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.'"

Comments

First Post ?

[lord_rob the only on]

If so it's made with Firefox 3 Beta 1 Yeah ! (If not, well it's made with Iceweasel 2.0.0.9)

Re:First Post ?

[CastrTroy]

You've got to be fast to make first post. You must be using Firefox 3, beta 1.

Re:First Post ?

[leica_user]

damn. real man uses telnet.

About damned time

[Mr. Underbridge]

"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?

Re:About damned time

[Slashidiot]

Totally agree. I've been using Firefox since my Windows days, and once I moved to OS X, tried Safari and Firefox, and found myself using Safari most of the time, just because Firefox 2 felt sluggish, yes, the plugins were a big plus, but not at the cost of feeling you are riding a fatty cow instead of a fire fox.

Re:About damned time

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that K-Meleon should be of interest to you.
It's Gecko and it's lightweight.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

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.

Re:About damned time

[A beautiful mind]

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.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

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.

Re:About damned time

[hitmark]

problem is that many users dont know the diff between a memory leak and a ram cache. they only see the browser eat up 100's of megs in the windows program manager, and go screaming memory leak all over the place.

its like listening to some office rat talking about programming a computer when all they do is save a excel file (it has happened to me), and you know that no matter of times you correct them they will say the same the next time you bump into them...

Re:About damned time

[pebs]

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?

What browser is crashing your whole machine? Are you running Windows 98 and browsing with Internet Explorer?

Re:About damned time

[insertwackynamehere]

The difference of course being that semantics aside, Firefox eating up 100 mbs of memory at times is a problem, whereas your coworker being an idiot is just your coworker being an idiot.

Re:About damned time

[Rogerborg]

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

Re:About damned time

[pfafrich]

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.

Re:About damned time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, many users were mistaking fragmentation (and caching) for memory leaks. We've been making this exact statement for years in the MozillaZine forums.

That's exactly the "nearly 5 year flame war over whether a browser that takes up 2 GB of memory is technically leaking it or not". The reasoning that just because there is a technical explanation for why it takes 2 GB of memory, doesn't help the poor user who doesn't HAVE 2 GB of memory, and thus his machine slows to a crawl, swapping itself to death.

It may not *technically* be a leak. But it's still a problem.

Re:About damned time

[barzok]

May be too late for me.

I switched to a Mac when the SR MacBooks were released 3 weeks ago. I haven't even bothered to install Firefox yet. I installed Camino because there was one site not letting me in with Safari, but aside from that I've switched to Safari and really not looked back.

I use Firefox on my (soon to disappear) PC and my work machine almost exclusively. I'll give Fx 3 a look on the Mac when it's released, but it'll really have to impress to get me to switch away from Safari there.

Re:About damned time

[hitmark]

i would say that highly depends on what firefox does with said memory.

a memory leak would be that it grabs the ram, and then grabs some more without making use of what it has.

but its been shown time and time again that firefox makes good use of said ram. also, its grabs an amount of ram depending on the total amount of ram available in the computer it runs on. so its not like it just grabs a amount, and force everything else to swap out because of it.

in personal experience i can never say i have observed firefox force things to swap out because of its ram use, something that would be a good indication on a memory leak iirc.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

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.

Re:About damned time

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:About damned time

[nschubach]

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.

Re:About damned time

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Yup. This is where usage studies are handy. It is easy to get into the trap of thinking "this is the way it is designed, this is how it should be used and therefore everyone is using it this way". Dropping into internet-cafés or looking at a non-technical user surfing the internet often show things about usage that you didn't necessarily think about.

I am not saying I do a better job as a developer, since I am often isolated from the end-user through management, but in a ideal world sitting down or observing the user counts for a lot.

Re:About damned time

[HeroreV]

The actual amount of memory used is very low. The problem is fragmentation. 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.

This problem could be easily solved with a moving garbage collector, but there are far too many developers in this world thinking "GC iz 4 teh n00bz im a r33l h4rdk0r pr0gr4amar I dont n33d th4t babi stuf".

Re:About damned time

[msuarezalvarez]

The strength of open source is that many people want to contribute. The weakness is that they only contribute what they want to contribute

You can always pay a developer to fix what you want...

Re:About damned time

[moderatorrater]

Bottom line: we don't care what causes it, just fix it. When my ubuntu install feels sluggish because I haven't restarted firefox in a few days, there's a serious problem that they need to fix.

Re:About damned time

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

So, you've filed a report for this -- right?

Re:About damned time

[welcher]

Open "about:blank" repeatedly and watch the memory footprint rise and rise. Tried it but didn't seem to make a difference. maybe it's not so easy to find these things, eh?

Re:About damned time

[nine-times]

Did it really take so long to convince them? Were they sitting around saying, "Bah! Nobody wants speed, security, or ease-of-use!"

It seems to me that this was sort of "according to plan". They'd been working on updates to the Gecko engine that were supposed to improve speed for a long time. They slated that update for v3, and slated other improvements for v2.

Re:About damned time

[owlnation]

What flamewar?

You must be new here...

Not sure why anyone modded you informative, because your post is just plain wrong. The whole memory-leak-is-a-bug-is-not-a-bug-is-a-feature war of flames -- or "flamewar" as it's commonly known as -- has indeed being going on for a number of years now.

Hopefully it is now FINALLY over.

Re:About damned time

[Starayo]

Everyone always talks about it using up so much memory, but I haven't had any memory problems since 1.5 where it took up 500+MB...

Never goes over 80 now, and I often browse around twenty tabs or more at once. :\

Re:About damned time

[recoiledsnake]

Firefox gets 55 million from Google because of all it's users, the CEO gets half a million a year, and the users have to pay for fixing bugs?

Re:About damned time

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Re:About damned time

[recoiledsnake]

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 That is not strictly true. Mozilla gets a ton of money from Google, and spends it or can spend it on developers and UI folks etc. The management can demand them to fix these nagging issues which don't 'scratch the programmer's itch' because the employees are getting paid to work on Firefox/Gecko. Mozilla had revenues of about 75 million in 2006 and pays the CEO half a million a year. 12 Million was spent in 2006 on development. I am going to quote myself from a previous comment:

Firefox does not look like a very typical FOSS program anymore in which developers don't get any money back from the masses of users. The developers working at Mozilla are getting paid directly from the money that the users are contributing with their clicks. Hence, I think the mantra of 'if you don't like it, fork it" is not really valid in this scenario. Note this is opposed to projects with paid developers like Apache and the Linux kernel which is supported by corporate entities and not end users.

Also, I remember that Mozilla wanted contributions for the NYT ad a few years ago and many of my friends who were students barely scraping by, contributed some of their much needed money to the project. Apart from that I guess a ton of people donated money to Mozilla in the past few years thinking that they needed funding badly. Did Mozilla really need it or were they getting enough money from Google to run that ad by themselves? The fact that the CEO of Mozilla gets a compensation of half a million dollars makes it worse.

Does this also mean the users(who are contributing to the coffers with their use of Firefox) can demand fixes to the nagging bugs and not get a 'if you don't like it fork it' reply? Take a look at this very annoying image captions wrapping bug that plagued users and web developers and was unfixed for seven years despite even stalwarts like XKCD's Randall Munroe complaining in this bugzilla thread. Note that you need to copy paste because bugzilla doesn't allow links from Slashdot https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45375 [mozilla.org]

How about using some of those tens of millions to help hire good programmers and pay for fixes to the bugs?

Re:About damned time

[msuarezalvarez]

Well, if your specific desires are different from the Mozilla Foundation's desires, so that they decide to allocate their money for other purposes, then yes. Those 55 millions look like a sand of grain in the beach when you compare it to the income of, say, Microsoft, and who do you think pays for the fixing of bugs in Microsoft's products? Can you pay your friendly developer to fix a particular bug in, say, XP, which annoys you and which Microsoft does not deem important enough to fix?

Re:About damned time

[slyn]

This post is the best I've ever read that "confirms" that the majority of the problem is in fragmentation.

There still is some sort of problem though, as this guy notes when he says (emphasis mine):

Our heap is now 29,999,872 bytes! 16,118,072 of that is used (up 4,634,208 bytes from before... which caches am I forgetting to clear?). The rest, a whopping 13,881,800 bytes, is in free blocks! These are mostly scattered in between tiny used blocks. This is bad.

Re:About damned time

[ketilwaa]

What relevant use cases are there for keeping your browser open for days? I would think you're either too lazy to turn it off, or you're using the wrong tool for the work at hand.

Re:About damned time

[moderatorrater]

I often work on problems for a couple of days, so I often have a bug report up in one tab, the example in another, and then relevant documentation in another. When I leave for the day, I can close the browser down, or I can choose instead to leave the browser up and preserve my tabs.

Re:About damned time

[shutdown -p now]

The issues are normally not with multi-megabyte XML files. They are with common, day-to-day web browsing, the kind that Opera and IE seem to handle just fine.

Re:About damned time

[ketilwaa]

Bookmarks all tabs? It's just one right click, one left click. (Unless of course you're filling in fields all through the days, and have open pages that are really long, and with no anchors, in which case you have a valid case. Though I would reevaluate my work flow if I did this.)

Re:About damned time

[recoiledsnake]

So you mean to say fixing memory leaks in Firefox that plague users are not what the Mozilla Foundation desires?

Re:About damned time

[gangien]

get off your high horse about some technicality. And that's all that saying it's not really a memory leak, is doing.

if you define a mem leak as taking up more and more memory than it should (which i think is 100% fair), than it would still be a memory leak.

Re:About damned time

[CastrTroy]

A couple megabytes isn't a huge XML file. I'm talking about XML Files that are hundreds of megabytes large. Open an XML file that large, and the browser will use hundreds of megabytes. It's not something that would happen to most users on a regular basis, but I've done it before, and firefox doesn't like it.

Re:About damned time

[hitmark]

but then, who say how much memory it should use?

Re:About damned time

[nuzak]

> What relevant use cases are there for keeping your browser open for days?

What relevant use cases are there for closing any app you use constantly? I haven't rebooted my computer in two months, I only hibernate it. Apparently I am using the wrong tool, because I expected one I didn't have to follow behind and clean up after because it's incapable of doing so itself.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

Could you give an example of a file that Firefox has a problem with that Opera and IE seem to handle just fine? If we can reproduce the problem, we can write a bug report and the problem can be fixed.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

It depends on the "problem" you are referring to. If you mean the problem of Firefox using hundreds of megabytes for no apparent reason, no, fragmentation is not the majority of the problem. Fragmentation will cause perhaps tens of megabytes to be wasted, not hundreds. In the example above, 14 MB ("a whopping 13,881,800 bytes") is wasted due to fragmentation.

The fragmentation is the problem people point out when they say that the memory leak is very easy to see. They say to look at memory usage, open a link in a new tab, close the tab, and observe that the memory does not go all the way back down to the previous level. Yes, the majority of that problem is fragmentation.

Anyway, it doesn't matter whether the problem is a true leak or fragmentation. If you can demonstrate a sequence of steps that causes Firefox to use far more memory than other browsers, you have demonstrated a memory problem.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

How about using some of those tens of millions to help hire good programmers and pay for fixes to the bugs?

And how is this different from what Mozilla has been doing for years?

Re:About damned time

[heinousjay]

A memory leak is a specific problem. Its definition is not available to be adjusted at your whim. I'm sorry that you feel that's a technicality, but guess what chief: it's a technical problem. See how that works?

Re:About damned time

[u38cg]

If you think that was bad, have a look at this... The amusement starts round about comment #38, two years in...

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

Open "about:blank" repeatedly and watch the memory footprint rise and rise.

It doesn't for me. Don't assume that others can see the same problems you can; you need to ask if others can reproduce the problem. Perhaps you could try creating a new profile and see if that problem goes away. If not, head on over to the MozillaZine forums and discuss the problem.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

No, there's no flamewar. No one has ever called the memory leak a feature. David Baron explained that some increased memory usage was due to a new cache introduced in Firefox 1.5. Many people have mistaken caching for a memory leak. Many people have also mistaken fragmentation for a memory leak. There are those who violently protest that these are merely excuses and that developers are denying that Firefox leaks memory. I suppose you could say it's half of a flamewar. Yes, hopefully that is FINALLY over now.

Re:About damned time

[Mr. Underbridge]

If you think that was bad, have a look at this... The amusement starts round about comment #38, two years in...

Wow. Thanks for the entertainment. That's exactly the sort of issue I'm talking about - utter contempt for anyone outside their little circle.

Re:About damned time

[recoiledsnake]

Maybe you should read your GP comment again? Let me quote:

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 Reading Slashdot at work is at the top of my priority list and writing documentation for my code is at the very bottom. But my boss makes sure to let me know that [no documentation = no pay] and I get the documentation done. Why should Mozilla be any different? That quote is valid for only volunteer developers, not paid ones.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

If Firefox is taking more memory than it should, it's a problem and you should file a bug report. The problem is knowing how much it "should" take. One guideline is looking at the memory usage of other browsers. If you can make Firefox use much more memory than other browsers, you can consider it a problem and file a bug report. Please include the steps you used to make Firefox use more memory than it should.

Re:About damned time

[bunratty]

I cannot see memory footprint "rise and rise" no matter what I do. Firefox developers have been working on memory leak bugs for years. They have fixed about 100 in the past year alone. Memory leak bug reports are not at the bottom of the priority list. In fact, they've fixed so many memory leaks that "Our extensive testing shows an occasional leak here and there and we are working to fix those, but in general we aren't seeing many leaks anymore."

Re:About damned time

[edxwelch]

Try reading some of the other posts here. Firefox *does* cause Windows XP to crash - or to freeze permentently to be more prescise.
I've had this happen to me so many times that I've had to switch to Opera. It seems to be particularly bad coming back from hibernation.

Re:About damned time

[mojo-raisin]

Firefox/gecko is just not multi-threaded enough.

For example, if one tab is loading a complicated page, all the tabs in FF slow down to a halt (reminds me of Mac OS 7 usability).

In Safari, a complicated tab does *not* slow down other threads. This is a how a modern web browser should behave. I think webkit/khtml/safari are the future, not gecko.

Re:About damned time

[tcc3]

Xp in general is bad coming back from hibernate. I don't see how this is a firefox problem.

Re:About damned time

[brentonboy]

get a session manager add-on and save the session.

Re:About damned time

[lav-chan]

Um, yeah, probably not, considering it doesn't run on OS X. lern2read

Re:About damned time

[BenoitRen]

You misunderstand. Firefox development is separate from the Core. Work done on the Firefox UI does not take away resources to work on the Core.

Also, the developers have never ignored memory use. That's a popular myth.

Re:About damned time

[pipegeek]

Just thought I'd mention---I just installed the linux build. My system has 1.25GB ram.... of which 90% was in use by firefox 3 beta 1 by the time it finished rendering this page.

Re:About damned time

[xtracto]

ROFLMAO

Now that clearly demonstrates the speed in which bugs are fixed in open source software that zealots always talk about.

Reported:2000-07-13
Fixed:2006-10-19

Just 7 years and 3 months! Not bad, for a bug which clearly affected end users and hid information from the users (showing incomplete tooltips). And people expect Mozilla guys to fix the more complex memory problem soon?

HAHAHAHAhaha

Re:About damned time

[beav007]

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.

Re:About damned time

[reboot246]

I've tried to get my friends and relatives to switch to Firefox, but when it gobbles up their memory and slows everything down to a crawl, they usually uninstall it and give up. They aren't geeks; they just want something that works. Ordinary people don't have the time or patience to keep up with a program's development. I'm just hoping everything will eventually get fixed.

Re:About damned time

[Blkdeath]

What relevant use cases are there for keeping your browser open for days? I would think you're either too lazy to turn it off, or you're using the wrong tool for the work at hand.

