Firefox .8 is out

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Anyone use it and have opinions? I've been trying to download it but haven't been able to from their server. Anyone know another place to try?
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 33
    thegeldingthegelding Posts: 3,230member
    running it...seems fine...i like the downloader better...you still have to update the flash plugin (why it isn't standard i don't know)



    g
  • Reply 2 of 33
    mcqmcq Posts: 1,543member
    Try from one of the mirrors (I got it from the European server):



    http://www.mozilla.org/mirrors.html
  • Reply 3 of 33
    moogsmoogs Posts: 4,296member
    Slower than Safari 1.2 overall at both rendering and message board performance. Much nicer interface than before and a much more robust set of preference options than Safari. No Safari book import unfortunately.



    Ultimately I think this will be a very good browser though. Enough so that it will probably wipe out Camino even though Mike P. has picked up the development pace of late. There just won't be much sense in developing them both other than Camino maybe being a bit smaller file size or something.



    They'll be based off the same core engine / code base, both share tabs and all the Mac-centric features, and the point of both will be to eliminate the bloat of the rest of the Mozilla suite.



    In the end I think we'll be left with Mozilla, FireFox, Safari and OmniWeb. iCab and Opera will die slow, painful deaths and IE is already dead.
  • Reply 4 of 33
    bartobarto Posts: 2,246member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Moogs

    In the end I think we'll be left with Mozilla, FireFox, Safari and OmniWeb. iCab and Opera will die slow, painful deaths and IE is already dead.



    FireFox is designed to eventually replace Mozilla. That is, when the Mozilla guys decide FireFox is ready as a primary browser, work on the Mozilla Suite will finish.



    So it'll be FireFox, Safari and Omniweb... and maybe Konqueror, depending on how well KDE is ported to Mac OS X. Konqueror rocks... file browsing, samba browsing, media browsing, web browsing, all from the same program... and it WORKS!



    Barto
  • Reply 5 of 33
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    I like it a lot, it's better at playing flash that is for sure. I will say that a progress bar wouuld be nice, it's set up much like safari though which I like.



    I wish delete would be back like in most browsers, and command-1/2/3/4/5...would go to the menu bar bookmarks.



    It doesn't use a lot of CPU and seems to render all the pages I want to go to perfectly fine. Are there any other browsers that are better? I know omniweb is in beta, and I like that pretty much, but still needs work and I don't think flash stuff is as fast in there as firefox, although better then safari.



    One more thing...I wish firefox would use native buttons and dropdown menus, these buttons manage to be just as ugly as WinIE buttons.
  • Reply 6 of 33
    cosmocosmo Posts: 662member
    Does it support the keychain the way Camino does?

    I love this feature and won't leave Camino until a better browser comes along that supports the keychain.
  • Reply 7 of 33
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    i really like firefox's interface (and its icon ROCKS!), but on some pages, it's as fast as Safari, on others, it's 700% slower (approximately). don't know what triggers the slowdowns. flash also seems to run a bit more sluggishly than under other browsers.
  • Reply 8 of 33
    Well, I have to say, I love it.



    To my eyes at least, it seems faster than safari (on my emac at least).



    The interface seems much more full featured...it is my new dafault browser!!



  • Reply 9 of 33
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Moogs



    In the end I think we'll be left with Mozilla, FireFox, Safari and OmniWeb. iCab and Opera will die slow, painful deaths and IE is already dead.




    Shit, Opera is already dead, it only exists in the solid *nix and windows world. I mean 7 still isnt out for mac yet. Im wondering if it ever will come out for mac.



    Firefox is really nice though, im still sticking to safari for now though.
  • Reply 10 of 33
    eugeneeugene Posts: 8,254member
    FireFox 0.8 seems to be very noticeably less responsive than 0.7.1. Wah,
  • Reply 11 of 33
    rokrok Posts: 3,519member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by killer2239

    Shit, Opera is already dead, it only exists in the solid *nix and windows world. I mean 7 still isnt out for mac yet. Im wondering if it ever will come out for mac.



    Firefox is really nice though, im still sticking to safari for now though.




    no kidding, i tried out opera 6.03 tonight, just because i hadn't touched it in a while... just check out the massacre it does to macromedia.com (when all other browsers check out just fine). i mean, a little bit "off" is tolerable. but that's just whacked.
  • Reply 12 of 33
    aquaticaquatic Posts: 5,602member
    I don't know why everyone is saying it's slower. It beats Safari 1.2 on Apple's own site by more than 50 percent I'd say nonscientifically. And rok hells yea the icon ROCKS! I'd like a bigger picture to make for a desktop background, does anyone know where I can get it? It must exist because it's partially in About... Firefox is a coolass name. Pinstripe is much better, getting closer to Aqua. It just needs to add some of the Mozilla Prefs it's still missing like Pipelining and Keep Alive connections.



    My other pet peeve with every other browser now that I'm used to Safari is they waste space. Safari combines the Stop loading and Reload buttons, which are mutually exclusive. Also the status bar is in the Address bar, which is logical. Brilliant in fact. So far I would say FireFox has imitated Safari the best. OmniWeb is close but vaguely ugly in the bars, the separator is annoying and the buttons and their placement are too. Still Safari, OmniWeb, and FireFox and Camino are the best browsers for any platform.
  • Reply 13 of 33
    shoot, i only use it at work on my pc as i dislike IE...never thought to use it on my iMac at home...sticking with safari at home cuz i is a sheep i guess





    g
  • Reply 14 of 33
    dglowdglow Posts: 147member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Aquatic

    I don't know why everyone is saying it's slower. It beats Safari 1.2 on Apple's own site by more than 50 percent I'd say nonscientifically.



    hmmm, I'm not seeing that kind of perf. \

    I did notice that FireFox seems to render images progressively, while Safari waits to draw the entire image at once. perhaps this feeds the perception of faster loading?
  • Reply 15 of 33
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Firefox has some disadvantages vs. Safari:



    - No quick and easy ad-blocking like PithHelmet (can be done by altering hosts file though)

    - Can't figure out how to have links in other applications open in a new tab in the current window. Right now the one and only option is to have them open in a new window.

