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Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 Released
Shining Celebi writes "According to the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 is available for download. This looks like it could be the final release candidate, and offers a tweaked UI and improved stability over RC1, plus, of course, all the new in Firefox 2.0 features."
Have these new features added additional bloat to the once-lean Firefox? I mean the anti-phishing thing and spellchecker are both cool, but why not leave these two things (particularly the spellchecker) as extensions?
I have been using the x86 Linux release all day today. And unfortunately, it still feels slower than Opera. From my quick measurements, it also seems to use more RAM.
I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera. I was hoping that it would render faster, while also consuming far less memory. My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM (measured with top) before I had to kill the process. And that was only after about three hours of use, in total. I didn't have any non-default extensions installed, so they aren't to blame.
My computer only has 512 MB of RAM, and I'm not in a position to purchase more. If Firefox 2 leads to my system thrashing after only several hours, then I don't think I'll be able to use it. Opera, on the other hand, only ever seems to ever consume 80 MB or so. I can't recall ever seeing it above 100 MB.
I really like the extensions of Firefox, many of which Opera does not offer. But Firefox suffers from some pretty severe memory management issues. Those in turn may lead to degraded system performance, even on computers with 512 MB of RAM, running Slackware 11. Unless Firefox deals with this excessive memory usage, I don't think I'll be able to use it on my system. Meanwhile, Opera functions without such problems, so I'll continue to use it until things improve with Firefox.
I've been running FireFox 2 since its first release, but I haven't noticed any changes to the UI as advertised. What's new compared to the older release candidate?
Full Tilt
Resuming your browsing session: The Session Restore feature restores windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session.
Yeah, like I need my last open browser window coming back up on my screen. I "accidentally" kill the power strip when my boss walks in my cube for a reason.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
From what I can tell, Firefox is losing users at an astounding rate.
Many people have stopped using it due to it's bloat and slowness. I installed in on my uncle's new desktop computer several months back. He asked if there was an alternative he could use, because he found it was consuming all of the physical memory in his system, and then some.
At the college where I work, a number of researchers, professors, and students had switched to Firefox over the past few years. I know at least ten who have switched to browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and some even back to Internet Explorer, unfortunately. Of the people I have directly inquired with, they basically said it wasn't comparable, in terms of speed or memory usage, with other browsers.
I know of several open source developers who have stopped using it because of the recent Debian nonsense. Debates aside, their handling of the situation had a very negative impact. Many developers have gained a dislike for the Mozilla project, and others have switched. Those developers I know are now using Konqueror. One of them is using Opera on Windows.
Myself, I have stopped using Firefox for the aforementioned reasons. Konqueror has proven to be a better browser. It works perfectly fine with all of the sites I visit, and doesn't use excessive amounts of memory. I use KDE, so it integrates with my desktop far better than Firefox did.
You may think that it's only 20 or so people I'm talking about here, and that we're not that important. I'd beg to differ. Each one of us has recommended the use of Firefox to our relatives, friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances. Many of them have stopped suggesting it. I personally don't recommend its use. I suggest Konqueror or Opera for Linux users, and Opera for Windows users. Mac OS X users these days seem to go straight to Safari. At least five of the people I know are now making similar recommendations to people they know.
The Mozilla project will need to put forth much in the way of effort to stop this. We'll need to see rapid technological improvements, as well as changes in the way the project is run. I don't know if we'll ever see such things happen, but at least we have alternative browsers to move to if things continue to get worse.
... no correct ACID2, and no support for SVG images in CSS.
Everybody else (besides IE, of course) supports the first, and I'd love Firefox to be the first to support the second.
Just my $0.02, I'm sure everybody's got their own pet RFEs and bugs.
{Java/ECMA}Script keeps getting better and better. I'll be happy to bet that by the time Perl 6 is actually "released," and "working" (in the sense that Perl 5.6.1 was working and Perl 5.6.0 was not), JavaScript will be cooler, faster, and more useful.
... read/write local files, and so on.
I want JavaScript + a Mozilla-like UI that will let me write full-featured locally-hosted GUI apps that can do all the things other local languages can
On the Windows build, the exact opposite seems to be true. The 2.0RC1 build seems to eat up far less RAM in intense browsing sessions than the 1.5.x series did. Much, much, less. Especially on very image intensive sites, that used to cause Firefox to gobble up memory until it usually died after a short period of time (uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Firefox Portable 2.0 RC 2 has been released. For the unfamiliar, Firefox Portable is Firefox packaged with a PortableApps.com launcher so it can be run from a USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, CD, etc and used on any computer. It can also be run from a local hard drive (even your desktop) making it a great way to test out another version of Firefox without impacting your installed version. Grab it from the Firefox Portable 2.0 RC2 Homepage.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
Well with the OS it's different than when an application RAM-hogs.
It's not like (at least on most desktop, non-mainframe systems) like the OS is really competing for memory with any other OS. It's not shared. The OS knows who's trying to use the memory and how much is "extra" at any given time, thus it can just use whatever's left over at the moment for cache.
With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.
If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.
Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> Well what exactly do you expect people to do? Record every web site they visit, every key they press, every mouse movement they make, so that when the browser's memory usage eventually gets too high there is a clear record of what has happened?
Yes, if you really want the bug fixed that much then you need to go the extra distance to help the developers reproduce it.
> I hate to break it to you, but not every software bug can be easily reproduced (especially when you are dealing with performance related bugs like this). You often have to deal with things that are sporadic at best.
Well unless you expect someone to manually trace through every possible code path in the source code to look for the bug, then it's going to need to be reproducable for it to get priority.
When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time.
>Disregarding them on the assumption that the people reporting them are just making up lies about the product you know to be perfect isn't going to help anyone.
I don't think anyone's saying that. But between the difficulting reproducing it, and possibly a diferent understanding of what exactly constitutes a "memory leak" - and particularly how to measure that - It may well be that any time a developer goes looking for it they instead find legitimate instances of large memory usage.
Images do actually take up a lot of memory - particularly since the browser probably holds a reference to the uncompressed bitmap, not the original image, so if you've got a lot of images open on a lot of tabs, you _will_ use a lot of memory. It's also possible that when that memory is released it is not actually reclaimed by the operating system untill such time as it's really needed, and depending on how you're measuring the memory usage of an application, it might appear that the memory has not been freed. That's what I mean by having a different understanding of what a leak is.
Just as the users aren't making it up, neither are the developers. I'm sure that no developer that would be able to fix such a bug who actually encountered it in a reproduceable way (or at least in a way that would give a clue to it's whereabouts) would deliberately ignore it. In fact they'd be ecstatic. They must be absolutely sick of hearing about it by now and would like nothing better than to be able to get rid of it once and for all.
Heh. That's a good one. Bugs reported for RC1 implemented in RC2.
There are bugs still in there that were first reported in 1999.
I have no extensions installed and only the flash plugin. FF has been open for 4 hours and is using 408 MB. I guess I need to install these extensions/plugins in order to reduce my memory usage.
That solution has been suggested more than once, but keeps getting rejected. I think it's a good idea but the powers at Mozilla think it will cause confusion.