Fire Fox Three Was Better Than Fire Fox Four

So is it 3 times as crufty as the 3.0.19 I'm still using,or has it gone on a suckiness diet?

(I've looked at 4, 5, and 6, and none of them struck me as being a worthwhile upgrade.)

All your safe space are belong to Trump

One of the last updates (7?) was a huge improvement on cruft.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

Yes, they've fixed the memory hemorrhaging for the most part. It still lags if you open a hundred or so tabs, but that's to be expected.

Fight smart, not fair.

Just updated. This one asks permission to monitor usage and customisation apparently.

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

Due to issues with a certain website that won't be mentioned here*

, I upgraded to the current, 9.0.1. So far, about the only real issue I have with it is the lack of a status bar option.*

I haven't yet looked if there's an extension that restores it, though.

Yeah, it means more space for actual display, but I kinda liked having the option, and how it shows URLs and actions in the bottom left corner (white box w/ black text displaying over any content there) is mildly annoying to me, on an aesthetic level.

[edit]
There is an Extension to return the status bar (gone since 4.0), I've found, called Status-4-evar. Apparently it's got some minor issues still, but it does restore the status bar, making use of the add-on bar.

edited 18th Jan '12 9:54:01 AM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

That's the one I'm currently using.

Fight smart, not fair.

My only problem with the not-a-status-bar is that when I mouse over it, it hops to the other side of the window and stays there until I mouse over it again.

I quit using Firefox Mobile tonight. I can take the fact that it's the only non-compulsory browser that doesn't have Flash capability, as long as I have a backup browser. The long launch times were grating, but what did it was some kind of javascript bug I ran into where when writing a post on this forum, the page would flash and then I couldn't type until I tapped outside the post box and then back in, and then I wouldn't be able to post until I closed the browser and reopened it.

edited 18th Jan '12 8:31:42 PM by TParadox

Fresh-eyed movie blog

That's what I've been looking for. The way it displays address during mouse-over grates me to no end.

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

For anyone that's a fan of Netscape's look-and-feel, I recommend looking into the SeaMonkey project. It's Firefox's rendering engine and technologies wrapped up in a nice, Netscape-ish package.

(I use Chrome because it's a lot easier to sync stuff like bookmarks across different OSs and/or machines, but I still have Firefox for the things Chrome can't do.)

edited 13th Apr '12 9:32:29 AM by DemonSharkKisame

I like Seamonkey, but there are a lot of things that it doesn't do, or pages that don't play nicely with. Downloads, mostly.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Chrome does have a better sync feature, from what I've heard. Though aside from mobile devices needing complicated keys instead of just a username and password, the only place to my knowledge that Firefox Sync doesn't stand up to Sign Into Chrome is that Chrome also syncs addons.

Firefox sync: sign in, synchronize bookmarks and history.

Sign Into Chrome: sign in, synchronize bookmarks, history, extensions, and themes.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I believe Sync will sync addons as well now, so it and Chrome are about equal in that department. And on that note, I'mma try Sync on another Firefox install in a VM to see if I can actually get it working...

...and indeed I did. Now I have no reason to use Chrome!

edited 13th Apr '12 2:50:52 PM by DemonSharkKisame

That's always a good feeling.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

So, I updated to FF 12, and they've gone glass-happy. The address bar is now trimmed with glass, but only if there aren't any tabs over it. If your tab bar hides when you only have one tab (this is TV Tropes, nobody ever only has just one tab), or you have Tabs on Top turned off, you'll see it, but otherwise you won't.

The way it changes is weird.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

That's why I never noticed that. However, I notice a lag when switching between windows and this version seems to be more memory hungry.

edited 3rd May '12 9:57:53 PM by Blurring

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

I've noticed that one of the more recent updates has made Firefox hate TV Tropes to the point I can't keep more than a dozen or two tabs open without having a lag explosion.

Fight smart, not fair.

So, is there any real benefit from upgrading from my current 10.0.1? I clicked the "check for updates" button, forgetting that it jumps straight to downloading the upgrade package (and does so even if you shut down Firefox entirely, then start it back up later).

[edit]
Scratch that, it went and updated to 12 anyway. Fucker...

edited 7th May '12 4:57:25 AM by Nohbody

All your safe space are belong to Trump

Unless you have compatibility issues, always update. Especially programs like web browsers are getting security patches all the time.

Most of these numbered releases are actually very minor fixes. I'd say FF 12 would have been 5.5 on the old numbering scheme.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I'm just leery in general of upgrading software unless there's a pressing need. Partly it's due to being somewhat reluctant to change, I admit, but also part is that they put on more bells, whistles, and geegaws with each new version that I'll hardly use (if ever), often at the expense of core functionality.

A good bit of the setting changes and extension additions I do on a reinstall of Firefox is fixing things that were supposedly "improved" but instead wind up with reduced usefulness. The so-called "Awesomebar" and the status bar being removed come to mind offhand, as does tab behavior.

All your safe space are belong to Trump

By "behavior", I'm guessing you mean more like "tabs don't resize until the cursor leaves the tab bar, making closing several tabs easier" than "tabs are on top just to piss you off".

I've come to like tabs on top. It seems to keep the interface cleaner.

I like the lack of status bar fine, I just wish that when it disappears when you mouse over it to see what's underneath, it'd just hide, instead of bouncing over to the other side where it doesn't belong. Also, I've still got a couple addons that won't move to the toolbar already, so I have to keep bringing up the addon bar every now and then in order to use them.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

The tab behavior I was referring to was mostly the thing with the back/forward arrows after so many tabs, which makes it difficult to tell how many I actually have open (and I tend to open a lot of them on a fairly regular basis, not just for TVT), and not letting me set them to the option of a zero width minimum without an extension.

As for the status bar, that "bounce around" thing was probably my biggest dislike of how they did it, followed closely by it disappearing and reappearing being something of a distraction to me, given the human eye's tendency to be drawn to movement.

The above said, I will admit that not all the changes were for the worse. I particularly like the sync function, to keep bookmarks, logins, and such consistent between my regular desktop and my laptop that I use only occasionally when I'm on the road.*

All your safe space are belong to Trump

I see somewhere along the line they fixed the status bar replacement so that it returns to the left corner automatically as soon as your cursor leaves the corner. It shouldn't appear on the right side at all, but it's still a major improvement.

I rarely run into tab overflow because I abuse Tab Mix Plus's ability to specify how wide tabs should be into replicating Faviconize Tab, which cuts tabs down to a favicon and a close button.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

After using more of Firefox 12, I think it freezes about as often as Firefox 6 or 7.

If a chicken crosses the road and nobody else is around to see it, does the road move beneath the chicken instead?

Which is still far better than 3.5's freezing issues.

In the last several versions, I haven't really had a problem with freezing except when launching some resource-hogging plugins like Quicktime, or when sending a downloaded file to the appropriate external application (like sending an mp4 to VLC, which I do a lot).

Fresh-eyed movie blog

One day I almost went into a panic looking for the usual options, until it occurred to me to press Alt. Especially the Favourite ALL Current Tabs option.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.