Firefox 3.0 Preview

Brian Heater passed us a link to a PC World preview of the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release. In addition to the usual smoother UI, bug fixes, and feature updates, Firefox 3.0 will introduce several new components that should expand offline Web application functionality. The inclusion of DOM Storage, an offline execution model, and synchronization should all work together to allow for wider adoption of software like Google Apps at the end-user level. "As the breadth and depth of the competing applications expand, perhaps Microsoft's 90-percent stranglehold on the preinstalled and post-PC-purchase installation suite market will loosen, if only a bit. Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision." The piece covers more than just the new functionality, of course, and should be of interest to anyone looking forward to 'Gran Paradiso.'

Comments

What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things with the "stop" button like the old Netscape let me.
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.

Otherwise I like the product.

Re:What I hope it has

[Teckla]

1. Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things with the "stop" button like the old Netscape let me.

You can stop animated GIFs by pressing the Escape key. Also, if you're like me and want to stop all GIF animation entirely, hop into about:config and set "image.animation_mode" to "none".

Re:What I hope it has

[dvice_null]

1. Why stop them when you can totally get rid of them: Adblock plus: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/186 5
2. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-_ Firefox
3. Goto 1

Your suggestions are how ever already listed in the wish-list. The only problem is that the list contains probably a thousand feature requests, so I'm not sure when they will be implemented.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstorm ing:User_Interface

Re:What I hope it has

[ProfessionalCookie]

I'd even be happy with native volume control.

Stop should be for stop loading (click it again to stop timebased media?)

Re:What I hope it has

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

2. Smaller memory footprint.

Firefox never seems to gobble up memory for me, but things do become noticeably slower after a while, with errors occassionally breaking in. I'd suspect they have some kind of memory fragmentation issues moreso than anything else. But that is just a wild assed guess on my part.

Re:What I hope it has

[shurikt]

Thanks, now I'm stuck in an endless loop.

Re:What I hope it has

[matt me]

1. Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button. Consider lynx?

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure s/he knows this already. But pressing the ESC key
or (gulp) having to go to prefs is way too involved. They
want to use the STOP button to do it.

Re:What I hope it has

[zCyl]

I think your idea is in a good direction, particularly with 1 and 3. I would like to see that implemented as a checkable/uncheckable option under "View" for "Enable plugins". Some pages become much more tolerable if you could disable all the flash/video/sound plugins for just that page.

Re:What I hope it has

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Those and a one-button way to stop *all* animations (Flash, whatever), and I'll be happier than a clam.

In fact, there should be a control that says, "no A/V". That and get the memory sucker under control. That's all I ask.

Re:What I hope it has

[Professor_UNIX]

In fact, there should be a control that says, "no A/V". That and get the memory sucker under control. That's all I ask.

Sounds like a default install of Mozilla on Linux. No Java, no Flash, no Quicktime/Realplayer/Windows Media streaming, *definitely* none of those fancy VRML plugins to let you rotate models on the screen or do a virtual walkthrough of real estate. Yea, Linux is ready for the desktop... a desktop from 1994.

Re:What I hope it has

[Bacon Bits]

Any time I have to go into about:config, FireFox's dev team has failed.

Re:What I hope it has

[Matt Perry]

Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things with the "stop" button like the old Netscape let me.

You can stop animated GIFs by pressing the Escape key. Also, if you're like me and want to stop all GIF animation entirely, hop into about:config and set "image.animation_mode" to "none".

Those are good suggestions but they don't solve his problem. He wants to stop animated gifs by clicking on the stop button, just like Netscape and the old Mozilla suite used to do. His hand is already on the mouse and he doesn't want to remove it to reach for the escape key. This was a useful feature and it's a shame that it's gone.

Re:What I hope it has

[diegocgteleline.es]

Any time the firefox UI doesn't do what you want to do 1) the firefox team has failed 2) your needs are different from the needs of the vast majority of population

Every time I install firefox anywhere I set browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing to false. For me, this doesn't me that firefox's dev team has failed, it's just that I need different things than Joe User, who is the primary target of Firefox.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you don't want to see my rabbit with a pancake on his head either. Hmph! /stomps away

Re:What I hope it has

[speculatrix]

you can also set it so that it plays the animation just *once*, which works for me (TM).

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, for I am the most important user of Firefox. The developers shall implement their application to exactly match my usage patterns!

Holy crap are you ever full of yourself.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

You realise that there's literally hundreds of settings that can be changed in about:config?

Think before you mod, people.

Re:What I hope it has

[bconway]

Are you a KDE user? Some people prefer not to have every obscure, configurable option in an enormous preferences window.

Re:What I hope it has

[ReptilianSamurai]

His hand is already on the mouse and he doesn't want to remove it to reach for the escape key.

He could just use his other hand.

Oh... nevermind

Re:What I hope it has

[nanoflower]

I can't even say that they've failed since they provide the hooks for extensions. So you can do just about anything you want if you get the right extension. I know I've been running NoScript and FlashBlock for as long as I can remember (other programs before those extensions came out) so I don't have to worry about downloading all the flash animation or the javascript attacks. I do think the memory issue is getting out of hand. Part of that is that Firefox doesn't do a good job reclaiming memory when you leave a web page, but that seems to be an issue throughout the programming world. It doesn't help that so many web pages go crazy with images and animation.

Re:What I hope it has

[Randle_Revar]

Any time I have to go into about:config, FireFox's dev team has failed.

No, it means you need to switch to SeaMonkey ;-)

Re:What I hope it has

[CastrTroy]

The fact that you can go to about:config and change all the settings gives them a passing mark in my books. If you could change half that stuff that easily with IE I would be happy. Also, the extensions rock. If they had Web Developer for IE, I would gladly pay $100 for it. The one they do have available sucks and pales in comparison to the one available for Firefox.

Re:What I hope it has

[Braxton_Bragg]

Kudos to the Firefox team for the effort . I appreciate your work, and it just keeps getting better. Bravo !

Re:What I hope it has

[iabervon]

Really, Firefox should drop Preferences (which doesn't have any of the really useful stuff, and is hard to find things in anyway), and just make about:config nicer. Preferences has a bunch of stuff sorted into non-orthogonal categories that are often vague ("main", "content", "advanced") or inappropriate (the choice of font is clearly a matter of presentation, but it's under "content").

The configuration engine should be extended to keep track of what the options are for things with options (and, in general, the effective types of settings, like "font" instead of "string"), what the description is, and keywords you might be searching for. Then ditch the "status" column (the same info is given by boldness) and the type (you only care when changing it), show the descriptive text instead of the name, and handle the configuration stuff that's not in about:config similarly (e.g., handlers for various types), and have type-specific widgets. And have the window blank if the search field is empty and "Show All" isn't clicked.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

I considered lynx, but after further reflection decided to stay with links.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.

In Vista, you can control volume separately for each application :) Not exactly what you want, but useful until the firefox dev team gets around to it. Posting anon because pointing out a benefit of Vista would get me shot.

Re:What I hope it has

[MattPat]

He could just use his other hand.

Oh... nevermind

Strange, I was under the impression that the porn industry had favored MPEG-2 over Animated GIF for their video format...

Re:What I hope it has

[Malc]

Ah yes, the escape key. That's so obvious. That must have been thought up by a UI expert.

What's wrong with the stop button? It says stop! This is the moronic behaviour one gets when programmers are left to the UI. A bit like GTK.

Re:What I hope it has

[Scyllissia]

Making jokes at the expense of those with disabilities. Man that's low.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

ohhh and don't forget to make it not freeze so long when an file download is finished (or a web page is saved that is the same thing): I noticed that happens more when your download list is big. A "feature" that I really hate very much. Funny, even a stupid linked list should not take that long when you attempt to check if the url is already in the download list even for a couple of thousands of items. And that is using a stupid linked list. Make that ant it will be the greatest browser in the planet. The one I'm using btw.

Re:What I hope it has

[cheater512]

How do you figure that? Your wanting a specific behavior which isnt a norm.

Why dont you make a petition or something else equally stupid to remove animated gif support from Firefox.
While it may keep you happy, most people dont want that to happen.

Re:What I hope it has

[Ilgaz]

I'm sure s/he knows this already. But pressing the ESC key
or (gulp) having to go to prefs is way too involved. They
want to use the STOP button to do it. I believe if the user suggests it in appropriate way, it will be enabled in a later version. That is exactly why Firefox manages to get installed to user's machines who would go nuts if someone installed Mozilla 1 to their machines. A developer community which learned to listen end users.

Re:What I hope it has

[Bacon Bits]

about:config is all undocumented. Some of the features, like auto image resizing, are fairly straightforward, but the vast majority of features are so obscure that they're useless. About:config was supposed to be for FireFox Beta, because the UI had fallen behind the front end. What excuse will FireFox 3.0 have? Cripes, you can still change data types!

Honestly, have you ever *not* had an about:config experience go like this:
1. Look for feature, and cannot find it.
2. Complain on forum or submit request.
3. Be told arbitrary about:config setting already fixes it.

About:config is like word-of-mouth preferences. They're undocumented, unintuitive, and certainly not something an average user would or should ever use. Here's something to think about. If you changed the dot context of each property into a tree heirarchy, about:config is indistiguishable from the Windows registry.

Re:What I hope it has

[Dan Ost]

I didn't realize that masturbating counted as a disability.

Or, perhaps, you missed the joke.

Re:What I hope it has

[Xiaran]

I would agree with you on the memory fragmentation. At least its *some* kind of memory issue. One thing Ive notice when I use Firefox on OS X(on a G4) I dont get what *appear* to be memory leaks like I get in Windows... but every now and again on OS X Firefox will throw a hissy fit, lock up and then suddenly SIGSEGV. It looks to me like some kind of memory corruption has gone on when that happens.

Re:What I hope it has

[edbutler3]

I agree with you, but after having to do a Google search last night to find the browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing setting (couldn't even find it in the Firefox help) I am a little surprised that the Tools / Options GUI doesn't expose that setting.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I install firefox anywhere I set browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing to false. Thank you! I updated to FF2 last week because of the announcement that FF1 no longer had support, and that has been bugging me. Not only did thy remove the option from the gui to disable that, but upon upgrading to FF2, it was forced enabled. I tried searching through about:config to find the option, but I never could figure out what the string was.

Now I just need to figure out how to disable auto-fill of forms, and I'll be happy again.

Re:What I hope it has

[Anonymous Coward]

shit, bacon bits had to go to about:config, disband the firefox team and liquidate the mozilla foundation, it's all over.

And it passes ACID2.

[LWATCDR]

The latest build that I got of Firefox 3 did pass ACID2. Another step forward for standards. Now if we can drag IE there.
Oh and first post.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[bcat24]

WRT the first post: Close, but no cigar. First "real" post, maybe. :)

On a more serious note, it's really great to finally see Acid2 compatibility. It may not be the test-to-end-all tests, but it's still one more thing to love about Firefox.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and first post.

You are a child.

(for clarity: I mean that in the most hurtful and demeaning sense possible).

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[maxume]

Finally, if can frood the fromb. I shall love it even more when it gloobs the wango tango.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[kinglink]

Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard. Acid is a really poorly written page with many issues or features developers want including error checking in CSS. Acid2 finds out if a browser can correctly interpret the errors for instance.

Personally I hope no one passes Acid 2 for one reason. It enables people to write poorly designed webpages. If you're going to write a web page do it correctly or not at all. Expecting a browser to fix your stupid errors shouldn't even be an option.

It's good Firefox 3 passes the acid test but who cares. It is better working than it was for poorly written pages. I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was. One of the reasons I avoid IE7 like the plague.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[SirTalon42]

"Acid2 is NOT a standard. Acid is a really poorly written page with many issues or features developers want including error checking in CSS."

The page is MEANT to be 'poorly' written and full of errors. It is meant to check the browsers error handling. Saying Acid2 isn't important is like saying checking for invalid input in your code and failing gracefully isn't important. Also if you prefer standards compliance over 'supporting the junk', you should go with Konqueror, Safari, or Opera (or any of the other KHTML/WebKit based browsers). Gecko only seems standards compliant when you compare it against Trident (Internet Explorer), but when you compare it against the other browsers it is rather depressing.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[Excors]

Acid2 is only testing the error handling that is required by the standards – it is necessary that browsers support the error handling properly so that future standards can extend the language in a backward-compatible way. To a browser that was written to support CSS2, pages that use CSS3 will look like invalid nonsense; but since CSS defines the error handling, CSS3 can be designed so that it will fall back gracefully for users who only support CSS2 (and even CSS1), and it will be relatively painless to adopt the improvements. That's why it's important to specify and to test the error handling.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[Anonymous Coward]

>>Oh and first post.

Get out. NOW

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. I think Safari was the first browser (or one of the first) to pass the ACID2 test. Yet I encounter tons of rendering errors in it all the time. Anybody can program a browser that passes the ACID2 test. Programming a browser that renders the entire CSS2 spec properly when it's coded properly is a much better goal, and a much harder one to achieve.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[xoundmind]

I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was.

