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Firefox 1.1 Boasts New Features

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).'"

41 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 Shook18 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I... have 6 tabs open right now and 29mb ram usage with the 1.1 release. Don't know if that is because the new release is so good, or yours is so bad, however.

    3. Re:What I'm curious about by FuzzzyLogik · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's why i switched to Opera. the ram usage and responsiveness of the interface is great. it took a little getting used to, but i use Opera on my windows machine, safari on my mac, and firefox in linux. granted i got opera for $20 with the edu pricing.

    4. Re:What I'm curious about by Ark42 · · Score: 5, Informative


      While it's true that the "Mem Usage" in task manager can easily show much more memory than the program is actually using, an minimizing a program will make this number drop, the number it drops to is still not the accurate memory usage figure. You really want to go to View/Select Columns and look at VM Size, not Mem Usage.
      VM Size is the actual amount of memory the program thinks it has, between whats swapped out and what is actually being used. Mem Usage can be higher than VM Size if memory was freed but not yet flushed by the OS, or it can be lower than VM Size if some memory hasn't been touched in a while and is swapped out to disk. Minimizing an application just gives Windows a hint that it should flush freed memory and swap out pages that have not been touched recently, which is why the Mem Usage figure drops when you do that.

    5. Re:What I'm curious about by kbrosnan · · Score: 5, Informative

      bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456 Memory use does not go down after closing tabs (resources not released) - Resolved:Fixed

      --
      These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
    6. Re:What I'm curious about by Teja · · Score: 4, Informative

      Firefox's memory usage is part reason why I ditched it and went Opera mostly full time. (Of course, Opera's innovative features are hard to beat so that is why I mainly switched). Being on a really old machine, Firefox would often use 112 MB of RAM with only around two-four tabs open, now with Opera at that many tabs, It'd only use around 25 MB of RAM with the same pages open. When Firefox is started up with no pages open, it'd be around 21 MB of RAM or so, with Opera, it is only around 13-14.

      --
      - Teja
    7. 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.

      --
      The shareholder is always right.
    8. 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. back/forward by Ark42 · · Score: 5, Informative


    And back/forward can cache the rendered layout instead of having to re-render everything: http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=6 567

    1. 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.

      --
      Power to the Peaceful
  3. If it's about what we can expect... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...it's called preview, not review.

  4. Umm Sanitize by thundercatslair · · Score: 5, Funny

    So this will clear all my tracks automaticly when I, say look at the hardcore of porn?

    1. Re:Umm Sanitize by Ride-My-Rocket · · Score: 5, Funny

      So this will clear all my tracks automaticly when I, say look at the hardcore of porn?

      Yes, but it won't hide your posts on Slashdot from your girlfriend.

    2. Re:Umm Sanitize by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, but it won't hide your posts on Slashdot from your girlfriend.

      I have a hard time believing that that will ever be a problem for anybody, anywhere, ever.

    3. Re:Umm Sanitize by Rakshasa+Taisab · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, you still need to manually apply tissue paper.

      --
      - These characters were randomly selected.
    4. Re:Umm Sanitize by xstonedogx · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well, there are (a few) girls on /., and I have a hard time imagining them with non-geeky guys.

      I know what you mean. I usually imagine them with other girls.

  5. 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.

    1. Re:Does the status line work properly now? by RotJ · · Score: 4, Informative
      Try hovering over a link in fark. It seems the text to display it is so complex, it overhwelms Firefox.

      I wouldn't call it overwhelming Firefox (nor would I call it overhwelming Firefox). You probably have Firefox set to disable javascript from changing the status bar text. If you enable having javascript change the status bar text in options > web features > Javascript Advanced or if you completely disable javascript, the links show up fine in the status bar.

      Fark formats its links like this:
      <a onMouseOver="w('http://www.planetark.com/dailynews story.cfm/newsid/30692/story.htm'); return true;" onMouseOut="c(); return true;" href="http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?IDLink=147 5780&amp;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.planetark.com%2 Fdailynewsstory.cfm%2Fnewsid%2F30692%2Fstory.htm" target=_blank>(Some Guy)</a>
      It uses onMouseOver to hide the click tracker from the status bar. The appropriate behavior for Firefox would be to show the actual url the link points to when you disable status bar text changing, so it's still broken.
  6. 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.

