Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Just got it through update. After long time, I saw what I have been blind to all these years. :) I pity the fools who still roam the wilds of internet without the company of Adblock Plus to protect them.

Actually I bailed because it crashes 4 times a day, on my stock standard Leopard install.

Rusty, care to send me the crash report links?

That's extremely abnormal. I've crashed just one time in the last three weeks of running nightly builds on Leopard including those leading up to and the beta itself (and that was testing a crash report bug).

If you type about:crashes into the addressbar, you'll be presented with a list of crash report links. If you could copy and email me those links, I could look into it and perhaps figure out what's messed going wrong for you.

- A

On my MacOS build, when I click the back button it brings down the history drop down as if I was clicking the arrow to the right. The forward button is working. Is anyone else seeing this?

Hey Asa,

I've emailed them to you. Thanks for taking the time. I had no idea about the about:crashes thing, that's quite cool. I would have sent more than the 8 or so I had, but we hadn't clicked report on a lot of them.

Like I said I've since switched to the nightly builds and they seem more stable, so I guess that's a good thing. Can I also just say, Firefox 3 is a major improvement on Firefox 2. It looks better, it runs leaner and faster.

Do you have any links with the developer of Firebug? I'm a web developer by trade and I live off that tool. Any idea if it will be ported to Firefox 3?

Rusty

Rusty: Check out the Firebug 1.1 betas at http://www.getfirebug.com/.

Asa: The beta 5 crashes that I've seen so far didn't generate any crash reports. Other than trying to figure out how to reproduce them, is there anything useful I can do?

I had no crashes of the latest Fx 3 nightlies on Leopard in difference to 2.0.0.13, which freezes several times a day. I've been using Fx since 0.6 on all systems and for the first time I had to return to an older release version.

Anyway, I still have several problems with the latest Fx 3 nightlies (b5 included), e.g.

- the CSS size limitation of images and objects on Myspace doesn't seem to work,

- if you want to heat up your system go to e.g. http://usemycomputer.com/indeximages/cars/Bugatti/EB%2018%20Veyron/index-2.html or any other of their thousands of galleries and hover with your cursor over the pic in col 1 row 2 and all those below it in col 1,

- start Fx 3, open a set of bookmarks at once. When 10 of them require a password you'll get asked for the masterpassword 10 times,

- recently I went to about:config to disable dom.storage.enabled, after testing if it works suddenly toggling had no effect anymore. That's what I thought at least, but it worked although about:config wasn't refreshed aka the toggled value wasn't displayed. After closing the tab, opening a new one and going to about:config the correct value was shown,

- and the delay of the "Help" dropdown on Leopard is still a bit long :)

Besides that Fx 3 will surely get awesome!! Thanks a lot for all all the fantastic work!!

Dex

JesseP: Try disabling Flash. Flash interferes with the crash reporter.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422308

I think flash is the culprit: In the period without adblock I had constant crashes when browsing sites with flash; it happended when following a link to a new page. On Youtube it only happens every other time switching to a new webpage; on news sites (with lot of flash adds) it became all the time.
So I am really glad Adblock is now here.

Asa, I didn't turn my back on Fx3b5 because of the ads I couldn't block, I snubbed it because I felt that there were just too damned many changes from Fx2 without being able to see just why the hell the changes were being made. Text Zoom, the Awesome Bar (which is good, but not Awesome), so fracking many theme changes late in the game that you had the poor theme designers pulling their hair out at new bugs that won't be fixed until after Fx3 got uncaged. Sorry, but as good as Fx3 is, I prefer Fx2 and I'll use it on my own comp even though Ubuntu is shoving Fx3 down user's throats. (The fact that Fx3 is the default browser in Hardy despite Mozilla saying Fx3 isn't to be used by everyone yet is another pet peeve of mine, but a rant for another blog post. And yes, I have posted about it on my own blog.)

Speaking of "flashing banners, skyscrapers, and billboards"

The firefox start page in Fx3 betas has a quirky resemblance to some of these.

AdBlock is OK, but I much prefer Ad Muncher - it works on all browsers and it is way better than anything else out there.

@JesseP: You're a lifesaver! Might have to switch to FF3 at work now.

@BostonPeg: I guess it's a matter of opinion, but I think FF3 is light years ahead of FF2. It uses less memory, it runs faster, and it looks a whole lot better. I guess that last one is subjective, but I loves me some FF3. I think it could still use some UI polish (not in terms of looks, more in terms of function and layout) but it's easily better than FF2 in my opinion.

@BrianP: Flash was listed as the culprit in only 1 of my 8 crashes - which is not surprising, flash on the mac is unbelievably bad. You would think by now Adobe would have done a better job than they have.

I've never bothered with adblock personally, I just run noscript and add a few lines in usercontent.css for sites laden with distracting animations. Anyone whose ads still display on my screen after that have earned the right IMO.

Fx3 rarely crashes for me (except when I've been screwing around in firebug for too long), though for the last week or so it's had a really annoying habit of suddenly forgetting how to open bookmarks until I restart it...

[OT] talking about wide open space have you seen this:
Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope