Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 4

Somecallmechief writes "Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso."

Comments

first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

did they fix THE memory leak?

Re:first memory leak post

[Klaidas]

I find it interesting how the parent post is modded "-1, Flamebait" at the moment. Sure, there is stuff to read about the leak, and plans to read about fixing that "leak", and he might have been a little too ignorant to read those. But come on, "flamebait"?
If we could tag comments, this would pretty much be "hurtetdsomeonesfeelings"

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

You're right. Flamebait is unfair. It's actually funny, seeing as how believing that Firefox somehow has one awful and obvious memory leak that developers can't seem to find is ludicrous.

Re:first memory leak post

[flappinbooger]

It's open source, right? Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something?

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

No, it is a stupid question that gets asked over and over again, and answered over and over again.

There is no one major memory leak.

1 - Most major complex apps have small leaks. It is damn near impossible to plug all of them, but Firefox has been plugging away at these very heavily for some time.
2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.
3 - Firefox uses a bunch of memory after you've been browsing a while. THIS IS A STANDARD FEATURE, AND NOT A MEMORY LEAK. Firefox doesn't just a cache of files downloaded, it keeps in memory a cache of fully rendered pages. If you don't like this feature, then you can adjust it, or turn it off completely.

Re:first memory leak post

[LMacG]

Your sense of humor called; it says it's having a wonderful time on holiday and is thinking of just never coming back.

Re:first memory leak post

[novakyu]

It's open source, right? Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something? A plug-in???? Well, that was good for a laugh. Do you also suppose that if there's something wrong with Linux, the kernel, then we should write userland tools to "fix" it?

As far as patch goes, have you heard about how difficult it is to get the patch accepted by the Mozilla team? And although I wouldn't know too well myself, since I am not a programmer, but I can imagine how ungratifying the job of maintaining such a patch would be (given that the upstream is changing).

Re:first memory leak post

[Bombula]

I'm no programmer, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but I thought CPU usage mattered more than memory. Obviously useless, wasted memory is no good (presumably this is what 'leaks' are). But what about useful memory usage? I have 2GB of RAM in my system, and I've never seen more than half of it used when I pull up task manager. Firefox could hog 500MB for all I care - I wish it would, if it'd speed things up, perhaps by preloading links on a page for example. Maybe just the act of using RAM slows a machine down, but if so can someone explain why? So long as the CPU isn't maxed out, shouldn't apps being taking advantage of the fact that I've got a big ol' bucket of RAM in my box?

Re:first memory leak post

[Knuckles]

Gosh, the quality of posts on /. really is in a steady decline.

Re:first memory leak post

[Adriax]

No extensions, latest version, fresh restart, and I've still seen firefox take 1.2gig ram in less than 5 minutes while browsing deviantart, my connection can't even get 50 meg of data downloaded in that much time, how can it justify 1.2gig of ram for it?

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

Actually, memory matters more for browsing. You have a bounded amount of memory, and if you use it all up, you're screwed. You always have more time (unless you're running a hard real-time system), so if a process takes all the CPU, other processes will simply run more slowly and you just have to wait longer. If you are in fact running a process that has a hard real-time component, you should set the processor priorities so a low-priority process such as browsing should not affect it.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

Again, it isn't the disk space of the files you've downloaded. It caches fully rendered versions of pages in memory. If you wish to change this, check out the following about:config settings.

browser.cache.memory.capacity
browser.cache.memory.enable
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
config.trim_on_minimize

Re:first memory leak post

[c0p0n]

They should've had, yes. After 6 hours and dozens of opened tabs, 120MB used. It would've normally been 250+. Still too much for my liking, though I would expect it to be better on b5 and final. Not sure if there are loads of debugging symbols on the Windows build I'm running at work now.

Now it actually frees up memory when you close a tab.

It runs really fast as well. No lag when clicking a different tab to switch to it. Pages render almost as quickly as they arrive. Javascript sites (gmail, gmaps, the like) are much faster.

In general it feels awfully snappy and fast. It gets better with each beta. With some tweaking most extensions I use work (the exception being Sage), most of the ones I use are compatible with some alphas or previous betas of FF3 and you can get away by modifying their install.rdf files (maxversion).

PS: it's now 110MB used.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I've gotten patches accepted by the Mozilla team. It's tedious, but not difficult. It may take a few minutes to write a small patch of a few lines, but then you may need to spend an hour making sure the patch gets reviewed and super-reviewed, and then find someone to check it in. Also, if you submit a patch to fix a bug, you shouldn't have to maintain it. Generally, ones bugs are fixed they remain fixed.

And anyway, if you think there's some sort of memory problem in Firefox, you should give the set of steps to reproduce it if you want it fixed. I'm still waiting on someone to demonstrate how I can get Firefox to eat up all the memory on my computer. I've run Firefox 3 beta 3 for about a week, and it strayed over 200 MB only occasionally, only to fall back below 200 MB.

Re:first memory leak post

[c0p0n]

Got to add, it actually feels like I'm using Opera. Definitely faster than beta3. And I've got many an extension running.

Re:first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if this is what it is actually doing, but if it is storing the unpacked image in cached memory you could end up with a lot more memory used than bytes transferred.

It's easy to have a 30x size difference between a compressed JPEG, and the size of the full uncompressed RGB image in memory.

Re:first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

A memory leak is when a program allocates memory but does not deallocate it once the memory is no longer needed. A program with a memory leak will, when running for longer periods of time (how long will depend on how bad the leak is), eat up all your available memory. So while it doesn't really matter if firefox takes up 5 or 500 MB, (I would prefer the former), with a memory leak, that 5 MB program might start taking up more memory than the 500 MB one. At some point, it will grow so large that you run out of RAM and you're computer will start swapping (temporarily put pieces of your RAM on your HD to make more space for other programs) and this can get rather slow, especially once the system starts trashing (that means it is swapping pages in and out all the time, making the system veeeeeery slow).

Using more RAM does not make your computer slower unless you're using (significantly) more memory than is available.

AC hopes that helps.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

That shouldn't be happening. Either that's a bug in Firefox, in which case you should give the exact steps to reproduce the problem so it can be fixed. Or it's a problem on your computer, in which case you should follow the advice in the Knowledge Base to fix it.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

As a comparison, I've had this Firefox session open for probably two days. I'm using a daily trunk build of the Firefox 3 Beta 4 branch. Firefox is using 90 megs of memory.

Re:first memory leak post

[darkpixel2k]

Now it actually frees up memory when you close a tab.

That's the part I always found hilarious. I would regularly have around 100 tabs open with various things I needed to deal with. After an hour or so I would have it down to my last tab. I would look at FF2's memory usage and it would be just over 900 MB on a laptop with 1 GB in it. I could let it sit there all night with that one tab open, and the next morning it would be using 950 MB. It's BS to say it's a 'feature'. There's actually a memory leak in the feature most people are referring to as 'caching'.

After I'd close that last tab, firefox would core dump and I'd free up 90%+ of the memory on my machine.

Re:first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

On rare occasions, commercial software is ahead of open source, and we just have to learn to do without certain features that we don't have the rights to.

While it's not immediately clear who first codified the memory leak, but the code is now owned by SCO.
So if things get a little leaky after surfing those pron sites, you'd better pay up.

It would be very cute to have a colorful 3D animated plugin to reorder and adjust your favorite memory leaks, but this has already been patented and is expected to be a key feature of Windows 7.
Before you get your hopes up too high, you'd better start saving up for a polycore 35 nm CPU.
We're talking major leak acceleration!

Microsoft is working hard to insure ACID compatibility. While they don't officially encourage employees to get high, they've found it helps to get a special blend of essential trace drugs in their drinking water. Even software developers can go green, or turn green, or at least yellow.. They're now processing the wastewater from the local jails and mental hospitals to make drinking water. This special Washington blend ensures that programmers can stay awake and also cope with post-Vista depression.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.

Re:first memory leak post

[Shining Celebi]

That's the part I always found hilarious. I would regularly have around 100 tabs open with various things I needed to deal with. After an hour or so I would have it down to my last tab. I would look at FF2's memory usage and it would be just over 900 MB on a laptop with 1 GB in it.

That's an awful lot more memory than I've ever seen Firefox use, so clearly something else is going on, but several of those pages are still stored in memory even if you close the tabs. The Undo Closed Tab feature caches those pages and their histories. I'm sure you'll be happy to know several hundred memory leaks have been fixed in Firefox 3, so with any luck, you won't have that problem anymore.

Re:first memory leak post

[urbanriot]

Can I get more information on this memory leak? Is it Firefox 3 beta only, or does it exist in previous versions of Firefox? I've been using 2.0.0.xx since it came out, and I've zero problem with memory leaks, with a ton of plugins installed and at ludicrous amounts of tabs. However, I've yet to try Firefox 3 beta.

did they fix THE memory leak?

Re:first memory leak post

[flappinbooger]

Glad I was able to give you a good laugh today. Thanks for answering my question, as well. We'll need to do this again sometime!

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something?

Because there isn't one. It's absolutely ludicrous to think the Mozilla developers cannot find and fix a terrible, obvious memory leak. No one can even explain how we would see such a memory leak. At least, whenever I try to follow the steps people give me to reproduce the problem, Firefox usually uses less memory than other browsers. If anyone still thinks there's any kind of memory problem in Firefox, explain how we could see it. That way, we could file a bug report and get the problem fixed.

Re:first memory leak post

[jamstar7]

You must be old here...

Oh, wait...

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

On point 3- I don't see how taking up 800-1200 Mbytes of memory for cache is even possible, nor even desired when the result is that it slows the entire machine to a complete crawl.

I can leave my office on Friday, with FF open, and come back on Monday, and memory usage has gone from 100MBytes to 1200Mbytes (yes, 1.2GB), and I haven't surfed a damn thing all weekend. How is that cached pages?

No, I do not use any extensions or addons.

This is not a feature, no matter how many times you say it.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I agree. It is not a feature. It is a bug. Now that we've got that out of the way, can you give us steps to reproduce the bug? Unless we have steps to reliably reproduce the problem, we cannot file a bug report and the problem cannot be fixed.

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

Sure, here are the steps:

1) Start Firefox
2) Surf the web normally for a day
3) Go away
4) Come back in 1-3 days and observe memory usage

Step 2) is optional and may be repeated (or not) over the course of the 1-3 day memory expansion period.

I would usually have 3-4 tabs open. Gmail was always one of them, and the others were usually Slashdot, aopa.org, and maybe one other news-related site (take your pick, fox, drudge, or whatever)

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I have had Firefox 3 beta 3 open for a week with several tabs open at all times (including opening and closing tabs regularly) and it's consumed less than 200 MB of RAM. I see other people in this discussion saying they never see a memory problem in Firefox. In another recent article, there were at least two other posters who said they keep Firefox running for one or two weeks and it doesn't use more than a few hundred MB. Anyway, when you give a set of steps to reproduce a bug, you should give the specific steps to perform.

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

I don't find anecdotal evidence convincing, especially when it does not agree with what I have found repeatedly and consistently with my experience.

Besides, what was wrong with the list I gave you? That's exactly how I use FF. I don't know how to be more specific than that.

Today, before I leave, I will start FF and just leave it there with gmail, slashdot, aopa.org, and cnn.com in 4 tabs. I will note memory usage before I go home today, and again in the morning when I come in.

Re:first memory leak post

[Aegis Runestone]

That explains all the lag I get for spending about an hour in deviant art. -_-;

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I don't find anecdotal evidence convincing, either. That's why without a specific set of steps to reproduce a memory problem (including especially the version of Firefox you are running and the operating system you are using), I don't believe there is one. Can you explain exactly which pages you have open (give exact URLs)? We can all try to leave the pages open all day and see how much memory Firefox is using tomorrow morning.

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

Fair enough

Tab 1: gmail.com (logged into my account)
Tab 2: www.aopa.org
Tab 3: slashdot.org
Tab 4: cnn.com

Now: 71280K (the largest memory user on the system at the moment)

We'll see what it is using in the morning.

Re:first memory leak post

[compro01]

unless i'm well off-base, firefox stores the pages fully rendered, which requires quite a bit of space for image-heavy pages, as the images need to be in unpacked bitmap (requiring x*y*color depth of memory).

though 1.2 gigs does seem pretty excessive to me, as i've never seem my usage go above 300 megs. are you meaning "latest version" as in this beta or as in 2.0.0.12?

Re:first memory leak post

[mrbill1234]

Fuck me. An application uses 200MB and we're happy about it too.

I must be getting old.

Re:first memory leak post

[wertigon]

"Also, if you submit a patch to fix a bug, you shouldn't have to maintain it. Generally, ones bugs are fixed they remain fixed."

I believe the parent was referring to when the patch isn't accepted into mainstream for some reason or other.

Re:first memory leak post

[Glimmerdark]

gmail updates fairly regularly, and the rest all have ad banners that will update. (many of them with flash or java based ads, yes? while it makes sense that you'd be using your pc more if you were actually sitting there, it could be possible that just those updates would, over the course of several days, add up to your memory issue? to be honest, I've experienced this same thing, and just chalked it up to that explanation. (certainly doesn't mean it's right of course). i find if all i have open is say a forum page without ads or any other updated info, i don't experience this problem. or at least not in any noticeably way.

Re:first memory leak post

[Pros_n_Cons]

I've only heard ludicrous two times in my life.
Once from Spaceballs and once from Mike Tyson.
my keen intuition tells me you'd be an interesting character.

