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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released
elfguygmail.com writes "Firefox 1.5 beta1 is out! It includes many new features including a new automatic update system, reworked options dialogs, faster browsing, new error pages, memory and stability updates. Get your beta at Mozilla.org."
Yeah! New error pages! Finally no more of that 404 bullshit.
Yeeeeeeah ! Faster back and forward means better performance reading messageboards . Deerpark alpha wont start on my machine. I am one those that submitted a couple of bugs on this. Good job boys!
Posting on it now. Generally teh snappier on OS X, which I appreciate. Text handling still isn't good enough to switch from Camino. The drag n drop tabs are a very welcome addition. Also, it looks like the Slashdot bug has been cleared up. Sweet.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
If they've really made it more stable and fixed the apparent memory leak, I'll be really happy. Firefox is great as it is, but it seems that if you leave it open for too long it starts to take up insane amounts of memory.
For those here that run Windows in the Classic theme, here a link to info on how to fix the menu looks http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_windows_classic
:(){
... all my extensions work on it. I had no problems with Deer Park Alpha, except that nothing except Adblock worked.
I don't want to read
Warning, seems like most extensions won't work from 1.0x to 1.5beta1..
My employer forces us to use firefox at my job... The database front-end they had designed uses flash. Firefox segfaults quite often and the copy/paste buffer is always farked up. I really hope these issues have been taken care of :(
If it were my choice at work, I'd use Opera.
That's good to know, can uninstall that firefox speeder upper thing. So far there turning out updates quicker than MS, and has better support. Nothing like the lack of pop ups and spam that just doesn't know how to work a PC without IE :)
Go firefox! On my site 65% of my users use firefox. It is a hardware site, so you'd expect it, but Firefox is gaining momentum and space. Anyone else have percentages from there site? Slashdot?
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
I've been running Deer Park Alpha 2 recently with no problems(SVG is kinda funky, but works great, and with the field testing it should be much better).
I hope SVG integrates with XUL ok. Gotta test out my XUL apps I have in the field for compatability too.
There's some changes Extension Authors need to check out too. Mozilla Developer News has the info and the big thing is XPCNative Wrappers will be on by default. (Yet more info on XPCNative Wrappers is available too).
Yeah, whatever. You say that now, but I bet you were one of those jerks hating on Network Solutions for making "new error pages" last year, weren't, you?
There are two things I am not fond of with the current non-Beta Firefox. The first is the way it needs to download the whole installer just to update a point release. The second is how extensions with similar functionality are not coordinated.
Take the GoogleBar for example. When I first installed Firefox it didn't come with a usable search tool, so I had to find GoogleBar which approximated the functionality of Google's IE GoogleBar. Now, Google comes along and releases their GoogleBar for Firefox and I'm left having to uninstall the old toolbar and install the new one. I'd rather the two projects just work closely together so that it could be updated seamlessly in one fell swoop.
Things like these occasionally mar my Firefox experience which is otherwise very smooth.
Speaking of smooth, does anyone else get a brief (1 second) pause when loading large pages in Slashdot? It seems to load part of the page, then it freezes for a second, then renders the rest of the page. It also happens on Photo.net, but there the whole discussion page reloads itself after loading once. Just a strange thing I noticed about Firefox.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
So the Adobe SVG plugin, which works fine in IE/Win and FF/Mac, will no longer be needed, which is great, since it crashes FF/Win! w00t!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
So far the only extension that works is the gmail notifier. Not even the all-in-one mouse gestures works... I'm patient, but will all of the developers make and re-make their extensions for every version?
I smell a need for backward compatibility
Runnin' On Empty
When installing Firefox 1.5
(1) Backup your old Firefox 1.0 profile
(2) Start with a clean profile, its best to use a clean profile
(3) Update your extensions
(4) If the extensions still complain, try this following the directions from this link
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
I was hoping that they'd replace the big goofy icon buttons on OS X and Linux that just don't go with anything. Maybe next version. The upside is the preferences layout is simpler, and browsing is a little snappier.
I'm also hoping that my memory leakage problems on linux are solved. We'll see! Now back to searching for the safarifox theme to see if it'll work...
