Sunday, February 10, 2008

On Firefox 3 Beta 2

I have been trying out Firefox 3 Beta 2. The first issue I came up against was that most of my extensions simply stopped working. So lets go over the first steps when you want to switch to Firefox 3 Beta 2.
  1. Step 1: Look for updates to your extensions that work with Firefox 3 Beta 2. Visiting the developer's site or support forums can be incredibly useful.
    • Get Mouse Gestures here
    • Get Tab Mix Plus here
  2. Step 2: If no update is available, try adding a boolean field "extensions.checkCompatibility" to about:config. (More info here)
  3. Step 3: Your skin will mostly stop working on installing FX3, so switch to another skin, but hey you can still get Personas for Firefox
  4. Step 4: Install Weave, create an account, setup an encryption password.
  5. Step 5: If you are concerned about <a ping> (I certainly am), know that it is on by default in all Firefox 3 builds before Feb 1 (which includes Beta 2). There are no visual cues or warnings on a ping link being clicked. You can disable it from about:config by the following method:
This whole ping controversy reminds me of the furor when it came out that the default eBay search plugin for Firefox 1.0 (German Version) sent the search first to a "monitoring" site then to eBay itself. This was soon fixed, and the "monitoring" URL for the search was provided by eBay itself, but that did not stop many people (including yours truly) from accusing Firefox of being spyware. See the related article on mozillazine here(via the Wayback Machine). And a translated version of the discussion in the German Firefox forums here.

As for the current ping issue, as per send_pings page, this is disabled by default as of all builds of Firefox post 1st February 2008. (Which means Firefox 3 Beta 2 users still have to turn it off manually, current builds are Beta 4)

Addendum: I looked up the post I made on the German Firefox topic at the time on my (now defunct) Yahoo 360 blog and suddenly came upon this nugget of information: I am a Facts Curator. (Whatever that means).

More interesting stuff: Yahoo 360 will soon be gone forever.

1 comment:

Abisurd said...

I've been using Beta 4 on a Linux box. Maybe Beta 5 is also out. Haven't checked,