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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.'"
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.
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.
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?
The default Linux theme is awful... is there any way I can get the windows theme for it under Linux?
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.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
...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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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'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.
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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.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'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.
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) -(
Same browser session open for weeks, dozens of tabs opened while browsing aggregator sites, then dropped back down to half a dozen or so standbys once everything's been read. Firefox 3b3 seems to be an improvement so far, but I've only had it installed for a few hours, we'll see how things look in another week or two.
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
Considering both of these are now stored in SQLite databases, it should be significantly better at failing to delete your bookmarks.
seamonkey (bigger than Firefox) with 5 tabs is only eating 50mb of ram.
If your only doing mild browsing then it shouldnt eat too much.
But if your heavily browsing then of course its going to chew ram.
I've seen Seamonkey hit over 300mb of ram when I'm on a streak.
It really doesnt bother me.
Its not a memory leak and I can keep using the same Seamonkey session for several weeks straight.
Looking at a big number in the task manager doesnt mean anything at all.
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.
Shift+Delete should do the trick.
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
from what I have heard, it has to do with reclaiming used memory. if you have a a bunch of small allocations between larger page allocations, what will happen is that when memory is freed (to prevent a leak), you end up with small wholes in the memory that are not large enough for another page allocation or to return the block of memory back to the system as unused - ie only 1k of a 4k block is being used. This leads to large amounts of RAM usage. I have heard that opening a new window (not a tab) and closing old windows will occasionally alleviate part of the problem
When all else fails, try.
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.
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.
"from what I have heard, it has to do with reclaiming used memory....[snip]"
Or, as the parent called it "memory fragmentation"
This space is intentionally left blank
Who the f- leaves their browser open and running for weeks?!?
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)
...people who also have their X sessions running for weeks? That does include me and most of my friends and family. I do try to keep my tab count low but it's a losing battle... most people I know have already given up and let their FF sessions grow beyond 2-digit tabs. You can't have too much of a good thing, right?
Why shouldn't you be able to?!?
And what are your results of this with other browsers? In my experience Opera and Safari do exactly the same thing concerning memory consumption.
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
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.