The OFFICIAL Unofficial Achewood Message Board
Trivial Pursuits => Science & Nature => Topic started by: CortJstr on February 12, 2004, 09:44:07 pm
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Anybody started using Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) yet? What's the verdict?
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I kinda liked "Firebird" better than "Phoenix" - but Firefox? I don't know.
I'm still using Firebird 0.7.
I'll have to think about trying out the new toy. I'll probably give it a month before moving to it, if only because I use a LOT of Firebird extensions, most of which it seems won't be compatible with Firefox.
Thankfully, these open source folks are fast to provide new versions.
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That is an uberly lame name. I'm still on Firebird 0.7 too, but I'll give this a try soon.
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I'm rocking out with Firefox, and loving it. The one problem I had with Firebird (when I clicked on the icon in the dock, I had to hit control+N to open a new window, instead of it doing it itself (most insignificant problem EVER)) has been fixed in Firefox, and I'd have to say it's probably the best browser I've got, at least for OS X, tons better than the godawful Safari, which I can't seem to keep from opening all the time.
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I think the Tabbrowser extension being updated for .8 will be the main hurdle for me and lots of others. There are others I use (flash click-to-view, mng support, alt-text, et ) but the tabbrowser is make-or-break for me.
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I grabbed Firefox at like 5 a.m. the day it was released, and I'm digging it, though yeah watch out for the Tabbrowser Extensions and their pesky "not working" status. The rest of the extensions I've installed work just fine, including Javascript Console Status, All-in-One Gestures*, Link Toolbar, Nuke Anything, Flash Click to View, Copy Image, Adblock, TTLO, LinkIt, and Paste and Go.
It's a bit faster-loading than Firebird, and keeps your place in forms when you switch back-and-forth between tabs (hooray!), and I happen to think Firefox a better name than Firebird. The awful car and its proponents have kind of spoiled that name for me. Also, I think you'd better get used to it, because it's officially been trademarked by the Mozilla organization.
*my make-or-break extension
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Well, Firebird was trademarked too. They'll trademark everything after the Phoenix fiasco. That's no excuse.
Eventually, of course, it'll simply be the "Mozilla Browser, v. 1.0" - these project names are just for the pre-release anyway.
And then the Thunderbird e-mail client (will this become the Thunderfox too?) will just be the Mozilla e-mail client.
Mozilla is the brand name they're working towards - these interim releases are just to distinguish the project from the Netscape Mozilla Application Suite.
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watch out for the Tabbrowser Extensions and their pesky "not working" status.
What do you mean?
All-in-One Gestures*, Link Toolbar, Nuke Anything, Flash Click to View, Copy Image, Adblock, TTLO, LinkIt, and Paste and Go.
I can't install gestures because I share my comp and it would drive my S.O. nuts. But Nuke Anything always looked nice. What are the others?
It's a bit faster-loading than Firebird
Thank God!
I hope the Google bar works too. I like it better than the built-in search bar.
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Ok, I'm getting it... for the faster loading if nothing else. Time is money!
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watch out for the Tabbrowser Extensions and their pesky "not working" status.
What do you mean?
I can't get the "TabBrowser" extensions working in Firefox like they do in Firebird - middle-click an empty spot on the tab bar to "undo close tab" and a few other things.
All-in-One Gestures*, Link Toolbar, Nuke Anything, Flash Click to View, Copy Image, Adblock, TTLO, LinkIt, and Paste and Go.
I can't install gestures because I share my comp and it would drive my S.O. nuts. But Nuke Anything always looked nice. What are the others?
Switch the gestures to your S.O.'s secondary button (context menu), so they're out of the way. Plus, you can teach your S.O. with the option that displays the gesture paths -- start with "Refresh", as it makes the most sense visually: up, down.
It's a bit faster-loading than Firebird
Thank God!
Like I said, a bit faster-loading. Just a touch speedier when you start it up. Should you leave Firefox minimized (or in the background) for any length of time, it'll be sluggish for a minute.
I hope the Google bar works too. I like it better than the built-in search bar.
Personally, I've never liked the Google bar, and I find the search toolbar just fine for my needs. CTRL+K if you want to search using the current tab, or CTRL+T - TAB if you want a new tab, and you're good to go. The only thing they need to change is to enable keyboard-based selection of the engines (have you added any search engines? It's great. IMDB, amazon, etc. are all available.)
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Ok... Installed Firefox and couldn't get it to do ANYTHING. It'd open up eventually, but I couldn't get it to load the homepage or open any menus... should I have uninstalled Firebird first?
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No, but you should have installed to a new profile. If it doesn't ask you which profile to use next time you start it up, just un- and re-install it, pointing to some new profile somewhere.
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Oops: I forgot this bit:
All-in-One Gestures*, Link Toolbar, Nuke Anything, Flash Click to View, Copy Image, Adblock, TTLO, LinkIt, and Paste and Go.
[...]But Nuke Anything always looked nice. What are the others?
Nuke Anything is awesome - I had Nuke Image before Nuke Anything was available, so I never changed it, but this time I went with this one, and it's S O - M U C H - A W E S O M E R you can't believe it. anything - ANYTHING can be removed from the page, completely.
