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

[shurikt]

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

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

[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

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

[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.

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.

Screenshots

[homm2]

Screenshots available here.

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.

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.

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: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.