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

Do you have any idea what you're talking about?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I remember the excitement when people first started using the trimmed down Firefox versions.

I can't say I remember ever seeing a "trimmed down" Firefox version.

Perhaps you mean Firefox itself? Pheonix was a trimmed-down Mozilla. It was renamed to Firebird, then Firefox, to avoid conflicting with existing products, trademarks, and asshats.

That makes your suggestion all the more humorous.

Lean, mean, secure, and eventually the amazing array of extensions people have grown to no longer be able to do without.

Speak for yourself. I do just fine on Konqueror.

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.

You know, I started out using it for days or weeks at a time. Then I learned about its session management features.

Also, you're welcome to try a complete rewrite. In fact, why don't you join one of the complete rewrite projects, like Webkit?

You see, if it's a complete rewrite, why even call it Firefox anymore? Wouldn't it be a completely other platform? And there already are other platforms that don't leak like a sieve.

1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves

Between tabs might be possible, but you have to understand, first, that large chunks of Firefox itself is written in JavaScript. The extensions, too. JavaScript is, inherently, not threaded. You get a JavaScript thread -- it can communicate asynchronously with other things, but that's it.

So that means, it would really take a significant amount of effort to make tabs independent, but more importantly, if it would really take a complete rewrite (as you say), it would almost certainly kill one of the main features of Firefox -- that its extensions are so powerful and easy to write.

But let's assume that this was possible, even easy. But, "within tabs"? Are you fucking kidding me? That is not a Firefox rewrite. That is a rewrite of the World Wide Web.

You might get away with some iframe hackery, but even that seems extremely unlikely. JavaScript is NOT threaded. I don't care how many times you, or others like you, want it to be -- the day we have to make a single webpage threaded is the day that webpage can no longer be a webpage, as we know it today. The only way it would continue to be a webpage at all is if we redefine the concept of "webpage".

Hey, I wouldn't mind picking, say, Python as the next scripting language for the Internet. But as long as we're stuck with ECMA-262, you get no threads.

3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:

People who are really curious can already do something like this: Compare RAM usage with Extension Foo loaded, and without Extension Foo loaded.

Most of us aren't going to care, though. How often do you actually look at how much RAM your system is using, aside from Firefox? Right now, I'm running four instances of Konsole, one of Kopete, and one of Konqueror, and I have absolutely no clue how much RAM any of them are taking -- or even of how much RAM I have free. I could check, but why bother? I've got plenty.

This is actually the least wacky of your ideas, but I think there are actually reasons it would be a technical challenge. And I think if you understood the concept of "extension", as distinct from, say, "program", it would be obvious that such a standard display would be impossible, or if it was even remotely possible, would be insanely misleading.

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.

Agreed, except for the fact that most people are going to have to shutdown anyway. You've got to reboot Windows sometime, and you really should at least hibernate once a day (when you sleep) to save power.