Dead-Fish.com

Firefox just updated itself to Firefox 4 from the RC1 version that is a few days old, I see no mention online yet but it appears to be here despite the homepage showing 3.6…

We are supposed to use IE7 (whose page carries a massive advert for IE9…) on work machines which causes all sorts of misery, not least its inability to run js or print pages without crashing or trashing the layout.  I had sneakily been using Firefox 4 Beta (have been for months on my main PC) with the IE Tab add-on to get around the issue of half our software not working on other browsers.  Sadly my machine got nuked and I need another way of doing this, cue Firefox Portable edition, installed on my USB memory stick and then taking full advantage of Firefox Sync to have all my bookmarks, passwords & so on to hand.

Sadly, if you try and update the mobile version in place using the Firefox update now request, it seems to go pop.  However, if you download the latest version and install over the top of your existing one, it works fine and remains sync’d and so on.

Two-weeks after beta 11 comes Firefox 4 Beta 12 with a very long list of bug fixes and no major changes I can see mentioned…

We are supposed to use IE7 (whose page carries a massive advert for IE9…) on work machines which causes all sorts of misery, not least its inability to run js or print pages without crashing or trashing the layout.  I had sneakily been using Firefox 4 Beta (have been for months on my main PC) with the IE Tab add-on to get around the issue of half our software not working on other browsers.  Sadly my machine got nuked and I need another way of doing this, cue Firefox Portable edition, installed on my USB memory stick and then taking full advantage of Firefox Sync to have all my bookmarks, passwords & so on to hand.  Sweet…just one other thing to do on a  fresh Firefox install:

Search results in Google replace the page you are looking at in your browser with its results, which is unhelpful in a tabbed browser if you want to cross reference something.  This is how to change this behaviour so that search result always opens in their own tab:

• Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
• Skip warning message
• Type:browser.search.openintab in the filter box
  
• Change the value to “true”

Hot on the heels of 10 comes Firefox 4 Beta 11 with a very long list of bug fixes, or a short list of highlights shown below:

• Support for the proposed Do Not Track (“DNT”) header
• Connection status messages are now shown in a small overlay
• WebGL has been re-enabled on Linux
• The default homepage design has been refreshed
• Firefox no longer switches into offline mode automatically

My main PC had a good weed of dead bookmarks and invalid passwords some time ago, but the backed up copy on my memory stick I merged on this laptop is considerably older.  Cue Firefox Sync which did as it’s name suggests and I set it to nuke they settings & PW on this machine.  Admittedly I had to do some head scratching with my own pass phrase which I obviously forgot…

Roll on the release version

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I have IE 7 on my work laptop which is of course crap.  I thought I’d pop the current Firefox beta on in vanilla flavour to compare the two head to head and to see it in action minus my favourite plugins.

Beta 7 is just out and has a couple of thousands bugs fixed from the earlier version.  It seems very quick even on this low spec machine and looks pretty good too.  Now if I could only remember my Firefox Sync password, it’s built-in now in the betas…

Taskbar tab preview in Windows 7, is normally fine, but the Firefox 4 beta has this on by default which means I see millions of stacked tabs.  This is how to remove them:

• Type about:config in the Firefox address bar.
• Skip warning message
• Type: browser.taskbar.previews.enable
• Change the value to “false”

/rage mode off

A couple of major elements added in beta 4.

Firefox Sync lets users access browser history, password keychain, bookmarks, and open tabs across their different desktop computers, it’s an add-on for Firefox 3.x,  integral in 4.o.

Panorama (formerly  Tab Candy), allows you to arrange  tabs into groups, you can zoom out and see all home screens at once.

Downloads

Is out, clearly the majority of your plugins are not likely to work (from my usage) but you can add an addon-plugin to report faults, but you can experiment with the new version…

I’m not a fan of the vanishing search or address bar, so turned that off.  Also address bar seems to stay stuck on the first URL visited regardless of where you go from there.

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