A look at Firefox 0.9 [LWN.net]

June 9, 2004

This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier.

The Mozilla Organization released not one, but two testing releases on June 9. Mozilla 1.7RC3 and Firefox 0.9 RC were released for widespread testing. Since Firefox is the future of the Mozilla line, we decided to take a look at the latest Firefox release to see how it is shaping up on its way to 1.0. As it turns out, a lot has changed since 0.8 and Firefox seems to be turning into an excellent browser. Naturally, we were only interested in testing the Linux version of the 0.9 release, but there are packages available for Windows and Mac OS X as well.

The first noteworthy change since 0.8, or at least the change that is first notable, is the addition of an installer for Linux users. Past releases of Firefox for Linux came as tarballs without any kind of installer. For this author, the difference between using an installer or simply uncompressing a tarball of the latest build into a convenient directory is negligible. Still, many users will probably find the installer much more friendly.

At install time, the new release copies over the profile from previous versions of Firefox from the ~/.phoenix directory that was used to store user data. If the ~/.phoenix directory does not exist, then Firefox will import user data from Mozilla. This author tested both methods, and Firefox imported the data from Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla 1.7 without any problems. User profiles on Linux are now stored under ~/.mozilla/firefox/.

A few items have shifted around in the new release. Specifically, the "Options" dialog is now "Preferences" and found under the "Edit" menu, rather than the "Tools" menu. Themes and Extensions now have their own managers, rather than being part of the Options/Preferences dialog. The Extensions manager is a bit slicker now, and apparently will enable the user to update their installed Extensions through Mozilla Update. At the moment, however, this feature does not seem to be operational. Presumably, one will also be able to use Mozilla Update to install and update themes in the future as well.

One minor quibble with the Download manager: in 0.9, the default download folder is "Desktop," which hardly seems like a suitable choice even for Linux users who run a desktop environment that supports saving files to the desktop. It's fixed easily enough, but one hopes that the Mozilla team will switch the default to prompt the user for a download location.

Though this author did not conduct any scientific testing, the latest Firefox release does seem faster than the previous release. The interface, menus and so forth, seem a bit more responsive than previous releases, and rendering also seems a bit snappier. Firefox 0.9 RC also seems a bit more stable, though it has crashed once during testing. The 0.9 RC is certainly more stable than the 0.9 nightly snapshot releases that this author had been trying out.

The most obvious change, and one that has generated a great deal of discussion, is the replacement of the current Firefox "Qute" theme with a new theme called "Winstripe." For this author, it seems like far too much fuss over a simple change. The browsing experience itself is not hampered by the new theme, and one expects that new themes for Firefox will become available for those who do not enjoy the default. The fact that users are able to focus so much attention on Firefox's theme may be a good sign, however. This may indicate that Firefox already meets their needs in terms of speed, stability and feature completeness -- allowing users to focus their attention on more superficial areas. If this is the case, the Mozilla developers should regard the theme complaints as something of a compliment.

In all, the latest Firefox is an impressive browser. It lacks polish in a few areas, but it is a solid browser with an impressive array of features. We'll be quite interested to see what the final 1.0 release of Firefox will look like when all is said and done.

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to post comments

A look at Firefox 0.9

Posted Jun 10, 2004 9:21 UTC (Thu) by rjw (guest, #10415) [Link] (1 responses)

What is really the aim of the installer on Linux?

People are either going to install it thmeselves, from source, or they'll get it as a package. The import wizards should surely be part of the program proper, nothing to do with installation. They can run on first use as well.

I really hate this desire to make installation like windows. Windows is *far* far worse at package management than linux.... why copy a badly broken system?

One argument is that people want to install in their home dirs - this is an argument for a relocatable package , and also more work put into making programs installable for just one or a small set of users. GoboLinux probably has the right idea here - each package is in its own directory, bt I'm not too sure about their dependency system....

A look at Firefox 0.9

Posted Jun 11, 2004 16:01 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I kind of like the installer, since it allowed me to install in /opt/firefox-0.9. This makes it easy to run multiple versions on the same system, and I know where everything is so I can easily nuke it when I'm done using it without breaking anything.

Of course I was able to do this almost as easily with prior versions by unzipping the tarball in the correct directory and changing a few permissions. Both methods are a lot easier than editing a package so that it installs where I want it.

Where will it run

Posted Jun 10, 2004 19:47 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (6 responses)

It's not exactly our "problem", per se, but there has always seemed to me to be a tendency in the F/OSS community not to impose arbitrary restrictions on such items as which processors a program will run on -- merely because we don't think it will be comfortable to use on slower machines.

If you want to run it on a 386, goes our notional argument, and you're willing to be that patient, go for it.

Comes now the milestone builds of Moz and FireFox.

Which will not run on my *586* laptop.

Someone decided that they should be built for P-II's and above; Pentium's need not apply.

I invite you to visualize my trying to build from source on my P-266 96MB laptop with KDE running, with only a couple hundred meg free on the 10 GB drive.

