Firefox 13 Released, Debuts Brand New Tab Page and Homepage 320
MrSeb writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 13. Unlike Firefox 12 (or 11, or 10, or indeed many of the recent Firefox versions), Firefox 13 is an important release with a handful of much-needed features that are long overdue. There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc. SPDY is on by default, too, which should help ameliorate the perceived speed difference between Chrome and Firefox. Finally, the developer tools (Page Inspector, Style Inspector, etc.) have been tweaked and updated!"
Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat (Score:5, Informative)
Re:NOOOO (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention (Score:2, Informative)
The last time I checked, Opera was free...
Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat (Score:5, Informative)
"So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc"
you want noscript then.
Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention (Score:5, Informative)
Why do Opera fanboys feel the need to convince everyone that Opera invented the web?
Because they did, more or less. Tabs, mobile browsing, CSS support, built-in adblocking (which no other major browser even has, as far as I know), speed... yeah, Opera pretty much pioneered everything important about modern web browsers, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention (Score:0, Informative)
Opera wasn't the first browser with tabs (not even the first with an MDI), they didn't make the first mobile browser, they didn't invent css, konqueror had built in content blocking before opera, and Opera had been lagging behind others in terms of speed until very recently since Chrome woke everyone up.
Opera are not gods of the web. Not everything is their invention, and it's tiring to hear fanboys in every god damn browser article saying "OPERA HAD IT FIRST" when not a god damn person cares.
Re:Smooth Scrolling (Score:4, Informative)
Smooth scrolling makes it extremely hard (impossible actually) to read as you scroll. It's the sort of eye-candy which REDUCES functionality, I don't really understand why anyone would want it (honestly: how often do you scroll and don't want to read as you scroll down. AT ALL.
Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat (Score:5, Informative)
Or Ghostery [ghostery.com]
Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat (Score:5, Informative)
That'd be RequestPolicy actually. NoScript doesn't stop images from external domains being loaded (the 'traditional' way of tracking across the web).
Re:Tab launcher garbage was first thing I turned o (Score:5, Informative)
Aaaand i just figured out how to disable that.
In about:config, just type in "newtab" and search
You will get 3 choices.
First one is the URL for new tabs. Set it to what you want (I use about:blank)
Set the other two settings to false and the fancy schmancy crappy new tab is gone.
Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention (Score:2, Informative)
So, that payment was completely voluntary, as using an ad supported Opera for free became an option in 2000. It went free with no ads in 2005. For the record, Speed Dial, the innovative feature in question, was released in 2007. Nice troll though.
How to disable the newtab page (Score:5, Informative)
First thing I did was to look for an option to disable the "Newtab page" (the feature that Firefox shows you your most used websites including little pictures of them whenever you open a new tab). Seems the Firefox devs decided that this is such an important function that there is no option to disable it in the settings dialogue, or at least I could not find one. But you can disable it via about:config and then setting "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to "false". Guess that is handy if you do NOT want your boss/colleagues to find out about your "hotponysex" fetish whenever you want to open a harmless Intranet page while somebody standing next to you.
Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How to disable the newtab page (Score:5, Informative)
There's a button you can hit on the top-right of new tab pages that toggles the setting you found.
Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat (Score:4, Informative)
The only feature that I want that is long overdue is a setting wherein the browser will make HTTP GETs only to the original domain. So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc etc etc.
You want RequestPolicy [requestpolicy.com] - it does exactly what you want and lets you whitelist on a per-site basis. So, for example, you could let google pages also pull in stuff from gstatic.com but no other websites could pull in stuff from gstatic.com.
RequestPolicy is more powerful than adblock/noscript/ghostery because of the per-site control - all of those others don't care about what site the request is coming from, only the one it is going to. At best they let you whitelist the requests from an entire site, RequestPolicy is much more fine-grained. Those other add-ons are important too, they just have different strengths.
Re:Conentrate on the browser part (Score:4, Informative)
Believe it or not, 90% or more of our engineering effort goes into "the browser part" (that is, Gecko, our rendering engine, and SpiderMonkey, our JS engine). Have a look through the list of bugs fixed in FF13 [mozilla.org] to see what I mean.
It's just that these back-end improvements are not things most people can understand -- I work on Gecko and I don't understand most of the changes that go into it -- so PR and the press instead focus on highly visible UI stuff.