to beat IE
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Funny
This release must be renamed Firefox 8 to be better than IE
Re:Memory
by
apollosfire
·
· Score: 5, Informative
As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.
To disable this feature, do the following:
1. type about:config in you address bar
2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
3. set its value to 0 (zero)
Re:Couple of questions
by
aussersterne
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.
I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...
-- STOP . AMERICA . NOW
CoralCDN - just in case
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here's something to fix
by
handelaar
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Early versions of FF allowed me to Find text anywhere on a page, including inside textareas.
That's been broken for years now. I don't care about how it renders RSS, I want basic functions to unsuck.
Re:Memory
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.
That's right, it's not a bug, it's a feature!
Close button at same tab
by
omeg
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.
There's no reason to not let the user be able to pick the old way of handling a UI functionality that a reasonable amount of people don't agree with.
Re:Close button at same tab
by
ElleyKitten
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching
There's an extension for the alpha already that turns it off.
I like extensions, but sometimes it seems like you have to have 80 of them just to get options that seem like they should be common sense.
-- "What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
Re:winter release
by
n0-0p
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Scheduled for sometime this winter (or summer in the North Hemisphere)
Don't forget that your summer is somebody's winter.
Download manager still broken?
by
edxwelch
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Fixfox and mozilla are unable to resume downloads across sessions. In other words if you have to reboot the PC for any reason, you will have to start that 300mb download from scratch. This bug has been outstanding for several years. There are numerous other missing features in the download manager, just compare to the download manager in Opera.
So install Leak Monitor. Then you can see the cause of the most severe memory leaks: poorly coded extentions.
Whenever you close a tab or window and a leak is detected, you'll get a message about it. I used it for a few days and discovered several minor extentions I'd been using were causing some very large leaks.
-- The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Firefox with extensions
by
spudnic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Just about everything in the review is available now, and has been for quite awhile, through extensions?
It seems that future development of firefox should be on the core application and let the extension developers handle the pretty stuff.
--
load "linux",8,1
use a permalink...
by
Val314
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Thank god they're putting in an automated spell check for multi-line text boxes. This site should become that much more bearable to read now.
Search plugin order
by
cpt+kangarooski
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Fucking dammit.
Why the hell are there buttons ('Move Up' and 'Move Down') for reordering the search plugins. They should be able to be dragged and dropped. It's not like the developers can't do this; the bookmarks can be. Why not this?
(It would also be nice for Firefox and Mozilla to understand URL files generated by IE. Safari seems to manage.)
-- --
This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Sorry, but poorly designed caching is a memory leak. I shouldn't have to restart my browser because it is taking 700mb of memory (no lie). Especially when I only have one window open.
Everytime a Firefox article gets posted, I see someone post a hack to fix the memory leak problem. I've tried every one of them and none of them fix it on my end. The only externsion I'm running is Google's Toolbar. Regardless though, no one except the most hardcore Firefox users would ever know to look in about:config to turn off this "feature". And they shouldn't have to either.
Extensions exist in a global context for the process. They can maintain a permanent reference to objects that are never used again, and should otherwise be freed. They may also create cyclic references, in which one or more objects contains references to each other. This creates a situation where the objects are not referenced by an accessible code path, and the reference count can never drop to zero. The result is a leak, and it is an inherint weakness simple of reference counting garbage collection.
Even web pages can create circular JavaScript references that result in leaks. FF isn't alone in this area either. IE has always been vulnerable to memory leaks via JavaScript, theirs are just confined to bad pages. However, FF 3 will have a cycle detector that identifies unused cyclic references and frees the objects. But that still won't fix sloppy extensions that hang on to large objects for no goood reason.
In my experience, Plugins are pretty bad too. They operate outside the scope of the garbage collection and often don't clean up after themselves. For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page. The PDF Download extension helps, but it isn't perfect.
As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.
And as mentioned before there are bugs for memory leaks that predate the fast back-forward feature. And to say that memory probelms are all becuase of this feature is revisionist history.
Re:For new users
by
plover
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Currently, there is no way to close a tab without first selecting it.
I used to think this too, which is why I used to use the TabX extension. However, since at least Firefox 1.5 I've been able to "middle-click" a tab to close it (without giving it focus.) Once I learned that, TabX was gone.
-- John
Re:I just went trhough the changelog...
by
Lisandro
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Question is, does Opera do these features better or will Firefox?
