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First Look At Firefox 3.0 Beta 2
DaMan writes "ZDNet takes Firefox 3.0 beta 2 for a spin and draws some conclusions that should be sweet music to Mozilla's ears.
"Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I've tried it on — from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters. No matter what you want doing — opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking — it all happens swiftly and smoothly. What surprises me about the Firefox 3.0 beta is how many memory leaks that Mozilla have fixed. Complaints of memory leaks with Firefox 2.0 were met with an attitude of "Leaks? What leaks?" Considering that there have been more than 300 leaks plugged, it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves.""
But does it pass Acid 2?...
I was under the impression that the issue was memory fragmentation. Ah well... does anyone have a link about this? I swear I read it somehere, or maybe it's from here heh.
Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?
"Considering that there have been more than 300 leaks plugged, it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves."
No shit, Sherlock. It is amazing that they even got the leaks under control with this release. Memory leaks are not the easiest bugs to find, especially with code that has been stale for several years. If they would have jumped on the memory leaks at a much sooner date (you know, pre 1.0) then they wouldn't have had to use a Herculean effort to stomp on them in 3.0. Let's hope they keep the memory leaks under control for future versions instead of putting it on the back burner.
But on older systems, the sieve like memory leaks made it inoperable within a short period of time. Hopefully this will allow those of us who run legacy hardware to have a modern relatively secure web browser.
Except for the newer bits, like most of Places and the cosmetics of new Super-autocomplete dropdown (which feels ... unrefined; functionality-wise it's doing a great job).
It's interesting to see the new animated-ish tab movement on the tab bar (when you scroll the mousewheel over it) and the animation when things like 'Remember this password?' appear. They look pretty, but are slow on some crappy video cards -- would anyone know how these 'animation' effects can be disabled?
And, kudos to the Firefox team -- I've been using v3 Beta1 for some time, and the browser does feel snappier. Of course, I haven't loaded up my 4-5 'must-have' extensions (Adblock, TabMixPlus, SwitchProxy, DownloadThemAll mainly, sometimes YSlow) so it'll be interesting to see how v3 does in "real"-use scenarios.
Go somewhere random
I can't wait for Firefox to stop crashing every now and then. I'm seriously looking forward for Firefox 3.0
I remember the excitement when people first started using the trimmed down Firefox versions. Lean, mean, secure, and eventually the amazing array of extensions people have grown to no longer be able to do without.
... ...
Those days seem long ago now. The project needs a top to bottom rewrite to deal with orders of magnitude more demanding usage of large numbers of tabs over days or weeks at a time.
Firefox needs to:
1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves
2) Bring the memory-performance balance up to par with other browsers
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
Tab 1: 35 megs
Tab 2: 50 megs
Extension 1: 500k
Extension 2: 100 megs == Zoinks!
Extension 3: 300k
So that memory/resource leaks can be readily identified, reported, and fixed.
The save active tabs option has helped to allow people shutdown and wipe the memory slate clean but that really is not a solution a decent piece of software should be forced to rely on.
While that doesn't rule out Resource Allocation Is Initialization (RAII) - a standard C++ memory management tool - it does make it a lot more labor intensive, by requiring special code to be written for each type of object that's managed.
With templates being allowed, one can use the standard library auto_ptr, as well as reference counted smart pointer templates.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Do we praise them for fixing the leaks? Or do we do the opposite for having obviously lied to us all this time?
The only reason Britney's vagina leaks so bad is all those losers making "deposits" in it...
Maybe it's late and I'm looking to nitpick, but "it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves" is a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications that I don't think are strictly true.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Firefox got replaced with some lame Iceweasel thing. Besides just looking nasty, it doesn't use the firefox settings. I lose the themes, stored passwords (Talk about lock-in! How in hell to I dig those out of firefox?), stored cookies (a bit more lock-in), plug-ins, etc.
Does anyone have a tentative date when v3 will be released?
. . . FlameCoyote
Hey, if this version can upgrade without deleting my bookmarks and javascript whitelist (like it did 3 of the last 4 times I upgraded), I'm excited!
When was the last time IE did that? Sometime between "never" and "why don't you fire up that bong again?"
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The best new feature is the so-called Awesome Bar, the new url input.
