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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Web Browser

I have read about Firefox 3 having the ability to sort bookmarks, and I have quasi figured it out, but I am still having problems. I can sort the bookmarks within the bookmark manager, but the settings I choose are not saved for when I go to the bookmarks in the bookmark bar...it seems all I am doing is sorting the bookmarks for viewing within the manager, not actually changing anything.
 
TwinCities Dan said:
I kinda like FF3, I only use FF because I CAN'T USE HOTMAIL WITH SAFARI at all, are you saying you CAN access hotmail? :confused:

(I know Hotmail=MS=the Devil but my account is like 10 years old so I keep the same address, I would gladly support Safari if I could just check my email with it :mad:)
Click to expand...

I can, try resetting Safari
 
clevin said:
"by extension" is an interesting word, i think it should be used with cautious. extension is assumption, and you dont know it, it has no support.
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If Apple provides funding for Webkit, employs staff to work on Webkit and deploys webkit based browsers across a number of platforms and architectures then I don't think it is a huge jump to say that by extension they support Webkit and its goals.

By extension means taking the same line of argument further. So it is not an assumption reached without proper basis.

Stop being so pedantic, otherwise I could get pedantic about all those “Active security featres”.

clevin said:
why is that you think webkit is created by apple then? because apple named it?
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Please find where I said Apple created webkit and then I will explain it. Funnily enough I'm sure I said Apple is a major contributor to Webkit not that they created it. Although as you rightly point out, they did coin the name.

clevin said:
less partial? safari is the only one being singled out by the standard drafter, or did you read something else?
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The fact Webkit (like Opera's Presto) passed is the achievement. It's a sad day when you start trying to discredit projects racing to provide top notch standards support.

As a reminder you originally attempted to make out that Webkit passing the ACID 3 test wasn't important because of Webkit's “partial” support for Web standards, even though ACID 3 is a test for web standards support. Confusing and completely illogical.
 
I'll use probably use Firefox on Windows but I'll stick with Safari on the OS X.

The Mac version of Firefox
Positives
- The Awesome bar is awesome.
- I can change the default search, (not new but a pet hate Sort it out Safari I want google.co.uk results not google.com, without resorting to hacking).
- Obviously the extensions continue to be great.

Negatives
- The screen scrolling seems jerky, compared o Safari.
- No gesture support - 3 finger swipe doesn't go back/forward, pinch doesn't zoom, it's excusable in Firefox 2 but I'd expect this support to be added to a new release.
- UI looks wrong, it's purely cosmetic and doesn't impact on usability but it looks wrong.
- Broken extensions
 
migulic said:
Here you go, Safari left, Firefox right. I don't know about you but I can see the difference clearly, even with this JPG compression
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I can't tell if you're joking or being serious. The font rendering is practically the same. The only "problem" I see is that FF has bigger font, which you do know can easily be changed from Tools => Content and you can even change the font type! *gasp!*

And then there's this blog:
http://www.sanneblad.se/johan/?p=180
Again, starting to read it, I thought the guy was joking and was being sarcastic but as I read further, I became more aware that this guy was serious, which was laughable in itself.

I know this is an Apple forum and people defend Apple's products but facts are facts and I'm almost ashamed to say I almost bought a MBP. I don't want be associated with people who are blinded and fooled by such fanboyism.

Two of my close friends both have a MBP (one of them being quite the Apple fanboy) and both use FF3 since it's just simply better (and have even used FF3 betas and RC rather than Safari). My point is that FF3 is better than Safari, no doubt, on any platform. The theme is fine, the rendering is fine, there's nothing wrong with the way the buttons look! (sheesh people)

/rant
 
elppa said:
If Apple is the majority funder of Webkit employs staff to work on Webkit and deploys webkit based browsers across a number of platforms and architectures I don't think it is a huge jump to say that by extension they support Webkit.

Stop being so pedantic, otherwise I could get pedantic about all those “Active security featres”.

