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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 does it pass Acid 2?...
I was under the impression that the issue was memory fragmentation. Ah well... does anyone have a link about this? I swear I read it somehere, or maybe it's from here heh.
Why did/does Firefox have so many memory leaks? Is it sloppy coding? A framework issue? Third party addons?
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.
Except for the newer bits, like most of Places and the cosmetics of new Super-autocomplete dropdown (which feels ... unrefined; functionality-wise it's doing a great job).
It's interesting to see the new animated-ish tab movement on the tab bar (when you scroll the mousewheel over it) and the animation when things like 'Remember this password?' appear. They look pretty, but are slow on some crappy video cards -- would anyone know how these 'animation' effects can be disabled?
And, kudos to the Firefox team -- I've been using v3 Beta1 for some time, and the browser does feel snappier. Of course, I haven't loaded up my 4-5 'must-have' extensions (Adblock, TabMixPlus, SwitchProxy, DownloadThemAll mainly, sometimes YSlow) so it'll be interesting to see how v3 does in "real"-use scenarios.
Go somewhere random
I can't wait for Firefox to stop crashing every now and then. I'm seriously looking forward for Firefox 3.0
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.
While that doesn't rule out Resource Allocation Is Initialization (RAII) - a standard C++ memory management tool - it does make it a lot more labor intensive, by requiring special code to be written for each type of object that's managed.
With templates being allowed, one can use the standard library auto_ptr, as well as reference counted smart pointer templates.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Maybe it's late and I'm looking to nitpick, but "it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves" is a bold declaration that is rife with interesting implications that I don't think are strictly true.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Firefox got replaced with some lame Iceweasel thing. Besides just looking nasty, it doesn't use the firefox settings. I lose the themes, stored passwords (Talk about lock-in! How in hell to I dig those out of firefox?), stored cookies (a bit more lock-in), plug-ins, etc.
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.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
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.
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.
I'm posting this from FF 3.0 beta2 right now. It's a good improvement, IMHO and I intend to keep it. Much smoother, pages are more legible for some reason, very quick rendering. It imported everything except the plugins. System specs: Dual P3 coppermines at 1 gHz, IGig of PC-133 ram, cable modem at 100-base-T eth0. OpenSuSE 10.3 with all updates and a bunch of add-ons. I'm happy with it so far and will either look for a source RPM or roll my own SuSE RPM for it.
C|N>K
And since memory is so cheap these days and everyone has a ton of it, what's the big deal about half a gig dedicated to the browser anyway?
Maybe if you're a web developer. My whole OS doesn't use half a gig of memory!
We need a rewrite that strips out all the bloat to make a lean, fast, bloat free browser out of a basically solid codebase. It'll be like it's risen from the ashes, so we need a name that reflects that. A name like "phoenix". I wonder if that's taken...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In Soviet Russia, Linux runs Firefox!
No, wait...
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.
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
new int [100000];
do_browser();
}
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
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.
Middle click on link -> open link in new tab
Middle click anywhere else -> Open/search whatever you have in your clipboard(use that a lot)
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
Well, if someone could write a version of emacs that works as a Firefox extension...
The number of leaks that exist in an application has little if any relationship to how much an application leaks memory. A single bad leak that happens often can cause enormous memory consumption, but even a large number of small leaks no one of which happens very often may not appear to leak much at all. Statements like this make me wonder if their author has ever written any nontrivial code at all.
I'm not at all saying that the Mozilla code isn't a memory hog (it's well-known that it is), nor that it doesn't exhibit the symptoms of memory leaks, which is also well-known, although as others have pointed out the issues are complex and often Mozilla gets the blame for leaks that are actually caused by third-party extensions. What I am saying is that you can't just simply count up the number of "memory leak bugs" and say whether an application leaks "a lot of memory" - sometimes the two are correlated, but by no means always.
Sheesh.
I am a rather heavy browser user. I usually have in excess of 50 tabs open. I usually keep going back to 3 or 4 of them, continuously open new tabs and close them, and occasionally go through the ones I have open and read/close them. I normally hibernate my computer (I run XP) and shut it down only occasionally. Currently my laptop has idle time of 107 hrs and Firefox has CPU time of 2hrs. I think I last restarted Firefox to install an update.
I used to have really serious memory problems with Firefox. My memory usage would skyrocket very quickly, and I'd have to close it and reopen. This stopped a while ago when I installed FlashBlock. I rarely view flash anymore, and my memory footprint is rather stable. Right now I have VM Size of 403M - not small, but I have 4 windows and 97 tabs open. Have fairly few add-ons installed: DownloadHelper, FlashBlock, IETab, TabMixPlus and TalkBack.
I don't believe that memory leaks on Firefox are a problem, at least not on Windows. I think it is the plug-ins that are causing the problems.
Cheers,
m