A First Look At Firefox 3 Alpha 5

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. '"

Comments

my seemingly eternal question:

[Tumbleweed]

Multithreaded UI yet?

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[starwed]

Well, here's what Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology officer, has to say about multithreading: Threads suck

I'm not very clueful on such matters, but it seems like maybe the most important statement is:

A requirement for JS3 (along with hygienic macros) is to do something along these more implicit lines of concurrency support. In all the fast yet maintainable MT systems I've built or worked on, the key idea (which Will Clinger stated clearly to me over lunch last fall) is to separate the mutable unshared data from the immutable shared data. Do that well, with language and VM support, and threads become what they should be: not an abstraction violator from hell, but a scaling device that can be composed with existing abstractions.

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[zig007]

That they don't fix that raises a different question that is quite interesting. Well at least i think so.. :-)

A friend of mine recently talked about someone..who's name i don't remember right now(a couple of beers were involved), that worked with systems security on fighter airplanes, claimed that fixing almost only high-priority bugs made the system worse.

This was very well documented, about 20 or 30 years of development had been analyzed.
He said that if the users seemingly low-priority complaints was given more weight(adressed more often), it made problems of all severities go down. Significantly.

His conclusion was that the smaller problems contributed to a more messy system where more serious problems might go unnoticed.

Not to mention that a happy customer is better than a dead one for other reasons :-)

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[Goodgerster]

That's actually the fault of your PDF reader, which I suspect is Adobe's crapware - ever tried Evince (on Linux)?

Re:my seemingly eternal question:

[Chandon Seldon]

Why not split things out into multiple javascript interpreters then? Why does per-tab javascript even *want* to run in the same interpreter as UI code?

It feels like a lot of design tradeoffs were made in Mozilla that trade 100k of RAM for like a second of UI latency. Bad deal.

Memory Hog

[MrSteveSD]

I just wish they'd fix the memory situation. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to stop Firefox consuming 200 megs of memory when I only have one tab open. It's been that way for as long as I can remember and I've used it on several different machines.

Re:Memory Hog

[CastrTroy]

What are you doing? Opening up a 150 MB XML file in that one tab? Seriously. I know Firefox has some memory problems, but that is not anything like I have ever seen. Most of the actual "leaks" i've seen involve flash and web pages that continually add stuff to the DOM with javascript and leaving them open overnight. I haven't seen many other huge memory problems. I've had Firefox open for days and have browsed to hundreds of pages and I'm still only using 132 MB.

Re:Password managers

[joe 155]

yes they are insecure, but someone needs to break into your computer before they can have access to it - and if they've already broken in it wouldn't be too hard to install a key logger.

If password managers allow you to have strong passwords and different ones for each thing then they give more security than they risk, I think.

Re:No Places for Me

[jswigart]

Why wouldn't google bookmarks or others be able to simply upload the new database file? Is it correct that it uses an sqlite database? It would be trivial for these shared bookmark extensions to upload that or to inject what they do upload and download back into the database. It's not a competition, google bookmarks is a supplemental feature afaik.

I don't care about new features

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to know if the geriatric, yet debilitating, bugs have been fixed. For example, bug #154892, "splitting absolutely positioned frames" that prevents people from printing many web pages from Firefox.

I'd also like the developers to think about the little subtleties that, as a Mac user, I take for granted from other applications. For example, when Firefox creates a new window it shouldn't be falling off the bottom of the screen.

Also, why does Firefox insist on displaying two different Mozilla pages after Firefox has been updated rather than just displaying my regular start page? This is rude and insulting. It does nothing for me. Finally, after 45 minutes with Google, I did figure out how to effectively disable this "feature" (about:config then change the keys named startup.homepage_welcome_url and startup.homepage_override_url to my regular start page) so that I merely get two start pages instead. (BTW, this "feature" cannot be disabled in Camino -- it appears to be hard coded in to the application bundle.)

There are many things I like about Firefox, specifically several extensions, but other things like those mentioned above that routinely drive me nuts -- I could keep listing them, but will spare everyone.

I would like to kindly suggest that the Firefox developers sit down and fix the irritating quirks, ancient bugs, and brain dead behaviors before adding new ones.

Nothing to see here.

[the_kanzure]

Maybe it is time that we seriously discuss the state of browsing the world wide web and suggest some new browser features to implement, not just "bookmark tagging". Can't we come up with something to increase browsing productivity more than "bookmark sharing" ? Brainstorming in groups is useful in this situation.

I use the Opera browser to open up 200+ tabs in one single session at a time, and it would be useful if they implemented more session management, such as the ability to add tabs to specifically saved sessions. Same goes for Firefox.

Let's increase the number of pages that we can view per day. When you look at the numbers, we view a surprisingly small percentage of the content available on the WWW re: nearly any subject. The fact that the limit to the number of tabs that can be opened in one active browsing session is somewhat dependent on how much the browser can handle at once seems silly- cached tabs and an ability to predict which tabs the user might pull up next would be useful (though no fancy prediction algorithms, that would be too much).

There is a suggestion on the Opera discussion boards about a "rush mode" for viewing tabs such that you can strategize which tabs you are to go to next when you close the current tab. That would be a useful plugin to implement. Speaking of which, where do we draw the line between plugin and component to distribute with the browser?

The web history features can also be improved, perhaps graphical illustrations of the pathways through the world wide web would be an improvement, such that there is no longer this linear time dependency, when in truth we go through many tabs and have many separate histories building at once. There's lots of information being lost in current history tracking.

And, does anybody else use browsers as extensively as I do? I would be interested in meeting with some of you and discussing strategies for increasing web browsing and content consumption rates.

Re:Password managers

[gbjbaanb]

try out keepass, which has features that defeat even keyloggers (who would only get a ctrl-v message).

Actually, come to think of it, why doesn't Mozilla take the keepass code, compile it in to firefox, and put a different ui on it? How much easier would that be than writing a new one from scratch, that won't be as quick to develop, good, or as secure.

Contributing Corporations

[obender]

Out of curiosity I did a find and grep on the source tree to see what companies contributed to the code base. I have to say there is at least one I did not expect. Here they are in no particular order:

IBM, Intel, Oracle, Mozilla, Microsoft, Netscape, MITRE, Digital Equipment, Novell, Activestate

I looked for the Microsoft code and it was just stuff copied from the SDK samples. Still, I did another count:

find . -name '*.c*' -exec grep -i Microsoft {} \; | wc -l
332

I would be really curious to do the same search on the IE7 code base, this time looking for Mozilla

The future is not that bleak.

[Ayanami Rei]

Spidermonkey has (simple) patches to support threading. While there's no built-in language primitives for it the core was almost already threadsafe anyway... it just needed an interface.
I've actually played with it in jsext and I was kind of surprised.

Of course it's not so cleanly implemented as in java with monitors and critical sections being a language component. You have to interface objects that wrap stuff if you want to share mutable data between threads.

Nevertheless it would be a quicker fix for Firefox if they just had the core spawn off threads that handled the event loop for each document root (open window, tab, frame). And shunt off cross-document calls into a message queue in another thread for dispatch (same thread could be used to take messages from the interface and route them into the windows)

Meanwhile the event-trigger javascript running in each document would look at act single-threaded sequential and not know anything was different.