I keep switching from Chrome to Firefox for reasons of principle ... and keep switching back to Chrome for reasons of performance. I hate myself, but can't help it. Firefox will briefly freeze scrolling a long page. Firefox will beach ball for 15 seconds after resuming laptop from sleep. And so on. None of it is crash/burn awful, but it adds up to be just irritating enough that it makes me mental. I tolerate it until I can't (for a couple weeks), then switch back to Chrome. Just did so yesterday, which is why I'm ranting in response to this headline.
This on OS X. Couple years ago when I was using Windows 7 all the time, Firefox was great. IME the fit/finish on OS X is not the same.
tl;dr: Firefox, I want to love you and be exclusive. Please change.
That really doesn’t sound like normal behaviour? Have you tried the ‘Reset Firefox’ button on about:support? More info at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-p...
This is all on a Windows 7 machine though, rather than OSX.
The irony is what use to be its greatest flaw, memory usage/leaks, is now it's greatest strength. Around Chrome 15+ memory usage started ballooning and was too much for my 2GB netbook. A laggy UI is much better than an unresponsive system from thrashing RAM.
Google+ is a great example - it slows to a crawl after a few minutes of browsing - it particularly becomes unusable when I scroll down and it loads more content via AJAX.
I'm on Xubuntu 13.04.
Apart from that, Chrome has very nice features that make life easier.
The PDF preview of Chrome is great. It can rival the PDF viewers on desktops easily. Heck, it helped once when I had to get a printout at a shop and they didn't have PDF Reader installed. I just dropped PDF onto Chrome and we had a PDF reader that could print. I know about PDF.js but it is not so good!
Next, the UI could be improved. Firefox has its upsides as well. I love the hidden status bar. I have dropped all my extension icons there. Now, with one shortcut, they are accessible and for normal browsing, don't come in between. But Chrome's way of managing extension icons is great, and one thing that particulary drives mad with FF is that there are no visible zoom controls. I have been using it on and off for a year now but I still don't know how to find if I'm zoomed in or not.
Chrome has really good Flash integration and I didn't know that I did not have Flash Player installed till I started using Firefox. What is stopping them from bundling a plugin like Chrome?
After using chrome and even safari, the UI feels so "thick". I think maybe a release or 3 focused entirely on performance and UI cleaning may be in order.
Its still my favorite browser though.
P.S. If anyone knows how to add that button to the FF toolbar, I would consider you a minor deity for at least a whole day.
edit: clarity. total rewrite.
If you don't know how certain options work, you should leave them alone; but if you don't leave them alone and something breaks, it takes only common sense and not specialized knowledge to suspect that the thing you changed has some relationship to the thing that broke.
De-featuring software for the presumptive convenience of a presumptive lowest-common-denominator user is not a good practice.
In the location bar type about:config
Search for javascript.enabled
You can turn it off there by simply double-clicking the entry.
So that's a yes and a no? :P
Although it's not a deal breaker for me (I am savvy enough to use about:config, NoScript, etc), I think this is bad for users in general. Many of them are not tech-savvy enough to dig into hidden configuration options. Though they certainly deserve better security when they browse the web.
I've been using Safari a lot lately. Only thing I'm not crazy about is the inspector. It's easily the worst of all the browsers, but at least they are fixing that in the next update.
I use Nightly so I've had the new scroll bars for quite a while now, so I'm inclined to believe they'll be landing sooner rather than later.
If you know a way around that, I would love to know.
- iClouds tab sync
- quite fast
- two-finger swipe for back/forward with nice "cover" effect
- scrolling is silky smooth*
- iCloud keychain*
* available on Mavericks. Scrolling was good enough earlier, but on Mavericks its butter smooth.
The inspector, as flawed as it is, has some nice features. I don't have Mavericks, but I believe these updates are coming: https://www.webkit.org/blog/2518/state-of-web-inspector/
UI feels and IS more native than anything else out there
Performance is better than Firefox and only worse than Chrome in beta technologies and a few edge cases
Pretty soon, <marquee> will be gone too. At least animated gifs are still stronger than ever.
