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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...
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.
As if alpha, beta, and RC weren't enough?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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
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.
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.
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..
Heidi Klum Almost More Heidi Klum
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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 want to be able to turn on/off javascript on a per URL basis.
FreeSpeech.org
Pornzilla?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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...
Beta 1 is now in the releases tree, as of today: http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/rel eases/2.0b1/