Check out the official Mozilla Firefox web site to see what’s new in Firefox 3.0.8.

Downloads and caveats

Confused why this download is called “Minefield” and has a different icon? See below.

If you really aren’t a big fan of the new redesigned theme, I highly recommend aronnax’s lovely GrApple Firefox themes which basically make Firefox look a heck of a lot like Safari. Not a bad thing in my book, but your mileage may vary.

Without further ado:

Download Minefield (Firefox) 3.0.8 for Intel

»Mirror » Mirror

Totally not required, but if you feel like donating to help with bandwidth costs, etc., I’d be most grateful. Any excess money raised will be donated to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Thanks!

What the hell is Minefield?

So for those of you who have followed my Firefox builds, you all know the drill - those builds used the Mozilla development codename “BonEcho” because it was against the Firefox trademark to distribute non-official builds using that name or icon. With Firefox 3 the development name has changed from BonEcho to Minefield, so all of the Firefox 3 builds available from this site will be called that instead of Firefox.

As for the icon, in the past I either used the default development icon (the blue earth) or a slightly tweaked version. Minefield’s development icon changed, though, and it’s just… grotesque. Sorry, I can’t mince words here - basically someone took the blue earth icon from BonEcho and tacked on a fuse to it. Get it? Minefield? Bomb? Ahem.

With these builds I’ve reverted back to the blue globe icon instead of using the default development icon, partially for consistency’s sake, and partially because it’s still a heck of a lot better than the bomb icon.

Moving forward there will no longer be more Firefox 2.x builds - as far as I’m concerned it’s obsolete and in the past. That said, I am still chipping away at complete instructions on how to build your own optimized Firefox builds from the comfort of your own home; watch for those in the coming weeks.

As usual, please post feedback and other effluvia in the comments. Enjoy, folks!

Since everyone else at work seems to be on the wordle tip, here’s mine. Seeing how I so very rarely post to this site any more (a mere nine posts including this one in all of 2008) I took the liberty of dumping the last 200 entries into Wordle to get a better idea of what I’ve been posting about over the past few years.

I’m kind of surprised how prominent Firefox is, but seeing how much I’ve posted about the optimized builds I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked. That said, besides that word no other themes seem to stand out, which is as good an indication as any of my rather fragmented attention span.

Since I have your attention, I wanted to confirm that there will be optimized Firefox 3 release builds available within a day or so of the official release (slated for June 17th, I believe). Firefox 3 has native form widgets built in (finally!) so there will be no more need for separate builds.

As this is a major release I definitely will build for all three platforms (G4, G5, and Intel) assuming the access I have to a G5 machine doesn’t go down.

So: web site is working again, Firefox 3 builds coming, and I am polishing off fairly complete instructions on how to build your own optimized copies of Firefox to follow soon afterwards.

That is all.

Unless Mozilla releases a major update I’ll probably skip every other maintenance / bug release as they seem to be monthly, and I just don’t have the extra time to build new releases every month. Just so you know.

I know I promised G4 builds last time and I still plan to get to these for the 2.0.0.14 release. The main issue is the only G4 machine I have is a Powerbook and it takes forever to build Firefox on it… but I’ll do my best to build for this platform when I have a spare moment.

Here’s what’s new in 2.0.0.14 according to the Mozilla change notes:

• Security fixes.

That’s it!

Download

Intel Mac-optimized Firefox 2.0.0.14

• w/ Firefoxy form widgets
• w/ aqua form widgets

G5-optimized Firefox 2.0.0.14

• w/ Firefoxy form widgets
• w/ aqua form widgets

As I mentioned about, G4 builds should be when I have some time to actually get to them.

Why is the name / icon different?

I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but every time I post a new Firefox release I still seem to get people annoyed / pissed off / confused as to why these builds are missing the Firefox name and icon. So here comes the strong emphasis:

The Firefox name and icon are trademarked and cannot be used with non-official builds. These are non-official builds, so they cannot have the official branding. Pretty straight-forward. Please don’t ask me to build versions with the official branding.

As always, feel free to post your thoughts / experiences / etc. in the comments. Enjoy!

According to the release notes, this update has “fixes for various web compatibility regressions” as well as a fixed for FTP “port-scanning” security hole.

(Folks, if you were wondering why it took me a little while to build this update, the preceding paragraph is all the reason you need. This is really just a minuscule, low-priority update.)

