Mozilla Firefox 0.9 ReleasedMonday June 14th, 2004The Mozilla Foundation today released Mozilla Firefox 0.9, and now begins its final push towards a 1.0 release of Firefox. New features in this release include a new default theme, a new browser migration tool, reworked theme and extension managers, a much smaller download size, a new help system, and many small bug fixes and speed tweaks. More on what's new can be found in the Burning Edge's Bigger Picture or in the Mozilla Foundation's press release about Firefox 0.9. Along with the new Theme and Extension managers, is a preview of the new update.mozilla.org website, which will be the new home for themes and extensions for all the Mozilla products, as well as possible updates to the products themselves. The site is expected to be completed sometime in the next week. Firefox 0.9 marks the completion of major feature work in Firefox for 1.0, with only incremental improvements remaining for the drive towards beta sometime next month. More information about future releases is available on the Firefox Roadmap. Builds are currently available from the Firefox releases page, along with the current set of Release Notes, or directly from the 0.9 directory on ftp.mozilla.org. (All builds are currently being pushed to FTP, some FTP servers may be behind, please be patient!) As of 0830 GMT, there are no explicitly-branded 0.9 builds available for download from the releases directory of the mozilla.org FTP server. Spoke too soon. There they are. http://www.pryan.org/mozilla/bt-tracker Look there for a MUCH faster download. And the source tarball! I cannot d/l themes. When I try and click on one it just pops up a dialog asking me to save it somewhere. = / You need to use the JavaScript trigger at texturizer.net to install themes. Doing it the way you did it is currently unsupported. I'm having the same exact problem. I went to download Qute from the new update.mozilla.org and I clicked Install, and it just prompted me to download the file. This is a gigantic problem and needs to be fixed! The Linux GTK2+XFT build is not available yet. Btw, why doesn't mozilla.org release official torrents? ... or did the Firefox site get a face lift? http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ Why doesn't Firefox automatically check for the new page, I have to refresh... I would have never seen the new page if I didn't refresh Is there a bug for this? Yea this has been a problem for as far back as i remember, but i think all browsers have this problem sometimes (ive seen in IE before too for example) If you want to fix Firefox so it ALWAYS checks for a new version of everything use about:config and set browser.cache.check_doc_frequency to 1 The default, 3, means it checks less often or something... In mozilla there is an actual option in the settings, but for some reason they barely put any of the more advtanced features like that in Firefox settings, its the only thing lacking from the browser IMO. I keep it set to 3 now cause some pages load slower with it set to 1 for some odd reason. This isn't necessarily a bug. In fact, the HTTP specification says that caches may guess suitable expiry times for documents if none is provided by the web server. Usually they make the guess based on the age of the document (so if a document was created recently, its estimated expiry time would be short). If a web server operator has a problem with this, they can send appropriate "Expires" and "Cache-control" headers (for Cache-control, "max-age" and "must-revalidate" are the interesting options). It would be nice if there was either an option to set the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency to 1 from within the options screens, like every other browser has, or a keyboard shortcut to clear the cahce like safari. The about:config screen is good enough, I suppose, since only developers should need that setting... Yeah it has changed, and it looks like the LH column has disappeared? And when are they going to add a full-size screenshot to these product pages? In linux when I clicked the 'install theme' icon from update.mozilla.org it opened the save dialogue box so I had to savve the theme. But how to install it from there? Ahh I can install themes from a different website so I'm guesing that update.mozilla.org has bad mimetypes set in the server... Linux installer builds are unusable, they still hang on certificate dialogs. Linux users should not download installer builds, they're USELESS. Use the usual tar.gz from here: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/0.9/firefox-0.9-i686-linux-gtk2+xft.tar.gz The bug http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=242275 is not fixed (even though its status says so). :( And the customize toolbar dialog is still broken (see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=245088 ) Now I was very amused by the rave over winstripe and gnomestripe, knowing that with pinstripe I have a decent theme on the mac. Boy was I wrong. They messed it all up. Now I have these XP-ish juppie-colored wouldbe cristal Icons on my Toolbar, Yuck. No man, this is not how Macuser will turn from Safari. On a Mac, Icons got to be decent, not screaming. I will turn back to 0.8 until I got the original Pinstripe back. This is just one bad Joke. This time You really... ah you should