    --
    -- $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.

  7. Funnyfox by anandpur · · Score: 5, Funny
  8. 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.

  9. 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.

    --

    Bryan R.
    The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
  10. Safari's builtin RSS reader and Firefox by konmaskisin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Tiger version of Safari truly does load faster than Firefox now (this must have been a priority for Apple!) ... not sure if it's preloaded like IE is but it is quick now. Generally though Firefox is jus a better and more convenient browser.

    There's only *one* area where Safari truly has a usabilty edge and that's RSS. The reader is *really* nice. Mozilla/Firefox could do something similar by improving Sage marginally (the article length slider is all that's missing it seems).

    Is better syndication support (rss atom etc) being considered?

  11. Re:Rendering Bug? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Bugzilla has banned links from slashdot.

    I've been using the nightlies and haven't had a problem with Slashdot for a while.

    That said, if you really do feed a copy of any slashdot page to a web validator, it comes up with 100+ errors. The problem is that direct linking of Slashdot to validators have been banned by Slashdot maintainers.

  12. 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.

  13. Ridiculous by GarfBond · · Score: 5, Informative

    This isn't really so much a review as a description of features currently in the nightly. Firefox 1.1 isn't expected until June at the earliest. The roadmap (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.h tml) gives a rough overview of the timeframes involved right now, though it is not always accurate as it isn't updated frequently.

    Honestly, Firefox 1.1 isn't even in alpha-release yet. To take some highly unstable code and to "preview" it is a bit premature right now. I would call 1.1beta a better time to 'preview' things, as hopefully by then there will be a feature freeze and things will have stabilized a bit. I'm not kidding about the unstable bit either: up until a couple days ago themes and extensions wouldn't install in the nightly builds.

    In fact, an article like this does a disservice because it's misleading the /. crew. Yes, an incredibly fast back/forward feature has been checked in to the latest nightly builds, but what they won't tell you is at present this feature is DISABLED. While that doesn't mean it won't be enabled in the future and might be enabled for 1.1, as it stands this feature is off by default and only accessible through a custom pref, so in its current state it changes nothing for the average end-user.

    This forums post gives a better idea of the new features to be expected in 1.1 with one line sentences: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2577 66

  14. 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 . . .

  15. Re:Rendering Bug? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    How to evade referrer bans:
    1. right click link, "Copy link location"
    2. paste into URL bar
    3. press enter
    Warning: This is illegal in the United States under the DMCA.
  16. The REAL news: Firefox 1.03 remote .exe execution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative


    wait for the spyware slags get hold of this one
    full remote execution of an exe with no user interaction
    http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/397747/2005 -05-05/2005-05-11/0

    catching up with MSIE

  17. Cool thing about OSS projects is I can ask you... by msimm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Did you report it along with your fix? Because not everyone uses the image looper quite that much and this could slip through the cracks without someone pointing it out.

    I'm sure they'd like to have as much working flawlessly as possible, so they'd probably really appreciate this kind of feedback. I'll assume you did report it (or at least verify someone else already had) and leave it at "this is the beauty of OSS" even the users have their part in the process (is IE displaying PNG's or CSS properly yet?).

    --
    Quack, quack.
  18. /. bug by kinema · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "the much-anticipated fix for the /. layout bug"
    I for one think this is great but is it really the job of the Mozilla devs to bring Slashdot into the modern times with a valid XHTML/CSS layout?
    1. Re:/. bug by CTho9305 · · Score: 5, Informative

      The validity of the HTML is irrelevant - the bug was a type of bug known as a "reflow bug". Reflow bugs are timing-dependant, in that they only occur when things happen in a certain order. This is a large part of why people with fast connections were less affected by the bug. You could likely construct a page with 100% valid XHTML which would demonstrate the same bug.

  19. The big question is... by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Funny

    Will it support ActiveX?

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
  20. Some good and some bad by Quattro+Vezina · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Good:

    - Back/Forward Cache: Yes! Yes! Yes! This brings Firefox one step closer to the way I feel caching should be done. Back/forward should always pull pages from the cache (ignoring meta expire), and clicking links should always load the page from the server.