Please find where I said Apple created webkit and then I will explain it. Funnily enough I'm sure I said Apple is a major contributor to Webkit.
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please do. I have no problem about you want to be p***, as long as you argue with fact, go full speed ahead.

you didnt say "by extension apple supports webkit", you said apple "by extension created safari to promote openness, innovation and opportunity of the web", adobe support webkit too, nokie support webkit too, KHTML contributed foundation for webkit too.

The fact Webkit (like Opera's Presto) passed is the achievement. It's a sad day when you start trying to discredit projects racing to provide top notch standards support.
Click to expand...

It is an achievement. unfortunately standard exist for a healthy web environment, when you twist standard to harm the very environment, you deserve to be criticized.

And please don't compare opera to safari, the standard i mentioned (sorry I forget the name) opera implemented 95% items in that standard to pass acid 3, its quite different compare to safari when it implemented 5% of those items, its opportunistic at its best.

Not to mention you apparent doesn't even understand acid 3 != top notch standards support. do you know how many standard are there, how many items in those standards? and how many items is in acid 3?

PS. 8 million downloads in 24 hrs is achievement too, do you care? or how about acknowledge that the rise of firefox gives safari better chance to be a valid alternative after all?
 
Wolf04 said:
And then there's this blog:
http://www.sanneblad.se/johan/?p=180
Again, starting to read it, I thought the guy was joking and was being sarcastic but as I read further, I became more aware that this guy was serious, which was laughable in itself.
Click to expand...

Personally I agree with your overall assessment-- for a typical user such as I am, a lot of these criticisms are nit-picky to the nth degree. However, a lot of people who use Macs are professional or quasi-professional designers; for such people, these tiny flaws can be quite grating.

Regarding your put-down of the site above, a Firefox Mac developer actually responded to the blog post, acknowledging each imperfection, explaining each technical hurdle he faced and agreeing they needed to be fixed. "The guy", Johan, very graciously thanked him for his response.
 
Well, i've been using safari since i got my mac, with firefox 2 installed but not being used. Now that i've firefox 3 has been released, i've switched to using firefox.

I'm fed up with safari crashing, both browsers good and fast, but firefox just seems more solid.
 
ATG said:
Firefox is bad for the mac, it just doesn't want to be a proper OS X app. The problem is that the developers just don't care about the UI on OS X. So here's my list of things wrong with firefox's UI:

  • Main window:
  • OK, just looking at it, the toolbar buttons are the wrong shape. Apple's ones have a smaller radius around the edges.
  • It lets me resize the window until only the toolbar and bookmark bar are visible, completely clipping the status bar.
  • When you mouse over an item in the bookmark bar, the mouseover effect doesn't even remotely look like apple's (NSRecessedBezelStyle). It doesn't look very good.
  • Why does right clicking the toolbar offer to hide the bookmarks bar, but right clicking the bookmarks bar doesn't offer such an option.
  • The toolbar customisation "sheet" isn't a sheet. It doesn't animate, it doesn't look like a sheet. There's no blurring behind it like with a normal sheet.
  • There's no animations when I drag a toolbar item to the toolbar from the customisation "sheet". I actually had to do it twice because the first time I thought I was doing it wrong because it gave me no feedback that the item would be inserted into the toolbar (which is what the animations do). Obviously there's no animation when items are removed from the toolbar either.
  • Preferences:
  • They still haven't fixed that annoying flicker when you switch between preferences items.
  • The help button isn't native and looks really bad.
  • I shouldn't be able to hide the toolbar in preferences. Also, while I can't resize the window with a resize handle, I can resize the content view by hiding the toolbar. Really odd.
  • The tab control used in the Advanced section has come out of 10.2.
  • The spacing between controls is done very badly. No care has been taken, the controls have just been thrown in there.
  • Toolbars:
  • If I hide the toolbar by clicking on the tic-tac, the gradient isn't changed so the titlebar is left as a light grey instead of the normal apple titlebar gradient.
  • There should be a divider line between the titlebar and content view when the toolbar is hidden.
  • And there's no animation, of course, when hiding the toolbar.
  • I can't move items around by command-dragging them.
  • I can't move the window by dragging the background of the toolbar.
  • The gradient is all wrong. It goes dark grey->light grey->medium grey. It should be dark grey->light grey.
  • Menus:
  • There are no rounded corners on contextual menus.
  • There's no blurring behind contextual menus.
  • Contextual menu items don't flash on and off when clicked.
  • If there's not enough space to show a menu from a <select> popup button, get this, it shows a scroll bar. A scroll bar in a menu! Really leading the industry with innovation...
  • Menus from <select>s also have this ugly black border, the selected items don't have a gradient and there's really not enough space to describe all the faults.
  • Non-Native Controls:
  • Every control seems to get focus when you click on it regardless of whether full keyboard access is turned on or off.
  • The search fields used in the download window and booksmarks window are completely fake. The focus ring around them is fake. They has no 'x' button to clear them. Also, it should be "Search" not "Search..." because it doesn't open a new window or sheet. There's also one search field in the addons window, which has the magnifying glass on the wrong side!
  • The source list used in the bookmarks window has mouseover underlines. This is odd.
  • If I mouse down and hold on a popup button, and then mouse up outside the menu, it should close. It doesn't.
Click to expand...

