Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed

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Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed

Posted by timothy on Tuesday June 30, 2009 @02:21AM from the new-improved-dragon dept.

johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page. Update: 06/30 15:31 GMT by T : No longer marked as RC; the Firefox upgrade page now says 3.5 has arrived.

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As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · 2009-06-30 02:26 · Score: 5, Insightful

The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?

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1. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by A12m0v · 2009-06-30 02:29 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Firefox really needs a multiprocess architecture.
  
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2. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by thedonger · 2009-06-30 02:30 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  (frequently over a gig of it)
  Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB (Jesus! I have really lowered my expectations thinking that isn't a lot!) with 15 tabs open for a week.
  
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3. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by oldspewey · 2009-06-30 02:31 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit)
  This is a bad habit? I've always just thought of it as a convenient way to browse.
  
  --
  If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
4. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by fredrik70 · 2009-06-30 02:32 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  according to this test is seems quite alright...
  
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5. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by SargentDU · 2009-06-30 02:33 · Score: 1
  
  So it is a convenient bad habit! :)
  Isn't that true for many bad habits?
6. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Jorkapp · 2009-06-30 02:33 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  They fixed most of FF's memory issues with FF3. I've been using 3.5 since beta 1, and I've never had any issues with memory.
  
  --
  Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
7. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by mikael · 2009-06-30 02:35 · Score: 1
  
  Or about stopping the auto-update. I use yum to install firefox automatically, then about 4 hours later I get message telling me that "Congratulations, you have firefox 3.0.11 installed", which breaks Google Streetview - it just remains black and no options actually appear in the Preferences->Clear Private Data popup. Reinstall Firefox using yum install, Google Streetview works again, and the cycle repeats.
  
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8. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 02:35 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Yeah, I thought the same, a convenient way to browse. And being able to close FF and open it later on with all my tabs intact, that's even better.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
9. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:37 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  It does indeed. On my Linux box I've created a custom version of Firefox that does just that, but on Windows this simply isn't possible. I've tried copying and pasting code from my Linux copy into the Windows DLL's using a hex editor but this hasn't worked and has broken my Firefox installation - Windows shittyness at it's finest!
10. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Alphager · 2009-06-30 02:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Or about stopping the auto-update. I use yum to install firefox automatically, then about 4 hours later I get message telling me that "Congratulations, you have firefox 3.0.11 installed", which breaks Google Streetview - it just remains black and no options actually appear in the Preferences->Clear Private Data popup. Reinstall Firefox using yum install, Google Streetview works again, and the cycle repeats.
  How is this a Firefox-Issue? open a Bug with your distro to set the updates off. And turn off automatic updates in the preferrences.
11. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:43 · Score: 0
  
  Maybe try using a decent distro instead of that RedHat crap? No regular distro I know of sets Firefox to automatically update outside of the OS update mechanism.
  Try "Preferences->Advanced->Update" and set how you like.
12. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Darkness404 · 2009-06-30 02:48 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I'm not sure if multiprocess architectures are really the way to go. Yes, they stop memory leaks but still take up more memory in the short run. Firefox is used heavily on older computers where IE doesn't cut it and the max memory is 512 MB or less.
  
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13. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Freedom+Bug · 2009-06-30 02:50 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I leave Firefox 3.0 open for weeks at a time, and I'm liable to have close to a hundred tabs open across 12 windows. Granted, it uses almost a gigabyte of memory, but I don't think any browser would do any better for that kind of load. The only time I ever need to restart is because Flash has stopped working.
14. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · 2009-06-30 02:53 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB (Jesus! I have really lowered my expectations thinking that isn't a lot!) with 15 tabs open for a week.
  
  I'm using version 3.0.11. I currently have three windows open with about 120 tabs between them. Process Explorer reports that the firefox.exe process has 585,384k private bytes and 689,916k virtual bytes. Over the next couple days the amount of memory consumed will continue to grow, probably until it hits around 1.5 gigs of private bytes. I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit. (Perhaps a quarter of those tabs are sites that i check and refresh fairly often, at least once a day. The rest are sites links that i've checked or the results of google searches that i either haven't finished reading yet or think i'll need to reference back to in the near future. (For example, over 30 of those tabs relate to the myriad of issues i've run into trying to get Oracle working through ADO.Net, and i'll need to keep a lot of them open for reference until this project actually works correctly.)
  
  It's not that i mind Firefox taking up a lot of memory when i have a lot of tabs open (although almost 5 megs a page already seems a little high, though not as bad as your 40 megs per tab!) but i do mind that when i notice my computer slowing down and see that Firefox has consumed somewhere between 1 and 1.5 gigs of physical memory that doing a pruning of the tabs gets me almost no memory back. I have in fact closed everything down except for one google tab left on one window of Firefox and seen it still consuming over a gig of memory.
  
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15. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · 2009-06-30 02:56 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  They fixed most of FF's memory issues with FF3. I've been using 3.5 since beta 1, and I've never had any issues with memory.
  
  As mentioned in a previous comment, i'm currently using 3.0.11, and i haven't seen a noticeable improvement over FF2. If they've fixed everything in 3.5 i'll be very happy. But then everyone told me they'd fixed the memory issued in 3.0 too, and that didn't work so well for me.
  
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16. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Sancho · 2009-06-30 02:57 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  How do you manage that? I mean, when you want to go to a page, do you really look for it in all of your tabs? What do you gain by leaving the tab open instead of just going back to the site when you want to view it again?
  I tend to max out at about 10 tabs because I close them when I'm not actively using them. It's really, really rare that I even actively use that many.
17. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Da+Fokka · 2009-06-30 02:58 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  ... Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit)
  Why is it a bad habit? The browser should facilitate the user, it shouldn't be the other way around.
18. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by NeoSkandranon · 2009-06-30 02:58 · Score: 1
  
  Everyone keeps manically saying "most memory problems are plugin related now" but howcome I don't ever seem to see anyone going "well using adblock $version sites X and Y seem to cause godawful memory leaks even with no browser activity"
  
  --
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19. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:59 · Score: 0, Funny
  
  Oh, you mean the multiprocess architecture that I described in my blog as being a pile of shit? See "Processes".
  Yes, I fully agree, we need to provide more "distractions" for programmers. Hey man, rather than solve bugs, let's just fuck around!
  Next up, Firefox On Rails...
20. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by maxume · 2009-06-30 02:59 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to something other than -1 should make memory use somewhat less aggressive (I haven't dug into it very deeply, but I don't think FF adjusts the number of pages any when the number of open tabs gets huge, and as I understand it, the setting is per tab, so you might actually have several hundred rendered pages in memory when you have 120 tabs open).
  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
21. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by SatanicPuppy · 2009-06-30 03:05 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Well, as long as we're talking anecdotes, I saw a dramatic improvement in 3 over 2...In FF2, the memory creep was constant and dramatic. 30-50 tabs would consume several GIGS of memory after a week or so. But with 3, it levels off. Yea, it uses a lot of memory, but it doesn't leak the way it used to.
  Just my personal experience of course.
  
  --
  ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
22. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by garaged · 2009-06-30 03:08 · Score: 1
  
  oh, come on !! use a real distro
  
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23. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by jc42 · 2009-06-30 03:08 · Score: 1
  
  I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB
  Hmmm ... I'm using a Macbook Pro at the moment, and according to the Activity Monitor window, Firefox is currently using RSIZE=338.62MB and VSIZE=1.37GB. This is with 7 windows with 25 tabs open, plus the "Library" (i.e., bookmarks) window. This seems about normal We also have a smaller, 5-year-old Mac Powerbook with only 1 GB of memory (vs the 4 GB on this machine), and FF there typically shows numbers about half as large. It's a lot slower there, of course.
  I've noticed that the RSIZE and VSIZE numbers rarely seem to have any discernable correlation with what FF is doing. I've also found that if I "kill -9" (force quit) the firefox process, restart it, and tell it to restore the previous windows, it usually uses only about half as much memory as it used before it was killed. This tells me something about its memory wastage, I suppose. But it doesn't really tell me much that's usable, since it usually balloons back up in a fairly short time.
  I do have some evidence that part of the problem is that memory expands permanently if I download any sort of "active" page. A page with flash is the really visible culprit, and I have flashblock installed. Still, there are some sites I'd like to look at that use flash in a useful way, so sometimes I enable flash for them. Then I watch to see whether it has ballooned up. Every few days I kill it and restart it, to get the memory back.
  It does seem likely that FF has little if any control over memory usage by plugins such as video viewers. They are really separate pieces of software, with minimal interaction with the main program. They are "black boxes" as far as FF itself is concerned, and FF would have little if any control over the way they use memory.
  
  --
  Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
24. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by 0100010001010011 · 2009-06-30 03:10 · Score: 1
  
  Drop the number of cached pages to 0. It'll dramatically drop the amount of RAM FireFox uses.
  Be warned, using the back button or "Undo Close Tab" is going to suck as it'll have to pull everything from network again. (Pair it with a local caching proxy?).
  I just wish they had a 'purge cache' button somewhere easy. Until then I'll just quit and restart.
25. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by garaged · 2009-06-30 03:11 · Score: 1
  
  and how 120 tabs are going to make a user's life better ??
  When I have 20 tab I cannot remember what was I doing on most of them, and I often get more confused that enlighted by having to "research" what was I thinking 2 days ago about a topic I'm no longer interested
  
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26. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:13 · Score: 0
  
  time to stop using your 105 extensions or figure out which one is causing leaks
27. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:15 · Score: 0
  
  Hey did you know that you could e-mail yourself urls with notes about what the url is about? Did you know that most of the sites you visit regularly can all be checked from one place with an rss reader? Did you know that a lot of the habits you are describing seem to be incredibly disorganized behaviours and laziness? Just wondering...
28. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by maxume · 2009-06-30 03:17 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to a small number (when FF detects 1 Gig or more of ram, it defaults to 8) should give you something in between (i.e., the pages will need to be pulled from the cache and rendered, but the number rendered pages in memory will be much smaller and the data will not have to be pulled from the network). More detail here:
  http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
29. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:20 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Er... Multi-process architecture is "a pile of shit" because you can't tell which process is which in your task manager?
  That doesn't seem like a difficult problem to fix, and is hardly a fundamental problem.
  
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30. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:24 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Multiprocess architecture would also nice for speed and responsiveness, I am kind of tired of having a single Flash applet slow down the whole browser to a halt. It would also be nice to utilize multicore CPUs and not have the thing max out at 50% on a dual core.
31. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · 2009-06-30 03:27 · Score: 1
  
  time to stop using your 105 extensions or figure out which one is causing leaks
  
  I'm using three extensions. Adblock Plus, Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant, and NoScript. I've got 5 plugins, Adobe Acrobat (which i really try to avoid actually having to use, so i don't think that's normally the issue) Java, Microsoft Office 2003, Mozilla Default Plug-in, and Windows Presentation Foundation. I don't have Flash installed for Firefox on this computer. Any site that absolutely requires Flash to work i open up in a different browser.
  
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32. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:29 · Score: 0
  
  Huh?
  The reason ALL broswers have added support for tabs is because they expect you to use them!
  If your browser does such a poor jobs of tabs that it makes you feel you're doing something bad, then switch browsers!
  That's like saying that wearing shoes is a bad habit because you wear cheap shoes that keep falling apart.
33. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:30 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  1.5GB looks like much, but it's only 12.5MB per tab. Considering that the browser has to keep the state and source data of every page, it doesn't seem excessive. Are you sure that the pages aren't running scripts which accumulate stale data over the course of days and weeks, because the programmers never expected their scripts to run for that long and didn't include any cleanup code, because that's usually handled by the browser when you leave the page or close the tab (which you never do)?
34. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by johnlcallaway · 2009-06-30 03:31 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Have you tried to use bookmarks to keep track of your sites instead of using tabs....
  
  Ok .. all joking aside....
  
  A feature I stumbled on in firefox is the ability to open all bookmarks in a folder. So I've arranged my bookmarks into daily/weekly/monthly folders based on topics. Then I middle click the folder and all the pages open up. I arrange the pages that usually open first at the top of the folder, and those that take longer at the bottom. It only takes a few seconds before I start seeing pages, and by the time I'm done with the first one, the rest are open.
  
  Then I just close them as I'm done with them.
  
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35. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by thePowerOfGrayskull · 2009-06-30 03:33 · Score: 1
  
  If 3.0.11fixes a critical security vulnerability (which is the primary reason these updates go out, if not the only reason) I would think you'd be willing to accept a temporarily broken streetview for an uncompromised browser?
  That aside, the default option of "on" makes the most sense (since most people won't bother checking or updating on their own), but you can certainly disable updates if you want to.
36. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by hairyfeet · 2009-06-30 03:39 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  In Windows try Kmeleon or Kmeleon CCF ME. Both are based on Win32 instead of XUL and use much less RAM. That said multi-process is NOT the way to go. There are still quite a few Windows and Linux boxes out there maxed out at 512Mb of RAM. For them Firefox works, whereas Chrome grinds to a halt.
  I've also found if you are picky with your extensions memory usage in FF3 isn't bad. I am typing this on a 1.1GHz maxed out with 512Mb running Win2K Pro and it makes a great netbox, even with 8 extensions and multiple tabs. But adding multi-process is like sticking bandaids on a bullet wound. There needs to be more control on extension management, or at least a rating system with memory and CPU usage figured into the ratings. But please don't screw FF with multi-process BS. Not everybody is using a dual core with 4Gb of RAM you know.
  
