Vista - Mozilla Firefox Update 3.0.8

Like Firefox or not - it almost never make sense to say "this cant be done". "This dont work well, I think a bug or 2 must be fixed first or I must change to less buggy add-on/userscript" is more likely

I still wouldn't be there if not for Mr Tech. Most of my AddOns are the same as 2.x. They just work when you kill the version checking.

btw I just installed FF 3.1 beta 3. I uninstalled FasterFox AddOn and it seems to work just as snappy, if not snappier, without it. Looks like they've improved the connection settings or whatever. Seems very stable.

They did some changes in version 3 gemal.dk - Firefox 3 beta 5 will have improved connection parallelism not sure if any changes in 3.1 but pipelining is still not enabled.

When Google Chrome came out they bragged about DNS prefetching, soon after came this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8923 and then it went into 3.1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453403 Could be why it feels snappier on some sites.

For more speed you need to enable the JIT booster, are they in about:config out of the box? Could even be enabled by now? if not add them. How they should look in user.js, which is the right way to add, notepad is better than Fasterfox.

user_pref("javascript.options.jit.content", true);
user_pref("javascript.options.jit.chrome", false);

Im on 3.08 because I wanted to try Google Gears but when on 3.1 chrome speedup was a bit shaky. Main reason 3.1 is delayed is this js-boosting, lots of problems but getting closer and closer...

The jit setting was enabled by default in today's build. One thing I did run into was the favicons kept getting changed to blue dots. Trying to fix that I got all balled up with 2.x vs 3.x and the only way out of hosing things totally was just to strip everything off and put 3.1 beta 3 on as the only browser and import passwords from another machine. Don't know what happened but it looks like if you're going to use 3 be committed cuz you may not be able to go back to 2.x.

You can run 1.x, 2.x, 3.x or whatever you like but what goes wrong is the profile mess. From 2.x to 3.x they changed format for most "system" files, like bookmarks, cookies. If you install 3 but keep 2 and reuse same profile I think those files will be converted to new sqlite format, now even sure you are asked? Mozilla got some kick in the butt over this when 3 was released if I remember correctly. Not a problem - if you know... So you cant revert to 2 without making a new profile. Then you could export the now incompatible bookmarks to a html-file and import in 2.x. This also goes for userchrome.css, user.js and what else there to tinker with. May be you had some chrome modificatioins that were specific to 2.x? May be "incompatible" trick for extensions showed itself as what it is, a trick Prefs.js, holds all about:config, is not cleaned unless you do it manually - so if you ever added/edited entries you must remove/reset to go default again. Much can go wrong, new profile is only answer unless you know all details. There are extensions to deal with this multiple setup but build in profilemanager plus some shortcuts should be enough. I used to have many profiles but gets tiresome, now I only have 2 extra - a clean/default one and one for messing/evaluating new extensions.

Good to hear JIT is enabled by default now - must be getting close then.

Yeah, the 3.1 beta 3 installs in a separate folder but just mentions that if you uninstall it, then your profile will still say 3.1. Doesn't really drive home the point about compatibility. Also I was using MozBackup and it claims to span all those FF 1.5 to 3.1 versions. How it handles the bookmark format stuff I don't know.

If I had it to do over I'd just use my password exporter to save my passwords since that seems to work on all versions 2.x to 3.x if you have Mr Tech. I have Newsbin 5.42 binary newsreader which is the last version with the old Newsbin format for the header spool. I don't update because it's another one of those no going back deals, and it's working perfectly so..

Thankfully FF 3.1 beta seems to work gangbusters so no real downside if I had side-stepped the 2 vs 3 profile stuff.

Lucky with pwords - probably only because file format did not change for just that file. I thought it did, confused with permissions.sqlite Transferring data to a new profile - Firefox - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

Just how Firefox is. Geeks make a browser targeting every Grandma in the world, but once user start to tinker Grandmas and many others are left with ??? Even if making new profile, taking advantage of profiles is answer to most problems with extensions etc. this cool feature is not exactly obvious in Firefox.

They do have a bit more flashy help/kb Firefox Support Home Page but they should remember their latest one-linier "Switching is easy!" also goes the other way, heh Switching to Mozilla Firefox

hmmmmm looks like the Hotmail no clicky no linky problem is fixed. At least with today's build of Minefield and NoScript update I can use Minefield with Hotmail. Seems pretty solid.