8 ms·

Firefox 12 released

162 points by aritraghosh007 15y ago

melling 15y ago
This is the one with a full silent update? Soon most people will be running one version of Firefox? Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers.
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  The major change to updates in Fx12 is that the Windows UAC prompt will no longer appear for every update (by default). Some additional changes (like finishing the update in the background instead of at the next startup) are coming in a later version: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/133/ http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/133/
- cpeterso 15y ago
  You can disable Firefox's "an update is available" nag dialog with about:config app.update.silent=true. This pref has been available in Firefox for a long time, but I believe it wasn't enabled because people who don't restart their browser often would not get security updates in a timely manner.
- Silhouette 15y ago
  Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers. I never understand this argument. All we have now is two different fast-moving targets, both with a track record of introducing breaking changes. IME this just results in a significantly higher number of customers complaining to our customer support team (not Mozilla's or Google's) that our web pages/embedded UIs don't work properly any more. I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway. As far as I can tell, about 99% of the developers using those features are people writing tech demos for the browser makers and/or trendy web design blogs. Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE. Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features. In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway compared to basic things like not freezing the entire browser UI because one tab is taking a while to load. That is something Firefox still can't do even though it's several years after every other major browser had it, and the apologists are getting awfully boring now.
  - sciurus 15y ago
    "Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features." Umm, isn't that what the 6-week-automatic-update cycle that you're arguing against is intended to address?
    - Silhouette 15y ago
      No, because many people aren't using browsers that update every six weeks, and even those who are don't get the same updates every six weeks. In this case, as far as I can see, the only new "feature" they've shipped is actually to do with the update process itself, and it's a change that is pretty controversial at that. In fact, quite a few recent updates to Firefox (and Thunderbird for that matter) haven't really had much substance at all. Not exactly a great argument in favour of the need for such rapid updates.
      - ok_craig 15y ago
        I wouldn't say there's a need for rapid updates; as a user, I just want them. I don't understand why users should be made to wait 6 months to a year for small features that are available now.
        Silhouette 15y ago
        As a user, why do you want them? They are of no value to you unless sites or apps that you value are making use of them, and few production sites use most of the bleeding edge tech that supposedly justifies the rapid release cycle. A lot of that tech is of more interest for app-like pages rather than classical web sites, but then you start running into portability issues: not every browser has a fast cycle, and those that do aren't necessarily including the same features at the same pace. That means everyone needs to code a fallback approach anyway unless it's acceptable for their product to support only specific browsers. Once you start down that path, the core functionality is probably there for your users even if you don't then reimplement it a second time or add enhancements using the new technologies.
Derbasti 15y ago
Will there be a Lion fullscreen-mode and Lion-style floating scrollbars? That would make my day! Edit: Apparently, not so. A pity. Does anyone know when we will see them?
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  Lion fullscreen is coming in Firefox 14: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639705 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639705 You can use it today on the Nightly builds from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ http://nightly.mozilla.org/ or in a few days on the Aurora channel: https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/ https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/ Lion-style scrollbars are still in progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564 You can test them on the UX branch: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly-build-of-firefox/ https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly...
  - Derbasti 15y ago
    So that's like, three months? Ok, not exactly the first ones on the field, but good enough for me ;)
    - mbrubeck 15y ago
      Correct, Firefox 14 will be released in 12 weeks. (Or you'll get it in just 6 weeks if you switch to the beta channel!)
- poodougnut 15y ago
  Lion scrollbars landed on the UX channel a few days ago.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > Lion fullscreen-mode Why would you want that?
  - Terretta 15y ago
dfischer 15y ago
We're going to have Firefox 50 in a year at this rate.
- aritraghosh007 15y ago
  With silent updates in place , I think even 100 is a possibility !
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  Both Firefox and Chrome increment their version number every six weeks, so it's easy to see that at this rate in a year we will have Chrome 26 and Firefox 20. :)
- melling 15y ago
