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Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Released
ink writes "Mozilla has released the third beta for Firefox 3.1 (which may become Firefox 3.5). This beta includes the new location bar, Mozilla's new JavaScript engine Tracemonkey, new HTML5 features and many other enhancements. It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."
They changed the location bar again.
Now I can watch people flip out about it on the interwebs for 6 months as well as being personally annoyed with re-getting used to how it functions.
You can't take the sky from me.
I was going to download this using Mozilla Firefox, but Microsoft told me it would be faster downloading, and it's returning a exception. Too bad I wanted to use it.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
How pretty much everything we do uses JSON and until now there has been no love from the browser.
My question is, will all these new JavaScript goodies (both in Firefox and in IE8) get rolled into jQuery? That way if jQuery sees the browser can do JSON serialization, or timeouts on XHttpRequests, it will use the native stuff instead of emulating the behavior?
I'm gonna have to play with the VIDEO thing. The big problem such a new feature will have is codec support. Nobody is gonna transcode their streaming content to use this thing when they can just use flash player. That and I really dont want "normal people" trying to find codecs on google--most of the hits for "$AWESOME_CODEC" are usually just spyware installers.
It's a beta. You don't get auto-updated to beta versions.
This one is only news worthy because it has some cool new features
...It looks the same on the surface, but there are many changes under the hood."...
Will Joe Public be in position to notice them? The new engine might be indeed faster but I wonder whether an ordinary user will see a difference.
Uh, yeah, you do if you're running 3.1b2. They have a beta update channel.
What's the new location bar? Is it something like the old location bar, aka the UnAwesomeBar? I'm pretty much sick to death of the awesomeness of the present location bar, what with Slashdot being listed as "Server 500: Internal Error" in the dropdown because about 4 months ago I got a 500 error message?
More importantly, have the Firefox devs realised that downloads can fail yet? Or does it still report downloads as successful if they are interrupted before they reach Content-Length bytes, or how about reporting as successful because they successfully downloaded a 404 error page? Supporting incomplete standards and reimplementing an already existing feature is all well and good, but reaching version "3.5" of a web browser without having the most rudimentary capability of detecting a failed download is nothing short of obscene.
Choking would require said wang to be long enough to pass the teeth, I think firefox is safe from your wrath.
You can't take the sky from me.
I thought Firefox was going to be implementing the same type of preemptive threading and memory protection that Chrome and, I think, IE 8 have?
So far the latest FF beta all seem horribly slow with multiple pages. The more tabs the worse the overall performance.
Also, the latest FF betas still have the awful performance rot where overall performance degrades over time as you continue to open and close tabs.
After using Chrome for a while it is hard to keep using FF when I've been able to keep Chrome open for a couple weeks and it still feels as lightning quick as it was when first started up.
I know there is a tendency among some people to think of version numbers as decimal, since they use decimal points. I know I did when I was younger.
It's kind of annoying when major projects make this mistake though. It leads to all sorts of confusion when people see results like version 3.1.150 being after 3.1.50 and don't know why that's the case (".5 is more than .15!", which in the case of the Firefox release mentioned in TFS would be accurate, but in the case of properly-numbered software wouldn't), or other people truncate 3.1.50 to 3.1.5.
I wish major projects at least would use the traditional "increment by one" method. If it can be done for the X-Men 2.1 DVD (after nerds no doubt complained about the "X-Men 1.5" DVD), it can be done for Firefox et al too :).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
is back!
It looks like they did. Firefox 3.1 beta 3 is still not available on the All Betas page, and when you click on the Download Now link on the Release Notes page, you get Firefox 3.1 beta 2.
The release linked to in the summary may not be the final, completed version, as Firefox 3.1 beta 3 has not been officially released yet. Download it at your own risk. You should wait until it's available through the links I give in this post.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm looking forward to them resolving the bit where the *nix Firefox builds performed slower than the win32 builds, supposedly due to Profile Guided Optimizations in javascript:
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-firefox-javascript-linux-and-windows-and-its-not-pretty
I just downloaded and am using it now .. it definitely feels faster, however, will it crash less on a Mac? :(
I love firefox, and I use it everywhere, but man, is it awful on a Mac.
