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Firefox 3 Beta 1 Review
DaMan writes "The newly-released Firefox 3 beta 1 has been reviewed by ZDnet and the verdict is that it is good. 'Is Firefox 3.0 going to be better? Given what I'm seeing so far, I think so. Why? Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users — security, speed and ease of use ... Everything about Firefox 3.0 beta 1 is fast. The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless.'"
If so it's made with Firefox 3 Beta 1 Yeah ! (If not, well it's made with Iceweasel 2.0.0.9)
Is it fast?
"Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users -- security, speed and ease of use"
Well, thank the Spaghetti Monster. Why did it take so damned long to convince them that was more important than constantly fiddling with the widget layer and whatever else they were doing? Why the nearly 5 year flame war over whether a browser that takes up 2 GB of memory is technically leaking it or not?
Who would have ever thought that having a secure browser that quickly loads pages and doesn't crash your machine would be enticing to users?
ilovegeorgebush
i certainly hope they fixed the memory leak "features"
but its too late for me i already jumped the boat
Does it still have memory leaks? Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those. They aren't *quite* so bad on Linux but my friends who use MS Windows have real problems with this.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I've been using Camino because it's got a fraction of the overhead of Firefox and doesn't have the insecure XPI installer design.
Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows.
So... is Firefox secure, or does it still have the "I'm going to ask you to do something stupid in 10 seconds" countdown when you click on an install link for an XPI file? I swear, they have made it less convenient to install extensions in Firefox than they would have by just letting you download them and install them manually, and they've had to close at least one security hole related to this unnecessary flourish.
It's sort of sad that we go from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and when posed the question "Is Firefox going to be better" the answer is simply I think so. But then again I don't have many complaints for Firefox if it would just work a bit better. Aside from that it seems like there has to be a better way for bookmarks, and I'm assuming that they're going to the new database format in FF3, but that isn't even mentioned here. Someone on slashdot brought up the awesome idea of having a homepage option that displays your bookmarks (maybe even drag and drop for organize). I guess that would be a cool feature I'd like to see.
... they can do the same to the overbloated and tremendously slow OpenOffice.org.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
so does it use less memory than vista now?
The steadfast refusal by the major vendors to pre install Firefox, the public apathy in not demanding Firefox is quite disturbing. These major PC vendors, really don't like to compete on price alone. Brand differentiation is a big thing for them. But why do they try the differentiation in cooler looking towers, better colored blinking lights or designer color boxes? Why are they not selling, "Our product has FireFox, the fastest growing popular browser!!". If the vendors are looking for Brand differentiation, security is a big thing. They can really set themselves apart. If nothing it gives them something to say in their advertisements. It is like the Hound of Baskervilles. It is the dog that did not bark that makes me think, may be there is something to the conspiracy theories.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Sure "it's good" because it's from Mozilla, and people don't try to look or find the bad side. If it was IE8, the review would be: Is it good? Not enough... even if there were wonderful things on it.
From the release notes:
I'm optimistic, but we'll see in time...
df -h
After reading an article back in September (I think it was posted here on Slashdot actually) comparing the speed of Opera vs Firefox and IE7, I decided to give Opera a try to see how well I liked it. I was really getting disenchanted with Firefox's memory problems and seeming "bloat" if you will. The only problem I have with Opera is the "lack" of support for Flash for Opera on Linux (not really Opera's fault though is it). I'd much rather prefer to use an open source app instead of closed source. Maybe Firefox 3 will be able to convince me to switch back. (I have grown rather fond though of Opera's Speed Dial and Magic Wand features though - maybe there are or could be Firefox Extensions to duplicate them?)
It seems the multithreading layer in Firefox bogs down really easily, as there are often delays when loading multiple pages in the background. Also the speed at which you can open a new tab is a lot slower. I wonder if there are certain performance metrics which FF team is using to test the app. Eg. "Time to Open 100 new Tabs must be 2s" Still any improvement is a welcome addition as I am totally reliant on Firefox for its excellent developer tools.
I'm posting this with Firefox 3.0.1.... from the future.
The Mac installation instructions have a problem... they suggest you drag Firefox to your applications folder, which will overwrite your existing copy of Firefox. They should either give it a different name (like, Firefox Beta) or suggest installing it in a different location, so that you can easily back out of the beta back to your existing Firefox version... particularly when they make a point that this is intended for developer testing only.
The Windows install doesn't seem to make the same mistake. Well, at least on the Mac the whole "installer" insanity isn't actually needed, and users have the option of installing most packages in a private folder instead.
Instead of this windows-screenshot-centric review, what geeks like me really want are the release notes.
Firefox no extentions http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195566731.jpg
Firefox with extensions http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195566750.jpg
Opera http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195566796.jpg
IE http://www.forumpix.co.uk/uploads/1195566785.jpg
Where is the full feature list?
I want to know if some of the features I've seen on / submitted to the feature brainstorming page have been implemented. Like, for example, not playing sounds on background tabs. That's absolutely annoying and stupid!!
Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more.
Looks like Firefox is reinventing dynamic runtimes from scratch, and I don't mean that in a good sense; XPCOM and garbage collection in XPCOM is not going to be as fast as in runtimes designed from the ground up for those features. Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language.
Maybe it's time to port Firefox to a language that's higher level than C/C++? Maybe D or C# or Vala or Objective-C 2.0?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I was about to ask WTF happened to them. They weren't linked from the download page, and I couldn't find them elsewhere on the site.
... Mac OS X 10.4 and later" and not bothered downloading it until I got in to work (still on Panther on my Mac mini).
