Browser Updates- Master Thread
 

I will start this thread to centralize all browser updates. Feel free to post updates as you see fit. I really dont like to use automatic update.

Jan 21 2010: IE8 critical security update and Firefox major update


MisterNice

It's 2010 now. I know, hard to believe...

LOL

I've caught myself making that mistake for several weeks...still do it every once in a while. :D

firefox 3.6 released today (jan, 21st)
 

noticeably faster and works just fine on both my 2.66ghz intel imac running snow leopard 10.6.2 and fine on my ancient road warrior g4 66zmhz titanium powerbook running leopard 10.5.8

maybe they can fix the problem where it disables your caps lock your shift keys and all forms of punctuation too

:p

Good. FF 3.5.7 was slow, kept locking up, and seemed to have a memory leak. I shall download it immediately so thanks for that.

Shoot, the other day I wrote a check (something I seldom do in this era of online bill pay) and caught myself writing 2008! Where did that come from?:confused:

Is there a reason why automatic updates are a bad thing?

personas seems silly to me, but what do I know. It just changes the top and bottom bars of the browser window, right? Am I missing something? No, I have not turned them on, but the roll-over preview didn't seem as exciting as their video about them.

-David

Regarding personas, that is what I have noticed as well. I have turned them on, but it appears to be just another browser theme (and a theme does not affect menus/buttons).

Anyone else?

ah, new tabs open next to the originating tab. That's great! I like that one. (I scratched my head once or twice when I didn't see the new tab at the end of my long list of tabs.)

-David

Personas, skins, well it just looks plain daft to me and selected a few and then could not read the buttons properly with some of them and I don't see anything there for me at the moment. I just found them too distracting from what I have been used to with the browser. And with recent releases of FF I am firmly in the camp that less is more. FF 3.6 seems to be more stable and less prone to lock ups - but I have 3 tabs open and am using 231,456K of memory - which doesn't decrease as I close tabs. Doesn't seem right to me.

jamais (except for special occasions) :D

yes-the update in question could be a dog which is why i allow for automatic checking for updates but not for automatically downloading and updating until i read some of the user comments and etc first

Took me a while to figure out this one as well.

I'm not sold on it. The user should be able to determine the behavior.

No doubt there'll be an add-on to emulate "old" behavior before the end of next week.

Personas: Plenty to choose from, but it really only affects the top 100 pixels and the bottom 50 or so, so you have to find a pic that has the right colors in those very narrow areas.

Now if they could only allow you to change color schemes of the websites actually shown...like FT and its 20th century blue scheme, for instance... :D :D :D

Chrome / Chromium is the way to go for speed!
 

I'm using Google's Chromium on Mac and Windows. I update the builds daily with TechCrunch's Mac Chromium Updater and Chromium Updater for Windows. Apply the AdThwart extension to Chromium and you are all set. Firefox is now the backup.

Yeah, I guess, but I like this behavior better myself. If you only have a few tabs open it doesn't matter, but if you have a lot of tabs open so the tab list doesn't fit, I just find it convenient that the new one is next to the one where I clicked the link. But, yes, I agree that it's a preference item.

For all we know there might be a config variable for that behavior.

-David

You are correct. Playing around in about:config, it's controlled by:

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

One thing I just noticed in FF 3.6 in Amazon is that when I went to change my email address the field displays my text in white on a white background - ie. I can't see what I am typing!

I'm seeing regular old black text at my Amazon account settings, so not sure what's up with your configuration.

FT seems to be loading faster; at least I haven't been getting that odd delayed behavior that has been going on pretty regularly for months.

I only noticed it in those fields so switched to Chrome to do the update, all fine.

As for FT and that slow loading - totally agree, I thought it was my laptop but, and I hope this is not tempting providence, but the slow loading seems to have stopped for me too. Although typiing this reply the words seem to buffer and although I am typing the cursor disappears and then all of a sudden all of my typed text appears (usually only 3-4 words). Odd.

Some updates can cause difficulties. I successfully run XP SP2 on my Thinkpads. If I update to SP3 they all will intermittently lock-up or freeze. Doing a system restore to SP2 will return them to working ok. I do the manual updateing.