  In an ideal world, we'd get an update every day. Continuous integration, a comprehensive test suite, a few million hackers test for a day, then and out the door. There's always a train leaving the station.
eps 15y ago
Anyone else noticed a significant improvement in overall responsiveness or am I seeing things?
- jmathai 15y ago
  I've been using Nightly for a few weeks and definitely noticed. It's been about as fast as Chrome which used to be way faster.
  - cpeterso 15y ago
    I've been using Nightly for months now and it is surprisingly stable.
bnr 15y ago
I still have my fingers crossed for Electrolysis (out of process tabs/sandboxing) to ship before Firefox 30.
- zobzu 15y ago
  It ain't going to happen until they rewrite Gecko in rust. But there might be things that are close enough to it.
  - sanxiyn 15y ago
    No, Electrolysis is unrelated to Rust. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis A big problem for Gecko which does not exist for WebKit is XUL extensions. If you think about it, XUL extensions must run in UI process (unlike Chrome extensions), but XUL extensions can also access web content which lives in web process. It is nearly impossible to make this 100% compatible...
    - RDeckard 15y ago
      I thought most Mozilla software was internally based on XPCOM. Then why can't they just proxy the interface calls to go to a different process via standard IPC mechanisms? (I've no knowledge of XUL extension model thou)
      - sanxiyn 15y ago
        They can and they do. It is called CPOW(Cross-Process Object Wrapper). https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/CPOW https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/CPOW The issue is that extensions expect to access web content synchronously, so you need synchronous IPC for perfect compatibility, but that causes your UI process to block on your web process.
    - zobzu 15y ago
      I did not mean that it's technically related. Rather, that it's my opinion they won't do it until then. The reason is that there is too much to rewrite/change/fix. Then if they do manage to do it (and do it right), well, I'd have been wrong :)
superxor 15y ago
Obligatory release notes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/ Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/buglist.html http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/bugli...
typicalrunt 15y ago
In case anyone opens their Firefox 11 client and it doesn't automatically recognize there is an update available, you can go to Help -> About Firefox and it will grab the update. Wait for the download to finish, then click the "Apply Update" button and you will be updated to Firefox 12.
- cpher 15y ago
  Thanks, worked just like you said.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  I believe Mozilla sometimes "soft launches" auto-updates to a subset of Firefox users to find any new issues before opening the flood gates to update everyone. But, as you point out, manually checking for updates should always find the latest version.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    I don't think the soft launch is so much for finding issues, it's just so their download servers don't get slaughtered.
    - mcpherrinm 15y ago
      Beta and earlier users tend to be different in a lot of ways from regular Firefox users. Soft launching surely helps the download servers, but a large point is to watch for new crashes, so that any emergency fixes can be put in before unthrottling the release. Past issues include antiviruses that crash Firefox because of their invasive monitoring. While ideally these things would be caught by QA or early adopter users, there's no way to test all possible combinations of software.
- Gormo 15y ago
  Be careful, though. If you go to the About dialog, it will begin downloading and installing the update automatically, without getting your permission, and you won't be able to cancel it from within the browser.
shin_lao 15y ago
They're installing a service that runs with elevated privileges to bypass UAC. I don't think it's a good thing to install that kind of loophole on your PC.
- ars 15y ago
  It's even worse to have people with ancient versions because firefox was installed by admin, but they (as they should) run as a regular user.
- RDeckard 15y ago
  As long as it's done right and only installs updates signed by Mozilla, then it is secure.
  - shin_lao 15y ago
    I'll bet you a beer or whatever you like to drink we're going to see a flurry of exploits around this service. I happen to have written a similar service a couple of years ago for a very different purpose and let me tell you one thing: this is nothing less than a backdoor. You run a program from the service and make sure it runs in the user's session. The problem is, how do you decide a program is "legit"? You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs). The other big problem - assuming they have a perfect gateway - is that a vulnerability in Firefox could become catastrophic as it could go through the service to run as a privileged user and wreak havoc.
    - jsight 15y ago
      > You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs). I read this a few times, and I still don't get why you wouldn't check the whole binary. Care to elaborate?
    - zobzu 15y ago
mmuro 15y ago
I don't know how Mozilla came to the conclusion that their Web inspector is actually usable. The HTML doesn't appear when inspecting (no, that takes an extra click). The CSS appears in an extra vertical sidebar taking up even more room on the screen. You can't add a Console button, but 3D View is worthy? I love Firefox, but this it's just plain odd they didn't integrate Firebug into core.
