I installed FireFox3 yesterday and so far everything seems to be working well, but I have noticed that when I logout of kde to console there are a ton of firefox error messages on my screen, even if they didn't necessarily cause the program itself to crash. Anyone else experience this?

Yes. That is a good utility; it works very well.

shadowsnipes:
Thanks!
I learned a new trick from you.

Cuetzpallin:
No but I'll look into it, thanks!

It's best to start with a brandnew profile when you upgrade to FF3.0.
The most important stuff (bookmarks, passwords) you can copy from the old to the new profile.
It's quite well possible that a damaged profile is responsible for those errors.

I have not had this problem either.

Besides testing a fresh profile you could also (first) test firefox in safe mode. Simply execute firefox -safe-mode to temporarily disable all addons.

If you can, you should try to record what the error messages are and let us know. I'm assuming they are actually messages from your WM and not firefox itself.

I'm glad you found my post useful. Do keep in mind that if you choose to share your Firefox profile between Windows and Linux that there are some caveats.

Permissions
You might want to be more mindful of this if using a shared computer. If sharing on NTFS turn on inheritance for the profile folder and adjust accordingly. FAT32 has no perms in Windows. Who is the owner and group of the partition and what is its umask in Linux? Just some things to think about.


Syncing FF versions
I recommend that you always have a "native" profile for your OS in addition to your shared one. If you don't set up your shortcuts to choose the correct profile automatically then you might want to have the Profile manager popup when FF starts. This is to avoid you accidentally having your profile automatically up/downgraded when it detects a FF version different from the last one used. What you don't want to happen is for a FF 3 profile to be downgraded to a FF 2 profile (the other way is fine). It really isn't a hassle once you set it up properly.


Some Addons might not work completely
In particular, any preferences that make use of absolute paths cannot work without intervention (ie. manually changing it) in Linux and Windows. Exceptions to this are when you can have multiple choices to choose from. For example, the downThemAll uses a path for its One-click download feature. I just make sure that I choose the right path for my OS in the drop down menu (my saved choices) in the DtA manager and then I can use the One-click without worry.

Tab Mix Plus - I have noticed that if I use my profile in Linux after using it in Windows that middle-click on my mouse gets reverted back to opening a URL from the clipboard. I expect this now, so I just turn it back off.

FoxyTunes - Some keyboard keys are interpreted differently, so what may be SHIFT+'/' in one OS is SHIFT+'?' in another. Personally, I recommend you not use FoxyTunes in one of the OSs and leave it alone. Otherwise you might have to reinstall it (keep the .xpi file around).

My other 10 or 11 extensions work fine and none of my themes are OS specific (some are- particularly ones involving transparency). Just be mindful of settings (including any FF prefs) that use paths and you will be fine. You could probably write a script to automatically change the prefs according to what you need for your current OS, but I haven't found a need for this yet.


An extra Bonus?
If you share your FF profile between Windows and Linux your Windows anti-spyware, etc programs can check it. I have never really needed this, but I do appreciate that SpyBot Search and Destroy's Immunization function can modify my FF profile to help prevent possible annoyances.

Here is a timely review of FF3.0
http://www.linux.com/feature/139209
I just untared it to /opt/firefox as it says in the article. Then I symlinked my plugins in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins to /opt/firefox/plugins. Everything working fine, and I can still launch firefox 2.0.0.14 from the xfce panel if I want to. No problems so far.

Just be sure you aren't using the same profile for FF 3 and FF 2. It is okay to have FF 2 profile "upgraded" to a FF 3 profile, but you may run into problems if you keep using the same profile for both. See my previous posts.

I found the review interesting. In particular, the statement about FF 3 using slightly more memory on Linux than FF 2 needs some personal investigation. That fact that FF 3 releases memory better is a significant improvement, however, for anyone that does a lot of browsing. Perhaps Mozilla will improve on the Linux memory management even more in the following updates, and it will see more significant max load improvements like Windows has. Even if there was no change in the memory usage for FF 3 it should be celebrated, since there are a lot more code and features added. Most software would use more memory in this case, so the fact that FF 3 has improved in memory usage should be applauded.

Edit:
Check out the SpreadFirefox page. It shows a nice graph (with javascript on) that lets you easily see the download stats. They need more colors though for regions with 1M+ downloads (US, Germany so far).

Shadowsnipes,
I read through your posts. What I did was to start FF3.0 with /opt/firefox/firefox -P. This allowed me to create a new profile for FF3.0, while I still have the old profile for FF2.X. I have not had any problems so far.

However if I run "/opt/firefox/firefox -P" in terminal and select the correct profile, everything runs ok. When I close firefox however I get these errors in terminal, as first reported by Wadsworth:
I have not had the problems with scaled images or flash crashes reported by Wadsworth in post #6 of this thread. I use no extensions or addons. Just plain vanilla firefox, and everything works ok in spite of the above errors.

tommcd,

Those are the same error messages I am getting as well and mentioned above in post #31. I have a screen full of them when I log out of kde. Everything runs fine though so the messages seem benign. It's not a profile issue, at least not in my case, because I put FF3 on a clean Slackware install and built my profile from scratch.

Dig

I get the same error messages when I close KDE.

Used both the official Mozilla build and my own, installed as in Slackware.

All works well except for those messages.

Bill.

Digger, I get those too, but only if I close firefox via the window managers close widget or other external means. If I close firefox with a ctrl-q I don't get them. Seems like its something not quite right in cleanup when the app is told to quit externally.

I haven't tried it, but I was wondering why upgradepkg would not work to upgrade to firefox 3? I know it will work with third party software because I just did it with Open Office. Just asking because I haven't seen it mentioned here.

Bob

I was wondering about upgradepkg as well. That is how I upgraded all the official Slack 12 updates of firefox and it always worked. If you use the official FF3.0 .tgz from any Slackware mirror my guess is it would probably be fine.

It would be helpful if someone familiar with the MozillaZine Forums could post about these 'Gtk-CRITICAL' shutdown errors and also file a bug report. I don't know how to do that myself.

Bill.

I have installed FF3 (from slacky.eu) on my new 12.1 install. The machine is a bit old so FF is running a bit slow. Can someone point me to a FF3 build script? I am hoping that compiling it from source might make it more responsive.

Thanks