Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3 Beta 3 Officially Released
firefoxy writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 beta 3. This release includes new features, user interface enhancements, and theme improvements. Ars Technica has a review with screenshots. 'Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.'"
How about that memory leak?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
...does it pass?
Although if you have a mac, be sure to install the proto theme. Although if you have a mac, you also should try the latest Webkit build too. Its ridiculously fast.
That is all.
Looks good. All we need now are for the extension developers to make their extensions Firefox 3.0 friendly.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I remember when Firefox first started it was meant to be a faster and more secure replacement for IE. Well, the longer I have been running it (many of you know that I was probably the last Slashdot IE6 holdout for various reasons) the more I realize how slow and awful it can be -- especially the last few versions.
Now, I haven't run the new beta but I looked through the article and some of the past ones that have come up and noticed all this crap about theming, new features, etc, etc, etc but nothing really talks about how much faster it is and how much less memory the program consumes -- especially when it's been open for more than 24 hours on XP.
So, are they going to go back to light, tight, and fast instead of this feature bloat that seems to have prevailed? Yes, it's nice to have bells and whistles but I think that it's just as important to have a browser that doesn't require me to close it and reopen it so that my machine doesn't grind to a halt every other day if I don't.
If you're trying out the beta and you're wondering why your back/forward buttons don't match the article's screenshots, right click, customize, uncheck small icons. There ya go.
On an unrelated note, this story seems to be dredging up all the trolls and fanboys... check out the first few comments, and the tags...
I've been using Firefox 3 (trunk builds) before Firefox 2 was an official release. I love it.
Whatever happened to:
> Issue one major release every year (Fx 3 in 2007, Fx 4 in 2008, etc.) since it helps drive upgrades and adoption
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Firefox_Requirements#Release_Roadmap
Now my dream is to see a QT brand of Firefox again, perhaps using QT 4's built-in Webkit. Unify Konqueror, Safari and Firefox on one rendering engine and work towards making that the best damned rendering engine out there. They spent nearly two years on the new Gecko rendering engine, and it still isn't as fast as Webkit/KHTML. Firefox has all the features I want for the most part. I'm not saying they should abandon GTK, but they support multiple widgets and toolkits. Someone please give me a QT 4 branch of Firefox and I've be very happy.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
One of the most promising and impressive new features in beta 3 is an integrated add-on installer system that allows users to search for and install add-ons from addons.mozilla.org directly through the add-on manager user interface.
Brilliant! Must build from trunk again!
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The default Linux theme is awful... is there any way I can get the windows theme for it under Linux?
The back and forward buttons will be used more frequently than before ;)
Does it still steal focus and jump to the currently active desktop when another application gives it a URL to open?
...that mention is made of [full] integration with GTK but no mention of KDE! My be it's time folks at KDE tuned Firefox to look at a native KDE application or make lots of noise while Firefox development is going on.
Many people have said that FF slows their system down, and honestly I have not experienced this on Windows, Linux, or Mac (OSX)... in far over a year.
The fact is that these supposed 'memory leaks' are more a factor with prior incompatibilities with Windows inconsistencies than being due to Firefox itself.
Feel free to stick to Internet Explorer if you prefer it, but the whole 'memory leak' thing is wearing a bit thin at this point.
I am open source, and Linux baby!
Is it just me, or do those screen shots look eerily like IE?
The Proto theme is now the default in Mac OS X; no additional download is necessary.
(If you didn't click the link in the parent post, the upshot is that Firefox now looks a lot more like Safari.)
SVG Filter Effects are working in FF3 - hooray!
See for example:
http://www.svgbasics.com/filters1.html
Although I imagine these have been in the FF3 branch all along, I only just noticed today because I've been playing with some drop shadows for my company's logo. Not only do the filter effects look really nice, FF3 does svg draws/redraws much more smoothly than IE+Adobe SVG Viewer, which had (up until now perhaps) been the best in-browser SVG experience for windows. Gotta say I'm really impressed and really happy.
Welcome to Slashdot.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The original phoenix/firebird/firefox were both fast AND had a small memory footprint.
They ran very well on old SGI desktop systems with sub-300 MHz CPUs and sub-512 MB RAM capacities.
Sometimes I wonder if desktop developers shouldn't be forced to use such systems today for all development work. It would force some leanness.
One thing that threw me for a bit was that my Home button was seemingly missing. They moved it to the Bookmarks toolbar, which I had hidden. At least it's able to be moved back without much hassle.
First of all, I would strongly recommend actually uninstalling (completely) and reinstalling Firefox if you want to use this beta. Some apparent conflicts between my extensions for Beta 2 and this install caused some of the weirdest, buggiest behavior I've ever seen in Firefox. Only by wiping my profile and starting from scratch was I able to get tabbed browsing to work correctly.
Secondly, if you're annoyed by the new theme, just switch to Small Icons. It looks fine, except for the slightly annoying "Home" button.
Speaking of the "Home" button, it's on the Bookmarks toolbar now, in case you were wondering. You can move it back where it belongs while in the Customize Toolbar dialog.
