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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.
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.
An integrated spellchecker sounds dangerous - pulling up a long /. comments page could cause my CPU to melt down...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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
"What features would you like in your next generation browser?"
Extensions!
"Does Firefox 2.0 meet your needs?"
Yes!
"What would you like to see improved?"
Opera.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
Flame me if you want, but this just isn't as good as IE 7 beta 3. They are going to need to do better than this to stop IE 7 from steam rolling the browser to under 5% share.
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
"They are going to need to do better than this"
Yes, it's called Firefox 3.0.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
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.
As if alpha, beta, and RC weren't enough?
Does Firefox 2.0 meet your needs?
Pron on demand. I want everything, from the advertisements, the logo, the menu backgrounds, everything to have pron.
Has anyone tried any of the RC's with the various Google extensions (notebook and browser sync) installed? Any word on how well they work?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
They can rename it the Mozilla Suite and then some people can come along and release a lightweight browser with none of the cruft called Firefox.
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
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.
So will this one delete all my bookmarks and remove all my blocked site too? Don't forget to back all that up before you update, I got screwed on the last one.
I'm a Safari user, but I support Firefox because it takes market share away from Microsoft (which can only be a good thing). Any word on how spell checking is implemented in the OS X version of FF 2.0? I was under the impression that any application in OS X can use the OS to do spell checking. Is FF 2.0 going to utilize that or is it going to do a bunch of work it doesn't have to?
Haiku for you!
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...
If the UI of FireFox 2 contains more things that allow the user to dynamically alter the UI, such as moving tabs around, it would be incentive for people like me to give it a shot over my current browser of choice, Opera....
I want it to pass the Acid Test.
Then I would like compliance with all W3C web standards. All of them, starting with XHTML and CSS1 / 2. You can start tacking the others on when you nail that big one.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
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..
Do the developers plan on integrating popular extensions until the codebase is as bloated as Mozilla of the olden days?
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Heidi Klum Almost More Heidi Klum
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!
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.
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.
I am curious to see if the spel checker works. Yep... sure does.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
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.
Sorry, but yes it does, at least if you're a business user with a corporate intranet that uses ActiveX as many do. This stubborn attitude among the Moz community that ActiveX == bad, integration with Windows authentication == bad, etc. is exactly why Firefox has such low penetration on corporate desktops, which in turn is exactly why it's so rarely included with off-the-shelf PCs from big name vendors.
Seven deadly sins of successful software development, #5: Believing that what you think the users should have is more important than what the users actually want.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
If what you're saying is true this is most likely because extensions by their nature need to be able to manipulate UI data structures such as UI javascript and XUL. I suspect making that process entirely thread safe is anything but trivial or could be even accomplished without co-operation from extension writers, making the API far more complex.
Now i've never looked at the Firefox code but I have done multithreaded programming and I suspect that might just stifle the great selection of extensions users currently enjoy a bit.
I blog with www.blogspot.com and their spellchecker is just atrocious. It works fine about 20% of the time, though its word catalogue is horrendously underpopulated, but sometimes it will inexplicably mangle the text in areas it didn't even prompt me about!
I'm using the new Word 2007 beta which supposedly has Blogger support, but I can't get it to work at all.
Long story short, the spellchecker is worth its weight in gold! This feature alone will considerably improve everyone's usage and enjoyment of the world's fancy shmancy Web 2.0 apps!
The current interface for setting cookie and JavaScript permissions is severely non-optimal.
What I want is something more like the pop-up blocking--it blocks cookies and JavaScript by default, and there's a button I can click to add a rule to allow cookies and JavaScript for particular domains.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
1) Firefox Plus - comes with extensions pre-bundled, like AdBlock, quicktime/WMP, whatever a basic user could use but might not have the guts (or forethought) to go get.
2) Firefox Basic - straight-up Firefox like we have now, add-your-own extensions, etc.
This way, Firefox can claim as features the pre-bundled extensions, and it compares better to IE when the user-installed packages are installed. Assume users won't maintain Firefox (by adding useful extensions), so allowing users to get all the extension features immediately after launch is good.
What spell checker has ever blocked content? Does Word prevent you from opening documents with misspellings? The grammar nazis are on Slashdot, not in software.
Firefox's spell checker only checks text input fields. You can right-click any text field and choose whether it should be spellchecked (default is yes). Why inform you of misspellings on a static page you can't fix?
And I'm sure Tori is beside herself with grief. Now that daddy's gone she'll never work again.