Re:first memory leak post

[agbinfo]

In my opinion, if a banner ad is replaced, the original banner ad's memory should be returned. If it's not, it's a memory leak. Flash and Javascript applications should be limited as to how much memory, CPU and bandwidth they can use. If they aren't this is a bug as well. If you have a single tab open and reload with different pages over and over, your memory usage should be limited to the last page loaded.

The above doesn't account for some speedup techniques that might cache some of the information and grow some lookup tables, loading dynamic extensions or strategies on when to free the memory. However, these should have a maximum footprint.

Re:first memory leak post

[darkpixel2k]

you'll be happy to know several hundred memory leaks have been fixed in Firefox 3,

I am definitely happy about it. I switched to the pre-release version back in January. (Whatever they had in the Ubuntu repos) Now the same situation uses up about 15% of the memory in my box. Of course a lot of my plugins don't work yet under FF 3...and I'm sure a few of them were partly responsible.

Re:first memory leak post

[darkpixel2k]

If you see the problem, you should report it as a bug. Please give the steps we would have to follow to see the problem you describe, and we can write up a bug report. That way, the problem could be fixed.

This is not the process I used, but this will duplicate it. Step 1 - Go to wikipedia
Step 2 - Perform these actions
Step 3 - After you have 100 or so tabs open, close all but one. Let your computer sit for a day, week, year, whatever.
Memory usage is crap.

But seriously, a good chunk of the problem is probably related to one or more of the extensions I have loaded--and I don't feel like browsing for a few weeks with extensions disabled to try and localize the issue.

If I knew how, I'd write something into the plugin system for Firefox that monitors memory usage by plugin to help try and track it down.

But I don't know C, C++, or whatever the heck Firefox is written in. Unless it's written in Python. In that case, I know it--just not very well. ;)

Re:first memory leak post

[Aegis Runestone]

Look here

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

        * Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
        * Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called "frecency") to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
        * Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5's window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
        * Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

I hope that helps. :)

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

Just see if you're running any of the extensions known to have bad memory leaks or one of the extensions that cause leaks in Firefox. If you're not running one of them, you'll probably be safe. For brave souls wishing to track down which extension is leaking, I suggest creating a new profile, then adding extensions one-by-one.

Re:first memory leak post

[EEPROMS]

If caching is classified as a memory leak then Vista has the worlds biggest god awful memory leak.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

You are correct that if you leave Firefox on a page with a banner ad that continually changes, and the ads cause Firefox to use more and more memory without limit, this is a problem. Give us the URL of a page we can visit to see the problem, and we can file a bug report.

Flash and JavaScript cannot really be limited to a certain amount of memory. For any limit that you try to impose, users are sure to encounter a site that needs more. In this case, I'm sure users would rather have the site work than refuse to allocate more memory. Above all, users want their browser to work properly on the sites they visit.

If you have a single tab open and load different pages in it, memory use cannot be only what is used for the last page opened. If you want to approach that ideal, you can disable the memory and bfcaches entirely. But still as memory is allocated and deallocated, memory fragmentation will cause memory use to creep up over time. There should be a maximum that is reached. If you can find a page or sequence of pages that cause Firefox to use an unbounded amount of memory as you keep loading them, please tell us what they are so we can file a bug report.

Re:first memory leak post

[Bilbo]

OK... I did the same thing, on Linux (OpenSUSE 10.3)

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
13995 ctryon 15 0 324m 138m 27m R 0 6.8 1:17.93 firefox-bin

I've even got several other tabs open. Doesn't look much like a leak here, but then I haven't been using it for hours....

Re:first memory leak post

[junglee_iitk]

There is no one major memory leak.

It amazes me how Firefox fanboys will say this everytime!

Yesterday I had two pages opened - two! One was Unicode reference page and other was some forum, when suddenly my 512 MB ram was full and by the time I opened a terminal and ran vmstat, already 300 MB of swap was used! I killed firefox and restarted, with "Restore Session" and it happened again. Then I restarted it without restoring and entered the two URLs again, but everything went fine. Thus, I couldn't report it as a bug.

But it is just so amazing to see people saying something as a "fact"!!!

Re:first memory leak post

[vandelais]

I have an answering service.
It told you that you should have an element of truth attached and that it keeps in memory a cache of fully rendered you! If you don't like this feature, then you can adjust it, or turn it off completely.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

Let me ask you. What version of Firefox are you using?

Download Firefox 3 and try again.

Re:first memory leak post

[agbinfo]

... Give us the URL of a page we can visit to see the problem, and we can file a bug report.

I was replying to a comment that was presuming that this might be the problem a previous poster was having and pointing out that this would be a legitimate problem.

Flash and JavaScript cannot really be limited to a certain amount of memory.

Given that Flash is an external module, it's pretty hard to limit. The OS would have to provide this ability. However, Javascript can and should be controlled as far as I'm concerned. If it's using too much memory it's probably a bug in the script and this could cause problems. A solution might not be simple since different computers have different capabilities and different users have different needs. There would be trade offs required to make this happen. I know that Firefox already detects scripts that have been CPU bound for too long so I might not be the only one with this opinion.

... memory use cannot be only what is used for the last page opened ...

... There should be a maximum that is reached.

I agree. That's what I was trying to say. The memory used by Firefox after opening a specific page should be a function of the memory required for that page + some overhead. That is, it should be bounded.

For the record, I haven't had any serious problems with Firefox for a long time. The biggest problems I have are with that other UA that some applications insist on opening to display their help pages and the like. Worst, sometimes they actually open the default UA (Firefox) and use non-standard markup because they assume that they have opened IE.

Re:first memory leak post

[doom]

Most major complex apps have small leaks. It is damn near impossible to plug all of them,

You mean, major complex apps that are written in C.

And yet, the linux kernel hackers seem to have managed to plug their leaks.

Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions.

Ah, so you mean the Firefox extension mechanism is fundamentally broken, and they can't figure out how to keep a misbehaving extension from taking out the entire browser?

It's not doubt very comforting to the Firefox team to be able to point fingers elsewhere, but what difference is this supposed to make to the end user? And why would I want to use Firefox if I didn't want to use the extensions? Konqueror works fine, you know?

Re:first memory leak post

[cthulhu11]

1) Then why haven't they released the code? 2) I have never installed a single extension yet Firefox bloats like corpse on hot day 3) The vsize growing to 2.5 frickin GB is hardly a "standard feature" and when I navigate back and forth it clearly re-renders pages. But, just for grins let's pretend this makes sense. Where exactly would one find that hidden "stop bloating and crashing" button? I sure don't see it.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I started Firefox on two different computers Tuesday afternoon with those exact four pages open in four different tabs. Computer A is an HP Pavilion running Windows XP Home and Firefox 3.0b5pre build 20080306. Computer B is a Dell Optiplex running Windows XP Pro and Firefox 2.0.0.12. When I first started the computers, Firefox was using 67 MB on computer A and 70 MB on computer B. After leaving Firefox running all night (more than 12 hours), Firefox was using 80 MB on computer A and 91 MB on computer B. That is an increase of 13 MB on computer A and 21 MB on computer B. It's possible that that amount of memory increase is due to a memory leak, but most often small increases are due to the effects from caching and fragmentation. I notice that the pages do have dynamic content, which would require loading new content and allocating and deallocating memory, so you would have to expect a certain amount of memory increase after hours of use. These are not static HTML pages.

The signature of a memory leak is memory usage increasing without limit. What happens when those sites are open for a week? Does memory use continue to increase to 170 MB? If so, I wouldn't be able to explain that degree of memory use increase by caching and fragmentation, and I'd have to say it looks like a leak.

The bottom line is that the vast majority of Firefox users don't have a particular problem with memory usage. If you do, then either (1) you are experiencing a bug in Firefox, and you should find a way to reliably reproduce a problem so it can be fixed, or (2) you are having a problem on your computer, and you should follow the advice in the MozillaZine Knowledge Base to fix your problem.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

If someone found and fixed a horrible memory leak, why on Earth would it not be accepted? I've never seen any reasonable patch to fix a bug not accepted. I've seen modifications and enhancements rejected. I've seen very kludgy attempts to fix a bug rejected. But not a decent fix for an outright bug. Anyway, all anyone needs to do is point out a problem, and Mozilla developers will fix it for you. We're still waiting on that all important demonstration of THE memory leak. After we get that, we can write a bug report then just sit back and wait for the bug to be fixed.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

We're not being fanboys. We're giving you the facts of the matter. If you still don't believe us, read what a Firefox developer has to say about Firefox memory usage. There is no one major memory leak. There are lots of things that can possibly cause Firefox to use lots of memory over long periods of time: caching, fragmentation, small memory leaks adding up, etc. It looks like Firefox 3 uses less memory than Firefox 2, and both use less memory than IE (see the second graph in the page I linked to).

Re:first memory leak post

[junglee_iitk]

(Now, day before) yesterday I was using beta 3... but as I said, it is there, but I cannot reproduce it.

This does not mean I am trying to downplay the development, because Firefox beta 3 was a breeze after the mess that was v2... but one should not report opinions as "facts"! It is like Ahmadinejad saying they do not have any homosexuals in Iran!

Re:first memory leak post

[wertigon]

Well, it's just that my impression has been that large Open Source projects suffer from lots of drama and politics. Just look at the recent Con Kolivas in the Linux Kernel development list. If things are as you say though, then that's great. I'm just stating how my impression is, might be completely off target, who knows? :)

Re:first memory leak post

[mxmissile]

I must be ancient then.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

It's true that an extension can use as much memory as it wants. The same is true of browser plugins, isn't it? Why don't you just avoid the extensions and plugins with horrible memory leaks? Complaining about Firefox not saving you from buggy extensions is almost like blaming your OS for allowing you to install a keylogger.

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

When I came in this morning, it had grown to 120MB from the 70-someodd it was last night when I left. I wasn't awake this morning and I ended up using it to surf around today (is there any way to save the history URL file?) and it has grown to 320MB since this morning.

I'm happy to provide any info that would help you guys figure this out. If there's a way to have a surf log (URLs and time and whatnot) I don't mind disclosing that to you over a period of time. It is definitely a consistent and repeatable thing on this machine.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I thought it was me providing you information to help you figure out your problem. If it's occurring only on your machine, that sounds like it's the number (2) situation I describe. If you still think it's the number (1) situation, it's still up to you to write a useful bug report. You can read what folks are saying about Firefox 3, and I don't see any hint of it having any memory problem. In fact, they seem to be saying there isn't one.

Re:first memory leak post

[NovaSupreme]

Yes, they did fix it!!

There is this post over the fixes - http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/ As you go through the link, you will realize FF has made a serious effort in fixing it.

And, if you, just like me, give it FF3 a shot - you will be delighted with the speed. It's awesome!

Re:first memory leak post

[Ambidisastrous]

Depending on how you use your computer, a shortage of memory can really slow you down. Try watching the CPU meter too; you might not be maxing that out either. When a normal user sees a computer behaving sluggishly, it's usually because the computer is pushing data around, not necessarily doing much processing on it. Pulling data from memory is much slower than working with the relatively tiny amount of info already in the CPU's registers; swapping data between RAM and a hard drive is orders of magnitude slower than even that. And there are plenty of tricks operating systems use to manage memory, so what you see in Task Manager may not be the whole story.

The way some people use Firefox, with multiple extensions running, plugin-heavy pages and a (few) dozen tabs open, it's possible to get well over 500 MB even without the help of memory leaks. The memory-leak bugs also tend to be architecture-dependent, so the same Firefox session that seems OK on your XP/Intel box might trigger a memory blowup on a minority platform. The way memory is actually allocated is managed by a mix of the OS, the way the app is written, and the compiler, so tracking down why memory is being used a certain way is difficult. In the case of Firefox there's also the code in extensions, plugins, and the Javascript on each site to keep things interesting... I too would cringe at a bug report that says Task Manager shows Firefox using too much RAM.

Normally when someone complains their computer is brutally slow, I advise (a) reinstalling Windows if it's been a few years, and/or (b) adding more RAM. (And if the response is "do it for me", I usually whip out the Ubuntu disk and start a frank discussion.) The CPU is rarely the real problem in normal usage -- heavy CPU processing usually has an obvious purpose, but a slow CPU won't cause the random 30-second lags that Users seem to encounter after a few years of Using.

Re:first memory leak post

[doom]

Why don't you just avoid the extensions and plugins with horrible memory leaks?

So, why doesn't the the "addons" site warn the user that they shouldn't install anything unless they're experts who really know what they're doing? Something like "'addons' are dangerous and may trash your software."

Complaining about Firefox not saving you from buggy extensions is almost like blaming your OS for allowing you to install a keylogger.

Well you know, part of the job that a real operating system does is it tries to contain the amount of damage a badly written app can do to the whole system. Under something like linux, you expect that if an app crashes it won't take out the entire operating system...

Except, of course, in the case of Firefox. I've seen Firefox 2 randomly wedge my kubuntu laptop so hard I've had to eject the battery to do a hard reboot (when this happens the X windows trick "Ctrl-Alt 4" will only sometimes get me a new shell I can use to kill firefox; sometimes the system refuses to respond even to that rather large hammer). But of course, this must be enitrely my fault, I must have the wrong addon installed (I have trimmed them down to what I'd call a minimal set -- adblock and whatever they call the latest re-write of the mozex idea and a few themes...), or maybe it's my fault for not feeling like debugging the C code, (or maybe for not using Windows like a normal person, eh?). What a bunch of winers, we users are, eh? We get handed this wonderful code for free, and get upset just because we get to spend hours of our lives experiencing the joys of firefox bugs.

