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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.
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.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
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.
It will come out of beta as soon as Ad Block Plus is updated.
Hint... They are called Bookmarks and History.
Besides anything called Awesombar makes me shiver.
How to Enter Into Firefox.
Click on the RadicalButton view threw the CoolMenu and once the narleyhighlight is set click it and firefox will load and now you can use the Awesombar to browse the web.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
what if you turn off the extension checks? is i truly broken, or just not "supported" on the new beta?
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
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.
RW
It's spelled "gnarlyhilite."
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Flashblock is the one, IMO.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
I mean Firefox has had some nasty memory leaks for the longest time and absolutely I would love to see those fixed. But it seems like this is more than just that, it seems like some big epeen contest between browsers.
Memory is perhaps the second cheapest commodity on a modern day PC after disk space. If they get too deep into this then it wouldn't surprise me to see them off-set this reduced usage with increased CPU time or disk seek times (which is destructive on a laptop).
Personally I rate browsers based on something like this:
Responsiveness > Features == Polish > CPU Usage > Memory Usage > Disk Usage
If the Firefox guys want to be No.1 in Memory Usage then perhaps I'll use a browser like Opera which focuses on Features, or one like IE 7 which is more polished than both Firefox and Opera.
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/
Are the critical extensions available? For me, that's Adblock, NoScript, and Flashblock.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
How old this info really is? Opera and Webkit has already hit 100/100p on Acid3 and Beta4 already had fixed a lots those memory leaks when comparing it to Firefox 2.x
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
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
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.
- Toby
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.
Oh yeah, those were numbers for non-production browsers, in-the-lab builds.
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
Those are probably private builds ATM. The latest public Opera scores 78 for me... I THINK I have the latest public build, at least. The site I get my download news from might not update for each build maybe.
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.
I think the behavior of the awesomebar is great, I just don't like how big it is. oldbar takes care of that though.
Now Opera is scoring 79... I think one of the tests they use sometimes fails when it should succeed.
Hmm a few of these tests fail if they don't succeed withing a period of time (click the A for a report). That's probably it.
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:
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:
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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 mean, Firefox is just a front end to Gecko, right? Back when the Mozilla suite was the focus of the Mozilla foundation and Firefox was just a side project, Firefox development effected Gecko development very little. Is this still true even with the focus shift from the Mozilla suite to Firefox?
I do know that Firefox nightlies DO NOT equal webkit nightlies. Firefox and Gecko are actually devoloped on separate branches and are only merged at intervals.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Yay, they put the home button back next to the URL.
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.
I thought the developers were not very interested yet in passing Acid3 tests ... they were in favor of dropping Acid ....
.... I'll be here for 37 more milliseconds....
Thank you
I didn't have back & forth arrows, no home button, and most of the extensions I use on a daily basis didn't work. Neither did the themes. Updates didn't work. And I couldn't edit my bookmarks.
Again, I don't know how much of this was FF3b4's fault and how much was hardy beta's. But I'm not going to upgrade to either til after FF3 comes out of beta. Hopefully, my fave extensions will work then...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
It learns from past behavior, so once you go to Slashdot a couple of times via that method, you'll get slashdot.org. That said, I agree with you that the old functionality should be there too.
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.
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.
Pi Ran Out
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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/28/1736255&from=rss
Works for me. Use Nightly Tester Tools.
I've been using the Awesomebar equipped betas for over a month. Sometimes the site I want is at the top of the list, sometimes it is third or fourth. It gets better for a few days, then gets worse for a few days, then gets better for a few days. Not only is it often bad, it is inconsistent.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
You'll get a big dump of *.so files that Firefox expects to find at runtime. For your particular problem, under Ubuntu/Kubuntu the package you need is the libpango1.0-0 package (apt-get install this one). You may find other libraries missing too when you run ldd. Hunting them down can be a PITA, but when 8.04 comes out it will have everything you need and FF3 will be part of the main repository.
If you aren't using an Ubuntu flavor, the same basic methodology applies, just use your own distro's packaging system to install the pango libs and other dependencies.
