Get Firefox Now

Are you ready to infiltrate society and spread Firefox one sticker at a time? Operation Firefox is currently recruiting agents to place huge 3.5’ Firefox stickers where the world will see them. In addition to worldwide notoriety, you might wind up with a new MacBook Pro or a Nintendo Wii.

Operation Firefox began last summer as a project initiated by the Mozilla Marketing interns. We had seen what the Mozilla community produced before, including the New York Times ad, the Firefox crop circle, and the Firefox Flicks contest, and decided to step up to the challenge and create another opportunity for Mozilla fans to show off their creativity.

This newest campaign puts 3.5 foot Firefox stickers in the hands of our community and looks for creative new ways to share Firefox with the world. Ultimately, our goal is to get 50 great photos of the Firefox logo in situations that promote some of the defining characteristics of the Web browser–performance, security, customization, and community.

The contest is two-tiered: first, we’re putting out a call for the 50 best “placements” for these stickers (due November 9th). Then, the most creative agents will receive a fathead sticker to complete their mission: take a photograph and submit before December 3rd. All 50 photos will be displayed on the Operation Firefox website, but the four best ones will receive a new MacBook Pro or Nintendo Wii.

Do you think you have what it takes to be an Operation Firefox agent? To learn more about the contest and how to participate, visit www.operationfirefox.com.

A lot of people complain about the Firefox “memory leak(s)”. All versions of Firefox no doubt leak memory - it is a common problem with software this complicated. We look to fix the issues where we can. David Baron and others have done a huge amount of excellent work in this area.

What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.

To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It's a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.

For those who remain concerned, here’s how the feature works. Firefox has a preference browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers which by default is set to -1. When set to this value, Firefox calculates the amount of memory in the system, according to this breakdown:

(reference: nsSHistory.cpp)

No more than 8 pages are ever cached in this fashion, by default. If you set this preference to another value, e.g. 25, 25 pages will be cached. You can set it to 0 to disable the feature, but your page load performance will suffer.

Edit: In the comments, Boris and David pointed out that I misread the code, and that this is a global preference so that there are no more than 8 cached pages for the entire session, not per tab. My initial posting had claimed that it was per-tab. Oops!

Softpedia reports that work is under way to give the widgets in web page forms a more Mac-like look in Firefox. The look of all other aspects of a web page is under the control of the designer of the page, but the appearance of the buttons and other widgets that make up forms depends completely on the browser. In the case of the latest Firefox, which runs under a number of different operating systems, the look of form controls also depends on the OS.

For your convenience, I’ve collected an example using five different browsers in the image to the right: Mosaic 2.0.1 from 1995, Firefox, a preview of Firefox with Aquafied widgets, Camino, and Safari. (I couldn’t test Netscape 3 because the current Netscape homepage crashes the browser when it loads upon startup.) The current Firefox seems closer related to its 12-year-old ancestor-of-sorts than to any of the newer browsers as far as form rendering is concerned, but the preview (now also available for PowerPC) nicely fixes that. The new code is supposed to go into Firefox 3, so as of that version all Firefox users can enjoy the better-looking widgets.

However, for those of us who want to couple most of Firefox’ power and standards-compliant rendering prowess with Mac-appropriate good looks, there is another choice: Camino. Like Firefox, Camino is supported by the Mozilla Foundation. Interestingly, the improved Aquaish widgets in the Firefox preview don’t look completely identical to the Camino ones, so apparently there is more (or less) going on than simply borrowing the Camino code.

We’ve reviewed Firefox before. It’s a great browser, and I personally use both Safari and Firefox every day. Safari is fast and agile, while Firefox’s plugins add functionality I can’t browse without.

Since Firefox is open source, at least two people (that I know of) have taken the initiative to tweak Firefox specifically for Mac OS X, making these optimized builds even faster than the regular Mac version of Firefox. You can download a version specifically for your browser (G3, G4, or G5.)

This version of Firefox has the best icon of the Mac-optimized versions. Tomorrow I’ll review another Mac-optimized version that works with Intel chips.

Editor’s Review - Mozilla FireFox for Mac

Firefox is a Web browser featuring tabbed browsing, plugin support and extensions support.

The 2.0 release of this popular web browser is finally here. I’ve been waiting for it since the first preview of this version, the Release Candidate 1. After the third release candidate Mozilla managed to announce the big hit.

