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: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.

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.