Thursday, February 14, 2008

Firefox 3.0 Beta Testing

I have loaded Firefox 3.0 (Beta 3) on our production server for testing. I also am testing the newer version of Flash that was released in December. I will try and use 3.0 fulltime until it's released. That will allow me to test all features and see how the upgrade will be perceived; and how best to alert users of changes.

Here are the issues that I am seeing. Some of these might be "user technique" (me), so I will continue tinkering and learning.

- Flash still seems crash prone when viewing videos. The PULSEAUDIO voice sync seems better on the December release. I'll continue to test. I know this is unrelated to Firefox, but I keep hoping this will get better.

- The first thing that I always do in Firefox is add a "Home" button on the top toolbar. But it appears to be gone in this build. I see it's available on the bookmarks toolbar, which I always immediately turn off. Hopefully this is an oversight, and will return in later builds (shot below).




- My mms and rtsp settings which worked perfectly in 2.0 are not working. In the shot below you can see the about:config setting. It's supposed to call a script which opens gnome-mplayer. I'll keep testing this and see if I can figure out the problem. Standard out and error provide no spewage.



--- The dialog appears for rtsp feeds, but when you click [ OK ] nothing happens.




-- gtkprint. It seems not to find CUPS printers on OpenSuse 10.2 I know 10.3 is out, but there are still a lot of 10.2 users out there, including us. "Print to LPR" for 99% of regular users means nothing and from their perspective printing is broken. I need to poke around and see if I can figure out how to get gtkprint to find and list the CUPs printers. I believe someone told me this behaviour is based on how it was compiled.



Update: Canvas scrolling on 3.0 using remote display to thin clients and Compiz is at least 50% slower. The scrollbars are very slow, as is movement with the scroll wheel. Thanks to those that commented, still tinkering here.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Firefox now puts the home button as the first button on the bookmarks bar by default (at least in the latest beta).

Dave Richards said...

badders: That's what I was afraid of. :( I personally like to not use the bookmarks bar and reclaim that real estate.

Anonymous said...

I believe that the home button isn't actually part of the bookmarks bar, but is merely placed on the bookmarks toolbar. So the button actually works the same as before, it just has a different default location. Just try moving the home button where you want it while in the toolbar customize mode, just as you would have in previous versions.

hb said...

I don't know about Firefox in particular, but the backends that GtkPrint uses can be defined by the "gtk-print-backends" variable, which should default to "file,cups", but may be set to "lpr" in your case. You can try to put the line

gtk-print-backends = file,cups

into the gtkrc-2.0 file that Firefox uses.

Dave Richards said...

So far no luck in moving Home from the Bookmarks bar, it seems hard coded there. I'll keep trying ideas.

holger: gtk-print-backends got me closer. I found the global file and it seems to be impacting the dialog. However, it's not accepting 'cups'. Thanks, you got me much closer.

J5 said...

Make sure you have the cups backend compiled by Gtk+. It should be in a directory similar to this:

/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/2.10.0/printbackends/libprintbackend-cups.so

Anonymous said...

Right-click the Bookmark Bar -> Customise -> Drag the Home Folder wherever you want.

:)

Anonymous said...

make the toolbar visible. Open customize toolbars, drag Home button wherever you want.

Works for me...

Anonymous said...

Just drag it from the bookmark toolbar to the main toolbar!

Anonymous said...

I don't think the 'flash crashes the browser' problem is the fault of firefox 3 beta 3: I have this issue with every browsers I try (which can use mozilla plugins of course), even konqueror would crash (however it may run mozilla plugins as another process at least it does not crash but reports that 'flash' crashed). Firefox2 crashes as well. So it seems to be a problem with flash plugin itself! I've tested on two machines, both hardy and gutsy. However as far as I can remember the bug first got when I started to play with pulseaudio, so maybe it's related? [flash plugin needs a wrapper lib to be able to use pulseaudio correctly, I assume it may cause the whole issue!]

Dave Richards said...

Thanks for the tips for moving that Home button. I don't know why that seemed not intuitive to me.

I agree that Flash crashing is not a Firefox issue, and that indeed it's worse with PULSE enabled.

I'm checking into a recompile of gtkprint, and also trying to figure out why 3.0 is so slow compared to 2.0 in scrolling.

Anonymous said...

When compiling, did you enable the --dont-crash flag? ;-)

/Wishes it were that easy.