(Have I filed bug reports on this? No, I haven't bothered. My experience with filing bugs with mozilla.org is that it's an exercise in futility...)

Re:first memory leak post

[doom]

On the other hand, there's some interesting reading material out there in those bug reports. For example:

Jim Bray 2005-11-30 13:05:30 PDT

It's pretty clear this is a flash problem. Hopefully someone has told them about it.

As a wishlist item: it would be nice if plugins could be encapsulated somehow so that instead of the browser crashing, the plugin crashes and is disabled.
It looks like Firefox is getting an X error and just throwing in the towel. A little more robustness and perseverance would be a good thing if possible.

Comment #21 [reply] Kevin Brosnan 2005-11-30 15:38:49 PDT

Jim the last bit is Bug 156493 'Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin) malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process' or bug 230017 'RFE: Run plugins in a separate thread'.

You might want to ponder those words of wisdom a bit there, oh firefox fan.

Re:first memory leak post

[try_anything]

I'm still waiting on someone to demonstrate how I can get Firefox to eat up all the memory on my computer.

As far as I know, the original problems were never completely deterministically reproducible, merely widely experienced. I had awful problems with Firefox until Firefox 2. With Firefox 1, I had to shut my browser down every couple of days or it would crash, under both Linux and Windows. Nothing changed about my browsing habits, but Firefox 2 works well for me. If people say they still experience the same problems under Firefox 2 and 3, I'm willing to believe they're telling the truth. On the other hand, given the outrageous denial and recriminations that some Firefox developers indulged in over the problems in Firefox 1, these continuing reports might just be from angry people and reverse-fanboys.

I think this is a good object lesson for developers, open-source and otherwise. If it hadn't been for the denial and name-calling by Firefox developers and fanboys over the original problems (which were eventually acknowledged to be real) people would try new versions of Firefox with an open mind. Instead, it looks like the lingering bad feelings will continue to cloud Firefox's reputation even after Firefox 3 is released.

Re:first memory leak post

[EmagGeek]

*pounding head into desk*

Yes, of course FF is flawless, and it MUST be my setup, because the fact that I can reproduce this on ANY machine, and that dozens if not hundreds of people have complained about the same problem IN THIS THREAD, and that the FF memory leak is absolutely LEGENDARY, yes, that obviously means it must be an isolated case of just my one machine.

This attitude is right on point, and is the perfect example of how our education system has been broken for decades. CS kiddies are taught that there is no such thing as a software problem, and that any problem must necessarily be a customer issue, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

It's not up to the customer to do your work for you and generate "useful bug reports." It's YOUR job to release software that isn't broken in the first place. This problem with FF is so ubiquitous that there really is no excuse for it having survived alpha, let alone made it to the umpteenth release of the SECOND major version. For you to tell me that it's my job to fix it for you, aside from being completely ludicrous, is completely arrogant and representative of the holier than thou attitude that software people have been taught to believe in.

I am a customer, not a developer. As far as I am concerned, it just has to WORK.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

And that would prevent plugins from using all your computer memory how exactly, oh Firefox FUD thrower?

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

Why doesn't every site that allows you to download software warn you that it may be dangerous? And I've filed over 100 bug reports at Mozilla, and most of them (especially the bad ones) have been fixed. It's not futile at all. Stop complaining for the sake of complaining and try giving some constructive advice once in a while, and you may find that it pays off. Whinging is and exercise in futility.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

No, I never said that Firefox is flawless, or that it must be a problem on your computer. On the other hand, I see no serious problem in Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, despite asking over and over again how I could see these memory and CPU problems people keep complaining about. I have helped many people who have come to the MozillaZine forums complaining about experiencing problems with Firefox, and it usually turns out that a simple operation such as creating a new profile or updating their drivers fixes the problem. It looks to me like these problems are isolated problems on people's computers, not some horrible, obvious flaw in Firefox. If you think there is a problem, show us how to reproduce the problem. And it's not MY job to release software that isn't broken, as I have no affiliation with Mozilla. I was trying to help you, but now I can see is all you want is someone to argue with and complain to. Send it to /dev/null next time.

Re:first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm much older. I'm from back when users weren't assigned an id number, and you could actually choose something like "Anonymous Coward" as your alias, which I did.

Re:first memory leak post

[doom]

oh Firefox FUD thrower?

Oh, I'm just a FUD thrower now. The gross instability of Firefox 2 is a mere lie I'm spreading, because... uh, because why? Because I'm a spy for Microsoft who wants you to use IE because they make so much money off of giving it away with the OS?

You guys are seriously delusional on this subject, and I can't imagine why. Firefox 1 (plugins or no) crashed once a month at most, Firefox 2, I'm lucky if I see an uptime of a few hours. Firefox 1 was an improvement over Mozilla, Mozilla was an improvement over Netscape... what the hell happened with Firefox 2?

Re:first memory leak post

[shogun]

lawn.getoff(kids[damn]);

And now, for the two burning questions:

[Anonymous Coward]

First: Which will be the very last browser with a final release that supports Acid2: IE or Firefox?
Second: What does it say about the Mozilla dev team's priorities that it's even possible that IE might beat Firefox to this punch?

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[Tridus]

The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass. Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance. I'd say supporting standards is definitely a priority for Mozilla. Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD? I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[MrNaz]

We were glad about the existence of Firefox, until Mozilla got greedy and sold out to corporate interests. I'm just waiting for the day that Mozilla decides to reinvent itself as a company with a profit interest as opposed to an non-profit company, which it really is now in name only.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[MrNaz]

Touché :)

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[cching]

Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about: so far behind, in fact, that IE actually has a shot at catching up. What standards are those? I'm people and I find that FF meets the standards that I care about. I use SVG, Javascript, CSS and XHTML, those are the standards that are important to me. IE7 is woefully inadequate and IE8 still isn't going to have SVG and it's javascript will still be sub-par performance-wise from everything I've seen (am I wrong about that?). So what standard are you talking about? I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious to know.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company, as is Microsoft, Apple, and Opera ASA. Why complain only about Mozilla? In fact, the other companies that make popular browsers are publicly owned, so they must answer to their shareholders. Mozilla, being privately owned, has the freedom to do whatever they like, such as give money away to support open source.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

That was not a final release. The general public doesn't use prereleases, and so prereleases don't count.

We're talking about the Acid2 test, right? The general public does not care about which browsers pass Acid2. Only web developers care. Once all popular browsers pass Acid2, they can use the features it tests. It doesn't matter whether Safari, Opera, and Firefox passed within three days of release of the Acid2 test. Web developers would still be waiting on IE to pass so they can finally use the features that Acid2 tests are have some confidence that all browsers would render their pages correctly.

That switch has been removed, and it was the only remaining obstacle.

No, the switch was not the only remaining obstacle. IE 8 Beta 1 does not pass Acid2 according to Ian Hickson because of improper cross-domain checks, not because of the meta tag.

Firefox still lags behind on the standards that people care about

Which would those be? According to Webdevout, Firefox compares favorably to Opera in terms of standards support. And they both blow IE away.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[c0p0n]

The Acid2 is the most similar thing you can get to a synthetic benchmark (like those sisoft sandra things for computers) in this area. It doesn't show any real-life usage of CSS and other standards, so to speak. They try to apply everything and not all browsers implement all of that. But they may implement 90% and that may be well good enough for 99% of the things real webdevs use in their developments.

That said, it's been a long time since FF3 passed the Acid2 test. And it performs not too bad on Acid3. Have you tried IE7 on those? The results are shite; however the browser itself is not (too) bad in terms of standards compliance. IE6 is the proper webdev nightmare, not IE7. While I needed hours of tweak for IE6 to display properly something, it merely takes a few minutes on IE7, and most of the time is not even needed.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[Kjella]

Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. The day "public build" means "final release", OSS has really gone to hell. Previews like that translate to "alpha, but really kewl" not to anything the general public can use. It's not the one you'll find standard in distros, it's not the default download on their website, it's not getting security patches, do I need to go on? Firefox has still not released a final release that passes the ACID2 test, if you say otherwise you're drinking the zealot koolaid. Honestly I don't care what IE does or not, what it means is that Firefox has no ACID2-compliant user base well over a year after that build. If you want to contest that, show me some user-agent logs where anyone is actually using the build you refer to.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

My point is simply that adhering to standards is a priority for Mozilla, contrary to what the OP was trying to imply. For all we know, the only reason that IE 8 Beta 1 passes Acid2 (or comes very close) is because of public builds of Firefox that pass Acid2, which have been available for over a year. Let's face it, knowing that Firefox 3 will be released in 2008 and passes Acid2 probably motivated the MS developers to make IE 8 pass Acid2 also. It seems to me that any way you look at it, IE is still playing catch-up to the other browsers, which all support web standards far better than IE does.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[SmittyTheBold]

I just want to the Acid2 test in OmniWeb 5.6, FireFox 2.0.0.12, and Safari 3.0.4, all the current stable releases of the browsers I have installed. Only FireFox failed. What good is it to "pass" the test if you don't continue with regression testing to make sure that future versions pass, too? Exactly what version of FireFox did pass Acid2? If "public" versions over a year ago worked, why doesn't the current release version?

I find it very likely that WebKit is going to be every bit as much an agent for change as Gecko has been.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

The public releases were Firefox 3 builds. No Firefox 2 builds ever passed Acid2. The point is that for over a year, Microsoft has known that Firefox 3 would be passing Acid2. My guess is that knowing this would happen (and that Opera and Safari also pass Acid2), they made sure IE8 would pass, too. And just last week they finally shipped a public version of their browser that possibly passes Acid2. It looks to me like Mozilla is still leading, even if IE8 final ships before Firefox 3 final.

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[sporkme]

WikiPedia:

Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. In contrast to most commercial organizations, the Mozilla Corporation is not motivated by a desire for profit, reinvesting all profits back into the Mozilla projects.

The purpose is to have a taxable entity that can compete with Microsoft and others in ways that not-for-profits are not allowed to, generating already-taxed donation money for the foundation. Please wake up, grow up and realize that "corporation" is not equivalent with"evil empire."

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[SmittyTheBold]

I'm not so quick to count Microsoft out. They're not a small, nimble organization, but neither is Mozilla, really. FireFox has a 15+ month lead on passing the test, and still doesn't have production code in the public's hands. It's still not done. I guess it may be a personal failing, but I see it as a piece of boolean logic: does the cirrent version of CompanyName WebBrowser pass Acid2? By that rule, both browsers are quite a bit behind their compatriots. If we're really lucky, Safari will pass Acid3 before IE and/or FF support Acid2. =)

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

The point you're missing is that it's not the public who are waiting for browsers that pass Acid2. It's developers who are waiting. Even after Firefox 3 and IE 8 are released, web developers still won't be able to use all the great new features that Acid2 tests, because they won't work for all the users still using IE 7. The limiting step in what standards web developers use is still how fast Microsoft gets versions of IE out to the public and how fast they get users to upgrade to the new versions. It wouldn't make any difference if Safari, Opera, and Firefox all passed Acid2 the day after it was finished. Even if Firefox 3 is released after IE 8, Firefox users will upgrade to the latest version much faster than IE users, the same way that currently 95% of Firefox users are using the latest version of Firefox, but only 60% IE users are using the latest version of IE, according to NetApplications.

Same bugs?

[ccguy]

There are at least two major bugs that have been there forever. I don't know if they annoy everyone, or affect everyone or just the people I talk to.

1) The damn proxy prompt window. For god's sake, if there's already one open window asking for the proxy user/pass, don't open another 20 at the same time. This is quite easy to reproduce: From a firefox that needs proxy to get out, go to any bookmark folder and choose 'Open All in tabs'.

2) For the life of me I can't figure out why sometimes the vertical scroll bar dissapear. It's not a specific page. Once the scroll bar is gone, it's gone forever, no matter what I load in that tab - if I open another tab it's all fine.

Yes I've opened bug reports for this. And no, I'm not fixing it myself, I've got my own projects to take care of.

Go ahead and mod me troll, I just needed to vent :-)

Re:Same bugs?

[ewrong]

Don't want to be stating the obvious but is the issue number 2 related to the page not being taller than the screen? i.e. there is nothing to scroll to so the scroll bar is not needed. Not exactly a bug, just a debatably useful feature.

I'd agree it would probably be better to leave it there greyed out like IE as occasionally I get clients wondering why the page just "shifted" a bit when they navigate to an identical templated page that's short enough to cause this.

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

The Mozilla team are number one on my list of open source projects that have the canned answers "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" and "don't like it, go fix it yourself".

I hate that when you click "view source", it reloads the page. I loagged this and was told that storing the page's source was a waste of memory. Forget that no other browser behaves that way. Forget that it's about 10k in the 200mb of ram used. Forget that it can be cached to disk.

I was also told that viewing the source made me a tiny minority and that if I wanted the feature I should go code it myself. Coz, y'know, viewing source is *such* a niche task. Only the tiny group of people with the very obscure jobs called "web developers" do it.

Idiots.

Re:Same bugs?

[doti]

This disappearing scroll never occurred to me, but the proxy prompt surely is annoying. And more yet as it seems to be easy to fix.

Also, if it already stored the password, why don't it try to reconnect automatically instead?

Re:Same bugs?

[ccguy]

Don't want to be stating the obvious but is the issue number 2 related to the page not being taller than the screen?

Well that's a new way I've been called an idiot this week :-) At least you get +1 for originality...