Speaking of which, can someone explain to me exactly what the difference is between a 2.0.0.x release and a 2.0.x release? I really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the idea to add yet another decimal point to the version number was discussed…

As usual there are two different versions available - one with “Firefoxy” form widgets applied, and one with the more OS X-looking aqua form widgets. The default user agent has also been tweaked to identify these builds correctly as Firefox.

Download

G4-optimized Firefox 2.0.0.3

• w/ Firefoxy form widgets
• w/ aqua form widgets

G5 and Intel mac builds

There are new builds of Firefox now available — download them from here.

Why is the name / icon different?

I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but every time I post a new Firefox release I still seem to get people annoyed / pissed off / confused as to why these builds are missing the Firefox name and icon. So here comes the strong emphasis:

The Firefox name and icon are trademarked and cannot be used with non-official builds. These are non-official builds, so they cannot have the official branding. Pretty straight-forward. Please don’t ask me to build versions with the official branding.

As always, feel free to post your thoughts / experiences / etc. in the comments. Enjoy!

So let’s look at fixing this.

1. Launch BonEcho / Firefox and enter about:config into the address bar.
2. You’ll get a “page” that consists of row upon row of preferences. Right-click / control + click anywhere on the page. Select New and then from the sub-menu select String.
3. A sheet appears asking for a New string value. Enter general.useragent.override and click OK or hit return.
4. Another sheet appears asking for you to Enter string value. This is where you enter the user agent BonEcho / Firefox should use to identify itself to servers.

   To set this to the official Firefox user agent for Intel-based macs enter Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0 For PPC-based macs enter Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0. Hit OK or press enter.

That’s it! Now BonEcho / Firefox should identify itself as Firefox 2.0 and sites that are overly picky about the user agent should work as expected. If you want to test this you can point your newly masked browser to the aptly named whatsmyuseragent.com.

More bumf on user agents

For on-the-fly user agent switching check out Chris Pederick’s User Agent Switcher extension. Everyone’s favourite neighbourhood encyclopedia has scads of information on user agents including a number of examples you can use if you want to masquerade as a different browser.

Okay, that’s enough Firefox on this weblog to last at least a couple of weeks. Back to your regularly scheduled meandering and pointless babbling.

For those of you who somehow missed the news, the long-awaited release of Firefox 2.0 is finally here, and so are optimized builds!

There’s a bunch of new features and fixes in this release, so instead of repeating what’s already been said I’ll just point interested parties to the Firefox 2.0 release notes.

Why is the name / icon different?

I really shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but every time I post a new Firefox release I still seem to get people annoyed / pissed off / confused as to why these builds are missing the Firefox name and icon. So here comes the strong emphasis:

The Firefox name and icon are copyrighted and cannot be used with non-official builds. These are non-official builds, so they cannot have the official branding. Pretty straight-forward. Please don’t ask me to build versions with the official branding.

So, without further ado…

Downloads

Make sure to choose the build that matches your processor. If you’re not sure what processor you have in your machine you can find out this information in the “About this Mac” window (Apple menu > About this Mac).

Previous download links removed. A newer version of Firefox is now available.

Recommended downloads

Here’s a small list of extensions and whatnot that I highly recommend:

• Nightly Tester Tools: Every Firefox update means that some (if not all) of your extensions and themes break due to version incompatibility. This extension helps you to cajole extensions to work and helps baby firefoxes sleep well at night.
• Pinstripe theme | Aronnax’s Firefox themes: One of the big “new features” of Firefox 2.0 is a “visual refresh”. (How many “times” can I do “air rabbit ears” in one paragraph?) Anyway, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that, but I personally don’t get it. For those of you that cringe when they see Firefox’s new duds these themes may prove to be the panacea you were looking for.
• Tab Mix Plus: The new close tab buttons in Firefox 2.0 are a nice addition, but overall Firefox’s tab feature is still lacking that je ne sais quoi. (Does anyone else think the default Firefox tabs are too damn wide?) Tab Mix Plus makes Firefox’s tabs much more customizable and adds in a bunch of other nice features, too. This is a link to the development builds that are compatible with Firefox 2.0.
• Stop and Reload extension: Toolbar space is at a premium. This extension combines the stop and reload button into one, ala Safari. You’ll need to use the Nightly Tester Tools above to install this one as it hasn’t been updated for Firefox 2.0 yet.
• Fission: Puts the loading status indicator into the address bar ala Safari. I hated this when Safari was first released, but I’ve gotten used to it and now whenever I use a browser that doesn’t have this feature I miss it a lot.
• Do you like this theme I’ve been working on? If there’s enough interest I’ll get it fixed up for Firefox 2.0 and post it for download.