If I have to alter how I use my tool, chances are it's the tool's fault.

The issue at hand here is that Firefox can (and quite often does) saturate a computer's available RAM (and much of its swap) in a matter of hours or days where other browsers do not.

There was a time when I could browse the web graphically on a computer with 32MB of RAM and less than 200MB of hard disk space (thus no room for gigabyte swap files). Are we really to believe that the web is now exponentially more resource intensive to the degree that a web browser requires gigabytes of RAM dedicated to it?!?

I love Firefox, but their number 1 biggest top of the heap (no pun intended) problem is the memory consumption. Number 2 right behind it is the memory consumption.

Re:About damned time

[Blkdeath]

What browser is crashing your whole machine? Are you running Windows 98 and browsing with Internet Explorer?

When your machine is thrashing because a single process just ate up three times the installed physical memory and the only way to get it back is to hit the small button beside the power button on the front of the case, it's just as good as a "crash" in most peoples' books.

Re:About damned time

[jesser]

The "debate over semantics" is happening on Slashdot. What's actually happening in the Mozilla project is that we spent the last 2 years fixing hundreds of leak bugs, and now that most of the leaks are fixed, we're noticing that fragmentation also contributes to memory use.

That said, if Firefox is using 2GB, you're probably experiencing leaks rather than fragmentation (unless you had a few hundred tabs open at some point). Is this happening for you with Firefox 3 Beta 1 or a newer trunk build?

Re:About damned time

[jhol13]

Off topic warning.

Maybe Java isn't that bad a language after all. It would solve a lot of security issues (not all) and memory issues (again, not all of them). It also could solve quite a few concurrency issues (new tab really should be new thread).

Of course, it would create its own set of problems but pointing them out does not a flamewar make :-)

Re:About damned time

[gangien]

wow a nice witty statement. gratz. let me say it in another way whether or not it's a true 'mem leak' or not, it's trivial. But feel free to debate meaningless semantics, and ignore your customers, I'm glad to be competing for a job with you.

Re:About damned time

[Kattspya]

I've got in excess of 50 tabs open and has had firefox open for quite a while, probably more than 48 hours. And it's only using 290.6 MB of memory. Something is clearly wrong with your setup. It would be nice if you could find out what.

Speed...

[ilovegeorgebush]

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.

So it's slow, then?

Re:Speed...

[T-Bone-T]

I can only hope it doesn't have as many grammatical errors as the summary.

Re:Speed...

[mehemiah]

Seriously, i mean, he sounds like he's selling a car. Is he getting payed to give a good review, or does he have ulterior motives?

Re:Speed...

[elrous0]

It's so fast you have to think in Russian just to control it.

Re:Speed...

[phobos512]

I sure wish I had some mod points right now. Props on the 80s movie reference :)

Re:Speed...

[Bazman]

Of course it's fast. Until you load up all the plugins you had on Firefox 2...

Re:Speed...

[sltd]

I just installed, and it actually is fast. I'm on a dual core machine with a gig of RAM, though.

Re:Speed...

[nileshbansal]

Looking at javascript speed tests, it seems it is going to be slower. The test reported here show that javascript in Firefox 3 is 20% slower compared to Firefox 2, and 4.4 times when compared to Opera. http://celtickane.com/projects/jsspeed2007.php
I don't know where Mozilla is spending all its money.

Re:Speed...

[WK2]

I can only hope it doesn't have as many grammatical errors as the summary.

It is a web browser. It displays arbitrary web pages that the user requests. So if the user requests a MySpace or Slashdot page, then it will have grammatical errors.

Re:Speed...

[T-Bone-T]

Firefox 3 itself has no text? That is a huge departure from standard web browsers!

Re:Speed...

[WK2]

Re-read what you replied to. There is a huge difference between "has no text" and "will have grammatical errors."

Re:Speed...

[T-Bone-T]

Are you serious?

Memory Leaks

[sepluv]

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.

Re:Memory Leaks

[grahamd0]

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.

Re:Memory Leaks

[ozmanjusri]

Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those.

Ah, another classic astroturf technique. Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!

Meanwhile, back in the real world, millions of people are happily using Firefox without difficulty, and will continue to do so.

Re:Memory Leaks

[sepluv]

>>Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!>millions of people are happily using Firefox Including me I should point out. I've used it since the first public release (Phoenix 0.1) and it has been my primary (and pretty much only browser) since Phoenix 0.2. I have also filed many RFEs and bugs, but I'd rather the developers worked on debugging memory leaks before working on those (esp. as memory leaks are indirectly responsible for most crashes).

Re:Memory Leaks

[ta bu shi da yu]

Dunno about memory leaks, but I know that all versions of Internet Explorer barfs on any page that has over about 200KB of text, while Firefox loads it incrementally and without freezing.

Re:Memory Leaks

[bunratty]

Yes, it still has memory leaks. I'm sure all popular browsers have memory leaks. Memory leaks are like crash bugs. You can make crashes less and less common, but it would take nearly a miracle to produce a browser that never, ever crashes no matter what. Similarly, Mozilla developers have worked for years to reduce the leaking of memory, but you can't expect a release with absolutely no memory leaks whatsoever. Mozilla developers report "Our extensive testing shows an occasional leak here and there and we are working to fix those, but in general we aren't seeing many leaks anymore."

Re:Memory Leaks

[sepluv]

(NTS: Preview is my firend.)

Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!

Leaving aside your ad hominem attack, that is a straw man. I didn't say people shouldn't use it, just that their working on other things (e.g.: features) doesn't matter to me (and many other users) until the leaks are fixed. In fact I encourage others to use it, I have the t-shirt (literally) and fluffy toy mascot, and I've persuaded organisations to adopt it as their default browser on all their PCs.

millions of people are happily using Firefox

Including me I should point out. I've used it since the first public release (Phoenix 0.1) and it has been my primary (and pretty much only browser) since Phoenix 0.2. I have also filed many RFEs and bugs, but I'd rather the developers worked on debugging memory leaks before working on those (esp. as memory leaks are indirectly responsible for most crashes).

Re:Memory Leaks

[MikeBabcock]

Millions of people who browse two or three pages, then close their browser have no problems.

Those of us who leave Firefox running for days at a time have problems. Firefox consumes GIGABYTES of memory in short order for me, and yes, I see this as a major programming fault.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Xiaran]

Second. I use FF on a daily basis on OS X, Windows and linux and the memory problem is the worst on the mac.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Jugalator]

Does it still have memory leaks? According to leak diagnostics I've seen posted on blogs, especially if they have extensions installed, it may have.

But those leaks are up to the affected extension authors to fix.

Re:Memory Leaks

[RpiMatty]

I don't understand why people leave a web browser open for days at a time, especially firefox, with its built in session saver.

Close firefox when you are done for the day. When you start it back up it can show you all your tabs from last time. That does help with the memory usage issue.
If you don't trust the session saver, then bookmark all tabs into a folder with the date. Then tomorrow you know which folder has all your bookmarks from yesterday.

What are the reasons for leaving it running while you are asleep?

Re:Memory Leaks

[Rogerborg]

Is it that you don't know the answer to the question, or that you don't like the answer?

Re:Memory Leaks

[Rogerborg]

You HATAH! Firefox doesn't 'consume' that memory, it just allocates it and stops anything else using it. That's totally different, from all valid points of view (excluding users', and what do they know?) and only a paid Microsoft shill would claim otherwise.

Re:Memory Leaks

[dintech]

(NTS: Preview is my firend.)

Oh the irony...

Re:Memory Leaks

[LordSnooty]

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.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Mr. Droopy Drawers]

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.

Re:Memory Leaks

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Memory Leaks

[T-Ranger]

Because closing it takes more then 0 time and opening it takes more then 0 time. Software is supposed to work for me, not me for it. You are asking the wrong question. The question is why is this insanity of a application requiring to be restarted continues to be acceptable?

Re:Memory Leaks

[drsquare]

Does it still have memory leaks? Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those.

Personally I'd rather they fix it so flash doesn't keep crashing it.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Shining Celebi]

Millions of people who browse two or three pages, then close their browser have no problems. Those of us who leave Firefox running for days at a time have problems. Firefox consumes GIGABYTES of memory in short order for me, and yes, I see this as a major programming fault.

I've used Firefox on my current laptop, running Vista and Linux; on a very old computer running 98SE and Linux; on a Dell running XP that's a couple of years old. On none of these machines have I had any memory problems with Firefox, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think of myself as a power user. I often have 30-40 tabs open in one or two windows, and I leave Firefox running for days at a time when I'm too lazy to just close everything.

Not everyone experiences the problems you describe. I think that was part of the problem with them not being fixed, because a lot of people simply can't reproduce the problems you're describing, and then worse, some people have gone around screaming their browser uses too much memory by their own arbitrary standards, so I suspect that the people with real problems -- like you, evidently -- may have been drowned out. I can't say that it's fixed in Firefox 3, because I don't experience the problem, but when I tried out the Beta, it did seem snappier, and I know they've done a huge amount of backend work.

Re:Memory Leaks

[msuarezalvarez]

How did you go from "it has this bug" to "Firefox is a lousy piece of software"?

Re:Memory Leaks

[SatanicPuppy]

The most annoying thing about the OSS zealot is the refusal to admit room for improvement. The grandparent didn't say anything about people not using Firefox, only that the memory issue is a problem, which it is. But to you, that means he (and probably I) are paid microsoft schills out to destroy firefox...Why else would we point to a problem that accounts for almost all the complaints against firefox?

I use Firefox. I use it everyday. I use it for about 95% of my web browsing. This doesn't mean it doesn't have problems that I would like to see solved, first and foremost among them the goddamn memory issue, whether it's cache, fragmentation, leaks, whatever. It's a real pain in the ass have your computer take 20 extra seconds to wake up from sleep because the damn webbrowser has eaten about 30% of the system memory.

But instead of addressing this, you throw a strawman, and a nice little ad hominem, and refuse to address the actual complaint.

Re:Memory Leaks

[MozeeToby]

You know, I've never understood that. I've been using firefox/mozilla since 2003 and I've only once had what I would call a major memory leak and that was caused by an extention.

Yes, the memory footprint is bigger in v.2 and yes, memory caching ten pages forward and back on every tab is probably excessive but if you do a little research you can disable these features. If you still have problems theres a setting that basically resets the memory usage everytime you minimize.

Granted, I'm not one to have the same firefox window open for weeks at a time, which is the situation that I most often hear people complain about the memory leak issues.

Also granted, I don't know of one person who consistently uses firefox that hasn't had some difficult to fix problem with it at some point (interestingly, it's never the same one from person to person. I had problems playing movies, one friend crashed every time a flash player loaded, and another just plain locked up occassionaly)

Re:Memory Leaks

[SatanicPuppy]

I'm trying to come up with a way to respond that doesn't belittle you, because frankly that was a terrible response.

Your suggestion is a workaround. It does not address the actual problem. Despite the fact that "there is no reason" to leave a program running, which is certainly debatable, the simple truth is that even under abnormal operation, a quality piece of code should not dramatically increase its memory footprint to the point of causing system stability issues.

Re:Memory Leaks

[badasscat]

I've used Firefox on my current laptop, running Vista and Linux; on a very old computer running 98SE and Linux; on a Dell running XP that's a couple of years old. On none of these machines have I had any memory problems with Firefox, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think of myself as a power user. I often have 30-40 tabs open in one or two windows, and I leave Firefox running for days at a time when I'm too lazy to just close everything.

Not everyone experiences the problems you describe

You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.

I work in web production and everyone at my office knows that you have to close and re-open Firefox every so often - because we're such heavy users, that means several times per day. It's something we complain about on an almost continuous basis.

We generally never turn off our computers (mine had been up 58 days when one of our IT guys asked me to reboot last week), and I had Word documents open at that time that I'm pretty sure I last opened in August. So it is pretty annoying to have to restart your browser several times a day. And btw, other browsers do not behave this way - not even IE. (IE's memory usage goes up if you open a bunch of tabs, but it drops again when you close them. FF just keeps taking and taking and taking.)

I initially thought it might be a problem with the Mac version of FF (I run a Mac at work) but it happens on my PC laptop at home as well, and it's even worse for my wife, whose computer has less RAM than mine.

It's definitely a problem with the browser, and I hope that 3.0 fixes it.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Tibor the Hun]

Because some of us run it on a Mac. (Same thing as a MAC, but spelled properly.)
We're in habit of not closing our programs down, so that next time we need them, we don't have to wait for them to load.
Unix can do that.

Not flaming, just explaining. That really is why some of us leave programs running on all the time -- because our OS doesn't mind.

Re:Memory Leaks

[kisielk]

_GIGABYTES_ of memory? I find that a little hard to believe. While I agree that Firefox is a memory hog, having gone up to 600 or 800 MB on a few occasions, I've yet to ever see it consume gigabytes of memory in one go.

Re:Memory Leaks

[tepples]

Personally I'd rather they fix it so flash doesn't keep crashing it. If Adobe Flash Player crashes, then the process it's running in will crash with it. Are you suggesting making each plug-in a separate process, even with the comparatively heavy overhead of starting processes on Windows?

Re:Memory Leaks

[Just Some Guy]

What are the reasons for leaving it running while you are asleep?

Turn that around: what are the reasons for not leaving it running? If it was well-behaved, then there'd never be a reason to close it.

Re:Memory Leaks

[naasking]

Millions of people who browse two or three pages, then close their browser have no problems.

Bull. I have over 50 tabs open. I regularly hibernate my computer, and only do a full restart maybe once every other week, so technically, my FF is running for almost 2 weeks straight. Firefox has never gone over 600MB. It gets progressively slower and consumes slightly more memory on each wakeup, but it never stops working, and it has never approached 1GB. I used this same pattern on my previous machine as well (only 4 months ago), so it's not a peculiarity of my installation.

Re:Memory Leaks

[psykocrime]

_GIGABYTES_ of memory? I find that a little hard to believe.

Believe it or not, it's true. I've seen it well over 1GB numerous times. Strangely enough however, FF2 on Linux doesn't seem to
be as bad as FF2 on Windows, and now that I've switched to a Linux desktop full-time, I don't see the problem as much. But there is still
no question in my mind that FF has serious memory management issues, whether they're technically "leaks" or not.

From what I've seen, the biggest issue is that closing tabs and windows (other than the last one) doesn't seem to return memory to the OS, at least not consistently. I've had 3-4 FF windows with 20+ tabs in each open before, then noticed memory usage being an issue and my system starting to use swap excessively... but closing all but one FF window with only one tab open, didn't result in the FF process's footprint shrinking at all.

Re:Memory Leaks

[thelexx]

This is my exact experience as well. The instance of FF I'm using right now has been running ~7 days and it's only using 116M with six tabs open. The low user number of the GP is the only reason I'm not calling the out for lying, trolling or simply being an idiot.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't understand why people leave a computer running for days at a time, especially Win98, with its built in application autorunning. Close windows when you are done for the day... That does help with the memory usage issue.[editor's note: removed several sentences about the various way to reload web pages. I will consider this analogous to reopening an application.] What are the reasons for leaving it running while you are asleep?

I'm anti-double standards. Truth be told, I run Opera. I never close my browser. Yes, if I close Opera and reopen it, other than refreshing the cache (which is an option I set), I cannot tell that it ever closed. And? AJAX applications, Flash thin clients on real time software, and streaming media I use consistantly throughout the day. If you are going to tell me that Firefox is only useful for loading an occasional static page and rebooting, fine. But I need a browser to do more than that, as do most people.

Lastly, as a developer, the first question I ask when there are memory problems is "are you running FireFox." More often than not, shutting that down solves the issue.

Re:Memory Leaks

[steveha]

I'm glad it works so well for you, but I am seeing the problems.