Dillo certainly would meet that standard.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[llamaxing]

I've never heard of Acid or Acid2 until just now, and I still don't know too much about it. But from what I've read, it's not that people can't build web pages properly. It's that they don't know they aren't. And that's what I think Acid2 is for.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[darkwhite]

Applaud it passes Acid 2 compatibility but don't expect it or demand it. Acid2 is NOT a standard. /i.

Mm-hmm, and the NHTSA crash test is not a standard either. I mean, who cares if something doesn't pass a test for standard compliance if it looks good and works well? Nothing could possibly go wrong when using it, could it? And web standards are more like guidelines anyway.

Idiot.

Re:And it passes ACID2.

[darkwhite]

damn messed up that tag

Just a Browser, Please

[FrankSchwab]

Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?

What happened? /frank

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[beef623]

People started using it...

Then they told other people, and pretty soon loads of people were convinced to switch from IE just to be away from IE. Then all the people who switched just because someone told them firefox was better started wanting all their web pages to work again. It's a vicious cycle I tell you.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[BKX]

At first, I wanted to agree with you, but after careful consideration, I do not. The web-apps feature that the article spends three pages on is really a useful browsing feature whose time should have come ten years ago: offline browsing. The only difference is that now that they've extended offline browsing to work well with newer things like DHTML and added in an API so that web-pages can better control it. A side-effect: better support for webapps. Does this mean that Firefox is getting bloaty? Not really.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[nonpareility]

Firefox isn't an office suite because of offline storage any more than it's a photo gallery because it can display images or a calculator because it can do math. They are all features that allow web pages and extensions to do interesting things that the browser itself does not.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Black Art]

What happened?

AJAX/Web 2.0/CSS/[Insert Buzzword here].

People wanted more and more bells and whistles in page rendering.

Try reading Slashdot with a 199x era web browser. I doubt it will work very well.

The nature of the web has grown in complexity from the httpd 0.9 days and so have the tools needed to view them.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[brunascle]

you mean you're looking for the web, only the web?

yes, i remember the time you're talking about, the time when i considered firefox just a Galeon clone with crapping tabbing.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[kabocox]

Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?

What happened? /frank

Short answer? Firefox is now competing against IE rather than just being a fork of Mozilla that most folks have never heard of.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Excors]

If you want Firefox with its original advantages and just its original features, why not use the original Firefox? Meanwhile, those who can benefit from the new technology will do so.

The only reason I can think of is that the old versions have unpatched security problems, so you'll want to upgrade after they're unsupported – but if you want the Firefox developers to stop adding new features, they're not going to still fix the security problems, they'll just move to more interesting and worthwhile projects and Firefox will die. Firefox has inertia now – and the whole web is gaining inertia, after stagnating during IE6's dominance, with even the W3C restarting realistic work on HTML – so it would be a waste if it didn't continue to grow and change.

In any case, they are planning to make future versions of Firefox faster and more secure and make the code less crufty, with better C++ usage and a better garbage collector to fix memory leaks and a new JavaScript VM. And Firefox is still only a 6MB download – it's not exactly the heaviest of programs you'll ever download.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sconeu]

Try reading Slashdot with a 199x era web browser. I doubt it will work very well.

Works fine in Lynx.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[jawtheshark]

Yes, you're not alone....

I use Firefox 2.0.x at work, because it was what came out when I started working there. At home, I am faithful to the 1.5.x range. Why? Because Firfox 2.0.x is noticable slower, the interface is... let's say, not as good as the FF 1.5.x interface. Even now, when I install Firefox for someone, I'l more likely to take the 1.5.x branch than anything else.

I hope that Firefox 3 goes back to the roots...

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[no_pets]

Okay, I didn't RTFA but why do we need to browse OFFLINE in the new, always-connected world?

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[zCyl]

If you want Firefox with its original advantages and just its original features, why not use the original Firefox?

Well, you'd still need to worry about discovered security bugs. So if you like the original firefox better than the newer ones, you should go fork yourself.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Overly Critical Guy]

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping?

Um, because that's what computers are for?

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Jaknet]

Because we are not all permanently connected to the web (well this is slashdot so we are talking the rest of the world not people here) For example being able to use offline pages means I can put them on my pda and be able to use them when travelling without having to run up expensive phone bills constantly re downloading each time and you can guarantee a lack of signal when needing the pages (directions, info etc). Also I cannot remember the figure but there is a large percentage of people just in the USA without broadband who are still on dial-up, and what about people with laptops, cannot always guarantee a WI-FI spot or somewhere to plug cable into.

I agree when there is an always connected world then offline browsing will be un-necessary, but much as it might seem different in some parts of the world this is still a very long way to off.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Door in Cart]

Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping?

Agreed, but the problem dates back to the c.1995 (I think) when the HTML form-element was tacked on to the (arguably) already mature notion of a hypertext document layout rendering engine. From that moment on, the notion of what a web browser is (and what it ought to be) has become increasingly jaded. What web applications need is their own protocol, and their own scripting / markup language. But in lieu of that they continue to make their awkward home in the ill-fitting web browser -- because there's no other option. As long as web browser developers continue along this path, it not only means a bloated interface for viewing hypertext documents, but it means a grossly suboptimal environment for application development. And by all accounts there's no turning back; it's couched as innovation. Hell, you can't even stay logged into Slashdot through Lynx anymore because it relies on Javascript for some reason.

From TFA:

"Our ultimate goal is to make it so that Web applications are not discernable from any other applications running on your desktop," Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla, explained to me during a recent interview.

So by this I gather I should someday be able to run, say, Google Maps with the same speed and efficiency as, say, sed -- on my 486. Now that's ambitious.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sumdumass]

It looks like a lot of people will support a fork. Firefox 3 will only support 2000/cp or better. There are quit a few people still using 98 and I have no plans on upgrading my computers because of firefox.

With this rush to be like IE and all, I'm wondering how long until Linux or other OSes are no longer supported either. It could be possible that they start limiting that to only the latest version of windows managers and kernels too. It would bring an interesting development around. Still I see the need to keep support for older platforms as well.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Asztal_]

I'm guessing mostly for mobile users. [if you've read TFA, you this won't be anything new] For example, imagine a calendar application - you could add an event to your calendar locally while you're offline (can't get a signal, don't have mobile internet, whatever), which I presume would be stored using DOM storage, then when you reconnect, it would synchronize with the calendar server. The other thing is that resources such as images, scripts, etc. can be marked for offline usage. I imagine if you're online, it will download a new version of the resource as usual, but if not, it will use the last version it had.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Kohath]

What happened?

Everyone else in the world forgot to ask you what you wanted. Normally, they'd check with you, because your needs and wants are more important than theirs but it completely slipped their minds this time.

Maybe buy them all a nice birthday gift this year and then they'll think of you when they see/use it. It'll act as a reminder.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sumdumass]

I have found 2.0 to be prone to crash every so often. It is probably because of the memory usages or something. I click the submit on the error report but nothing has fixed it. I'm about to uninstall again and go back to 1.5 for a while.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[aridhol]

I've got a laptop. I often fly from one end of Canada to the other. That's about 12 hours, including stopovers. On Air Canada's new planes, there are 115V jacks I can plug in my laptop and use it for the 12 hours. I could probably work with offline mode.

Also, I'm in the Navy. We don't necessarily have internet access in the middle of the Pacific. And yes, we're allowed to bring our personal laptops with us as long as we don't bring them into classified spaces.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[crabpeople]

"The web-apps feature that the article spends three pages on is really a useful browsing feature whose time should have come ten years ago: offline browsing"

Why would you ever be offline?

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[vhogemann]

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform...

Consider for a moment that currently, the web itself is an application platform. But as cool as some websites might be, HTML + Javascript wasnt designed for complex interface design... Flash and JavaWebStart are too heavy and intrusive.

We *need* a sane standart way to define rich user interfaces that can be deployed using HTTP, something designed to better support assincronous events, and that look and behave consistently. Lets face it, AJAX as nice as it might seem, its nightmare to implement and mantain... and it only gets worse as your project grows.

Firefox uses a XML format to define its interface, the widget placement and behavior, its called XUL. And actually it can interpret XUL documents loaded at runtime, even over the internet... and it uses JavaScript to define the behavior, so if you use AJAX today it will be very easy to learn and use XUL.

Take a look at this proof-of-concept application: Mozilla Amazon Browser - http://www.faser.net/mab/ - its just fantastic! It behaves and looks like an ordinary desktop application, but every bit of the processing happens at the server-side.

Im not saying that Firefox and XUL are the right choices... but theyre a step in the right direction, and a much saner solution than aberrations like ActiveX.

Just my $0.02

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[shwouchk]

While I must agree with a lot of what you said, I think most users (myself included) would rather download a 60mb Firefox with a 50mb footprint, rather then a 6mb one with a >>150mb footprint...

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that your snide comment could have been made when the whole Mozilla suite first came out. Back then, there were users clamoring for a stand-alone browser and the Mozilla devs weren't doing anything about it. It took the fed-up users creating Firefox (and the subsequent adoption being greater than the Mozilla suite's adoption) before anything official was done by the Mozilla folks.

So we may see history repeat itself. One of the disgruntled users who they "forgot to check with" will fork Firefox and pair it down to the bare essentials of a browser. Whether there are enough fed-up users to adopt that browser will determine whether the Mozilla foundation needs to take note of these concerns.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Kohath]

One of the disgruntled users who they "forgot to check with" will fork Firefox and pair it down to the bare essentials of a browser.

Good. Then they'll be happy instead of disgruntled and there will be more browser choices. It's win-win.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[kiddygrinder]

Why not just use a lightweight browser? there's a few about, like dillo for linux or k-meleon for windows (plenty of others too, these are just the ones i know off hand). If you want lightweight, you should give up on firefox right now and move on. I happen to like all the crazy crap it can do though.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[luserSPAZ]

Why doesn't that one guy just use Lynx?

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[dch24]

Whine, whine. :-) Of course, in a community development environment, that just might get someone to fix your bug.

Just for kicks, imagine if what you said was:

I have found (IE 6.0) to be prone to (get exploited) every so often. It is probably because of the (Microsoft marketing strategy) or something. I click the submit on the error report but nothing has fixed it. I'm about to uninstall again and go back to (IE 3.0) for a while.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sumdumass]

I don't see how stating a fact is a whine. Unless your suggesting I should start whining. Of course I have gone through the proper channels that are presented to an end user. In the case of MS, I have went back to IE 5.x when IE6 was unstable on my system. But we aren't talking about IE6 now are we?

If i have to goto some community forum and specifically tell them I have a problem when presumably, that's what the crash report thing that pops up instead of reloading Firefox after a crash then the GP op is correct in saying later versions of Firefox have become bloated and not about slim fast browser anymore. This button that phones home for no good reason would be a prime example. That is, unless the button is supposed to let the developers know what and were something needs fixed and they are just ignoring it. But on that reasoning, then why would anyone pay attention in the forum to do something and fix it?

Firefox 2.x doesn't have anything I would miss in 1.5 besides a spell checker. And it isn't a very good one at that. I usually don't care about spelling enough to do anything anyways. Just like in other OSes when I went back to IE 5.5, 6.0 didn't offer anything special enough for me to worry about. And if we were to change IE6 to 7, then I would say I'm doing it right now. Actually IE7 doesn't crash on me, it just randomly displays the page incorrectly, drops all the pictures and doesn't work with one of my accounting programs that will cost another $400 or so to update. And don't get me started on why some accounting program would need to use IE in the normal operations of it.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Eli Gottlieb]

People want to write web-apps, but no real platform exists for writing a user-interface that will run on the client machine while the application logic runs on the server. So everyone tries to do it in the web-browser because it's ubiquitous, even though such an attempt is technically inelegant, prone to error, and often produces bloat (see: AJAX).

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[jesser]

The storage and offline APIs are part of Gecko, so they'll be in Galeon too.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Plunky]

Hell, you can't even stay logged into Slashdot through Lynx anymore because it relies on Javascript for some reason.

I'm not sure why that is, but its not because of javascript - I am running Firefox with Noscript (slashdot not permitted to run scripts) and stay logged in all the time..

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[mgblst]

Wow, is seems those people who only want a mobile phone that calls have finally found something else to do.

You do not have to upgrade.

Their are plenty of alternatives.

Or did you mean that you want ALL browsers to be tailored to just you?

Yes things progress, in most cases like this, for the better. You don't have to use all these new functions, they are hidden from you anyway. Ebay will still work, so sill fox news website, so don't worry.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Ilgaz]

Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping?

Um, because that's what computers are for? That is the exact thing what made Microsoft too afraid from Netscape and they decided to go into war.

