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A First Look At Firefox 3 Alpha 5

Posted by Zonk on from the alpha-beta-awesome dept.

abhinav_pc writes "PC World is reporting that Mozilla today made an early testing release available from its Firefox 3 browser. This alpha version (code-named Gran Paradiso) for the first time adds the anticipated Places feature for bookmarks. Firefox 3 alpha 5 also features a new password manager. A new crash reporting system called Breakpad is also now available in some Mac OS X and Windows builds but is not yet supported on Linux. 'Places will also be less likely to lose data in the event of program or Windows crashes. In fact, according to Connor, "We haven't figured out how to make Places lose data." For backwards compatibility and manual backups, Firefox 3 will save bookmarks in the traditional bookmarks.htm file when it closes. For other bookmark upgrades, Mozilla is planning to enable bookmark tagging, and is considering building its own synchronization client into the browser capable of backing up and sharing bookmarks. '"

6 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Ummm, no. by SEMW · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yeah, yeah. Most likely, you are falling victim to Windows' misreporting of memory usage. [...] Try this: in Win XP or 2000, look at a piece of software that has been running for a while. go to task manager and look at the memory "used". Minimize the piece of software. Look at the memory usage again. Amazingly, it will have dropped dramatically. Well, yes. If you've minimized a program, the chances are you're not actively using it at that moment, so it makes sense to swap some of the memory that program is using out to the pagefile, to make some space for whatever programs you *are* actively using.

    There's a solution if you consider this a bug: in about.config, create a Boolean pref called "config.trim_on_minimize", with a value of "false". This will just tell the OS to not trim memory usage when you minimize Firefox. The downside of this is that the rest of your machine will be much slower when you're not actively using Firefox than it would otherwise, because it's hogging a load of memory even though its minimized.

    Personally, I'd leave the OS default behavior alone; if Firefox is minimized it doesn't need to keep a load of crap in memory just because you're uncomfortable with the concept of memory management. In the meantime, stop spreading FUD.
    --
    What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
  2. Re:my seemingly eternal question: by romcabrera · · Score: 5, Informative
    Opening PDF files in the browser

    enough said.

  3. Why doesn't anyone port Dillo to windows? by zymano · · Score: 2, Informative

    Use dillo if you got linux. only 400k.

    http://www.dillo.org/

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/dillo/

    1. Re:Why doesn't anyone port Dillo to windows? by Kelson · · Score: 3, Informative

      Remember, that 400k does *not* get you scripting, CSS, or plugins. You aren't going to be viewing YouTube with Dillo anytime soon.

  4. Re:Breakpad? Are you kidding me? by Kelson · · Score: 2, Informative

    RTFS. Breakpad isn't just for crash recovery, it's for crash reporting. It should improve the information they get on the bugs, including bugs they didn't already know about, which should make it easier to fix them.

  5. Re: bloat bloat code your bloat... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    Surely you're joking; do you have any idea in what's involved in creating a layout engine from scratch?

    Libcroco is used in Inkscape and there's been talk of restarting development. Gnome have a skeleton of a browser based on Apple Webkit (khtml derivative) in their CVS somewhere and then there's the dillo codebase;

    A web browser is too complex a task to develop on a part time basis, and it also is a fast-moving target. I dedicated seven years full-time to it, and I'm willing to dedicate more. This doesn't depend on me anymore as I had to take a job to pay the bills. We made great achievments with Dillo and it would be easy to quickly push FLTK2-Dillo if we could have both core developers working full time on it. This is a tiny deal for some sponsors (e. Cell phone maker), and we wish it could happen soon. Through this time we've been supported by individual's donations, and we thank them indeed for believing in our project and to help make it grow to what it is.

    If you as a reader, or user, or interested party have a good idea, sponsorship or development time to devote, please don't hesitate to contact me to try to arrange for the future of Dillo.


    The flow of a document is the flow of a document with respect to behavior of inline/block elements and the box model. Basically it's how text wraps around an image. If you don't get that floats remove an element from the flow, you aren't going to be writing your own browser any time soon.