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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.'"
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.
I've found them to be worse on the Mac, actually.
Not trying to start a flame war, I use both on a daily basis.
I setup a lot of Dell machines as part of my job, and for a period of about 2 months (about a 1 and half ago) all the machines i recieved had Firefox preinstalled. Then it stopped.
It was annoying to think that my job would have 5mins shaved off it to then find that they've gone back to the IE only way of thinking.
What really would matter is, are there PC makers who would pre install Firefox at the factory? They throw in so much of crapware but not Firefox, GIMP and OpenOffice. Why?
Because the companies that author the crapware pay the desktop manufacturers to put them there. It's a form of advertising.
Mozilla Foundation probably can't afford it. Although perhaps that opens up the possibility of doing a donation campaign or some such fund raiser with the community to get such spots purchased.
Actually Firefox is forbidden on Dept of the Army systems. Why? Well, it requires updating separately, and is always flagged on scans. Some of the systems in question - ok, a lot of them - can't do automated updates due to not being on the Internet in the first place, and an institutional aversion to accepting updates from any source without vetting them through a security team first. So I don't imagine this changing anytime soon.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
I've submitted an explanation about the ping-pong game between the developers and the users as a story a while ago. The memory hogging problem boils down to memory fragmentation instead of memory leaks basically, that is why the devs weren't finding leaks and the users feel there are some...guess it turns out both groups were right.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
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.
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.
Oh FFS. Open "about:blank" repeatedly and watch the memory footprint rise and rise. The issue was never with reporting, but with memory "sure we allocate it and never release it but that's not technically a leak, we just don't know what happened to it" leaks being bottom of every developer's priority list.
The strength of open source is that many people want to contribute. The weakness is that they only contribute what they want to contribute
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The ol' "That Hurts, so don't do it" reason?
I don't turn off my Linux system and I leave FF on all the time since I'm running an AJAX app that updates all the time. Because my eyeballs aren't staring at it, doesn't mean I have to turn FF (or my system) off.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
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.
Isn't this what multiple profiles are for? Super fast switching would be nice this works well enough I think.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
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
The actual amount of memory used is very low. The problem is fragmentation. [pavlov.net] If Mozilla would actually tackle the real problem instead of focusing on what know-nothing users continuously claim is the problem, it would probably be fixed already.
See, this is in fact the problem - the contempt for the user community. From a user's perspective, this debate of semantics is aggravating and pointless. You see, I don't care what the hell you call it, or even what the root cause is - memory leaking, fragmentation, whatever. In the end, it's simply ridiculous that a damned web browser ends up occupying 2GB of memory. This needs to stop now, and it should have stopped 5 years ago.
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's entirely feasible if you don't use "clever" dirty tricks such as reinterpret_cast'ing ints to pointers and vice versa, xor'ing pointers, putting them into a union with other types, etc. In other words, if you don't do things that are widely considered bad style. Bear in mind also that C++09 is going to add GC integrated into the language itself, and the language is not simplified for the sake of it; it's just that the things enumerated above, which are legal (though dangerous and frowned upon) now, will become forbidden in gc_strict mode, so it's a good idea to start worrying about that now (you want your libraries to be usable regardless of the user's GC setting, don't you?).
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.