I routinely keep a couple dozen web pages open, sometimes more. On top of that, I read web comics each day, and I open a couple dozen web comics at once, then close the windows as I read each one.

top(1) routinely shows Firefox growing over 500 MB of RAM. Once it grows above a certain size, I kill the firefox-bin process, and then run Firefox again and let the session restore. Firefox re-loads the same pages and has well under 200 MB for the same page set.

It's not routine, but I have seen Firefox grow to over 1 GB of RAM, no exaggeration. Killing and re-running the process brought it back down under 200 MB.

On top of the large memory usage, I am seeing the CPU getting hammered at 100% just to load another page. It really does seem like there is some code that gets slower and slower when you use too many pages.

So far I have been living with it, killing the process to reclaim memory. But I'm eagerly looking forward to Firefox 3.

steveha

Re:Memory Leaks

[General Wesc]

Good job, you got him. Those hundred of people reporting 1GB+ memory usage with Firefox were all Microsoft shills and Opera fanboys. Thank you for your anecdotal proof. You've done OSS a great service with your mighty debunking powers, sir!

Firefox never takes 1GB of RAM on my laptop either, so I always figured all these people reporting problems were lying. Okay, sure, I only have 512MB, and Firefox will occasionally take around 300MB (+>200MB swap), even while competing with numerous other applications, but the only way I could picture Firefox taking 1GB of memory would be if a person had a different system than me, and we all know that's bull, right? Everyone runs the same OS and applications, visits the same web pages, has the same hardware, keeps the same cache/fastback/etc. configuration...no possible way people could have a different experience than us. If they dispute this, they're lying, plain and simple!

Re:Memory Leaks

[coolGuyZak]

it just allocates it and stops anything else using it

This is somewhat misleading. It's true that no other programs can use the same virtual memory that a particular program allocates. However, if a particular page is swapped to disk, the physical memory can be used by another program. Furthermore, the address space is isolated per process, meaning that, sans OS 'interference', the same address space can be allocated to each program.

And I do realize you were being facetious.

Re:Memory Leaks

[General Wesc]

I leave FF on all the time since I'm running an AJAX app that updates all the time.

Um, I wonder where all that memory's going...

If keeping an AJAX app open for a long time increases the memory usage, that's what is known as a memory leak, which is precisely the sort of bug we're claiming exists and that you seem to be rolling your eyes at. 'Oh, that's not a bug--AJAX apps have to keep every past request in memory!' No, they don't. There's no reason to, and if Firefox does (it doesn't, as best I can tell--but Firebug does) then that's a bigger bug than the eventListener bug in Gecko 1.8(?) (which caused me to start using Opera as my primary browser while awaiting a bugfix).

Re:Memory Leaks

[drsquare]

I don't see why a video player crashing should crash a browser. And I'm using Linux.

Re:Memory Leaks

[naasking]

My system has 2GB of memory, so caches would be far larger than on typical systems; if I'm only seeing 500MB of usage, most other people will see less, particularly with 50+ tabs open. My bread and butter is web applications development, which means I'm browsing far more than the average individual, and thus far more likely to see errant behaviour. I use a stock configuration, with a custom homepage. The only uncontrolled variables are plugins, which can't be blamed on Firefox. Same results on a completely different system as well. This is more than mere anecdotal evidence: it's observation under a controlled environment, otherwise known as the scientific method.

Now if people experiencing memory growth would conduct similar tests with their unusual configurations, and stop spouting "FF leaks memory!", then perhaps we can narrow it down to the actual source of their problem. If FF itself leaks memory, it's negligible; stating FF leaks memory is worse than wrong: it's a malicious attack, aka FUD.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Tickletaint]

Well, Firefox is a lousy piece of software--something we Mac users have known for some time, but which you PC users are just now beginning to realize. Late, as always, to the party.

Re:Memory Leaks

[PitaBred]

Unless of course the AJAX app doesn't properly release memory, and just keeps allocating new objects and/or adding elements to the DOM. In which case, the memory "leak" is in your the AJAX app, not Firefox.

Re:Memory Leaks

[sepluv]

LOL. My excuse is that I was in a law lecture at the time so wasn't really looking at the screen lest the lecturer noticed I was on the computer and not listening.

Re:Memory Leaks

[tepples]

I don't see why a video player crashing should crash a browser. Because the video player runs in the browser's address space, with all the browser's privileges. At the time the Netscape plug-in binary interface was frozen, the overhead of passing pixels between a browser and a video player running in a separate process might have been too large.

Re:Memory Leaks

[funaho]

I significantly reduced the memory leaks and random crashes that I used to have by removing the Google Toolbar and Google Sync extensions.

Re:Memory Leaks

[PitaBred]

Yes. You're not starting a lot of separate processes, you're starting one more. The overhead is more than worth it for the stability. If you were starting 100 copies of flash I'd think otherwise, but that's not the case with a browser.

Re:Memory Leaks

[bunratty]

memory caching ten pages forward and back on every tab is probably excessive

That would certainly be excessive. That's why Firefox caches a total of up to eight pages maximum by default.

Re:Memory Leaks

[Titoxd]

Parent is not bullshitting. I usually leave Firefox running and I place my computers in hibernation. Process Explorer (don't be fooled by the URL: It is a great program developed by Sysinternals that was then cannibalized by Microsoft) reported that Firefox was using ~ 850 MB of private memory. That's pretty bad. But opening Apple's Activity Monitor showed that for the same number of tabs, with similar content, Firefox was using 1.5 GB of RAM. That's even worse.

In my experience, Firefox 2.0 has been the worse version in the responsiveness department. Having a few tabs open slows down the computers significantly. What is even worse is that Firefox keeps crashing while trying to release memory on exit, not just on Mac OS X, but now on Windows XP as well. So, when I restart Firefox, it asks me if I want to reopen all of those tabs, taking even more time and memory in the process.

Firefox 1.5 didn't use to be bad at all, but if 3.0 doesn't fix these issues, I'll jump ship back to IE 7 / Safari. Who cares if it is free as in speech if you can't use it... :(

Re:Memory Leaks

[blazerw11]

You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.

Most don't. Users without problems don't complain. If most did have this problem, we'd see more like 200 million comments, not 20 or 30.

Current running firefoxes, all on Linux: Firefox 3, i386, 2 tabs, 1 hour: 148MB (same as it was 30 minutes ago).
Firefox 2, amd64, 9 tabs, 12.38 days: 225MB (same as it was 30 minutes ago).
Firefox 2, i386, ? tabs, weeks?: 137MB
Firefox 2, i386, ? tabs, 1 day: 177MB

My experience and the numbers above confirm this is that 2GB of memory used by Firefox is rare. Also, I just don't believe the users that claim 20+ tabs with usage under 200MB.

I just tried opening a ton of tabs in FF3, 25 to be exact. After opening them I was up to 205MB, but then it flicked down to 203.5MB. So, I thought I'd report that, but it kept creeping down while I typed. Now it's 154.2MB. That's pretty cool.

Re:Memory Leaks

[bunratty]

Those of us who leave Firefox running for days at a time have problems. Firefox consumes GIGABYTES of memory in short order for me, and yes, I see this as a major programming fault.

If you're seeing a problem like that, please file a bug report. When I run Firefox for a week, it uses only about 200 MB. Please reports problems so they can be fixed.

Re:Memory Leaks

[tepples]

[When you start Adobe Flash Player in a separate process,] You're not starting a lot of separate processes, you're starting one more. Visit this site with flashblock to see seven SWFs above the fold.

Re:Memory Leaks

[General Wesc]

• This person merely provided a screenshot, and it's his memory cache that's the issue (and it's old): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213391#c38
• This is also a very old bug, but even the newer comments are finding >1GB in memory (or memory+swap): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51028 -- This is when loading massive testcases, however.
• Here's someone getting neat 1GB. Ad-Block was to blame: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=358170
• No great detail here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=389620

We know it's very possible for Firefox to break 1GB. Sometimes it's even reasonable for such a thing to occur. Sometimes it's not. Seems immature and counter-productive to declare that anyone who says they experience this is lying just because they don't put enough effort into helping us fix it.

I don't know what MikeBabcock is doing (and, yeah, if 'gigabytes' means 2+, I'm a bit sceptical, largely because it's quite unusual to have that much), but I don't have much cause to doubt his claim. Maybe he has Firebug or another memory-hogging extension installed (not Firefox's fault). Maybe he's browsing large photos or intense AJAX apps. When I want to use YouTube or browse photos on Flickr, I always open another browser, because otherwise I'll have to restart Firefox when it swells to using half my memory and that again in swap. If I had 2GB of memory, I suspect it would use more than 1GB. If I give it that much cache, I think it probably should. Unused memory is wasted memory. Unfortunately, setting config.trim_on_minimise=true and minimising only temporarily seems to release the memory, and doesn't release the swap.

stating FF leaks memory is worse than wrong: it's a malicious attack

That's strange. All over people are praising that over 300 leaks have been fixed in Gecko 1.9 (Firefox 2 -> Firefox 3). So the current release has (or had--minor releases fix some) 300+ leaks, but it's worse than wrong to say it leaks memory?

The newest versions might not leak much, but we've had some maor leaks in the not-too-distant past. Gecko 1.8 (1.7?) had a huge leak that actually made me switch to Opera for the most part until it was fixed. ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241518 ) That was a bit over a year ago, but there are obviously other, lesser leaks. Yes, most of the major problems are features (fbcache), memory fragmentation, or extensions, but there are still issues. For most of what I do, Firefox is good enough. If I spent all day browsing Flickr, I don't think it would be--certainly not under my current configuration + extensions. And that's a darn shame, because no other browser can match it, as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Memory Leaks

[PitaBred]

What an example of shitty web design. Anyway, does flash require a full process for each object, or can you just start all flash objects in a single flash instance? And either way, 7 processes isn't that much once you have the data cached. I think it'd be worth it. Windows does have a penalty for starting up a process vs. a thread, but it's still negligible when you're talking about 7 processes. If it were 700, then we might have a problem.

Re:Memory Leaks

[xtracto]

Those of us who leave Firefox running for days at a time have problems. Firefox consumes GIGABYTES of memory in short order for me

Not only that, but some people like me, run firefox and just hibernate hence not closing it (I usually have a virtual desktop where I keep firefox open) and the little beast gets bloated very easily.

Of course, I stopped ranting about it since Firefox 2.0 arrived, because it is *clear* firefox developers are just *lallalaal wont hear you* about this problem. Of course, when [if] it is solved sometime, they will then acknowledge that it was a bug :).

Re:Memory Leaks

[naasking]

Seems immature and counter-productive to declare that anyone who says they experience this is lying just because they don't put enough effort into helping us fix it.

I never said anyone was lying; those are the words the GP poster put into my mouth. The original statement I contradicted was >1GB for 2 or 3 tabs which has never occurred on any of my, or my client's computers (some 20+ machines in total) in a broad range of usages with stock configs.

Maybe he has Firebug or another memory-hogging extension installed (not Firefox's fault). Maybe he's browsing large photos or intense AJAX apps. When I want to use YouTube or browse photos on Flickr, I always open another browser, because otherwise I'll have to restart Firefox when it swells to using half my memory and that again in swap.

I have all of these extensions, including the web developer toolbar, petname toolbar, bugmenot, and the javascript debugger, and browse all of these sites in the same browser, with 50+ tabs and FF has never risen above 600MB. It slows a bit as it approaches 400MB, but it's not unbearable.

So the current release has (or had--minor releases fix some) 300+ leaks, but it's worse than wrong to say it leaks memory?

As I discussed, stock config, even with the many extensions and plugins I have installed, has negligible leaks. I know FF leaks in an absolute sense, as the process grows by maybe 5MB every time I wake from hibernation for no discernible reason, but that only necessitates a restart every two weeks! I usually have to restart Windows before I have to restart FF. Overall, that's pretty decent, and the criticisms that it leaks paint a much harsher picture (like the post I first replied to), which makes them FUD.

Overall, there plenty of work to be done to make FF more resistant to leaks, particularly in the plugin and extension API; the core seems fairly solid though. Ideally, I'd like a core written in a memory safe language with a compacting GC to avoid many of these problems, but I'm sure that won't be coming anytime soon.

Re:Memory Leaks

[bunratty]

I'm sure Firefox developers don't want to hear you rant. However, they do want you to clearly and patiently explain what the problem is. Remember, developers are people, too, and will likely ignore you or get argumentative if you start complaining too vigorously. Why not file a polite bug report?

Re:Memory Leaks

[DrMorris]

I know what you are talking about. I routinely have 40-50 tabs open, because I'm working on many different things. For people who think this is insane: no, bookmarking does not always make sense, I instantly bookmark stuff I'm sure about to need again, this is all just temporary stuff.

An advice to you: take a look at the settings which Firefox uses for caching requests. Not just memory cache, I'm talking about the thing that appeared in 1.5 or 2.0, some rendering cache. That's the thing that "makes the back button fast", so that the previous page doesn't have to be rendered again. I'd think that this one takes up a whole lot of memory, just imagine 30 web pages, each of them cached for the last 10 requests...

Re:Memory Leaks

[totally bogus dude]

You don't. Most do, as is evidenced by the comments here. It's always a mistake to think you are the rule rather than the exception. You need to listen to others.

Right back at ya; I'll join the chorus of others who regularly leave Firefox running for days (and sometimes weeks, depending on how many fixes Windows needs) on end without problems. I've never seen its memory usage above 300 megs (this machine has 3.6 gigs of memory). Currently it's using 111, which is less than the world community grid processes. I typically have a tab with MRTG graphs open refreshing every 5 minutes, and another with Nagios status refreshing every minute. On top of that, I regularly open and close new tabs for Google searches, slashdot, etc.

As a sibling post says, people who don't have problems don't complain. I was actually about to close this thread because people bitching about the memory use is boring to me, but your claim that "most" people have problems with Firefox's memory usage got me snarky. Millions of people use Firefox without problems. It's extremely difficult to fix problems you can't reproduce, and most of these excessive memory consumptions problems do seem hard to reproduce for some people. I certainly can't.

Maybe being web developers makes you special. Do you make use of any extensions that might be somewhat uncommon amongst most users? Perhaps the pages you guys develop just kind of suck? ;)

Re:Memory Leaks

[General Wesc]

I don't think he was saying he leaked like that with one or two tabs. It was that he's not one of the people with one or two tabs and that he keeps it open for a long time, though admittedly he didn't really say he had more tabs--just that he left it open, and that it grows to gigabytes 'in short order'.

I was considering calling his claim 'bull' tantamount to saying he's lying. It could just mean he's mistaken, of course, so I was being a it unfair there.

Right now, memory usage (perhaps not leaks--I don't really know) is the only issue that annoys me about Firefox more than it does on other browsers, and nothing makes me happier than them putting so much emphasis on improving that. (Of course, this is partly because I can use (often leaky) extensions to deal with any the other deficiencies.)

Re:Memory Leaks

[Blkdeath]

I don't understand why people leave a web browser open for days at a time, especially firefox, with its built in session saver.

Close firefox when you are done for the day. When you start it back up it can show you all your tabs from last time. That does help with the memory usage issue.
If you don't trust the session saver, then bookmark all tabs into a folder with the date. Then tomorrow you know which folder has all your bookmarks from yesterday.

What are the reasons for leaving it running while you are asleep?

The more I hear this, the more I think back to another ages old argument.

If you're not using your computer at night, why not shut it down? I mean, no operating system should have to deal with the stress of keeping itself together for more than 8 hours at a time.

It's inexcusable behaviour for an operating system, a database server, a web browser, an MP3 player or any other tool we have. It should just work. Period. The fact that it doesn't and yet there exist other tools out there that do is a case-in-point proof that Firefox is broken and needs repair.

