Firefox: Please fix your darned URL drag and drop behavior

This is what you get when you drag and drop a location field URL onto a rich text editing field from four different browsers (all on XP):

Chrome*: Gordon's Tech- The best feature in Safari 3.1- drag and drop urls

Safari: Gordon's Tech Blogger BlogThis! Drag and drop URLs

IE 8: Gordon's Tech Firefox One thing IE does far better -- and FF could do it to

Firefox: http://tech.kateva.org/2007/07/firefox-one-thing-ie-does-far-better.html

IE has had this behavior since at least IE 3 (was there an earlier version?). Safari (webkit) added it in 3.1, and Chrome has always had it.

I love the fact that these 3 browsers display the page title field. It’s annoying that Firefox doesn’t.

Now, this isn’t the biggest problem with Firefox today. Still, it’s symptomatic.

I used to use Firefox everywhere. I now use Chrome on XP, Safari on OS X, and Camino on our 10.3 iBook.

Firefox, please get better!

* Chrome is the only one to put the hyphen after the name of the blog. Nice touch.

Firefox is in the ICU

Startup times for Firefox are insanely long on all my machines. Same story for my colleagues.

Most have switched to Chrome or IE 8 largely because of this problem.

I've been ignoring the problem for a while, expecting it would be fixed. If anything it's getting worse.

Is this related to Google's abandonment of FF development? Is there any way to raise a red alert here?

I don't want FF to the way of Netscape.

Firefox 3.5 slow startup: It's a big bug

Firefox 3.5 can take up to 15 seconds to launch the first time each day I use it at home, but at work it can take, literally, minutes.

Disabling update checking seems to fix the problem. It's in Tools:Options:Advanced:Updates.

I disabled all update checking. Of course this is not optimal, I'm hoping FF comes out with a fix shortly (I'll have to manually request the fix update though!).

(Credit to a work colleague for this fix.)

Update 7/24/09: After a few days I realized removing update checking didn't really fix things. Another colleague spotted the bug report. Wow.

It's remarkable how long it took the Firefox team to admit there was a serious problem, and how egregiously bad the original security related design decision was. Per my colleague:

Apparently the issue is that the Firefox 3.5 NSS (Network Security System) reads all the files in the IE cache and the Windows Temp folder to generate a seed for its PRNG. Not only is that expensive in and of itself but it also might (!) cause your AV scanners to re-scan every one of the touched files. Apparently clearing your IE cache and Windows temp files may or may not help.

This should be a wake-up call for Firefox. How did this design make it into production? Why was there so much resistance to admitting something was badly wrong?

Update 7/24/09b: The newest release may have a fix.

Update 7/24/09c: It was a bad design flaw, but I now see why I was so affected by it. Some IE install glitch had given me a HUGE IE cache -- one that was above the IE 8 1GB limit! I only discovered this when trying to reset it, and discovering IE shrunk it to 1GB. I set it to 50MB and deleted what was in there. As usual my Windows Temp folder also held quite a bit of junk, but it was the IE cache that was huge.

Testing Firefox 3.5b4

Firefox 3 has been very slow on a single CPU PPC G5 iMac. It quickly pegs my CPU.

Happily Safari 4beta has been a great improvement over Safari 3, and Google's Safari (4) support is finally respectable. So I've been using Safari -- really for the first time. (Camino runs into too many Google oddities, otherwise I'd use it over FF 3. We do use Camino on an ancient G3 iBook running 10.3 -- and it's marvelous there.)

Now, however, James Fallows reminds me that FF 3.5b4 is a real option. I've started testing ...

Welcome to Firefox 3.5 Beta 4

... This release is being made available for testing purposes only. You should read the release notes before getting started.

We want to hear all of your thoughts about this beta, especially if you encounter broken sites or other web weirdness. Drag this feedback button onto your bookmarks toolbar and click on it when you have something to tell us...

I know how to test it.

First impressions? It's fast and responsive so far, and my CPU is running at about 35-50% -- which is about the same as Safari. The mouse wheel scrolling is particularly smooth, and Macintosh copy/cut shortcuts work in the rich text editor (not sure that's new, I switch platforms so often it's all a bit automatic).

The release notes mention ...

• There are Gmail oddities, fix by refresh
• Uses Tracemonkey - so faster Javascript, maybe fewer memory leaks
• Location aware browsing (I'll turn it on of course)
• HTML 5 offline storage (like webkit and chrome)
  

Updates to come, but this feels like a good one.

