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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.
What was wrong with Beta 5?
Yeah i dont get the comment in the summary Firefox3 beta 5 has been quite stable for most people, it still crashes with flash though (in fact last night using flash 10 it took out my xorg) but when not using flash i've not had any problems. I've been using it consistently since beta 3 because its been so much more stable than firefox 2
If people have been having people's they really should be filling bug reports, there's no way its going to magically improve without being told what's wrong
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I haven't had too many problems with crashes, but I still don't run firefox on linux. The biggest issue I've had with it is a tendency for tabs to just take a VERY long time to load.
The behavior I've seen is this:
1. Go to a site with lots of links - such as a news site or RSS aggregator.
2. Start middle-clicking on links to open them in tabs.
Inevitably one of the early ones just doesn't load - it sits and looks like it is loading and does nothing for a minute or two. All subsequent tabs do the same thing. As soon as the first one actually does load and render the others instantly load and rendor. Obviously something is blocking the loading/rendering in all open tabs when this is happening.
Everything works just fine in konqueror, so that is what I tend to use all the time. I'd actually prefer firefox for its plugins/etc, but it just isn't reliable for me. Now the only time I use it on linux is when a page doesn't render correctly in konqueror.
I'd also like to comment that I'm very concerned with the keep-piling-on-features mentality in Firefox. I want a web browser - not an OS/desktop-in-a-window. The whole reason that firefox was born was that everybody was tired of Mozilla having 47 huge features that nobody needed. Let's stick to the basics and do them right. If they want to come out with a few other apps that can tightly integrate with firefox, that's great - but let's let the stand-alone browser be a stand-alone browser...
You imply people should accept using buggy software. I use linux and do accept some bugginess with certain applications, but no way am I going to live with a browser that crashes frequently (when I was using ubuntu 8.04 it would happen as much as ten times a day) while often taking down XORG with it! No way, nu-uh.
FF2 works rock solid with my machine. Why should I use something that causes aggravation with the most simple task? I think it's ridiculous that canonical should have used such a cheesy piece of crap for a browser in the first place - one more example of piling on feastures without fixing the problems first.
Anyway, I never had ff2 lock up my desktop, and it pretty much never crashes. the closest it comes to crashing is when flash locks up - and that problem was easy enough to fix by adding a KAPOW button on my tooltray that executes "killall npviewer.bin" This is an effective fix that is all but impossible using ff3 with its penchant for killing xwindows...
I can understand some websites may make a Firefox tab crap out but it shouldn't affect the rest. Did you file a bug report?
I would use Opera but I just can't bring myself to use a proprietary browser. Now, I'm not RMS and I do use some proprietary software, for example Flash is installed on all my Linux boxes and I have a few proprietary games I play via WINE and some non-free Linux software such as Google Earth too. But when you think of all the information you enter on a web browser (credit card numbers, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, Social Security Numbers, etc.) I just can't bring myself to use a non-free browser. It also doesn't help that Opera used to be Adware and that also makes me hesitant to use Opera as a full time browser. I don't hate Opera (in fact I use it on non-personal sites on the Wii all the time) but I just don't trust a proprietary browser when there are several good free alternatives around (Firefox, Epiphany, Konqueror, Seamonkey, Etc.). If Opera ever comes out with a free version of their browser (As in open-source free) I will be one of the first to download it, but until then Opera is mostly restricted to browser-testing and the Wii.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
"You imply people should accept using buggy software."
..a clearly labeled beta that you have to go through some hoops to deliberately download? Yeah, you should accept a few bugs. And also report them, so they won't be there in the final release.
Well
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If Firefox "takes out" Xorg, that implies a bug in Xorg, not necessarily one in Firefox. In fact, the Xorg bug could conceivably be a security issue, so that's more severe.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Never happened and I've run the latest version since FF2. I bet there is some other factor making it touch, otherwise it would be more of a storm about it because it is not that acceptable.
So is firefox 3 going to crash as much on Linux as Firefox 2 has been? Its been almost as bad as Netscape 4+ were. Actually I take that back, it is worse than it was as far as stability goes. Why are we going backwards? When I use Firefox in Windows, it much more stable.
Hey, because you system/install/whatever is shit, then it means Firefox is guilty.
Never mind that there are zillion people out there who don't have Firefox on Linux crashing at all. Must be that it's Firefox, not you.
"You imply people should accept using buggy software."
I didn't read that way. I'd say he implies that people should accept beta software is buggy and that using beta software and filling bugs against it it's the best way for such a software to become as buggy-free as possible when launched as stable.