It takes a couple hours to get used to, but it's simply fantastic. Kudos to the team that implemented it.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
In the present 2.0.0.11 Firefox, I miss the ability to pause/resume or even stop/resume downloads. This is a feature I thought would be included. What about support for bittorrent, anyone?
But it adds a bit of comedic effect if you think of them as Shatner pauses.
It (perhaps) seems a little faster than 2.0.0.11, but I haven't done anything "strenuous" with it yet, nor did I ever really see any problems with memory being gobbled by Firefox, so I can't tell the difference. I REALLY can't tell the difference because all of my themes, extensions and bookmarks, etc. seem to be working fine (miracle of miracles), automatically, but they've also not changed the version when you go to Help->About Mozilla Firefox.
Hell, if I were coding this stuff, I'd change the version number before I'd made any code changes, just for the hell of it!
How about basic useability improvements that I've been hoping for since Firefox 0.8 (Firebird back then, or maybe Phoenix even) such as page-created modal dialogs (eg. javascript:alert("");) being tab-modal instead of application-wide, or how about the Downloads dialog being useful? I'm not talking about making it a Download Manager or anything, I mean stuff like actually telling me if a download fails instead of reporting "Complete" even if the download URL resulted in an error or if it cuts out before downloading Content-Length bytes. And I'm sure there are plenty more things like these I could think of if it wasn't 5am right now.
I know this stuff may be considered trivial things to some people, but it strikes me as basic functionality. I would hope that Firefox won't make it to a third supposedly major version change without these kinds of things being addressed.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug, and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong. Those, who aren't willing to put up with the hostility are not even deemed worthy of being a user — if you had a bug, you should've reported it!
But when a new release has (some of) the bugs fixed, the fixes are touted as a major leap forward. We are supposed to love the new version for all the fixes it includes — and ignore all the bugs, that the next version will be addressing...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'm posting this from FF 3.0 beta2 right now. It's a good improvement, IMHO and I intend to keep it. Much smoother, pages are more legible for some reason, very quick rendering. It imported everything except the plugins. System specs: Dual P3 coppermines at 1 gHz, IGig of PC-133 ram, cable modem at 100-base-T eth0. OpenSuSE 10.3 with all updates and a bunch of add-ons. I'm happy with it so far and will either look for a source RPM or roll my own SuSE RPM for it.
C|N>K
I prefer(red) the Download Statusbar to the default download window.
And since memory is so cheap these days and everyone has a ton of it, what's the big deal about half a gig dedicated to the browser anyway?
Maybe if you're a web developer. My whole OS doesn't use half a gig of memory!
I am posting from Firefox 2.0.0.11 on a zombie Wallstreet PowerBook G3 running Gentoo Linux. Everything else runs livably, but Firefox REALLY SUCKS on a 266MHz G3 with 128MB of RAM.
Earlier today, switching into Firefox's workspace to see if GMail had finished loading and then switching back took nearly three minutes. And I didn't even have multiple tabs open.
If Firefox 3 performs better, I'll stop trying to switch to other browsers. (Konqueror won't finish building until sometime next year, and Opera is too weird for me.)
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
We need a rewrite that strips out all the bloat to make a lean, fast, bloat free browser out of a basically solid codebase. It'll be like it's risen from the ashes, so we need a name that reflects that. A name like "phoenix". I wonder if that's taken...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
A link within a link? That's new.
can't I fucking scroll by clicking in the middle mouse button?
Who decided to make it load up the homepage anyway?
I have this really funny quote that I like to put here. Unfortunately, there's this really annoying thing called a char
Does it run Linux?
I seldom use much more than a quarter gig for Firefox.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
One of my pet peeves of FireFox is that if you save a picture to your harddrive, Firefox goes through the download manager, which is irritating. And slow. Does Firefox 3 fix this?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
FF 3.0, IE 8.0 and XP SP3 betas all have good reviews, great news for us. Vista sp1 not so much. Anything else to be excited about in the pipeline.
Is there a setting in v3 where I can see what cookies were last modified/accepted? I have Firefox ask me each time it encounters a site that wants to save a cookie and sometimes if I decline and the site doesn't work without cookies, I want to go back and have FF save its cookies in a session. But FF sorts cookies but name and that makes things difficult to find.
Another highly insightful review written by a fist-grader...
Not two hours ago I finally made a decision that was very painful to make: I switched from Firefox (after many years) across to IE7, because I just couldn't take the bloat any more. On a good day Firefox would be sucking 400MB of RAM, and my system would start slowing to a crawl.