Update: Google Gears is not compatible with the beta (unsurprisingly). So you'll lose offline Gmail if you install. Also I found one bug. In a multi-user OS X machine the install reports a privileges error if another user is active, even if FF is not in use in the the other session.

Firefox for OS X bug: non-admin user and auto-update

With Firefox 3 a non-admin OS X user cannot uncheck the "update Firefox" advanced option. The checkbox is grayed out.

Only admin users can uncheck "update Firefox".

This is wrong.

How to use Firefox with Sharepoint - avoiding the credential problem

I found this one via a work colleague.

Firefox works pretty well with Sharepoint, but you need to enter your domain credentials every time you authenticate. It turns out there's a way get FF to store the credentials and enter them automatically.

I haven't tested this since I use IE 7 with SP, but I wonder if a similar approach would work with a standalone windows feed reader that would be more capable that the one built into IE 7; the key is "NTLM authentication support". (The Outlook 2007 and FF feed readers are miserable, IE 7 is decent by comparison).

Configure NTLM for Firefox, Using Firefox for Sharepoint Sites « My Home Automation project

...  Firefox does have NTLM just that you need to configure it ... NTLM stands for NT LAN Manager ... Microsoft’s authentication protocol...

... launch Firefox and enter in the URL field - about:config

From there it will provide a long list of settings, on the ’search’ bar type NTLM, you will see 3 entries ... Double click on network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris

From there you will enter the DNS name of your Server...

If you use multiple SP servers, you can separate the name by commas. "DNS name" is just the familiar name, like "server_name.megacorp.com".

How many browsers really work with Google? Fewer than you might think.

How many web browsers are fully supported clients with Google's web applications?

Fewer than most people imagine.

Consider this acid test suite of Google web applications that I routinely use:

1. Gmail with Google Video Chat
2. Google Apps: Documents, Spreadsheet
3. Blogger and BlotThis!
4. Google Sites
5. Google Calendar
   
6. Google Page Creator*

Now consider this set of browsers I run against those apps** and the OSs I use with them:

1. Firefox (XP and OS X)
2. Safari (OS X)
3. Camino (OS X)
4. Chrome (XP)

Which browser(s) really work with all of Google Apps 1-5, or even 1-4?

Just Firefox. Even today's Chrome has obvious bugs, such as omitting the final character from a link created against an existing text string.

I assume IE 7 works pretty well too, but I can't speak to that. I'm surprised Chrome still doesn't work as well as FF against Google's own properties.

It's still incredibly hard to deliver full function "web 2.0" apps against more than one browser.

* On death row and supposedly due for replacement by Google Sites, but that seems to be on hold.
** I use IE 7 regularly against Sharepoint at work, but nowhere else

Camino 2 is coming - and Chrome for OS X

I really like the auto-complete URL feature of Firefox, and nothing beats Firefox's compatibility. Google Chat, for example, works in Firefox, but not in Camino.

On the other hand Firefox 3 is slow and ill-behaved on OS X PPC machines. Camino 1.6.x is much nicer. So I've drifted back to Firefox on my iMac where Google Video Chat doesn't work anyway.

So it's good to know that a new version of Camino is on the way. The new features include an OmniWeb like ability to view tabs over browser windows, though for me OS X Spaces has broken my love of tabs. It's so nice to be able to hit the F9 key and see every open window and move them between Spaces.

It's also great to read that Chrome is coming to OS X ...

Mozilla launches a slick first beta of Camino 2.0 VentureBeat

... Users of Camino will also be happy to know that the team’s project lead, Mike Pinkerton, is currently also working on Chrome, Google’s web browser, for the Mac platform. Progress is being made on it (though slowly) and it should be done at some point in the coming months. Until then, it’ll be Camino-only browsing for me...

The big problem with Safari has been incompatibility and bugs with Google's advanced services. Firefox and Camino have been much better, but Firefox has quality issues and Camino doesn't get the love it deserves. So for a Google-customer like me, the Chrome news is interesting.

Weird Firefox bug: can't uninstall incompatible Add-ons

This is a weird bug. I'm surprised it persists.

Firefox 3 won't run Add-ons that aren't compatible with it.

That's fine, but it won't let you uninstall or remove them either. I think FF 2 did, so this is a new bug.

It's a cosmetic annoyance since the incompatible add-on isn't doing anything, but I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed. It's not exactly subtle.

OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox

Even after five updates it's not clear that 10.5.5 is a better OS for my iMac G5 than 10.4.11. Leopard is probably optimized for the Intel machines, and I suspect the security measures (memory address changes) have their price.

The biggest problem now is it's slow. In particular Firefox routinely pegs the CPU (activity monitor) on 10.5 whereas it didn't on 10.4. The type lag is very annoying. In general it feels about 10% slower for most of what I do.

So if you have a PPC machine on 10.4.11 you might want to wait until you buy a new machine to switch.

Update 9/27/08: I find a few other people noticing this. Some are disabling the memory cache. I'll try the new google toolbar and look for other extensions to remove.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application: "In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

* LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
* Permissions - apps cannot be updated
* Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
* The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.

Making your Google custom search the IE and Firefox defaults

I love my Google custom searches, I’ve made a subset of them the “start” page I use on all browsers and platforms.

My favorite search engine includes Google, but I’ve added biases including

1. everything linked to from links in my Google Reader exported OPML file
2. my Gordon’s Tech/Notes extended memory [1]
3. my legacy web pages
4. everything I like and add via my toolbar embedded Google Marker

Why do I love this search?

Say you search on “In our Time" and “Social Contract” in standard Google. Today you go to the evil iPlayer oriented BBC site, the streaming-centric site that never mentions podcasts. With my custom search engine I go instead to the virtuous original site.

My biased Google is flat out better than straight Google. For me, anyway.

It’s annoying to have to go to my special page to run it though. I’d like to replace my browser search in Firefox and IE with the Google-Gordon search. In the old days that was easy – just run a search, extract the URL, add a wild card, and paste it into the browser like so:

• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search to something like
• http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w (Windows Live Toolbar syntax)

Now it’s harder, but not terribly harder. It’s just terribly hard to find out how to do it.

For Internet Explorer 7 it’s very easy. From the search drop down choose “find more providers” and follow the simple directions to “create your own”:

So I just pasted in:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&ie=UTF-8&q=TEST&sa=Search

and it works:

You can also create a Google Toolbar 5 custom button and in Windows Live toolbar search you just enter this URL:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=009911250981951822495%3A0-go6uatoz4&q=$w

I don’t know how to create a custom search to over-ride the Firefox default search, but, and this was surprisingly hard to find, it’s not hard to create a custom Google/Firefox toolbar button:

The Google Toolbar's Custom Buttons feature makes it possible for you to create buttons and share them with other Google Toolbar users via our Custom Buttons download page at http://www.google.com/tools/toolbar/buttons/gallery
To create a search button for your favorite site, please follow the instructions below:
1. Open Mozilla Firefox and visit the search page for which you'd like to create a custom button.
2. Place your cursor inside a search box on that site and right-click your mouse to view the context menu.
3. Select "Generate Custom Search" and click "Add."

Holy cow. These bizarre directions actually work. I added my button and made it my new default. A couple of caveats:

1. The directions are all for XP. It does work in Firefox 3/OS X, but some of the directions don't apply (ex: where xml is stored)
   
2. This wouldn't work from the Gadget form on my search page, I had to go the google hosted page directly.
3. To get the XML, so you can host the button, you use Google FirefoxToolbar:Manage:Select Button:Edit:Advanced Edit.
   

I put my search button XML file on one of my personal sites. This link is supposed to add it to a Google toolbar:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://www.faughnan.com/gordon_google.xml

Buttons can be submitted it to the Google Button Gallery, but I don't have delusions of grandeur.

[1] Damnit Blogger, give me backlinks! BTW, I remember when “extended memory” had a different meaning, as in “QEMM”.

Chrome blame: you don't think they mean Flash, do they?

Page 8 of the Google Chrome comic is about "placing blame where blame belongs".

There's a bit of intensity in this topic. I'm left with the sense that Google engineers are upset with a common plug-in, an its tendency to wreck browsers.

You don't suppose they mean Flash?

I'm looking forward to Chrome. In a world of Chrome/Safari/iPhone/Web Kit, IE 6/7/8, and Firefox 3 even the most clueless web app vendors have got to start thinking about standards.

As a Web Kit user I'm also grateful for the automated QA the open source Web Kit platform is getting.

Thanks Google!

Update: After the comic slipped out ahead of time, Google put out an emergency blog post pre-announcement. It will be out in beta tomorrow for Windows, Mac and Linux to follow but no timelines given.