So far, I don't see a whole lot to write home about. The new theme is definitely ugly. On the other hand, the beta feels very stable and very, very fast.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. I frequently grab text from the last known addresses without necessarily wanting to go to the page again (E.g. download heavy sites, buggy sites that crash the browser that I need to submit a bug report on.)
Anonymous Coward
"immediately load urls I click on them from the address bar"
thats a fairly trivial gripe, and a lot of the time you may not want to actually navigate to the URL, but simply put it in the TextBox/Address bar to copy the URL...
Although admittedly I dislike FireFox almost to the point of hate (I prefer Opera, or even Safari or Konqueror, although Phoenix was a kickass browser)... I think they should improve the AddressBar/Dropdown to incorporate things like being able to remove a URL from the list, or right-click a URL in the list and "Open In New Tab"
Something a few IE Shell/Clones have like Avant, and I think Maxthon does aswell... Opera has te dropdown addressbar toolbar which, you can add any button/textbox/favorites you want to it... FireFox doesnt seem to have any sort of ability like that, at least not without hunting down some obscure add-on or something.
That's a user interface paradigm that's decades old now, and just because the bunch of monkeys coding IE think it's fun to throw it out the window doesn't mean it's a good idea. Microsoft has the anti-Midas touch for interfaces these days anyway (cf. Vista generally, that new Office abomination generally, drop-down menus that hide half their contents for no particular reason, etc.). Emulating them would be a terrible idea.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Fast, really fast.
Don't trust me. Try it.
Akk, I hate the new theme for Mac OS X. Is there an easy way to bring back the Firefox 2.0 one ? I can't even find my freaking home button ! Also I usually run safari side by side so this is actually super-confusing for me.
firefox breaks if you have the ipv6 module in without an ipv6 capable ISP.
the party lines seems to be that a number of serious gating ipv6 bugs cannot be marked as gating because no devs can verify them, for lack of ipv6 setups to test. a highly suggest <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&content=ipv6">looking at the ipv6</a> bugs if you're bored at work and want cause for a good chuckle.
i've always been an opera proponent because firefox consumes far more resources than is concievably acceptable for any piece of code to use (my p1120 laptop IS perfect, no theres nothing wrong with 224mb of ram and an 800mhz crusoe), but the mishandling of critical showstopping issues in firefox 3 has been hilarious. firefox 3 has made enormous strides to try and become something like respectable, but ten percent of linux users are going to have firefox fall flat on its face and thats <i>hilarious</i>.
Yes I do, but how many average users are going to know that? I'd be willing to bet that the Parent didnt even know that...besides, thats only one of many features that its lacking in comparison to Opera, Avant, etc. There isnt much coding invlived to add a context menu on right-click, or even a tooltip saying "Yadda Yada for Yada!"
AARRRGGHH!
Agreed that would drive me nuts.
I suspect it'd make a nice exploit as well...
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I had no idea you could do that - thanks!
Just a naive question. Why the fuck do they use themes ? Can't they just use native widgets à la wxwidgets ? Seems to be the right way (c) to do it. And of course if the user wants to customize the look of the application he can do this using the desktop's themes feature.
I wonder how much time they loose trying to tweak the themes.
Firefox could take advantage of the same thing; Microsoft wasn't going to update IE until after they saw a substantial move from IE to Firefox. IE 7 has "emulated" many of Firefox's features now and it's going to be a while until MS can design / buy / copy / steal any more improvements. The Mozilla folks could take this opportunity to make Firefox the superior product it's so very close to being. Just polish the rough edges and fix some bugs, guys...
The new Office interface is a huge improvement for everyday use.
Drop down menus that hide unused options is also another improvement. And it is very easy to access the hidden options.
Sorry but 66% of your examples are, well, bad examples.
It's easy to bash if you are a linux user and don't use them everyday...
(This does not mean I disagree on the click thing)
Well, maybe that's true (though I never would have guessed it in a million years). Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work in 3.0b2. Or maybe they just decided to leave it out of the Mac version for fun -- treating Mac users like second-class citizens seems to be a popular hobby of the Firefox team.
I'll have to agree that I prefer having to hit enter as I do that quite often. Some of us actually know how URLs work and what they're for. : ) Power to the consumer!
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
A few examples:
- Take the whole logic behind confirmation dialogs for the installation of extensions. The basic idea is that you do not want a simple click to trigger the install because you want to warn the user of the implications. Fine. The proper way is to do what explorer 6 does: ask for confirmation, have a little checkbox to bypass the confirmation for this site in the future if you want to, and if confirmed perform the action. Instead, firefox got it completely wrong. First, I can't authorize *just* this extension. I have to authorize every extensions from the site, which is generally not what I want. Most of the time, you don't known and trust the site sufficiently to blindly authorize everything. So to achieve this, after installation, you have to dive in the preferences menu and try to remove the authorization. Fucking morons. The second problem is even worse. Instead of having the sequence 1. click 2. accept 3. the action is performed, you actually have to retrigger the action ! You have to find the installation link a *second* time, and re-click on it. This is totally brain-damaged. To sum up: to install one (and only one) extension requires 2 (or 3) clicks in explorer 6, *14* in firefox (I just tried it). double fucking morons.