If the leaks have been addressed, I'll very much be looking forward to re-migrating to Firefox. May the gold ship soon!
-- No, no gems to be found in this sig.
I can't say I remember ever seeing a "trimmed down" Firefox version.
Perhaps you mean Firefox itself? Pheonix was a trimmed-down Mozilla. It was renamed to Firebird, then Firefox, to avoid conflicting with existing products, trademarks, and asshats.
That makes your suggestion all the more humorous.
Speak for yourself. I do just fine on Konqueror.
You know, I started out using it for days or weeks at a time. Then I learned about its session management features.
Also, you're welcome to try a complete rewrite. In fact, why don't you join one of the complete rewrite projects, like Webkit?
You see, if it's a complete rewrite, why even call it Firefox anymore? Wouldn't it be a completely other platform? And there already are other platforms that don't leak like a sieve.
Between tabs might be possible, but you have to understand, first, that large chunks of Firefox itself is written in JavaScript. The extensions, too. JavaScript is, inherently, not threaded. You get a JavaScript thread -- it can communicate asynchronously with other things, but that's it.
So that means, it would really take a significant amount of effort to make tabs independent, but more importantly, if it would really take a complete rewrite (as you say), it would almost certainly kill one of the main features of Firefox -- that its extensions are so powerful and easy to write.
But let's assume that this was possible, even easy. But, "within tabs"? Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a Firefox rewrite. That is a rewrite of the World Wide Web.
You might get away with some iframe hackery, but even that seems extremely unlikely. JavaScript is NOT threaded. I don't care how many times you, or others like you, want it to be -- the day we have to make a single webpage threaded is the day that webpage can no longer be a webpage, as we know it today. The only way it would continue to be a webpage at all is if we redefine the concept of "webpage".
Hey, I wouldn't mind picking, say, Python as the next scripting language for the Internet. But as long as we're stuck with ECMA-262, you get no threads.
People who are really curious can already do something like this: Compare RAM usage with Extension Foo loaded, and without Extension Foo loaded.
Most of us aren't going to care, though. How often do you actually look at how much RAM your system is using, aside from Firefox? Right now, I'm running four instances of Konsole, one of Kopete, and one of Konqueror, and I have absolutely no clue how much RAM any of them are taking -- or even of how much RAM I have free. I could check, but why bother? I've got plenty.
This is actually the least wacky of your ideas, but I think there are actually reasons it would be a technical challenge. And I think if you understood the concept of "extension", as distinct from, say, "program", it would be obvious that such a standard display would be impossible, or if it was even remotely possible, would be insanely misleading.
Agreed, except for the fact that most people are going to have to shutdown anyway. You've got to reboot Windows sometime, and you really should at least hibernate once a day (when you sleep) to save power.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Don't get me wrong lads, I love firefox, but the downloader in 1.x and 2.x is ASSSSSSSSS
I know that 3.0 did SOME changes to the downloader but how many? Is it just the UI or resume?
In FF 2.0 on a single core, p4 3ghz, if I open say a 1920x1200 JPG on a web site, then right click to save as, the ENTIRE BROWSER dies in the ass for up to nearly 10 seconds, it even does it on my heavily overclocked quad core machine at home (still 4 or 5 seconds)
There's something about that download box which just completely chugs machines.
Posting from RC2 now. It's a lot faster on my system, big time. Noscript works fine also. Keep it up devs!
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
new int [100000];
do_browser();
}
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
These problems have been solved for twenty years now; that software in 2007 would be manually reference-counting (and not even handling reference cycles properly!) and digging for bits of fragmented memory to parcel out is pretty embarrassing. You could instead, for example, use a modern generational garbage collector.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Are they going to do anything about Javascript performance?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Will dodgy plugins still be able to kill or deadlock the whole app?
The reason I am waiting for Firefox 3 is the new Gecko engine which will make vertical text possible. With this, it should be possible to make tabs vertical. Right now the only way to get that in Firefox is the Rotab extension, but it is an ugly slow and unpolished hack which has not been updated in ages. Hopefully a major extension like TabMixPlus will make vertical text an option
in FF3.
They've made some things better, and some things got worse. Or maybe they're just continuing to pretend the Mac doesn't exist.
