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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."
I'm glad that the Acid3 test is just a side mention in this story. The recent Firefox betas look great. It needs to be said though that the WebKit builds that score 100/100 are publicly available. But it also needs to be said that there's a lot more to a web browser than its performance on a single standards test.
Now if Google could just port Google Browser Sync over...
I'm glad there isn't an improvement in their Acid3 score with the latest beta. It means that their release procedure is sane and they aren't introducing regressions right before a big release. Kudos to the devs for not pushing patches for the sake of it.
Also, every time I uninstall firefox 3, I could no longer click links in outlook unless I reset default browser to IE and switch back. This is very irritating.
I <3 me some Awesomebar.
Seriously, on OSX, Webkit nightly (Safari) is so much better than FF3B5 (Firefox). Faster, better render, better integration.
Only thing keeping me from Webkit completely is 1) Extensions (Adblock+, Google Gears, Firebug!) and 2) Awesomebar
It's that nice.
All you haters can use a theme that kicks it.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Fine, some people like the 'awesomebar' - a lot, however, don't. A way to turn it off completely would definitely be appreciated, being forced into using it is not.
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/
Because you care about competition. Once you stop caring about competition, you get sideswiped just like IE has been by Firefox. The whole idea is to have a plural browser environment in which each browser vendor competes to deliver the best standards compliance and the best feature set. If you only care about Firefox, you may be missing the point. We can measure Firefox's progress objectively (against its own past performance), but we also need to assess its progress relative to other browsers so that we can assure it remains competitive, and can (at the very least) hold its ground in market share. No one wants to return to the old days of browser monoculture and stagnation.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Oh yeah, those were numbers for non-production browsers, in-the-lab builds.
Agreed. I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.
URLs are the key to http IMO - they're the ones to keep in memory as they're unique, unlike page titles and bookmarks. When I type "sla" in the address bar, I want slashdot.org, not some random blog post with the term 'slashdot' in the title I happened to pass by at some point.
At the end, what pisses me off the most about this whole deal is not being able to revert to the old behavior. That kind of forced nurturing is what I'd expect from Microsoft, not Mozilla.
I know you've been modded insightful, and I'm not going to necessarily disagree with that. The "Awesomebar" (meh on the name) is not for everybody. It's definitely a different way of thinking.
However, I have been using and testing Firefox 3 Betas pretty significantly. Personally, I'm very much enjoying the Awesomebar. I tend not to use bookmarks all that often - it's nicer to just start typing and, based on how I browse, the site I want to go to is usually at the very top of the list. The Awesomebar has also been helpful when I haven't been able to quite remember the site I want to go to. I start typing, and the site is usually listed somewhere near the top.
Either way, it would be cool if there was an option to shut off the Awesomebar (for those people who don't like it) - but a new way to do something does not necessarily make it hideous.
Opera, on an internal build, got 100/100 (this isn't a percentage, there are two other aspects to Acid3 - pixel perfect placement and animation smoothness).
Safari got 100/100 a day later, but in the process discovered a flaw in the Acid3 test that had to be fixed, making Opera's score 99/100. Safari is at least available in a nightly version. Apparently it also got pixel perfect placement and the animation was arguably smooth.
I don't personally think it counts until it's a full non-beta release.
Actually, I find the new bar very useful. I understand that it's not perfect for everyone, so an option to turn it off would be great.
Not all movement has been in the forward direction. Back them, most web traffic was totally static, even the HTML. These days, it's far more likely that the HTML is generated dynamically from something like mod_php. This, in turn, means that rather than tying up a slim process, a persistent connection ties up a "fat" process with a language runtime embedded in it. Three times as many simultaneous persistent connections means up to three times as much memory usage. Not as much of a problem if it's just a bog-standard 1999 static fileserver, but a big problem if you've got a 2008 dynamic interpreter built in.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that this is a bad change, I just think that it's got downsides as well as upsides. This will only further the adoption of lightweight reverse proxies like nginx, pound and varnish.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.
Which is why the awesomebar is going to be a big success in the Real World (outside of slashdot). You know, real people don't care about what a URL is, and I can't find a reason why they should.
I'm a geek, and I can't live without the awesomebar. You can remember a domain of a frequently visited page, but the whole URL? When I've to search an article I visited a week ago, I just have to type "slashdot" and some word from the title and the url appears. Typically I'd google to find it, now the awesomebar avoids me that. That alone makes the awesomebar worth of it. When I type "sla", the first item in the list is ALWAYS slashdot, because the awesomebar knows what pages you visit more frequently. Oh, and the favicons make easier to browse at the list of URLs than the old text list, because you can differenciate one domain from other.
``Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?''
I think it has pretty much always been a big deal. Unless you have plenty of memory, memory is likely to be the limiting factor on the performance of your system. In extreme cases, memory shortage can cause programs to not work at all. Firefox has been a notorious memory hog. So I am _very_ glad to see this addressed. I might actually start using it again.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Some people do a LOT of their web-browsing with their mouse. From what I've seen (I did some repair work for a while and would often have people SHOW me what their problem was, which means I saw their habits), this is actually quite probably the majority of 'regular people.' This means that they often only have one hand on the keyboard (and one on the mouse). For those people, the horribly named Awesomebar is MUCH more convenient than browser history. They have to either move their other hand to the keyboard (which adds a step) OR click View->Sidebars->History which is adding more than one step.
You're implying a logical fallacy. "Microsoft creates bloated software" does not imply "Non-Microsoft does not create bloated software".
rage, rage against the dying of the light
And it's essentially OSX only. Unless I missed the memo, the Windows version is still pretty much a waste in all respects. At least FF3 will run properly on more than just one OS.
Most of the other points are completely irrelevant as few people are going to plunk down hundreds of dollars to ditch a free web browser for a different one. Perhaps if somebody were completely split down the middle of Mac v., PC, this would make some sort of difference, but for the vast majority of people, it just isn't a realistic happening.