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37. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:42 · Score: 0
  
  The Quick Brown Firefox chases the Bad Habit Rabbit.
38. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by matang · 2009-06-30 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  why don't you just add rss feeds to your bookmarks toolbar? assuming at least half of the sites you keep open have rss enabled, you could severely decrease your need to have an insane number of tabs open at once.
39. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:45 · Score: 0
  
  I have the exact same problems you run into. I'd love a multiprocess architecture simply to cut down on my Firefox restart time, which generally seems to cut memory use by about half. I often find Firefox grinding around 1.2 gigs of private and virtual bytes, and that's my queue to restart it.
  I don't know how far of an outlier I am, but I don't have a problem generating 200 open tabs. Shoot, I have 12 open right now trying to find shallow bookcases for dedicated paperback storage.
40. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by cayenne8 · 2009-06-30 03:55 · Score: 1
  
  "why don't you just add rss feeds to your bookmarks toolbar? assuming at least half of the sites you keep open have rss enabled, you could severely decrease your need to have an insane number of tabs open at once."
  While I've heard of RSS feeds, never actually tried using them much. What exactly do they do for you?
  
  --
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41. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:56 · Score: 1
  
  While having 100+ tabs open is a bit nutsy in my opinion, if you are working on several things at the same time, it's more efficient to leave the tabs open. It's the same habit with programs on the computer. Sure, I could just leave open one program at a time, but during the course of the day (I do desktop publishing at a printing company) I use Outlook (for email), Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Acrobat, Distiller, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, several different Windows Explorer windows (different parts of the network), Firefox and Notepad. It's a pain in the ass to keep opening and closing programs and windows, when I can leave them open and ALT-TAB back and forth. As it is, I usually leave Acrobat, two explorer windows, Outlook and Distiller open.
  
  Some folks probably find it more efficient to leave tabs open if they're going to be reading/referencing the material in them.
  
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  Julie Moult is an idiot.
42. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:56 · Score: 0
  
  oops. s/Brown/Browser/
43. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by cayenne8 · 2009-06-30 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  "So it is a convenient bad habit! :) Isn't that true for many bad habits?"
  Ok...what exactly makes keeping a bunch of tabs open a bad habit?
  Until I started reading this thread, I never had heard of this practice as being remotely a negative thing. Hell, I thought it was probably the norm (if I had in fact ever thought to think about it).
  
  --
  Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
44. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by RebelWebmaster · 2009-06-30 03:58 · Score: 1
  
  I just wish they had a 'purge cache' button somewhere easy. Until then I'll just quit and restart.
  Stuart Parmenter made a RAMBack extension that may do what you're looking to do.
45. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by elrous0 · 2009-06-30 03:59 · Score: 1
  
  The main thing *I* want to know is how to combine quantum physics and general relativity into a consistent single theory that works for both large bodies and quantum particles. But yeah, memory leaks in Firefox are pretty important to me too.
  
  --
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46. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:00 · Score: 0
  
  That test seems broken, counting chrome's apparent combined size, which unfortunately counts the same shared memory several times. I'll look at it when it counts correctly (ala chrome's about:memory page)
47. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by thedonger · 2009-06-30 04:02 · Score: 1
  
  I am running XP. I guess I am a wussy-user as I rarely go over the 15-tab mark. Currently I run with NoScript blocking most everything, but I haven't noticed that it mitigates the memory usage compared with not running NoScript.
  
  --
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48. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by TheCycoONE · 2009-06-30 04:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Threading would work just as well, if not better in your scenario. Separate processes just gives you the extra boundary of protection and convenience that comes with not sharing memory.
49. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Mercodus · 2009-06-30 04:13 · Score: 0, Offtopic
  
  > Not everybody is using a dual core with 4Gb of RAM you know.
  you're right... I'm using a quad core with 8Gb of RAM :D
  
  --
  All alcoholics quit. Some while they are still alive.
50. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Colonel+Korn · 2009-06-30 04:17 · Score: 1
  
  The main thing i want to know is if they've (finally) fixed the memory issues yet. Namely, if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit) and then close those tabs, will Firefox free up the memory (frequently over a gig of it) without requiring me to shut it down and restart it?
  That's been fixed in the Windows client since 3.0.something, but in 3.5 beta I still heard people complaining about it in Linux. For MacOS I have no idea.
  
  --
  "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
51. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by diegocgteleline.es · 2009-06-30 04:32 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Like this?
52. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by backwardMechanic · 2009-06-30 04:34 · Score: 1
  
  I would have agreed with you, until the original poster admitted to have about 120 tabs open. That's like deciding to read the internet, starting at A, and working forward.
53. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:36 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Opera also has this feature, except instead of implementing it in typical OSS fashion, a totally unguessable interface function (middle-clicking a bookmark folder? seriously?), you click on the item at the top of the bookmark folder called "Open All Folder Items".
54. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by NeoSkandranon · 2009-06-30 04:39 · Score: 1
  
  This is pretty awesome for things like webcomics. I have a folder for dailies, one for M-W-F, T-Th, weekly, etc (and yeah one for "hardly ever")
  
  --
  If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
55. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:43 · Score: 0
  
  Most of my tabs are things that I want to go through, maybe a few times, and then never see again for a long time. I don't want to be constantly adding and removing bookmarks for things I'm not going to be looking at daily or weekly. The session manager add on helps out a bit for that, but there's still the issue of pages I close not having their memory freed while FireFox is open.
56. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Hatta · 2009-06-30 04:52 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open
  No, you should be able to have as many tabs as you want open and the software should handle it. It's the computers job to do what we want, not ours to conform to the computer.
  On the other hand, I regularly have 3 or 4 windows open with close to 100 tabs each, and I don't really have a problem. If I hadn't shut down my pc last night to hook up a disc, I'd check the RAM use, but in any case, FF is pretty snappy for me.
  
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57. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by gnapster · 2009-06-30 04:55 · Score: 1
  
  Would it be so hard for Firefox to provide a 'crutch mode' which could restrict itself to a single process?
58. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by SeanMon · 2009-06-30 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, I thought the same, a convenient way to browse. And being able to close FF and open it later on with all my tabs intact, that's even better.
  Have they fixed the annoying "bug" where having the Downloads window open causes Firefox not to ask you to save the tabs for later? The Downloads window shouldn't count as an open FF window.
  
  --
  "Scud Storm!" -- Jeremy of PurePwnage.com
59. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Guru80 · 2009-06-30 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  I can't imagine a reason to have so many pages open at one time. I would have to imagine everything from the internet connection (depending) to the browser to your system would degrade with that much open. I can manage to get up to 20 tabs open but after they have been open for a day or 2 without me touching them they get bookmarked if they aren't already and closed until I need them again.
60. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by FishWithAHammer · 2009-06-30 04:58 · Score: 1
  
  IE7 and IE8 use less memory than Firefox, in my experience. I don't think I'd recommend Firefox on a computer with those specs--it wouldn't work particularly well.
  Firefox is great, but svelte it ain't.
  
  --
  "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
61. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Logic+and+Reason · 2009-06-30 04:59 · Score: 1
  
  RSS feeds simulate a "push" architecture. So when there's a new post on a blog you read, that post shows up automatically in that site's RSS feed, which you would view using an RSS reader (Firefox has one built-in, though it's not as good as a dedicated reader). Think of it like a service that automatically sends you an email when a site gets updated, except it's more convenient since most RSS readers have a keystroke for opening the corresponding URL, and other little niceties like that.
62. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by FatAlb3rt · 2009-06-30 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  True, but the browser should NOT be everything to everyone. Otherwise, you wind up with bloatware in order to cater to the needs of every user, like the ones who like to have 120 tabs open.
63. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by jc42 · 2009-06-30 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  Just for yuks, when I reached a resting point in what I was doing, I decided to kill off Firefox and restart it, clicking on the "Restore Previous Session" button when it appeared. Before killing it, the numbers on this Macbook Pro with 4 GB memory were RSIZE=338MB, VSIZE=1.95GB. After restarting and letting the windows stabilize, the numbers are now RSIZE=190MB, VSIZE=1.15GB. Those differences (RSIZE=148MB, VSIZE=.80GB) seem to me to be fairly indicative of a memory-management problem of some sort. But of course I don't know much about the inner details.
  
  --
  Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
64. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Thaelon · 2009-06-30 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  if i keep a lot of tabs open for awhile (yes, i know, bad habit)
  Why is that a bad habit?
  The applications should change to suit the user, not the other way around. After all, they have no other purpose than to be used.
  
  --
  Question everything
65. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by don_carnage · 2009-06-30 05:17 · Score: 1
  
  You need Morning Coffee -- it allows you to have a different set of bookmarks for different days of the week. For example, if you have a webcomic that only updates on M/W/F, then it won't open on T/TH.
  
  --
  Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
66. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Shetan · 2009-06-30 05:23 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  The opera menu item at the top is much better than the "Open All in Tabs" at the bottom of the bookmark folder? Personally, I don't really see a difference, but I guess there could be an issue with someone not having the attention span to read all the way to the bottom of the menu. Middle clicking on the folder is just an interface shortcut.
67. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by jp10558 · 2009-06-30 05:24 · Score: 1
  
  And this is why I use Opera, because I almost never have less than 40 tabs open. Once you realize that there's a better way to have temportary bookmarks than, well, bookmarks you regularily delete or relying on a fickle history, you start to accumulate tabs. Or at least I do.
  
  --
  Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
68. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by vertinox · 2009-06-30 05:25 · Score: 1
  
  Why is it a bad habit? The browser should facilitate the user, it shouldn't be the other way around.
  Which user then? If we please every single user we'll have a big pile of bloat ware and no user will be happy.
  
  --
  "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
  -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
69. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Razalhague · 2009-06-30 05:29 · Score: 1
  
  Middle click opens a bookmark in a new tab. In typical OSS fashion, it logically follows that middle clicking a folder opens all the bookmarks in that folder in new tabs.
70. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Razalhague · 2009-06-30 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  I used to have that too. Now I just use a feed reader.
71. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by mvdwege · 2009-06-30 05:34 · Score: 1
  
  What typical OSS fashion? Middle-clicking on things to make something happen dates back to at least Netscape Navigator.
  Mart
  
  --
  "I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
72. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Jamie+Lokier · 2009-06-30 05:35 · Score: 1
  
  I too have typically about 100 tabs open. But they represent work in progress - branches in a topic I'm researching. I need to keep them around to come back to them, usually to condense some part of each page into a few notes eventually. Until that job is done, 100+ tabs open.
  Since following a topic like that takes a few months, I keep the tabs open for that long as I open new ones and finish up with old ones.
  RSS feeds don't help with that.
  Bookmarks aren't very good either. Bookmarks which behaved like little tabs - keeping a big thumbnail (enough to read why I'm holding on to that page) might be better.
73. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Nicolay77 · 2009-06-30 05:39 · Score: 1
  
  Don't assume that because you have a very short span attention then other people is the same.
  I actually use some pages as a reference for weeks, and I think my normal usage is about 50 tabs open (but I don't use FF).
  
  --
  We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
74. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Beelzebud · 2009-06-30 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  Wouldn't bookmarks be easier to use than a hundred tabs spread across 12 windows? That just seems like a very inefficient way to do things. Is bookmarking pages really that much of a hassle?
75. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Will.Woodhull · 2009-06-30 06:04 · Score: 1
  
  I've arranged my bookmarks into daily/weekly/monthly folders based on topics.
  What a fantastically neat idea! I've always categorized them by subject area, but there is no reason why I can't set up calendar categories as well, and simply have dual entries for some sites.
  I'm often browsing with a dozen tabs open, but rarely more than that. Once the horizontal scroll kicks in, any advantage to keeping multiple tabs open is lost; it makes more sense to invest the minute or two it takes to make and organize some bookmarks.
  
  --
  Will
76. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Sir_Lewk · 2009-06-30 06:06 · Score: 1
  
  I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit.
  No. There is nothing wrong with you, it's an issue with the browser. End of discussion.
  
  --
  "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
77. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Junior+J.+Junior+III · 2009-06-30 06:11 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit.
  Who the fsck is anyone to tell you how you should use your web browser? If you need the browser to support 120 open tabs, then if it doesn't do this well, then it's a tool not well suited to your task. You should expect it to require some system resources to pull this off, but those that the application asks for should be managed properly and freed up if no longer needed. That is not too much to ask for, and you shouldn't apologize if you choose to use the product this way.
  
  --
  You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
78. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Sir_Lewk · 2009-06-30 06:13 · Score: 1
  
  I tried using Opera but in typical proprietary fashion it's UI clashed terribly with my native widgets.
  On the other hand, my browser of choice also has an "Open in Tabs" menu entry. Big whoop.
  
