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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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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
> Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?
Since people started doing more "wep apps" (and memory usage skyrocketed as a result) and since mobile devices started becoming a real browsing platform. RAM on those is not all that plentiful, so far.
Note that the work to reduce memory usage in Firefox has thus far led to performance improvement, most likely due to better cache coherency. There _have_ been some optimizations to reduce memory usage at the cost of more CPU usage (largely to do with how long decoded 4-bytes-per-pixel representations of images are kept in memory), but most of the memory usage improvements have been due to using a better allocator and fixing leaks. There is no "must have the smallest memory usage around" goal; as you note other considerations are at least as important.
I 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 not sure if you recall reading the comments to any other story about Firefox on Slashdot or Digg or Ars or virtually anywhere else in the past two years, but about 90% of those comments discussed memory usage. The Firefox team is doing a good job responding to its user base. They have not, to my knowledge, had to sacrifice speed or additional features to achieve lower memory usage.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
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
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'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.
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.
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.
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