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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."
Is the new release really deserving of the 2.0 moniker? It's hard to say, given the fact that it looks and feels very much like 1.x.
Hey, to be honest, if you want to keep up with IE, you gotta start jumping up in numbers. To the general jo-blo user, IE is light years ahead of FireFox just simply cause it's on version 7 versus version 2.
A browser that started faster, responded faster, loaded pages faster, didn't consume vast amounts of my precious system memory, and using a platform native interface
But then, Firefox is the best choice for Windows 2000 and earlier operating systems since Microsoft chose not to make IE7 compatable with these OS's.
I could live with a browser that consumes vast amounts of memory if it would bother to periodically return that memory to the system. I'm likely to be modded down for saying this, but the real (and perhaps only) problem with firefox the memory leak which has pretty much always plagued it.
And before you respond by saying "read article X and change Y in about:config", I suggest you try a simple experiment: Open up a firefox window and start Gmail, leave the window open for several days and monitor how much memory is used each day. The memory will increase over time. Apply the "memory fixes" and run the same experiment. While these hacks can reduce the amount of memory used, they can't fix the memory leak.
Badass Resumes
If you are worried about losing data, you should wait until Firefox tells you that it is time to update, rather than risking a beta release candidate for which there is no support.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Has the SVG support improved? For the more complex stuff - animation and interactivity?
I've alway liked the idea of SVG overtaking Flash as the format of choice for more complex multimedia online, but nobody seems to use it very much. Any ideas why not? Why isn't the OSS community promoting SVG more?
Tear-off tabs, i.e. the ability to select a given tab, drag it outside of the browser window, and drop it anywhere not in a given window and have it open in a new window. Under a WM/DM supporting multiple desktops, this would be highly useful for grabbing a tutorial you're previewing, having it tear-off, and then tossing it onto another desktop for later use in conjunction with a terminal or given application window, and would prevent the user from having to bookmark quite so much material.
i don't see the point in having an integrated spellchecker.. that's what FireFox plug-ins are for... the FireFox developers should concentrate on just building a solid stable browser and allow others to add features like spellchecker etc using the plug-in feature..
In fact it's the best browser for any operating system other than Windows. In fact, it's the best choice for Windows users too!
Actually, I'm not opposed to all these nice new features they've added, although it might be nice to have some optional for smaller systems. Also, I am aware that Firefox developers fix bugs all the time. They're just not going after the REALLY BIG ones.
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.
I once suggested a solution to their problems. The basic philosophy is that they want to fix the crashes. But at this rate, they never will, so it's better to find ways to limit the damage done by crashes. The best solution, IMHO, is to stop using threads. Instead, fork a separate process for each document and one more for the UI, and use IPC for them to communicate. This way, when a web page or plugin inevitably causes the browser to crash or even just grow too big, killing that one window or tab won't bring down the whole browser, and the memory it used will be returned to the OS. This will have the side-effect of making the browser much more responsive, because you're not kept from switching tabs while a DNS lookup hangs the browser for one document. Naturally, they didn't like my solution.
I think stability isn't really all that important to them, at least not proactively; if you're just reactive to bugs, you're never going to get a solid product.
why must firefox always break extensions? I have yet to use one which did not
work with a new version of firefox yet have many times had to manually alter
files so that a new release of firefox would work with them (while waiting for
the extension writer to make any changes he deems necessary beyond updating
the version compatability).
Why can't firefox have a 'try it one time' feature similar to windows and screen
resolutions? Let people use their extensions and if they crap out they can then
be disabled.
Whoever marked this as a troll is a tool. It's pretty funny, but also kind of true in the eyes of a lot of people. 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.
I really wish Firefox would go back to the lightweight browser it once was. The power was the ability to have extensions to do anything you wanted, but it was my choice which ones I wanted using my system resources.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
new firefox still doesn't pass the acid2 test.
but i do like the built in spell check feature!
I like Firefox too, and use it at home.
Nevertheless, at work we are forced to use IE or miss out on functionality on the corporate intranet. One of my colleagues, also a Firefox fan, sent a mail to the admins asking them to tweak their site to support other browsers. They basically told him to get stuffed, IE is the corporate standard and that's all they care about.
Though it irritates me to say it, why shouldn't they say that? It is not the company's job to support personal web browsing preferences, and the use of company resources to browse the web at lunchtime or whatever is a perk, not a part of the job description. If IE/ActiveX/whatever is the corporate standard, and it works, then anyone else's browser had better be compatible with it or expect not to be adopted on the corporate desktop.
The same goes for using Thunderbird without Exchange connectivity, BTW.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
>> would be nuts not to force employees to use Firefox for everything
Well, so much for the cornucopia of choice that free software offers! User must be FORCED to use application X for EVERYTHING.
Way to go buddy!
Mostly, I'd just like existing behaviour to be more robust. The only new functionality I'd like to see is much more sophisticated bookmark handling and the ability to export/export a full set of configuration settings, including extensions and bookmarks, between different firefox installations, including up-version. Kudos to the team.
Do any of you even know how memory usage works? Comments like "It's using 42mb just to display this page! IE is using 22." amuse me. Hello, memory caching. Is this page theonly one you've looked at before you loaded firefox?
And where's the memory leak? I've been running my browser for 3 days, with gmail, and I'm not swapping memory yet. I only have 512mb on this machine. If it's a real memory leak, and not managed memory caching, then I will eventually hit swap, no? Please let me know how long I can expect for that to happen.
Memory is extremely fast, so the fact that an app is taking up a whole 42mb of memory doesn't mean it's going to be slower than an app using 12mb. Memory usage is not an indicator of performance, or bloat. It's simply what the application has allocated. Also, with IE, there's parts of it integrated into the OS, if I recall correctly, so there's hidden memory usage you're missing.
Look at how much paging the app is doing while it's operating. Run vmstat when running IE vs. Firefox and report those numbers. Wait, you can't do that.
Never mind. Remain ignorant and opinionated.
No SIG for you!