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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.1 Alpha 2
daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed "Shiretoko." The new build includes "support for the HTML 5 <video> element" and the ability to "drag and drop tabs between browser windows." ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla's Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.
This is really starting to get annoying.
I suppose you filed a bug report a few weeks ago and no one has done anything about it?
Don't bother to check, I am quite sure you didn't:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453452
This was posted on the 3rd. On the highly unlikely event that it was you that posted that bug, maybe you should give them more than 3 days to do something about it before bashing them on /.?
Also, I would categorize this as a low priority bug(OMFG? Pressing a button AN EXTRA COUPLE OF TIMES? You still alive?), so don't hold your breath.
It is also in the 1.8 branch..
You know one thing I find annoying?
Users that find bugs and never tell you about them.
Baboons are cute.
While I appreciate the new features in Firefox's latest release, I am still disappointed in it because I cannot watch CNN live streams.
Before you jump to conclusions, let me inform you that I have all the latest plugins installed; from Flash, Shockwave, Java and all the rest.
I even have CNN's own plugin for Firefox installed...but live streams will not play! Incidentally, the commercial before the the actual content (which is in Flash), plays fine. When it's over, what one sees is a black screen!
Whose fault it is, I do not know...all i know is that I cannot watch those live streams on CNN. What's going on?
Cookies are shared among all tabs. That isn't just expected behaviour, it's the only sensible one (except for privacy mode).
You're either trolling or not understanding the purpose of having different processes for different tabs.
Because no more than one person could possibly be experiencing the same bug
Yep. Quite likely.
And besides being an excuse to not report bugs, it would also be an excuse to bash them on forums? Right?
Baboons are cute.
I suppose you filed a bug report a few weeks ago and no one has done anything about it?
No, I did not report this as a bug. To the best of my knowledge I have never reported any bugs to the Mozilla team.
On the highly unlikely event that it was you that posted that bug, maybe you should give them more than 3 days to do something about it before bashing them on /.?
Firefox is used by millions of people. Firefox is also, presumably, used by all of its contributors. I don't download its nightlies. I don't run its alphas or betas. I do participate in the evaluation of other products, and I do report bugs I encounter there, because I'm running pre-release versions of those applications.
My Firefox is at 2.0.0.16. This is an official release (and, as far as I know, the most recent revision to the 2.0 tree). When Mozilla issues a public software update that has passed their internal reviews and release management processes, I don't believe that it's my responsibility to report bugs prior to complaining about them.
You know one thing I find annoying?
Users that find bugs and never tell you about them.
Firefox is free software. I appreciate that. But using Mozilla's free software does not automatically enroll me as a card-carrying member of the Mozilla QA team.
They have people who are paid to do this shit.
I am not one of them.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Or you're just caught up in the hype and think it's faster? Do you have any benchmarks or data that show Chrome is performing better than FF3.1 alpha2?
Its not what it is, its something else.
Chrome isn't perfect and doesn't run all that well on a hyperthreaded P4 single core.
I'm not about to throw away my computers just to run a beta Chrome which really isn't as functional as my Firefox. I doubt if it would ever be.
A lot of us appreciate the work that FF dev. does and it can only improve.
Thanks.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Maybe, If you started to think, instead of demanding from people who give you stuff for free, you'd found out, that "Never" means "Never ask me if I want to update to *this* version.".
Besides: If you don't like it, you can easily fix it. Every noob can change some "if (...)" in some JavaScript C code.
Never forget that all that beautiful open source software only gets created, fixed and updated because we like to do it. And if we listen to you, it's only because we like to make people happy.
If you insult us, call as stupid idiots, tell us that we're shit... do not expect us to even talk to you.
It's common sense: Be nice. Most of the time, people will help you.
But maybe some people do not get out of their basement too often... (Users and Developers alike)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
n/t
Although Psychotria (953670) was meant to be funny it gave me an idea. add firefox's upgrade address to your host file and point it to yourself thus it will not look for an upgrade.
