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Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released
bunratty writes "Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released today. This last beta release sports performance-boosting improved connection parallelism. Not only has 'the memory leak' been fixed: Firefox now uses less memory than other browsers. This is not only according to Mozilla developers, but CyberNet and The Browser World as well. As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1 and 79/100 for the latest Opera 9.5 snapshot. The final release of Firefox 3 is expected in June."
Yeah, I know. I never used them.
... I can just type "Ha..." and based on my usage patterns it *knows* I want to go back there. That's smart.
I only use the bookmarks on the bookmark menu. I never open a sidebar or go into the separate bookmarks panel except to organize the bookmarks - a rarity indeed.
Same thing with history. It takes too long. I could have googled for it faster. The interface isn't slow, per se. I've never worked that way, and don't feel like starting anytime soon.
Now if I jump back to wikipedia, I don't have to type "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha..."
Not perfect. Smart. People like using the Windows CMD+R command bar and launch bars for the exact same reason.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Ok this was amusing, I just upgraded from 3b4 to 3b5 and it decided to replicate the forward/back button control a few times: Screenshot. Easily fixed under customise toolbar though...
Works for me...
Just open up about:config and add "extensions.checkCompatibility" as a Boolean set to false.
They changed the default values for some connection settings? What's the big deal? I've had these settings for a really long time now.
roll-eyes.
Try Mozilla Weave?
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Minutes. I've hit this bug before, and on my Sempron (shut up I'm in college) it knocks the computer out cold and hangs everything, and I was forced to reset the computer. It happens randomly, and repeatedly, and if you don't restart firefox it gets worst until the whole computer freezes; at first it just freezes the computer a little and then lets up but then the time it takes to make it free again increases.
From my experience with beta 4 it works fine when you turn off compatibility checking. The only broken extension I'm run into is Cookie Safe, but CS Lite fixes most of the problems (not all it seems, it still hangs but rarely enough to be hard to isolate). As said this is with beta 4, not beta 5, so your mileage my differ.
So far these betas have been surprisingly good. Once I isolated the Cookie Safe issue, I hardly break 300k of memory usage (6 hours of regular browsing). I still get some odd CPU usage spikes everyonce in a while (a little more often than with Firefox 2), but that isn't too much a deal breaker. The odd address bar has kind of grown on me, as have the IE style navigation buttons.
My only real complaint is the history/bookmarks window. Dragging and dropping between panes is... it sucks. And not having unfiled bookmarks available in a menu is also obnoxious.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
That's fine, but the massive text and the site name stacking crap annoy me to bits, as does the fact that it stores even more useless crap than the old version did.
I think they could make everyone happy by just allowing some damn customization...I seriously don't need site names in my history, and it clutters up the damn dropdown.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Beta 4 only scored 68 / 100, so they have made some core changes. They fixed tests 42, 67, and 69. In addition, the test seems to run about 40% faster in B5 vs. B4, at least on my PC.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Yes, but those are very early development builds of those browsers. They haven't even seen an alpha release, much less a beta. The "Opera" build was actually using the WinGogi interface for Presto, and the Opera developers said not to use those builds for everyday browsing. You would want to compare those browsers to Firefox 4 nightly builds. However, I don't think work has even started on Firefox 4 yet. I opted to compare Firefox 3 to the recently released Safari 3.1 and the soon-to-be released Opera 9.5.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
> Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
Since people started doing more "wep apps" (and memory usage skyrocketed as a result) and since mobile devices started becoming a real browsing platform. RAM on those is not all that plentiful, so far.
Note that the work to reduce memory usage in Firefox has thus far led to performance improvement, most likely due to better cache coherency. There _have_ been some optimizations to reduce memory usage at the cost of more CPU usage (largely to do with how long decoded 4-bytes-per-pixel representations of images are kept in memory), but most of the memory usage improvements have been due to using a better allocator and fixing leaks. There is no "must have the smallest memory usage around" goal; as you note other considerations are at least as important.
I think the behavior of the awesomebar is great, I just don't like how big it is. oldbar takes care of that though.
