Fun with Firefox

it always weirds me out when people make similar products to competitors but then sort of make them worse, almost wilfully. for example, in OSX, Apple seemed to replicate the scrolling through windows with Alt Tab, but instead of scrolling thru windows, made it so it scrolled through open applications. Like, for fucks sake! you were so nearly there! but you fluffed it at the last minute!

Maybe its some copyright thing i dunno

firefox is kind of demanding! i installed the update, and it said in lolhueg letters, "You should update Adobe Flash Player right now."

RIGHT NOW!!!!!

now firefox crashes every time i try a google search :(

choose your firefox persona... poll :|

totoro

have upgraded to firefox 4. rounded corners on Add a Post box, woo.

is there any way to run version 3 in parallel? even though i installed in a different directory and have renamed the old executable clicking on it still gets me another Firefox 4 instance.

ah, ok, you have to close all the ff4 instances and then use the old executable.

any nice themes for it? im using the mac osx one now...kind of chunky.

I'm waiting until the themes catch up to start using ff4.

I really enjoy how it says 'close group' and you say 'yes' and it kills all your tabs. Brilliant.

I have a spaceman spiff theme

Not keen on ff4 in that they've moved the home and reload button to the right. Trivial but irritating.

move it back

right-click on tab bar, customise, draaaaaag

Oh, right I'll give it a go.

Okay, using it now. Love that it's faster. Most of my add-ons are still compatible. But where's Echofon hiding at now?

Oh, never mind. The add-on bar is turned off by default.

pingdom Pingdom
Wow, Firefox 4 has already been downloaded 6.9 million times (since yesterday). http://bit.ly/hpREUq
2 minutes ago

why oh why does the 'connecting' animation spin one way when the 'downloading' animation spins the other?

and i'm not sure i like the tabs ALL the way up there - further for the mouse to have to travel / me to look up to click on them.

plus some text boxes are now showing my input as a tiny serif font, which is bad.

You can set the tabs to appear in their more familiar location. Just uncheck "Tabs on top"

i like the tabs on top.

I think they must have inverted the "Open in new tab/window" popup menu placements, because I've opened shit in a new window about 20 times since I installed it last night.

they have.

yes, i knew that tabs on top was an option. that said, i think the tabs not on top is still a bit odd - they now go all the way across, including over my bookmarks sidepane thing whereas before they were only above the content window, so the leftmost is now too far left. will try and get used to tabs on top as the space it saves will be handy on the laptop (not that it's available on ubuntu yet)

johnny, middle button opens in new tab (i think, again it's an option) and is often easier.

middle button

You mean a three-button mouse or a laptop? Because I have neither.

does yr scroll wheel button click in? that often works too

or, you can press both buttons on your 2 button mouse and it'll do the same thing, sometimes (might be a linux thing and is almost unusable ime)

this isnt mac available yet right

it is

ah crap, thats what i was afraid of - my home g5 says its incompatible with my system

Hmm I might give this a go when I get home - does Adblock Plus and Noscript work with the new vers?

can't do it until there's a working favicon picker extension

xp yep

why oh why does the 'connecting' animation spin one way when the 'downloading' animation spins the other?

this is driving me up the wall

Ugh. That mobile version is atrociously slow on my android - nothing comes close to the default browser's performance. Desktop FF4 rules though.

love the new speed / tab candy groups

Two weird things... the intro videos said there was going to be a "Firefox menu button" but I just see the normal File/Edit/View etc. menus at the top.

Also there was going to be a "Bookmark Button" on the top right but I don't seem to have that either.

okay, apparently on XP you have to hide the menu bar to see the Firefox menu button. Got that now.

mmm, and there's no Firefox button on OS X, thank god. Hate that thing.

just don't upgrade FF ffs. It breaks everything! i.e., flash (which I hate anyway) add-ons, etc.

The puny amount of screen real estate you gain by using the Firefox button doesn't make up for the extra steps one has to go through to get to the bookmarks and tools menus.

