Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward

Kurtz'sKompund writes "Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.0 has passed a major milestone! The Places feature has been added to the alpha client slated for release next week. Places is a complete re-work of the bookmarking and history browser functions. It was at one point slated for Firefox 2.0, but will instead see release in Mozilla's next major version. '"We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk," said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. "Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us." Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1. Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it's incompatible with earlier Firefox editions' bookmarks. Alpha users must convert their existing entries, Mozilla developers said."

Comments

So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

Until they decide to remove it and delay it until Firefox 5 (after they skip 4)

Re:So how long...

[Headcase88]

They've got to skip 4, 5, 6, and 7 to get ahead of the game. The quality of a browser is directly proportional to its version number.

Re:So how long...

[Headcase88]

Hey mods, that's known as a joke.

Re:So how long...

[bruno.fatia]

Oh so THAT'S why Opera is cleary winning..

Re:So how long...

[Machtyn]

and so is its bloat.

Re:So how long...

[ehrichweiss]

Heh, funny you should say that. Back in the day I remember having a "discussion" with someone over how the Amiga OS was only at v3.1 and Windows was "clearly ahead"; I responded with "So, Windows 95 is 95 times better than Windows 1.0? and almost 32 times better than Windows 3.1?". The silence was deafening.

Re:So how long...

[StarReaver]

I have a feeling you meant "Inversely proportional", but I'll let it slide this time.

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

Although version numbers do not reflect quality or advancement, I would have answered "yes" in response to your question. Also, Windows 2000 was indeed, 21 times better than 95.

Re:So how long...

[bobo mahoney]

It is definatley why IE pretty much skipped version 1 and 2 because Netscape was on version 3.

Re:So how long...

[anasciiman]

Opera won't even be a minimalistic contender until they add proper SOCKS proxy support into the damned thing. Imagine ... a modern browser without that functionality

Re:So how long...

[Lorkki]

I think I had similar discussions on a school yard around the same time.

Re:So how long...

[nuzak]

IE never skipped a version. IE 1.0 came with the Windows 95 Plus! Pack.

Screenshots of IE versions 1-7

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

And you misspelled 'you' and 'misspelled'.

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't think that managing bookmarks would be all that difficult. But replacing the firefox bookmark support with a full sql parser and storage engine actually improved performance, functionality, and speed while decreasing code size and complexity. Anybody that's ever seen the firefox codebase can tell you it's a bloated mess.

Re:So how long...

[couchslug]

IMO low user awareness of Opera is why FF is currently "winning", and why Konqueror gets microscopic publicity even though it works well and is limited to 'Nix.

Re:So how long...

[Boglin]

That logic is ridiculous. If Windows 95 was 95 times better than Windows 1.0, that would imply that Windows 98 was 97% the stuff as same as Windows 95.

Wait a second...

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

and you are dumb.

Re:So how long...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately for your joke and rationality the _subconcious_ mind doesn't work like that.

When?

[Anonymous Coward]

When the hell will the devs address the staggering memory leaks?

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry... what memory leaks??? Were we supposed to do something with that?

Re:When?

[BosstonesOwn]

Consider it a feature. They want to test all the memory in the machine for you ! Now that is what I call good folks.

All joking aside , isn't it on the bug tracker a lot ? I thought that the whole reason for this write was to fix the various memory issues before they moved on ?

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're apparently embedding a fucking SQL DATABASE into Firefox 3. Given that SQL databases are not exactly known for being light-weight (in fact, quite the opposite), I'm going to take a guess that the answer is probably half-past never.

If you want a light-weight, featureful browser that doesn't require 100 extensions to make it barely usable, you might consider trying Opera.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek]

SQLite has this name because it is... lite! It has a very, very small footprint. By your comment, I can tell you have never used it. I have. It is designed to be small and easy to embed into an app with out requiring a bunch of resources.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to that page, the DB uses 0.25MB for its code alone. That's not lite.

Assuming Firefox is already 10MB (which isn't that far off) that increases the size by almost 3%, which is not insignificant. Especially when you realize that's leaving off all the bloat that will be included by code that uses a SQL database for bookmarks instead of something sane like a flat file.

They're bookmarks - that's a list of strings. Or at least, should be a list of strings.

Re:When?

[althea19]

They're apparently embedding a fucking SQL DATABASE into Firefox 3. Given that SQL databases are not exactly known for being light-weight Because of course SQLLite isn't a light-weight SQL DB library or anything..

Re:When?

[heinousjay]

Yes, everything should be done your way. Heaven forbid features other people find useful worm their way into your software, since you are obviously the anonymous arbiter of all that is technology.

Re:When?

[rainman_bc]

They're apparently embedding a fucking SQL DATABASE into Firefox 3. Given that SQL databases are not exactly known for being light-weight

There's a big difference between an embedded database like Berkely DB or SQLLite and an enterprise DB like DB2 or SQL Server... And embedded SQL Database is VERY lightweight.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek]

You think a SQL db that only takes up 250K is significant? Geez, what do you have like 4MB of memory? The SQLite DB is already in FF 2. So it will not add anything to FF 3. However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not. This will give you plenty of ways to sort your bookmarks and store more info for each bookmark. For example, in FF 2 you can give a bookmark a keyword. This way you can just type that keyword and go to that URL. I use can type "/." and press enter and get to /. with no clicks. I have a lot of keywords setup for my most used bookmarks. Bookmarks in FF are more than just list of strings. They have a URL, name, keyword and description. One big problem with bookmarks in FF 2 is the inability to sort properly. FF 3 should fix that now that FF 3 will be able to use Order By to sort how the user likes.

Re:When?

[mhall119]

Firefox currently stores bookmarks in an XHTML file so it currently uses an XML parser to load bookmarks, I don't think you'll notice any negative performance hit from SQLite.

Bookmarks were strings 10 years ago, now they are multi-field records, especially things like live RSS bookmarks. The hole point of the "Places" component is to give more state and functionality to bookmarks and history.

I also think the SQLite engine is going to be used for the new client-side persistence framework which does need database capabilities, so it would be there regardless.

Re:When?

[adiether]

How do you know it has memory leaks? Seriously, have you done a exhaustive memory profile? Opening a few webpages, closing them, and looking at MemUsage in the task manager before and after is hardly conclusive. Of course, I am assuming you are doing this, but if you have concrete data, please share. I can leave Firefox running for weeks averaging 50+ tabs at all times.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not.

Oh, goody, so when Firefox next corrupts my profile (and that's a when, not an if), instead of having a nice easy-to-read text file I can easily open with an text editor and copy the bookmarks out of, I'll have a binary blob that I can do NOTHING with.

Yeah, that's really progress right there.

After all, why should things like bookmarks be human-readable? Who would ever want to pull bookmarks off a machine without launching a SQL database?!

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek]

I have never had my profile corrupted with Firefox. I use Firefox on WinXP, OS X and Linux and keep my profile in sync with Google Browser Sync. However, if your profile does get corrupted, the bookmarks file should be fine since SQLite supports standard RDBMS constructs to keep the file from being corrupted. Since SQLite uses a regular file (like Access, but much, much better), you can just copy it to where ever you want as a backup.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...all the extracted code for FF3a4 is a little over 215MB. That puts the increase right around 0.1%. Of course the data base is already in there...so there is no increase.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox currently stores bookmarks in an XHTML file so it currently uses an XML parser to load bookmarks, I don't think you'll notice any negative performance hit from SQLite.

Actually, it's a specially formatted HTML file, but it's almost XHTML so that's close enough.

But the big thing about it is that, being an HTML file, it's human readable. I can open it in Internet Explorer or Opera and import my bookmarks from it should I decide to stop using Firefox. I can open someone else's bookmarks.html file and copy out bookmarks should I decide to.

It's plain text, so it's human readable, which is great if for some reason the profile becomes unusable. (Most common time I need to do this is after a Windows reinstall, when I'm copying out old profile data from the old Windows install.)

You can also get bookmarks from a Windows profile into a Linux profile quite easily.

In short, bookmarks being plain text or in XML is a very good thing.

Replacing that with a binary blob is a very bad thing.

Re:When?

[Trillan]

sqlite is vary resistant to corruption. In fact, the only way you're likely to see it is if Firefox for some reason tries to touch the databases with its own code rather than sqlite. Further, a simple command line query will dump everything.

Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.

A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.

Re:When?

[mhall119]

You say "binary blob" like you won't be able to access the SQLite database without Firefox. SQLite is open source and public domain, you can download the programs needed to access the file on multiple platforms.

No, you can't open it in your text editor, but then again it's not a document it's a database. You can't get what you need for the Places feature from a document unless you subsequently treat it like a database, which would truly be a performance disaster.

But, we might be able to have our cake and eat it too. The Mozdev article says that your bookmarks.html file will be updated when changes are made to the SQLite database. I'm not sure if this will be the case in the final release or if it's just in place for alpha/beta testing.

Re:When?

[Hatta]

Well it might be light, but it performs like crap compared to MySQL. Compare Amarok with the built in SQLite db or with MySQL. Hands down, no question, it works much much better with MySQL.

Those of us who already have MySQL installed will want to use it. I hope they make it as easy to switch as Amarok does.

Re:When?

[dorath]

Off topic yes, but if you're using Opera then you can type /. into the bar and press enter, and get to slashdot.org.

Re:When?

[Asztal_]

So export your bookmarks to HTML.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek]

SQLite usually beats out MySQL and PostgreSQL for many things. However, it really depends on what you are using it for. SQLite was not made to be a full-blown RDMS. Here is a speed test.

Re:When?

[wumpus188]

I haven't done a memory profile, but I do have smth for you to try out. Go to this site and leave FF running overnight.

Re:When?

[Hatta]

Well those numbers are old, and my experience suggests otherwise. But it could just be that the amarok devs did a shitty job of implementing SQLite. Or it could be that my collection is >60,000 tracks. Still this might be an issue for people with insane amounts of bookmarks.

Re:When?

[Serious Callers Only]

That site contains Flash. Have you tried it without Flash installed?

Re:When?

[Martin Blank]

I don't install Flash in Firefox, but I routinely reach 200MB use by the end of the day with an average of about four tabs open; I've only had it running today for about 2.5 hours and it's at 135MB. I do have 23 add-ons installed, but many of them are low-usage (Add-N-Edit Cookies, BugMeNot, ColorZilla, Copy Plain Text, IdentitySelector, IETab, Location Navigator, MeasureIt, and SecureWire Web Relay [for SSL VPN]). Even those that get heavier usage (AIOS, DownThemAll!, Forecastfox Enhanced, Gmail Manager, Google Toolbar, Slashdotter) shouldn't be eating up gobs of memory. I routinely run two or three virtual machines at a time on this 2GB notebook, so Firefox isn't helping things there, even with swapping enabled. Even disabling the add-ons doesn't save me from enormous memory usage by the end of the day.

Re:When?

[bunratty]

When the hell will the devs address the staggering memory leaks?

About 100 memory leaks in Firefox have been fixed in the past year. It wasn't leaking too badly last year, though. Which "staggering" leaks are you referring to? Do you have some specific Bugzilla bug reports you referring to?

Re:When?

[bunratty]

I don't install Flash in Firefox, but I routinely reach 200MB use by the end of the day with an average of about four tabs open; I've only had it running today for about 2.5 hours and it's at 135MB.

Is that any worse than other browsers? Here are some instructions for seeing Opera and IE use 150 MB or more within about three hours with one tab open. Firefox 2 consumes less than 100 MB viewing exactly the same sites as those other browsers. If you want to say the memory of a browser is enormous, oughtn't you compare its memory usage to that of other browsers instead of just throwing out numbers without anything to compare them to?

Re:When?

[__aahlyu4518]

"I can leave Firefox running for weeks averaging 50+ tabs at all times."
You DO know about bookmarks, right ? ;-)

Re:When?

[Paradise Pete]

I'll have a binary blob that I can do NOTHING with.

There are many easy to use tools for working with SQLite files.

Re:When?

[Ornedan]

Have you also disabled all in-memory caching? Firefox keeps pages in browsing history in memory by default.

Re:When?

[RobertLTux]

what you are missing is
1 the sqllite engine is already present
2 they are yanking out the older crusty Mork/Xml/Vhatever code
3 they are using this to simplify things and enable cool things like throwing your bookmarks online (obsoleting the 12 bazillion bookmark sync extensions)

Re:When?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Well I don't know about memory leaks but the Downloads dialog is a fucking disgrace to efficiency. Download 50 or so things and the entire programs slows very noticeably.

I remember a few years back when I first upgraded to a version of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (forget what it was called at the time) which used the Downloads dialog and instantly the whole thing slowed to a crawl. Why? Because I'd never cleared my downloads cache before and the brand new Downloads dialog had about 2000+ entries in it. I think simply opening the dialog took a couple of minutes and the Clean Up took about five minutes. All for what is essentially just a listbox! God knows what would happen if they ever tried to make the Downloads dialog useful by doing crazy things like telling you when a download failed to actually download anything.

OK, rant over. I like Firefox for the most part but that has really pissed me off for a long time. Glad I finally got that off my chest.

Re:When?

[Timesprout]

It's quite informative that the Mozilla site displays the results of a micro benchmark to show their competitors in a bad light after their history of memory issues. Its a worthless comparrison and anyone with profiling experience can tell you how easy it is to produce skewed micro benchmarks. At this stage everyone is aware there have been memory issues with Firefox and one silly micro benchmark does nothing to change this.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

The devs don;t care--the mem leaks will disappear when flash become irrelevant.

Re:When?

[Pootie Tang]

You can also use "%s" in conjunction with keywords which makes them even better.

bookmark keywords

I use this all the time. For example "flix clerks" will do a netflix query for me. I use this even with google and have the search engine box disabled in the UI. Because the cursor location defaults to the url area when opening a new tab/window, I find this easier (you don't get the history of search terms like with the search box though, I'm not sure that's always a bad thing).

I see a word I don't know? double-click word, copy, cntl-t, d space, paste, enter - bam, it's very quick and I only use the mouse to select the word.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember.

Re:When?

[kbrosnan]

The current implementation keeps bookmarks.html in sync with the sqlite bookmarks database. See Places bookmarks have landed! for details. Most notably from that post is this tidbit.

* Migration from bookmarks.html -> places.sqlite will happen only once. From then on, bookmarks.html will be kept up to date with changes in the db, but not the other way around. This means that after initial import, if you make any changes to bookmarks.html (say, by running Firefox 2 and editing your bookmarks) you will need to manually export them and re-import them into the bookmark-on-places nightly (see bug 381216). This means if you run Firefox 2 and Minefield or Gran Paradiso Alpha 5, when it is released, using a single profile Firefox will overwrite any changes. It is imperative for testers to know about how to use the profile manager.

Re:When?

[bunratty]

Its a worthless comparrison and anyone with profiling experience can tell you how easy it is to produce skewed micro benchmarks.

Then it should be even easier to produce a benchmark showing a "memory issue" with Firefox. Why not create one and we can all see what this thing is once and for all? If no one else is willing to write a benchmark, then we'll just have to settle for the one that exists, won't we?

Re:When?

[graphicsguy]

No, you can't open it in your text editor...

Ah, emacs. http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/sql.el
Okay, maybe that's not quite what you meant, but it's close.

Re:When?

[Matthieu Araman]

Places still writes the bookmark.html file.
It just doesn't read-it anymore (but you can tell it to import it back if you like)
BTW, sqlite stores everything in one file so nothing is really changed
if you wan't to save, you just have to copy one file
if you wan't to move/copy you profile, it's just a file to copy
it will be much more robust, powerfull and allow new things to be done.
also the sqllite code is stable and field tested by hundred of projects so it's a very good idea to reuse it instead of using some mozilla only solution.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

[I am not the original poster.]

You DO know about bookmarks, right ? ;-)

I don't care to choose between making new bookmarks and keeping a large number of tabs open - what is this, the 90s? ;p I never close Firefox except when I happen install some extension or update the browser itself. All tabs are restored when I open it up again, so I can just continue where I left off.

I routinely have 50-100 tabs open. If I bookmark something, I'll just forget about it and never read it. Bookmarks to me are for filing away things that I have read at some point and found useful, not something that I look through to find something new to check out.

Re:When?

[lib3rtarian]

1) Are you saying sqllite is already in firefox 2.0? I haven't looked at the source code for firefox 2, though I use it, but it would be news to me. 2) I don't know what that is, I just hope the new code is faster / more reliable (or at least equally as reliable). 3) I'd be surprised if this ends up being simpler.

Re:When?