To answer the question no, that's not the problem. It happens to pages that obviously need the scroll bar, and the thing is, once a tab decides to remove its scroll bar, there is no way to make it come back (visiting another page in the same tab doesn't do it).

For some time I thought it could relate to a plug-in or a combination of plug-ins but I'm experiencing it now using a vanilla firefox.

It doesn't happen all the time, maybe once or twice a day.

Re:Same bugs?

[cerberusss]

Well, your bug is my feature. I'm glad that they don't keep that whole stuff page in memory. Some pages including styles can get up to half a megabyte. I could call you an idiot as well.

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

Half a megabyte of source?! What kind of pages are you looking at? ASCII pron?

Re:Same bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web developer toolbar gives us "View Generated Source" which is basically what you are requesting.

Close, but not quite the same.
While this does give you source that is not re-loaded, it is the interpreted source, and not the source from the server itself.

While this has its own use for debugging why something might render the way it does in the browser, it is not a true picture of what you get from the server and can make debugging server script output harder.

For a quick example:

<html>
<body>
  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>foo</td>
      <td>bar</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</body>
</html>

Arguments of whether this is good/bad HTML aside - it IS the source provided. If you view it using the "View Generated Source" or through the Firebug DOM inspector, you'll find the inserted 'tbody' tags around the table body.

Arguably, those are correct in the context of the document in memory, but they are not an accurate representation of what was returned by the server. The 'view source' option returns the actual source, but it does a reload, so you may not get the same source in this view that the display got if the document has changed in the interim (has something state specific, etc.)

Re:Same bugs?

[tobiasly]

I hate that when you click "view source", it reloads the page. I loagged this and was told that storing the page's source was a waste of memory. Forget that no other browser behaves that way. Forget that it's about 10k in the 200mb of ram used. Forget that it can be cached to disk.

I could have sworn that this used to happen to me but then when I tried to explicitly reproduce it I couldn't. I did a "tail -f" on my apache log and when I viewed source in Firefox it didn't register another hit, not even a 304. Changing the HTTP headers to turn caching on or off had no effect.

Glad to know I wasn't going crazy in thinking it did this at one point but I can't reproduce it now. Maybe it's some combination of extensions that are causing the behavior? People are often quick to blame Firefox for "bugs" when it's really their extensions causing the problem. Does the issue still happen when in "Safe Mode" (or a pristine profile) in the latest FF2?

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

Yes, this is FF default behavior. Try viewing the source of the resulting page after a login form. You'll get the "Reload page and resend POST data?" dialog box.

Re:Same bugs?

[phillips321]

Do you loose the entire scroll function or just the scroll bar? Using the arrow keys, page up/down or space bar....? Also I know firefox cannot support the scroll bar theme that some websites try to issue (IE does support scroll bar themes), maybe the sites you view turn off the default scroll bar in order to display there own as a sort of firefox work around? Don't quote me on any of this, just heard bits through the grapevine

Re:Same bugs?

[Keeper Of Keys]

I used to see something like this a lot. I put it down to a bug in the Littlefox theme I was using. Are you using the default theme? I am mainly using Flock these days, so perhaps the trouble lies in the chrome, which is different in Flock I believe?

Re:Same bugs?

[cerberusss]

Save Slashdot's frontpage in Mozilla as 'complete webpage'. Remove all images. What's left is source. It's slightly more than 500 KB.

Re:Same bugs?

[Scaba]

That doesn't happen for me. I think it's an extension you're using, or you have all caching turned off. And to your earlier point: it is estimated there are 125 million users of Firefox worldwide. Do you really think a statistically significant portion of those persons are web developers in need of View Source?

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

Do you really think a statistically significant portion of those persons are web developers in need of View Source?

Given that FF users statistically overrepresent geeks and standards discontents, yes.

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

I don't want to sound disparaging when I say this, but your brain is akin to scrapings from a retarded baboons arse. The source of slashdot is, as of this very moment, 88kb. What you described includes all CSS, JS and externally referenced HTML, which is significantly more than the source required for "View Source". And before you go off all half cocked, that 412kb of CSS and JS etc is already cached, so the only difference over what is already there would be the 88kb.

Like I said, scrapings.

Re:Same bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that ~350kb javascript file that has nothing to do with 'view source' and is cached?

Go to Slashdot's page, press Ctrl+U (view source). Save that file. Yeah, all of around ~50-100k. Even if we assumed that's typical (it's not), we're only looking at about 7.5MB with 100 open tabs. Even if that is too much RAM for you, disk caching has already been suggested. Surely you can spare 7.5MB of disk space while you browse?

Re:Same bugs?

[BZ]

The HTML is cached too. It's just not guaranteed to not be evicted from the cache. Neither is anything else.

Re:Same bugs?

[BZ]

Pages that big are pretty common. All sorts of mailing list archives, any long text document, etc.

We routinely get bug reports with people complaining that their multi-megabyte (often tens of megabytes) HTML file doesn't render instantaneously...

Re:Same bugs?

[cerberusss]

Nah you don't sound disparaging at all :D Anyway, OK, I admit I was really looking for stupid things.

Re:Same bugs?

[spagetti_code]

Half a megabyte of source?! What kind of pages are you looking at? ASCII pron?

Actually, the slashdot homepage is usually over 800k.

Re:Same bugs?

[CFrankBernard]

Will the following prevent it from disappearing?

about:config [entered in Address bar]

dom.disable_window_open_feature.scrollbars true

Re:Same bugs?

[jtarbotton]

I get the same problem. I found if I grab the right edge and pull it to make the firefox window bigger I get it back. I then can reduce the size again without loosing it. If you run maximized I guess that won't work for you. I have only seen this on my win2000 machine. I have never seen it on XP or Ubuntu which I also run regularly.

Re:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

I use Firebug extensively. It does not have a source viewer. You, in your ignorance, may *think* it does.

Re:Same bugs?

[spage]

If you select then choose View Selection Source from the context menu, Firefox does not seem to re-request the page. It shows th actual HTML behind the selection, including dynamically modified and generated code. I'm no expert but it's definitely different behavior.

So Ctrl-A to select all, right-click, then View Selection Source.

I hope this helps. Thanks in advance for your insulting retort.

Re:Same bugs?

[ewrong]

ctrl + r ?

Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Lumpy]

Under OSX it's a giant leap forward compared to Version 2.X. It runs nearly as fast as safari, crashes less and does not consume all ram like the older versions love to do.

Re:Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Constantine XVI]

I have noticed that, however, it still takes forever to load. Mind you, I've got a "Sawtooth" 500MHz PowerMac G4 (running Tiger), and it might not be as bad on a modern machine.

Re:Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I know what you mean.

It takes AGES to load up on my TRS-80 Color Computer.

I went to Radio Shack and bitched about it, but the rep acted like I was crazy and basically ignored me. But you know how those guys are.

Re:Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[barzok]

Beta 3 was much faster than Safari on my November-issue MacBook. And memory usage was better on top of that. I was impressed enough for Fx Beta 3 to replace Fx2 as my primary browser at work.

Re:Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[chrisgeleven]

Agreed. Firefox 3 on OS X is making quite a strong statement against Safari 3.

Really the only issues I have left Firefox on the Mac left is no integrated PDF viewer and the fact that I really like Safari's find feature.

But those are quite minor. Overall, Firefox 3 completely wrecks Safari.

Re:Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Trillan]

It isn't "as bad," but it's still noticeably slow to load on my Intel Core 2 Duo mini.

Nice and speedy

[neokushan]

Been using this all morning and so far it's been nice and speedy for me. It's been much faster than the previous betas and there's definitely a significant improvement with most google aps (among others, but I use these all the time). Might not be many new features over Beta 3, but the speed increase and reduced memory footprint (it's still quite big, but better than previous versions - around 100Mb usage after about 6 hours of constant browsing) are very welcome. If this trend continues, the final release should be the best since 1.0.

Re:Nice and speedy

[DustyShadow]

Have you tried right clicking? It crashes on me every single time I right click on a page.

Re:Nice and speedy

[Abcd1234]

Just tried it here on Windows, and it works fine.

Toolbar UI Changes?

[diamondsw]

So where do we go to provide input on the batshit-insanely-ugly toolbar changes they've made, especially on XP/Vista? Those icons are some of the worst I've seen (including IE) and will do quite a bit of harm to Firefox's branding. Right now whenever you see Firefox in screenshots, ads, etc, you recognize it immediately based on the toolbar icons (minor changes from 1.5 to 2.0 aside). This toolbar... you'll wonder what unpaid intern in an ad graphics department cooked it up thinking it looked "kewl"...

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Constantine XVI]

I'm not a fan of the XP icons, and the jury's still out on the OSX theme, but I love the new Linux theme.

Mostly because it adopts my GTK+ theme and icons, and mostly blends in with everything else on my system (though IMHO Addons should be under Edit).

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Cska Sofia]

i like the way the frequently-used back button is larger/more obvious than the rarely-used forward button. it is a shame it still uses as much toolbar space as two equal sized buttons though. oh i guess it's kinda ugly but it's a browser not a work of art. usability is what counts. and you'll still be able to recognise it in ads.

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Slimcea]

For more discussion on the new UI themes and changes, there's a thread going on at mozillaZine about it.

The icons will grow on you after a while, and they're still making refinements and changes to the icons and backgrounds. Personally, I think the Back/Forward buttons are pretty decent, it's the rest (Reload/Stop/New tab/window) that looks a little too simple and out of place. Can't say I really agree with using different themes across different Windows versions too, this has to be the first application I know that tries that.

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[maskedbishounen]

This is one of my pet peeves. Yes, it may be a bit shallow; but can we please stop changing the theme every release? I know, I know -- it's for the sake of being "user friendly". But how is changing for look and feel of your application, without doing so much as officially supporting/including the past theme revisions, helping anyone? What's become of my browser experience when I don't know what I'm doing anymore?

Take the organize bookmarks dialog. It's magically disappeared. Perhaps I'm supposed to read the changelog and find you access it for clicking random widget #167 -- but why? It's been under the bookmark tab for years, in practically all browsers. Same with the separate history arrows; sure, just rip out that back arrow. You'll only save a few pixels and annoy the heck out of everyone who actually uses it. But that's progress, right?

While I certainly won't condemn the developers for attempting to progress on their interface, is it really so much to ask to being able to revert the interface to something like the previous version without the need to find a handful of about:config settings to change, or use their horrible extension search (which needs to let you filter by version, dammit)?

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[metamatic]

I filed a bug report about FF3 putting the back menu on the forward button. Join in the fun!

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Knuckles]

Take the organize bookmarks dialog. It's magically disappeared. Perhaps I'm supposed to read the changelog and find you access it for clicking random widget #167 -- but why? It's been under the bookmark tab for years, in practically all browsers.

Maybe I misunderstand, but AFAICT it's still there, just that it's called "Show all Bookmarks". Not all that hard.

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[maskedbishounen]

Heh, figures it was something like that. And here I was going under the assumption that it actually opened all the bookmarks, like if you had middle clicked a folder.

Off to turn in my geek badge...

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Knuckles]

To be honest, I also hesitated a bit before clicking for the same reason, when I searched for it after reading your post. But then, I assume they did some user testing for the string change.

Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[Utoxin]

I've been using the nightly builds for a couple weeks now, and they're flagged as beta 5... I figured beta 4 had been out for a while already.

For what it's worth: I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing of Firefox 3 so far. It's faster, uses less memory, and I really like the new address bar features, and the bookmarking. (It has tagging built into the bookmarks now.)

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[Legion303]

The newest nightlies are marked "3.0b5pre," which I assume means pre-release. b4 was doing that for awhile, so presumably once it got to "release" stage they dropped the "pre."

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[jac89]

Once the code freeze was initiated for beta 4 the nightly builds changed to 3.05pre.

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[Kokuyo]

Which address bar feature are we talking about? Because if you're talking about this avalanche of text that really doesn't interest me but does a terrific job of getting in the way of actually finding the URL I'm looking for then I'll have to say I, for one, am not impressed.

Is there a way to turn that off?

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[ASimPerson]

Nope, it's a "feature". I love everything else in FF3 so far except for this so-called "awesomebar".

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[Kelson]

I've been using the nightly builds for a couple weeks now, and they're flagged as beta 5... I figured beta 4 had been out for a while already.

For what it's worth: I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing of Firefox 3 so far. It's faster, uses less memory, and I really like the new address bar features, and the bookmarking. (It has tagging built into the bookmarks now.)

I've been using the nightly builds for a couple weeks now, and they're flagged as beta 5... I figured beta 4 had been out for a while already.

As I understand it, they branch the code when they're ready to produce a beta. So there's a set of nightlies still on the trunk, which will eventually become Firefox 3, and there's a set of nightlies that will become beta 4. That way it's possible to refine beta 4 a bit, and still keep working on issues that are targeted at beta 5 and beyond.

So the plain nightly builds are after the branch for beta 4, and working toward beta 5.

Let's see if this works:

. . ._____Beta4 . . ._______Beta5
____/_______________/__________________
. . . ^nightlies start calling themselves beta5pre

Treat the dots as empty space; it's the only way I could get it to not collapse the spaces together. (What's so wrong about allowing the PRE tag?)

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[TheDreadedGMan]

Huh...

I actually found this new bar quite useful, it actually uses some fuzzy logic and puts the things you use most/recently at the top... also using icons and the actual page titles instead of just the addresses..

It uses SQLite to query history/bookmarks/typed addresses.

Oh well to each his own.

Anti Virus

[Rik Sweeney]

From the release notes:

Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.