My Firefox is at 2.0.0.16. This is an official release (and, as far as I know, the most recent revision to the 2.0 tree). When Mozilla issues a public software update that has passed their internal reviews and release management processes, I don't believe that it's my responsibility to report bugs prior to complaining about them.
While I agree that it's not your job to make sure there are no bugs, it's not realistic to assume that a non-alpha/beta release is perfect. It should be stable and bugs should indeed be few and far between, but it's not going to be a flawless product. You shouldn't have to hound the programmers to get things fixed, but as far as I'm concerned, you have no right to complain about something you can do and have done something to fix.
I wonder if FF are planning to fix the poor memory handling and speed in Linux any time soon. I'm getting quite tired of just how Windows focussed they are. I know that needs to be their primary target, but it would be nice if the Linux version didn't lag behind *quite* so much, especially seeing as they forget to mention that all these fancy improvements listed for a new version don't actually apply to the Mac and Linux versions.
I once had a chat to some Mozilla guys on IRC; I'd just gone through the rigmarole of posting a bug in Bugzilla, and was saying how it wasn't exactly easy to work out.
Their response was that Bugzilla isn't intended for end-users to submit bugs; it's for developers.
The average user is going to take one look at Bugzilla and run screaming so fast the air friction will burn their face off.
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
There's no reason why it can't. In embedded space it even makes sense.
The other two examples have nothing to do with whether or not something is an OS. Just your narrow definition of one.
I haven't tried the latest Firefox but so far the day I've had with Chrome has been amazing. Even with the latest versions after less than a day's usage switching between tabs would start to slow down and even closing every single tab would leave Firefox with a huge amount of leftover memory. Responsiveness and shedding the leftover memory would only be fixed by quiting out of the browser two or three times a day.
Even if there are a few benchmarks where Firefox can match Chrome it isn't going fix the performance and resource rot that plagues Firefox.
The bitter reaction some people are having to people going crazy with excitement over Chrome sounds like there are people too emotionally attached to just a piece of software. Dumping Firefox for Chrome was no different than dumping Alta Vista for Google or IE for Firefox years ago.
Wow, I've never come across a bigger cry baby tardmonkey.
You cry about a bug, then refuse to submit a bug report. You know what, pack your computer up (or disassemble it, but I doubt you make your own computers) and send it back to whoever you bought it from because you're too fucking stupid to own one.
You posted on slashdot crying about a product issue with a free browser used by millions of people that has a very simple bug reporting system. Do you not see how unbelievably retarded you come across?
I'm no genius, but to me, reporting a bug that DIRECTLY AFFECTS YOU seems like a SMART thing to do. Crying on slashdot about it, then proceeding to try and prove that it's mozilla's fault you don't report bugs, well, really comes across as MONUMENTALLY FUCKING STUPID.
Then again, the stupidity of people using the internet never fails to astound me.
Look forward to seeing your place in the Darwin awards.
It takes less time to report a bug to Mozilla than to bitch about it on slashdot then defend your own moaning. If you want bugs fixed then report them, if you don't want them gone, don't complain about them. If you think that Mozilla has enough "internal reviews and release management processes" to find all their bugs before it goes out to users then you are an idiot. Most bugs aren't discovered until the users use it in their own different ways and no amount of testing or anal retentive release management is going to fix that. Mozilla does thousands of things right and you're complaining some trivial dialog box; if they had waited until all the bugs were found before releasing, you would still need to use another browser such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Crome, Safari which are all even buggier.
You're right about Mozilla, they do release free software and you don't have to do anything in return. It also means that they're just writing it because they want to make the best software possible and unless you help them by reporting the bugs, they don't care about you or whether you like their product or not.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Exactly : you aren't paid to report/fix bugs , but you don't have to pay for the software either.
So , simply put , you can't complain . You can post bug reports to help speed things up
Slipping shoelaces ?