Posts on “essential extensions to use with Firefox” are seemingly a dime a dozen these days, so I’ll end here. Feel free to post in the comments any feedback, thoughts, rants, praises, or anything else that comes to mind that is Firefox-related.

Enjoy, folks!

(Who wants to lay money on when Firefox 2.0.1 will be released?)

Post-Digg update: Jumping jehosaphat, people, you just burned through over 150 gigabytes of bandwidth in just over 5 hours. Yikes. More here.

Okay, okay: you can stop haranguing me now - optimized builds of Firefox 1.5.0.6 are now available for G4, G5, and Intel Macs.

These teensy updates from the happy nerds at the Mozilla corporation are starting to become a monthly occurrence, but hey, if it wasn’t for these you’d never come ‘round for a visit, right?

Here’s the changelog:

Firefox 1.5.0.6:

• Fixed an issue with playing Windows Media content

Firefox 1.5.0.5:

• Improvements to product stability
• Added changes for Frisian locale (fy-NL)
• A literal clambake of security fixes

That’s it. I suppose the Frisians out there must be happy with these changes, but I for one am looking forward to when a Firefox changelog is longer than three lines. Firefox 2.0, don’t fail me now.

As with previous optimized releases the G4 and Intel builds come with both Firefoxy form widgets as well as the more integrated and mac-like aqua form widgets. The G5 version is aqua form widgets only.

The usual spiel: these builds are called DeerPark and doesn’t have the official icon because the Firefox name and branding are reserved for official release; this comes with zero support (read: you’re on your own); I’m not responsible if anything medieval should transpire.

Oh, and in lieu of donations I highly recommend you take your destiny into your own hands and buy those pants you’ve been thinking about. Black leather pants in the middle of the summer? Now that’s hardcore.

Downloads

A newer version of Firefox is now available: Go and get it.

Here’s what’s new according to the Mozilla changelog for Firefox 1.5.0.4:

• Improvements to product stability
• Security fixes (more details on this here)

The usual caveats apply: I don’t support these builds, they’re called DeerPark because of trademark issues, and please don’t run these if you’re not comfortable running untested, unofficial releases. In lieu of donations, I ask that you take the time to phone your mom and / or dad - I’m sure they’d love to hear from you.

Now that I’ve spun these builds and posted them, who wants to lay money on how long before Firefox 1.5.0.5 is released? I hope for later rather than sooner - a guy’s gotta do real work with his computer sometimes, you know.

Downloads

Edited 07/29/06: A new version is now available and you can get the details (and downloads) from here.

After banging my head against a tree and cursing loudly in German (hey, you never know) I finally gave up on trying to figure out how to set up an auto-update server for these builds. The instructions made my head throb mightly and I had to rush off and take a long, cold shower before I inadvertently burst something valuable. Ah well.

Sigh.

Inexplicable high CPU usage on MacBook Pro

If you’re seeing high CPU usage on your MacBook Pro (or any Intel-base mac) that you can’t seem to track down in Activity Monitor or top, try checking the Sharing preference pane in System Preferences. If Windows File Sharing is checked, try toggling its checkbox off and on. I had this issue with a new MacBook Pro that was driving me nuts - nothing was listed in Activity Monitor or top, but the CPU was hovering at 80% and my machine was overheating.

Turns out samba (which powers the Windows File Sharing feature in OS X) was launching and then crashing over and over and over and driving CPU usage nastily high, but toggling the sharing pref fixed the issue.

Gotta love the Apple Store

Speaking of MacBook Pro’s, it turns out my new work machine has a buggered screen. It has a very strong blue / cyan cast that I can’t get rid of through calibration. So I went down to the new Eaton Centre Apple Store to visit the Genuis Bar for the first time.

I didn’t even have to show the issue to the technician. I explained the problem and she promptly asked, “do you have your receipt?” and said that I could exchange my machine for a new one if it was purchased within 14 days.

Unfortunately I was a few days past the cut-off date, but they’re going to order a replacement screen and logic board for me anyway. I explained that I can’t really go without the machine for too long as I need it for work, so they’re going to schedule the repair over the weekend. If that still doesn’t fix the issue she said they’d go ahead and replace the laptop with a brand new one, which is pretty cool. I’ll keep you posted how it turns out.

Oh, besides the screen issue it’s not too bad of a machine, though it does have the whining issue and did get rather hot until I installed the latest SMC firmware updater. But it’s fast and feels pretty much the same as my G4 Powerbook, which is a good thing.