Remember The Milk - Tasks in the Cloud. Still in the running.

[The first time I wrote this I though RTM tasks had no notes. They can have notes when entered from the web UI. I don't think there's a way to import tasks with notes, the pro versions can sync with Blackberry or Windows Mobile, not Palm.]

My early experience with MobileMe has rekindled my enthusiasm for our familial Google Apps calendar and cloud services.

The missing links are Tasks and Notes.

I'll be tracking Evernote closely, and watching how OmniFocus matures from its rough start. Both promise some sort of application / service / iPhone integration.

So what about Remember The Milk? RTM has a Firefox plugin that provides gCal and gMail integration ...

Remember The Milk - Services / Remember The Milk for Gmail

...No need to check your calendar when setting due dates! Remember The Milk talks to Google Calendar when it detects that you're adding a task related to an event in your calendar, and automagically figures out when your task is due..

Ok, that sounds interesting. So what does RTM do for export? iCal and Atom. Not the easiest for me to process, but potentially useful.

What does RTM do for import? Not too darned much. You can email a list of "tasks". One per line. No due dates, not notes.

That's because RTM tasks are single line items.

Ok, that's not good, but it's not a complete fail either. I need to check out the Pro version.

The best feature in Safari 3.1: drag and drop urls

There are a few features of Internet Explorer I really like.

Save as archive for example, which creates a MIME formatted version of a web page in a single .mht file.

Most of all though, I like the drag and drop URLs. Click on a title bar URL, drag it to an edit field, and IE creates a link using the title of the source page.

Every other browser, as best I can recall, simply displays the URL. (I just verified that Firefox 3 just copies the URL.)

Today, on a whim, I tried the drag and drop operation into a Blogger "compose" box. Here's an example of what I got: Gordon's Tech: iTunes library: recreate, move and more.

So Safari has adopted IE's behavior.

Did it always do that? When did this change?

Great improvement. Now if Firefox could only learn this trick ...

Using Blogger: Camino in place of Firefox 3

Things were going too well with Blogger. It had been months since a real disaster. Heck, I was even using Blogger in Draft (draft.blogger.com)!

Then, after installing Firefox 3, the wellness resolved ...

Gordon's Tech: Blogger a mess with Firefox 3

... Every other post I've written over the past 3-5 days has had problems with lost line breaks. All my text runs together. It's as though Blogger had broken their age-old management of paragraph breaks. I've tried Safari 3, Firefox 3, ScribeFire, XP, OSX, Blogger-standard and Blogger-in-Draft...

I'm not sure what's going wrong, but on various posts Blogger will abruptly treat the text as though it were true HTML -- instead of treating paragraph breaks as though they included a paragraph tag.

I think the trick is having edited it at one point with Firefox 3 and the Blogger in Draft editor. I think there's some style sheet persistence that's not exposed to the HTML editor. Subsequent editing with FF 3, even when Blogger in Draft is disabled, can trigger the problem.

Once a post gets into this mode, there's no escaping it -- turning off Blogger in Draft or using the HTML editor doesn't fix things.

I've found I can fix the post using either the superb Windows Live Writer (XP only) or Safari 3.

I've disabled the beta/draft version of blogger and returned to regular Blogger. On XP I can avoid this by simply using WLW. On OS X though I don't want to revert to FF 2. Safari 3 doesn't work very well with regular Blogger. So how can I get FF 2 type behavior on OS X?

Easy, use Camino. Works great.

I'll take another look at things in a couple of weeks, but until then I'll stay with Camino for my OS X blogging.

Blogger a mess with Firefox 3

I'm rewriting this post.

Every other post I've written over the past 3-5 days has had problems with lost line breaks. All my text runs together. It's as though Blogger had broken their age-old management of paragraph breaks. I've tried Safari 3, Firefox 3, ScribeFire, XP, OSX, Blogger-standard and Blogger-in-Draft.

My original post implied the problem was with ScribeFire, Blogger in Draft, and Firefox 3. Then I thought it was Firefox 3 and any version of Blogger. Now I think it's any version of Blogger with Firefox 3 and Blogger-in-Draft with Safari 3.

Basically Blogger is having a really lousy holiday weekend.

Be warned.

They'll fix this eventually. It's not hard to spot!

Why Firefox 3 is a great OS X browser

My impression is that for users of the Google tool suite, FF 3 is the best OS X browser.

