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Firefox Beta Touts Advanced Engine, Solves 8 Flaws
nandemoari writes "Mozilla may be this year's winner in the 'browser battles' as they ready the next beta version of their tour-de-force, Firefox 3.1. Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox — a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users.
As this year's crop of new browsers emerges, enhanced features are becoming secondary to one thing: speed. Mozilla is nearly ready to release the next beta version of Firefox 3.1 to the public for testing, and insiders predict that it will outpace even Safari 4, which has been the fastest browser in wide release since its beta began last week." It looks like they also will be upping the next major release to v3.5 to better show the significance of the release.
Ooooooooooooor you could just go to about:config and set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0.
But you know, if aimlessly bitching is your thing, please continue.
Wes
I don't really care about the speed. It's already fast enough. I just wish they'd sort out the RAM consumption issue and all the memory leaks.
Firefox 3 is the best performing browser memory-wise according to all independent tests that I have seen. It barely ever creeps beyond 200 MB RAM usage for me over days of usage. In comparison, Safari 4 Beta and IE 8 easily grows to 300-400 MB after a bunch of tabs browsed. It doesn't even take much effort to get those there.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I concur - the Mighty Mouse is not so mighty, Apple's worst product in a long time. I have the problem you describe in Safari 3 and 4 beta. Plus scrolling down has worn out somehow.
Right clicking on the Mighty Mouse appears to have been designed by someone who only used one-button mice before. You have to pretty much take your fingers off of the mouse and only click on the right side of the mouse. It would have made much more sense to make it signal a right click if the right "button" area of the mouse was being touched, regardless of what's happening on the left. It sucks, and they really should fix it (probably could be done with a firmware update).
As for the scroll ball, I have used the "turn the mouse upside down and run the scroll ball around on your pants leg" method with some success. It only works until you get something inside the scroll ball that won't come out. My primary Mighty Mouse (I have four, two are bluetooth and on the same desk) would not scroll right, and even throwing it at the floor and wall didn't work, so I decided to break the damned thing open.
It's actually not hard to crack the mouse open, if you don't mind breaking that little collar that runs around the bottom of the mouse. There are two flexible connections that you have to disconnect, but you can remove the scroll ball mechanism with a small phillips screwdriver, disassemble it, clean it out, and reassemble it. I did it a month ago with no further problems. There is an order to reassembling the mouse and not having one of the flexible connections pull out, but it's not hard to trial and error your way through.
Putting moderation advice in your
Did you know that there are other Mozilla Gecko-based web browsers that you can install Adblock Plus and Flashblock into? They're SeaMonkey (cross-platform as well) and K-Meleon (Windows only). Try them.
By the way, Chrome doesn't do multi-threading. It has a multi-process architecture.
Nope, it's definately a Linux Firefox issue. I have exactly the same problem.
I've found that the workaround is to hold down the mouse button, and only release the button once I've selected something from the list. That works reliably every time. Right-clicking once sometimes brings up the menu, sometimes fires off the last action, and sometimes fires off a completely random action.
Not a fix, I know, but have you considered Flashblock?
I know I know - yet another Opera user. But disable plug-ins and javascript and re-enable them on site I want them on. I have a very happy browsing experience and its three clicks away from re-enabling flash/javascript. If .gif adverts are a pain you can also block moving images.
All without any impact on an already respectibly fast browser.
Sorry, I'll go back to my little Opera hole now.
Excuse me if I'm missing something, but aren't eight critical vulnerabilities supposed to be patched in the stable branch instead of a beta branch?
(I also am not entirely sure whether fixing so many critical vulnerabilities should garner applause from Firefox users...)
RTFA: "The beta Firefox 3.1 will still have a few bugs to work out, but Mozilla officials have promised that eight of the security flaws found in the current browser, six of which have been rated critical, will be fixed in the updated version. The most serious of these vulnerabilities are already being repaired, and can be downloaded as patches from the Mozilla website."
have you been defaced today?
As an Add-On and Web developer i'd say: disable firebug when you don't need it. Firebug is a ressource hog.
Constantly running a debugger must slow down your browser.
-S
Firefox 3.1 (3.5) uses NanoJIT from Tamarin for Tracemonkey. They scrapped the other plans (Actionmonkey) a long time ago.