I'm not sure if you recall reading the comments to any other story about Firefox on Slashdot or Digg or Ars or virtually anywhere else in the past two years, but about 90% of those comments discussed memory usage. The Firefox team is doing a good job responding to its user base. They have not, to my knowledge, had to sacrifice speed or additional features to achieve lower memory usage.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Sounds like it could be a resource manager of Firefox that does some work in the background, makes sense since you say it occurs after a few hours use and that it disappears if you restart it (thus removing all of Firefox's allocated resources from RAM).
You certainly didn't see Apple ship Safari 3.1 with 100 on Acid3. WebKit (more accurately Safari) are at the beginning of a development cycle. They just shipped Safari 3.1 after quite a long dev cycle and are beginning Safari 3.next (or 4?) so it makes sense that they tear into their code in a pretty aggressive way. As far as I can tell, Opera 9.5 due sometime soon also won't pass Acid3. All of this work you're seeing on Acid3 is for the _next_ release, not the current release. (where current is Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and Opera 9.5)
In fact, there are patches implementing ACID3 features that aren't going to be merged in Firefox 3 because they're too intrusive (what, slashdotters want an example? look here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421765#c8)
Acid 3, just like acid 2, has been released when the firefox development cycle is focusing on stabilizing...other browsers have focused on passing acid3 like it was the most important thing to do and have done ugly things just to be the first, take for example this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=410460#c44
And the fact that at least WebKit has introduced a special case for the Acid3
font:
m_allowFontSmoothing = (nameStr != "Ahem");
Apparently, this was related to an outdated list of phishing sites, causing the browser to try to download updated sites in one bite. See here: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/2007/11/firefox_3_beta_1.html. It hasn't happened to me in months, so I think it's been fixed.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/28/1736255&from=rss
Works for me. Use Nightly Tester Tools.
Problem with that is, for one example, when you have two 'favourite' websites that get used equally - one being Ebay, and one being your banks website. When I type 'online', I expect to see my banks website URL as the first choice (as it starts with 'online'), and yet the 'awesomebar' persists in putting Ebay as the first choice, because its the 'worlds online market place'.
I have *never* chosen Ebay in that instance, and yet it persists as the top choice in the list. Precisely the sort of behaviour that we are talking about.
I find syncing histories a tad overboard.
I use FoxMarks for bookmark syncing across multiple FF installs. You can also log on the their website from any internet computer and access your bookmarks without installing anything. Now thats useful.
Questions 10, 11, and 12 in the Google Browser Sync FAQ imply that the PIN is used to encrypt the data before it's uploaded and that Google doesn't presently have access to the information. This might explain why changing your PIN is not currently possible.
10. Why do I need to provide a PIN?
11. Can I change my PIN?
12. What's the point of encrypting my information?
Of course you still have to trust the companies whose code you are running and allowing to auto-update.
Well, I just downloaded beta 5, and given it a whirl for a few minutes.
Speed and general responsiveness: Massively improved! Page loading is noticeably faster, generally feels snappier, but that might be sensory bias. I did notice, though, that large config panels (particularly in Preferences) are dog slow on first load. This may be a first-run thing, so maybe it will disappear.
Startup was a bit slow, but that may also be due to the fact that it was starting for the very first time.
The UI: Looks awesome. I have to say that it is VERY true to the Mac way of doing things (at least on Leopard). Heck, the main toolbar looks more Mac than Safari :)
Tabs are also easier to deal with than Safari. When you open a lot of tabs (like I do) Safari stacks the extra ones in a menu. Firefox allows you to scroll to the tab you want. Nice. But this has been around since FF2, so nothing new there.
I like the preferences panel now. Despite the load time it is definitely more true to the Mac way of doing things. The layout stil seems a BIT sloppy, but I'm enjoying it.
Overall verdict from a random insignificant Mac user: thumbs up. Some minor graphical bugs to fix (the search bar icon has a non-transparent background, for example). But overall a big step forward from FF2.
Yes, too many entries and two lines each, with the site icon making them look staggered. I simply couldn't see anything useful at a glance.
The oldbar addon gets you back to a clean list: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227
I'm able to enjoy the feature now, and I find it useful. This mode should be configurable, as well as reverting to a "dumb" URL text search if that suits your habits. Otherwise, this annoyance has the potential to drive away users, because every time you type a URL the awesomebar will assault you.
