By default, Firefox ships with the Use hardware acceleration when enabled option turned on. Unfortunately, Firefox has a number of font rendering bugs under the hardware acceleration umbrella (the following are a select few):

• Line spacing problem with D2D enabled(use hardware acceleration when available)
• Text using hardware acceleration looks inferior to and considerably different from text with acceleration disabled and on other browsers
• Increased line heights with DirectWrite (unlike in IE9)

As a result of these bugs, I’ve run with hardware acceleration disabled on my personal systems for quite some time. This, however, has resulted in an unforeseen consequence with my web development. The apps and pages I’ve developed look great in every browser, except stock Firefox! I only recently ran into this issue when I re-enabled hardware acceleration on my work laptop (in the process of creating a new profile). To my horror, several sites I had developed looked pretty terrible, my photo site being one among them.

I have since rolled out an updated stylesheet to my photo site, fixing the problems that showed up in stock Firefox. It should (hopefully) still look alright in all other browser variants (if you spot a bug, let me know). It’s worth knowing, however, that enabling hardware acceleration in Firefox is a worthwhile thing to do if you develop things for the web. The underlying bugs in the rendering engine may bring out underlying flaws in your design.

The Firebug extension is a very helpful tool for web development. But did you know that you can use its console as an output target for your Firefox extensions? It’s pretty simple to do:

Firebug.Console.log("Text to log"); // Output text
Firebug.Console.log(myObj); // Output an object

Is that easy or what? Having this capability is a great way to print out JavaScript objects from your Firefox extensions, making your debugging life much easier.

In a recent update to Googlebar Lite, I made a number of improvements to the search term highlighting feature, fixing several bugs along the way. This feature uses the nsIFind interface available in Firefox, which is poorly documented in my opinion. Unable to find any decent examples, I picked apart another extension I found that uses this interface, and I now better understand how it works. As such, I thought I’d provide an example of how to use this interface so that future developers won’t have to dig down in the source like I did.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I tweeted recently, Firefox 4 is to the 3.x line what Windows 7 is to Windows XP. It really feels like a worthy successor in so many ways. Tabs on top is a great enhancement, and I especially like the tabs-in-the-title-bar approach. I’m really able to maximize my screen real estate with these options. Surprisingly, I don’t miss the status bar or menu bar as much as I thought I would (and yes, I know the menu bar is still present; I’ve simply chosen to turn it off). The orange “Firefox button” is a little strange, and takes some getting used to, but I can live with it.

The biggest improvement in my eyes is the ability to pin certain sites as “app tabs.” Currently, I have GMail and Twitter pinned open. I am the world’s worst at closing Firefox down completely at various points during the day. I don’t know why I do this, but knowing I have some app-tabs open will hopefully help me break this terrible habit. One other great improvement worth mentioning is start-up time, which is notably faster. They’ve really caught up to (though not surpassed) Chrome in this regard, which has always been lightning fast to boot up. Hopefully this trend will continue.

One of the strangest decisions (among many) made in Firefox 4 is the removal of the browser’s status bar. No longer can users glance down at the bottom of the screen to see where a particular link will take them. Instead, this information is displayed on the right side of the URL bar in a surprisingly low-contrast font (how are low-vision users supposed to cope with this?). I cannot think of a single application, in Windows or otherwise, that exhibits this behavior.

Removing the status bar from Firefox completely changes the standard windowing paradigm. I’m all for maximizing vertical real estate, but I really think they should have copied Chrome and made the status bar invisible, showing it only when necessary. Besides, gaining 20 pixels or so isn’t that much of a real estate win.

I’ll be interested to see if this decision, along with a few other similar changes (removing the menu bar by default) impacts Firefox’s usage rate, if at all. I can’t imagine too many corporations will adopt Firefox 4 out of the gate due to changes like this, but perhaps my perception is too closed minded. What do you think about these changes? Are you willing to put up with them, or will you use a different browser?