Why is this Firefox's job? Isn't that the point of Anti Virus?

Re:Anti Virus

[pdragon04]

It's called "being considerate" and "playing nice with others". I know... novel concepts around these parts.

Re:Anti Virus

[Cska Sofia]

it's more efficient for firefox to raise some kind of event than for an AV program to pick up this information on its own by polling.

Re:Anti Virus

[Junior J. Junior III]

Well, right, but is efficiency the goal or is security?

If you have to rely on another app to inform you that it's doing something, that's pretty easy to circumvent if you don't want the scrutiny, and puts a burden on application developers to worry about informing the security app what it's doing.

That's like calling a building secure because visitors must voluntarily report to the security office and check in, as opposed to having guards stationed at the doors checking everybody as they pass through.

Re:Anti Virus

[skyriser2]

Here's an extension that launches your anti-virus program on downloaded items, and is working with current versions of Firefox, Downloads Scan: http://downloadstatusbar.mozdev.org/downscan/.

Re:Anti Virus

[Cska Sofia]

with notification, the AV program can scan the file before it is made available to the user. without notification there is a potential delay between creation and discovery in which time the user could have opened the file.

Re:Anti Virus

[Junior J. Junior III]

Which is to say that notification provides better security, BUT if you're RELYING on notification, then you've potentially still got a problem.

I would think that the better way to do it would be to scan the file when it is being written; failing that, before the first read event. The I/O subsystem ought to be passing these events to the security application; it shouldn't be up to each and every application running on the system to voluntarily participate in notifications.

Re:Anti Virus

[herve_masson]

You may be right, but most AV are hooked at filesystem level anyway (i.e. when you writes or run an exe file). I wonder if/how this hook would replace this filesystem control in a better way... Might be good for CLAM which does not have on access scanning.

Re:Anti Virus

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Maybe, but waiting for my av to finish scanning the porn I download is annoying.

Re:Anti Virus

[compro01]

with the integration, firefox shouts to the AV "hey, I'm downloading executable something.exe. get ready to scan it and I'll let you know when I'm done.".

without the integration, the AV has to find out for itself that firefox is downloading an executable and check periodically if the download is done yet.

i would presume that the former is significantly more efficient.

Re:Anti Virus

[yakumo.unr]

This was an issue that many users including myself campaigned for a user configurable option, the developers conceeded to an about:config setting, and not a tools -> options menu setting.

So type 'about:config' without quotes into the url bar and hit enter, accept the 'I'll be careful' warning.

Type 'scan' into the search bar at the top and you will then a list of variables to choose from including : browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone

Double click this to change it to false, and then Firefox will no longer force your AV to scan. This is for those of us who are happy with our AV scanning internet traffic automatically, and also automatically scanning on accessing the file.

Re:Anti Virus

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that it's bad that FF will notify the A/V program, it's bad that it's part of the core and not implemented as an extension.

And A/V software will still have to poll since relying on FF to notify could create a security hole if FF had a bug that caused the notification to not happen.

And really this is the job of the OS to begin with. OS X, for example, has an OS-level mechanism (documented in Leopard but possible to use in Tiger) that allows applications to be notified of changes to the file system without having to poll.

Adding features in the wrong place is not a substitute for them not existing in the right place. Making it an extension allows users to opt-in because their OS is lacking rather than being forced to use it when there is already a better mechanism in place.

Re:Anti Virus

[master_p]

Generally operating systems do not support events on the file system (some do, but not all), so on some platforms when a new executable appears, it's the application that has the responsibility to inform the system.

First question

[mistersooreams]

When will there be a properly-supported 64 bit version? Assuming 64 bit is the future, delaying it will only increase the difficulty of adding 64-bit compatability later. I know there are third-party builds but they're not updated regularly and their reliability is questionable.

Re:First question

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? I am posting this from 64-bit Iceweasel (Debian's distribution of FireFox).

Re:First question

[Dystopian Rebel]

Compile it yourself. It is easy to do. And because it's open-source, it's ~possible~ to do.

Re:First question

[Thelasko]

To settle the Firefox 64-bit question. I use Ubuntu 64-bit and am a contributer to the 64-bit forums. Firefox can be compiled for 64-bit. However, Flash and Java are only available in 32-bit. Adobe in particular is very stubborn about releasing versions of it's software for architectures other than x86. 64-bit Firefox will work with fine even with 32-bit Flash and Java using a plugin that was released with Ubuntu 7.10.

So, in summary don't blame Mozilla for Adobe's stubbornness. You can sign the petition to Adobe here, although it is unlikely to make a difference. The problem appears to be across Adobe's entire product line and on every operating system.

Re:First question

[fmangeant]

I totally agree : on my 32 bit PC, Firefox uses only 2 Gb RAM !

With a 64 bit version of Firefox, it could use a lot more.

Re:First question

[Goalie_Ca]

I've been using the 64-bit version on linux for about 3 years now. News to me it doesn't work!

Re:First question

[HeroreV]

This bugs me too. I've been compiling every 3.0 beta release myself because I can't download 64-bit versions from Mozilla. The 32-bit versions of Firefox look like shit on my box because they can't use the 64-bit Qt widget libraries. What really bothers me about this lack of support is that it means the 64-bit versions aren't going to be tested nearly as well. It's like Mozilla only cares about getting feedback on the 32-bit versions.

Re:First question

[wild_berry]

Firefox developers say: please file a bug with Microsoft -- even the Win64 stuff limits each process address space to 2 GiB of memory, which is clearly not enough for our advanced 64-bit memory leaks.

Flash Performance?

[codemoose]

Has Flash performance improved? I love FF, but Safari and IE consistently outperform it on pages with medium to heavy Flash.

Re:Flash Performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate it when I'm navigating with the tab or arrow keys and the mouse cursor gets 'stuck' on some flash ad abomination. This permanently disables all keyboard navigation, including the menus, so I have to f***ing kill the browser.

So hate me, I'm using unclutter (the cursor remover) with awesome, the window manager, because the mouse wasn't detected at boot by this esoteric prepackaged kernel. Hey links (and links-graphic), who luvs ya baybee??

what about wmode???????

[pulse2600]

What's the story on the wmode flash transparency issue? Last I heard Adobe was waiting for Mozilla to put some sort of code into the Linux version of their browser in order for the wmode fix in Adoobe Flash to work properly. Or maybe it's the other way around now? Anybody have a clue? How can I show somebody Linux/Firefox as an alternative to Windows/IE when this problem drastically affects the functionality of many websites out there?

Re:what about wmode???????

[zzxc]

Firefox 3 supports windowless plugins on Linux, and has since last summer. See bug 137189

More info is on this blog post

Re:what about wmode???????

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure how you came to this conclusion, according to the bug you posted, the wmode flash transparency issue has not been resolved (however it does seem to be in Adobe's court now): (In reply to comment #110) > > Upgrades of the Adobe Flash plug-in have occurred after this bug was marked as > RESOLVED FIXED, so perhaps the question should be asked more explicitly as > whether the appropriate communication between the Firefox and Adobe Flash > developers about this matter also has occurred. > Excellent point. BTW, this bug/feature is 5 years old, I'm glad it's being fixed and congratulate the mozilla team. You have no idea how much harm this bug has done. Comment #112 Karl Tomlinson (:karlt) 2007-12-26 14:31:02 PDT (In reply to comment #110) > Upgrades of the Adobe Flash plug-in have occurred after this bug was marked as > RESOLVED FIXED, so perhaps the question should be asked more explicitly as > whether the appropriate communication between the Firefox and Adobe Flash > developers about this matter also has occurred. See comment #93. Windowless support in Flash may require significant changes to the plug-in, and I know Adobe are working on this. Comment #113 Matthias Versen (matti) 2007-12-28 09:18:55 PDT *** Bug 410033 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Comment #114 Reed Loden [:reed] 2008-01-13 01:09:31 PDT *** Bug 412156 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *** Comment #115 Matthias Versen (matti) 2008-02-28 12:43:27 PDT *** Bug 420157 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Fixes a Gmail problem..

[InDi0]

...with resizing fonts and logo pictures, which happened automatically the second time I gave the gmail window focus. Now the correct zoom level is retained.

Acid3

[Froggie]

66/100, I get. Jerky on update, and I may be getting a slightly off rendering because AdBlock Plus is adding 'block' elements to the page.

Re:Acid3

[MooseMuffin]

66 with adblock, 67 without it. You aren't missing much.

Google Toolbar

[psychodelicacy]

Doesn't work with this beta. Anyone know of any fixes for this?

Re:Google Toolbar

[NickCatal]

There are none... Google toolbar, even when overriding your old addons to work with the new ones, doesn't work.

I am still using the nightly builds and absolutely loving it. So much faster than B3 on my MacBook Pro

Re:Google Toolbar

[Constantine XVI]

Install the "Nightly Tester Tools" extension. Lets you override compatibility checks on extensions

is it just me

[ThirdPrize]

or is it getting harder to sound excited about each beta release of a browser? All they do is smarten up the interface. Any speed increases are negligible unless they can render it faster than the pipes can download it. It is not like any of them are going to do anything too revolutionary as all they are doing is implementing standards.

Re:is it just me

[naylor83]

Well, if you want to see how different page loads can be in different browsers, I suggest you try loading a few non-cached pages in IE7 and Firefox 3 beta 4. The difference is very noticable. Don't ask me how, but somehow Firefox 3 seems to suck the pages down off the web and display them in half the time it takes in IE7.

New Address Bar

[Richard_at_work]

Ok, I can live with the speed increases, the nice new native look and feel, the decreased memory usage - but someone please tell me how to turn off that damn funky new address bar - its driving me mad (and slowing down new tab creation)!

Some docs say to tweak the 'browser.urlbar.richResults' setting, which I have done and it has had zero effect (FF3 Beta 3). Any ideas?

Re:New Address Bar

[Rhabarber]

Try the magic oldbar extension.

Re:New Address Bar

[Richard_at_work]

Just installed that extension, unfortunately while it reverts the look and feel to the old menu bar, it doesn't seem to totally revert it - I use 'find while typing' a lot to visit certain pages a lot, and this behavior seems to have changed in FF3 to include content other than the URL, resulting in a weird display order. This is one of the behaviors I wish to revert.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

To put it bluntly: You're sh*t out of luck.

See here for the discussion that basically goes:

Us: This is terrible behaviour and hugely inconsistent. It will confuse novice users with inconsistency and searching in an address bar and it'll annoy power users who used to be able to consistently locate the places they wanted to go based on the URL (which they remembered and which remained consistent). If we wanted to search then we'd search. Yes, it can be useful in some situations, but if we know what we want to type then we don't want the browser thinking it is better than me and incorrectly second-guessing what we want.
Them: Everyone searches, and it learns. Searching is the future, so we're going to make you search.

The two sites I visit most at work are Slashdot and the BBC news (news.bbc.co.uk). What used to turn up top for "ne", "new" and "news"? The BBC news, because I wanted to go there and it matched what I typed. What turns up now? Slashdot because of "news for nerds" in the title. It needs huge amounts more weighting on URL starts than titles, but they don't seem willing to change it.

The other one that really annoys me is one of my sites. I could normally go to "sk" and hit it as first result, but now I've got to type even more of it and it doesn't make it to the top until after I've done the whole domain (because the domain is in the title of another page that always turns up top).

Re:New Address Bar

[Richard_at_work]

Ahh, dammit - thats what I was afraid of. It would seem we both have exactly the same issues with the 'feature'.

Hint to the devs: I already have a search field, its right next to the address bar. I can live with that.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

Ah, but that searches through a search engine, not your history and your bookmarks where it can potentially reveal bookmarks that are buried off in folders that people won't see but which accidentally (and potentially embarrasingly) show up for otherwise innocuous terms, even after you've cleared your browsing history.

I suggested some kind of tag for the searching, e.g. "s: slashdot" searches for slashdot in URL, title, etc, where as "slashdot" uses old-style auto-complete but they wouldn't have any of it.

Unfortunately I think it's also quite deeply buried in the code, so it might not be too easy to replace the functionality.

I will point out, though, that there have been times when I've used it to find a page that I could remember part of the title of. I just think it's terrible design to force such potentially inconsistent results ("addresses starting with what is typed" versus "anything - page or bookmark - with the typed characters anywhere within it, including session IDs") with no way of doing a "just auto-complete" behaviour.

Re:New Address Bar

[darkwhite]

I agree with your sentiment about the URL bar. The loss of URL-only autocompletion is the most annoying "feature" I have ever seen in a new browser. What's worse is that this appears completely non-customizable. I can't revert to the old behavior, I can't tell it to stop learning, I can't rearrange or delete what it already learned, and I can't manage how it integrates with bookmarks/places. Most annoyingly, the results are unpredictable and the non-trivial amount of time that it needs to find contents for the dropdown box is frustrating. This is a complete trainwreck of a feature and I'll be looking for an extension to disable it... or writing one myself.

Re:New Address Bar

[Inda]

Sorry if I've missed something but it is possible to delete what it's learned.

1. Type something like "slash"
2. Use the arrow keys to highlight the first title to delete.
3. Hold down the delete key.

I don't fancy clearing my browsing history, but I expect doing so would clear the lot.

And it seems to put your bookmarked URLs at the top. I've bookmarked links into an obscure folder for this purpose only.

I like this new feature... I can understand why others don't.

Re:New Address Bar

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Oldbar extension URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Re:New Address Bar

[FreakinSyco]

Sounds like you would really benefit from adding keyword shortcuts to websites in your bookmarks.

