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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.""
Beta 1 did, so you'd hope Beta 2 will :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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.
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
Sorry for replying again but I just found out that the test itself is broken and not Firefox. The reason is given here but it appears that it now renders wrong in Opera and Safari as well.
Hmm... The test breaks and IE is suddenly compliant while previously compliant browsers are not *dons his tin foil hat*
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
To the best of my knowledge, Firefox typically does not leak memory, at least in the conventional sense that references to memory are erroneously discarded and unused allocated memory cannot be freed. Instead, the actual heart of the issue is supposedly memory fragmentation:
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/
As the linked article suggests, memory fragmentation can be reduced by replacing heap allocations with stack variables, where possible, in hotspots such as the JavaScript engine. As for the heap allocations that cannot be dealt away with in this manner, effort can be made to group them together such that they are less likely to cause fragmentation.
It shows up like that because of a misconfiguration on webstandards.org. (In particular, "not found" pages are served as 200 instead of 404.) Safari and Opera will show you the same thing. Hixie is trying to get it fixed.
The version of Acid 2 on the author's website works fine.
The shareholder is always right.
Sorry, I call bullshit. The only time I've seen that "response" was on Ben Goodger's blog, numerous comments by ignorant fanboys, and a lot of copy/pastes by people like you. I have yet to see anyone familiar with Firefox internals make this (patently false) claim. Of course part of the problem with the Web is that most people can't tell apart a random blogger who doesn't even use Firefox, a Firefox fanboi, and a Gecko developer, even if they were to try. And they don't try.
;)
The claim I _have_ seen made is that leak bugs would be easier to fix if people actually provided some idea of how to reproduce the leak (e.g. which sites they visited in the process of leaking). At some point David Baron wrote an extension that allowed collecting such data automatically, and the results from this led directly to a number of leaks being fixed in Gecko 1.9.
The other issue Gecko 1.8 had is that it had several leak scenarios that particularly hit AJAXy apps. With the growth in the number of such apps, the leaks became more serious. Gecko 1.9 fixes those issues.
Try the beta. You might like it.