-
Another thing concerns the update to extensions. Do you really need this "do you want to update your extensions" dialog right when you start the program ? The average user, who might have had an extension installed by a techie friend, shouldn't even know what an extension is. Way to scare him away. Fucking morons. This thing should happen automatically, or maybe with a little thing in the statusbar (à la windows update notification in windows). This way the average user, who by principle, doesn't touch what he doesn't understand, won't be confused.
-
About the update thing again. The great thing is that if you say ok, I'll please you, do your updating stuff, firefox conveniently blocks until the update is done. Which is great for unsuspecting users who are in a hurry to check their emails and expect this stuff to be done in the background. Fucking morons. I guess they will just fire iexplore to get the job done while firefox is blocked. What are they thinking ?
-
Can we talk about plugins ? Is there any reason why firefox should freeze for 30 seconds while a page loads java ? Or even crash ? Ever heard of the idea of loading in a separate process ? Don't tell me it is the fault of the plugin writer, it isn't. This should have been fixed years ago. For an example of an application that does this right, look no further than the gimp. Plugins are loaded as separate processes and cannot bring the app done.
I'll stop there before I break my blood pressure monitor. But seriously, usability wise (I am not speaking of the underlying engine), this is a piece of crap. And to think that firefox was supposed, among other things, to fix usability issues in mozilla suite. sigh. So please, use your millions to create a usable program and shove your themes,tag,semantic crap you know where.Have they fixed it to where it doesn't steal focus and give me a headache when rendering pages?
This is why I use Opera, but Opera has it's own issues. I'd rather use a Free tool. But I almost have a psychotic break whenever a browser steals the focus from the URL bar when I'm typing in there, just because the page has finished rendering. This keeps me with Opera for now...that and the dumbass file Save interface.
expandfairuse.org
I really hope they get rid of this cancer-inducing theme. Aaah. My eyes hurt already!
Other than that, it seems a bit snappier than Beta 2 and it broke my customized toolbar layout, but hey, it's a beta. Everything is good now.
Off to finding a new theme.
The reason I want FF3 is to get whole-page zoom.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/27/firefox-3-gets-full-page-zoom
I use a 110 dots per inch monitor. I hate, hate, hate all web pages that were laid out with WYSIWYG design tools, with fonts set to 7 pixels tall and columns also specified as a certain number of pixels wide.
I don't have eagle eyes and I don't like to sit close to my screen. So I have my personal CSS forcing fonts to a minimum size... which makes some pages ugly, and other pages unreadable (depends on how much the page designer hard-coded with pixel sizes). I'm also using the ImageZoom extension to scale up images... which means the scaled images cover up lots of text on many web pages, and fancy graphical navigation buttons often don't match up with their clickable regions.
And I have a 16:10 ratio monitor... which means that often I will read a web site and there will be a narrow strip of text in the center, and tons of wasted space to either side, again because some web designer hard-coded things with pixel counts.
I used to wish that web designers would make sites that can adapt to unusual screen sizes. Well, the WYSIWYG tools aren't going away, so now I just want to zoom my pages.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I decided that beta 3 would be the time I switched to FF3. I've got all 20 of my addons working except Roboform (which works with beta 2). Didn't they know beta 3 was going to be released? Idiots. It's just another reason I wish I could easily escape from Roboform lock-in.
It's finally good enough for me to switch permanently. Weave replaces google browser sync (because google hasn't updated their extension). Some hacks are still necessary to make other useful extensions work properly, so it's still a little rough around the edges. (see Nightly Testing tools and extensions.checkCompatibility=false). But damn it, I've waited long enough. Firefox 3 is here and I love it.
btw: Does anyone know how to scale the TEXT in firefox 3?
Ctrl +/- now scale the entire page, insted of just the text(Which looks bad with many images) -(
This doesn't seem to work for me on Mac OS X. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Been using Beta3 for a week now through ubuntu-backports, and the thing which irritates me most are the harsh settings towards wrongly configured ssl-servers. It doesn't just spew out a warning box, but tells you that you shouldn't access the site and you have to go to the preferences to set an exception manually. I never really realised how many bad ssl-certificates are out there...
Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 3 was released a few hours after the announcement. It's packaged with a launcher so it runs self-contained so you can use it from a flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, etc. But it's also handy for trying out the current beta without affecting your local install. You can even run it from your desktop to try it out and then delete it.
It's available from the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 3 homepage.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I guess I can kinda see what you are nitpicking about. Only at the highest level of zoom, though, which is overkill for me. I still think it performs beautifully because I can actually read everything clearly without physically moving closer to the screen (which defeats the purpose of owning a 37" display).
Are you saying you prefer FF2's font-size adjuster and it's wonderful ability to smoosh everything together into an unintelligible blob of nastiness?
