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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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
butter the donkey
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.
"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.
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
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.
Okay, I didn't RTFA but why do we need to browse OFFLINE in the new, always-connected world?
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just a concern.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
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.