Hint: Right click a bookmark > Properties > Type something in the keyword area (I use 'sd' for /.) > Now try typing in that short two character keyword in the address bar. Gets you to /. (or wherever) every time.

Re:New Address Bar

[soliptic]

Wow, that really does sound like an absolute trainwreck.

Nearly every site I go to, I just type 1 or 2 letters, down arrow, enter.

"s" - > slashdot, "f" -> facebook, "l" -> last.fm, etc.

I don't think I could cope with this absolutely retarded behaviour. Guess I'll hang around on v2 until someone fixes it. When the fuck will developers learn, STOP DOING "CLEVER" THINGS THAT RESULT IN INCONSISTENT AND UNPREDICTABLE RESULTS, I need my (muscle/visual) memory damnit.

Now I know that tenuous cheap shots at Microsoft are tedious, (and if you really care, check my history, I've defended MS more often than I've slated them on here) but honestly - this is exactly the sort of crap I expect from the "I know how to make your computer easier to use - menus items that rearrange and show and hide themselves every bloody time you open them" crew at Redmond.

Genius :rolls eyes:

Re:New Address Bar

[darkwhite]

People hate this feature because its behavior is too unpredictable (breaking one of the fundamental UI guidelines), unintuitive (there is no apparent rule to how it orders the suggestions - a set of search preferences is not an apparent rule), cannot reasonably approximate the old behavior, and is often slow to boot. The intentions are great, but the feature has too many problems to be usable.

You're right that the suggestions can be deleted - nice find. Too bad you can't delete all suggestions from a particular site or pattern at once.

Re:New Address Bar

[bigbigbison]

You are lucky if it turns up "news for nerds" when you type "ne." Half the time it seems to pick the letters that are within a word. For example I've had situations where if I typed, "ne" it would turn up something like "review of a videocard page one" as the first hit because "one" has "ne" in it.

Now why on earth would someone who was looking for the first page of a review type in "ne?"

I simply don't understand why it doesn't look for the start of words first rather than simple combinations of letters.

I suppose it could be worse though. I once worked at a school that had a profanity filter so bad that it would censor the words whenever it found a combination of letters even if they were separated by a space. So if you were to write an email with something like, "as some have said" it would delete "as s" because it thought that was "ass"

Re:New Address Bar

[gaspyy]

I agree that the new system is incredibly stupid.

One example: I have a subdomain for phpMyAdmin, e.g. phpmyadmin.myserver.com. I used to type "php" and it was right there at the top. Now, when I type "php", I get all sorts of results like "http://www.randomserver.com/index.php".

It's stupid, annoying and clearly a step backaward.

When a new feature is hated by 50% of your user base, it's time to either abandon it or at LEAST provide an option to disable it.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

I don't bookmark them - why should I need to when I know the URL? Bookmarks are there to track useful sites you might want to go back to and find again but which were a bit tricky to track down.

As an analogy, do you put a book mark in the front page of all of your physical paper books, or just on the page you're up to and the pages that might be a useful reference at a later date? Bookmarking "my website" is equivalent to the first one.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

But will that wipe the item from your history completely or just reset its weighting to 0? If you could say "for this search then ignore this result" it would let you blacklist complete failures in the search, but that'd still be a long and slow process to go "no, my results are wrong, must spend the next five minutes wiping the results while preferably keeping my browsing history just so I can get better results the next time I do it".

Re:New Address Bar

[MikeUW]

I'll tell you why I don't like it:

a) I don't like a long list of my personal bookmarks appearing whenever I start typing a URL. I'd rather not have my personal bookmarks being put on displayed if/when others are looking at my screen. The fact that this is the default behaviour bothers me.

b) The results are too big/flashy - just a simple list (the url and title as separate/coloured fields on a single line would be sufficient)

c) Not enough (or not working) customization options. I should be able to give priority to how (let alone *if*) it searches my bookmarks and/or typed URLs. On Fedora 7, I installed ff3 from a fedora repository last night (this ff3 claims to be beta 5) - in about:config, 'browser.urlbar.maxRichResults' can be set to a smaller number (or zero) making the results much less obtrusive. However, the option that I really want is 'browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped', but it has no effect. I still see my bookmarks being listed. I can only assume this is a bug. In either case, these options should be much more prominently displayed in the preferences, and better options for tuning search results need to be provided.

That's pretty much it. What I find most ironic is that this thing with extra features can be disabled with an add-on that installs the old location bar...isn't this usually the other way around (install add-ons to *add* extra features)?

Re:New Address Bar

[TheDreadedGMan]

Finally a kindred soul... LOL

+1

I use the new "awesomebar" and find it more useful then the old one.

Re:New Address Bar

[syousef]

Oldbar is what you're after. Annoying that it takes an extension to do this. It should have been an option. The Mozilla developers have lost the plot.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Re:New Address Bar

[syousef]

You can still have it with oldbar

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

Stupid that it's not simply an option.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's just old-style formatting (i.e. not "OMGWTF you must see this as it it covers a chunk of your browser window with icons and coloured text") not old-style behaviour.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

Way to force unnecessary and cluttered behaviour on the user ("Yes, we know you go to GMail a lot and it is easy to spell, but you've now got to bookmark it if you want to show it at the top of your results list").

As for the analogy, it does match, just with extra computerisation.

Paper books: you mark the places you want to go back to, you know the books you go to the contents page for a lot, you can (if you have big bookmarks that you can write on) quickly skim the bookmarks to find the one you want.

Browser: you mark the places (pages in sites) you want to go back to, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot, you can quickly skim your bookmarks to find the one you want.

"Awesomebar" browser: you mark the places you want to go back to or keep for reference, those places then always jump to the front when you don't necessarily want them, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot but you've got to type a reasonable amount of the address to guarantee you get the right one, they're never going to be in the same order twice, they change drastically as you type each character, etc.

Re:New Address Bar

[spage]

The awesomebar is a real advance. Keep at it, I think you'll come to love it. It started great and continues to get smarter in nightly builds. The frecency (measure of how frequently and how recently) is very good at picking the right URLs. If the wrong things shows up, just enter another sequence from the title or the URL ("news bbc front" OK! {Enter}).

You semi-consciously learn to pick words that work, e.g. I type {Ctrl-L}cairo march{Enter} for mailing list archives, {Ctrl-L}Dash{Enter} for my blogger home page, etc. It's MUCH faster than navigating bookmarks, much better than URL completion, and no need to set up a keyworded bookmark.

One of the developers blogged about recent changes, http://ed.agadak.net/2008/03/using-the-awesomebar and invites feedback.

(But Slashdotters should drop the shitty "Firefox developers are idiots for not doing it the right way!" attitude if they want busy developers to spend more than 5 seconds considering their bitching.)

Re:first post

[naylor83]

Sorry, no FP. But Firefox 3 is da bomb!

Bookmark Sync?

[Bander]

I used the previous beta quite happily under OS-X, but I've become seriously dependent on Foxmarks for keeping my bookmarks synced between the two (or 3, sometimes 4) systems I use regularly. Can anyone suggest a bookmark sync tool that works with Firefox 3? Ideally it would work with Firefox 2 as well, but 3 looks "ready enough for me" (if not my mom), so I'd probably be happy with using Firefox 3 everywhere if necessary.

Other than the compatibility issues with mods written for older versions (omelettes, eggs, etc), I am impressed by the quality of version 3. The speed and interface tweaks are certainly welcome.

Re:Bookmark Sync?

[Samurai Tony]

Rather than trying to sync bookmarks between multiple machines, why not use portable apps http://portableapps.com/ via a memory stick and only have the one set?

Re:Bookmark Sync?

[Bander]

The reason I don't use a portable apps sort of solution is because I use OS-X, Windows XP, and Linux systems in roughly equal measure. At work two of the boxes are physically adjacent and in use at the same time. I can't use a physical device like a USB drive on more than one system at the same time.

Obviously I can manually export and import bookmarks, but I did that for years and it sucked.

There was an addon with bookmark sync functionality that required you to use your own WebDAV or ftp server, but it was orphaned before Foxmarks came along. I'm not even going to try to get it to work with version 3.

Re:Bookmark Sync?

[macdaddy]

The reason behind wanting to sync bookmarks between 2 machines is most likely because the wants to access his bookmarks on both machine simultaneously. I want to access my bookmarks on 4 machines simultaneously. I don't want to have to shutdown FF on PC #1 (and the 1.5GB of RAM that it's consuming) to take it to PC #2 and do something else with it. I want it on both machines. I want it on all my machines.

Re:Bookmark Sync?

[Bander]

I would mod you up... I signed up for the Foxmarks beta, waited for my e-mail, and now I'm happily using the beta. It does what it says on the tin. Thanks for the pointer!

2.0.0.12?

[FudRucker]

there is a javascript vulnerability that has gone unpatched for a while now http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/09/2215205

i sure hope moozilla's developers don't depend on NoScript to keep javascript features patched for them...

Re:2.0.0.12?

[BZ]

> there is a javascript vulnerability that has gone unpatched for
> a while now

Except it's not. The guy who wrote that article is just pretty confused.

Of course figuring that out involves following the relevant bug, because he never publicly admits it when he made a mistake. Then again, he's in the business of making noise, not security, so it's not that much of a surprise.

ogg/theora/dirac/vorbis and video player DOM

[GNUPublicLicense]

It's gone. I was told it's finished, no video player DOM and no default codecs (ogg/mkv/theora/dirac/vorbis/speex). That's a huge blow for GPL software since the web is now video/audio enabled...

Re:ogg/theora/dirac/vorbis and video player DOM

[kbrosnan]

WhatWG and W3 HTML5 working groups drastically altered the specification for such that the Mozilla implementation was non-conforming. Rather than have legacy that only worked in Fx 3 Mozilla did the only thing they could do which was to drop the feature. It will be in a later release once a standard is hashed out.

Re:Fucking idiot

[MrNaz]

Yea! And all those Windows users should also be ashamed of themselves for not using IE! And don't even get me started on Linux users who don't use Lynx. Using Linux with a graphical program! How irresponsible!

For those interested in performance numbers

[bconway]

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2

Not bad.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[dudeinthedark]

That test doesn't include IE8 beta 1. When I tested it with the same website he used IE8B1 scored 8710.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[bunratty]

Uh, wouldn't you have to run the tests for different browsers on your computer? How can you compare the time it took your computer to run a test in IE 8 Beta 1 with the time it took a different computer to run the test in a different browser?

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[slapys]

I checked it out because of the above post and discovered an ENORMOUS speed increase. Firefox is now way faster than Opera! This is huge!

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[bunratty]

To be fair, Firefox is now faster than Opera at one particular JavaScript benchmark. Opera may still be faster at rendering pages or in the JavaScript on a site you frequent. But, yes, it does look like a large increase in overall JavaScript performance for Firefox.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[elmartinos]

I hate to say it but performance in Linux sucks, especially for tab switching. In windows pressing Ctrl+Tab is almost instantly, in Linux (Ubuntu 7.10) it takes almost a second!

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[skiflyer]

All I know is the common forum packages utilized by the sites I visit throughout the day are much much faster. Further, the browser stays more responsive while threads load in background tabs... now if I can just get my gesture plugin working I'll probably use it exclusively.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[Blakey Rat]

Despite that test's claim of "real world" performance testing, it doesn't appear to have any tests which do DOM manipulation. In the real world, DOM manipulation is something like 90% of what JS is used for.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[thechao]

I think I understand what you mean by "5x" faster. However, what I hope it means is that I can "surf the internets" five times faster: five times reading speed; five times download speed; five times ... uh ... meditation speed. Y'know. All the "fives" in my geek life.

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[dudeinthedark]

I ran the test with FF2 as well but I forgot to include the numbers, sorry. I got 14865 with FF2 no add-ons. Just ran with FF3B4 and got 4589.2ms. I would run it with IE7 but IE8 seems to have erased it.

Re:Fucking idiot

[naylor83]

Hmm... duh! Read his post again. The whole point of it is that Firefox 3 now actually feels like an OS X app.

Why do you need it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, people complain when Firefox uses a couple hundred megs of memory. Do you really need a version that uses more than 3-4 gigabytes? Also, have all of your plugins been updated to 64-bit versions? If not, prepare for a world of hurt.

Re:Why do you need it?

[sd.fhasldff]

Why I need a 64-bit version of Firefox????

Well, I'm running a 64-bit OS. I do have a chrooted 32-bit environment for my online banking, but keeping the chrooted environment up-to-date is a hassle.

If you think that *memory* is the sole raison d'etre for 64-bit, you are mistaken. AMD64 is a new instruction set with many advantages. In fact, almost everything I run is 10-70% faster in 64-bit and this has nothing to do with memory limits.

Re:Why do you need it?

[Tuzanor]

Will it play nicely with proprietary 3rd party 32-bit plug-ins (ie flash)? IIRC, you can compile firefox as 64 bit in unix, but it will break flash. This may not bother some people, but will others.

Re:Why do you need it?

[jcupitt65]

Most linuxes come with a 64-bit firefox as the default, I know ubuntu does. Flash doesn't work though, so I actually use the 32-bit build.

Re:Why do you need it?

[Koohoolinn]

Using nspluginwrapper (link) you can use 32bit Flash (amongst others) with 64bit Firefox.

Re:Why do you need it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what nspluginwrapper is for.

wget the picture?