The only thing FF3 seems to be missing is a "fit to width" button like Opera has. FF3 zoom seems to fit to the screen width automatically (which is what you want 90% of the time) up until the point where it would be forced to smoosh everything together. I guess you could call it "intelligent zoom" but it would still be nice to have the ability to turn it off.
Post a few links where you think it looks really bad. I'm interested.
Considering both of these are now stored in SQLite databases, it should be significantly better at failing to delete your bookmarks.
Do you know which settings to disable? Usually I don't mind if moving from one tab to the next is a bit slow - I've got lots of CPU, except when Mozilla tries to burn it all, and it's often slow anyway because the machine's busy paging/swapping heavily.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
was that the Downloads window took an insane amount of memory and time to pop up, usually requiring a tweak in config to a 15 second delay before it pops up (so that small jpg downloads en masse wouldn't freeze it up). Unfortunately, it still was required for really large downloads and was easily the most annoying thing in 2.0. Having tested out this release, the download window is absolutely perfect. That in itself is enough to make me switch over completely from 2.0.
Please don't talk as if you're the only person whose opinion matters. I agree with one of your points and disagree with another. Do you care which way round? 'Course not. UI preferences are very subjective, and certainly not life-or-death. Have some respect for others' points of view.
If they _really_ wanna improve the addressbar, they should go back to the one used in 2.0. The new one drives me fucking batty. when I type sl, I expect to get an option of sites beginning with sl, not every goddamned site with sl in the url, title the last time you visited (really bad for sites with changing titles) and even parts of query strings. This supposed "awesomebar" fucking blows in every way. Fuck the guy who invented it and may his children get colon cancer.
I hope they do something about the drag'n'drop copying of web images to disk. All too often I get a 0 KB image file, or a "this file is in use" warning. Extremely frustrating! I've never had this problem with Internet Explorer, though it does piss me off by asking for confirmation each and every time.
Believe me, it really is much better now.
Unfortunately, Google Reader suddenly stopped working on Leopard running the latest beta. I guess Ill just jump over to Safari now...
Shift+Delete should do the trick.
I tried Firefox 3 (previous beta) on a 7 year old PC recently - Pentium III 700 MHz, 512 MB - and it ran *much* faster than Firefox 2 on many operations, particularly hitting the Back button. It also used less memory over time, as Mozilla have fixed many, many memory leaks.
I used it as my day to day browser - the only thing stopping me upgrading completely were a few extensions that aren't yet migrated to Firefox 3 (primarily Sage RSS reader - no longer maintained so I'll use Wizz instead).
Actually, the perceived performance issues of Firefox mostly stem from the fact it's a single-threaded architecture running on a JavaScript+XML interpreter (XULRunner).
There is indeed only one thread handling the UI and DOM, but there are multiple threads. Network operations, file decoding and so on run in separate threads from the UI. MAking a multithreaded UI is quite hard; note that IE (at least 6, most likely 7 too) does that too, with the difference that you can have separate windows in different processes altogether; but then they can't talk to each other through JS.
The only time this architecture is really a problem ATM is when JS from a page sucks up CPU: it bogs down the whole UI.
Moving to a fully multithreaded architecture is a very hard problem, esp. for such a complicated application, with such complex interactions as a web browser. Every single little thing would have to be synchronised, with big deadlock risks at each turn.
The only possible approach is to divide work among threads such as there is minimal, well understood interactions between them. You can't for example just have one thread per window, because HTML+DOM+JS expect to be able to touch other windows from the same domain. You could divide processes by originating domain; that's what Apprunner does.
But then you have coordinate communication between the windows and the bookmarks, history and so on. Not too hard to do, but has to be weighed against the minimal gain.
Eventually, we will have to take advantage of many-cores CPU. That means that even DOM parsing will have to be multithreaded, for use on ultra low power 256 cores mobile cpus. Robert O'Callahan is working on this. But what you have in this case is a number of related threads with a very limited scope, and precisely defined interactions.
You can read more on these issues at his blog:
Parallel Dom Access
Night of the living threads
Agree with Kadin2048 completely. After all, how is the address bar supposed to know when you've finished typing the URL you want to go to?
Besides which fact, there's already a way to go straight away to a URL without having to hit enter - highlight it wherever you want to copy it from, then middle-click anywhere on the browser apart from an input field. (Caveat: works with Linux, no idea if it'll work with a lesser OS.)
TFA says that on OS X the new look is so fine that Camino users may switch. Not to denigrate the fine work of the Firefox team, but at least part of the new look is "faux" and is not really OS X goodness--in particular, the toolbar and its associated sheet doesn't behave like a real Mac app, pop-up menus look weird, and the tabs in the Advanced section of the preferences window look like tabs did several years ago. Also, scrolling is still jerky when using the trackpad on a Powerbook (but smooth when using the thumb bar--go figure) and there is still no integration with Keychain, OS X's password manager, and text copied from a web page looses its style and formatting when pasting into another program.
I suppose there is a plug-in somewhere to create thumbnail tabs and another one to make per-site preferences and another to save workspaces and another to make resizable text entry boxes, but for me, I get all that and much more in Omniweb (www.omnigroup.com), still the gold standard for browsers.