  --
  "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
79. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Sir_Lewk · 2009-06-30 06:16 · Score: 1
  
  I've been using 3.5 Beta (packaged by Fedora) for a few weeks now and haven't seen much of an improvement.
  Actually no, that's a lie. I haven't been using it for a few weeks because it's still damned unbearable.
  
  --
  "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
80. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by AmiMoJo · 2009-06-30 06:17 · Score: 1
  
  The memory overheads from multiprocess architectures are actually pretty low, and the benefits huge. Mozilla have been working on reducing FF's memory use and it makes sense to use a bit extra for this when the gains are that big.
  Performance needs to scale, but that means being able to take advantages of the upper end as well as working well on the lower end. Apart from Atom based netbooks I don't think you can buy a mainstream PC with less than dual core CPU and a gig or two or RAM.
  I used to despise "bloat" because I was used to an Amiga with a few megs of RAM and a 50MHz CPU (which was high end at the time), but I have come to realise that it's okay to have 10 FF add-ons installed and to keep my email client open all the time, because computing power and memory are both cheap and the benefits I get are more than worth another 1 second of loading time or £10 spent on another gig of RAM.
  Sure, it's still evil when software installs start-up items and services you don't really want (iTunes, I'm looking at you), but the default install of FF 3.5 is actually pretty light weight by today's standards. Maybe not compared to Lynx, but funny pictures of cats are worth the extra few megs :)
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
81. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by AmiMoJo · 2009-06-30 06:19 · Score: 1
  
  It doesn't work like that anyway. You see one task in the task manager, the actual multiple processes for each tab run under that task and are killed along with it.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
82. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by voidphoenix · 2009-06-30 06:23 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Tree-style Tabs FTW!
  
  --
  Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
83. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Your.Master · 2009-06-30 06:42 · Score: 1
  
  I actually agree, but that doesn't mean that the sort of user who uses 120 tabs shouldn't agitate for a browser meant for them.
84. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by MrCrassic · 2009-06-30 07:10 · Score: 1
  
  Is this only when you have lots of extensions? I use a vanilla version of Firefox, and have practically no memory issues. Additionally, when the occasional memory issue does arise, every other browser I try runs into the same issue.
85. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Zantetsuken · 2009-06-30 07:15 · Score: 1
  
  I'm gonna throw out a number here, and say that out of any site worth checking that often, 1/3 of them will have an RSS or Atom feed - maybe you oughta look into using an RSS aggregator/reader (myself I use Feedreader which displays the content in the reader). It's usually a helluva lot easier than leaving that tab open. For example instead of leaving /. open all week, just run the reader on the side, check it every now and then, and select only the articles you want to read. And then when you're done with that article, close it and free up the memory.
  
  Whether its news, tech support forums or leisure forums, or most anything else - that would hugely decrease your count of always open tabs. The aggregator I mentioned using, Feedreader, takes up as little as ~1.5MiB when its sitting idle minimized to the status bar to ~50MiB when browsing feeds - minimize it back to the status bar and its back down to 1.5MiB. When it pulls down new feeds, it'll update the icon in the status bar to show you have unread feeds - so you don't have to keep going back to that tab and hitting reload just to see if there's something new...
  
  If you don't find RSS readers useful enough, go back to your current method - but I'd say its certainly worth checking it out to save yourself some time and resources...
86. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by ckaminski · 2009-06-30 07:24 · Score: 1
  
  Every year or so I send an email to the MSDN folks - implement fork() in Win32, for fucks sake (a lot more PC than that) - with all sorts of reasons why it's a good idea.
  
  I keep failing to hold my breath, however. :-/
  
  Windows has all the underpinnings to support this. What do I get instead? Fibers. Yup. Fibers. Retro non-preemptive threads. WTF?
87. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by RebelWebmaster · 2009-06-30 07:27 · Score: 1
  
  No, though it should be noted that the download manager doesn't open by default since version 3.0, instead going in the status bar.
88. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by ckaminski · 2009-06-30 07:29 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Multi-process != slow. What it equals is process isolation. If you global/static memory footprint is kept to a minimum, and you have fork() style semantics, your total overall memory usage is not significantly greater than if you were using threading instead.
89. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by ckaminski · 2009-06-30 07:33 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Not true if your platform properly supports fork() semantics. You only make copies of data in child processes that you change - unchanged code pages are shared amongst all children.
90. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by johnlcallaway · 2009-06-30 07:34 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  I don't need another plug in, the existing 'Organizer Bookmarks' works just fine.
  
  I guess I'm just old school and think I can determine how to organize my stuff better than the computer can. I keep a tab labeled 'new items' where I dump stuff, and periodically reclassify or delete them depending on whether I find them interesting and where I want them to be. I doubt if a plug in can determine whether or not something I open every day is 'interesting'.
  
  --
  I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
91. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anubis+IV · 2009-06-30 07:51 · Score: 1
  
  I used to do something like this in Safari, except I did it by days of the week (I used to follow a lot of pages that would update, say, only on Mondays, or on Tuesdays and Thursdays only or...*sigh*...they were all webcomics, okay?). I did it for years, in fact. Then, in all seriousness, I finally discovered RSS. Instead of me going to the pages once a day or once a week to see what new stuff has been posted, I let the pages come to me with their new information. And if I don't want to get updates from them all the time, I just tell my RSS client to only refresh the feed once a week or once a day, rather than every 30 minutes. Saves loads of time.
92. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by sixteenbitsamurai · 2009-06-30 07:59 · Score: 1
  
  Middle click opens a bookmark in a new tab.
  If I had mod points, I'd mod this informative just because I didn't know that. Considering I've subjected myself to the right click menu for that function for well over a year, this information is quite helpful!
  
  --
  Yeah, that just happened.
93. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by BikeHelmet · 2009-06-30 08:23 · Score: 1
  
  Good god man - there's a bookmarks toolbar for a reason! :P
  You have a legitimate complaint, but I agree with Xaedalus that it doesn't apply to the majority of Firefox users. It probably only applies to <2% of them.
94. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 08:27 · Score: 0
  
  perhaps you missed this post from last week ... http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/06/20/1951212/Memory-Usage-of-Chrome-Firefox-35-et-al
  referring to this article http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory
95. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by VGPowerlord · 2009-06-30 08:30 · Score: 0, Offtopic
  
  ...that's what my home machine has.
  At work, I'm stuck on a Dual-core with 3GB of RAM. :(
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
96. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by PJ+Kix · 2009-06-30 08:32 · Score: 1
  
  Firefox really needs a multiprocess architecture.
  think again. bad idea if you want to conserve memory ... http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory
97. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by glumx · 2009-06-30 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  What I do is have Firefox remember my open tabs when I close the browser. That way you could just close the window with 120 tabs open, then reopen Firefox and everything would reload and all that memory would be freed.
98. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Ilgaz · 2009-06-30 09:15 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Won't people flame "It is using 200% CPU?". I notice same people asking for 64bit everything makes scene about browser using 1 gig RAM. This attitude really started to hurt the development of all applications I think.
  What matters is, it should not leak memory or "hog" the CPU as result of bad programming, otherwise I am all for Caches, multiple threads etc. IMHO all browsers should at least experiment with "HTML rendering" and "image decoding" as separate threads. Even Symbian (foundation now) demo'ed SMP capability of the upcoming open source Symbian. We talk about low power ARM devices here and a hugely complex operating system which is moving to open source.
99. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 09:19 · Score: 0
  
  I'm using version 3.0.11. I currently have three windows open with about 120 tabs between them. Process Explorer reports that the firefox.exe process has 585,384k private bytes and 689,916k virtual bytes. Over the next couple days the amount of memory consumed will continue to grow, probably until it hits around 1.5 gigs of private bytes. I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit. (Perhaps a quarter of those tabs are sites that i check and refresh fairly often, at least once a day. The rest are sites links that i've checked or the results of google searches that i either haven't finished reading yet or think i'll need to reference back to in the near future. (For example, over 30 of those tabs relate to the myriad of issues i've run into trying to get Oracle working through ADO.Net, and i'll need to keep a lot of them open for reference until this project actually works correctly.).
  Use bookmarks, idiot. 120 tabs won't help when someone trips over the power cord and your firefox history is irrecoverable for some reason.
100. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 09:28 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  You have 6 windows/tabs open, therefore 6 "chrome.exe" processes in the Task Manager.
  Chrome itself is locked up/wedged, so you can't use the Chrome Process Manager (part of Chrome) to determine which of the sub-processes (read: which of those 6 chrome.exe processes) is causing the problem. The Chrome Process Manager is the only way to determine which of the chrome.exe sub-processes is associated with which tab/page (e.g. chrome.exe --> URL/title mapping).
  The core problem: one of those 6 is responsible for Chrome (as a whole -- that means all processes!) wedging, so you need to kill the right one, otherwise you lose work you've been doing in the other 5. So which chrome.exe process do you kill?
  The correct answer is: "I don't know!" You therefore have to start killing them off one by one until Chrome un-wedges.
  This problem also applies to classic UNIX fork() (read: ppid and pid), although you can "solve" this on most mainstream *IX OSes by using setproctitle() or overwriting argv[] to contain the URL (or web page title) of the page/tab associated with that Chrome process.
  The solution therefore becomes: "ps -auxwww | grep -i chrome" "Oh, that one there is the page I just loaded before things locked up, let's kill that one" "Yay, Chrome works now! Back to doing work in the other 5...".
  Well, this isn't so on Windows. And don't try to blame this on Microsoft either -- this isn't their fault. This is purely the fault of the "let's go with a multiprocess web browser architecture!" concept. It's a flaw that's intentionally overlooked, and it's an acceptable flaw based on the supposed "security gains" from said model. But in the real world, it won't fly.
101. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Ilgaz · 2009-06-30 09:52 · Score: 1
  
  I wonder if something like this http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=monitoringplugin can be coded in Firefox, as extension to firefox like firefox:memstats
  What it does is giving stats about memory usage, one click "garbage collection". Of course, it is Java.
  It should be easier to do in C right? So people could see where did memory go, if it is used in caches etc. I don't think XUL is allowed to do such things for security so it should enter to main code.
102. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by don_carnage · 2009-06-30 09:57 · Score: 1
  
  That's what Delicious and StumbleUpon are for.
  
  --
  Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
103. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Emetophobe · 2009-06-30 10:17 · Score: 1
  
  Opera also has this feature, except instead of implementing it in typical OSS fashion, a totally unguessable interface function (middle-clicking a bookmark folder? seriously?), you click on the item at the top of the bookmark folder called "Open All Folder Items".
  Firefox works the same way, you can either right click the folder and choose "Open All in Tabs" from the context menu or mouse over the folder and select "Open All in Tabs" from the drop down menu. I didn't even know middle-clicking a folder was an option until I read this thread.
104. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 10:17 · Score: 0
  
  Dude. Bookmarks.
  Categorise them by tags, folders, whatever floats your boat. You can open an entire folder of bookmarks at once as tabs with FF.
105. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by wakingrufus · 2009-06-30 10:55 · Score: 1
  
  try an addon called "morning coffee" you can put websites in there, and assign a list of 0 or more days to each. then you just press the coffee button on your toolbar and it will open up all the pages assigned to that day in their own tabs.
106. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Tubal-Cain · 2009-06-30 13:02 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think I'd recommend Firefox on a computer with those specs--it wouldn't work particularly well.
  My work machine disagrees with you.
107. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by lawpoop · 2009-06-30 13:10 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  12.6 MB per tab -- which means per page? That sounds like an awful lot to me. For testing, I save the page of this slashdot thread using FF. It's size on disk ( html file + its folder) is 836 Kb.
  
  Are you telling me to keep 836 KB of data as a live page takes 12MB? What am I missing?
  
  --
  Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
  -- Pablo Picasso
108. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by andreyvul · 2009-06-30 14:15 · Score: 1
  
  Windows has kernel-level fork support, you just have to reimplement half the wheel via Native API. The book "Windows NT/2000 Native API Reference" has an example of what I mean. ...oh wait. Expose POSIX functionality through Win32 instead of Native API?
  
  --
  proud caffeine whore
109. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Thermionix · 2009-06-30 14:39 · Score: 1
  
  More people need to learn about this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890 "This provides tree-style tab bar, like a folder tree of Windows Explorer. New tabs opened from links (or etc.) are automatically attached to the current tab. If you often use many many tabs, it will help your web browsing because you can understand relations of tabs." It has really made keeping ~100 tabs open in a single windows a breeze for me, and helped to improve the organization of this massive amount of tabs!
110. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by mqduck · 2009-06-30 15:32 · Score: 1
  
  Shouldn't the length of time open have nothing to do with how much memory is being used? Isn't that the problem?
  