New functionality
Give Firefox and other browsers
1) the ability to drag a number of files/folders onto a spot and facilitate transfer via method specified by the web page: one file at a time, all files in parallel up to X simultaneous uploads, or the whole shebang as a single tar file (filenames in UTF8 or MIME encoded). All those cool photo sites and people still have to upload one photo at a time, that's dumb.
2) Better support for ajax with some useful functions. a high speed xml parser, zip en/decoder, launch and manage multiple javascript threads, provide optionally encrypted local storage, network with other browsing people in realtime if user allows it, etc. Ability to JIT download and store various signed interpreters (python, perl, parrot, random gamer kernel, etc.) would be extremely neat, too.
3) Improved human-computer interaction (HCI) facility. For example there is a DOM selector somewhere in the debug menu or in the scrapbook which is a little useful for programmers, but most mortals (I'm still talking intelligent people, just not programmers) have no way to do simple things like point their finger at something on the screen to tell the computer or website to do something about it. A simple, highly useable way to point at predefined areas on the screen (in a web page and on the desktop), perhaps using a transparent overlay to help out, would be a vast improvement. None of this otaku gesture shit. Something every user can suddenly get a massive improvement out of.
4)While you're at it, support allowing individuals to specify a URI which holds persistent structured info they want to be able to get at. Like favorite links, addresses, whatever. Support a bunch of ways to get at the data including support for high speed encrypted search,retrieval,storage.There's lots of ways that Firefox could support the development of really useful services, just making it possible to do something not necessarily doing it all itself.
5)Allow a miniapp to run in the system tray and respond to events, write in javascript, or whatever. A clue could be taken from the openlaszlo/dojo work.. and note that the Flash security model is too secure while dojo.storage is looking for storage providers and Firefox needs to provide. I'm for making minimal additions that have maximum effect, no more eye candy that never gets used or brings most computers to their knees.
A marketing attack
There may be a way to use M$ tactics against them. Prepare Firefox code so that it can be easily branded and customized. Make a new version for every computer manufacturer and rename versions as Explorer. Every new computer could have a version of Firefox and the manufacturer might give it priority if say it includes a free user feedback ajax app, etc. Embrace and extend? You just want to make sure Microsoft doesn't willfully throw a wrench onto every desktop making it impossible for Firefox to deliver useful improvements to the user experience.
That's not a good test because the JavaScript is constantly running and the page is never reloaded. That means it could easily be a leak in Google's JavaScript causing the results you see - it's not as if a browser can magically decide that a script doesn't need an object any more if it's still hanging onto it.
That's not to say I don't think that Firefox has memory problems, but if you're going to do something like that, at least reload the page periodically.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
1. Security. I feel that lately Firefox has slipped on their security record. I want them to audit more, design it better to be secure.
2. No memory leaks. Yes, it still does leak memory.
3. NO BLOAT. NO BLOAT. NO BLOAT. The integrated spellchecker and various shit is something I don't want. If someone wants it, they can just install the extension to provide that functionality. That is the whole point of the extension system. I don't want beginner-user-oriented feel-good features, tyvm.
4. Better standards support. ACID2, etc.
Basically, that's my wish list. I am afraid they are slowly creating another Mozilla suite though. This is my take from an engineering viewpoint.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
new firefox still doesn't pass the acid2 test.
but i do like the built in spell check feature!
Anti-Karma-Whoring measures.
May the Maths Be with you!
Tell me why a non-technical end user should have to monitor memeory use at all.
That's exactly my point. End users should not monitor memory usage, and therefore should not see the effects of memory leaks. They're only noticeable if you watch closely over days.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Yes, but Opera and (gasp!) IE don't have that problem. You can say whatever you want about design flaws... but final users don't see that, they just notice functionality, and machines slowed down. I am a fan and user of Firefox since it was called Firebird! I evangelized many people in the early days... But sadly know I acknowledge to have recently downloaded Opera, now it is free :(
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.
I wasn't a fan of the Mozilla browser suite, but one thing I really liked was the quick launch "agent" in the icon tray. I don't want another icon in my tray, but I would love to see Firefox preload and stay resident in memory to speed up launches. The program launches slowly sometimes and I use the browser all the time.
Then again, the browser is taking up 40MB of RAM right now which is no small chunk of change. It's no biggie for me (1.5GB RAM) but it may be unacceptable for people on lesser machines or thin clients.
