Firefox 2.0 RC2 Review

segphault writes "Ars Technica has a comprehensive review of Firefox 2.0 RC2. It includes screenshot comparisons that illuminate the user interface changes that have transpired since the second beta, and it examines the similarities between the browser tab implementation from Internet Explorer 7 and the new tab management features in RC2. From the article: 'If RC2 is any indication, Firefox 2.0 is an incremental improvement of the 1.5.x series with performance improvements and a handful of relatively useful features. Based on my own experience, I consider it stable enough for regular use, but I endorse caution for users that rely on a lot of extensions, as most extensions aren't yet compatible with Firefox 2.0.'"

Comments

Extensions

[Anonymous Coward]

All but one of my ~dozen installed extensions (largely developer oriented) currently work, with the exception being TBE. Firefox 2 seems pretty good, but it would've been fairer for this to have been v1.5.

Re:Extensions

[kwanbis]

you know about the many changes on the rendering engine, right? And how about the incredible reduction of memory leaks?

Re:Extensions

[saridder]

Less than half of my extensions worked, but even worse was that my theme didn't work. That made me go back to 1.5. And none of the spell check features in the forms worked either. Loved the "tab remember" feature where you can close the browser and it will remember all the pages you had open in the previous session.

Re:Extensions

[samkass]

Loved the "tab remember" feature where you can close the browser and it will remember all the pages you had open in the previous session.

This was one of my favorite features from Opera 4-5 years ago. Glad to see the idea finally spreading.

Re:Extensions

[HeroreV]

You know what I love? Open source. Glad to see the idea spreading. Too bad Opera hasn't been receptive to it.

Re:Extensions

[Firehed]

Well some people might not want those fifteen tabs of porn to reopen after hurredly closing the browser, since the person next opening the browser might be the one for whom it was just hurredly closed. I hope there's an override key.

Re:Extensions

[Disavian]

ONE MILLION DOLLARS!!!

Re:Extensions

[h2g2bob]

Or you could just create a different profile in Firefox. Open with "firefox -ProfileManager".

For added security, you can make the icon you open firefox with as the "safe" "firefox -P default".

It also makes it marginally safer too as cookies and stuff are seperated for different profiles.

pun intended

[User 956]

and it examines the similarities between the browser tab implementation from Internet Explorer 7 and the new tab management features in RC2.

One could almost say that they've been "keeping tabs" on the competition.

Re:pun intended

[Dachannien]

One could almost say that they've been "keeping tabs" on the competition.

That pun stunk so bad I had to open a new window.

RC2 woes

[TheDarkener]

You know, I installed RC2 on my computer last night after I performed the recommended hardware upgrades, and my video drivers wouldn't work, my sound broke and it kept bugging me about activation. It wouldn't even let me download files from my favorite websites!!

Oh wait.

Solid, but no biggie

[Kelson]

I've been using the Firefox 2 betas and RCs since beta 1. It is, overall, better than 1.5, but there's no "gee whiz!" factor this time through. (Though I'll admit inline spell-checking is quite nice!)

Of course, as a web developer, I'm really looking forward to Firefox 3, which will be built on Gecko 1.9 and should have some good improvements to the rendering engine. (Firefox 2 jumps from Gecko 1.8 to 1.8.1 -- minor changes only.)

Oh, yeah, on the extensions issue -- admittedly I don't use very many, but most of the ones I rely on have been updated by now. At this point I'm mainly waiting for the HTML Tidy-based validator.

Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

[NineNine]

It's kind of ridiculous that they still have such a huge bug at this point, but does anybody know if Firefox's memory leak(s) is(are) fixed yet? I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page. It makes me not able to commit my company completely to Firefox (that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX).

Re:Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

[Kelson]

Yes and no.

Because there is no big fat memory leak. There are a whole bunch of little ones that add up. They've fixed a lot of them. They fixed a bunch of 'em in the 1.5.0.x series, and a bunch more in 2.0.

I doubt they've got everything, but 2.0 should have less of a memory problem than 1.5.

Re:Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

[sleeper0]

For what it's worth I believe they still have a ways to go. I write this with RC2 having launched it somewhere between 24 and 36 hours ago. It was using 237MB of memory, but when I closed my other tabs it dropped down to 193MB. Obviously if I closed it and relaunched it on this page it would only be using a fraction of that ram. Compare that to other processes currently running and it dwarfs them all - VMWare virtual center server 2.0 is using 44MB, Sql Server 42MB, Outlook 2007 36MB, Apache 32MB, IE 7 RC2 27MB. IE would definitely be using more if it had gotten more use, but many of the other applications have been running for at least a week or two.