Another problem that came up on a friend's install was a library linking problem because a bunch of libraries that FF3 uses are in its distribution directory and for some reason the runtime library loader is not finding them. My friend had an Ubuntu 7.10 install where this was a problem... but at the same time I have Kubuntu 7.10 and it wasn't an issue at all (go figure). That can usually be solved by tweaking the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to include the FF install directory where its extra libraries reside.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
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?
it is hideous, and its sporadicly accurate at best if doing upgrade. That it works for you is great It like "ribbon" technology should be user optional and configurable.
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
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.
Great in concept, poor in practice. While all the blogs out there have pretty, meaningful URLs, most dynamic sites still have all sorts of nonsensical querystring crap that's not too helpful for finding a page. If http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=509004&op=Reply&threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=22943372 means a whole lot to you (rather than, for example, http://tech.slashdot.org/2008/04/02/firefox-3-beta-5-released/reply/), you're a lucky man.
It does learn quickly, though it's a bit annoying at first. I certainly agree about forcing the new behavior - I expect (read: hope) that this will be a toggle in the app preferences come the final release. You do have to remember that this IS beta software, so it could well be on a to-do list somewhere. The good news is that it takes both urls and titles quite happily, so it doesn't REALLY matter.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Would it kill you guys to view a page with ads?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I can't say I have seen that issue, but if you are having that problem, I'd recommend taking note of how you're using it and provide feedback to the developers. My guess is they don't intend for a site that you choose frequently off the Awesomebar to drop farther in the list. They may need to tweak the algorithm.
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).
When I'm looking up a new wikipedia page - something I haven't visited before - this is MUCH faster than typing out the whole URL or going to the front of wikipedia, typing a name, and hitting "go to" or search. In fact, I periodically visit the wikipedia page for the letter "A" just so there's a short wiki URL near the top of my hit list. This means a new wikipedia page in a tab is only:
That's only seven keystrokes plus the name of the page for a new wikipedia page I've never visited before, plus no use of the mouse. It takes about half a second total. I do this far more often than I revisit an old wikipedia page. And even when I want to that, I just type "en" and then arrow down through the list of hits.
The awesomebar totally screws this up, because the letters "en" match thousands of other things in my history since they will now match mid-word. Moreover, since it shows two lines per entry with little bolds and underlines everywhere, it's much slower to scan visually, and much slower to draw on the screen on my 2-year-old powermac G5.
I hate the new "awesombar". It's cluttered and slow and much less useful to me. I wish I could turn it off! I'm actually sticking with FF2 for the time being, despite the horrible, annoying and unresolved FF2 Macintosh Window Snapback bug, just because the awesombar slows down my workflow too much.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I use the "%s" feature of bookmarks so i can google and search wikipedia, etc. from the address/awesome bar. It really cuts down on the time it takes to navigate: a quick Alt+D and i am there.
I use mouse gestures, so right click + mousewheel rolls through all the open tabs.
Now I wouldn't want to run 40+ tabs regularly, but it isn't too inconvenient when I do happen to have an obscene number open.
:x
Yep. I used to be able to (for example) reliably use just the letters "en" to bring up a wikipedia url, which I could then edit to go to the page I wanted, even if it was one I had never visited before. That doesn't work at all anymore since "en" matches thousands of URLs mid-word.
And since the new list has two lines per entry, it's MUCH slower to scan through visually. Highly annoying.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Have you through about creating a new profile for Firefox and checking which of your addons are causing the leaks?
A truly clean copy of FF2 doesn't leak that much and FF3 even less. At least, whenever I followed the instructions of people complaining about leaks on a clean copy that's the case. The leaks has thus far been minimal.
Post the tabs that you use at once and the way you use them. I've always wondered which sites caused that much leaking.
Or check out bookmark keywords. I have it setup for "w something" would do a wikipedia search for something, g is google, az is amazon, etc. Also works with delicious and the delicious extension (adds shortcut:w, etc. as a tag in delicious). I use these exclusively and get rid of the search bar.
It's just an informal name, not the actual name for the location bar. Are we not allowed to nickname things?
