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Mozilla Firefox 2 Alpha 1 Available
Mini-Geek writes "Code-named Bon Echo, the first Alpha of Firefox 2.0 is now officially available. You can download it at ftp.mozilla.org. From the article: 'Here are some new features in Bon Echo Alpha 1 that require feedback: Changes to tabbed browsing behavior, New data storage layer for bookmarks and history (using SQLlite), Extended search plugin format, Updates to the extension system to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions, Support for SVG text using svg:textPath'"
I forsee no problems. It's a surprisingly minimal addition to a software package, and the problems with Firefox's memory management are very likely in unrelated modules.
"SQL" engines tend to evoke images of hulking software packages like PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle, but those things do an awful lot more than the typical desktop app needs, and the SQLite engine is much, much simpler in order to meet that lesser demand.
From now on, I buy only Intel.
Works fine on Windoze even after 2 hours .. No crashes or memory hogs.
In addition, it is co-existent with Firefox.
TFA doesn't say anything about new exciting features. I wonder what made them decide it to be 2.0 alpha instead of 1.6? Was it just so that they could reach the planned milestone?
I read something about they were trying to optimize the renderengine, so it could support cairo and have hardware acceleration... no promises was made, but they expected it to be in 2.0 (correct me if I'm wrong).
I guess the more comprehensive changelog (which isn't available yet) will reveal some more interesting changes - perhaps some nice performance enhancements?
For those who are wondering - the 2.0 alpha build renders the ACID 2 test exactly the same as Mozilla 1.7.12. (http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html #top)
I don't personally think that the ACID 2 test is the be-all end-all test, but I know the question will be asked, hence the post.
I hope so, check out Ben Maurer's latest blog entry, near the bottom he talks a bit about this. Actually, the latest entry is quite informative about the new memory mapping features in the latest kernel.
We do? Funny, I've been running FF since the 0.8 days (Phoenix) and have never had any memory issue. In fact, I've never had any issue other than one mini-crash which forced me to use a default profile until I pulled up my old one. Further, I've installed FF on several different systems, including W98, and not one of those systems has ever had a memory issue.
Looking at the FF boards it appears the issue is not so much with FF but the multitude of extensions that people think they need to install.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
A portable version of this build was just posted for those that want to use this with a separate profile:
http://www.cybernetnews.com/?p=417
Mu.
The memory usage problems have been related to the image cache. (I've heard that this is often caused by an old version of the adblock extension)
Using SQLite to store profile information will probably have little impact the memory usage problems people see.
Personally, I dislike all kind of autosort behaviour like the office feature of showing only recently used commands. Many (most?) people remember the positions of items and choose before reading the actual bookamark. If the sorted in some random way (like most recently used) then each item has to be read -- and you can't assume that people with a collage degree are able to read :)
Why does the kernel go through stable and then unstable forks? Can't it always be a stable build, like with Windows?
You believe falsely. (Possibly you're thinking of BerkelyDB). http//sqlite.org has full disclosure, even describing the virtual machine and opcodes that drive this little ~300kb, mostly-ANSI '92 compliant wonder.
Combine a scripting language for end-user forms, and you've got everything MS Access wishes it could be.
Get Hipp. Get SQLite.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Here and here.
That's why it's called an alpha developer build. It's barely beginning active development. You cannot expect it to be stable. You cannot even expect it to be safe. This is not a beta or release candidate. It's meant only for testers and active developers. Use with extreme caution.
Favorite quote: "
It will be much more than that when Firefox 2 actually makes it out to the world. This is a very early build and according to the Roadmap, it will be released near the third quarter of 2006. I'm guessing it will actually be a little later than that. I also found this Feature Brainstorming page, which seems to be closer to what's being planned for 2.0. I see a lot of new stuff.
Favorite quote: "
Adblock itself has had, and still does have, memory leak problems. The original maintainer shows no inclination to deal with them. It's generally recommended to use Adblock Plus, which has fixed most of these problems and also has useful new features, such as whitelisting. The maintainer of Adblock Plus has also shown strong interest in debugging and fixing any problems, including memory leaks.
There's a few problems that can cause leaks in FF itself which have been fixed in the main trunk. Almost all of those fixes are supposed to be included in 2.0.
Yes, here are the instructions for using with Adblock plus.
They aren't doing this just to get sorting algorithms. This actually improves things because right now there are a number of different formats that Firefox stores data in. Look at your bookmarks.html(HTML), cert8.db(Berkeley DB), formhistory.dat(mork... don't ask). Using sqlite reduces the amount of code for accessing all of these formats and provides some degree of uniformity. Getting data from sqlite is pretty easy(and much easier than the current situation) because we have dozens of language bindings and tools to do it with.
Yes I read the arguments against this is in AUP, but Firefox is an application that runs completely counter to most of what's in there. Firefox is never going to be a Unix application following the advice in AUP. It wants to be an operating sytem(or platform if you prefer), and not just an application.
This will also almost certainly kill any chance of reusage of bookmark data by other programs
Not at all. SQLite is extremely easy to use -- it has bindings for major scripting languages, and trivial queries can be run on the command line. I use the Python bindings in a number of my minor scripts, and it has frequently resulted in a massive performance improvement (as opposed to using flatfiles and writing the data-munging and analysis code myself).