For example, they claim to have "Cocoa native" widgets. Well, they look a bit more native, but they still don't act native. Even simple things like the about-box having a useless toolbar-toggle still aren't fixed. Click "Advanced" in the prefs and see Mac OS X 10.1-style tabs. If you turn off the status bar, the resize-grip overwrites part of the scrollbar. Popup menuitems don't blink like normal menuitems when you choose them. Little bloopers like this are everywhere still. Do they not have any Mac devs, or does the architecture make trivial problems hard to solve?
They did fix a couple of things that are really nice: triple-clicking now works properly, and the drop-shadow on popup menus looks much closer (though still not quite right). Purely on user interface, though, I'd say there are more things that got worse than better.
The new bookmarks system sounds like a good idea, but it's not really usable yet. When you try to Bookmark This Page, you get a popup that looks like a sheet (in the top-right or top-left corner, depending on whether you have tabs -- ?), with buttons Delete and Done (!), but it disappears if you focus a different window (and still adds a bookmark!). The whole thing is really weird. Tagging is a good idea, but the UI is a complete mess.
Overall, it does feel faster, and it hasn't crashed (though I've only been using it for a day). I guess being more stable is the most important thing, and they've got plenty of releases left to fix the UI. Unfortunately, they don't have a history of actually fixing the Mac UI, so I guess if all I get is speed and stability, that's better than nothing. Small steps. Firefox 8 will act like a normal Mac application, just you wait!
Most generational GCs I know of use copying; they have tiered object-age regions and copy newer objects into the older-object regions if they live long enough. So if your program allocates a zillion objects of which 95% die quickly, the 5% get copied elsewhere (and are packed during the copying, reducing fragmentation) while the 95% get collected, leaving your new-objects area a contiguous free area again.
You're right that it's the copying that is the fundamental benefit; a plain copying garbage collector with no generations would handle fragmentation just fine. Generational GCs are just a typically more efficient, and these days more common, way of doing it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Cache the html, and small images, and push larger images to the disk cache. End result, much less ram use, and nearly the same speed.
But todays webpages, most are dynamic and not static, so caching it useless, how about a do not cache list of domains!!! Just about
every page i do a back on, its never instantly refreshed from ram, its reconnects to the server, re-renders, re-downloads everything because
its all php/asp/cfm stuff.
On another suggestion, how about give firefox the Vista feature of using a flash drive for cache. Its MORE SECURE, leave no traces on the desktop, and use much
less ram, if the file IO is comparable to ram io. We only need recall speeds of 100ms, which is fast enough for any response.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Memory pools are made so that you can have a large real block of ram used for lots of small allocations, and you could have different sized pools
for different sized 'puddles'. Now if you allocate ram using handles, and not pointers, it gives the memory allocator/manager the abillity to defrag the ram
as it is... as long as apps can signify that X bit of ram is not in use during X time slot, ie semaphore based ram allocs in pools with access locks.
Sure its something that should be OS specific, but for an app that is used on multi OSes of different versions, its sometimes good to re-wrap this
on a higher level if you cannot trust the OS to do it right all the time.
oh and having 64meg or so of never-page-out ram can be helpfull too.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
*starts as minor giggling and rolls into full blown laughter*
"Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
Why, oh why is there no way to mod "-1, Insane,troll"?
it's lose not loose!
ACID2 fits in perfectly with the Microsoft Mindset. Remember how MS screwed other browsers. They...
1) custom coded their HTML generators (e.g. Frontpage) to generate badly broken webpages, which any sane browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc) would have problems with
2) custom coded IE to handled the badly broken webpages produced by Frontpage, etc.
The net result was a World Wide Web full of pages that are "best viewed with Internet Explorer". Embracing broken "MS Extensions" is wrong. Yet the people behind ACID2 seem to think that it's a good idea that a web browser should take a badly broken webpage and guess at what the "intent" of the webpage is. What's next? A C compiler that tries to guess what you intended your program to do, rather than returning a compiler error when it encounters broken C code? The solution to broken webpages should be to fix the broken webpages.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Yes, burn the heretic!
lynxcache mirror: http://lynxcache.com/The_Mozilla_Blog_raquo_Blog_Archive_raquo_Firefox_3_Beta_2_released.html
The real questions is, will firefox stop sucking on a mac. FF1 was stable, but 2 crashes like a blind hanglider with vertigo.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
If you have some evidence that IE more secure or functioning better than Firefox, then I'd like to see some documentation on that. Personally, I use Firefox, Konqueror, Epiphany, Lynx, etc, and would call myself a browser-agnostic. Hell, for kicks I even fire up IE in Wine every once in a while. I'd use Opera too if they had a 64 bit version. The parent was clearly either a troll or someone who knows shit about browsers. (Or someone who has access to documentation that noone else have seen.)