[etrusco]

And the isn't memory freed/cleaned up when you close the page? Otherwise, by this single fact the only thing you can say is __that page__ has memory leaks.

Re:When?

[hansonc]

Is a plain text editor one of them?

Using a database for bookmarks is just plain stupid.

Re:When?

[don_bear_wilkinson]

No, that remark is just plain stupid. Stupid as in 'being lacking in information, knowledge or the ability to understand facts'.

But, you probably meant to say "Using a database for bookmarks would require me to learn something trivial about a different (and more functional) way of storing information so that I can continue to play with my toys the (arcane) way I am used to". Or something like that. :)

Seriously, I hear you. I've sometimes been glad that the Bookmarks were in text files. I could do 'stuff' to them. But, it sounds like there are still going to be ways to get to the information. Maybe slightly more involved than popping open vi or notepad, but very doable. And a small price to pay for functionality, performance, features, etc.

Try to not be a luddite, eh? :)

Re:When?

[Martin Blank]

My histories tend to not be more than about ten pages or so per tab, and I frequently close out tabs as I finish with them, even if they were only used for one story. What I will do often on a site is Ctrl-click on multiple stories on a page and then read them in sequence, closing out each story as I finish with it. It's my belief that closing that page should result in all memory associated with that tab being freed, but when testing that by watching memory use as I close the tabs, there is little or no change in the overall memory usage, and that strikes me as something that should be addressed.

There may be a fix (I think I know what you mean with the in-memory caching), but I'm not going to do that because when in forums, I will often jump back several pages, and I don't need or want them reloading just going back or forward. Besides, if I have to look up a method to do it, then it's not something that I'm likely to want to be sending my parents through, and that's an important point, especially since they have much older, slower systems than do I.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah using a relational database to store flat data just to be able to sort it and give it a keyword is totally not overkill... I'm being sarcastic ;-)

Re:When?

[jonadab]

Actually, it's a known issue. Comes up practically every time someone mentions Firefox on slashdot, and is widely discussed in other places as well, including b.m.o. The term "memory leaks" is technically a misidentification of the problem, but the observed behavior is almost identical to what you would see if there _were_ substantial memory leaks. The issue is well known and widely documented. What Firefox is actually doing is extensive in-memory cacheing, trading RAM for other things, like improved back-button performance. On systems with enough RAM to support it, this is a Good Thing(TM).

You can turn it off in about:config, but I forget the exact pref name.

Ideally I think Firefox should try to do a better job of automagically figuring out how much RAM it can use this way without creating performance problems, but that's not entirely trivial to accomplish. (It's not enough to know how much physical RAM the computer has, which I think is what Firefox currently does. It would also have to determine how much RAM other apps are using, among other things.)

Re:When?

[SirTalon42]

SQLite is meant for smaller DBs. When you have >60,000 tracks you're going to be pushing the limits of 'small'.

Re:When?

[nuzak]

I have a sqlite databases with over 1.5 million rows and it doesn't break a sweat even with complex queries. Perhaps the amarok folks don't know about indexes?

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek]

I guess you don't know anything about an embedded DB? SQLite makes "sacrafices" for the sake of low footprint/performance. For example, SQLite, treats all fields the same. Where a normal RDBMS would do checks to insure data type, SQLite, skips those things for speed/footprint.

Before you "cry wolf" over some technology being put into Firefox, why don't you read up on it? Hell, SQLite has been around for a long time. The feature-set is well known. Oh, and if you are using Firefox 2.x, well, guess what, SQLite, is a part of Firefox 2.x.

And you whole "point" about using a relational DB to store "flat data" is just silly. Firefox keeps a lot of info about a bookmark. That has to be stored somewhere.

Since SQLite is already a part of Firefox 2.x and since there have been no problems with the SQLite in Firefox 2.x, it seems safe to say that Firefox 3.x should keep SQLite and actually take advantage of the great SQL support.

I would love to be able to sort my Firefox bookmarks with no hassle. However, that is not currently the case.

Bitching about some technology that you do not understand is pretty chee-see IMO.

With that said

Re:When?

[Alaska Jack]

The extension SmartSearch was made for people like you. It basically ties together your contextual menu with the Quick Searches you've already defined.

Let's say, from the above example, you've defined "d" as a keyword to search Dictionary.com. With SmartSearch, you'd right-click on the word, and choose
[Search for 'turnip' on...] --> [Dictionary.com]

Best extension ever. You'll use it all the time.

    - Alaska Jack

Re:When?

[ballwall]

I thought this was in FF now?

I have 'Keymarks' in my bookmarks for cpan and a few other pages (and have since ff 1.5), so putting:
cpan DBD::DB2
in the address bar brings up the relevant cpan search.

Are there any new features that the Places feature offers? I imagine having a sql structure would be a benefit if you're talking about thousands of bookmarks, but it seems like overkill to me. Unnecessary complexity. (It could very well be I just haven't thought of what the developers are imagining it will be useful for).

Re:When?

[rainman_bc]

Regardless of how "light" this is, it really sounds like feature creep to me.

Regardless of how you feel, sqlite ( or BDB) will be faster than trying to parse text files or xml files for the amount of config settings in Firefox.

It's a good idea.

Re:When?

[CastrTroy]

Well, since firefox has the "Undo Close Tab" feature, I'm pretty sure that it doesn't release all the memory when you close a tab. I'm not sure when it does release the memory, or if it's possible to disable undo close tab so that memory will be cleared when closing a tab.

Re:When?

[Redneck Hacker]

You can turn it off in about:config, but I forget the exact pref name. I believe it's browser.cache.memory.enable

Re:When?

[Paradise Pete]

Using a database for bookmarks is just plain stupid.

Suppose I wanted to know when I bookmarked it. And how long it's been since I used it. And how many times. What if I want to have it expire in a month? And what if I want to make a few notes about it, categorize it, group it. Etc. etc. etc.

All those things are easy with a database, and mighty painful with a "plain text editor."

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even at 0.25MB on a modern system with 512MB of RAM your at 0.05% of physical memory. So while you may be concerned about the 0.25MB of bloat on you 64MB Pentium 133 I certainly won't be concerned on any of my machines. Not to mention that by using an SQL Database you open up some possibilities for doing creative things with your History and Bookmarks like you see with delicio.us and other bookmarking sites that maintain added stats regarding bookmarked pages. Also, SQLite is very lite compared to the 20MB+ MySQL engine or even the nearly 10MB Berkeley DB.

Re:When?

[dcam]

I'll tell you what ticks me off about FF: the memory & processor usage in opening a window. This is something like 50Mb to open a new window. This can make it a couple of seconds to load. A work colleague decided to test whether this was the extensions (eg HTML validator) that increased the load. Nup, ~50Mb to open a window. He googled for details on how to fix this, followed the various instructions, still 50Mb to open a window.

My guess is that firefox runs a new instance of gecko and rendering tools for new windows. It doesn't seem to do the same for new tabs.

Note: this probably isn't a memory leak but it is pretty freaking annoying.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Are you saying sqllite is already in firefox 2.0? I haven't looked at the source code for firefox 2, though I use it, but it would be news to me.

There's already two sqlite DBs in version 2. Look in your profile directory for search.sqlite and urlclassifier.sqlite.

Re:When?

[1point618]

Translation:

I don't like the way Firefox doesn't free all its memory when I close a tab. I know there is a fix to that, but that fix destroys functionality that I like associated with this behavior, so I won't use it.

Way to go, you fully understand why this is not a "leak" and you enjoy the functionality you get from it, but you are still complaining. Listen, closing a tab doesn't instantly give you back the memory because you might need to get back to that tab soon, so it keeps it cached, which is actually a very nice thing. If you don't like this, I'm pretty sure you can turn off the closed tab caching, I know the Tab Mix Plus extension lets you. So it might be a good idea to read around in those forums of yours and ask some good questions to figure out how best to make Firefox do what you think it "should" do.

Re:When?

[jonadab]

Wouldn't that turn off the *whole* memory cache?

I was talking about the pref that just turns off the newer RAM-eating rendered page caching feature.

Re:When?

[bunratty]

I haven't done a memory profile, but I do have smth for you to try out. Go to this site and leave FF running overnight.

I left that site open overnight in Firefox 2.0.0.3. When I opened the page, Firefox had 31 MB Mem Usage and 40 MB VM Size. This morning, Firefox had 31 MB Mem Usage and 40 MB VM Size. Perhaps you should find a more convincing demonstration of Firefox's horrible and obvious memory issues.

Re:When?

[Martin Blank]

When did I call it a memory leak? The only time that I mentioned a leak in this thread was when I was referring to another poster's mention of a leak in NoScript (which someone else said had been fixed).

I referred here to the way that Firefox handles memory, which may include leaks but also may include unnecessarily holding onto memory long after it's practically needed. There's little reason to hold onto the last ten tabs closed per window, plus their entire contents. Even if that's seen as a necessary feature, at that point it's best not to hold onto cached information, and it should simply be a list of links, which even with expanded information shouldn't hold cost more than a megabyte. Disabling holding onto that memory should not require an extension or an about:config change; I should be able to find it in the Options dialog box, which AFAICT does not have any such options.

I have no problem with a browser holding onto memory in the currently open tabs. That's behavior I expect in all browsers to a certain extent.

Re:When?

[Wolfrider]

--This is what DISK CACHE is for... If you close a tab or a window, it should immediately free the memory. If the closed page is needed again, it can be retrieved from disk.

--Disk is cheap, RAM should be given back to the system whenever possible to conserve resources. Especially when you have the OOM-killer $disaster-abortion-abomination to worry about in Linux-land.

Re:When?

[vidarh]

It really annoys me that people keeps spreading that line. I, and many others, have done those config changes and still have to close Firefox regularly to reclaim memory. It takes a day or two at my regular usage for Firefox to eat 1-1.5GB of memory that it won't give back if I close tabs.

Re:When?

[zero_offset]

Count yourself lucky. I've lost my bookmarks file several times -- and when FF goes down, it blanks the handy file on disk, too. I've scheduled a little script to copy my bookmarks elsewhere each night because of this. It has also happened to my wife twice, and a couple of friends several times. It hasn't happened to me lately, so maybe they fixed it, but it is (or was?) a real issue.

Thunderbird 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they also modify Thunderbid 3.0 to use SQLite as a backend. Using a lightweight SQL backend has a lot of benefits over ugly mailbox files.

Re:Thunderbird 3.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Except portability.

Re:Thunderbird 3.0

[audi100quattro]

huh? If sqlite is portable enough to be used in firefox, then why not thunderbird?

I wouldn't mind a gmail-like conversation layout with other features enabled by having a "lite" relational-DB handle all the mail/contacts and other stuff. Microformats anyone?

Re:Thunderbird 3.0

[HeroreV]

Obviously you've never read about Mork. It would be difficult to come up with anything less portable than Mork.

Hrm..

[nametaken]

I'm not the usual jerk that complains about FF's feature bloat, but I wonder if this new feature is optional.

Re:Hrm..

[maxume]

Mork!

Sqlite will be there regardless.

Re:Hrm..

[chaosite]

Meh. SQLite is in fact rather nice. What I want them to get rid of is Mork (if they haven't already): http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html

Re:Hrm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. SQLite is in fact rather nice.

Except that you have to construct SQL queries instead of the leaner unabstracted way of function calls. Constructing a scripting query and parsing the resultls is always going to be extremely slow compared to a dedicated function call. Abstraction for abstraction's sake is never a good idea, especially when the job is so simple and the data set so tiny (typically no more than a few hundred bookmarks with 2-5 fields).

Re:Hrm..

[Ikcor]

And by "wonder" you really mean "hope."

Re:Hrm..

[Tribbin]

It's not really bloat. It is a fast and efficient way to store the bookmarks. I hope SQLite is going to be used for many more programs as people will have it on their systems anyway.

Once you have installed SQLite you don't have to configure anything. I used it for a tiny guestbook that I wrote for fun.

People that have sqlite and php-sqlite installed with their apache can drop the files on their webserver and they have an instant databased guestbook that is easy to backup.

http://home.deds.nl/~tribbin/pub/guestbook-0.1.tar .gz

Re:Hrm..

[mhall119]

Except that you have to construct SQL queries instead of the leaner unabstracted way of function calls. Constructing a scripting query and parsing the resultls is always going to be extremely slow compared to a dedicated function call.

Well that all depends on what's on the other side of the function call, doesn't it? Parsing an SQL query is orders of magnitude less resource intensive than filtering and sorting a few hundred bookmark records based on multiple criteria. If SQLite can do the filtering and sorting faster than the difference between parsing SQL and calling a function, then it's a performance win. Remember that function arguments also have to be parsed, evaluated, then the results used for filtering and sorting when using the current XHTML bookmarks file.

Re:Hrm..

[Kazoo the Clown]

As the usual jerk who complains about feature bloat, I actually don't have a problem with it utilizing sqllite-- it's a lean and mean database that I've used in a bunch of situations-- it works really well and has a small footprint. I would like to see a lean-and-mean minimalist browser though-- at one time Firefox was that, and that is what attracted me to it. So far I'm still running FF 1.5, as I've seen nothing to convince me to upgrade. If it ain't broke, STFU about upgrading.

Re:Hrm..

[HeroreV]

typically no more than a few hundred bookmarks with 2-5 fields

Speak for yourself. I currently have over two thousand bookmarks.

Re:Hrm..

[Tim Browse]

If SQLite can do the filtering and sorting faster than the difference between parsing SQL and calling a function, then it's a performance win. As I found, this seems likely.

Bloat or Performance Issues?

[svendsen]

Ok someone give me details on this "SQLite database engine" please.

I don't know anything about SQLLite but will this add any bloat/performance issues/etc the firefox 3.0? I mean a database engine to manage bookmarks seems like overkill to me.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[nine-times]

I mean a database engine to manage bookmarks seems like overkill to me.

Well, it is a 'lite' database engine...?

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[GIL_Dude]

I was going to make the same comment: it seems totally overkill to put a "bookmarks" or "favorites" feature into even a scaled down RDMS. I just hope they make it easy to back the damn things up and move them between machines. (yes, I know I could just use some online service). However, it is my end users who want to have them backed up and restored to other machines, etc.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Applekid]

It's a very lightweight C library which basically enables "on the ground" SQL queries and such. No client/server mechanisms to worry about, no middleware (other than sqlite.dll, and even then you can just take the source and compile it in), and the security of the database is handled by security permissions on the file. That's right, "the" file. A single file contains the schema and data.

It fully supports transactions and is appropriately ACID. For someone who's had his Firefox bookmarks hosed before, this is very welcome for me.

The benefit of this will [hopefully] be fully searchable bookmarks and easy to move the bookmarks around to other computers.

I've used it in the past and it's been great for me. Check it out: http://www.sqlite.org/

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[svendsen]

But what does "lite" mean. At the cheesecake factory they have a "lite" cheesecake, it *ONLY* has 800 calories and like 35 grams of fat vs. its counterpart of 1300 calories and 70 grams of fat. Sure the 1st one is "lite" but by itself it's a whole lot of stomach and ass growing.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[richwklein]

SQLite is developed for embedding so it is miniscule (less than 250KiB). It was already included in Firefox 2.0 so it does not add any size to Firefox 3.0. It also allows for some interesting ideas that are being played with for the new release, like site annotation and full text indexing.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Applekid]

Oh, and, it's fully cross-platform public domain, too. The database file is also equally portable. ^^-b

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[DragonWriter]

Ok someone give me details on this "SQLite database engine" please.

Details.

I don't know anything about SQLLite but will this add any bloat/performance issues/etc the firefox 3.0?

SQLite by itself, I imagine, won't. How much else they do with it may or may not.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Coryoth]

But what does "lite" mean. Well according to the SQLite homepage it means that the entire database engine fits inside of 250KiB fully configured, or less than 150KiB with optional features removed. That seems pretty light to me. If you're concerned about the impact of 250k of memory then you probably have a lot of things you should be worrying about before SQLite inclusion...

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[MyLongNickName]

1/3 less calories.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[blindd0t]

Have you ever used a Linux music player such as Rythmbox or Amarok? These use SQLite, and do exceptionally well with dealing with a sizable database. Basically, SQLite is what MS Access was *supposed* to be in terms of a portable database file format, but instead it is a very good, successful implementation.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Bandman]

It also allows for some interesting ideas that are being played with for the new release, like site annotation and full text indexing.