Re:Is the big fat memory leak fixed?

[Paradise Pete]

It was using 237MB of memory, but when I closed my other tabs it dropped down to 193MB. Obviously if I closed it and relaunched it on this page it would only be using a fraction of that ram.

Just because it hasn't released it to the system doesn't mean it won't reuse it internally.

Almost ready..

[Anonymous Coward]

After upgrading to V2 RC2, its working pretty good so far. Session restore is pretty handy (now I can install new extensions, restart the browser and start from whereever I had left), and tab management is pretty good too.

Though there are some bugs - esp the toolbar customization needs to be looked at. My V1.5 toolbar customization is not sitting well with RC2 - esp the Search Engine. Its hogging all the screen from left to right, and I had to move it to its own bar (previously, it was sitting with Google Toolbar).

And of course, better memory management was a welcome change.

All extensions except on worked fine (had to disable extension compatibility check for Greasemonkey, and it worked perfectly fine).

Tab changes suck!

[MikeFM]

I've been testing the upcoming version for a while and I hate the tab changes. The tab changes are crappy. I'm an experienced user and I think so and my girlfriend that is a casual user complains about the changes too. Sure, you can make things mostly act the same as we're used to but it takes an effort to reconfigure and still doesn't work very well.

Having a close widget on each tab wastes space and is more work than a fixed location, the drop down doesn't work very well and should only appear if there are to many tabs, tab scrolling doesn't work very well and is probably not needed with the dropdown listing, and more tabs should be allowed to appear before they start scrolling.

Re:Tab changes suck!

[Dr.Syshalt]

You can disable close widgets. I've figured out there should be the way to do that, checked and here you go

Go to about:config

Change the value of browser.tabs.closeButtons

1 - the usual look
0 - only the active tab has the close widget
2 - no close widgets.

Have fun

Re:Tab changes suck!

[MacJedi]

What about one global close widget?

You can do it. The parent poster had an incomplete list:

0 - only the active tab has the close widget
1 - the usual look (close widgets on each tab)
2 - no close widgets.
3 - global close widget (at far right)

"most extensions"? FYI !

[arielCo]

Well, I use a lot of invasive extensions, and I only lost Session Manager, which is unsurprising since Fx now includes a similar feature and they would probably step on each others' toes. Survivors:

• Adblock Plus
• Video Downloader
• Inspect this
• IE Tab
• IE View Lite
• JS View
• EditCSS
• GMarks
• Google Notebook
• Sage RSS Reader

All in all, I agree that this is mostly an incremental upgrade, and it is somewhat faster, but I'm not sure it deserves the new major version. Several tiny UI bugs didn't get fixed.

spellcheck

[vivek7006]

I jst upgreaded to RC2 and I musht say that the neu spellchek feeture works lik a charm

Improvements for developers, too

[Black Acid]

Probably the most interesting features to programmers are the addition of the SQLite engine, and significant JavaScript enhancements heavily borrowed from Perl and Python. You can use generators (yield statement), Pythonic iterators, array comprehensions, and what the Mozilla people call "destructuring assignment". Some examples from the article for the curious:

/* Destructuring assignment example - swap two values */
[a, b] = [b, a];
 
/* You can return multiple values from functions now */
function f() { return [1, 2, 3]; }
var [a, , b] = f();
document.write ("A is " + a + " B is " + b + "<BR>\n");
 
/* Easier fibonacci sequences with generators */
function fib() {
  var i = 0, j = 1;
  while (true) {
    yield i;
    var t = i; i = j; j += t;
  }
}
 
/* Array comprehensions */
var evens = [i for (i in range(0, 21)) if (i % 2 == 0)];
 
/* New scoping semantics with 'let' expression/definition/declaration */
if (x > y)
{
  let const k = 37;
  let gamma : int = 12.7 + k;
  let i = 10;
  let function f(n) { return (n/3)+k; }
  return f(gamma) + f(i);
}

Good stuff.

Re:Improvements for developers, too

[GrouchoMarx]

No, Bad stuff. Are these new features part of the ECMAScript standard? If not, then wtf are they doing in the browser?

When Microsoft "extends" the web without asking the standards committee, they get vilified (and rightly so). Mozilla shouldn't get a by on it just because they're cool. "Embrace and extend" is bad, no matter who's doing it.

Gah, just get me a standard that I can bloody use consistently!

Why ActiveX?

[khasim]

(that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX)

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology. Even Microsoft is trying to get away for the security holes they've created with that.

Sometimes, security means not implementing something if it cannot be implemented securely.

Re:Why ActiveX?