I am encouraged by the promise of better memory use. I've never seen a browser that didn't leak memory like a sieve.
highlight desired URL, hit delete, it's gone, same goes for stored text input box histories.
hold ctrl when you click for new tab, or use middle mouse button, the same as for the bookmark toolbars.
And how many users know that you can do the same with forms? I didn't, until I tried it. So the form history manager is no longer needed! Thanks a lot for this excellent tip!!!
Given my opinion we would have two buttons "bookmark Page" and "Bookmark Site". The former bookmarks the current page while the latter just bookmarks the top level domain. Why do this? Because most of the time i just want to bookmark the site so I can come back to it later. Invariably though you have to bookmark "www.a.b.com\default.htm" and a couple of months later that gets replaced with "default2.htm" or something. Quite a lot of my bookmarks lead to old pages (which never get updated) or 404s. Yeah, I know the websites could do some clever redirecting but how likely is that?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
But does it crash less with the quicktime plugin? I know every time someone reports it on Bugzilla the devs claim it is Apple's fault that the quicktime plugin crashes. However, Internet Explorer works on the same sites that Firefox 2 crashes on with Quicktime! Also, if a plugin crashes, why should the whole browser go down!?!? I'm seriously really close to going back to IE because everytime I get anywhere near Apple's website or any web page that embedded a quicktime movie or audio file the entire browser crashes. "Restore session" is a farce in that case too because you usually can't close the page that has the quicktime on it fast enough to stop it from crashing again.
This bug has been reported at least 15 times on Bugzilla and has never been fixed even though it is usually listed as "Critical - Crashes". At one point I thought I was good to go, once I got Quicktime 7.3 installed but then it started crashing again. Now I will go to Quicktime 7.4 and see if that magically fixes the fact that Firefox crashes every time a plugin misbehaves!
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
The new Office interface has been a great success. As for the drop-downs hiding half their contents, it does that so the menus learn which options you use regularly, and only show them. It's better to hide things you don't want to use than show everything, and the way MS has figured it out means you don't have to configure it manually - you just use it, and it figures it out itself.
I would say that the vast, vast, vaaaaaaast majority of people feel absolutely no inclination to delete entries from the drop-down list. Type-ahead works just dandy. If you want to micromanage your URL history, that's what bookmarks are for.
The fact is that these supposed 'memory leaks' are more a factor with prior incompatibilities with Windows inconsistencies than being due to Firefox itself. Next time, please consider that anecdotal evidence isn't indicative of anything significant. You admit that "many users" are reporting memory leaks, but you dismiss them because you have not? You should know by now that individual usage patterns may vary. In about an hour, I can show you how moderate-heavy browsing on Firefox, with many tabs open, leads to ~450MB memory usage on any of my systems... in Linux or Windows. If you read the previous posts, you'd probably know that this is a known, widely-reported issue, and it has to do with some of Firefox's features. You can cry "incompatibilities" all you'd like, but you just sound like the average Tier III tech support drone when you say it.
Personally, I hate IE on many levels, and I can only hope that the fine folks who work on this project will be able to fix these issues, or make it easier for me to disable the features that cause them.
* Side note, I realize that I am also pointing to my own anecdotal evidence, but there are probably 100 other posts in this thread saying the same thing.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
The "browser.send_pings" variable is false by default, unlike Beta 2 where it was true.
I looked at the FA, and I'm pretty disappointed to see they've gone the IE/Safari way with the interface, assuming that people want a back/forward button, and URLbar, and pretty much nothing else. I like the FF2 buttons along the top, damnit. I hope there's a way to get that interface style back. :-(
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
What's so hilarious? Anyone could do the regression testing bzbarsky is asking for. I'm sure if "ten percent of linux users are going to have firefox fall flat on its face" there should be plenty of people ready to spend a bit of time on that.
I've never had Firefox use that much CPU, but many of those tabs you closed are still cached in memory (along with each of their histories) so they'll reopen really fast if you Undo Closed Tab. Closing the tabs does not necessarily mean they're going away. Changing this option in your about:config should keep that from happening (I think), but you'll also lose some of your session restore functionality. I have it on, and I've never had any of the problems you and a lot of other people have, but I hope this helps.
Yes, IMHO, this is a UI "mistake" in Firefox 3 Beta 3 - the home button is clearly a navigation button and not a bookmark (if it was a bookmark, it should be in the Bookmarks menu (or one of the bookmark folders), which it certainly wasn't for Firefox 2). Luckily you can customise this:
1. Switch on your bookmarks toolbar with View -> Toolbars -> Bookmarks Toolbar (as you can guess, I have my toolbar permanently switched off - you've got a Bookmarks menu, what the freak do you need a bookmarks toolbar for *as well*?!).
2. Right click on the menu bar and select "Customise..." to bring up the customisation dialogue box.
3. You should hopefully be able to drag the Home icon from the Bookmarks Toolbar to the Navigation Toolbar (if not, drag it to the Customisation dialogue box first).
