Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Firefox - More fire and fewer cancer warnings than California

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Fangs404 posted:

The whole point of the 3rd party builds is to enable support for SSE, SSE2, x64, and possibly some other instruction sets while also turning on some compiler optimization flags that Mozilla doesn't enable when they compile for whatever reason. I don't believe there are any other differences (but I may be wrong). There probably isn't a noticeable difference except maybe on really JavaScript-heavy sites.

Does anyone know of any comparisons done between vanilla FF and Pale Moon or Waterfox?

Pale moon makes a few additional changes, which he details here. Notably, he makes some UI changes in Palemoon 4.0+, to bring back a few features from 3.x (status bar, tab location I think). I run Pale Moon, but I actually went through the trouble to revert the look to stock Firefox.

Also, third party builds are not compatible with Firefox Sync (Mozilla's restriction). I suppose if you found a third party sync server, that would do, but I didn't think it was worth it.

Edit: Sync seems to work with palemoon again

kapinga fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Sep 1, 2011

# ¿ Aug 22, 2011 03:58

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:20

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Agreed posted:

Is Internet Explorer still tied into Windows like it used to be back when Firefox first hit the scene? Just curious what the modern reasons for not using it are, apart from "ugh, Internet Explorer." I love me some noscript, adblock+, etc., don't get me wrong - not such a big fan of seemingly random success closing the program and I don't know why it doesn't just auto-kill the process rather than unhelpfully letting you know it's still running when clearly you don't want it to be... But what's IE done that sucks lately?

To expand on trandorian's post, yes, IE is and always will be deeply tied into Windows - but this has nothing to do with why people might or might not use it as a browser.

IE9 is pretty great, IMO, and I used it for several months after it came out. In then end though, I like ABP and the ability to write and/or install trivial little extensions that make individual sites work better. I believe I was also running into somewhat higher memory usage (IE9 does the one process per tab thing) and this was causing me trouble when I was also doing COMSOL+MATLAB simulations on my laptop.

I'm pretty sure there isn't more interest in IE9 because most nerds just immediately assume that IE == poo poo. There was depressingly little discussion here when it came out, in comparison to the constant babble in the FF and Chrome threads.

tl;dr IE9 is just fine and you should give it a shot if you're not happy with Firefox. It's different and less customizable, but that may or may not bother you.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2011 00:32

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

ChesterJT posted:

Apologies if this is an obvious question, but was something very basic in the way add-ons work with the clock changed sometime after FF3.6? I used this plugin for quite a while and it got broken when I upgraded to 4. he creator gave up on it back in 2010 so I edited the plugin myself to allow install up to FF9* and it will install just fine. However one key part of the plugin is that it uses the PC clock to calculate the in-game day and time (MMORPG). This part is broken now and it just displays red ?s where the time as. It seems like something as basic as clock management wouldn't have changed, but I haven't done coding in quite a number of years so looking through the plugin's code gave me nothing to go on to try and fix it.

var d = new Date(); is a javascript standard and hasn't changed in ages, so there's something more complicated going on here.

There have been a number of security changes with the add-on system over the years, but if the script is running (red question marks says yes), then it's just something in the code that's broken. It's impossible to say without digging through the add-on code while looking at the game web-pages. Is there anyone else you know in-game who might have that kind of knowledge?

# ¿ Sep 21, 2011 03:26

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Magic Underwear posted:

Nope, that's a bullshit argument. Making changes to established functionality requires justification. I doubt there is any justification forthcoming except that some rear end in a top hat at Mozilla wanted it that way. The fact that there is no option to change it back is just the cherry on top.

Bullshit, this is a much nicer way to present images and is in agreement with the way most graphics professionals prefer to work. And not every change requires an option to be reverted. It's not like centering an image on the page prevents you from doing anything that you did when the image is aligned on the top left.

(I agree they should let you change the background color without loving with normal web pages, but that will probably be implemented quickly, and before the version hits the main release.)

# ¿ Dec 27, 2011 17:33

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Selavi posted:

The most annoying thing by far is not being able to open a new browser window within about a minute of closing one (when it says there is a Firefox process running). This has been happening since probably version 4 on every computer I have used Firefox on. I am tired of having to open up the task manager to end the process all the time. What's the holdup to getting this problem fixed?

You don't have to end the process, it will do it on its own. Pretty sure that it's cleaning things up and closing gracefully instead of being forcequit. Sometimes this can take a while, but usually only if you've had tons of tabs or a very long session open. When I was doing extension development, this would usually only take a few seconds - by the time I clicked "OK" and tried to open FF again, it worked fine.

Also, it's been true since forever, not just FF4.

This also applies only if you close the entire browser, not just a window. I'm not sure what a good fix is for you besides "don't close the entire browser if you're just planning on reopening it a second later".

# ¿ Feb 16, 2012 18:42

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

LeftistMuslimObama posted:

Is there a way to make a portable firefox installation and a normal installation run at the same time? I want to make a separate firefox profile for my wife because she keeps loving up my bookmarks and settings because she's confused by my extensions like noscript and ABP. I want to make her her own profile which she can use so that she doesn't have to worry about messing things up in my browser, and so she can manage her own bookmarks separately.

