Firefox 1.0 out Sept 2004

Michael, an application should never ever crash regardless of the 'setup and/or PC'. If it is then it's the application that's at fault. I'm sure Mozilla/Firefox/INeedAWankGetMePorn is essentially stable and will get fixed. But it's not excusable.

Paul
 
Paul, that's a rather sweeping statement about it not being the setup/hardware. In the PC market there is such a range of equipment/configurations as well as OS variations that you cannot categorically ensure that a piece of code will not encounter problems and fail due to factors outside the control of the programmer. For what it's worth I've only had a handful of crashes in all the time I've been running Firefox. And those were probably more to do with my ageing system trying to keep up with the demands I place on it than poor coding.
 
You're right Paul but there's clearly something rather unusual happening on adam's pc if his browser is crashing every day. For the overwhelming majority of people FireFox is at least as stable as IE6.

You can blame the PC in some cases though. When I first installed Windows 2000 ages ago on my previous PC it crashed at least once a day. It turned out to be some dodgy memory that somehow had not affected NT 4.0 before it.

Michael.
 
I installed Mozilla,(latest version)didn't realize they were different,it's fast and the layout is simple,I have no problems at all with IE,or the Avant browser,just Mozilla crashing everyday,saying do you want to send a error report.

My pc is new running XP professional.
 
Michael, I was refeering more to the look and feel of it, its never crashed on me, although menus sometims stay open, even though they should close and the preference panel is a mess.
 
I've just downloaded Firefox v 0.93 after finally having enough of the same problems as Adam has with it... on IE6 with the latest updates. Certainly, it's a lot more basic in appearance, but I personally think that's an advantage. Also, the pop-up blocker is an excellent feature, something Microsoft really should take into mind when they develop IE7 at some point in the future.

There isn't really a "what's best" with software, it's like all things, down to personal preference. So long as you can explain why you like something if someone asks, without insults having to be traded, where's the problem? We're all different.
 
In the PC market there is such a range of equipment/configurations as well as OS variations that you cannot categorically ensure that a piece of code will not encounter problems and fail due to factors outside the control of the programmer.
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You can guarantee that a user application will never exit with an unhandled exception while the operating system is still intact. I think developers should be much more hardcore about this. It's never acceptable. It is acceptable to have to abort a program, just like a kernel has to be able to 'panic', but any serious app should die politely and with a nice message telling you where and why and how to report it.

Paul
 
michaelab said:
Getting back to FireFox, it's the quickest, fastest most featured and least buggy browser I've ever used. It's already streets ahead of IE and the rest of the competition.

Michael.
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Agreed! I use the latest Firefox browser (with Windows XP Professional - Microsoft Service Pack 2 etc) and I find it a very good browser to use with no annoying pops and boy, is it fast?

Btw, I've only compared Firefox to Internet Explorer and being a non-techie, I don't sit there analysing what's behind the screen. I mainly go by what's presented to me on the screen and so far I like what I've seen. Let's put it this way, if Firefox is good enough for Microsoft's Head of Security, then it is certainly good enough for me.:D



Enjoy the music,

Lawrie.:D

.
 
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

Happy newish Firebird day Firebird day, read the fun and frolics at SlashDot.

First time I have had anything go wrong

The requested URL /pub/mozilla.org/extensions/adblock/adblock-0.5-0.5.2.039.xpi was not found on this server

Looks like the latest adblock has gone for a walk :mad: not too happy.
 
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It's a preview release and some of the extensions & themes don't work yet.

"The new Firefox Preview Release is the award winning preview of Mozilla's next generation browser. Firefox empowers you to browse faster, more safely, and more efficiently than with any other browser."

I guess the server is maxed out with people downloading the 1.0 pr code,
 
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crapdot

The live feed is a good idea, I have a folder full of BBC links but when I tried the same for slashdot it did not work - must be the crapdot code. Good news is that I now don't have to do the "refresh" dance every now and then just to get the slashdot page to look right.

I reckon one of mega good additions are the way you can stop the browser accepting any/all downloads and then white list sites you trust and if you only download to the desktop it sure does makes for safer surfing.
 
Just upgraded the forum software to vb 3.0.3 (from 3.0.1) which has improved RSS feed support and now enabled the feed so if you're a FireFox 1.0PR user (or anything else that supports RSS feeds) you can now get the latest threads as an RSS feed.

If you're a FireFox user just click the little RSS icon in the bottom right corner to add the live bookmarks.

Michael.
 
Cheers Robert, didn't know the version for 1.0PR was out, autofill is a nice extension too.
 
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I still find this version buggy and unstable. For starters, some survey thing kept popping up on it, and this crashed Firefox completely. The last time it did the same, only this time it lost 10Mb of an active download because of it. Tooltips stick the the screen, back does not take you to the point you were in the previous page on occaisions, I still think the interface is a little amateurish. Clearly it has come on lots though....

However, I've been using Opera browser today, and find it superior in almost every manner, so if you have an open mind, give Opera a try... you can find a serial for it easily enough to get rid of the banner ad.
 
IMO, the only thing that Firefox has going for it is the pop up handling. This is the second version I've tried and although I like it overall, I can't get on with the way it renders graphics in web pages. If the web server is a bit on the slow side it puts a box up with a little box in the corner with a red cross (the old "I can't find the file" icon), until it can download the picture and display it. While IE is no quicker at displaying the graphics on such pages it will sit there and not display anything in the graphics space until it has the whole picture and then will display it. To my mind this is a far more polished way of dealing with slow graphics loading and doesn't make the page look like it is in the process of being constructed by a web developer while you wait for the graphics to load.

I do find it very marginally quicker than IE to display pages however. But only on certain sites and as per an article I read in a PC magazine I don't care about the niceties of whether a web designer is not fully following all the appropriate rules of web script writing or not. I want my browser to be unfussy and to display the pages as was intended not baulk at it and display a messed up page just because the browsers software coders are too stuck up about the way web pages are designed. The simple fact is there will always be bad code out there on the internet a browser should ignore deal with it not be the flag waving argument of purist software writers.

Till Firefox displays the pages of every site I want to visit correctly like IE can, and until it starts thinking about what users want from a browser rather than what software coders think a browser should be like I won't be using it.


The new version of Thunderbird is good though, (now it has the global inbox).
I still don't understand why it has to take quite so long to start up though, (Firefox has exactly the same issue).

GTM
 
opera has dodgy css rendering.

thunderbird and firefox take a while to start, because the gecko runtime engine has to start too, ie is quicker off the mark as it's "native" to windows os.
 
GTM said:
Till Firefox displays the pages of every site I want to visit correctly like IE can, and until it starts thinking about what users want from a browser rather than what software coders think a browser should be like I won't be using it.
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Come on GTM, that's just outrageous! IMO Firefox is incredibly "what users want" oriented, far more so than IE. Faster browsing, popup blocking, tabbed browsing, the new find (in a web page) toolbar - everything about it is great little usability features that IE doesn't have.

As for not rendering some sites (very few IME) correctly, it isn't as simple as you say it is. The only way to do that 100% would be to code in the same rendering bugs that IE has in it which is a ridiculous thing to have to do. It's unfortunate that because of Microsoft/IE domination writers of websites have had to code around bugs in IE in order to make their pages display properly (in IE). Unfortunately, they don't always cater for the fact that someone may be visiting their site with a different browser.

It's got nothing to do with Firefox coders being stuck up about the way pages are designed, it's about trying to hit a undefined target. The problem pages are not because Firefox isn't handling sloppily designed pages, it's because it isn't handling obscure hacks and workarounds that designers have been forced to put into their sites so they will look correct with IE!

Michael.
 

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