know it by know VandalL PS. never change a winning Team PSS. keep up the good coding! Mac theme wasn't changed in the 0.9 release, it looks just as 0.8 (and a lot better than the Windows/Linux versions). Generally, I agree, It's the same Theme, and It looks way better than Win and Lin. But they changed the 4 main Icons on the Iconbar: http://www.kberg.ch/vandall/ff08ff09.jpg And because this is the Pinstripe, I can not just download the old theme as sugested below :) Never the less, FF is an amzing Browser. (and since Browsing itself did not change dramatically since 08, I still can use 08) -said that - i just ran into a context-menu bug for the Textfiled :) G VandalL Change the theme if you're so horrified by it that you can't use the browser! >Change the theme if you're so horrified by it that you can't use the browser! That's a good general statement, but for mac users but it's probably still the best in general. The others are...akward. Especially with the fact that the mac versions still usually build upon the idea of the windows taskbar. As for the people horrified that the theme changed, keep his in mind, doesn't it look like the early pinstipe betas from so long ago? I personally like the darker icons anyway. Maybe this is what he was working towards all along ;) That's not the point. One of the big things in the .8 release of Firefox for the Mac was that it was more Mac-like. The pinstripe theme was included as the default mac theme, and it fit the OS very well. Now, in the next release they've rolled this back to make it look like the Windows and Linux versions, which, if you're a Mac user is a very jarring UI change. Most Mac users aren't going to gor through the rigamarole of finding the pinstripe theme and installing it' they're just going to not use Firefox. As a web developer, I need Firefox to get my job done (thank you DOM Viewer, JS debugger, etc), but it's annoying to go through two different looking UIs. (And there is no Pinstripe for FF .9 from Kevin who made the Pinstripe theme, so it's not even possible to just "change your theme".) I was thinking along the same lines except the other way around Now, in the next release they've rolled this back to make it look like the Mac version, which, if you're a Windows user is a very jarring UI change. Most Windows users aren't going to go through the rigamarole of finding the Qute theme and installing it' they're just going to not use Firefox. Actually, the Mac theme won't ever work on the Windows Firefox, it requires the Mac OS and it's theme manager to operate correctly. That's the big thing. The windows and linux versions look a lot like windows and linux without a special theme, but since the mac os has such a specific look and feel, it is a huge jarring change between firefox and the rest of the OS without the pinstripe theme. I don't know if anyone else has run into this problem, but I can't change the theme if I want to. Maybe it has moved somewhere else and I am missing it, but I can't find the theme manager in preferences anymore. My mistake. I knew there was a new extension manager. I did not pay attention to the fact that the theme manager was separate from preferences as well. I agree that the .8 icons looked nicer, but I just don't see what all the stink is about. Whether I am on my Mac or my PC, I am in a web browser to look at web sites, not icons. As long as the icons give me a clear indication of what they are for, I couldn't really give a rat's patootie exactly what they look like. Got my config figured out for now. It's at http://www.manuzhai.nl/weblog/comments/firefox-0-9/ for those interested. I have just installed firefox 0.9 on a mac, and when I launch it, the " Default App" icon appears in the dock instead of the -oh so beautiful- firefox one.... is that a bug ? or am i a definitely moron who can't install an app properly ? Well , on more thing : why does pinstripe has been changed ? it was perfect ! Probably to look more like Winstripe (OS integration but still the same look and feel, yadda yadda). config.trim_on_minimize -> false Makes Firefox and Mozilla always responsive. More details here: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76831#c277 Prog. Mozilla Update seems to be slashdotted but it does appear to have qute (the theme that used to be the default on Firefox) available for download. So if you preferred the old look then you can get it there. Is this final build different from the RC that was released? If so, what bugs have been fixed? Yes - the 0.9RC was more of a beta release than an actual candidate for release. 0.9 has fixes and improvements to the profile/settings migration stuff, UI to set different languages, fix to a problem with some Java applets, changes to the Mac theme, a bunch of crash and layout/image fixes from the 1.7 back-end, and bumps the version number from 0.8 to 0.9. The version number in help --> about says 0.9 now, but still says Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8 at the bottom. Me too!!! Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8 Tested on XP and Win 2000. This will hurt their usage stats as the 0.9 will be picked up as 0.8. They release a patch/update... soon! the new theme isnt so bad, but the octagonal stop button HAS to go In the USA stop signs are always octagonal. :-) All around the world stop signs are always octagonal. I can't think of any exception. You're comparing road signs to web browser buttons? uh, ok. Makes perfect sense. So the Forward and Back buttons should be flashing green arrows then? In use the stop button is actually red so little that I don't really mind it. Also, if you don't like the vertical drop shadows, you can use the small icons and the vertical drop shadows are gone. However, then the download icon is just a down arrow on top of a gradient background and doesn't really look like what they were intending. The home button is ugly in either big or small, and why did they change the mac icons? They were so nice before. I'll overlook the whole theme issue and say this has to be one of the bigest releases yet. Also the opening up of update.mozilla.prg is a huge step forward for the Mozilla aps and i think this alone makes this release special, due to the impact it will have on the marketability of the products. Bring on 1.0 Unfortunately I see that an opened xul window doesn't respect width and height anymore :-( Eg: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <window id="parent" title="Parent" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"> <hbox> <button label="Open New Window" oncommand="window.open('child.xul','Child','chrome,centerscreen,modal');"/> </hbox> </window> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <window id="child" title="Child" width="300" height="300" xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul"> <label value="Child Window"/> </window> Have you cried CSS styles so you would write <window id="child" title="Child" syle="width:300px"> I think all the window properties are now accessed via style. -mark http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/mirrors.html I'll overlook the whole theme issue and say this has to be one of the bigest releases yet. Also the opening up of update.mozilla.prg is a huge step forward for the Mozilla aps and i think this alone makes this release special, due to the impact it will have on the marketability of the products. Bring on 1.0 i appologise, i pressed refresh and it appears its caused me to double post. freel free to delete or whatever the procedure is. after updating RC with final, firefox.exe starts opening and closing itself all the time! i have uninstalled and reinstalled, still the same ... and the same with TB 0.7rc ... anyone with this problem? please! i'm writing this with IE :((((((((((( ok, i had to delete all my profile (but the bookmark) as it appears to be some extesnion maybe ... by the way ... yersterday i installed a nightly and the hight of the toolbar was smaller (normal) than today! today is higher like 4 pix more I realise the Mozilla people try and push "official" (whatever that means for an open-source cross-platform project) builds, but it would be nice if they first checked that a default build from source actually worked. Here I am, adding minimal makefiles for all the "no rule to make target export" errors, and then there seem to be messed up header locations too: nsBrowserInstance.cpp:92:31: nsIBrowserHistory.h: No such file or directory nsBrowserInstance.cpp:107:31: nsToolkitCompsCID.h: No such file or directory (and nsIBrowserHistory.h and nsToolkitCompsCID.h are nowhere to be found) http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ "Migration Import" and "New Visual Theme" are stuck together.
I just did a full uninstall of the 0.9 RC then an install of 0.9 and I still have this bug: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=246136 I did not lose my theme or bookmarks although I deleted the FireFox folder during the uninstall of the 0.9 RC. Is the memory leak fixed now? That's my biggest whinge with Firefox. Should pick up search plugins from your old install too. Hate copying those every damn time. Takes, like, a 15 seconds! BTW, what's the point of the new profile location that just creates a pointer to your old one? Anyway, so far so very good. I don't mind the barrenness of the new theme, after applying the noted css tweak to it. Standard is too wide. This is quite a day for Mozilla: Firefox 0.9, Thunderbird release candidate and NVU 0.30 all coming out. These products are all so much better than the lame Mozilla/Netscape bundle. It absolutely cannot be over-stated how important focus is and we are seeing it first-hand. Is it possible that the bookmark keywords are not working anymore? I've already installed some extensions, but I don't know if they are the cause, or Firefox itself... Any feedback? WFM. Check the properties of the bookmark and see if the shortcut is still there. Check your caps lock--the bookmark shortcuts might be case-sensitive. WFM as well, and they're not case-sensitive, I just checked. The best I can figure is that either his shortcuts are gone or the keywords got stripped somehow during import (although that WFM as well, going from 0.8 to the RC and now final). http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html Use a bookmarklet to zoom in on this image: http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/may04_browsers.gif That's encouraging, especially as it's the only browser outside of IE6 to be showing steady growth. "Other" is an awfully large segment when you take into account Opera, Mozilla offshoots with different user