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
How does Konqueror stack up? I've been using Konqueror ever since I discovered it uses much less memory and (thus?) runs faster than Firefox. Now with the improvements in those areas for Firefox, this may no longer be true. Does anyone have numbers?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Disable version checking with extensions.checkCompatibility = false
The actual appearance got tweaked a bit in beta 5, the fonts are smaller and the colors more muted. As for your second point, are you arguing that because a full-text index of your browsing history is better, that nothing else is an improvement? I think that's bogus. The awesomebar is useful to me every day. Would Google Desktop be more useful? Maybe, but at that point I can just search Google itself and be done with it.
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.
I haven't installed it yet, but FF Portable has a FF3b5 version available:
Firefox Portable
Yay!
I still get a tab "hanging" on loading and any subsequent attempt at opening any link in another window hangs as well.
Sigh...
I completely understand what you're saying. I have no idea why people want to have so many tabs open all the time. I use tabs to open multiple pages at once, then read them all and close them as I'm done with each of them. Useful with mouse gestures for news articles or porn, but why would you open dozens of pages and leave them open? You'll have to refresh them anyway if you want to use them again. Just bookmark them and open them when needed, I'd say.
I use Webkit almost completely, but I also like the Awesomebar. The things holding me to Webkit are the find interface, keychain integration, and the combined stop/reload button. If someone would make extensions that would enable these in Firefox I would switch in a second.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
The awesomebar has one huge advantage over URL autocomplete: URL autocomplete is very poor for quickly finding one of multiple pages at the same site.
For example, I spend a lot of time in Bugzilla. With the awesomebar I can type "bug 1234" and the awesomebar will find the bug I want if I've visited it before. I can even type "bug image crash" and get a list of bugs with those words in the title that I've visited before.
I think the awesomebar is one of those things that will take people time to get used to, but then they won't be able to live without.
Wow. Seldom these days do I learn handy new things about the Intertubes, but a having never once right clicked on a search field I have to thank you immensely for that. Thank you very much! Its simple and it has the potential to be awesome.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
I don't really see the point in tweaking the algorithm. The old behaviour was perfect.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
When are we going to be able to start firefox in a process separated from one already running? I know it can be achieved by starting it under a different profile every time, but that is not convenient, and sometimes doesn't work - I'd lose access to all the bookmarks and cookies in the main profile.
I mean, don't mozilla people also hate having 31 Firefox windows all crash and burn just because one of them tripped over a badly implemented web site? Or do they just browse in one window, one tab, ever?
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
What I badly need is a replacement for that awful Flash player. There is so much Flash content on the web now, that unfortunately I need a viewer for this. Firefox 2 is fine. The need for better/faster viewing or more features is not very big.
So please Mozilla foundation: If you want to do something to improve my web exprerience just put some effort into Swfdec or Gnash or do something from scratch and put it into Firefox.
http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swfdec
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash
I agree with the parent article - my work laptop only has 512MB, and it's only been recently that memory's cheap enough for me to bother paying my own cash to upgrade it with DDR1 just to support one over-bloated application. Ok, that one over-bloated application _is_ my browser, and I use it even more than email, and it's not like I'm going to switch to IE for regular use unless I'm really desperate, but Firefox 2.0 is usually using far more RAM on windows I've already closed than Microsoft Office is currently using for the 17 Powerpoint windows, 17 Word documents, 2 Excel spreadsheets, a Visio diagram, and 4 IE windows that I've currently got open now. (Those add up to 13 MB, Outlook is bloating along at 49, and Firefox is currently at 55 only because I just killed the previous 167MB that was swapping to death and reopened 4 tabs of Slashdot. But Firefox is normally well over 100 except when I've just restarted it, and usually turns my machine into a total dog somewhere around 200-300 MB.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've been using EDGE for internet access a lot lately and I'd often be able to swap through all my 50+ tabs before I even get the first Google results, let alone get to load the correct page. Of course I never need to do that because I more or less know where my tabs are.
Using multiple tabs also simplifies browsing as you'll never need to use the back or forward buttons, and I'd imagine opening up every potentially relevant search result in a new tab is common practice.
I don't know what happened, but upon installation and opening I now have three forward/back buttons....I just don't know which one to choose when I want to click back!! there's so many choices! I imagine this problem will fix itself if I close out, but I don't know if I want it to go away just yet hah.
