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.""

Comments

Re:looking forward to going back to firefox

[Seumas]

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.

It should be fast

[T-Bone-T]

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. Those don't strike me as particularly hard things to process. Browsers have been doing most of those things quite well for a long time on much weaker hardware. If the browser bogs down adding a bookmark, it has serious problems.

Re:Hmmm...

[RotsiserMho]

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."

Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster

[QuantumG]

I don't think any of us give a shit about the specifics.. let the developers sort that out, but anything that causes the browser to lock up such that you can't switch tabs needs to be fixed.

Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster

[Pulzar]

Your list of must have features are not end-user features. Why should the browser be bloated with what are debugging and profiling tools?

They *are* end-user features, though. In Windows, you can open the task manager and see how much memory each task is taking up. Would you also argue that that is a bloated debugging feature? Is 'top' a bloat? Firefox is a little OS of its own, running multiple extensions and web apps, I don't see why a feature that's standard on every OS is so non-applicable to Firefox.

Since every instance of Firefox is different because of the extensions, the only way to figure out how to keep the memory usage down is by having these memory-reporting features available. It's a necessity, as much as it is on other platforms.