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

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.

Screenshots

[homm2]

Screenshots available here.

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".

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: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: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.