I guess you can still implement it easily in JS though.
Which might never happen :-(
This OS is what, 12 years old now? Linux was on version 2.4.x when XP came out. OSX wasn't around yet, or was brand spanking new. I hate MS as much as anyone but that's still pretty impressive.
I mean other than developers purposely breaking things that already worked under XP?
To whit: http://beefproject.com/
New users aren't even readily informed that JavaScript is a thing.
if you search for the primary its there (at least it's on pgp.mit.edu as far as I can see) it's the primary that you need to trust for the trust to work
For FF 23:
gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.asc gpg: Signature made Tue 30 Jul 2013 09:32:39 PM PDT using RSA key ID 15A0A4BC gpg: Good signature from "Mozilla Software Releases <releases@mozilla.org>" gpg: WARNING: This key is not certified with a trusted signature! gpg: There is no indication that the signature belongs to the owner. Primary key fingerprint: 2B90 598A 745E 992F 315E 22C5 8AB1 3296 3A06 537A Subkey fingerprint: 5445 390E F5D0 C2EC FB8A 6201 057C C3EB 15A0 A4BC
gpg --sign-key 0x8AB132963A06537A
gpg --verify SHA1SUMS.asc gpg: Signature made Tue 30 Jul 2013 09:32:39 PM PDT using RSA key ID 15A0A4BC gpg: Good signature from "Mozilla Software Releases <releases@mozilla.org>"
It is however, indeed, only self-signed right now as far as I can see.
Curiously, the 1024 bit DSA key used for some previous releases (0x7f4d66451ebcab3a) has been signed by "Someone at Mozilla Should Sign the Release Key (so users can verify the key's owner!) <anonymous@lulz.example.com>".
A year ago there were a few addon problems here and there, but these days addon authors are used to the new release cycle, so I don't have even these problems anymore.
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-weekly-201322-...
Those first few (dozen?) releases people constantly complained about the version number changes, the rapid release cycle, and there was quite a bit of fragmention.
There days there are a billion people getting a new HTML5 browser every 6 weeks.
It is great seeing people update fast. I am waiting for the day when IE 6-8 usage goes down to 0.
Finally. That one took quite a long time for them. It looks simple in the change log, but I suspect that it was actually quite a big change under the hood.
EDIT: Woops, it seems that this is an error on release page, since they've hit a regression [1] and they've pulled the feature, it's due to come back in v24. And is seems I was right that this was actually a pretty big change under the hood [2].
EDIT 2: And they now removed the error about new scrollbar from the article.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564#c244
[2] https://bug636564.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=744...
A quick resize (redraw) fixes things, but it's the only app on my machine that tweaks like that going from space to space.
'browser.tabs.autoHide' config also removed, tab bar now always visible no matter what.
Add-on to restore old behaviour: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/hide-tab-bar-... (There is an unnecessary gradient to the background of my navigation toolbar now though.)
Discussion threads of indignant catharsis: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.fire... http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=2687123
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keywordurl-ha...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/keyword-searc...
I didn't understand why they would disable this feature which I love so much, but reading the bug explained that it was to prevent malicious apps from being able to change the default search in a way that is not easily reverted by users (keyword.URL can only be changed through about:config). Makes sense to me, and fortunately we have add-ons which can restore this functionality :)
>The new scrollbars has been disabled on Beta for Firefox 23 due to a serious regression. It is now scheduled to be released in Firefox 24 as long as there are no serious regressions.
* inspect the element
* right click on either the element in the breadcrumb view or in the source view
* select copy outer html
* paste into your document
fixed formatting
I believe the new baseline compiler is included in this release as described here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/04/05/the-baseline-...
If that is the case it's the most interesting new feature for me, but I'm a compiler guy :-)
Beside that, I love FF. Thank you for this release and everything.
