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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.""
Beta 1 did, so you'd hope Beta 2 will :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
Have you tried Opera? It's really quite good. I use it on my older Linux laptop (128MB ram) because it's the only modern browser that can show pages without thrashing the drive. I also use Opera on powerful machines - I think it's the best browser out there in terms of both the feature set and the quality of workmanship.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
Sorry for replying again but I just found out that the test itself is broken and not Firefox. The reason is given here but it appears that it now renders wrong in Opera and Safari as well.
Hmm... The test breaks and IE is suddenly compliant while previously compliant browsers are not *dons his tin foil hat*
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
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.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
To the best of my knowledge, Firefox typically does not leak memory, at least in the conventional sense that references to memory are erroneously discarded and unused allocated memory cannot be freed. Instead, the actual heart of the issue is supposedly memory fragmentation:
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/
As the linked article suggests, memory fragmentation can be reduced by replacing heap allocations with stack variables, where possible, in hotspots such as the JavaScript engine. As for the heap allocations that cannot be dealt away with in this manner, effort can be made to group them together such that they are less likely to cause fragmentation.
It shows up like that because of a misconfiguration on webstandards.org. (In particular, "not found" pages are served as 200 instead of 404.) Safari and Opera will show you the same thing. Hixie is trying to get it fixed.
The version of Acid 2 on the author's website works fine.
The shareholder is always right.
Sorry, I call bullshit. The only time I've seen that "response" was on Ben Goodger's blog, numerous comments by ignorant fanboys, and a lot of copy/pastes by people like you. I have yet to see anyone familiar with Firefox internals make this (patently false) claim. Of course part of the problem with the Web is that most people can't tell apart a random blogger who doesn't even use Firefox, a Firefox fanboi, and a Gecko developer, even if they were to try. And they don't try.
;)
The claim I _have_ seen made is that leak bugs would be easier to fix if people actually provided some idea of how to reproduce the leak (e.g. which sites they visited in the process of leaking). At some point David Baron wrote an extension that allowed collecting such data automatically, and the results from this led directly to a number of leaks being fixed in Gecko 1.9.
The other issue Gecko 1.8 had is that it had several leak scenarios that particularly hit AJAXy apps. With the growth in the number of such apps, the leaks became more serious. Gecko 1.9 fixes those issues.
Try the beta. You might like it.
A MS internal beta version of IE8 reportedly passes Acid2. That's a bit different from "IE is suddenly compliant."
Those of you watching from home from an IE browser, please don't attempt the Acid2 test, or you might do further damage to the test.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
There! See! You are doing it again! Stop being hostile, and fix my bug(s)!!!
-- A good compromise leaves everyone mad. --Calvin and Hobbes