    - No spell checking as you type (this is a biggie).

    - No close box in the tab itself - there is a close box over on the right side of the tab bar.

    ADDED: Bad shortcut to switch tabs. In Safari, it's an easy cmd-shft-arrow to switch tabs left or right, but in Firefox it's the very difficult to reach ctrl-tab and ctrl-shft-tab. I kinda wish you could easily customize keystrokes like that, because although SOME standards are in place (command-Q, command-P, etc), others like tabs are not really established. Safari's commands are much more intuitive and easy to reach than Firefox's.



    Here's what I do like:



    - Seems as fast or faster.

    - Text entry is way better than Safari 1.2 (although text entry in previous versions of Safari has always been fine).

    - Dialog box confirmation if you want to close a window that has more than one tab open.

    - Tab bar is handled much better. In Safari, if you have the tab bar hidden when you only have one tab open, the window will change size when you close the second to last tab. If it fills the height of the screen with two tabs open, close one tab and the bottom will move up. Now, that doesn't make much sense, does it? The entire purpose of hiding the tab bar when only one tab is open is to save space and give you more room. Firefox does this properly. It's not a big deal, you can just have the tab bar always showing in Safari - it just takes some time to describe the problem.



    I'm going to try using Firefox for a while as my default browser. Hopefully they can pick a name and STICK WITH IT. At least they took "Mozilla" out of the name and gave it an awesome-looking icon.
  • Reply 16 of 33
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    - No quick and easy ad-blocking like PithHelmet (can be done by altering hosts file though)



    I take it you've never seen the famous AdBlock extension? It works wonders.
  • Reply 17 of 33
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    I take it you've never seen the famous AdBlock extension? It works wonders.



    Hey thanks! Downloaded, works great!
  • Reply 18 of 33
    I'm loving this. The only problem (really, honestly, the only one) is that middle-clicking doesn't open a window in a new tab (actually, it doesn't do anything at all.) It renders everything Mozilla does (ie virtually everything), is very fast, and I like the look, kind of how Safari should have been if Apple hadn't had that brushed metal fetish.



    (Edit - before I forget: If you used the older version, go into ~/Library and rename Phoenix to Phoenix.old before running the app, when I didn't it came up but didn't work properly - scrollbars were missing, Cmd-T didn't work, and more. You can reimport your bookmarks by bringing up the Manage Bookmarks selector, clicking Import, and going to ~/Library/Phoenix/profiles/??????/??????/bookmarks.html)



    Compared to the other browsers: Mozilla looks uglier and is much slower and eats up memory. Safari also looks fractionally uglier (unless I go in and edit the .nib so it uses the non-brushed look) and doesn't render everything I want.



    Chimera's old and has problems under Panther, the last official release of Camino crashes a lot, and the Camino nightlies seem to have a lot of performance issues and has problems under Panther too. (The problems both have under Panther is a screen drawing bug where you get white patches that suddenly appear over the page you're looking at. The Camino developers are pinning this one on Apple, I don't know enough to either contradict or confirm that explanation.) From a web development standpoint, Firefox has that Javascript console and DOM browser from Mozilla, both of which have proven to be life savers for me in the past, and neither feature has made it to Chimera/Camino.



    IE I'm not even going to comment on.



    If they can fix that middle button issue (which seems trivial), I'll probably swear off Chimera/Camino for good.



    This is good stuff
  • Reply 19 of 33
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    Firefox has some disadvantages vs. Safari:



    - No quick and easy ad-blocking like PithHelmet (can be done by altering hosts file though)







    While it's not exactly what you want, there is a per-site image-blocking feature. Most ads come from a handful of servers. All you need to do is right-click on them and select "Block images from ..." (where ... is "ad.doubleclick.net", etc.) Unfortunately it doesn't work for Flash animations which are, to my eyes, the worst offenders - animated .gifs are bad enough, but Flash... yealch.



    While there's a bug registered with Bugzilla to allow blocking of Flash animations in the same way,



    http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94035



    If you register with Bugzilla, you can "vote" for it, though it's already one of the most popular "bugs" on the site and nothing's been done with it for years.





    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    I'm going to try using Firefox for a while as my default browser. Hopefully they can pick a name and STICK WITH IT. At least they took "Mozilla" out of the name and gave it an awesome-looking icon. [/B]



    There should be no problems with the current name. For "Firebird", they chose the name of an existing open source project and, after being told that a project already existed decided to seek legal advice rather than do the right thing. The lawyer said there was nothing technically illegal about calling it the same thing, so in a fit of "I know my rights, get over it, that's just too bad" obnoxiousism (to coin a word) they adopted the name.



    Bizarre, very obnoxious, and I'm relieved they finally came to their senses over the issue.
  • Reply 20 of 33
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    I just find it funny that it has gone from Phoenix to Firebird to Firefox, and at the same time, Chimaera turned into Camino. I mean, seriously, THREE already-taken names? You'd think they would eventually learn. I hope by now they have.



    By the way, the Adblock plugin that Brad told me about works fine, just as easy as PithHelmet. Now I can use it to block those stupid smokey smileys that Nebagakid always puts everywhere
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