Moving to the trunk
Trunk fixes and new features: Almost all of what's new on the trunk is in Gecko rather than in the Firefox UI, so it's mostly interesting to web developers, but these fixes seemed like they would be of general interest:
- 217527 - Left column on Slashdot is sometimes too narrow or too wide for its contents.
- 238493 - (Re)implement widget change caching. (Fixed problems where ads in pages would flicker into other parts of the page during page load, e.g. on Gamespot.)
- 97283 - Mouse wheel scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
- 251986 - Keyboard scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
Missing features: The plugin finder, the find toolbar, and the new tab/window options are branch-only for now. Merging will probably begin over the weekend or next week.
Regressions: I'm seeing many minor regressions, but none of them annoy me enough to keep me from using trunk builds. Partial list of trunk-only regressions. I'll keep an eye on vote counts and comments to see if any regressions should be red items in Burning Edge posts.
Stability: I backed up my profile to be safe, but I haven't hit any crashes or dataloss bugs in several hours of using today's trunk build.
Performance: I haven't tried to measure performance differences.
Extensions: The 7 extensions I use all work on the trunk. I had to manually enable some extensions that didn't advertise themselves as working in Firefox 0.9 (the trunk thinks it is 0.9), but that was easy: I just right-clicked the extensions and selected "Enable". It also made the Thumbs button disappear from both my toolbar and the Customize Toolbars window, but disabling and re-enabling the Thumbs extension fixed it.
From the roadmap:
Shortly after 1.0 is released we will resync the branch with the Gecko trunk fully and there will be a period of bug fixing and little feature work leading up to a release tentatively called "1.1" which will be our first release off the trunk.
Firefox 1.1 is targeted for March 2005.
November 13th, 2004 at 6:41 am
What extensions do you use?
November 13th, 2004 at 8:32 am
Jesse, I didn’t suffer from any dataloss either while using the trunk build. The problem I had was that once the profile had been used by the trunk build, the Aviary one refused to start, and I had to rebuild it with bits and pieces.
I’m not really sure which file caused Firefox not to start though… The start script wasn’t very verbose, it didn’t return any errors, but Firefox never started. Weird :-s.
November 13th, 2004 at 9:45 am
I stuck with my old 0.9 milestone profile all the way up the 1.0 final w/o a single problem. I changed all extensions to be 0.9-1.0 compatible and I can run both branch and trunk from that profile. No problems at all.
November 13th, 2004 at 10:09 am
Will Firefox 1.1 be targeted at end users or developers/testers? I’m curious since 1.0 is based off of the 1.7 stable branch which is much more friendly to developers trying to write Firefox add- ons. (Then again maybe the purpose of the stable branch is to be friendly to embeders, which is independent of Firefox).
November 13th, 2004 at 12:24 pm
Don’t forget about bug 20022 – :hover state not set until mouse move.
I think that was also a very important bug that was fixed on the trunk.
November 13th, 2004 at 12:53 pm
Markus, try deleting *.ini in your profile. That has fixed “Version X of Firefox doesn’t start” problems for me in the past.
November 13th, 2004 at 1:28 pm
amake, I use Google Pagerank Status, Thumbs, Search Keys, Extension Developer, Favicon Picker, Delicious Delicacies, and a secret porn-related extension.
November 13th, 2004 at 6:02 pm
Martijn: added.
November 13th, 2004 at 9:00 pm
I can use extensions on the trunk, but I can’t install new extensions.