If the initial review had linked to the right page I would have seen "Requirements
Will FFIII have a IE plug-in to open badly built asp.net pages?
Considering that his screenshots are from Vista, it's probable he just has a faster computer
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
I installed the Firefox 3 beta today as well and was positively surprised to see everything react much snappier than my current Firefox. AJAX-laden sites like GMail, Netvibes and Digg comments didn't have the usual effect of slowing down the browser to a creeping halt as they do to Firefox 2. If this holds up then I can't wait for the final release.
But, and there's always a but: every fresh Firefox installation feels snappy. 2.0 did, and 1.0 did as well. It's always been like that, sort of like a fresh install of Windows. It's when you start installing extensions that it goes downhill, and as a web designer I need quite a few extensions. What I am waiting to see is how Firefox 3 will play along with those. I don't think the author of TFA considered that factor.
parasight.de
The one feature that really floored me is that you can browse ZIP files ONLINE! That's just novel! It's hidden though (most users would rather a ZIP file download than a directory listing pop up when they click it) and you access it by prepending "jar:" to the url and appending "!/" to the end. Try it!
It also has a much better HTML/CSS layout and better functionality for file:// and ftp:// (and jar:) urls (has a show hidden files option for file:// and shows explorer icons for files).
Here's some more of my favorite new features:
Overall speed increases... tab switching is now snappy like it should be, and like it is when you don't have any extensions. I like my extensions, and now I can have my cake and eat it too!
Places. This is probably the one feature everyone here is aware would be in FF3. Firefox 3 throws in some sample queries when you first run it and it imports your bookmarks into an SQL database.
Bookmark favicons now update to a new site favicon even if the bookmark already has a favicon! This was a bit annoying as before to update a favicon you had to manually go into the bookmark HTML and delete the icon data.
New download manager appearance with search and with the ability to use a Windows antivirus program on EXE files.
Full page zoom! However, it seems to crash when I used it on slashdot.org! :(
New Places UI for bookmark organizing.
"Worse, because C/C++ is so cumbersome, a lot of people seem to write things in Javascript that should probably really be written in a compiled (yet safe) language."
Please explain, I'm losing you here.
And no, it's not the language to blame. It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs, lots of us do it every day.
I will agree that garbage collection is a weird way of doing things and it would be better if the obeyed, oh, the FIRST rule of C programming - keep track of our damn memory usage!
C is a beautifully powerful and elegant language, and very portable. No need to move away.
What's the verdict on GPO management for firefox? I've seen an XPI that allows for IE-like management of firefox from a domain controller, but it hasn't been updated in quite some time (I've tried it for 2.0.9, but the XPI will only work with 2.0.0). Will 3 support honest-to-god, grown up management? or will I still have to use hacked together scripts from "Billy Bob's house of chick, waffles, and firefox"?
That's my biggest knock on firefox right now; trying to manage it centrally is more hassle that it's worth. I've seen the tools out there now and my choices are A. a collection of logon and logoff scripts B. roll my own MSI's and have to re-push firefox when I need to make a change or C. create custom config files at install before the machine is rolled out, then go back to and do B. if I need to make a change.
Oh, and it'd be nice if I didn't need administrative rights to finish installing some of the updates (Either 2.0.7 or 2.0.9 wouldn't finish auto-updating unless a domain admin was starting firefox.)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
From TFA:
And all the screenshots are done in Windows Vista!? So, apparently the guy doesn't think there's anything wrong when an OS consumes more than 500MiB of RAM just to boot, right?
My automatic update keeps demanding that I install IE7. Any way to shut this off?
This is my sig.
It may be fast, but it's not safe. Uninstalling now.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless.
I may not be a great lover... but at least I'm FAST!
I thought the whole point of firefox was a faster rewrite of the slow bloated old Mozilla browser? These days it's one of the worst examples of bloatware around, it's painfully slow and heavyweight, IE7 smokes it in this regard. If it weren't for firebug I'll bet lots of people would be using Safari/IE7 instead.
It's pretty bad and slow on it's own, but it gets far worse when you start to use extensions of course, some protections against all the painfully slow and memory-leaking extensions people are churning out would be great
Also, if so much attention is supposedly being paid to creating good cross-platform code and features, why has it never worked properly in Linux? Crashes, memory leaks, and dear god don't even try to install any extensions, it's a lost cause. I had to spend all day yesterday hacking out custom Linux FF CSS to get a simple, standards-compliant page that looked perfect in FF on Windows to render consistently when a FF on a couple of distros suddenly became a client requirement.
I hate to come across as flamebait, but sometimes I really think something is fundamentally dysfunctional among the decision making process with Firefox. It used to be terrific, but slowly became a prime example of bloatware, and it seems to be getting worse with every release.
Will it still be a POS on Mac OS X? While I'd love to have Adblock etc, for now I'm sticking with Safari because it blends with OSX so much better.
I write bullshit
This is an honest question.
:)
It isn't the first time I've read someone lets firefox run for days, but I've never understood why. What's the benefit of doing so? If you're afraid to loose opened tabs - just use the built-in sessionsaver. I do and it works great. And then just bookmark the pages you don't use frequently, but are important to you.
Are you running some web-app all the time?
Are you to lazy to use the close button?
As a Mac user, I've been eagerly anticipating the release of Firefox 3. For too long, the browser has felt like a foreign application that doesn't integrate nicely in to the OS X UI (Among other issues). With the abundance of third party extensions that greatly assist my general browsing and development experience; it's difficult to switch to an alternate browser.
Now, Firefox feels like it's apart of OS X utilising native widgets and dialogues. More importantly, the proposed Firefox3 themes for OS X look fantastic.
