Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Firefox 3.5 Released

Firefox 3.5 has been released. It adds several new features - including private browsing and HTML5 support. One feature I disabled the moment I installed Firefox 3.5 - Geolocation. (See the link, I also updated my tweak guide) The other strange thing - all the buttons in the Google Toolbar disappeared, and whenever I stop moving my mouse, an annoying small yellow box pops up under the cursor. (Update - See the last paragraph in this post)

This time, I didn't have as many extensions die on me as for Firefox 3.0. Automatic Save Folder died, but its usable up to Firefox 3.5b4, so possibly it will be updated to fix this. BlockSite is gone too, but I only use to it block Beacon, so I installed Facebook Beacon Blocker instead. This blocks Beacon, but it doesn't replace links with text or show a warning message on block via address bar. It'll do until BlockSite works again...

Mouse Gestures Redox has an updated version you can download from their site, so does Tab Mix Plus. Unfortunately, I use Widefox and on installing Firefox 3.5, everything went blank. So here's how to get Widefox running on Firefox 3.5:
  1. After installing Firefox 3.5, everything will be blank. Exit Firefox. (Use the Task Manager to make sure it REALLY exits - on my machine it has a nasty habit of running in the background while the window closes)
  2. Go to your profile folder - %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles
  3. There will be a folder called <gibberish>.default. Navigate to it
  4. Navigate to chrome.
  5. Rename userChrome.css to _userChrome.css
  6. Start Firefox
  7. Install the latest TabMixPlus Dev Build
  8. Restart Firefox (make sure)
  9. On restart, TMP will be enabled again. This is important. Do not go to next step unless TMP is enabled first
  10. Shut down Firefox (make sure), rename _userChrome.css back to userChrome.css and follow the instructions here as before.
BTW, if you are installing Widefox for the first time with Firefox 3.5, just install TMP, follow the instructions here (after making sure TMP is working on restart) and then setting up Widefox as per the normal instructions here.

I am noticing Firefox 3.5 use less memory - it also seems faster. Lets see how it goes :) BTW, the Widefox pages are hosted on Googlepages - they will be gone soon. Might be a good idea to copy them to your hard disk :) I have shared them on my Office Live Workspace, just in case.

Update: I just uninstalled Google Toolbar and restarted. The small box is gone. Looks like Google Toolbar is not working well with Firefox 3.5. Lets reinstall and see what happens... Yup - that fixes it!

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I switched to Chrome about a month ago after being fed up with restarting firefox 3-4 times a day and watching it sporadically hang for 20seconds at a time.

Has the stability improved? (And more to the point, were you previously seeing any stability issues in FF3?)

I still keep firefox around because of Firebug. But I use Chrome almost full-time now.

Ashish Vashisht said...

I was not facing any stability issues, so can't help you out with that one. But as far as I can see, its a delta release - not much to show for all the buzz.

I tried out chrome, but I keep several tabs open and I have noticed that taking virtual memory into account, chrome seems to use a lot more memory. Maybe some is shared and I am miscalculating.

I would switch to Opera if not for all the addons!

Pog said...

Hey, thanks for the update on geolocation. Wasn't aware it was on by default.

Much better now that I am a nobody!

Ashish Vashisht said...

You're welcome :) BTW, I just found out that if you using Tab Mix Plus with the Google Toolbar, TMP will disabled Google Toolbar's nifty New Tab page. You can re-enable it by setting TMB Options > Events > Tab Opening > Load On New Tabs to "User Location" and specify the location as:
chrome://google-toolbar/content/new-tab.html

Kevin said...

Hey, thanks for the great fix. I have another question though. I've seemed to have lost my scroll bar in the vertical tab bar when there are too many tabs open. I think it used the "when tabs don't fit width" option in Tab Mix Plus option. Any ideas? I've used Opera for a while, and am now switching back to FF so the update to 3.5 was a big one.

Ashish Vashisht said...

I don't think that is an option in FF3.5 at all! Maybe you can try something with multi-row in TMP and widefox at the same time, I remember multi-row showing a scrollbar when there were too many tabs. So possibly it will show one even in case of widefox :)