- padenot 15y ago
  In my Nightly (don't know about current release), I just have to click once on the show html button, and if I inspect another page later, it brings the HTML panel along. I actually find the vertical CSS sidebar to be an excellent choice. CSS (and code in general) is an inherently vertical thing (short line length), whereas the number of rules displayed is maximized using a vertical panel. A console button would maybe be a good idea, but I only use the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't mind, this prevent reducing the visual clutter. Firebug is a seriously old and not that sufficiently maintened code base, hence the choice to write new tools, more integrated with the browser.
  - Jgrubb 15y ago
    I was under the impression that Firebug was being actively developed again. Is that not right? They had some really cool features that Webkit inspector did not last I tried it, which was fairly recently.
  - dangoor 15y ago
    Yes, the style inspector is vertical for exactly the reason you cite. We're also working on a better solution so that it doesn't cause issues with responsive designs. Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.
- c_t_montgomery 15y ago
  Completely agree. I've heard some people like it - I am struggling to see how it'd be useful, or have any benefits over firebug.
ComputerGuru 15y ago
They haven't gotten rid of the "checking for compatibility updates" dialog - which was the worst part of the Firefox upgrade process in the first place. Until FF fixes their extension compatibility, stops breaking plugins with each release, gets rid of version verification for all the popular plugins, and finds a more streamlined way (non-modal, ffs!) of prompting you to enable/disable extensions that are now broken or require more permissions, they'll still be playing catchup to Chrome's autoupdate procedure.
- zobzu 15y ago
  Well, they're playing catch up on that, that's for sure. But my understanding is that they're adding the necessary features one by one. Next is silent updates (=no dialogs). This one is just "no UAC prompt".
tvon 15y ago
FWIW, the Web Inspector looked horrible until I switched to the default theme.
tomflack 15y ago
Lion native full-screen mode: what's the difficulty stopping this?
- potch 15y ago
  Nothing, actually! It's already in our Nightly builds, and will be appearing in Aurora some time this week. You can grab Nightly at http://nightly.mozilla.org http://nightly.mozilla.org
  - tomflack 15y ago
    Can you give us some insight in to the decision making process when prioritizing feature additions then? It seems bizzare to me that it's taken since the first developer preview in Feburary of 2011 to get the feature in to merely the nightlies.
kijin 15y ago
Updated both Firefox and Thunderbird today. As usual, no problems whatsoever. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the Thunderbird team to fix this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299
smhinsey 15y ago
It seems to have subtly broken TreeStyleTabs on OS X, which is a shame because I am addicted to it, but at least it's still usable (the tabs take up ~150 pixels of vertical space). Hopefully this will resolve itself with a TST update. That said, wow, the OS X improvements are huge. Previously I could only force quit if I wanted to shut down to free memory or whatever, but now it closes normally. I'm also not seeing the same kind of memory usage, but it's early so I'm not sure how long that will last.
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  What part of Tree Style Tabs does it break? I was about to upgrade, but TST is by far my most important extension (and the number one reason I've never seriously considered switching to Chrome).
  - smhinsey 15y ago
    It's purely the visual component I mentioned, the functionality seems to be okay, although it's reported as broken in the add-on manager. I have the tab bar docked on the left vertically and the tabs are ~3x taller than they should be. I'm the same way about switching to Chrome, by the way. I would love to but I just can't picture life without TST after so many years.
    - kissickas 15y ago
      I don't see the tabs taking up extra vertical space, although 3x the size should absolutely be noticeable. I did, however, have a problem yesterday when watching a fullscreen video: if I put my cursor on the left side of the screen, the tab bar would appear (as though I had it set to auto-hide) and obscure that portion of the video. It was quite annoying because the sensitive areas extended all of the way to the top left of my screen, where I have a "corner" set up on my Mac to disable the screen saver.
      - smhinsey 15y ago
        Ah, you know what, I just figured out what the issue was. I was using the "metal" TST skin and when I switched it to another one, the 150px-tall-tab problem went away.
jasonkester 15y ago
Glad to see they've finally moved to silent updates. That's the feature that lost me years ago, and as nice to see it finally make it, I don't think I'm coming back from Chrome. The problem with the "hey, before we're going to let you use Firefox, we need to download a new version for you. Wait a few minutes" screen is that it stops you dead from being able to do whatever you opened the browser to do. It's jarring enough to make you avoid Firefox for anything except the times when you absolutely need to test something on it. That means you use it less often, which means that opening it always puts you through that annoying process. Every Single Time you use Firefox. So over the years, they've trained me that "Firefox == Pain". It'll take them a long time to train me back. But I applaud them for finally trying.