[nmb3000]

ActiveX is a Microsoft technology. Even Microsoft is trying to get away for the security holes they've created with that.

ActiveX is just an implementation of OLE and COM via the Internet Explorer browser. Anyone is able to write an interface that supports ActiveX controls. The idea that they are inherently insecure is an oft-proclaimed falsehood on Slashdot. IE's implementation has had problems, but that's not the same thing as the technology behind it.

ActiveX : Internet Explorer :: Extensions : Firefox

It all comes down to implementation of the interactive extension to the browser.

Sometimes, security means not implementing something if it cannot be implemented securely.

That is true enough, although the problem is usually between the chair and keyboard. The biggest problem with ActiveX, and the way it got it's bad reputation is users who click 'Yes' to everything. Give Firefox enough market share and it will become profitable for these malware authors to write extensions that screw a computer/browser the same way ActiveX can.

Re:Why ActiveX?

[killjoe]

"Active X is INCREDIBLY useful for applications"

Yes, it has full access to your machine including the ability to read and write to hard drives, reboot your machine, muck with your registry etc.

"t's much more advanced than AJAX, and it was there 5-8 years ago. "

Yes. It was Microsoft's answer to the applet. Applets were first of course. Too bad Sun never could make them work because they were much safer then activex.

"Java never cut it (buggy, bloated, and hard to relatively hard to develop)."

Bloated maybe, buggy no, hard to develop? Nonsense. Much easier to develop java applets then activex components.

"AJAX is just another Javascript kludge. "

Yes.

"Active X is pretty damn useful when done correctly. I have a bunch of Active X apps that I use via IE."

Great if you are willing to use IE and windows.

Re:Why ActiveX?

[shutdown -p now]

The biggest problem with ActiveX is that it is, essentially, native executable code from an untrusted source executing on your computer. In contrast, Java applets are sandboxed on bytecode level.

Close button in the active tab. Argh !

[drsmithy]

Whoever came up with this idea needs to be slapped. It's not _quite_ as bad as having a close button in every tab (which commits the additional sin of wasting a section of screen space that's already scarce), but it still makes a destructive action (closing a tab) _far_ too easy to trigger accidentally (by clicking _just_ the wrong part of a tab).

Having the tab bar suddenly become scrollable when you open "too many" tabs is another stupid idea. Took me a minute the first time it happened to realise I wasn't seeing a bug (tabs not being created) but a piece of awful UI.

New Obligatory Question

[JackieBrown]

Is it available for Debian?
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?archi ve=no&bug=354622

Re:Close button in the active tab. Argh !

[Kelson]

Blame it on conflicting usability studies -- or maybe conflicting usability goals.

Close buttons on the tabs are good from a discoverability standpoint.
A close button on the end is good from a clicking-in-the-right-place standpoint.

Firefox has traditionally given discoverability a high priority.

useful tip

[vivek7006]

I found a really useful tip from the article

Unfortunately, the green arrow button is difficult to remove from URL bar, but it can be accomplished by hitting about:config and tweaking the browser.urlbar.hideGoButton, changing it to "true."

Re:useful tip

[hdparm]

Not sure about 2.0 (I suppose it's the same) but you could always do it by opening View-->Toolbars-->Customize window and dragging 'Go' button back into it.

Re:extensions and themes

[J053]

To make your 1.5 extensions and themes work:

1. Download the .xpi file
2. Unpack it (it's a ZIP file, really) into a directory
3. Edit the install.rdf file - find the line with "maxVersion:" and change it to (for example) "3.*"
4. Replace the install.rdf in the .xpi ZIPfile with your modified one
5. Install the extension/theme: in Firefox, browse to "file:///wherever-you-put-it/whatever.xpi"
                                                                in Thunderbird, use the Installer

I have yet to see an extension for 1.5.x that didn't work with 2.x after doing this

still has UI consistency/key command problems

[SuperBanana]

I reported this bug years ago and was told "probably won't happen until 2.0" and the bug was promptly closed/ignored:

In most modern operating systems, lists in dialog boxes can have a range of items selected by holding down shift, and individual items flipped on/off with a modifier key that varies slightly; in OS X, it's the apple/command key. Open up the cookies box, a place where selecting lots of items would be REALLY handy (ie, deleting all the crap cookies that will expire in "2046"), and try selecting multiple cookies. Bzzzzt, no go. And guess what? In pre-1.5 versions, you COULD do this, so it really WAS a bug/feature delete with 1.5. Now, select one cookie and hit the delete key. NOTHING HAPPENS. Why the hell not?