To disable Awesomebar read my earlier comment. I'd assume that there is no setting in the main options (yet) because it is not yet a finished/polished feature.
No existe.
I'll bite... The way I work is I right click on a link while reading an article and it loads in the background while I continue to read, then I tab over to the next loaded article. It's fast and i can compare and contrast numerous articles, what's not to like? BTW I have at least 20 tabs open now, no problem on a 4 year old dual G5 tower or a 4 year old p.c. notebook. just make sure you have at least a gig of ram...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
You can turn it off completely. Read my earlier comment. I'm guessing that there is not a setting in the main options (yet) because it is not yet a finished/polished feature.
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.
Does anyone have trouble downloading exe files? I get a "Blocked: Download may contain a virus or spyware -- sourceforge.net". I'm trying to download the portable version, and 3b4 actually had trouble downloading it as it had trouble with some downloads where it would remove the file as soon as it's done with the download. 3b5 is worse in that it appears all exe files are blocked. Doesn't seem to be fixed if I toggle browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone to false. The message comes up immediately and nothing gets transferred. Perhaps it's not working quite right with Symantec AntiVirus Corporate?
Actually, firefox3 added a new feature that lets you do this for any site.
Go to wikipedia, right click on wikipedia's search box on the left and select "Add a Keyword to this Search..." then choose "w" for your keyword. Now you can go to the address bar and type "w test" and it'll be identical to if you filled out the search box on wikipedia with "test".
I haven't found webkit to be faster. Even on webkit's own Sunspider javascript test, firefox3b5 is 30% faster than webkit nightly. (Tiger on my dual g5)
Greasemonkey broke again, /sigh
Every update it seems to break, what keeps changing that this addon breaks every time?
I love the new address bar. I also think that people that don't like it have just rushed to their conclussion after the first hour they tried it. Cause I initially didn't see much sense on it.
Hints:- If you want to force it to just remember a URL type "http://"
- For titles, don't type http:
- Use the star to give priorities to more important pages
- If you just want to type the URL, just do as always, it doesn't prevent you from doing so
- If it is too big for you, there's an addon to make it look like a tiny autocomplete but keep the smartness (I however prefer to be able to see both title and URL, some pages got silly URLs like "http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=509004&cid=22942946"
- Actually use it for a while before judging, it needs to learn your ways some time before it gets really useful
I have personally been inept at using history or bookmarks before, this thing has really made me begin to use that stuff, finding a page you last visited is easier than ever, you just need to remember something about the title or the URL or both. Using the history was always hard until this. This thing can replace bookmarks, history and address bar, so it is minimalistic in design, which means I like it. I just wish there was an icon to remove the entry from history that would then mean it has also replaced autocomplete manage:)Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.
..." 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).
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
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.
I wish to remain anomalous
Sorry, but that doesn't cut it because you can't get awesomebar to ignore your bookmarks without deleting them. What this feature needs is a bunch of options all to itself. For instance, you should be able to tell it to completely stop suggesting things from your history, leaving only a} bookmarks and b} things you've explicitly typed into the address bar. Also, you should be able to "tag" your bookmarks with "keystrings". I should be able to make a bookmark for slashdot, and set a keystring of "sla" to it. If I ever type sla into the addressbar, my bookmark absolutely should be the first pick, bar none, because I have a 100% match.
The awesomebar is an interesting idea, but it's very much 1.0 in terms of feature-set and usability. For now, it's annoying enough that I'm using the oldbar add-on, and keeping my history off. Sad that I have to reach that far to make Firefox work the way I want to work. And I'm not a dev, so hitting the source code myself isn't an option, like it isn't for most users.
"Oh no... he found the
That's exactly what I thought before I tried it. Really, just try it. Never close anything. I don't think there's really a limit to how many tabs you can have open. I sometimes have around ten tabs in every window and around 10 windows. That's 100 tabs right there.
But I suppose this is why some of us keep all sorts of junk on our computer desktop and others prefer to keep everything tucked away or atleast in folders on the desktop. Some of us just likes living in a mess.