Great! Now all of Opera, Safari and Firefox support the video element, can we please kill flash already?
I doubt youtube, game trailers, southpark studios and friends will demand this real soon now because people in general suck but I can wish can't I?
still no decent process separation between tabs and plugins though. FF has a lot of work to do to catch up to Chrome (or even IE) in this respect. This problem has been known since years now and nothing has happened.
They could also learn a thing or two about sandboxing from both IE and Chrome.
I think there are quite a few people who desperately want to see some 'numbers' to let them continue to hang on to Firefox for whatever reason. There are valid reasons for not dumping Firefox and immediately moving to the vastly more responsive and resource lean over time Chrome like extensions and other features.
Some of the reaction to Chrome remind me of console fans who are faced with a competing console putting out significantly better graphics and they go searching for someone with some sort of plausible technical authority to quote them performance numbers to 'disprove' what they and everyone else are seeing with their own eyes.
With reference to my babble; I know, but I used a paragraph of his to introduce an observation.
My observation was that people have slated Firefox 2 and IE 7 and 8 for using 200M of memory, and when Chrome uses the same it's all shiney and new.
I see you're quoting from that comic. Firefox does not have one giant address space, it can allocate memory and release it as and when required using various different methods depending on data requirements (just as any other process can).
The fact that this memory is attached to one process or various is beside the point, apart from one: When a process (tab/window) in Chrome is destroyed the OS cleans up the memory. When a tab or a window is destroyed in Firefox the application cleans up the memory.
Very well, but this basically means Google's designers have decided that any memory problems will solve themselves (or rather the OS will solve them) when a tab or window is closed in Chrome and that this advantage outweighs the disadvantage involved in spawning new processes and the IPC between them. There is also less incentive to spend time fixing memory leaks because the workaround will be to close the window/tab and re-open it again.
FF3 has achieved quite a reduction in memory usage and received praise for it until now, and slating it as 'crappy code' and 'half-hearted attempts at fixing [memory leaks] is disingenuous.
"They have people who are paid to do this shit."
Ridiculous. They are giving you stuff for free, *and* you expect them to do even more stuff for you for free while insulting them at the same time? Talk about being ungrateful, rude and anti-social!
If they want it fixed, yes. It is impossible for a programmers to fix a bug they don't know exist, even if it's in an official public release.
Then she better tell someone about it, if she expects someone to do something about it, just like she would with any other kind of problem.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Chrome doesn't seem to allow me to switch to another window by hovering the mouse over that window's taskbar button while dragging a tab - which makes the feature nearly useless if you use maximized windows.
Most web site designs nowadays are tested against window widths of 800 to 1000 pixels. Many of them are "liquid", meaning that the width of the main text area resizes with the width of the window; on these, if you make the window too wide, you have to move your head back and forth to read. Others just put blank bars at the sides if your window is too wide. So unless you use a small screen, such as that of an older PC or a subnotebook PC, why would you use maximized windows with a web browser?
Last time I checked, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company. This is not the Foundation we're talking about here. The people who work for Mozilla Corp (the people who put out Firefox) all get paid and they're trying to make a profit.
Usually, when a software company expects their customers to be beta testers, they get slammed on /.
And let's understand something: just because you don't pay for something does not mean you are not a customer. Remember, free is the new cheap.
You are welcome on my lawn.
IMHO programmers often have an elitist attitude towards their users. Yes I know I just insulted a lot of readers, but what other explanation is there for Firefox, Netscape, Windoze, or other programs to keep INSISTING that I MUST upgrade my software immediately OR ELSE face dire consequences?
Um.
Hello? I don't "must" do anything if I don't want to. I told the dialog box to go-away, now please stop bugging me. It's like hazing SS men pounding on my door. "Sir... sir... sir... you must upgrade your Firefox Browser from the tricolor 2.0 to the swastiki 3.0 immediately. Or else."
