What's new in Firefox 7 | Hacker News Reader

What's new in Firefox 7

mozilla.org

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It took me years to finally upgrade from Firefox 3.x (to 6)

Then it only took me a week to upgrade to 7, which was 100% painless and added some nice abilities.

Check out this FF7 extension which finally allows you to see what fonts are used on a page including font-face:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fontinfo/

I'm a big fan of the WhatFont bookmarklet, which seems to do the same thing in a simpler, more user-friendly way.

http://chengyinliu.com/whatfont.html

It couldn't have taken you years. Firefox 4 was only released in March of this year. Firefox 5 came three months later in June. Firefox 6 was two months later in August, and Firefox 7 now comes a little over a month afterwards.

Actually, it could. If he was on 3.6, he could have waited years to make the leap to 6.

3.6 doesn't force you to auto-upgrade. You're encouraged, but never forced.

I guess his point was that 3.6 was only released 1.5 years ago.

I didn't even know that there was a 5 and 6 :-(

(still on 3.6 at home and at work for reasons of inertia -- not broke, won't fix, yet)

>not broke, won't fix, yet //

I'm a great believer in that. However, bugs have been fixed, memory leaks plugged, rendering times improved. Personally the promise of more effcicient memory use has me chomping at the bit - FF runs like molasses on my 768MB Athlon 1.1GHz.

Thanks for the info. Perhaps it will soon be time to upgrade on my Ubuntu netbook (roughly the same RAM/CPU specs).

It couldn't have taken you years.

Sure it could. Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008, 3.5 in June 2009 and 3.6 January 2010. If he just upgraded then he could have been on Firefox 3.x for over 3 years.

Their release notes has an incorrect link for the article on memory reduction, they should be linking to:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/09/firefox-7-is-lean-and-fast/

I would request a fix but I can't find a contact on that page and I don't feel like creating another account for their bugfix system right now.

Thanks for the informal bug report. I will file a bug and fix it soon!

Thank you! Sorry if that came off as antagonistic, I think I really need to start using some form of password manager or another.

The nightly channel was on 9 last time I checked and it had a much better OS X UI, the first time some put effort into cleaning it up since FF4. I really wish they would get that into the release channel.

A new version is released every 6 weeks, so if it's on 7 than you will see 9 in production in 12 weeks.

i've been using the 9 nightlies now for about month and have had no problems with it -- seems pretty solid.

Gladly clicked "yes" to send Mozilla memory usage. Hope that helps them speed it up on OSX!

I think 7 is the first version with a useful "about:memory" page so that you can get some idea of what's actually chewing up your RAM.

Now that you've clicked "yes", if you install the "about:telemetry" addon you can go to about:telemetry to see the exact data that Firefox sends: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/abouttelemetr...

No real change except the "http:// for a beta user?

BTW to undo that "feature" in about:config set browser.urlbar.trimURLs to false

I only wish undoing the javascript disable from the urlbar was as easy.

I'm curious what you use Javascript in the URL bar for?

It's been used as a security hole: A large-ish number of Facebook/etc phishing scams have had people copy javascript into their address bar.

For technical users, it's a pretty bad interface for writing and testing javascript.

Check out the Web Console or Scratchpad under the Web Developer Tools menu instead. It's really a much nicer way to run some impromptu javascript on a page.

It's useful for allowing non-technical users to do something like setting a cookie when you're trying to help them debug remotely.

Chrome and Firefox both include easy to access developer consoles to execute JavaScript in now.

Then, what good did disabling it in the URL bar do? :)

"Open the developer tools and paste this into the JavaScript Console" is far less effective as "paste this into your address bar" as far as phishing schemes go. At least, in my experience. YMMV.

BTW, what's the rational behind that change besides trying to morph firefox into chrome?

It conveys no useful information to the user. It'd be like prefixing all emails with "email:".

Wouldn't it convey that you are not on an https site?

but doesn't it break copy and pasting urls?

When you select (copy) the URL it silently adds 'http:// to it. You will see only when you paste it. I'm not sure I really like the concept of silently putting stuff in my selection buffer. I'm going to disable this.

What's new? Most of your favorite plugins stopped working. Wait, that's not really that new anymore, nevermind.

It seems like they have a lot of work to do before they're able to match Chrome's super-smooth version bumps.

All my plugins work this time.

All my plugins work, nothing to report. Perhaps you could contact your addons' developer to see if they are going to upgrade them. During the years I learnt to distinguish which addons I really need, while I uninstalled the others, making Firefox a lot faster to load and run. Honestly, many addons are not vital and I can happily live without them.

Also, there's a new feature of having a "retro" feel in OS X Lion: visible scrollbars and lack (Lion) of gestures.

Further more, why do I need to restart my browser to install an extension in this day and age and why didn't it auto update instead of it bitching and forcing me to download it manually?

Firefox 6 still doesn't have a delicious plugin. Guess I'll stick with firefox 5 for a while.

You don 't just use the bookmarklet?

I use the full plugin. Posting things to delicious, searching, and so on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/delicious-ext... works fine for me on both 6 and 7

Guess it just requires some manifest/firefox hacking then. The top reviews complain just exactly about not working on ff6 and 7.

Question: Did you try the Compatibility Reporter[1] yet?

I'd wager that 95% of all addons will work without problems with version checks disabled - and I'm using the Nightlies. The only one so far that didn't work correctly since a while is Tree Style Tabs, which I assume is due to the fact that it heavily modifies the interface.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

That is a great addon. But ever since yesterday, delicious addon can't do full sync for me, which left me in a no bookmarks state.

If you try it, make a backup of your FF configs, as if it doesn't work, it will also leave you without local bookmarks.

If I can't get the sync back, making it work on FF 7 will be least of my worries... (Yes, I reported it to Avos team).

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