MisterNice

It appears a new stable release of Chrome is now available with 1500 extensions some of which I gladly use with FF.

MisterNice

Interesting that extensions seem not to work when Chrome is started in Incognito mode. :td:

I updated to FF 3.6 and Chrome 4. Glad Chrome now has extensions in non-beta release. No ....... was just killer in Chrome. I use it as my 2nd browser and often have both open.

I hate mozilla!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

I have major issues running Mozilla Firefox 3.5.9 on my three year old Dell Inspiron running XP Professional. Besides being a massive memory and resource hog (task manager sometimes has it operating at 500,000Kb or more), opening some websites (most noticeably Facebook) often gums up everything including other programs. It has gotten to the point where it genuinely infuriates me and I have desires to toss my laptop at the nearest window. And I'm generally not an angry person...

I never thought I would say this, but Explorer is so much better at this point.

Does anyone else have these problems? I think I'm going to try out Chrome or Safari. What do you think?

It might be my laptop, but I don't think so. Because I can simultaneously run iTunes, Adobe Photoshop CS3, Word 2003 and Excel 2003 without any problems whatsoever. Only when Photoshop is stitching together relatively large panoramas does everything slowdown, but that is to be expected and I generally them leave my laptop alone for a few minutes.

So why is it that a stupid, simple web browser apparently has massive issues with just opening a simple website like GMail or the New York Times???? I have disabled a plethora of add-ons... doesn't help.

HELP????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :mad: :(

3.6.3 is what I am currently running and is significantly better than 3.5.9. Hangs, crashes, mem leaks seemed to be the order of the day. I went to Chrome but I did not like the lack of bookmarks in a format I am used to.

I amusing FF 3.6.3 also and its far superior to chrome, opera etc. For a few websites I gotta use IE but 98% are better with FF and its nice free add-ons. My ram is 2gb but I occasionally exit FF with its quit and save feature and click on FF. It takes about a minute and FF ram drops a lot. There is rumored to be a major FF upgrade in Jun 2010.

MisterNice

I updated to the lastest version, hoping it would fix some of the problems. Oddly I did not know about a later version than what I had running.

But it hardly makes a difference. Only Facebook seems to run better, otherwise it's ... bad as the older versions.

When everything was slowing down again, I checked my task manager. Firefox was gobbling up a whopping 500,000Kb+ of memory with CPU usage consistantly above 5-10% (even when I wasn't actively browsing). Other processes such as Photoshop and iTunes (both also running and active) just a fraction of these resources, maybe 1-2% of CPU.

So I closed down Firefox, the normal way, clicking on the "X" in the upper right-hand corner. I timed how long it took the firefox.exe process to finally close. 9.5 minutes, of which five minutes had it using above 500,000Kb of memory and often CPU usage reached above 50%. :eek: What can Firefox possibly be doing that it needs to remain active so long???? Not updating, considering I updated the day before.

I'm going to try it for a while longer, but in the meantime I'm getting used to Chrome and starting to re-like Explorer. I think Firefox will soon be getting the uninstall... it really has gone downhill like a downhill racer with a rocketpack since it first replaced Explorer as my preferred browser.

What add-ins do you have running?

facebook + flash are a lethal combination, sometimes. If you are running flash based games on facebook or flash based anything, that can have the effect that was described.

I've seen that same effect with firefox. When it gets into that mode where it's doing nothing but eating all the cpu cycles, you just have to kill it (sometimes in taskmgr) and restart it. Frankly, I don't think IE is any better either. It's the flash based stuff (not flash-based video) that seems to push it over the edge. Though I admit, it's hard to pinpoint what exactly is going on at that point, since I might have 10 or more tabs open, many of them with active content (google reader, calendar, etc.)

One thing you can do with the latest version of ff is the plugin version check. (from tools/add-ons/plugins/find updates). Note, this is different from the "extensions" check, which has been around forever.

-David

I'd kill all of those and see what the performance is like. If I had to bet I'd place blame on Norton or Skype, with better odds on Norton.