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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.
Hmm.. I find it does the right-click thing on my iMac but it might be 'cause the Mighty Mouse is so awful.
I've started using bash for file management instead of Finder because I can't trust the mouse to accidentally move folders etc.
It seems like 3.1 has been stuck at beta 2 for several months. This is while Chrome and Safari have leapt ahead with the taps and top interface and other improvements.
I still prefer Firefox, but the difference in screen real estate between Firefox and Safari Beta 4 is jarring.
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You must be doing something wrong (seriously). I have 4 extensions and 16 Addons installed and have routinely checked my Firefox memory usage; it's gotten to 700MB before a few times but not twice per day, it was after 3 days of having it open.
Personally, I like the awesome bar but I do wish there was a way to easily disable different classes of entries from getting added. I have turned off history on my machine because the awesome bar just gets too cluttered, but I use it all the time to quickly navigate to my bookmarks.
and I've seen very few people even talk about it.
Because a lot of people don't get it? This is the first time I've even heard about it and I've been using FF3 since installing Intrepid Ibex on release day.
Yes, but Firefox has a faster turnaround time as it is. Microsoft only patches once a month, often misses critical patches and then didn't update their browser for years. Mozilla was the first true competition that IE had, has a fast turnaround time, and patches vulnerabilities fast, often within days of being made aware of them. Sometimes they don't do as well as they could, but when they're able to put out 3 major versions of their browser, 2 .5 versions and many smaller ones within the time that IE's able to put out 2 new versions, they deserve praise instead of scorn.
Yikes! Opera peaks at 250MB, and stays there. They really need to work on the memory issues. Even though I don't even touch computers with less than 4GB RAM, it's pretty sick to see 25% of that eaten by a web browser.
I agree, although I had Opera ranked over FF for casual browsing. I only used FF for it's web developer tools and firebug. Now I have made the move to Chrome for casual browsing, so now FF is in 3rd place.
Where Chrome is really better than opera is closing down. I can have 20 tabs open in Chrome and when I close the application, I recover all the memory pretty much instantly. Opera needs about 2-3 minutes where it actually takes more memory (e.g. jumps from 170MB to 210MB ram) before finally closing down internally. As I mentioned elsewhere, FF in windows normally just crashes upon closing, taking 100% CPU usage and requiring killing from the task manager. Therefore I use it as little as possible.
Adblock is not a dealbreaker. I have it installed in FF but it's normally off. The sites I visit don't require blocking ads. I won't visit a site so obnoxious that it would require adblocking to be functional.
BINGO!
While the Awful bar would make an EXCELLENT extension, it is wrong to force it on people that don't want it. FF started out as a nice, stripped-down browser that you could customize any way you want with easy to install extensions. now it's become a bloated, slow beast that get's features put in that a significant amount of users DO NOT WANT (note I said "significant amount", not necessarily "majority". Just because users who don't want it are a minority doesn't mean we shouldn't get a say.)
The problem is that this is one part of the browser that is NOT modular. There isn't a way to REVERT the behavior back to the old way, we are stuck with it. Even extensions can't fully fix the problem. (Yes, I've tried "Old Bar" extension and all the about:config tricks. None of them return the desired traditional functionality.)
So basically I'm stuck with either completely disabling the URL bar, or the horrible new behavior. Frankly, i hate the new behavior enough that I narrowly prefer NO function to it's current function.
the lead devs for Mozilla need to listen to ALL the users and realize that NOT EVERYONE LIKES the new bar and they should make it MODULAR as it should be.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
What's more, you shouldn't have to dig around in about:config to change a setting that doesn't actually do what you want.
The max rich results setting just means it won't display any search results. That's not even remotely the same as going back to an old-school auto-complete functionality.
To be fair, I hated it at first (and at times I still do) but while it sometimes has completely random matches, there are a number of sites that I can now get to much more easily, even without having bookmarked and tagged them. About the only thing that I do always do is use the oldbar extension as a basis for my CSS to get a slightly more sensible appearance (i.e. something that doesn't go half way down your screen with half a dozen results).
It also coincided with the introduction of threaded comments on Digg, where the same thing has become common practice.
You can speed up firefox especially with the super bar by using tmpfs to put the firefox profile in your ram. A guide can be found at http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-717117.html
Everything it tests has had a call for implementations out for at least five years. In W3C land to become a recommendation there must be two completely interoperable implementations -- fundamentally they will not become recommendations until they are implemented, so the "not even a standard yet" argument doesn't fly.
Try Swiftweasel. The native Linux firefox versions are all compiled completely unoptimized. Swiftweasel just enables some of the i686 and -O2 optimizations and it's still Firefox, all my plugins work, but it doesn't dog down like Firefox proper (I still have it installed, I've compared the two).
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.