Opera & Firefox - I told you so...*grin*

[Bill Day]

Sometimes I feel slightly smug....There have been several threads
lately about differences between Opera & Firefox..(or Opera &
Mozilla), and a couple times I wondered why I seemed to be the only
one remarking about the INTERNAL speed of Opera when navigating
forward & back...now I open http://www.mozillazine.org/ and read:

"Thursday May 5th, 2005
Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox include a new feature
that significantly improves the speed of the Back and Forward buttons.
When using Back and Forward in older builds, the page is retrieved
from the local cache rather than the Internet but Gecko still has to
reparse the HTML and use it to rerender the page, which can take a
while with more complex documents. With this new feature, the rendered
page is kept in memory, which makes Back and Forward performance much
faster (almost instantaneous). In addition, going back or forward to a
page cached in this way shows the page exactly how it was when you
left it, in compliance with section 13.13 of RFC 2616.

The blazingly fast Back and Forward feature is currently disabled by
default....."

more to read at the site, some of it suggesting that you wait till
they tweak the feature thoroughly....it does show, of course, that
Firefox is always being improved, and I guess that one day they will
have 'almost' all the features I want. (But Opera's easy Q,A,Z,X,1,2
method of one finger navigation, they still haven't seemed to
try....and I love the ability in Opera to HAVE tabs, but not display
the tab toolbar,)

Oh, well...there's always room for two...or three...or
four....browsers. I learn from all of them.

 

[Paul B.]

Sometimes I feel slightly smug....There have been several threads
lately about differences between Opera & Firefox..(or Opera &
Mozilla), and a couple times I wondered why I seemed to be the only
one remarking about the INTERNAL speed of Opera when navigating
forward & back...now I open http://www.mozillazine.org/ and read:

"Thursday May 5th, 2005
Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

The latest nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox include a new feature
that significantly improves the speed of the Back and Forward buttons.
When using Back and Forward in older builds, the page is retrieved
from the local cache rather than the Internet but Gecko still has to
reparse the HTML and use it to rerender the page, which can take a
while with more complex documents. With this new feature, the rendered
page is kept in memory, which makes Back and Forward performance much
faster (almost instantaneous). In addition, going back or forward to a
page cached in this way shows the page exactly how it was when you
left it, in compliance with section 13.13 of RFC 2616.

The blazingly fast Back and Forward feature is currently disabled by
default....."

more to read at the site, some of it suggesting that you wait till
they tweak the feature thoroughly....it does show, of course, that
Firefox is always being improved, and I guess that one day they will
have 'almost' all the features I want. (But Opera's easy Q,A,Z,X,1,2
method of one finger navigation, they still haven't seemed to
try....and I love the ability in Opera to HAVE tabs, but not display
the tab toolbar,)

Oh, well...there's always room for two...or three...or
four....browsers. I learn from all of them.

Wow, that is amazing. I noticed an awesome increase in the speed
of loading historical pages, but attributed it to changes in my
extension profile. There's a bug issue on this, and it's old and
the word was that fixing this apparently simple thing would take
a deep rewrite of how FF composed pages - no mean feat. But
evidently someone finally took on the challenge, because the
browser is markedly faster in dealing with pages in cache.

p.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BBQ=AB?=]

Sometimes I feel slightly smug....

I guess satisfaction has to come from somewhere.

There have been several threads lately about differences between
Opera & Firefox..(or Opera & Mozilla), and a couple times I
wondered why I seemed to be the only one remarking about the
INTERNAL speed of Opera when navigating forward & back...

Probably because there hasn't much else to say about it; Opera does
this faster than any other browser.

now I open http://www.mozillazine.org/ and read:

"Thursday May 5th, 2005
Back and Forward Now Blazingly Fast

Thanks for reminding me. I read about it when it was announced last
week, and I forgot to check it out once I had some time. I just got a
trunk nightly and turned on the "fastback" option. It's every bit as
fast as Opera, and I look forward to using it in Firefox 1.1
eventually. (The recent trunk builds are incompatible with a lot of
the extensions I use, or I would stick with a nightly for this
feature.)

Apparently, this is a pretty tricky thing to make any browser do, and
some bugs have to be introduced to get it done. One of the Opera
developers is quoted in the buzilla entry, and there is a lot of
discussion about how to avoid the bugs he talks about. I get the
general idea, but unfortunately, it's a bit beyond me to figure out
most of the details of what they are talking about.

It's all at <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=274784>,
with Ian Hixie quoted in comment #3 about the Opera bugs.

Instructions for enabling it with recent nightlies of Firefox are at
<http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/chase/archives/008085.html>. (If
anyone wants to try it out, I recommend making a full backup of your
profile folders first.)