[newr00tic]

don't even get me started on Linux users who don't use Lynx. Using Linux with a graphical program! How irresponsible! Linux users should use wget with 'convert-links-to-locally-correspond' -flags.. ;)

Source

[mhamel]

I kind of agree with them. This is a waste of memory and time for the huge majority of people. We are talking about a project which is already under attack for it's bad memory usage. I understand why they don't want to go that road. It, to the least, show that their can be other points of view and that you do not need to be that aggressive with them.

A web developer will probably not use "view source" very much anyway. Try firebug. That's the way to go if you really want to understand a page. You'll rarely need "view source" after that.

Re:Source

[brunascle]

I disagree, viewing source is very important, and if it's dynamically created content and it has to reload the page, the source you're viewing may not be the same source that created the page. It's essential for debugging (e.g. HTML typos). and for a POST request, reloading is absolutely unacceptable.

Re:Source

[MrNaz]

I have Firebug and Web Dev toolbar and a whole bunch of others. View source still gets used heaps, as the HTML real time validator uses it. View source is a core part of any web dev work.

Re:Source

[Asztal_]

You could always use View Selection Source or DOM inspector (which I believe is now an extension on addons.mozilla.org instead) or one of the other tools that do a fine job of this.

Re:Source

[brunascle]

i do use DOM inspector constantly, but there are certain things it wont help with (e.g. debugging certain HTML typos). i havent used View Selection Source, but i suspect it generates the source from the current DOM rather than displaying the original source, which means it would have the same problems as the DOM inspector.

Re:Source

[bjdevil66]

Thanks for pointing out Firebug - I'll try that out.

However, the GP post had a valid point in some cases. I don't see a good reason to save the source in memory for static pages, but for debugging dynamic pages (POSTs, etc), it doesn't make sense to have to repost every time you view source.

Re:Source

[cronot]

A web developer will probably not use "view source" very much anyway. Try firebug. That's the way to go if you really want to understand a page. You'll rarely need "view source" after that.

Sorry, no dice. I'm a web developer too, and I do use Firebug all the time, but there are times when viewing the source is necessary, and Firebug's presentation doesn't cut it because Firebug doesn't present the page as it was sent to the browser, but as it was computed by Firefox, i.e. as FF "understood" it - you may know that when the source has incongruities and errors, all browsers try the best to "fix" it, so the way Firebug presents the source is not necessarily the same as it was received by Firefox, and this can mask problems you may be trying to fix.

"Waste of memory" doesn't cut it too. As the GP said, the source of a page alone rarely goes beyond 100kb, and that's a tiny fraction of the memory FF uses right after launch - you'd hardly see the difference in memory usage if the source for the current opened pages was kept on memory.

Re:Source

[Bogtha]

This is a waste of memory and time for the huge majority of people.

Memory how? MrNaz has already said it can be cached to disk. Time how? It doesn't have to download anything extra.

If Firefox can keep the contents of tabs I've already closed in memory, they can surely keep the source to the page I am currently viewing on disk.

A web developer will probably not use "view source" very much anyway. Try firebug. That's the way to go if you really want to understand a page. You'll rarely need "view source" after that.

That's simply not true. Firstly, I prefer view source to Firebug. Secondly, Firebug shows you the DOM, not the source. When you're trying to debug JavaScript that modifies the DOM, you often need to see the original source, not the DOM.

Re:Source

[maxume]

What should the browser do if a user requests the generated source while it is changing it? A built in feature needs to answer that question in an unambiguous way and the answer will inevitably make somebody unhappy. Fortunately, a user added feature doesn't face those problems:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html#generated_source

Re:Source

[jma05]

What's there to disagree? As parent suggested, that IS what FireBug does and MORE. Parent is not saying viewing source is not important. He is saying that the "View Source" function in FireFox is not relavant anymore since substantially better tools are available. But I agree, it is curious that they chose to reload the page for this.

Re:Source

[brunascle]

firebug shows the generated source, not the original source. so, for example, if javascript changed something on the page, those changes would be in the generated source but not the original source.

Re:Source

[AySz88]

I think you misunderstood: Instead of trying to get the original source with "view source", use something like firebug, which shows you the current source even after client-side dynamic stuff has changed the DOM tree. This seems to be much more useful for the vast majority of cases than the normal "view source" anyway.

Re:Source

[zenslug]

Firebug is the tool you need. As a web developer, I spend about 98% of my time in Firebug, and 2% looking at the output to View Source. Firebug gives you the view to the rendered page, so dynamic changes to the page are visible and malleable.

Re:Source

[szap]

firebug shows the generated source,

The raw source is available, IIRC, under Net -> $current_url -> Response, if you have enabled it. Shows every damn request, images, html, text and ajax alike.

Re:Source

[Anonymous Coward]

Still doesn't seem to be the same. If I hit a page that embeds the current time (milliseconds) in the response, I see a different value on screen as opposed to what firebug shows in its source. This seems to indicate that the firebug display is from a separate request.

Re:Source

[szap]

Hmmm, just checked. In fact, I created a page that outputs a large random integer. It's the same. Don't know, maybe we've different Firebug versions or it reloads the source under different circumstances. Firebug's been a foolproof all-in-one debugging tool for us so far.

Feature creep vs Bug fixes

[spineboy]

Normally I'm somewhat against feature creep, but I think that the new features added are all very, very good. Most are security concerns, and some just make the dang thing easier, more eficient, and smoother to use (star button to add fav bookmark). The added features seem to not be of the bells and whistles type.

  The attention to reducing memory footprint, mem leaks, and speed are all very well received, and thoughtful. It seems to be a big push of this release to concentrate on that.

This seems like a very nice release and improvement. - I particulary like the thunderbird anti-phishing tie in.

Re:Feature creep vs Bug fixes

[David Gerard]

I'm living in Minefield (Firefox 3 nightlies) on Windows at present. The interface feels just like Firefox 2 except better. Lots of nice little touches and lots of work improving the plumbing.

Re:Feature creep vs Bug fixes

[markjhood2003]

I particulary like the thunderbird anti-phishing tie in. I thought the whole point of FireFox was to unbundle from the email client. I've always preferred the SeaMonkey distribution because the browser and email play together -- maybe you'd like to try it.

May not work with older Linux distributions ...

[Herschel Cohen]

I was already having problems with Beta 3, which would self destruct on startup. Now the latest beta says I need the newer Gnome developers tool kit. Therefore, until I upgrade my distribution I will no longer be able to try using version 3 tests. Nonetheless, beta 2 still works fine.

Re:May not work with older Linux distributions ...

[tmalone]

They also dropped support for OS X 10.3.9 and below. The pool of software my aging TiBook can run is getting shallow. I think they advertise this better now, but when the first betas came out it was buried in some release notes. It would be really nice if Apple would include some way for you system to tell you when you're trying to run software that is too new for it. Some sort of API version data embedded in the executable would be nice, instead of just having it mysteriously crash.

Linux tends to be better about this; it usually prints to the console that you have the wrong version of a library. A nice little popup would be cool though.

Security Security blah blah blah

[gelfling]

Is it faster and smaller? Does it run better and not crash? Is it a RAM whoring slut? Is it going to break all of my extensions to protect me from myself?

I work in security and I'm actually a little sick of everyone trying to incorporate more security features into every product under the sun. Hey, maybe a little bit of education and awareness is worth 10 million lines of antiphishing code.

Re:Security Security blah blah blah

[luserSPAZ]

Or, you know, maybe education doesn't work.

And yes, it is faster and has less crashes and uses less memory. Did you think that was a binary choice?

Re:Security Security blah blah blah

[gelfling]

Yes generally it is. Ever more bloat ever more animated dancing bears. When things run faster it's been my experience that it is result of a complete code overhaul or when major functions are jettisoned. If that's not the case here, then I applaud them.

Re:first post

[XenoPhage]

Sorry, no FP. But Firefox 3 is da bomb! Oh, wonderful.. Now how am I going to get through airport security?

Fork It

[sd.fhasldff]

We were glad about the existence of Firefox, until Mozilla got greedy and sold out to corporate interests. I'm just waiting for the day that Mozilla decides to reinvent itself as a company with a profit interest as opposed to an non-profit company, which it really is now in name only.

I don't care whether Mozilla is "a company with a profit interest" or not. What I care about is the product - if some people are making money, well, good for them. This isn't Communism, you know... (yeah, that's gonna cost me).

One of the many things that make Open Source Software so great is that you can just fork it if you don't like the direction the product is headed in.

I seriously don't understand the animosity towards Mozilla for becoming a "real" company. It's enabling them to do a lot of great things that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

And, if you don't like it, fork it!

Re:Fork It

[MrNaz]

I seriously don't understand the animosity towards Mozilla for becoming a "real" company. It's enabling them to do a lot of great things that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

Not being aggressive, but genuinely asking, what sort of things are you talking about?

Re:Fork It

[kbrosnan]

The Mozilla Foundation which owns the Corp has funded several projects in 2007.

• Support and maintenance of the mozdev.org
• Development of Perl 6 and Parrot
• Implementation of accessibility features in the Dojo AJAX toolkit
• Enhancement of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows
• Enhancements to the OpenSSL cryptographic library and Apache mod_ssl SSL/TLS module
• Enhance the Orca open source screen reader for Linux to support Firefox
• much more read the "projects in 2007" link...

Current work includes improving l10n tools Community Giving and Tools for the L10n Process

2006 10k USD to openbsd to continue development of openbsd and openssh. Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/03/31

Re:first post

[Anonymous Coward]

mod down again; it's not that funny. (no offence intended, parent.)

If you think this is a good formula for humour, no wonder Linux has no chance versus the commercial/'smart' OS'es; the beanbag/propellerhead/pepsi-gulp style has to go some time or the other; smart up. - (This is why you don't get laid, too.)

Seriously impressed....

[mike_diack]

I was very impressed with FF 3 beta 3, but beta 4 seems much much faster even than beta 3. Firefox 3 looks like it'll be really great.

The only downside is as usual, a lot of extension authors need to bump their version checks again - a lot of my extensions that were working with FF 3 beta 3 don't work with beta 4 (due to the version check)

Mike

Re:Anti Virus (the email server way)

[Krneki]

No, I don't want any exe spying everything I do. Firefox.exe should call the anti-virus process to check the file. This is the proper way to handle stuff, on demand.

It depends

[Enderandrew]

The slowest component in your computer is most likely your hard drive. When you run out of memory (which is both fast and cheap) the computer swaps to pagefile, and that slows your computer down. If you're running out of memory, and relying on swap, then memory is an issue and you want to use less of it (or buy more of it). However, if you're not running out of memory, then yes, CPU usage is more important.

Re:It depends

[Firehed]

Well certainly, but you seem to have missed the part about unused memory. The parent poster said that there is tons going unused - he's obviously aware that it's faster than the hard drive, and is curious as to why page files are being used anyways intead. I certainly wonder the same thing - I have over two gigs of physical memory listed as available in my task manager, yet I still have a 1.25GB page file. My MBP at home is a bit better that way because at least when I was running 2GB it would dwindle down to about 1% free before starting aggressive paging use (I don't think I've gotten it to max out 4GB since making the jump though it's certainly still paging). The question isn't so much with our software as it is with the OS if you ask me - why on earth are large amounts of data being cached out to the swap file with so much free RAM? Unlike a lot of ignorant enthusiasts, I didn't get lots of memory just to have more free.

Re:It depends

[Enderandrew]

I agree, and this is why Firefox has this feature. Unused memory isn't helping you, so Firefox intends to use it. It is only really a major problem when you do need the memory for another task, or when the OS pagefiles when it isn't necessary.

Re:It depends

[addie macgruer]

Be careful of the way you read OSX's activity monitor pages. The cocoa frameworks are lazy by design: for instance, if you inform it to load an image, it will mark it as being in 'virtual memory', but not actually touch the disk until you try to draw it to screen, when the memory manager then does the lifting. Opening ten thousand images in a program doesn't take a second, but drawing them to screen will cause disk thrashing.

Makes sense, because what's the point of starting to load them all, running out of RAM, and then writing them to the pagefile on the disk, and then reading them again when you need them.

Consequentially, on startup most of /System and /Library end up in 'virtual memory'. On Activity Monitor on my Mac, up 19d, has a 'VM size' of 34.6 Gb. More important is the page in / outs, which stand at a little over 1.00 Mb for me. If I was short on RAM, that would be a lot, lot more.

Google Toolbar

[rtgree01]

I for one can't use a browser without the Google Toolbar.... Until Google releases a version for this version, I can't switch...

Why it's faster

[Anonymous Coward]

After stumbling around looking for where the source tarball was, I downloaded it and unpacked it. During unpacking I noticed a certain directory: mozilla/modules/libpr0n. Now I know why so many guys say it performs faster; it's optimized to view the kind of sites they all go to...

Re:Why it's faster

[compro01]

for those who don't get it, that's the gecko (the rendering engine firefox uses) image decoding libary. i believe the "official" name was "libimg2", but some people apparently thought that name was too boring.

As always, Try it the easy way: Firefox Portable

[CritterNYC]

You can try out 3 Beta 4 without disrupting your Firefox 2 install on Windows by using Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 4. It's designed for portable devices (USB flash drives, iPods, portable hard drives), but you can also just run it from your desktop.

Acid3 status

[cyfer2000]

Acid3 status of firefox3 in a spreadsheet, just for your entertainment.

I don't know whether I like it yet

[Chrisq]

The address bar behaviour seems odd, but it might be OK when I'm used to it. There should definitely be a way of switching back to the normal behaviour though.

