Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

> If you just can't wait, head to the front page of mozilla.org and click the link.
I'm one of the Beta 1 users who can't wait. It seems to work fine as far, except that the Web Developer Extension is disabled. :-S

I started using the branch nightlies last week, and discoverd when they bumped the version numbers that the Nightly Tester Tools extension is very useful! Recent versions include the ability to label your extensions as being compatible, so if the number is the only reason it doesn't run, it'll take care of it.

As far as I can see, the Web Developer Toolbar works fine with that tweak.

I haven't followed the whole 1.5 development, but was the graphics kit changed? Or why the change in how menus look and feel? It feels like a step backwards to me - like it's going from a native windows application look-and-feel to a Java-like look-and-feel. On mouseover the toolbar menus are highlighted in dark colors instead of with a button-like appearance in 1.0, or with light colors and a dark border as in Office and other Windows apps. The dark color highlight looks unprofessional to me. Then when extended the menus look like they were pulled out of an old version of Java Swing or something....

@joe
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=314655
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=303806

Download the Classic Menus extension.

It'll be fixed for 1.5 probably.

Where is the src?

GOOD WORK EVERYONE!

And thanks!

monk.e.boy

Working fine here.:)

Mats: grab it by yourself, using cvs on MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH ;)

Asa, depending on how well the automatic update feature works for the incremental update from 1.4 to 1.4.1, do you expect that we'll see the same for 1.5 when its released?

Asa, please excuse me if this is the wrong place to ask this question. If someone has a pointer to where they would rather I posted this question, please send it along and I will re-ask there.

I have been having this problem for the last several days now. Anyone else?

- My build: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051003 Firefox/1.4.1 - Build ID: 2005100307

- Open FF. Select Help/check for updates

- See that an update is available, click Download & Install Now.

- See 490K download (sweet!) select Restart Firefox Now.

- FF quits, then see "FF is upgrading ... wait a few moments."

- See message "FF was unable to apply the partial download and will now download the entire file" or words to that effect.

- Select OK and let FF do this. Select re-start now.

- Note that when FF has finished applying the updates, and finished loading ... the version is the same as before the update.

- Again, select Help/check for updates and see that an update is available.

- Repeat the process. The same thing happens if one selects "Later" instead of "Restart Firefox now."

This same behavior is occurring with Thunderbird (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051003 Thunderbird/1.4.1 ID:2005100308)

I have deleted the files active-update.xml, updates.xml ... essentially the trick I learned when updates failed in the past. Nothing seems to get past this problem. Before I download the latest branches, uninstall FF and T-bird, then re-install I thought I would ask to see if anyone else has experienced this problem and learn what they did.

So, any thoughts here would be gratefully appreciated.

Sincerely,

Lawrence
Ithaca, NY

The options box is till not big enough for all of the information.

Sam: What platform are you on? Which Options tab? It looks OK for me on Win2k and Linux.

Can anybody size inline SVG in ems or relative to the containing element? Firefox seems to totally bail on this, although it can cope if the SVG is external and not inline.

Hi Asa, I don't want to appear pushy, but I made a posting to this blog entry twelve hours ago. I got the message that it has to be cleared before it shows up, but I do not see it twelve hours later. Do you have such a huge backlog? Did I do something wrong?

Using Beta 2 and everything works fine so far. Good work!

It keeps saying no updates found when i try to upgrade.

Dave: "If you're a Beta 1 user, you should wait for the automatic update to be triggered sometime in the next few days"

I'm having an odd pop-up related problem, that also existed in Beta 1. On sites that have a lot of user-requested pop-ups, like in photo galleries and the like, the pop-ups stop working after some period on time.

I can't lock down the period of time, but they will inevitably stop working and I have to quit and re-launch Firefox to get them to work again. White-listing the site in the pop-up blocker has no effect on this issue.

I did a search in Bugzilla, but saw no entries.

Anyone else seeing this?

-Michael

I just downloaded from mozilla 5.0 m/b

A couple a days ago I downloaded the release from your previous blog which was about 4.96 what changed?

Sam, Kelson, they've fixed the width bug, but height is still a problem if you change system fonts or use a custom OS theme...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283697#c108
You can fix it by adding a style to userChrome.css (user-created file, see the Support Tips &* Tricks page)like so...
#BrowserPreferences {
height: 45em !important;
}
HTH

8 out of my extension were incompatible.. darnit luckily I have Nightly tester tools which saved me! darn it. EVERYONE who has firefox should have this extension!

I'd very much disappointed if *another* major Fx version *again* will be bundled with at least 3 broken features. Unfortunately MoFo is quick only on fixing security issues whenever some critical bugs are stalled for YEARS!

Bug 242207 - History of Firefox is lost frequently without crash. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242207#c51)
Bug 252371 - incremental find/search in page does not find/highlight text in textarea/form/text entry boxes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252371)
Bug 294050 - Search in history is case-sensitive for non-ascii letters (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294050)

Not to mention, flash went totally abrupt with adblock installed, my history did disapear after crashing, and yeah firefox 1.5b1 was way more stable for me. new bugs arise as old bugs lie in the dirt but in due time they will come out. I hope mozilla get's this version more stable then the last because I disapointed as well.

I love the draggable tabs, but is there a chance we'll be able to tear them off as new windows in 1.5 final? That would make it much easier for me to manage sets of related tabs in multiple windows, something I want to do but haven't been able to make practical yet.