Just downloaded it, seems cleaner, the new error pages seem a bit better than the old popup systems; informative and not nearly as cluttered as IE's. Haven't tested page rendering that much, so that remains to be seen, but seems good so far.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Very cool that they have a new release out, I'll be downloading it soon.
But I'm a little dissapointed it looks like the built-in SVG support isn't in there. Guess it's still alpha? (Haven't been following the Deer Park releases)
I'm really looking forward to the day where I can actually do a site in SVG and be able to expect more than 2 or 3 people to be able to see it...
And wow am I ever tired of struggling with the Flash IDE.
I have switched many people to Firefox and have found that people I switched months and months ago will never update. They never look at the little red arrow on the top right. They stick with the same version they have unpatched. Other applications use auto update because users dont update programs, its a problem but if Firefox is to be known as the most secure, fastest, bug free browser on the internet then they have to make sure everyone updates.
Are you sure about that being a real bug and not just some environmental problem? I don't ever remember seeing this problem on any FF on any machine. I just tested it again and it works fine.
Works just fine if you go directly to the swf, but attempting to load it in a webpage does nothing.
For example:
This swf loads.
Its containing web page shows nothing. Works in 1.0.6
I mean, that's why this is a beta, clearly something is wrong. Shame though, I was hoping to use this on a daily basis to QA. No flash means I can't, I do too much work in flash to not have it load.
Now here's something other web browsers should also include in themselves. Let's hope that M$ also "copies" this feature into de "new" IE 7.
Right now Steve Balmer is running around naked, drooling at the mouth and ripping up pictures of Bambi, convinced that they named the beta Deer Park because of him somehow.
I agree 100%. There are often pages that I visit which take a while to load. I load them in the background in tabs, but the whole browser grinds nearly to a halt while they load. In fact, if a flash animation takes up lots of CPU in one tab, then all the other tabs, and every other part of the user interface sometimes locks up for a minute at a time. This is just sad.
My second big gripe is just general bugginess. Yes, it takes time to iron out bugs, but Firefox has had some time. Right now, we're on 1.0.6, and honestly I'd rather see them just spend 100% of their effort on a 1.0.7 that is as close to bug free as humanly possible rather than adding more features. I'm sure the features they're adding right now are worthwile overall, but I'd much rather stay with the feature set I have now and see all the bugs disappear. The worst one is something that seems to relate to perhaps an event queue. Every now and then, something will happen that seems to cause Firefox to just stop processing events. I can press buttons and hit Command-W (I'm on a Mac), and nothing will happen. But if I hold down the mouse button inside a window, somehow this rejuvenates the event queue and these events get processed eventually. Totally, totally weird.
The worst part is that it seems that flash animations use the same thread as the user interface. So if you have a flash animation that takes a LOT of CPU, which lots of them do, then the user interface becomes unresponsive. This is just silly. You're taking untrusted code (flash from whatever web site) and letting it take CPU time away from critical stuff like being able to close the window that contains the CPU-hogging flash code!
For the hell of it I clicked on view source on the provided link...
This was a comment in the code:
Note to Editors of this Document!
I have meticulously repaired the indentation here. DO NOT OPEN THIS
DOCUMENT IN A WYSIWYG EDITOR OR (in the words of Robert DeNiro) I
WILL BRING YOU DOWN! I WILL BRING YOU DOWN TO CHINATOWN!
-Ben
nice.
-Vinod
including a new automatic update system
I am sick and tired of every application including its own update system. They all have different user interfaces, they don't handle dependencies correctly (e.g., Firefox may upgrade its own extensions, but not the download manager that they depend on), and they make random connections all over the Internet.
When will Windows and Macintosh get decent package and dependency management so that developers don't have to put this functionality into applications anymore, and that we don't have to put up with the security risks of many different update systems anymore?
"you can get a computer that will stomp that one into the dirt for a couple of hundred bucks easily."
No way. Robot legs are very expensive, and fitting a pair onto a case would be run into the tens if thousands of dollars.
Beautiful: Firefox' source finally builds with GCC4 out of the box; no mucking around necessary!
They've jumped up half a version and still no display:inline-block? Shouldn't they finish CSS 2.1 before they start on CSS 3? Every other major browser out there supports it, so it can't be that hard. Even IE, with it's dismal standards support, has inline-block.
