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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?
...does it pass?
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.
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 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.
Except... the problem with themes which try to emulate the native look and feel of the platform is that it has to be all or nothing; getting even a minor detail wrong can throw off the whole theme. This is even worse on the Mac, where there are a lot of users who are much pickier than average about the look and feel of the UI -- it has to match the native interface, because if it doesn't they're going to notice. And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
Crazy though, why not just use Opera?
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
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
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)
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.
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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.
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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 ?
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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.If you run Linux and your computer is too slow to run Firefox, you are SOL.
You are warned of this as soon as you visit the site in an unrecognized browser. Luckily, they let you continue and try to log in anyway, but you soon discover the truth of their warning. Opera/Konqueror users are greeted with "We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later."
Don't even bother trying to view it in a mobile browser. Well, I suppose you can get through to a garbled version using the mozilla-based Minimo 0.2 if you can stand to wait long enough.
Actually after thinking a bit it dawned on me to try a false user agent in Opera. I managed to get through to my email. WTF?! Ignorant web developers piss me off.
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
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.
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
And what are your results of this with other browsers? In my experience Opera and Safari do exactly the same thing concerning memory consumption.