cleaned out your system, you may be appalled at the accrued filth. Click for our guide to degunking the works.
UpdateFor both performance and security, make sure your operating system and all applications are up to date. In Windows XP, that means selecting the Windows Update link from Internet Explorer's Tools menu. If you've bitten the bullet and bought into Vista, launch the Windows Update Control Panel to get the latest patches.
Upgrade
It's common knowledge that insufficient RAM and low hard drive space will cause an otherwise healthy computer's performance to lag terribly. But nearly every part of a desktop PC can be upgraded, often cheaply and without much fuss. Be sure to check out our most recent Upgrade Guide for tips on what to upgrade and how to get it done.
Seek Swifter Software
For everyday activities such as checking e-mail and surfing the Web, your choice of application can make a difference. Various speed tests are now a regular part of PCMag's browser reviews, and Windows' native browser is regularly trounced on these tests by alternative browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.
Weed Out Useless Running Processes
The story called "Speed Up Windows XP" focuses on pre-Vista slowdowns, such as how to kill memory-hungry excess processes. But Vista users will benefit as well from learning how to use the free Process Explorer utility. Windows is notorious for keeping dozens of arguably unnecessary processes running in the background, sucking up system resources. Show 'em you're the boss by killing the extraneous ones.
Clean Up Your Start-Up
Both Windows XP and Windows Vista include a Start menu folder called Startup, and in it you'll probably see some application shortcuts. If there are programs listed in Startup that you don't want to load at system start-up (which will slow things down, after all), you can simply delete the shortcuts there. Easy peasy.
These days, however, many programs and processes that load at start-up aren't listed in the Start menu. You can still find them in the System Configuration editor (Start | Run | msconfig). And you'll find our instructions on taking advantage of this powerful dialog box here. There's even a video! (full Story)
Dec 19, 2008
Critical Internet Explorer Update Available
As you may or may not know, a huge security flaw was discovered in Internet Explorer yesterday that could allow criminals to steal passwords and even take control of your computer. As dedicated Firefox users, we don’t know much about the situation. However, we’d still like to remind 30% of our readers to run Windows Update to receive the latest security patch to keep your computer protected. The official Microsoft Security Bulletin can be viewed here where you can download individual standalone patches. Internet Explorer Beta 2 users are also affected by this vulnerability and should run Windows Update as well. Surf safely folks. (story Link)
Dec 10, 2008
Hands On with Opera 10 Alpha
Today Opera Software made available a preview of its next major browser version, Opera 10. The pre-release alpha version showcases a new rendering engine, Presto 2.2, which the company states will improve browsing performance over the previous version by 30 percent. The company also claims that the reengineered browser and rendering engine will lead in standards support, saying that it manages 100 out of 100 on the Web Standards Project's Acid3 browser test. The previous best among major browsers was Google's Chrome, scoring 79 out of 100. In my testing, I confirmed the rare 100 score, as you can see from the accompanying slideshow.
The very lightweight installer is a mere 6MB download. Firefox is just a bit bigger, at 7.2MB. Internet Explorer 7 dwarfs both, at 14MB. Installation itself is straightforward and quick. When you launch the browser, it loads in less than 2 seconds. On the same machine, Firefox 3 and Google Chrome take slightly over 2 seconds. But startup speed for all of the browsers is good on a reasonably up-to-date machine.
For speed, Opera 10 won't set any records, but it's fast—and it's still an alpha. Chrome's performance on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, however, vastly exceeded what the new Opera engine managed. The test runs a balanced variety of JavaScript operations—such as string manipulation, graphics operations, and decompressions—multiple times. Opera took 8,088ms (a lower score is better), far faster than Internet Explorer 7's 256,116, and slightly lower than Firefox 3's 6,535, but still substantially trailing Chrome's 2,763 on the same Vista machine.
Of course, according to Microsoft, JavaScript performance accounts for just a small fraction—under 4 percent—of actual Web-page loading time. And anecdotally, a PCMag.com page that took 4 seconds to load in Chrome took only 2 in Opera 10. But in a test called Lots of Text, which evaluates a different aspect of performance, Opera took only 92ms compared with IE's 128ms. Chrome blew both of them away, clocking a mere 12ms Firefox posted a respectable 64ms. I should note, though, that the developers may not have optimized Opera's memory usage yet in this alpha build. I loaded the same ten popular media-rich sites into Opera 10 and Firefox, and Opera required 156MB of RAM, and FireFox only 111.
In real Web site testing, the Opera 10 alpha works well with Facebook, though it didn't seem any faster than Firefox, despite the Opera team's claims. And Yahoo mail (in its newest form) still presents an error page stating that the browser isn't supported. Opera had no trouble with Citibank's site, but the Fidelity Investments financial site claimed that the browser didn't support 128-bit encryption, and it wouldn't display in my account.