Please don't flame, just an honest opinion from a long time firefox user/supporter/evangelist.
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
Hey everyone - glad you're excited about the new beta, we're pretty excited to release it. We actually haven't finished the QA on the download page, the update snippets, etc, yet. What you're seeing here is that last night we started sending out the final bits to our mirror network. So yes, you could go get it directly off the FTP servers, but that can overload mirrors and make it hard for other people to download it.
We'd prefer if you waited a few hours until about 2pm PDT when we'll be ready to update:
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html
which uses our mirror-rotation script to ease the load of downloads.
Mike Beltzner
Director of Firefox Development
Why is it that every time a new version of Firefox comes out, we need to have a news story about it? Same with any other browser, but at this point it seems like the nightly builds are being posted about. It's getting ridiculous.
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
Everyone remembers FF devs flaming people in those FF memory leak stories from a few years ago. The anger comes from the fact they know they have a huge problem with the way FF is architected. Lashing out is a very common reaction from developers who are aware of some fundamental problem with their code that they know would require massive amounts of work they are unable or unwilling to fix.
The FF devs got away with it because they were compared to the horrible mess that IE was back then. Now IE has really gotten its shit together now with it great leaps forward with javascript performance, threading, and memory protection.
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism from the "IE sucks! I use FF so I'm cool" days.
Finally..finally!
Now I think I an transcode my snapshot video footage into a format that I don't have to worry about for ...at next 5-10 years.
Sounds like someone got a little upset when they had their patch rejected by the Firefox dev team. :-(
You do have a good point. There has been talk about supporting additional image formats (JPEG 2000, TIFF, MNG) using imagelib extensions. They could do the same for different video codecs, as well.
I notice that Firefox is an open source project, so all it takes is someone to come forward to do the work. I also notice that the Google Summer of Code will be starting over the next several months. Are there any students out the that want to make some extra $$$, get great software development experience, and add a significant new capability to one of the most popular browsers?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Here's the feature I want: bug fixes! Everytime I turn around there's a new Firefox packed full of new features I don't need. I wondering how rock solid it could be if they spent half that energy on fixing bugs. No new features until the bug queue is empty!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
>So after shoving a freaking DATABASE into Firefox 2,
yes, a db that is under a quarter of a MB. It is vastly superior (with regards to interoperability, speed, flexibility, and scaling) to the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format they where using, and it much more powerful and useful than flat html file that was used for bookmarks.
>they're now adding a freaking VIDEO playback feature?!
Yes. The web is a different place than it was even 5 years ago. Video is the norm, and once the video tag takes off, this will be very valuable to most users. Those that may not need or want video are probably smart enough to find a different browser that is more suitable to their needs.
>On the upside, it's nice to see Firefox is finally supporting JSON.
JSON has been supported in FF since 3.0. FF 3.1 drops JSON.jsm for native JSON. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JSON
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Particularly funny since there's a pretty nice-size contingent of ex-Firefox developers on the Chrome team.
The Minefield beta is really fast.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Only when Google decides to shoot its revenue foot and release adblock, I might consider Chrome.
Firefox by itself - I'd be grateful if they scaled back. Do you remember the origin? There was this bloated hog called Mozilla Suite, and there was this little-known neglected wild branch called Phoenix, which was meant to be the Mozilla engine with a minimalistic, customizable frontend - cut on all the bloat.
And suddenly people switched en masse to the small, lean "just a browser" thingy while the monstrosity died.
Now Firefox becomes the new monstrosity full of bloat. It really needs another "phoenix branch" - something that will take all the lean mean backend stuff and do away with "awesome bars", "intelligent bookmarks" and all this cruft people don't give a shit about, and move it ALL to extensions, from which you'd take what you like while not being encumbered by all the rest.
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the poorly documented, brain-damaged Mork history format
Let me clarify something: it's not brain-damaged; it's braindead. Even the original author claims as much (specifically, it's the "zany" serialization it used to use)!