Here's one for you. There exist web based network monitoring apps that refresh either the page or specific elements within on a set time period to alert administrators to problems in and around their network. These therefore require a web browser to have a page loaded for perhaps as long as months at a time without rest. Should each shift really be responsible for "rebooting" a session that should otherwise just sit there looking green all day and all night? Is that reasonable?

Re:Memory Leaks

[Blkdeath]

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.

I do not now, nor have I ever installed a single third party (or otherwise) Firefox extension since day one yet I still see it consuming hundreds of MB worth of RAM on a regular basis.

So now that we've eliminated the extensions scapegoat, and the scapegoat about the users being obviously too stupid to control their web browser, can we get on to the part where the problem of memory leaks, fragmentation, whatever is actually solved?

If you want a car analogy, fine, I'll give you one; if a fire keeps popping up under the hood it doesn't matter how long my morning commute is or where I stop for coffee; the damn thing's broken! It just shouldn't bloody well do that!

Re:Memory Leaks

[Rogerborg]

Congratulations, you won the Retard Olympics.

Re:Memory Leaks

[jesterpilot]

If it encourages people to shut their machines down when the'yre done computing, i would call it a feature, not a bug.

Re:Memory Leaks

[coolGuyZak]

There's no reason to get indignant about it. We can't all be winners, you know.

Re:Memory Leaks

[SatanicPuppy]

That's three times as many as it ought to take, so no. If I wrote a piece of code that was supposed to run in the background and provide some service, every click beyond what was strictly necessary for it to do it's thing would be considered a flaw.

Jesus. You could take that same argument and apply it to Windows...You just need to restart it every day, no big deal. Just hit three keys, and then return, that's all. I don't know why you have a problem with that.

Re:Memory Leaks

[delinear]

The problem is that FF's success has brought an influx of new users, many of whom wouldn't know where to begin to file a bug report, but the second they mention their problem on a site such as this, they are shot down by a dozen anecdotal stories about how user x runs 50 tabs streaming g0te pr0n 24/7 for 17 weeks without seeing memory rise above 27MB so the OP is obviously lying/using their browser wrong/just plain stupid.

This doesn't really encourage people to help - clearly people are having problems, but the only way to find out if those problems are caused by the browser or are really down to how it's being used is to work with those people, not shoot them down. The fact that so many memory leak issues have been fixed between versions 2 and 3 indicates that there was always at least some validity to the arguments of people who claimed they were experiencing issues, yet there are still people in this thread right now basically insinuating (or outright stating) that such users are lying, flying in the face of the evidence.

So in short, you are right, filing a polite bug report will do more to help the cause than ranting, but we as a community need to be more willing to listen to these issues also, otherwise the one thing that helped FF grow (its user base) will end up tearing it apart.

Re:Memory Leaks

[delinear]

I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say that the whole responsibility for managing this falls to the extension author. Windows gets enough stick for being so insecure, but I don't hear people arguing that the OS doesn't need to be secure and that security is down to the people writing the applications that run on it. In this case, as in that, the real answer is a combination of the two - sure the extension authors should do their utmost to eliminate memory leaks, but it would be nice if the browser prevented any particular extension from eating all the machine's memory - even if it just alerted users to an extension which was hogging memory and gave the option to disable the extension in this session and reclaim the memory.

FF has done pretty well from extensions - most people cite them as the reason they switched to and stayed with FF, so it's not entirely fair to dump all the blame on people who are dedicating their time and effort to making FF better and to expect no contribution to solving the problem from the people who are being paid to develop the broswer (indirectly by the users of FF who are experiencing these problems and asking for solutions).

Re:Memory Leaks

[PitaBred]

But... the operating system is allowing Firefox to keep allocating memory. It's not a BUG, you're just a moron. The web application needs to be designed properly. If Firefox requests more memory than is available, that's a different issue. But as long as it can request memory, it will do so, and the operating system will allow it to. After all, the operating system is just there to serve the applications. The web app needs more memory, so firefox needs more memory, so the operating system gives it to it and gets bogged down. The whole chain starts with the web app being badly designed.

Re:Memory Leaks

[MikeBabcock]

Thank-you :-)

I don't close my browser because the things I was working on today I'll probably be working on tomorrow again. I leave my browser on at work, and lock my screen and leave for the night, then come back and continue the next day where I left off. I leave Evolution running, Kopete running, and many other apps, but Firefox is the one that drags my system into the dirt with its memory consumption habits.

Re:Memory Leaks

[AnyoneEB]

There are problems with that:

• Your solution does not scale. Maybe the speed improvements in Firefox 3 will help, but currently if I restore my Firefox session on my desktop it takes about a minute to settle down.
• On top of that session restore feels the need to actually act like I closed an reopened the browser, which technically I did, but the whole point of restoring my session is that the browser should act like it never closed. This means that a lot of websites visit require me to login again.
• And the final, and really the most annoying, part is that session restore does not properly handle multiple desktops so if I have Firefox windows organized into 7 desktops (looking up things for different projects I have open), and then kill it and restore, I suddenly have a ton of Firefox windows clumped into one desktop.

If Firefox had proper session restore, then your solution to memory leaks would at least be a reasonable workaround, but as it stands, it is not acceptable behavior.

On the other hand, although Firefox does use a lot of memory for me, it does not seem to leak. As you may have gathered from my post so far, I tend to have a lot of windows and tabs open.

I've been using Camino...

[argent]

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.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[alexhs]

Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows. But... Firefox is already a lightweight derivative... of Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey)... Or so I've heard... four (five?) years ago... :P

Re:I've been using Camino...

[argent]

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.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[bhima]

I was using Camino last year and then it just sort of stagnated.

Now I'm doing the Firefox - Safari shuffle.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[SuperMog2002]

Indeed it is, but the parent's point still stands. Camino is nothing more than a GUI on top of the Gecko engine with some of OS X's nice features utilized (password management and auto spell check, mainly). Effectively, it is tiny and runs very fast, because it doesn't have the overheard of the extensions engine blowing it up and slowing it down. It's also written entirely in native OS X APIs, which also helps it to have a look and feel that matches OS X itself and most other Mac apps.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Captain Splendid]

have the insecure XPI installer design.

It's insecure? How does something you have to OK get to be insecure?

Re:I've been using Camino...

[CastrTroy]

However, if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera. Opera is fast, but without the extensions, isn't even close having as many features as Firefox. Extensions are what gives Firefox it's usefulness. Here's the extensions I use on a regular basis. Flashblock, Hackbar, IE View, Reload Every, Save As Image, Web Developer. That's what suits me. I'm sure everyone else who uses Firefox has their own list of extensions that they find useful, yet would be completely useless to me. Take away the extensions, and you've just taken away the whole point of running firefox.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Tekzel]

I couldn't agree more. I use Firefox for two reasons - 1) It isn't IE, and 2) The extensions. In fact, I have about 30 I use on every machine I use Firefox. Sure, it would be faster if I didn't use them, or used less of them, but then I would lose a LOT of functionality. There has to be a tradeoff, and I am comfortable with a slightly slower browser that has a whole lot more features that appeal to me. The machines I use aren't exactly speed demons, but they aren't low end trash either, so they have power to spare, why not utilize it.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[msuarezalvarez]

Someone wants to remind you of a great example. Cancel or allow?

Re:I've been using Camino...

[tepples]

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. What about XPI do you find insecure? How would you improve it, without requiring each extension and theme developer to pay 500 USD per year?

Re:I've been using Camino...

[fizzding]

>Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows. Try K-meleon.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[CastrTroy]

I also find that my browsing experience is fast enough with Firefox. Sure it could be faster, but the speed it runs at doesn't seem to be a problem at all. Things that would improve my browsing experience would be a faster internet connection, not a faster browser, and I only need the faster internet connection for streaming video, or very graphic intense webpages. The things that I find slow on my computer are things like video encoding, but that's a much harder problem to solve.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[ChronoReverse]

And there's always...

Password:


(sudo prompt for password)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Danse]

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? Nope! Now it has the "I'm going to ask you to do something stupid in 3 seconds" countdown! Much faster!

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Captain Splendid]

And get this: there's no save as! The solution, ironically, is to load up IE7 and do a save as

Or you could, I dunno, right-click and 'save as' from FF. It's what I do for my TB extensions.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[roju]

There is a lightweight native Moz derivative for Windows. It's called K-Meleon.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[beckerist]

I've been using the beta now for about a week and am actually getting sick of it. The only plugin that installed for me was Adblock+, I want my noscript, gmail checker, tabmixplus, and downloadbar if nothing else!!! The "places" feature is sort of cool, you can click a folder in your bookmark toolbar that shows you all your most visited places, recently visited places, and you can even star sites (to the right of the address) and it will fill up a "most visited starred" and "recently visited starred" sites lists too...

Still, I want my plugins back!

BTW, I've been using Firefox since the .X days. This is what I've found:
Version:Avg Mem Usage(KB):Peak Mem Usage(KB):CPU time/day average (minutes, I'm a heavy user)
.X : 85k : 300k : ~1:15
2.0 : 175k : 315k : ~45
3.0b1: 125k : 175k : ~25
Now keep in mind I have only 1 plugin vs. maybe 6 to 10 before, but the loadtime is definitely much quicker now too.

I didn't save numbers for 1 (I didn't have it very long.)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Joe Tie.]

Have you tried the nightly tester tools to force them to install? I've been on it for about three months, and gmail checker's the only one I really have any problems with. Firebug has a couple bugs, but nothing that's a show stopper. Oh, there's also that about:config option that needs to be added to get some of them to install as well. But for the most part the majority seem compatible.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[hairyfeet]

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)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[jonbryce]

http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/ might be what you are looking for.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[nuzak]

> Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows.

K-Meleon (despite the name, it's got nothing to do with KDE).

Re:I've been using Camino...

[schweini]

I just want to point out, as others have, that K-Meleon is a really nice, full featured Gecko-browser for low-end machines. Its basically Firefox without the XUL layer, and is even more customizable than FF out of the box. It really a life-saver on old machines. I run it on a old Pentium II, 300MHz, 64MB RAM laptop, and it's quite snappy and very usable!

Re:I've been using Camino...

[lav-chan]

However, if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera. Opera is fast, but without the extensions, isn't even close having as many features as Firefox. Extensions are what gives Firefox it's usefulness. Here's the extensions I use on a regular basis. Flashblock, Hackbar, IE View, Reload Every, Save As Image, Web Developer.

Opera's built-in content-blocking feature can block Flash. A 'Reload Every' feature has been built in to Opera for years and years. Most operating systems have a 'capture screen' feature built in. Opera has tons of Web-developer stuff built-in (style sheets, JavaScript options, turn on/off images, table/div structure, element outlining, &c.).

Not to say that Opera does everything you want (as far as i know it can't do the Hackbar stuff and sadly it doesn't have an IEView-like feature) but it is really annoying when people say that Opera 'isn't even close' to Firefox. 90% of all Firefox extensions are designed to emulate Opera.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[daeg]

I used to run a ton of extensions as well, but gave up because so many of them have awful memory consumption. One of the worst ones is LiveHttpHeaders, which nearly all developers have used. It has an awful memory leak -- all HTTP headers are saved in memory and never freed. This extension should be dying with the rise of Firebug, but MANY developers still have it installed.

To solve the problem of "bloat" from extensions, I set up multiple profiles. One for general browsing, another for heavy web development, etc. Set the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable to "1" and you can select a new profile each time (set your shortcuts to start firefox -P). A simple bash wrapper around Firefox syncs bookmark files back and forth -- even works great with 3.0b2pre. For general browsing, I don't need the web developer toolbar, Firebug, etc, likewise, if I'm doing web work, I don't care about RSS feeds, etc.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[BenoitRen]

Pity there's not a similar lightweight native Firefox derivative for Windows.

Go go K-Meleon!

By the way, neither Camino or K-Meleon are derivatives of Firefox. They're just native browsers using Gecko and everything that comes with it.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[BenoitRen]

However, if I'm going to use Firefox without the extensions, then I might as well be using IE or Opera.

I disagree about IE, because it's an unstable piece of shit that is severely lacking when it comes to supporting web standards, which means web pages of lower quality for you.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[jsebrech]

You know, for general web browsing I don't find the extensions that useful. I used to be a heavy extension user, but after a while I figured out I didn't really use all those extensions often enough to be worth it.

For web app development however, I agree that firefox is the absolute king of browsers because of the extensions. These are the dev extensions I can't do without:
- Firebug (duh)
- Remove cookies for site
- HTML Validator

There are a lot of extensions for IE as well, but they're much harder to find out about. I've recently been toying with DebugBar + Companion.JS on IE, and they're pretty useful. No comparison to firebug, that's for sure, but sufficient for me to not be constantly aggravated at the general uselessness of IE.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[beckerist]

While I've been using FF for a long time, I have to admit I'm not quite sure what you're talking about. I googled some of your terms and found a plugin for firefox. Is that what forces the others open? I tried both links. The first was "addon not found" and the second came back with a message saying "version 0.2.2 was not compatible with Firefox3.0b1." (A lite version.)

Do you happen to have instructions? I'm really serious in that I just want to revert back to the 2 versions...I have a powerful computer and don't really care about a few hundred megs, and my plugins are too important!

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Randle_Revar]

Get the full nightly tester tools here:
http://www.oxymoronical.com/web/firefox/nightly

(if you trust an extension from a non-mozilla site linked to by some random guy (me) who claims to use it and says it is ok ;-)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Blkdeath]

Version:Avg Mem Usage(KB):Peak Mem Usage(KB):CPU time/day average (minutes, I'm a heavy user)

Wow. Those figures are incredible, even after I convert them to MB.

Incredible in that even if I could get the memory usage that low (I'm using 122MB right now with 6 tabs open. No flash, no plugins, no third party extensions) under Windows XP Pro SP2.

Now, that being said, I'm using 2.0.0.9. I had 3.0b1 installed for about 15 minutes. Let me break down the time frame for you;

• 3 minutes to download + install.
• 1 minute to load my homepage, open a second tab and go to another webpage.
• 10 minutes for XP to stop thrashing as it swapped everything out of RAM to make room for Firefox as it spiralled out of control sucking up all of my available 512MB of RAM and went looking for more as I tried repeatedly to kill it.
• 1 minute to uninstall it and delete the remaining shortcuts and installer package.

I do believe this is the shortest, most curt, worst experience with a software package to date. Seriously. If this is their version of a leaner, meaner Firefox I'm scared to see the end results.

(n.b. I've been using Firefox as my exclusive browser under Linux and Windows since around about v0.86)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[SuperMog2002]

I actually use bare Firefox on Windows all the time. On my Core Duo @ 2 GHz with 2 GB, it's still quite fast, and a lot more sites are tested on Gecko than are on Presto (Opera's engine). On OS X, Firefox runs quite slowly (it's clear they haven't taken the time to optimize it for OS X), and Opera still doesn't utilize the OS X features. Having a central password manager is nice because I can set one security policy and have it automatically applied to every application that plugs in to it. For instance, I could set it to require me to type my user password before it auto-fills any other password if its been an hour since I last accessed it. Firefox has a similar feature, but it's specific to Firefox. This feature is system wide. Also, Safari and Camino (with your permission) share the same bank of passwords, so if I save my password with one browser, the other can access it. In addition, you can set your password bank to automatically sync with other Macs, either using Apple's own .MAC service, or a third party app that implements the Sync Services interface. Having a central spell check is also a nice feature. On Windows, Firefox, Word, Pidgen, and Thunderbird all have their own spell checkers (okay, Pidgen's uses the Aspell package, but it's still different from the other three). All of them have their own dictionaries, they don't all put the right-click suggestions in the same place on the menu, and some of the are pretty dumb about making suggestions. On OS X, every app that chooses to spell check a text box pulls from the same dictionary, will display the results in the same order, and always puts them at the very top of the root context menu. This consistency makes for a much smoother experience. Unfortunately, neither Firefox nor Opera plug in to this service, but rather implement their own spell checkers, and thus suffer from the same problems as on Windows. Thus, Camino's reason for existence: A nice, stripped down, bare bones use of the Gecko engine, and it uses the OS's features to its full advantage.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[pugugly]

I don't get it. I have firefox open now. It has 170 Mb used in task manager. A lot.

