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I won't deny that it may result in more memory usage, but the virtual machine would make Mozilla's JavaScript engine faster [1]. And remember that JS is extensively used in Mozilla's GUI, and in fact, they intend to migrate more non-critical C++ code to JS in the future (for faster development, security, etc.).

[1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/20 06/11/project_tamarin.html

The /. summary is pretty worthless (is anyone surprised?). This is only related to Flash inasmuch as Flash has a JavaScript VM / JIT Compiler, and that technology has been released to Mozilla so that they can take advantage of those performance improvements. At least that's how I read the news from people actually involved.

Brendan Eich's blog
Frank Hecker's blog

It is not normal that Firefox 2.0 crashes all the time, so it should be possible to fix that (if you are still interested in). Try these steps:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Mozilla already auto-closed inactive bugs a year ago.
The success of Firefox, compared to Netscape and Seamonkey, testifies in part to the fact that its developers know how to prioritize bugs.

eval('gFindBar.onBrowserKeyPress = ' + gFindBar.onBrowserKeyPress.toString().replace('.op enFindBar(true)', '.openFindBar()'));

• Clean up our APIs to be fewer, better, and "on the outside."
• Simplify the Mozilla codebase to make it smaller, faster,and easier to approach and maintain.
• Take advantage of standard language features and fast paths instead of XPCOM and ad hoc code.

We should instead focus on cleaning up things which are (broken, instead refering to RDF). Like removing all the XPCOM overhead, or why there are fifteen interfaces to desribe a window.
(Regarding undergoing API clean up:) Instead of writing twenty lines of code (...) use the WHATWG Drag and Drop API and just write two.

Mozilla has tended to make decisions that have been extremely controversial among the community. Relevant examples include the removal of Qute and MNG, the use of difference licenses for source and binaries, the creation of Mozilla Corporation, and more recently the trademark/copyright debate that led to Debian's fork of Firefox called IceWeasal. Does Mozilla feel that these decisions and others like these were correct and ultimately important for its users?

Mozilla has tended to make decisions that have been extremely controversial among the community. Relevant examples include the removal of Qute and MNG, the use of difference licenses for source and binaries, the creation of Mozilla Corporation, and more recently the trademark/copyright debate that led to Debian's fork of Firefox called IceWeasal. Does Mozilla feel that these decisions and others like these were correct and ultimately important for its users?

You might want to reinstall your operating system. There have been several clues recently that third-party software can cause Firefox to hog memory.

If you're still convinced that it's a problem with Firefox, help to narrow down what the problem is so it can be investigated.

You might want to reinstall your operating system. There have been several clues recently that third-party software can cause Firefox to hog memory.

If you're still convinced that it's a problem with Firefox, help to narrow down what the problem is so it can be investigated.

Mozilla 1.0.x users will need to manually update their browser to a new major version.

Mozilla will be releasing Firefox 1.5.0.8 which contains a patch to the update system that allows Firefox 1.5 to offer an option to upgrade to Firefox 2. This upgrade will only be offered and not forced unlike the minor updates which download, install and update with little user input.

Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 quality assurance
Mozilla quality assurance blog

Slightly tangential Mozilla bugday info. Bugdays happen every Tuesday with three sessions a day for the different timezones

I've had it switched on for ages. I sometimes wonder why it's off by default.

Some reasons against pipelining.

0 Display a close button on the active tab only

1 Display close buttons on all tabs (Default)

2 Don't display any close buttons

3 Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s

Or you can install Tab mix plus which gives you these options and more.

You should read the Problematic extensions KB.

Extension:
Google Toolbar (official)

Problem:
* Causes a dialog to appear that says "A script on this page is causing mozilla to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?"
* Leaks memory

Workaround:
Uninstall the Google Toolbar and use the unofficial Googlebar extension instead.

If you want firefox to use very little memory when minimized, set config.trim_on_minimize to true.

There is a performance cost to using that option, and since I don't expect minimized windows to free memory, I don't use it.

The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.

Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.

I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.

Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.