It does. I like Firefox a lot, but i'm not blind - every single feature that it's available in both and works better in Opera. With a fraction of the memory usage, and much faster to boot. Much more stable too - i only had Opera hangning on me a couple of times (both on Windows and Linux) - when it happens, it promptly apologizes and offers you to open the windows you were browsing at the moment of the crash. Priceless!
Also, Oprera has a shitload of functionality not available on FF or not needing extensions (gesture browsing, searches in the url bar, etc...). Those are the reasons it has been my main browser of choice for years now.
Re:Memory
by
Mistshadow2k4
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Poorly coded extensions definitely are the biggest memory leak problem. I was using forecastfox for a while and Firefox was leaking like a rusty bucket, even with the sessionistory fix. One day, forecastfox popped up with the latest temperature over an hour after I'd closed Firefox. I uninstalled it right then and Firefox has been pretty well-behaved memory-wise ever since; I haven't seen it's memory usage go over 85 mb.
Also, this fix helps too:
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
-- I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
The parent was unfairly labelled a troll. I love the Firefox browser, and use it all the time. But it and Thunderbird have a lot of annoying, quick to fix problems that could have been fixed, and are often actively ignored. If you want a real list of stuff that is broken, we could start with the parent poster's list, which seems somewhat valid, and continue from there...
1. Under the XP home theme (reduced functionality without reason) - No "Block images from this server" in context menu - available in Mozilla forever, this prevents kids from seeing the constant AdultFriendFinder crap that comes up on some non-pornographic sites.
2. On my system, it does seem to be smaller and faster than Mozilla, though I am not sure about the new Seamonkey developments. I tried it when they first started, and their first task was apparently to introduce lots of bugs and change the icon to something they created in Microsoft Paint. Not impressed with their priorities.
3. Renamed to Firefox - Wow. This was a bad move. I get a questioning look almost every time I bring up the "better browser to use" argument to businesses. Plus, everyone ends up calling it Foxfire. There are too many "cool" names involved. Mozilla was hard enough to explain, but at least I could connect it to Netscape's mascot (since people still remember Netscape). But Firefox, Firebird, Phoenix, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey? Surely someone came up with something better, but it was turned down as too practical. Think about the words "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape". The title describes the function.
4. Memory leaks - Running latest Firefox Stable build for Win32, one window, no tabs, no extensions, haven't visited any sites with Java, one Live Bookmark (default BBC World News thing). Browsing around for a few hours, memory use creeps up by several megs. Even as I type this (watching Task manager, memory has gone from 37,??? to 39,132. Weird.
5. Incomplete, annoying interface - Well, I would call a "resume button that has not ever apparently worked an annoying interface feature. I would also say that losing favicons for no apparent reason is annoying. No built-in function for removing or re-ordering search engines (you shouldn't need an extension for this simple task.
6. Offtopic Thunderbird complaint - Signatures now have a stupid "--" in grey that cannot be turned off, and the signature is in grey too (no option to disable) which has annoyed countless customers. Some people don't feel like typing their own name 50 times a day. Email is not Newsgroups. Don't try to make it that way.
7. Memory usage is now up to 40,648. Eventually, Firefox will crash on me. Not a huge deal for me (I used Mozilla M9, M10, etc. all the time). But pretty lame for a browser that has had this much development time. No, it's not just this machine either. 40,860 now.
So stop modding people as troll, just because they didn't feel like they should have to type all this junk out, when the accusations hold water.
Vidar
-- The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
so I'll just keep asking...and getting no answer
by
Tumbleweed
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Multi-threaded UI yet? Anybody? Anybody?
Bueller?
The longer this is put off, the harder I suspect it's going to be to put it, due to a more complicated codebase.
Lay the foundation first, folks, PLEASE.
Re:Did I miss this feature?
by
corrosive_nf
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Tools --> Options --> General. type your favorite urls in the homepage box seperated by |
Oh wait, you want a way to do this with one hand. Err, can't help you there, I'm afraid.
-- --
Trinity in high heels carrying a whip:
The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Re:so I'll just keep asking...and getting no answe
by
The+One+KEA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Darin Fisher did this on the trunk in bug 326273. The complexity of the repair, as you surmised, means that Firefox 3.0 will be the first consumer release to contain these changes.
-- SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/
Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Re:I just went trhough the changelog...
by
xigxag
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Too bad there's no way to mod a post as "potentially life changing." I've been putting off trying out Opera since before it went free. Your post made me decide to give it another try, and so far (admittedly only an hour or so of heavy surfing) I love it. I was able to get it to connect to my banking site. It does phpbb better than FF. My machine seems about 50% faster, and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation.
Most importantly, I didn't have to install any extensions to get it to work acceptably.
If there's one functionality that should be built into FF 2.0, there should be a brainless way to export and import your extensions, forms, passwords and bookmarks in one "FF2go" zipped bundle so that when you reinstall it on another computer, you can get started right away with your old configuration.
-- There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Slashdot Mirror
This release must be renamed Firefox 8 to be better than IE
As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive. To disable this feature, do the following: 1. type about:config in you address bar 2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 3. set its value to 0 (zero)
Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.
I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/
Early versions of FF allowed me to Find text anywhere on a page, including inside textareas.
That's been broken for years now. I don't care about how it renders RSS, I want basic functions to unsuck.
Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.
There's no reason to not let the user be able to pick the old way of handling a UI functionality that a reasonable amount of people don't agree with.
Fixfox and mozilla are unable to resume downloads across sessions. In other words if you have to reboot the PC for any reason, you will have to start that 300mb download from scratch.
This bug has been outstanding for several years.
There are numerous other missing features in the download manager, just compare to the download manager in Opera.
Whenever you close a tab or window and a leak is detected, you'll get a message about it. I used it for a few days and discovered several minor extentions I'd been using were causing some very large leaks.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Just about everything in the review is available now, and has been for quite awhile, through extensions?
It seems that future development of firefox should be on the core application and let the extension developers handle the pretty stuff.
load "linux",8,1
like this one- aka-firefox-2-alpha-2-review.html
http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com/2006/05/bon-echo
if you want to link to an article of a blog and not just point to the main page...
Thank god they're putting in an automated spell check for multi-line text boxes. This site should become that much more bearable to read now.
Fucking dammit.
Why the hell are there buttons ('Move Up' and 'Move Down') for reordering the search plugins. They should be able to be dragged and dropped. It's not like the developers can't do this; the bookmarks can be. Why not this?
(It would also be nice for Firefox and Mozilla to understand URL files generated by IE. Safari seems to manage.)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Everytime a Firefox article gets posted, I see someone post a hack to fix the memory leak problem. I've tried every one of them and none of them fix it on my end. The only externsion I'm running is Google's Toolbar. Regardless though, no one except the most hardcore Firefox users would ever know to look in about:config to turn off this "feature". And they shouldn't have to either.
Extensions exist in a global context for the process. They can maintain a permanent reference to objects that are never used again, and should otherwise be freed. They may also create cyclic references, in which one or more objects contains references to each other. This creates a situation where the objects are not referenced by an accessible code path, and the reference count can never drop to zero. The result is a leak, and it is an inherint weakness simple of reference counting garbage collection.
Even web pages can create circular JavaScript references that result in leaks. FF isn't alone in this area either. IE has always been vulnerable to memory leaks via JavaScript, theirs are just confined to bad pages. However, FF 3 will have a cycle detector that identifies unused cyclic references and frees the objects. But that still won't fix sloppy extensions that hang on to large objects for no goood reason.
In my experience, Plugins are pretty bad too. They operate outside the scope of the garbage collection and often don't clean up after themselves. For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page. The PDF Download extension helps, but it isn't perfect.
As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.
And as mentioned before there are bugs for memory leaks that predate the fast back-forward feature. And to say that memory probelms are all becuase of this feature is revisionist history.
I used to think this too, which is why I used to use the TabX extension. However, since at least Firefox 1.5 I've been able to "middle-click" a tab to close it (without giving it focus.) Once I learned that, TabX was gone.
John
Question is, does Opera do these features better or will Firefox?
It does. I like Firefox a lot, but i'm not blind - every single feature that it's available in both and works better in Opera. With a fraction of the memory usage, and much faster to boot. Much more stable too - i only had Opera hangning on me a couple of times (both on Windows and Linux) - when it happens, it promptly apologizes and offers you to open the windows you were browsing at the moment of the crash. Priceless!
Also, Oprera has a shitload of functionality not available on FF or not needing extensions (gesture browsing, searches in the url bar, etc...). Those are the reasons it has been my main browser of choice for years now.
