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Firefox 1.1 Boasts New Features

Posted by timothy on from the on-a-roll dept.

Distro Jockey writes "The Fedora Core Blog gives a review of the features we can expect from Firefox 1.1. Many uses have been running the latest trunk builds and seeing dramatic improvements in page rendering, managing many tabs quickly, and the much-anticipated fix for the /. layout bug. From the article: 'One major new feature in Firefox 1.1 is the "Sanitize" feature. This enables secure browsing with much more ease. Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences).'"

13 of 479 comments (clear)

  1. What I'm curious about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    (1) Does it finally fix that bug where sometimes images from certain hosts will stop displaying until you restart Firefox?

    (2) Does it finally start to reverse the recent trend for firefox to become a huge RAM hog, or does it continue this trend?

    1. Re:What I'm curious about by Guy+LeDouche · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I REALLY hope that something is done about resource usage. We are constantly told how much lighter, and faster Firefox is, yet it's still just as slow and bloated as Mozilla. Yesterday I was browsing with 4 tabs open and the RAM usage for Firefox was ~98MB This is not a good thing.

    2. Re:What I'm curious about by jesser · · Score: 5, Interesting

      David Baron, a Mozilla Foundation employee and one of the strongest Gecko hackers, has been spending a lot of his time fixing memory leaks in Gecko and Firefox.

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      The shareholder is always right.
    3. Re:What I'm curious about by ergo98 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      and is a completely and totally useless statistic that reflects nothing particularly interesting about how much memory a program is actually using

      You have that complete bass ackwards. Memory usage shows how much physical memory (something which is usually somewhat limited) is currently allocated to the process, while VM Size shows the virtual memory (something which is practically limitless).

      If a process starts up, allocates 100MB, and then never touches it, the VM Size will be significantly larger than the real memory usage, and in the real world this makes a big difference - having some seldom-used space in a paging file set aside for a task is a lot less relevant than having a block of physical memory set aside. If, on the other hand, a process allocates 100MB and then perpetually scans through it looking for Waldo, it won't be paged out and it'll consume real physical memory.

      Of course memory usage can include shared memory blocks, but overall it is the best indicator of the real, practical memory usage of an application. No one cares how many new statements exist in the code - they care how much finite physical memory is practically used by the app.

  2. Does the status line work properly now? by British · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Try hovering over a link in fark. It seems the text to display it is so complex, it overhwelms Firefox.

  3. Another "hope they fix this" post. by antizeus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I for one hope that the MacOS X version properly supports the middle mouse button (apparently the nightly builds have before the 1.0.3 release, but that release doesn't). Additionally, I hope it also uses Emacs key bindings.

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    -- $SIGNATURE
    1. Re:Another "hope they fix this" post. by CTho9305 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The reason releases that come after a given nightly don't have the same features is branches. Before each release, a branch is made (usually at the beta) so that the code is stable, and rapid (dangerous) development can continue on the trunk. Firefox 1.0.x were released off the 1.0 branch - branches usually only get very important bugfixes and security fixes. The trunk is where the day-to-day stuff happens, but as a result it can often be in pretty bad sahpe.

      --
      My server
  4. Copy? by sammykrupa · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article: 'One major new feature in Firefox 1.1 is the "Sanitize" feature. This enables secure browsing with much more ease. Select the "Sanitize" option in the preferences and Firefox will scrub your profile of sensitive information (which you select in the preferences).'

    Sounds something like the "Private Browsing" feature in Safari.

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    Dashboard Widgets
  5. How About That Memory Leak, Fixed? by BRock97 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So, how about that Firefox "feature" that keeps dynamically grabbing RAM as new images are displayed (at least that is where I am seeing it). Being a weather guy with my image looper adding new images every 5 minutes (and deleting the oldest one; the memory still isn't given up), I hate to see my browser using 500MB of RAM after a couple of hours. I was able to fix it with an entry in about:config called browser.cache.memory.capacity, but it would be nice to know if it is fixed by default since we will be rolling out Firefox on a bunch of desktops where I work in a few months.

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    Bryan R.
    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
  6. Re:google maps by Ark42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Might be related to http pipelining being enabled or disabled on one of your installs. It makes a HUGE difference in the speed all those little tiles load for me.

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    Morphing Software
  7. A few setbacks, UI wise by erikharrison · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think there are a few setbacks, UI wise, in the latest builds.

    The new preference dialog sucks. I suspect it's design is an attempt to match what OS X users expect, since Firefox devs have this (IMHO) crazy notion that the product should look as identical as possible across OSes.

    The whole thing looks much more cluttered, and it has the same bugs that the UI did in pre 1.0 where the text was rendered inside of windows all the time (Like in the toolbar customization pallete, or in the current prefs). Which makes me worry that actually it's an XUL problem. If text placement is a thing that's hard to get right in XUL, it makes me worry about it as a platform.

    However, performance did increase noticably for me, and the sanitize feature could be handy. I don't offhand find it much more useful that the "Clear All" button under privacy now. But it is nicely customizable, and not loosing my login cookies is kinda nice . . .

  8. Re:back/forward by Saeger · · Score: 5, Interesting
    back/forward can cache the rendered layout

    YES! Finally!

    Instantaneous back/forward (with mouse-rocker) navigation is one of the major killer features that has kept me using Opera as my main browser for years now. And if the tab switching and general snappiness of Firefox v1.1 has also improved to Opera's level, as some attest, then I can ditch Opera for good...

    ...well, as soon as Firefox gets the one last feature I can't live without: opera-like image AND text zooming (+/-), instead of just text scaling (Ctrl+/-).

    Yep. That's it. I can live without the rest of the kitchen sink.

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    Power to the Peaceful
  9. Uh-oh by XanC · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I hate to report this, but I uninstalled Web Developer, just to see... And it was like getting a whole new computer. FF is fast. And it's holding at 22MB resident. Normally by now it'd be at 75 at least, and climbing forever and ever.

    Maybe I'll see if I can send some info to the developer... It's such a useful extension. But I've never seen FF fly like this.