The search priority of the Awesomebar has been fixed in 3b5, I think. I used to have to type three or four characters to get to some of my favorite sites, and now it's back to searching the URL first. YEAY!
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
Did you know that Alt-Tabing is called "Cool Switch"ing?
You comment just reminded me of the 'Special' stages from Super Mario World on the SNES.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I put Opera on my XO a few days ago, which turns it from a really *neat* device to a really *useful* one.
I would rather run software freer than Opera currently is, but I also (esp. on a device like the XO, where switching tasks is notably slow) want to have tabs in my browser. Right now, as far as I know, Opera's the only way to get that -- but I'd rather it be Firefox, because of the extensions, muscle memory for shortcuts and menus, etc.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
With the new address bar whichever page you go to most will be the first suggestion it gives you. If your webmail is the most frequent one then it will be first. If it's not then type one more letter.
I don't get the problem with the new bar. Sure it's bigger than before but it works quite sensibly.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
For example, I spend a lot of time in Bugzilla. With the awesomebar I can type "bug 1234" and the awesomebar will find the bug I want if I've visited it before. I can even type "bug image crash" and get a list of bugs with those words in the title that I've visited before.
I think the awesomebar is one of those things that will take people time to get used to, but then they won't be able to live without. Would not just a properly constructed quick search bookmark be more useful? I used to have a quick search bookmark such that "bug 87945" would load the bug. It is really easy to create such a bookmark, or an even better one. For the rest I'll assume you are talking about the bugzilla at bugzilla.mozilla.org, although the same procedujre should work for most bugzillas. Step one, create a bookmark of bugzilla.mozilla.org. Then edit its location to be "https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%s". Then add the word "bug" to the keyword field. Now typing "bug 789456" will load that bug even if you have never been there. Further typing "bug image crash" will do a quick search for "image crash". That latter part is admittedly not quite as useful the so-called awsomebar as it does not limit you to only the bugs you have been to, but it is also not mutually exclusive with it either. Typing that phrase but not hitting enter will let awsomebar show you the bug you have been to. If you cant find the bug you want, just hit enter, and bugzilla will search for the bug for you.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Seriously though. Awesomebar sounds like something invented by strongbad. I'm sure it's a good feature, but it's hard to talk about it without sounding like a moron. Same thing goes for GIMP.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Tacvek, it's not the completing the bug number that's the magic here. It's that it will complete against the bug summary (which is the page title) as well. All you have to do is remember a word or two from a bug you've visited before and you can get back to it super-quick. That's the magic, not the bookmark keyword which we've all had for at least 8 or 9 years now.
- A
Did you completely fail to read anything I said? I'll put it on one line so it doesn't get lost.
I only type urls in the url bar so it's unhelpful if it matches things which are not in the url.
That's it, that's my only problem with the awesome bar, the way it looks is fine. If it could only match at the start of the domain or sub-domain like Firefox 2 does that would be even better.
I wish to remain anomalous
I never use history. I actually disable it because I never look in there, among other reasons. I think the major problem is that there's just too much stuff in there, and it's too hard to really find, since you can only search by page title and URL, and often times you don't even know what you're looking for. I think history should have a much more hierarchical view. It shows you a tree of how you ended up at a page. So, you search google for Foo, and then from there opened up pages A, B, and C. Those should all be child nodes of the original google search. That way, when you look in your history, you only see the starting points, and you can recall your navigation path in order to find the page.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
512 MB of RAM is simply not enough to comfortably run Windows XP, Outlook, Powerpoint, Word, Excel, Visio, and two different browsers. 512 MB of RAM is the minimum needed to run Windows XP and a few light applications. For a heavy user such as yourself, 1 GB is needed if you don't want it swapping to death.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Stop using online for the bank and try using the bank name...
Change your habits. Type ebay when you want to go to ebay and type "bank" or whatever when you want to go to your bank. Problem solved.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
So... it's faster for the vast majority of users that don't tweak those settings. That is new for beta 5.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I work like this, and I always have. I've always had a messy room, but I've always been able to find what it was I was looking for fairly easily. Every time mum made me clean my room, I couldn't find squat, despite the fact that I was the one who put everything away.
