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Nine Reasons To Skip Firefox 2.0
grandgator writes, "Hyped by a good deal of fanfare, outfitted with some new features, and now available for download, Firefox 2.0 has already passed 2 million downloads in less than 24 hours. However, a growing number of users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser. Expanding on these ideas, this list compiles nine reasons why it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0, skipping the "poorly badged" 2.0 release completely." OK, maybe it's 10 reasons. An anonymous reader writes, "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0. This defect has been known since June 2006 but no patch has yet been made available. The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally). If security is the main reason users should switch to Firefox, how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?"
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
Update: 10/30 12:57 GMT by KD : Jesse Ruderman wrote in with this correction. "The article claims that Firefox 2 shipped with a known security hole This is incorrect; the hole is fixed in both Firefox 1.5.0.7 and Firefox 2. The source of the confusion is that the original version of this report demonstrated two crash bugs, one of which was a security hole and the other of which was just a too-much-recursion crash. The security hole has been fixed but we're still trying to figure out the best way to fix the too-much-recursion crash. The report has been updated to clear up the confusion."
A pity as Firefox 2.0 just crashed on me. I was wondering what the hell was going on and I just refreshed slashdot to see this very story.
:(
I still trust it more than IE of course, but do wish as we get newer versions that the stability does continue to improve.
I'm sure they can do it and I still have faith.
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
It's not always the most glamorous part of coding an app, but it needs to be done.
Personally, I haven't upgraded (and I won't until everything - esp. my extensions - "just work").. and reports like this suggest that this may be the prudent action.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
1) The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)
2) Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
3) The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
4) There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
5) The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
6) There are reported problems with the CSS engine in Firefox 2.0, affecting various websites, and making certain features unavailable to surfers. Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail
7) Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated
8) Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances - for unknown reasons - will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel
9) RSS feed handling has taken a step backwards, and is inferior to that of IE7.
> how do we explain known vulnerabilities remaining unpatched across major releases?
:-(
just read some comments of a release manager in mozilla's bugzilla - "This is not a major issue, WON'T FIX in current release". Next bug!
It's seriously seems to be getting worse and worse with each apt-get upgrade for me. I've been using Firefox 2.0 for a while now with Edgy, but while I was searching for... well I'll be honest, mass amounts of porno with about 50 tabs open, my system has slowed to a crawl about 10 times more often then it did with 1.50.
no wonder IE7 team sent a cake to Mozilla foundation a la "from Redmond with love"... See it here if you have not already: http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-wi th-love/
The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation.
So, does that mean that 640K won't be enough memory then?
There are really only three or four issues that actually affect users of previous versions. Many use a theme other than the default, and I can't really see how the preferences dialog is any more confusing. Not to say that those three or four issues aren't important, though I haven't experienced the much maligned memory leakage or crashing myself. These just seem too trifling to actually warrant skipping a version.
Let's see now:
The new theme is too bulky, inconsistent on different platforms, and inferior to the highly refined and very user friendly theme of 1.5 (this is despite late efforts by Mozilla to spruce up the icon set and improve consistency)
I agree but you can download new themes or even the old FF theme, so wtf would this stop you from using FF 2.0?
Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based)
Why does this matter, it wasn't in FF 1.5 so why would its existence even if it's not great be a drawback?
The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
I've found that to have always been the case, long live google and about:config.
There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions of Firefox. While this can, to some degree, be expected, the loss of this huge user contributed extension base is a non-trivial problem with Firefox 2.0, and could be a deal breaker for some people all by itself
Nightly tester tools and the author seems to not understand that extensions are very often (always?) open source. Anyone can unpack and fix extensions if needed. Hell all my extensions work once I disabled compatibility.
The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
It's not a memory leak in the sense of doing nothing increasing memory usage so that inaccurate. Second of all it exists, probably worse even, in 1.5 so why the fuck would it stop someone from upgrading? Has the author so run out of ideas as to list any and all faults of FF?
Notable among these is a continued problem with certain aspects of Yahoo! mail
Continued as in it existed in 1.5? LEt me repeat my point again: "wtf is this a reason to not upgrade, you already have the problem with the current version."
# Reports indicate that episodes of random freezing during use are worse with the 2.0 version, though a cause has not yet been isolated
# Numerous users have reported that the History bar is buggy, and that in some instances - for unknown reasons - will not display recent items when the history menu is opened as a side panel
FF has lots of fun rare bugs which does not mean everyone or even many people will get them. Just make a backup of your profile folder beforehand and downgrade if you are unlucky enough to get such bugs.
I upgraded and was pleasantly surprised to find that of the 14 or so extensions that I use, only about 3 were "incompatible" with the new version - not nearly as bad as I had thought.
That said, I've had it freeze a couple of times on me (however the session-restore worked, and put me right back where I left-off when it started up again). Javascript is still a major stumbling block - it's really damn slow. Aside from fixing bugs, hopefully they put a lot of emphasis on optimizing their JS engine, as it really is sluggish on sites that use a lot of it (Digg and the like).
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. Before when you close your browser you had to open your tabs again and get it in the same configuration, now it goes to being the same as before immidiately.
So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
..vulnerability reported by Security Focus doesn't seem to be effecting Firefox 2 on my machine..
I didn't switch because of security problems, but because of the attempts to foist session management onto all of us and because the Tab Killer plugin which I use to eradicate all record of tabs from Firefox doesn't work in 2.0 yet.
Why can't the Moz developers make a simple Tabs On/Off switch in the Options Panel, and the same for session management. I do not want my browser to remember that I had ten pages open and then reopen them when it starts. I'd be running Opera if I wanted that.
One final rant, why did they move the proxy settings panel from the front of Options to somewhere buried again. Not that IE is a great browser, but they don't jumble the preferences UI around every release. For an IT department that supports over 20000 users on a university network, trying to figure out which version of a browser they're running just to find their proxy settings is painful.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
So far, I really hate a couple of features:
* When the number of tabs increases more than 5 or 6, new tabs are not visible only by clicking a tiny arrow to the right of the tab bar.
* The colour indicating currently active tab is only slightly different from the colour of the inactive toolbar, making me strain my eyes trying to figure out which tab is currently active.
Thanks, but no thanks, I'm sticking with 1.5........
i'm using a firefox 3.0 nightly build, and i love it
Looks like the server has already barfed.
I think firefox 2.0 is great though myself. The spellcheck alone was worth the update to me. It is just as functional as the last one so far for me. I am not really a browser power user though, so perhaps it is dysfunctional for those types.
Firefox to internet:
.0 release to an established release, and to Internet Explorer, is just pretty laughable where I am sitting. I have not experienced a single crash or bug, but then I have not exactly been trying to break it. Overall, I am quite impressed and look forward to seeing where this release takes the community.
If you are for any reason dissatisfied with your Firefox experience, we will gladly refund your money.
There will, of course, be growing pains. TFA highlights a known security bug, and points out that the memory leak has found its way into Firefox 2. CSS is initially seeing some compatibility hickups. There is always room for improvement. I began using Firefox 2 a few hours after the actual release. I was surprised to see an article complaining.
The other points of the article are matters of preference and wishful thinking.
-"I don't like the theme." ORLY well how is that IE theme support working out for you?
-"The anti phishing is weak!" ---compared to what? The antiphishing in 1.5?
-"Extensions did not automagically compatible-ize themselves!" OOOOHHH, well let me switch to that other browser that inherently supports third-party code. Perhaps we have overlooked the ".0" in the release version number. Third parties will have to adapt to meet the changes as Mozilla works to meet them. This does constitute a reason to potentially delay switching if extensions are absolutely necessary for your casual web usage.
-"I don't understand the options screen!" BWAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAAAAA!!!! This can't be serious.
-"I don't like the RSS thingy! IE does it better!" Where was it again that RSS originated? Was that Redmond? While IE's RSS Just Works (TM) there are clearly many custom options for this feature with Firefox, and unimaginable numbers of extensions are to follow.
So why delay switching to 2.0? Because 1.5 is just fine. Not because 2.0 is broken. Comparing a
FairTax baby!
For me, when it comes to extensions, one (incompatibility) is too many. Each of the ~14 I have serves a purpose - and I'd rather not go without the functionality provided. (With extensions like ad-block being one of the main reasons I switched to FF in the first place, and why I doubt I'll move back over to IE7).
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Safari with PithHelmet and Saft has had most of these features and a lot more for a while now, I didn't realize how far Firefox had lagged behind. I wonder if IE is going to overtake Firefox once again too, hopefully they get their shit together.
I admit I never really liked some of the features in FireFox anyway, such as the the automatic download to desktop.
stick with seamonkey!
I really hope it can be fixed, but on my MacBookPro and my PC, FF2 locks and I have to restart it by killing the process. I've tried removing all my plugins and even deleted my profile and started fresh. I get random locks on both my win32 and osx versions which rules out the OS. I have faith they will resolve the issues, but maybe they released it too soon?
I love firefox, but I question where they are going. If you look at the blog post every 3rd entry is complaining about memory issues or bloat. Now here comes FF 2.0, with more features, but these seem to only exacerbate the problems. Firefox's original claim to fame was "Not being IE". It didn't have ActiveX, supported tabs, and was super speedy. Firefox gained popularity because it was a viable option when people went looking for a replacement to IE. But that was the catch, people were looking for a replacement.
Now I find myself getting more and more frustrated with Firefox's bloat, and looking for a replacement for it. (I have way too many greasemonkey scripts to make the switch lightly).
The memory issue is huge for those with less than a gig of ram. The fast back/forward switching is nice, but not if it ends up getting paged out. Yes, users can turn it off in about:config, is that viable? And while the developers keep complaining about extensions being the culprit, it seems like some work there on the garbage collector is in order, or at least isolating and counting usage by each extension to show users which is causing the problem. (Instead of forcing each user to manually disable them until they happen upon the one that's causing the issue).
All of these new 2.0 features have an audience, and should probably even be included in the installer. But why aren't they extensions? Is there some technical reason my browser should have the overhead of a spellchecker if I don't want it? And finally, why aren't they solutioning what the users are asking for?
It seems like quite a few people are out defending Firefox, but that's actually a disservice for Firefox.
What it really comes down to is to make Firefox into a browser that can convince the other 80+% of the users to switch. Saying "oh but, Firefox did it first!" or "you can just change x setting to make it better if you like" is irrelevant because when it comes down to it, it's whether the average users think it's better than the other browser. Making excuses for issues that even be perceived as problems doesn't help Firefox.
I like Firefox and upgraded to 2.0 on Tuesday, but it's not really the opinion of the Firefox crowd that really matters, it's the users still using Internet Explorer, the crowd that Firefox is really going after.
I'm tempted to start browsing with notepad & just imagining what the HTML would produce.
Safer, AND I wouldn't have any problems finding what I like on the porn sites.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Sounds to me like Mozilla really need to get their act together, especially given the revenue they are supposed to be generating through Google, there isn't really an excuse for this.
imagine the reaction of slashdotters...
you humored me.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
That was back when it was decently stable. I'd have a few dozen windows open. I'd repeatedly open and close windows.
Now, with the 1.5 release, things aren't so nice. I started using tabs only because I thought that would help with memory usage and stability, but it seems not. I'll typically have a half dozen windows open, each with a half dozen tabs. Well, that's because of the crashes. I'd be up to 10 windows with 10 tabs each if the browser didn't keep crashing.
Right now my 1.5 release has been running for 13 days. It's about to crash I think. One of the windows is acting funny. I abandoned that window, leaving it open on one of my many virtual desktops. From experience, I know that firefox will crash if I mess with that window. ("funny" being: new tabs wind up as windows with the controls missing rather than as tabs) I think the previous run crashed after 6 days, judging from how long my X server has been running.
So you say 2.0 is actually worse? How much worse?