Yeah, it does. The adblocker's called PithHelmet. There's dozens of other extensions available, most of very high quality.
The main point of the beta is so that extension developers can make their extenions work. Nothing is supposed to be great about it.
For older hardware, I strongly recommend installing Mozilla instead of Firefox. You install only the parts you want, and even with a "complete" install, the memory usage is much lower. This despite that Firefox was supposed to be a leaner alternative to the Mozilla suite -- it's ended up s much more bloated and resource craving. If you have less than 512 MB RAM and use the PC for more than one thing at a time, I honestly can not recommend Firefox at all.
Opera seems nice, but it's not customizable enough for me. I also can't compile my own, but have to use pre-compiled binaries that links against old libraries I don't even have installed anymore.
Regards,
--
*Art
Well, as one who manages the family computer, which runs WinXP, AutoUpdate is actually pretty useful. I haven't had to install an update manually for quite some time.
Seriously though, I can't wait until we get an OSX port that doesn't suck (Camino is okay, but what good is it if you can't use all the cool firefox extensions?).
Well, as a Mac OS X user, I feel your pain. But, I'm wondering which parts suck for you? I have issues with page rendering. Look at these rendering jobs from the LiveJournal home page (be kind! this is hosted on my personal server box):
- FireFox 1.0 (Sorry, but the "About" Dialogue blocks the effected text, so you'll have to trust me)
- FireFox 1.5 Deer Park Beta 1 the distributed Mac OS X binary, not compiled from soruce
- Camino 0.92 just for comparson
- Opera 8.02 for Mac OS X
- Safari 2 (And if you don't trust me, think about how many web browsers have a brushed metal GUI like that)
This occurs on several pages, but the only one I could produce on-demand was the LiveJournal page. Note that this is the LiveJournal home page, not user pages, and contains relatively simple and stable code. Note that Safari and Opera read the pages perfectly fine, but all the Mozilla-based browsers (all versions), even Camino, can't render the page properly. And these problems are not always so minor. On occasion, text can continue right outside of the view (and scroll) of the window. Text boxes will end up with text no longer inline with the cursor, making editing and correcting typos virtually impossible.Any one else have this problem? I know it's not too isolated since I've had this happen on both installations of OS X 10.4 and even 10.3. Or are there other problems that I don't know about?
Rawr
Faster back and forward means better performance...
Nice. Too bad its taken over 11 years for someone to optimize this in a relevant browser.
I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used. I hit 'back' and I observe network activity even when the page is entirely 100% cacheable content. The browser is probably playing with If-Modified-Since... I'd rather it just render what's cached especially when, between the time the page was first rendered and the time I hit 'back' the network flakes out and, rather than simply rendering what is already faithfully stored on my local disk, the browser hangs!
It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.
There's probably some profoundly crucial and subtle reason for all this and I've foolishly revealed my ignorance. Apply the necessary flames, but only if you have credible answers.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Anyone know if any of the code changes will make it back to the Mozilla Suite tree? Or is that officially dead as of 1.7? I would like to know because I love the integration of email and browser. I've been using the Suite style since Communicator first came out and I really like it at home. At work I use Firefox and Outlook.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I understand that IE isn't standards compliant, but it is dominant. As such, many people will be viewing the FireFox web site in IE. But IE doesn't render many of the FireFox site's pages correctly! Rounded corners don't work on every page and some pages (such as the "Mozilla FireFox 1.5 Beta 1 Release Notes" page) have much larger issues. However, IE renders the content at full width and FireFox leaves a substantial margin on either side (I have a wide screen display, I want to make use of it!).
Blame Microsoft all you want, but this is inexcusable. If you want people to switch to FireFox, they need to believe FireFox is better. Seeing as most web sites are built for IE, users coming to FireFox's web site see a page that doesn't render correctly and they assume the makers of the page are to blame. Why would they blame IE? Every other page they go to renders just fine in IE.
Since the same organization that made the page makes the software, it is conceivable that people would be turned away from FireFox on the assumption that people who produce broken web pages also produce broken programs.