Previously, on slashdot... we discussed why messy desks are more efficient than clean ones. It's like working a stack in a computer program, except rather than being a regimental push/pop of the top item, it's a general "the stuff you use the most is closest to the top".
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/21/1312258
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I do something like that too.
I use the "Bookmark all tabs" option to save my open tabs into sets (like [project]_Legal, [project]_Design, etc). The sets are then saved as folders on the toolbar, and when I switch projects, I just right-click the folder and select "Open all in tabs". When that project's done, I can cut and paste the whole folder(s) into an archive.
I also have a few standard sets like "News", "Funny" etc on the toolbar and open them the same way. It's fast and easy to maintain.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You mean something like Bookmark Keywords? They are extremely handy -- eg. I have slashdot set to "/.".
In your case you could set your online banking to "online" (or perhaps a bit more obvious "bank").
But "oldbar" should be the default, and the new thing should be the extension!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/15/less-fragmentation-coming-in-firefox-3/
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/14/leaks-memory-we-never-forgot-about-you/
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Or the Firefox developers (and you) could stop being stupid and realize that the address bar is just that: a bar for typing in addresses! If you want a bar to have some fancy searching going on when you type in "bank," use the fucking search bar for it!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I agree with the horrible-bar being hideous, it needs improvement. When I type the initials of a website I expect the bar to show me that website and not something totally unrelated first. At least improve it in the order items are shown. The way it is right now it's useless to me and unfortunately I have to say it'd make the difference for me to choose IE8. Plus, most Add-Ons don't work, including Adblock Plus (shows it works but doesn't get rid of JPG most of the time and never gets rid of Flash). Sorry but if I have to be honest, I don't see a reason to stick with FF3, and I used it since the very first version.
They've implemented Smooth Scrolling in the tab bar. I really dislike smooth scrolling, and turn it off whenever possible, but in this case, you can't.
Unless you dig into the discussion of the patch to find that you have to add to your prefs.js file. Unfortunately, this also disables the good bits of this patch, one of which is that triple-clicking on the arrows at either end of the tab bar will take you to that respective end of your tabs list. That's not very well worded, but if you use lots of tabs, you'll know what I'm talking about and why it's a good thing.
However, I doubt that they'll add an option to turn the smooth scroll off after all the hard work they went to to implement it. As they say: "animation is something we definitely want to do more of" (blatantly out of context quote, but it does seem to be the majority opinion...)
|>
Here be Dragons
I know!
Every time I type "j", it brings up "jello pudding pops", and every time I type "n" it suggests "New Coke"!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426679
After visiting google.com and searching for any term, such as "digg", clicking on the search result takes you to a page with the following text:
================
*Redirect Notice*
The previous page is sending you to _http://digg.com/_.
If you do not want to visit that page, you can _return to the previous page_.
================
I suppose this is intended to fight Phishing redirection attacks, but as of Firefox 3 Beta 5, the Redirect Notice is shown for all search results, including clearly non-phishing results such as digg.com and yahoo.com.
This does not occur in:
Firefox 2.0.0.13
Firefox 3 Beta 4
Internet Explorer 7
This does not occur for the following google-owned sites: blogger, orkut, youtube.
It DOES occur for similar but not google-owned sites: wordpress, linkedin, hulu.
$8.95/mo web hosting
Ok, so are you prevented from just typing in addresses in the address bar? If that's all you want I fail to see what's stopping you.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I found this new version clunky and annoying. What the hell is up with the address bar? I haven't been following the development of FF recently, but that bugs the hell out of me. I didn't see a way to turn it off, so I nuked the whole program.
Also, my must have extensions don't work, (which was a given).
I got grumpy with all these BBC feed entries appearing in my dropdown. For the moment, I set richresults to 0. But do you know how to get FF3-B5 to simply report real histories only without any of Mozilla's or BBC's entries?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Yep.
I just butchered my Bar in an attempt to do this, though when the official FF3 comes out I'll have to look for Back-Out add-ons.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I Cleared Private Data a couple times, but those BBC feed entries that I don't want kept appearing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"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."