  --
  Property is theft.
111. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by ScottG489 · 2009-06-30 16:30 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe the answer is to release a multi-process version as well as continue to release the single process version. If you had a lot of RAM, then you could download the multi-process version.
112. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by ahabswhale · 2009-06-30 18:43 · Score: 1
  
  Yes it does and they fixed that quite a while ago. Where the hell have you been? It's actually the most memory efficient browser (and I've tried all the big ones, IE, Safari, Chrome, and Opera). However, this new version has a massive memory leak if you use the new "secure browsing" feature. If you want secure/private browsing, use a different browser.
  
  --
  Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
113. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by FromellaSlob · 2009-06-30 19:37 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Are you telling me to keep 836 KB of data as a live page takes 12MB? What am I missing?
  Quite a lot. HTML and JPEG are no use to a graphics card. Those pages have to be rendered. A single screen of 1280x1024 @ 24-bit color uses 3.75MB uncompressed in memory. Now think how much you need to scroll that up and down. I don't personally know the details of how Firefox manages memory, but I know your comparison is not valid.
114. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by FromellaSlob · 2009-06-30 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  I've clocked over 400 tabs at my worst.
115. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Atario · 2009-06-30 20:33 · Score: 1
  
  What do you gain by leaving the tab open instead of just going back to the site when you want to view it again?
  
  Because I'll never remember it. And I don't want to bookmark it, either -- out of sight, out of mind.
  
  --
  "A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
116. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by xaxa · 2009-06-30 21:22 · Score: 1
  
  Assuming you aren't using Firefox as root, how does it have permission to update itself anyway?
117. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 22:37 · Score: 0
  
  Technically the browser does not "need" to cache the rendered version of images and page bitmaps, unless they're bound in Javascript data structures (but that could not be done before 3.5). It can just render the images again when it needs them. It only needs the source data. Obviously that's a time-memory tradeoff, but consider how fast Firefox displays a page loaded from the hard disk. Would you really want to keep that much data in memory just so switching to a tab which you only look at once a day is a split second faster? Still, the DOM is dynamic and carries information which doesn't translate to HTML, so that must be kept in memory in a non-flat data structure. Add to that script and plugin state and you'll easily use a couple of megabytes per page (and Firefox keeps this information for multiple pages per tab so that the back button returns you to the same state that you left, not how the page was when it was fresh.)
118. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by NeoSkandranon · 2009-07-01 00:09 · Score: 1
  
  Will be checking this out, thanks
  
  --
  If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
119. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-07-01 03:03 · Score: 0
  
  Because there are many sites where I need information, but only for the short term and I don't want to bookmark every temporary use site because it clutters up my bookmarks.
  I often have Opera running for MONTHS at a time with dozens of tabs open and no issues (Firefox can't even run for a few days like this without consuming gigs of RAM and 100% CPU). In the way that I work, tabs slowly get "cycled". A temporary use site with information I want gets a tab and will eventually get cycled out of the browser after I have used it up.
120. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by FooBarWidget · 2009-07-01 03:31 · Score: 1
  
  Not true if your platform properly supports fork() semantics.
  Yeah, it's not as if 90% of all people happen to use an OS that doesn't support fork(), right?
121. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Bob+The+Cowboy · 2009-07-01 04:01 · Score: 1
  
  It's not that hard, people have been doing it forever. Ever heard of file folders?
  100 tabs over 12 pages is only 8 or so tabs. I routinely have the same setup here and the way I manage it is by separating my tabs amongst different windows. Email, calendar, slashdot, facebook, twitter in one. News in another. If I'm working on a project on MySQL, I'll have a half dozen or so pages about that in another. Python pages in another. Ubuntu audio problems open in another. Qt documentation in another.
  So all I need to keep track of is which window is for which task (aided by multiple desktops courtesy X). Now I've only got to look across 8 tabs or so for the right page.
  Really helpful sites are bookmarked, but bookmarks are unwieldy (more work to sort) and just because I need a page over a couple days, doesn't mean I'll need it ever again. Also my job often requires me to be working on multiple different projects (see above) at the same time, so why bother closing all my python tabs if I'm going to be working on python again in a couple hours?
  Also, FWIW, I've never seen any of these memory leak problems people talk about (Linux - Slackware and Ubuntu) in any version of Firefox. Guess I'm just lucky?
  My biggest beef with Firefox is that there isn't a Mozilla-provided msi installer (and Group Policy admin tool). That's why its not more widely used at my work. No Frontmotion doesn't cut it.
  Bill
122. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by IpalindromeI · 2009-07-01 06:40 · Score: 1
  
  Basically, you add the feed address to your reader. Most websites have them now, especially webcomics and blogs. Your reader periodically checks the feed and looks for updates.
  So now the reader handles all of the update checking, and you just read the updates as they come in. All in one place, organized however you like.
  
  --
  
  --
  Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
123. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-07-01 09:10 · Score: 0
  
  On modern OSes, fork() lazily copies the address space, so most of the pages between the old and new process are shared, with copy-on-write semantics. Physical memory usage isn't equal to the total physical memory usage of each process.
124. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by jafac · 2009-07-01 12:07 · Score: 1
  
  That's not a bad habit.
  It is a legitimate, and fairly common use-case.
  You're doing this, to overcome the shortcomings of other methods of "stacking" medium-term pages for later use, like bookmarks, or relying on a search engine to recover them.
  Hundreds of open tabs is the best way to save "scratch" data from web research, particularly when multitasking. I did it when I was a student writing papers, I do it when I'm in a support role, and I do it when I'm in a development role. I wish there was a better way, but apparently, nobody's imagined that paradigm yet.
  
  --
  
  These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Softpedia claims to have it already by MLS100 · 2009-06-30 02:26 · Score: -1, Troll

Link: http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/Browsers/Mozilla-Firefox-Final.shtml
It still brings up the "Thank you for testing this RC" screen though when you restart. Perhaps they forgot to change it?
1. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 02:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Do not download FF from anywhere except the main FF site. :P And FF3.5 is up now for download. Pretty snappy, speed-wise. :)
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
2. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by udippel · 2009-06-30 03:33 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, thanks. Now I still need to wait for the .deb; and then I'll be up!
3. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by thePowerOfGrayskull · 2009-06-30 03:35 · Score: 1
  
  Not sure why this is modded "troll"; but that aside, it seems they've jumped the gun and posted the current RC as the final version on softpedia. No idea why they would have done so.
4. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by bonch · 2009-06-30 04:06 · Score: -1
  
  On the Mac, Firefox still puts its tab close boxes on the right side instead of the left. Why has this not been addressed after all these years?
5. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 04:22 · Score: 1
  
  Same reason why people go "FRIST PSOT!" on new Slashdot articles.
  
  Softpedia were trying to "break the street date" as it were.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
6. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by compro01 · 2009-06-30 04:58 · Score: 1
  
  If you like, Tab Mix Plus has that as an option, among many other nice things. Unfortunately, the main version hasn't been updated for 3.5 yet, but you can find the development version here, or simply override the compatibility check, which seems to work fine.
  
  --
  upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
7. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:08 · Score: 0
  
  There's a bunch of tab features/options extensions (I use Tab Mix Plus). I suspect you can find one that will put the close tab button where you want it.
8. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by compro01 · 2009-06-30 08:43 · Score: 1
  
  Addendum : Found one issue with the old version (0.3.7.3) on 3.5. The close buttons on the individual tabs (which I prefer over the singular close button) will occasionally disappear when opening and switching between tabs, with no way that I've found to get it back other than restarting Firefox. This does not occur with the latest dev version (0.3.7.4pre.090516).
  
  --
  upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
9. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 10:26 · Score: 0
  
  Do not download FF from anywhere except the main FF site. :P
  Um. Does that mean I'm not allowed to get it by typing su -c 'yum update firefox' ? Mind you, I will have to wait till tomorrow for the update to hit the repo.
FP! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:27 · Score: -1, Offtopic

FP! :D
1. Re:FP! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:29 · Score: 0
  
  Why do you brag about getting the Fourth Post?
due soon by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:28 · Score: -1, Redundant

ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5/source/
the announcement could be soon
1. Re:due soon by geegel · 2009-06-30 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  Open Help>Check for Updates. It's released already
  
  --
  right...
What makes FF the best browser by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:28 · Score: 1, Insightful

It has a lot of plugins that provide for effortless retrieval of pornographic image and video content in bulk.
So talk standards and compliance and speed all you want. It's all bunk and you know it.
FF is best because it makes it easiest to pull down naughty media.
HTML 5 and Javascript by ObsessiveMathsFreak · 2009-06-30 02:29 · Score: -1

And will HTML 5 videos play if I don't have javascript enabled? Oops! Oh well. Back to flash then.

--
May the Maths Be with you!
1. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by phantomcircuit · 2009-06-30 02:34 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Yeah they will actually, most sites will use javascript to test for the ability to use them however.
2. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by ikefox · 2009-06-30 02:42 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  I suggest you take a look at Kroc Camen's "Video for Everybody" HTML5 video element implementation. Not a hint of Javascript is necessary to implement it, and it's very cross-platform. It can play back in OGG, Flash, Quicktime (even on the iPhone), WMA, or alternatively provide a download link. http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody
3. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:46 · Score: 0
  
  You're concerned about running javascript, but not about running the massive bundle of vulnerabilities that is flash?
  I give up.
4. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Tom9729 · 2009-06-30 02:48 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Without installing any kind of plugin JavaScript is supported by virtually every modern desktop browser and a growing number of mobile browsers. Yes some websites use JavaScript to do annoying things like resize/move windows, but most browsers let you limit what a website is allowed to do.
  Umm Flash on the other hand requires you to install a 3rd party plugin that may not work well (or at all) depending on what platform/browser you use.
  IIRC the HTML 5 spec doesn't even say that JavaScript is "required" to play videos, it's just used for the UI.
5. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:51 · Score: -1
  
  In other words, "No, they won't."
6. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:51 · Score: 0
  
  And why would you have flash enabled but not javascript? If yuou are doing ti for security reasons then you are seriously misguided. If you are doing it for performance reasons then you are misguided as well because nothing chews cpu like flash.
7. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:55 · Score: 0
  
  Will Flash videos play if I have Flash plug-in turned off? Oops! Oh well, fuck Flash then.
8. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by SatanicPuppy · 2009-06-30 03:10 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Shrug. I block flash too, so what's the difference? Flash player is as big a potential security exploit as javascript.
  
  --
  ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
9. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by CarpetShark · 2009-06-30 03:38 · Score: 1
  
  Not a hint of Javascript is necessary to implement it, and it's very cross-platform
  Of course, you could do this back in 2000, with a simple object tag, a mimetype, and a url.
10. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by maxume · 2009-06-30 03:47 · Score: 1
  
  You still had to hope that the user had a video plug-in installed for that mimetype, and that the plug-in happened to support the codec you used.
  I don't think the video tag matters a great deal, but the popularity of flash objects used for playing mp4 files shows that there was room to improve on the year 2000.
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
11. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by CarpetShark · 2009-06-30 03:56 · Score: 1
  
  You still had to hope that the user had a video plug-in installed for that mimetype
  Like you do with flash, and like you have to hope that a browser is HTML5-capable, actually has a screen and isn't being read to a blind user via a screenreader, etc. Nothing on the web is guaranteed; it's intended to be flexible and adapt to the end-user.
  
  the popularity of flash objects used for playing mp4 files shows that there was room to improve on the year 2000.
  It shows nothing of the sort. Flash is used all the time, often to create entire sites and display simple text, when HTML can do that much better. To some flash developers, everything is an opportunity to use flash. Not that I'm singling out flash devs or anything; lots of people do it, with DHTML menus etc., almost as much as with flash.
12. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by maxume · 2009-06-30 04:03 · Score: 1
  
  Well, we disagree on the second point. YouTube, Hulu, and every other video site I can think of are on my side (but I am biased to think I am right).
  I don't think the tag is really intended for today, it is intended to make the experience smoother 10 years from now (at each stage, hosting, browsing, etc.).
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
13. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Tielman · 2009-06-30 04:24 · Score: 1
  
  I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
  Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
14. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by CarpetShark · 2009-06-30 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  YouTube, Hulu, and every other video site I can think of are on my side
  No, they're on the side of money -- creating media that's difficult to save to your own machine, so they can add adverts and DRM on the site, and make you link your friends to their copy instead of just sending them yours.
15. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:38 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah but since you probably don't have any friends, what's the problem?
16. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by CarpetShark · 2009-06-30 05:50 · Score: 1
  
  DRM killed all my friends, you insensitive clod.
17. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by IANAAC · 2009-06-30 07:05 · Score: 1
  
  Umm Flash on the other hand requires you to install a 3rd party plugin that may not work well (or at all) depending on what platform/browser you use.
  
