Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Long, long ago, I talked about several issues I had with Mozilla Failfox Firefox 3.0 and openSUSE 10.3 for the AMD64/EM64T architecture.

Ever since then, I have learned several things:

1. Debian's Iceweasel fork doesn't seem to be much ahead of mainline Firefox in terms of bugfixes, as far as I can see. This might be not true for security fixes and such; I admit I haven't done any actual research on this and I'm basing this statement on my user experience.
2. The Download Day was a trap.
3. Other people who I have talked to regarding Firefox's stability on Linux claim that is never/rarely crashes, but all of them use x86 kernels and userspace.
4. Iceweasel 3.0 taints the Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny distribution on the AMD64/EM64T architecture, with no differences in either of my laptops. This Linux distribution is remarkably stable otherwise, and lived up to my expectatives since I originally switched to it when it was the Testing distribution — this is, comparing it to the released openSUSE 10.3.
5. Off-line browsing is truly, horribly underestimated, to the point that one of the major web browsers does not support it at all; probably in favor of simplicity and ease of use, and “permanently connected people”. But, STILL... 😕
6. It's not a good idea to leave a chainsaw and a newspaper near the reach of a cow.

I recently switched to Debian Squeeze, which is still under development (e.g. Testing) as of this writing. Originally, I just got a newer revision of Iceweasel 3.0 with the set. Some weeks ago, I got upgraded to 3.5.

As I mentioned in my previous post in this series, the status bar does still glitch a lot — no, wait — the status bar glitches even more than in 3.0. Scrolling is less laggy but only with smooth scrolling disabled, although I am not exactly using a well-supported video configuration at the moment and I probably should not complain about performance issues with any 2D application unless I'm willing to use the unaccelerated X.org VESA driver for benchmarking or shut up.

The Live Bookmarks feature stopped working after the upgrade until I went and manually reloaded every single Atom/RSS feed I had linked in a neat folder in the bookmarks toolbar. It took me a while to realize that nobody posting anything near Christmas was a bad sign — I didn't miss much anyway, since my feed sources aren't really chatty. Yes, I know I'd be better using an actual feeds reader, but I'm just that lazy, which is also why I don't use Opera as much as I want.

However, this version of Firefox is much, much more stable than 3.0 — as far as this AMD64/EM64T architecture user is concerned, that is. Firefox just got better, really. But it's still rather odd because I've heard comments on IRC of people claiming that it got more unstable instead. Hmm... Well, maybe Windows or x86 Linux users are less lucky this time?

Firefox 3.5 also supports the CSS text-shadow property, which was introduced in the CSS level 2 specification, removed in revision 1 (CSS 2.1), and seems to have been picked up again for CSS 3. No version of Internet Explorer before and including 8.0 supports this (although ISTR that they support a shadow filter using a custom extension to CSS that didn't even follow the specification for naming vendor-specific properties), and current Opera, Safari and Chrome support this property well. That means that I must make more use of it in this site's stylesheets from now on. 😉