Being a Wikipedian myself, I looked for some extension to let me go directly to a Wikipedia article, and I eventually found it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/443
The way I configured this extension, you can just enter some lemma in the address bar and then Ctrl-Enter takes you to the Wikipedia article. It is quite useful because you don't have to use the mouse to go to the Google/Yahoo/Wikipedia-field. And if the article does not exist, it goes to the site anyway and doesn't redirect to the Wikipedia search (which I find somewhat annoying).
That's not the whole story. The Acid3 test assumes specific font-smoothing behaviour (that it doesn't increase the dimensions of the text). This is not always true on OS X and isn't required by any specification. The workaround in Webkit was to guarantee the font-smoothing behaviour that the Acid3 test expected. That font is not a normal font, it's designed specifically for testcases, so both the "bug" and the workaround would not affect normal situations. And the Acid3 test has since been changed to avoid this problem.
Please include this information when mentioning this "ugly thing", because without the pertinent facts, people assume a number of things that simply aren't true.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
R-click the Search box on Wikipedia.
Click "Add a keyword for this search"
Put something in the Name box
In Keyword, put something like "wp"
Click Add
Now, when you type "wp foobar" in the address bar, it runs a Wikipedia search for foobar
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
Nothing to do with the Awesomebar, but - if you want a quick Wikipedia lookup (or almost any GET-search site, really), you can just do this:
:)
1) Create a new bookmark, name it.
2) In location, put http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25s (/. mangled that - it's a percentage sign followed by s)
3) In keyword, put something short. I use "w" for wikipedia.
4) Save the bookmark, then type "w [something]" into the address bar.
5) ???
6) Profit!
But hey, to each their own. If your way works, that's fine too
Like 'FreakinSyco' says you can hover your mouse over the drop-down-list of options and press the delete button. This works for google search too, if you want to remove any search terms that, er, people shouldn't see.
-Docvert converts MSWord to OpenDocument, clean HTML
I just right click in the search field on the front page, and use "add a keyword for this search". Then I just type "wiki whatever" in my location bar.
Disable version checking with extensions.checkCompatibility = false
There's nothing "long" about the dev cycle of WebKit, it's in stable development with no big features being worked on and no architectural changes in the works. Just bug fixes, performance improvements and gradual standards compliance additions. Apple will release Safari 3.1.1 or 3.2 whenever they decide there's enough improvements to be worth the hassle of making PR announcements. When they release Safari 4.0, it will almost certainly ship with Mac OS X 10.6, and there will likely be a simultaneous minor version update to Safari 3, bringing it to the same WebKit release as Safari 4.
WeKit is just the rendering engine, it's not tightly coupled with Safari the way Gecko/Firefox is. Major safari updates are always about new GUI features (RSS in 2.0, "webclip" in 3.0, etc). Better standards compliance/performance is a sideline feature for Safari, that's for the WebKit team to work on.
Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*. They're several months, if not years behind WebKit and Opera.
- change the extension from the adblock xpi to .zip .xpi
- unzip the file
- find the file called install.rdf, and change maxVersion for Firefox to 3.1 or something and save the file
- zip the files you just extracted
- change the extension of the zip file back to
Done. Now you made your add-on compatible with Firefox 3.1. This way you still can have compatibility checking on (for maximum stability) but manually change the one extension you can't live without (for maximum convenience).
I haven't installed it yet, but FF Portable has a FF3b5 version available:
Firefox Portable
Yay!
The Safari number (100/100, pixel-perfect result) is for the WebKit nightly builds, which can be downloaded from the WebKit site or built by checking the code out of the (public) svn repository. This is directly comparable to a FireFox beta, since both are publicly available but not officially called releases. Since Apple isn't the only one to use WebKit (Nokia do and there are also GTK and Qt bindings now) I wouldn't be surprised if someone other than Safari gets better results by using a newer version of WebKit than the one that Apple officially supports.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>Firefox and IE only just now pass Acid 2 in their *development releases*.