It's horrible. It's like they ran out of ideas and decided to trumpet a big orange eponymous button that does a load of crap nobody ever cares about. The menu bar was just fine.

There's a bookmark button on the far right. You can move it to the far left through an unintuitive "Options to toolbar layout to physically move the thing" function.

Shit works better once I figured it out. That orange menu path was starting to piss me off.

Firefox 4 is doing weird things to our work CMS, and looks like shit on the office Windows XP system, so I'm either going to reload 3.6 or transfer over to Chrome.

At the office, I used to use Firefox for work, and Chrome for pissing about and procrastinating, but it looks like I'll be doing all of that on Chrome now, and checking into Firefox for Firebug when I need it. Never mind, I guess.

well gave it a shot, hated it. i'll stick with chrome.

I'd use chrome if it had adblockplus and noscript, but it doesnt, so i wont.

adblockplus for chrome

Well thats half the battle.

adblock plus on chrome only hides the ads, it doesn't block them. If that sort of thing matters to you.

i think firefox just wants you to update every 3 days so that people visit its homepage.

and today it's explaining the new tab screen to me, despite me having used it for months.

the very handy 'Youtube Link Title' script brok with the last update.

It's annoying. Still my preferred web browser though.

(updating greasemonkey fixed my greasemonkey script problem fwiw)

new version introduces ads to the new tab page (which is what the popup window was telling me, had i read it)

That's a bit naughty. I use the 'Tab Mix Plus' extension to customise my tabs. New tabs can be opened as blank pages (about:blank).

i haven't seen one yet. it may be limited to people who don't have 9 tabs worth of history to display.

why still use this over chrome, i'm curious?

When I last tried Chrome on a desktop it resolutely refused to open in full screen mode. Plus various other little niggles. By not using it I also feel less entwined in the Google ecosystem.

"i think firefox just wants you to update every 3 days so that people visit its homepage."

It has never once made me go to its homepage in windows/linux.

it did today in windows (win8). might've been more of an update page than a homepage.

this, i think: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/desktop/

"Committed to you,
your privacy and
an open Web"

which seems at odds with the ads thing.

interesting thing on slashdot today. how they get a lot of their money from google (for being the default search) but how chrome could mean that google will just stop paying them soon, leaving them up shit creek.

At home I can't go to a URL from the address bar. EG I type in "google.com" and hit enter, nothing happens. :(

http://www.cnet.com/news/in-major-shift-firefox-to-use-yahoo-search-by-default-in-us/

For a couple weeks FF on my Mac hasn't let me go directly to a URL. Doesn't matter if I do or don't use www, http, https, etc. I type it in and it does nothing when I hit Enter or the arrow button. Anybody else? I guess I could google it.

Other weirdness, on my work computer, the spellcheck dictionary defaults to Spanish, and I am pretty sure I never even added Spanish to my list of dictionaries.

Quick Googling suggests checking if you're in compatibility mode, and turning it off if you are.

Also sounds like maybe you've got a virus. :\

Thanks. I will look into it.

Are you thinking virus w/r/t of the language thing or the URL thing?

Both in conjunction, maybe -- though the first one sounds more likely.

The problem w/ the address bar not letting me go to a URL was a problem w/ a plug-in, though I couldn't figure out which one.

The problem w/ the spell-check dictionary defaulting to Spanish is now happening on my HOME computer too. I have no dictionary add-ons, so I don't know how to get rid of Spanish. It's not just an inconvenience, it's blowing my self-esteem b/c I realize how bad my spelling has gotten.

Does FF sync browser data for a single account like Chrome does?

This is the first Google hit for

firefox spellcheck language

Hi - sorry, I didn't see new answers.

My work and home computers were not synced, no. I tried that the support thing earlier, but it didn't work, but since I updated to the latest version of FF on computers, Spanish seems to have gone away. (I thought FF asked for updates automatically, but for some reason it never asked me if I wanted 39 or whatever.)