LWN: Comments on "A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2"

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

Cato — 2006-05-26T17:57:09+00:00

TabMix Plus on Firefox 1.5 does the right thing - it prompts you as to which saved session to open, and even tells you if that session crashed, so it's easy to open one that doesn't crash Firefox (although I've only rarely had that problem anyway).

Does it protect the contents of text boxes?

arcticwolf — 2006-05-25T09:36:41+00:00

There's an extension called undoclosetab that does just that and which will restore form contents, too. Saved my on more than one occasion, although I agree it would be nicer if the browser itself weren't so brain-dead about this...

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

Quazatron — 2006-05-22T14:42:49+00:00

> The browsing session is automatically restored in the event of a crash.

From all the apps I've used before that implement this behaviour, this is what I've learn: If your session crashes, and your app reloads the session, It'll just crash again. And again. And yet again.

I'm sure hope I'm wrong and they manage to get this right.

I'm not nobody!

xoddam — 2006-05-22T04:49:59+00:00

And nobody isn't me.

Nor do I care how statistically you speak!

Does it protect the contents of text boxes?

fergal — 2006-05-20T23:46:53+00:00

It's quite remarkable that Firefox 1.5 (and probably every other browser) will happily throw away several hours worth of typing with a single mis-click. Have they by any chanceadded an "Are you sure you want to close this tab/go back/clear the form and throw away your email/blog posting?" dialog?

As things stand Window's Notepad takes better care of users' hard work than browsers do.

Bug filed long ago but untouched so far.

Spell checker

jzbiciak — 2006-05-19T16:07:37+00:00

"Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken." -- yakkoj@netscape.net

Now if they could add lose/loose, their/they're/there, your/you're checking, that'd be something.

Default Linux browser?

jwb — 2006-05-19T04:03:49+00:00

This also gives Konqueror users a means to cloud the issue that their browser is used by,
statistically speaking, nobody. Whatever the most popular browser is, a finite slice of that must be
clandestine Konqueror users. It's a brilliant marketing strategy which I have long admired.

Spell checker

proski — 2006-05-18T22:04:31+00:00

The spell checker shouldn't be underrated. Sometimes an embarrassing typo in a public forum or in a message to the boss can be worse than losing the whole hard drive worth of data and leaking all credit card numbers to the scammers. That's why I'm switching to Bon Echo now, despite all warnings.

Well, on the other hand, Forecastfox is incompatible with Bon Echo, so people living in tornado prone areas should probably wait a little bit :-)

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

proski — 2006-05-18T18:55:05+00:00

If you want the single close button, use tab-no-x

Default Linux browser?

martinfick — 2006-05-18T18:39:13+00:00

Right, and because of this general assumption, most Konqueror users have to use the nifty 'set user agent' feature and disguise themselves as other browsers so that stupid websites to not say "we do not support your browser... please use IE, Netscape or Mozilla", but yet they actually do support us if we masquerade! Please, do not trust those logs!!!

Default Linux browser?

jonabbey — 2006-05-18T18:16:03+00:00

Well, Corbet probably has access to LWN user agent logs..

Default Linux browser?

martinfick — 2006-05-18T17:22:30+00:00

Funny, I always thought that Firfox was the default alternative windows browser, and that Konqueror was the default linux browser. :)

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

pointwood — 2006-05-18T13:04:45+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised if there was an extention that did that already :)

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

job — 2006-05-18T08:49:20+00:00

They seem determined to go with the old-style close buttons instead of the newer Firefox-style. Weird. But at least a slight improvement from alpha 1, which did both.

A test drive of Firefox Bon Echo Alpha 2

mgh — 2006-05-18T04:44:22+00:00

One feature that would be a cool addition to the exsiting search function would be a "search this site" button that would auto-magically add the current active tab/window domain "site:xxxx.yyy" to the search query (on google).

I often find that google is better than search engines on local sites. Also the results could optionally be opened in a sidebar so that the current page was not reloaded.

Yeah - ok, someone has already probably thought of this ;)