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

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.

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.