The new version keeps all of the former's helpful and unique browsing helpers, such as tab previews, mouse gestures, and its trademark speed-dial page. With speed-dial, whenever you create a new tab, it opens and shows nine favorite sites of your choice, any of which you can visit with a single click. Of course, you still get a predictive address bar, much like what you'll find in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8. And Opera still boasts one of the best implementations of tabs in any browser. The "new tab" button is the clearest of that in any browser, and you can drag tabs out to a new window or to the trash can. This version adds spellchecking and a streamlined feature for updating the browser.
Developers, too, get new capabilities, including support for CSS3 Web Fonts and transparency using RGBA and HSLA. There's also an improved Dragonfly Web-site debugger that's capable of editing the DOM and inspecting HTTP headers. (full Story)
Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 Available for Download
A second beta of the upstart Firefox 3.1 browser from the Mozilla Foundation was made available to testers late Monday.
Highlights include a new private browsing mode that removes traces of web sessions users want to keep private, a vastly faster JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey, and more support for emerging web standards.
According to a Mozilla Developer Center blog post, Beta 2 is already available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux in more than 50 languages.
Code-named Shiretoko, Firefox 3.1 beta 1 debuted in mid-October, sporting improvements in its Gecko Web-page layout rendering engine and adding support for some CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 features.
It also added tab-switching previews, similar to those in the Opera web browser, but these were removed in this latest beta by popular demand. Another tab improvement is the ability to drag a tab from one browser window into another.
The address bar, known as the Smart Location Bar or the Awesome Bar, has also been made even more, well, awesome. Version 3.1's bar lets you restrict your address entries using typed characters, for example, to limit results to just bookmarked pages.
The new Private Browsing feature works with a simple menu choice, and any history and cookies created during the session won't be saved. It's a much preferable method than deleting cookies and history manually, which would make unavailable pages you want accessible later. The Private Browsing feature, however, does not keep a user private from the sites he or she visits. Even if users neglect to turn on the Private Browsing Mode, they can still remove history from the past few hours of browsing, or remove all traces of a Web site.
Aside from the new JavaScript engine's improved speed, Firefox 3.1's underlying Gecko 1.9.1 page layout engine has been sped up with "speculative parsing for faster content rendering." It also gives Web developers the ability to use "web worker threads" to perform background JavaScript operations so that pages won't be slowed by time-consuming calculations.
Update: After running the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark test, we can confirm that the new rendering engine is significantly faster than Firefox 3's. The test does multiple runs of a variety of JavaScript operations, measuring the time it takes to run--meaning a lower number is better. In the results, Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was nearly three times as fast as the released version 3, taking 2689ms compared with the earlier version's 6535ms. By a small margin it actually beats the previous speed champ, Google's Chrome browser, which took 2763ms. Chrome, however, still handily takes the lead in the "Lots of Text" speed test, which simply loads a Web page containing nearly a hundred thousand characters, taking only 12ms compared with Firefox 3.1's 84ms.
Beta 2 also supports more forward-looking Web standards, such as the w3c's Geolocation JavaScript API. This lets a web page query the browser's location and can be used to plot maps, give directions, attach location information to pictures, and more. The brower also now supports the HTML 5
Aug 17, 2008
Mozilla Fixes Awesomebar In Next Firefox Version
I've been complaining about new "Awesomebar" in Firefox 3, which is the name for all the new functions in the location bar. To quote the Firefox help on the subject, "[t]ype something into the Location bar, and the autocomplete drop-down will show matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you have bookmarked and tagged." Awesomebar is also known as the Smart Location Bar.
I liked to use the Tools-Clear Private Data feature now and then in Firefox 2, because it cleans out the Location bar history. You can get it with Ctrl-Shift-Del. When I started using Firefox 3 it looked like it didn't work anymore. That's because bookmarks are not considered private data to be cleared. Even after you clear all the private data, if you then drop the location bar down there are still entries in it.
I wasn't the only one who found this confusing. Several bug reports turned up on Firefox Bugzilla site and a popular add-on for Firefox, Hide Unvisited 3, came out to turn off the tracking of bookmarks in the Awesomebar.
Now Mozilla has announced that they will add functionality equivalent to Hide Unvisited 3 to Firefox 3.1. The changes will be in the form of entries in about:config. The feature will be in Alpha 1 of 3.1, which should be out soon.
Aug 15, 2008
Bug In Firefox Prevents Updates For Some Users
As I had reported in an earlier post, my Check for Updates option on the Help menu in Firefox 3 was grayed out:
I had a similar problem with Firefox back around version 1.5 and reported it in Bugzilla. I remember nobody being very helpful about it. My report was probably one of many that was consolidated into one report on the same problem. The original post was in December 2005 and it's still basically open, depending on who you listen to in the report's discussion thread. A second Bugzilla thread covers the same bug and attempts to narrow the bug report scope and give it new attention.
The problem appears to be that if a user does not have write access to the directory from which Firefox was installed then Check for Updates will be grayed out and the user will get no automatic updates. How would such a thing happen? In my case, I installed Firefox 3 from a network share while logged in as Administrator. I would argue that giving a non-privileged user write access to software installation directories is a bad practice. This bug appears in all platforms, not just Windows.