PS: This post was brought to you from Firefox 3 Beta 1.
I'd prefer a "Send randomly generated angry email to site-owner" button. With the option of specifying how many million emails you want to send.
Maybe Mozilla should partner with owners of the storm botnet...
The real question isn't whether 3.0 will be better than 2.0; it's whether 3.0 will be better than 1.5. Firefox 2 was a step backwards in a lot of ways.
Is it just me or does the "brighter" part imply that we might be getting those awful "shine like its made of glass, covered in gloss varnish and polished to a micron-perfect smooth surface" effects all over the interface?
On the plus side at least some of the improvements (like resuming saves and better performance) might be worth it. Hopefully any uglyness can be styled away again. Native forms sounds like an improvement as well.
Giving users an "easy way out" is important; it builds trust by showing respect up front. Letting people know they can get rid of something lowers the resistance to try it.
How would you like to try a roller coaster that seemed like it could be a lot of fun, except you couldn't see where (if!?) people were supposed to get off afterwards.
Users will feel safer trying to install a program if they know it will uninstall cleanly, or at least be easily removable (as in: programs that live solely in their install directory).
The same goes for (business) relationships. If you sign up for anything at Fog Creek or Dreamhost, there is a prominent button saying, essentially, "I want out, and don't ever bother me again." Conversely, with most phone or insurance companies, even figuring out where to ask is a challenge. What kind of impression would you like to make on your company's potential customers?
"Good news, everyone!"
Thank you.
When you hit the arrow next to "book flights," the go button is rendered incorrectly (below, in the next clickable area) so you can't actually click it. Opera renders this correctly.
.... was in Silver Blaze not the Baskervilles
After being a longtime FF user, I couldn't take it any more and switched back to IE. I loved FF tab handling, ued many extensions and thelike. What I *HATED* was the crashes, mmory leaks killing my machine and the slow page loading. I switched back to IE and added IE7Pro, which gave me Firefox like tab handling, inline search (with highlighting), ad blocking and GreaseMonkey scripting! I've found that IE7 is faster in displaying most of the sites I visit and have not had memory leaks, system slowdowns or the like.
I'm encouraged to see this reviw, but echcrunch had a brief note that says tha FF3 is *still* a memory hog. They need to getthis right. Ie7 with IE7ro is quite good and I expect IE7Pro to kee etting better and maing IE7 better.
I guess I just question whether someone who willingly chooses to browse with IE over Firefox is qualified to measure the value of a browser.
...and then the beta crashes fast.
Be careful with Firebug. You need to ensure you only have it enabled for the web sites that you're actually debugging. If you have it enabled for all web sites, you are slowing down page loads by more than 200% and leaking memory with every site you load. Firebug is AWESOME but should only be turned on for debugging. The irony is that web developers bitch about
Firefox's performance and they have Firebug instrumenting and bogging down every site they visit.
There is a few new features in the DOM, CSS and Javascript (including a good subset of XPath and XSLT) which will help offload some parts of the big script libraries to the browser.... now if only they'd get up to speed on the things that Webkit is doing!
;-(
Not that it matters really when IE7 is still light years behind
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
... right here: Get Firefox 3 Beta 1
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I keep Firefox for entertainment(games,slashdot,complex sites etc) and Opera for heavy duty browsing where speed matters.
It seems Firefox 3 also passes the Acid2 test.
A few other minor observations - it won't install any add-ons unless they update securely. So far the only add-ons I've been able to install successfully are GMail Notifier and Adblock Plus. I'm not complaining (since it is a beta release specifically for developers and testers). I just can't wait for development and support of my favorite add-ons to take place!
One nice thing I noticed is that if you are installing add-ons from a site that is not in the exceptions list you can just accept it via the title bar now instead of having to open the settings, add the site, reload it, and wait again.
So far I'm impressed! It's fast and smart.
"This food is problematic."
Camino: no adblock. No deal.
Ooh I want one of those.
There have been so many times that I've wanted to complain to the site owner, but I'm just too lazy.
"the uninstall process is fast and painless"
I'm running 2.0.0.9 on W2k, and have never had a problem with Southwest.com. I just booked travel last week using the site. Everything renders and functions correctly. You may have an extension or OS problem.
Try this
I am trying it now. Whereas in 2.x if you typed a URL starting "news" it would list all url's starting like that, 3.0 now lists all urls with "news" anywhere in the URL or title. It takes longer to find the completion you usually want.
...is not having so much crap in your websites? Are you the person to blame for sites that only work with javascript or flash? I don't want your dynamic crap. I want sites that are as lean and easy to use as the browser itself.
:-)
yahoo mail used to work 100% without javascript. It still works mostly, and is much nicer this way. Except they broke attachments because they require all of them to be scanned now; that part requires javascript. The end product is I'll just stop using yahoo mail.
Firefox is nothing without its extensions. Therefore, Firefox 3 beta 1 is largely nothing. I won't use a browser that doesn't have AdBlock. Call me back when my essential extensions are working with Firefox 3...
Nothing to see here. Move along.
People just want software to do what it's supposed to do. People want to get stuff done. If you're a kid writing a report, you want it done so you can go outside and play. If you're an adult doing research for an R&D project, you want it done so you can get paid. Software that does cute animations and junk like that is stupid because that detracts from its purpose. Not that Firefox does stupid animations but you get the picture.
You sir, are a fool if you are serious.
Memory leaks, none here, and I use 2.0.0.7. What, did you stop using at 2.0.0.0 when those happened? Because I went back to 1.5 for quite some time before switching back to 2.0. It is very worth it to not be dependent upon a proprietary browser that runs on ONE operating system; now you are dependent on Microsoft to provide your "solutions". Good luck with that. Vista Ultimate is ONLY $350!