It is not like they cared about what browser user will open CNN with, they were afraid someone using the technologies tipped by Netscape 4 would eventually make a webtop operating system which doesn't give a heck to what OS/Platform user is on.

It is exactly same deal about Java.

To see the mix of why they are so afraid, check http://www.thinkfree.com/ , mix of vendor independent Java+AJAX. That is what makes MS afraid.

They can't stop it BTW.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Ilex]

With this rush to be like IE and all, I'm wondering how long until Linux or other OSes are no longer supported either

The key difference here is that like Windows itself Linux and the other OS's are continually being updated and supported. Windows 9x / Me have long been superseded by newer versions hence they are considered obsolete products and are no longer supported by Microsoft. It's ludicrous to expect third party developers to support a platform which isn't even supported by it's own manufacturer.

Those old 16bit OS's are now almost a decade old and won't even run on the latest series of processors. Times change, we move on. You may not have any current plans on leaving the 20th century behind but once you find nothing works on your old platform and you can't even find replacement hardware parts which do work I'm sure you'll re-consider upgrading. Perhaps to Linux?

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sumdumass]

One of the things OSS pretends to fix is forced upgrades from vendor lockin and such. This is really just the same thing. But you correct in that the rest of the world has moved on. And if I or anyone else wants to continue using certain products we will be forced to upgrade from an otherwise fully functional product. And relying on one product to supplant another is just switching vendor locking from one company to another.

Of course, looking at surrounding events and and such, It appears the choice to drop support for older OSes in newer versions happened about the time that Mozilla started working with Microsoft in their security deal. This is why, what and where, is gets scary. If the two decisions are related, it could mean the eventual shafting of all alternative OSSes in the future.

Now, you touched on obsolete. There is nothing obsolete about windows 98 or existing versions of Linux OSes. They are fully functional and fully operational for the needs of many many people who are already using them. In fact, the only reason they are obsolete is because useful products refuse to develop for them. This is OK, it is their choice. But I still have the right to cry foul and make that cry even louder when putting the microsoft/mozilla partnership into perspective. Coincident or not, it is still benificial to MS to have this happen. If anyone has a problem with this then they should take steps to corent it. My steps are currently limited to informing others of the trend and pointing to Mozilla's partnership with MS. Calling a person petty is another.

Now, From my understanding, the only reasons they give for dropping windows 98 is because they are planning on using some new MS api that Vista was supposed to sue and 2000/XP has access to. I'm not sure this is a reason I can live with seeing how the Linux version doesn't have access to this and it is likely to use QT in the process which mean the Linux interface can be ported to windows to some degree. I wish there was a better explanation for the reasoning but there isn't.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[julesh]

Firefox 3 will only support 2000/cp or better. There are quit a few people still using 98 and I have no plans on upgrading my computers because of firefox.

Frankly, I've found that almost any computer capable of running Firefox is more than capable of handling Win2K, if not XP. You can acquire second hand copies of Win2K for not very much cash, too.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[darkwhite]

You're free to use an obsolute POS closed operating system, and you're free to make a fork of an open source project to support it. And others are free to completely ignore you.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[sumdumass]

And I'm also free to make this point. See how the free world goes around?

And I'm going to make it again, around the time of the MS Mozilla deal, Mozilla announced it was discontinuing support for windows 98/me. I have a feeling has more to do with MS then mozilla but cannot prove or disprove any of it because I wasn't present at the meetings. Anyone switching from one app to another to avoid vendor lock in and forced upgrades are pushing futile efforts with Firefox or Mozilla products. And I'm not sure this doesn't extend to alternative operating systems. Give in or switch away entirely!

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Anonymous Coward]

The technical reasons are largely due to adopting the Cairo graphics library, which is primarily developed for Linux but also supports Windows and OS X (plus other backends for outputting PDF for printing, OpenGL for better performance on reasonably modern computers, etc). Cairo's Windows implementation makes use of features only provided from Windows 2000 – especially for text rendering, and especially because they care about international support with Unicode and complex scripts that just weren't handled well back in Windows 98. In FF 1.5/2.0, the SVG renderer already suffers on Win98 because the OS doesn't provide the necessary support for proper text, and nobody has offered to invest the effort to patch the problems.

Cairo has a separate backend implementation for X, which probably works better than the Windows one because it's had more development effort, and that uses totally different technologies (building on the standard components that modern Linux distributions provide) for things like text rendering, so it's not affected by the same issues &ndash - Mozilla's move is not weakening their Linux support in any way.

Re:Just a Browser, Please

[Carlinya]

God knows I would in a flash.

Wait... my connection ISN'T that flashy... /end lame joke.

I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Channard]

The biggest problem I had with Firefox was that it would take more and more memory as you opened more pages, and despite trying a few things there seemed to be no limit to how much memory it would take. And it didn't release the memory until you actually closed the program and opened it again. So you could open 12 pages, close all but 1 and it'd still be using the memory equivalent to those eleven closed pages.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I think the core execution engine is supposed to be improved, so this problem might be fixed. One way to know is to try the alpha build and see what happens. It's probably fine, I've used the nightlies without too much issue. Memory isn't a problem for me anyway, my system has more memory than I've ever seen it use.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[secolactico]

On my Windows machine, Firefox is the only program that actually consumes more memory than Outlook. And that's only with a couple of tabs open and five extensions (noscript, adblock, filterset updater, farky, tabmix). Outlook on the other hand has 3 pst open (about 1.5 gb each) + spambayes + lookout (now part of the msn desktop search)

And yet I won't give up firefox. It's so darn convenient (specially with the extensions) that I'm willing to put up with the memory footprint.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only complaint I have is that Firefox has been crashing on a dail-[no carrier]

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[daeg]

You can help curb it by adjusting "browser.cache.memory.capacity" in about:config. It's in KB, so a value of 30000 means 30,000KB or roughly 29MB.

View: about:cache to see your current cache/memory status (click the links for further details).

Also note that the setting doesn't entirely stop the "runaway RAM", but it can greatly curb it. If you only view a few pages a day and use your back/forward a lot, I don't recommend changing it. However, if you, for instance, do a lot of Google searches and visit hundreds of different sites a day, dropping that setting can greatly reduce your memory usage. If you are restricted to only a few sites, your RAM shouldn't go too high anyway.

Most of them aren't leaks. Although I think there have been a few leaks regarding plugins, but I'm too lazy to go look it up.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

And it didn't release the memory until you actually closed the program and opened it again. So you could open 12 pages, close all but 1 and it'd still be using the memory equivalent to those eleven closed pages.

Although Firefox does have memory leaks, what you're describing is far worse than any confirmed memory leak. Perhaps what you're seeing is that memory use reported by the operating system is not going down when you close tabs, but Firefox is at least releasing and reusing memory internally. If what you describe was really what most Firefox users experienced, most users would not be able to use Firefox for more than a few hours before they would have to restart it. There's no way Firefox could get the 14% usage share it has today with such a serious memory problem.

In summary, Firefox does have some memory leaks, but it doesn't leak anywhere nearly as badly as you're describing for the vast majority of users. For most users, it takes many days of use before memory leaks become readily apparent by looking at memory usage numbers alone. The real memory leaks are far more subtle than what you describe, and usually require some sort of memory leak detection tool to track down.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

You can help curb it by adjusting "browser.cache.memory.capacity" in about:config. It's in KB, so a value of 30000 means 30,000KB or roughly 29MB."

That setting for browser.cache.memory.capacity would cause Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 to consume more memory than the default setting, as long as you have less than 4 GB of RAM installed. Let's stop spreading misinformation about Firefox memory usage, please.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Anonymous Coward]

What difference does that make? Is this memory not being freed when you need it for other applications?

I really don't understand this obsession with free memory. Your RAM should be close to full at all times if you are at all interested in performance. You just dump cached information if you actually need more memory for something else. The days of DOS are long gone.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[daeg]

Correct, it was simply an example. For some unexplicable reason, my profile originally had a value of over 60,000 (default, not user set). Far, far more than the default values. Setting it back to what the default should have been fixed most of my insane memory issues (2GB, Win32).

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Bacon Bits]

There's no way Firefox could get the 14% usage share it has today with such a serious memory problem.

Most people a Windows users. They're used to serious problems with everyday programs.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[sumdumass]

I think he is describing the cache thing were Firefox caches parts of the page to make loading the next pages faster and to navigate between back and forth faster.

I have seen the same or similar features. It appears that Firefox loads this and adjust the number/amount used based on the 12 pages and then doesn't resize it for a while later. It is annoying as hell on my limited XP system. It causes everything to slow immensely because it takes what was just enough memory and makes it not enough if you open 12 or 15 tabs. It was explained as a feature to me when I complained about it. And I don't think I should change my browsing habits because I already changed them once the tabbed browsing feature became useful. That is like taking candy from a baby after you gave to him.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Exaton]

most users would not be able to use Firefox for more than a few hours before they would have to restart it

No shit, Sherlock.

I browse actively, and that is exactly what I have to do, several times a day. 1GB RAM (significant because Firefox is configured to use an average amount of memory proportional to the amount available, I believe), a dozen extensions. After two or three hours and maybe 20-30 tabs opened / closed, the memory footprint goes over ~120MB and I restart it, because the system starts to have trouble coping.

There's no way Firefox could get the 14% usage share it has today with such a serious memory problem.

That is a purely fanboyish comment as far as I am concerned.

On a side-note, I am in favor of the direction Mozilla is steering Firefox in, with support for ever more powerful RIAs. But Firefox 2.0 is a memory guzzler, and that's that -- "some [few] memory leaks" my foot.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

If you think Firefox has that serious of a problem, go ahead and file a bug report. If it did have any bug that serious, there would certainly be a bug reported already, it would have hundreds of votes, and there would be well-known demonstrations of the bug. Where's the evidence for a problem of this magnitude in Firefox?

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

Memory usage of around 100 MB of using a browser for several hours is absolutely normal. That shouldn't cause any sort of problem if you have 1 GB of RAM, unless you're desperately short on memory already. I'm not denying that "the system starts to have trouble coping," but it sounds like it's not due to memory use.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Anonymous Coward]

I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5 series because the memory over-use in 2.0 was just too over the top. 1.5 does the same thing for me, but at no where near the rate of 2.0. I have ctrl+alt+shift+m bound to "killall firefox-bin". I was hitting the damn combination every 20 minutes under 2.0. I only have 256mb of RAM, but I'm also running WindowMaker, so I generally have all the RAM I need.

2.0 was nothing but a huge disapointment to me. I really hope that 3.0 is as great as they're saying it is.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I dunno...how about this for evidence:
http://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+memory

I clicked thru the first 10 pages or so before I got bored. That's an awful lot of hits with titles like "How to Reduce Firefox Memory Usage", and "Fixing Firefox's Memory Leak". I've tried all the about:config tweaks to try and reduce the footprint. I've spent hours digging into this crap. Firefox 2 is simply _not_ good enough in the memory arena.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[OverlordQ]

Normal for Firefox, but not normal for a good browser.

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

Oh, I dunno...how about this for evidence: http://www.google.com/search?q=firefox+memory

All that shows is that there's lots of talk about Firefox's memory usage. If there were an actual obvious and serious memory problem, it would be simple to demonstrate, wouldn't it?

I've tried all the about:config tweaks to try and reduce the footprint. I've spent hours digging into this crap. Firefox 2 is simply _not_ good enough in the memory arena.

Have you tried reducing the memory use of any other browser with any success?

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

I've found all browsers use about the same amount of memory, generally topping out at over 100 MB of RAM after a day's use. For a more reproducible browser memory benchmark, see this post: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=4685 25

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[SirTalon42]

Except 100 MB isn't normal for most browsers. I've had a Konqueror session open for around 17 days now (visiting lots of web pages in that time), and lets see the memory usage... 65,120 RSS! Thats Konqueror from KDE 3.5.6 on SuSE 10.1. 2 tabs are open right this second in that instance (neither very complex sites right now since I'm reading about printing to the computer's screen by using the VGA controller).

For comparison I just opened Firefox (2.0 or something, listed in about as "Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0-30 Firefox/2.0") and it opened to http://www.opensuse.org/ (default home page, I haven't customized or tweaked FF at all). The memory usage after letting it settle? RSS is 47,420! Lets just hope it doesn't rise too much (for comparison a newly started instance of Konqueror uses 28,888 RSS).

Now lets visit a few sites: Just /.'s front page and we're at 50,460, thats reasonable since /.'s page is much more complex than the opensuse gateway page. Open 4 articles and set it to show all comments (note, I'm not logged in so its not the javascripty version, just the pretty much static HTML) and we're at 62,516 RSS. Lets close all those new tabs and move the original to about:blank... Memory usage is now 61,852 RSS. It went down some, but didn't give back all the memory.

Now lets try the same thing with digg (without restarting Firefox): Just the main page on digg and we're to 62,296 RSS. Lets open the current top 4 articles in new tabs and see what we go to... and now we're to 69,452 RSS, lets close those tabs and move the original to about:blank again... 69,412 RSS.