Mac OS X has third-party pretty form widgets; you should be able to find them via Google.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
well, i am no programmer, but i find that the netscape/mozilla/firefox family doesn't have toolbars that are movable and allows me to rearrange to what i like. i need to stack 2 or more toolbars into a row, but i can't.... is this in the works for firefox 3?
Bah, that's nothing -- I was using it when it was still Phoenix!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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".)
I liked "2.0 Beta Candidate" better back when it was "Beta 2 Preview".
In both cases, people have said not to download, and wait for the real Beta--though for somewhat different reasons.
Firefox: "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."
IE: That's why this is a preview for developer testing only. Never install betas of OS components (that includes beta previews) on a machine that you can't afford to rebuild.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
>The Spellbound extension already does this for Firefox.
:(
Well, did it move or something?
http://spellbound.sourceforge.net/
This hasn't worked with current versions of Firefox for awhile, and I really miss it
Gee, thanks...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
> Please enlighten me as to how you can garbage collect an object when you can't tell if it's still in use?
s cr.html
Actually, you *can* to some extent. Check out the Boehm Garbage Collector:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Hans_Boehm/gc/gcde
The basic idea is that it looks at the registers, the stack(s), and the static data region(s), and heap for any sequence of bytes that *looks* like a pointer and assumes that it is. Once it's done the memory scan, it reclaims all memory that hasn't been pointed to by these alleged pointers. I know it sounds crazy and it's easy to think of various scenarios that will cause memory to never be reclaimed, but it works surprisingly well and is extremely portable.
I can smell the old faithful Apache1.X smell, mm..., sweet. To be honest, I don't like your proposal too.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Sorry, submitter. You've shared with us a link to RC3, not Beta 1. Beta 1 is in fact not released at this point. Note that 2 of the 3 release candidates were posted within the last 24 hours. That ain't the same as Beta 1 being available.
When (and if) Beta 1 is released today, it'll be here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/bonecho/
Garbage collectors can collect only objects that cannot be reached, and therefore cannot be used. If a pointer or reference in the code hangs onto an object so that it might be used later, a garbage collector cannot collect it. Many Firefox extensions have problems like this — they keep a reference to many pages so they cannot be collected, even with the most sophisticated garbage collector. A web page can also leak memory by continually allocating objects and holding onto references to them.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'd like to see FF2 actually pass the ACID2 test. Right now there are things, admittedly crazy things, that are within the purview of the standards (deeply nested tables and DIVs for instance) that simply DO NOT render on Firefox (or IE for that matter).
I'd also like to see a general cleanup of the code where all standard behaviors aren't a result of gazillions of exceptions.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
- Read text from a text area,
- Underline text in a text area in read, and
- Create a context menu associated with each word in the text area
Then it would be possible to write an extension that provided spell checking and integrated with the rest of the system. On systems that don't have a built-in spell checker, you could provide an aspell (or whatever) back end.I have no desire for my browser to be duplicating features of my OS in the name of portability.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You can also put all this in a script and run it with crontab.
I would like it to run, i'm using 1.08 because 1.5 always crashed when I started it.
what sig?
Features are not bad so long as you have the option to load them or not load them. Personally, I have no use for spelling checking (or feature x) in a browser. But if I wanted it, it should be easy just to download and install the module and then just as easy to unload when I am through with it.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Are you serious?
I'd like Linux Firefox to work properly with svg and gtk (it crashes when it opens a file/save dialog while gtk is using some svg icons/themes
Also I'd like Firefox (mozilla in general) not to override gtk's pup-up/contextual menues. It's the only thing that gets in the way when I want to use a gtk imput method.
errera hunamum ets
Try this site for fixes that allow Spellbound to work on the current version of Firefox.
The inline spell checker needs to work in all text fields, not just textareas. Imagine I'm a user filling out a form with 10 text input boxes, and one textarea...having the manually click on each textbox and select "Spell check this field" is uncalled for. Just spell check them all.. or at least add a "Spell Check tThis Form"...
Add extensions. Opera seems to think that everyone will like their particular flavor and never anything more.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
How does it make you feel?
And Firefox hasn't had that problem either since the release of 1.5.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'm at work and can't try the Firefox Beta Candidate (which is actually up to release 3 now), but does Firefox 2.0 on OS X use OS X's built-in systemwide spellchecker or do I have to use Firefox's? As I type this post, Safari is spellchecking everything for me, and I'd like to continue using the OS X spellchecker in Firefox.
"Sufferin' succotash."
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.
