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.'"

Comments

Extensions

[Midnight Thunder]

Looks good. All we need now are for the extension developers to make their extensions Firefox 3.0 friendly.

Re:Extensions

[NickCatal]

Exactly! You would think there would be some 'legacy plugin support' for people to enable if they so desire. I don't know that all of my plugins are being actively developed, and I cannot stand this version of Firefox on OS X for much longer (the beta is much more stable, but no plugins work)

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's nice, they've moved on from pretending it doesn't exist, blaming the user, blaming extensions, blaming plugins, blaming the memory monitor: blaming everything except the code.

However, as someone who routinely sees Firefox use 300MB (up to 100MB already!), I have to ask:

Did they actually fix it?

So they're addressing it. Does what they've done actually solve the problem? Or will I still watch Firefox use up to 500MB during a normal browsing session?

Re:YAY!

[Kinky Bass Junk]

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.)

Re:YAY!

[Kadin2048]

immediately load urls I click on them from the address bar, instead of waiting for me to hit return No. That's a terrible idea, and would drive innumerable people (myself included) completely crazy. Text-entry fields shouldn't do anything when you click into them in order to edit. The return key is the proper way to actually cause an action to be taken on the entered text.

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.

Re:YAY!

[Vectronic]

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!"

Re:YAY!

[Keeper Of Keys]

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.

Re:So...

[Guinness2702]

"from what I have heard, it has to do with reclaiming used memory....[snip]"

Or, as the parent called it "memory fragmentation"

Response from a designer

[IdahoEv]

Give me these three things, and I'll give you pages that smoothly scale to all screen sizes and resolutions:

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.

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.

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.