Lets go back to /. and pretty much repeat the same thing and see how the memory usage goes... Just the main page and we're to 71,096 RSS. Lets open those same 4 articles and set them to -1 comments and see what we end up at... RSS is now up to 71,384, not as big of a rise as the previous time, but it did still go up (looks like maybe it replaced the old pages in cache, which would be a good thing and the slight increase could be explained by new comments).

Now lets go to about:blank then try something a bit different... RSS dropped down to 71,004 which is good. Now the different part, lets load lwn.net in the first tab, and in new tabs linux.com, sourceforge.net, planetkde.org, planet.gnome.org, and planet.mozilla.org. RSS is now to 79,432. Lets close all but the original tab and send that to about:blank. RSS is now to 77,088, it went down again which is good.

Lets try the same thing but another set of sites: original tab is amazon.com, new ones are ebay.com, bbc's site, cnn.com, google news, weather.com and wired news. The results of this one is a bit different than previous times, RSS has risen back to 77,148. Maybe we've hit a limit of how much Firefox is using? Lets close all but the original and go to about:blank again... RSS is now 75,692, dropped even more this time.

Lets go back to digg.com and see what it does... RSS is 75,962, exactly the same. Looks like its recycling some of its own memory (or loading the page entirely from cache). Now to open 4 articles. RSS has risen to 80,540. Lets close those and go to about:blank yet again. RSS is 80,308. Dropped some, but only a tiny amount. Lets go back to Amazon.com and search for 'operating systems design and implementation'. RSS is now 80,480, a slight rise. Now lets open Mr. Tanenbaum's books in a new tab (the 3 top results). RSS is now 80,552. Another tiny rise. Close those tabs and go to about:blank. RSS is now 80,488, a slight drop.

Its nice to see that in my little test the RSS didn't just skyrocket, but Firefox is still using more memory than the instance of Konqueror that has been open for 17 days (and has opened many more websites including lots of slashdot articles using the ajaxy version of the site). In case anyone is wondering: my machine has 1.25 GB of ram, and the total memory usage never passed 50% on my sy

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[CyDharttha]

This is my firefox with 13 tabs currently open, been running for about a day (or maybe it's 18 hours 31 mins.. ;), i didn't do heavy browsing today, but did yesterday. i don't have any extensions. i regularly leave it running for a few days, and when i do shut it off i kill it so i can restore open tabs.

    VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
374m 228m 28m S ....0 ...11.3 ..18:31.11 firefox-bin

Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging.

[bunratty]

Okay. How about alien abductions:
http://www.google.com/search?q=alien+abduction

I clicked thru the first 10 pages or so before I got bored. That's an awful lot of hits about aliens abducting people. We simply have to do something about all these alien abductions!

If you're not convinced about alien abductions, then why would I be convinced about Firefox memory problems, especially because I've personally used Firefox for over a year without any problem whatsoever? I've spent hours digging into this crap. Firefox 2 is simply at least as good as other browsers in the memory arena.

Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[thisisauniqueid]

The biggest performance hit in Firefox seems to be to do with the fact that the UI is multithreaded (as is the JS engine). Is there any chance this is going to be addressed in Firefox 3? Using a single-threaded browser in a multicore environment is painful, especially when working with many tabs at a time.

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[thisisauniqueid]

Oops, that should say "is *not* multithreaded"...

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[nonpareility]

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/20 07/02/threads_suck.html

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Threads aren't the end all. An optimized, well performing application running on one core will allow you to multitask using your other core(s). Using threads has overhead and its not always the best solution to every problem. I think we'd benefit from MT games over browsers or word processors. This reasoning will only get worse as Intel and AMD start shipping more cores. Its all about the cores instead of the megahurtz eh?

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[VGPowerlord]

See the third comment down in that thread.

Having a single thread will kill your GUI performance the moment you do anything complex.

I know that this is a generalization, but users do not like an unresponsive GUI. Yet, if there's only one thread, the same thread that's running the GUI is doing any calculations and other operations that are going on.

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[xehonk]

Threads may not be the end all, but they might help performing several tasks at once better. I've seen firefox stop responding for a few seconds more than once because one tab was loading something. Of course my other tabs, though rendered completely, were left unusable because of the single threaded nature of firefox.

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite frankly, that attitude spells disaster for Mozilla. Web apps need multithreading to stay responsive while they work on data. If someone else makes a browser with optional multithreading Javascript extensions, and Firefox insists on a single-threaded environment for web applications, then it will look really old really fast. If they think that Mozilla hackers can't handle multithreading, they can keep the UI in one thread for all I care, but the web application in the browser needs threads if it is supposed to do more than just shift DOM nodes around.

Re:Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please!

[aug24]

As has been discussed here before, the problem is that tabs/windows (including pop-ups) sharing a common server will need to share a common thread. This is surprisingly hard to implement correctly, which is why the delay in delivery. I understand the Moz guys would love to deliver it, but...

Justin.

Screenshots

[homm2]

Screenshots available here.

light and nimble?

[ClosedSource]

"Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision"

Despite the alleged lightness and nimbleness of web apps, they're still slower and more unreliable than native apps, when they work at all.

Re:light and nimble?

[smaddox]

I agree. And input is a lot more difficult.

However, for some applications I still prefer webapps (email, calendar) primarily for synchronization. If everything is stored out on a server, I never have to worry about synchronizing different computers.

This is why I think its a great idea for more effort to be put into making webapps more usable. It is also handy that processor speed doesn't really matter. You can get performance on a mobile phone comparable to a desktop. Of course, this is assuming no connection bottlenecks, which ATM is a horrible assumption to make.

Re:light and nimble?

[ClosedSource]

I think servers are best at storing data that needs to be centralized or is too large to store locally, but you don't need a browser-based application to access it.

Maybe, but...

[ISurfTooMuch]

"Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision."

This may be true, but how is using Firefox helpful if the PC owner has already invested in all that hardware to run Vista?

It's nice to see Dell moving toward preinstalled Linux, but will that be enough? IMHO, Linux is great, but I wonder if it's too much OS for some people. One of the reasons that Windows succeeds is that it offers just enough functionality for most people. Look at it this way. I carry a Swiss army knife in my pocket. It's one of the smaller ones, with maybe 14 tools in it. I could go out and get the one that has something like 36 tools, but I don't need that. If I was going on a camping trip, maybe it would be useful, but it isn't necessary.

I guess I have two points here. First, if someone is going to use Firefox on Vista, then the hardware savings they'd experience with Firefox is negated by the fact that they needed all that hardware just to run Vista, never mind any other apps. Now, if they want to avoid Vista, then Linux is their only choice on the PC platform, and I have to wonder if it's ready for the masses. Say what you will about Linspire, but they seemed to have the right idea by simplifying things as much as possible.

Re:Maybe, but...

[stratjakt]

Now, if they want to avoid Vista, then Linux is their only choice on the PC platform

They can still get XP.

The logic you weave assumes that somebody is sitting there with a non-functional bunch of hardware with no OS, and now has to go shopping for it.

The truth is, if you went out to build a PC using new components today, it would be able to run Vista. If your PC is a year old, it may run Vista or not - but it already runs XP and you really have no reason to upgrade it.

And frankly, the recommended home system has some pretty low specs by modern standards:

* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
        * 512 MB of system memory
        * 20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
        * Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
        * DVD-ROM drive
        * Audio Output
        * Internet access (fees may apply)

That's copy pasted from MS's official page. A lot is made of the "need for a new video card".. DX9 with 32 megs memory? Whatever.

So who is this market with people with 5 year old PCs, and no use for them, who need to go get an OS? It doesn't exist.

People would want to see all of Vista's razzle-dazzle in linux, before they'd order the linux machine from Dell.

Re:Maybe, but...

[svendsen]

I think people overlook one more thing: hardware and software.

A friend of mind loves Apple and when I was looking for laptops said at least look and I did. Now forgetting about the price difference between the Dell Inspirion vs a Macbook pro here was the break down to go to an Apple:

Adobe CS 2.3 $200 [work related]
New Scanner (old one does not work with Apple I checked) $200 [to get the same DPI, resolution ,etc)
New color photo printer (same as above) $200
MS Office $150 [yes there is OO but would be used in work environments so better safe then sorry]
etc. etc.

So right off the bat $750 worth of new hardware/software I would have to buy. All I would need for Vista is Adobe 2.3. So the cost alone between Apple vs. Vista is already $500 for Misc. hardware and software. The list gets longer if I want to go to a Linux distribution (more software and hardware need replacing).

I'm not rich $500 is a chunk of change to me. I have a feeling a lot of other people may be in similar situations. Now tack on the price difference between the fully loaded Dell e1505 I got vs the Mac Book pro and its a HUGE chunk of change.

And of course now I need to say the standard slashdot disclaimer: I do not hate Linux I have used it a lot, I do not hate Macs I have used them too.

Re:Maybe, but...

[looseSpark]

The logic you weave assumes that somebody is sitting there with a non-functional bunch of hardware with no OS, and now has to go shopping for it.

...

So who is this market with people with 5 year old PCs, and no use for them, who need to go get an OS? It doesn't exist.

Well... my sister who is not working and does not have a computer, is desperate for a PC so she can surf the web, IM/VoIP with family emigrated to Canada, send emails and write up her CV, was last week the recipient of one of my old PCs. It is probably still capable of running Windows XP but I do not have a spare, licensed copy lying around, only Windows 98 first edition with no firewall which would probably get hacked and virus-infected in less than 20 seconds.

She is sitting there right now with a non-functional bunch of hardware with no OS. So, I'll be installing a nice, secure, up-to-date and easy-to-use copy of Ubuntu 6.10 on it for her (which is easily enough "razzle and dazzle" to do what she wants to do on it).

I do not think she is in a unique position - there are plenty of people with 5 year old PCs with no OS who need to get hold of one somehow; people who can't afford Vista or even second-hand XP. Why should they even bother with a great, secure alternatives like Ubuntu Linux so readily and freely available?

DOM storage?

[asninn]

DOM storage? Great, *yet* another way in which websites can store data. I haven't even managed to educate people like my parents about why they shouldn't automatically accept cookies from every server forever - and don't get me started on Flash and its ability to store data on your computer without you even noticing (a "feature" that's enabled by default, one might add, and that can't even (easily) be disabled without going to Adobe's website).

Now, don't get me wrong, there certainly are legitimate reasons to store data on people's computers, but I really want to have some control over who can store information on mine - I want to be able to allow/disallow it, I want to be able to say "notify me whenever it happens", and, most importantly, I want a sensible default where at the *very* least, you get notifications that data is being stored.

Re:DOM storage?

[TheMysteriousFuture]

Leave your poor parents alone.

Why the hell shouldn't they let their browser accept tracking cookies. So Google Adsense or DoubleClick knows that they are in the 55 to 64 age group, recently browsed Oldsmobile's on eBay motors, and like sites about knitting.

Who the hell cares?

Now I am the LAST person to ever quip "If you aren't doing anything wrong then you shouldn't have anything to hide", but get real. You sound like that crackpot drudge when he got wind of RFID being used on the large bottles that drugs are dispensed out of at the pharmacies last year and posted a headline "MINIATURE RADIO TRACKING ANTENNAS IN YOUR DRUGS!"!!!!111!!11oneone!

Give me a break.

So many people on slashdot get their nose permanently affixed in the air and forget that most people use a computer to GET SOMETHING DONE, not as an end unto itself.

Get off my lawn you damn kids~

Re:DOM storage?

[thanasakis]

I have the feeling that we are talking about caching rather than storage in the strict sense. Imagine if gmail could cache some stuff so you could use it even when offline. While you won't be able to read new incoming mail, you will be able to cached messages that you opened, like, in the previous days or something. This would save server capacity for Google and speed up your experience. It is a win win situation. Privacy is not an issue, at least no more than it was before, as long as you are able to push a button and clear everything, like we are doing today with "clear private data". It won't be hard to do it.

Re:DOM storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

*I* decide whether I'd like to get tracked or not, thank you very much. If nobody cares, why are they so damned interested? Who gave them permisson to snoop? And would you accept a store sending PI's after you if you decided to look at their display window? Didn't think so. And fuck you, btw.

Re:DOM storage?

[zeroduck]

You are using services provided by these companies--can't they ask for anything in return? That is, advertising to you.

There is of course a line where this tracking is invasive, but tracking searches on eBay to provide more relevant advertising doesn't seem to be too offensive at all.

Re:DOM storage?

[icebrain]

It would be nice if they brought back the "keep deleted cookies from being set again" checkbox from version 1. I didn't like having to add that flag through about:config.

Re:DOM storage?

[Malc]

I can't imagine how much fun you have browsing the web having to deal with cookies. Your poor parents. Just accept them and get on with using the web. I've been ignoring cookies being set for more than a decade, and I can't say I'm particularly worried about continuing to do so. There's just more important things to worry about in this world.