1. it never crashed on any of 3 pc i used since i've installed ff 2.0 one day after the release,
2. it's much more responsive (especially in linux) than any ff was before,
3. the theme looks flashy and i like it!
Besides being SLOW, restarting isn't going to place multiple windows on numerous virtual desktops.
I have virtual desktops containing browser windows which contain tabs. That's 3 levels with which I organize things. It may be 5 desktops times 2 browsers times 8 tabs, for a total of around 80 tabs.
No, I don't want to restart that, even if I can.
That was a hoax.
Slashdot Classic
I have been using it since it was released and have had no problems.
Firefox may not really be a good browser, I mean there are some programming errors in it, probably even lots of them and I don't know if there will ever be a error-free version of it, but look at the alternatives. (I do not claim this list is complete)
There we have the Internet Explorer. It only runs on various versions of Windows. It has an unpatched security flaw since 1998 (http://www.ccc.de/activex/) which the vendor doesn't even think of closing.
Then there's Opera, a nice standard conform browser. Unfortunately it doesn't come with it's source-code, so even if you buy it, you probably can just throw away your license when you buy a new computer. If you don't buy it, you'll get adware with all the consequences.
Of course there are also other alternatives like Dillo. Small, _FAST_, but without any CSS support.
So essentially you need to choose your poison. Firefox just seems to be a moderately good browser, but they finally need to clean up the code.
I upgraded. After 4 days, it's only sucking up ~140MB of memory. Not perfect, but it's MUCH better than the ~230MB of memory suckage I experienced from version 1.5.
I don't have these random crashy problems nor care about how much memory it takes up. All my extensions work - after changing several install.rdf files' maximum version to support 2.0. It's the extension developers fault, not Firefox's. Haven't had any problems with websites not working. I like the spellchecker, microsummaries, new theme, the search bar changes (Add so-and-so search, rearrange, autosuggest) I've been using 2.0 since beta 1. I like it.
I've been using V2 since Beta1, compiling the source on my Gentoo box, and I'm very happy with it.
... whatever
All this 'V2 isn't ready' stuff smacks of Astroturfing to me, especially as the *new* Internet Exploder is
about to be released
I'm staying with V2, rock on FireFox!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
that was a tertiary concern, the tabs and my other plug-ins were the major reason for switching back. If they had worked, I would have stayed with 2.0 and hunted deeper to get rid of a small annoyance.
BTW, according to the Find Updates button, the six plugins I run that are incompatible with 2.0 still have no updates for them.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
The single WORST decision on any level in this iteration of Firefox has to be the removal of the right click from the mouse button being held down on the Mac. That's seriously going to confuse people, I mean, doesn't every website tell apple users to hold down the mouse button over a graphic to get the context menu?
Oh it can be re-implemented but I had to rummage around in about:config to find the thing and, due to the failure of the release notes to MENTION this had been removed, even submitted a bug report on the topic. I know it's a small thing....but it's always the little things that matter with an application as big as a web browser!
Open Source Software buggy? With security problems? Shipped with known issues before it's ready?
That's impossible. Only big, evil, money-grubbing, corporations do that.
I mean, you could easily misspell IE7 as Firefox. The letters are right next to each other on the keyboard.
(Yes, I really like flame. It's a sickness. I need help.)
A speech...
I agree with most of what you've said, but not quite with this. The way I remember things, Firefox's original claim to fame, at least among geeks, was not being Mozilla, as in Mozilla Seamonkey. In other words, it was Mozilla with all the extra flab cut out. Just a browser. No mail client, no composer, no newsreader, no built in IRC chat client, etc etc. This made it much faster loading, and eventually more comparable with Internet Explorer as a drop-in replacement.
It's still just a browser, but since then it seems to have been becoming a somewhat more heavy duty browser trying to meet everyone's needs, without necessarily doing everything brilliantly. The irony for me is that Mozilla Seamonkey can still be installed in modules to some extent, so it's actually possible to install just the browser. (Well, the browser seems to come with the Composer in my debian package, I'm not sure if that's standard.) I haven't done any extensive benchmarks, but anecdotally it does often feel more cut down to me than Firefox does. To be honest, it feels more stable and I almost prefer it over Firefox.
The full Mozilla Seamonkey suite seems to have been forgotten in all the Firefox hype, but the only thing that's putting me off using it more often is that it doesn't seem to have a very reliable extension handling interface. That is, I can install an extension from an XPI file, but there's not actually an extension management interface in the front end UI that I could find. Perhaps this is a good thing, because it diversity of so many third party extensions of varying quality seems to be one of the big complications of Firefox stability.
And other similar needlessly and pointlessly inflammatory posts -- people, the anecdotal experience of others should not be used as the basis for any decision making process. And how this whole item is supposed to be news should be up for debate as well -- what are the editors of /. still pissed off about the Firefox pre-posting availability story?
Here's an idea, load the same three pages in tabs in the latest browsers of your choice -- personally I've done this with IE7, Opera 9.02, and Firefox 2.0. My own example is my Google personalized home page, this /. story, and timeanddate.com. Now Firefox takes up ~45M, IE takes up ~55K, and Opera takes up ~48M. Now I won't say Firefox is better and IE sucks (though that is, of course, true) -- without knowing every theme, plug-in, and add-on, as well as the configuration of each of those installations, the above numbers are meaningless.
If you're happy with Firefox, great, if you're not, too bad, and I hope you enjoy running something else - there's a lot of great choice.
HOWEVER, PLEASE QUIT POSTING YOUR OWN PERSONAL PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES AS NEWS APPROPRIATE FOR OTHER PEOPLE TO ACT ON!!!!
Looks like the IE7 team probably downloaded & used Firefox 2.0 RC2 before they sent
the Firefox team the cake.
Er wouldn't they indicate that it's evolving quickly because they're happily breaking compatibility in the name of development? I think these are two entirely different sets of circumstance.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
There will, of course, be growing pains
Yup. Open Source products usually get decent by V3.0 or 3.1
agreed i am using the swiftfox build on edgy and emmory usage and responsive is noticeably better, IMO.
I have installed the latest ver of firefox on my machine running Linux and I can vouch that this new version is not buggy. It has never crashed even once and I found it to open quicker than firefox 1.5.
Having said that, if you are using a lot of extensions including del.icio.us and many prominent ones, then it could consume some memory and might significantly slow down the machine. I think it has got to be some problem with the extension you are using rather than firefox itself.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
I switched to FF 1.0 for a while but then went back to Mozilla. It feels speedier (well its 0.001% faster, but statistically significant for me ;) + I dont need to keep Thunderbird running.. The Mozilla suite handles it all under one process..
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.1) Gecko/20040707
Can someone explain the "memory leak"? I'm using FF2 on Ubuntu (and before it 1.5 and 1., 0. etc) on an old P3 thinkpad with 256M ram - and FF using too much memory never causes me any problems, And I surf all day! And visit myspace! I do shutdown each night (saves electricity), but I have 8x less memory than so people I see complaining.
Do the "memory leaks" only appear if you have more memory?
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I have only had 2.0 crash on me -once-, and that was due to the Alpha version of Flash 9 that I'm running. I mean, come on...I use it while browsing myspace profiles, and if that doesn't crash it, nothing will.
My reasons for sticking with 1.5 are much simpler - it's virtually perfect as far as I'm concerned. I run with TabMix Plus and AdBlock Plus, and a few config hacks to try and curtail what is my only complaint - the insane memory footprint. Here's a hint to what seems to be a majority of clueless developers these days - your application is only one of many I need to run simultaneously, and you can't all have all my PC's resources at once. Ignoring the memory thing, it's the perfect web browser.
I knew I wouldn't be in a hurry for FF2 as soon as I heard talk of "new features" - unless I imagined it, wasn't the idea in the first place to create applications that do one job and do it well? To get me to send a cake, all that was necessary was a Firefox with THE SAME features as version 1, but significantly leaner and faster.
I have been using Firefox 2.0 on Windows and Linux for a while now (RC1)
1. It is faster than 1.5
2. It is more stable than 1.5
3. It is smaller than 1.5
4. It does more 'out the box' - requires less extensions
5. It looks better than 1.5
7. I love the spell checking
8. It is more secure than 1.5
9.If it uses more memory, it is because it remembers
the previous pages and the back button works instantly.
The reasons not to quoted in the 'story' are moronic
Cheers
Sygin
Don't make your problems my problems!
"The ability to close and continue sessions later removes a major reason why many people kept their browsers open for long periods of time. [...] So even if some leaks remain, the problems they cause are reduced."
Just because a new feature serves as a workaround that mitigates a known serious flaw in a program does not imply that the problem has been corrected or should be ignored. I hope the Mozilla.org folks pay attention here. There are many millions of us who like Firefox and use it by default...avoiding IE as much as possible.
But the sort of tech savvy folks who will try and then adopt brave new software are often most sensitive to unresolved issues with it, especially if they affect system performance, reliability, or security.
Having used Web browsers since one had to concern one's self with the differences between the various flavors of Mosaic (NCSA, Spyglass, etc.), I'm very comfortable using recent versions of Firefox, Opera, IE, and Netscape...in that order, which happens to reflect my preferences. Netscape used to come before IE. Opera is still very lean and mean. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if a (F)OSS browser (or several) dominated the market for such apps.
It is too bad that Microsoft was not ordered to completely unbundle its Web browser from its operating system. I am sure there would have been a much better IE7 on the market years sooner if MS was motivated to compete in that area, instead of having overwhelming market share by default.
Striving for Stupendous Karma,
Fractalzone
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
I am a Firefox developer, so I can comment with some authority on these points.
First, as to the "critical security hole", as we've already stated in numerous other places, the actual exploitable hole was patched long ago. A non-exploitable crash does remain and will eventually be fixed. Anyone who reports this as a security hole has not done their due diligence.
Second, the summary posted here is a bit surprising. The feedback we've seen so far is quite the opposite of this summary: most users are, in fact, reporting better performance, lower memory usage (we fixed some of the most egregious leaks), and an easier-to-use browser. Additionally, we fixed far more bugs, especially old, longstanding bugs, in this release than in any previous Firefox release. So even if none of the new features flotas your boat, this release *should* be a polished step forward, once you start poking around a bit.
Third, as to the nine points this article raises:
# The new theme sucks
As this is a matter of personal preference, I can only encourage those who dislike the new theme to download one of the many alternative themes available. There are updated versions of the 1.5 Winstripe/Pinstripe themes, as well as many others, whatever suits your fancy. I will note that the majority of editors reviewing Firefox 2 have felt that the new theme is a step forward; so clearly not everyone believes this is a negative point.
# Antiphishing technology is both weak (blacklist based) and a potential privacy problem. The privacy issues are raised because Firefox 2.0 Antiphishing Features employ an engine previously released by Google, which has been shown to potentially cause privacy risks.
This argument is unclear. One of the antiphishing modes uses a blacklist and the other submits URLs to Google. So it at worst is not both weak and privacy-violating at the same time. Going further, however, I would ask for a less vague argument about privacy. Switching on full antiphishing protection displays a warning notice to the user specifying exactly what sorts of data is sent where, and for what purpose. I hardly consider it a violation of privacy to allow people to explicitly choose to send their data somewhere else. (Of course, given that Google doesn't actually do anything with this data other than feed it into their anti-phishing database, I don't consider it a violation of privacy regardless, but we have options precisely because not all users will feel this way.)
# The new Options dialog box is confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hides important features
Especially given the positive feedback we've gotten on the redesigned pref window, I'd suggest explicitly naming problems here rather than making such a vague and general argument. The new options box is IMO a vast improvement on the old one: it reduces the number of tabs containing embedded tabs to one (the Advanced tab), it rewords many options for grammar and clarity (especially where the old wordings had generated bug reports), and it slightly modifies the default set of options to better fit actual usage. Name the "important features" being hidden and I suspect the list will consist of features that are very important to a tiny fraction of our userbase.