Go. Away.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The feature you want is it being more stable. Putting tabs in processes doesn't fundamentally fix this - it just lessens the impact of a fault at the cost of extra system overhead. In some cases splitting into processes maybe pragmatic (e.g. the closed source plugins), but if the underlying problems were fixed, you wouldn't be asking for this feature.
Last time I checked, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit company.
Quote wikipedia:
"The Mozilla Corporation reinvests some or all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects.[2] The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."
Just like Microsoft, right?
Except it isn't:
"The Mozilla Corporation was established on August 3, 2005 to handle the revenue-related operations of the Mozilla Foundation. As a non-profit, the Mozilla Foundation is limited in terms of the types and amounts of revenue. The Mozilla Corporation, as a taxable organization (essentially, a commercial operation), does not have to comply with such strict rules. Upon its creation, the Mozilla Corporation took over several areas from the Mozilla Foundation, including coordination and integration of the development of Firefox and Thunderbird (by the global free software community) and the management of relationships with businesses.
With the creation of the Mozilla Corporation, the rest of the Mozilla Foundation narrowed its focus to concentrate on the Mozilla project's governance and policy issues. In November 2005, with the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.5, the Mozilla Corporation's website at mozilla.com was unveiled as the new home of the Firefox and Thunderbird products online.
In 2006 the Mozilla Corporation generated 66.8 million dollars in revenue and 19.8 million in expenses, with 85% of that revenue coming from Google for "assigning [Google] as the browser's default search engine, and for click-throughs on ads placed on the ensuing search results pages."[4]"
Baboons are cute.
Chrome stayed on my system for about 15 minutes during the evaluation. Yes it was fast, yes it was shiny but I dont think i can browse without my firefox addons (adblock plus!!, piclens, rikaichan for japanese etc). I got used to the web without ads and I just cant go back.
If I open Tab B from Tab A, it should get Tab A's cookies. But cookies in Tab B shouldn't "backport" to tab A
Uh, why not? If I'm browsing a site using multiple tabs, and the site resets the cookie to avoid session fixation attacks, or it uses cookies to configure features to whatever, all my tabs should get the new cookie, they shouldn't behave like entirely separate browsers.
The point is that if different processes can communicate with each other, that significantly increases the likelyhood of cross-tab / cross-process vulnerabilities. The attack footprint just grew, rather sharply, in size.
Compared to what? Everything running in the same memory space?
The multi-process model Chrome's using means tabs communicate via message passing*, rather than grabbing locks around shared data structures and poking at things directly, which seems to be what you think is going on. A message passing model's a far smaller area to attack, since it can be a rigorously defined, limited and enforced protocol, rather than an advisory thing a programming error can easily forget or an attacker ignore. And yes, it allows child processes to be run with significantly reduced privileges; e.g. your tabs could be running as user nobody, chrooted to /var/empty, unable to create files or even see most of the system; any time they need to do anything with higher privileges, they need to talk to the parent process, which can consider what they *should* be able to do and reject anything else.
Sure, the message passing might not be as robust as paranoid as you'd like, but it's a far smaller space to attack and secure than "well, if someone gets an arbitrary code execution attack going on, it's game over".
* I haven't looked at the code, it certainly *could* just be sharing big chunks of memory like that, but I somewhat doubt it.
What if your grandmother uses Firefox and something doesn't work as she expects?
My grandma would probably just click the 'Never' button every once in a while.
If something really gives her problems, she'd call me up. I'd look at it, and file a bug report.
Wow... the system works.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
"... but what other explanation is there for Firefox, Netscape, Windoze, or other programs to keep INSISTING that I MUST upgrade my software immediately OR ELSE face dire consequences?"
That's because morons like you, with vintage software, are responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of bots flooding the net with spam and other nasty stuff.
