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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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
very early (pre-alpha, i believe) builds of opera and webkit have hit 100/100, and AFAIK, the opera build that does that feat isn't even publicly available. the numbers they're showing are for browsers that are actually available and usable.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
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.
Works for me. Use Nightly Tester Tools.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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."
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
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.
Disable version checking with extensions.checkCompatibility = false
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!
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
To disable Awesomebar:
Go to about:config, type urlbar, "promise to be careful" if you haven't already, and either set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0 or set browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped to true.
No existe.
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.
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.
Greasemonkey broke again, /sigh
Every update it seems to break, what keeps changing that this addon breaks every time?
Firefox will not crash due to a badly implemented web site. Firefox will crash only due to a bug in Firefox or software that is running inside the Firefox process that you have installed on your computer, such as an extension, plugin, driver, or the operating system itself, or in some circumstances, a hardware problem. Is Firefox crashing often for you? If so, follow this advice.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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
Why do that? Everyone knows bitching is easier than change.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.