Firefox 1.5.0.4

Jumping jehosophat, people, I know a new version of Firefox is out. I get the internets here too, you know.

I gotta say, every person who emails me or posts a comment that tries to:

1. Guilt me into building a new version,
2. Assume that insulting me or my intelligence will make a new build magically appear (if you really think this works, I fear for your loved ones), or
3. Repeatedly email me every day asking when the new build will be available

… makes me not want to post builds at all. Here’s a hint: haranguing me just pisses me off. Please stop.

For everyone else who is patiently waiting for new builds, they’re coming, and if you could kick the idiots in your midst in the ass for me, I’d appreciate it.

For the record, the new builds will take a bit longer as I’m looking into how to set up a Firefox update server. I don’t want to have to build the entire application when it’s just a teensy update that’s been released, and I’m sure you would appreciate being able to update your optimized build from within the browser, too.

So give me a few days and hopefully I should have some new builds posted. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to shut the computer off and go have a life for a bit.

Here’s the changelog:

Firefox 1.5.0.3

• Security fix for a denial of service vunerability.

Firefox 1.5.0.2

• Universal Binary support for Mac OS X which provides native support for Macintosh with Intel Core processors. Firefox supports the enhancements to performance introduced by the new MacIntel chipsets. (Obviously this isn’t applicable to these builds).
• Improvements to product stability.
• A whack of security fixes

That’s it. No mood-enhancing flavonoids, no brand new widgety-doodads, and no life-reaffirming Yngwie Malmsteen guitar solos; just bug fixes and “product stability”. But you asked for optimized builds, so here they are.

Updated: For now, there are G4 builds with the aqua native form widgets and Firefoxy form widgets, and a G5 build with aqua form widgets only.

If you’ve a G5 and looking for a Firefoxy build I sadly won’t be able to help you. I no longer own a G5 machine and all of the G5 builds that appear on this site are provided by my building partner Voon Siong Wong.

Downloads

As usual, comments are welcome, but I’m not responsible if these builds slap you in the face and call you a Dungeons and Dragons weenie (or, god forbid, crash). And for the last time, the Firefox icon and name can only be distributed with official builds. Sorry for yelling, but I’m getting pretty tired of people sending me angry emails asking the same question over and over again.

At any rate, enjoy.

(Neil, who is in dire need of strong caffeine and a muffin right about now).

Anyway, for all of you bleeding edge, early adopter, thrill-seeking nerds out there I’ve built an optimized version of the Firefox 2.0 alpha release (codenamed “Bon Echo”) for G4 and Mac Intel machines that includes aqua form widgets. A G5-optimized version is also available.

Folks, the name has “alpha” in it for a reason - if you’re not comfortable running pre-pre-release software, then stay far, far away from this build.

Check out more deets on Bon Echo, including an abbreviated what’s new and other goodies.

Updated May 15: I’ve built a brand new version of the Firefox 2.0 (“Bon Echo”) alpha, version 2.0a2. I will continue to update this post as the Mozilla group updates the official Firefox 2.0 pre-release builds.

The Mozilla links weblog (which I believe is new?) has a really good overview of what’s new in Firefox 2.0, so check it out.

Download

No, I’m not going to build a version with Firefoxy widgets, at least not yet. This is an alpha, after all, so subsequent builds are pretty much guaranteed. Once the final Firefox 2.0 release is available, however, I will build versions with both form widgets. But for now it’s aqua or nothing.

Okay, now it’s time to go and see The National and forget that I’m a nerd for a few hours…

Subscribe to the Firefox / Mozilla newsfeed

Colour me impressed

I’m planning to write a fairly in-depth review of my new acquisition once I’ve worked with it for a while, but first impressions are very positive. This machine is pretty damn fast, and the transition from my G5 iMac to the new platform was almost seamless. Photoshop run a bit slow, but I’m almost never doing print-related stuff so it’s bearable for now. Rosetta is incredible - pretty much any application I’ve thrown at it just works.

If you decide to order one of the new Intel machines, my advice to you is to max out the ram, because you’re going to need it. But this is easily the fastest mac I’ve ever owned, and so far I’m pleased.

Optimized Firefox build

Of course, like any slack-jawed nerd one of the first things I needed to figure out was how to build an optimized build of Firefox for the new processors. With warped priorities like this, sometimes I wonder why Renée puts up with me.