Opera is excellent, especially in regards to its small footprint, standards support and speed. The big gotcha, though, is still its closed source nature. So I don't generally recommend it except in situations like that one (with 128MB RAM) where it's the only appropriate option.
However, that does not mean that it has to be difficult to install. You can install Opera from a repository and let APT, or a graphical front end like Adept or Synaptic, do all the work.
I'd like to see Opera find some kind of open source licensing model, even if it is a dual licensing plan like with Qt or MySQL. Alternately, I'd like to see Firefox trim down further. After all, it got started to avoid the everything+kitchensink problem of Mozilla.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
If a sieve didn't leak, wouldn't it just be a defective bowl?
It's simple. It has to update the virtualizer that's running the rootkit inside which you have the perception that your OS is running in. In order to update the rootkit virtualizer, it has to stop direct virtualization and fall back to simple emulation. But once the new rootkit is on, and all the neccessary updates have been installed, the virtualizer kicks back in and takes control of the host.
Firefox 3 under Windows requires Win2K, XP or Vista. Under OSX it supports MacOSX 10.3+ only.
Thankfully, the number of users affected is low, and those older systems (especially the Win98/ME users..) have their own problems that go beyond browsers.
However, I mostly agree with your sentiment. Supporting just the current and maybe the prior major release should be sufficient.. especially if you're coding for standards, in which case you don't have much to worry about.
YOU DO NOT FOOL THE TROLLGOONS!
VGPowerlord is an alternate pseudonym for Jombeewoof! YOU HAVE BEEN EXPOSED! We, the TrollGoons, have relentlessly pursued Jombeewoof. We will now also relentlessly pursue VGPowerlord. You will be profusely exposed as a deleterious child-raping sex offender and incompetent academian every time you post on Slashdot. Just as we have done with Jombeewoof. You are on McCarthy's list, you pinko commie scum!
The TrollGoons are ubiquitous!!! We are Slashdot police!
Jombeewoof is a bastard who thinks the world owes him a living. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=267807&cid=202 [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] 07637 [slashdot.org] Jombeewoof tried to destroy an Internet Service Provider in Massachusetts by expecting large bandwidth without paying anything. Educated alone doesn't pay the bills. Jombeewoof is not worth your mod points and is a MySpace loser. Jombeewoof, give up, get off the Internet. The TrollGoons won't leave you alone.
YOU ARE NOT WANTED ON SLASHDOT!
The number of leaks that exist in an application has little if any relationship to how much an application leaks memory. A single bad leak that happens often can cause enormous memory consumption, but even a large number of small leaks no one of which happens very often may not appear to leak much at all. Statements like this make me wonder if their author has ever written any nontrivial code at all.
I'm not at all saying that the Mozilla code isn't a memory hog (it's well-known that it is), nor that it doesn't exhibit the symptoms of memory leaks, which is also well-known, although as others have pointed out the issues are complex and often Mozilla gets the blame for leaks that are actually caused by third-party extensions. What I am saying is that you can't just simply count up the number of "memory leak bugs" and say whether an application leaks "a lot of memory" - sometimes the two are correlated, but by no means always.
Sheesh.
Opera has the best downloader I know of. As you clumsily fill out the dialog box questions at human speed, the file is being downloaded in the background at net speed. Half the time when I finally press enter the file is already completely downloaded. Zero or close to it cpu utilization.
Now if only Opera would incorporate that super autocomplete thingy...
I come here for the love
I've seen a few references to this, and I just checked their site again. As before, I only found versions for "Windows, English". Is there some way I can make it run on my Mac and/or my linux machines? Does it work in German or Arabic or Chinese?
...
This is obviously some definition of "portable" that I haven't encountered before
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I get lost on Mozilla's website. Anybody have a link to the actual download. Beta1 crashed on startup on my computer.
If you have some evidence that IE more secure or functioning better than Firefox, then I'd like to see some documentation on that.
Here you go!! How about an entire security website for ya?