Re:DOM storage?

[knorthern knight]

> and don't get me started on Flash and its ability to store data on your computer
> without you even noticing (a "feature" that's enabled by default, one might add,
> and that can't even (easily) be disabled without going to Adobe's website).

    In linux, add the following line to the user's crontab to zap the .macromedia directory in the "user" home dir every hour at the top of the hour.
0 * * * * exec /bin/rm -rf /home/user/.macromedia

In Windows, the "Windows Task Scheduler" does something similar. Obviously the "Flash-cookie" directory will be named differently, but the principle is the same. See Microsoft's knowledgebase article for instructions on running a command at scheduled intervals.

I wish to make a complaint.

[jd]

The screenshots aren't pink and don't mention ponies. How am I supposed to use it on Saturday if there aren't any ponies?

Re:I wish to make a complaint.

[eln]

Just wait until Sunday, and Slashdot will provide the ponies for you.

Re:I wish to make a complaint.

[h2g2bob]

Just wait until Monday, and Slashdot will provide a dupe of the ponies for you.

Re:I wish to make a complaint.

[Firehed]

Or just use the Slashdotter extension. I force the ponies theme on all books.slashdot.org to warn me that it's something I don't care about. Damn lack of custom RSS feeds...

I hope it's good

[AaxelB]

Man, I hope it's as awesome as we all want it to be. Specifically, awesome enough to almost make me consider switching back from Opera. (Not that I want to, but I always enjoy watching competition)

Of course, by then we may have Opera 10 coming up... Good luck, Mozilla!

Re:I hope it's good

[VGPowerlord]

You might want to wait until they fix the cache memory leak er... usage feature if they haven't already.

Re:I hope it's good

[bunratty]

Is there something wrong with the feature? It does take more memory than if you disable the feature, but that's how it works -- by caching the DOM of recently visited pages so you can go back to them faster. If you don't like it, simply set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0.

Re:I hope it's good

[Abcd1234]

Is there something wrong with the feature? It does take more memory than if you disable the feature, but that's how it works -- by caching the DOM of recently visited pages so you can go back to them faster. If you don't like it, simply set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0.

Yes, but this should be a standard preference, as should the related performance tuning parameters which control the amount of memory Firefox consumes. The fact that you need to go into about:config and change a rather obscurely named parameter constitutes a failure of the dev team, IMHO.

Re:I hope it's good

[bunratty]

Most users need not be concerned with the fact that the feature exists, much less that there's a setting you can change. Besides, if it were in the preference dialog, some small percentage of users would change it to some insanely large value like 999, see Firefox consume huge amounts of memory, and then ask for the horribly obvious memory hogging problem to be solved. That wouldn't make the memory complaints go away, but instead make them worse.

Re:I hope it's good

[VGPowerlord]

Well, I've had the experience of Firefox using > 700MB of RAM doing this without me having changed any settings, so yes, it's a problem.

Re:I hope it's good

[Abcd1234]

Most users need not be concerned with the fact that the feature exists, much less that there's a setting you can change.

Well clearly there are quite a few users that are concerned about memory usage, and if making these options available to those users can improve Firefox's image as a memory hog, then I'd say it's worth it to expose them via the preferences.

Besides, if it were in the preference dialog, some small percentage of users would change it to some insanely large value like 999, see Firefox consume huge amounts of memory, and then ask for the horribly obvious memory hogging problem to be solved. That wouldn't make the memory complaints go away, but instead make them worse.

Oh come on, now. This is very easy to deal with. You put the performance controls in an "Advanced..." dialog with sufficient warnings about memory usage. If they crank the number above some predetermined percentage (say, 50% of physical), then pop up a warning dialog that what they're doing will cause Firefox to consume very large amounts of memory.

Honestly, this is trivial stuff. Your attitude is born of a disdain for users, and *that* is a very bad thing for the Firefox project.

Re:I hope it's good

[bunratty]

Your attitude is born of a disdain for users, and *that* is a very bad thing for the Firefox project.

It's these very users who keep complaining of some obvious and serious memory problem without describing in any detail what their problem is. It's exactly those people who have fiddled with their settings and installed dozens of extensions, and won't admit they caused the problem themselves. Seriously, people, just create a new profile and be done with the problem. If you still think there's a bug in Firefox, please give enough detail that someone can write up a bug report.

A far cry from light and nimble

[xebra]

What those optimistic web application developers actually deliver is certainly a far cry from what they envision. That certainly isn't a reason not to try, but just because it's OSS doesn't mean they get kudos for promises they some day really hope to be able to fulfill.

246 Mb resident

[Colin Smith]

Lightweight?

You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[Colin Smith]

Does this mean that Firefox is getting bloaty? Not really.
    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
  5373 colin 15 0 246m 71m 23m S 18.9 16.3 14:08.68 firefox-bin


Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[Anonymous Coward]

3/2 is a fraction.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[bcrowell]

>Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.
I'd love to use a smaller browser, but Konqueror has shown me at least one crippling bug in the small amount of use I've given it. When I open too many tabs, it stops loading content and just spins indefinitely.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[CastrTroy]

Except Konquerer requires that you load the KDE libs, which if you're using a desktop environment like XFCE, then loading the KDE libs seems like using a lot of memory for nothing.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[bradbury]

Firefox is clearly bloated. IMO this is a function of the DOM and the ability to allow users to twiddle hundreds of variables at runtime. But I can easily over the course of a few days push it to 1.2+GB of VM and 700+MB of resident memory and I think that is because they are keeping all of the document & window representations in VM [1]. (Now, of course you can argue that a person shouldn't use 80 windows and 500 tabs but perhaps you don't do research in medicine where one can easily need to juggle dozens of abstracts and papers, or perhaps you don't open up a dozens of URLs going through Firefox bug reports and Wiki discussions about why various Firefox modules will not compile under Gentoo Linux [2]).

The problem of Flash crashing Firefox is a serious one. Even with the session restore capability trying to restore a 500+ tab session can easily take 20 minutes of nearly 100% CPU utilization on a Pentium 4 (and a good chunk of 100% utilization on a DSL line). To avoid that pain I've disabled Flash entirely for Firefox. This is a *big* problem with plugins. You've got an open source browser but closed source plug-in shared libraries you are mapping into your address space. Thats a security hole as big as Texas.

And although performance and memory utilization improvements are listed as being priority items for Firefox 3.0 I see little evidence for improvement in these areas in 3.0 vs. 2.0 under Linux.

And of course, improvements to the bookmark/history search functions seem to be missing (again). One longs for the days of Netscape 4.72.

1. Which I think is one of the reasons performance will degrade significantly with the opening of more documents and increased fragmentation of the heap which results from using the browser for extended periods.
2. Which of course they don't. The released Linux Firefox 3.0a3 as well as the current CVS sources have at least 4 files which have to be patched to get it to compile.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[Khaed]

500 tabs? Jesus Christ.

Try opening 500 IE windows.

Why do you have 500 tabs open? ...what porn sites are you visiting? Urls plz. :)

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[VGPowerlord]

Try opening 500 IE windows.

Yes, because IE runs so well on Gentoo Linux.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[DavidV]

'3/2 is a fraction.'

The same math applied to version, 1/0..... lost carrier

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[superiority]

Why do you have 500 tabs open?

See the bit where it says s/he has 500 tabs open? Try reading the next few words:

[I] do research in medicine where one can easily need to juggle dozens of abstracts and papers...[and] open up...dozens of URLs going through Firefox bug reports and Wiki discussions about why various Firefox modules will not compile under Gentoo Linux

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wanted to post my firefox system footprint, so I ran 'top' and started looking for it. After not finding it among the 40 most active processes in my system, I stoped looking. On the other hand I was only browsing slashdot at the time. And that's the point; a web browser is an extremely extensible application, which will take up very small or huge amounts of resources, depending on what it's currently showing you.

Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated?

[Khaed]

Still, though -- 500?

Don't let Seamonkey die

[gelfling]

It's quicker than FF, handles profiles better and is generally well built. The only bone to pick is the lack of extension update checking. Other than that Seamonkey is better than FF/T-Bird.

Re:Don't let Seamonkey die

[hritcu]

The only way you can get Seamonkey saved is by using it. Adding it to this list won't help.

Re:Don't let Seamonkey die

[DarkEmpath]

Agreed.

Seamonkey seems to get all the little things right that get over-looked in Firefox (even down to the way the middle-click gets handled is nicer than Firefox).

The Seamonkey team (or is it council?) don't seem to be helping themselves - when I tried contributing to the documentation wiki, everything I did was removed the next day, along with the original work I was contributing to.

Now, I'm going to continue using Seamonkey as long as it's maintained, but I'm not too confident of it's future.

Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision."

Firefox, light and nimble?
Jebus, the memory footprint on that thing is far, far beyond ridiculous at this point, not to mention noticibly larger than even IE7's memory requirements.

And even ignoring that, you're comparing Firefox to Vista. I should bloody well hope it's light and nimble in comparison, unless, of course Firefox 3 aims to be a whole operating system.

Furthermore, Vista actually has fairly reasonable hardware requirements if you turn off all of that fancy GUI stuff. People forget that not only can all those flashy things be turned off, but you can painlessly swap out the explorer shell in and of itself. The comparison is outright stupid. Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different, you don't have to use it. The only difference is that Aero is included in the default install.

I understand that this is slashdot, and we never pass up a chanceto take a shot at Microsoft or Vista. But seriously, this has gotten to the point of sheer stupidity, and hipocracy: Id someone were to make a completely uneducated, false claim about Linux, it'd be followed up by a few dozen posts crying bloody murder, yet, now, because its ashot at Vista, its suddely okay to make completely asinine claims that in no way at all intersect with reality at any point whatsoever?

No wonder there's all this talk about Linux's superiority, and Firefox's superiority, and [random OSS app here]'s superiority, people have absolutely no clue about the competition. At least have a basic grasp on the competing broducts before making these comparisons. Know thine enemy and all.

I could swear Sun Tzu turns a full rotation with every other post here.

Yeah, yeah, -1 flamebait, whatever.

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[Bacon Bits]

I could swear Sun Tzu turns a full rotation with every other post here.

Sun Tzu + Slashdot + magnets & wire = new source for renewable energy?

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[bunratty]

the memory footprint on that thing is far, far beyond ridiculous at this point, not to mention noticibly larger than even IE7's memory requirements.

Most people find that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7:
http://scobleizer.com/2006/10/21/the-great-firefox -2-vs-ie-7-memory-test/
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127309-page,6-c, browsers/article.html
http://oomny.com/2006/03/24/internet-explorer-7-be ta2-and-firefox-2-alpha-memory-comparison.html
http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/2006/10/ie_7_a _better_b.html
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=4685 25

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[Anonymous Coward]

"Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different, you don't have to use it."

No-one complains because you *don't* need "obscene" hardware requirements to run XGL/Beryl. I do it on a Dell 800MHz PIII Ubuntu box with a GeForce 3 Ti-200 graphics card & 512Mb of RAM quite happily. This gets me the wobbly windows, the cube desktop, all that jazz. I fully admit to not having tried Vista myself yet (I'm primarily a Mac user, so I'm not even a Linux zealot), but I note from Microsoft's own Vista pages that the Linux machine I refer to here only scrapes in at the absolute minimum system requirements level for Vista. I therefore seriously doubt that such a machine could even run Vista usably, never mind with Aero.

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[Anonymous Coward]

Other people can say what they want. My experiences routinely showed Firefox at about 80-85mb with a dozen tabs opens, (which, I'll confess impressed me, I'd find it closer to 90-100 on Linux and FreeBSD) IE7 with around 65-70mb, and seamonkey with about 40-50mb. Personally, I use seamonkey for everyday browsing, since the other two, frankly, use more memory than I'd like my browser to.

On a side note:
Two of the tests you liked aren't very realistic, one test 100 open tabs, which isn't a real-life situation, no browser should be expected to be optimized for that kind of workload. The other pits out of the box IE7, versus a custom Firefox setup, not very objective, methinks. And a the Zimbra one only shows me a bunch of coloured bars, with no indication of what each represents, nor any specifications on what the test entails.

And in any case, the point was that Firefox is neither nimble, nor light. It hasn't been for a very long time (since approx Firebird 0.7 or 0.8), and that using Firefox as the model for "light and nimble" is ridiculous.

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[TheThiefMaster]

Just out of interest I decided to open ie7 and load up the same couple of tabs as I currently have open in Firefox 2. Firefox was using 44MB of ram and ie7 used 47. Given that Firefox had been open for over half an hour of me browsing around, I don't think it has any memory problems.

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[Elad Alon]

Sun Tzu + Slashdot + magnets & wire = new source for renewable energy?

Renewable? Slashdotters can't reproduce.

Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison....

[bunratty]

one test 100 open tabs, which isn't a real-life situation, no browser should be expected to be optimized for that kind of workload.