It's been open for three days on my work machine. Who the heck are these people that are whining about it grabbing a Gig of memory? I have 25 plugins, including one that saves all my closed tabs, and after 3 days I'm at 170 Meg. You're doing something wrong.

Pug

Re:I've been using Camino...

[jsoderba]

Strange. It uses 80 MB on my machine after an hour of browsing.

I assume you used a fresh profile? An old profile might have extensions that misbehave in development versions.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[dylan_-]

The best is when I try to download an XPI for thunderbird and firefox tries to install it. And get this: there's no save as! The solution, ironically, is to load up IE7 and do a save as.

The other guy did tell you how to do it, but I'm curious....have a look at this (or, in fact, any Thunderbird extension). How on earth did you miss that big green box with the title "How to Install in Thunderbird"?

Re:I've been using Camino...

[Blkdeath]

Strange. It uses 80 MB on my machine after an hour of browsing.

I assume you used a fresh profile? An old profile might have extensions that misbehave in development versions.

Since I've never installed an extension in my life I find that rather doubtful.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[argent]

Go go K-Meleon!

K-Meleon is not based on the Mozilla/firefox rendering engine, it's based on KHTML.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[BenoitRen]

I see you didn't even take the time to read the main page. It explicitly mentions using Gecko. Everything else shows that as well, like for instance, the user agent string. Oh, and did you see the favicon they use? That's Mozilla, Netscape's mascot.

You probably let yourself be fooled because of the name, which starts with a K.

KHTML didn't even exist on Windows yet until the recent release of Safari 3 beta, while K-Meleon has a long history.

Re:I've been using Camino...

[argent]

I'm assuming that's sarcasm. I hope that's sarcasm. Truly. :)

Re:I've been using Camino...

[gad_zuki!]

It used to work exactly as I described with no save as. This was later fixed after many complaints.

Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[archen]

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.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[pionzypher]

Agreed, something similar to the one Opera has with smaller icons would be quite useful.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[dosius]

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.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[Fneb]

I have a local html page with my most common links on it and a few search fields (Google, Google UK, Sourceforge, and Wikipedia), and another page for comics (I read way too many). It's not hard to implement, its just a hassle getting around to it and adding new links (particularly since I got annoyed at the plain html look and re-did it in iWeb, meaning there's code all over the place). An automatic method of doing it within the browser would be nice, but on the other hand, having 2 html files in a known location is easy to move between computers and between installs.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[calebt3]

We kinda have to. He is using Vista in the screenshots.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[afidel]

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.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[bioglaze]

If you read many webcomics, you should consider using a tracking service. I use http://piperka.net/

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[battleforevermore]

Check out the addon SPEED DIAL... its borrowed from opera... which also has Bookmark sync... and other features you will see in the future versions of Firefox...

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[john83]

Just to clarify, that's the file in C:/Documents and Settings/[username]/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/bookmarks.html and not C:/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/defaults/profile/bookmarks.html [I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.9 and Windows XP SP2 (I'm at work, don't mod me down!).]

I like the idea, but it would be nice to have a bit more formatting to the page. Mine is a bit long to use conveniently.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[jalefkowit]

Haven't the bookmarks been stored in an HTM file since Netscape 2?

Yes.

Aren't they still stored in bookmarks.html?

No. FF3 includes "Places", a new SQLite-based backend for managing things like bookmarks.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[poached]

del.icio.us Get an account it's free. Install the plugin for either IE or firefox and persist your bookmarks across machines. The other option is to install the google toolbar and use its bookmark feature. It saves the bookmarks to your google account and you can retrieve the bookmarks on any machine with google toolbar installed and logged into your account.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[Christopher Rogers]

... the awesome idea of having a homepage option that displays your bookmarks... Safari already has this. It's not on by default but it's there. This is probably one of the main reasons I use Safari at work on my Windows machine (even though it's still buggy). It brings up the same screen as when clicking the bookmark button on the toolbar, which gives you full screen bookmarks with folders, drag & drop, and search. It might even search the contents of your cache too, but I'm not sure.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[hollywoodb]

Opera has had your bookmark-homepage idea for some time... It's called speed dial.

Also, Opera 9.5 (still in beta, has a few bugs but http://my.opera.com/desktopteam has more info) has a new thing called Opera Link which lets you synchronize bookmarks, speed dial, and your personal bar (like a bookmarks shortcut bar that holds other things as well) across any Opera 9.5+ browser anywhere, and gives you http://link.opera.com/ to access your bookmarks from any browser.

I've been using 9.5 at work since alpha and it is looking to be one sweet release. At home I still use the stable 9.2x branch which doesn't have Link but does have Speed Dial.

I only have Firefox around these days for the sites that don't always play nice with Opera, which are actually very very few. And I know Opera isn't open source, but they're very community-friendly and their development team is easily accessible and responsive to bugs and they produce packages for just about every major Linux distribution, as well as Mac, Windows, Solars (sparc and intel), QNX, BeOS, FreeBSD and OS/2.

Re:Is Firefox 3 going to be better?

[Fneb]

Thanks, looks pretty good. There's only one comic I read that it doesn't have, which is pretty good, but at least one of them doesn't point to the latest page, and one comic changed its numbering order half way through so it won't work for that. Does it update the latest comic automatically?

Preinstalled firefox?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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? Is Mozilla foundation working with any vendor to preinstall it?

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Gigiya]

The vendors don't care because the consumers wouldn't, either.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[stranger_to_himself]

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[corpsmoderne]

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? Is Mozilla foundation working with any vendor to preinstall it?

Ho yes, more and more PC makers are pre-installing Firefox, Gimp and OpenOffice... along with Ubuntu...

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[garett_spencley]

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[HBI]

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[thommym]

Dell will. They'll offer Solaris now.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[JeepFanatic]

In theory, wouldn't the code for ANY updates to Firefox be available to be examined, tested and approved being that it's open source? In my opinion, that's better than just being able to test a closed source update. Seeing though as I don't work for the Army, I can't comment any further.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[pat mcguire]

I'll try to say this as pleasantly as possible to avoid the ravenous mods, but unfortunately it's still going to be along trollish lines: I don't think anyone really knows what exactly the license OEMs obtain Windows is under (trade secret), and it wouldn't be suprising if it were one of the conditions not to install Firefox, OpenOffice.org, etc. A full version of Office costs more than Windows XP, and I'm sure that Microsoft would prefer their users use IE.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[veganboyjosh]

Actually Firefox is forbidden on Dept of the Army systems...ok, a lot of them - can't do automated updates due to not being on the Internet in the first place,

If they can't get on the internet, why do they need firefox? Makes sense to me that it wouldn't be allowed if there's no reason to have it in the first place.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Joe Jay Bee]

Yes, of course, that's why Windows and Internet Explorer are both bit parts in the computer industry, while Linux commands a 90%+ market share.

Preinstalling Firefox would do a hell of a lot to gain market share for it, especially if it was the default browser. But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[tmjr3353]

Umm...browsing, you know, intranet sites? Just a thought.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Minwee]

Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Update -> Automatically check for updates for:
[] Firefox
[] Installed Add-ons
[] Search Engines

Why is it that I know how to turn that off, but the entire Department of the Army can't figure it out?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[ThirdPrize]

Maybe this will change your mind? I thik they can spend some of their own money first before the consider taking donations from the public.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[moogs]

If you had no web browsers preinstalled, how would you go about downloading Firefox? I mean, that's the only reason IE is preinstalled with Windows, right?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[drew]

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.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[drew]

You totally missed the point.

1) That doesn't meet the Army's requirements because it doesn't give them a way to review the updates before they are deployed, or control deployment (e.g. Windiws SUS)

2) That doesn't work for PC's that are not internet connected.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[insertwackynamehere]

I know what the OEM license is; it came with my brand new system-free OEM copy of Windows Vista Ultimate 32 Bit Edition that I purchased from Newegg for $180.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Joe Jay Bee]

That's true. Sorry, my bad, I agree entirely. :)

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[garett_spencley]

Wow

I missed that article (obviously) and had no idea.

Yeah if MF is worth that much then they could definitely start buying ads for their apps. It would go a long way towards increasing adoption.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[EvanED]

Command line FTP. Windows still comes with that! ;-)

(And I, sadly, still use it from time to time.)

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[One Childish N00b]

What really would matter is, are there PC makers who would pre install Firefox at the factory?

I bought my latest desktop from Dixons (in the UK) and it came with Firefox, Google Desktop and numerous other things preinstalled. I think Google Earth was another one. I'm betting this was a Google deal with the store as their Toolbar was also preinstalled as a Firefox extension, but there are indeed major outlets (at least over here) that come with Firefox preinstalled.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[msuarezalvarez]

I only get Firefox updates through Fedora. I'm quite sure the Army can ask the people there how they manage... Likewise, you can of course pull updates from the local network.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Woek]

NO webbrowser? You mean so you can download the one you want using.... command-line FTP? Gopher?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[PunchMonkey]

But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.

This comment reminds me of the first modem I had bought in old DOS days. It was OEM and came with no terminal client. I was left there trying to figure out how I could download a terminal client without one to start with.

I suppose you would still have command line FTP...

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[ChronoReverse]

Why would you need to update Firefox if it's only going to be used for browsing known-safe internal sites?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[vadim_t]

A co-worker recently brought his new laptop, it had Firefox preinstalled.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[tepples]

That doesn't meet the Army's requirements because it doesn't give them a way to review the updates before they are deployed, or control deployment (e.g. Windiws SUS) Then you turn OFF auto-updates, package Firefox in SUS, and deploy it. I don't understand what's wrong with this process. Is it that the user can turn auto-updates back on?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[tmjr3353]

Well that's another question altogether; however, I imagine it would be good to keep these things up to date. It can be difficult to determine how infection can spread. How can I be 100% certain that some internet enabled machine won't create an issue on the intranet? If I have unpatched machines on the intranet I still consider them as vulnerable.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather download Firefox by visiting getfirefox.com in IE than by typing HTTP commands into telnet getfirefox.com 80 > firefox.exe.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Jimmy_B]

But then, to be honest, I'd rather have no web browser bundled with a Windows install, thanks very much.

What tool do you propose users use to download their first browser, then? FTP? Average users won't know how. And before you say that they should read the manual, I'd like to point out that the Windows manual is, in fact, entirely in HTML. (The Windows help viewer is a thin wrapper around Internet Explorer's rendering engine, and the help files themselves are zip-like bundles of HTML files.)

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[pat mcguire]

Yes. But it seems obvious that Dell, HP and all the other major players would have different arrangements directly with Microsoft for volume licensing rather than having a stock contract, much like other large companies do for large-scale commercial use. They might be willing to agree to more restrictive terms in exchange for a price cut.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Minwee]

:%s/You/I/

1. If an update isn't applied, you don't need to review it. Turning off automatic updates seems to resolve your concern quite nicely, since you can then package any updates you have in any manner you like. Yes, even Windows SUS.

2. I'm pretty sure that you can disable automatic updating even if you aren't connected to the Internet. Why would that be a problem?

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Llywelyn]

SIPRnet != The Internet, but still requires a web browser.

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Techman83]

I wonder if they have heard of Zenworks Patch Management... An easy way to keep all your deployed applications up to date! I can't wait to implement it, will save us a lot of work!

Re:Preinstalled firefox?

[Joe Jay Bee]

Hah, nah, not new here (new account because old one bore a really, really old web address). It's that common decency thing that gets me all the time tho... ;)

Memory usage

[dfdashh]

From the release notes:

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Developers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation.

I'm optimistic, but we'll see in time...

Re:Memory usage

[edxwelch]

So, that means there are 300+ memory leaks in Firefox 2.0?
That would make sense.

The

[JeepFanatic]

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?)

Re:The

[audi100quattro]

There is the speed dial extension, and the google toolbar for firefox (along with the password manager) on linux has most of the features wand does.

Now if only del.icio.us and google notebook worked with FF 3.0, I'd be using it as my primary browser right now.

Re:The

[legoman666]

A friend opened my eyes to Opera about a year ago and I haven't used Firefox since. Like you said, the only problem I have with it is flash. (although, seeing as how half of the banner ads are flash now, not having flash installed isn't really a bad thing). If there is really a flash applet I want to see, I fire up the website in IE6.

Re:The

[JeepFanatic]

Anytime I want to view something on YouTube though I have to open up Firefox and I'd really much rather be able to just use one browser. NOTE TO ADOBE - make Flash available for Opera on Linux please!

Re:The

[legoman666]

I prefer not watching Youtube videos. Not having flash installed gives me an excuse not to click on every god damned youtube link people send me and tell me to watch. It's an annoying trend; linking to videos instead of text. I can easily skim a news article or posting. It's impossible to do the same thing with a video.

Re:The

[insertwackynamehere]

I agree with your sentiment but I'd personally rather be able to do something and choose not to than not be able to do something and accept it for what it is.

Re:The

[Thanatos69]

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)

Actually I believe is their fault. Instead of taking a build it and they will come approach, perhaps they should be rallying for support from the larger vendors such as Adobe. If not, they could always try to rework some of their code to work with what Adobe has already done. Perhaps I will build a browser and expect everyone to make their software compatible with it, yes... that will work.

Re:The

[Joe Tie.]

Google notebook seems to be working fine on my install.

Re:so

[someone1234]

Yes, but only with Linux.
On Vista, it uses slightly more memory than Vista, but only if Vista leaves some free memory.

still slower than safari 3

[hexsprite]

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.

It's so fast...

[halivar]

I'm posting this with Firefox 3.0.1.... from the future.

Re:It's so fast...

[arhavu]

Ha, wait till you see Firefox 5 that I'm using to post this even farther from the future.

...or the all-encompassing Firefox Singularity that my future self is now informing me will have be coming be really something.

Re:It's so fast...

[Kuvter]

You must also be using a quantum computer that can run a program before it's installed.

Re:It's so fast...

[San-LC]

My Netscape Navigator 4.0 just finished downloading your post....from ten years ago.

Re:It's so fast...

[halivar]

Truly, it was ahead of its time, then.

Re:It's so fast...

[killa62]

No, that means its really slow

Release notes

[dirtyhippie]

Instead of this windows-screenshot-centric review, what geeks like me really want are the release notes.

Re:Release notes

[doti]

Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic. And obviously the author of the del.icio.us extension will use this to synchronize the tags.

Re:great!

[Slashidiot]

They say the have plugged more than 300 memory leaks in the release notes. I hope that's most of them...

Comparison Photos

[phillips321]

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

Re:Comparison Photos

[ferpadro]

lol, best comparison ever I use Firefox with almost no extensions. Does that make me a "Barbie van" lover? :(

Re:Comparison Photos

[tijmentiming]

Please, stop posting pictures from forumpix. It's slashdotted again. Make a mirror first.

Re:Comparison Photos

[backbyter]

All 4 look identical to me:

The connection has timed out
The server at www.forumpix.co.uk is taking too long to respond.
* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
moments.
* If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network
connection.
* If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure
that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Re:Comparison Photos

[ronadams]

Opera hasn't had an ad-supported browser for about 4 years now.

Re:Comparison Photos

[tecker]

Mirrored by Coral Content Distribution Network (.nyud.net:8090)

Firefox no extentions
Firefox with extensions
Opera
IE

Re:Comparison Photos

[mabinogi]

Since when is an ad-supported product immediately spyware?

Besides the fact that it's not ad-supported any more.