# There are many reported compatibility issues with the large existing libraries of extensions, themes, and plugins currently avaialble for earlier versions o Firefox.
Actually, since the Gecko engine remained at version 1.8, with almost every XPCOM interface backwards compatible with Firefox 1.5, this release has by far the _fewest_ number of incompatibilities of any release in Firefox history. Most extensions are compatible once their version numbers are set properly, and only a small fraction actually broke. Additionally, we contacted the authors of the most popular extensions in advance of the release to explicitly ask them to test their extensions, and filed bugs to track the upgrading of popular extensions. While we can always do more here, I think this has been th
5). Memory leak: I often run Firefoxes for a whole week long. Yes, you read that correctly. I often just leave important links open when I leave work, then I login back from home and continue useing it, then again tomorrow from work, and so on. After a week it often eats up around half a gigs of memory, true. But really, how many of you do such things ?
Sorry, I'm gonna rant now ...
What, a whole week? My computer (running Ubuntu 6.06LTS) is up all the time. Basically it goes down when there's a power cut. Current uptime is 55 days (reflects the fact that I moved house 55 days ago). X hasn't been restarted in all that time.
Why does Firefox need so much memory to display a few web pages? And why doesn't it at the very least return the memory when I, say, close all but one web page? I mean, I know C++ is an awful computing language to write anything in, and modern languages have garbage collectors, but still there's enough memory checking tools out there so they can catch these memory leaks by now.
Or is it a misguided attempt to "cache" stuff in memory, which is about the stupidist thing you can do given that today memory is very slow versus processors, so usually it's faster just to recompute what you need when it's needed. Typical C++ programmers wouldn't know that though - they're still reimplementing reference counting on every one of their classes, when a central, optimized garbage collector would be a lot faster.
/rant over
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
What the hell are you using it for? I've had SeaMonkey open over a month (same gecko core) and its using less than 70 MB. Thats still a lot more than it ought to be, but how the hell do you get over 200 in 4 days? I'm calling bs on that.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I love it! Can I have some of that Remond cake?
I love free (as in liberty) software, but really Firefox has been buggy and crash-prone for me on FreeBSD and Debian GNU/Linux since Firebird v0.7 -- which is when I first switched to Opera.
Lest you think I'm out of date I still install Firefox occasionally to check it out, but the problems have never been resolved AFAICT. Firebird v0.6 was the peak release for speed and stability.
IMO the only reason it has done so well recently is that it's a *bit* better than IE and it's free.
DUH
Happens to ALL new products.
I'll wait a bit before I hop on board. Just like I do with all new stuff.
Well, it seems like every version of Firefox still has issues with espn.com.
Its definitely the most reliable site to crash and/or generate 100% cpu time on any recent version (1.5.x and 2.0).
Just go browse to one of the scoreboard pages a few times. It really likes to do this on Mac.
Maybe it's because you aren't surfing. If you actually use firefox, instead of simply letting it remain minimized at about:blank for a month, it will quickly use ridiculous amounts of memory. Here it's at 305MB and counting... Oops, just checked, it's now 306MB. And I haven't really done anything apart from writing this in the meantime.
I did... But then I went right back. One of the ways I use a browser is to select text in a xterm or other app and middle click on a new Firefox tab. The keyword.URL key is set to search rather than return the first result so I get a page of search results on that text - most useful. In FF2 this doesn't work - a middle click on the browser window != typing something into the URL bar now. No problem, but I don't know what it == so I could set that. I did try Seamonkey but that had bigger problems - thing is, this is a habit I picked up using the old Mozilla suite.
They also moved the tab close button. The browser is one of the few apps where I make use of the mouse so I like it to be as efficient as possible to do stuff. Being able to close a bunch of windows by repeatedly clicking the same button was very handy - I would press ^W repeatedly but if the page focus isn't just right then the window won't close... While I'm on the topic, did the order the tabs are focussed when the current tab is closed change? ISTR being irritated by something like that.
A few of my extensions stopped working but that's excusable - they've probably been fixed by now. I'm just not on FF2 any more.
I hope the Moz team hasn't become obsessed with market share... that's what promotion and campaigns, not release dates, are for.
Give me one good reason!
licet differant, aequabitur
Using the classic theme! Ducks for cover and runs
Your thoughts form your reality.
One of the reasons I switched from Firefox to Opera was that Firefox - even the latest version - seemed to eat up more and more memory, and never released it even when I closed all but one of the firefox windows.
I was going to give you two
1. FF2 sucks
2. You sucks
but if you can only take one
1. You BOTH sucks
Most of the changes deal with things that I don't much care about. I'd like it to freeze up less often and leak less memory, but what I would REALLY like would be for the rendering to work properly in Indian writing systems. And it would sure be nice to have a little button to click on for clearing the URL like in Galeon.
Can't open the article link, don't know if this bug is mentioned on there. Even when I check the "open links in new window" option, 2.0 unpredictably creates pop-up links in a new tab, rather than a new window. I also hate the glossy Macintosh-wannabe look of the new buttons. It also creates popup windows on some sites, where the older browser did not.
What do volunteers have to do with it? Firefox staff are paid to do their jobs.
Are you planning on answering any follow up comments? How does anyone know it's the original poster and not e.g. me?
Rapidshare for one is completely useless now: it won't accept download requests even using DownThemAll or anything else - returns completely spurious error messages about incorrect captcha entries and the like.
I can't download images from the www.corrsmisc.com (Corrs fan) site using their download buttons, although the image save function in Firefox 2.0 still works.
And as I reported yesterday in another topic, many of the ebook download sites I've been using also don't recognize Firefox 2.0 downloads. Many of them, however, ARE usable with DownThemAll. And I can use DownThemAll with the Corrs fan site, too.
It seems like the Firefox 2.0 Download Manager is simply and totally broken. Why this wasn't detected during testing is a mystery to me - assuming the Firefox people actually DO any testing before making a major release like this...
Otherwise, I've not had any crashes or other problems. Speed of site access and page rendering seems about the same or slightly faster than the 1.5 versions.
But since MUCH of my browser work involves file downloading, I'll probably have to revert back to 1.5.0.7 as the current problems are simply unacceptable.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I believe it becasue there are some leaks in FF. I saw 200+ yesterday with 3 tabs open.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Why did they wait for Firefox to be released before posting this points?
If they really wanted to contribute they could have done that criticizing the beta version as loud as they are killing the official one now.
This was probably made on purpose... I really feel this is just a (well executed) flame-bait attempt.
Beta releases are normally for people who enjoy software that's new but are O.K with some bugs so they can help improve the program, but therein lies the problem, only users who want to use betas actually do. By releasing a final version and getting over 2 million downloads, that's just that many more people finding bugs and with Firefoxe's error reporting software that's that many more fixed bugs later on. The whole point of open source software is so that it can be fixed by the community and if we leave it up to the handful of developers those bugs we are seeing now will always be there.
It's a great effort to protect unexperienced users bei enabling safe browsing by default. Everone can easily disable it in about:config: browser.safebrowsing.enabled false When you have an extension that isn't compatible with FF2.0 the chance is high that it is no longer developed. Such an extension isn't worth installing anyway. My noia-Theme and the netcraft toolbar were updated for compatibility. My migration is done! I've noticed the memory usage but even with FF1.5 it was never too annoying on my 512MB-RAM System running Ubuntu Warty. FF1.5 and FF2.0 use almost the same gecko engine. I liked it before, I still like it. This guy must be kidding. FF2.0 is no big upgrade but still a nice refinement and worth installing.
well on my system. I suspect that this might be a campaign by IE loyalist to discredit Mozilla and the hard work that they have done for free, for all of us. Well I have news for you......Microsoft will not reward you in any manner unless forced to do so. Just think about it, if Mozilla did not exist you would still be on MS Internet Explorer 5. Competition causes an increase in quality by all of those affected to the benefit of the general public. Personally I use both at times and try to benefit by the advances of both.
if your site uses javascript to display content in named popup windows, it probably won't work with FF2 (if the window ends up behind the main content window the user will see nothing happen when clicking the link, and therefore assume your site is broken).
:(
this affects 2 high-traffic sites i own, and quite a few others i know of.
it also breaks behavior web designers have been able to rely on for almost 10 years. sadly, this cock-up seems to have been a poorly informed intentional change in default settings.
the browser also has CSS problems under linux - i find pages with a:hover defined, the link text and images jump about in a highly irritating manner
sorry guys - this release completely sucks!
1) I don't mind it. I'm indifferent about it. None of the fox themes have been nice to look at. Most have been nothing but eyesores, and this one is no different. If you don't like it, change the theme. QuBranch, Phoenity, GrayModern, and Mostly Crystal are nice. And the Gnome theme, for you l00nix folks out there. 2) If you get suckered in by phishing, you shouldn't be allowed on the intertron. And like someone else said before me, at least it has anti-phishing, unlike the previous version and a good number of alternative browsers floating around. 3) I don't see how the options dialog has changed much. It's actually pretty sparse compared to most other browsers I've used. Extremely user-friendly. 4) 95% of my 20+ extensions worked on release day. The ones that didn't, I hacked at the rdf file - and guess what, they work perfectly. It's been out for 2 days - give people time. My only gripe is Tabbrowser Preferences is totally busted and useless now. Could be the fault of the author, could be the fault of the browser. But it'll be fixed. The author is working on it right now. 5) I've had a couple browser windows up since 2.0 was officially released on mozilla.org, each with several tabs. Some even with flash ads in them. No leak. Whatsoever. 1.5 took up more memory over time, actually. 6) Don't use yahoo search, mail, or anything else on it, so I don't know. But none of the dozens of sites I frequent almost daily have CSS issues. Some even look better with the few CSS2 additions 2.0 made. 7) Hasn't frozen or crashed once on me after *several* hours of use and constantly being left open. 8) Never used the browser history sidebar, never will. Don't see the point. So you could very well be right. The only thing I use related to history is the new "recently closed tabs" thinger, and it has worked flawlessly so far. 9) Didn't really use RSS in 1.5, but I tried out live bookmarks in 2.0 and I rather like them. If you don't like them, use Sage. It kicks arse. I don't see a single reason to *not* upgrade to 2.0. And I could give you about 100 why you should upgrade. Very likely sound like a fanboy, but I'm far from it. I simply use an app if I like it - and 2.0 is the best browser out right now, hands down.
Not to be a smart ass, but it seems to be just fine so far. Maybe there were compiler issues with other platforms
...but FF 2.0 works fine for me One thing that this list doesn't point out is that 1.5 has not auto-updated itself to 2.0. WHICH MEANS YOU DON'T HAVE TO USE IT! Other than the memory problem and a few glitches, this list doesn't have much to go on about.
now a little to the left
Anyone know why this line in my userChrome.css no longer works in FF2?
menu[label="Go"] {
display: none !important;
}
Cheers.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I had posted a few ideas to the Firefox 3.0 brainstorming wiki with some suggestions that would improve general stability. But this other guy went to town and really did a good job of explaining some really needed changes:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/User:Csreis
Well, there are more options than Internet Explorer or Firefox. Opera for instance. I myself hate the fact that if you specify firefox to always open links in a new tab, and not a new instance, it still now and then opens up a new browserwindow. :) :)
Amaya is a browser made by the w3consortium. I haven't tried it yet, but a browser made by them, well I'd expect it to adhere all the standards
You've also still got Netscape but that browser hasn't been a serious competitor for a while now'but it's still available if someone'd like to try
I'm afraid I'm still an opera fanboy. Like the looks, like the usage, like that it's crossplatform, like that it had tabbed browsing back in 1999.