No, bookmarks are now stored in a database. This is possibly the most important change in FF3 for me. The old method was SLOW and subject to corruption. A proper database also opens up possibilities for (much) better searching.
Link to installer: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html/
The download package is small which means that it comes in fast, the installation is fast, the browser fires up fast, pages and tabs open fast, the browser shuts down fast, and the uninstall process is fast and painless
Sounds like the critics saying that Firefox 2 is slower than Opera and Internet Explorer are right eventually... Yes.
The GP (ozmanjusri) criticized your argument and although you might disagree with his criticism, it is most certainly not an ad hominem attack. I'm as much in favor of tossing in latin phrases ad libitum, but there was no *personal attack* here. Sure, the criticism was overly broad and not particularly poignant... Cetera desunt
The only problem I've had is that at times the Flash clip would turn black, and I had to reload the page to get things rendered properly.
The saddest poem
Judging from those screenshots he's using Vista, and is complaining about Firefox using up too much memory. Does anyone else find this highly hypocritical?
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
...if any problems with Firefox 3 will find their way into Iceweasel 3 ;)
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
I tried it this morning. Some of my bookmarks that were in the bookmarks toolbar disappeared.
Anyone know a workaround for getting Mouse Gestures to work in FF3b1?
It does appear to do MUCH better on the Acid2 test than FF2 (guess the new rendering engine could be all that it was hyped up to be), but it doesn't quite pass - if you compare to the reference rendering, you'll notice that there is a little too much space between the mouth and bottom edge of the space (I opened the reference and the live test is two different tabs and switched back and forth).
I'm of the opinion that nothing matters as much as implementing a multithreaded UI, to avoid the whole-browser lockups that happen with some Flash-intensive pages. I've given up hoping, though. It seems that something that should've been architected in from the beginning has been left so late that it's likely much too hard to implement now. :(
First, the car must have wheels, power, and a way to go and stop. THEN you can figure out where to add the fuzzy dice and ground effect lighting.
program is so high that not even the experienced and well paid by google (to bomb us with google adz) Millioner Mozilla developers can no longer hack it. Their No 1 priority is keeping mozilla mainstream and they achieve that by pushing fwd new standards (since google, mozilla, opera and MS control the w3c these days). And these standards are "derrived from the implementation". They are not simple standards for everybody. HTML5 describes the error handling of mozilla for malstructured documents!
So you want us to fix your mess? Piss off.
You aren't alone on doing the shuffle - at least among OSX users! Firefox is great because of the extensions, but FF2 is just bloatware on OSX and it is dog slow. When I updated to Leopard I decided to give Safari another shot. I added in Pithhelmet, SafariStand, and SafariBlock. All it lacks are auto-updating blocklists and it is far faster than FF ever was and it Acid2 compliant to boot!
As a long time Firefox user I hate to say it, but I may not go back to Firefox for quite some time (unless FF3 is a vast improvement).
Get a web developer
Does anybody know when a FF3 version of the google toolbar will be available?
I get the error: Google Toolbar for Firefox 3.0.20070525W could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 3.0b1 as described on my blog
Could it be that since I shut down every night the memory use doesn't "build up"?
How about having the installer come with an option to create a "portable" version that would be runnable from a single folder such as on a USB Thumb Drive? As it stands, we either have to wait for the guys over at PortableApps.com to create a portable version, or we need to roll our own. I would think that it would be a snap for the installer to place all of the files in a single folder in a controlled and supported way.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
"FFIII"
Congratulations, you just made a webbrowser sound like a RPG.
If you care about security, speed and ease of use shouldn't you be running Safari? I always thought that the advantage of Firefox was its extensions model (which seems to be part of the reason for FF's memory and stability issues). Especially now that the new 3.0.4 release of Safari on Windows seems to fix the issues in the first Windows Beta.
Security
According to Secunia, the Safari team seems to be doing a much better job than Firefox. Safari didn't have any highly critical or moderately critical issues reported, Firefox had 8. Safari has a total of 3 less or not critical issues still to be resolved. Firefox has a total of 4 less or not critical issues still to be resolved.
The Firefox team wins on the number of security issues fixed but only becasuse they had more security issues in the first place.
http://secunia.com/product/12434/?task=advisories
http://secunia.com/product/5289/?task=advisories
Firefox - 6 Highly critical issues had been found (6 fixed)
Safari - 0 Highly critical issues have been found
Firefox - 2 Moderately critical issues had been found (2 fixed)
Safari - 0 Moderately critical issues have been found
Firefox - 6 Less critical issues had been found (3 fixed)
Safari - 3 Less critical issues have been found (2 fixed)
Firefox - 3 Not critical issues had been found (1 fixed)
Safari - 3 Not critical issues have been found (1 fixed)
Speed
Apple claims that Safari's HTML rendering is 1.7x faster than FF and their JavaScript is 2.4x faster on Windows. On the Mac the difference is even greater - 3.1x and 2.7x.
There are many ways to measure performance and that the results will vary on each but I have yet to see anyone show a benchmark where Firefox is faster than Safari. I've seen unscientific tests where someone with a blog and a stopwatch makes claims down to the hundredth of a second based on a tiny sample set, the variability of the live Internet, and a handpicked site or two to make their point but that doesn't have the same credibility to me as a benchmark developed by an independent 3rd party.