It's not 100 tabs opened at the same time. It's 100 total tabs opened, with only 10 open at any one time. That's a completely realistic scenario, as many users open and close tabs all the time. The fact remains that most people cannot see any serious memory problem in Firefox. Some small percentage of users do, but that does not mean that most others see the same problems. In fact, the problems seem so rare that I hardly see the problem discussed on MozillaZine any more, and I haven't had a serious memory problem in Firefox demonstrated to me in over a year. The last one was a huge memory leak when viewing large image galleries, but that was fixed in an early Firefox 1.5.0.x release. Memory use is simply a non-issue for the vast majority of Firefox users in 2007.

Not PC World

[MSTCrow5429]

It's PC Magazine. Fact checking, anyone?

Firefox has never been simple

[thaig]

Its architecture is far too sophisticated for a "simple" browser.

Thank goodness they put so much forethought into it or it would not have had a future.

What about the other half?

[SeaFox]

I'd much rather see Thunderbird 2.0 get released. I thought Mozilla was going to try and have the development of the two projects a little more in sync than this.

Re:What about the other half?

[RebelWebmaster]

It's in the Release Candidate stage. It won't be long :-)

Re:What about the other half?

[SeaFox]

Gaim 2.0 has been in release candidate phase for a couple years now.

3.0 already?

[bogomipz]

Boy, are the Mozilla folks trigger happy with their version numbers lately. I thought they went pretty fast from 1.5 to 2.0, and expected them to slow down after that. With 2.0.0.3 as latest release, they're suddenly ready to go 3.0? WTF?

Re:3.0 already?

[jeff_schiller]

The underlying rendering engine is completely being changed in this release, plus there are several big features (Places, Offline Storage, etc). I see no problem with bumping it up by 1.0 every major release.

Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads!

[Ant P.]

Whoever decided it was a good idea to add animated PNG support to the core instead of making it a plugin is clearly smoking crack.

Re:Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads!

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way does it allow anything worse than animated GIFs? And why would the makers of ads use a new format when only a small fraction of viewers will be able to see the animation at all? For now, it's mostly useful inside Firefox's own UI, letting them do animation with a proper alpha channel.

Re:Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads!

[WillAffleckUW]

Have to agree - the more I can turn off (checkbox option) anything animated, the better.

Mind, I use NoScript and Adblock plugins - but it would be better if I can say "No animations unless I expressly ask for them".

Re:Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads!

[moosesocks]

I don't think the lack of Animated PNG is stopping *anyone* from making banner ads. For that, we already have Flash and Animated GIF.

I hope that once and for all, we'll be able to completely kill GIF, and support PNG transparency properly in all browsers.

Platform = memory hogger

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Java does that too, Eclipse does that too (which is more than just Java, it's its own platform; Eclipse doesn't - yet - unload modules it loaded). More and more platforms seems to make that mistake. Not sure if Linux auto-unloads modules it didn't need for a while.

Only the basic Unix platform (Linux, BSD...) seems able to actually just reuse memory it doesn't need (it will still keep things it loaded - like files - cached, but when you need the memory for something, it will be free to use).

Sad sad world.

Download Link?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for asking a really dumb question, but can anyone provide a link to the download of the latest alpha release?

Re:Download Link?

[looseSpark]

Sure... here you go.

:-D

One thing that annoys me...

[kosmosik]

One thing that annoys me is that when a plugin dies with Fx that also entire Fx instance dies. I guess it is less of a problem on Windows where everything is closed source and things like Flash plugin are more polished. But on Linux it is a fucking nightmare. My Fx crashes few times a week because of Flash Plugin. It would be cool if Fx did like Opera does - in Opera when plugin dies it is just that the does not display (you can reload it) but entire browser still sits there without a hickup. In Fx when plugin dies Fx dies with it and you are forced to kill Fx and load it again... good that they added session support so when you load after a crash set of all open tabs/URLs is opened again - but again, it is a workaround not fix to the problem.

So: does Fx still crash when a plugin crashes in version 3? If yes when they plan to overcome the issue? The issue of shitty closed source plugins cannot be overcomed for obvious reasons.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[proberts]

The source is available. If you don't like something, fix it. That's one of the benefits of open source. If you can't fix it, then (a) try to get the project coders to fix it or (b) pay someone to fix it. Third party whining does little to benefit open source projects.

Use the Source Luke.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[kosmosik]

> The source is available. If you don't like something, fix it.

The problem is I can't. So what now? Shall I shut up?

> That's one of the benefits of open source.

The fact that source is aviable surely is. But not the fact that I cannot fix it since I:

- know nothing about Fx/Netscape plugin model internals
- know nothing about Fx code
- know little about C++

I could probably spend few months and actually manage to do this - but it makes no sense for me.

> If you can't fix it, then (a) try to get the project coders to
> fix it or

That's what I was trying to do first asking on /. if it is being done. If not I could fill a bugreport but I bet there are dozens of them on this topic.

> (b) pay someone to fix it.

I actually do pay for Mozilla Fundation - I pay for Red Hat etc. they support Mozilla. Anyway this is trash talking - how much I need to pay and to whom to get this done? And also I would like it to be in mainstream, not in some fork/patch and with next version it does'nt work.

> Third party whining does little to benefit open source projects.

OK so pointing to an obvious problem is whining? So I guess you (why you - are you Fx developer or spokesman) try to tell me to just fuck off? :)

> Use the Source Luke.

Yeah we love empty slogans.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[RebelWebmaster]

That's an issue that's on their radar for Gecko 2.0 (Fx4) when they're doing a more massive overhaul and cleanup of Gecko.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[Anonymous Coward]

My observation is that Firefox is bit by bit gathering some small shitty bugs. I'd add the following:

1. JRE also seems to hang Firefox after Firefox has been running for a while. I have xkill Firefox and then go kill the firefox-bin process by hand.

2. the mplayer plugin causes freezes, often when I try to go Back from a page with embedded multimedia. If I kill the mplayer process by hand, Back then works and does not crash firefox.

I'm more so griping at the situation rather than flaming the developers, for they have created a very complex and essential piece of software.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[kosmosik]

> That's an issue that's on their radar for Gecko 2.0 (Fx4)
> when they're doing a more massive overhaul and cleanup of Gecko.

Cool. As for now it is the biggest bug - nice that they add features but I would love to have it fixed in the first place and then have added another way to navigate tabs or something like that. ;) It is kind of show stopper. I guess they don't care much about Linux platform since it has so far priority. :\

Anyway thanks for answering.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[proberts]

>> The source is available. If you don't like something, fix it.

> The problem is I can't. So what now? Shall I shut up?

But don't you see the issue here, you're consuming and consuming without contributing, worse-yet you're not even willing to try to do anything. I've given you alternatives, yet you still want to whine and poke instead of trying to do something somewhere that'll actually affect what you want. Here's a hint- the Mozilla devs aren't likey to take feature requests from Slashdot. Take responsibility for what you want, but do it where it makes sense to do it!

>> If you can't fix it, then (a) try to get the project coders to
>> fix it or

> That's what I was trying to do first asking on /. if it is being done. If not I could fill a bugreport but I bet there are dozens
> of them on this topic.

Oh come on! Slashdot isn't the right place to do this by a major leap. There's a wealth of support and communication venues for Mozilla, Firefox, et. al. Slashdot isn't one of them.

> (b) pay someone to fix it.

> I actually do pay for Mozilla Fundation - I pay for Red Hat etc. they support Mozilla. Anyway this is trash talking - how much I
> need to pay and to whom to get this done? And also I would like it to be in mainstream, not in some fork/patch and with next
> version it does'nt work.

That's not the same as paying someone for a particular feature, and I'm pretty sure you know it. I haven't heard that the Mozilla or Firefox folks are that bad to deal with to get patches accepted. It's also not very difficult to float a proposal, ask a question, file a feature request...

Honestly, you're not fulfilling your responsibility as an open source user if you're not pursuing things the right way. There are a range of options open to you, none of which you seem to have even explored, all of which are way, way more effective than whining on Slashdot.

Heck, I could see if you'd even tried one or two- but at this point you're not even close to trying, so why should your complaint have any weight if you haven't taken the appropriate steps?

Paul

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[Malc]

Why when extensions crash Firefox, Firefox doesn't get the blame, but when third party drivers bring down Windows, Windows/Microsoft gets the blame? Double standards? If NT is crap because drivers crash it, then Firefox is crap too. Oooh, got to love /. and it's crowd of mindless bigots/zealots.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[FunWithKnives]

You, my friend, are a shining example of why FLOSS gets a bad wrap. Here are a few hints for you, genius:

Not everyone is a developer. Even if someone is a developer, they may not have the massive amount of free time available, which you obviously do, to wade through code fixing bugs.

Flaming a project for no good reason is one thing, and will incur flames like yours, however vitriolic and ignorant they may be, in retaliation. Offering constructive criticism as the GP did is a Good Thing(tm). He is a Firefox user, ergo it is completely within his rights to suggest, criticise, or review. Are the Firefox devs just coding the browser for their fucking health?

His question was within the context of TFA. He was asking the Slashdot community whether anyone knew if this was being worked on already. Slashdot is not the correct venue to ask questions about FLOSS projects? What the fuck are you talking about? You are also blindly assuming that he has no plans to submit a bug report and/or speak to developers about the issue. Do I really need to explain to you what assuming does?

Everyone that uses FLOSS has the responsibility to fix bugs themselves and meticulously file bug reports? Did I miss that meeting? Using it, advocating it to everyone who will listen, and contributing via donations aren't enough, right?

From this vantage point, it seems like the GP had a valid question within the context of the discussion, and instead of getting any sort of worthwhile advice or reassurance, he got an elitist dick with a stick up his ass, and the knowledge that some people in the FLOSS community are narcissistic assholes.

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[kosmosik]

> But don't you see the issue here, you're consuming and consuming without contributing,

Hey fuck off ok? Do you know me?

Re:One thing that annoys me...

[proberts]

> You, my friend, are a shining example of why FLOSS gets a bad wrap. Here are a few hints for you, genius:

It's ironic that you're trying to be ironic with the word genius, but can't use the correct words in your very first sentence. It's "bad rap," genius.

> Not everyone is a developer.

Which is why I mentioned non-development alternatives.

> His question was within the context of TFA. He was asking the Slashdot community whether anyone knew if this was being worked on already.

Give me a break, first you crow that not everyone is a developer, then you claim Slashdot is the venue to ask about the development roadmap of a project? With logic like that, you're not going to get very far in life. The Firefox project makes their bug reporting system available for both search AND submission- that's the canonical reference point for checking on bugs, not Slashdot. The project also makes available a Web forum, newsgroup and IRC channel- all of which are monitored by the folks who will actually FIX the issue if the complaintant doesn't have the inclination and they're convinced fixing it is the Right Thing[tm.] Surely you're not suggesting that the complaintant's Slashdot posting is a better venue, or that they should take the word of a Slashdot poster over that of a member of the project?

> Everyone that uses FLOSS has the responsibility to fix bugs themselves and meticulously file bug reports?

IF you want it to be better, then yes- if you just want to whine and not get anything changed, then Slashdot is the perfect venue. Since you seem to be good at that, I can see where you'd recommend it.

When you grow up enough to stick to reason instead of name calling, let me know.

Paul

Fix Crashes and CPU hogging

[Danathar]

I can't count the number of times I've had to kill -9 firefox on my PowerPC based Mac Laptop. It would be nice if they could FIX the bugs that crash/freeze Firefox BEFORE moving on to the next release.

Re:Fix Crashes and CPU hogging

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used Firefox on the internet every day since 1.5, it's never crashed on my PPC. I run MYSQL and PHP servers on it also [development machine].

Re:Fix Crashes and CPU hogging

[RebelWebmaster]

Maybe the problems you're having require moving onto a new release to be fixed properly? They're making a lot of big changes in Gecko 1.9 which would be downright impractical for Gecko 1.8.1 as they're too regression prone. It's one thing when the regressions pop up during a 1-2 development cycle for the next major release. It's another thing when they pop up in a x.0.0.y release. If they did things the way you're proposing, updates would hardly ever come out because development cycles would be horribly extended.

Re:Fix Crashes and CPU hogging

[Danathar]

Your reality does not match my reality. Therefore you must be from another dimension.

Quick! Get back before the portal closes! :)

Is 3.0 the WinVista killah?

[WillAffleckUW]

I'm thinking they bumped up the version number to 3.0 as it gives you even more reason not to use WinVista.

Because I'm sure MSFT is pushing tin with it's IE version release number for that.

Sadly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Grandparent has described 90% of the IT population..

Thinkfree.com anyone?