If I had the time I would've tried amaya and would have written something more like a review, but I'm afraid I'm quite short on time at the moment.
Manuals are your last resort only
I think the article and a lot of the posts can be summarized as basically saying "Waaah!!! It's different, bring things back the way they were!!! I can't handle change!".
If you really don't like shiny new things, you shouldn't have upgraded to Fx2.0 the day it was releasd. Wait a couple of weeks, or better still wait until they release 2.0.0.1 or whatever and then upgrade.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
here's where Opera comes in.
Agreed. When I found Firefox I fell on it with enthusiasm. I still like the user interface. But it seemed to grab memory and cpu time and seize up the system. I questioned this on user forums, and the answers (if any) would tell me I don't have enough RAM. Now I use Opera, and don't have these problems.
-wb-
I've got 15 tabs open plus the error console and two view:source windows. It has been open since yesterday evening. Firefox is currently using 475MB with a peak of 485MB and a VM size of 635MB.
I do, though, have 40 extensions installed (all but a couple new ones I do actually use. The new ones I haven't really gotten around to testing out yet (such as analytics)). I also have 6 extensions which were rendered incompatable with 2.0, though most of those would duplicate features which are now integrated (session saver and such). Of those unduplicated ones, I only used one regularly (antipagination).
This is typical usage for me. 2.0 has actually fared better in memory usage and stability for me than 1.5.
The incompatibility isn't the fault of Firefox's developers. It's the fault of your extensions' developers.
Opera's only free as in beer.
Galeon's what I'm using. It does use Gecko, though, so you still need to install Firefox.
Wikileaks, no DNS
just to add to the hordes of poster already posting their experience:
I had been dissing FF2 since its new features were first made public. Just to name a few, X close button on each tab, the anti-phishing feature, and other things that i considered a bloat-factor.
But yesterday I decided to make a go for it after testing FF2 on other PC since RC1. I dled 2.0 and to my surprise, most extensions and themes already have updates available. That includes CloneWindow by Pikey, which I considered key feature that I needed when I jumped from IE years ago.
Also, I found out ways to disable things I didn't want, namely the close tab buttons, which I changed to 1.5 style.
On usage, loading the program felt faster, although loading some websites felt a little slower compared to 1.5..
all in all, I think the upgrade to 2.0 is worthwhile, if you take the time to tailor it to your wants n needs.
Amaya: If you think some W3C standards are painful just wait until you try their browser!
Your comment motivated me to go and register an account. Well done.
I typically have 20 or so tabs open, and 1.5GB of memory in my machine. Firefox normally consumes more than half of that.
There have been several cases where I've gone away for a couple of days, leaving Firefox open. I've come back to find Firefox has consumed all my memory, 2GB of swap, and the OOM-killer has gone nuts nuking everything in sight.
The problem is evidently fairly widespread, but it does sound like quite a few people don't experience it. I wonder if perhaps it is accentuated by pages that auto-refresh, like Gmail (which I normally have open).
I've found that lots of pages saved to disk with prior versions of Firefox do not for some reason render properly anymore with version 2. Also a zombie Firefox process was taking 99% percent of my CPU earlier today. I haven't had the well documented problems with the previous releases, but for me at least, this version is proving troublesome.
Before installing FF 2 on my Windows XP box I'd heard of "improvements" in tab behavior that I suspected would annoy me (e.g., "close" buttons on individual tabs instead of just one; which at least can be un-improved through about:config). However, what I didn't expect is that there would be new bugs in the tab implementation that would affect how I read Slashdot's daily "headlines" email on Gmail.
In the "old" days, when I clicked a link in the Slashdot-headlines email message, FF 1.5 opened a new window and shifted the focus to it. (Incidentally, this is also what MS IE 7 does so I presume this is the intended behavior.)
FF 2.0, in contrast, opens a new tab and shifts the focus to that tab. Each of these behaviors irritates me.
And the buggy thing about this is that in Options -> Tabs I have set "New pages should be open in..." to "A new window" (not a new tab) and UN-ticked "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately."
In FF 1.5, I could work around the focus shift with a simple ALT-tab and, moreover, separate windows fit the way I read the Slashdot headlines. Separate tabs do not.
So, in sum, as much as I love FF and prefer it over IE (and as much as I love the new spellchecking feature--which, incidentally, just marked "spellchecking" as an error), I may have to back-step to the almost-latest version.
Jeremy Butler
www.ScreenSite.org
www.TVCrit.com
(taken from here)
1. Not true. The theme is perhaps not consistent, but this does not matter to the casual user who downloads Firefox for use on 1 platform.
2. Not true. Antiphishing technology privacy issues are clearly noted when the user ENABLES the (by default DISABLED) feature. This makes it completely by users' choice, and defeats this issue completely.
3. Little bit true. There are certain options hidden which should be visible. But it's a choice made towards new users, not towards old users that still remember releases such as Firefox 0.9. So it's actually a good thing. And user interfaces tend to address the most common denominator anyway, which is also a proper thing to do.
4. Little bit true, but to be expected ! Extensions access XPCOM-exported functionality. It is by default that many of the XPCOM interfaces are not stable - this is known to developers and this is clearly noted next to the interfaces you want to develop upon. If extensions use unstable interfaces they know that it could break in future releases. Short story: this issue is no issue at all.
5. 50% True. But this is a bug that could just as well be fixed in Firefox 2.0.1. Memory leaks are however not easy to fix, and it is by no means sure that it would be even fixed in 3.0, so pure speculation to make this an issue not to upgrade to 2.0.
6. True. But this also represents a transitional problem that will most likely be fixed (or worked around) in the 2.0-branch
7. Unverifyable. The author refers to some blog that mentions presumably a Firefox 2.0 RC3-version. But there are no details on the setup of the person's Firefox, nor on the extensions he had installed (see 4). This makes this issue unverifyable and strikes it off this list.
8. True. Again not something major that couldn't be fixed in the 2.0 branch - have patience.
9. Untrue. The article author states that RSS feed handling takes a step backwards - in the linked article there is no mention of this: it says that RSS feed handling has never been so good in Firefox as it is in IE7. This is a feature that Firefox may be lacking, but as it has never been present in earlier releases this is NO REASON not to upgrade. Stricken, your honour.
My judgement from the issues he stated ? He mentions 2 issues that would qualify as a "no-go" for upgrade, the history bar and the CSS issues. But both these issues are minor in that they could be fixed in the 2.0 branch. I clearly show why the other issues are not so true, and sometimes clearly dead-wrong. In my eyes, the author is writing a big fat troll, and slashdot should know better than to post this. Now the damage has been done, this discussion can quickly be silenced, hopefully.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
The well known memory leak issue, which causes the Firefox browser to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM, eventually leading to sluggish performance and crashes, has been carried over into yet another generation. This is despite an enormous amount of public commentary and user requests for resolution prior to release of a new version of Firefox
For how long major applications like Firefox will have memory leaks? can we please stop using C altogether and use a decent garbage-collected language like D (there are other languages around, but D is as close to C as possible)...
Firefox is actually written in javascript, isn't that a modern language? The libraries firefox uses are written in C++, would you really want to rewrite them all in a functional language? Would use of a functional language provide any tangible benefit to a web browser? The OCAML garbage collector isn't particularly suitable for a multithreaded application, Haskell and Erlang are your main contenders.
Good luck!
I haven't even tried 2.0 and stick to 1.5 because of all the new features in 2.0 that interest me, I have them all through extensions. Mainly Tab Mix Plus and SessionSaver. And it works fine.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
You just got troll'd!
Does anyone know how to override the plugin-search on Firefox?
I'm running 64 bit, and would like to be able to use the standalone Flash player, rather than the plugin.
Wikileaks, no DNS
NT4, W2k, and XP, are all capable of up times of at least a month. The reason I know i s that I run optmisation jobs that run for two weeks at a time, and I would get very cross if the OS crashed in the middle of one.
Still, we've come a long way from Mac 7.5 which would crash twice a day.
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
---- ---- 1.8 15.9 344576 192924 ? Sl Oct26 60:26
That's much better than it was in 1.5. I don't think this guy knows what he's talking about.
Yes, FF1.5 displays the XML correctly (as the authors intended) while FF2 completely ignores the linked XSL stylesheet and applies a style of it's own. This is clearly wrong, providing a default style is one thing but overriding the authors styling is something entirely different. I no longer have time to run nightlies myself but how could this have ever gotten through QA?
If you spent hours hacking XSLT and CSS to style your feeds then this issue alone is a valid reason to tell others to avoid upgrading.
Opera beats firefox in every way.
And it works out of the box, no dodgy extensions needed.
... is opera 9
my utility belt tells me its to the bar batman
I switched and have been happy as a puppy. Let's go through the list:
1) The old theme was already too bulky. The LittleFox theme I installed in its place upgraded without a hitch.
2) If you don't like the feature, you can turn it off..
3) The old Options box was "confusing, poorly designed, and illogically hid important features" too - it's just a matter of getting used to it.
4) I have more than a dozen extensions installed. Seeing as I had upgrade problems in the past (even from 1.5xx -> 1.5yy) - which usually were resolved within days - I was a bit anxious, but alas, all extensions immediately had updated version (except for one I played with myself, obviously); two I had to reinstall manually, the rest upgraded automatically
5) FF1.5x hogged up 200-300 MB on my system. Now is only hogs up around 100MB. In any case, why would a bug 'carried over' be a reason 'not' to upgrade?
6),7),8) didn't happen on my box. CPU hogging actually went down.
9) Webpages (e.g. Protopage or Google homepage) or dedicated software handle RSS feeds far better than 2.0 or 1.5. Both implementations suck - why revert if there are much better alternatives?
The thing that bothered me the most with 1.5x was the memory leak and the accompanying CPU hogging. Both issues virtually disappeared since I upgraded to FF2.0.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
on Windows the preferences is in the Tools menu
on Linux its on the edit menu
on Windows middle click on a tab closes it
on Linux it opens a url
surely it would make logical sense to work and look the same across all platforms
having different actions and moving menu options about is just retarded
$this->space($intentionally!=$BLANK);
do please note the lc(t) of $this.
Why UNIX?
Developers of FireFox have done an excellent job. Day one I installed the Cat Thief Mostly Crystal theme and set the necessary options to disable prefetch - (Still on dial-up here). Complete setup took less than 1/2 hour to find all information, install, and configure the 2.0 setup. Useability has improved nicely. I have seen one freeze which required me to kill the task - Java related I think. The entire session restored nicely. All in all the update is really appreciated and I would recommend it to all Mozilla or FireFox 1.5.x users.
about:config > new boolean > extensions.checkcompatibility > False That works for fixing most of your extensions...and I only have 1 that doesn't work - Google send to phone. actually...I don't have ANY of the problems listed. It's probably some buggy extensions...
editing a twiki web page and saving it used to be:But in 2.0 'access keys' is now either removed or overridden - either way, I think it's a bad change
This one reason is enough for me to skip this release
This argument is unclear. One of the antiphishing modes uses a blacklist and the other submits URLs to Google. So it at worst is not both weak and privacy-violating at the same time.
1 0/sometimes_its_j.html and http://www.squarefree.com/2006/10/28/san-diego-fir efox-party/ for how it could be improved. But I'm willing to attribute that to being rushed rather than being sneaky.
It's still a blacklist if it's on the server. Blacklists are limited in effectiveness against targeted attacks or phishing pages distributed across a botnet.
I'm not sure why the author of the article is unhappy with this. The arguments I've heard are (1) advertising that Firefox includes anti-phishing may make users complacent in checking the URL before entering a password, and (2) it would be nice if Firefox could also (or instead) use some heuristics to detect things that look like phishing sites.
I don't think (1) makes having blacklist-based anti-phishing worse than not having it at all. (2) is wishful thinking given CSS and JavaScript.