When I initially saw the awesome bar, I didn't like it - mainly due to when I went to navigate to gmail it showed me the titles of the mail for accounts that weren't mine.
It does expose the history alright, and to be fair that is something that was in the history list already. There is a extension that lets you filter sites from storing in your history. And I have this set to filter gmail which solved my problem.
Now I think it is brilliant. Just for finding sites I have been to or navigating bookmarks, It is excellent.
And as for the history, if it forces you to change your behavior to not leave traces of browsing you don't want other people to see in the history, it is probably a good thing - The kids were maybe already snooping into what Mommy and Daddy were looking at!
Please fix your flash plugin. Seems that once a day if I go to a page with considerable flash (which is most pages these days), the browser will crash and when I examine the crashfile, it's *gasp* always you. I've reinstalled flash and FF 3.0.6.....
This is Slashdot, not Adobe's bug reporting system. Please fix your bookmarks. They won't fix the problem if you don't post it where they will read it.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Minefield and the 3.1 betas branched a long time ago.
IIRC, You want to test Shiretoko.
We'll say it again... Chrome does not use multithreading, it forks each tab into a new process.
The reason for this is that the Windows compile is compiled with some kind of compiler optimisation. Don't really know what that optimisation was, however it had nothing to do with Windows.
IIRC, that was profile-guided optimization, which gives Firefox a 15-20% speed boost. It was enabled on Windows nightly builds at the time but not Linux nightly builds due to various reasons. It's now enabled on both, and surprise surprise! The performance gap is gone.
We're still seeing this cited and modded up despite being busted on this very site (in the comments for that story) though, which I guess just goes to prove the old adage that a lie can get around the world before the truth manages to tie its shoes.
FWIW, they've landed performance improvements for the AwesomeBar to Fx3.2.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Speaking as a Gecko developer, the article's author is just confused. Either that, or in desperate need of copy, no matter how inane.
What _is_ true is that Tracemonkey at ship will be reasonably competitive with then-shipping Safari (as opposed to Webkit nightly builds, which should be compared to the then Firefox nightly builds) and V8 (depending heavily on the test; it'll be a lot slower on the V8 tests).
Due to the way the jits involved work, it's pretty easy to find tests where one or the other of the engines above is a lot faster; for example nightly Tracemonkey is about 5x faster than nightly Webkit on a fractal-generator script I have lying around. That's mostly because I made sure that everything the script hit ended up on trace. Can't test with Chrome easily, since I don't have a useful Windows machine to hand (performance tests in a VM are pretty much worthless). As I said, V8 is a lot faster on its own tests, since Tracemonkey leaves those completely on the interpreter so far. Other tests will fall somewhere in between.
Now you're correct that whole-system DOM performance in Webkit tends to be better than Gecko. We're working on it. ;)
> In W3C land to become a recommendation there must be two completely interoperable
> implementations
This is a recent development, and wasn't in place when the specs ACID3 tests were written. None of them have two interoperable implementations, and none even come close. Some are impossible to implement a written due to self-contradictions. It's great fun.
Why is parent getting modded up? It's incorrect. Adobe already has a working, native 64 bit flash player for Linux. Give them some credit where it's due. We spend years complaining about no native 64 bit flash clients, and then Adobe actually releases it (!) and it's solid (!), and still people complain. I don't get it.
Whoever cleared this for the front page?
If a free software team announced "our current stable version is insecure, but if you install our test version, you'll be safe", there would be serious hell. If you have security holes in your current stable branch, you bloody well fix them immediately instead of asking users to download a beta version. (Well, unless you're Google, in which case the whole universe is in beta.)
Just to be sure this wasn't the case, I traced the source through this poorly researched blog entry on infopackets.com back to CNet, and lo and behold:
Nope, no mention of a beta. Yes, a beta of 3.1 was released at the same time as a stable 3.0.7, and yes, 3.1 has an advanced JS engine that will boost performance. I'll even wager that if the 3.0.6 bugs were also in the 3.1 branch, then this beta fixed them as well.
But no, users do not have to download a beta version to ensure security, and to mislead them otherwise is pretty irresponsible as there is already enough FUD going on about Mozilla.