Will there be one?
I'm expecting one (though that'll probably be the point I abandon FF) and am a little disturbed that I can't find anything better than "you will receive an offer to upgrade [...] over the next several weeks" (That is under "dev news" only!) on this (Jeez, I'd expect a notice on the getfirefox.com frontpage, to be honest, but then, the team is too stupid to mask a directory on public mirrors as well...) From this thread I gather that the auto-updater can't handle a major upgrade at the moment, which seems not-so-well-thought-through as well...

Not completely undocumented.

Do volunteers care about tracking down memory leaks?

No, they just want to complain about them rather than help track them down.

If you do want to help track down memory leaks, it might be good to start a discussion on MozillaZine.

This argument is unclear. One of the antiphishing modes uses a blacklist and the other submits URLs to Google. So it at worst is not both weak and privacy-violating at the same time.

It's still a blacklist if it's on the server. Blacklists are limited in effectiveness against targeted attacks or phishing pages distributed across a botnet.

I'm not sure why the author of the article is unhappy with this. The arguments I've heard are (1) advertising that Firefox includes anti-phishing may make users complacent in checking the URL before entering a password, and (2) it would be nice if Firefox could also (or instead) use some heuristics to detect things that look like phishing sites.

I don't think (1) makes having blacklist-based anti-phishing worse than not having it at all. (2) is wishful thinking given CSS and JavaScript.

But IMO, browser makers can't rely on blacklist-based protection. We need to improve the UI for authenticating sites (e.g. highlight part of the hostname in the address bar) and should do things to educate users (make sure they know what a hostname is, how a phishing attack works, and why relying on The Law to protect them will not work).

(Of course, given that Google doesn't actually do anything with this data other than feed it into their anti-phishing database, I don't consider it a violation of privacy regardless, but we have options precisely because not all users will feel this way.)

That's good to know. Google loves to sell other aggregate data, so it's nice to know that they've promised to keep this data extra-private.

It does seem suspicious that in the "server-side blacklist" mode, we're sending Google much more data than they need in order to implement blacklist-based anti-phishing. See comments on http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2006/1 0/sometimes_its_j.html and http://www.squarefree.com/2006/10/28/san-diego-fir efox-party/ for how it could be improved. But I'm willing to attribute that to being rushed rather than being sneaky.

Does anyone know how to override the plugin-search on Firefox?

I'm running 64 bit, and would like to be able to use the standalone Flash player, rather than the plugin.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s#3_2

This might help if you have crashes:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

Opera, which has to run on small devices such as cell phones, is quite a bit better at handling memory allocation failures. As Firefox is ported to cell phones and its code is simplified, I imagine it will get significantly better at handling OOM situations. But for now, with Firefox only running on desktop OSes that pretty much never fail when you call malloc or new, I don't see why anyone would care that it crashes when you artificially limit the amount of memory it is allowed to use. Unless you're encountering really bad memory leaks, in which case you'd be thrashing well before hitting OOM anyway.

Thanks for the (duh) reminder, and link.

I stumbled across some Mozillazine "knowledge base" articles in the past when I was trying to configure some custom shortcuts. My recollection of what I found was that the information incomplete. If it helps anyone else, the "keyboard registry" can be found here.

It's nice to see someone else who agrees that this stuff should be distributed as documentation (or made part of the Help file), rather than buried in an MS-styled knowledgebase on the web. Yeah, it's a browser we're talking about, but I'd rather have a README or something similar available at install time. Maybe I should write up some man pages and quit my bitching?

you mean something like this?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/About:config_entries

MozillaZine seem to have a pretty comprehensive list on the about:config entries and possible values. It'd be nice to see a help section on about:config though, and maybe include all the entries in the help file, or at least a link to the MozillaZine page.

Firefox update on 1.5.x says.....

There are no new updates available. Firefox may check periodically for new updates

See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=4769 75
(You may have trouble accessing the page. Since 2.0 was released, the forums have been slowwwww.)

You really ought to install Qute, a theme that was actually designed by somebody with an aesthetic sense. I'm actually using QuBranch right now, the unofficial Qute build for FF 2.0. I actually forgot how much better Qute was than that default theme in FF 1.5.