If you have partially typed anything in the URL bar and hit tab, half the time you aren't taken to the next text box in the browser window. Similar behavior happens elsewhere, only on a page.

It gets worse: just like older versions of 1.0/1.5, the current release candidate suffers from "keyboard-go-dead-itis." I've had to close Firefox FOUR times today because I could no longer enter text ANYWHERE. Not in forms, not in the URL bar, not in the search bar. Command keys (ie, apple-T for new tab) stopped working as well (1.5 still does this, though now usually only when Flash is on the page. Why Firefox allows flash to intercept command keystrokes is beyond me.)

Oh, and I still haven't figured out how to do the resume-where-you-left-off bit, despite having poured through the prefs pages several times.

mozStorage (SQLite) and Zotero

[Noksagt]

One of my favorite aspects of Firefox 2 is the new features for developers, including storage with SQLite. This enables neat things like the new Zotero extension, which stores bibliographic data (a'la Endnote, but with automatic recognition of metadata by programs like refbase and on sites like google scholar).

Nightly Tester Tools

[Noksagt]

If you're too lazy to bump the maxversion of your favorite extensions, you can use the Nightly Tester Tools to fore the app into thinking an extension is compatible.

Hard to make more than an incremental improvement?

[StateOfTheUnion]

I have to admit that when I first moved to Firefox from IE, the tabbed browsing was a feature that I didn't know that I needed until I tried it; and then I was hooked.

I don't really hear about any great new must have features in the RC2 version. Though I do acknowledge that coming up with great new features and ideas that most people appreciate but don't know that they need yet is no easy task, but I really don't see any key features in this version of Firefox to make me really want to upgrade. As I said before, great ideas in the browsing experience may be hard to come by since the idea of the browser and its application are mature. It's a bit like coming up with a great new feature for a word processor . . . a lot of the "low hanging fruit" is already taken.

What this means to me is that upgrading the browser is like upgrading the word processor; it's not a very high priority because there isn't a very compelling reason to do it (at least IMHO) . . .

Extensions

[slapout]

Why do extensions have to be changed for every release? Does the interface change that much?

Spell Check Only?

[maeglin]

Is the 2.0 designation deserved? I suppose that depends on your perspective. At the risk of veering into a largely irrelevant philosophical rumination on the ontological significance of version numbers, I feel inclined to point out that the implications of version numbers vary greatly between various open source projects. In some cases, there is a well-established nomenclature and version numbers can be used to infer all sorts of useful things about the nature and status of a build. In other cases, it may simply be an arbitrary value selected for the sole purpose of making it possible to distinguish between builds. For Firefox, it doesn't seem like there is a fully consistent version numbering model yet. Rather than expressing disappointment about the lack of new features in the upcoming 2.0 release, users should remember that Firefox release numbers aren't always going to be a helpful medium for establishing expectations.

Sheesh... Judging by the above paragraph it also comes with a thesaurus.

Re:He says the 'quick-search' is new?

[1point618]

As far as I can tell, the difference is that now, instead of having all the normal, handy options you get with hitting ctrl-f, you now get a blank bar at the bottom that doesn't let you search by capitalization, go to the next search term, etc. I'm waiting for an extension to fix this.

Re:What big fat memory leak?

[bunratty]

I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page.

When I leave Firefox overnight, I come back the next day and it's using the same amount of memory as the night before. Even after days of continuous use, it's using only about 100 MB of memory, as all browsers seem to do when I use them for days at a time. If you can show how to reproduce over 200 MB of memory use by having Firefox have a single web page open overnight, please do so. Is it some particular page that causes that memory use?

Re:Firefox 2 fixes the most common leaks

[bunratty]

It appears that the more common leaks are fixed in Firefox 2.

Re:Hard to make more than an incremental improveme

[jazman_777]

As I said before, great ideas in the browsing experience may be hard to come by since the idea of the browser and its application are mature.

They're waiting to see what the Opera developers come up with next.

Re:What big fat memory leak?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably their myspace page.

I for one...

[HawkingMattress]

Finally decided to switch to opera today, and i'm quite happy with it so far.
The auto satisfaction of the firefox team, marketing gimmicks and now version number pushing finally got me. Well no, in fact those three are the last straw, the real reason is the total crap that ff has become. I've been moaning about the memory leaks for more than 3 years (no, i'm not talking about the slow as hell cache "feature"), pages take forever to parse and display (it seems like 10x faster in opera, really...), and basically switching to opera gave a new life to my venerable Athlon 1.2 / 500M. On this kind of machine, you can really see the difference... Feels like switching from an interpreted BASIC app to C++ one. In fact when you think about with all the XUL code that sits on top of gecko, it's probably the case...
The only thing I could miss are the developper extensions (which, combined with the inspector are really good), but I'm not into web programming any more for now (happy me !)

