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Firefox 2.0 'Beta Candidate 1' Released
Krishna Dagli writes to mention that a Firefox 2.0 Beta Candidate has been released to the public. Ars Technica looks at some of the included features such as tab scrolling, anti-phishing measures, and an integrated spellchecker. From the article: "There is an option to search for updates for any extensions that have been broken, but it was not able to update any of the extensions I had installed. Fortunately, Firefox has been integrating many useful extensions (like the ability to drag and drop tabs to new locations) along its development, so this is not as big of a problem as it might seem. The browser seemed quite fast and stable, although I did not perform any benchmarking tests. I found one really obscure bug, where if the user clicks on a help link when a preferences dialog box is open, a new copy of Firefox will load without the user being able to switch back to the original either through Alt-Tab or the Windows task bar."
Copied & pasted from the arstechnica forum:
PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THESE BUILDS
Unlike the real Beta 1 release, the RCs for it are only intended for internal use, and are not mirrored. Thus widespread distribution of these links stands a good chance of DDOSing the poor Mozilla servers, which are only hosting these for internal testing.
Furthermore, we're already in the process of spinning RC2 builds with a half-dozen fixes.
We're hoping to get Beta 1 out this week; until then please just be patient and wait a few days longer, or else grab nightly releases if you must have something up-to-date.
Note that these release candidates will NOT properly auto-update to anything in the future.
The article links to RC1.
You can aleady get release candidate 3
Or you could wait a few days an get the actual beta.
The Spellbound extension already does this for Firefox.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... Firefox Usage Passes 15 Percent in US
This is not an end-user product. It's not even a beta version. It's a release candidate that may or may not become a beta. Do not bet your business or your precious bookmark collection on this release. Extensions and themes will be disabled and only very few can be reactivated by updated versions. Most authors have not yet made updates for their extensions and themes. If you want to test the Firefox beta 1 release candidate 1, backup your profile first.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Yes, there are hundreds of leaks in Firefox. Gmail triggers several of them. The good news is that all but one of them is fixed on the trunk, so Firefox 3 should leak much less on Gmail. The other good news is that you generally need to run Firefox for several days before the leaks become noticeable, if you monitor the memory use number closely.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You can do that with the current one without any extensions installed. Just drag 'em with the left mouse button.
Is that the only dynamic thing you're looking for?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
There are already builds of Firefox available that pass Acid2.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The Firefox 2 Beta 1 builds are all candidates until the final is announced. The latest is Firefox 2 Beta 1 RC 3, but there might be more changes before Firefox 2 Beta 1 is officially released.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Huh? You can already drag tabs at least in Firefox 1.5, Opera 8, and Opera 9...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
There are no Gecko (rendering engine) changes in Firefox 2.0. It's based on the same version of Gecko that Firefox 1.5 was. Firefox 3.0 will be based on Gecko 1.9 and is expected to pass the ACID2 test.
Goncyn
Lurker Extraordinaire
It's possible to leak memory in garbage collected languages. As an example, see Firefox...
(The simplest way is to simply never unset references to objects. Even if a reference will never be used again, the GC can't remove it because it can't know. Other ways involve adding event handlers and then never removing them. So there may be 20 event handlers on an event, all of them now useless, but they can't be GCed because the object sending events still has a handle to all of them. In Firefox's case, there are a number of ways to make it so that JavaScript objects become "root" objects in the mark-and-sweep GC, so they'll never be collected even though they're never referenced by any other "root".)
What you're looking for is already done. The extension "MR Tech Local Install" does that among other things.
When you install a new extension, and it's for an older version, it warns you and lets you bypass the warning.
You can donwload the extension here
--
Luckily there are others that had before the same needs we have now
Try this site for fixes that allow Spellbound to work on the current version of Firefox.
Still no inline-block, and broken XMLHttpRequest. (Bugzilla links, so block those referrers.)
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Firefox won't use the native cocoa widgets of OSX for spellchecking until version 3 (as it's currently roadmapped). Firefox 2 will use it's own spellchecker, regardless of OS.
My biggest beef with Firefox is that it still crashes frequently and has massive memory leaks that require me to quit and restart the browser on a daily basis. It doesn't take much to get Firefox to grow to 1GB in memory footprint and start causing my system to thrash. A fundamental flaw is that it does not release memory back to the OS, so when you close tabs and windows, the process doesn't shrink. While this isn't directly Firefox's fault, there are lots of ways around this that they refuse to implement. On the other hand, the true memory leaks ARE their fault.
1) config.trim_on_minimize = true
2) Install the leak monitor extension for a day and disable any extensions that it complains about. (Bugging the authors of those extensions is optional.)
3) browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers - Set this to something other then -1 (such as 2 or 4). With 1GB of RAM, this defaults to a larger value. (Mozilla's wiki has the details on what "-1" translates to for various RAM configurations.)
Firefox had a bad habit of eating up 350MB on my 1GB system. Now it's much better behaved (around 120MB) just by changing option #3 to a value of "2" instead of "-1". I've also disabled some of the extensions that the leak monitor extension complained about.
I haven't used suggestion #1 yet.
My biggest complaint is similar to yours, separate tabs should be separate threads rather then hanging all of the browser windows and tabs waiting on network activity. An implosion in one tab should only take out that tab (or worst-case that window).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
The reason I switched to Firefox wasn't because of the neat features, it was because it used less memory and was significantly faster than IE. With every release Firefox has gotten more and more bloated, to the point that it is taking 42mb of RAM to display only this thread on Slashdot. IE is taking 22mb to do the exact same thing. That's just rediculous.
Have you mucked with?
config.trim_on_minimize = true
(Useful in some scenarios when nothing else works.)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
(A better thing to muck with. When set to "-1", Firefox assigns it a value based on your total amount of RAM, I think. Setting it to a lower value such as 2 or 4 should result in less memory used. The Mozilla site has details on how this setting works.)
Changing the second item from the default (-1) to a lower value (2) made a big difference in the amount of RAM that Firefox was chewing up on my system.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Beta 1 is now in the releases tree, as of today: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/2.0b1/