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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.
Right-click is a nightmare on linux platforms (don't know if it affects others, I'm exclusively a linux shop these days).
It randomly follows an action rather than bringing up the menu about one time in ten. Opening up email programs, choosing a new window, bringing up link properties... needs fixing, badly. (Workaround for fellow sufferers - install mouse gestures add-on)
Also it seems really really processor-hungry on one of my machines. Wish I knew why.
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. My firefox process is currently using 1.1GB of RAM and I have to restart it about twice a day just to free up some RAM. I've only got about 4 extensions installed and I've tried disabling each of them in turn to ensure the problem didn't lie in an extension.
Interesting how stories spin out differently depending on the browser in question. If it were an IE story, there would be howls of derision that the vulnerabilities existed in the first place and questions about why Microsoft didn't fix them more quickly.
Because Acid3 only tests a small part of CSS compliance. Giving fanboys pretty number to shout about should not be a priority. Also, please don't reply to posts that you are actually not replying to. Replying to the first post is obvious attention seeking.
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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I love Firefox, I currently use it... but only one question : 8 flaws solved / how many vulnerabilities not solved?
I can't call that English
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.....
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
This article sounds like empty hype to me.
I still use Firefox, and will continue to do so for the time being. The reason being adblock and flashblock, exclusively. I am not as happy with Firefox as I was when I first used the 0.8 something version. I feel Mozilla have lost their way. Too much bloat like the awesome bar -- which frankly just does not work for me at all, it's an hindrance, not a help.
I want to use chrome, because of the multithreading. Firefox absolutely needs to have multithreading to compete. It can be a true dog to use if you have tabs that reload in the background.
The second that there is some sort of adblock and flashblock for Chrome I'm gone. No more Firefox for me.
I'm sorry to have to do that. I actually bought the firefox T-Shirt. I was active in the GetFirefox campaign. But now, I use it only because of the extensions.
Please, Mozilla get your act together. Now more useless features that should really be extensions, and get multithreading sorted. I want to be a Firefox fan again.
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.
I loved it from the first time I saw it.
Maybe, just maybe, not everyone hates it. Maybe it's just a vocal minority that hates it. Maybe the 'community' -is- getting input and the problem is that you are going against the community, not them.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I love the "awesome bar" myself, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of the community in this community project gave Mozilla similar feedback.
I'll admit, the bar hasn't helped me find the really odd or obscure site I havn't visited in a while, but that's what bookmarks are for.
What's your beef with the awesome bar? I actually *like* how it searches through my bookmarks as I type in keywords. No more having to go through multiple levels of bookmark folders. I pretty much just click the yellow star to bookmark a page, then add a few custom tags to it. I got rid of the "I feel lucky" google search behavior, but I've been doing that since firefox 1.x...
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.
The ACID3 test is not important. It tests for unimportant small rendering bugs, and CSS3, which isn't even a standard yet.
You shouldn't have to dig in about:config to disable a prominent feature.
"Microsoft is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of IE -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted IE users."
slashdot users laugh at the propaganda
but when a firefox shill says
"Mozilla is resolving eight critical vulnerabilities found in the current version of Firefox -- a move sure to garner applause from devoted Firefox users."
slashdot puts it in the story summary reverently
propaganda is propaganda is propaganda. no matter the source, even if you love the source. just say "firefox fixed some bugs." and leave the sleazy ad copy out of it please
what next?
"the exploit found in firefox is a feature, not a bug" maybe?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
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?
I thought that replying to the first post was a sign of horrible UI decisions. Anyone else notice the number of replies to the first post skyrocketed when the new design rolled out?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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).
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!
It also coincided with the introduction of threaded comments on Digg, where the same thing has become common practice.
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.
Whine whine whine...
Seriously. If it was a "regular" config option, you'd still complain it wasn't the default. And if it was the default, you'd still complain that the feature was there and that your browser process was wasting memory by including code you're never using. And so on, and so on...
At least it IS configurable. And believe it or not, some people, like me, actually LIKE the AwesomeBar (although I still think the name is a bit on the silly side).
The speed boost is attributed to TraceMonkey. I've been testing nightly builds for a while now with TraceMonkey enabled and they're generally outperformed (barely) by Webkit nightly builds, and pretty much trounced by Chrome. So if the author is betting on TraceMonkey to give Firefox as massive lead in Javascript performance then he may be in for an unpleasant surprise.
He then raves about how eight critical flaws will be fixed in the upcoming version. Say what? That means there are eight critical unpatched flaws in the current released code that have yet to be repaired. That's a bad thing, not a good thing.
> 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.
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.