GREAT. And with the way this project has been headed, they're going to be SURE that storing the text of the last 200 pages I've looked at in memory, so I can be sure to search through everything my browser has seen in the last week, in addition to the utterly crappy caching of the last however many pages I've had open since I opened my browser, and the memory footprint of my browser being open will somewhere around 80% of my 2GB of memory. ARGH.

I already have to close firefox if I look at totalfark then read a slashdot thread nested. It was worse, until I did the about:config hacks to kill the memory retention. Stupid bloated crap. Can I get Netscape 2 again, but with up to date CSS and JS? Please?

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[grasshoppa]

Not to rain on the parade ( I dig sql lite ), but sql lite is most appropriate for light database work ( ha! who'da thought? ). I have attempted to run it in a more demanding environment ( greylisting on a semi-busy mail server ), and after a few days it tends to puke all over itself ( multiple ins and outs concurrently ).

For bookmarks, I'm sure it will work just fine. However, what I'd like to see from firefox are more corporate friendly features. Shared bookmarks, for example, to an sql backend. Group settings ( proxy address, home pages, look and feel, security to name a few settings I'd like to set group-wide ). These are just a few of the things I'd like to see centrally managed.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well according to the SQLite homepage it means that the entire database engine fits inside of 250KiB fully configured, or less than 150KiB with optional features removed. That seems pretty light to me. If you're concerned about the impact of 250k of memory then you probably have a lot of things you should be worrying about before SQLite inclusion...

It's not the size of the database library itself that causes bloat, but the code that uses it. The convoluted way queries have to be created and results parsed, and the actual runtime memory for doing a query is what hurts. That the table also has to be kept in duplo in memory during the query is almost negligible compared to the bloat in speed and memory of the calling code. It makes things easier for humans who can't really program all that well, at the expense of speed and code size.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Coryoth]

Just to add to "If you're concerned about the impact of 250k of memory then you probably have a lot of things you should be worrying about before SQLite inclusion..."

If you're desperately concerned about that 250k, then you can get it back by using tcsh instead of bash. All you people complaining about bloat are using tcsh (or even csh, or raw sh) instead of bash to save the ridculous waste of memory and bloat right?

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope they make it easy to back the damn things up and move them between machines.

With bookmarks-on-Places enabled, Firefox will continue to write out the bookmarks.html file (but it will no longer be the master copy of the data). You'll still be able to move bookmarks.html to another machine and import it into Firefox.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Kijori]

GREAT. And with the way this project has been headed, they're going to be SURE that storing the text of the last 200 pages I've looked at in memory, so I can be sure to search through everything my browser has seen in the last week, in addition to the utterly crappy caching of the last however many pages I've had open since I opened my browser, and the memory footprint of my browser being open will somewhere around 80% of my 2GB of memory. ARGH.
You mock it, but being able to search through the sites you've visited is actually really useful once you get used to it. Of course I don't have them in memory, they're written to disk, but the number of times I've wanted a page I was reading and not been able to remember its name or URL, just what was on it... searching the pages you've been to today is rather more accurate than searching the whole web with Google.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[jddj]

SQLite also helps power the Firefly Media Server - formerly/also known as mt-daapd (think of mt-daapd as an open-source iTunes music sharing server, without all Apple's restrictions on sharing counts).

It's lightweight and seems to work well in that application. I don't think I'd try to scale it up for a national medical record database or anything, but it's probably right-sized for managing a collection of bookmarks and history URLs - particularly if it can deliver some gee-whiz functionality that is useful.

FWIW, I decry the bloat, too - would be happy to see a more stable Firefox 1.5 vs. a more featureful 3.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Bandman]

Sure, I'm not arguing the functionality of that, just that the guys who decide default usage in the firefox project will make it painful for everyone else. I'm sure that the fix will be as easy as adding a random string into an undocumented about.config setting that doesn't exist by default.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[heinousjay]

You're right. Damn these people who keep putting features into software, reusing component code from open source projects, and generally trying to move us forward. Obviously what people really want is the satisfying feel of using a computer like it was still 1976.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[PitaBred]

Write a plugin? I mean, there are things like Foxmarks that already do bookmark synchronization... it shouldn't be too hard to just write a plugin to ensure that you always have the corporate bookmark set from a random website, and you don't even have the overhead of SQL then, either. Just a single HTML file somewhere. Settings, you can access those from a plugin, too...

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[bheekling]

Have you ever used a Linux music player such as Rythmbox or Amarok? These use SQLite,

Wrong. Amarok can use either SQLite or MySQL. You can configure that at first run.
On the other hand, Rhythmbox uses an xml file for storing its database information.

$ ls .gnome2/rhythmbox/
audioscrobbler.queue covers jamendo magnatune playlists.xml plugins rhythmdb.xml

See that rhythmdb.xml? Know what that is? Take a guess.

$ file rhythmdb.xml
rhythmdb.xml: XML

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Just Some Guy]

Oh, and, it's fully cross-platform public domain, too.

I was ready to correct you on the difference between open source and public domain, but upon further reading, you're right: it's completely public domain. They'll sell you a license if you really must have one for some reason, but it's available for downloading and embedding for any use you want to put it to. Kudos, dev team. That's pretty cool of you.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Taagehornet]

A single file contains the schema and data.

Personally I wouldn't be too worried about the memory footprint, but I guess this means that they're dropping the text based configuration files in favour of a binary format? - If that's the case, I sincerely hope they'll reconsider, from The Art of Unix Programming:

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

I had hoped that the mess that is the Windows Registry had taught people to avoid odd binary formats if at all possible...

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[ricotest]

Congratulations, I've never seen the word 'asshole' captured into a single post so succinctly!

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[cerberusss]

What I like about sqlite is that it's public domain (not even BSD licensed or something). But still people call the developer and ask for a license. He assures them that no, they don't need a license and it's all public domain. Usually the reply is something along the lines of "yeah sure, but what does a license cost". So he sells them a license :-)

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Matthieu Araman]

I think you misunderstand what has been done.
sqlite is running with firefox (no external binary launched)
Before there was mozilla function made to read a file in a mozilla only format
each time ypou wanted to change something you add to change the whole functions or the file format.
now these function were replaced with more generic function in another more optimized format (but which can be exported to plain text). These more generic function implement the sql language
when you wan't to change something, it's much more flexible.
as these function are heavely optimized, you're not losing anything.
I think it will be faster, much more maintanable and much more scalable
I mean the web has changed, so we need to have much more bookmarks and using a plain text file is slower than using a db for this.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

"For someone who's had his Firefox bookmarks hosed before, this is very welcome for me."

But how about, you know, the developers actually programming things carefully in the first place? Bookmarks are hardly the most complicated things in the world. Having to rely on a DB just says "Oops, we can't code a reliable bookmark system, so we'll have to switch it all over to SQL to keep the data fairly safe."

This kind of approach is really sad. Why not actually take care in programming, and write a reliable bookmarks system? Again, it's not *that* hard. This is just a whopping great band-aid, and illustrates why we're always battling with buggy and bloated software.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[bheekling]

Whoa, you're right, I do sound like an asshole. I should've took a deep breath before writing that comment... I just have an intense dislike for people who use incorrect information to make a point.
Can I be excused just this once for my hastiness? :}

Thank God!

[OwenMarshall]

The Mork file format was one of the most braindead database systems ever. Coding to access it is ridiculously difficult.

Mork is dead... thank the gods.

Re:Thank God!

[jopet]

Mork is indeed braindead, but it is as far as I understand not used for bookmarks (which uses essentially a plain HTML file), it is used for email metadata in Thunderbird (and Seamonkey).

Unfortunately, there is no indication that any work is done to move the backend for storing emails and email metadata in Thunderbird to something sensible. The way how this is done now prevents a lot of useful functions and extensions from getting implemented -- it is just not worth the hassle with a back-end that is based on mbox and mork.

Re:Thank God!

[Fast Thick Pants]

In Firefox, bookmarks are stored in an html file, but browsing history (History sidebar and URL autocomplete) is in a Mork db. With Places, both will be stored together in a SQLite db.

In Thunderbird, Mork is used not only for the email summary files but also for the address books, which is much more frustrating. It's nearly impossible to find or write non-Mozilla code that can read or write Thunderbird address books, which is a serious impediment to synchonization tools. (Honorable mention to Dawn, which does a fair job of Mork address book conversion.)

I, too, believe that Thunderbird has far more to gain from the move to "Unified Storage" than Firefox does.

Re:Thank God!

[jopet]

Thanks for that clarification. Will there be an API so that clients (extensions) can store arbitrary additional metadata for history and bookmark entries?

And yes, forgot to mention that the Thunderbird back-end for addresses stores just as much as the one for emails :)

Unfortunately my impression is that the Mozilla foundation does not invest much of its accumulated fortune into bringing Thunderbird into the 21st century (what do they actually *do* with the money, anyways?)

Re:Thank God!

[WWWWolf]

Will there be an API so that clients (extensions) can store arbitrary additional metadata for history and bookmark entries?

While I'm not familiar with how SQLite is used in Firefox, I believe the answer is "probably yes" and it's called something like "CREATE TABLE foo" and "INSERT INTO foo (blah, bookmark_id) ...". =)

Leap?

[arth1]

It's hard to leap when you're that big[1]. A few small steps, sure, but to qualify for a leap, I'd say one would have to replace HTTP or TCP/IP. And whether the direction is forward is also open for debate. If the browser takes up several times as much memory as the OS, I personally think it's time to find the axe and use it. Others may disagree -- which is why it's good there's more than one browser.

[1]: Obligatory "Look at the size of that thing!" quote.

Regards,
--
*Art

Reinventing the wheel?

[Rethcir]

Look, I love firefox, but I can't really think of anything wrong with regular-ass bookmarks. I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort. This seems like a bloat feature to me.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[SquareVoid]

That is great that regular booksmarks work for you. However, many people feel differently about it and is why they are reinventing the way we think about bookmarks. The feature will either sink or swim, but I welcome the attempt at change. Currently I am using google bookmarks, but that is not as fluid as I would like it to be.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[remmelt]

Tagging? Sorting in more ways than alphabetically? Adding notes, relationships/links, sharing bookmarks, grouping, etc. These are off the top of my head, I'll stop here before this post tips over into buzzword land.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Rethcir]

Care to elaborate? Are you talking about networking bookmarks directly thru firefox?

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[RandomPrecision]

Regular ass-bookmarks? Ew.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Coryoth]

Look, I love firefox, but I can't really think of anything wrong with regular-ass bookmarks. I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort. This seems like a bloat feature to me. Obviously you've never used Epiphany's bookmark system, with searchable tagging instead of hierarchical folders. It's rather nice and, due to searchability, you bookmark a lot more pages without worrying about getting an unmanageable mess of bookmarks. The tagging is nice because it lets you associate a bookmark with several different categories (which is pretty common). In general its just a nicer way to work with bookmarks. As to bloat -- you are aware that SQLite uses less than 250k for the entire database engine? That's hardly bloat, and the gains in bookmark management (presuming the Firefox guys put as nice a frontend on it as Epiphany did) are tremendous.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be beneficial to /. trolls who like to pull figures out of their asses, now they can optionally store sources for these figures in the same location.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[iabervon]

The point is to make the infrastructure used for forward and back, visited links, autocompletion of URLs, the history sidebar, etc. better implemented and easier to use internally. At that point, the infrastructure is sufficient for implementing bookmarks as well, so there's no need for a separate bookmark data storage feature.

They've invented rubber tires for their high-performance needs. Now they're going to replace their wagon wheels with tires, because they've got tires available.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[ChrisA90278]

"I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort."

Apple has built this into Mac OS X and it let them do some eat stuff. For example "smart folders". With these I can make a folder and all the bookmarks move themselves into the correct folder. It enables a feature like where you just say "bookmark this" and then the broswer follows a set of rules you've defined and the bookmark finds its way into the correct folder(s).

And then what if you wanted to merge two sets of bookmarks or if a group of people were doing some web based research and wanted to build a combined bookmark database.

Or if a large organization, like a company with 10,000 emplyees had a big intranet with internal documents and wanted to maintain an index by letting anyone add his own keywords and links to a big bookmark database.

So, what this does is enable new uses, maybe it does the current job better. wh knows but I think the idea is to enable new things.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[PitaBred]

Can I have both? I don't want to tag all my bookmarks, some of them I just want in a temporary "area", just a quick drag is all it is now.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Coryoth]

Sure, just have "Uncategorized" as the default tag and anything you don't tag will get dumped in tere until such time as you provide some info.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, how about an XML file for all of that? Use nodes like , , or

Bookmarks were intended to be portable.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[drinkypoo]

Ever heard of the del.icio.us direc.tor? Too lazy to find all the goodies right now but if you install the del.icio.us official plugin, greasemonkey, and the del.icio.us direc.tor greasemonkey script, you can achieve the same functionality but through del.icio.us; if you like such sites, I highly recommend it. I then use the actual bookmarks only for web-inaccessible resources...

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Seq]

They still are portable. SQLite is actually pretty easy to use, well tested, and small. It is extremely easy to write even a script to copy the contents out of the sqlite database and drop into a classic bookmarks.html file. If they were to use XML and write a new handler for doing all this, they still probably would not fall within the 250KB size of sqlite (which they already include, btw), and would have the problem of not just debugging experimental new functionality, but an experimental new storage back-end.

SQLite runs on more platforms that firefox does, so I fail to see the portability issue.

Aside from the potential new ideas that could come with fancier bookmark handling, I look forward to having epiphany-style tagged bookmarks in my browser so I can find appropriate links under multiple applicable catagories rather than a single location in a rigid structure.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[evilneko]

Perhaps what he means is that any browser can read an html file, and most can import it? The smart ones can even open it directly and use it as a bookmarks file, avoiding the problem of 'import' sticking everything into a subfolder of whatever bookmarks file it is currently using.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[cuby]

When you have a 2MB html file with bookmarks and the need to share it between 4 computers, like I do, you'll see the point.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Look, I love firefox, but I can't really think of anything wrong with regular-ass bookmarks. I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort. This seems like a bloat feature to me. 1. database is already in the system (FF2), so there's nothing new being added.
2. code is being removed because much of the old bm management portion is slimmed down as a result of using this new storage mechanism
3. And most important, this doesn't change how bookmarks work for you. You hit Ctrl+D, optionally enter more information, and the site is bookmarked. Given 1 & 2, 3 means that you'll still have your "regular-ass bookmarks"

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[jp10558]

Maybe I'm missing something, but how is this different than using the bookmark description field for "tags" and current quicksearches (Well, in Opera)? I don't mean the SQL backend, but the UI or use imagined.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Coryoth]

The short answer is that it provides more flexibility to do that kind of searching. You could list all the bookmarks with a certain tag, in order of date they were added; or all the bookmarks you added in the last month; or list the most frequently visited bookmarks (which, epiphany supplies as an automatic category). You don't have to use a database to do this, but if you have a bunch of data that you want to query and sort in a variety of different ways then throwing it in a database (if you've got a small light one like SQLite) provides the most flexible and extensible approach.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[jp10558]

I see. It's going to be like the label functionality in M2/Thunderbird. That most people never use. I just don't see a likely need to do that sort of reporting on bookmarks... I suppose it might be useful if you can't name your bookmarks something you'll remember, but even then - will you remember enough to make a useful query? I doubt it.

Maybe this will allow some cool extensions, but my imagination isn't good enough to see anyone going beyond the current use model for bookmarks. Maybe this will at least make large bookmark lists more efficient - though I don't have much inefficency that's noticable to me with my large file.

Then again, I don't really know how Opera treats bookmarks in the backend.

SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[Noksagt]

Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries,

But SQLite is in Firefox 2.0 (and is already leveraged by extensions like Zotero). If Mozilla wanted to have the feature in the 2.x branch, I think they technically could (or, if a developer wanted to write an extension that allowed Firefox 2 to see both the old bookmarks and the new ones, there doesn't seem to be any critical impediments).

However, the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite doesn't yet have SQLite. Will it be unable to share bookmarks with the new Firefox? Or will it get SQLite before Firefox 3 is released?

Re:SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[Kelson]

But SQLite is in Firefox 2.0 (and is already leveraged by extensions like Zotero). If Mozilla wanted to have the feature in the 2.x branch, I think they technically could (or, if a developer wanted to write an extension that allowed Firefox 2 to see both the old bookmarks and the new ones, there doesn't seem to be any critical impediments).

Places was originally in the 2.0 branch, but they dropped it during alpha testing. It just wasn't ready for prime time. (A number of alpha testers were annoyed that they had to export their bookmarks, then re-import them. Converting from the old structure to Places was, I think, automatic, but converting the other way hadn't been anticipated.) So they've had another year to work on it, and presumably they're confident that it's stable enough and fast enough now.