162 points by aritraghosh007 15y ago

This is the one with a full silent update? Soon most people will be running one version of Firefox? Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers.

mbrubeck 15y ago
The major change to updates in Fx12 is that the Windows UAC prompt will no longer appear for every update (by default). Some additional changes (like finishing the update in the background instead of at the next startup) are coming in a later version: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/133/ http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/133/
cpeterso 15y ago
You can disable Firefox's "an update is available" nag dialog with about:config app.update.silent=true. This pref has been available in Firefox for a long time, but I believe it wasn't enabled because people who don't restart their browser often would not get security updates in a timely manner.
Silhouette 15y ago
Chrome + Firefox means 40%-50% of the Internet is getting a browser update every six weeks. This will be a boon for software developers. I never understand this argument. All we have now is two different fast-moving targets, both with a track record of introducing breaking changes. IME this just results in a significantly higher number of customers complaining to our customer support team (not Mozilla's or Google's) that our web pages/embedded UIs don't work properly any more. I have yet to be convinced that this obsession with releasing every six weeks really gets useful features out there in a way that benefits most users anyway. As far as I can tell, about 99% of the developers using those features are people writing tech demos for the browser makers and/or trendy web design blogs. Much of the content on those sites doesn't even work on both Gecko and WebKit at the same time, never mind IE. Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features. In any case, a lot of those features frankly aren't all that beneficial anyway compared to basic things like not freezing the entire browser UI because one tab is taking a while to load. That is something Firefox still can't do even though it's several years after every other major browser had it, and the apologists are getting awfully boring now.
- sciurus 15y ago
  "Meanwhile, real sites still have to cope with a majority of visitors who don't have the latest shiny new features." Umm, isn't that what the 6-week-automatic-update cycle that you're arguing against is intended to address?
  - Silhouette 15y ago
    No, because many people aren't using browsers that update every six weeks, and even those who are don't get the same updates every six weeks. In this case, as far as I can see, the only new "feature" they've shipped is actually to do with the update process itself, and it's a change that is pretty controversial at that. In fact, quite a few recent updates to Firefox (and Thunderbird for that matter) haven't really had much substance at all. Not exactly a great argument in favour of the need for such rapid updates.
    - ok_craig 15y ago
      I wouldn't say there's a need for rapid updates; as a user, I just want them. I don't understand why users should be made to wait 6 months to a year for small features that are available now.
      - Silhouette 15y ago
        As a user, why do you want them? They are of no value to you unless sites or apps that you value are making use of them, and few production sites use most of the bleeding edge tech that supposedly justifies the rapid release cycle. A lot of that tech is of more interest for app-like pages rather than classical web sites, but then you start running into portability issues: not every browser has a fast cycle, and those that do aren't necessarily including the same features at the same pace. That means everyone needs to code a fallback approach anyway unless it's acceptable for their product to support only specific browsers. Once you start down that path, the core functionality is probably there for your users even if you don't then reimplement it a second time or add enhancements using the new technologies.

Derbasti 15y ago

Will there be a Lion fullscreen-mode and Lion-style floating scrollbars? That would make my day! Edit: Apparently, not so. A pity. Does anyone know when we will see them?

mbrubeck 15y ago
Lion fullscreen is coming in Firefox 14: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639705 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=639705 You can use it today on the Nightly builds from http://nightly.mozilla.org/ http://nightly.mozilla.org/ or in a few days on the Aurora channel: https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/ https://mozilla.org/firefox/aurora/ Lion-style scrollbars are still in progress: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636564 You can test them on the UX branch: https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly-build-of-firefox/ https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/03/15/mozillas-ux-nightly...
- Derbasti 15y ago
  So that's like, three months? Ok, not exactly the first ones on the field, but good enough for me ;)
  - mbrubeck 15y ago
    Correct, Firefox 14 will be released in 12 weeks. (Or you'll get it in just 6 weeks if you switch to the beta channel!)
poodougnut 15y ago
Lion scrollbars landed on the UX channel a few days ago.
masklinn 15y ago
> Lion fullscreen-mode Why would you want that?
- Terretta 15y ago

dfischer 15y ago

We're going to have Firefox 50 in a year at this rate.

aritraghosh007 15y ago
With silent updates in place , I think even 100 is a possibility !
mbrubeck 15y ago
Both Firefox and Chrome increment their version number every six weeks, so it's easy to see that at this rate in a year we will have Chrome 26 and Firefox 20. :)
melling 15y ago
In an ideal world, we'd get an update every day. Continuous integration, a comprehensive test suite, a few million hackers test for a day, then and out the door. There's always a train leaving the station.

eps 15y ago

Anyone else noticed a significant improvement in overall responsiveness or am I seeing things?

jmathai 15y ago
I've been using Nightly for a few weeks and definitely noticed. It's been about as fast as Chrome which used to be way faster.
- cpeterso 15y ago
  I've been using Nightly for months now and it is surprisingly stable.