Re:Comparison Photos

[mollymoo]

Take the hard drive out of the Dell and remove its top cover.

Re:Comparison Photos

[WNight]

When it phones home to download more ads.

Re:Comparison Photos

[phillips321]

forumpix.co.uk looks fine to me.

Re:Comparison Photos

[bcat24]

What do you do to make a mirror? Well, first you'll need some glass...

Full feature list

[Anonymous Coward]

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!!

Re:Full feature list

[Victor Antolini]

You might wanna check this site out, it's awesome if you like to keep track of development.

Maybe this site has it indexed too.

Re:Full feature list

[jesser]

I don't think you'll find a full feature list anywhere. My changelog and the release notes mention a lot of the new features, but if you want to know whether a specific bug got fixed or feature got added, you'll need to check Bugzilla.

In this case, it's bug 334987, and it looks like it won't be done for Firefox 3.

By the way, it would be both hard to fix (because sound comes from plugins) and controversial (because some users like to leave pandora.com playing in the background while they do other things).

Did they fix FireFox' memory leaks?

[MichaelCrawford]

I leave my laptop on for days at a time, just putting it to sleep when I'm not using it. This mostly works, but every couple days I have to quit FireFox and relaunch it, because it becomes so slow as to be unusable. For example, holding the mouse down on a scroll bar arrow causes it to scroll one increment every ten seconds or so, rather than scrolling rapidly as it should.

Re:Did they fix FireFox' memory leaks?

[bigbigbison]

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.

Re:Did they fix FireFox' memory leaks?

[dpilot]

Sometimes perception can be more important than reality, and this might be one of them. You need to pass the "duck test". If it looks like a memory leak, acts like a memory leak, and shows up on garden variety monitoring tools like a memory leak, it may not matter that it's really fragmentation. It's perceived as a memory leak. Getting people to perceive it as a fragmentation problem rather than a memory leak is kind of like changing the background screen color on a BSOD. The net is that the session is still slow.

By whatever name it's called, it needs to be fixed. On the good side, it looks like it's being addressed.

Thank you!

[argent]

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.

If the initial review had linked to the right page I would have seen "Requirements ... 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).

And yet I just had to launch IE to pay a flight.

[Thanshin]

Will FFIII have a IE plug-in to open badly built asp.net pages?

Worthwhile Benefit?

[greginnj]

the uninstall process is fast and painless

Does anybody really care how fast Firefox uninstalls?

Re:Worthwhile Benefit?

[Datamonstar]

Anyone who is uninstalling it.

Re:Worthwhile Benefit?

[Wolvie MkM]

People who have had to endure the 30-45 minute uninstalls of any Adobe CS3 product would probably enjoy a welcome reminder of what a proper uninstaller is supposed to do :)

Re:So tell me

[smittyoneeach]

Compared to lynx, no. But then, what is?

Yeah, but...

[infestedsenses]

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.

Re:Yeah, but...

[Seraphim_72]

Isn't this what multiple profiles are for? Super fast switching would be nice this works well enough I think.

Sera

Re:Yeah, but...

[Bogtha]

It's when you start installing extensions that it goes downhill, and as a web designer I need quite a few extensions.

You should be using a separate profile for web designing and surfing. Otherwise your surfing extensions (e.g. Adblock, NoScript, minimum font size, etc) could interfere with your designing, and you've already acknowledged that your designing extensions are interfering with your surfing.

Re:Yeah, but...

[infestedsenses]

I already do that to test in multiple Firefox versions simultaneously. But yeah, you're right, I will definitely set up multiple profiles on my default Firefox and see how that goes. I just wish it weren't necessary.

Re:great!

[wwmedia]

nice, i will try it once its out, i still believe Mozilla are a bunch of nice people

tho i believe ALOT of money corrupts even the best of intentions, at 50million+ i hope they hired the best and the brightest to fix issues that (it hurts to say this) even lesser browsers like IE7 don't suffer from

Starring Keanu Reeves

[Anonymous Coward]

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. No, I saw this browser before, it's not slow. I think it's called "The Browser That Couldn't Slow Down."

Browse zip files online!

[The MAZZTer]

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.

Re:Browse zip files online!

[Christophotron]

Full page zoom works like a champ for me. It's not quite as refined as Opera's but it is a huge improvement over the old font-scaling. To me, page zooming is the only major feature in other browsers that keeps me from using FF 100% of the time. In the beta, all the menus and RSS feeds are screwed up for me though. When I open Tools, for example, all I see is an empty gray pulldown box with no options. Same for Slashdot RSS, right-click menu, etc. That's unfortunate, as I would have liked to view the new options. I can't wait until all of my extensions work in FF3. I'd use a beta if the menus weren't all screwed up and (at a minimum) Google Browser Sync supported it. Get to work, Google!

Re:Browse zip files online!

[sseaman]

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! You're still downloading the .zip before you view its contents, aren't you? Actually browsing the contents of a .zip on-line would require server-side decompression; instead I'm guessing that Firefox is downloading the .zip into memory, uncompressing it (internally, or does it launch an external app?) and displaying the file names of the uncompressed files in your browser window (hyperlinked to "download" their contents to your default download directory).

It sounds like it could be convenient in the right context.

Re:Browse zip files online!

[j3thr0]

You can get a list of the contents without uncompressing the whole thing. "unzip -l" for example.
It does make sense that you'd have to download the whole thing to do that though.

Re:Browse zip files online!

[Bogtha]

Konqueror has been able to do this for years.

In fact, I believe Konqueror's predecessor, KFM could also do this. The feature is about seven years old.

Re:Browse zip files online!

[ZorbaTHut]

You're still downloading the .zip before you view its contents, aren't you? Actually browsing the contents of a .zip on-line would require server-side decompression

Actually, no, it technically wouldn't. ZIP files store their table-of-contents starting at the end, with (I believe) a marker at the very end letting you know how large it is. If you're working with a protocol that allows you to download fragments of files, which I believe HTTP does, you could actually download only the parts of a ZIP file that you need to extract the files inside that you want.

I don't know if they're doing this, note. But it certainly would be cool, and it certainly would be possible.

Re:Browse zip files online!

[PitaBred]

Hell, any KDE program that uses the KIO objects can do that. I open things remotely via fish:// in Kate all the time, so I can edit the HTML directly on the web server, and still use a GUI program. I save it, and it automatically pushes it over the SSH link.

Does that even make sense?

[Nursie]

"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.

Re:Does that even make sense?

[tepples]

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. A lot of problems with keeping Firefox open longer than 24 hours can be attributed to heap fragmentation: plenty of free memory within the process's space but in blocks too small to be useful. How is that normally solved in C or in C++?

C is a beautifully powerful and elegant language, and very portable. Strictly source-portable C is not useful for desktop applications because there are plenty of holes in the C standard library. For example, in standard C, how does a program enumerate the files that may be opened with fopen()? In POSIX, you do this with opendir(), but opendir() is not in the C standard nor in Win32.

Re:Does that even make sense?

[Nursie]

That's why the Lord invented ifdefs and #defines :)

One can have source-portable code that compiles differently on different platforms.

Sure, it's not true portability, I'll grant you that.

On heap fragmentation, well that is solved in my current project by using our own memory management system on an mmap'd file, and by keeping the data we play with in small chunks. I think a web browser is probably unique in both the range of data sizes and frequency of load, so it's tricky I'm sure.

IMHO, this is an operating system problem, not a language issue. May I ask how you'd solve it a higher level language?

Is it that the target VM can hide the actual memory addresses from the running program such that it can shuffle things around when it detects fragmentation?

Re:Does that even make sense?

[tepples]

IMHO, this is an operating system problem, not a language issue. May I ask how you'd solve it a higher level language?

Is it that the target VM can hide the actual memory addresses from the running program such that it can shuffle things around when it detects fragmentation? Yes. Both Java and .NET have compacting garbage collectors, and they don't use pointers as unbounded iterators. I'm sure they allocate operating system buffers, such as file buffers and drawing surfaces, out of a separate heap. But all this is easier to do when you build a whole language around this mechanism, like Java 6 or .NET (each about 50 MB as of the latest update), and harder to do when you're trying to squeeze everything into a 6 MB Firefox Setup.exe download package.

Re:Does that even make sense?

[m2943]

It's not that horrendously difficult to keep control of memory in C programs

The Firefox developers just told you that the browser bloated by hundreds of megabytes, had lots of memory leaks, and that they needed to focus for an entire release on fixing those problems, and you still claim "it's not that horrendously difficult". Evidently, it is for Firefox developers.

lots of us do it every day.

OK, so there are two possibilities: either you are a lot smarter than both the Firefox developers and me, or you simply don't know how much trouble you're even in and you just think you have memory management in C under control. Odds are it's the latter.

Re:Does that even make sense?

[bunratty]

A lot of problems with keeping Firefox open longer than 24 hours can be attributed to heap fragmentation.

No, fragmentation is not causing people to have to restart Firefox. Fragmentation looks like a memory leak to people who expect memory use to go down to a previous level after closing a tab. Fragmentation also looks like a memory leak to people who point out that Firefox uses less memory after they close Firefox and restore their session. It's not the problem with Firefox gobbling up hundreds of megabytes for no reason that some are reporting. Those problems sound like severe memory leaks that are going unreported, because users think that it's a "well-known problem" that everyone is experiencing.

One word: Management

[Darth_brooks]

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.)

Re:One word: Management

[MMC Monster]

I'm not sure what you mean by administrative rights to finish installing updates. The updates are changing files in \Program Files\Firefox (or something like that), so of course administrator rights are necessary.

What should be done (I don't know, since I am administrator on my winXP box) is that update should not be possible unless you have the suitable permissions. I know that this is the way on Mac OSX. (On Ubuntu, it's updated via apt-get or Synaptic, so it's not an issue.)

Re:One word: Management

[barzok]

Corporate Windows desktops are already owned by IE, and until all those custom, in-house apps and industry-specific systems are rewritten to not require IE6, or ActiveX, or IE-proprietary HTML/CSS/scripting, it's not going to relinquish much marketshare there.

Memory Overhead

[filbranden]

From TFA:

When a browser starts to edge near to consuming 500MB of RAM on a regular basis, something is wrong.

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?

MS Keeps Pushing IE7

[tjstork]

My automatic update keeps demanding that I install IE7. Any way to shut this off?

Re:MS Keeps Pushing IE7

[jsight]

Block IE 7

Re:MS Keeps Pushing IE7

[mnmn]

Yup. Install IE7.

Re:MS Keeps Pushing IE7

[jesser]

Why don't you want to install IE7? Lots of applications embed IE, so even if you never use Internet Explorer, you'll be safer if you update.

But

[Joe Jay Bee]

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.

Re:But

[ErikZ]

Mac users mystify me with this attitude. They seem to be unable to use tools that don't "Look good".

Form over function. Bah.

Re:But

[pedx1ng]

OK, I've seen many comments here and elsewhere about how Firefox is so poor on the Mac, but frankly I don't see it. So I am genuinely interested in some reasons why this is perceived to be the case. Can you or someone else list the main complaints? I use XP, OS X and Linux boxes and the thing I love about using Firefox on all of them is that I don't have to retrain depending on what OS I'm on at the time. I've tried using Safari, but although it gets lauded for its speed in rendering pages, I haven't noticed it being any faster. If anything it actually felt like it loaded pages slower. That's not scientific of course, and I've seen the Apple benchmarks showing Safari to be quicker. I've come to rely on a couple Firefox plug-ins as well.

Re:But

[Tickletaint]

Form IS function. Your comprehensive lack of understanding--you probably think hardware and software are meaningfully separable, too?--is why you will always be a PC user.

Re:But

[Tickletaint]

If you don't want to "retrain" to take advantage of the unique offerings of each platform, Safari being one such offering, why are you even bothering with the multitude of OSes in the first place? Just stick to your fucking beige box PC and you'll never have to worry yourself with "retraining" yourself out of mediocrity.

Re:But

[Tickletaint]

Oh, and if you can't immediately recognize anything wrong with the Mac port of that piece of shit PC software, Firefox, then what the fuck are you doing on the Mac to begin with? Jesus fucking Christ, where to begin? Widget behavior, preference layout, lack of integration, a turd-tastic overall philosophy of design. Obviously you're at home living in sewage, to the point that you don't even recognize beauty staring you in the face--just GTFO the Mac. Seriously.

Re:But

[Macthorpe]

There always has to be one elitist snobby Mac comment in any article, and you just nailed it.

Hopefully that will put off anybody else who decides to pipe in.

Re:maybe time for a port?

[oliverthered]

or Javascript, oh wait it already does that.

Re:And yet I just had to launch IE to pay a flight

[arevos]

Will FFIII have a IE plug-in to open badly built asp.net pages? Presumably they'll just port the one for Firefox 2.

A Mac Perspective

[Tatey]

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.

Re:A Mac Perspective

[the pickle]

IMO, it still feels like a Windows app. If extensions support isn't critical to your workflow, you might want to have a gander at Camino instead.

p

Re:A Mac Perspective

[MeditationSensation]

apart? You mean "a part".

Re:A Mac Perspective

[lucas teh geek]

I really like the second design on that page, but the blog of one of the user interface design guys suggests that the final theme may look significantly different from all of those. sounds like they want to make firefox look native, but recognizable as firefox on every platform. I'm undecided which way I think would turn out better

Re:And yet I just had to launch IE to pay a flight

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Problems with Yahoo Mail

[lseltzer]

I got this trying to log in:

name:NS_ERROR_DOM_WRONG_DOCUMENT_ERR
message:Node cannot be used in a document other than the one in which it was created
lineNumber:463

I wonder if GMail gets errors...

Re:Problems with Yahoo Mail

[lseltzer]

I guess they're still testing because it's still broken

Still using 1.5

[Kuciwalker]

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.

Re:Still using 1.5

[octopus72]

I liked 1.5 way of handling tabs. With 2.0 they somehow screwed it up, but I didn't take time to patiently search through all tabbing extensions to get that back, o got used to a new scheme. Otherwise I don't see much difference. UI feels snappier, while in 1.5 it was known to block for short moments. On my home PC I still used 1.5 few until a few days ago (because of extensions but I realized that now that all extensions which I can't live without have been made compatible with FF2.0+, so I moved to 2.0).

I guess it won't be too long before I move on 3.0 beta, if the performance is going that improved (yes, AJAX websites are not really fast on firefox currently).

Re:Still using 1.5

[jesser]

Why don't you try out the beta? I think you'd be better off using a beta than using a "stable" version that no longer receives security updates.

Everything is _brighter_

[IBBoard]

Everything is brighter, clearer, and easier to access.

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.

Re:Sure

[lordofwhee]

You're assuming, of course, that IE8 actually DOES have anything good about it that every other browser out there doesn't. Actually, you're also assuming IE is even well-known enough then for anyone to care.

Re:So tell me

[Anonymous Coward]

A cheetah!

What how you let people sign out says about you

[KlaymenDK]

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?

Re:And yet I just had to launch IE to pay a flight

[Thanshin]

Thank you.

The dog that didn't bark ....

[jmhowitt]

.... was in Silver Blaze not the Baskervilles

Re:The dog that didn't bark ....

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Thanks, I stand corrected.

But are the memory leaks fixed? I'm back to IE

[pcause]

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.

Re:Sure

[Random BedHead Ed]

That's a completely fair comparison and you're probably right: the reviews would look like that. But frankly after so many years of a single-browser web, IE still has a lot of apologizing to do, even if they improve things drastically.

