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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."
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.
> 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'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
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");
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
Yes, Firefox does include a few Gecko fixes that increase the Acid3 score, but not because Firefox 3 is chasing the test. We're focused on getting in the right set of changes between now and ship and that's not going to be defined by Acid3.
- 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