Actually, Javascript can cause memory leaks in IE as well:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/ie_leak_patterns .asp
I haven't tested it lately because I tend to stay away from IE, but a couple of years ago it was quite easy to slow a user's system down while viewing a page in IE by using Javascript to scroll text across the browser's status bar. Many Websites that had tools and toys for Web developers would warn of the danger of using Javascript for scrolling text effects. The effects would be noticeable in minutes rather than days.
* * * * * *
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
--Groucho Marx
And to top it all off, things like leaks in gmail are exactly the kinds of things that can become issues to nontechnical people. My mom mostly uses her computer for email. She often ends up leaving it on gmail for ages. After complaining to me about how slow her computer gets I finally got around to installing opera.
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.
Does Firefox have the ability to do NTML authentication to a domain? I can currently do it by listing out each and every web host, but I can't just say do it to *.mybiz.net addresses. This is problematic because we have a lot of hosts on *.mybiz.net
To be able to define domains and set up security preferences for those domains is the #1 thing preventing our organization from taking Firefox more seriously.
I admit I haven't had time to investigate this since earlier versions.
The problem with that is ego. The people that in the mid to late 90s that created the corperate activex website is still there. He got a promotion for doing it ontime and on budget. Now you're telling him he did it all wrong. Not only are you saying he was stupid, but his boss was stupid for rewarding him for doing it. Plus, right now with IE it "just works"( Translated it means that its horibbly buggy, but everyone already knows about the problems and how to work around them). They don't want to re do the system , disturb the status quo, and retrain everyone for the new app, just because its a better idea in the long run. But stick in there, soon you can claim that the ROI for the previous system was tremendos and further ROI could be achived with an update to standards based AJAX applications or what have you. Then you can change over after the new system is completed, just don't use the Firefox argument to change the application. The application allows firefox, not the other way around.
Hmm... Integrated spell checker huh?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Does anyone know why Firefox 1.x, despite having a fairly configurable interface, requires you to have an active extension just to make the Google search field larger?
(I know there's ways you can edit the user file to change this, but this is a pain and on many of the machines have to use, I haven't bothered. Why should this be so difficult??)
Was this some kind of deal with Google, which G wanted users to go to a generic Google page if they wanted to enter (and SEE) more than 15 characters or so of search text?
Drives me crazy - hope 2.0 fixes this...
Your argument would mean that a Mazda RX8 is zippier than a BMW Z4, just based on the highest integer value in the product name.
While the dumb-as-a-post users you refer to certainly exist, they are not in any majority.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I don't think the point of the CVS cop-out is that you shouldn't discuss features available in non-final builds. The point is that you shouldn't dismiss problems in final builds because they're fixed in non-final builds.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
*Better printing support. Whenever i want to print something, fonts, tables, everything look bigger
than they look in IE or opera, and the page is html and css complaint
*Memory reduction. I disabled the cache and it still sucks over 200MB after my typical browsing
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Attachable and detachable tabs would be so insanely useful. This is such a natural extension of the tab concept I can't imagine why it hasn't been implemented yet.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
really my firfox 2.0 beta is at 123,632 K .. and I'm only have one tab open.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Damn.... How come Firefox doesn't have a grammar checker?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I would like to see the Firefox dev team collaborate with Adobe to fix their PDF viewer. I have worked in both the academic and corporate world, and one thing which is common between both is that everybody makes heavy use of PDF. Waiting two solid minutes for Firefox to try to render a PDF (which might or might not actually render at all) is completely unacceptable, and it's the primary "deal-breaker" behind why my office uses IE. The only two things I would change about Firefox are: 1) reduce the memory footprint and CPU overhead, and 2) fix PDFs. Both of these should be the real priority, not adding more features to an already full-featured browser.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
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.
Mosaic's mom was hot! We made lot's of children.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
That sounds like normal memory use. The memory leak becomes apparent when you can't get memory usage to go below 200 MB. Besides, are you actually having any problems with memory usage, or just complaining about a number? You really shouldn't be watching the numbers at all...
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
That's not good enough. Firefox has been running on OS X for years, and it doesn't look like a Mac app. By this time, the controls were supposed to look like Mac controls.
Albuquerque PC
How is that different from the redirection that already takes place now? I think it's better -- you don't have to wait for the server to serve up a redirect, and you can probably remove pings with user scripts.
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!
Yes, I agree. Not only does it need to look like a Mac app, but they need to make it support Services (instead of providing its own spell checker, especially) and Applescript too.
