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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.""
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.
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.
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).
Yes it does.