Couldn't they provide 64bit binaries? That would be very useful, at least to me...
I use Firefox on Linux as my primary browser. I'm having a huge problem with random slowdowns, however. It seems to be fairly random, exacerbated when multiple tabs are open, and possibly related to Flash. When the slowdowns start occuring Firefox will start eating 99% of CPU and become unresponsive. A strace will show dozens of gettimeofday() calls every second.
A google search for "firefox getttimeofday" will show many people with similar problems.
This is on CentOS 5.2 with the latest packaged firefox...
Anyone seeing similar problems?
Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.
I believe you mean your very unpopular, entirely off-topic opinion here. Yes, it's true! Trolling about Chrome on a story about Firefox's latest beta is, in fact, off-topic.
The Firefox devs got away with it by fixing their memory problems. They made Firefox use less memory than other browsers. What was it they were unable or unwilling to fix again?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Hmm. My experience seems to be a bit different than yours. I find firefox to be fast and solid. Maybe Chrome has improved since it was first released, but a dozen people here installed it on release date, and dumped it within two days because it was unusable. Besides, it's apparently Windows only? That's what Google tells me at least.
A big reason to use firefox for me is that it runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, without issue.
"Its a web browser, not the holy grail of computing. Its no more important, in the big picture, than an IM client."
Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).
To be fair, I've not looked at ff3.1(5) yet, nor IE8. Sometime after they've hit final release, I'll be interested. Advertising betas just seems silly, even for /..
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Yes, you do. But the auto-update is not activated until later on, usually a couple of days after having the new version available through direct download.
uh...looking at the Google Chrome team page, I can immediately pick out the following people as being ex-Mozilla employees or contributors: Ben Goodger, Darin Fisher, Brett Wilson, Peter Kasting, Mike Pinkerton, Jonathan Haas, Pam Greene, Jungshik Shin I'm sure there are more that I'm not aware of, but those are all certain.
The initial goal of the Firefox project was to create a user oriented browser. Making it small was a side goal, but it was never a primary goal for the people involved.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yep, I fully expect to be modded down for stating my sure to be very unpopular opinion here.
I believe you mean your very unpopular, entirely off-topic opinion here. Yes, it's true! Trolling about Chrome on a story about Firefox's latest beta is, in fact, off-topic.
I will never understand why some people care SO much about mod points or flags... dumbest thing ever... who cares!
Looks like the ubiquity add-on crashes beta 3 (which, I suppose, is to be expected). I had to disable it just to get Firefox to open up properly... Just an FYI in case anyone else is using ubiquity.
I don't remember any Firefox developers flaming people about memory issues. I remember fanboys doing it, but there's a big difference there. The only "official" response I know of from any Firefox developers was Ben's "It's a feature, not a bug" blog post from 2005, which is long-obsolete. Ben doesn't even work for Mozilla anymore (ironically, he's on the Chrome team now).
Give me a browser that can run on a Commodore 64-sized computer times the 8-to-64 bit word conversion..... .....somewhere around 1/2 or 1 megabyte in size. That would be slick.
Yeah I know. "Impossible." (sigh). Right now my FF3 browser is using ~150 megabytes and I don't know why it needs all that room just to display one single page.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
really brings up the MSN page fast. No really. Really really fast.
A lot of the bullshit surrounding Firefox is the reason I avoid it where I can. Even if that means just using the unofficial or Iceweasel branding. I don't particularly like Mozilla Corporation's obsessiveness with income (see the other Mozcorp story on the front page - "Hey, look, we might be able to get more money from someone else!"), their stance on trademark names/icons (see Debian vs. Mozcorp), or the way their developers tend to come off as, sometimes, elitist (such as the memory leak "feature" discussions).
In fairness, the real utility of the database will be enabling client-side storage for web apps that utilize HTML 5 features (since the client-side storage stuff is mandated by HTML 5 -- this is the same API that Palm's new phone is going to use). In addition to basic key-value pair storage, there will be fully realized structured/relational data storage.
