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

Is it faster?

[garcia]

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.

Re:Is it faster?

[QuantumG]

While you're asking for it to be "faster", other people are asking for a smaller memory footprint.. considering that most performance issues in a browser are related to caching, they can't please all the users all the time.

Re:Is it faster?

[Stan Vassilev]

While you're asking for it to be "faster", other people are asking for a smaller memory footprint.. considering that most performance issues in a browser are related to caching, they can't please all the users all the time.

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).

Extensions, which basically "patch" themselves into this single-threaded synchronous engine, often exacerbate the problem too.

All XUL applications seem to share this slow response / performance problem, other popular ones exhibiting the same issue being Joost, Miro, SunBird.

However this issue is so deeply ingrained in XULRunner, that I hear misguided excuses all the time, such as "it's about the RAM cache / CPU usage balance", which, oddly enough, no other major browser suffers from (I use all on a daily basis as a developer myself).

About when we'll see improvements: most likely starting with Firefox 4, which is to completely replace the current JS engine, SpiderMonkey, with the one in Flash 9 (codenamed Tamarin), which compiles to machine code before execution, instead of being interpreted from opcodes.

We'll hopefully see some threading too (one thread for the main UI and one per tab at least), although the lead Mozilla developers have some quite irrational fears of multi-threaded architectures.

Re:Is it faster?

[petsounds]

Honestly, it is leaps and bounds faster and more stable than 2.x. I too felt a malaise setting in with Firefox 2. Terrible memory leaks on OS X, sluggish performance, and a slowdown of innovative features. All that has been rectified. On top of that, 3 adds some real innovation to the browser space, such as the location bar "search-as-you-type" feature.

Beta 3 has one new feature that I've been waiting years for - you can now type shortcuts in the location bar to reference installed search engines. For instance, if you've set up "g" as the shortcut for google, then type "g vegan restaurants" and you'll get the results immediately. Mozilla had this, but it never made it over to Firefox until now. Thanks to the dev who implemented this feature; I owe you a beer.

So please, definitely try out the Firefox 3 beta. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Firefox 3

[Enderandrew]

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.

Add-on finder?

[Enderandrew]

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!

Re:Firefox 3 Mac OS X UI

[ubernostrum]

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.

Re:YAY!

[marcushnk]

AARRRGGHH!

Agreed that would drive me nuts.

I suspect it'd make a nice exploit as well...

The feature I really want: whole-page zoom

[steveha]

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

Re:So...

[kripkenstein]

High memory usage is different from memory leaks - every time you open a new tab it stores in ram some of the previous and next pages in ram. So if you do a lot of surfing on different tabs it very quickly goes up to 100MB in ram. You can disable that from the settings but you lose the ultra-quick back and forward capability. Yes, that's true, but it isn't the entire issue.

I'm running Firefox 3 (the previous beta, not the latest), and I set max_total_viewers to 1, which should in theory do what you said. Yet I routinely see ~200MB used by Firefox, and on my 512MB machine I need to restart Firefox once a day or so, since a web browser taking up half of my RAM doesn't make for good responsiveness of everything else.

One issue might be memory fragmentation in Firefox, or so I've been told. Perhaps someone who understands this stuff can clarify.

If you close the tabs, does it free RAM or Leak?

[billstewart]

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!. Firefox 2 isn't significantly better than later Firefox 1.x versions - I'm hoping 3 will be at least a bit better.

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.

Threads are harder than you believe

[Nicolas MONNET]

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