Re:SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[AaronLawrence]

Although I like the decreased memory usage of seamonkey over TB+FF (saves basically 50% of the RAM), and the more powerful preferences etc, I think we have to face the fact that minimal effort is going to Seamonkey (just a few hardy volunteers) and FF+TB are going to be far ahead of them normally.

Re:SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[Anonymous Coward]

If they had significantly different codebases, I might agree. But their toolkitizing seamonkey & the development costs of porting firefox/thunderbird code into SeaMonkey are much less than writing that code from scratch for firefox and thunderbird. Also note that much of the work on Thunderbird has been done by two people--Scott Macgregor and David Bienvenu. Yes, others have contributed patches. Yes, they have a strong base from the suite. And yes, the QA/themes are done by others. But Mozilla.com has given the two few dedicated resources & have put a tremendously greater effort into Firefox. Small (but "hardy") teams can accomplish a lot.

Re:SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[AaronLawrence]

Yes, I thought it would be like this too, but:

a) They don't seem to share as much code as I thought - a lot of things are noted as being Firefox-specific in discussions
b) In reality the suite lags far behind
c) Some of the important changes are in the user interface which is clearly not shared.

Re:SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[bunratty]

This will change somewhat with SeaMonkey 2, due out around the same time as Firefox 3. It dumps the old XPFE front-end in favor of Firefox's new toolkit front-end. This will reduce the amount of non-shared code, and make it easier to port non-shared code from Firefox and Thunderbird to SeaMonkey.

Changes

[eebra82]

For anyone wondering what's going to change in FireFox 3.0 (Wikipedia quotes):

The largest known change for Firefox 3 is the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. It will also provide CSS3 columns.[90] Firefox 3 will include features that were bumped from Firefox 2, such as the overhauled Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQLite backend, according to the wiki.

Also, what's expected to come in FireFox 4.0 (also Wikipedia):

On October 13, 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4.0 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project), and tool-time and runtime security checks.

Re:Changes

[suv4x4]

just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project)

Yup.. based on Flash 9's script runtime engine.

How much memory does it consume?

[Colin Smith]

Hmmmmm, 285Mb with 2 windows and 2 tabs open. Only 18Mb shared too, which isn't a good sign for our multi user machines.

  4331 me 15 0 285m 67m 18m S 1.7 3.4 0:27.10 firefox-bin

I don't know, is it windows guys developing it these days?

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[GIL_Dude]

Must be, since on Windows Vista it is currently taking 48 MB with three windows and 10 tabs. Doesn't seem to be a problem here. Of course, I hear a lot of the issues are with extensions and I only run one: adblock plus.

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[darkmeridian]

It's a feature, not a bug. Firefox will cache the last few sites you visit in RAM so you can quickly move back. You can disable it if you want.

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Ant P.]

I haven't seen Fx2.0 go over 100MB except when I'm really pushing it. 3.0a2 wasn't much different. Right now it's at 60MB.

PID PRI USER NI VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command
22784 3 ant 0 142M 59704 20028 S 0.0 3.2 3:56.73 /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[aztektum]

Yeah seeing as how I only have 5 tabs open (3 slashdot, 2 mostly plaintext sites) and Firefox has steadily increased its memory usiage from 170MB to 187MB now for me... Ooooh 188MB keeps going. 189MB. While I write this post. Please add more features.

FWIW I have no extensions or themes installed, either. (190MB)!!

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Anonymous Coward]

disable firebug.

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[TheSunborn]

How do you mesure that memory usage?

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Colin Smith]

No extensions running. I'll have a look at 3.0.

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like how Microsoft Outlook uses memory (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/827310)? Maybe its a problem with your OS.

If you're using less than 100% of the memory in your system, its going to waste...

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[bluefoxlucid]

285 of VMA. 67 Resident. VMA space may not be linked to anything in particular, for example files opened with mmap() take VMA space but can be removed from memory at will (so sometimes they are resident, sometimes they are not) because you can re-read the data from the file. If you change the file data, it either A) changes in the file; or B) gets copied permanently to memory, depending on how you mmap() it (shared, private).

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Anomolous Cowturd]

Using lots of virtual memory is not necessarily a bad thing. I note from your stats there that it's 285 virtual and 67 resident. If most of the virtual is just caching recently visited pages, you might as well cache it in swap as in regular files. 67 megs resident with four tabs open is not great but not terrible either. Even with a 512 meg machine that's only about 14% of your RAM, leaving plenty for other stuff.

Why care if most of it's memory use is swapped out anyway? Those 218 swapped out megs aren't hurting you at all... why worry?

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are if you've got a 256 MB swap partition...

Re:How much memory does it consume?

[nuzak]

> Those 218 swapped out megs aren't hurting you at all... why worry?

They are when the memory allocations are fragmented all over and doing something like switching a tab has to thrash through those 218 megs doing god-knows-what. It also bloats the TLB, which slows everything down every context switch.

Bring it on...

[BrokenHalo]

I'm looking forward to this going gold for just one reason: some of the sites I visit frequently have a particularly in-your-face usage of auto-refresh which pisses me off (i.e. insisting on re-loading just when I'm in the middle of reading a particular paragraph). FF 3.0 (I heard) is supposed to be able to block this...

Re:Bring it on...

[oldmacdonald]

The refresh blocker extension might be what you're looking for.

Re:Bring it on...

[BrokenHalo]

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try.

Why not a pluggable API?

[jrumney]

Wouldn't it be a better idea to come up with a pluggable API for bookmark storage and retrieval? This way users could keep the old storage format if they had a reason to prefer it, or write a new backend that shared bookmarks directly with IE, use del.icio.us or other web based bookmark providers etc.

Personally, I switched to del.icio.us about a year ago, and will never switch back to being tied to local storage for bookmarks, no matter what advantages this change brings. The few sites I don't want to post to the web I can easily remember the addresses of, and autocompletion means they are only a couple of keystrokes away.

Re:Why not a pluggable API?

[richwklein]

In the list of features slated for Firefox 3.0 is a sync api to allow for these kind of things. The places apis also allows for something called remote containers. Remote containers let you implement a folder with bookmarks from a different datasource, some examples that come to mind: file system, ie favorites, del.icio.us, etc...

Re:Why not a pluggable API?

[pimpimpim]

Yes, this would be the best thing. I like to reuse my bookmarks for other things, up till now this could be done with some perl hacking, it would be nice if there could be a way to access it from outside now as well. This would introduce a security issue as well, though.

Bookmarks

[FudRucker]

my bookmarks collection got so big that i removed them from my firefox profile and created several html pages (categorized) with only the links (without all the other meta info) and bookmarked the pages...

Re:Bookmarks

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I do the same. I'd love to have an editor that allowed you to drag and drop URLs around the way files can be moved in explorer/konqueror.

Re:Bookmarks

[ZERO1ZERO]

Isn't that what Start -> Run -> file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/%username%/F avorites does?

Re:Bookmarks

[wilec]

Yea same here. I ended up with about two dozen 25 - 100k files. In fact mine got so big that it was easier to use perl to whack it apart and clean it up than to manually sort through it all. It was nice to have a responsive bookmarks file again. Dang nearly time to do it again with a 1.2mb bookmarks file, now where did I put that script. Ah but for being saddled with the interesting but cursed life habits of a packrat...

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

Re:Memory use

[BosstonesOwn]

Well now it seams like they are starting to move into Microsofts style of software writing. To bad too I really liked firefox and it wasn't to bad on my solaris box.

I don't have enough bookmarks to need a db to track them.

Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Lethyos]

All posts resembling the pattern “why don't they fix this problem instead!?” are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. There is more than one person working on this thing, and as remarkable as it may seem, many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!

In this case, "coding" with one hand and masturbating with the other.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[drew]

Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored.

It has been for 7 years, why should I expect that to change now?

(Actually, it looks like inline-block really has been implemented for FF 3.0. Thanks guys. In two more years I might actually be able to us it on a real site.)

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. Oh yeah, wanna bet? :P My pet peeve is the lack of Copy Image in the Linux version, but Bug 21747 basically hasn't seen activity in years :(

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Overly Critical Guy]

Yep. It's just as stupid as the argument people make when the government shuts down a piracy ring, and everyone chimes in with "I sure am glad they're going after the real bad guys instead of murderers and rapists." But those posts usually get modded up.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

ll posts resembling the pattern "why don't they fix this problem instead!?" are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny.

So true! I was having a bunch of Mexican immigrants put an addition on my house when the "foreman" (guy who understood the most English) complained about something "en fuego". Yeah, I know it means fire. But why should a small-to-medium (and growing) fire cause a work stoppage? Sure the firemen looked at me odd as these Mexicans hammered away and had to step over their hoses to bring more 2x4 studs into a burning house. Big deal. The bottom line is this: you just can't stop progess.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[malsdavis]

Mine's the Windows bug where bookmarks can occasionally be blanked and all lost for seemingly no reason. Various reportings of this bug have been ignored for years also.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

[...]many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!

I'm able to not do several tasks in parallel.

Bye,
Wally

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[drinkypoo]

It's just as stupid as the argument people make when the government shuts down a piracy ring, and everyone chimes in with "I sure am glad they're going after the real bad guys instead of murderers and rapists."

Know what the difference is? When they spend money on fighting copyright violations, we spend money in order to support big media (ask yourself the last time the FBI got involved in the violation of the copyrights of an individual without money) whereas when we spend money on fighting violent crime, we spend money in order to make life safer for everyone including the people running big media and thus profiting from it.

Firefox development doesn't cost me anything. That's the difference.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Read again: "Just because some new feature is being added". Your pet peeve has been ignored even without new features being added.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[suv4x4]

All posts resembling the pattern "why don't they fix this problem instead!?" are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored.

I've been whining, moaning, crying, and being basically a huge pain in the rear regarding Firefox for ages, because they don't implement my feature.

Which is decent performance, at least approaching somewhat, the performance of other browsers like Opera and IE. I'm sick of clicking links and seeing my actions play out like a little recorded script plenty of seconds later.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Bent Mind]

does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. Not only is my pet peeve being ignored, it's described as a feature. I have my home directory mounted from a NFS file server. If I'm logged in on one machine with Firefox running, I can't run Firefox on any other machine. Firefox apparently can't handle having multiple instances updating the same profile. A lock file is created that causes Firefox to show the Profile in Use error and refuse to start.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[AaronLawrence]

But it DOES mean longstanding bugs are being ignored.

No developer likes to work on fixing horrible tricky bugs, and I don't blame volunteers for not doing it on Mozilla. But Mozilla foundation is earning *millions of dollars* now from Google, so I *do* expect some of their paid developers to simply spend their time on the hard slog of fixing old, significant bugs. Thats one of the main reasons why you would want paid developers on it.

Instead, all the core developers have fun AND get paid, working on exciting new rendering toolkits and the like.

SQLite

[rjmx]

Try looking at http://www.sqlite.org/

In essence, sqlite is a file-only rdbms. No networking. No user permissions (apart from those of the host filesystems, of course). Works with mostly standard SQL. Very lightweight and easy to use (I've used it for a couple of projects of my own, so it can't be too hard).

On my Debian lenny systems, the sqlite executable is around 35k, and the library file around 150k. That's pretty small.

Backing a database up involves copying the file somewhere else. That's all. Add to that the fact that it's well-documented (unlike most previous FF and Thunderbird data files), and it'd be silly NOT to use it.

.....Ron

Light version?

[BlueParrot]

I love Firefox ( or Iceweasel as it is called on Debian ) but I am running a fairly streamlined xfce install and currently fire.. err... Iceweasel, is using about the same amount of memory as the rest of the system combined. I know there are other browsers, but I really do like Iceweasel, except for the memory footprint. Seeing that I only use a fairly small subset of the features it would be nice to have a light version with just the essentials. I wouldn't suggest axing the features other users love and depend on, but perhaps provide an alternative for those of us who really don't need an advanced database for our 3-4 bookmarks ?

PS: It would also be nice if Firefox didn't highlight "Iceweasel" as a typo.

Re:Light version?

[milo_a_wagner]

Camino?

Ok, but....

[Interested Bystander]

I only just upgraded to 2.0! Sighs and reminds self that only dead products (and people) are static. We now return you to your normally uplifting /.

Firefox became a hog

[harry666t]

Where are the times when it was a quick and lightweight browser I loved? Today... Konqueror > FF.

Re:Firefox became a hog

[simong]

There's always Opera. That fits on a floppy. Doesn't it? God, I'm old.

Re:Firefox became a hog

[Kelson]

There's always Opera. That fits on a floppy. Doesn't it?

Only if you're using a really old version of Opera. Current downloads of the US-English version run 4.0 MB. The download with all available language packs is 6.3 MB.

Fortunately, you're more likely to find a USB port than a floppy drive on most computers these days, so the extra size doesn't make much of a difference.

Re:Memory use

[Anonymous Coward]

A big part of the issue is that most of the FF zealots refuse to acknowledge the existence of the problem in the first place and sometimes even come back and blame the user.

Alpha 5?

[ZOmegaZ]

Ayi ayi ayi!

And, to the dorks complaining of feature bloat.

[Lethyos]

Adding new features is not automatically a bad thing. It does not intrinsically slow down a program or make it cumbersome. Of course, these are two possible side-effects, but are not always certain. With good practices and architecture, new features are a boon, not a bust. Also, think of all the things the computer on your desktop does right now. Would you rather it have the functionality of a machine from a few decades ago because people complained that expanding its usefulness was counter-productive? Let products evolve, let engineers innovate, and let the process for coping with the consequences work.

I cannot believe some of the mundane topics Slashbots will harp on these days. Get over it and try adding some useful dialogue to the stories instead of bitching about things you do not understand or understand only as a result of experience with one particular vendor in Redmond.

Re:And, to the dorks complaining of feature bloat.

[drinkypoo]

I cannot believe some of the mundane topics Slashbots will harp on these days.

Me neither. Above all, I cannot understand why people will write whole paragraphs bitching about what other slashdotters themselves choose to whine over.

Re:And, to the dorks complaining of feature bloat.

[dedazo]

Get over it and try adding some useful dialogue to the stories instead of bitching about things you do not understand or understand only as a result of experience with one particular vendor in Redmond.

At first I thought this was just an offtopic reference to Microsoft to get that karma up, but then I realized you're actually implying that people who use Microsoft software are incapable of judging the quality of other software. Are you serious?

Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger]

As a user of multiple computers (work, home, friend's house), I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer. That's superior to this new "improvement". I think browser developers are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking in vain for "the next big thing". I'd rather see work done on useful plug-ins. That work well with existing browsers, than see a new browser that has some improvements of debatable worth that break the old way of doing things entirely.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[DragonWriter]

As a user of multiple computers (work, home, friend's house), I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer. That's superior to this new "improvement".

The Places system is designed (among several other objectives) to facilitate synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with remote storage systems.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes, the "I personally have no use for this feature, therefore no one else could possibly find it useful" approach.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Just Some Guy]

I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer.

That's all well and good, but what do you do on the day that del.icio.us inevitable goes offline, perhaps forever? OK, maybe it won't, but do you really want to trust all your data to a remote service that basically operates at their own whim?

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger]

I imagine that on that day (which I doubt will ever come), I will use Google to "view cached", or the Wayback Machine, or some such online archival service, to retrieve all my bookmarks and then look for a new universal bookmark repository.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally when I am on the go I just use my usb mem card. It has everything I need. Even have one that has a stripped down linux/gnu image I made for I can do things on the go and stay in my environment. Get with the times remote storage is so 60's. Now with a couple credit card size mem stick you can your main system around with you anywhere.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use local bookmarks. Whereever I go, so does my laptop. :-)

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[roman_mir]

Do you read any books online? If the text is long, try using this extension.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Dirtside]

Central bookmark storage sounds like a great idea, but I'd rather not store my bookmarks on a server I don't control. For one thing, I don't want other people to know what I have bookmarked. For another, I've got a few logins bookmarked with the password in the query string, and I'm not letting that sit on someone else's server. (Yes, I know that my email server isn't under my control, but then I use POP, so the emails are only on that server for a few minutes before I download them and delete them. And I'd prefer to run my own email server, but there's problems with that.)