Using auto-update, my beta 1 upgraded to beta 2 with no problem at all. Very nice work.

Well ASA, i followed your instruction and the result was that it did download the 782k, applied it and on restart told me that it failed after which it offered to download the full kit, which it did fine.....now if there are 95 million upgraders reading your column, i hope they wont be sending you messages to.....i suppose the update systems on your servers track who managed to successfully upgrade with the subset of 782k...which then asks the questions, was there any talkback the user was unawares off?.....

i read some serious lament about the supposed open source / open mind / out of the box Mozilla programming and steering group....one of them was the absolute and categorical silence on the memory leaking...as i write on this only tab open, firefox has hogged 55mb of my ram....the moment i open a second it increases to 77mb and adding further to 90/95mb as the day goes....some lament on 200mb. So,what is the Firefox/Mozilla programming team doing about this? I read atop that 21000 reported bugs are about to be defaulted to Solved....what is the exact justification of that.....hey, how can i complain as i can nowadays run the IE engine in a Firefox frame....please neverever touch that feature in the kill bill obsession that some are displaying (figuratively of course).

Just updated from B1 to B2 through the automated update system. However, I wasn't prompted to update, I manually selected check for updates. Very quick, very smooth.

I understand you want to make Firefox work better with Luna on XP, and thats all well and good. However, what I don't understand is when there is a way to detect whether Luna is running or not and adjust accordingly, why it isn't implemented, especially when you complain about Microsoft dropping support for older versions of Windows and keep hammering home that Firefox is going to support older verisons of Windows that IE7 is dropping. If there wasn't a way to detect it I could understand all this somewhat, but there is.

On the bright side, it took this to finally let me find a far superior theme.

Hmm, when I clicked on "Show Update History", it said "no updates installed yet". I did used auto-update to upgraded Beta 1 to Beta 2, and my Firefox said it is Beta 2; therefore the auto-update is successful.

Why it didn't list beta 2 update in the update history?

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051006 Firefox/1.4.1 ID:2005100614

Tom: support for doing the menu bar highlighting properly is being worked on at the moment. Whether it happens for 1.5 or not it's on its way.

To all the people requesting random new features for 1.5: if it isn't in Beta 2 it's not going to be in 1.5 final. You missed the boat. Better luck next time.

- Chris

I'd very much disappointed if *another* major Fx version *again* will be bundled with at least 3 broken features. Unfortunately MoFo is quick only on fixing security issues whenever some critical bugs are stalled for YEARS!

Bug 242207 - History of Firefox is lost frequently without crash. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242207#c51)
Bug 252371 - incremental find/search in page does not find/highlight text in textarea/form/text entry boxes (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=252371)
Bug 294050 - Search in history is case-sensitive for non-ascii letters (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=294050)

Yep My history randomly disapears, I do use my history as short term bookmarks so that's a bad thing, I hope you guys fix these bugs by the final release.

This is is a bit off topic but firefox is slipping once again in share http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp ?

I've upgraded using the automatic upgrade, and have no problems. However, I never got the upgrade prompt either, but it installed it on the next time I ran Firefox. Before the upgrade, I had to kill the Firefox process, since it took up over 100,000kb in memory.

Hello,

I just updated my Firefox Nightly and the update installed I could not start anymore my Firefox:

./firefox/firefox
*** Item Location path changed: /home/server/firefox/extensions/{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd} Item ID: {972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd} LocationKey: app-global, attempting to upgrade item...
*** Item Installed/Upgraded at Install Location: app-global Item ID: {972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}, attempting to register...
*** ... success, item is compatible
./firefox/run-mozilla.sh: line 424: 19005 Segmentation fault "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

I just have installed AdBlock Plus and Noia Extreme as Extension/Theme.
Then I removed the whole ~/firefox directory and downloaded the latest Firefox version everything works fine again. Also the Extensions/Themes are avaiable and working (wihtout a reinstall).

Bye

Asa,

If it helps to know... the auto-update worked correctly for Portable Firefox: Deer Park. It correctly recognized it needed to update, downloaded the patch update, failed as expected (due to firefox.exe being packed with UPX), downloaded the full update, applied it, and relaunched with the portable profile instead of the local one. Of course at that point, it was using a full install of Firefox rather than a packed one (at double the size) but it worked correctly.

Regards,
John

> The Thunderbird 1.5 Beta 2 release will follow pretty quickly, as will the available localizations.

The Tb release followed. Pretty quickly. But there`s still no localized build availble. I understand that this is a beta release. But i think it`s very important to change this before u push the next major release. The closer you release the offical localized versions to the offical english version, the better. News sites will pick up very quickly, well they already do on the beta versions.
This will get the users attention. They will onjly see: damn no localized version availble. They might come back a day later. Or 2. But then, they r lost.

I have no idea what stops you from realising the localized builds. Is there a reggression? I mean, localized nightllies are working fine AFAIK...

Going from beta 1 to beta 2, the automatic update loaded but could not apply the incremental update, so it had to load the full update instead.
I'm using Windows XP SP2 with all updates applied, but am also using Microsoft's unsupported Virtual Desktop Manager from their PowerToys (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx), so multiple firefox windows were opened in multiple desktops simultaneously, and the update popup window was very well hidden behind other program windows in a hidden desktop. I have no idea how long it had been sitting there.
Maybe for future releases you could also place a notification in the System Tray? (Unless it was already there, in another desktop!)