agents, Safari, Konquerer, etc. I think the Foundation would consider it a masive success if Mozilla were to simply grow alongside IE, as opposed to contributing to its outright decline. Why must I use a bookmarklet for this? I mean Firefox, has the handy automatic zoom in/zoom out feature for images larger that the screen width/height, why not also for images smaller than the screen width/height (but then default the original image size of course) Some constructive criticism: hmm, another Mozilla.org website where branding has gone to the dogs. Where did that blue gradient suddenly come from? I seriously hope this website gets cleaned up before Firefox 1.0. The theme "screenshots" are so tiny they really give no idea of what the theme looks like. And the user comments thing seems to fall apart as well. I prefer using http://texturizer.net/firefox/, they do it well. Yup, update.mozilla.org has bad alignment issues both on firefox and IE. Which browser did they use to test it? :rollseyes: The firefox team sure has screwed up the UI on all platforms in the past week or two...cheers to you! Fx 0.8 was just about perfect on XP and OSX (gnome needed some loving), but now it is shamockery... Come now, just because some little itty bitty icons change doesn't mean the whole Mozilla browser is trash. that is absurdist, inflexible thinking. relax. enjoy yourself. When I tried to copy some files from my old profile to new one (namely key3.db and signons.txt) - suddenly Firefox started hanging on this page (exactly on this one). Looks like signons.txt was corrupted :-/ since after creating new clean profile everything works. If i click on any link in my email, It ALWAYS does two things: 1)Opens in a new window. (didnt it used to open in the last active window/tab) 2) Downloads the page, (.htm etc.), asks me what to do, and if i say 'open' it will open from the local drive. I always thought Firefox was just a codename while it was being created. I always figured the end result would just be called Mozilla. Egad... you're actually calling the final product "Mozilla Firefox"? I guess you can just chalk me up as another idiot who thinks the name is stupid. The recent poll says the majority of users think "FireFox" is an acceptable name. Calling it just "Mozilla" would be like calling IE "Microsoft". Also, there are other products that have Mozilla in their name which would cause confusion and would be a big pain to search for. Calling it "Mozilla Browser" would cause people to mix it up with the Mozilla 1.x suite browser. How on Earth did you come to this conclusion, especially with all the fanfare with Firefox branding in recent months? Besides, "Mozilla" is a corporation, not an application, and it would contribute to the additional confusion of the Mozilla Browser component in the suite, which will continue to be supported for a while yet. Reaching the conclusion originally wasn't hard - the branding document about it is still there on the mozilla site - http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/branding.html , saying that the official name will be Mozilla Browser. Missing all the subsequent stuff about the Firefox name is quite impressive though... Portable Firefox is a repackaged version of the official Mozilla release compressed and reconfigured for optimal use on a USB flash drive. The package is available on my website: http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/ Please post any comments or questions back to this mozillaZine thread: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=580900#580900 When I installed the Release Candidate on Linux, it properly migrated my .phoenix directory like the Release Notes indicated, but when I installed the release, my bookmarks were removed! Fortunately, I hadn't wiped my .phoenix directory yet. My other problem was on Windows, where I had 0.8 installed. I removed 0.8, and then installed 0.9, and it did not migrate my Phoenix directory. Anyone else see these? Someone back a bit had asked whether the memory leaks had been fixed in this version or not. Sorry, I don't remember the name and I'm too tired to scroll. But YES! :) That blasted memory leak, for me on my 98SE box running Aston Shell anyway, has been FIXED! I've done my best to invoke it every which way I can and the browser just keeps purring right along, ultra-responsive, no sluggishness, no GUI slowdown. And it's been very easy on the CPU, generally staying in the 30% range (with 21 programmes opened). What a true delight to use once again! So go ahead and give it a try and see what it does for you as well. That's about all I can recommend from this end. I'm satisfied. I'm seriously considering pressing the "Make default" button. :) Hats off to the Devs and thanks for a free, well-constructed product. I'm looking forward to 1.0! I've read a few weblog posts today on the release of 0.9 and gathered some of the ones with actual comments (as opposed to the hundreds of others who just linked to the release or excerpted the press release) into a convenient blog post at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/005714.html --Asa so far mozdev.org was the main site for extensions and themes. with the new official updates site, mozdev becomes a bit obsulete, doesn't it? According to mozilla.org, Firefox 0.9 is no technology preview