Whether the FireFox web site doesn't properly support IE out of laziness, or out of malice. It should be fixed.
http://brandonbloom.name
I like how it looks best in Linux, but I kinda miss the Windows version sometimes...with its speed and all. And I know its not Linux/Gnome- Epiphany flies. So does a WINEd IE. Only Firefox is slow. Will that be better?
Open Source Sushi
Ugliness has no place on the Mac desktop, even on the web. Neither does actual functionality. Style over substance, baby! (Honestly, there's no OS without flaws)
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
No, this still doesn't fix bug #154892: "Splitting Absolutely positioned frames not implemented - Missing second page of content when printing or print previewing this site"
9 2
This bug prevents many web sites from printing in any useful respect from Mozilla browsers.
Its existence keeps me from rolling out Firefox as the default. It probably keeps any organization that frequently prints web pages from considering Firefox.
But what really irks me is that this bug has existed since 2002!. The bug has been duplicated in dozens and dozens of bug reports. It has at least 70 votes in Bugzilla. Yet no one has fixed it, and there is NO INDICATION that it will be fixed in the foreseeable future, yet it directly affects the user's browsing experience.
The history and severity of this bug does not reflect well on the Mozilla browser or its open source development model. NOTE: I am actually, personally, quite impressed with the Mozilla project, but someone who wants an excuse to banish free software might start with something like this.
Finally, as a Firefox user, a personal plea: Somebody, please fix this! Please?
For more information:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1548
After a clean install of Firefox 1.5 Beta 1, I tried to reinstall each extension I used, only to find out that Flash stops working after installing AdBlock, so for now the solution is to uninstall it until an update version comes out.
So, the big deal here is maintaining consensual state. I'm sure you know the basics here. Best practice is to POST when changing state on the server, and GET when reading. But, not everone does that. And it also took a long time to come up with that simple rule. The upshot is that when using browser based C/S apps, there is no good way to tell if the last action changed the state of whatever it is you're looking at. (For a simple example, think of confirming a bank transfer, and hitting back from the "it worked" page.) And even the POST means change rule doesn't always work or apply. Good app design has to play a role, but a browser has no idea if what is going on with the server.
There are other reasons why back can't always be exactly "what you got a page ago", but the above is the main killer (from the perspective of what I do, at least). Developers can make this better by playing tricks with the last-modified header and whatnot, but you're either going to sometimes get broken info or at least do a HEAD when going back, take your pick.
It is notable that the whole AJAX obsession usually completely kills the back button, and many web developers are very hot on the idea. If global state, session, and sometimes transaction can be bound that much more tightly, it does make life easier for a coder, at the expense of some great client side functionality. (Again, depending on how you think of it.)
Doesn't mean I'm not using XMLRPC - I don't mind bragging that we were doing some of this a few years ago. Having a community to trade ideas with kicks ass, and I've learned a lot from other's experimentation. But we shouldn't lose track of basics, like "the browser is not just a window frame; inbuilt functionality is important and if you make your own back buttons, you're missing the point."
I forget what 8 was for.
The memory is still bloated. But it's clear there have been some improvements in that area. The issue is at least still under some control. But you are all correct, it is a caching issue. Memory is now usually released back to the system. As in 1.0.6 when you closed a window, the cache for the page in memory was never released. When I close a tab, I see memory drop. I just had two broswer windows open and about 4 tabs in each, took up 80Mb. After closing the other window, I'm now at 65Mb. Still too much though. At least it doesn't continue to bloat until it reaches 200Mb and crash. Oh and I've had this window open all day, so that is a plus.
Has anyone else suffered with the weird thing where if a website times out, the browser displays a blank page, the tab says 'untitled' and if you refresh, instantly you just get a blank page (as if it hasn't even tried to refetch it).
Also there's that thing where the browser will not display the page due to some timeout again I guess, but the ticker thing still rotates as if it's trying to fetch the page (a look at netstat or LievHTTPHeaders tells you it's not).
Mind you I think the rotating ticker thing is broken in Thunderbird too, as it keeps on going after 'no new messages on server'.
Or is it meant to constantly rotate in the top right of the window just to distract you?!
Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla stuff, but there's still basic bugs in it that need fixing before adding more crap.
