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First Look At Firefox 3.0 Beta 2

Posted by samzenpus on from the check-it-out dept.

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.""

14 of 531 comments (clear)

  1. Why so many leaks? by Aminion · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?

    1. Re:Why so many leaks? by wizardforce · · Score: 2, Interesting

      from the tests I've done on different firefox builds, the extensions are by far the biggest problem in regard to memory use although firefox can use a lot of memory under certain conditions that have nothing to do with extensions. if firefox is left open for hours/days at a time, multiple pages etc... it will use a lot more memory.

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      Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    2. Re:Why so many leaks? by BZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

      A brief answer is "yes".

      There is sloppy coding in some parts of the codebase (some of which are not actually used in Firefox, though; parts of the addressbook code in mailnews come to mind). The reference-counting system used in Gecko will leak in the presence of reference cycles (mitigated in 1.9 with the cycle collector). The reference-counting system and the GC-based JS engine don't play that nice together in some ways (again mitigated by the cycle collector; planned to be fixed in Gecko 2.0 by moving to a GC-based setup for the C++ as well). Extensions have been known to do silly things like holding onto all Window objects ever loaded in the browser (which of course prevents them from being GCed).

      Some things you missed are memory fragmentation, plug-in leaks (only really solvable by putting plug-ins out-of-process), and unbounded growth of caches (there isn't much of this, but for completeness sake).

  2. Re:Memory Leaks? by jamesh · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Even Windows isn't that bad.

    Windows EventID 9582: The virtual memory necessary to run your Exchange server is fragmented in such a way that performance may be affected. It is highly recommended that you restart all Exchange services to correct this issue.

    It happens quite a bit actually.
  3. Awesome Bar by farnsworth · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

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    There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

  4. I only skimmed TFA but... by LighterShadeOfBlack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
  5. Re:Hmmm... by phantomcircuit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No it doesn't proof

  6. Is the 'downloader' still a piece of shit? by AbRASiON · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Is the 'downloader' still a piece of shit? by Waccoon · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yeah, the file requester/browser is horribly slow, and has been since 2.0. It doesn't really matter how fast your computer is if the GUI is stuck in a loop. Also, how hard is it to add resume download support to the download manager? If I've downloaded 80% of a 500MB file, and it gets stuck, and the server supports resume download, I don't see why I should have to start over again.

  7. Vertical tabs by Compuser · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:Hmmm... by aussie_a · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes it does.

  9. Re:Hmmm... by byolinux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sure. Give me the source code for Opera under a free software license and I'll use it. Until then, no thanks.

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    Join the Free Software Foundation
  10. Re:Memory Leaks? by 19thNervousBreakdown · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I run Exchange servers, and yes, it means that the actual RAM (+ PF) is fragmented. It is not merely complaining about the page file.

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    <xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
  11. Re:The old cross-platform coding guidelines by BZ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    At the time when the guidelines were created?

    Let's see... OS/2 and HP-UX come to mind, at least if you cared about performance and the like.

    And if we're talking about templates, GCC's support was pretty bad too, at the time. In fact, it wasn't until the switch to GCC 3.x that life got a little better on that front. egcs 2.95 was a bit of a mess in all sorts of ways.

    No one's arguing the guidelines don't need revising. They do. But when they were written they made perfect sense. You have to keep in mind that they're almost 10 years old now. C++ compilers were _really_ bad back then. Heck, some of them were still based on cfront!