You know, FF is an open project. You can do something about many of these issues besides complaining about them here... if you want to.
 
ungraphic said:
Not really, when safari continues to display webpages incorrectly, and firefox does not, im not going to switch to safari.
Click to expand...

Go to an iWeb created photo gallery then. ;)

Wolf04 said:
I can't tell if you're joking or being serious. The font rendering is practically the same. The only "problem" I see is that FF has bigger font, which you do know can easily be changed from Tools => Content and you can even change the font type! *gasp!*
Click to expand...



The font rendering is different, people spend a lot of time in web browsers these days so it does become an important point. I really didn't like FF2 because of this and didn't use it.

Nothing I tried got the font rendering to be the same.

FF3 is also different to how Safari looks and I prefer Safari. Opera is different again but in a way that is not prohibating.

Wolf04 said:
/rant
Click to expand...

Well that much was obvious.

It comes down to personal preference people can argue until the cows come home about which is better at each specific point but there are somethings that are intangible which makes the whole arguement moot.
 
HockeyGuy said:
Has anyone noticed that scrolling is not very smooth with FF 3 when doing a "two finger" like I am doing on my MBPro trackpad? It seems choppy.

Then when I do it with Safari 3 it works perfectly. Anyone else?
Click to expand...

You need to go to FireFox | Preferences, Advanced tab, tick "Use smooth scrolling". While there, untick "Use autoscrolling" as that is the absolute most hideously un-ergonomic monstrosity of an option ever foisted upon the world by IE.

The upside is that scrolling will now be pixel-level scrolling instead of "text line" jerky scrolling. The downside is that when you want to scroll down by a line or two FireFox will "helpfully" slow down the scroll to a delayed pixel-by-pixel scroll instead. Also, if you rapidly scroll with your scroll wheel you'll find that it can take FireFox a long time to "catch up" with this option on (just cleaned the ball of my Mighty Mouse, which entails turning it upside down and rubbing it violently up and down against a napkin; Firefox went into a scrolling fit for thirty seconds slowly and painstakingly reacting to the scrolling vomit.) Safari (and, might I add, all other Cocoa Mac apps) is much smarter about "collapsing" rapid scrolls. This is why the option is off by default: the effect for those using the arrow keys or scrollbar is a crappy responsiveness.

Shame FireFox can't separate the two concepts (they view scroll wheel rotations as precisely equivalent to clicking the up/down arrow on the scroll bar, which is the Windows metaphor but which is not the Mac metaphor).
 
jettredmont said:
You need to go to FireFox | Preferences, Advanced tab, tick "Use smooth scrolling". While there, untick "Use autoscrolling" as that is the absolute most hideously un-ergonomic monstrosity of an option ever foisted upon the world by IE.

