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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."
NATIVE support for the current standard recommendation of SVG.
Plain and simple. That's the one thing I've been waiting on in a mainstream browser.
Yes, you can get it with betas and prc's but, mainstream, main trunk, production releases that include this are unknown to the public at large.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
There was requirement about "native interface". Only when Opera will learn that double-click used to select text (not to open pop-up menus). When drag'n'drop will finally start working (try to drag URL from location bar to create link, try to drop link to open in new window/tab). When UI will be drawn using host OS (menus are always too thin - provided the amount crap in the menus - they are barely readable, controls don't use system font, etc etc etc) When tabs will be closing in the order they are on screen - not some random order. When tabs would be simply switching by Ctrl-Tab. And finally when about box will be what it is meant to be - dialog box.
Until then, tradition of Opera to break UI rules with every new release, does no good. Opera can called anything - but "native application." Unstandard keyboard shortcuts (easy to mistype), unstandard behavious (always confusing with other applications), etc. "Native application" doesn't mean "picture looks like everything else". Opera's "nativity" - is skin deep only. For definition of what native application I can only direct you (and hopefully Opera's devels) to sources: MS Guidelines for UI development & Apple's HIG & GNOME HIG. Read that before reinventing square wheels. Send that to Opera - probably they do not know about the guidelines.
Mozilla people spend lot of time making sure that people used to various OSs and various UI standards will feel themself comfortable. Specifically goal of Firefox was good integration with host OS - Windows or Linux - even Mac OS X support now improved greately. Br... Somebody stop me. I'm flaming.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Javascript has a concept known as closures (basically function objects), which when created inherit the scope they were created in, in the form of the scope chain. This scope chain can keep pointing to variables long after a naive reading of the code would seem to conclude nothing is pointing to them (by all references to them having explicitly be set to null). This in turn causes memory leaks. This is not a bug, but is behavior that is mandated by the ECMAScript standards, which firefox tries to aspire to.
I've run into this problem myself in an actionscript (flash) application, where I initially blamed flash for my memory bloat, until I learned that it was my own weak understanding of closures that was the cause.
Since firefox extensions are written in javascript, I expect that a lot of them have memory leaks in the form of ill-designed closures, which would cause the firefox process to bloat, even though the firefox developers are not at fault.