But I've got my own Linux box at home that I'd love to centralize my work and home bookmarks on; an ideal system would retrieve bookmarks on browser startup, and cache them locally, so that if it couldn't retrieve them the next time it started up, it could still use the cached copy. When I update my bookmarks anywhere, it contacts my bookmark server and tells it to update the master list. Combine that with Subversion for a permanent history, that'd be nice.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger]

Central bookmark storage sounds like a great idea, but I'd rather not store my bookmarks on a server I don't control. For one thing, I don't want other people to know what I have bookmarked.

I understand completely. That's what kept me away from del.icio.us for a long time. Then a friend of mine showed me a setting you can activate that enables a "do not share" checkbox. I have no idea why it's not enabled by default, but now I can (reasonably) safely keep all my bookmarks there, and not have people see where I bank at, or what pr0n fetishes I have. ;-)

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Dirtside]

Actually, my privacy concern is more about: what if delicious gets hacked, or has someone nefarious working on the inside, etc., or a bug temporarily makes non-shared bookmarks shareable, etc.? Having my data on someone else's server at all is what I want to avoid.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Juergen Kreileder]

I use the Bookmark Sync and Sort add-on to synchronize my bookmarks over my own WebDAV server. The add-on works with FTP too.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Tweekster]

%99.99999999 of everyone that uses the internet.

you are an exception, an edge case, not the rule

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[pyrrhonist]

I imagine that on that day (which I doubt will ever come), I will use Google to "view cached"... to retrieve all my bookmarks and then look for a new universal bookmark repository.

That's going to be an easy search.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[dcam]

There is also the google browser sync extension. I've been happily using it for a while now.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger]

They say that 76.34% of statistics are completely made up. I strongly suspect that was one of them.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[jsebrech]

I think browser developers are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking in vain for "the next big thing". I'd rather see work done on useful plug-ins. That work well with existing browsers, than see a new browser that has some improvements of debatable worth that break the old way of doing things entirely.

Well, what if you wanted to have thousands of bookmarks, and be able to easily look through them based on tagging etc., and you wanted this data to be stored locally? I suspect this is where they are headed with places, and I would welcome it.

Besides, current browsers have a long way to go still. They're basically stuck in the mid-nineties, and are optimized towards static websites, instead of towards dynamic web apps. For example:
- HTML and CSS are optimized for showing and laying out text, not application control surfaces.
- HTML and CSS don't have good support for anything but the most simplistic of fluid layouts, which are a must for web apps. (And if you doubt this, compare the experience of creating fluid layouts in flex 2 or java swing with that of creating them in HTML/CSS).
- JavaScript 1.x is really, really slow (an order of magnitude slower than ActionScript 3), it doesn't have native support for namespaces / packages, its syntax for OO is poor, and its support for dynamic loading of application code is sub-par, all making it way too difficult to develop large client-side web apps.
- browsers don't have decent support for local storage.
- browsers don't have decent support for rich media (video, editable graphics, sound) that can be used by web applications (which is why youtube's video player is flash-based).

Many of these issues have been hacked around to some degree by various toolkits, but the fact remains that browsers are not suited to developing client-side applications, and you won't see the full bloom of web-based applications until the browsers catch up to the needs of the market. So, I think it's good that the mozilla developers aren't resting on their laurels and really trying to improve the concept and base technologies of a web browser (obviously within the confines of the standardization work of W3C, WHATWG and ECMA), instead of remaining stuck in 1996, like microsoft is with IE.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger]

Well, what if you wanted to have thousands of bookmarks, and be able to easily look through them based on tagging

Much as I hate to be like one of my detractors, and make a statistic up based purely on what I feel is right, I'd have to say that I think significantly less than 1% of the browser market wants that. Of course, the rest of what you say makes a very powerful argument in favor of a new browser version, although I don't know how much good rich media support will do us so long as YouTube and the like are flash-based, which they will continue to be until IE catches up to Firefox. I was focusing on (what I see to be) the wasteful re-inventing of bookmarks, and not thinking about preparing for the future of the web.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[petermgreen]

My general impression of the wayback machine and googles cache is that they are very hit and miss. Certainly not something i would want to rely on catching my bookmarks.

Re:Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Tweekster]

And it doesnt change the fact you are an exception not the rule

first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[rs232]

"Hmmmmm, 285Mb with 2 windows and 2 tabs open. Only 18Mb shared too, which isn't a good sign for our multi user machines"

The alleged leak is to do with Firefox using memory to cache pages. The solution is simple. Type about:config in the address bar and schange browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer , browser.cache.memory.capacity and config.trim_on_minimize.

Firefox here .. 37 MB with 2 windows and 2 tabs open and any increase is to do with the size of the cache. --

I like Firefox except for $RANDOM.FUD ..

was: How much memory does it consume? (Score: Firefox memory leak FUD)

Re:first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[svallarian]

Type about:config in the address bar and schange browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer , browser.cache.memory.capacity and config.trim_on_minimize.

Tell me again what about that is, in any way, simple.

Re:first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[rs232]

"Tell me again what about that is, in any way, simple"

Firefox's Memory Leak Bug or a Feature ?

Re:first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. Good to know how to get rid of that crap. But... the solution is simple?

Man, that's an awful, awful way to fix what is a completely insane default behaviour. My firefox currently is using 377MB of RAM. Who on earth thought that a "feature" that is observationally equivalent to a really nasty memory leak was a good idea to enable by default, never mentioning it in the GUI preference menu, and having you change undocumented flags in the bloody config: registry to turn it off? Makes my head hurt to think about.

Re:first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[vidarh]

Why do you keep spreading this bullshit? For those who report large and rapid memory leaks with Firefox this makes _no_ difference.

Re:first memory leak FUD of the thread ..

[bunratty]

And for most users, for whom Firefox uses no more memory than other browsers, continuing to post that Firefox has a serious memory issue makes _no_ difference. The only post that will make any difference is one that describes this memory issue in enough detail so that someone can write up a bug report. Until someone does that, it's pointless whining.

SQLite is brilliant

[athloi]

This lightweight, fast, simple database eliminates many of the headaches associated with using a full-on SQL installation, and works just as well for most of what most developers and users need.

If you're a Perl geek, like me, you will find this Perl module for seamless SQLite interface to be a power tool. The next time you need to get something working by morning, and it's 2am and the person "in charge of databases" hasn't called back, you'll be thanking it.

Re:SQLite is brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

And the next time the person "in charge of databases" gets a call at 4am, demanding that the copy of some data from yesterday that got accidentally wiped today is restored NOW, he'll be cursing you.

SQLite is a fantastic and useful piece of database, but as with any database system the value of the data has to be considered in the long term. Saying "It's not that important if it goes missing" is all very well during development, but it doesn't always apply a year down the line.

Re:SQLite is brilliant

[CoughDropAddict]

I agree that SQLite is brilliant, but I want to add a word of warning: don't use it for anything that needs to support any kind of concurrency (ESPECIALLY writes concurrent with anything else).

SQLite holds up like a champ (I used it for a database that ultimately grew to 20GB, 150M rows), and it will never corrupt your data, but due to the nature of its file-based implementation (there is no server process to mediate concurrent access), the locking is quite coarse.

Felt the same about tabs

[EnsilZah]

I felt the same before i tried tabs for a while, "I can't see anything wrong with just opening a new window for each new link i want to open separately".
I wouldn't judge it before i try it for a while.

Re:Felt the same about tabs

[Bearpaw]

After about 5 minutes, I thought tabbing was right up there with sliced whole-grain bread. (And Tab Mix Plus is peanut butter and jelly.)

I hope Places is on that level, but I also hope there's a way to make it look and work like Bookmarks, for them as prefer them.

Re:Felt the same about tabs

[tqft]

Right now all the places/sqllite stuff is just backend - goal was UI equivalency with FF2.0 for inital release.

That may change once it is bedded down and bugs ironed out.

Why Do We Need This?

[Blahbooboo3]

So instead of having a nice simple bookmarks.html file it is all in some places.sqlite file. A few questions/observations.

1) If this is correct, disappointing that the devs called the bookmarks file places.sqlite instead of bookmarks.sqlite so people know where the bookmarks are if you want to move them. Am I correct?

2) Is this new file now no longer human readable the way bookmarks.html?

3) Someone please tell me how this makes my life better as a normal Firefox user? Sure sounds like change for change sake to me...

Re:Why Do We Need This?

[DragonWriter]

1) If this is correct, disappointing that the devs called the bookmarks file places.sqlite instead of bookmarks.sqlite so people know where the bookmarks are if you want to move them. Am I correct?

Since "Places" integrates, among other things, bookmarks and history, calling it "bookmarks.sqlite" would be misleading to a certain extent; since the feature in Firefox 3.0 that combines those prior features will be known as "Places", I think "places.sqlite" would be a natural name.

2) Is this new file now no longer human readable the way bookmarks.html?

I believe SQLite files are not easily human readable, though there is a command-line query tool that lets you query them.

3) Someone please tell me how this makes my life better as a normal Firefox user?

You might want to look at the Mozilla Wiki discussion of Places as a starting point.

Re:Why Do We Need This?

[N3Roaster]

I don't really follow Firefox development, so I can't answer point 1 and can only speculate on point 3, but as a happy user of SQLite I can say that the file is not particularly human readable. It would be a binary file and while you may be able to pick out bits of text, it isn't going to be as clear in a text editor as bookmarks.html. There are, however, free tools available for interacting with SQLite database files, so it isn't as though you'll be forced to use Firefox to see its bookmarks.

Re:Why Do We Need This?

[dmeranda]

It's a "real" database now, so access to it is just standard
SQL, and less error-prone than mucking with XML schemas. Even
programatic access is easier.

$ sqlite places.sqlite

sqlite> .schema
sqlite> select * from xxxx;
sqlite> insert ....
sqlite> .dump

or to get the output back into text format, something like

sqlite> .mode csv
sqlite> .output output_save_filename.csv
sqlite> select * from xxxx;

Re:Why Do We Need This?

[Blahbooboo3]

Other than nerds, who cares about this feature in Firefox?

Wouldn't it be better to work on making Firefox faster, smaller memory footprint, and a safer web browser (serious investigation in JavaScript vulnerabilities etc) compared to IE?

Nerds/programmers might love this, but otherwise I don't get what this does to better the Firefox experience for normal users...

Re:Why Do We Need This?

[LWATCDR]

"Wouldn't it be better to work on making Firefox faster, smaller memory footprint, and a safer web browser (serious investigation in JavaScript vulnerabilities etc) compared to IE?"
Moving from XML style bookmarks to SQLLite Bookmarks will.
1. Use less memory.
2. Be faster.
So it does do two of the things you want.
I am not a big fan of XML. It is often used for things it shouldn't be.

Bloat...

[Eddi3]

Pointless extra bloat (like this) is the reason I still use Firefox 1.5. It's fast, and has all the features I need, and unless these conditions improve, I can't imagine why I would try to fix something that wasn't broken.

bookmarks and history

[thegnu]

I rather think that integrating bookmarks and history into a light database would be pretty decent. They can then put all my passwords, phone number, SSN, pictures of my penis, and home address in a database, and my life will soon be very Convenient(tm).

But really. /.ers seem very reluctant to apply Reading for Comprehension to the summary, which clearly states a restructuring of the system. Maybe this new feature will make us all happy and the genocide will stop. Speaking pragmatically, probably not.

I for one welcome our query-driven overlords.

In case none of you have guessed, I'm visiting a friend who is having lady trouble, and I am therefore drinking. w00t!

Think of his loved ones, for cryin' out loud!

[killmenow]

Mork is dead... thank the gods.

Poor Mindy...

memory leak FUD #2 ..

[rs232]

The alleged leak is to do with Firefox using memory to cache pages. The solution is simple. Type about:config in the address bar and change browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer , browser.cache.memory.capacity and config.trim_on_minimize.

Firefox here .. 37 MB with 2 windows and 2 tabs open and any increase is to do with the size of the cache. --

I like Firefox except for $RANDOM.FUD ..

was; Re:Memory use (Score:1)

Re:memory leak FUD #2 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

The alleged leak is to do with Firefox using memory to cache pages.

Alleged? What is this, the Mozillazine Forums? Everybody who's not a FF fanboy acknowledges the leak. The leak is real, the page caching preference doesn't fix it, and the devs are completely delusional.

Maybe all that Google loot has gotten to their heads? They don't care about the common user's memory issues. IMO, it's been downhill ever since the NY Times ad. Marketing is what FF is now about. The overriding goal is to increase market share.

"You peasant users will like the bloated software we give you! Don't even consider installing Opera!"

Re:memory leak FUD #2 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny, I have a few 6 tabs in two windows and still uses less than 256MiBs out of 4 GiBs. Oh wait maybe you are using it in Windoze. You may have received an 'update' from that chair-throwing fucktard to give it an illusion to take more memory, or maybe its the fucktarded Windoze OS from the getgo. Maybe you should consider trying Ubuntu as it is user friendly and is much quicker than anything Micro$hit gives you.

A....A.... *A clue!*

[Anonymous Coward]

Apologies for sneezing at you, there must be an air leak in my nose.

Firefox Memory Leak is a Feature

I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[TheGratefulNet]

scrolling is painful on FF.

I'm using the latest 2.x trunk, built from ports on freebsd.

mouse based scrolling is VERY VERY slow. even on a very fast box (c2duo e6600 3gig ram).

I'm not sure what they are doing to make scrolling so bad but I would think the engine is already too bloated in terms of how much i/o and cpu it needs JUST to scroll pages!

I'm happy with the feature set for 2.0. I need no new features. I DO need usability improvements and that's mostly in terms of screen speed.

(or do I have to give up and go to opera just to get reasonably modern scrolling speed?)

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[Kelson]

That's strange. I'm running Firefox 2.0.0.3 on a considerably slower box (single Athlon 1800, 1GB RAM), and scrolling speed is fine, whether dragging the scrollbar, using the mouse wheel, etc. I suppose it could be an OS-dependent bug (I'm running Linux, not BSD), or optimizations in the official binaries, or maybe a video driver issue?

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[cyfer2000]

Can you give a link of the site that shows slow scroll please? People can test if this has been fixed in 3.0.

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[TheGratefulNet]

the worst example that comes to mind is the 'frys javascript nightmare/hell page'. aka, their online ads.

try this url:

http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/ROP/ads.aspx?a dvid=32664

takes forever to load (even on fast connection) and just really slows FF down noticeably.

hit page-up and page-down to see slow scrolling.

worse, use the thumbwheel in any 5btn mouse, give it a few spins and sit and wait until FF catches up.

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[cyfer2000]

I don't need to scroll at all on this page. Wait, you don't have Adblock, do you?

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[FrostDust]

Think for a second. You do realize that would defeat the user's purpose of visiting the page, right?

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[Scoth]

Out of curiosity, what video driver are you using for X? At least in Linux, I found FF scrolling (and any scrolling at all really) to be very slow when using the VESA drivers. Might be related if you're using something similar. Not really FF's fault.

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[Mr. Hankey]

Seems fine here... Scrolling is smooth and the thumbwheel doesn't slow it down. What is your video card and which driver are you running? A crappy driver will slow down everything that scrolls text mixed with images, not just Firefox. For reference, I'm running a 32-bit Linux distro on an AMD 4200+ dual core, with 2gb RAM, a PCIE GeForce 6600 and NVidia's 9755 drivers. FF 2 runs fine (although it's eating 260mb RAM) with 26 tabs open. Come to think of it, I guess that's 10MB per tab...

Re:I don't want features; I ONLY want speed

[vidarh]

It's most likely memory related. Whenever Firefox leaks enough memory to start swapping on my machine (usually within a day of me starting it) choppy scrolling is always one of the first ways I notice.

Native Mac UI

[Kelson]

It's also worth noting that native form controls for Mac OS X were enabled yesterday, something Firefox's Mac users have been clamoring for since the 0.x days.

memory leak FUD #3 ..

[rs232]

"Iceweasel, is using about the same amount of memory as the rest of the system combined"

I wouldn't have known about the issue except that every time Firefox is mentioned on slashdot it gets talked about. The alleged leak is to do with Firefox using memory to cache pages. The solution is simple. Type about:config in the address bar and change browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer , browser.cache.memory.capacity and config.trim_on_minimize.

Firefox here .. 37 MB with 2 windows and 2 tabs open and any increase is to do with the size of the cache. --

I love Firefox except for $RANDOM.FUD ..

was: Light version? (Score:2)

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[svendsen]

So if that's all there is to "fix" it why don't they release an update then? Seems this is a band aid approach. And what about all the non tech people who use firefox, if you learned it form /. , and they don't read /. How would they know this fix?

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[rs232]

"So if that's all there is to "fix" it why don't they release an update then .."