Either that, or Camino needs to be made more like Firefox (supporting extensions, etc.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
It's not going to happen in Firefox 2, but maybe Firefox 3. A development branch (http://wiki.mozilla.org/Gecko:Reflow_Refactoring) already passes the Acid2 test (http://flickr.com/photos/dbaron/126886608/), but needs more work.
Yes, cool! Bitch about free. While you're at it, tell the developers they're stupid when they ask how they can better serve everyone. And make demands about what you were supposed to have, you know, for all your hard-earned debt from the Mozilla organization.
/. readers will take at blind faith to say exactly what the link text says goes a long way to make you look like you know what you're talking about.
Nice link! Too bad it doesn't contain anything about OSX, MAC, or CONTROLS. But adding a link that 99% of the
Yeah, I am flaming, but you all need to start allotting a little more oxygen to the brain.
No SIG for you!
There is a PDF extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/636/
I really love Firefox, and I'd definitely appreciate a spell checker, but I'm going to check out Opera tonight because I hate waiting nearly 30 seconds for it to open. (IE7 is even worse with closing tabs--takes like 5-10 seconds. . . well, maybe 2/3 but it feels like a minute.) There should be an option to start with Windows, or something.
How is userjs different from extensions, aside from the fact that Opera lacks the XUL?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I'd like to see: /etc/skel, or whatever other mechanism the OS supports) without having to jump through hoops
- Ability to enter metadata (description, keywords) when creating a bookmark
- A bookmark search facility (wait, wasn't this on the 2.0 roadmap before?)
- an extension garbage collection utility (when an extension monopolizes CPU time or memory, it should be killed and reloaded automagically)
- the search box to be resizable without having to install the "resize search box" extension
- All tab mix plus features to become standard in the browser
- Documentation of ALL command line options to be included in a readme file (or in the online help)
- Profile management should be accessible from the Tools menu or through edit->preferences
- Deployment to be better documented (to make it easier to deploy standard profiles for all users, be it on Windows, Linux, OS X, etc., in the All Users profile, or in
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
"This build, codenamed FiReflowfox, comes from the development branch of Firefox called REFLOW_20060603_BRANCH, and has an entirely rewritten page layout engine, that has some serious bugs, including the inability to display list and combo boxes. However, it does pass Acid2 version 1.1, and also renders most pages correctly (although it has problems with the tag "sandwich" ...)."
Yeah, almost makes sense. Dumbass.
Build a tool even an idiot can use and only an idiot will want to use it. -S.O.B.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I want to be able to turn on/off javascript on a per URL basis.
FreeSpeech.org
there are more than enough grammar nazis here on slashdot willing to do the best they can to help you.
Because then it would crash when you go to /.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
> 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
Lynx?
I would like a way to remove the close icons on each of the tabs. I'm tired of accidently clicking on them, and I couldn't even find an option in about:config.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
No complaints really. I have two Gigs of Ram on my box. Also, I mistakenly reported the problem. The current use of Firefox was quite small. However, a previous instance which had crashed was staying on in memory.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Fine. Acid2 compliance won't be in the released Firefox 2.0 either.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Pornzilla?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
That's correct, because the reflow branch will be merged onto the trunk, rather then the 1.8.1 branch. You can expect Firefox 3 to pass Acid2. My point is merely that the code for Firefox passing Acid2 is written and available if you want it. It's not vaporware, in other words.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
They shouldn't. For the end user, the issue isn't whether Firefox leaks memory, but whether Firefox leaks enough memory to impact performance.
That depends greatly on your usage patterns (how long you leave it running, how many tabs you typically have open at a time, how many other apps and services you run, etc.), which extensions you use, how much RAM your computer has, etc. If your scenario is such that the leaked memory doesn't get bad enough to impact performance, it doesn't matter whether Task Manager shows Firefox using an insane amount of memory.
Just to clarify, I'm not saying that the memory leaks don't matter in the abstract. I do think Mozilla should continue tracking them down and fixing them. But if you can only see the problem in Task Manager, and not in actual performance, then it's not a critical issue in that particular scenario.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/
At first I couldn't imagine what could possibly make Firefox use 1 GB of memory, but then I realized that's probably the average size of a typical MySpace page...
Why should someone switch to Firefox if they're unhappy with the look and feel?
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Some advanced printing features would be nice. I know some people are already aware of this problem, but it would be nice if you could print pages as they're displayed. Sometimes there are noticable rendering errors in the print preview that do not appear when actually viewing some pages. Also, a print cropping feature would be extremely useful.