This is why we need to require licences to use computers. In other industries, you are required to undergo long training and certification processes before you can even get near to a production machine, and none of those machines are remotely as complex and have as many active parts as a computer.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
It's still slow as fuck because the Mozilla guys are obsessed with that Cairo crap. That's it, I'm tired of Firefox getting uglier, slower and more bloated with every new version, and just for what? The release of Firefox 3 will mark the day I switch to a better browser. I'm undergoing evaluation of Firefox alternatives as I post this.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
This doesn't solve the problem - deleting 'ebay.co.uk' from the list seems to delete it from all lists, so it doesn't show up when I start typing 'eb'. Not a solution.
I have just set both of those to your recommended settings, and it does partially work - however, it leaves me with only a single suggestion when I type a URL and not all matching URLs. It does not restore the functionality of the address bar from FF2.
There, fixed it for ya.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
But I fust downloaded 5b4 for windows and scored 70 rather than 71 on acid 3
Having done that slashdot threads did not display, so I have gone back to beta 4!
Your complaint is valid, but your solution isn't (IMHO).
The propper fix for that problem isn't to throw AB out completely, but to improve it so that it learns which results to show on top.
If you like the old interface you have a few good options: look for (or code) an extension that mymics the old behaviour; don't upgrade; adapt to the new behaviour; or, if all else fails, use another browser.
Well, you could always complain and try to convince the developers to revert to the old bar, but as you admitted yourself, there are many people who like AB and it's helpful to new users.
The fact that it doesn't behave as it used to - the behaviour has changed significantly and the work-arounds do not solve the issue completely.
Last time I tried Safari on Windows - it was terrible. But when comparing OS X versions of Firefox and Safari, I actually prefer the letter one. The only thing that's missing is extensions. So, obviously, many people who use OS X do care about development of both Firefox and Safari.
Aza Raskin thinks that Bookmarks and History are not the best way to access previous sites, and the address bar is.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I've been impressed by Konqueror. I don't know how it compares to the new Firefox, but compared to Firefox 2.0.0.12, Konqueror 3.5.5 eats up a _lot_ less memory and runs noticeably faster. And, contrary to Opera, it is open source. I've run 3.x versions of Konqueror on machines with 64 MB memory and 200 MHz Pentium MMX CPUs...I don't know how that compares to the OLPC, but it may work. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Like a lot of things in Firefox, you can turn it off if you really don't like it. To disable the awesomebar and just have the old URL autocomplete, you'll need to add a pref. I confess, I didn't much like it at first, but the behaviour learning and improved search introduced in 3b4 has sold me on it. Any who... to turn it off:
Add the boolean pref browser.urlbar.richResults and set it to false.
This pref is only checked on startup, so youâ(TM)ll need to restart Firefox for it to take effect. More information about this pref can be found here. More info on setting prefs through about:config starts here
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
Personally, I'd been using an extension for FF2 called "my_urlbar.a" or something like that, which did exactly the same thing as the awesomebar does now. The sad thing is, that extension did it *without slowing down my typing*. If only they'd improve the speed of the awesomebar's response, I'd be much happier -- it's a great idea, but I'd happily sacrifice site rankings and whatever other bells and whistles there are in order to make the thing *fast*. After all, it doesn't matter how many usability boxes your interface tweaks if acceptable speed isn't one of them
(ps -- speaking of abominations that are ugly and slow, am I the only other person here who finds the new theme of the
... and if anyone *was* wondering how to get rid of those ugly grey boxes surrounding the comments, try the following in Stylish:
li[class^="comment contain"] {
border: 0 !important;
}
But there exists no later version of the RFC than the one from 1999. If a web server wants web browsers to use behavior that violates the latest RFC, the server should indicate this to the user agent.
My browser collects tabs like my sink collects dishes. (Now if only there was a "Wash all dishes" menu option
I at first didn't like the "AwesomeBar" because the first thing I did after installing the new version is to try out a web-game a friend of mine had suggested. The webgame meant repeatedly going to pages again and again, and even though I just played it for a few session at the start, it was always.. ALWAYS suggesting that piece of crap for the weeks after.
If you're going to use it, make sure you only visit the pages you use day to day, after a few days you can go check the rest of the crap.