Obviously, it's not documentation which nobody else has seen, it's simply being better informed than, well, anyone else here. Not too difficult, considering Firefox users (and FOSSies in general) have a long and glorious tradition of keeping their head in the sand regarding their own faults. That's why they have no credibility, you see.
Even the top level post cites the serial lying regarding Firefox's history of memory leaks. You can't change reality, but you sure can mod it down, can't you?
Assholes like you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever happened to Minimo?
Constitutionally Correct
How come my 700MHz Duron with 384MB memory ran Firefox perfectly? Never had any problems. At least none that were memory-related. I'm convinced that 99% of all the memory issues people THINK they have is because Firefox keeps allocating memory as long as the system allows it to... which is the right thing to do! If you buy gigs of memory and the system isn't using them, why shouldn't firefox (or any other application) keep gobbling them up? Firefox releases the memory nicely again if the system wants it (e.g. you start up Open Office).
Maybe it's your extensions or plugins that are causing the problems, if in fact you are experiencing problems?
That's not to say that there are NO leaks. Of course there are. I've used IE many, many times where it simply stopped responding and had to be stopped. I've experienced the same thing with Opera, although far less frequently. The only times I've had to shut down Firefox has been due to plugins or extensions. Again, not saying there aren't real leaks and maybe you just happen to visit sites that cause these cases to occur, I don't know, but it seems quite clear that 99% of the problems people report aren't real (it's just a memory usage number, which is useless in many, many ways).
He is a volunteer, right? Then what they do is a gift from their heart, not a job. Stop expecting perfection, and sit down and think how you can help these people improve your software.
http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top
It is easy to find if you simply google it. I used the following as search words: "firefox 3 beta 2 download", sans quotes. However if you are the type that wants a direct link, see the beta download page.
When you can't find something in a site, its often much easier to just simply put it in google, or any other search engine.
All posts released under the GNU Free Documentation License
I am a rather heavy browser user. I usually have in excess of 50 tabs open. I usually keep going back to 3 or 4 of them, continuously open new tabs and close them, and occasionally go through the ones I have open and read/close them. I normally hibernate my computer (I run XP) and shut it down only occasionally. Currently my laptop has idle time of 107 hrs and Firefox has CPU time of 2hrs. I think I last restarted Firefox to install an update.
I used to have really serious memory problems with Firefox. My memory usage would skyrocket very quickly, and I'd have to close it and reopen. This stopped a while ago when I installed FlashBlock. I rarely view flash anymore, and my memory footprint is rather stable. Right now I have VM Size of 403M - not small, but I have 4 windows and 97 tabs open. Have fairly few add-ons installed: DownloadHelper, FlashBlock, IETab, TabMixPlus and TalkBack.
I don't believe that memory leaks on Firefox are a problem, at least not on Windows. I think it is the plug-ins that are causing the problems.
Cheers,
m
...the accusation of a memory leak in an open source project on slashdot.org. Or driver functionality on linux/BSD. No matter what it stirs up the duality mode of attack/protect, us/them and eventually spills over into the Middle East somewhere.
:)
You'd think by now we'd recognize our behavior patterns and evolve
Kudos to all those who have toiled and slaved over this project for making it the best and, in doing so, adding a hidden benefit of making computing more green.
*** Don't be dull.***
Well, ok, I did.. Had a quick look at the sidux.com Software forum. Didn't see anything I haven't experienced myself, crashes, high CPU loads etc... The usual stuff :)
poor quality control the iceweasel releases have apparently hadIn fact right now I'm writing this on such an Iceweasel release (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.10) Gecko/20071115 Iceweasel/2.0.0.10 (Debian-2.0.0.10-0etch1)) just now on Debian etch... Yea this fscking thing keeps crashing every day... but it is a gift, and instead of whining I say loudly *thanks*, and that if I get some time available I'd certainly help. And I think they do need some help, look 547 freakin bugs are there and only 7 people track the PTS (maillist to get info about what happens in a package). The maintainer looks like he has many other things to do in Debian as well and I think he is also in the GNUTLS team. Surely they have other things to do as well, they may have jobs or families for example.
Of course I should say that most of the problems in Iceweasel probably come from upstream (Firefox), although without proper analysis it is difficult many times to know for sure whether a problem is in the browser code or in some lib.
Even though I have suffered from the bugs, I don't think it's right to whine about it as if volunteers had an obligation to build my free software. They do what they do for their beliefs or sometimes for fun, we shouldn't whine at these people even if sometimes the produced software is sloppy.