Apple is the only company I've seen actually put up numbers, their testing configuration and the details about their benchmark. i-Bench was developed by Ziff Davis labs and was used regularly to compare IE and Netscape in PC Mag during the first browser wars. I had never heard lots of complaints about the benchmark until it was being used to show the Firefox was slow. The attacks would sound more genuine if the attackers would offer up a better alternative.
http://www.apple.com/safari/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari.html
Ease of use
This is what Apple products are all about. They might not have all of the advanced features of Firefox and IE but they excel at simple, easy-to-use interfaces.
-cj
Has no one heard of FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?
There is already an IE plugin for FFII, you know. Actually I know of at least two. And yea, I'd assume it'll be updated to work with FFIII.
Firefox 3 is Acid2 compliant, if you didn't know.
Still doesn't have anywhere near the level of CSS(3) support as WebKit. Check Dave Hyatt's blog for a few examples.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
On Linux the Firefox does not have its own pixmap cache, which has forced it to use the X11's cache. When Firefox has crashed or some of the extensions screwed up it has meant that the memory from the X11 process has not been freed, causing growing and growing X11 processes. That has lead to stuff like 4 gigabyte X server processes, forcing users to ctrl-alt-del.
This blocker level bug has been around from Firefox 0.3 or so, and the fix is now at last being committed to what will become 3.0. Yeah, it is in Bugzilla, been the whole time. Marked as "enhancement" since 0.3. One guy on Planet Ubuntu blogged about having finally done something about it some 2 months ago. Hooah.
The bottom line is: Don't talk utter shit about Firefox being good handling memory. It is not. Never has been. It has been complete trash.
One of the things I'm most excited about, possibly just because it came out of nowhere, is the native tabs on linux. It's close enough to being released that I didn't think there'd be any new features, and then about five days past they appeared after an update. Even thunderbird's gotten a much needed deuglification, those bars looked both out of place and ugly as hell before. They still look a bit odd, but still a million times better than what had been there before. I really hope they can do something about the stability issues before release. I wouldn't have thought they'd be at a beta level yet from how often I see the system freeze or crash. It happens often enough that I had to toss together a program to kill it, free my profile, and start it up again.
Everything will be taken away from you.
nice, now I can explore online the contents of ODTs
.tar.gz? i'd like to able to navigate them and .deb files too.
jar:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKMarketing/Leaflets?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=leaflet1-foss_alan_cocks.odt!/
without having to download them!
anything similar for
Serious Question: I am not a web developer. Acid2 Compliance means what to me?
That Webpages render correctly? What sorts...
like those goddamn IE only pages?
The pages that use some codec that is popular with 13-17 crowd in Slovenia?
The pages from my bank that do not render properly with any browser I have ever tried?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Acid2 doesn't even measure compliance, only error recovery for whatever advanced selectors the creator of Acid2 came up with. It's far from a CSS test compliance suite, but the folks at the W3C are so allergic to the idea of working reference implementations, let alone test suites, that you're never likely to see one.
Contrast to the IETF, which requires (or at least used to require) two working, different, and interoperable implementations before considering any protocol for a standard.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
so I can't speak too well to its similarity, but K-Meleon would seem to qualify as a lightweight, Windows-native Firefox derivative. kmeleon.sf.net
It finally suppports things like display:inline-block (sometimes much easier to use than float and is sort-of supported by IE already) and soft hyphen (­).
Before installing it, rename the existing application bundle to something different (e.g. "Firefox 2.0"), and then drag the other App bundle to the Applications folder. Both versions of the program will now be available for your use. Ditto with any other application: I installed iLife '08 yesterday, but I wanted to keep iMovie '06 for the time being. So I did the quick rename thingie, then after the installation process was complete, I opened both of them. They were running side-to-side, with no problems at all. My experience with doing the same thing on Windows hasn't been as pleasant, but YMMV, of course. But just like in Windows, you can install the new version somewhere different, if you know what you are doing...
A friend opened my eyes to Opera about a year ago and I haven't used Firefox since.
A while ago I got fed up with a nasty bug in Seamonkey/Firefox (see bug 263160 / "frames open in new windows leaving the firefox window unusable" in Mozilla Bugzilla for details) and tried Opera, having heard much good about it. Indeed, there was plenty to like (slightly but noticeably quicker UI response time, the Wand feature etc) but after a couple of weeks I returned to Seamonkey because I bumped several times into behavior that was very much not something I'd expected from Opera; the browser reached repeatedly in a couple of days about a gigabytes worth of virtual size, of which something like 700-800 MBs were actually resident. Even after I had closed all tabs but one empty placeholder one, only very little memory was regained. I have 2.5 GB of RAM on my machine, but being an amateur photographer, I have plenty of other apps that would also like to have some memory, so I decided to revert back to Seamonkey, as in my case it uses less memory and needs restarts at least somewhat less often.
I mentioned about this to a couple of my friends that are long-time Opera users and the behavior wasn't familiar to them. Likewise, in my case Seamonkey (or Firefox) doesn't really exhibit the memory leakiness that has been described in many places. On the other hand, while I suffer from the nasty bug I mentioned earlier while using Seamonkey or Firefox, almost no-one of my friends have ever bumped into it and even those who have do not experience it frequently. So I suppose the leakiness and other issues of both browsers are largely site-dependent.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
I installed on a windows test box .. comparison when running: 182Meg (4 web pages) v 2.0.0.9 44Meg (same 4 Web pages) ..
with low RAM (256M XPSP2) on the test box it was in a word unusable.
sticking with 2.x for now
> I can't actually believe that a group of developers would have a problem where their programs memory usage gradually increased from 10 MB to 2GB over a few days, and actually release it. And not only release it, but carry it over from alpha all the way through to version 2.0.
