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."

Comments

Re:Awesomebar?

[lpangelrob]

It's not hideous - sometimes I only remember titles of pages, and other times only the last parts of the URL. The fact that remembering those things counts for something in Firefox (and gets me to my destination faster) makes me far more likely to use it, both here at work on Win2k and at home on my Macs.

CPU spike bug?

[aredubya74]

I haven't been able to find a bug on Moz Bugzilla on the behavior, but both previous betas would occasionally spike in CPU usage after a few hours' of usage, seemingly at random. Restarting the browser clears the problem. It doesn't seem to be a site-specific problem, as rebrowsing the same pages doesn't immediately trigger the spike. Anyone else seeing this? Otherwise, I've been very happy with the FF3's rendering and feature set.

Re:Awesomebar?

[TobyWong]

I'm the same as you. I either flat out remember the url or google for it. I just glanced at my bookmarks now and it's full of junk I put in there "just in case" but never actually used again.

Mind you I usually have 20 - 40 tabs open in firefox all the time and I just resume my session on startup. It's just a different way of browsing and one that I prefer.

Connection parallelism

[Bogtha]

I'm sure somebody is likely to bring it up, so it may as well be me with some additional relevant facts. The HTTP 1.1 specification, RFC 2616, says that:

Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.

This "improved connection parallelism" is simply changing Firefox from using the RFC-suggested 2 persistent connections, to 6. Now, SHOULDs and SHOULD NOTs are not set in stone, but they do require careful thought before ignoring.

The Bugzilla entry debating this has a comment that points out that other browsers have also started to ignore this part of the specification:

• Firefox 2: 2 connections
• Opera 9.26: 4 connections
• Opera 9.5 beta: 4 connections
• Safari 3.0.4: 4 connections
• IE 7: 2 connections
• IE 8: 6 connections

Re:Connection parallelism

[garett_spencley]

RFC 2616 was published in 1999.

I agree that specification recommendations should not be ignored without careful consideration. However, I think the jump from 2 to 6 makes a lot of sense after almost 10 years of adhering to the specification and I don't think that it was done without careful consideration. Web servers and bandwidth have both strongly moved forward, and that specific suggestion in the RFC was just that. A suggestion. In the context of 1999.

Re:Awesomebar?

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

4. Close history sidebar.

I can't stand the name "awesomebar," but IMO it does have better sorting and filtering logic than the history sidebar, and its performance is a bit more nimble, so it's starting to win me over.

Firefox 3.0 and the spring linux releases

[themildassassin]

I'm wondering how the new releases of distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are going to handle not having a stable version of Firefox 3.0 until June. Currently Ubuntu is using beta 4 for the hardy beta, will the plan be to revert back to FF2 when hardy becomes stable or release with a beta version of FF3?

Re:Awesomebar?

[aj50]

The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.

We like it to autocomplete the url that we're typing so disabling it completely is a step backwards but the new behaviour seems dumb.

Example: I've typed in web, am I more likely to be looking for "xkcd - A *web*comic of ..." or "GameFAQs... Video games *web* site..", perhaps I want "Lets turn this fucking *web*site yellow" or "Rapidshare: 1-Click *Web*hosting" or maybe, just maybe, I've started typing in webmail.bath.ac.uk like I do reasonably often (but probably not as much as I visit xkcd or GameFAQs).

I admit, web is a very generic word so this is quite an extreme example but I find that when typing in urls into the address bar, the awesome bar is a lot worse at bringing up the rest of the address you're typing.

Side note: I really like the idea of an integrated search for bookmarks and history, it is more useful than I would have thought but it already exists in the history panel (which I have appear in my sidebar). If they wanted to draw attention to it, would it have killed them to integrate it into the search box and make the search box itself more of a central feature? I mean, when I want to search, I use the search bar or hit my google bookmark on the toolbar, I don't type what I'm looking for in the address bar.