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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.'"
From the release notes:
I'm optimistic, but we'll see in time...
df -h
Instead of this windows-screenshot-centric review, what geeks like me really want are the release notes.
They say the have plugged more than 300 memory leaks in the release notes. I hope that's most of them...
Tis women makes us love, Tis Love that makes us sad, Tis sadness makes us drink, And drinking makes us mad.
I guess that K-Meleon should be of interest to you.
It's Gecko and it's lightweight.
But... Firefox is already a lightweight derivative... of Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey)...
It's lightweight in that it has less compiled code in it, alas it makes up for it with an excessive amount of scripted code.
Why would you demand Firefox from your vendor when you can install it yourself 30 seconds after you get home? The idea that having Firefox preinstalled would influence anybody's choice of vendor is nuts.
What flamewar? For nearly two years, Mozilla developers have asked users to file good memory leak bug reports and have even supplied tools for doing so. If you're still having problems, simply report them and they can be fixed. You can report any bugs in Firefox 3 beta directly to Bugzilla, or discuss them in the MozillaZine Firefox Builds forum first.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I"m sure that many of the memory leaks have been fixed. However, they may not be the biggest problem. One of the developers has been making some really interesting posts about Firefox's memory fragmentation problems. http://blog.pavlov.net/
Those have yet to be solved.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Haven't the bookmarks been stored in an HTM file since Netscape 2? Aren't they still stored in bookmarks.html?
It's not that hard to point your homepage there, if you really want it...though...why?
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
But those leaks are up to the affected extension authors to fix.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Yes, many users were mistaking fragmentation (and caching) for memory leaks. We've been making this exact statement for years in the MozillaZine forums. But there are actual memory leaks, also. You can't point the finger at any one cause. At any point in time, Firefox memory use is some combination of memory needed to display the open pages, various caches (not just the two people talk about all the time), fragmentation, and possibly memory leaks. The only news is that the developers are getting diminishing returns on fixing leaks, and are now turning to reducing fragmentation to reduce normal memory use.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I run FF 24/7 for weeks on end on Windows and it never goes over 200MB. I accept it's still a lot but then I also tend to browse lots of forums with crappy animated avatars and the like. I can have 20 tabs open across three windows and it still doesn't go over 200. I'm amazed that some people find it using memory in the order of gigabytes.
See pavlov.net blog on Memory fragmentation in firefox.
I ran in to this problem back in the days where 4MB of memory was a lot. My program needed a lot of large objects with a short persistence. The upshot of this was that the program soon ground to a halt due to swapping memory I partially overcame the problem by writing my own allocation algorithm which kept separate lists of blocks of different sizes, hence it managed to recycle much of the memory blocks.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
He wasn't arguing that it wouldn't be good for FireFox to have vendors pre-install it. That's pretty obvious. He was arguing the OP's claim that it would be a good brand differentiator for the vendors to preinstall Firefox. I think he has a point. Most users who know why they should be using Firefox know that they can download and install it for free in less than five minutes. So why would I, as a customer, make a choice of which vendor to purchase from based on a piece of free bundled software? It wouldn't at all, especially since most new PC's come so loaded with crapware that the first thing I do is blow them away and install the OS from scratch.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Yes, I agree with you 100%. A browser taking up 2 GB of memory and making the computer slow to a crawl is obviously a very serious problem. No one could possibly disagree with you. Please report it as a bug, along with how to see that outrageous memory use. There is no flamewar. There is no way that memory use is caused by normal fragmentation or caching, which together normally account for only several tens of megabytes of memory usage.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Maybe they need to realize when some pages that people make are taking up too much memory, or some extensions are using too much memory. If you go to a page that adds a couple new elements to the DOM every 3 seconds, and leave it on all night, you're going to end up with your browser consuming gigabytes of RAM. If you have a plugin which doesn't release it's memory, and keeps on asking for more, you're going to have a browser that takes up 2 GB of RAM. If you try to open up a huge XML file with your browser, then you're going to have a problem with the browser taking up lots of memory. Those are the only times I've ever seen my usage go above 200 MB. Under normal browsing conditions, even leaving Firefox open for weeks, I've never seen it go over 200 MB. When it does, it's because some rogue page keeps adding stuff to the DOM.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I have the same experience. I figure it's either some rogue extension, or some weird webpages that people visit that actually lead their browser to consume gigabytes of RAM.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Use iGoogle as your homepage and add a bookmark gadget, either to the main tab or to a bookmark tag. Heck you could even do a bookmark tab with multiple widgets per category. That way your bookmarks are available anywhere and if you set google as your homepage they are only a alt-home away. I love my firefox addons but Google has done as much the change the way I use the web as the Mozilla Foundation.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
... 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.
Block IE 7
Throw the bums out!
Just last week I went to move 40,000+ small (less than 700 byte) files off an FTP server. I was lazy and decided to just use IE6's built in FTP client. I was moving the files in the background and doing other "work" in Firefox while it moved the files. A few hours later everything on my PC started closing out (crashing), even Explorer and I was left with Firefox and a few other applications running. IE, Explorer, Visual Studio 2005, and a few other applications just aborted when my machine ran out of memory (1G RAM, 2G swap).
Why IE was using over 2G of RAM for moving 40,000 files I have no clue, but I was impressed that Firefox continued to run when even Windows Explorer (and even Visual Studio... Microsoft's "crowning achievement") shut down. I guess Microsoft doesn't plan on running out of memory when coding applications.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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."
So, you've filed a report for this -- right?
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
Has no one heard of FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?
It may not have AdBlock(tm) with FilterSet.G(tm) but it does block ads. I don't really care which bit of software blocks my adds, so long as it gets done with minimal hassle to me. Camino does that. If Camino had a semi-convenient way to get at my del.icio.us bookmarks, I'd never use anything but.
Firefox 3 is Acid2 compliant, if you didn't know.
They have a lightweight version,it is called Kmeleon. That said,I do hope they fix the memory problem in FF. While I like Kmeleon,I do miss my extensions(although they have added adblock support,which was my main extension)
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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Firefox no extentions
Firefox with extensions
Opera
IE
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
I currently have 5 tabs open in Firefox: /., 3 static pages, and a 650kb text file.
I also have two instances of IE7 open. One with 3 tabs with static pages and a heavy AJAX child window (Oracle Web Access email client), the other with one tab on the Asus site, and a child window with one tab, on the Asus support site.
Memory Usage:
Firefox (2.0.0.9): 248,192k
Internet Explorer 7 with multiple tabs and a heavy AJAX child window: 158,880k
Internet Explorer 7 with one tab and a child window: 106,664k
Both IE with AJAX and tabs and FF have been running since I logged on to this machine a couple of days ago. The other IE instance has been open about 18 hours.