When I saw how awful the FF 2.0 default theme was (refresh? ugh!) I went out and found Qute again, and remembered what it was like to actually enjoy looking at my web browser again.

Even in the best of cases, Firefox uses three or more times as much memory than Opera does, even when Opera is being pushed far harder.

Adblock
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Problematic_extensions
use https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2108 with http://userstyles.org/style/show/299

Making the changes you mention should not affect memory usage, because those are the default settings. You can try setting browser.cache.memory.capacity to a low number like 4096 to save memory.

I wonder why Firefox seems to use up so much memory for some people, whilst others get away with relatively little. Did you have any plugins installed that might have been the cause of this problem?

Not only plugins, other people have found that programs like WindowBlind can make Firefox use more and more memory, so there are lots of things to check in order to understand why some people has a particuliar problem, because it's very possible that the problem isn't in Firefox itself

Adblock .5

If it's a cache, then there needs to be some way to configure it to not eat up a large chunk of my RAM

Try the Third Party/Unofficial Builds forum at MozillaZine:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=42

You might want to look at an optimized build. I'm using the G5-optimized 2.0rc3 (same as 2.0) from this MozillaZine forum thread and it doesn't bother me too much. It aquafies most of the widgets (if a web page trys to style a widget, you get the styled version; only unstyled widgets get aquafied) and I do notice a little transparency in the context menu. I don't know if it's in the official 2.0, I haven't tried it. There are also some G3, G4, and Intel optimized builds, but I can't recommend any since I haven't tried them.

This can be changed.

Yeah, I was disappointed to see this gone from the UI, but it is still available via about:config . The key is network.cookie.cookieBehavior, default value is 0 (all cookies allowed). Change this to 1 (no 3rd party cookies). More info from the MozillaZine knowledgebase.

-molo

apparently settting browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 in about:config brings back the old behaviour. See http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s I haven't tried it yet but I will, the new way sucks.

Add the following to your userChrome.css file to make inactive tabs less visible and the active tab stand out a bit more:

/*
  * Make un-selected tabs less visible.
  */
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) {
  color: #555 !important;
}
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) .tab-icon,
#browser tab:not([selected="true"]) .tabs-closebutton {
  opacity: 0.6;
}

This might help: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_engines_disappear _from_Search_Bar Worked for me!

Firefox is very stable browser. It is almost impossible to get it to crash, unless you have a corrupted installation, corrupted profile or you are using some unstable extensions. So what you are experiencing is not normal and there should be a fix for it. See if this article helps you:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_crashes

If you're doin' the Gnome/Linux thang*, open up the GConf editor and drill down through / -> desktop -> gnome -> interface. Change the key 'gtk_key_theme' to 'Emacs'. When you're focused on a textbox or the location bar, you get C-w, along with a bunch of other nifty stuff. My biggest complaint is that C-k deletes to the end of the line, but doesn't copy it into the clipboard.

More information.

* Dawg.

Well, wait until it's officially released? If http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2006/10/the_a ntirelease.html (as of your posting) is still accurate, it says, for example, "I haven't finished posting the source tarball, for instance." Maybe if you're trying the preview release, though..
I'll just quote http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail100.html - Keep your pants on. For real.

You don't need to take the bad with the good. Just stay away from the bad extensions and use only the good ones. It's not all extensions that leak memory; it's just a handful as far as anyone can determine. But use just one extension with a bad memory leak, and don't be surprised to see memory use skyrocket.

OK, according to mozillazine (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Cookies it should work in FF 2.0.

see this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButton s

No, we have. Not. Released. Firefox. 2. Yet. When people link to bits directly on a random FTP mirror, they're doing a number of people harm including, quite possibly, themselves: ...posts linking to direct FTP mirrors could be costing the operators of those mirrors hundreds to thousands of dollars in bandwidth bills, or may cause them to crash by linking directly to them. This could cause them to "un-volunteer" their services as a mirror, making it even harder to obtain Firefox on release days.

See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/preed/2006/10/the_a ntirelease.html for the Mozilla build team's take on articles like this one.

If they don't want it linked to, they shouldn't put it on the internet.