"Why should I use something that causes aggravation with the most simple task? I think it's ridiculous that canonical should have used such a cheesy piece of crap for a browser in the first place"
That's quite a different assumption from the grandparent's poster and I have to say I do agree with both of them: specially when talking about open source software, betatesting and filling bugs is the best way to improve software quality for a non-developer but it's ridiculous and misleading shipping a quoted-to-be stable and "production-ready" OS release full of beta-quality software. Still, too many Linux distributions follow the featuritis trend instead of following strong engineering advices. Just as an example, I feel OK for Fedora to be released with beta-quality software (Fedora is aimed to be a "technology-preview" and enthusiast testing field) while I don't feel the same to be OK for Ubuntu which is told to be a production-ready, non-technical user-friendly one.
But then, I think Linux distributions not to be so different to any other "market" products: it is the consumer responsibility (within legal requirements) to practice their own "due-diligence" and see how good the *product*, not the marketroid speech, stands against their requirements.
More like "paranoid".
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
By hoops, I take it you mean "install the default web browser from the Ubuntu 8.04 CD". Granted, it's about as stable as everything else in the distribution.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
I've only been using FF3 on Ubuntu 8.04, and it has been terrible on both of the machines I've used it on. Basically it has long and short hangs and random crashes. Well, not completely random, actually. Some of the problems are pretty clear related to JavaScript, and /. and Gmail are two of the most affected. I have a number of other machines to upgrade, but not yet, please.
I really feel that the Ubuntu people are losing it, and the failure of their project will be a major black eye for Linux. It's a good idea, but they are screwing it up by not figuring out how to manage their initial success. One example is relying on mirrors rather than BitTorrent as the default download. Some of the mirrors must be okay--but I sure have heck finding them. Certainly not the mirrors selected by their testing procedures for the best mirror.
Overall, I'd guess that their problem is that they are trying to be too aggressive about supporting new features for too many platforms. It's not like Apple's situation, where they can control the number of supported configurations. In theory, you'd suppose that Ubuntu could offset it by better testing, but in practice, their testing is evidently quite slipshod--and the result seems to be that each new release is worse than the previous one, though it has a few new bells and whistles. In conclusion, I can no longer recommend Ubuntu as a beginner's distro, and I'm thinking about switching to something else... My own employer is basically a RHEL shop, though I've never liked it much.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
After like 10 years I'm still reading the "works on my machine" posts with no mention of the machine type.
;)
I call them the "Well, its raining HERE" comments.
You need to identify the (OS::distro) and plugins in use for these "Release [ ] suxx0rs!!!" posts to have any meaning.
I generally find that if that question is answered, it's some guy running the L33tware distro in 24MB of RAM on a Transmeta Crusoe who is enraged that his opensource software crashes, and no, he hasn't logged a bug because God told him that it is destiny to always have bugless software AND will be Lord of Faerun in time.
(No offense to parent
Could you please link to the bug you filed?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It would be "nice" if the plugins developers would KEEP UP with the growing revisions of Firefox. I haven't been able to use FF on the Mac yet, since the plugins I depend on are slow to be updated.
Yeah, I know you can hack the install to override it, but come on.
That is certainly not Mozilla's fault.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The open source idea is great but open source is not the be all end all. It just isn't. There are too many industry specific applications that are so highly tailored to particular industry and there is simply no open source alternative. I work in the construction software industry. There are several job cost accounting, project management, estimating and document imaging packages made by several vendors that are specifically tailored to this industry. I highly doubt there will ever be open source alternatives to these kinds of pieces of software that can all integrate together as seamlessly as the propriety alternatives. Forget integrating together, I doubt we will ever see open source alternatives for any of these in the first place. Writing that kind of software can be tedious and you have to understand the specifics of the industry and the kinds of business processes that small, medium and large companies have and you have to understand the different kinds of contractors that are out there (general contractors, electrical contractors, heavy highway, etc) and their various requirements.
I just don't see an incentive for a bunch of developers to get together who have that kind of very industry specific understanding to write these big, complex pieces of software just for the fun of it. I love my job because the work environment is great and so is the money but if I were given a choice of writing any piece of software I wouldn't choose writing stuff for this industry. It's not that I don't like it, it just wouldn't be my first or second choice if I could do anything and get paid just as well as I'm paid doing this and have the kind of job security that I have.
I get enjoyment from my work, but the real enjoyment comes when we close a huge deal and I cash a huge check.