[i)ave]

Google Docs??!! This is not even close to MS office. The only free online office suite worth using (if you want something that reproduces MS office) is Thinkfree http://www.thinkfree.com/. It faithfully reproduces PowerPoint, Word, and Excel with full compatibility. The ONLY thing keeping something like this from replacing office for most people is that, obviously, you've got to be online to run the office suite. Now, what happens to an "online" office suite like this when you can use it offline, as well? More precisely, what's the point of spending hundreds of dollars on MS Office anymore? For me, at least, I'd never buy MS Office again.

--Dave

Re:Thinkfree.com anyone?

[Arramol]

At this point, MS Office's only real defense against losing its massive market share is its name recognition. Most people haven't heard of alternatives like Thinkfree or OpenOffice, even though from personal experience I can say that although OOo lacks some of Office's polish, it's more than adequate for the average user.

Re:Thinkfree.com anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd take that "full compatibility" with a grain of salt.

The first spreadsheet I imported into ThinkFree did work better than Google Office and comparable to Open Office but it wasn't fully compatible. None of the MSOffice alternatives imported the vertical text in a cells from my Excel spreadsheet, and of course none of them imported my formatting macros.

I also have not had luck with my coworkers' PowerPoints having the proper fonts and graphics when importing them into OpenOffice 2.0 (admittedly a 9-month old release).

It's livable though, particularly since I'm just an software developer and can shrug my shoulders at formatting stuff. I have a legit copy of MSOffice that came with the machine sitting around that I could install but the pain hasn't gotten bad enough for me to bother. (I rebuilt my PC after a trojan infection a year ago.)

My 2cents.

Flamebait mod was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if we consider the poster a credible source...

The parent post gives numbers without context of any kind. We do not know what version of Firefox is being used. We do not know how many and which extensions are being used. We do not know how many concurrent windows and/or tabs are in use. We do not know what URLs or files Firefox has been asked to open. Without this information, we cannot reach any actual conclusions, as these could be perfectly reasonable values for any browser, depending on the tasks the browser was asked to accomplish.

Re:Flamebait mod was right

[Colin Smith]

And you are an anonymous coward. I don't think anything more needs to be said.

Re:Flamebait mod was right

[Anonymous Coward]

Your flamebait got called out, and you didn't answer the questions you just attacked - upgrading you from flamebait to troll. I don't think anything more needs to be said.

Re:Flamebait mod was right

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been happy with Firefox's memory footprint either.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309
Firefox/2.0.0.3

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
72.5 14.6 254748 114524 ?? R 1:34PM 53:30.45 /Applications/Firefox.app

1 Window, 4 tabs open:
http://maps.google.ca/
http://www.google.com/reader/view/
http://slashdot.org/
http://www.pcmag.com/

Web Developer Extension
Javascript Debugger (not open)
Netcraft Toolbar
GrApple Theme

By way of comparison, here are the same numbers for Safari (1.3.2 (v312.6)) with the same 4 tabs opened:

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
9.0 8.5 209612 66564 ?? S 6:43PM 0:58.24 /Applications/Safari.app/

And for Opera:
Version 9.10
Build 3588
Platform MacOS X
System 10.3.9

Same 4 tabs opened.

%CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
3.5 11.9 258548 93216 ?? S 7:02PM 0:47.31 /Applications/Opera.app

Is that enough for you AC? Yeah, I thought so ...

(
By the time I finished testing the other browsers, ps -auxm was reporting - FF keeps my laptop toasty, burning the CPU cycles -- it's the google.

70.8 14.4 256140 113096 ?? R 1:34PM 70:11.16 /Applications/Firefox.app
)

Re:Flamebait mod was right

[mirshafie]

These tests are not scientific, but they should give those Firefox lovers something to think about. I'm on Sabayon Linux, and I'm a Konqueror user.

First I fired up Firefox, and disabled the extensions I had (GSpace). I did not disable the DOM Inspector extension as it is included by default. I restarted Firefox and copied some stuff out of top. Then I opened up the same tabs that I had open in Konqueror at the time in Firefox (except of course the split view of my files). I waited for the CPU to settle down (!), and then copied another line out of top. Finally I closed all the tabs in Firefox except www.mozilla.org and noted down what top said. Look for yourselves.

Versions used:
Firefox: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061117 Firefox/2.0
Konqueror: Konqueror 3.5.5, KDE 3.5.5

---

Idle Firefox with DOM extension, one tab (www.mozilla.org)
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14697 mir 16 0 169m 41m 22m S 0.0 8.2 0:11.39 firefox-bin

Idle Firefox, DOM extension. 7 tabs; mozilla.org, ./ and a Google Image search.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14697 mir 15 0 219m 64m 27m S 2.3 13.0 0:43.01 firefox-bin

Idle Firefox, DOM extensions, after closing 6 tabs.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
14697 mir 15 0 211m 64m 27m S 0.0 13.0 0:57.13 firefox-bin

Idle Konqueror, many plugins enabled. 7 open tabs; one split view, files, ./ and a Google Image search. Many tabs had been opened and closed this day.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
12913 mir 15 0 80276 63m 22m S 0.0 12.8 1:16.75 konqueror

I was a Firefox users for years before I got fed up and switched to Opera. I'm now a happy Konqueror user. Konqueror does has some issues, but it is one hell of a browser.

OS X window snap bug fix?

[hedley]

Very annoying. It happens from time to time, windows just can never move from their frozen screen position. If you can nav the browser somewhere else (depends if the buttons are not occluded) then it can unstick itself. Did I mention its annoying?

H.

Re:OS X window snap bug fix?

[Firehed]

Well let's be completely honest here - Firefox for Mac just plainly isn't up to scratch with its Windows (and, more likely than not, Linux) equivalent. Fx3 for Mac should, in my eyes, basically be Safari with extension support. Just sitting there being open, albeit with plenty of tabs open, Firefox is eating over 300MB of RAM and 20% of my CPU cycles (well, 10%, since Activity Monitor treats each core as another 100% available). I also had this idiotic flash bug which caused all videos being played to freeze up after two seconds, which never happened in Safari.

That said, I can't live without my extensions. Camino feels like more of a proper Mac app than Firefox does (and, technically speaking, it is), but it just doesn't have the same extension support that Firefox does, which is a complete deal-breaker for me. I'd love to help out in the development since I know others would benefit too, but I currently have neither the time nor the knowledge.

Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[Animats]

Too much in the browser, again. It's a browser. Not a "platform". We went through this already, with Mozilla, which had to be chopped down to provide a browser of manageable size. The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.

In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.

The project seems to have been captured by the "browser as a platform" people again. Nobody cares about XUL, people. All users want is a browser.

In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine. The OLPC is going to force computing to go on a much-needed weight reduction program.

Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[geekoid]

It does improve performance for dial up users.

You are right, people just want a browser. They also want to watch videos, do there spreadsheets, etc all in a browser.

I hope you are right about OLPC, but I don't think so. Anymore then browsing by phone slimmed down anything. More likly there will be OLPC versions of various websites.

Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[dvice_null]

> In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.

You can disable this if you like to. Basicly it is just a question about whether it should be enabled by default or not.

> Nobody cares about XUL, people

Actually some care. Because of the XUL+Javascript, it is very easy and fast to make addons for the Firefox (It took me a week to learn and make an extension that interacts with a website with data retrieved from another website). The great amount of addons is one of the key advantages Firefox has for other browsers. Nowadays surfing the web without an adblock plus is pure pain. And making websites would be impossible without Validator and Web Developer.

> In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine.

In a few years, computer can be 10 times faster or 1000 times faster. Even OLPC machines might get upgraded. But Firefox devs are trying to improve the performance also.

Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[looseSpark]

I agree with keeping Firefox slim.

People say they want "just a Web browser"... but what if this *is* the Web in 3 years time and these web applications are the future, soon to become the norm? If Mozilla didn't start making moves to support it now people would be complaining that they, like Microsoft back in the 90s, failed to anticipate the future of the WWW and got left behind.

What if in the days of text only browsers people said "...but the Web is about text, we don't need no stinkin' graphics!" (yeah it's unlikely, I know, but bear with me I'm making a point here ;-) ) or when the Web was text and graphics, "...we don't need no video, we've got text and graphics!"?

What I am saying here is this: the Web evolves and browsers need to keep up with it. I know they're having a hard enough time keeping up with things like Javascript and CSS and people will argue they should get existing standards right first before trying to support anything else (to which I agree in part) but we don't really know what the Web will be in 5 or 10 years and our browsers will have to support whatever it becomes. We will have to adapt too just like those users and their browsers did back in the early days of the Web.

Mozilla's mandate for Firefox is that it would be fully compliant with the latest W3C Web standards and the W3C seems to be looking into this technology. Should Mozilla ignore it or support it?

Maybe the solution is to introduce these features as an add-on until the technology becomes more ubiquitous and then introduce it into the main build?

Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[Dhalka226]

The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.

But with all due respect, "we" means nothing more than "some of the people on this website."

I have never--literally never--heard a so-called "Joe user" complaining that IE or Firefox were too bloated. All those complaints and debates seem to exist only around sites like these.

Are they becoming Mozilla again? Yeah, maybe. Wasn't this sort of bloat the reason Firefox was created in the first place? Yeah again. Does any of that matter to the typical users that have been adopting it the past few years? Not as far as I can tell.

Re:Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress.

[Justin205]

It does improve performance for dial up users.

Caching the HTML and CSS in memory and on disk is not what Firefox is using so much memory for. It's caching the fully rendered 'snapshots' of a page, for use using the forward/back buttons. These are cached up to a certain number forward or backwards per tab, meaning more tabs equals more memory use.

A disk cache/memory cache of just the source code has been done in every semi-modern browser, ever. That improves speed for dial up users. Caching rendered pages just speeds up forward/back. Maybe they should concentrate on making the rendering engine more quick and efficient, instead of making the whole program use more memory.

It's a bit of a disappointment...

[rmccabe916]

That it has been decided to terminate support for all operating that cannot handle the Cairo graphics engine. I cannot help to believe that there are Firefox users out there who would like to get the latest features whenever a new version comes out. Also, it kind of makes me believe that adding the engine is a sort of quick fix to the sluggish performance some people claimed to have seen. Why couldn't the code just be optimized instead to make Firefox run faster?

Re:It's a bit of a disappointment...

[bionicpill]

Last time I checked FF was open source. If you think the code should be optimized you're more than welcome to go do it yourself.

Re:It's a bit of a disappointment...

[atamido]

This is a legitimate question, and there are two very good reasons for switching to Cairo (or rather, switching to another graphics framework).

1. The current rendering engine simply isn't flexible enough to handle some of the things they want to be able to do with it. For instance, finally properly supporting inline-block would be awesome. Full CSS2 support would be great, but on a bigger note, CSS3 will be solidified soon, and they are going to want to properly support it. Then there's other things like SVG.

2. Maintaining a cross platform rendering engine is a LOT of work. There are already several cross platform rendering engines that are much more advanced than what Gecko has been using, so why not switch to one of those and gain features while simultaneously freeing up programmers to work on other things? I don't know why Cairo in particular was chosen, but I imagine there were some good reasons.

Honestly, by the time FF3 is released, Windows 98 will be 10 years old. (Lets face it, no one should be using Windows Me.) The writer of the OS stopped supporting it years ago, and it was a security nightmare before they stopped. While it may be noble to want to support an OS that is likely being used by people in countries that don't have the financial ability to purchase more recent hardware, it isn't practical for many reasons. The OS itself can't support many newer things coming out, so not being supported by a newer version of a web browser isn't surprising. If these people want to run more recent software, they should upgrade their software to either an NT based kernel or switch to Linux. One is easy, and the other is free. Either way the expectations of developers are not that high.

Disappointing release

[Anonymous Coward]

What a disappointing release. I was hoping 3.0 would provide readline key-bindings and the ability to edit text entry boxes in an external editor (I mean, come on. If you are a Unix power user this is killing you). I was also hoping that we would finally be able to install extensions without requiring a restart and better isolation and profiling/inspection of extensions to better contain run-away extensions.

I was also hoping for an interface to enable a proper Ruby or Python console to make web development a hell of a lot easier. I don't know how many times I wished I could just pull up a console for the current page and manipulate or inspect it. Firebug and Chickenfoot have the right idea but they are still severely lacking (and javascript sucks).

Did the Firefox devs listen to any of the comments they asked for on the Wiki a few months back? What has actually been implemented?

I feel like the biggest problem with Firefox
is that it is too monolithic, everything is too tightly integrated; it needs a serious architectural overhaul.
It needs to be modular, parts should be able to be swapped out easily. I should be able to replace peripheral functionality (e.g. download manager) easily.
Extensions feel Frankenstein-ish, and they don't feel quite like a replacement as much as a hack glued on, although I don't know if this is a problem with the design of the extension system or with implementation of extensions by their authors.

Nice trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Noez mah firefox uses 5 more MB than Opera!