A lot of companies grew so complacent during that dark time that they're still not prepared for a simple browser upgrade ("It'll break our IE-only intranet apps!") so IE6 users abound. And have you used IE6 lately? I have it on my work computer. It's like a pair of handcuffs, only less liberating. Type in a new address, or press the Back button, or even the Stop button, and prepare to wait ... and wait ... while the browser tries to decide what you want it to do. The Titanic would be less sluggish. And to be totally fair I should pretend the IE world has advanced to IE7, but even that version has a lot of annoyances. Any reason why when I push Ctrl+L the browser has to open a Go To window instead of simply putting my cursor in the address bar? I haven't forgotten why Firefox (or Phoenix when I started using it) was so revolutionary, and it hasn't lost any of that. The bloat of version 2 still doesn't detract.

Should we even take this guy seriously?

[Critical Facilities]

I like Firefox but Firefox just doesn't like me, so, while I have it installed on most systems, I mostly use Internet Explorer 7 and Opera for day to day browsing.
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.

Re:Beta shouldn't replace the real thing...

[n0dna]

I love that you managed to slip in "the whole "installer" insanity" after pissing and moaning about your platform's procedure.

Nothing but class.

Re:It's not so good yet...

[BZ]

> and I already started getting errors.

And filed a bug, right? That's the point of a beta: to get feedback if things don't work somewhere for some reason...

Re:maybe time for a port?

[courtarro]

With users complaining about poor speed and high memory usage, moving to a higher-level language will hardly make anyone's day. C is one of the leanest and fastest languages that can be used across architectures and operating systems.

Re:So tell me

[kraemate]

Hah! _real_ men use links. Oh wait... dont they simply nc to port 80?

Be careful with Firebug

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's not so good yet...

[CodeShark]

Actually I am a senior level developer for a rather large company. And we don't release until our code works with the known interfaces to our systems and those interfaces have had a chance to be tested against the new code. Basically, the logic is "first do no harm", and releasing even a beta that doesn't work with the known top interfaces (I mean, we're talking NoScript here, not some obscure plug in!!) says to me that this is more of a "late alpha".

Think of it like this: You're the Mozilla marketing organization, and you want good press for your new 'beta' release. Would you a) rather see a /. posting like mine, or b) contact the NoScript coders, etc. and give them an opportunity to get their plugins ready, and have the /. post say "great job guys, it even works with the major plug ins like Noscript, FireFTP, Firebug, etc. More Plugins compatible with FireFox 3.X beta to be released soon..."

Well, us professional coders go for the 2nd every time. 'ts why we get paid to be senior -- because we can think farther ahead.

More importantly for web developers

[foniksonik]

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 ;-(

Re:More importantly for web developers

[starwed]

now if only they'd get up to speed on the things that Webkit is doing!

Firefox already has SVG, XPATH, almost all the "XML Technologies" (it's missing incremental rendering), and web developer tools. And it certainly has improved all it's speed benchmarks from FF2.

Re:More importantly for web developers

[BZ]

Firefox 3 will do incremental rendering of XML. Heck, this beta does it, as have a number of the most recent alphas.

And the magical link that everyone wants is...

[sootman]

... right here: Get Firefox 3 Beta 1

Re:And the magical link that everyone wants is...

[sootman]

And your comment contributes to the conversation how?

I added mine because most people don't read the articles* so after digging around for a while on Mozilla's not-exactly-easy-to-navigate site I figured I'd post the link and maybe save some people the trouble, since the Slashdot "editors" (Zonk, you retarded piece of shit, why am I not surprised?) didn't realize that THEIR READERSHIP might be interested in checking out the newest version of Firefox.

In short, fuck you.

* I come to Slashdot for the discussion, not the articles. Why click a link to read what some tool thinks about Firefox when I can click a link and read what hindreds of tools think about Firefox? :-)

Re:It's not so good yet...

[CodeShark]

They can have my debugging reports and my attention when NoScript works but not before. Because -- catch a clue, I haven't got a single virus or malware infestation from a site protected by NoScript, and I can even see who the off-site advertising providers are for the sites I go to and selectively deny them the ability to run scripts on the content pages I read.

I'm not going to open up my machine beforehand -- I have too much experience with companies like M$ to trust them with unblockable JavaScript, etc. not counting the other bad guys out there.

fast enough

[Frozen Void]

I keep Firefox for entertainment(games,slashdot,complex sites etc) and Opera for heavy duty browsing where speed matters.

Re:fast enough

[starwed]

heavy duty browsing where speed matters.

WTF does that even mean? It sounds like one of those gushing yet meaningless reviews you find on product boxes.

Acid2 Test

[citking]

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.

Re:Acid2 Test

[stun]

It passes it BUT it does not pass it anymore if you change the Default font to Cambria. I have the Vista fonts because I have Office 2007 on my Windows XP Pro SP2. I like the Cambria font better than Times New Roman, so I change the Default font under "Tools ==> Options ==> Content" tab. Then, try refreshing the page for the ACID2 test (http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html/) and the smiley looks weird and it fails the ACID2 test.

Yes it's fast

[remmelt]

Camino: no adblock. No deal.

Re:Yes it's fast

[clubby]

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.

Re:Yes it's fast

[remmelt]

I did not know that. Going to give it a try now.

Re:Yes it's fast

[argent]

If adblock is a deal-killer for you, then of course it isn't an alternative for you.

Don't rule out the possibility (however remote) that other people may have different priorities. :)

Re:Yes it's fast

[remmelt]

Also, it _does_ block ads.

Southwest.com Renders Correctly with 2.x

[computersareevil]

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.

Ob

[Bearpaw]

My automatic update keeps demanding that I install IE7. Any way to shut this off?

Try this

I hate the URL bar prompt sort!

[Chrisq]

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.

Moving garbage collector for C++

[tepples]

This problem could be easily solved with a moving garbage collector Easily? Please elaborate. How well would a moving garbage collector work with the semantics of the C++ programming language as implemented by GCC?

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[the_lesser_gatsby]

By not building it with GCC in the first place?

Using C++ for a modern software engineering project where reliability and security is paramount is like building a large bridge out of cast iron. You can do it with a lot of care and expense, but the result is always going to be suspect.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[coolGuyZak]

One of several ways.

• Using a library someone already coded.
• Defining a new idiom and coding a script to transform the idiom to "real C++" before compiling.
• Integrating garbage collection into smart pointers. (My favorite).
• Overriding new and malloc().
• Defining a set of GCC extensions to enable C++ garbage collection.
• Revising the C++ standard to include garbage collection, and waiting for the GCC devs to catch up.

The difficulty of each depends on your familiarity with the material.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[tepples]

Using a library someone already coded. Which would you suggest?

Integrating garbage collection into smart pointers. (My favorite). This is already done to an extent. XPCOM has always used reference counted pointers (nsCOMPtr), and Firefox 3 has a new reference cycle detector. These help find and bust actual leaks but not fragmentation. What makes fragmentation difficult is that several operating system APIs hold onto references to buffers, and those buffers will need to be locked while the OS holds onto it.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[tepples]

Using C++ for a modern software engineering project where reliability and security is paramount is like building a large bridge out of cast iron. Then why didn't the HotJava web browser take off? Which language would you recommend, and will the browser plus the runtime for this language fit into a 6 MB download the way Firefox Setup.exe does?

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[coolGuyZak]

I'm not a C++ programmer (Merely familiar with the language, from college), so I don't have a library to suggest, unfortunately.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[shutdown -p now]

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?).

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[the_lesser_gatsby]

HotJava is a lame prototype from 1996. A better comparison would be Eclipse 3.3 against Visual Studio 2005. I use both daily (yes, I program quite a lot of C++), Eclipse is far superior.

I doubt very much whether a Java web browser and runtime would fit in 6MB (the program itself almost certainly could). But one thing is for sure - it could certainly fit in the eventual memory usage of well-tabbed Firefox after one week.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[BZ]

I was with you until you got to unions, actually. But if you're storing data that might be an integer, a double, or a string, you rather end up with a union that has a pointer type and a non-pointer type in it. Either that, or you end up using twice as much memory.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[Ambidisastrous]

Yep, there are lots of ways they could have spared themselves a few years of C++-induced pain. The root cause of the problem, IMHO, is that when they scrapped the original unusably bloated and crufty codebase, for the rewrite they restricted themselves to a very archaic subset of C++ -- for portability's sake, apparently. The restrictions went too far, though, so things like exceptions, some of the STL (auto_ptr!), even C++-style comments (// instead of /* */) were forbidden in the Moz Dev guidelines. (IIRC.) There are plenty of GC libraries out there for C++; the Boost libraries include that and many other very helpful tools -- but introducing that would be a big change to an enormous codebase. Recently they've seen the value in using newer features, particularly exceptions, and there's an effort towards simplifying the code base using these features now.

Historical note: One of the biggest ways Netscape originally doomed itself was by attempting to rewrite it all in Java. There's no silver bullet, but you don't have to shoot yourself in the foot, either.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[shutdown -p now]

Normally you'd use std::string, and that means that union is right out already.

Re:Moving garbage collector for C++

[BZ]

You must have meant std::wstring. But in Gecko code in particular you would not in fact "normally" use std::anything. That might change, but as of the time the current portable code guidelines for Gecko were written, that sort of thing wasn't portable reliably enough.

Extensions

[Wolfger]

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...

Re:Extensions

[ampathee]

Actually, Adblock (plus) is one of the few extensions that does already work with Firefox 3 beta 1.

Re:Extensions

[Wolfger]

I did, like, actually install and try it before writing about it. Amazing concept for Slashdot, I know, but Adblock (I believe it's actually Adblock Plus on my work machine, but not 100% positive at the moment) did not work. Maybe it works on some other OS, but on a crappy Windows machine it did not.

Re:Extensions

[ampathee]

So did I. It worked on this crappy windows machine, Adblock Plus 0.7.5.3
My OP was made from the FF3 beta, but I've gone back to FF2 now (I needs my mouse gestures).

In any case, it's a developer preview/testing release - not intended for general use yet. Which doesn't mean it's not interesting to /. denizens.

heh

[rice_burners_suck]

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.

Re:Sure

[msuarezalvarez]

[...] after so many years of a single-browser web [...]

Except for maybe the initial days of the web, there have always been several browsers. E.g., I've been only for what seems forever now and have never used IE...

Re:But are the memory leaks fixed? I'm back to IE

[Tatsh]

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!

Bookmarks in database!

[sd.fhasldff]

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.

Re:Bookmarks in database!

[i.of.the.storm]

I'm pretty sure it does generate an HTML backup of the bookmarks though, so you might still be able to do the trick, pointless as it may be. However, I think with all the new data in the Places system (it remembers your most used bookmarks over a period of time among other things) it wouldn't be too hard to make a home page that shows several of your most recently viewed bookmarks, perhaps similar to Opera 9's spiffy home page thing. Although that one gives you a live preview of the sites you add to it, which I suppose could be done also via an extension.

Download link

[kievia]

Link to installer: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html/

Firefox T-shirts at Mozilla Store

[tepples]

In fact I encourage others to use [Firefox software], I have the t-shirt (literally) and fluffy toy mascot How could you even figuratively have the t-shirt? Literally. But I'd interpret figurative "T-shirt-wearing" to mean figurative "card-carrying".

MoveHHi()

[tepples]

Because closing it takes more then 0 time and opening it takes more then 0 time. Even if restarting Firefox took 8 hours, you wouldn't notice. Most people go through a nightly maintenance process called "sleep" to defragment their minds.

The question is why is this insanity of a application requiring to be restarted continues to be acceptable? Other comments to this article have suggested that Firefox's problem is external fragmentation of its heap. As far as I can tell, the most obvious way to manage heap fragmentation is to defragment the heap. Mac OS classic had the "Memory Manager", which encouraged the use of a double-indirect pointer called a "handle". If most memory was allocated with NewHandle(), the app could occasionally call MoveHHi() to defragment the heap and reclaim the spaces between allocated blocks. But a lot of APIs in Windows and GNU/Linux don't expect underlying memory to be moved around beneath them, removing some of the advantages of such a heap, as any block that the OS holds a reference to has to be "locked" in the heap.

Re:MoveHHi()

[T-Ranger]

If it took exactly 8 hours and I knew that I would be away from a given computer for 8 or more hours.. No.,. That would still be unacceptable.

Sometimes FF needs inter-day restarts. Sometimes it crashes.. Or the OS does. Or something locks up and it needs to be killed. And ATI driver crash might cost me a minute a week.. But an 8 hour restart of my browser would really suck. In any case... Having to restart an application on a regular basis is insanity.

On fragmentation: I don't care. Mozilla is built on some fairly old and obscure code, I grant. The story of FF memory usage is one of developers trying very, very, hard to avoid doing any work. Sure they solved some very specific cases - after getting more users then necessary to produce very detailed error reports - and these small cases were resolved. But now - and this "memory fragmentation" revelation seems to be new - it turns out that perhaps there is a fundamental problem with low level FF/Moz memory handling. Why has it taken years for someone to say "Wow. FF memory management really sucks and there are dozens of small examples of how this is generally true. Perhaps there is a fundamental problem?". It seems to me no one was taking a holistic view of the project. Individual developers may have tweaked very specific issues in their little world.. But why did no leader step up and say "hey, people, what the fuck?"

!ad hominem

[sd.fhasldff]

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

> Nothing else matters (esp. new features) until they've fixed those.
>> Ah, another classic astroturf technique. Firefox doesn't do X, ergo no Firefox for anyone, anywhere!

Re:!ad hominem

[sd.fhasldff]

While he didn't technically call your post an astroturf, I can see why you would take offense at that. However, he attacked your ARGUMENT (with reasons) and called that LINE OF ARGUMENTATION a "classic astroturf technique".

As I said before, however, I think his interpretation of your argument was overly broad and likely untenable. Just because you are offended (personally) by something does not make it a personal attack.

Flash plugin for Opera in Linux

[gr8dude]

the only problem I have with Opera is the "lack" of support for Flash for Opera on Linux

Hmm, I'm not sure I'm following you. I've used Opera with Flash on Linux and things worked as expected. You can find instructions on Opera's site: Installation of Plug-ins for Opera on Linux.

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.

Re:Flash plugin for Opera in Linux

[JeepFanatic]

Thanks for the link. I'll try that out.

Wait.. just hold on a second....

[Mystery00]

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?

I wonder...

[seandiggity]

...if any problems with Firefox 3 will find their way into Iceweasel 3 ;)

Buggy Places system

[MeditationSensation]

I tried it this morning. Some of my bookmarks that were in the bookmarks toolbar disappeared.

Mouse Gestures?

[Fearan]

Anyone know a workaround for getting Mouse Gestures to work in FF3b1?

Triple Click

[muirhejs]

My favorite new feature (from the release notes):

Text selection improvements: Multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; Double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; Triple-clicking selects a paragraph.

Very impressed so far.

Re:Maybe the real answer

[infestedsenses]

That's quite a lot of assumptions you got there based on my post. I write websites based on clean XHTML and CSS that use semantic markup and relative font sizes that scale in every browser. I avoid Javascript and Flash as much as I can. I don't have any "crap on my websites" as you put it, but thanks for asking.

Well, almost...

[richdun]

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).

Re:Well, almost...

[XenoPhage]

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). Hrm.. I did the same here and noticed that the nose is slightly smaller (by like one pixel on each side) than the reference rendering.. But damn close!

Re:Well, almost...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

You probably configured a minimum font size. That sort of thing can affect how the test displays, but it isn't considered to be a failure as long as it works with a standard configuration.

Hrm.. I did the same here and noticed that the nose is slightly smaller (by like one pixel on each side) than the reference rendering.. But damn close!

CSS isn't intended to be pixel-perfect. In particular, the rendering of borders (which are used to implement the diagonals on the nose) isn't precisely specified.

Both Opera and Flash Player are proprietary

[tepples]

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. If you are running the proprietary Adobe Flash Player in your Firefox process, then you have already "tainted" the running copy of Firefox with closed source (in the sense of a tainted kernel).

what matters most

[Tumbleweed]

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.