Tab changes rock!

[jdbartlett]

Mike, I disagree. I can see where you're coming from, but I for one like having the ability to close a tab without first selecting it.

Re:Close button in the active tab. Argh !

[nithinsujir]

I disagree. I love this feature because I can close unwanted tabs without first focusing the tab. yeah, i know you can use middle click, but i prefer this way.

To see more tabs and minimize scrolling...

[mrawl]

To restore your sanity go to about:config and set browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50. The default value of 100 is a disaster and just about guarantees that awful scrolling behaviour.

Never change UI on upgrades

[iabervon]

It seems like nobody likes any of the UI changes, which is entirely what I'd expect, because every change to a UI is a major hit to usability. This isn't to say that the new UI might not be more usable for new users. But experienced users will continue to try to use the UI the way that worked before, and it will cause problems for them. This is especially true if the improvement is in discoverability, because experienced users will only benefit in that, when the stupid computer refuses to work like it's supposed to, it's not quite as difficult to figure out what you have to do instead of the natural thing as it might be.

Of course, it's also good to offer improvements to the UI for users who decide to retrain themselves or for new users. But this should be done by adding configuration options (ideally with UI-driven configuration methods, like the Customize Toolbars dialog), and making the upgrade process configure these options based on what used to happen, not based on the current defaults. (Of course, if you're importing settings from a different program, set the options to match the default or configured behavior of that program, not the local defaults.) The ideal is that, when the user gets a new version of the program, everything looks the same as it did before, but new behavior is available when the user decides that it is desireable.

Re:Never change UI on upgrades

[Vexorian]

What I really dislike are aesthetics not really the functionality. Bon Echo Alpha had mostly the same functionality but was really beautiful for me, I can't understand what made them chose such an ugly default theme. Seriously.

SQLite enables new extensions like Zotero

[Augustus De Morgan]

Firefox 2 includes a critical new underlying database engine--SQLite--which enables new kinds of extensions, such as the free, open-source citation manager and digital research tool Zotero.

Re:extensions and themes

[Bob54321]

Look for an extension called "Nightly Tester Tools" or something like that (too lazy to google for you). It has a feature alloing you to "force" extensions to install in any version.

Re:No sandbox == run ActiveX & get pwn3d.

[Andrew Kismet]

There's also IETab, which lets you run IE windows inside firefox tabs. Very useful for web-design, especially doing what I call the "flicker test", rapidly switching back and forth between the two to see the major differences.

System themes no longer apply

[jiawen]

From TFA:

Although the new tab theme looks very attractive, it isn't consistent with the computer's default system theme. Visual integration is one of the factors that contributed to Firefox's initial success over the original Mozilla browser suite.

Opera is looking better and better every day... System themes also don't apply in Opera, but at least I get superior speed.

Best bug fix in FF 2.0

[deppe]

The finally got around to fixing the bug where FF would consume 100% CPU on Mac OS X when you press and hold the left mouse button. This was a major issue for everyone with a laptop (it goes through battery much faster) and also annoying on the Mac Pros (the CPU fans spin up when you select text).

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14171 0

Re:What big fat memory leak?

[bunratty]

I'm saying I don't see the memory leak that others are reporting. Most other Firefox users never see it either. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. However, people who complain about the problem need to explain in detail what the problem is so we have an idea what they're referring to. Remember that even if only 0.1% of the tens of millions of Firefox users see a problem, that's still tens of thousands of people seeing the problem. Just because many people are complaining about the problem, that doesn't mean that we have any clue what they're referring to.

Bug 213391 does have some example pages that use lots of memory in Firefox. This is because Firefox stores all images on the page uncompressed in memory. For pages that have lots of large images, that can take quite a bit of memory. But when you leave the page, the memory is released. If you can demonstrate a way in which the memory is not released, causing a large memory leak, be sure to describe step-by-step how to see the problem, and it can be fixed.

Close button per tab

[DaoudaW]

Have they fixed or provided a work-around to the close button per tab problem?

When I tried RC1 this "feature" drove me absolutely batty. All of the other buttons such as go back, go forward, refresh, etc. remain in one place on the user interface, but for some misguided reason it was decided that close tab has to follow the tab. I typically open several tabs at a time then read through them deleting as I go. Having to chase the tab with the mouse is terribly annoying when moving rapidly through search results, news articles or whatever group of tabs I happen to have open. This is especially an issue when I have more than 20 or so tabs showing, which makes the target small and the page title non-existent on the tab.