bnr 15y ago

I still have my fingers crossed for Electrolysis (out of process tabs/sandboxing) to ship before Firefox 30.

zobzu 15y ago
It ain't going to happen until they rewrite Gecko in rust. But there might be things that are close enough to it.
- sanxiyn 15y ago
  No, Electrolysis is unrelated to Rust. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis A big problem for Gecko which does not exist for WebKit is XUL extensions. If you think about it, XUL extensions must run in UI process (unlike Chrome extensions), but XUL extensions can also access web content which lives in web process. It is nearly impossible to make this 100% compatible...
  - RDeckard 15y ago
    I thought most Mozilla software was internally based on XPCOM. Then why can't they just proxy the interface calls to go to a different process via standard IPC mechanisms? (I've no knowledge of XUL extension model thou)
    - sanxiyn 15y ago
      They can and they do. It is called CPOW(Cross-Process Object Wrapper). https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/CPOW https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis/CPOW The issue is that extensions expect to access web content synchronously, so you need synchronous IPC for perfect compatibility, but that causes your UI process to block on your web process.
  - zobzu 15y ago
    I did not mean that it's technically related. Rather, that it's my opinion they won't do it until then. The reason is that there is too much to rewrite/change/fix. Then if they do manage to do it (and do it right), well, I'd have been wrong :)

superxor 15y ago

Obligatory release notes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/ http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/ Complete list of changes: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/buglist.html http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/12.0/releasenotes/bugli...

typicalrunt 15y ago

In case anyone opens their Firefox 11 client and it doesn't automatically recognize there is an update available, you can go to Help -> About Firefox and it will grab the update. Wait for the download to finish, then click the "Apply Update" button and you will be updated to Firefox 12.

cpher 15y ago
Thanks, worked just like you said.
cpeterso 15y ago
I believe Mozilla sometimes "soft launches" auto-updates to a subset of Firefox users to find any new issues before opening the flood gates to update everyone. But, as you point out, manually checking for updates should always find the latest version.
- notatoad 15y ago
  I don't think the soft launch is so much for finding issues, it's just so their download servers don't get slaughtered.
  - mcpherrinm 15y ago
    Beta and earlier users tend to be different in a lot of ways from regular Firefox users. Soft launching surely helps the download servers, but a large point is to watch for new crashes, so that any emergency fixes can be put in before unthrottling the release. Past issues include antiviruses that crash Firefox because of their invasive monitoring. While ideally these things would be caught by QA or early adopter users, there's no way to test all possible combinations of software.
Gormo 15y ago
Be careful, though. If you go to the About dialog, it will begin downloading and installing the update automatically, without getting your permission, and you won't be able to cancel it from within the browser.

shin_lao 15y ago

They're installing a service that runs with elevated privileges to bypass UAC. I don't think it's a good thing to install that kind of loophole on your PC.

ars 15y ago
It's even worse to have people with ancient versions because firefox was installed by admin, but they (as they should) run as a regular user.
RDeckard 15y ago
As long as it's done right and only installs updates signed by Mozilla, then it is secure.
- shin_lao 15y ago
  I'll bet you a beer or whatever you like to drink we're going to see a flurry of exploits around this service. I happen to have written a similar service a couple of years ago for a very different purpose and let me tell you one thing: this is nothing less than a backdoor. You run a program from the service and make sure it runs in the user's session. The problem is, how do you decide a program is "legit"? You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs). The other big problem - assuming they have a perfect gateway - is that a vulnerability in Firefox could become catastrophic as it could go through the service to run as a privileged user and wreak havoc.
  - jsight 15y ago
    > You're going to tell me "you check against a digital signature". Except it doesn't work. You can only check parts of the binary, not the whole binary (as some content is unpredictable once it runs). I read this a few times, and I still don't get why you wouldn't check the whole binary. Care to elaborate?
  - zobzu 15y ago

mmuro 15y ago

I don't know how Mozilla came to the conclusion that their Web inspector is actually usable. The HTML doesn't appear when inspecting (no, that takes an extra click). The CSS appears in an extra vertical sidebar taking up even more room on the screen. You can't add a Console button, but 3D View is worthy? I love Firefox, but this it's just plain odd they didn't integrate Firebug into core.