Quote from the parent comment: "Firefox continually degrades in performance and memory usage over time where you can feel the tabs taking longer and longer to switch. And the memory leaks and left overs from long since closed tabs won't go away without quitting out of Firefox."
Those bugs are over 8 years old, and exist in Firefox 3.0.1. See the, CPU hogging bug not fixed: Top 20 excuses.
I wonder why, when Firefox gets $50 million a year from Google, they don't fix the bug that bothers users the most. Is it that they don't have the technical ability, or is there a lack of corporate will?
No, google "users" are a product. The advertisers are the customers of google.
Do you know what "address space" is, and how memory allocation works ? Because the only way to have more than one address space is to have more than one process.
And sometimes Firefox misses some of it. Then it stays allocated until Firefox exits, at which point the OS can clean it. Since the total memory is limited, when such things happen over and over again, these little crumbs of allocated but unused memory take up greater and greater portion of memory space, until finally there's not enough unallocated memory left to satisfy an allocation request, and Firefox crashes, taking all its tabs and windows with it. On the other hand, if each tab has its own process, a particular one might crash, but the rest keep on working.
Of course, the same goes for any error. In Firefox, it kills everything, while in Chrome, it kills only the tab in which the error happened, or that's the theory anyway. And since browsers are complex, it's easy to make errors while coding them.
As opposed to the Firefox way of closing the whole browser and starting from scratch.
FF3 is crappy code. Even if it doesn't have a single memory leak - which I sincerely doubt - the UI has a tendency to hang while the browser is busy, which is simply sloppy.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Insightful"? More like "mods on crack"! Firefox 3.0 final was released on June 17, 2008 - that's just 3 months ago. FF 2.0 is not "vintage" by any sane measure.
It is not that we are elitists. It just that users are stupid. Nothing we can do about it.
It's not yet, but the unwillingness to upgrade is why we had to start this intense firefox promotioning in the first place because IE6 *had* gotten to where it was vintage software. We'd like to not see that happen again.
Aside from that, I can sympathize. I used winamp3 up until last year.
Address space is not fixed per application on modern OSes or on UNIX-based OSes,
No, but it IS limited to one per process, which was GP's point.
If Chrome has a bad memory leak (when e.g. it destroys a flash object) and you restrict your use to one window only without opening new windows or tabs, you will eventually notice it just as much as you would in Firefox.
No, you won't, since Chrome also (at least according to the comic) throws away the process in certain other situations as well, such as when loading a page from a new domain. But that is irrelevant: If it only affects a single tab, the "cost" of a restart is minimal: You have to close that tab and load a single page again, instead of reload every single tab (in my case often 40-50).
The fact that Chrome's design means it uses the OS as a crutch and it steps in and throws everything out when a window or tab is closed does not mean Chrome's design is inherently good, it just means it's more robust at the cost of the extra baggage the OS needs to maintain separate processes (extra memory, slower speed).
More robust == better. That "extra baggage" is mostly the cost of memory protection, which was accepted by most people as good in the early 90's at the latest. The ONLY place where we've put up with the kind of poor isolation that we've seen in the browsers have been in the browsers. That may have been acceptable when they were mostly used as document viewers, but no longer now when they have become application platforms. Todays browsers are throwbacks to Windows 3.1, AmigaOS and old MacOs version prior to memory protection.
I think FF3, Opera, and Safari will go with threads, IE8 will go with processes, and Google will have a decision to make with regards to benchmarks when memory usage and new tab/window response time places them closer to IE8 than it does to the competition.
I very much doubt that. The cost of multiple processes here is minimal. In fact, with multiple cores becoming more and more common, designing for less shared data structures will reduce cache coherency and locking issues and may end up being faster. It is in any case an overhead that is small enough that the extra protection is worth it.
If you really don't want any upgrades just go into the options and toggle the "Check for updates" box. The default auto-upgrade is appropriate for 99% of internet users, but if you're one of the 1% please use the preference we put in just for you. No need to get all hostile about it.