It is M$ that has an obligation to create software that at least partially works, since you pay for it, and yet its own software is much more buggy than free software. It is because they don't write code for the love (they don't even try to combine coding for the love with business, which is perfectly possible, for example they could release open-source and then get business as support/customisation contracts... but no, they keep the code closed as if code is like cattle in corrals).
The way free software works socially is not to have distinctions between developers and users. Such distinctions exist in closed source. In free software, every user should aspire to become a devel at some point and contribute actively. And the mindset "oh look this stuff is full of bugs, they don't do a proper job" means that somewhere in the mind of people who say this exists a small thought that says "I am a consumer, I only consume, and I expect others to feed me good software". In free software we should see ourselves as both producers and consumers, and we should specifically say "ok, this software is crap, but I can help fix it, and even if it's written in a language I don't know I can sit down and learn it".
I usually don't read TFAs. But when I noticed that the author has used JPEG encoding for a screenshot, I didn't bother to read what he has to say.
I have a truly marvelous proof of the Riemann hypothesis which this sig is too short to contain...
I was feeling just like I used to feel years ago when i switched to Firefox. IE sucked so bad but I was still comfortable using it. I liked the tabs in firefox and many other features but for some reason it took me time to dump IE. Now with those thousands of problem with Firefox I was looking the opera way. It was the same feeling. Opera has some features which are cooler than firefox but I just could not crossover. I am glad to see that mozilla has finally admited the memory leaks and fixed it. I was begining to believe in a bizzare conspiracy theory that microsoft had infiltrators who were sabotaging firefox :-P. How could something so good go so bad and then when you got to help in the forums they all acted as if i was some dumb f@ck who did not know to operate a computer.
It's portable in the sense that you can put it on a usb key and take it (and your settings) with you. (Not portable in the sense that it is cross platform)
;)
For Linux, portability is not an issue. You can just untar the firefox binary on a usb key and just run it from there. Also, by manipulating the $HOME variable, you can define where the settings should be stored.
Sorry for being insensitive, but who needs a native language version? Your English seems to be just fine
"They copied our code!" Another chair was thrown somewhere at Redmond..
I like the new features and it looks like it did pass the Acid 2 test after all. The new theme is also on the good track and I might not install firefox 1.5 theme again.
The site that causes the most trouble for me is fark.com, which has pointers to lots of random newswire articles (and snarky headlines), which I normally read by opening each interesting-sounding one in its own tab and then reading the articles. Most online newspapers have some collection of random components, with whatever Javascript and flash animation the page designers thought would be most eyecatching or insightful or shiny, so it's 50-100 different kinds of dancing pigs burning RAM and CPU time and every piece of bad scriptware ever written and every different source of annoying ad-banner that's fit to print. Unfortunately, it's not a really good test case for the developers, because not only is FARK constantly adding new articles and scrolling old ones off into the archives, but the news articles they point to may stick around a few days or not depending on how the newspaper manages their website, and the advertising banners on the newspapers are coming up differently every time.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The CSS specifications mandate how bad input should be handled; they define the error handling. The Acid 2 test intends to test that error handling. If browsers handle errors differently from how the specifications mandate, they are not compliant with the specifications, so they may fail the test.
If the result of errors was undefined, you'd have a good point. It would make no sense to test what is undefined in the specifications. But that is not the case. Errors in CSS are supposed to be handled in a specific way, and testing that is entirely reasonable.
If you're interested, you can always have a look at the specifications for yourself.
CSS level 1
CSS level 2
CSS level 2 revision 1
Just for all those who think that IE doesn't leak memory:
"It's possible to set up a ciricular reference that prevents cleanup, and this leaks memory in IE."
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9204
The point simply being that there are almost certainly circumstances under which ANY browser leaks memory. The circumstances likely aren't the same, of course, which is part of the problem and why different people have different experiences.
In the end, those who claim that a given browser leaks memory really need to provide DETAILS. Not just "running it for any significant time" or some such BS. Real details of pages visited and actions taken on those pages. If there's a leak, it'll be reproducible. So log your visits (hey, "history") and try figuring out which ones are causing the problem.
To see if the leaking is related to Javascript, try turning it off once you have found a reproducible case (which might be a huge list of sites of which only one might be the actual offender).