Poorly coded extensions definitely are the biggest memory leak problem. I was using forecastfox for a while and Firefox was leaking like a rusty bucket, even with the sessionistory fix. One day, forecastfox popped up with the latest temperature over an hour after I'd closed Firefox. I uninstalled it right then and Firefox has been pretty well-behaved memory-wise ever since; I haven't seen it's memory usage go over 85 mb.
Also, this fix helps too:
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
The parent was unfairly labelled a troll. I love the Firefox browser, and use it all the time. But it and Thunderbird have a lot of annoying, quick to fix problems that could have been fixed, and are often actively ignored. If you want a real list of stuff that is broken, we could start with the parent poster's list, which seems somewhat valid, and continue from there...
1. Under the XP home theme (reduced functionality without reason) - No "Block images from this server" in context menu - available in Mozilla forever, this prevents kids from seeing the constant AdultFriendFinder crap that comes up on some non-pornographic sites.
2. On my system, it does seem to be smaller and faster than Mozilla, though I am not sure about the new Seamonkey developments. I tried it when they first started, and their first task was apparently to introduce lots of bugs and change the icon to something they created in Microsoft Paint. Not impressed with their priorities.
3. Renamed to Firefox - Wow. This was a bad move. I get a questioning look almost every time I bring up the "better browser to use" argument to businesses. Plus, everyone ends up calling it Foxfire. There are too many "cool" names involved. Mozilla was hard enough to explain, but at least I could connect it to Netscape's mascot (since people still remember Netscape). But Firefox, Firebird, Phoenix, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey? Surely someone came up with something better, but it was turned down as too practical. Think about the words "Internet Explorer" or "Netscape". The title describes the function.
4. Memory leaks - Running latest Firefox Stable build for Win32, one window, no tabs, no extensions, haven't visited any sites with Java, one Live Bookmark (default BBC World News thing). Browsing around for a few hours, memory use creeps up by several megs. Even as I type this (watching Task manager, memory has gone from 37,??? to 39,132. Weird.
5. Incomplete, annoying interface - Well, I would call a "resume button that has not ever apparently worked an annoying interface feature. I would also say that losing favicons for no apparent reason is annoying. No built-in function for removing or re-ordering search engines (you shouldn't need an extension for this simple task.
6. Offtopic Thunderbird complaint - Signatures now have a stupid "--" in grey that cannot be turned off, and the signature is in grey too (no option to disable) which has annoyed countless customers. Some people don't feel like typing their own name 50 times a day. Email is not Newsgroups. Don't try to make it that way.
7. Memory usage is now up to 40,648. Eventually, Firefox will crash on me. Not a huge deal for me (I used Mozilla M9, M10, etc. all the time). But pretty lame for a browser that has had this much development time. No, it's not just this machine either. 40,860 now.
So stop modding people as troll, just because they didn't feel like they should have to type all this junk out, when the accusations hold water.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Multi-threaded UI yet? Anybody? Anybody?
Bueller?
The longer this is put off, the harder I suspect it's going to be to put it, due to a more complicated codebase.
Lay the foundation first, folks, PLEASE.
Tools --> Options --> General. type your favorite urls in the homepage box seperated by |
t p://www.fark.com
http://www.google.com/|http://www.slashdot.org|ht
And when you open firefox, the urls you put in the home page box will be tabbed.
Hold down Shift while you mouseover a link.
Oh wait, you want a way to do this with one hand. Err, can't help you there, I'm afraid.
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Darin Fisher did this on the trunk in bug 326273. The complexity of the repair, as you surmised, means that Firefox 3.0 will be the first consumer release to contain these changes.
7 3
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3262
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Too bad there's no way to mod a post as "potentially life changing." I've been putting off trying out Opera since before it went free. Your post made me decide to give it another try, and so far (admittedly only an hour or so of heavy surfing) I love it. I was able to get it to connect to my banking site. It does phpbb better than FF. My machine seems about 50% faster, and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation.
Most importantly, I didn't have to install any extensions to get it to work acceptably.
If there's one functionality that should be built into FF 2.0, there should be a brainless way to export and import your extensions, forms, passwords and bookmarks in one "FF2go" zipped bundle so that when you reinstall it on another computer, you can get started right away with your old configuration.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.