The upside is that scrolling will now be pixel-level scrolling instead of "text line" jerky scrolling. The downside is that when you want to scroll down by a line or two FireFox will "helpfully" slow down the scroll to a delayed pixel-by-pixel scroll instead. This is why the option is off by default: the effect for those using the arrow keys or scrollbar is a crappy responsiveness.

Shame FireFox can't separate the two concepts (they view scroll wheel rotations as precisely equivalent to clicking the up/down arrow on the scroll bar, which is the Windows metaphor but which is not the Mac metaphor).
Click to expand...

Try addon "YASS" (yet anothet smooth scroll)
 
What's interesting to me is that Webkit and thus Safari might quickly become the most installed web browser around the world. With the iPhone and other phones using webkit at the base of their browsers, it shouldn't take long for them to rapidly add numbers...especially when you consider that the cellphone is the most prevalent computing device in the world
 
I find Safari to be the better browser. Firefox is slightly faster, has the plugin architecture but it doesnt integrate perfectly with Mac OS X. I like the font rendering of Safari and its simplistic design. I also like the seamless synching with .Mac without having to install 3rd party programs. Another thing that I like better in Safari is the RSS Feeds functionality and more specifically, the way rss feeds are being displayed. I dont like Dynamic Bookmarks in Firefox.
I know Firefox is great, especially if u use Windows, but for the moment I will stay with Safari.
 
tsice19 said:
Really? I've never noticed.... then again, I must be on MR too much.
Click to expand...

I've had site troubles too with Safari, which is a pity as it's nice and quick and integrates with iPhone bookmarks.

- Online proofing websites (few support Safari properly IME)
- Occasionally sites will display incorrectly
- Safari's zooming is a mess
- Weird Gmail problem when attaching large-ish (3 meg+ files) tend to jam it on 'working..... still working...'.
- Banking sites are hit and miss

FF3 is a nice improvement. I'll give it a thorough test drive but since the early v3 build I've been further and further hooked. Oh, and all the extensions are rather nice.
 
zombitronic said:
Can someone post the scores/screenshot of FF3 running the acid1, acid2 and acid3 tests? I just tested the current build of Safari and it passes acid1 and acid2 and gets a 75 on acid3.

http://acid1.acidtests.org/
http://acid2.acidtests.org/
http://acid3.acidtests.org/

It may not be the official Safari release, but it makes me glad that the nightly WebKit build passes with a score of 100. I like using an OS that doesn't need to have it's web browser replaced.
Click to expand...

Odd. If opened in a background tab, FireFox gets a 71 score on Acid3. If loaded in a foreground tab (or hit reload with the window in front), it gets 69.

Sounds like there is a bug with background/foreground rendering in FireFox.
 
ungraphic said:
Do you make this very same complaint about other applications? I think you should, because youd then have some credibility to such a weak complaint, especially since themes are available for firefox.
Click to expand...

I wasnt refering to the looks of Firefox but on the fact that it doesnt render fonts the way Safari does and the lack of .Mac Bookmarks syncing
 
eastcoastsurfer said:
What's interesting to me is that Webkit and thus Safari might quickly become the most installed web browser around the world. With the iPhone and other phones using webkit at the base of their browsers, it shouldn't take long for them to rapidly add numbers...especially when you consider that the cellphone is the most prevalent computing device in the world
Click to expand...
well, we will see, you can't assume iPhone will take over all the cell phones tho. :D
HD303 said:
How does the Full Zoom work? I'm not seeing any buttons to "Zoom" into anything.
Click to expand...
zoom is done by pressing cmd++ and cmd+-

but if you want a button or some sort, you might want to try these
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2671
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6489
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6715
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6827
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6965

any one of them, no need for all, sure you can if you want to.
 
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