Got to say all of that is totally non-intuitive to the average user - why do you need the Customise dialogue box up first? Direct drag-n-drop without the dialogue box would be much better, although I suspect that it would be too easy for clumsy users to accidentally re-arrange their icons by mistake then...
Drop down menus that hide rarely used options are a bad idea for 2 reasons.
1) stuff used commonly starts to be done by shortcut or muscle memory, and large menus don't interfere too much.
2) stuff used rarely should be easier to find (not likely to know where it is) not harder, and should not break the muscle memory buy moving things.
I will say the new office is quite alright though. A lot of stuff is hard to find, but it is the truly unused/one time use for power user stuff. And the way they setup the styles in word makes it all worth it. It does feel a little wasteful in space though, losing 2 inches of hight when most monitors are wide now anyway.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Firefox will take up crap-tons of memory and then make my X server soak up the remainder (often hitting over a gigabyte).
The sad part is, whatever they do to make FF 3 better, WebKit's already got them beat..
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
But in a good way ;) Really adds to the experience when browsing virtual gentlemanly establishments
which is totally what she said
Being a long time opera user, one thing I miss in ff is a true mdi interface. I found a setting to force all windows to open in new tab but that means I cannot have small popup windows inside the main ff window (still only one program in taskbar).
So... how about those gaping security holes?
Memory leaks and security holes: things Firefox doesn't have... at least until they announce a fix for them!
You mean like hovering the cursor over a URL in the list and pressing the delete key?
That's the tip of the day for me. Thank you, sir.
My typical memory-burning web surfing session is to go to Google News or especially to Fark.com, open up about 100 tabs of potentially interesting news stories, and then go read them one at a time, closing each one after I've read it. It's one thing to have the browser use lots of memory while I've got all the tabs open - but when I've finished with them all, and just have the original page back, or even hit "Home" to get "about:blank", the browser typically *still* has over 100MB of RAM and is often burning 20-70% of CPU. That's a memory leak!.
Not necessarily; all that means is that Firefox isn't freeing up memory at a time when you think it should. It could very well be freeing up that memory at a different time, one the programmers deemed more appropriate. Is this the case? I don't know, and neither do you. It would be in your best interests to dig a little deeper than anecdotal evidence with a sample size of one before making accusations like this.
How about forever? I've had sessions like that (I do the same thing with Google News myself) that eat up over a gig of RAM and never let it go, even after every tab is closed. One time I closed all my Firefox windows except the download status window just to keep the app running at all, and left it like that for two days -- still no memory released.
Closing that last window of course released all my RAM. Luckily, I have a couple gig available, but its just stupid.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Who says it has to obscure anything?... a ToolTip can be drawn anywhere, even a newb programmer can figure out where the edges of the control is and draw the ToolTip outside that area, you can also Enable/Disable ToolTips quite easily, and if you really wanted to get into it, you could make a custom component that has a "Do Not Show Again" option...
If I want to Micro-Manage my URL's I'll use Opera, or Avant...lol... Bookmarking means its (relatively) perminent, I dont want to have to click 'Add' when its already in my URL History, and then click Delete afterwards when im done with it (if I even needed it)...
"Micro-Managing" your URL history is handy when you are refencing stuff, and then it just automatically clears it out afterwards once you stop using it for awhile...
Opera specifically has a Self-Managed URL History called "Top 10" that quickly shows you your "Top 10" most frequented URLS since the browser was lasted Started/Launched...
No one said that any of it has to be manditory, or even on by default... by why not an option? its almost "Hello World!" level programming...
Call me crazy but adblock is the killer app for Firefox these days as far as I'm concerned anyway...
--bornagainpenguin (not the OP but thought I'd chime in any way
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
I use Gmail chat all the time. But FF3 shows screws up the chat windows. It shows "..." instead of their name, also it shows "..." on several menus. I can't fathom why they would release a browser that doesn't work with one of the most popular sites on the market. I'm sure there are lots of people out there that don't use Gmail (chat), but that's no reason to ignore it.
Try to understand what position you're responding to before you post your wisdom. I wasn't saying that when I click on the address bar to type in a URL, it should immediately load. I was saying, when I click on it, and I get the drop-down list of previous URLs I've typed in, and then click on one of those, it should load immediately. (btw, that's perfectly clear from the original post, and it's not "clicking in order to edit", genius) That is MUCH MUCH MUCH more convenient for me, and IE (including later versions) does it.
Yes, sometimes I'll want to merely copy that from the drop-down and DEFINITELY NOT WANT it to load (never remember being in that circumstance, but whatever), but 99.99% of the time I just want to click on it to load, but instead I have to move my hand back to the keyboard.
And why would this be such an atrocity that I can't even turn on such an option, buried deep somewhere in the "help"?
As for "text entry fields shouldn't do anything when you click on them in order to edit"? As if Firefox follows that? LiarSucks seems to have no problem popping up its little "suggestions" about what it thinks I want to enter into the field when I click on it. (And choosing those options is *so* easy from the keyboard, right?)
