Don't let Firefox update to 3.6.16 New Tabs are broke

[MsWhatsit]

@needscoffee

I switched to Pale Moon browser, which is a build of Firefox which is much less memory-intensive. It uses half the memory that Firefox did in my system. It’s a lot faster. All my Firefox add-ons work with it, including Greasemonkey. I almost don’t know it’s not Firefox except that it runs so much better.

I use Tab Mix Plus add-on for keeping my tabs on top or bottom, and for telling new tabs where to open.

Hey, thanks for mentioning this. I downloaded Pale Moon last night and you’re right, it’s exactly like using regular Firefox except faster. All of my add-ons seem to be working just fine.

[BigT]

@Claverhouse

As for New Tabs, they are working on 4 fine, but unfortunately Mozilla has a habit of copying Opera’s bad ideas and a time ago moved to the little cross at the end of the tab-strip, which is just annoying ( like most of Opera ). There was an extension to remove this behaviour, but it is incompatible with 4, and Fx won’t, as previously, offer a New Tab icon in customization…

Do note that the Mozilla team also has a habit of allowing you to go back to the old way. Just right click on one of the toolbars, choose customize, and drag that plus sign off the tab bar either to another bar if you want the button, or to the customize window to delete it.

I’ve been using Firefox 4 since the sixth beta. I’ve stumbled upon a lot of things.

BTW, you get rid of the big orange button by enabling the menu bar. But try the orange button mode. It’s pretty cool, with your tabs moving up to the titlebar when maximized. (Although that will depend on your window manager in Linux.)

[BigT]

@Kaio

Well, grrr. Despite the fact that it worked fine until I restarted FireFox, my one-click weather add-on is now disabled because it is “incompatible with FF4.”

Bunk. It was working, until FF auto-disabled it. And now there’s no option to turn it back on.

Blah. Guess I’ll be waiting to upgrade at home, then.

Install the addon “Addon Compatibility Reporter.” It will allow you to try to use old addons (so you can report if they work).

Also, for something like a weather addon, there’s likely already a replacement out there. (Unlike FFvB :()

[BigT]

@MsWhatsit

Hey, thanks for mentioning this. I downloaded Pale Moon last night and you’re right, it’s exactly like using regular Firefox except faster. All of my add-ons seem to be working just fine.

I’m a Firefox lover, and even I may try it once they come out with a Firefox 4 version. My old standby, pigfoot, doesn’t have a good enough computer to compiling his faster version of Firefox 4, and the one from bleeping computer has too glitchy a UI and very little difference in speed and memory.

[Claverhouse]

@BigT

Do note that the Mozilla team also has a habit of allowing you to go back to the old way. Just right click on one of the toolbars, choose customize, and drag that plus sign off the tab bar either to another bar if you want the button, or to the customize window to delete it.

Oh sure, and there is a [compatible] extension which removed the + and reverted gracefully — Remove New Tab Button. But now ( and of course Firefox for Linux may have different behaviour to the Windows version ) none of these now add back the new tab icon in customization ( although there is a new window icon, which is less useful, and which option also disappeared in one of the iterations ).

So one has to right-click a tab header to get new tab or go to the file menu, both of which are a trifle clunky.
In general the 20 odd most useful extensions I need work in 4; that leaves up to 50 that are presently incompatible, but which I can live without [ apart from Image Fetcher, Open Image in New Tab, Quick Restart and Thumbnail Expander ]. Nightly Tester Tools enabled the use of any extension no matter how incompatible, but it may have injured my profile since I can’t install some new extensions [ eg: nothing happens even after the installation ]. Which means a new profile. Which means installing 40+ extensions one by one…

[Kaio]

@BigT

Install the addon “Addon Compatibility Reporter.” It will allow you to try to use old addons (so you can report if they work).

Also, for something like a weather addon, there’s likely already a replacement out there. (Unlike FFvB :()

Well, supposedly the weather add-on is compatible with FF4 since at least Friday, yet on Friday it still worked temporarily, and then disappeared, so I have my doubts.

As of this morning there isn’t a compatible version of IE Tab, either, along with the AVG SafeSearch (WTF with that…), so I’m sticking with what I have for a little while. I usually have to, anyway, because many of my most useful add-ons lag behind (grumble).

I’m a little worried about IE Tab, actually… looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2009 (!), so I wonder if it will be. I’ve done some cursory searching for an alternative, but haven’t found anything yet. Any programmers out there want to make one?

[Peremensoe]

@Kaio

As of this morning there isn’t a compatible version of IE Tab, either, along with the AVG SafeSearch (WTF with that…), so I’m sticking with what I have for a little while. I usually have to, anyway, because many of my most useful add-ons lag behind (grumble).

I’m a little worried about IE Tab, actually… looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2009 (!), so I wonder if it will be.

I’m using Firefox 4 and IE Tab 2 to write this reply. IE Tab 2 was updated December 21, 2010.

[Ferret_Herder]

Agreed, thanks for the Pale Moon recommendation! You need a separate application to do a Firefox-to-Pale Moon transfer of data, but it works like a charm.

[ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies]

I was a little sad to lose some of my add-ons switching to FF4, but most of them were caught up in a couple of days. Still waiting on Live HTTP Headers and Tor Button…

[Kaio]

@spark240

I’m using Firefox 4 and IE Tab 2 to write this reply. IE Tab 2 was updated December 21, 2010.

Weird, none of the new IE Tabs came up in my original search. That leaves AVG Safe Search, then. And, well, I still don’t know if the weather add-on really works or not, since it kept disappearing / disabling on me.

[Kaio]

Also, even using Is It Compatible, I’ve found it worthwhile to double-check on any that it says are not compatible with FF4 – it’s still saying that Firebug is only compatible to 3.6, but if you check the Firebug page, it says there that it’s compatible with 4.

On the other hand, so does the weather add-on.

[Tim_T-Bonham.net]

@Kaio

One thing I don’t like about the newer versions is that it seems if you click a link to open in a new tab, it puts it next to your current tab, instead of all the way to the right of your tab set like it used to. I haven’t been able to get used to this – I don’t switch to the new tab when it opens, so I always mouse all the way to the right looking for it, before I notice that it’s back in the middle. Grrr. Is there a setting to change this?

The Add-on ColorfulTabs makes the tabs different colors, but tabs from the same site are the same color. Minor thing, but I really like it, and it makes things like this much nicer. (And there are all kinds of options for choosing your own colors, assigning certain colors to chosen sites permanently, etc.).