Link Toolbar: it parses the <link> tags in a document, but not for stylesheets -- look at the source code on this very page you're reading right now yes this one TYPE CTRL+U DAMNIT and you'll see <link> tags for "top," "search," "help," and "authors." Link Toolbar gives a navbar in the status bar to get immediately to these pages. LinkIt is a secondary extension that extends the Link Toolbar extension (whew) to parse for other tags that resemble the relationship-defining <link> tags.
Flash Click to View - turns embedded flash anything into a button that you need to click to play the flash. No more ridiculous flying flash ads, or annoying flash-contained-mp3s before you turn down your speakers, &c.
Copy Image - Funny enough, Gecko browsers don't come with a context-menu option to copy an image to the clipboard. So this does it.
Paste and Go - copy a URL to the clipboard, get to the address bar, and type CTRL+SHIFT+V to ...paste the URL into the address bar and go there without bothering to hit enter.
TTLO - "Things They Left Out" - basically kind of a greater-detail options panel to add in some configuration pieces for the peniswheel, HTTP settings, external applications, and other things. It really helps integrate the browser smoothly into your environment.
Adblock - The. Single. Greatest. Plugin. Ever. (though please note it's the gestures that I absolutely require) You can block content (images, scripts, iframes, etc) from servers - any server - using wildcards. I used to have a 31 thousand line hosts file (resolving all known adservers to the dead loopback 127.0.0.1 address) to keep ads from loading. This cuts my filters down to about seven to start with, such as "*/ads/*" and "ads.*" and "*.atwola.*" - plus, it's easy as anything to block content that you're viewing, since they've added access to the context menu PLUS a clickie in the status bar which lists all blockable content on the current page. Create your filter, click "OK," reload the page, and you're done.
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Like I said, a bit faster-loading. Just a touch speedier when you start it up. Should you leave Firefox minimized (or in the background) for any length of time, it'll be sluggish for a minute.
See now I'd been blaming other CPU/RAM intensive programs for the slow Restore. But on my work computer (NT4, maybe 400MHz) Firebird takes like 2 minutes on the initial load.
I hope the Google bar works too. I like it better than the built-in search bar.
Personally, I've never liked the Google bar, and I find the search toolbar just fine for my needs. CTRL+K if you want to search using the current tab, or CTRL+T - TAB if you want a new tab, and you're good to go. The only thing they need to change is to enable keyboard-based selection of the engines (have you added any search engines? It's great. IMDB, amazon, etc. are all available.)
The main reason I like the G bar is that is spawns a new tab by default. With the built in bar I frequently forget to ctrl+t before searching. I like the single-click site search as well. I hated having to type in "site:www.411mania.com" or whatever. The other egines sound fun though.
I love Flash c-t-v. I usually hate Flash so I only click it for menus and stuff. Ad blocker didn't seem that necessary since just right clicking and "block images from" has wiped out virutually all of them already. I noticed FB also doesn't really let you drag an image into explorer so the copy function could be nice.
I looked at TTLO but it was so vague in the features that I couldn't tell if I wanted it or not.
For andalucia's problem: not everybody has to create a new profile but if it wasn't working you should. You can just run the .exe with a -p argument.
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Okay, I bit the bullet and installed Firefox. Half of my favourite old extensions don't work with it, but everything essential does.
It's faster to open now than IE - about 1.3 seconds on my 1.8Ghz Athlon. Pages don't seem to render any faster, but Firebird was pretty fast to begin with.
What I don't like is that no skins work with it but the original one that came with it (and which is not very nice looking).
Still, it's better than the early Mozilla releases that used the old Netscape 4.x buttons as the default.
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I got it working, thanks for the advice.
I'm with Jough on the troublesome lack of skins. I went questing this morning for my favourite, Orbit, to no avail.
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I dunno what the problem with the skins is. I use the Phoenity skins (Neo at the moment) and they're flawless so far.
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I just got round to updating to Firefox and the latest Thunderbird (there is a splendid tool called Mozilla Backup around, which lets you backup your profiles properly, just in case anyone lacks it). I've not noticed many differences from Firebird, but then have been in London for the last few days. One thing is the icon is way better.
My bro uses Mozilla still, and every time he visits complains that I close my browser after each time I use it. He then sees how fast Firebird/fox loads on my machine (partly it is much faster than Mozilla to load, and partly my computer is actually a lot better than his) and he kind of shuts up then.
Anyway, I couldn't imagine not using the Mozilla dev project browser/email client, whatever the fuck they call it at the time.
As for skins, I am very utilitarian, and nuke all but - back, forward, reload, top and gome, and make them small icons with no text. I then stick the address section on the same line, so the menu and the address/buttons/google box are all on one line. This just is least cluttered and offers most space for the page I find.
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Yeah, I make my icons as small as possible too - but I had a custom skin for it that made everything VERY tiny and it doesn't work with the new version of Fire
birdfox.
It's all good. I'll figure it out.
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I want my StumbleUpon toolbar back.
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I just got round to updating to Firefox and the latest Thunderbird (there is a splendid tool called Mozilla Backup around, which lets you backup your profiles properly, just in case anyone lacks it). I've not noticed many differences from Firebird, but then have been in London for the last few days. One thing is the icon is way better.