I'd say it's a nice feature, but you need to trim useless pages it pops up with as well.
Modern-day PCs cannot be carried in your pocket. These are designed to target Pocket IE and the smartphone version of Opera[1].
[1] The smartphone version of Opera is a full web browser. It is not Opera Mini, which uses a proxy to distill HTML.
Add the pref browser.urlbar.richResults as a boolean, set it to false.
this pref is only checked at startup, so requires a restart. it'll give you the old behaviour back.
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
add the pref browser.urlbar.richResults as a boolean, set it to false
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant
I have updated to Beta 5 and already twice I have had Firefox go crazy with my memory. It got up to 1.5GB before I forced it to quit. All I had up was Google Reader, CNN and the Prototype documentation open. So is this another memory leak that has been introduced or is it just going crazy for me?
I think he just means that most people would have maybe 10-20 tabs at most, having 40 articles to go through is a bit much :P
which is totally what she said
"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. "
Why are you comparing two betas to a shipping product? The "beta" Safari, known as webkit (www.webkit.org), has been scoring 100% on Acid3 for about a week now.
Was it ignorance, shame or malice that causes people to use inappropriate comparisons to bolster their positions?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
Still no 64-bit release, but at least they're building it on the minefield nightlies.
Which, BTW, seem to indicate that b5 is the last before final. Nightlies are now 3.0pre not 3.0b6pre.
Little Green Footballs ran this yesterday.
/.!"
Imagine my shock when I showed up at my brother's place after work, and he's all enthused about the FF3 he's just installed on his iLaptop(tm)(R)(c). He heard about it on his political (not even techie!) blog. It does inertial scrolling! At least on iMach(tm)(r)(c).
"What? Firefox 3!? No way. I woulda seen it on
At least I was able to take some wind outta his sails by running Acid3 on it. He was pissed to see it score 'only' 71%: "WTF?! It doesn't even _work_!"
So, while you guys still _really_ rule when it comes to Anime & TV Sci-Fi, you're falling behind the curve in the tech deployment stories.
And if you want the dirty details of OffalXML (wait- I guess that's now ISO DIS29500(tm)(r)(c)), Groklaw is the place for that.
But nevermind that. What do we need serious stuff for, anyway?
Who's already seen BSG 4.1, (out Friday on Sci-Fi)?
WTF happens?
And who's ready for Summer Glau as a ballet Terminator? Yow!
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
The find inteface in safari kicks ass, no doubt.
Really, I also run into a few sites that misbehave in Webkit nightly (gmail included).
What I also miss from my windows days is IETab (or even IEView)... it'd be nice if there was something similar for OSX (or Safari!).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Not really faster than 2.x with FasterFox with respect to loading content. But Beta 5 is really quick with executing JavaScript, as can be most prominently experienced with GMail.
Please note that regardless of their rendering abilities both Opera 9.27 (that uses the Opera Widget Engine, I believe) and Firefox 3.0b5 (which uses the Gecko engine), still cannot retain styles and links when copying from them to any style-capable editor (just about everything) under Mac OS X (any version). Safari, OMNIWeb, and other WebKit-based browsers have and still handle this with no trouble. This is a bug in Gecko that has been in Bugzilla, and ignored, for years. Please appeal to Firefox and Opera development for fixes in this area. Those of us who must copy and paste styled sections of webpages must use Safari or other WebKit apps as constantly switching back and forth is, in my opinion, simply not worth the effort.
Be as you would have the world become.
I'm not going to argue aesthetics with you, just wanted to reply to your Google Desktop bit. AFAIK, Google Desktop does index your browser cache, so you can search your browsing history. I tried it out once and just didn't find it all that useful.
How lucky we are that Nanny knows best, and won't let us risk damaging ourselves by giving us optional access to a useful feature that we have been enjoying for many years!
How about providing us with a more efficient feature instead of the (scientificaly proven) suboptimal one that we have been suffering for many years?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
No, you're right -- it's stopped working in Beta 5. (It was working correctly in Beta 4). Nevertheless, you still get less hits with it. I'm not sure how that works ...
Anyway, I agree the awesomebar is considerably less-than-awesome, but why don't you file a bug report?