One of the lead engineers explains how that came to be …

Firefox 3 for Mac OS X: Under the Hood « Boom Swagger Boom

Firefox 3 will be released soon (get the RC here). While the release contains a huge number of new features and performance improvements for all platforms, it is particularly significant for Mac OS X users. We rewrote most of the Mac OS X code that was behind Firefox 2 in order to benefit from modern Apple technologies and fix long-standing bugs. Once you try it I think you’ll agree that the results are astounding. I’d like to explain what exactly we did in this rewrite, how Firefox 3 for Mac OS X is different “under the hood.”…

So much better than FF 2!

The new world of Firefox bookmarks

This morning I watched a brief screencast on FF3, with a focus on Advanced bookmarking and tagging.

It's a terrific screencast.

The FF 3 bookmark and security features are even better than I'd realized -- and I've been running FF3 on my macs for weeks.

This is one heck of a browser launch. We're spoiled on the OS X platform now, with both Firefox 3 (blessed by Google) and Safari 3 (blessed by Apple) as excellent choices. The primary drawbacks of FF 3 for OS X are the lack of Cocoa integration (no services, no dictionary lookups) and the lack of AppleScript support (even less, currently, than FF 2). (I use Camino on my aging 10.3.9 iBook and I very much love its Cocoa integration. I'd really like to see a future version of FF 3 and Camino merging, perhaps adapting the tab management features of OmniWeb.)

Firefox 3 beats Safari by a country mile though when it comes to bookmark management. No more of that silly filing and organizing -- unless you REALLY want to do it.

One click to add any site to the unsorted collection. A second click (or a double click) to change the default name and add tagging. Tag model is similar to bloggers, easy to type or select from an on-the-fly dictionary (flat ontology). It's easy to see how well with will work with bookmark synchronzation and integration with web bookmark services. The search model is seamlessly integrated into the url field.

This is the way I've been managing my Outlook email for about two years now -- tagging, renaming subject lines, minimal filing for special projects, full text search.

Brilliant design.

Update 6/8: More great FF 3 features.

Make Firefox 3 beta accept the Windows Live Writer Blog This extension

Update 8/20/08: See the last update for the new way to do this.

I can't get the changes I've made to WLW's rfd file, per Joe Cheng's (WLW engineering) blog, to do anything. I'm hoping Joe will have some advice, but, in any case, the illustrious WLW team is promising an update to the "Blog Ths in Windows Live Writer" Add-on. I might just wait for that.

I ended up installing the Firefox Nightly Tester Tools add-on. Then I removed all non-compatible add-ons except for WLW (note I'd already uninstalled Google Web Accelerator), then I clicked the over-ride compatibility button in the test tools options. That worked.

Update 5/27: Joe Cheng's (WLW engineering) blog has a post about a finer grained workaround. Joe also promises to update the extension soon. I continue to be amazed that the WLW team is supporting Firefox use. (Tip via Brandon T. I subscribe to Joe's blog, so I should have caught his posting. I need to check out Bloglines and see if I've somehow lost his feed ...)

Update 8/18/08: At the end of July Joe updated his post. Note the renaming install.rdf trick to force Firefox to refresh its version. The advice now works, but it's also becoming obvious that Microsoft manage understands the value of WLW, and is no longer interested in maintaining a plug-in that supports Mozilla Firefox.

Interesting OS X observation from Firefox development

OS X has memory issues, and APIs that don't do anything ...

Firefox 3 Memory Usage pavlov.net:

... On Mac, If you look at Activity Monitor it will look like we’re using more memory than we actually are. Mac OS X has a similar, but different, problem to Windows XP. After extensive testing and confirmation from Apple employees we realized that there was no way for an allocator to give unused pages of memory back while keeping the address range reserved.. (You can unmap them and remap them, but that causes some race conditions and isn’t as performant.) There are APIs that claim to do it (both madvise() and msync()) but they don’t actually do anything. It does appear that pages mapped in that haven’t been written to won’t be accounted for in memory stats, but you’ve written to them they’re going to show as taking up space until you unmap them. Since allocators will reuse space, you generally won’t have that many pages mapped in that haven’t been written to. Our application can and will reuse the free pages, so you should see Firefox hit a peak number and generally not grow a lot higher than that....

My sense is that OS X does a lot to test the patience of application developers.

I've been using Firefox 3 beta 5 on OS X, and I feel that it's faster and much less likely to peg my CPU.