  True enough.
  But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5. Yes, I understand that HTML5 can wrap Flash content, but why add the extra layer? I just can't see sites like hulu.com doing that, as much as I would like to see it happen.
  As far as Flash performance, maybe my expectations are lowered, but I've never really had great problems on any fairly recent Linux distribution (last 5 years or so).
18. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Simetrical · 2009-06-30 12:02 · Score: 1
  
  I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
  Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
  And some sites don't work at all if JavaScript isn't enabled. Just because a lot of people use JavaScript when they don't have to doesn't mean it's actually required by the features they're using. <video> itself works fine without JavaScript.
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
19. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Simetrical · 2009-06-30 12:07 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5.
  You can bet YouTube will. Chrome supports <video>, YouTube has test pages that use it, and for that matter the editor of HTML 5 is employed by Google. If <video> really is better, which it theoretically should be, other sites will be pushed to support it for feature parity and consistency with the biggest player out there.
  Some people will still try using encumbered formats. There's no way to stop that. Some people serve images instead of HTML for the same reason. But <video> is a step in the right direction for the web regardless.
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
20. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 16:51 · Score: 0
  
  I think the default UI doesn't even need JS - you just need it if you make a custom UI.
21. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by TheRaven64 · 2009-07-01 00:09 · Score: 1
  
  You still had to hope that the user had a video plug-in installed for that mimetype, and that the plug-in happened to support the codec you used.
  Exactly right. I went to the FireFox video tag demo page with Safari 3.1 just now. Safari uses QuickTime to render things in the video tag (which surprised me slightly; I thought it was only Safari 4 that supported the tag). Unfortunately, the video was in Ogg Theora format and I don't have the Theora QuickTime plugin installed. The result was that the browser provided an embedded QuickTime display, but the video didn't work. Pretty much exactly the same behaviour we've had with object/embed tags for the last decade or so. I hope the video tag specification will be fixed to require graceful failure if the browser or plugin doesn't support the format, rather than just not working but reporting success.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
22. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by maxume · 2009-07-01 02:28 · Score: 1
  
  Apple says they support the tag in 3.1:
  http://support.apple.com/kb/TA25197
  At present, the html5 working draft suggests showing a link to the video if playback is not supported. There is also an example of using javascript to fallback to a plug-in if the browser does not report that it can 'probably' play the video (apparently being sure is a bit tough).
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
23. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by TheRaven64 · 2009-07-01 03:23 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  apparently being sure is a bit tough
  Being sure before you load it is difficult. Being sure after is trivial. It might take longer for fail-over to happen if you have to try opening the video with a plugin and then handle failure only when it reports it, but it's still better than just displaying a non-working video UI.
  One of the ideas of the video tag is that you should be able to nest them with different video formats and have the first supported one work, then fail-over to a flash video or Java applet video player if none of them works. This isn't possible if the handler is reporting success when it fails to load the video.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
24. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by jonadab · 2009-07-01 06:42 · Score: 1
  
  Will Flash videos play if I don't have Adobe's thrice-becursed annoying crash-happy proprietary plugin installed?
  
  Oops! Oh, well.
  
  (I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the user's operating system decide what software to use to play it.)
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
It's full of stars by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:29 · Score: 0

er, there's no there there.
As of 10:30 EDT if you try to enter the 3.5 directory on a mirror site you get redirected to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/comingsoon/
1. Re:It's full of stars by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 02:55 · Score: 1
  
  It's there now.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
2. Re:It's full of stars by acariquara · 2009-06-30 03:04 · Score: 1
  
  You don't have to. The latest Release Candidate *IS* the final build.
  
  --
  Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
3. Re:It's full of stars by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:14 · Score: 0
  
  but without release notes :-D
4. Re:It's full of stars by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:24 · Score: 1
  
  I'm sure they'll catch up. :P
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
Real geeks by ZeroExistenZ · 2009-06-30 02:31 · Score: 2, Insightful

use telnet for browsing the internet.

--
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
1. Re:Real geeks by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:41 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah, I just decode the Theora stream in my head... Don't you?
2. Re:Real geeks by Alphager · 2009-06-30 02:50 · Score: 1
  
  use telnet for browsing the internet.
  Real geeks look down on lusers who use this fancy telnet; they use netcat!
3. Re:Real geeks by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:11 · Score: 0
  
  Real geeks look down on lusers who use this fancy telnet; they use netcat!
  Any respectable geek generates valid SSL-certificates for their website :P
4. Re:Real geeks by garaged · 2009-06-30 03:13 · Score: 1
  
  genius laught at kids using netcat for web when they can use lynx -dump to actually get somethin done
  
  --
  I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
5. Re:Real geeks by mcnazar · 2009-06-30 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  telnet??!!11
  I dumped telnet for browsing once I discovered Gopher. Try it. You'll never look back.
6. Re:Real geeks by elrous0 · 2009-06-30 04:05 · Score: 1
  
  No, REAL men use acoustic coupler modems to post through BBS hubs.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
7. Re:Real geeks by Sir_Lewk · 2009-06-30 06:22 · Score: 1
  
  REAL men don't need acoustic coupler modems, or even computers, they just dial the BBS hub with a regular telephone and do it by voice and ear alone!
  
  --
  "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
8. Re:Real geeks by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 06:27 · Score: 0
  
  REAL men don't need acoustic coupler modems, or even computers, they just dial the BBS hub with a regular telephone and do it by voice and ear alone!
  Captain Zap, is that you?
9. Re:Real geeks by fast+turtle · 2009-06-30 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  Ribbit using Kermit to browse the net
  
  --
  Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Truth Filter by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:36 · Score: -1, Troll

I ran the title through a truth filter, this is what I got:

Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For not being made by Microsoft, Google
What about Slashdot? by macbeth66 · 2009-06-30 02:36 · Score: 5, Insightful

the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language
Although, I would be happy if Slashdot would work right with the existing standards.
Let me be the first to say... by McNihil · 2009-06-30 02:37 · Score: 1

We are all like a bunch of jonzing pirates wanting FF 3.5... Like crack addicts we need our fix... like yesterday... or the day before.
We want it NOW!!!
1. Re:Let me be the first to say... by bibos · 2009-06-30 02:45 · Score: 1
  
  then just get it - replace the original filename of the download link by getting rid of the "rc3", then you've got the final version.
  Example for OS X
  replace
  http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5rc3&os=osx&lang=en-US
  with
  http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US
2. Re:Let me be the first to say... by McNihil · 2009-06-30 02:54 · Score: 1
  
  Ofcourse but I am waiting for some important plugins to be fully compatible with it too. Some plugin vendors wait till things are set in stone to update their stuff... yeah I could hack something together on some cases but I'd rather spend time posting on Slashdot ;-)
3. Re:Let me be the first to say... by compro01 · 2009-06-30 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  Quick way - just grab the nightly tester tools addon and override the compatibility check on a per-addon basis.
  
  --
  upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
4. Re:Let me be the first to say... by McNihil · 2009-06-30 07:10 · Score: 1
  
  Much obliged, thank you!
AwesomeBar much more Awesomer by Duositex · 2009-06-30 02:39 · Score: -1

I work in a help desk role with four other people supporting a few hundred so I was waiting to pull the trigger for the latest version because I didn't want to lose my workhorse browser in action. But when I started reading about all of the new features I decided I'd dive right into the release candidate given that the headache of backing up profiles and such between upgrades seems to have gone away. Now that the updates to Firefox come automatically and only require a restart of the browser I figured there wasn't really a good reason to wait. I'm very happy with this decision so far. I can't say for sure if it seems faster or not on this setup, but I *can* say for certain that the new features are quite welcome. Especially being able to filter the junk that pops up in the awesome bar with some simple characters. It finally gave me some motivation to properly tag and organize the menagerie of "Unsorted Bookmarks" in Places. I'm quite pleased with the result and I'm already saving a lot of time when revisiting resources related to the support work I do. The only feature that's still missing from the browser that I find myself wishing it has is an advanced interface for creating the smart folders other than the "Save" button in Places. The long and short: If you hated the awesome bar before and turned it off, give it another shot in 3.5 and see if the new features make it bearable. Thumbs up Mozilla.
I hope they fixed printing by SilverJets · 2009-06-30 02:41 · Score: 0

Somewhere in the development of Firefox 3, someone at Mozilla got the idea that printing to a file is more important, or at least as important as printing to a printer. So now, when you click print you then have to select print to file or print to a printer, then click OK. Very, very annoying when printing out a bunch of individual pages. It should default to the printer with an option for printing to a file (the way it used to be in earlier versions). Print still means "send it to the printer", printing to a file is a minor benefit at best.
1. Re:I hope they fixed printing by SpooForBrains · 2009-06-30 02:49 · Score: 1
  
  I do not observe this behaviour using Firefox 3.0.10 for Windows.
  
  --
  "The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
2. Re:I hope they fixed printing by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 02:57 · Score: 1
  
  Nope, I don't get this behavior either.
  
  Have you checked that off in your default printer settings?
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
3. Re:I hope they fixed printing by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:59 · Score: 0
  
  Printing is broken, but not for the reason you say. I've never seen that problem.
  The problem with printing is that 50% of the time, the page is cut off on the right side so you don't get everything. Firefox developers don't pay attention to printing. I use another browser for printing.
4. Re:I hope they fixed printing by A.+B3ttik · 2009-06-30 03:01 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It's a setting in your OS, dude, not in FF. Like most programs, FF just implements the existing PRINT framework.
5. Re:I hope they fixed printing by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:10 · Score: 1
  
  For me, 0% of the time the right hand is cut off. I doubt it's FF.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
6. Re:I hope they fixed printing by uberdilligaff · 2009-06-30 03:36 · Score: 1
  
  For me, 3.0.11 defaults to the last printer I used, which could be my default printer, but often isn't. I find this convenient and I like it.
  
  --
  Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
7. Re:I hope they fixed printing by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:34 · Score: 0
  
  pebkac.
8. Re:I hope they fixed printing by CopaceticOpus · 2009-06-30 06:09 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  I have seen that problem as well. Very annoying.
  Another problem is that you can do print preview, and you can choose to print a selection... but you can't preview what will print if you print only the selection. This would be very useful when you want to make sure the selection will print as you expect, or if you want to scale the print to fit on a certain number of pages.
  Even better, what if they made the print preview interactive? The user could cut out blocks they don't want to print, or select certain sections to print. Currently, I accomplish this by using Firebug to delete unwanted structures from the page before I print.
9. Re:I hope they fixed printing by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 06:15 · Score: 0
  
  Lol! Asshole. Blame Mozilla for your own fucking stupidity.
10. Re:I hope they fixed printing by SilverJets · 2009-06-30 07:09 · Score: 1
  
  Except its not, dude. Firefox 2 worked perfectly fine. All other applications recognize the default printer including Thunderbird. Something changed/broke in Firefox 3.
11. Re:I hope they fixed printing by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 07:29 · Score: 0
  
  You might notice that every application on that machine behaves the same way. It's and OS setting. l2default printer.
12. Re:I hope they fixed printing by SilverJets · 2009-06-30 08:25 · Score: 1
  
  And actually I might notice that every application on that machine DOES NOT behave the same way. This changed from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. Even Thunderbird recognizes the default printer. And yes, I've removed and re-installed Firefox 3.
13. Re:I hope they fixed printing by SilverJets · 2009-06-30 08:26 · Score: 1
  
  LOL Asshole for not realizing everyone in the world does not use Winbloze.
14. Re:I hope they fixed printing by hackel · 2009-06-30 09:27 · Score: 1
  
  Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
15. Re:I hope they fixed printing by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 19:40 · Score: 0
  
  What if I want to read it on a bus?
16. Re:I hope they fixed printing by jonadab · 2009-07-01 07:07 · Score: 1
  
  > Stop wasting trees. There is no reason to print a web page. Ever. Stop it.
  
  Yeah, I used to think that way.
  
  And then I got my current job, and started working with normal, non-IT-industry users.
  
  I know, for IT people, it doesn't make sense. I mean, printing it is unnecessary and just creates extra physical clutter, a piece of paper you're just going to misplace. If you just save the link (possibly someplace online, like your private scratchpad at Perlmonks), you can go there any time, from anywhere. Why would you ever want it on paper?
  
  But it's different for normal users, because (Are you sitting down? Mind your blood pressure, this may be a bit of a shock...) they don't have the internet available everywhere all the time.
  
  Really, no fooling.
  
  They don't have handheld devices that can browse the web. They don't have the internet on every floor (much less every room) of their house. They don't have it in their car. The computer in the house (there's never more than one) is probably shared between several family members, and even if nobody else is using it, it still takes at least five minutes, usually more like ten, to get something off the internet, because they have to wait for the computer (which is old and slow and never had enough RAM in the first place because it was a cheaper model) to boot up, then wait for the internet connection to dial, then try to find the site...
  
  That's assuming they *have* the internet at home; a double-digit percentage of the population doesn't.
  
  Some people only have internet access at a friend's house, or at the public library.
  
  Many only have internet at work. They can't take a web page home, and even if it's needed for a job-related reason, they can't take it with them to meetings, or when they have job duties away from their regular desk -- or maybe they can't take it to the desk, if they have internet at a shared workstation, which is common. They can't take a website and show it to a coworker, or the boss.
  