padenot 15y ago
In my Nightly (don't know about current release), I just have to click once on the show html button, and if I inspect another page later, it brings the HTML panel along. I actually find the vertical CSS sidebar to be an excellent choice. CSS (and code in general) is an inherently vertical thing (short line length), whereas the number of rules displayed is maximized using a vertical panel. A console button would maybe be a good idea, but I only use the keyboard shortcuts, so I don't mind, this prevent reducing the visual clutter. Firebug is a seriously old and not that sufficiently maintened code base, hence the choice to write new tools, more integrated with the browser.
- Jgrubb 15y ago
  I was under the impression that Firebug was being actively developed again. Is that not right? They had some really cool features that Webkit inspector did not last I tried it, which was fairly recently.
- dangoor 15y ago
  Yes, the style inspector is vertical for exactly the reason you cite. We're also working on a better solution so that it doesn't cause issues with responsive designs. Firebug is still actively maintained and continues to have new releases and improvements. Firebug 1.10 (currently in alpha), for example, is now restartless and has less impact on page performance.
c_t_montgomery 15y ago
Completely agree. I've heard some people like it - I am struggling to see how it'd be useful, or have any benefits over firebug.

ComputerGuru 15y ago

They haven't gotten rid of the "checking for compatibility updates" dialog - which was the worst part of the Firefox upgrade process in the first place. Until FF fixes their extension compatibility, stops breaking plugins with each release, gets rid of version verification for all the popular plugins, and finds a more streamlined way (non-modal, ffs!) of prompting you to enable/disable extensions that are now broken or require more permissions, they'll still be playing catchup to Chrome's autoupdate procedure.

zobzu 15y ago
Well, they're playing catch up on that, that's for sure. But my understanding is that they're adding the necessary features one by one. Next is silent updates (=no dialogs). This one is just "no UAC prompt".

tvon 15y ago

FWIW, the Web Inspector looked horrible until I switched to the default theme.

tomflack 15y ago

Lion native full-screen mode: what's the difficulty stopping this?

potch 15y ago
Nothing, actually! It's already in our Nightly builds, and will be appearing in Aurora some time this week. You can grab Nightly at http://nightly.mozilla.org http://nightly.mozilla.org
- tomflack 15y ago
  Can you give us some insight in to the decision making process when prioritizing feature additions then? It seems bizzare to me that it's taken since the first developer preview in Feburary of 2011 to get the feature in to merely the nightlies.

kijin 15y ago

Updated both Firefox and Thunderbird today. As usual, no problems whatsoever. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for the Thunderbird team to fix this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=449299

smhinsey 15y ago

It seems to have subtly broken TreeStyleTabs on OS X, which is a shame because I am addicted to it, but at least it's still usable (the tabs take up ~150 pixels of vertical space). Hopefully this will resolve itself with a TST update. That said, wow, the OS X improvements are huge. Previously I could only force quit if I wanted to shut down to free memory or whatever, but now it closes normally. I'm also not seeing the same kind of memory usage, but it's early so I'm not sure how long that will last.

rkudeshi 15y ago
What part of Tree Style Tabs does it break? I was about to upgrade, but TST is by far my most important extension (and the number one reason I've never seriously considered switching to Chrome).
- smhinsey 15y ago
  It's purely the visual component I mentioned, the functionality seems to be okay, although it's reported as broken in the add-on manager. I have the tab bar docked on the left vertically and the tabs are ~3x taller than they should be. I'm the same way about switching to Chrome, by the way. I would love to but I just can't picture life without TST after so many years.
  - kissickas 15y ago
    I don't see the tabs taking up extra vertical space, although 3x the size should absolutely be noticeable. I did, however, have a problem yesterday when watching a fullscreen video: if I put my cursor on the left side of the screen, the tab bar would appear (as though I had it set to auto-hide) and obscure that portion of the video. It was quite annoying because the sensitive areas extended all of the way to the top left of my screen, where I have a "corner" set up on my Mac to disable the screen saver.
    - smhinsey 15y ago
      Ah, you know what, I just figured out what the issue was. I was using the "metal" TST skin and when I switched it to another one, the 150px-tall-tab problem went away.

jasonkester 15y ago

Glad to see they've finally moved to silent updates. That's the feature that lost me years ago, and as nice to see it finally make it, I don't think I'm coming back from Chrome. The problem with the "hey, before we're going to let you use Firefox, we need to download a new version for you. Wait a few minutes" screen is that it stops you dead from being able to do whatever you opened the browser to do. It's jarring enough to make you avoid Firefox for anything except the times when you absolutely need to test something on it. That means you use it less often, which means that opening it always puts you through that annoying process. Every Single Time you use Firefox. So over the years, they've trained me that "Firefox == Pain". It'll take them a long time to train me back. But I applaud them for finally trying.