Does Windows (and MS products) have some poor interface? Absolutely. Is Firefox better? No. And neither is Mac, which has its own ridiculous decisions. Check "UbuntuMacDupe" on youtube, and then commence denial of the claims.
I absolutely hate how people laud Mac's user interface decisions. Let's count:
1) Unnecessarily complicated process to save frames from videos.
2) Unnavigable iPhoto.
3) No discoverable way to black out parts of pictures I want to email to people in iPhoto, no discoverable image editing program to do so. (Thanks for the privacy help there, Mac!)
4) Mail Rules filter for Mac-related emails that is so big is spills onto the doc, and can't be closed until you figure out how to remove the dock, something a lay user should NEVER need to do.
5) De-emphasis of right-clicking, to cull all the disabled losers.
6) Tabbing between fields in web browser turned off by default.
7) Unnecessarily complicated process for uploading pictures to websites.
I could go on and on.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Firefox 3.0 betas 1 and 2 haven't seemed to play nice with Windows 2000. Basically, after browsing for a while, the view gets "detached" and the redraw fails. The only thing I see after that is a giant white space where my webpages should be.
No one else seems to have this problem, so I'm going to assume it's a Windows problem.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
it's not memory leaks per se, it's memory fragmentation. as mozilla isn't garbage collected, you can't defrag it; you can only restart the whole process.
Preference in user interfaces are generally subjective, and shouldn't be labeled right or wrong. But that is an exception. Hiding less-used options hidden is bad, in the same way as sometimes having "Ok" on the left of "Cancel" and sometimes on the right would be.
And what are your results of this with other browsers? In my experience Opera and Safari do exactly the same thing concerning memory consumption.
Eww. They changed the modal window that asks to remember the password. Now it appears inline at the top of the browser viewstate. This is not bad, but you can't use keyboard shortcuts any more!
This is really bad...
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Firefox keeps by default ten previously closed tabs in memory. So even if you close 10, you won't get any memory back - because while they don't show up in the tab bar, they're still there, with their forward and back sessions stored in their entirety as well. You can recover closed tabs by hitting Ctrl+Shift+T
Apparently the grandparent and I are two of these f-s. I'm constantly accessing various websites; why wouldn't I keep the browser open? I also typically have several pages I haven't gotten around to reading yet queued as tabs. I also have a web interface to my mail and RSS feeds open pretty much constantly.
My counter question is, "Who the f- closes their browser when they are going to use it again soon?!?".
No. Do you shower hundreds of times every day? I leave my browser and media players both open because they are applications I use constantly. When I walk away from the computer, pressing pause on the player and leaving the browser as is make perfect sense. I do close out infrequently used applications like my word processor. If my job required a lot of word processing, however, I'd leave it open.
Unlike your unrealistic shower analogy, a browser shouldn't use any additional resources while doing nothing. Obviously the TV and shower require energy to keep functioning. I'm surprised you didn't throw a car analogy in there as well.
If you're referring to the fact that it can check for automatic updates, you can turn those off.
Nice troll attempt though.
Sure, it's running most of the day, barring closing for some reasons. But I shut my laptop down and take it home with me every day. When I used a desktop, I'd log out each day. But I've never ever ever seen or heard of anyone I know personally to treat normal apps on a computer like they were services, constantly running. I swear, it's a phenomenon only found on Slashdot or something.
It just seems wasteful.
1) 100% of the public using browsers that correctly implement CSS. 40% are still using the superbly broken IE6, and FF2 (20%) doesn't implement display: inline-block, which is important for making bordered tabs and such that scale with the size of their fonts.
2) Full SVG support in all browsers. IE has none, the others have a mix of laughable crap.
3) Clients who trust the designer's artistic sense and ability to compat-test on multiple rigs, instead of, say, looking at it on one windows machine in IE6 at 800x600 resolution and complaining "no, we want the text to wrap after this word, not that word".
Sadly, this environment doesn't exist. Sizing things in pixels and limiting the scope of the primary content to 780px wide is STILL the most reliable way to get a consistent appearance that makes clients happy.
SVG doesn't even really exist in any substantive, usable way, so graphics have to be done in pixels. Font sizes are usually scaled to match those sizes. At least all major browsers will let you override that.
This is the environment we have, and trust me the designers aren't any happier about it than you are. I do fluid-width displays every time my clients will let me (~20%), and I always try to make sure the page won't break when the fonts scale. Beyond that, I'm constrained by the tools I've got.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I just suspend and then resume it and everything is still running. Taken that way, it's no different than leaving it running throughout the day, I guess. Technically, it takes longer to get a full "week" of leaving it running. If I stopped and started everything I use throughout the day ever night/morning, I'd probably lose an hour a week just on the "rebooting" of the applications. Oracle, Firefox, Eclipse, Outlook - and those are just the big ones.
I also run a lot of extensions in Firefox - I'm sure if I didn't I'd be more inclined to start it on demand.
I've run my computer like this since my first really multitasking capable OS (either Linux or Windows on a 486; I forget which). I still say nothing should be being wasted here, unless you leave the computer on instead of suspending it.