But IMO, browser makers can't rely on blacklist-based protection. We need to improve the UI for authenticating sites (e.g. highlight part of the hostname in the address bar) and should do things to educate users (make sure they know what a hostname is, how a phishing attack works, and why relying on The Law to protect them will not work).
(Of course, given that Google doesn't actually do anything with this data other than feed it into their anti-phishing database, I don't consider it a violation of privacy regardless, but we have options precisely because not all users will feel this way.)
That's good to know. Google loves to sell other aggregate data, so it's nice to know that they've promised to keep this data extra-private.
It does seem suspicious that in the "server-side blacklist" mode, we're sending Google much more data than they need in order to implement blacklist-based anti-phishing. See comments on http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2006/
The shareholder is always right.
I upgraded during RC2, and have had no odd problems as of yet. If anything, it is more stable then 1.5 and uses less memory. I could not give up the spell-check. I had always copied text to word to check and then copied back, but this is so much more convenient! Fix whatever little bugs there are, and go on, don't revisit the past. Bryan
You guys are about 2 hours late with this article :(
Seriously though to me it's the same as my previous firefox (came from 1.8 -> 2.0) plus a few graphical tweaks and this nifty spellchecker. All my extensions updated fine, and so far so good.
Apologists for Firefox don't help make it better. They rushed this realease out to try and steal back some media thunder from the recent IE 7 release. Firefox is great, but there are some important issues including the ones you list a 'not true' that need to be addressed ASAP. They should have been addressed before it was even released.
For every one of you fools who says "Firefox 2 isn't buggy!", I can find ten to fifteen people who have had serious problems with it. I'm happy that it's working well for you, but for most people it has been a relatively major disaster.
I have to wonder why Firefox still can't implement extensions correctly, years after first being released. Take GIMP, for instance. It also allows for extensions written in Scheme, yet still runs fine and with a relatively good level of memory consumption even when 80 to 100 extensions are being used. The Linux kernel is similar. It often runs fine with hundreds of modules installed.
Yet here's Firefox, becoming very unstable after installing not more than two or three extensions. And by the time you get near ten, you become witness to guaranteed crashes and excessive memory consumption. Why can other open source projects implement extensions correctly, while Mozilla cannot?
As far as I'm concerned, a bug in an extension is a bug with Firefox itself. There is no reason why a faulty extension should rocket up the memory usage, or even outright crash the browser. Firefox should be able to isolate extensions in such a way that they can't harm or take down the entire Firefox process. If a faulty userland process crashes the Linux kernel, we rightfully declare the bug to be with the kernel itself. It should be no different for extensions that crash or resource starve Firefox. The problem is with Firefox.
84 MB for just browsing 20-30 pages is a memory leak,, on the other hand IE 7.0 seems to have fixed the memory leak bug with the ActiveX,, well done FireFox...
1. It's worth fifty crashes just to have a spell check in the browser. Suddenly I'm spelling things correctly and that can't be a bad thing.
2. It's likely that there will be a 2.0.1 or something by Wednesday or so (soon, at least) whereas if this were from a closed source company, the wait would be much longer.
And a third thought just for the hell of it:
3. It's fun to be out on the edge. If I was doing this for business, I would likely stay with 1.5 as my workhorse and just play with 2.0. That's what I would do with ANY new software.
Vote Democratic on Tuesday, Nov 7. Checks and Balances turn out to be a good thing after all.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
It's a pity there's no good Gecko (or for that matter KHTML) based browser for Windows other than Firefox, because XUL has a huge potential for exploits, and on top of that the mechanism for installing XPI files is just begging for attacks (and in fact there's been at least one vulnerability fixed there).
On the Mac there's a plethora of browsers using both engines. Why on Windows is there only Firefox and KMelion?
Simply put, I use FF because I like it more than any others. I switched to FF2 because I wanted to, because playing with new toys is what appeals to me.
IE7 is installed on my PC, but I dislike it's tab configuration overall.
Opera is nice but I just can't seem to really like it.
Firefox may have rare problems (I haven't seen any), but find any application anymore that doesn't have SOMETHING wrong with it, ya know?
I've been using Firefox 2 since it was released and I have had not problem, no crashes or anything bad to report. I have not even noticed any slowdown when typing in forms. I've noticed a lot of people are pushing Opera as a replacement to Firefox and IE. Well for IE yes, I can certainly see that. But for Firefox, I personally love Firefox, and one reason that really makes me love it it the ability to add extensions. I do Web Development for a living and I have a few extensions that really make life easier. As far as I know there is no ability for extensions in Opera. I know they have the Opera Widgets but there not as good and they are not part of the broswer window, they open in a separate window so then you have to switch back and forth, I don't like to work that way, so I will stick with my tried and true Firefox!!!.
Here's my extension list with the compatible first. As you can see, the important stuff is compatible and the somewhat trivial ones aren't. Adblock Filterset.G Updater Adblock Plus BugMeNot CustomizeGoogle Download Statusbar FireFTP Forecastfox Enhanced IE Tab MinimizeToTray Mouse Gestures Searchbar Autosizer Stylish And those not compatible: BetterSearch Paste and Go Tab Mix Plus Update Notifier
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Me three (Firefox RC3 under Gentoo Linux). What I have noticed is that most of the people who complain about memory leaks and crashes seem to be running Windows. Could it be that the Firefox binary is being compiled a certain way, leaving it more susceptible to these sorts of problems? Or is it just that the user is running Windows, which in itself is more susceptible to crashes? Perhaps someone with more technical knowledge on this could opine as to what could be going on.
The seamonkey browser (on linux, that is all I use so can't coment on the other arches) is just better over all as a browser compared to firefox. I don't know why but it's true, and I get a couple dozen tabs running all the time. I keep trying FF ever since it was announced, but stuck with first the original moz suite and now the unofficial but tolerated fork seamonkey. FF is a little better for extensions/plugins(sheer raw numbers available), but I personally don't need that many and what I have always works fine with seamonkey it seems. I also much prefer the old traditional preferences over FF dumbed down preferences. Try it out, you might like it. You don't even need the whole suite, you can get just the browser part if you prefer.
No, they just want to complain about them rather than help track them down.
If you do want to help track down memory leaks, it might be good to start a discussion on MozillaZine.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I've surfed with SeaMonkey every day for several days without closing it, and the memory use still hangs around 100 MB. If you see memory use go up to 300 MB and want the problem fixed, you should describe what you're doing to cause that so the bug can be investigated. Until then, all we can say is that we simply don't see the problem you're referring to.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I am a longtime (longtime) Linux and UNIX user, but after initially being the platform of choice for Webbing (I remember using term + Mosaic long before you could take Windows on the WWW) Linux/Unix of the last few years has been behind IE/Windows in the user interface department, in part because of a browser experience that was just plain *slower* on the same hardware. Anyone who dual-boots has likely experienced this.
With FireFox 2.0's new forward/back method, in combination with SwiftFox and FasterFox (there is a 2.0-compatible version out there, just do a Google search), the Linux browsing experience is finally faster in every way (including back/forward) than the Windows/IE version. It's like the universe has realigned itself according to what always should have been.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
A lot of the Mozilla developers AREN'T volunteers, they work for the Mozilla Corporation/Foundation.
That is not to say I was never burned by a change, e.g. beta 2 failed immediately upon boot up losing all my collected tabs. But it had features I was unwilling to do without. While I have a system monitor GKrellM right next to the browser, when I see high cpu usage the browser no longer locks under 2.0 even at 100%. As for the browser locking, it happened once so far, when I just happened to be downloading the image of Ubuntu 6.10 that was going very slowly. Once completed the hang vanished.
This is not to say that some that those seeing problems are mistaken, however, a perceived disadvantage to some can have no impact on others. Take the case of a complete crash - I really ceased to notice. I recover all my collected tabs upon a restart of the browser. Indeed I purposely turn off my machine with the browser running to make it think it crashed each night.
I really do not know how many tabs I have running routinely. Once when I estimated I was keeping 30 to 40, the actual count was 72. For me, on my system, version 2.0 seems to have better to no worse performance than anything I experienced under 1.5.0.x. I also tend to limit myself to just a few add-ons (extensions) that I consider critical: flashblock (his stopped my hanging problems under 1.5), adblock (nice but less so than blocking flash), noscript (to provide default protection against most Ff historical vulnerabilities) and whatever Mozilla throws in. Most of those listed were available very early in the test cycle.
We use differing machines, components, OSs, etc., hence, the range of problems that can be encountered are immense. Nonetheless, We are mostly being given a gift, which most of us have contributed nothing. Moreover, few of us are even active as a tester (under 1.5, at best, I was a low contributing casual tester). It would be more appropriate to contribute in some fashion before making too vociferous complaints. This is especially true when you only arrive upon the official release. What I really did not like was the assertion that Google's funds were sufficient to perfect this admittedly highly complex tool. Moreover, that is to the standards of and outside critic with extremely refined tastes.
It's a bit ironic that more efforts are expended on the Windows (and perhaps even the Mac) by Mozilla over other Unix and Unix like operating systems that are its root. The conventional wisdom is that Linux people expect freedom to be no cost above all else, whereas Windows people are willing to pay again and again for substandard products thrown at them. Are we standing logic on its head here?
I am more troubled by the sense of entitlement where many of those complaining see themselves as solely receivers of gifts with no sense of responsibility. If you think Firefox 1.5 is better suited to your needs, stay with it. Indeed if you believe IE is superior return to it. However, should you really want a superior product, please deem it a given that you must contribute in some small fashion. Indeed, a complaint as a fully detailed flaw description is a valued contribution, particularly when given in a timely manner. Do not become part of a package cult expecting value goods to fall from the skies - recognize even flawed products were created by someone's efforts. Give them some token of your appreciation. Then your nit picking or major complaints can be taken in a more positive fashion.
1. browse to about:config
2. right click in the page and go to new>boolean
3.enter the following phrase
config.trim_on_minimize
4.Hit enter.
5.select true.
6. restart firefox
Now whenever firefox uses to much ram just minimize it and it will drop to around 20 mb
thanks
I learned long ago from RedHat never to download major dot-zero releases of software and to wait for the .1 (or in the case of RedHat 7.x, the .3) before actually using it. I'm surprised more people don't share this view.
rooooar
Helps with all the crashes.
ducks
"I don't like it. The new Firefox "visual refresh" replaces the previously clean Firefox UI with muddy and vague-looking icons. So, one of the first things I did was download a theme that returned the old Firefox 1.5 look and feel. The built-in phishing protection is truly third-rate. There are two antiphishing options: Mozilla's weak blacklist-based protection (yes, seriously) and Google's antiphishing technology, which is both poorly rated and a privacy nightmare. The new Options dialog box is a miasma of choices, some of which are hidden in embedded tab controls. It's ugly, confusing, and illogical. Firefox doesn't offer many truly neat features. Firefox 2.0 is free, but it's a woefully minor improvement over Firefox 1.5 that suffers from various incompatibility problems, especially with themes and other add-ons. I wouldn't recommend this new version, to be honest. I'll be sticking with Firefox 1.5 at least for now. I recommend you do the same, or switch to the surprisingly solid IE 7.0."
Especially given the positive feedback we've gotten on the redesigned pref window, I'd suggest explicitly naming problems here rather than making such a vague and general argument.
Here's one: since the "new and improved" cookies window was introduced in 1.5, you cannot use the delete key or selection modifier keys (ie, something you can do in selection lists in 99.9% of the applications out there.) This makes deleting a large number of cookies extremely time consuming. Instead of "[shift] click click [delete] [click OK in confirmation" I have to do: "[click] [click delete] [click OK in confirmation] [[repeat FOR EACH COOKIE]]"
Want a solid bug report? MacOS X RC2 had to be restarted on average about 4-5 times a day because I would suddenly find myself unable to type in any forms, the URL bar, and the search bar.
