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Firefox 2.0 To Debut Tuesday
An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 2.0 for Tuesday, says the Seattle PI. They give a quick recap of some of the new features, and discuss the ongoing IE vs. Fox debate." From the article: "Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7, its biggest upgrade since 2001. Analysts said IE7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Firefox's growth at Microsoft's expense. Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."
geez, "tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated" that is beginning to sound like microsoft innovation. Long before firefox existed, I was using tabbed windows in opera. Give credit where it is due.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Tuesday? The day when security patches for IE are released?
One of the annoying things about the new firefox interface is you can't have as many tabs in the bar at once anymore. Sure, it has a scrolling interface, but I liked the sort of spatial representation of the old system. Is there a way to change the minimum size of the tab headers in the new firefox?
Not that it matters who came first, but Mozilla did actually have tabs earlier than Opera. What you were using in Opera back then was actually MDI, not tabs.
But of course other browsers had tabs far earlier than any of these two.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
When has Mozilla claimed that in innovated tabbed-windows interface? You are quoting Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not Mozilla.
Hey Folks,
They're both free apps under Windows! How does it really hurt MS if FF gets 100% marketshare? In fact, if FF were to take over it might actually benefit MS. How? IE has been their worst blackeye of the past couple of years. More problems with than than everything else. If MS could make all the bad IE press go away, don't you think that would be a positive? I realize this is like suggesting to Apple to let Dell build their hardware, but does that make it a bad idea? As long as FF adheres to Open Standards, everyone can compete with web-sites equally with it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Its Sunday after all right now, so why not pray for FireFox? This is FireFox 2.0 Beta running on my Windows XP PC.
1. Starts without maximizing itself to the full PC screen area. Always leaves space available. In contrast SeaMonkey correctly occupies the full PC screen area when starting (but SeaMonkey makes me create a new profile except for once.). FF thinks its full screen according to its maximize/window button but is mistaken.
2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine.
http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/
Those are my FF issues. What are yours?
Thanks,
Jim Burke
The changes are nicely summarized in this page.
I find "Client-side session and persistent storage" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future. There are also JavaScript 1.7 which makes JavaScript more Pythonic, SVG support, and several other features.
python>>> q="'";s='q="%c";s=%c%s%c;print s%%(q,q,s,q)';print s%(q,q,s,q)
With the built in spell checker, I expect about 12% of the web's users to look smarter by at least 50% on Tuesday, with the number expected to grow as Firefox spreads.
Oh You POS
But where can I get my IceWeasel 2.0 ?
In Bob we trust.
I hope it won't leak quite so much memory. That'd be nice.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Yes. Stop spreading the myth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabbed_browsing
Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month
This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.
Of course, it can be difficult to establish a market when the "market leader" does the ultimate price-war thing and gives its product out for free. They did kill Netscape Corp, of course, but somehow they still didn't capture the "market".
There are some bizarre (bazarre?) economic theories at work here, I think.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm a Windows user. I used to think that Firefox used too much RAM - I have about 30 tabs open in 2 windows, and it consumes over 140MB. In my book that's A LOT.
Few days ago I installed IE 7. I know, installing brand new MS software is a bad idea. But I'm reinstalling this OS soon anyway, so I wanted to give it a try. I opened the same tabs in the browser. Some of them didn't have my cookies, so slightly different pages loaded. But to my surprise, IE7 was taking up over 400MB of RAM. That's almost 3 times as much as Firefox. It got sluggish compared to Firefox. (I have a gig of RAM in a decently fast computer)
I'm sticking with Firefox. I'll test out 2.0 when it comes out, and baring bugs or bloat, I'll be using it as my main browser on all 3 computers I use.
m
With the new spellchecker they will also be introducing a new attribute to the input tag: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Controlling_s pell_checking_in_HTML_forms
Is this a non-standard attribute? Are we going back to each browser adding stuff and hoping the other one stays relatively compatible? I'm not saying whether this is a good or a bad thing. I was just curious.
U ar right.
Julia Cameron
Oich ù agus hiùraibh éile
Besides having far better CSS support than Firefox 2.0, Konqueror also uses only a fraction of the resources. Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.
For example, when I simultaneously open about 15 of the blogs and websites I read daily, top reports Firefox 2.0 rc3 as using 149 MB of virtual memory. Konqueror, on the other hand, uses a cool 28 MB for those exact same sites. Opera uses 31 MB. So as far as I can tell, Firefox is the lame duck when it comes to effective memory usage. This is with a build right from mozilla.org, without any additional extensions installed. I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.
A problem I have had with the Firefox 2.0 release candidates is crashes. This doesn't happen with Konqueror, or any other application I'm using, so I doubt it's faulty RAM. These crashes aren't easily reproducible, and I frankly don't have the time to bother debugging an application that I really don't use, and that crashes the few times I do try it out.
The 1.x branch of Firefox used Gecko 1.7
Fx 1.5 uses Gecko 1.8
Fx 2 uses Gecko 1.8.1, so a much smaller change (as in no new feature in HTML/CSS, just bug fixes I think). The new features are in SVG (textPath support), JavaScript (1.7) and Client-side session and persistent storage
Fx 3 will be the next big jump to Gecko 1.9, with the reflow that will fix Acid 2 and incremental layout bugs, plus more CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 support.
I am a big fan of Firefox in terms of philosophy and features, but have been driven to Opera (which I actually prefer for most things) due to the ridiculous amounts of memory that Firefox consumes. With multiple tabs open, I can routinely see Firefox over the course of a day or two of remaining open consume upwards of 900K, and it will continue to grow until it is shutdown and restarted. This is a serious issue for many Windows Firefox users, and the developers seem either unwilling or unable to focus on fixing it. This should have been the number one priority for version 2 in my opinion. It results in a shoddy product that would be unacceptable in a commercial application. Why is it that this elephant just sits in the room while FF developers pretend it's not there. Restarting an application should not be the solution to any problem, let alone one this serious. It's widespread and should have been addressed a long time ago!
Is this a non-standard attribute?
We wanted web pages to control the spellchecking defaults to some degree. For example, webmail applications will want to automatically turn it on for subject lines, even though it is normally off for <input> elements.
We discussed with the WHATWG web standards group to come up with the attribute. I'm not sure about the status of this in any of their specs, as I'm not sure there was any strong consensus. That's one of the problems coming out with a new feature not currently supported in any other browser or mentioned in any standards.
- Brett (Firefox spellcheck contributor)