There is no issue to fix, but if people want to restrict memory usage thec can tweak it using about:config.

Firefox still at 54 MB with two windows and two tabs open ..

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[drew]

Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else. I regularly see Firefox go above 250 MB of memory, and nothing short of closing it entirely will get that memory back. And despite what you claim, it's not the cache, because according to the documentation for the "browser.cache.memory.capacity" config key, Firefox is only using 18 MB for its cache. According to what you say, I should never see Firefox go over about 75MB, but it's very rare for it to be using less than that unless I've restarted it within the past hour or two.

I don't complain about the problem because honestly, I don't mind closing Firefox out every other day or so to free up the memory, but I do complain about people who deny it's a problem because it doesn't happen to them.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[nolifetillpleather]

"Type about:config in the address bar and change browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer , browser.cache.memory.capacity and config.trim_on_minimize." change them to what? and my about config doesn't even 2 of those 3 preferences.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done that, and I still have to restart the browser every day or two once its memory usage hits 200-250MB. If I don't restart it, it climbs to the 300+ range and makes the entire system so unresponsive as to be painful. Note that my settings include restoring all windows and tabs at startup, and it only uses around 50-80 MB on startup.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[drharris]

You're not going crazy.. I see the same thing on my system ( OS X ). I have to restart at least twice a day when it passes 220MB of usage. At that point it takes over a second to register a link click or respond to the scroll wheel.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

How much memory now? It's riveting.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an issue to fix. How can it be that I've set the upper limit to cache use in preferences->network to 50MB, and still Firefox is eating about hundred megabytes after a days use? It doesn't matter that this bug is labeled a feature -- it's a nonsensical and disruptive default setting which I have no way of knowing about, which has the exact same effect as a memory leak, and which I cannot change unless I just so happen to know the secret, magic variable to change in the about:config database.

There is an issue to fix, because regular people don't know why this is happening, don't want it to happen and have no clue how to fix the problem. Doesn't matter that it's not a programming bug -- it's a design bug, and it's still a bug!

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it be that I've set the upper limit to cache use in preferences->network to 50MB, and still Firefox is eating about hundred megabytes after a days use?

Sorry, I missed a "four". It's four hundred megabytes of memory for what's supposed to be a light weight Mozilla. I think that's an awful design choice.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[Kattspya]

ATM I've got about 25 tabs open and Firefox is using 148MB. But I do close it several times a day because it can be set to save the tabs you have open. Before that you could use an extension for the same functionality. The only reason I can think of for not closing FF is loading streaming video and not wanting to reload the data. If you're not doing that just close the goddamn program when it's not needed.

I've got the Adblock plus, video downloader, RIP, linkification, gmail, distrust, dict, quick note and filterset g updater extensions installed and running currently.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[vidarh]

That's bullshit. I've tried that, and it makes no difference at all in the memory leaks I'm seeing. I use tabs a lot, and Firefox very frequently does not release all memory when I close the tabs.

Currently Firefox takes up about 1 GB with all caching turned off, and closing tabs makes minimal impact.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[vidarh]

If you seriously think there's no issue despite all the people who reports first hand experience with huge leaks, then you are deluding yourself.

Firefox at 1GB with one tab and the cache cleared here.

Re:Lightweight browser

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the database in itself that is the bloat here, but the whole query language interface and parsing routines needed to use it. Yes, it causes bloat and is going to be orders of magnitude slower than any well written hash table.

Re:Memory use

[daeg]

No, but offloading it to SQLite means they can slowly remove the horrible parsing, storing, etc mechanisms for the current data formats. And it also means that, hopefully, tools will be developed for IT managers to easily sync bookmarks with their employee desktops, e.g, updating home pages, etc remotely.

uh....

[SuperDre]

what's so special about this? There isn't anything wrong with current bookmarks IMHO, but then again, developers need to think up junk so they can release another version... So this isn't anything to brag about IMHO..

Re:uh....

[hobo sapiens]

Well, I guess a non-special enhancement deserves an un-special comment from someone who is apparently very "special".

Man, I hate it when the idiots escape digg.com and come to /.

Downloads window

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they fix the Downloads window yet? Whoever thought it would be a good idea to store the list of downloads as XML, then parse and re-encode it every time the list changes should be shot. It slows down to a crawl with more than 30 files in it, forcing me to clear it on a daily basis.

captcha: crotch

What are places?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's great that they're including this new feature, and you'll be able to import your old bookmarks. But what is the new feature? How is it different? How is it better? Why does neither the summary nor the article talk about these things?

Far from what people want...

[nsebban]

Firefox users want a browser that displays webpages. A browser that is fast. A browser that doesn't hog the whole computer's resources. A browser that never leak hundreds of megabytes after an hour of usage.

Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ? Or at least does it need it more than it needs a stable and fast browser ? I honnestly don't think so, and I'm sad seeing Firefox going farther and farther from it's initial goals as an Open Source project :(

Re:Far from what people want...

[dvice_null]

> Firefox users want a browser that displays webpages. A browser that is fast...
> Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ?

You obviously are not a programmer who understand xml parsing and knows SQLite very well. Well as I happen to be such a programmer, let me just tell you that I can pretty well guarantee to you that switching to SQLite will make the browser faster. Most like it will also decrease the amount of needed memory.

Reasons for this:
- SQLite is very light database. Basicly it is just component that can be used to write and read a file, but searching a certain element(s) in the file is very fast compared to normal read methods.
- Reading xml files or similar, as the current bookmakrs.htm file is, is very slow and it requires a lot of memory. This is because you first need to parse the html tree and after that you will get the actual data from the file. It is very good if you have only few items in the file, but if you have thousands bookmarks like some people do, it will get slow.

So basicly they are just removing the bloat and making the browser faster.

Re:Far from what people want...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ?"

I need it! I can't tell you how much I wanted the feature to be in 2.0. I've lost bookmarks several times (still some I can't find.. probably never will again). I dual boot Ubuntu and Win2k. It would be nice to be able to share the bookmarks between both versions of FF easier. I have so many bookmarks that I need some way to sort them in the browser (or even a more in depth search of them).

"Or at least does it need it more than it needs a stable and fast browser ?"

What exactly is a "fast browser"? FF renders pages plenty fast for me . . . and I haven't had it crash on me since pre-1.5. Stable is as stable does.

"...I'm sad seeing Firefox going farther and farther from it's initial goals as an Open Source project :("

You mean the goal of being the best damned browser there is? In my opinion, it's right on track.

Re:Far from what people want...

[i-thinkTwentyTwo]

I guess this isn't about creating a whole new feature, but rather a significant improvement to an existing feature. Using a SQL database to store bookmarks seems obvious to me, even more obvious to use something like SQLite. Now, keep in mind that places is about more than just bookmarks (it will encompass history as well) and it begins to get clearer what sort of extra functionality you can provide, such as:

• Bumping frequently accessed pages into favourites
• Improving autocomplete (in the address bar) to rank by relevance
• Tagging

If someone was to implement these features now it would be harder than it should be and certainly not as fast as it should be. At the core, most of these sort of features only need 1 simple SQL query. I don't use bookmarks for the sites I visit frequently. Mainly because it's a pain to maintain them (compared to the value extracted from using them). Bookmarks have pretty much remained unchanged for years. This isn't because they can't be improved, but because they aren't necessarily the most glamourous part of the browser. Sites like del.icio.us are evidence that people are looking for more.

Re:Far from what people want...

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> You obviously are not a programmer

>>> Reading xml files or similar, as the current bookmakrs.htm file is, is very slow and it requires a lot of memory. This is because you first need to parse the html tree and after that you will get the actual data from the file. It is very good if you have only few items in the file, but if you have thousands bookmarks like some people do, it will get slow.

I myself am obviously a programmer, and I call inexperience here.

XML processing doesn't need to be slow: just take a single-pass through the file and set up an internal data structure (such as a "tree"), and you're performance will basically equal to or even perform faster than a database. The latency of reading the file is typically far higher than any processing, as long as the processing is reasonably efficient, and the latency typically doesn't change all that much even if the file is a larger text file rather than some more compact binary "sqlite" file. Now if you change "thousands bookmarks" to "millions bookmarks", then the story might change.

Re:Far from what people want...

[nsebban]

If you really think that what makes FireFox 1.5 and 2.0 slow and resource-hungry is the current bookmarking system, you should put your SQLite and XML knowledge aside and come back to more basic stuff =)

A bookmark list is no more than a list of urls stored in a file. The folders hierarchy is no big deal either. A very good example of feature that should be kept as simple as possible. Several users commented on their use of a roaming bookmarks service (del.icio.us and others), and it's actually a way more interesting feature to integrate to FF, than a shiny auto-bookmark-store-o-matic© that will be fun to program, but won't make a difference to the end-user.

The point of my initial message is that many people among the FireFox user-base would prefer having a lightning-fast and memory-thin FireFox with the feature of 1.5 or 2.0, better than a big fat browser full of features that most people don't even need, and won't use at all.

Honnestly, I would pay for a lightweight version of FireFox.

Re:Far from what people want...

[udittmer]

> So basicly they are just removing the bloat and making the browser faster.

They're making the bookmark system faster, not the browser. Using bookmarks constitutes a fraction of the time spent in a browser, so the overall performnace gain will be negligible.

memory leak FUD #4 ..

[rs232]

"Yeah seeing as how I only have 5 tabs open (3 slashdot, 2 mostly plaintext sites) and Firefox has steadily increased its memory usiage from 170MB to 187MB now for me... Ooooh 188MB keeps going. 189MB. While I write this post"

Five tabs open, three slashdot, two plaintext, memory used less than 62 MB, while I write this post. ..

--

was: Re: How much memory does it consume? (Score:2)

Re:memory leak FUD #4 ..

[vidarh]

So in other words you're one of the lucky ones that don't experience the memory leak. Doesn't help those of us who are.

Doesn't work

[edxwelch]

Thanks for the tip, but it doesn't work.
I installed that plugin and http://www.reuters.com/ still refreshes

Re:Doesn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.reuters.com/resources/js/refresh.js

Might be the reason... adblock that javascript.

Re:Doesn't work

[maxume]

Reuters is also using javascript to do the refresh. You can probably turn it off by putting the following in a bookmarklet and clicking it on pages you don't want to refresh:

javascript:(function(){refreshFlag=false;})();

There is a whole host of other javascript, so it might not work, but it probably will.

Autoexport to HTML

[iabervon]

The thing I don't like about this change is that bookmarks.html is the ideal homepage. It's a web page that's stored locally, has no ads or extra junk, and has a list of links to the things that you personally want to get to regularly, updated automatically. The biggest thing I missed when I used Konqueror for a while was that it couldn't render its bookmark list in the browser window. Of course, it should be easy enough to have an extension generate a nice file from the bookmark database every time it changes.

Re:Autoexport to HTML

[Anonymous Coward]

This is even done automatically, the bookmarks.html will be kept in sync with places (but not the other way round).

Re:Autoexport to HTML

[archen]

You know know now that you mention it, that should probably be an option for a homepage regardless of what format it's in. Bonus points if you could theme it.

Re:Autoexport to HTML

[Quila]

It shouldn't be that hard to make an add-on that that parses Places into HTML and loads it onto the page. Available as a button or as the home page at startup.

Re:Autoexport to HTML

[pyrrhonist]

You know know now that you mention it, that should probably be an option for a homepage regardless of what format it's in. Bonus points if you could theme it.

There was an extension that kind of did that. I think it's dead now. I haven't tried it recently, so I don't know what the state of it is.

features != memory

[DreadSpoon]

Can you point to any evidence that indicates that it is any particular feature, or even a huge group of features, that causes this increase in memory?

I'm willing to bet that the reason Firefox uses so much memory is because it uses an absolutely huge amount of data. Bookmarks, history, cache, not to mention the bazillion images used by pages (both those loaded and those cached), plus the increasingly complex markup used on pages which requires a staggeringly huge DOM tree to represent, plus all of the layout code necessary to support the increasingly complex CSS specification...

Somehow I doubt that ripping out the existing bookmark code (a reduction in code size) and replacing it with a SQLite backend (which already exists, and is stupidly small to boot) is going to account for any kind of memory consumption increase compared to just loading up the latest version of Slashdot vs. the old version of Slashdot (as one example).

Re:features != memory

[Quila]

I'm willing to bet that the reason Firefox uses so much memory is because it uses an absolutely huge amount of data.

We have a winner! Just cranking up Firefox for the first time doesn't use much memory. But in addition to the history, disk cache, etc, it caches in memory the last several pages you visited in order to make the back/forward buttons work fast. Multiply this by several tabs that you've been browsing through for a while, and you're using a lot of memory.

Re:features != memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Then how come Opera has the same functionality, only with much more pages in the back/forward cache without using so much memory?

Snappy Firefox

[Doc Ruby]

I hope it makes a small leap backwards. Ever since a couple of weeks before fully upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04, when I run Evolution 2.10.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.3, after a few hours (or maybe a lot of GUI and HTTP events), some combo memory leak fills my 512MB RAM and starts crazily swapping. I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.

Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.

Re:Snappy Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I'm using FF 2.0.0.3 right now on my Win2k machine and it has a footprint of 66MiB. It has been running ALL NIGHT (aprox 8 hours) with at least 10 taps open the whole time.

Seems like they fixed most of the memory leaks to me.

Re:Snappy Firefox

[Doc Ruby]

Anonymous dude Coward, don't you think the FF 2.0.0.3 code in my Ubuntu 7.04 install is different from the code in your Windows 2000 install?

Re:Snappy Firefox

[Jerf]

Your 2.0.0.3 doesn't snapshot its state for you? If you kill it, next time you restart it's supposed to offer you the ability to "restore" the session, which redoes all your tabs and even does a decent job with where you've scrolled to in the page. I haven't had the courage to see it if retains text box state. It's not a "total" snapshot, but it's most of what you need and it's probably better than Evolution.

I poked around in the preferences to see if you might have shut it off, but I don't see a setting for it in the standard preferences dialogs.

Killing Firefox and immediately restarting it is how I've been keeping its memory usage down. (I've cut my plugins down to NoScript, Flashblock, and Nuke Anything, and that has slowed the leaking, but it still leaks. And linux + out of memory + no swap disk seems to go absolutely fucking insane. I still can't figure out what the hell it's doing, even in theory. Note that leaky Firefox is the only reason I need a swap partition at all; otherwise I've got more than enough memory.)

Re:Snappy Firefox

[Doc Ruby]

Like I said,

I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.

So I'm in exactly the same boat as you.

Looks like we could use a Firefox "watchdog" extension that tracks memory usage to catch the memory leak, then offers to cycle the app and recover the session.

But I've noticed that cycling just Evolution gets me out of the jam just as well.

Come on people!

[VinB]

Where's all the hearty IE bashing that I've come to know and love around here?

Re:Come on people!

[Spy der Mann]

Where's all the hearty IE bashing that I've come to know and love around here?

What's an IE?

All criticism is not FUD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cults often use language to redefine milieu and prevent any criticism from sinking in with adherents. How is modding every post critical of Firefox "Troll" and screeching "FUD" at all criticism any different?

From the way you guys behave, you'd think there was nothing wrong with Firefox, Linux and whatever other idols you've agreed to exalt.

FUD is redundant nonsense, BTW. Uncertainty is doubt, so why not just shorten it to FU? Fits a bit better with you blokes' mentality.

How much larger are the bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

The last FF upgrade to 2.0 from 1.5 approximately doubled the size of my book marks. It went from ~400k to ~850k in size. I am just curious about the load times and how this will impact the performance when you launch FF or when you access bookmarks. Also, how is the data stored with SQLite? Binary or text? Personally I prefer text; it is easier to recover if there is a problem.

Just my .02 cents worth.

Re:How much larger are the bookmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

The last FF upgrade to 2.0 from 1.5 approximately doubled the size of my book marks. It went from ~400k to ~850k in size.

It's because they now store favicons in the bookmark file. Look at the file with a text editor to verify. Each entry now has a Base64 encoded image crammed in.

I noticed this slowed down my bookmarks menu, so I turned off favicons, which helped. As a bonus, it shrinks bookmarks.html back down to the 1.5 days.

Steve?

[cicho]

Steve Ballmer? How's it going, buddy? I knew it was you when the second chair flew by!

In related news . . .

[KalElOfJorEl]

Microsoft plans on releasing its new feature, "Locations", with the next release candidate of Internet Explorer 7. It requires a small version of MS-SQL Server to be installed, which will be included, and requires 1GB ram and 3GB free hard disk space.

Leap Forward?