From a "layman" perspective, it seems like if you can't keep the keyboard working, your programming staff is incompetent and/or has misguided priorities. Stop fucking around on all the fancy stuff, and get the basics right. Remember that the whole reason people went with you in the first place is that you were supposedly light and fast- and instead you've added in bloatware we can't remove. If you want to have "phishing protection", great, make it a plugin, even if it's included by default, so that we can remove it.
Please help metamoderate.
0. Make a working directory. I called mine "fff." Make two directories in it: 1 and 2. Now you'll have ~/fff/1 and ~/fff/2. 1. Copy the /chrome/classic.jar file from the OLD firefox version to your ~/fff/1 directory. For example, on Slackware it's /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.7/chrome/classic.jar
2. Unzip the classic.jar file. Copy ~/fff/1/skin/classic/global/browser.css to your ~/fff directory.
3. Now copy the /chrome/classic.jar file from the NEW firefox install to ~/fff/2.
4. Unzip the classic.jar file. Copy ~/fff/browser.css into ~/fff/2/skin/classic/global/browser.css. Just overwrite the file, because it sucks.
5. From ~/fff/2, you can just do zip -f classic.jar. -f is freshen; zip will report that it updated the one file.
6. Copy ~/fff/2/classic.jar back to where you found it in the NEW firefox install. I had mine in /usr/lib/firefox2/chrome/.
7. Restart firefox, and let GTK render your widgets without any ugly gradients!
(reposted AC to avoid whoring)
This doesn't work on Windows. I don't plan on working it out on Windows,because I can't even get firefox 2 to RUN on windows. Anyone else remember the days when the browser was two megs and didn't require an installer? I sure am glad it ships with a pile of .PNG files to ensure it looks unlike the entire rest of my desktop. Thanks, mozilla!
The above mentioned websites.. espn.com and uefa.com
Actually espn loads up in 2 secs, pretty big site indeed.
Now someone said Opera doesn't work with Ebay... huh?
My sympathy goes to the Firefox team though, Opera dev's are
paid more. Stick with FF if you like it, I'm sure they'll fix
those bugs pretty soon.
I've found 2.0 to be a step in the right direction, but for one thing: new tabs take the focus away from your currently-focused tab. This despite NOT checking "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately." Please, bring back the "open tabs in the background" option.
I agree. The change annoyed me too. There is a hidden pref, though. To restore the FF1.5 style single close tab button, set 'browser.tabs.closeButtons' to '3' in about:config.
Unfortunately, often the options really don't go beyond IE and Firefox, in fact we are often lucky if Firefox is an option in the first place. Blame it on the web developer's stubborn refusal to code to standards, the browser developer's stubborn refusal to implement the standards, or the w3's stubborn refusal to come up with timely and satisfactory standards that everyone can use. But in the end, browser compatibility is a pipe dream at best.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
On my machine, Celeron 600 with 384 MB, Firefox will crash daily. It will freeze, CPU will hit 100%, and I can't cancel the task through the ctrl-alt-delete. I must restart my system and begin a new instance of Firefox. Thank goodness that it reloads tabs. But so does the Google add-on. For me, I regret not having a copy of 1.5.0.7 around to restore.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
it might be a good idea to stick with 1.5 until the debut of 3.0
Wait for 3.0? What about 2.1? Feh, what kind of FUD is this.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The developers claimed to have fixed the problem in 1.5.0.5 according to Secunia, but the problem still exists in 2.0 according to SecurityFocus (and I have witnessed the crash personally).
;)
But with Firefox 2.0, all your tabs will be restored for you when you start it back up! That's good enough, right?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I'm actually liking 2.0 a lot, so far. No stability issues (I used to have them with 1.5) and it definitely seems to be faster.
Buuut...that might be because I don't have Tabbrowser Extensions anymore. That fact is really bothering me, too, because I no longer have FF working in single-window mode, and tabs aren't behaving like I expect them to. Bah. Annoyances.
> "SecurityFocus reports an unpatched highly critical vulnerability in Firefox 2.0.
SecurityFocus is lazy, basically.
The testcases that shows the vulnerability in question actually showed two problems -- an exploitable crash and a non-exploitable stack-fills-up crash. The exploitable crash was fixed. The other crash is still being worked on, but it is _not_ a security vulnerability.
Of course if all you do is load the testcase in question, you have no way to know which crash you're hitting. That's where someone who was actually trying to report correctly would put in a little more work, but that's too much to ask of SecurityFocus.
Memory leaks are however not easy to fix
... not to write them in the first place! It saves so much trouble. (A bit like other types of bugs, really.)
Well, some are harder than others, certainly, depending on whether it's a simple coding error (just forgetting a delete) or a totally cocked-up design (throwing raw (ie non-smart) pointers around between threads and not having a clue who ends up owning the memory).
But the easiest way to fix memory leaks is
Personally I gave up writing memory leaks years ago. But, judging from the numbers of other people's memory leaks I get paid to fix, this doesn't (for some reason which I have trouble understanding) appear to be a universally popular approach.
271MB here. 4 tabs open. Running for 26 hours.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
There are certain types of content that use more memory. Firefox 2 seems much better than 1.x for me, but I still notice high memory usage when browsing heavy javascript pages. There are extensions for leak detection in javascript code, but then again isn't javascript supposed to handle memory cleanup for you? It seems like the implementation is not working in these modern browsers or that implementing the higher DOM interactions has caused an inconsistency with the original intent of javascript.
In order to speed up reload times, they keep pages you've left in memory. That is part of the problem. There should be a clear limit on how much memory will be used for a page that you've already left. If it is very large, reload it from disk cache. If it uses flash or java, don't cache it in memory when you leave.
I don't know what the intended behavior is, but this is the perceived behavior I've noticed in Firefox 1.x. On my system, Firefox uses less memory when starting vs IE7 but quickly surpasses it in use.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
www.opera.com
fixed all my firefox woes in one single download!
You can adjust browser.tabs.closeButtons in about:config to get the close button to your liking. Options are on each tab, single button on the right or no close buttons at all.
---John Holmes...
I'm sure I'm not the only student forced to contend with the horror that is WebCTVista and FireFox. Regardless of where I use it -- on my laptop, at school, at home, on my room mate's computer -- FireFox loves to hang, in conjunction with Java. Does 2.0 fix this at all, anyone who knows?
I've been using 2.0 for a few days and I haven't noticed any bugs, crashes or anything like that. I haven't noticed the memory leak problem at all either.
is this a platform-specific issue or set of issues?
I'm noticing that a lot of the complaining posts apparently appear to be from Mac users or Windows users. I myself am using 2.0 and have experienced no problems, but I'm using Linux (Fedora Core 5).
What platform to the majority of Firefox users develop on? I'm sure there's a pile of statistics from bug reporting that show the number of complaints by platform. I'm suddenly feeling that I'd be interested in seeing it. Anyone got a link to a nice chart or graph where this stuff is collected?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This argument is unclear. One of the antiphishing modes uses a blacklist and the other submits URLs to Google. So it at worst is not both weak and privacy-violating at the same time. Going further, however, I would ask for a less vague argument about privacy. Switching on full antiphishing protection displays a warning notice to the user specifying exactly what sorts of data is sent where, and for what purpose. I hardly consider it a violation of privacy to allow people to explicitly choose to send their data somewhere else. (Of course, given that Google doesn't actually do anything with this data other than feed it into their anti-phishing database, I don't consider it a violation of privacy regardless, but we have options precisely because not all users will feel this way.)
The design doc I found on this was very unclear about what the capabilities are, but seems the provider list is extensible through prefs.js. Is that correct? If so, isn't this just a file-write away from being configured to make GET requests containing the full URLs you visit somewhere other than Google, without the user specifically going through the warning notice, or even knowing this is happening? Again, please correct me, but those things seem like client flaws to me... it doesn't really matter how Google handles the data if it's not going to Google, and full URLs shouldn't be going anywhere.
You guys are totally missing the point, of how totally stupid this post is. The whole argument is that you should not upgrade to the new version because it has problems. Umm, I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist to realize that if the new version has problems -- SO DOES THE OLD ONE! In fact, some of those problems were FIXED IN THE NEWER VERSION. I mean what is the point of this message? New cars still use gas, so don't buy a new car? Yes, Firefox has a bug in it, so go use Opera or IE which are don't? Look, if you don't upgrade to the new version, you're stupid. If you go run IE instead of Firefox because of its standards compliance and security record, you're also stupid. Opera, same thing. So, if you want something perfect, don't upgrade. In fact, don't use a computer, because they, and all the software on them, are designed by humans, who write buggy software, and make pointless whiny posts. Like this one, and the one it is responding to.
They really ought to have these settings in a menu.. rather than an obscure option set in a text file.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
An anonymous reader writes (and /. copies into the lead-up to this story):
When I tried the link in the article Secunia points to as an exploit of that bug, I see that it tells me there are two testcases, one of which was fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and 2.0 and the other is called "a denial-of-service condition that is an annoyance, but is not exploitable to compromise your system" but remains unfixed.
This is the more important of the two questions and the easier to answer: security is not the main reason users should switch to any free software web browser (including, but not limited to, Firefox). Users should switch to a free software browser because users should switch to free software, and browsers are an important part of modern-day computing. Despite Mozilla's focus on "open source" values (speedy development, fewer bugs, other values that are designed to appeal chiefly to business managers) which are sometimes simply lies (as one can see with the bug that the anonymous poster brings up here), that's not the reason to value any free software. One ought to value Firefox as a contribution to a free society where people can treat friends as friends and build communities who share without having to do so in the dark in fear of being discovered as copyright infringers. Mozilla won't tell you this; they're too busy pushing aside software freedom for its own sake to talk about this. It's unfortunate they have not taken any time to teach their audience this while Microsoft worked on MSIE7. Ironically, software freedom is the one thing Firefox will always have over MSIE for as long as Firefox remains free software and MSIE remains proprietary; technical features can be reimplemented and even patented to prevent competition, but software freedom is something no proprietor can deliver. Catering to businesses who distribute free software can be helpful but such interests remain shallow.
Digital Citizen
>users are reporting bugs, widening memory leaks, unexpected instability, poor compatibility, and an overall experience that is inferior to that offered by prior versions of the browser... Do you think MS has infiltrated Firefox with its folks or its just that firefox programmers can also make mistakes...
Can someone explain this to me w/o modding me -1:
.9)-- most of the comments were about how firefox is just BETTER. Users were sold on it based on it's merits. Now, maybe because of IE7, FF promoters here apparently aren't satisfied with these arguments and instead resort to these misguided tactics.
Why is it that every comment in this page that compares IE favorably to FF is modded -1?
Why is it that every comment in this page that mentions problems w/ FF like memory leaks, crashes, etc, is either not modded up or is modded down?
Slashdot users pride themselves as a bit more informed that the dumbass NOOBs, so why are we incapable of holding 2 opposing viewpoints at the same time? Isn't that supposed to be the mark of intelligence?
Nobody has ever accused Slashdot of having intelligence, but I think the average user would consider themselves to be a notch or 2 above average.
It just seems like people that have the political agenda of advancing FireFox thinks that the best way to do that is to hide any criticism and treat any suggestions to convert to IE7 as totally unacceptable.
When firefox debuted--and I've been running it since then (since v
What I'm saying is, we used to convince people to switch by giving them MORE INFORMATION. Now, it seems, the accepted tactic is trying to play-up FF strengths and hide FF criticism.
That's sad to me.
Go ahead, mark me -129 offtopic flamebait troll, but anyone reading this page knows that what I'm saying is true.