  So they print the web page (or the email message, or whatever) so that they can have continued access to it when they walk away from the computer. They want to take it with them.
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
17. Re:I hope they fixed printing by hackel · 2009-07-01 07:39 · Score: 1
  
  Those are all valid points, but if we *allow* them to use printing as an option, surely it will just prolong this behaviour! Printing an article off for a friend with limited internet access seems reasonable--I was specifically thinking of a work environment. The last couple times I have worked in that type of office, people printed all kinds of things they absolutely did not need--especially people with computers at their desks!
  Why do non-IT users need to access work-related webpages at home on their offtime? Also--in the U.S. only 7% still use dial-up.
  Maybe we just need a maasive paper tax to help people think twice about what they chose to print!
Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 02:42 · Score: 1, Interesting

Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization". Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.

--
Le français vous intéresse?
1. Re:Non-profit? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:52 · Score: -1, Troll
  
  You're an anus!
2. Re:Non-profit? by mrsteveman1 · 2009-06-30 02:53 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.
  The fox has waterwings on, he can't swim.
3. Re:Non-profit? by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 02:59 · Score: 1
  
  I don't see how Google being a larger benefactor means they're running the show.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
4. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:05 · Score: 1
  
  The point is that it wasn't just some nebulous group of hackers who made Firefox in their free time, like GNU or something. It was funded by a major business. And it's not like no one is making money off Firefox either.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
5. Re:Non-profit? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:08 · Score: 0
  
  Many giant US health insurance companies are nonprofits. It's a legal construct, that's it. If you or the submitter are construing it to mean something else, that's your problem.
6. Re:Non-profit? by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:15 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  "The Mozilla Foundation accepts donations as a source of funding. Along with AOL's initial $2 million donation, Mitch Kapor gave $300,000 to the organization at its launch. The group has tax-exempt status under IRC 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code, though the Mozilla Corporation subsidiary is taxable." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation
  
  It is still open source. Not sure where hackers come into this. It accepts donations, which is not the same as funding.
  
  And nonprofit does not mean they don't "make money off firefox".
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
7. Re:Non-profit? by hedwards · 2009-06-30 03:22 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  It's not technically true, it's completely true. Don't the Mozilla foundation have tax exempt status?
  
  All non-profits have to make enough money in one way or another to fund operations, after all people can't generally afford to work for free and suppliers expect compensation for their supplies. Google would be in a world of hurt if it clamped down on Mozilla as that would definitely trigger a swift DoJ investigation into anti-trust violations.
8. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:24 · Score: 1
  
  The fact is, the people who pay for Firefox to be developed (call this "fund" or "contribute" or whatever you like) are in return making a profit from Firefox. As a previous poster said, non-profitness is just a legal construct, but the author of TFA was implying that it was somehow "amazing" that a non-profit company captured 25% of the market share from the likes of Microsoft.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
9. Re:Non-profit? by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:48 · Score: 1
  
  How is it not? How big is the Mozilla Foundation compared to Microsoft? 75 million dollars compared to what, billions, in revenue?
  
  And Firefox did not have the advantage of being built in natively on 90% of the worlds desktops and laptops.
  
  Heck, Firefox is bigger than the browser that comes on the other ~9% of the worlds desktops and laptops, Safari.
  
  I'd call that a success story, wouldn't you?
  
  Nonprofitness is a tax legal construct. No one has said nonprofitness means they don't make any money, or imply such a thing. It implies more that they are not giant corporations with billions to toss around, of a small group of employees trying to compete with workforces numbering in the tens of thousands.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
10. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:54 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Microsoft may have billions of dollars, but I'd be interested to see how much of that went to the IE budget pre-Firefox. I tend to think not much, given the quality of IE6. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, and use it whenever I need to go to a site Elinks can't handle, but I don't think it's all that "amazing" that a project set up by Netscape and funded by Google could compete with a project that Microsoft had abandoned. Especially since the Opera devs probably worked in similar (or worse) conditions, and Opera has been better than Firefox for years. (TFA's author might claim that this is less amazing because Opera is for-profit, and I think that's silly.)
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
11. Re:Non-profit? by Millennium · 2009-06-30 04:07 · Score: 1
  
  The fact is, the people who pay for Firefox to be developed (call this "fund" or "contribute" or whatever you like) are in return making a profit from Firefox. As a previous poster said, non-profitness is just a legal construct, but the author of TFA was implying that it was somehow "amazing" that a non-profit company captured 25% of the market share from the likes of Microsoft.
  Are they? How does that work, especially now that, with Chrome on the scene, Google is actually funding one of its own competitors?
12. Re:Non-profit? by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 04:19 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think MS abandoned IE, but they were resting on their laurels. IE was still dominant since it was on 90% of all the desktops and laptops out there.
  
  I don't see how it's silly to think it's "amazing" that a company with very little behind it is able to beat it's competitors, and continually catch up on the #1... when it's competitors have more clout and money.
  
  And you keep saying "funded by Google" like it's a bad thing, and conveniently forget that there are other corporations that both provided the seed money for the project and continue to donate. Google was not part of those who provided the initial money to get things rolling.
  
  And as someone has pointed out elsewhere in this thread, Google created Chrome... so are they now "funding" their competition?
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
13. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 04:42 · Score: 1
  
  I never implied it was a bad thing. Does the word "fund" carry negative connotations for you? I simply think it's ridiculous to make Firefox into some mythical example of the "little guy" coming and beating big bad Microsoft.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
14. Re:Non-profit? by maxume · 2009-06-30 04:44 · Score: 1
  
  Google cares that you look at Google search results and the accompanying ads (Mozilla makes their money as a search affiliate). They don't care if you use Google's free browser to do it, or some other browser.
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
15. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 04:45 · Score: 1
  
  It's not really a competitor. Google doesn't care how many people use which browser -- all they care about is how many people use Google search. The more people who use Google search, the more money they make. Both Firefox and Chrome drive people to Google search.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
16. Re:Non-profit? by fm6 · 2009-06-30 05:11 · Score: 1
  
  Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization".
  How does taking Google money make Mozilla Foundation not-nonprofit? Being nonprofit means you don't pay your owners profits. It doesn't mean you can't have income. In point of fact, many nonprofits have some kind of .
17. Re:Non-profit? by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 05:12 · Score: 1
  
  When all the non-mythical examples haven't come as close as Firefox has, is it still ridiculous? :P
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
18. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 05:23 · Score: 1
  
  I guess Apple and GNU/Linux (in the server market, at least) would be counterpoints to your claim.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
19. Re:Non-profit? by koreaman · 2009-06-30 05:26 · Score: 1
  
  Note: I meant "Apple on the desktop and GNU/Linux on servers"
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
20. Re:Non-profit? by arevos · 2009-06-30 06:09 · Score: 1
  
  Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization".
  From Wikipedia:
  
  A nonprofit organization is an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals.
  Being funded by Google doesn't mean that Mozilla isn't a nonprofit organisation.
21. Re:Non-profit? by mqduck · 2009-06-30 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  How can something that's not technically true be completely true? At best, it's partially true.
  
  --
  Property is theft.
22. Re:Non-profit? by Simetrical · 2009-06-30 11:07 · Score: 1
  
  Microsoft may have billions of dollars, but I'd be interested to see how much of that went to the IE budget pre-Firefox. I tend to think not much
  Really? How do you think Microsoft killed Netscape, if not by pouring far more money into IE than Netscape could hope to come up with?
  IE6 was the best browser of its time, or at least a definite contender. It was clearly superior to contemporary Netscape. We forget this only because Microsoft let it molder for years, until it had been greatly outclassed by the competition. IE6 sucks now, but it didn't always — don't forget that.
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
23. Re:Non-profit? by TheRaven64 · 2009-06-30 21:28 · Score: 1
  
  It's not technically true, it's completely true. Don't the Mozilla foundation have tax exempt status?
  It's technically true and misleading. The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, but the Mozilla Corporation is not. Moz Corp is a fully-owned subsidiary of the Foundation. Most of the funding for development comes from Moz Corp (and their many millions of dollars per year from Google and anyone else who pays to go in the search box).
  
  Google would be in a world of hurt if it clamped down on Mozilla as that would definitely trigger a swift DoJ investigation into anti-trust violations.
  The only way this would possibly be an anti-trust violation would be if Google was shown to be attempting to use its effective monopoly in the search market (not sure they have one; they only have around 70% of the market in the US, less worldwide) to gain market share in the browser market. Stopping buying advertising space for their search in a competitor's browser would definitely not count as an anti-trust violation any more than MS stopping funding OS/2 development when they started working on NT did.
  Google pays a small amount for every search that comes from a browser search bar. This includes FireFox and Safari. If their own browser becomes a bit more popular, they may decide that they don't need to do this anymore.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
24. Re:Non-profit? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-07-01 03:07 · Score: 0
  
  Opera has been better than Firefox for years
  Kindly don't present your opinion as fact.
25. Re:Non-profit? by Nicolay77 · 2009-07-02 05:51 · Score: 1
  
  The Firefox marketshare is also because of Google. Before developing Chrome, Google promoted Firefox heavily.
  And Google have billions in revenue too.
  That said, I think Google jumped the shark with Chrome. If the same company controls both the biggest search engine and the browser, they will be unstoppable and therefore very dangerous. That's the only reason I don't like Chrome.
  
  --
  We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
"A nonprofit foundation" by BuR4N · 2009-06-30 02:44 · Score: 0, Redundant

"an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation"
According to (unconfirmed information) Wikipedia they pulled in 75 million USD during 2007 alone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing

--
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
1. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by christopherfinke · 2009-06-30 02:54 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  "Nonprofit" doesn't imply a lack of revenue.
2. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:03 · Score: 2
  
  Uhm, yes, they pulled in 75 million. So?
  
  "A nonprofit organization (abbreviated NPO, also not-for-profit) is an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_organization
  
  Nonprofit does not mean "doesn't make any money".
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
3. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by hedwards · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 1
  
  If you can suggest a way that they can fund operations without revenue, I'm sure you're eligible for a Nobel. All non-profits take int revenue in some fashion to pay for operating expenses. Non-profits are just limited in how much they can take in and how they handle it. Generally speaking it's limited by the amount of service they're providing and how much it costs to provide the service.
  
  A properly run non-profit is going to turn a profit in some years in order to make up for years when it's running a bit in the black. It's just that the cash ends up going back into the non-profit rather than being distributed to shareholders or on non-related endeavors.
4. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by Is0m0rph · 2009-06-30 03:28 · Score: 1
  
  BuR4N here's a link for you to read since you seem to think non-profit means no income: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Profit
5. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:44 · Score: 0
  
  "Nonprofit does not mean "doesn't make any money"."
  I agree, but the wording "astonishing achievement" would be more proper if they where 2 guys that had no funding, and had to work in a cardboard box next to the freeway and got electrocuted when they touched the keyboard.
6. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 05:18 · Score: 1
  
  If you compare Mozilla's revenue to Apple and Microsoft, their funding is pretty non-existent. When you look at all the other so-called MicroSoft beaters, and find most of them have vanished to near-obscurity (Corel? Lotus Notes?), and look at the other open source software companies slowly gaining traction against MS, Firefox is pretty exemplary in what they've accomplished.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
A Bug No One Mentions by DirePickle · 2009-06-30 02:45 · Score: 1

Did they ever resolve this? It's still present in 3.0 for Linux. Basically, instead of being polite and letting the OS keep the disk spun down until data needs to be written, Firefox spins up the HD for writing every single time it does anything. So if you have an aggressive spin-down policy (like Ubuntu Jaunty does, at least) and you're web-browsing, your HD will spin up and down every twenty seconds or so.
1. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by RebelWebmaster · 2009-06-30 02:53 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Yes, they've done a lot of work to reduce the number of fsync() calls used. There are numerous bugs filed tracking that work. More work is still planned, but it should already be in better shape than 3.0.x was.
2. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by DirePickle · 2009-06-30 02:57 · Score: 1
  
  Hey, that's excellent news. I gave up and just set my HD to never spin down so it didn't eat itself.
3. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by 0123456 · 2009-06-30 03:07 · Score: 1
  
  Basically, instead of being polite and letting the OS keep the disk spun down until data needs to be written, Firefox spins up the HD for writing every single time it does anything.
  But this isn't a bug, it's a feature: the ext4 developers keep telling us that Posix requires that you fsync() any file that you actually want to find on the disk after a reboot.
  More seriously, this may be a response to the earlier problems on Windows where you would reboot after a system crash or power outage and find all your bookmarks had been eaten by scandisk because they weren't properly written to disk before the crash.
4. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by DirePickle · 2009-06-30 03:18 · Score: 1
  
  I guess that's maybe possible, but--and I'm not a programmer--it seems that FF oughtn't need to even *touch* the bookmark file except once at the beginning of the session and then again if you actually bookmark something. Instead, it spins up every time you you follow a link, even if it ought to be something in RAM, and certainly my browsing history is not something that's important to me after a reboot. Though, now that I think about it I guess it might be related to FF remembering what tabs you have open after a crash. This, also, is not that important to me...
5. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:21 · Score: 1
  
  Spins every time you follow a link? Uh, you do know that websites download temporary files, right? Cookies? Pre-caching images, etc?
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
6. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by DirePickle · 2009-06-30 03:27 · Score: 1
  
  When the drive is spun down, the OS stores all of that in RAM for later writing (either the next time an app forces a spin-up for something important, or when something needs to be read, or at a predefined time (every five/ten minutes or something?)). So unless it's something that needs to be written right away in case of a crash, it's supposed to just hang onto it. Except for perhaps bookmarks, I'd say that 'unimportant' defines everything that FF is downloading.
7. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:34 · Score: 1
  
  Sure. But there's also the fact that you can browse while "offline", as well, there are settings for when you only want to see "changes" to web pages. There may be addons that are doing things in the background, as well, Firefox might be checking for updates. Tons of things happen that may be cause for the HD to be spun.
  