This version comes with some new features that in the previous stable releases of Firefox (1.5.x) were available only by using certain extensions. This is a good thing because in this way you will get a stronger browser than the previous versions.

The producers said there are new features in this release. Here is a list with those new features: Visual Refresh, Built-in phishing protection, Enhanced search capabilities, Improved tabbed browsing, Resuming your browsing session, Previewing and subscribing to Web feeds, Inline spell checking, Live Titles, Improved Add-ons manager, JavaScript 1.7, Extended search plugin format, Updates to the extension system, Client-side session and persistent storage and SVG text.

I think every FireFox user will like the fact that the Session Saving functionality is an option and not an add-on like it was before. You will have to enable that options from the preferences panel though. You can find it in the ‘Main’ tab under the drop-down menu named ‘When FireFox starts’.

I like the fact that the producers implemented a single add-ons panel in this version. You will be able to manage your Extensions and Themes from the same window. Another nice thing is the possibility to disable an extension, rather than uninstalling in in order to make it cease function.

I need to say a few words about the Web standards too. Since all current browsers are trying to comply with the W3C standards I had to test the browser with the well known Acid2 test. This build of Firefox failed again the test. You will be able to see how it is rendering the image in the screenshots I took during the testing. Programmers of Mozilla have been making gradual efforts in order to pass this test.

Pluses: it has an improved tabbed browsing and other new features in this build, it has a little better rendering speed that the previous release. The ‘Preferences’ panel and the ‘Add-ons’ panel looks better.

Drawbacks / flaws: so far I didn’t get any but if you do get a crash you can always use the TalkBack engine in order to help the Mozilla to improve FireFox by uploading the crash log.

In conclusion: the product looks like an evolution, not like a revolution but you can’t have them all. It is a better implementation and the producers already have plans for a third version. In fact, if you would like to take a peek to an alpha build of Firefox 3.0 you can take it from the download section. Please remember: the alpha builds are only for testing and sending feedback to the producer, and they aren’t recommended for daily usage. An interesting thing is the fact that the 3.0 Alpha 2 version passes the Acid2 test. A strong alternative for this product is Opera, a Web browser that is improved by its producers with every new version.

Publisher’s Description:

Mozilla Firefox project (formerly Firebird, which was formerly Phoenix) is a redesign of Mozilla’s browser component, written using the XUL user interface language and designed to be cross-platform. When you download Firefox, it includes a popup blocker, tabbed browsing, a smarter search, hassle free downloading, and improved privacy and security.

Mozilla on Thursday made it easier for Mac users to browse the Web with Firefox. The open source software developer released a new version of its browser with more Mac support and several security fixes. The big story with Firefox 1.5.0.2 is that it adds native support for Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) Mac OS X running on Intel’s (Nasdaq: INTC) processors, according to JupiterResearch analyst Joe Wilcox. The security fixes issued are typical, though important, updates common to most browser updates.

The software updates will be automatically delivered to Firefox 1.5 users in the coming days. Those using earlier versions of the popular browser, however, must make manual updates to the software at Mozilla’s Web site.

All About Apple

Firefox 1.5.0.2 includes Universal Binary support for Mac OS X which provides native support for Macintosh with Intel Core processors. Firefox supports the enhancements to performance introduced by the new MacIntel chipsets.

Could this cause Apple users to flock to Firefox? Wilcox said it may cause some migration, but most Mac users are still using the older processor. Regardless, however, “the more applications that move over to the MacIntel chipsets the better,” he told LinuxInsider.

Wilcox has tested Apple’s Rosetta translation technology to run applications intended for non-Intel Mac hardware. His conclusion: the emulation works well, but the experience is much better using the native Universal Binary code.

Making the Transition

Apple faces a significant challenge in making a transition from one processor to another, since the older software is written for the older processor. Apple’s translation technology attempts to circumvent that challenge by building compatibility into the operating system to allow the new hardware to run the old software.

“With some applications you notice the emulation more than others. The applications may not be as responsive when you first open them. For the person that bought the Intel-based Mac and is looking for that performance increase, the bigger bang will come from the native code,” Wilcox noted.

Stability and Security

Firefox labeled its latest version a “stability and security” release because it addresses critical security problems and various bugs. The update comes on the heels of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) major update to Internet Explorer on Tuesday.

Specifically, Firefox fixed spoofing vulnerabilities, along with file stealing, space heap overflow and crashes with evident memory corruption issues. Mozilla recommended that all Firefox users upgrade to the latest version.