Firefox Deer Park Alpha Available

The Mozilla folks have made available the newest release of the Firefox web browser. This release is for testers and developers only, and should not be used if you have no interest in trying out the latest build. The release notes cover the recent changes. From the what's new document: "Fast back (and forward) - This very experimental feature allows much faster session history navigation. The feature is off by default but can be enabled for testing purposes by setting the browser.sessionhistory.max_viewers preference to a nonzero number."

burning edge says:

[professorhojo]

According to Burning Edge, there are numerous usability regressions since 1.0 on the trunk builds.

I think they need a lot of time to iron things out and this is one of those things they've decided to prolong the process!

Since Fx is a hugely successful project that is still unusual in its open-source nature, the fact that more alphas and betas and in-betweens are being released may be a good thing.

Changes

[Hank Chinaski]

Notable bug fixes

* Web page rendering and interaction
o 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
o 238493 - Ads on Gamespot flicker into other parts of the page during page load.
o 95227 - Make it possible to set different default font type (serif vs sans serif) for different languages.
o 47350 - Current scroll position not retained, reloading or going back to multipart/x-mixed-replace (e.g. Bugzilla bug lists).
o 56314 - Reverse selection colors when page background is similar to default selection background.
o 274553 - Blocking iframes either via an extension or userchrome.css breaks find toolbar search.
o 103638 - Targets with same name in different windows open in wrong window with javascript.
o 62384 - Text Zoom doesn't change dropdown height (without reload).
o 97283 - Mouse wheel scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
o 251986 - Keyboard scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
o 209020 - Meta HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" broken if midas was ever used in that browser window.
o 198155 - Midas html editing mode persists after leaving the page that enabled it.
o 21616 - Space after ::first-letter pseudo-element line is larger than between other lines (improvement in first-letter drop-caps appearance?).
o 273785 - Plugins not scanned/detected on startup (empty plug-ins dialog in downloads, open-with dialog for PDFs).
o 76197 - Scrollbars should look disabled when there's nowhere to scroll (not yet fixed on Mac).
o 151375 - Focus outline should be drawn outside of element.
o 133165 - Focus outline should include larger descendants of inline elements.
o 65917 - :active neither hierarchical nor picky about what can be activated.
o 20022 - :hover state not set until mouse move.
o 278531 - Generic request prioritization (loadgroup prioritization) (e.g. for each HTTP host, load images with lower priority than pages).
* Improved error pages. To enable error pages, go to about:config and set browser.xul.error_pages.enabled to true.
o 157004 - Error pages should be stored in history and show the original URL in the address bar.
o 237244 - "Try Again" on XUL error pages does not repost form data.
* Downloads
o 239006 - Download manager doesn't account for filesize when presenting combined percentages.
o 245829 - Download manager progress and title do not update correctly, wrong number of files and percentage after finishing or cancelling a download.
o 249677 - Cancel does not delete temporary file in helper app dialog, if default action is save.
* Accessibility
o 175893 - Make XUL 's focusable.
o 162081 - Wrong letter is underlined as accesskey / mnemonic when widget direction is RTL.
o Many keyboard accessibility fixes.
o Many screen-reader accessibility fixes.
* Speed and memory-use improvements
o 227361 - Don't reflow documents in background tabs until window resizing is complete.
o 131456 - Memory use does not go down after closing tabs.
o Many other speed and memory-use improvements.
* Windows-specific bugs
o 16940 - [Windows] IME is now disabled for password fields.
o 255123 - [Windows] Opening URL from another app focuses an existing window before opening a new window.
o 171349 - [Win98] Firefox icon is Win98's standard icon (taskbar & upper lefthand corner of app).
o 284716 - [Win2k/WinXP] Create DDBs in nsImageWin::Optimize. (Fixes several performance bugs with large images, such as slow scrolli

New browser features

[darteaga]

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/new-brows er-features.html [mozilla.org]

Re:Extensions

[Hank Chinaski]

this is a alpha released. it is targeted at extension and theme developers so that end users have all their favorites available ones the final product is published.

Two things to look out for

[linuxci]

1. Talkback [mozilla.org] (aka Quality Feedback Agent) in Windows builds is only enabled by default for a random selection of users on the Windows platform. This feature was built into the installer so that the talkback server on Firefox release builds wouldn't get bogged down.

As this is an alpha release and is a good idea to send in as much crash data as possible you may want to do a custom install on Windows and make sure it's selected.

2. This release comes with a tool you can use to report broken websites. This can be found in the help menu.

This data is stored in a serpate database to bugzilla so that you can report any broken sites without having to worry about clogging up bugzilla with duplicates.

Re:Yay!

[linuxci]

I thought this wasn't considered to be a bug, and that the problem was with Slashcode's HTML?