[LMacG]

Firefox is going to rapidly transform from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist browser?

Re:Leap Forward?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the goal of FF all along. Mozilla.org is known to be infested with commies. Here's some of their pre-Firefox work: http://mithgol.ru/Mozilla/dow-full.gif

moderators: Parent is not a troll

[volkris]

Unfortunately I don't have moderator points at the moment; the troll moderation you received is completely unwarranted.

As you can see, SQLite is one of those darlings of the open source movement that aren't open to criticism. I HAVE used SQLite many times, and your concerns are certainly warranted whether or not they turn out to be significant. As the replies to your comment and moderation on it indicate, you're just not supposed to bring it up at all.

I know of three or four projects clinging to SQLite despite various problems it causes, some of which are deemed features. In these cases the DB has caused far more harm than good, but since the since has such a religious following it's simply not an option to drop it.

Sorry, man.

Re:moderators: Parent is not a troll

[BagOBones]

"know of three or four projects clinging to SQLite despite various problems it causes, some of which are deemed features."

I would like to hear what projects these are. I have been considering SQLite for a project and would like to know any possible problems.

Re:moderators: Parent is not a troll

[MikeB90]

I know of plenty of projects using SQLITE. For megabyte to tens of megabyte size database, SQLITE is GREAT. For hundreds of megabytes, it can still be good, but needs careful design and tuning. For 100s of megabytes, use a client/server DB

We use it to back our web based products. The concurrency isn't great but can handle dozens of users easily. We have DBs ranging to the gigabyte size. To date, in the past 4 years, there have been virtually no serious issues with SQLITE.
Pros:

quality code, excellent free and paid support
public domain code
excellent SQL 92 compliancy, with the exception of GRANT/REVOKE, which aren't relevant on this kind of DB
compiles on tons of platforms from embedded to Windows/Mac/Linux.
Fast, especially for SELECTs
ACID
UTF8/UTF16 compatible
Full Text search module available (caveat: I haven't tried it and don't know how good it is)
Well documented
Thread safe

Here are the caveats:

- As noted, it's not client/server. So it's concurrency is limited. Multi users apps should carefully consider their usage of SQLITE. You can work around this up to a point of course, but eventually you'll hit contention.
- For 100MB+ databases, consider client/server also.
- SQLITE can only use one index (single or compound) in the WHERE column.
- INSERTS are slow unless you batch them. This is because you are opening, closing, and flushing each time. So if you do one INSERT at a time, you'll whine about the speed. The time to insert say 10 things one at a time, is in my experience about the time to insert 1000 rows when wrapped in a transaction
- Both pro and con: a db is a single file. That makes it easy to deal with, but can be problematic in some cases, especially larger DBs

Re:moderators: Parent is not a troll

[volkris]

As the example that's most burned into my brain, take the python jabber client.

The developers of the program, which was meant to be very lightweight, decided they needed SQLite to manage chatlogs. I mean, it's lightweight, right? And it gets such glowing reviews from EVERYONE. How could this go wrong? They put a good deal of work into setting this all up, and once they started making releases with SQLite various users started reporting problems.

Aside from the usability issues with people no longer being able to access their plaintext log files as they wanted to, many started finding basic performance of the client to be completely unacceptable. There were major memory use issues (I got to watch one computer thrash for ten seconds for every single message received) and, very irritatingly, a problem where the harddrive would be accessed every time anything was added to the database--a deal breaker for many laptop users.

This was all traced directly back to the use of SQLite, and it was determined that it wasn't a mistake on the part of the client's developers. The SQLite devs verified that it was SUPPOSED to act that way! They cited some weird, half-baked philosophical grounds for their design decisions.

Anyway, I left that Jabber client behind, as did many others, because the simple inclusion of SQLite had made it unusable. The devs had invested a lot of effort in moving to the SQLite backend, and last I heard they were still trying to dig their way out.

Take it for what it's worth and all, but I have NEVER seen an SQLite installation that actually improved the project. If you really need an SQL database, bite the bullet and insist on a real one. Just think hard ahead of time about whether you actually need SQL in the first place. Lots of projects seem to be applying SQLite as a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.

Re:moderators: Parent is not a troll

[Tim Browse]

Odd, because that's not been my experience of SQLite at all - I wonder exactly what the chat log stuff was doing, as that seems exactly the kind of thing that SQLite eats for breakfast.

When I read the SQLite mailing list regularly, I was amazed how often people used it for jobs I would have thought to be outside its remit/scope - logging was a common example. People would ask questions about SQLite and mention their multi-gigabyte SQLite DB files with millions of records and I would think "Wow, that must suck in terms of performance." When asked about performance, these people invariable say "Oh no, that's fine, that's not the problem I'm asking about."

So adding a record to a DB whenever a chat message comes in? Seems like gravy for SQLite. I'm curious as to what the hell could cause it to thrash for 10 seconds to perform a single INSERT. Maybe they had lots of indices configured? Even so, 10 seconds still seems like ages.

In my own experience I've written code that converted DBs to SQLite, and did, say, 1000 inserts in the process, and this took a fair amount of time (of the order of 30 seconds, which surprised me), but that's due to the locking model SQLite uses. Wrap it in a transaction and those inserts took 1-2 seconds, iirc.

I'm not doubting the evidence of your own eyes, but I do wonder what the heck was going on there.

Re:moderators: Parent is not a troll

[volkris]

IIRC it was using transactions and everying. A number of python- and database-experienced people took cracks at the codebase, but nobody could find anything that was being done wrong.

The spinning up of laptop harddrives at every chat message was a huge deal to some users, so they searched through the SQLite access options to see if some buffering was disabled or something.

They found articles and messages from the SQLite developers talking about how SQLite intentionally flushes Linux's disk buffers and how this was absolutely the right way to do things. It was weird. Very weird.

As for the thrashing, it was as if some huge library was being unloaded and reloaded into memory at every access. Perhaps it was something to do with the python SQLite library, I don't know, but again nobody could figure out anything that was being done wrong.

Eventually people started hacking their private copies to yank that functionality out of there.

Google Bookmarks + GMarks extension

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget in-browser bookmarks, using a combination like Google Bookmarks + GMarks extension is bookmarking bliss, especially when you use different computers throughout your day. You can also do a Google search that only applies to pages you have bookmarked.

Bookmarks?

[Bazman]

Do people still use browser bookmarks? I can't remember the last time I bookmarked something. I just google it. Or I start typing the URL in and Firefox completes it for me from my history. Or I remember where I saw a link to it.

Just about the only bookmarks I have are a set of tab bookmarks that I fire up when I start my browser so I get slashdot, gmail, our helpdesk and a couple of other things come up. Yeah, that needs an embedded SQL database...

Oh well, I'm sure some people will find it useful....

Re:Bookmarks?

[Blakey Rat]

Even if you don't use bookmarks, Firefox has to read and parse the bookmarks.html file when it starts up. SQLite will make that operation very very fast and consume less memory as well, so you still benefit.

Oh and by "some people" I think you mean "the vast, vast majority of people who do use bookmarks." I don't use, for instance, earrings but it would be moronic for me to say "oh well, I guess some people find earrings useful..."

Re:Bookmarks?

[netik]

This is going to be about as useful as when Mozilla started putting email in a database vs. flat file. Performance took a serious hit and it became impossible to work with large mailboxes.

There is no way you can tell me that reading from a quasi-relational database (SQLLite) is faster than parsing a raw text file in C. Maybe you won't see much of an impact because the bookmarks file is small, but this is just dumb.

Re:Bookmarks?

[Dan Ost]

I follow lots of comics on the web. I use bookmarks to keep my place so that I don't actually have to remember what the last day was that I got caught up.

I also bookmark specific posts on newsgroups, mailing list archives, and blogs (like /.).

I couldn't live without Bookmarks for these purposes.

Besides that, most of my other bookmarks are to things local to my machine or to websites that index topic-related sites. I could use google, but I prefer well designed index sites to seemingly randomly organized search results.

I love Google, but Bookmarks are still a Good Thing.

Re:Bookmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried keywords?

If you give a bookmark an easy to remember keyword, all you have to do is type the keyword in your address bar and you're straight to the site. No messing with google, no tabbing through your history.

There's no faster way for those sites you visit every other day.

Re:Bookmarks?

[makomk]

This is going to be about as useful as when Mozilla started putting email in a database vs. flat file. Performance took a serious hit and it became impossible to work with large mailboxes.

From what I've read, that had less to do with the fact that it was a database, and more to do with the fact that the file format was a really badly-designed, custom-written monstrosity. SQLite is a fairly decent embedded database.

Re:Bookmarks?

[Tweekster]

Yes, 99.9999% of people do. you are an exception, an edge case, not the rule.
You are no the average user, please dont apply your personal preferences as if it is the norm, it is anything but.

Re:Bookmarks?

[bdubSOv1iKIJ403M]

(If this has already been fixed, please ignore this message.)

Relying on url autocompletion is not very scalable. I once tried setting the history_expire_days
to some insanely large value, such as 3000, so that urls would never be forgotten by mozilla, and
always appear in the url autocompletion bar. However, once the history file became too large
(a few thousand entries? I'm not sure of the exact size), mozilla slowed down considerably in
several ways.
- Browsing through the history became unusably slow
- Url autocompletion became unusably slow, and lagged behind typing considerably.
- Rendering pages slowed down a bit, because of the extra time needed to color links. (For every link in the page, it needs to check the history file to see if the link should appear in the "visited" color.)

After a certain point, I stopped using that profile, because it had gotten so slow.

(This was with Mozilla 1.6)

Re:Bookmarks?

[Ilgaz]

Even if you don't use bookmarks, Firefox has to read and parse the bookmarks.html file when it starts up. SQLite will make that operation very very fast and consume less memory as well, so you still benefit. I hope they test the huge bookmarks file/history situation in entire coding process. Or they call for beta/alpha testers with huge bookmarks/history usage. Why? An Apple OS X hint (command in fact) has become a hit lately, the sqllite Vacuum command.

They even coded a GUI shell to issue that command (freeware)

http://www.musingsfrommars.org/2007/03/vacuummail- will-speed-up-apple-mail.html

They should start/continue with that situation in mind. There shouldn't be anything involving "speed up Firefox because of large history". It should be done automatically.

Re:Bookmarks?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to keep a permanent history of every single page I visit and Google isn't that good at finding everything. It is quicker and easier to bookmark pages I might want to go back to. I also bookmark commants I make on Slashdot to check for replies, since I don't have an account I wouldn't otherwise be able to get back to them quickly and easily.

I would prefer they focus on making the the browser faster and lighter. Konqueror seems to be much better that Firefox in this regard particularly on CPU usage, unfortunately I don't like the UI of Konqueror so I stick to Firefox. However as long as this feature doesn't have a negative impact of the performance of Firefox then I don't have a problem with it.

Re:Bookmarks?

[Ilgaz]

Firefox is focused on general, average user profile who still uses bookmarks and even check their history manually.

That is why they are successful at adopting the average browser user. That is what Mozilla suite (pre Firefox) missed and people like me were getting flamed/kicked/banned by community because of reminding that fact.

I think what is more interesting is Opera Speeddial feature which has been recently introduced. If they were just, a bit OS X native friendly... (I really need keychain)

http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screensh ots/speeddial.jpg

They found that average end user visits 10 sites frequently and made that "Super simple bookmark" thing.

I personally prefer Omniweb Workspaces, a grouped bookmark feature native to Omniweb

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gall ery/movies/04_workspaces.html (Embedded Mov file)

Isolated instances?

[manifoldronin]

When are we going to be able to run multiple firefox instances in isolated processes?

Re:Isolated instances?

[w3stfa11]

http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3114

Re:Isolated instances?

[manifoldronin]

Thanks, but that only lets me run firefox with different profiles. It's not what I'm looking for. If I have an IE instance running, and I start another IE instance from the Windows desktop, the new IE instance will have completely separated run-time data (e.g. web sessions) from the existing one, while sharing the same static data, e.g. bookmarks and persisted cookies. IE may have been stupid on lots of other stuff, this sure is one thing it did right.

Bookmarks are so 1990's

[Count of Montecristo]

Bookmarks, places, whatever. That's so last decade. . Ever since i started using the del.icio.us plugin, i've never looked back. Categorization, portability and mobility are essential. The thing that got me hooked is being able to share my bookmarks between computers, platforms and devices.

Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I won't be upgrading then. Posted anon. so butt-kissers can't mod me.

Doesn't work (stupid javascript)

[oldmacdonald]

Reuters uses javascript to refresh and refresh blocker only nukes the META tag type of refreshing. The combination of refresh blocker and noscript does the trick here.

Fire Winifred!

[Futurepower(R)]

Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.

Someone with no technical knowledge cannot run a technically oriented company. Fire Winifred! That's Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, a socially uncomfortable lawyer who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now that Mozilla Foundation is making millions from making Google the default browser, Winifred can afford to hire people to make herself look good.

Don't let ignorant and foolish and even stupid managers destroy your programming efforts. Find some way to have them removed.

The idea of using SGLite is a good one, provided there is a way of exporting bookmarks to HTML.

However, there are many, many quirks in Firefox that should be fixed first, but no technically oriented manager to organize that.

Re:Fire Winifred!

[makomk]

I've never used a web browser that isn't annoyingly unstable. IE 6 crashed reliably on certain sites (haven't tried 7 yet), Konqueror crashes with frustrating regularity, and Firefox is generally fairly decent by comparison.

Re:memory leak FUD #5 ..

[rs232]

"I regularly see Firefox go above 250 MB of memory, and nothing short of closing it entirely will get that memory back"

Firefox less than 60 MB, climbed just over 60 MB with five windows open and then dropped back witht a single window. Now just over 75 MB with ten windows open. Dropped back to just under 70 MB and holding and that's after stressing it by opening/closing multiple combinations of tabs and windows. If that's the memory leak issue then I guess I can live with it.

Thank you!

[pestie]

One thing that bugs me about software in general, and open-source in particular, is this constant need for developers to change things just for the sake of changing them. "This way is better!" they'll say, but really, it isn't. When is "good enough" just plain good enough? When I upgrade to the next release of Ubuntu, for example, I don't want to be forced to re-learn all the software I knew and develop new habits just because someone decided it would be cooler if it worked differently.

Case in point: GAIM/Pidgin. When I first switched from Windows to Linux on my desktop I switched from the "official" IM clients (ICQ and Yahoo) to GAIM. But I had to retrain myself to use control-enter to send an IM, rather than tab-space (tab to move my focus from the text-entry box to the "send" button, space to "click" the button without using the mouse). This key combination worked in all the official clients, but GAIM couldn't be configured to use it. I liked being able to embed newlines in my IM's using just the enter key, so I didn't want that to be my "send" key. So I retrained myself. Fine; I'm willing to make compromises.

But now the new GAIM/Pidgin comes along and, oh, hey, guess what? You can't configure it to use control-enter to send any more! No more embedding newlines with a simple enter key press! Nope, that's not the "right" way to do it! And remember that send button? The one that was so handy every time you just had to go to the mouse to teach the built-in spell-checker all those words or acronyms it didn't know? Well, that's gone, too! It, too, was the "wrong" way to do things. No, there's only one right way, and that way is to send using the bare enter key, embed newlines with control-enter, and never, ever click a "send" button. So now I have to retrain myself yet again. Thanks, guys.

So apparently that's what's happening with Firefox now, too. The concept of history and bookmarks, which is perfectly fine and has been since NCSA Mosaic, is now uncool. No, it needs to be replaced with something else. And if I don't like it I need to suck it up and just take the time to completely revise my work habits! 'Cause some basement-dwelling, self-appointed God of Computing said so, I guess.

I really don't mind change. I welcome it! But I want to be able to change on my terms, not someone else's. I took to tabbed browsing like a fish to water, if you'll pardon the cliche. But nobody forced it down my throat. And I'm getting pretty goddamned sick of developers forcing these things down our throats just 'cause it's the "next big thing." I'm a geek, too, and I love playing with computers just for the hell of it. But I also use computers as tools to accomplish other things, and I don't need my software getting in my goddamned way.

Re:Thank you!

[Dragonslicer]

But now the new GAIM/Pidgin comes along and, oh, hey, guess what? You can't configure it to use control-enter to send any more!

