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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.
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.
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
> 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
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");
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.
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.
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."
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.
I haven't installed it yet, but FF Portable has a FF3b5 version available:
Firefox Portable
Yay!
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
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.
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