Portable apps for Windows

[tepples]

Well, at least on the Mac the whole "installer" insanity isn't actually needed It isn't needed much on Windows either , is it?

Re:shuffle

[datapharmer]

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).

Google tooblar doesn't work :(

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Maybe just me

[tygt]

Though I only surf on WinXP, and I almost never close firefox, I haven't had many problems with memory hogging at all, and I actively surf most of the day.

Could it be that since I shut down every night the memory use doesn't "build up"?

How about a "portable version" option?

[jbarr]

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.

Safari 3

[cuijian]

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

Re:Safari 3

[Vegeta99]

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.

There ya go, a rocket strapped to a tricycle is obviously going to go faster than the space shuttle, and not only that, less parts are gonna go flyin' when it crashes.

Re:Safari 3

[cuijian]

Heh, that's funny. I like the part about the tricycle.

Unfortunately, your post is completely void of any actual content to respond to so let me just say this. Sometimes you don't want to be stuck with the space shuttle - its old 70s technology that is being retired.

Turns out you actually get more when you dump the old crufty architecture and start with a clean slate:

Acid 2 support (back in April 2005)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

Mobile support
Safari has a code base that is small and fast enough to be used in Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Nokia's S60 series phones.
Nokia funded Minmo for years and realized that they couldn't get the bloat out of Gecko and moved to WebKit. Google is a huge supporter of Firefox and I'm sure they had some strong technical reasons for doing so.

CSS3 support that Firefox should be jealous of:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/safari-3-and-css-3

HTML5 Client-side Database storage with SQL
http://webkit.org/blog/126/webkit-does-html5-client-side-database-storage/

HTML5 Media support
http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/

CSS Animation
http://webkit.org/blog/138/css-animation/

CSS Transforms
http://webkit.org/blog/130/css-transforms/

There is lots more info over at http://webkit.org/ and http://webkit.org/blog/ the website for Safari's open source engine.

Don't get me wrong Firefox has some great stuff too. I think its great to have as many people pushing for an open web as we can get. If you want to actually have a conversation with like, content, and stuff I'd love to hear why you're such a Firefox fan.

Till then I'm going to be having fun on my tricycle. Be careful on that 'ol shuttle.

    -cj

Re:Safari 3

[Ash-Fox]

If you care about security, speed and ease of use shouldn't you be running Safari?

Shouldn't you be running OpenBSD and Lynx?

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.

Lynx beats Safari's HTML rendering.

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.

I don't know.. The fact you can use Lynx with two keys and enter seems easier than this whole aim and click thing :P

Now in all seriousness, I don't think the issues Firefox currently has in security is even significant (nothing really in the wild). I don't find Safari easier because of the windowing scheme in OS X (no maximization, each site having it's own 'optimum size') and I certainly don't think tabs being disabled by default is 'ease of use'. The only point you have in my opinion is with speed. But even then, the javascript statistics are skewed and I can't recall when I last saw someone complaining about Firefox's speed outside of Slashdot.

Re:Safari 3

[trouser]

Is there a Linux version? No.
Is Apple evil? Yes.

FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?

[tomthegeek]

Has no one heard of FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?

Re:FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?

[Darth_brooks]

Not enough of us apparently.

It'd be nice if mozilla could offer up those tools instead of having to dig around, hoping you've asked google the right question

Re:FrontMotion Firefox Community Edition?

[GaryOlson]

Honestly, no I had not heard of this.

All your browser are belong to us!

Re:It's not so good yet...

[Piata]

Do senior level developers always blow this much smoke? Web 2.0 is a buzz word and it's not Mozilla's responsibility to maintain 3rd party plugins. If you're not into testing beta software, then skip it, but don't bash a beta for what it is; a feature complete build that requires mass testing to crush as many bugs as possible. Building good software shouldn't be a publicity stunt.

Re:shuffle

[GDubs]

Firefox 3 is Acid2 compliant, if you didn't know.

Re:So tell me

[PitaBred]

I don't even see the code any more, all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...

Re:shuffle

[Tickletaint]

Still doesn't have anywhere near the level of CSS(3) support as WebKit. Check Dave Hyatt's blog for a few examples.

Native tabs

[Joe Tie.]

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.

Entrenched ABI

[tepples]

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. Even if C++09 allows for precise, compacting garbage collection, how long will it take for the plug-in application binary interfaces to prohibit bad style?

Re:shuffle

[bhima]

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?

Re:shuffle

[nuzak]

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.

Re:Sure

[Random BedHead Ed]

I know, choice has alwasy been there but I counted the days of 90% IE (and above) as a "single browser web" because at that level developers will happily disregard anything but the browser with the largest share.

Finally!

[porneL]

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 (­).

Re:It's not so good yet...

[BZ]

> They can have my debugging reports and my attention when NoScript works but not before.

That's up to the NoScript developer, actually. The NoScript extension lists what versions of Firefox it's compatible with and explicitly excludes this beta from the list. At some point it'll probably get updated to include that, since it's a one-line change in the maxVersion field in the install manifest.

Heck, you could make that change in the extension yourself, today, and install it.

None of which explains your not filing bugs about the CSS and JS issues you ran into. You clearly tried the browser and ran into them, right? You can use Firefox 2 (or whatever else you want) to file the bug if you want to minimize your NoScript-less browsing time. But saying "nyah, nyah, there are bugs but I won't tell you about them" is just not helpful, sorry.

Not quite

[Titoxd]

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...

Re:Not quite

[argent]

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.

That's another way to do it, yes.

I tend to install beta software in ~/Applications so that it doesn't impact other users on the same machine.

I have had issues with Firefox/Seamonkey and Opera

[Explo]

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.

Bloated Betaware?

[Go-seki]

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

Yeah, Riiiight !!

[Saija]

JavaScript changes Firefox 3 supports JavaScript 1.8. One important change that may require updates to your web site or application is that the obsolete and non-standard Script object is no longer supported. However, since Script was non-standard, it's unlikely this is something you ever did anyway, so you're probably fine.
From this page: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_web_applications_for_Firefox_3/

Homepage option already exists

[tknd]

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).

Re:So tell me

[bob.appleyard]

If you need to step out of the realms of bash builtins, you know something is wrong.

{ echo -e "GET http://www.google.co.uk/ HTTP/1.0\n\n" >&0; while read LINE; do echo "$LINE"; done; } <>/dev/tcp/www.google.co.uk/80

Re:The thing about that is...

[Mr. Underbridge]

This has been debunked many times, you can use a clean install of FF, no extensions, and after a week it's crapped up. I could also contend that's a failure of the extension system, that they can 'leak' or otherwise lose memory.

If it's the pages I'm viewing, FF should handle that. Anything else is a poor excuse.

The developers who have contempt for users have it because they get bitched out by people who they're supporting for free.

Another myth. Most developers (certainly the main ones) have jobs sponsored by the mozilla foundation, which is donated to by...users. There's simply no excuse for the behavior. On the positive note, I'm hoping it's coming to an end. Because otherwise, with an improved IE and other alternatives, FF doesn't have that much going for it.

Let's not kid ourselves. FF beats Opera in terms of market share because it's theoretically a community effort. It certainly isn't because of its features or superior memory handling. If the devs want to isolate themselves and make it really clear that they don't care about the community, they might get what they've always wanted - the ability to work on a dead project that attracts no user interest.

Re:maybe time for a port?

[m2943]

With users complaining about poor speed and high memory usage, moving to a higher-level language will hardly make anyone's day.

I didn't say anything about a "high level language"; D and C# are not "high level languages", they simply happen to be garbage collected languages.

And moving to a language with garbage collection is exactly what Firefox needs because it fixes the reason Firefox is bloated and slow: poor memory management.

Don't take it from me, take it from the Firefox developers: they implemented a garbage collector. However, implementing a garbage collector in user code simply doesn't work as well as when the compiler knows about it.

Re:maybe time for a port?

[m2943]

C# - Basically specific to Microsoft platforms. Cripplingly limited unless you use native code anyway.

Quite wrong: C# has all the same constructs as C and C++, including pointers if you like.

[Language X] Virtually nobody has experience with this language, nice as it may seem. Changing to this would kill Firefox dead.

Virtually nobody has experience with XPCOM.

Firefox has invented its own programming language, it simply has done so very badly.

As for porting to other languages...

With all the effort wasted on XPCOM, Firefox developers could have created their own HLL-to-C translator and written Firefox in that. Heck, if it were a subset of C#, Java, or Objective-C, people would even feel comfortable with it. That would have been less work and made Firefox programming far more accessible than the messy codebase and Firefox specific hacks that are being shipped right now.

Re:shuffle

[BiggusJimmus]

[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.

Not new

[BenoitRen]

JAR URL (JAR files really are just renamed ZIP files) was already supported in Firefox 2.0.

Re:Not new

[jesser]

Being able to refer to a file inside a JAR is not new. Being able to get a list of files inside the JAR (by leaving off the filename after the "!/") is new. See bug 309296 for details.

Uninstall Painless?

[Maldon]

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?

Re:But are the memory leaks fixed? I'm back to IE

[BenoitRen]

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.

Disable ping-back functionality

[tod_miller]

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.

Beta Not available to general public

[Techman83]

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/

Re:It's not so good yet...

[Brett_Zamora]

I had FF 2.0.0.9 installed on a Dell P4 1.8 Ghz with 1 GB memory. I uninstalled it and installed the FF 3 Beta 1. After launching the FF3 browser the first time, about 2 minutes passed and then the Firefox3.exe program started consuming memory. (According to my Task Manager) The performance on my PC went downhill to being unuseable. I did a couple of screen captures of the Task Manager showing FF3.exe using in excess of 900 MB of memory. Finally was able to close the browser, re-opened it a second time and got the same exact results. FF3 Beta 1 has now been uninstalled and FF 2.0.0.9 put back on. I think the beta needs work.

Has the plugin architecture been fixed?

[rrohbeck]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Err, no

[Nursie]

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.

Re:Err, no

[m2943]

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.

Of course, you can avoid memory leaks in C; that's not the issue. The issue is the cost of doing so, and the cost is extra development time, poor performance, and extra bugs relative to systems that automate these issues. That is what the Firefox experience tells you, and it applies to you as well. Firefox shipping with memory leaks isn't the point; the point is the amount of time and effort between shipping a version with memory related bugs and fixing the bugs, because you're spending that kind of time in your projects as well.

As for your supposed corporate credentials, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and all the big, experienced guys are using and shipping C software with pointer errors and memory leaks. All of them have seen the light: Apple added garbage collection to Objective-C, Microsoft is pushing for C#, and Oracle and IBM are pushing for Java. Software developers like you resist the change, and the existence of large codebases is making it difficult to switch overnight, but it is happening. (Java, unfortunately, is a pretty poor choice, but that's a different discussion.)

Re:Rantalicious:I've been using Camino...

[Eskarel]

Yes Firefox 3 is still in beta. But beta means testing, and testing means more than just opening it, browsing to a couple of web pages and then closing it. It means doing what I do with it on a regular basis, which means being able to use my extensions.

I've tried it, it does some wierd things with importing javascript outside of the header. This works in every other browser I've ever seen but not in firefox 3. I'd try to work out what was causing it, but none of my debugging tools work in the new version, so I can't.

Ubuntu...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Or Windows SUS.

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... ...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.

Or, as sibling posters are saying, you could do it through WSUS. So what's the problem?

Perimeter-based security flaw

[The Monster]

It can be difficult to determine how infection can spread.

Remember the original Trojan Horse? It was designed to defeat a perimeter-based security system. Once the perimeter is penetrated, there was no defense. Before networks became standard, there was Sneakernet.

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.

Re:Rantalicious:I've been using Camino...

[Eskarel]

Firebug, CSSmate, a colorzilla, measureit (can you tell I'm a web developer?), I've also been using the straight up web developer add-on as well, though I find firebug more useful.

Re:Does it still use an obscene amount of ram?

[jesser]

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.

Re:shuffle

[BZ]

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.

Cra@p Review

[scmartindale]

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.

Major memory sucking issue

[lpangelrob]

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.

Lol

[Nursie]

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.

Re:Lol

[Nursie]

"Ah, well, that explains it: all of those companies have large constituencies like you that simply don't get it, and marketing, inertia and industry conservatism keeps you in business, not your technical prowess."

Don't get what? that some higher level languages simplify memory handling but also don't solve everything and have other drawbacks? Or am I supposed to somehow "get" that C is (in your deeply flawed opinion) obsolete? Perhaps you'd like to detail why that's your opinion, or if not what exactly I'm supposed to "get"?

Also, I'm amused that first you say that these big companies "get" it, and then you say that they don't get it and inertia/company name is the only reason they keep selling. Make up your mind. If you mean to imply that myself and/or my group are standing firm against corporate modernisation strategy then you're mistaken.

You may also be interested to know we were bought in relatively recently due to aforesaid wild profitability, we didn't have the name then and were already selling into an enterprise market and beating the two major incumbents.

I suggest you back off at this point, you're out of your depth.

Re:It's not so good yet...

[CodeShark]

General agreement. But there's a certain level of completion required before something should be called beta, and in my book this one was too early because it requires a trust level of the users doing the beta that Noscript provides, where out of the box Firefox 3.0 doesn't. So I have to make my machine less safe than if I was using the old buggy version -- which, even with it's flaws -- with NoScript was more safe.

So as a "senior" level, I would have voted against beta status until at least that plug in writer had an opportunity to register their plug in (and update if necessary) as workable with 3.X before releasing. Because I'll bet it's a registration type thing as opposed to plug-in recoding, and registration type stuff takes minutes to do and only a short amount of time to test. And I don't have egg on my face in the mean time.

Re: filing bugs with Firefox 2

[CodeShark]

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....

IF only one could find out WHICH extension or page

[egghat]

... 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

Re: filing bugs with Firefox 2

[BZ]

> 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?

Please read for content.

[argent]

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.

Standalone apps for Windows

[argent]

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.

I stand corrected.

[argent]

Well, I stand corrected. K-Meleon merely has an unfortunate name.

XPI security

[argent]

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?

So, what's there, really?

[argent]

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.

Re:So, what's there, really?

[BenoitRen]

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.

In what way isn't it ready? Lots of people, including non-techie ones, seem to be happy with it.

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*".

It is native. It's not XUL. Or do you mean the look?

By the way, I don't understand what you mean with this insecure XPI thing. Is it the concept? Or the fact that in Firefox they use a white-list? Or that you think it can't be turned off? At least in SeaMonkey, you can.

Re:So, what's there, really?

[argent]

If I have time I'll try a recent version of K-Meleon, and see if it's improved.

I've gone into the XPI security issue at some length in a separate message. The fact that XUL isn't the native UI isn't a security issue, it's a quality of implementation issue... XUL without the XPI installer model may not have security issues, but it's still not native.

Re:So, what's there, really?

[BenoitRen]

You haven't answered my UI question. How is K-Meleon's UI not native? Again, it's not XUL, and I wasn't talking about security at all when mentioning XUL.

You'll be happy to know that K-Meleon treats XPIs just like any other file. The act of installing an extension isn't trivial, though...

Re:So, what's there, really?

[argent]

I didn't say K-Meleon wasn't native.

Other reasons than extensions...

[argent]

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?

Re:Beta shouldn't replace the real thing...

[cyborch]

Ok, I downloaded it. Opened it. Dragged it to the desktop. Doubleclicked it. Noticed that it didn't run a single of my plugins. Deleted it. Took something like 30 seconds in total. Didn't interfere with my Firefox installation at all. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Has anyone compared to Firefox 1.5

[Dr.Who]

With Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Windows XP SP2 and six windows open the VM size is less than the Memory size.

Mem Usage Peak Mem Usage VM Size
68,388 K 69,356 K 59,276 K

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!