It doesn't. Not for me. Not even on these crappy work machines. It never has, though these poor developers have been trying to fix it the whole time.
Usually, it's either the pages you're viewing (large images, adding elements to the DOM constantly, whatever else) or extensions or both. Firefox can't fix memory leaks in extensions. It can't do much about memory it HAS to use for whatever you're doing.
Might want to try different extensions (e.g. AdblockPlus instead of Adblock) or other things. Because if the problem were with Firefox itself, I should be seeing it too. Especially on these low-memory, crappy work machines.
The developers who have contempt for users have it because they get bitched out by people who they're supporting for free.
From this page: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_web_applications_for_Firefox_3/
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
http://myportal.mozdev.org/
Though in practice I still don't use it.
Instead, you may just want to try this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1722 which makes your address bar a bit more flexible (searches matching bookmark names in addition to URLs).
[quote]You aren't alone on doing the shuffle - at least among OSX users! Firefox is great because of the extensions, but FF2 is just bloatware on OSX and it is dog slow.[/quote] Most definitely. I've been using FireFox and the Mozilla suite for years and years now. When I got my MacBook, I was quite chagrined to find just how ridiculously slow and bloated it was. Then a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an Optimized Build of 2.0.0.8 for OS X that works great. I haven't run any benchmarks on it or anything, but the painful waits as firefox would chug and chug along are basically gone. Before I found this, I found Firefox to be damn near unusable on OS X, and I was running it on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM.
... is more JavaScript and XML!
JAR URL (JAR files really are just renamed ZIP files) was already supported in Firefox 2.0.
So 3.0b1 added a new little checkbox at the end of the uninstall which says it will remove personal data.
Checking it brings about a little yellow box saying it will remove bookmarks, saved passwords, and the like.
Stupidly, I clicked this checkbox and hit Next before reading the little yellow box. Goodbye bookmarks, usernames, and everything else. Specifically, those used by my current 2.0 installation, which I had every intention of keeping.
So, painful for me due to my own incompetence. But is it too much to ask to place these automatically deleted items into the Recycle Bin/Trash?
Hard work often pays off after time, but laziness always pays off now.
So Firefox doesn't work out for you. That's fine. But why the hell are you using IE as an alternative?! It's unstable and uses an ancient engine that is very much lacking in web standards support. You could have tried Opera, or even the other Gecko-based browsers like K-Meleon and SeaMonkey.
Using about:config, filter for 'ping' and doubel click to make it not automatically send ping-backs.
Ping backs allow you to track outgoing clicks from your website.
Am I against the feature? Like is like saying I am against http referrers. I am not against them. I disable them. Always. And give up using sites that decide it would be fun to rely on the referrer id rather than learn more than 11 distinct lines of PHP code to develop an entire site.
I am against the way it was introduced, deceitfully, quietly with calls that 'omg, what, like the w3c is suddenly the only standards body we should listen to? face bro!'. It was very weird.
You could say google would like this, but honestly, I will do my damndest to ensure everyone upgrading to FF3.0 gets to know about ping-backs, and how to easily disable it, so Firefox 4 sees ping-backs go the way of clippit.
Drop ping-backs, it's dishonest to hijack and send this information about Firefox users habits (even though the same can be done with unobtrusive javascript calls, and analytics, i.e. onclick="urchin('lol user clicked pr0n link');return true;")
yup. ping backs. bad.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I was poking around hoping to have a look see for myself, release candidates are available, but the link that digg posted is wrong, It points to the RC not the beta and browsing to the beta directory sends you here:
http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/index.php/2007/11/07/were-happy-that-you-digg-us-but/
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Um. Howabout switching back to FF2? I mean, until FF3 is out of BETA.
***BETA***
FF3 is faster and "cool" or whatever...but it's BETA.
I'm really not expecting all of my plugins to work until the final version comes out. I won't be surprised if they pop up as compatible earlier (as NoScript has), but I can understand the need to put software out there to work out the bugs of the basic functionality over the nibblings of a kajillion plugins. But you know what I do if I want them back?
Thats right! I run FF2. It's okay to be serious about something like that. BECAUSE IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
That's because FF3 is BETA.
BETA.
Next time forecastfox or Mr. Whahoo's Porno Screensaver for teh Internet doesn't work, remember this one simple word: BETA. Firefox 3 is STILL IN BETA. Not only that, but it was RELEASED LESS THAN 48 HOURS AGO.
Not only that, but be prepared FOR ANOTHER BETA VERSION that might (gasp!) make some things not work again!
To complain that BETA software doesn't have all the features of a final release is like complaining that a one-year-old can't tie their shoes.
Patience!
Okay, now that I feel appropriately douchey, I realize that people don't know how to run multiple instances of firefox.
This'll get firefox 2 and 3b running at the same time.
Don't type the quotes.
1. Right-click on My Computer.
2. Click on Properties.
3. Click on Advanced.
4. Click on Environment Variables
5. Click New
6. When the dialog pops up, type "MOZ_NO_REMOTE" in the top box, and in the bottom, type "1". Hit okay until the dialogs are gone.
7. Make sure Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 are installed in separate directories. For example, I have FF2 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9\ and FF3 in c:\program files\Mozilla Firefox 3 beta\
8. Find the executable for FF2 (for me, in c:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox.exe), and make a shortcut to the desktop.
