Slashdot Mirror
Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now
Jay writes "Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is out now. If yours didn't auto-update, then get it while it's hot! The release came a bit early, with Computer World noting: 'As recently as last Saturday, Mozilla's chief engineer said that although the company had locked down RC1's code, it was planning to publicly launch the build in "late May."'" My copy just downloaded — restarting after I save this story. God I hope it's better than the last beta.
Some changes are summarised here: http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2008/05/firefox-3-release-candidate-1-is-here/ . A new version of Cairo (1.6) is used under the hood.
For the last year, I have consistently seen on the Windows version an annoying bug. If one tab takes forever to load, any other tab will not load a new page either. I find Ebay is one of the worst to bring it out. If you switch to using IE in a tab, that tab will show about:blank.
I can understand some websites may make a Firefox tab crap out but it shouldn't affect the rest.
The issue I've seen with Flash isn't a crash, but that if one lingers on a page with a lot of Flash content (say, Youtube) and leaves the page up while browsing in other tabs, CPU eventually spikes to 99% usage, requiring the browser to be shut down.
Unfortunately, this isn't a Firefox problem, but a problem with the Flash plugin. The workaround I found (thanks to other Slashdot users) was to install the addon Flashblock. Now, instead of having the Flash content sitting and waiting, it's replaced by a little clickable object to load it. Since installing it, I have not experienced the CPU spike behavior, when it used to be a daily issue. Hope this helps folks.
RW
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge
FF3b5 has a strange JavaScript issue where if you go to a page that runs some kind of combination of JavaScript the entire browser, all running windows of it, will close, no warning and no recovery when you start it again. I saw it happen on a few pages but mostly with gmail. Trying to reply in gmail was almost a certain way to trigger it.
I'm sure you've heard of Pidgin before, but I thought I might recommend it again. The first time I used it, (it was still Gaim at the time) I hated it. I was using an old version of the AIM client and didn't want to have anything to do with messaging on Linux.
However, things have really changed drastically, and I couldn't be happier with my Pidgin installation on both my Linux and Windows installs. Pidgin supports a whole slew of protocols, including MSN. It's the only real alternative for users running anything before Windows XP, too, as they won't let you install messenger on older versions of Windows. (At least, the last time I tried to, I couldn't) If it's been a while since you tried it, give it a shot. You might be surprised.
If you're using KDE, there's something out there, I can't find it at the moment, to make Pidgin look a lot better than it does right after a default install. I think it's on Kde-look.org somewhere.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Your comment leads me to believe you've never done any significant software development work. Consider that the Acid3 test was released at the tail end of the Gecko development cycle. This puts Mozilla in a bad position, because they were already at feature freeze and didn't want to further delay the final release. So, shooting for Acid3 compliance at this point would be the height of stupidity.
The Acid3 test is also a bit controversial in its own right. Acid1 and Acid2 addressed broad compatibility with several core web standards, without regard for any particular browser. In contrast, Acid3 covers an odd mix of quirks chosen to intentionally highlight bugs in different browsers. Acid3 also includes a random mix of features from things like SMIL and SVG, which are enormously complex standards not supported in their entirety by any major browser. That also means that Acid3 can be gamed by simply implementing just enough of a feature to pass the test, but not enough to be genuinely useful in practice.
Simply put, Acid3 is a much less useful test than the previous versions. I have no doubt that Mozilla will eventually pass, but they won't delay the Firefox 3.0 release and have made it clear that they won't play the partial implementation game to beat the test.
Were there other problems? Because apart from the above, I used the last beta every day on Ubuntu, MS Windows, and OS X and had no problems. It is the Phishing protection database. After you erase that file, disable Phishing protection. If you feel confident enough in yourself to identify phishing sites yourself, that is. I leave it enabled for the mother in law.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Don't know who the hell modded you as troll, but if anyone reads this please note that parent was most likely being deadly serious, in fact up until 3.0-beta4 I always used Opera over Firefox on Linux.
To GP, in my experience Firefox3 is much more stable than FF2 on Linux, I'm using Kubuntu 8.l04 KDE4 edition.
I had a similar problem. The solution was to right click on any flash applet, and "disable hardware acceleration"
In my experience 90% of 'firefox' issues on linux are actually Flash issues.
Flashblock and noscript sorts most of that out and makes the internet usable again to boot.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Er, what? Opera provides binaries for x86, x86_64 (in the most recent beta build only), PowerPC and SPARC, and all of the above come in .deb, .rpm and .tar.gz. You can explore the relevant parts of their FTP site for yourself if you want to check.
Can you reproduce the crash on demand? Try launching firefox under gdb ("gdb firefox" from a console, then "run" at the prompt) then making it crash. The console you launched it from should give the gdb> prompt again, where you can do a backtrace ("bt full") to see the exactly where the crash was as well as the sequence of function calls that lead up to it.
Your firefox will be likely dying inside some library, and once you figure out which library that is (based on the backtrace) you can download it's -dbg package and repeat the process to isolate the specific function causing the crash.
This is basically what apport tries to do after the fact, but it's often works better if gdb is attached right from the start.
On a related note, I just looked in synaptec and firefox-3 itself does not have a -dbg package, only firefox-2 does.. I'm hoping this means they've left debug symbols in the binary itself.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!