It took quite a while, as a bunch of stuff has changed, but I managed to get a build working, and wow, is it fast. Even building the application was fast. Normally, building Firefox on my G5 from scratch takes around two hours or so. On my new machine, the build took maybe 45 minutes.

The hardest thing was figuring out what to put on the icon. I couldn’t bring myself to put “Intel” on it, and using “Core Duo” seemed overlong and a bit misleading, as this build should run fine on any Mac Intel machine. So Mactel it is, for now. I know it’s kind of sucky. Intel needs to come up with snappier names for their processors, I guess.

At any rate, this build has the aqua form widgets applied (see this post for a screencap of what they look like) and has my first run at processor-specific optimizations. It’s important to note that this build is based on the latest nightly code which will eventually become Firefox 2.0 - it is not based on code from an official release. But it’s working like a champ so far.

As usual, the icon and name are still DeerPark, and I am not responsible if anything should freak out or throw a hissy fit. And now it’s time to crack out the bold:

This build is for Intel machines ONLY. It will not run on a non-Intel Mac machine. If you’re looking for G5 and G4-optimized builds, check out this post.

I will probably start updating these every couple of days, so keep your eyes peeled for a dedicated nightly builds post. If you have any questions about this build or the machine it was created on, feel free to post them in the comments, but keep in mind that as usual I’m not providing support for this build.

Subscribe to the Firefox / Mozilla feed

Here’s the changelog as writ by the Mozilla folks:

• Improved stability.
• Improved support for Mac OS X.
• International Domain Name support for Iceland (.is) is now enabled.
• Fixes for several memory leaks.
• Several security enhancements.

All great, especially the OS X support and IDN support for Iceland. I’m all about the Iceland. Get the full details in all of their nerdy glory from the Burning Edge.

Form Widgets a go-go

Each processor’s build is available in two separate flavours - one with aqua form widgets, that look like this:

… and one that has the Firefoxy form widgets, that look like this:

What’s the big difference? Besides the obvious visual differences, the main key notable is that the aqua form widgets are not affected by styles, and the Firefoxy widgets are. So if a site you’re visiting has applied visual styles to the form widgets, you won’t see them with the aqua widgets. Not a huge deal, but some people prefer to see a site as the designer intended it so I’m making both available.

G4-optimized Firefox 1.5.0.1 builds

This is if you’re running a Powerbook, an iBook from the last three years or so, an eMac, Power Mac towers before June of 2003, or a Mac Mini.

G5-optimized Firefox 1.5.0.1 builds

You’ll know if you’re running a G5.

Because I constantly have to answer these questions, I’ll get them out of the way here:

1. These are unofficial builds and come with absolutely no support or warranty. I am not a Firefox developer and cannot fix bugs, troubleshoot issues on your system, listen to you rant about how much you hate Firefox, etc. There are better places for that.
2. The reason these are called “DeerPark” and don’t have the swank Jon Hicks Firefox icon is because both the icon and the Firefox name are trademarks of the Mozilla corporation, and only official builds can use the official branding.
3. No, I’m not accepting donations - hell, all I’m doing is entering a few commands and swapping a few things around. The builds are hosted on my .Mac account, so Apple is covering the bandwidth. I appreciate the thought, but I’m cool.

Enjoy, and feel free to post your thoughts (bearing the above in mind) in the comments.

Up until now, the option was either to grin and bear it, use a program called “Firefoxy” to apply prettier (but still not Mac-like) form widgets, or to use Camino, which uses Mac native form widgets but doesn’t support any of the great Firefox extensions. Firefox is supposed to get native form widgets at some point, but this looks like it won’t happen until Firefox 3.0.

Thanks to the efforts of a wily fellow named “Pu7o” in the Mozillazine forums, you can now enjoy the ultimate browser mashup: Firefox with the more native-looking form widgets from Camino. Here’s what they look like:

Because these use the OS’s resources to draw the form widgets, even themes work. Here’s what they look like under Max Rudberg’s awesome Milk theme:

In celebration of this geeky but momentous occasion, I’ve built a Firefox 1.5 G4-optimized build that incorporates this hack. Yes, it’s a hack, but from everything I can see it works just great. There are a few small alignment issues here and there, and I’ve seen a couple of places where the very edge of buttons are cut off, but it’s 100% usable and looks so, so much better.

There are also G5-optimized Firefox versions built from the latest nightly code - cutting edge, potentially unstable, but with all of the latest changes and updates - that have the aqua form controls applied.

Subscribe to the Firefox / Mozilla newsfeed