9. Do the same thing for FF3 (c:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe)
10. Right-click on the new shortcut for FF2 on the desktop
11. Where it says "Target", go to the end of the line, and after the quotation marks add "-p default". The final total line will read:
"C:\program files\mozilla firefox 2.0.0.9\firefox" -p default
12. Click okay.
13. For the new shortcut to FF3, right-click on it and on the line marked "target", add a "-p betatest" so that the final line reads:
"C:\program files\mozilla firefox 3 beta\firefox.exe" -p betatest
14. Click okay.
15. When you double-click on either of those shortcuts for the first time, you'll get a scrange window asking which profile to use. for FF2, select "default". For FF3, create a new one called "betatest". This window should not appear again.
16. Now FF2 should work with all FF2 plugins and whatnot, and FF3 will live in its own private world for you to fuck around with to your heart's delight.
The rant is still directed at people who demand that beta software do everything a final release is supposed to. Of course, this does not include people who rant at Google, because Google doesn't seem to quite know what the final project is going to end up doing anyway.
Sincerely,
me
If I had a dollar for every time a plugin (Acrobat, WMP, Java) hung or crashed the browser I'd be a rich man. Especially Java, and it seems that more and more systems use Java. Open two different windows or tabs with different Java applets and you can be pretty sure that it'll crash. Flash seems surprisingly clean in comparison.
Plugins really need to run in a separate process so they can't take the browser down and can be killed without adverse effects when they run amok.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I work for a company you _have_ heard of on server products that have to run constantly on everything from desktop pcs to big iron. We'd know if we had leaks because we test, and we'd know because our very large telecom and ISP customers would scream at us.
We don't deal with the same kind of data as the fox guys do, but we do have memory under control thankyou. Not everyone on slashdot only programs in their bedroom after college.
Or Windows SUS.
...except through apt. But then, I have to be root to even run apt, and while it's not trivial, it's still relatively easy for any competent admin to setup a repository, and review -- even with full source -- every update before it hits the repository.
On my Ubuntu install, actually, Firefox updates are disabled by default, out of the box. Since I'm not root, the "Check for Updates" item in the "Help" menu is grayed out. It is actually impossible for me to install a Firefox update...
Or, as sibling posters are saying, you could do it through WSUS. So what's the problem?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't even know if it's possible in Windows to disable mounting filesystems on USB drives or MP3 players that might contain one or more "*.mp* .exe" files helpfully dumped onto them by a virus that includes that vector.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
If you're seeing higher memory usage with plugins (do you mean extensions?) than without, that's a pretty good sign that you're encountering memory leaks rather than overzealous in-memory caching. Those leaks might be the fault of Firefox or the fault of the extension; you'd have to debug them to find out.
The shareholder is always right.
Actually, the W3C now also requires two working, different, interoperable implementations. That's one major reason that CSS 2.1 is still in CR instead of REC.
And they're working on test suites. It's a time-consuming process. Figuring a spec without much fluff text, you would assume about one testable requirement per sentence, at minimum. If you have a spec a few hundred pages long (a number of the W3C specs are), that's a _lot_ of tests.
I'm really interested in Firefox 3, but ZDNet's review is weak.
Firstly, it's mainly screenshots - OF THE INSTALLER.... and Amazon.com. Anyone qualified to review a top browser would know that people want to see Web 2.0 applications and web standards tests, not Amazon.com!
Secondly, this guy chooses IE 7 over Firefox 2.0 - that immediately casts doubt on his judgement and tells me that he knows absolutely *nothing* about web standards or web development.
Lastly, he writes his article trying to explain what's NEW in Firefox 3 and proceeds to list several features that have always been there, like efficient text search within a page, zooming and download resuming, not to mention the security features and warnings.
If his ramblings do actually have a point, why hasn't he given any details of the new or changed features, instead of just enumerating features that were already there?
In my opinion, he saw Firefox 3.0 as a cheap trick to earn some reads. Verdict: Publicity Whore.
On this particular Windows 2000 box, leaving a webpage open for a minute or two (Chicago Tribune in particular, but it just happened in Gmail) suddenly causes Firefox 3.0 to suck up memory at an incredible rate (3-4 MB per second) up to 650 MB. The first time required a reboot, and I've had to kill the process three times since. This never happened in 2.0, and I'm posting from 2.0 right now. Maybe I'll wait for the RC version.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I work for one of those you mentioned. I'm not really at liberty to to say which. We're not under any pressure to switch from C, nobody's even suggested it. Even for new components. Could be because we're industry leaders in our sphere and wildly profitable.
Yes, we suffer from the occasional leak, which we plug fast, but not many and usually when one customer has done something unusual.
If you think Java is an automatic get-out-of-leak-free card, you're mistaken.
Huh? and this is an honest question because you lost me there....
How do I file bugs in the new version when the Firefox 3.0 overwrites the old version 's DLLs, and I don't see the errors in 2.X
Of course, I could try to send the bug reports in via IE, Opera, or Safari....
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
... are the root of all evil ...
But as a normal end user I can't. Which is really sad. Yes, I'm a tab collector (for later reading/blogging) and until I reach the point of a "tab sweep" I regulary hover around 100 to 120 open tabs. But FF shouldn't consume 14 GB RAM (had this on Monday) even under such extreme circumstances. And it should never consume 100% CPU which now is the normal behaviour when I return to office in the morning.
FF could be much better if a "debug and analyze" plugin was available. That plugin should collect memory and CPU usage of the different tabs so that I can close the tab that causes the problem. That would help a lot to bring up more cases where FF behaves strangely.
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
> How do I file bugs in the new version when the Firefox 3.0 overwrites the old version 's DLLs
Does it really do that on Windows? That doesn't happen on either Mac or Linux (which are what I have experience with), but I guess those don't use the mess that is the installer.... That behavior is really unfortunate.