Some users on the Bugzilla thread are arguing that this is proper behavior, but the problem is that it seems not to have been the behavior in the Firefox 2.x generation. Thus the bug would appear to be a regression error. The threadmaster argues that this is proper behavior and that if Firefox 2 did not behave this way (which was also my experience) then that was a bug.
In the meantime I am forced to change to a behavior I don't believe in, either granting my restricted user account write access to the installation directory or reinstalling as that user with a new writeable installation source directory. Not a really big deal, but not the right way to do things.
(full story)Jul 21, 2008
Useful Tricks and Extensions for Firefox 3.0
Since we all know Mozilla has released the much awaited 3.0 version of Firefox. If you didnt know, then you can download it from following link:Or you can download its portable version which doesnt need to install:
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Portable Edition
So lets start it:
Fix Broken Extensions and Make Them Compatible:
When you upgraded to Firefox 3.0, you might have noticed that many of your favorite extensions stopped working and got disabled by Firefox.
Actually it happens because the developer didnt update the extension or the developer failed to code the extension compatibility version properly.
No need to worry. You can follow the steps given in following tutorial to make your broken extensions working again:
Fix Broken Extensions and Make Them Compatible With New Version
Fix Frequent Firefox Crashing Problem in Windows Vista
Many people who use Mozilla Firefox 3.0 in Windows Vista are facing a frequent crashing problem. After 4-5 minutes their Firefox crashes and Windows Vista shows a message, “Data Execution Prevention (DEP) has shut down Firefox to protect the OS.”
If you are also facing this problem, then use following simple steps and your problem will be solved:
Windows Vista Data Execution Prevention (DEP) Crashing Mozilla Firefox
Disable Automatic Virus-Scanning in New Download Manager:
New Firefox built-in download manager scans the downloaded file for virus or spyware upon completion.
Actually this kind of behavior only occurs under
You can disable this automatic virus-scanning using following tutorial:
Disable Automatic Virus Scanning in Built-in Download Manager
Disable OR Adjust URL Suggestions in New Addressbar:
The new addressbar shows a drop-down list of matching URLs as soon as you type something in addressbar. By default it shows 12 suggestions in drop-down list.
Some ppl might feel uncomfortable with this new feature and want to disable it. Some might want to increase / decrease the no. of suggestions in drop-down list.
So here is a simple and small tutorial for adjusting no. of suggestions in addressbar or to completly disable this new feature:
Disable / Adjust URL Suggestions in Addressbar of Mozilla Firefox 3.0
Disable Automatic Image Resizing:
Firefox automatically resizes an image if its larger than the screen area. There is no option available in Firefox Options to disable the Automatic image resizing. Even IE has this option.
So if you want to disable automatic image resizing, then following trick will help you:
Disable Automatic Image Resizing in Mozilla Firefox
Add Vista Aero Interface to Firefox:
Now you can enjoy Windows Vista default Aero interface in Firefox. There is an extension called “Glasser” which can bring the glass borders to Firefox window:
Glasser: An Extension to Add Vista Glass to Firefox 3
Get Opera Speed Dial Feature in Firefox:
“Speed Dial” is a nice and useful feature in Opera browser which lets you to visit your favorite websites easily and quickly by providing their thumbnails in a grid format.
Now there is a good new for Mozilla Firefox users. You can also enjoy this feature in your Firefox now.
You need an extension “Speed Dial” which can add the same functionality to Firefox:
Get Opera Speed Dial Feature in Mozilla Firefox
Enable Windows Media Player File Streaming:
Firefox doesnt stream Windows Media Player files in websites. But there is a way to enable WMP files streaming in Firefox.
Follow the instructions given in following tutorial and it’ll install WMP plugin for Firefox and your Firefox will start streaming WMP files without any problem:
Enable Windows Media Player Files Streaming in Mozilla Firefox
Hidden Easter Egg in New Version:
Mozilla has included a cool easter egg in new Firefox 3.0. Follow the steps given in following topic to reveal it:
Reveal The Easter Egg in New Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Beta5 and RC1
(story Link)
Jul 3, 2008
Firefox3 Sets Download Record
today's rating is 28,887,740
The open-source Firefox web browser now holds the Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in a day.Mozilla Foundation said today that its recent 'Download Day' record attempt was successful.
It thanked the Mozilla community, which downloaded the latest version of the browser, Firefox 3, an impressive 8,002,530 times in 24 hours.
The record attempt did not run completely smoothly, with many internet users reporting that they were unable to connect to Mozilla's servers.
Some visitors checking for the update were delayed by up to two hours as the servers buckled under the massive demand.
A matter of hours after Firefox 3 was made available, security firm DV Labs/Tipping Point claimed it had found a flaw that could let cybercriminals take over a PC if malicious links were clicked.
Firefox now holds over 19 per cent of the world browser market, making it the second most popular behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Mozilla believes that it will push over the magic 20 per cent mark this month.
The counter on the record site currently displays nearly 28.5 million downloads of Firefox 3.
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