    - Interface speedups: Great news. I love Firefox's rendering power, but the UI is slow as hell. This should help.

    - Rendering errors fixed: More good news. While I can count the amount the number of times I've seen the Slashdot bug on my hands, better rendering is always a good thing.

    - Focus follows mouse: One of the best changes. I've had so many issues with the focus not being where it's supposed to be. For example, I'll switch to another window or tab, but the focus is usually still in the old one. If this gets fixed, I'll jump for joy.

    - Sanitise: More privacy == A Good Thing.

    The Bad:

    - Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom (the sole reason I installed TabBrowser Extensions was to get the browser tabs to appear on the bottom), but I don't mind them on the left side. But having them on top is just horrible. It looks prettier on the left too, especially with my theme, which places an image of a gecko in the background of the left pane. I'm also worried that my theme won't work with 1.1--I've been using an old version of the theme, as the author made a change a while back that uglified the icons, defeating the purpose of the theme (the version I use only uses two colours in the icons...). Officially, my theme only supports up to 0.9, but I've hacked it to allow 1.0 to install it--if 1.1 has any major UI changes like this one, it may cause my theme to choke.

    - Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion. I like to be able to dick around in the preferences and not have to worry about screwing something up. It pissed me off to no end back when I used Galeon, and it'll piss me off in Firefox too. But, hey, I can tell that the Firefox devs have an agenda to screw up the preferences dialog as much as possible. They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?), they already flipped the OK and Cancel buttons, and now they're adding these shitty changes too. If I wanted to use a browser with Gnome's horrible HIG, I'd use Epiphany.

    --
    I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
    1. Re:Some good and some bad by abulafia · · Score: 4, Informative
      Preferences tabs at the top: I hate having tabs at the top--I'd prefer them on the bottom

      Personally I agree with the hate, but not the placement - give them to me on the left or the right, and leave more vertical real estate. But see below.

      Live preferences: I hate these things with a passion... They already moved it to the Edit menu a while back (WTF?)

      I'd prefer no live prefs, too.

      But, the deal here is being consistent. They're trying to make the app work like other apps. So, the theory goes, even if they don't make your personal favorite UI choice, at least you know what it will do.

      The Edit->Preferences thing is a long standing Mac standard from the pre-OSX days. Back then, most apps followed it. The strength of the convention was most noticable when you used a Microsoft app, which hung them off of Tools->Options. If you haven't noticed, non-OSX MacOS is where a lot (but obviously not all) of Gnome's UI sensibilities come from.

      So, I generally agree with your behavioural preferences, and weirdos like you and me and always dick with the undisplayed options in the config file, fiddle with the chrome, etc.. Meanwhile, everyone else gets consistency. Which is a good thing.

      --
      I forget what 8 was for.
  21. Re:erm by kbrosnan · · Score: 4, Informative

    bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131456 Memory use does not go down after closing tabs (resources not released) Resolved:Fixed One of the many core changes that are going to be in Fx 1.1.

    --
    These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
  22. Re:MOD PARENT UP (and another suggestion) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    No need, in Firefox:

    1. Go to about:config
    2. Type "referer"
    3. Set network.http.sendRefererHeader to 0

  23. Re:Acid2 by kbrosnan · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/0 4/acid2.html

    There's been lots of speculation about which browser will get Acid2 working first. I'd put my money on Safari. The problem is that we're late in the Gecko 1.8/Firefox 1.1 release cycle and there are a couple of bugs that would be quite a lot of work to fix, and introduce significant risk, and they're just not as important as other work that we have long planned for 1.8 and some other strategic work that I'll blog about soon. We will get to it in 1.9.

    I'm sure some will seize on this as an opportunity to say "Gecko developers don't care about standards" ... they're simply wrong, as anyone can tell by looking at the huge number of standards compliance bugs we fix in every release. And keep in mind that if everyone's #1 priority was always standards compliance, Firefox would never have happened. -Roc

    Part 2
    Use about:config to modify browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete
    http://mozillazine.org/misc/about:config/

    --
    These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based upon the order I joined. -Homer Simpson
  24. 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.