I thought I could achieve this by just making an installation of portable firefox on my system drive and making a shortcut on the desktop for her to use, but if you have either the regular or portable version of FF open, clicking on the shortcut for either just launches another window of the one that was already open. I'd like to be able to leave my own window minimized with any tabs I had open still in there and still have her be able to launch her copy. Is there any way to do this? She doesn't want to use Chrome or IE or Opera.

Add the "-no-remote" argument to the shortcut/command that you're calling to run your wife's profile:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile

No need for a second install at all!

kapinga fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Mar 7, 2012

# ¿ Mar 7, 2012 21:32

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Not to mention that pretty much every mobile device that Mozilla wants to run Gecko on has hardware to decode H.264 and not WebM. There is a huge amount of inertia in manufacturing to support H.264, and Mozilla is simply not a big enough player to change that. Apple could force it to happen (via their direct production of incredibly popular mobile hardware), but has zero incentive to do so. And the immense power savings of hardware decode vs software means that H.264 will be the video format for mobile devices for the foreseeable future.

I respect Mozilla for trying to force the issue, but they simply don't have the power, even on the desktop, to change the direction of an entire industry on this one. I'm glad they are finally moving on, because I don't want to have to switch browsers once HTML5 video starts becoming popular.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2012 15:51

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Tamba posted:

Noscript also does this for Java, Flash, Silverlight and "other plugins"

Except instead of reloading the page for each and every subdomain, this wouldn't be nearly so annoying nor would it break basic functionality on so many websites.

Seriously, Noscript is a nice security tool if you're willing to put up with the hassle, but it should never, ever, ever be the default behavior of Firefox. This proposal of click-to-start is a reasonable attempt at compromise, but I'll have to see it in action to form a meaningful opinion on it.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2012 04:45

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Saoshyant posted:

Oh, and yeah, Waterfox and any fork we use will most likely use the exact same profile, including settings, extensions and whatnot of the official Firefox. Don't uninstall them carelessly.

Pale Moon uses a separate profile, which makes it fairly annoying when you first install it, but prevents these kinds of problems.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2012 23:37

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Goober Peas posted:

Ugh, I'm about to dump Firefox after 7 years of being a fanboi. 12.0 crashes on me at least once a day. I've tried disabling add-ons, reinstalling, and having no luck resolving the crashes.

Make a new profile and transfer data before giving up. Reinstalling Firefox does nothing, it's all about the profile.

eta: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_data_to_a_new_profile_-_Firefox

# ¿ May 19, 2012 23:40

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

unruly posted:

Not sure if you're replying to me, but here's the documentation on how to setup prefetching. It's not really that hard.

And this only works if the web developer has specifically included additional code to indicate the pages to prefetch. It isn't just scanning the page for an <a> tag with the label "Next" or anything.

Does anyone have information as to how widespread the prefetching tags are in use?

# ¿ Jun 15, 2012 15:36

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

unruly posted:

I think you'll find them commonly in CMSes where the feature can be easily automated. Forums would be an excellent use of it as well.

I wonder if you could somehow, through JavaScript, add appropriate link tags to the header and have the browser actually pick up on it. That way you could have a very simple extension that provides link prefetching for pages that lack it.

I was thinking forums at first, but what about the instance where the next page is having posts actively added to it? In that case, you load up page 1 and the browser caches page 2. When you finally get to page 2, 10 new posts have been added. Will the browser refresh or check in any way that the page has changed since it was pre-fetched?

Also on CMS's, I can see how it would be easy to implement, but how widespread is it actually? I don't work with them, so I'm genuinely curious.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2012 18:20

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

pipes! posted:

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but the trouble the close only works until a new window is spawned.

That's not how it works for me? I make sure there's no addon buttons in the bar, and then close it and it stays gone, until a new addon tries to put itself in the addon bar.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 15:29

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Waffnuffly posted:

If the latter and you run Windows, try using Pale Moon. It restores the status bar natively, i.e. not via an extension that sits in the addon bar, and pretty much removes the addon bar entirely in place of the status bar, which you can disable (although the hovering link things don't get switched on if you disable it, from what I can tell).

No, it doesn't. He's simply included the Status-4-evar extension in the Firefox folder directly, it behaves exactly the same way. Not every extension sits in the addon bar, and I'm pretty sure Status-4-evar does not (although I don't use it myself).

However, I'm pretty confident pipes! wants the whole addon bar gone, without the status bar. I wish I could help you out, as I've always had both turned off with no problems. Sounds like you've tried way more things than I ever went through, so I'm afraid I can't be much help.