#include <sig.h>
Needs some more work to pass the Acid2 test
I am a speak english. Do you not? - Saroto
That's a Firefox trunk build - much different than Firefox 1.5 beta 1, which is a Firefox branch build.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
1.) OS X builds of Firefox 1.5b1 are _much_ more stable than their 1.0.x cousins. If you take a look at the URL below you'll see a great big stack of bugfixes, including many for OS X.
5 b1.html
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/1.
2.) That sounds like an issue with JavaScript menus - I doubt it's the browser's fault per se; it could be an issue with the way the menu is designed.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
My debian system has a manual update every once in a while (usually after i get the Debian Weekly News(letter)) How should this auto update feature workt together with apt-get? it's nice if it can signal there is an update available, but usually I dont run firefox as root, which would be the only one that has permission to do the writes necesary.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Well, there goes my karma, I WILL be modded as troll for this, but had to get it out
Consultant: No, what I'm asking is, do you want us to build the method that works, which you hired us to discover and spec out for you, or the broken one, for which you're now asking?
Client: The broken one!
Consultant: You're sure.
Client: Are you billing me for this conversation?
I forget what 8 was for.
I'm the GPP os the thread. Read my post and you'll see that it clearly states it wouldn't cure all of the problems but it would help and its better than nothing. I said that the developers could still work on keeping the memory footprint down, but the GC would help.
Regards,
Steve
I canne' change the laws of physics Capn'.
The basic problem is that it is a big program and uses a lot of memory. The basic trick IE uses that makes its load-up times faster is that it doesn't really 'load-up' at all - its process it a permenant residence of Windows. However there is a quick start agent for Mozilla - I don't remember if they turned it off by default or something but they did have one. I'm not sure one exists for Linux either. It's all about sacraficing boot times vs. individual loading times though.
Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.
Wrong. Many (most?) GC implementations don't bother to run a collection cycle at shutdown - precisely because the OS will clean up anyway, so there's no point.
GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory.
Oh dear, the old "it's not absolutely perfect so I will reject it out of hand" line. Yes, of course GC isn't a silver bullet. It's just another useful tool that makes it easier to write programs with fewer bugs in them. Yes, of course it doesn't magically remove every single possible cause of memory leaks. It just removes one large class of potential problems from the things the programmer has to worry about.
And yes, GC doesn't solve the problem of handling resources other than memory. RAII cleans up file handles and stuff for you too. That's nice, I admit it. But there are other strategies that can handle this in a GC language. C#'s "using" statement, for example. And I don't know about the code you write, but in the code I write, the vast majority of objects do not represent any resource other than memory - so GC handles them just fine, thank you.
If doctors were C++ programmers, we'd still have kids dying of easily treated diseases daily - after all, antibiotics don't cure viruses, so there's no point using them, is there?
Firefox and Mozilla have to deal with every quirk of IE's broken css support and none standard extensions because any website that renders in IE "correctly" but not in Firefox/Mozilla is the fault of Mozilla/Firefox?
Now you are saying that the web designers for Firefox/Mozilla must not use w3c standard code because it does not look as good in IE as it does in Firefox? So when a website that doesn't render correctly in Firefox it is Firefox's fault but when a website doesn't render in correctly in IE even if that website is COMPLETELY w3c compliant it is the website's fault....
Wow and people wonder why Microsoft is hated by so many knowledgeable computer users.
"Since the same organization that made the page makes the software, it is conceivable that people would be turned away from FireFox on the assumption that people who produce broken web pages also produce broken programs."
Unlike Microsoft that produces broken programs and websites?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, ah, what exactly would you like the server you can't resolve to tell you?
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
only 2002? pfft!!!
this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458
has been open since 1999 and has over 150 votes. and quite frankly, i don't think the votes mean much. i remember reading a quote from a major maintainer saying that he might consider how many votes a bug had if it was something in the tens of thousands. (this was about two years ago, regarding the most voted on bug in bugzilla, with a little over 500 votes. and still open, by the way...)
and as much as i like mozilla/firefox and appreciate the work that the developers are putting into it, i still find it ridiculous how they will frequently mass move bugs that they don't feel like fixing (even ones marked as release blockers) from one release to the next. the bug above was originally targetted for mozilla milestone M9...
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?