I use Firefox on all of my home machines, and keep IE as the standard on the 300+ work PCs I control. Why? Because all of my home machines have 1GB of memory or better while at work 256-512MB is more the standard. You can bury your head in the sand all you want, but the fact is that IE6 uses less memory than both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0. I find it interesting, by the way, that the Firefox developer above states that they've fixed the most egregious memory leaks in 1.5. In trying to find a fix for the problem, this is the first indication I've seen of the Firefox developer community even admitting that 1.5 HAD memory leak problems. As someone stated earlier, this denial that there's problem only does the browser a diservice. So, I have four machines running Firefox and three hundred running IE. Multiply those numbers times numerous similar corporate environments and ask yourself how big of an impact the memory problem has on adoption?
The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.
Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.
I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.
Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.
I didn't know Windows users frequented Slashdot. Having all configuration done through text files is the One True Way.
Skipping the 2.0 release and waiting for the 3.0 release sounds about as stupid as skipping the 1.0 release and waiting for the 2.0 release.
It's a point release with new features. 2 million downloads in 24 hours. That's a lot of beta testers.
Who didn't expect problems? Since when did point releases have a perfect track record? I'm sure it'll be fine long before version 2.5.
I've had a problem since upgrading, but it has nothing to with the quality of Firefox. Each tab has it's own button to close it now, instead of one button on the right. I find myself unconsciously moving my mouse button to the top right when I want to close a tab now. Is there an add on that brings back this functionality to those amongst us who don't like change?
...
Stability wise, 2.0 has been rock solid for me. It seems a bit more polished, but then again that could just be a placebo effect of seeing a shiny "2.0" on my software. So far so good!
What platform are you running on? I've never seen FF go above 150MB on Windows and I tend to keep it open for days. Under Linux, the memory usage that you see includes shared libraries so you can't be sure that it's all being used by FF. Still, I have 13 tabs open (that I've been using, I didn't just throw open a bunch of tabs to see what would happen) and that number is at 127MB.
None of those reasons is enough to say "Wait until version 3." That's insane. Unless Firefox has a revamped versioning system now, 3 is going to be a long way off. Wait until 2.1? 2.2? Maybe more reasonable. Let them fix the problems they caused, but that doesn't mean wait for another major release.
Posted from Safari 2.0.4 -- Not waiting until Safari 3 because I can't middle click to close a tab.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Try opening this link in a new tab in Firefox 2 with Firefox maximised and other tabs open - http://uk.games-workshop.com/download/download.htm ?/spacemarines/deathwatch/assets/deathwatch.pdf
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
In the 1.x line, the flip side of using this setting is that when you de-minimize FF it takes 30 seconds or so for the window to reappear as it reacquires the 400 MB it discarded when you minimized. Has this behavior changed?
Well, I've had it open for almost 48 hours now ... surfing an average of 7 tabs open at a time (8, right now), doing HTTP uploads and all kinds of other crazy crap ...
Firefox is using 95MB. Thunderbird is using 100MB.
Here's a good rebuttal to most of the points in this article.
My friend and I have been trying to get the FF devs to even comment about 2 nasty "bugs" in FF2.0. First one happens quite often when you download .DMG-files. As by default Apache doesn't have mimetype for .dmg, it sends them as plain/text. FF doesn't like to open a 1-1000MB text document and usually just freezes unless you are fast enough to click stop button. This could be fixed either by allowing user to define custom mimetypes for specific file extensions or if FF would popup a dialog confirming that you really really want to display this huge text document. The second "bug" is very annoying. My friend likes to keep files in the FF download window until he has had time to verify that the download succeeded and to delete the older version of the download (as he downloads new versions of programs quite often). He does this while downloading multiple things and often when he is clicking the remove download button, a download gets complited and as the complited download bar is smaller that active download one with progress bar, the downloads list shifts upwards and he clicks and removes a wrong file. And as there is sometimes second or so lag between clicking and FF to actually processing the click, this thing happens even more often.
Perhaps majority of users are using download managers or something, but it is kinda silly that FF cannot provide working download functionality out of the box. I guess I must wait for FF3.0 to get these problems fixed.
- Raynet --> .
At about 70Mb here after a few hours, with eight tabs still open.
You using any extensions? That seems to be the first thing to check. I've currently got Adblock Plus, AiOS, DownThemAll, Launchy, Nightly Tester Tools, Nuke Anything Enhanced, Pearl Crescent Saver Basic, QuickJava, Tab Clicking Options and User Agent Switcher installed. Some tab extensions seem to be amongst the biggest culprits.
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
It's just an effort to counter astro turfing. Firefox does not have public relations firms, firefox does not spend millions on advertising, firefox does not pay thinktanks to write articles about how evil proprietary software is, firefox does not pay people to hang out at internet sites and hype their product and denigrate the competition.
Firefox does have fans though and they are defending their project. Like all open source projects it's a community driven affair and the community hangs out here.
If you want constant, uncritical praise of MS and hate for everything open source, SUN, Java, sony etc I would reccomend you hang out at gotdotnet. At least here they don't delete posts.
evil is as evil does
I know I will be modded down as a troll as everytime I mention Opera in /. but here I come anyway:
Opera handles memory better than IE7 and FF1.5/2.0. It doesn't has memory leaks there, and the memory is put to an use: when you go to the previous page, or the fifth previous page in a tab, it is rendered instantly, unlike the other two browsers. And you can configure how much RAM memory do you wish to use as cache, no need to use 512MB if you only want to use 64MB RAM.
Ohhh and 6b) Opera passes the ACID test!
Being fair, 9b) I have to agree, IE7 RSS reader rocks.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Anyone have problems with the display of FireFox 2.0. I mouse over the tabs multiple times with out clicking on them and they go nuts. Displaying icons from the toolbar in them, messing up the site icons etc....Very strange. Anyone have a fix??
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=513737 5&size=lg
There's just no excuse for this kind of memory usage, and no I didn't visit any flash intensive / video pages.
I was surfing news sites, closed windows after using them.
Some parts of the API are broken in FF2. For instance, there is a new event dispatch system that causes a custom handler for the onpopuphiding event (the documented way to handle your own custom menu being hidden) to crash the browser. I reported this bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3493 14) during the beta process, but it hasn't yet been fixed. This kind of problem can be worked around after some hours of debugging, but I think Microsoft places a higher value on backwards compatibility than Mozilla does. It's also annoying that there's not really any official API for extending tab functionality, so you end up having to use internal variable names that could change at any time.
(I am the author of a very simple extension called Tabs Menu).
I haven't had a CRASH as it were, yet. But I HAVE noticed it slows down really bad on BIG pages with lots of pictures on it ... And then after I went back to Google's page .. it was still slow.
I did have a crash, but it was related to Media Player Classic...
= Grow a brain...
Under certain circumstances (hadn't bothered to replicate it exactly yet), after you Ctrl-T to open a new tab, the URL bar is either not focused, or is focused and has a cursor, but typing produces no effect. So an annoying extra click is needed.
.0 release. So the solution is to wait for 3.0? A much more drastic change? How about 2.0.1 or 2.1.1 - I know, crazy talk!
So far, this has not been a show-stopper. Oh, and the option to turn off the ridiculous new tab behaviour should be in the Options, not just about:config.
About the list - most of the legitimate complaints are about the kinds of things you would expect from a
(can't really comment on the various memory issues, I usually have 4 or 5 windows with 20+ tabs, which variously uses 300-400MB; doesn't seem like all that much, all things considered)
sic transit gloria mundi
When I saw 2.0 had Session Restore, which can furthermore be turned on for regular app restarts [*] as well as the default crash/software upgrade, I decided it was time for me to switch from Safari. I've been waiting for a browser with this feature approximately forever. First, because software has bugs, and browsers (even good ones) crash. Second, because sometimes you want to restart your browser for other reasons (OS update that requires restart, memory leak in browser, etc). It's very nice to be able to do so with the knowledge your 17 windows and 42 tabs will be restored when you re-launch.
I'd be interested in knowing of (Mac) browsers other than Firefox 2.0 that do this trick, if any. I'm sorry Safari doesn't do this since I generally prefer its design. I nag Apple periodically about it through their feedback page, for all the good that does.
[*] set browser.startup.page to 3.
Worthless FUD Created by OpenSource Haters and Greedy Microsoft Slaves.
Still happens in 2.0 for me.
;)
Er, clue up to you, too!
everything in moderation
That's great except for the fact that, without those "unstable" extensions, FF is pathetically lacking in features conpared to Opera, Maxthon, and even IE7.
everything in moderation
I'm sorry, English is not my first language so I must ask: does "culprit" mean "the thing that provides a minimum acceptable set of features and prevent sucking compared to the alternatives?"
everything in moderation
Four tabs? Do you ever use your browser? Does 67MB per webpage/tab seem reasonable to you?
everything in moderation
FF is written mostly in C++, not C. That aside:
1) Lots of the leak problems are caused by extensions, which are written in a memory-managed language called Javascript.
2) Much of the core leak problem is caused by a performance feature in Firefox which causes it to hold references to objects longer than the user thinks is needed.
Bottom line is no higher-level language would resolve either of these things. The browser code says to hold on to objects, so it does. The addon code permits extensions to create objects in memory and hold on to them, so they do.
Memory managed languages do not prevent programmers from writing code that holds on to objects in memory on purpose.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
WHA WHA WHA WHA! It's 6 rational FAGS!!! get it right or pay the price.
- Wolf Bearclaw
Video at 10.
With it and IE7 running behind it, it uses extremely low memory (4.5MB's with 15 tabs open), has fast fixes to security problems and includes a very decent community of plug-in and theme creators. I do believe it has had less security holes than Firefox as well (according to Securina), but that might just be a side effect of security through obscurity.
This was a response by "Critical Thinker" on the same blog with the list.
1- If you don't like the theme, you are completely free to switch to one of your choosing at http://addons.mozilla.org./
2- Marginal anti-phishing support is still safer than none at all, which is what users would have if they stuck with the 1.5 line.
3- The options dialog had to be redesigned in order to make room for all the new features. If you wish to give up anti-phishing, spell-checking, and session restore just to get the old options dialog back, so be it. Of course, real pros use about:config.
4- Extensions are third-party add-ons, and Mozilla has no obligation to ensure support for any of them. In fact, it's wiser for Mozilla to maintain the current setup, because automatically allowing extensions from earlier in Firefox history might cause bugs and even holes in newer versions. However, if you NEED those unsupported extensions, you are fully within your rights to unzip them yourself and make them compatible.
5- You are correct that the memory leak remains an issue, and it in fact will likely not be fixed until version 3.0. However, memory has actually been improved on the 2.0 branch, and you're only hurting your readers by making them stay on the 1.5 branch.
6- The Gecko engine is superior in standards compliance to the 1.5 branch. Any sites that don't work are a result of faulty designers designing them for compatibility with Internet Explorer. Since Microsoft has no desire to fix this issue, the only way to fight this is by encouraging further adoption of alternate browsers.
7, 8- These are actually valid concerns. Nice.
9- While the opinions of one blog is nice, the RSS support of 2.0 is fully functional as it is. In fact, more reputable sources (such as Wired) have noted that the RSS is actually superior to Internet Explorer 7 in that Firefox 2.0 offers even more options to the user for RSS than IE7.
Trivial concerns are no reason to avoid upgrading to superior security, memory management, and features. Have a nice day.
I'm not going to start debugging memory leaks in firefox. This is something that is better left to firefox developers and testers. I'm not a tester, I'm a user. I use the version of firefox that I installed with apt-get in ubuntu. There might be programs I actively use and care about that I would bother submitting detailed bug-reports about. Firefox is not one of them.
However, 490 MB is completely ridiculous. If the developers feel that going hunting for memory leaks is not of any importance, then that is their decision. I'm not paying for firefox, and therefore I can't vote with my money. But if they care even a tiny little bit about putting out a halfway decent product, then plugging memory leaks should be near the top of their priority list. If I remember correctly, this was one of the main reasons netscape scrapped the development of their previous browser. History repeats itself.