E: http://www.palemoon.org/layout-differences.shtml

Pale Moon posted:

Pale Moon 4 (and later), after posting a survey and getting feedback from the users, has chosen not to put the status bar as such in the core code of the browser like previous versions of Firefox, to prevent incompatibilities with Firefox extensions and avoiding unnecessary bugs by leaving the elements in the browser core untouched. Instead, the functionality is provided as a bundled, and fully configurable, add-on. This has been done mostly for technical reasons once the wish to retain a status bar was heard loud and clear from the users.
This bundled status bar add-on allows for proper grouping of status information in a fixed UI element, in the expected locations. It also includes status information that is missing from a stock Firefox browser.

kapinga fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Jun 30, 2012

# ¿ Jun 30, 2012 00:20

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Sri.Theo posted:

Does anyone else get a crash when they visit this link? http://www.economist.com/node/21560317/comments#comments

I think its something to do with the opinion cloud on the right, but if I try and move the page before its fully loaded it crashes 50% of the time.

No problems for me on 14.0.1 on Win7.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2012 17:54

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Only Shallow posted:

I just updated to Firefox 15 (OS X) and can't figure out how to disable the new rounded Chrome-style tabs. They don't play well with TreeStyleTabs.

I didn't see anything obvious in about :config and found nothing useful on Google.

This would be something that could be modified in your userChrome.css, but if you're planning on doing it yourself it's going to be a fair bit of CSS work for you.

This is also something that the developer of TreeStyleTabs should be taking care of - it's a bad sign if they're going out of date. I'm not sure if there's a way to undo the rounded tabs, it would be related to the Theme that you use.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 16:06

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

NihilCredo posted:

I'm not seeing what's wrong in that picture? It looks fine to me.

For what it's worth I also have Tree-Style tabs with FF15, although on Windows, and the tab area looks just like it did before:

The problem is the grey curved shapes on the left and right of each tab. It's the cutout of the Chrome tab shape, but it's not at all appropriate for the Tree-style tabs.

I suspect it might have something to do with the Mac theme, as FF 15 on Windows doesn't have rounded tabs for me. Can anyone else on OS X give it a shot?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2012 18:24

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Install Gentoo posted:

I don't see why you'd need to make it an extension thing, when it can just be one of the thousands of deprecated features that are re-enableable by way of about :config?

Remove the option from the default customization menu? Sure. But removing it from about :config is just silly.

If you remove the code entirely, you don't have to support anything about it in future releases. Keeping it around in about :config means that you have to make sure it at least kind of works.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 17:30

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Question Mark Mound posted:

Can Firefox have multiple extension/tab styles on multiple windows?

I have two monitors, one on a widescreen monitor and one tallscreen. The widescreen monitor would be good for having tabs down the side of the screen, but obviously on the tall monitor that would make things cluttered - so having one window with side tabs and another with top tabs would be pretty handy.

Also, regarding the whole URL owns tab / tab owns URL thing - it's always made sense to me for the tabs to be on top. To me, the URL is a piece of information about the current status of just that tab, as changing the tab will change the URL, so the URL would be beneath the tab.

You can run two instances of Firefox using the -no-remote option, and can use different profiles for each of the two instances. This would be the only way I know of to have two different themes/extensions on different windows.

Note that the two won't talk to each other very well, as they'll see each other as completely separate programs. That means no dragging tabs from one window to the other. You might be able to use Firefox sync to share histories and bookmarks, but that's about it.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2012 16:22

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Alereon posted:

I did, but my workaround was to disable Acrobat Reader and use the built-in PDF reader.

Is the built-in one different from the JS based PDF reader? I used that for a little while, but I found it to have significant rendering problems on occasion.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 22:01

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Question Mark Mound posted:

I'll run Crystal Disk later on and hopefully build a clean Firefox profile this weekend. As far as I know my graphics card drivers are up to date and though I have AVG installed the plugin for it is disabled. I suppose I haven't done a defrag in a while either so I'll get that done tomorrow.

Fingers crossed it'll all be okay after that! I usually have between 5 and 12 tabs open at a time across two windows.

I'll note I was unimpressed with the performance of Invisible Hand back when I had it installed (years ago), so Invisible Hand could be the source of your slowdowns. Firefox is very much susceptible to degraded performance due to badly coded add-ons.

# ¿ Nov 24, 2012 18:00

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Edit: Wait I clicked on the wrong thread

# ¿ Jan 8, 2013 17:27

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

Mozi posted:

I just updated Firefox and now there is literally a half second of lag for any action I do. Tried restarting with addons disabled and that didn't fix it. Does anyone know what could cause this? If not I'll just switch to Chrome, this is unusable.

Read the OP - it says how to refresh your current profile or create a new one if need be. Something's definitely wrong with your ~~install~~profile.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2013 19:03

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 22:20

kapinga: Oct 12, 2005; I am not a number

my stepdads beer posted:

All you font issue bros:

code:

    gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled: true;
    gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.use_gdi_table_loading: false;
    gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_max_size: 6;
    gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families: ''; (delete the string)
    gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode: 5;

edit: if you're on windows

I'm giving this a shot. It looks good, but I can definitely see that there's a different renderer being used to make the fonts. I like the way normal text displays but some bolder weights seem to be a little uneven.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2013 16:53

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