I assume that you went back to 2.x by uninstalling the beta and reinstalling 2.x, right? In that case, what's keeping you from reporting the bugs? Just not having the details off the top of your head?
Please do file the bugs once Giorgio updates NoScript, ok?
I love that you managed to slip in "the whole "installer" insanity" after pissing and moaning about your platform's procedure.
There's nothing wrong with the Mac's procedure, my comment was about the instructions on the Firefox beta web page.
It's certainly possible to write applications that run in place (I don't like overriding the existing meaning of the term 'portable application' for this) for Windows, but Microsoft makes it hard. Apart from the registry issues, their shared libraries don't normally get tracked by the complete path name so if your application needs (and includes) a copy of a Windows library that may not be installed you really need to do something to make sure it GETS installed in %systemroot% unless there's a more recent one there. Portable applications really need to eschew those libraries, and they must avoid others because they expect the application to be using the registry. On top of that Microsoft, by default, hides the contents of "Program Files".
I disagree that configuration for the application should be restricted to the application directory. A versioned config file in your profile is more useful for the more typical case, because it allows you to run the application from read-only directories or media.
On traditional UNIX systems you can set up standalone applications a lot more easily, but they're not the default.
The Scheme NeXT came up with and that Apple continues to use in OS X makes standalone apps the default, and installers the exception. That's the real distinction.
Perhaps a weaker term than "necessary" is desirable, I suppose "inevitable" is better. Microsoft makes you bend over backwards to avoid them, Apple makes you appear a tad eccentric if you use them.
Well, I stand corrected. K-Meleon merely has an unfortunate name.
What about XPI do you find insecure?
The fact that the XPI install is initiated from within the browser. This means it's necessary to provide a hole in the sandbox whereby an untrusted object can request privileges necessary to install an extension. Since this privilege is equivalent to full local user privileges, any exploits that could use this hole would be extremely serious. It is certainly possible that they have blocked all possible avenues of attack through this hole, but given that similar (albeit somewhat broader) holes in the Microsoft HTML sandbox have been responsible for the majority of exploits through IE, it seems poor design to even allow such a hole to exist.
The alternative design would simply download the extension like any other file, and leave it in the user's download directory and download manager. Then the user would, outside the untrusted object, explicitly request that the extension be installed. The operation of installing would, depending on the platform, include:
1. Opening the extension in the OS file manager, with the handler for that file type set to Firefox.
2. Right-clicking the Firefox download manager entry and selecting "install".
3. Selecting an "Install Extension" menu entry and navigating to the downloaded file.
By making the installation a separate step, explicitly requested by the user, you gain two advantages.
1. It is not necessary to provide a mechanism for a web page to request an operation that can grant them full local user privileges. This should be an obvious point, so I won't go into further detail.
2. Making the install a separate operation from the download means that the user is explicitly requesting it, and not just clicking on an approval dialog. The difference in these two user interface models is surprisingly large... in 20 years as a network and system administrator, and almost 10 years experience with Internet Explorer, I have only had one user (out of several hundred over that period) who was unable to learn not to download files and double click them after the first time they came to me with an infected computer. I have had many users come to me over and over again and say they clicked OK (or open, or "infect me now", or whatever the dialog of the week said) and their computer was acting funny. Because people get trained to approve dialogs, the dialog comes up and it's a reflex to click it.
Currently, XPI does make it fairly hard to open by accident. But to do this they have made the whole operation more complicated than just treating an XPI file with the same security model as an executable would. Instead of downloading it then (at your convenience) selecting "install", you have to whitelist the site (which takes several steps), then wait through a countdown, then click on an approval dialog.
A simpler design would be both more secure and more convenient. It's rare enough that you can say this of anything, no?
I see you didn't even take the time to read the main page.
No. Guilty. Googled right to the download page.
Poking around in the user agent string, however, is a but much.
Frankly, back when I last tried it, in June or July, it was so far from ready for prime time that I didn't do much more than install it and play with it for a few minutes.
Yes, I assumed that they would be using the "K" name because they were using the KHTML engine.
That we had to wait for Safari on Windows to get a KHTML-based browser at all is appalling.
In any case, I think I should have said something more to the effect of "it's a pity that there isn't a decent lightweight browser for Windows using the native UI *at all*". Because, right now, there isn't. I don't know what the problem with Safari is... for me it started out nice and fast but bogged down very quickly. K-Meleon might be worthwhile with a year of polishing. Firefox 3 seems like an improvement, but it's still not native and I'm still concerned about XPI. There's a third party webkit browser but last I looked it was kind of stalled.
There doesn't seem to be anything out there for Windows, at all.
Extensions are what gives Firefox it's usefulness.
On OS X, where there are a plethora of wrappers around Gecko and Webkit/KHTML available, yes, I suppose that's its distinguishing mark.
if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera.
On Windows though, where you might be considering using IE, Firefox is about the only alternative. Opera isn't that small these days, and its MDI-based user interface belongs in the '80s. I used Opera instead of Firefox on my Toshiba Libretto, but I'd have loved something similar to Camino instead.
But... IE? OK, OK, I was getting on Firefox's case about security earlier. But really, Firefox's design problems are at the "not washing your hands after you go to the restroom" level. IE is like running barefoot through the "Hot Ward" and snogging all the E-Bola patients by comparison. The idea of allowing any random native code module run if it's had the trust dog piddle on it so it smells right? What maniac thought that was a good idea?
With Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Windows XP SP2 and six windows open the VM size is less than the Memory size.
I wonder if there are some shared memory segments, or memory mapped I/O.
No time to flush out with SysInternals. I have a turkey to prepare!