Yesterday’s nightly Firefox build fixed bug 147777, in which the :visited CSS property allows web sites to detect which sites you have visited (essentially a privacy hole). Sid Stamm wrote a very interesting article on the problem, along with how the Firefox team decided to fix the issue. I recall being amazed at the simplicity of this privacy attack: no JavaScript was needed for a site to figure out where you had been. Several history sniffing websites are available if you’re interested in seeing the hole in action.

In my recent post on gripes I have with Firefox 3.6, I mentioned in passing that I detest (and disable) the AwesomeBar. I had a recent lunch-time discussion with Dustin about this very topic, and Michael asked about it in a recent comment, so I thought I’d post a few thoughts on why I dislike the AwesomeBar as a whole.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, Firefox 3.6 has been released. I’ve been using it for a few days now (I picked up the release candidate earlier this week), so I have a few thoughts on it.

Faster Performance

If Firefox 3.6 is faster than 3.5, then it’s not by much. I have yet to see any gains. When I installed Firefox 3.6, I blew away my old installation completely. I’m using a new profile, with a fresh install, and cold starts still take upwards of 15 or 20 seconds on my laptop (Core 2 T7400 at 2.16 GHz, with 2 GB of memory, on Win XP). I only store 14 days of history (versus 90 days by default), I turn off the Awesomebar (which I hate), and I only use 7 extensions (Adblock Plus, CoLT, Console², Firebug, Googlebar Lite, Linkification, and Web Developer), none of which seem to be the problem. Mozilla had better make significant gains here in the future. Browsers like Chrome are literally miles ahead in this realm (Chrome cold-starts on my system in as little as 5 seconds).

HTML 5

I haven’t played with the HTML 5 stuff, but there’s been plenty of news about websites adding HTML 5 variations of their content (like YouTube and Vimeo). The only problem? Firefox doesn’t support the H.264 encoding being used by these sites! I understand their licensing standpoint, but if the world chooses H.264 over OGG, they had better jump on board pretty quick.

Personas

Do we really need Personas? This feels like something that AOL would have rolled out back in the day, for every grandma computer user. The real-time preview mechanism feels very scary to me; the fact that document-level content can alter the look and feel of my web browser feels like a security nightmare waiting to happen. What kinds of exploits will crop up as a result of this?

Plug-in Checker

This is the one feature of 3.6 that I actually appreciate. A new update mechanism allows you to quickly see if your plug-ins are out of date, which was pretty painful before. Unfortunately, I have a number of plug-ins on my laptop here that aren’t recognized by the updater, but maybe that will improve with time.

I’m hoping that the next release of Firefox, whenever that may be, will be a step in the right direction. Lately, Mozilla really seems to be heading into some strange territory. As much as I love Firefox, I’m growing tired of the bloat, I dislike their possible plans to ditch extensions, and the new UI features seem insipid at best.

The only thing holding me back from moving to Chrome (which I also enjoy), is the lack of decent extension support. When that feature gets implemented, I just may switch, so consider yourselves on notice Mozilla. The next Firefox release had better be good to win back my respect.

Here’s a great web developer tip that I’ve discovered recently. If you’re trying to test a site that involves cookies, and you specifically want to test as a “new visitor” (i.e. you are visiting the site for the very first time), simply turn on Private Browsing mode in Firefox. This can be done with the handy Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard command, or via the corresponding menu item in the Tools menu. Using Private Browsing will prevent you from having to clear your cache, allowing you to save those cookies you really do care about.

When you’re done, simply exit Private Browsing mode and you will be returned to your previous session: cookies, history and all! This is a handy way to quickly run through tests that might otherwise be a bother to do.

It is being reporting that Firefox will replace menus with an Office-style ribbon interface. Personally, I couldn’t be more against this. I’m no fan of the Office ribbon (it takes up way too much screen real estate and looks clunky), and I fail to see how this interface will make things better for the user. Mozilla is known for screwing around with the GUI, however, so I won’t be surprised when something like this shows up. I can’t imagine how this change will affect many extensions out there, like Googlebar Lite, that add UI elements.

What do you think about the Office ribbon interface? And what do you think of this decision? Thankfully for me, someone will undoubtedly come out with a theme to fix this stupid design decision. Consider me signed up for it already!