Stop the Fucking trolling, firefox does not ever use more than 100 MB, you may wish to friging update yourself

Also whatever bad thing you have to say about firefox consider:

• You are not a FUCKING WEB SPIDER, you do not need to open 100 tabs at once, the internet is made to be read so it doesn't make any sense to ever have more than 5 tabs open, seriously. If you are used to 10 tabs, you are not a 1337 HAXORz you are a MORON!
• Opera is still a gay browser with no real life functionality that is not truly free
• Konqueror is still useless and no cross platform
• Safari and IE are still shit
• If you want light weight browsing do the world a favor and : Kill yourself or use a text-mode browser

Re:Nice trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

well you are not a web spider but for instance right now I have 23 in one window and about 10 in another and almost all contain useful information I want to read. Maybe you are one of those fatty asses ADSL users that simply can search and download again but then not everyone have a fat ass and uses a dialup.

Re:Nice trolls

[mirshafie]

Man, you update yourself. Go ahead and open five tabs or whatever in Firefox, Opera and Konqueror. Check memory usage. Close the tabs except one. Check memory usage again. Then come back and talk about "5 more MB". All browsers have problems. The difference here is that most other projects actually try to fix the problems they have, even if they are slow (even Microsoft!). But Firefox is completely ignoring it all and puts all focus on trying to keep up with some of the stuff in IE7.

Re:Nice trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me address you concerns, in order:

1. I currently have 15 tabs open, I generally have at least 40. (So Firefox often uses 600+ MB of RAM). That's how I browse, I multitask, I switch back and forth between pages, I'm a "packrat" with my tabs, I suppose you could say.

2. I use Firefox, but Opera is still a fantastic, rich browser. It is not "gay" (and using that to refer to a web browser reflects your maturity level).

3. Konqueror, while not as powerful as many browsers, does suffice for most needs and has a robust rendering engine (KHTML). As a file manager, it is certainly excellent. It was never designed to be cross-platform (neither were IE, Safari, Links/Lynx, K-Meleon, or many other web-browsers)-- it was designed to be a web browser for KDE.

4. You won't get much argument from me about Internet Explorer, although version 7.0 was a definite leap forwards. Safari, on the other hand, is a great web browser: it integrates well into OS X, and is fast, clean, and simple.

5. There are certainly more lightweight browsers than Firefox, many of use choose it because it is so extensible. A text-mode browser is insufficient for the majority of web browsers, but I don't think less memory consumption is too much to ask (although the 8MB/tab Firefox is currently using for me isn't too bad).

Go away, troll.

i'll pass on this

[Neotrantor]

until they learn to program in threads so i don't have to have a tab freeze what another is rendering, which does not happen in konq

Re:i'll pass on this

[SirTalon42]

Firefox's devs think threads suck and don't want to make Firefox thread safe.

what about security

[josepha48]

I just have to wonder how security is being handled in this. How is this going to prevent a virus from being part of someones storage and run in mozilla. I read that they are thinking about it, but what is to stop someone from setting up a fake google app and installing a virus on to your system instead of a word processor, or worse a wordprocessor that turns you machine into a bot while you run your app off line. My connection is always on line, so even if I am working in 'offline mode' what is to stop a virus from working online.

Just a concern.

Stop it.

[geekoid]

It is a valid question. You don't have to be a software developer to ask a question like that.

God, that answer makes you sound like a fucking idiot. It reflects poorly on OS.
Yes, he can fix it, but maybe he relizes he isn't qualified to fix it.

Re:Stop it.

[rmccabe916]

And you are certainly correct. While I may know about various areas of computer science, I only have taken a few basic courses. However, I am taking engineering courses in college, and know what saddening consequences shortcuts can lead to. (I'm not exactly saying that Cairo is a shortcut, but that it just sounds like it.) Also, I'm definitely not against open source. It has led to a lot of transparency in showing how the software we use works. But it is not the only way to get such a result if there are other ways to let us know what is going on, or how we can help out on a project. :-)

All Those Memory Complaints

[aliens]

What exactly are you saving that RAM for? True love?

Re:All Those Memory Complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite what you Firefags believe(*), Firefox is not the be-all and end-all of computing. Some of us might want to run other programs, maybe even *gasp* at the same time!

(*) I deliberately didn't use the word "think" here, because "think" doesn't describe anything Firefags ever do.

Re:All Those Memory Complaints

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly are you saving that RAM for? True love?

How about all the other tasks that I know (better then Mozilla does) will be firing up in another few hours from now and I don't want Mozilla to greedily scarf up all available memory for itself.

First to include the other as a plugin:

[smittyoneeach]

Firefox, or Eclipse?

Re:First to include the other as a plugin:

[Myen]

Eclipse won. ATF

Re:First to include the other as a plugin:

[smittyoneeach]

ATF? WTF? SOA?

wishes

[dheera]

1. give me my flat tabs back! at least they used the right colours from the OS and the look was well-integrated.

2. stop the ugly animation of the beige bar every time a popup window gets blocked. that takes 10+ seconds when a site like digg.com is refreshing at evey step of the animation. it should appear, not animate.

3. when i hit F3 to find something, it should come up right away. the fact that it takes 3 seconds on any 1Ghz machine i have tried is absurd.

4. bring back the link navigation from mozilla where you started typing the text of the link and then hit enter to follow it.

5. make input text boxes follow the height: specification correctly in CSS. IE does do this, surprisingly, while firefox just adds a couple random extra pixels to the height.

6. get rid of the XML-based interface and use a hard-coded text file instead. i just did Edit->Preferences on my 1.6Ghz machine, and it is absolutely unreasonable that it took 2 full seconds to do that. it's a freaking property page! it should load in 0.1 second!

7. the error console, likewise, took 4 full seconds on a 1.6 Ghz machine for me on a page that is full of errors. really, now... the freaking error console is just lines of text!!! it should be displaying as fast as catting a text file into a console!! are they using XML for each error displayed or something? really, now... get rid of the happy little exclamation points and stop signs if that helps, but i doubt it... just please tell me what is taking my 1.6Ghz 4 full seconds to simply *display* errors that have already been processed. if it's "XML parsing" or some crap like that, really... come on... same with the download manager... it's a bunch of text and should come up in 0.01 seconds but takes me about 2.

8. make SVG faster, on par with Opera.

Re:wishes

[Anonymous Coward]

1: You're in the minority here. Deal with it. Or get a theme.

2, 3, 6: Seeing as most of your complaints are about speed, perhaps you should look at why your system is slow instead of simply blaming Firefox? All of the above operations are pretty much instant for me on any computer.

4: It's already there. Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Search for text when I start typing.

5: <html><body><input type="text" style="height:1200px"></body></html>

This produces a text box the height of my monitor in Firefox.

7: This one is fast for me, too, but I have a faster computer, so maybe this one is valid.

8: I don't use SVG, so I can't comment. But, given your track record so far, I'll not take it from you.

Re:wishes

[LifesABeach]

Personally, I would be grateful if SVG was NOT a plug-in.

AJAX MS Office

[Anonymous Coward]

People like to point out that the online AJAX office applications will kill MS Office. While they will give people more choices, once the online/AJAX MS Office is out (yes, it is actually being created, as I am told by someone actually working on the project) people will likly automatically use that if using an online office product.

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[earthbound kid]

Woohoo! Macs for Mac Users, beyotch!

People who fail to learn history...

[knorthern knight]

...are doomed to repeat it.

1) Netscape (under AOL). It was gonna be the ultimate OS-on-top-of-the-OS. Applications would run on Netscape's API, rather than on the OS itself. AOL f'ing destroyed Netscape.

2) Then we got Mozilla "about:kitchensink" jokes when the developers put email and usenet news and HTML webpage editing into Mozilla. Enough people screamed and eventually a *BROWSER* was created, called Phoenix. Due to trademark issues, it was eventually rename to Firefox.

Now we're going through the same thing all over again.

nay-sayers

[smoker2]

I still have a copy of Phoenix if you're interested !

Is XUL development dead or not necessary anymore?

[mandreiana]

I'm building a Rich UI web app and looked again at XUL, after not working with it for 3-4 years. Nothing changed, the toolkit looks awful compared to say Gmail.
Is plain XHTML, CSS and AJAX all that is required now for rich web UIs? Do you recommend and good tutorials+samples sites about this?

Thanks

ui suggestion...

[jovius]

I'd very much like to see browsers provide an option to get rid of having all content inside their own windows... Minimal and resizable (scalable?) frames or a clutter free fullscreen mode would be much more neater. Browsing would happen by a separate freely placeable configurable toolbox, which could be called when needed. To write an address a text input thingie could be called and hidden if not constantly needed. The overall feel would be much more open and free. I personally hardly ever use any other menus than Bookmarks, and the fullscreen mode doesn't minimize in the same nicely minimal fashion.

Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

[Futurepower(R)]

I think you missed an overall point that the original commenter had in mentioning one particular shortcoming of interest to him. Firefox development is haphazard. There is insufficient overall guidance of the process. Because there is insufficient guidance, Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.

For example, see this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs. In my attempts to report bugs in Firefox, Firefox developers have used every one of those excuses, some of them many times. If you look within Slashdot stories about Firefox, you will find many comments about Firefox developers abusing those who report bugs.

In comments like those posted here, people often talk about some shortcoming in Firefox that occurs to them at the time they are writing the comment, and fail to make the overall point, that there are a lot of issues receiving little or no attention, not just the one they mention.

The head of the Mozilla Foundation is Winifred Mitchell Baker, a woman who is very uncomfortable socially, like many people with technical knowledge. However, she has NO technical knowledge. She is a perfect example of the fact that someone with no technical knowledge cannot guide a technical company.

In the beginning, Winifred got the job because no one thought there was money in free software, and the effort to improve the Mozilla browser was very small. But then Google started paying for Google Search to be to the right of the address bar in Firefox. Now Mozilla Foundation makes millions of dollars, and Winifred can afford to hire people to do public relations to cover her incompetence.

The linked information about Mozilla Foundation income is from someone on the board of directors of the Mozilla Corporation, who says in the linked blog that the nickname of the Mozilla Foundation is MoFo. It appears that the lack of social ability is more widespread than just affecting the president. Or maybe he is socially aware, and the association is intentional.

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use . What people call the memory hogging bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still present in Firefox version 2.0.0.3, even though the bug was reported more than 4 years ago.

If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop.

I could write more, but I have to unload all my Firefox windows and tabs before I am finished working with them, because now that I opened more windows and tabs to do research to find links for this comment, Firefox is using as much about 40% of my CPU as reported by Windows Task Manager, and I don't like the way it slows my computer. (This is not a dramatization, it is an actual fact; I just started my laptop from standby to begin working this morning at about 7 AM Brazil time, where I happen to be at the moment.)

I am also putting this comment on my web site, so that I can make corrections if I find that there is some error.

Spoken like someone who's never used Beryl.

[Civil_Disobedient]

Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different

Ah, but that's the hilarious, beautiful thing about it.

I'm running Beryl on my 5 year-old laptop . Celeron 1.5 Ghz. Built-in video (Intel 810). 384 megs of RAM. This is some old, anemic friggin' hardware.

And yet, it flies. Everything runs as quickly as it should. The 3D bells and whistles don't slow the machine down a single cycle. Now, can you please explain to me how I can somehow get all the cool eye candy of Vista (and then some) on a system with one-quarter the spec of the recommended system architecture? Is Microsoft's coding really that bad?

no shit!

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like a lot of people will support a fork. Firefox 3 will only support 2000/cp or better. There are quit a few people still using 98 and I have no plans on upgrading my computers because of firefox. I'm right there with ya, bud. It steams my clams that Mozilla continues this ridiculous minimum system requirement nonsense. FireFox 3 won't work on a Microsoft OS from 10 years ago? That means you'll have suffer from the horrid FireFox 2 you currently have without upgrading. Just part of a continuing pattern of dismissal, if you ask me; FireFox 1 didn't support my MS-DOS 4.1 from 1988 either!

Uhhh... Google apps?

[grikdog]

I'm just a simple user here, guys. What are Google Apps, and why would I ever need those in my browser of choice? Is Firefox never going to branch a lightweight Camino clone for Windows XP?

Re:Firefox development sometimes resembles playing

[bunratty]

What people call the memory hogging bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still present in Firefox version 2.0.0.3, even though the bug was reported more than 4 years ago.

If it's been known for four years, isn't there a great deal of detailed information about it somewhere? Isn't it reported in Bugzilla? Why not give us the bug number so we can look at it ourselves?

Try the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar

[smagruder]

Even though this is nowhere as good as Web Developer, it does provide many valuable web development tools for use in IE.

Here's the link: http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=6 14

Faking interest.

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't read the links.

Stop Flash with Flashblock Add-on

[dananderson]

I stop Flash animations with the Flashblock Add-on. Just go to Tool-->Add-ons, search for Flashblock and install. You can enable Flash for selected (well-behaved sites) or just click on a Flash icon to enable specific animations within any webpage. It's made my surfing experience a lot less aggravating.