Ah, maybe you actually investigate and learn something about this before making ridiculous assertions of fact. Firefox passed Acid2 in a "development release" (dbaron's reflow branch builds absolutely were available as "development releases") precisely two years ago and trunk builds were passing in early December of 2006.
I don't know about your definition of "just now" or your definition of "development releases" but it seems to me that you're way off on at least one of those.
- A
Perhaps, but shame on the devs for not announcing a 3.1 release to fix Acid3-compliance as soon as possible after 3.0's release. How I long for the days when standards were a priority on that team.
I think you're confused. The Acid 3 test is not a test for Web standards. It's a test for a particular (and rather small) subset of Web standards. It's not even a representative set of Web standards that would necessarily move the Web forward in meaningful ways if there were compatible implementations across the various browsers.
At Mozilla, we're definitely focused on fixing bugs in our various Web standards feature implementations as well as adding new Web standards capabilities, but we're not going to focus on any one test, especially a test that's designed as much to make browser vendors jump through hoops as much to advance the standards state of the Web.
- A
>As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores
>only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1
>>If we're comparing a Firefox beta then we may
>>as well look at a newer version of Safari, too.
>>The latest nightly builds of WebKit get 100/100
>>on Acid3. http://webkit.org/blog/173/
Actually, that's not quite fair. Firefox 3 beta 5 is the final beta and it's basically done. It will be a shipping browser at the same time as Safari 3.1. Comparing shipping browsers with nearly simultaneous releases (only a few months apart) is an eminently reasonable thing to do.
- A
To disable Awesomebar:
Go to about:config, type urlbar, "promise to be careful" if you haven't already, and either set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 or set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true.
No existe.
Lots of the changes in Firefox 3 with regard to bookmarking are in acknowledgment that the current way of bookmarking isn't as efficient as it should be so users DO go and do what you do, just google for their sites.
The star is a one-click bookmark. You can file it later if you want, or just use the "smart" bookmark features.
The awesomebar is basically a search engine for your bookmarks and history. I really don't see why people hate it. If you want to type in a URL without your pr0n sites showing up, clear your history! But seriously... you enter in a key word or key words, and all sites which have some connection with it pop up, with them intelligently ranked based on how often you visit those sites. Even if you just type in URLs you'll find as soon as you type in the "h" of "http" your most frequently typed urls you started typing with "http" in the past will appear! I used to manually type in the address to planet.mozilla.org to go there. Now I just tap h and it's right there by the top for me. The AwesomeBar is designed to make it easier to find your bookmarks and history items.
And if you don't like it... that's why we have extensions.
A Webkit nightly is not directly comparable to a Firefox beta. A Webkit nightly is comparable to a Firefox nightly, which hasn't gone trough the testing and triage that betas get.
ACID 3 is symbolic, and it is important to recognize that and not to simply sound grumpy about it.
Well, I'd rather Mozilla contributors worked on issues that were real than issues that were "symbolic".
Mozilla has for 10 years, and continues today, to demonstrate a serious commitment to Web standards. For the better part of the last decade, Mozilla has been the only serious standards advocating competitor to Microsoft and Firefox over the last four years has almost single-handedly revived the standards-based Web.
So, if you think that a failure to drop everything else we're working on (to improve the Open standards-based Web) and start tap dancing for Ian Hickson and his Acid3 test erases our credibility on Web standards, then go ahead thinking that and don't expect me to waste further time trying to change your mind.
- A
Firefox will not crash due to a badly implemented web site. Firefox will crash only due to a bug in Firefox or software that is running inside the Firefox process that you have installed on your computer, such as an extension, plugin, driver, or the operating system itself, or in some circumstances, a hardware problem. Is Firefox crashing often for you? If so, follow this advice.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Open about:config
/sigh
Add booleans extensions.checkCompatibility & extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set to false
Multiple restarts
Get your dev build here: http://adblockplus.org/development-builds/more-firefox-3-fixes [adblockplus.org]
Adblock Plus still fails to install.
Any thoughts?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
10.3 -> 10.4 is not a point release, despite what the version number may imply. For example, 10.4 to 10.5 is along the scale of XP to Vista. There are certainly some UI differences, some more extreme than others.