Although Slashdot's HTML is old and bloated by modern standards this was actually a bug in the Firefox renderer. Although I'd like to see Slashdot clean up their HTML in the future this time it wasn't their fault.

This bug was actually fixed before Firefox 1.0 was relased but they pulled the fix from 1.0 as it caused some regressions, lucky that they got ironed out.

Many work

[glrotate]

Working:

Adblock
Launchy
Bugmenot
Spellbound
Stumbleu pon

Broke:

Forecastfox
Dictionarysearch

1.1 Extensions

[mdew]

http://www.projects1.com/firefox/exthacks/FFnightl yextensions.html [projects1.com]

something to help with the coversion to 1.0->1.1, also best to try a new profile too.

Re:Firefox 1.1

[linuxci]

Not sure that is fully implemented yet (as there's no easy way to test) but this feature will be in for 1.1 so making updates a lot smaller and easier (not that the full download updates were that big anyway)

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this wasn't considered to be a bug, and that the problem was with Slashcode's HTML?

Are you fucking kidding me? EVERY TIME Firefox gets mentioned on Slashdot this comes up. And EVERY TIME, a FUCKING MORON like you says this.

It's a bug in Firefox.

What, the valid HTML testcase attached to the Bugzilla entry isn't enough? The FIREFOX DEVELOPERS saying it's a bug in Firefox isn't enough? The fact that the next version of Firefox will fix it isn't enough?

What will it take for you fucking fanboys to realise that YES, YOUR PRECIOUS FIREFOX HAS A BUG?!?

I started pointing this out in a reasonable manner last year. I get slightly louder and more aggressive each time I post this. I don't tolerate idiot fanboys. Nobody should.

Re:Changes

[Issue9mm]

That's not necessarily something that should be fixed at the browser level. From a coding perspective, I've gotten into the habit of specifying horizontal margins and padding in ems, which is a relative unit of measure (horizontal) based on font size. Because of that, a simple document can scale perfectly regardless of text size.

If I specify a column's boundary at 150px, it isn't the browser's job to correct for it, other than to wrap the text when it gets too big.

Long story short, your complaint is with web designers, not with Firefox.

-9mm-

Re:Fast back

[linuxci]

They are, it's the parent post that got it wrong.

Feature off by default as it's got some bugs at the moment, see my earlier comments [slashdot.org] on how to enable it.

Not sure if they plan to implement the feature the parent mentioned in safari

Re:New browser features

[toadnine]

Not bad. 3 out of 6 new features are copied from Opera. "Sanitize" vs. "Delete private data" "Fast back (and Forward)" vs. "Rewind" and "Fast Forward" "Report a broken website wizard" vs. "Help -> Report a site problem"

Re:Changes

[n0-0p]

Opera style "page zoom" should be possible in 1.5, so you may eventually get your wish anyway. It's just not really practical with the current rendering engine.

Just installed it, first impressions...

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Pro:

* An old xml text webpage of mine, first I clicked on, showed an xlink image. Inline images were the one thing I knew of preventing 100% XML webpages.

* SVG. When I finally converted from seamonkey for all the gorgeous features I didn't realize firefox had, the lack of SVG hurt, hurt badly.

Con:

* Alot of extensions seem to be broken. Waiting for updates will be hard.

* Greasemonkey. Yes, I know it's just another extension, but at work, this one is a lifesaver. Going without it means using IE for our stupid webapps.

* The GrayModern theme is broken. The realization that this theme existed convinced me to switch from seamonkey. God I hate the default theme. (Are there any compatible themes at this point? I'd take anything other than the default!)

Strange:

* Even though it disabled the FavIcon Picker extension, alot of my links still have the icons I set for them. Wondering if a single click on them will undo the handywork.

Re:Deer Park??

[alex_ware]

Deer Park is so that it ISNT CALLED FIREFOX. If anything is badly wrong and it bears firefox branding then it is bad press but if it is an alpha build that is called by another name then there is no risk.

Re:CSS 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting that they have already started to implement some of the proposed CSS 3 features

CSS 3 is a family of specifications. Some of them are finished and ready to be implemented. There's nothing "proposed" about them, they are full, finished specifications, and Opera and Safari are implementing them as well.

That other browser can't even get CSS 1 right, and won't be implementing CSS 2 features in the edition that is supposed to be out this summer.

Apart from rumours from somebody who has little credibility (IMHO), we don't know one way or the other what improvements Internet Explorer 7's rendering engine will have. I'm personally taking the Internet Explorer developers' silence on the matter to be a bad omen, but it's not certain that there won't be big improvements.

Also, it's the beta that's due this summer. God knows how long it'll take for the final version to be released.