A lot more people read open source than closed. Maybe only 200+ people outside of the Mozilla project have read Firefox, but how many external developers have read IE7? 0?
I can't see how you don't understand that all else being equal, an open source program is going to be more screened for this stuff.
As for trusting it, well, I'd rather trust the thing I could verify, even if all I had time to check was random subsets of it, than the thing I couldn't...
Of course, high end commercial packages will be here for a while.
What the OSS movement has done well is to provide alternatives to commodity software so that the ancillaries don't smoke your budget. OSS can also provide add-ons that the mainline vendor has not built into their official package releases.
Applying what I have learned through this site, I have completely replaced IE as a browser, and because MS-Office 7 is so silly, *almost* replaced that with Open Office (the 3.0 betas are out, and can handle the new extensions.)
Now when we buy software, at least I can be satisfied when it's spent on first-tier applications rather than the result of a 25-year old weasel deal in Seattle.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Odd, I've never entered my 'social security number' (or Canadian equivalent, my SIN) or a credit card into a web browser. If I need to buy something online, I get one of those pre-paid credit cards from wherever and use those.
Regardless, you send all of your information over the network - even your e-mail address! - despite not being able to see the code on the other end?
Fact of the matter is, you should trust Opera more than any web site. Breaking into a poorly-maintained server (or even a well-maintained server with a 0-day exploit) is often not as hard as you'd think. Once you're in, it's a trivial matter to dump the database, or even just modify the code to redirect information.
Do you really know who's behind every website you visit? Not 100%, not all the time. But you know who's behind Opera, and you can track where it tries to connect and how. That's more reassuring than anything.
Any 'closed-source is the boogeyman' individuals should honestly stop and think about things like the recent exploit in the Thai (?) language pack for Firefox, or the huge SSL bug that Debian developer introduced way back when. Just because many eyes *can* look at it doesn't mean they will.
I'd opine that it is more important; promoting "alternative" software to the management types requires a tricky blend of eye-candy and stability. Most of my discussions went easier when you can say "This software does _____"
I'm seeing a lot of remarks about flash, and if a particular important reference site you you just happens to have that magic combination of elements to take you down, it's a tough initial impression to erase.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
100% ack. The "more eyeballs - bugs shallow" idea turns out to be little more than an elusive Idealtyp if you look at the openssl Debian desaster. Replacing all the certificates that are floating around and calming down eventually is gonna cost tons of money. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany Debian is huge and the number one choice for servers.
It's a little like with airbags or fastened seat belts. They tend to work. But if you drive more recklessly as a result the net effect is zero if not negative.
Mind you, I reckon the more people switch to Linux the fewer will bother to even check the checksums of the files they download and install. Let alone look into the source code of their Firefox.
That's your opinion. A perfectly valid one.
In my case I prefer to use some software that has been working perfectly fine for years and has been extensively copied in almost all features by others.
And by copied, I don't mean perfect copies. Mouse gestures in FF still sucks after you have used Opera mouse gestures for more than a week. And middle-button scrolling. All others have middle-button scrolling, but I just can't have pixel perfect accuracy with FF as I can with Opera. You see, you talk about hypothetic stuff (but valid, nonetheless) and I talk about actual experience (because all else is not really equal).
Having said that, I expect that FF copies Opera excellent SVG support as soon as possible.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I'd also like to comment that I'm very concerned with the keep-piling-on-features mentality in Firefox. I want a web browser - not an OS/desktop-in-a-window. The whole reason that firefox was born was that everybody was tired of Mozilla having 47 huge features that nobody needed. Let's stick to the basics and do them right. If they want to come out with a few other apps that can tightly integrate with firefox, that's great - but let's let the stand-alone browser be a stand-alone browser...
I'm surprised to hear this. I had the impression that Firefox 3 was much heavier on improvements (speed, memory, security, stability, OS integration) and lighter on new features than any other recent version, despite the long development cycle.
Even the 40 or so "new features" I listed in my unofficial changelog are mostly replacements for, or subtle enhancements to, existing features. That's a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of speed and memory improvements and over 16000 total bug fixes.
Are there any new features that you think are especially "bloaty" or damaging to the user experience, or any aspects of quality that you feel have been neglected?
The shareholder is always right.
Perhaps, then, your post would have been better placed somewhere else, and not as a response to "I would use Opera but I just can't bring myself to use a proprietary browser..."
Somehow I think we can troll each other on the internets without name calling.