There was a tremedously popular Firebird icon that is almost completely identical to the Firefox one. Granted, it only chanded the shortcuts and not the taskbar/program icon, but still.
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Does anybody know if there's a way to resize the search box? I'd like to put it on it's own line and extend it. Right now it only shows like one word which bugs me when I'm trying to do site-searches and stuff.
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i just started to use firefox, and i like it lots and lots.
i will have to try these so called "extensions" and whatnot that you people are using.
and, considering how old this thread is, anyone found any new extensions and whatnot that they can't live without?
also, what is the purpose of "skins" beyond changing the color of things? please note that i have never used a skin for anything longer than 1.3 seconds, and that was only one time with winamp when i was young and confused.
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TabBrowser Extention is my absolute must-have. It allows you to use "single window" mode so you have lots of tabs instead of window. Allows dragging tabs to rearange, an un-close button, prevent sites from auto-refreshing, and other funs stuff. It also lets you open a whole set of bookmarks at once each in a tabl. So in the morning I just click my Routine folder and it open Achewood, the Post, Diesel Sweeties, etc all at once for me.
There are other smaller extentions that add these features individually but TBE gives you all at once and then some. I would guess it's also in the top 5 most installed as "TBE" is a pretty common acronym around the Firefox fora.
AdBlocker. Enough said.
I really like Flash Click To View.
BugMeNot which will give you premade log-ins for places like NYT or WashPost.
TiA-CAPRL creator. Usefull for linking to Amazon or Google results.
Sage. A bare-bones RSS feed in one of the tabs.
IEView. Opens the page you're currently on in IE. Useful because my bank requires ActiveX
Some people swear by penis Gestures others hate it. Did you ever play Black & White? Did you like the spell system? Same idea.
I use the Qute and Neptune themes just because there's something about the default theme I don't quite like.
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Flash click to view is a must have on a Mac because Flash runs about as fast as BLISTER's fetid corpse.
ImageZoom is somewhat awesome.
And not everybody knows about this, but if you type a forward slash "/" it automatically finds whatever you type on the page. Once it's found the first occurance of that word, you can hit control-g to find the next or use their little highlighter doo-jiggy.
Some Firefox settings are only available from the config screen. If you're daring, type about:config in your address bar. On the Mac, Firefox doesn't let you tab to drop-down menus in forms like IE does. To change this, you can go to about:config and change the accessibility.tabfocus field to 3. Changing it to 7 lets you use tab to go through all the links in the page as well (enter key 'clicks' those links).
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/ awesome.
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And not everybody knows about this, but if you type a forward slash "/" it automatically finds whatever you type on the page. Once it's found the first occurance of that word, you can hit control-g to find the next or use their little highlighter doo-jiggy.
Some Firefox settings are only available from the config screen. If you're daring, type about:config in your address bar. On the Mac, Firefox doesn't let you tab to drop-down menus in forms like IE does. To change this, you can go to about:config and change the accessibility.tabfocus field to 3. Changing it to 7 lets you use tab to go through all the links in the page as well (enter key 'clicks' those links).
I forgot about that. I keep the "always find as you type" option off because I generally find it annoying. But sometimes it's useful.
Also in about:config is broswer.blink_allowed which if set to false ignores the BLINK tag on pages.
Right below that is a new_window option that will make it ignore attempts to open a new window/tab from a link you clicked. Useful if you get into the habit of middle clicking links that you want to open a new tab.
Towards the bottom are the various security flags so if you accidentally check off one of those "Check here to not see the message again" flags you can undo your mistake.
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If you're thinking of upgrading to the newest version of Firefox, don't. 1.0PR is buggier than the Temple of Doom. It had some pretty features, but it is all the time crashing on both the Mac and Windows in my pitiable experience. I have reverted to 0.9. The tears they do come, but they are not often.
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I'm using the preview release now as my default browser (I haven't opened IE in about a week) but yes, it does crash from time to time, which the regular releases haven't done. I mean, it IS a preview beta, after all.
Someone has to provide QA feedback on this thing, though, so I figured what the hell. It's more stable than IE even with the bugs.
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0.9 tended to crash with the eMusic download manager so I decided to try out 1.0PR to see if it helped. But I haven't had a chance to test it yet.
Other than some Extention installation wonkiness it's been very good to me.
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I haven't had any significant problems with 1.0PR to date, but I may just not have shaken it enough. I'll update once there's a stabler version, of course, but thus far it isn't crashing and burning.
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1.0PR hasnt' really crashed much for me. It was crashing when I did one thing in particular, but I utterly fail to remember what it was...
I've been having so many problems with temperature and shit.
Also, I've been doing a lot of tweaking of windows to make Pro Tools and it's hardware as happy as possible... Ugh.
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Yeah, what's up with the new Intel motherboards and overheating? I swear, if I hear one more Zone 2 alarm due to temperature I am going to just freak the fuck out like Howard Dean.
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS POST MARKS THE LAST YOU WILL EVER HEAR OF HOWARD DEAN. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE IN THESE TROUBLED TIMES.