Re:I don't know whether I like it yet

[syousef]

Here you go:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227

For the record I think the Mozilla devs are on crack to do this without putting in an option to turn it off.

Division of responsibility

[xant]

This is good, but can't we put the responsibility on the system where it *really* belongs? Viruses, not Firefox, should inform the AV system when malicious code is about to executed.

Still fast

[lpangelrob]

Still fast. Very fast. Now I'm going to put it through the Windows 2000 + Google Maps stress test. Usually this fails. :-D But looks good so far. I'm impressed!

However, it still crashes on first startup attempt. Probably related to the old 2.0.0.12 installation (that got uninstalled, btw).

Re:Still fast

[TheDreadedGMan]

usually profile from ff2 causes this.. best to save out your bookmarks from ff2 or backup your profile folder, or both, then delete your profile if it's crashing at start.

Just my experience from a version of ff3 beta 2 on linux.. beta 3 and beta 4 have been good to me so far, but I only use Adblock and Spelling extensions...

3 more questions right here for ya?

[pbhj]

>>> The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.

How did that get marked insightful.

What is Microsoft attempting to do? What does it say about the MozDev team? Who was content to sit around?

Re:3 more questions right here for ya?

[calebt3]

1. Microsoft is attempting to make an Acid2-compliant browser
2. It says that Microsoft realizes that they have fallen behind and need to actually be competitive again.
3. MS was content to sit around. IE6 was *the* browser for years. That's the reason for No. 2

Much Faster

[bogie]

This is the biggest increase I can remember for Firefox. One informal test for me was how many tabs of digg.com I could open before the browser locked up. With 2.x by the 4th or 5th tab the entire browser is locked up for several seconds at a time for up to a minute. With 3.0 beta 4 that never happens. The speed increase I'm seeing feels comparable to the lastest Webkit nightlies. Impressive.

Safari Scrolling

[pkulak]

Has anyone else noticed that scrolling complex pages on OS X is terrible? It's like your trying to push the page up through molasses.

Forks

[DrYak]

One of the many things that make Open Source Software so great is that you can just fork it if you don't like the direction the product is headed in.

Also known as IceWeasel, as may have noticed those who followed the recent problems of firefox branding and the consecutive fork.

Standards

[unchiujar]

It seems the standard has improved a little bit also. http://acid3.acidtests.org/ now reports 67% instead of 61% for the previous beta. It actually reported 66% on first opening the page and then on each subsequent refresh 67%.

I'm also running the latest beta.

[crhylove]

I'm also running FF3 beta 4, and I can say: IT IS FAST. It is probably the fastest browser I have used, ever. I don't necessarily like all the changes, and agree the new icons are a little homely, but the speed is undeniable, and those other quibbles are largely cosmetic.

For those of you on Windows who don't want to hose your registry with multiple Firefox installs, I highly recommend the portable version. In fact, for 20 different reasons I recommend the portable version of not only Firefox, but all your Windows apps:

http://portableapps.com/news/2008-03-11_-_firefox_portable_3_beta_4

It's not a real package management system, but it beats the hell out of installing and reinstalling tons of crap in Windows. I think in many ways it also beats most Linux package managers I've dealt with.

I also want to submit a complaint about a lack of x64 apps in general. There is still no Skype for 64 bit Linux, for example, and that's just plain bad form.

Keep rocking Mozilla! Keep rocking FOSS! Keep rocking portableapps.com!

rhY

Re:I'm also running the latest beta.

[Fantastic Lad]

Awesome advice. I'd never heard of portable apps before. What a great idea. Thanks for the heads up!

-FL

Re:I'm also running the latest beta.

[crhylove]

I really recommend them. Nearly every one of my favorite apps is available on that site, too:

Gimp
Thunderbird
Firefox
Pidgin
Open Office

Wait a minute did I just admit that I like Open Office? Somebody kill me. I like the portable apps system so much though that I even use them on Linux under wine. I suppose I would run them natively if I didn't have to use windows sometimes though.

Sounds great, but....

[EmagGeek]

does it still leak gigabytes of memory all over the goddamn place? I'll switch back from IE when someone can swear to god and their mother's grave that they've fixed all of the memory allocation issues in FF.

Re:Sounds great, but....

[bunratty]

Congratulations! Your phrase for today is: false dichotomy.

Re:first post

[MorpheousMarty]

Wow, I bet with a personality like that you get all the guys.

YouTube in Iceweasel 64?

[tepples]

I am posting this from 64-bit Iceweasel (Debian's distribution of FireFox). I'm assuming that Iceweasel 64 would use the Gnash 64 plug-in for SWF objects because there is no Flash 64. So how well does YouTube work in your setup?

Re:YouTube in Iceweasel 64?

[Anonymous Coward]

It works great on my setup. I use MPlayer to play YouTube videos, and it's much better than YouTube's own player.

Re:YouTube in Iceweasel 64?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck in this day and age cares about Flash.....

I'm sure FF 3 Beta 4 is great but

[treeves]

when are they gonna go to FF 3 Gamma?

New development trend

[ASimPerson]

Is it just me, or is becoming trendy in open source development to introduce changes your userbase hates because the active developers think they know what's good for them?

Another shining example of this recently is pidgin. In the most recent version (2.4.0) they introduced a change to the IM window that automatically sizes the area you type in. The default size is 2 lines and you cannot resize this area at all. They claim that this is all most users need but I hate the sizing - as you start typing it will resize itself and generally I like having that area be around 3-4 lines. But more importantly I want to be able to redesign the damn typing area like I've been able to do since I started using AIM 10 years ago.

Re:New development trend

[syousef]

Is it just me, or is becoming trendy in open source development to introduce changes your userbase hates because the active developers think they know what's good for them?

It's just you I'm afraid. This behaviour is no new trend. I believe it's THE core reason open source stagnates.

Throws off sites that use table layouts

[elrous0]

Anyone else noticed that this version throws off some sites that use table layouts (pieces are misaligned)? I've got a couple of sites that I designed that use table layout on their front page (don't give me a lot of CSS crap, folks, absolute positioning is still no match for a well-done table). On some of them it seems to introduce random gaps in the slices (they look just fine in IE and Firefox 2.0).

Re:Throws off sites that use table layouts

[Bogtha]

Sounds like you might have changed the doctype so Firefox isn't being kicked into quirks mode. Unless you are vertically aligning the images to the bottom or changing them to block display, they are supposed to produce gaps in table layouts, because they are base-aligned by default, meaning the "gap" is the space reserved for descenders that is between the baseline and the bottom of the table cell.

As far as I know, the doctype switching hasn't changed in Firefox 3, so you should be seeing this problem in earlier versions as well. Take a look at Tools | Page Info | Render Mode to see if it's in quirks mode.

And absolute positioning is not the only option for CSS layouts, so if your reason for avoiding CSS really is "absolute positioning is still no match for a well-done table", then perhaps you should take another look at CSS.

Awesomebar

[Anonymous Coward]

They added three nice features to the awesomebar, they just fucked up the user interface. The three nice features they added are, 1) substring matching for completion, 2) matching on titles as well as URL's and 3) the "frecency" sorting. If they don't fix the awesomebar by the time FF3 is released than an extension can be written to deal with it. The current interface in FF2 is far better, and would only require a couple of tweaks.

Extension compatibility check _before_ I install?

[NeMon'ess]

How do I see what version my extensions are compatible through? Preferably in a simple list. I'd rather not go through them one-by-one but I just might. Yeah I've heard about disabling firefox's checking.

The one thing I don't like about Firefox3

[wozzinator]

That the download window doesn't have a "Clean Up" button so I have to resort to right clicking and clicking on Clear Downloaded. It may seem like laziness, but now without the button, firefox 3 is discouraging to me.

Re:The one thing I don't like about Firefox3

[TheDreadedGMan]

Yep! Welcome to teh new "upgraded" downloads dialog.

On another note, it pause/resumes now... which is so useful for... I dunno... dial-up?? ;)

Re:first post

[bytta]

Sorry, no FP. But Firefox 3 is da bomb! Oh, wonderful.. Now how am I going to get through airport security? Just use IE - that one's a dud...

Re:Extension compatibility check _before_ I instal

[Westacular]

You are (almost) in luck. Firefox's integrated auto-updater will now, as part of the dialog telling you there's a new version and asking if you want to upgrade, list your extensions and highlight which are and aren't compatible (and lets you do a bulk "check for updates" at the same time). It's quite slick, I was impressed.

But that doesn't help you if you're upgrading from 2.0.x or if you're not receiving the new version through the built-in updater.

Re:Fucking idiot

[misleb]

I wonder how much of it is faked and how much of it is real Cocoa controls though. Not that it really matters, but I'd be interested to learn what they've done to Cocoaify the front end. I notice that you can't click and drag the window by grabbing the bit of teh toolbar below the title bar. In other Mac apps such as iTunes and Safari, you can grab any part of the gray toolbar and move the window.

-matthew

Did you mean ...

[Evil Pete]

... Firefox 3 is better for you? (ducks)

n00bs

[Anonymous Coward]

waiting for a beta release and then flock to /. to comment with usual crap. How pathetic that can be. I mean.... it's not like there is a trunk build every night or something.

Still broken (GMail contacts)

[Bilbo]

I may be missing something, but at least in the Linux version, seems to still have the problem in GMail where the the Contacts page doesn't display any names when you do a search. This is something that appeared when Google released a new version of their email app. I'm not sure if it's a problem in the Google code or if it's a rendering problem in Firefox. I tried to test it with Opera, but unfortunately, when you use Opera, it falls back to the older version of GMail, which doesn't have the problem.

(The current, non-Beta version of Firefox does NOT have this problem.)

Re:Still broken (GMail contacts)

[neokushan]

I'm unsure if I'm using the newer version of Gmail or not, but searching for contacts works fine for me.
Is there any way to force it to use the newer version, that you know of, so that I may test it and see if it's a problem for me as well?

Re:Still broken (GMail contacts)

[Bilbo]

When you look at your contacts page, does it show up in one column, or do you see three columns -- one for groups, one for "search results", and one for the actual information for the contact? If it's in three columns, that's the newer version. If the names are in one column, then it's probably the older version. In the upper right corner, there should be a link to "use older version", or "use newer version". That's how you can toggle back and forth. Are you on Linux or Windows? I haven't tried it on Windows.

Re:Still broken (GMail contacts)

[neokushan]

Although I have options for all 3 columns, each is displayed on their own and there's no option to use a newer/older version, so I'm guessing I'm still using the older version. Oh well. At least it works.

Re:Fucking idiot

[nuzak]

iTunes isn't a Cocoa app either. It's Carbon.

Re:Extension compatibility check _before_ I instal

[NeMon'ess]

But that doesn't help you if you're upgrading from 2.0.x

Doh! Ah well thanks anyway. Odd are pretty good things are compatible now that the betas have been going on for a while.

Really?

[kingturkey]

Do we really need an article on the Slashdot front page every time they release a new Firefox build?? It's not even a new release, it's just a beta build! Surely Mozilla has their own blog with RSS, so people that need to find out about every build can read it, but is it really newsworthy? I'm sure I'm going to get modded as a troll or flamebait here but it's worth saying.

So what if it's the extensions?

[syousef]

2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.

You REALLY wonder why open source doesn't take off EVEN when it's got the superior product???

A brief summary.

Firefox Advocate 1: Our wonderful new browser Firefox supports extensions.
User: Cool!!! I love these things!
Developer: Cool!!! Web developer tools are much funkier than IE.
User: Wait a second. This thing is bringing my system to its knees!
Developer: Mine too. I just kill it
Firefox Advocate 2: Morons! Firefox is fine. It's those extensions. Everyone knows the extensions can't be trusted. Turn them off! Why do you need so many extensions anyway?
User: Um? Wait a second. You're calling me a moron and asking me to switch these off but I switched over because I was told these made the browser extensible. I'm going back to IE. Both browsers suck, but at least that's the one most people use and the IE community isn't as rude.

EVEN if it's the extensions causing the problem, the extension model implemented by Firefox allows this to happen. The developers have to take some responsibility for this, especially if they're touting the feature. One solution: Identify the extensions that leak and reject installing them until they're fixed.

If my operating system crashes for most apps, I'll blame the OS. If it's only one or two I'll blame the app. Same with the browser. If it crashes running most extensions it's a piece of shit.

i tried 3.0b3

[Frozen Void]

quite fast and seems to be more slick looking. However after intalling one extension(suppose to be compatible with 3.0) it crashed and after deleting it(3.0) i discovered my firefox 2.0 cookies,some preferences and some extension data gone.Had to spend a hour to get it all back into my settings(mostly about:config).
I'll check it after few months after official release.

How good is it with the Acid3 test now?

[xushi]

I can't install it on my laptop at this time, but i'd like to know the result it gets on the Acid 3 test, comparing it to the previous article mentioned about IE5 vs IE7, FF 3b3, etc..

Weave

[luserSPAZ]

Give Weave a shot: http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

I've been using it for a while now, it's pretty nice. Encrypts your bookmarks before they leave your computer too, so your private data remains private.

Re:first memory leak posthaste!

[X'16435934]

What's a "memory leak"?

I am a plumber. If you can explain it to me in simple layman terms, perhaps I make a "plug-in" and stop all that memory leaking away.
If not, I shall attempt to mount the dyke and use a "finger" if necessary to plug the hole. It's been done before, so I'm told.
I'm sure this leak can be fixed, and finally this open "source" will finally be plugged!

Pls advise.

Too many bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the buggiest, clunkiest Firefox I have run in a long time.