Sorry to go off-topic here, but you can configure that, it just isn't internal to Pidgin. You have to use a .gtkrc file instead. On the Windows computer I'm on now, it's "c:\Documents and Settings\Name\.gtkrc-2.0". The file should look something like this:

gtk-theme-name ="MS-Windows"

binding "custom-keys"
{
# enter inserts a newline
bind "Return" { "insert-at-cursor" ("\n") }
# send message
bind "<ctrl>Return" { "message_send" () }
bind "<shft>Return" { "message_send" () }
}

widget "*pidgin_conv_entry" binding "custom-keys"

Re:Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

No free software developer ever forced you to use their software.

Re:Thank you!

[Anonymous Coward]

So just never update your copy of Firefox. Or make your own fork and backport security fixes if you want. Though I guess that, too, is too much improvement for you.
No-one should ever have a good idea, because implementing it might cause some discomfort for you. Do you have any idea how much you sound like a little whiny kid with ecsessive entitlement syndrome?

As far as the GAIM bit goes, that's just general GNOME shit of removing possibly confusing features (where possibly confusing means possibly capable of confusing your senile grandma whose dementia has gotten to the point she doesn't remember the previous minute most of the time).

Re:Thank you!

[azenpunk]

everything that, to you, is 'good enough' was 'needlessly improved' to someone else some time ago. if you don't want Firefox to change, then go save a copy of it's installer now and put it someplace secure.

and, not to be mean (I'm quite sleep deprived at this point), if you want to welcome change on your own terms, write your own browser.

you'll never find a car that's absolutely perfect if you're very specific about every detail you want and also rely on others to make the car for you.

from the sound of things tho, i doubt you will be forced to manage your bookmarks differently with the upcoming system, but the option will be there.

Re:Thank you!

[pestie]

Boy, I do so love when some chickenshit AC comes out of the woodwork to tell me what an asshole I am, especially when they decide to misinterpret what I wrote.

I don't feel entitled to anything. I feel annoyed by forced changes, and changes for the sake of change alone (as in, when the new way of doing things has roughly the same number and scale of drawbacks and advantages as the old way). Hey, change all you want! Just don't be surprised when your users grumble because you, the developer, have changed something because you were bored.

I'm with you on the Gnome thing, though. I don't have a strong opinion about desktop environments for Linux, but I prefer KDE for serious desktop work and Xfce for a more lightweight environment. Gnome isn't anything I want to use on a regular basis. It's a shame that no other open-source Linux IM client seems to offer what Pidgin does. Maybe it's time I looked at Kopete again.

Re:Thank you!

[pestie]

You realize your attitude is "part of the problem," right? At least if "the problem" is defined as "getting more end users to accept and use open-source software."

I'm fine with new ways of doing things as long as they're optional, at least in the beginning. And, sure, if they catch on hugely (like tabbed browsing, for example), make 'em the default and maybe even phase out the old way of doing things. But as an end user, I shouldn't be forced to learn a whole new way of doing things just because it's the cool new thing to do in geek circles. I am a geek, and it's mildly to severely irritating to me, depending on the circumstances. For people who aren't geeks (i.e. most of the population), it's a huge disincentive to use open-source products. All too often the developers are focused on the gee-whiz aspect of things and can't be bothered to design a decent, consistent user interface, or even fix known, long-standing bugs. It's one of the few remaining impediments to widespread acceptance of open source software, but it's a huge one. Yes, I know some people don't care if open source software becomes more widely accepted, but I do. So I'm going to do what the rest of us geeks here at Slashdot do and post my opinion. I don't expect everyone to suddenly agree with me, but maybe a few readers will see my point and give the problem some thought. And maybe if that happens enough times, some developers will stop worrying quite so much about 3D spinning-cube desktop eye candy and graphical, framebuffer-mode Linux installers and start concentrating on usability, stability, performance and documentation.

Re:Thank you!

[Kjella]

Try KDE instead of Gnome and related apps. Most things are configurable, I'd say at times almost overconfigurable because I don't know what half the settings do. But the defaults are mostly sane and it's better than the alternative - not putting it in the GUI at all and coming up with a really hacky config file fix like one guy replied to your post. I'd rather be intimidated by complex menus than frustrated by inflexible functionality. YMMV.

Re:Thank you!

[kiddygrinder]

You're assuming that they have no idea what they're doing, despite having worked on a web browser for years. Bookmarks are *not* perfectly fine, the bookmark system in firefox is completely borked and needs re-writing and instead of trying to reinvent the wheel why not farm it out to a lightweight database that has been proven to work? I *really want* changes to the way bookmarks work, i currently have several hundred bookmarks on my computer, some kind of tagging and searching deal would be really nice.

Just because it seems like they're blindly changing stuff doesn't mean they don't have some good reasons, just because they make changes doesn't mean you have to upgrade. It seems obvious you're more concerned with things staying the same than you are with new features so why not just stick with what you have already?

Re:memory leak FUD #6 ..

[rs232]

despite what you claim, it's not the cache

Cleared the cache and it's currently at 58 MB ..

Failure?

[Leroy_Brown242]

Has firefox completely failed to meet it's original goal if I am contemplating a bribe to some developer friends to compile a stripped down version of firefox so it doesn't use so many damned system resources?

Left running for 24 hours, with google homepage and gmail up, I am looking at about 1GB of memory used.

This just does not seem reasonable to me, but I'm a minimalist.

Places? How about tagged bookmarks

[cylcyl]

kind of like the way gmail tags e-mails? You can have folders that are tags, and any bookmark that matches that tag will show up. when you create a bookmark, you can choose from a tree of all the tags you have. You organize tags into trees so that they display well from a menu. There probably already is a plug-in for that (right?), probably should just fold that into the main code...

Re:Places? How about tagged bookmarks

[unapersson]

That's how bookmarks have worked in Epiphany for a long time. When you type in the toolbar it matches the keywords you have defined, and automatically groups bookmarks in a hierarchy based on the tags. It's one of the reasons I still use Epiphany rather than Firefox (on Linux).

Got NoScript?

[tjwhaynes]

If you have NoScript installed, it leaks memory every time you close a window (no leak when closing a tab though). There are other examples of Extensions chewing memory up - try installing Leak Monitor to find out whether you have Javascript objects getting orphaned.

However, having NoScript installed seriously reduces the amount of Javascript running so it tends to be a net win on memory usage.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:Got NoScript?

[bunratty]

Firefox 3 includes a cycle collector to handle these memory leaks in extensions, as well as some remaining memory leaks in Firefox itself.

Re:Got NoScript?

[Martin Blank]

I'll add LeakMonitor in and have a look on my next restart. Thanks for that.

I don't run NoScript, because I almost always leave the pages with default settings, and even in those cases where I'd want to block functionality, I'd probably lose out on the leak you mention because they'd be relatively rare.

Re:Got NoScript?

[HullBreachOnline.com]

It's about time. Memory leakage is my only gripe with FireFox. I was considering shifting to Opera as my primary browser more and more. (Opera is currently my secondard for Web development testing.)

Re:Got NoScript?

[vidarh]

Finally someone with useful advice on the memory issue rather than the tired old line about caching.... Installing Leak Monitor now. Thanks!

How about the transparency-printing bug?

[Kadin2048]

Or another long-standing bug: Firefox's apparent inability to print layered transparent PNGs, such as the type used for the route-line overlay on Google Maps.

Seriously, go try it. At least on OS X, you don't even need to print, you can just hit the "Preview" button from the Print dialog, when looking at a Google Maps "print view," and it'll show you the route-line-less (and therefore pretty damn useless) map that it's about to print. It does the same thing on any other page that uses overlaid transparent graphics in layers.

It's well known and extremely annoying, but apparently the FF devs don't care about printing bugs?

It's unfortunate, because it just makes FF seem very much 'unfinished' when, in order to print a map from one of the more popular sites on the Internet, you have to use an alternate browser. The same thing works just fine in Safari on Mac OS X, or IE on Windows.

They need to stop adding new features and fix some of the bugs that have been around for months or years.

Re:How about the transparency-printing bug?

[HeroreV]

Piss poor printing support is part of the reason for switching to Cairo. Firefox 3.0 probably won't have this problem.

Re: Disable PANGO for faster scrolling

[zorn169]

Scrolling in firefox was painfully slow on my system. If i happened to go to a page that used a Japanese or Chinese font, it would grind my system to a halt. Disabling PANGO really helped. Start firefox with a script that does something like:

#!/bin/sh
export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
/usr/bin/iceweasel

lazy slashdot users

[ThwartedEfforts]

Or you could read the above message as "I'm not even feeling lucky enough to type 'sqlite database engine' into google and hit 'I'm feeling lucky', I'd much rather type 40 additional words into a textbox on slashdot.

Are bookmarks even useful?

[A Friendly Troll]

I haven't bookmarked anything in years. I do have some old bookmarks (the youngest one is two years old, the second youngest almost four years), and unsurprisingly, more than two thirds of the links are dead. Anyway, I digress...

Are bookmarks useful? When I want to find something - anything - I use a search engine. Unless the page is really obscure (in which case a bookmark would have been useful, yes), I can find it in less time than it would take to browse through all the bookmarks, not to mention the time initially needed to bookmark/rename/tag/label/describe/nickname/whatev er. For others I guess bookmarks are the better choice.

What I'd like to see in a browser is a history tracker. For example, I visited site A, then I clicked on its page links 1, 2 and 3, and eventually went from site A to site B to site C, on which I clicked page links 1 and 2, and 2 had a link back to site A (which I didn't follow). It would be neat to see a browsing diagram. In this case, a big circle named A would be connected with B, B would be connected with C, and C back with A. The links between A&B / B&C would be a solid (as I followed them) line with an arrowhead, but C&A would be a dashed light gray or something. The caption on the lines would be the link name.

Re:Are bookmarks even useful?

[Tweekster]

Yes for 99.9999% of people they are.
you are an exception and edge case, not the average user

Something better probably should exist, but that doesnt change the FACT that bookmarks are incredibly useful for damn near every person on the web.

Moderators: Parent is wrong

[Vexorian]

Parent is wrong about grand parent not being a troll. The guy complained about it taking 0.25MB! that's a troll for you.

What about XHTML 1.1?

[Mongoose]

I still don't have a ruby tag for furigana in firefox / gecko. Even MSIE6 has that... it's the only W3C standard it has over firefox.

Memory leak or Memory mapped?

[Colin Smith]

There is no leak alleged. Simply an observation that it appears to be consuming 1/4 of the RAM of one of our X login servers.

On this machine, with the settings you mentioned, with only /. open and adblock extension:

browser.cache.memory.capacity=0, browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers=0, config.trim_on_minimize=true

7642 1 54684 190536 7.8 12.1 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin

That'd be 55Mb resident and 190Mb consumed in total. Firefox 2.0.3

The question is... Is it really using that much RAM or have the developers simply mmapped everything?

storing bookmarks in a db is overengineering (n/t)

[Tran]

(n/t)

I can think of a faster way...

[Tran]

of course it depends on how many sites you visit every day...

In Opera, I save my daily visited sites ( each in a separate tab) as a session, and open the browser - or any number of session sets that way.
I do beleive Firefox has a similar cpability now.
Opera alos now has "speed dial" (odd name - but it works) - set up 9 sites and upon opening a new tab - click on any one of the 9 sites presented and you are there.

Re:I can think of a faster way...

[whitehatlurker]

Yeah, I actually have an Opera session called "comics" for the very purpose cited earlier.

Haven't really gotten hooked on the "speed dial" thing yet.

Useless Bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a browser! I don't want the browser to need a database! SQLite? This is too far!

gmail leak

[bunratty]

Ah, memory leaks when gmail is open. Now maybe we can discuss an actual, confirmed memory leak for a change. Of the six reported leaks with gmail, four are fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.3 and two seem to be Firefox 3 only. If you can still reproduce a memory leak with gmail up in Firefox 2.0.0.3, you should file a bug report to make sure the problem gets addressed. A browser using 1 GB of memory after a day of use certainly isn't reasonable. It sounds like a problem that should be fixed ASAP. Filing the bug report, including a set of steps to reproduce the problem, is the first step to getting it fixed.

Re:gmail leak

[bunratty]

I left Firefox 2.0.0.3 open all night with the Google homepage and my Gmail inbox open in two tabs. When I first started, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. This morning, Firefox had 40 MB Mem Usage and 31 MB VM Size. Maybe there's something critical you're leaving out of your steps to reproduce the problem. Or maybe something's just screwed up on your computer causing the excessive memory use. Try creating a new profile.

Re:gmail leak

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running firefox 2.0 on a very old laptop (IBM 560X), and I found that if I have gmail open, all of my 90M of memory gets eaten up pretty quickly, specially after the new fancy gmail interface was introduced (this is despite limiting memory-cache to 5M). However, I also learned that if I force gmail to use the old interface, the memory leak is manageable. There does seem to be some sort of memory leak coming from JavaScript, but I've been too lazy to follow up on that and try to give firefox crew some useful feedback.

Re:storing bookmarks in a db is overengineering (n

[ATMD]

Not only that, but when I SSH into my box from somewhere else, I'll no longer be able to retrieve a bookmark by simply peeking at the handy HTML file Firefox currently keeps them in. Will Mozilla be implementing some alternative plaintext bookmark file for such use, or will I have to go hunting for an extension to enable it?

XUL

[pingveno]

Firefox also uses XUL (an XML dialect) for its entire interface. Dozens of DOM trees has got to hurt.

I already run a SQL server...

[Magus2501]

Can I just have Firefox use my existing MySQL server instead? Why does a browser need its own private SQL backend?

Maybe they'll take a hint from the wonderful folks making Amarok. Amarok lets you pick your SQL backend, and only forces SQLite when there's nothing else.

Re:storing bookmarks in a db is overengineering (n

[HeroreV]

I've heard Firefox will still create the HTML-like file, just not read it.

So let me get this straight...

[RebelWebmaster]

MoFo switching to an SQLite-driven Places bookmarks/history system 1.) Reduced final compiled codesize by a bit over 70KB (according to their own build system) 2.) Greatly improves data reliability 3.) Is either performance-neutral or in some cases actually improved performance And you guys are complaining? If that's bloat, sign me up!

NoScript is memory-friendly!

[Giorgio Maone]

Toby, care to tell me where you got this info about leaks?

A "leak on window closure" regression appeared in NoScript 1.1.4.6.070322 (an "unofficial" development build) and was fixed 3 days later.

Since then I keep Leak Monitor in my development profile, even if it's a pain because of Firebug's and Venkman's leaks... ;)

Later NoScript versions are completely leak-free (see the changelog).

Re:NoScript is memory-friendly!

[tjwhaynes]

Toby, care to tell me where you got this info about leaks? A "leak on window closure" regression appeared in NoScript 1.1.4.6.070322 (an "unofficial" development build) and was fixed 3 days later.

I have NoScript updating automatically so it's tracking whatever releases I'm getting from mozilla.org. Any attempt to close an open window fires leak monitor reports containing a javascript object which references information that looks like Noscript data - lists of whitelisted and blacklisted sites, etc. I can reliably reproduce this on my x86 laptop (work machine) but I can't send bug reports from that machine. I see that there is a new Leak monitor for x86_64 platforms so I'll try and repro the leak on my personal box using the same set of extensions.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Re:NoScript is memory-friendly!

[Giorgio Maone]

An add-on leaking a lot on window closure is Firebug, and I bet you've got it...

That's good news

[GuyRCook]

I do like hearing that progress in being made on the FireFox browser, I use it quite a lot and the various extensions to same. Keep on keeping on, Guy

Cron a del.icio.us backup

[gottabeme]

I have a daily cron job that downloads my bookmarks from del.icio.us. It's a one-line curl command.

Re:memory leak FUD #5 ..

[drew]

That's great. Good for you. Really. However, since you seem to have entirely skipped the first line of my post, I'll repeat it again for your benefit. I'll even emphasize it this time so you don't miss it.

Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else.

I don't doubt your observations. I know that plenty of people don't have any problems with memory usage on Firefox. But I also know that there are a lot of people do as well, and the attempts of either group of people to discount the other are equally ridiculous. Your experience (and mine) is not universal.

However, since it seems like the only thing that matters to you are useless and arbitrary numbers, my firefox.exe is currently at 125MB with three windows and 4 tabs open. Closing all of the windows except for the one that I am posting in brings it down to about 117. Firefox has been running for about 2 hours, and I have neither the patience or the desire to track how long or how many pages it took me to get to this point.

Leakage

[anars]

Easy on the adding of features. How about fixing Firefox to use automatic garbage collecting before throwing the responsibility of doing it at us? (read: keeping open tabs at a minimum)

Off topic but...

[meiao]

Does this works for windows version too?
98 is better than 95 which is better than 3.11 and so on.
Does ME == 1000?
What about XP?