I wonder how the spell checker will work. Hopefully it won't be an autocorrect system. Could you imagine trying to enter a user name and password to a site, and firefox keeps autocorrecting your username and password to similar words? But I think that a regular spell checker would be a really cool feature to add to firefox, especially with so many people posting on web forums. Now you don't have to actually know how to spell, all you need is for Firefox to know how to spell.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
There's a difference between 'free' and 'at no additional charge'.
And if you're unhappy with the product, you shouldn't use it. I never said you should. If you ahve criticisims, you should state them in a polite manner. The point is, it's free and you can't expect something of someone who hasn't promised you anything, and hasn't taken any of your money.
Don't like Firefox? Great. Don't want to use it? Fine. Demanding that they provide features you want? Moronic.
No SIG for you!
With current mozilla/firefox builds if you SSH into a remote machine with X11 forwarding and invoke Firefox, a new LOCAL session starts up. Utterly useless for testing clients web browsers.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I leave my box up 24/7. I often need to access my boxen from other boxen, which is why they stay up, so I TS in (on windows) or SSH or VNC in on Linux. Many times I will leave a browser open for days or weeks, mostly because I'm not thinking about it. If these were game consoles or other commodities, then I would see your point, but they are computers, and the reason I own them is because I need them to compute, 24/7. So, yes, this is a real world problem.
Maybe her and Pia Zidora (sp?) can star in a movie together.
postmodernsideshow.com
I agree with other posters. This should have remained an extension. Avoiding this kind of bloat is why Firefox forked from the Mozilla Suite in the first place. If you need spell checking, great, install it. But don't force it down the throats of people who have no use for it.
It would be best if the linked to a torrent of Firefox Beta, then it wouldn't go down heavily on the servers.
Why is it still not standard to torrent the file? Any extra users would/should help to increase the ease of download for the incoming downloaders.
BitTorrent it!
You don't need an extension for that; in userChrome.css add this code, changing the number if you want: /* resize search bar */
#searchbar {
width: 300px !important;
}
Slashdot Classic
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/1.0.8/
Slashdot Classic
Oops sorry, didn't read whole post.
Slashdot Classic
There are two very annoying bugs that have been around and known since "1.0.0" that still have not been fixed:
- Many times, when you copy and paste from Firefox, the clipboard gets cleared and nothing gets copied into it. Once this happens, not cutting and pasting for you until you restart Firefox.
- If a DNS query does not respond immediately, Firefox will hang until it does. Ever heard of CreateThread and pthread_create? Or ADNS for that matter?
If the source were not so insanely complicated and difficult to build, I'd fix these myself. I work with malware that's easier to reverse engineer than Firefox's source.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Beta 1 is now in the releases tree, as of today: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/2.0b1/
Newsflash. Using firefox 1.5 with no extentions at all and doing just what you say, after 3 months with no restart, it still uses the same 24 megs of memory it always has. No configuration tweaks. No anything. Plain old firefox.
The only memory leaks I have ever found with firefox involve plugins. Either firefox extentions or with its ability to use things like flash.
If you have problems with the memory leaks, I suggest you stop installing the extentions. Unless it is because of flash sites in which case I suggest you prod firefox to improve their flash support (there entire memory model is screwy for plugins in general). But firefox by itself doing only the test you suggest has 0 memory leak. I have 3 months of data to prove it as well ^_^
I keep going to click on a tab to activate it and I close it by mistake - losing that tab and how ever the hell I got there.
And I keep going over to click the red X on the right hand side to close my active tab - and instead I just close what ever tab is on the right.
This imo is bad, bad, bad user interface design. Surely I can't be the only person who has gotten mixed up by the new design and closed tabs by accident?
Tools->Options -> Tabbed Browsing -> Display -> uncheck the "show close button on every tab" checkbox. Requires that you run the tab mix plus extension or other tab extension, however the changes may be persistent, so you can probably apply them and then disable the plugin.
Sorry I can't tell you the about:config key, couldn't find it either.
Gravity Sucks
OK, one of the things I've always loved about the tabs in firefox was changed!
Normally in Firefox, in order to close tabs you have to click the red cross at the far right, where this STAYS no matter how many tabs you have.
Now in beta 2.0 this have changed. The closing cross is now located in EVERY damn tab, meaning that if I want to close a bunch of tabs I now have to MOVE the mouse for each one! WTF! Talk about lack of usability. This is exactly the same lameness seen in Konquror and Opera and one of the main reasons I do NOT use these browsers but prefer Firefox.
Give me my right side closing cross back! NOW!
*GRRRR*
-pug