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

(But Opera's easy Q,A,Z,X,1,2
method of one finger navigation, they still haven't seemed to
try....and I love the ability in Opera to HAVE tabs, but not display
the tab toolbar,)

Download the KeyConfig utility and you can have your "z" key back on
Firefox - I do!

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfig

 

[Bill Day]

Download the KeyConfig utility and you can have your "z" key back on
Firefox - I do!

http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/keyconfig

there are a LOT of complex comments about that extension...people seem
to have had 'some' problems getting it to do what they wish....I'll
read more, and may try it...thanks.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BBQ=AB?=]

there are a LOT of complex comments about that extension...people
seem to have had 'some' problems getting it to do what they
wish....I'll read more, and may try it...thanks.

If you back up your profile, you should be able to give it a try
without risking anything. I use a ridiculous number of extensions, and
any new one might not play well with the others, so I make a backup
before installing any new one. Several times I've had to restore the
backup, and each time it's worked fine. (No guarantees here -- I'm
just saying it WFM.

 

[Bill Day]

If you back up your profile, you should be able to give it a try
without risking anything. I use a ridiculous number of extensions, and
any new one might not play well with the others,

(you mean everyone doesn't use 27 different extensions? *grin*)

yeah...I now have trouble with tabs. Don't know what I did, but no
matter how many tabs I create, a new site always opens in #1. (checked
every setting I can find) I have "tabmix" and it has worked fine
before. I think I'll just un-install it and re-install....which worked
fine with "easy gestures" when IT decided to hang.

I'll start now backing up my profile...or as soon as I get it tweaked
so that everything is working.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BBQ=AB?=]

(you mean everyone doesn't use 27 different extensions? *grin*)

Heh, I'm using 47 of them now. This gives me an excuse to post them.

yeah...I now have trouble with tabs. Don't know what I did, but no
matter how many tabs I create, a new site always opens in #1.
(checked every setting I can find) I have "tabmix" and it has
worked fine before. I think I'll just un-install it and
re-install....which worked fine with "easy gestures" when IT
decided to hang.

The extensions for tabs and gestures seem to be the most likely to
cause conflicts. And ones that capture keystrokes can conflict with
each other. I use Tab Browser Prefs and All-in-One gestures, and it's
been a long time since I tried any of the others for tabs or gestures.
I meant to give TabMix another go when I get a chance.

I'll start now backing up my profile...or as soon as I get it
tweaked so that everything is working.

I hope it works well for you -- it's saved my profile a few times. I
meant to add that you might want to clear the cache &c. before backing
up, to save a little space.

 

[Aaron]

Heh, I'm using 47 of them now. This gives me an excuse to post them.
<http://www.cotse.net/users/putty/firefox-extensions.htm>

Heh, you beat me, I have 44 now. In the past I have gone post 50, but
honestly, I think most are just for fun.

Nice list BTW, interestingly we don't run too many in common, besides the
popular ones like Adblock, Embuttons,Allinone, imagezoom, useragent
switcher and X.

I really should check out the greasemoneky family of extensions
(Greasemonkey, Aardvark, platypus), though for now, I find RIP (a
permanent version of Nukeeverything) is sufficient.

You might consider using tabmix, since that will cut out all the other
tab related extensions like tabx,undoclosetab

The extensions for tabs and gestures seem to be the most likely to
cause conflicts. And ones that capture keystrokes can conflict with
each other. I use Tab Browser Prefs and All-in-One gestures, and it's
been a long time since I tried any of the others for tabs or gestures.
I meant to give TabMix another go when I get a chance.

I use Tabmix with All-in-one gestures.No problems as far as I can tell.

I hope it works well for you -- it's saved my profile a few times. I
meant to add that you might want to clear the cache &c. before backing
up, to save a little space.

It's a trick, that deserves to be more widely known, espically among
users with a lot of extensions.

 

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=BBQ=AB?=]

Heh, you beat me, I have 44 now. In the past I have gone post 50,
but honestly, I think most are just for fun.

A few of them are, but I actually use most of the ones I have
installed. Quite a few of them, I use very rarely, but I'm happy they
are installed when I need them. E.g., I probably use the Wayback one
once every couple of months, but I needed it just now to try to
respond to Dick about the Firefox site.

You might consider using tabmix, since that will cut out all the
other tab related extensions like tabx,undoclosetab

I use Tabmix with All-in-one gestures.No problems as far as I can
tell.

Thanks. Last time I tried it, TabMix wasn't offering anything I
wanted. Now that development has been handed over to someone else, I
want to try the next version when it arrives.

It's a trick, that deserves to be more widely known, espically
among users with a lot of extensions.

I think it might be good if there were a built-in option to have
Firefox automagically back up the profile when any XPI install is
initiated. If for no other reason, quite a few extension authors have
(lazily and stupidly, IMO) raised their maxversion up to ridiculous
levels; I expect that to cause big trouble when Firefox 1.1 arrives.