  Not saying there isn't a bug, and I dislike having my HD spun for no reason as well...
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
8. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by thePowerOfGrayskull · 2009-06-30 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  The problem is that if they're polite and fix that, then they open themselves up to that other nastiness - "Oh, no, I crashed and my settings are gone!" which you might recall from ext4 discussions a few months ago here.
9. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by xaxa · 2009-06-30 21:27 · Score: 1
  
  On my netbook (with SSD) I went to about:config and set browser.cache.disk.enable to false.
Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." by AbbeyRoad · 2009-06-30 02:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Correction: "...and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure NOT to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language..."
(That's better.)
I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility???? Aren't they just playing into Micrsofts hands? MS is sure to just go ahead and create MSHTML 5.0 which is completely incompatible with HTML 5.0. What will they do then?
Wave there hands madly in the air, I suppose.
1. Re:Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." by TropicalCoder · 2009-06-30 03:31 · Score: 1
  
  Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility?
  I really hope you are joking! If they wait for Microsoft to implement HTML 5 first we may be waiting a long time. Microsoft may not see that as to their advantage, since they would likely prefer that HTML 5 type features be handled via their SilverBlight. Let them go right on ahead and do that if they wish. I don't think that will get them anywhere these days.
  BTW: Does anybody know if or how Mozilla responded to that stealth modification Microsoft made to Firefox to run their .net crap? I hope there was something done in the latest version to prevent that from happening again. Microsoft should simply offer a plug in for those who want one rather than step all over 3rd party software like they did.
2. Re:Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." by Cr4wford · 2009-06-30 08:33 · Score: 1
  
  lolwut?
  
  Modern web development is all about "progressive enhancement." A website should be built for a bare minimum of functionality to cater to the lowest common denominator of browsers, with additional "layers" of features (javascript effects, HTML5, CSS3, etc.) added on top. For those that can utilize these additional features, they get a better web experience. For those who can't, they still get a functional website, it just might not be as pretty or have that advanced functionality.
  
  What you're describing is more reminiscent of the Netscape-IE browser wars, each fighting with their own proprietary features, which did create compatibility problems. Firefox isn't adding proprietary features, HTML5 is a web standard created by the W3C. And as of late, Windows has been much better about complying with W3C web standards--although not as well as Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera. At the very least, I am sure they wouldn't create their own proprietary HTML5.
  
  --
  Freelance Web Designer - Portfolio
3. Re:Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." by Simetrical · 2009-06-30 11:09 · Score: 1
  
  I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
  Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility????
  Why do you think IE8 fully supports CSS2.1? Because every other browser agreed on a standard, and IE got the reputation of "first make everything work in standards-compliant browsers, then hack on support for IE's brokenness" among web developers. Microsoft isn't so much of a monopoly that they can't be pressured by good features in other browsers.
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
4. Re:Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." by TheRaven64 · 2009-06-30 21:37 · Score: 1
  
  The web was built around the idea of graceful fallback. Any browser is allowed (and expected) to ignore any tags you don't understand. A well-designed web site will still render in TBL's original WorldWideWeb, it just won't look the same. My site, for example, uses the text shadow attribute on headings which, when I wrote it, only worked in Safari (not sure if it works elsewhere now). People who view the site in another browser don't see shadows on the headings, but they still see the text. The site looks correct in all browsers, but it looks better in some than others.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, REAL geeks ... by SpooForBrains · 2009-06-30 02:46 · Score: 5, Funny

... send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back.

--
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
1. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:05 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah, and REAL real geeks then get the mail delivered as a scroll of mail by an actual mail daemon in Nethack.
  And REAL real real geeks don't, because they play extinctionist games in Nethack and have already killed all mail daemons...
2. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by yet-another-lobbyist · 2009-06-30 04:05 · Score: 1
  
  Wow, this is unbelievable! I can't imagine how the Internet is any fun like this. Why is he doing this? Seems just totally eccentric to me.
3. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by cpghost · 2009-06-30 06:14 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe he's living behind a Great National Firewall that blocks port 80 to some sites?
  Actually, it makes a whole lot of sense, to fetch web pages remotely via e-mail. When that smtp-http gateway even PGP encrypts/signs the pages, it would be pretty cool.
  
  --
  cpghost at Cordula's Web.
4. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by Sir_Lewk · 2009-06-30 06:19 · Score: 1
  
  If you follow the link you'll realize the "REAL geek" it's refering to is none other than RMS. I'm pretty sure he doesn't live behind a Great National Firewall (he is in the US right?). He's probably just that crazy.
  
  --
  "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
5. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by Gnavpot · 2009-06-30 06:52 · Score: 1
  
  ... send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back.
  
  Actually, I remember doing that around 1993-1994 when I did not have a real Internet connection but only some kind of proprietary online portal subscription which included Internet email.
6. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by SpooForBrains · 2009-06-30 06:57 · Score: 1
  
  Time management, I believe. I seem to recall reading that he finds it more convenient to read web pages at his leisure in his email than by using a regular web browser right at that moment.
  Plus, he's pretty much the dictionary definition of eccentric.
  
  --
  "The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
7. Re:Actually, REAL geeks ... by m85476585 · 2009-06-30 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  I actually do that to browse the web on my cell phone. Internet access is too expensive on my plan ($2/mb or $2 million to fill up my 1tb hard drive), but I have unlimited texting. To use it, I email the URL of the page I want to my server, and the server gets the page with wget or curl, strips out any HTML, and sends it back to me 140 characters at a time. It is quite basic right now, but I could add a lot more logic, like replying with "more" to get more than the first 5 pages.
It's up now! by anom · 2009-06-30 02:46 · Score: 1

www.getfirefox.com :)
still using iCab ;-) by Herve5 · 2009-06-30 02:47 · Score: 1

indeed, am I the only one still using the mac-only, closed-source iCab -but the one that invented ad-filtering 10 years before Adblock, and still updates almost every month (now with e. g. full screen favorite-sites preview...)?

--
Herve S.
1. Re:still using iCab ;-) by Darkness404 · 2009-06-30 02:57 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, because there is no need to use iCab when you can use Safari or Firefox. iCab pretty much renders the same as Safari and all the UI can be done in Firefox (or Chrome or an OSS webkit browser).
  
  --
  Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
2. Re:still using iCab ;-) by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:01 · Score: 0
  
  I used to really enjoy using it, but it fell behind with regards to the Webkit based browsers. I use Omniweb when I'm on my Mac now. But I see that iCab has been re-written in Cocoa/Webkit. I will have to re-visit it.
3. Re:still using iCab ;-) by Alaska+Jack · 2009-06-30 08:15 · Score: 1
  
  Probably, but I think I will download a fresh copy and give it a spin. I was a huge iCab fan back when it first came out... even before tabbed browsing was invented, it had this "open link in new window behind current window" ability that was so obvious to me, I couldn't understand why IE couldn't do that. Plus it had a great little community of users.
  - AJ
RMS by koreaman · 2009-06-30 02:47 · Score: 1

I'm trying to decide if that's more or less hardcore than using wget like Richard Stallman does.

--
Le français vous intéresse?
But...what happened to Beta 4? by swordgeek · 2009-06-30 02:47 · Score: 1

According to the official working schedule, FF3.5b4 is going to be coming out in the near future--on April 24.
Some may have noticed that April 24 (and 3.5b4) has already passed. I find it sadly ironic that the weekly FF3.5 meetings have talked about branding, evangelizing, and marketing; and yet they can't be bothered to update their own schedule.

--

"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
1. Re:But...what happened to Beta 4? by tuffy · 2009-06-30 03:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Firefox 3.5b4 was released on 04/24/2009 11:07:00 PM, according to the checksum dates. Enjoy.
  
  --
  Ita erat quando hic adveni.
2. Re:But...what happened to Beta 4? by JustinOpinion · 2009-06-30 03:28 · Score: 1
  
  Not sure what your complaint is exactly...
  
  Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 was released on April 27 2009. Just a few days after it was scheduled to be released.
  
  We are now at the review candidate (RC) stage... which admittedly wasn't included in that original schedule since it's never known how many RCs will be needed or how far along they will be.
  
  They seem to be remarkably on top of things, to me.
3. Re:But...what happened to Beta 4? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:57 · Score: 0
  
  Say what?
  FF 3.5 b4 was released on April 27
  http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5b4/releasenotes/
4. Re:But...what happened to Beta 4? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:11 · Score: 0
  
  Clearly they haven't done enough to evangelize their checksums.
Bloat by Spazmania · 2009-06-30 02:47 · Score: 1

I usually kill off my firefox 3.0 and restart it once it reaches the point where its holding 400 megs of ram and takes a quarter-second to respond to button presses. Wasn't Firefox's advantage over Mozilla supposed to be the lack of bloat?

--
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
1. Re:Bloat by ericrost · 2009-06-30 04:34 · Score: 1
  
  I don't really know what you mean. Firefox == Mozilla (internal codename for Nescape == Mosaic Killer)codebase picked up after Netscape folded. So Firefox == Netscape + n == Browser proded by the Mozilla Foundation.
  
  --
  My Babylon
2. Re:Bloat by Spazmania · 2009-06-30 05:10 · Score: 1
  
  'Doh! I meant Netscape whose internal codename was also mozilla.
  
  --
  Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
3. Re:Bloat by ericrost · 2009-06-30 06:48 · Score: 1
  
  Then no, Firefox's advantage over Netscape was supposed to be existing since Netscape abandoned it and went out of business.
  
  --
  My Babylon
4. Re:Bloat by IntlHarvester · 2009-06-30 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  Prior to Firefox, the Mozilla Seamonkey browser was usually just called "Mozilla". Not to be confused with the project itself or the old Netscape codename, Mozilla was an end-user product in it's own right and heavily promoted by Slashdotters.
  
  --
  Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
5. Re:Bloat by VGPowerlord · 2009-06-30 08:55 · Score: 1
  
  They didn't go out of business... they're still a division of America Online. Unfortunately, AOL failed to capitalize on anything but the netscape.com Internet Portal.
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
6. Re:Bloat by TheRaven64 · 2009-06-30 21:40 · Score: 1
  
  FireFox was never lower in bloat. If you used the entire Mozilla suite, then switched to FireFox (Phoenix back then) then you needed more RAM, because FireFox and Thunderbird both included their own separate copies of the XUL / XPCOM runtime libraries. The big advantage for me was that a crash in the browser stopped also killing my mail client.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
7. Re:Bloat by Nicolay77 · 2009-07-01 02:41 · Score: 1
  
  Have you tried Opera 10 Beta?
  
  --
  We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
no sense of humor today, mods? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:49 · Score: 0

I squirted milk out my nose when I read that.
1. Re:no sense of humor today, mods? by clickclickdrone · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  >I squirted milk out my nose when I read that.
  Had you been drinking milk at the time or are you just really wierd?
  
  --
  I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
2. Re:no sense of humor today, mods? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:13 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  Nah, just lactating.
3. Re:no sense of humor today, mods? by kenj0418 · 2009-06-30 04:48 · Score: 1, Funny
  
  I squirted milk out my nose when I read that.
  > Had you been drinking milk at the time or are you just really wierd?
  You must have gotten Eric Cartman's bad kidney.
4. Re:no sense of humor today, mods? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:26 · Score: 0
  
  No he just got the crappy kidney
And more than that! by The_mad_linguist · 2009-06-30 02:49 · Score: 5, Funny

In Firefox 3.5, the bard class has been totally revised, and you no longer need to "intuit direction" to browse the web.
1. Re:And more than that! by elrous0 · 2009-06-30 04:09 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah, but they totally nerfed the refresh button.
  
  --
  SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's here by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:50 · Score: 0

Get it now http://www.getfirefox.com
Works for me by Chris+Pimlott · 2009-06-30 02:50 · Score: 1

Running 3.0.11 here, print dialog defaults to a real printer, as it always has.
Released!?!! by ericlondaits · 2009-06-30 02:51 · Score: 3, Interesting

As of now, if you got to Mozilla's page and choose to download Firefox, you get version 3.5 :
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html

--
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
1. Re:Released!?!! by redcaboodle · 2009-06-30 03:10 · Score: 1
  
  NOTE: THIS WORKS.
  Just started working with 3.5 De_de. Firebug already has an update, but the ugly dotted borders are not fixed. Sigh....my designer will lynch me.
  