Now it's been released. It's available for everyone through the links I gave, and through Check for Updates... for Firefox 3.1 beta 2 users.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
The only thing funnier than that comment is the fact that the parent post got modded "Informative". :D
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.
It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.
I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.
Beg to differ.
http://waynepan.com/2008/09/02/v8-tracemonkey-squirrelfish-ie8-benchmarks/
Pretty sure Lynx will.
How do *you* think that one goes about "preemptively" threading something?
With Chrome and its incredibly clean and modern code base and extensions soon to arrive and the Linux version rapidly maturing, the only reason to keep using FF will be misplaced lingering fanboyism
It's easy to have a clean codebase when...
* No fullscreen mode.
* No detection of click-through
* Cut and paste uses icon-shape style instead of dragging an image
* Can't grow selection using cursor
* Not cross platform
* History is just a list of titles (can't even get URL info)
* History looks like a webpage, but you can't do text search or select or right-click on links
* Downloads looks like a webpage, but same problems as history
* Closing a window with multiple tabs nukes them with no warning.
* No 'view page info' showing links, media, etc
* No 'page style' css choices
* Poor handling of many tabs (they shrink forever).
* Can't control what sites are in the screenshots on start page
* Can't search inside and outside a text field at once (either or)
* Can't see pages that are in the cache (work offline mode)
* Print... just silently does nothing if no printer installed
* No rss support at all
* No multiple profiles
* With lots of bookmarks, it doesn't remember where you were in the list so you have to scroll to the bottom again to click more than one
* Can't allow/prevent pages from choosing their own fonts
* No whitelist for cookies
* No clearing of cookies on closing browser
* No separate proxy settings, have to use OS ones
* No settings for enable/disable Java, Javascript.
* Can't restrict Javascript behaviors, such as moving windows
* Can't disable image loading
* Can't modify MIME type mappings
* Can't set max history time in days or entries
* Can't set cache size
* No master password
* No whitelist to avoid site warnings
* No support for security devices
* Can't control update behavior
* Poor accessibility
* No autoscroll (fixed?)
* Can't clear all transfers (have to remove one by one)
* Buggy UI, for example Text Encoding menu doesn't autoscroll up despite having arrows (have to click arrow, can autoscroll down if wiggle mouse)
* No firebug equivalent.
* No mouse gestures.
* Plugins perform badly and/or fail
* Has bad rendering on many non-perfect sites (same with all WebKit browsers)
Oh yeah, and they stole the name 'chrome' from Mozilla, which is pretty scummy. They don't even give props to Mozilla for the name.
Let me know if these are outdated... I don't have my Windows vmware image handy.
Plugin support?
nsPyContext.o: In function `nsPythonContext::Deserialize(nsIObjectInputStream*, nsScriptObjectHolder&)': /home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src/nsPyContext.cpp:728: undefined reference to `PyMarshal_ReadObjectFromString'
nsPyContext.o: In function `nsPythonContext::Serialize(nsIObjectOutputStream*, void*)': /home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src/nsPyContext.cpp:682: undefined reference to `PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString' /usr/bin/ld: libpydom.so: hidden symbol `PyMarshal_WriteObjectToString' isn't defined /usr/bin/ld: final link failed: Nonrepresentable section on output
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [libpydom.so] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/savages/mozilla/mozilla-1.9.1/extensions/python/dom/src'
Maybe an early version. The recent Lynxes got quite monstrous.
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Hmm. I bet there will be a mini-flood of "Oh Shit! Some bastard has worked out how to make the browser crash (yet again) (or leak the sandbox) by doing something truly evil and unexpected with JavaScript again."
It's hard to get that sort of thing really secure. If they do it truly securely, well... my hat's off to them.
I agree that Mork is extremely bad technically, yet the end result is that I like using FF3 less than FF2. Although they improved the db greatly, they also decided to do a lot more with it and this negated most of the gains.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
If they support JSON shouldn't they release the beta tomorrow on Friday the 13th ?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Lots of spinning beachballs and hangs when scrolling compared to beta 2.