You must be new here. =P
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
We use an absoloute abomination of an intranet site to create / transfer / delete users on our network here at work.
)
This website is thoroughly incompatible with FFox (poorly designed) - but works fine with ie.
So I fire up ietab and bravo I can still use ff @ work.
Anyhow they've recently "broken" ietab with a bug (http://bugzilla.mozdev.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15486
Sadly FF2.0 is not compatible with OLD versinos, only new versions, so if I switch to the new FF2, I use the new "broken" ietab and I can't do my work.
I know most of you don't care but it may affect a small amount of users here.
Still I've got 2.0 @ home, seems fine - I'm sure these bugs people are whining about will likely be fixed in the upcoming weeks.
You appear to have missed the GP's point, and provided a perfect example of what they are complaining about.
Most intelligent people try to avoid sites that are blindly pro-anything. When we try to escape from the pro-MS zealots, we don't want to end up listening to pro-Mozilla zealots like you creating false dichotomies: Just because the GP doesn't claim that Firefox 2.0 is the second coming of Jesus does not imply that they want to go stick their tongue right down Bill Gates' trousers.
If you really believe FF is better and want to convince people, then do so with open, intelligent dialog; not by employing the same BS that other vendors use. Mozilla will never win a propaganda war with Microsoft. Those who try do more damage than good to the Mozilla projects.
Firefox will only move forwards if we acknowledge its shortcomings and make it even better.
I personally use Firefox almost exclusively. I think it is a great browser. I want it to get better.
"Just because the GP doesn't claim that Firefox 2.0 is the second coming of Jesus does not imply that they want to go stick their tongue right down Bill Gates' trousers."
Nobody claims that FF is the second coming. Nobody. On the other hand we have had enough gripes about memory usage which odd enough only seems to effect a small minority of users and which is most likely caused by odd extensions.
In other words anybody who claims that firefox uses "too much memory" (whatever that means) is lying. It's not the fault of the firefox team.
"If you really believe FF is better and want to convince people, then do so with open, intelligent dialog; not by employing the same BS that other vendors use."
That's a stupid thing to say. Why would you not use a tactic proven to work and use a tactic proven not to work instead? Advertising firms, corporations, PR firms, political parties, psychologists, marketing gurus etc have done billions of dollars worth of research to figure out how to best convince people to buy your product. Why would you completely ignore all that? We should take advantage of all that research and use the exact same tactics used by corporations and political parties.
"Firefox will only move forwards if we acknowledge its shortcomings and make it even better."
Yes sure whatever.
"I personally use Firefox almost exclusively. I think it is a great browser. I want it to get better."
Me too. Oddly enough I seem to be alone in thinking that bitching on slashdot and pissing on the firefox developers, and yelling about how IE7 is sooo much better will not help one iota towards making FF better.
evil is as evil does
I use OSX. When I hold the curser down on a link the pop up menu which provides a range of options "Open Link In New Window" "Send Link" etc. no longer appears! Very frustrating. I've gone back to version 1.5.0.7
Weird, you seem quite fluent in both English and bullshit...
Tab Mix Plus is a decent replacement for Tabbrowser Extensions, although neither its session-saving ability nor the very leaky Session Saver are required any more unless you want to store sets of tabs (and bookmark folders are the obvious solution there.)
Isn't [holding 2 opposing viewpoints at the same time] supposed to be the mark of intelligence?
No, haven't you heard? The mark of intelligence is the ability to compress Wikipedia efficiently.
The new tab design is really a step backwards. There used to be a close [X] icon in extreme left that has now been replaced by a drop down icon. Earlier, if I had 15 tabs open, all I had to do was keep my mouse pointed at one place and keep clicking away. Now I have to seek the close icon for each tab. It is irritating.
where did my sig go? where's my sig at?
Then you're obviously doing something unusual. Been browsing multiple tabs in Firefox 2 for a few hours now. Only 47 MB used. Or are you running 80 tabs each with a stupid Java applet and 60 tabs with a complex nested table test in each?
I'm running my entire system including firefox on less than half of that.
The developers have been hunting for memory leaks and fixing them. However, they can fix only leaks they know about. If you feel that going hunting for memory leaks is not of any importance, then that is your decision. Don't complain that someone else isn't doing something about it when you aren't.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Case in point.
No, I'm not doing anything unusual. Yes, I'm running 80 tabs each with a stupid Java applet and 60 tabs with a complex nested table in each. Java applets and complex nested tables are out there for a while, actually since before firefox development was started. I expect my browser not to leak memory just because it encounters it.
Also, I expect my browser to use sane amounts of memory for each tab. If opening another tab uses umpteen megabytes of memory, something is wrong. A tab should take no more memory than a few pointers, as well as some resources at the display server. Firefox already keeps closed tabs in the cache. I expect it to limit memory cache for open tabs as well!
Look, I don't need your permission to complain about something. Firefox has a problem with memory usage. You choose to deny this based on personal experience and ideological reasons (i.e. I need to contribute in order to have a right to complain, what kind of twisted mind would come up with something like that?) I don't care about your denial other than to try to get the facts right. And I don't care much for your ideology either.
While it's obviously true that the firefox developers "have been hunting for memory leaks and fixing them", it doesn't mean that they are finished. In fact, these kinds of tasks usually never get finished. Whenever you introduce a new feature, fix a bug, rewrite or refactor code, or just do some change, there is a risk of introducing a new memory error. That is the nature of programming, and especially the nature of programming in C++. And with a program with gazillions of lines of source code, nobody will be able to finish finding the combinatorial explosion of memory errors that already exist, in a reasonable time-frame, regardless or resources at disposal. It's like telling someone that you cleaned your kitchen 10 years ago.
There's a test-version of 2.0 compatible Tab Mix Plus in the description at addons.mozilla.org
Thank you for compliment! I like to "shoot the bullshit" with Americans on internets. Thank you for recommending alternate culprit, too. Maybe the suck will be less then. Yes?
everything in moderation
I hate both of em for their own reasons...and yes I use both.
Firefox's download window causes FF to slow to a crawl whether you have it open or not when queuing up a lot of pr0n. Its the software, not my hardware... but, a positive is at least they have one.
IE7 I have found that when downloading heaps of pr0n it sometimes loses the ability to right click (no menu appears) and I have to close IE and restart it. It really sux to almost reach a climax and find you having to Alt-F4 instead of having to Alt-FU.
Shame on both of em.
Now, more important why wont ACDSee 9.0 thumbnail 2TB of files either???...it crashes too...
All these so called advances in computing and nothing stands up to my pr0nolithic demands.
I'll use AC's post to share my thoughts. I'm not trying to blindly defend Firefox, but give it a more reasonable judgment:
Well, a matter of opinion I'd say. While I agree the new theme might not look as good on a classic-style Windows, I do enjoy the new tabs, and IMO they outweight any possible disadvantages of the new theme (only one I can think of is the new reload button, which looks weird; the new look of the address and search bars is also nice, and happen to fit into my overall theme). For the average user, on a mostly-default Windows XP look, the theme should still fit; for all others, odds are they have enough knowledge to change the theme on their own. But then again, this is just a matter of opinion, so just because I like it is not a reason to consider the author "wrong".
What alternative to blacklisting would you suggest? This is a serious question; while I see the problem with blacklisting (and I'm sure there will be hundreds of scam cases around the world which won't be blacklisted in time -- hell, which won't be blacklisted at all), I don't know how effective other methods are. Giving a false positive is particularly dangerous, and whitelisting every single bank in the whole world is impractical.
Now about the security risks: you haven't done your research before saying it, have you? Options->Security (we'll get to the options dialog soon). By default, the system works by using both blacklists and a couple white-listed addresses, locally. Firefox automatically downloads updates to those lists.
I agree some important features are missing (especially about tabbed browsing; there should be simple and practical settings to switch between "window mode" and "tab mode"). I also must say I got lost for a couple seconds in the redesign while trying to help a friend to automatically clear the downloads list on shutdown. But still, I'm not sure if it's badly designed: I'm more inclined to think that it was just because I was used to the previous one. (yeah, then you can argue the old one was alright and needed no change, I agree)
Well, that happens for every Firefox release, and will continue to happen pretty much forever. I sincerely doubt it will get any better with the 3.0 release. I haven't heard of any of those "many" issues; only that most extensions just need a single version bump to work, due to Fx2's relatively small changes overall, and in fact I could bet it will get a lot worse on 3.0, since it will use a new codebase (Gecko 1.9) with several internal changes, probably forcing much more changes on extensions.
That's priceless. No matter what it is, it's nothing other than MS's fault.
How dare anyone not toe the line - any pro IE comment must be modded down to "counter astro turfing".
What a sad and a pathetic joke.
You have some serious logic issues. "Firefox has memory issues. Only a small minority of issues suffer it - most likely caused by odd extensions" (says who? I ran FF 1507 with one extension, only, "Download Statusbar" on imageheavy sites, and could quite easily push memory usage to 400+mb. Was it actively leaking? No idea, wasn't checking for that. Should it have been using half a gig of RAM. No.
It's about this point where I just decided you were the ultimate Firefox troll. "Acknowledge any issues? Whatever, talk to the hand.":
You certainly seem to with the above quote.
Any developer with a large open source base of users knows the following:
-The new version is always slower.
-the new version crashes and the previous version did not.
-There is always more negative feedback than positive.
This is not always the result of software bloat, but just the result of users wanting to contribute by reporting bugs. An other cause is that change is often not appreciated.
If from 2 million testers you get a list of 9 bugs where most bugs are hard or very hard to reproduce the Mozilla Firefox team did a good job.
this is total unsubstantiated hearsay, but isnt tab mix supposed to be a buggy hacky nightmare?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I use the browser constantly, I just try to keep the number of tabs under control.
(Now: 262MB, 5 tabs.)
Nothing seems reasonable to me these days. People just don't seem to care about bloat, or about documentation, or about commented code. Bring on the woodpeckers.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"Was it actively leaking? No idea, wasn't checking for that. Should it have been using half a gig of RAM. No."
First of all there are well known javascript memory leaks that effect every browser. If you frequently visit sites that leak memory your memory usage will go up. Secondly I don't have that problem even though I have half a dozen plug ins, always have firefox running (pre-loader), and always have at least a half a dozen sites open in tabs.
So yes the so called firefox memory usage only seems to effect some people.
"It's about this point where I just decided you were the ultimate Firefox troll. "Acknowledge any issues? Whatever, talk to the hand.":"
Oh yes bitching on slashdot, pissing on the firefox developers and going around yelling that IE7 is soo much better is a much productive effort.
But hey I tripped up your shilling efforts to I am happy with that result.
evil is as evil does
It's kind of ironic that Opera users parade its ACID test compliance, and yet Opera breaks so often on real sites with bad markup...
Would you tell me the URL of these sites?
I would happily report those sites in the Opera forums.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
Could do... I'll check it out, thanks.
We noticed a weird thing on our site in ff2, it doesn't cache any of our images. reloads them every time?! these are dynamic images that send headers to a static image. Works in ff1.5. Seems like FF is heading IE's way with these kind of bugs. Or perhaps 2.0 was just released too fast
Planet MiniBox - Home to the world's leading shoutbox
Doth complain too much. I'm at 731MB virtual 438MB resident, so what's your beef? Now admittedly I have 19 windows with a total of perhaps 250 tabs, but this is only about twice my normal usage.
How else do you keep 2 projects going, with all the required reference materials, and red slashdot at the same time?
I tried it, but couldn't get it to work straight away.
/usr/local/bin, 32-bit, so I can use plugins normally.
In the meantime, I've upgraded to FF 2.0, which is sitting in
Wikileaks, no DNS