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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 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.
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.
It would take a really bad OS to make memory fragmentation a problem, since memory address pointers are virtualized (IE I'm talking about how process A can't access process B's memory and how the same numerical pointers in each point to different memory locations). Even Windows isn't that bad. Besides, the only performance metric any kind of fragmentation can really affect is speed, never size.
Or is this some misnomer or am I misunderstanding this?
I love my firefox, but with Opera and Konq out there, the only reason I really stick to Firefox is for the extensions that I simply can't live without. I am getting so damned tired of it crashing on KDE time after time that I'm on the verge of being willing to dump it all and survive extension-free. As it is, I'll be just browsing around, reading some stuff, click a link... the page I want will start to come up... and then it'll just hang out of nowhere and never come back to life. I'll kill the process and re-launch it and it'll be fine again for a few hours. It's just so damn frustrating. Thank god for the session saver. That absolutely had to be implemented, because without it nobody would continue using firefox unless it was completely crash-free.
I do like the idea of using Konq full-time, but the extensions just aren't there. Meh.
You mean to say IE8 did, so you'd hope Firefox will!
'leaks like a sieve' has been a figure of speech for quite some time now, I don't think you can blame its inaccuracy on the author of the article
It is much more important to be compliant with CSS than just passing the Acid2 test, and so I really don't pay much attention to this test at all. There are better test suites out there, for instance http://www.css3.info/selectors-test/test.html.
We need to pay less attention to passing any one test and more to standards compliance as a whole.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
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.
Normally, I'd agree with you, but I think in this case it's different. It's all about public perception and to and extent, marketing. If IE8 can pass a test that's widely publicized and the latest FireFox can't, people may doubt that FireFox is superior. Of course people such as yourself will realize it doesn't mean much, but it's a very easy thing to point to and say "Hey it looks like Microsoft got something right."
I would hope not. The OS on its own isn't really doing any useful or interesting work.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
It's been claimed for IE8, but anyone can download the Firefox betas and check for themselves. Big difference.
Wouldn't be the first dose of vapourware to come out of Redmond....
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
To be honest its mostly irrelevant at this point since you're still going to have to support FF2, IE6 and IE7 for years yet.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
You're right. We won't be able to fix problems today, so fuck it, let's just never fix them.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
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
Abandoned no.
Kludging to pass the test without actually implementing full CSS2 support, yes.
ACID2 is a test of a few of the hardest elements of CSS2, based on the assumption that if you passed the test, you'd have good support for the rest of the standard. If your goal was to just get the tick in the box for marketing purposes, it wouldn't be hard to just kludge it.
That's very much Microsoft's style. Look at how they're hacking ISO instead of fixing MSOOXML for a recent example.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Bullshit. Do you think Firefox doesn't have to render stuff written in Frontpage too? Mozilla pays just as much attention to quirks mode as Microsoft.