anymore since it's placed ebfore Mozilla 1.6 and out of the Technology Preview section. We may be eager to have or show a final release, but this is misleading. Firefox still needs the preview technology umbrella, (fot default theme and update.mozilla.org twaks as minimum, not mentioning the 1.0 targeted bugs), otherwise it would have been 1.0. Hope the media doesn't take it wrong. The idea is that everyone will understand Mozilla's from version numbering and know that 0.9 is pre-release. New users finding Firefox for the first time at 0.9 should find it no less stable than Mozilla 1.7, in fact their migration from their browser of choice will be easier than the migration paths Mozilla suite offers. It is for that reason, and for the marketing run up to 1.0 that Fx now sits atop mozilla.org/index.html #103 Since FF0.9 "Conn. refused when attempting to ..."by aelanthi Thursday June 17th, 2004 6:30 AM Since Firefox 0.9 installation, am not able to open any internet/intranet site. No matter i use a proxy or don't. It always pops up a small Error dialog saying "Connection refused when attempting to contact w3.*.* " ( Intranet site without proxy) OR "The connection was refused when attempting to contact the proxy server you have configured Please check your proxy settings and try again"(with proxy). Have double checked my machine's network settings, no problems with DNS resolution. IE works like champ. I did clean uninstall of 0.9 and went back to 0.8 but the problem persists. Somebody please help me :-( #111 Re: Since FF0.9 "Conn. refused when attempting toby lazyland Wednesday June 30th, 2004 2:47 PM I have this too, all the time now since going to .9, going back to .8 did not solve the problem, and for a while I thought it was with my wireless, which I went to a day or two before the update. But it is the same on wired, I can usually connect after clicking many times. Driving me batty. Major bug here, it is showing up all over in forums, if you do a search on the error message. I am clueless. I use a wireless router around the house, and suspect this has something to do with the problem, FF reading it as something it is not. But could it be a confusion between FF and the firewall (Zonealarm)? #104 Since FF0.9 "Conn. refused when attempting to ..."by aelanthi Thursday June 17th, 2004 6:41 AM Since Firefox 0.9 installation, am not able to open any internet/intranet site. No matter i use a proxy or don't. It always pops up a small Error dialog saying "Connection refused when attempting to contact w3.*.* " ( Intranet site without proxy) OR "The connection was refused when attempting to contact the proxy server you have configured Please check your proxy settings and try again"(with proxy). Have double checked my machine's network settings, no problems with DNS resolution. IE works like champ. I did clean uninstall of 0.9 and went back to 0.8 but the problem persists. Somebody please help me :-( #105 Since FF0.9 "Conn. refused when attempting to ..."by aelanthi Thursday June 17th, 2004 6:42 AM Since Firefox 0.9 installation, am not able to open any internet/intranet site. No matter i use a proxy or don't. It always pops up a small Error dialog saying "Connection refused when attempting to contact w3.*.* " ( Intranet site without proxy) OR "The connection was refused when attempting to contact the proxy server you have configured Please check your proxy settings and try again"(with proxy). Have double checked my machine's network settings, no problems with DNS resolution. IE works like champ. I did clean uninstall of 0.9 and went back to 0.8 but the problem persists. Somebody please help me :-( If you have the Zonealarm firewall software, try allowing access to Firefox in the 'Program Control'. Even if you have Zonealarm installed but are not currently running the software you may experience the problem you mention. If you have the Zonealarm firewall software, try allowing access to Firefox in the 'Program Control'. Even if you have Zonealarm installed but are not currently running the software you may experience the problem you mention. Ever since I uninstalled FF 0.8 and installed 0.9, my default image viewer (for .gif, .jpg, etc.) has been set to IE. Setting FF .9 as the default browser doesn't seem to help this since it's only associated with HTML files. Is there any way to remedy this aside from manually setting FF as the default for each file type? I wonder when Firefox is going to allow you to add & manage bookmarks from the Sidebar? I hate having to access that function from the menu above. With Mozilla, there's buttons in the Sidebar that easily allow you to do this. Also, the Print Preview function need to be acccessable via a toolbar button, which Mozilla also has. I recently installed Mozilla after Firefox screen went weird ( worked for a while great!) any way Mosilla work fine for me. Like the tabsand the feeling of freedom from IE just wish I could get back some of the features of Fox Fire like down loading web sites to have off line (on bloody dial up). Got a couple of questions why does my Mozilla read " Mozilla Fox Fire 0.9" and has any one seen a screen do (see screen cature on this web page http://geocities.com/knightstar_red ) this on Fox Fire 0.9. If so what happen? Thanks for all the work to get Mosilla and Fox Fire!! Knightstar555@yahoo.com |