Hm, i think he must try this one ECDYSTERONE
* No multiple profiles
--user-data-dir='path/to/profile'
You can even simultaneously run two instances using different profiles. My partner and I use this on our shared desktop so we can stay logged in to all those sites we don't care if the other person sees.
http://www.chromeplugins.org/tips-tricks/how-to-create-profiles-in-google-chrome/
What is a nonconsole text editor, and what makes it so?
Sorry to yell but Firefox is damned near perfect for me, bar 2 minor issues.
1. a crappy web page which locks up a tab, I want to be able to ignore that tab / process and continue browsing, without locking up the entire browser.
Full honesty: I'm not a coder so I can't appreciate how difficult this might be, but I don't care - I'm an end user, I feel this would be a very very welcome addition to Firefox.
1a. performance increases from 1, ideally also
2.
Applications and plugins 'stealing focus' of firefox keyboard controls.
Control W
Control tab
Control shift tab
Control shift N
etc etc
Some of these awesome and handy keyboard controls simply don't work properly when using FFox on pages such as youtube and other flash based pages, the plugin itself 'takes focus' of the keyboard and for all the ALT D, ALT TAB or any other combination of keystrokes you simply can't get the browser to listen to the commands, you HAVE to click the current tab up the top and re-highlight it / select it (try it now, you'll see a faint outline circle the tab)
I really wish that could be addressed as I'm a 'high end' keyboard user and it really gives me the niggles to have to go up and click on that.
Anyone know a way around it?
I tried to document the issue on youtube but it's hard to put in to words, or visually.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLk0MBSxb-A
SQLite replaced an existing database (non-SQL, but still a database) that was already there. That was Mork. SQLite is a vast improvement.
As far JSON, you can get JSON from wherever you want, and sites commonly do. XHR is not the only way to get JSON. People pass it around in query strings, for example.
As always, you can try it out by downloading the portable version - Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition - from PortableApps.com. It won't affect your local 3.0.7 install, so you can try out the features of the new beta without worrying about it affecting your extensions or settings.
http://portableapps.com/news/2009-03-12_-_firefox_portable_3.1_beta_3
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
hmm, I think I was thinking of Dave Haas. Oh well. Thanks for clarifying.
I wasn't trolling specifically about Chrome, I was asking (in the subject) why ppl still use FF. There are other UNIX/LINUX choices available, netscape/mozilla come to mind.
Although my opinion and subsequent sidebar about how much I think FF is crashware (which it is) may have been off-topic ... I felt like pushing some buttons.
P.S. this time I'm posting from Opera. :P
I only meant to imply that I understood (and expected) the tender feelings of FF users^H^H^H^H^Hfanatics would cause my main point to be lost under a negative moderation.
Yes and no. It's definitely not the holy grail of computing. However, the web has become SO central to the internet (and in fact, computing in general) that it is actually more important than an IM client (or an FTP client, or...).
We have different priorities. All the fancy 'cloud' apps provide exposure and risk that I (as a SysEng) cannot assume. As long my data will not be under my direct control in the cloud, there is no chance of the web ever replacing my dmz'd 3-tier app environment. it is merely a connection path to a Java/PHP webserver. YMMV.
WRT news, knowledge, and reference, the web is clearly the best option out there, but again, just a connection method to resources.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wasn't trolling specifically about Chrome, I was asking (in the subject) why ppl still use FF.
So you where just trolling in general?
Look, it was an article about a friggin' FF beta. And you come on and say "Hey, FF is shit, why do you like it?!?" How is that not a troll? I mean, let's face it, in all probability, you weren't actually looking for an honest, thoughtful answer to that question (and yes, believe it or not, there is an honest answer... I just don't think you're interested in it).
If, on the off chance, you *were* looking for an honest answer, let me know, and I can explain to you why I use FF as my primary browser.
I felt like pushing some buttons.
Ah, see? Like I said, a troll. But, hey, at least you admitted it eventually.
Well, it's not offtopic if you consider that there is an ad for Google Chrome on the page along with the article about Firefox. Kind of ironic, actually.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Well, if the porn industry adopts the video tag, both Firefox and Opera will rise in usage. A lot.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.