I have to restart Firefox every few days due to memory and/or CPU usage. I don't blame the browser because I have too many extensions installed for me to accurately place the blame.
"the Mozilla Foundation is strongly opposed to free software"
I have no mod points ATM, but parent is a troll
The Sun guys rewrote their plugin to operate in a separate process as you mentioned -- it's a heck of a lot faster [1]. I agree with you, however, that FireFox should really be doing this work, not each individual plugin developer.
[1] https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6uNea.html
That did it. Thanks!!
If I actually have to tell you what is meant by the term "beta software", well, perhaps you should not be reading /. in the first place. At least send the complaint to http://feedback.mozilla.org/ rather than here.
look out boys, we got ourselves an open source UI designer!
Look, I use Office, Word particularly, every day. I work in an office where people use it every day. We are, by any definition of the term, "everyday" users. And I have not met anyone in my office who thinks that the ribbons are a step up from menus, or that the auto-hide feature was a Good Thing. (In fact, I discovered that the office secretary swears like a longshoreman; I suppose that's worth something.)
This is, I believe, one of Microsoft's key problems. They design their products around hypothetical users, rather than real ones. If they'd gone out and actually talked to people who use their software, I think they'd have discovered that most people are pretty satisfied with it overall, and although there are perhaps some minor tweaks or additional features that could be added here and there, virtually nobody wants to re-learn their entire fucking word processor. But instead they have some flawed idea of a non-existent 'everyday' user, who's simultaneously dumb as a rock but also totally willing to sit down and relearn a completely new interface just so they can turn on Track Changes or change the inter-paragraph spacing.
It's poor design, it's unnecessary, and it's also arrogant.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Very Informative. A non-moderator +1 for you!
I do this to many extensions.
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the
On visiting Paypal, I noticed that the Firefox 3 Beta makes strides towards making users more aware of SSL and security certificates. The name of the organization that you are connected to is prominently displayed when visiting a secure site. Clicking on the name gives you additional information about the organization in a clear easy to understand manner.
The handling of invalid certificates is pretty serious too. You are presented with an error page which you must actually read, at least once, to figure out what to do to make an exception and connect to a site with an invalid certificate. Once you are connected, the name of the company on the certificate is NOT displayed, indicating that Firefox does not actually know who you are communicating with.
It falls pretty much in line with how I think this should be done.
Firefox 2 in Vista already looks like the screenshots in the article. Is the author confusing Vista's automatic window dressing as something provided by Mozilla?
They finally made it metallic :o kinda weird at first.
In the view -> sidebar, bookmarks isn't labelled, so until you actually push CMD + B you don't know that it opens the bookmarks sidebar.
The biggest thing is probably that the home button doesn't show up in customize toolbars at all; you have to have the dialog open to drag it from your bookmarks toolbar to your everything-else toolbar. That doesn't make much sense, but I guess they thought they had a reason for it.
I'm pretty pleased that forecast fox works again though 8) Some people seemed to like using the 'turn off extension compatability checking' method, but that just gave me a million crashes so I forwent it xD
They have a section in the preferences now where you can control what applications open what kind of filetypes; I'm not sure if that was there before, but it looks like it might be useful in future.
(summary: holy crap it looks different by default, and wtf put the home button back where it's always been.)
Mammon slept. And the beast reborn spread over the earth and its numbers
grew legion. And they proclaimed the times and sacrificed crops unto the
fire, with the cunning of foxes. And they built a new world in their own
image as promised by the
sacred words, and spoke
of the beast with their children. Mammon awoke, and lo! it was
naught but a follower.
from The Book of Mozilla, 11:9
(10th Edition)
Wait a minute
There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.
If a release candidate is supposed to be of high enough quality to immediately become the final release, then why would you *plan* to have more than one?
I know if you fail to plan, you plan to fail... but who plans to fail deliberately?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Yet it does. So does Eclipse. What does this have to do with anything?
If this wasn't Slashdot I would be offended (well, not really)....
You cannot suggest I am referring to anecdotal information when you have no clue what information I posses, can you? More importantly, using your supposed anecdotal info to counter my alleged anecdotal info doesn't fly either.
With that said,I will have you know I am proud of my Tier III tech support drone heritage. For what it's worth, I am a Tier III tech support drone, and my father was a Tier III tech support drone, as was his father. In fact I come from an ancient Celtic clan of Tier III tech support drones dating back to the 1300's!
So, if my anecdotal information isn't good enough, then who's is??
So I challenge you, sir, to provide me with anecdotal information that would make me feel otherwise.
Cheers!!
I am open source, and Linux baby!
I did complain on there back in the days of the beta1 release, but it was not addressed in the next two beta releases. I know it's beta, and I don't care too much that it doesn't work there, but I don't want to see FF3 officially released with that broken. I'm surprised with how few people notice/complain about it.
Why is it bad? You don't have to wade through menu items you never use in order to find the ones you do. It's learning from what you do, and works with you. It's the same as the customisation tools, only it does it for you.