I invite you to imagine third-worlders trying to run it on their 486's.

I invite you to read the open bug , see all the comments and merged duplicates... and note that it's 4 months (and a couple of milestone builds) old, and that it hasn't even been assigned to the release manager yet.

Can This Project Be Saved?

Is anyone in the penthouse suite at mozilla.org listening?

Is it just me?

Cause, y'know, so many things are just me...

Where will it run

Posted Jun 12, 2004 22:20 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (5 responses)

It's no longer true that most things will run on a 386. Proper atomic instructions need for threading only exist on 486 or above, so very few places make a 386 distribution any more.

Optimizing for a particular processor can often speed up the code. If I were running something much slower than my PIII-450, I'd find a faster browser, an older Netscape, or possibly Konqueror or Opera, or Lynx. Given that there are very few pre-Pentium II users left for Mozilla, taking the speed advantage over the compatibility with older chips seems to be reasonable.

Where will it run

Posted Jun 12, 2004 23:23 UTC (Sat) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (4 responses)

> Given that there are very few pre-Pentium II users left for Mozilla,

My perception is that this line of thinking, which clearly is that of the Mozill build team as well, is
probably quite insular thinking; it may be true in the US (though I'm not even sure of that), but I
guarantee you there are easily 5 times as many Pentiums outside the US as there are Pentium-II+'s
inside the US....

Where will it run

Posted Jun 17, 2004 8:05 UTC (Thu) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (3 responses)

I guarantee you there are easily 5 times as many Pentiums outside the US as there are Pentium-II+'s inside the US....

That's meaningless. Given that, there could still be fewer people percentage-wise using old computers outside the US then inside. In any case, I've never seen anybody come up with real numbers for either side of this debate. I do think your division is wrong, considering that several European nations and Japan have higher average incomes than the US, and many other nations are at least comparable. I still question that there's many Pentiums left. My father's Pentium 2 had a motherboard failure recently. How many Pentiums have failed and been replaced already? How many of the people running Pentiums are actively upgrading their computers and would try and run Mozilla?

I keep saying

Posted Jun 18, 2004 16:00 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

"third-world" quite clearly, and everyone keeps not listening...

<sigh>

I keep saying

Posted Jun 18, 2004 22:37 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (1 responses)

If you care to back and look at your last message, you didn't say third-world, unless you think "outside the US" means third-world. In any case, all you've done is make some unsubstatiated claims about the quantity and quality of machines in the third world. Nobody is going to be swayed by that alone.

You're right; it wasn't here I'd said it

Posted Jun 21, 2004 23:58 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

On the other hand, your original reply didn't really speak to my assertions, either, and it isn't pertinent here: empirical testing has proven that building it to run on the 586 does not make it slower to run on the 686++ than building it so that it will *not* run on the 586 -- as the bugzilla comment chain shows.

A look at Firefox 0.9

Posted Jun 10, 2004 21:38 UTC (Thu) by Klavs (guest, #10563) [Link]

I'm a (almost) happy user of Firefox 0.8 - I'm hoping for

1) kde actually restarting firefox - instead of mozilla - when it saves the session (KDE gets everything else right - so I don't know whose to blaim KDE or Firefox).

2) A bit more resillient extensions - wrong permissions on extensions, and installation in anything else than the common extensionsdir makes it crash horribly for me. Luckily after some forum digging it works quite well now :)

3) a Bug fix of the Password manager - I once entered the password wrong - and then just choose cancel - it then deleted ALL passwords saved.
- more over - it does not support saving a password pr. URL - so when I have f.ex. mysite.dk/somestuff/ and mysite.dk/otherstuff/ with different usernames and/or passwords - it doesn't remember them seperately and I can find no option/extension for this :(

4) For some reason my webbank does not work properly - links in one frame to another makes it open the frame in which the link is - in another window - instead of just doing as it is suppose to - luckily I have backup browsers for that purpose :)

Even with all these annoying bugs - its still the best browser around :)

I haven't reported these as bugs (althought I usually always do on projects) but I figured they were so obvious so they must have been reported already.

if any one knows if they are or not - let me know - and I'll report them :)
p.s. who needs an installer when you're running Gentoo Linux ;)

New Theme

Posted Jun 11, 2004 15:50 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I don't know why there are so many people complaining about the new theme; I think it looks pretty good. It's nice to see icons that are simple and have some representation of the function they perform instead of just being screenshot eye candy. The "new tab" icon confused me at first -- I thought it was the "print" icon -- but other than that they are nice and simple.

A look at Firefox 0.9

A look at Firefox 0.9

A look at Firefox 0.9

Where will it *run*

Where will it *run*

Where will it *run*

Where will it *run*

I keep saying

I keep saying

You're right; it wasn't here I'd said it

A look at Firefox 0.9

New Theme

Where will it run

Where will it run

Where will it run

Where will it run