  --
  -- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
2. Re:Released!?!! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:14 · Score: 0
  
  Seems someone updated the Image to Firefox 3.5, but it still links to 3.0.11
3. Re:Released!?!! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:30 · Score: 0
  
  No, I followed it and downloaded it... and it actually is 3.5 alright. ... Underwhelmed so far.
4. Re:Released!?!! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:33 · Score: 0
  
  Unless you read the box. It has 3.5 in big letters, but under that it is still 3.0.11 for windows...
5. Re:Released!?!! by sunwolf · 2009-06-30 03:36 · Score: 1
  
  It's out if you manually check for updates too. Did they change the font rendering? Either I'm suffering from a placebo effect from my shiny new FF3.5 or everything's prettier.
6. Re:Released!?!! by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:30 · Score: 0
  
  No, it's just not labeled as an RC properly. It's still not officially released.
Serious question for liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 02:56 · Score: -1, Offtopic

I'm not trying to be an ass. I'm asking a serious question of liberals. Why do you flee states like CA and NY where you kept voting yourselves tax increases until your eyes were popping out and no one could afford to live or do business in your state any more, only to land in a much more affordable state and repeat the process all over again? Why do you keep doing the same things and expecting different results? Isn't that the definition of insanity? Could you please stop wrecking the quality of life for people who have modest means but still like to enjoy having a little disposable income? For God's sake, you're like a plague of locusts: once you've devoured all of the tax revenue of one region, you move on to the next, with little thought to the devastation you leave in your wake. You leave behind empty, crime-ridden cities with trashed real-estate markets, crushing taxes on the few producers that decide to stick around for some insane reason, and huge social programs well beyond the state's means to pay for them. But of course those social programs are vital to keep the majority of folks from starving and losing their shelter once you've finished your handiwork.
1. Re:Serious question for liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:24 · Score: -1, Offtopic
  
  See, now that's what I'm talking about. You liberals just want everyone to follow your agenda without asking any questions, and just trust that you know what's best for us and our families better than we do. Any attempt to question your policies is met with an attempt to silence it through ridicule or intimidation. Gee, I always wanted to know what it was like to live in early 1930s Germany. Thanks for showing me, libs.
2. Re:Serious question for liberals by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:09 · Score: 0
  
  The response you were looking for was "oops I posted this under the wrong story" and not what you posted, "hey look at me, I am insane!? Fear zombie jeezus!".
  Also if you want to fit in maybe try some l33t speak so people think you know what a transistor is, and if you don't want to come off crazy try lolcats.... I can haz hitler? See how much better that sounds?
Huge update by superFoieGras · 2009-06-30 02:58 · Score: 0

I always have wondered: How does such a wolrdwide update work ? Supposedly Mozilla is non-profit, so how do they manage extra bandwidth for the huge load of downloads they are going to get in the next few days ? I'm thinking about the Skype crash, where everyone updated and reconnected at the same time and killed their servers for two days.

--
I swear Officer, these are not WMD, just plain French cheese...
1. Re:Huge update by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:11 · Score: 1
  
  The Firefox project is funded by Google.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
2. Re:Huge update by lattyware · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 1
  
  No profit doesn't mean they don't have money. Many people and companies donate money, buy merchandise, and donate servers or the like.
  
  --
  -- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
3. Re:Huge update by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:26 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  No, but they do receive donations, plus money from a deal to put Google as the default search. Google is not the only one donating.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
Er.... what??? by brunes69 · 2009-06-30 02:59 · Score: 1

So you are disabling javascript, but allowing flash? That makes no sense whatsoever.
For one, I don't know of many sites whose flash applets will work properly without Javascript to initialize them. For two, flash has MUCH larger potential for security holes and exploits than Javascript, which does not even have write access to the filesystem in any way. One wrong buffer overflow in flash and the thing can actually WRITE to your hard drive.
1. Re:Er.... what??? by Simetrical · 2009-06-30 12:18 · Score: 1
  
  For two, flash has MUCH larger potential for security holes and exploits than Javascript, which does not even have write access to the filesystem in any way. One wrong buffer overflow in flash and the thing can actually WRITE to your hard drive.
  Non sequitur. The Flash interpreter is implemented in C or suchlike, so it can have buffer overflows. JavaScript interpreters are also implemented in C or suchlike, so they can too. Firefox has had plenty of buffer overflows over the years. (Which isn't to say that Flash doesn't reduce security, just not for this reason.)
  
  --
  MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
Competition by koreaman · 2009-06-30 03:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation? Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist, a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari, and most (l)users would be stuck with the latest version of IE -- IE6. Thank you, Firefox, for reigniting the browser wars, and here's hoping that this time around the wars will be fought with functionality, stability, security, and speed, rather than with a new incompatible extension to JavaScript every week.

--
Le français vous intéresse?
1. Re:Competition by KillerBob · 2009-06-30 03:44 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  While some mod is sure to rate this a troll (it isn't), I have to say that IE8 isn't all that bad. I still prefer FF on my laptop, and my netbook is running Linux (an Ubuntu variant), but on my HTPC, I haven't bothered to install anything other than IE8. Said system is rarely used to browse the net, of course, but the experience I have with IE8 is surprisingly not crappy.
  I was also saddled with IE8 or IE8 at my last job, and again, it was pretty good. (was laid off a month ago, going back to school in september).
  I agree with you in saying that if it weren't for Firefox, MS and others would have stopped upgrading their technology, and we'd still all be pretty well screwed from a security and stability standpoint.
  
  --
  If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
2. Re:Competition by tibman · 2009-06-30 03:48 · Score: 1
  
  Evolution through conflict, eh?
  
  --
  http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
3. Re:Competition by Overly+Critical+Guy · 2009-06-30 04:19 · Score: 0
  
  What a stupid comment. Google Chrome is based on WebKit, a non-Gecko rendering engine initiated by Apple and derived from KHTML, which has nothing to do with Firefox. It would exist with or without it. People who "paid way too much for their computers" are still running Safari, because it's the faster, better browser, and there's a Windows version available.
  Internet Explorer still commands something like 90% of the market based on most studies, so those "browser wars" only exist in dwindling niche circles like Slashdot. If anything, Firefox is losing the war since WebKit has been adopted by Google and is also being used on several mobile devices. Gecko is a messy engine that few understand.
  
  --
  "Sufferin' succotash."
4. Re:Competition by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  No, it's more like 65.5% http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0
  
  If the browser wars exist only in dwindling niche markets, why does MS continue to improve Internet Explorer?
  
  And if Firefox is losing the war, and "few understand" it, why are they continuing to creep upwards in market share? Why are there a number of Firefox derivatives? Why are the other browsers continuing to play catchup? (tabbed browsing, addons, etc)
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
5. Re:Competition by mambodog · 2009-06-30 04:51 · Score: 1
  
  a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari
  I see what you did there..
6. Re:Competition by koreaman · 2009-06-30 04:54 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe your comment is the stupid one, both because it is factually incorrect as the other poster pointed out, and because you completely misunderstood my point. I meant to say that Firefox's explosion on the browser scene drove improvement in other browsers and even expansion of e.g. Google into the market. It did so in two ways:
  1) By taking market share from IE and Opera, forcing the former to improve and the latter to go gratis, and
  2) By showing people that IE could be beaten.
  I never implied that Chrome was using any code developed by or submitted to the Mozilla Foundation.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
7. Re:Competition by fm6 · 2009-06-30 04:59 · Score: 1
  
  Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation?
  Huh? Is there somebody out there yelling, "No! We need one browser! Competition is evil"? If so, I haven't run across them.
  With browsers (as with any other software) there's always some obsessive fanboy who says that everybody should be using Firefox or Opera or even Lynx. But that just religious non-logic; it's not an argument against competition.
8. Re:Competition by koreaman · 2009-06-30 05:02 · Score: 1
  
  P.S. even though your last comment is stupid, I just read through the rest of your posts and decided I am a big fan. I fucking hate the Slashdot copyright groupthink. Keep up the good work bringing the truth to people.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
9. Re:Competition by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:20 · Score: -1, Troll
  
  No, you're not the only person who thinks competition is good for end-users. It's basic economics. Are you arrogant or just karma-whoring?
  "a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari"
  Arrogant. Got it. Thanks for clearing that up.
10. Re:Competition by koreaman · 2009-06-30 05:41 · Score: 1
  
  TFA, while at the very end paying lip service to the point I was making, talks about having been "worried about Firefox" because other browsers were getting better.
  
  My point was that other browsers getting better is a <i>good</i> thing, not something that anyone should be worried about, unless they are a zealot.
  
  Basically the same point you're making, actually, so I wonder why you criticized my post, unless of course you didn't rtfa.
  
  --
  Le français vous intéresse?
11. Re:Competition by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · 2009-06-30 05:43 · Score: 1
  
  Huh? Is there somebody out there yelling, "No! We need one browser! Competition is evil"?
  I think his name is Ballmer.
  
  If so, I haven't run across them.
  That's good... he throws chairs. :)
12. Re:Competition by GreyDuck · 2009-06-30 05:48 · Score: 1
  
  If I had mod points... I don't like IE8 all that much, but I don't see how this post was a troll. On the edge of off-topic, arguably, but not a troll. Sheesh...
  
  --
  I'm only wearing black until they come out with something darker.
13. Re:Competition by hkmwbz · 2009-06-30 06:06 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist
  That's crazy talk. Chrome's existence did not and does not depend on Firefox.
  
  --
  Clever signature text goes here.
14. Re:Competition by fm6 · 2009-06-30 06:20 · Score: 1
  
  I didn't say nobody was against competition, I said that nobody was arguing against competition. MS management may hate having competition, but they'd never admit it in public, not with the DOJ watching.
15. Re:Competition by fm6 · 2009-06-30 06:45 · Score: 1
  
  You're reading way to much into the authors prose. Being worried about the future of a product is not the same as wanting all competing products to go away.
  I have pretty much the same attitude. I basically prefer Firefox to all the alternatives and would hate to see it go away. But its performance and reliability problems are getting to be a bit much. TFA and I both think that if 3.5 doesn't address these problems, Firefox's days are numbered. (He says it does; I haven't had time to install it yet.) That has nothing to do with being anti-competition.
16. Re:Competition by node+3 · 2009-06-30 06:53 · Score: 1
  
  a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari
  I see what you did there..
  Yeah, someone should tell him that Safari runs on Macs, too... :D
17. Re:Competition by node+3 · 2009-06-30 06:58 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  Huh? Is there somebody out there yelling, "No! We need one browser! Competition is evil"?
  I think his name is Ballmer.
  
  If so, I haven't run across them.
  That's good... he throws chairs. :)
  It was much easier to deal with him back when he used to just roll barrels at you...
18. Re:Competition by mdm-adph · 2009-06-30 08:02 · Score: 1
  
  What's really, really, really depressing about that chart is that there are apparently more people out there using obsolete, end-of-life versions of Netscape than there are Opera. :(
  
  --
  It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
19. Re:Competition by FlyingBishop · 2009-06-30 08:20 · Score: 1
  
  He deserves a troll mod for opening with
  
  While some mod is sure to rate this a troll (it isn't)
  Though, yes, IE8 isn't that bad. It's roughly on par with Firefox 2, which was a good browser in its day, and I have no problems when I'm forced to use it.
  Silverlight on the other hand...
20. Re:Competition by Ilgaz · 2009-06-30 08:58 · Score: 1
  
  IE 8 is not bad but still coded and designed in Microsoft way... Sending URLs of downloads to Microsoft, torturing user if he dares to remove Windows search feature from Windows (yes, 7), claiming W3C Strict XHTML valid sites having "errors" and generally bugging user... I have even installed a download manager just to get rid of that annoying "Notice the information bar?" crap.
  My Windows 7 install to Mac Mini is basically "lets have a real windows for stupid Nokia phones in its 20 gig space" and "lets test our sites without too much high tech" thing so, IE basically stays as default browser and IE 6 will run in Virtual XP (ms gives free) but you can't claim IE 8 is not an annoying browser... It is like Bill Gates coming in your house and standing at your back, talking... Trust me, I am not a big fan of mini Steve Jobs (Safari) either but at least, it really behaves like a real OS default browser should behave. Simple, does the job and somehow not bugging. It is like Apple's idea. They give the engine free anyway, all free to come with the next Firefox with extensions, high end features. Omniweb is a good example how to use that great engine.
  The speed etc. issues claimed for IE 8, really pushing it too much I agree. All sites work kinda fine, with OK speed but man, that claim that my character by character verified sites are "containing errors" really kills it...
21. Re:Competition by VGPowerlord · 2009-06-30 09:09 · Score: 1
  
  Oh, we're pulling the "make shit up" game?
  OK, my turn!
  Has it not been for Firefox, Google Chrome would probably have been released years earlier and be the number two browser on the web, IE would still have been updated to compete with Chrome, and Opera would still cost money as they wouldn't be getting any money from Google.
  P.S. ECMAScript is the standardized version of Javascript. The latest edition is ECMAScript 3, published in 1999.
  Since then, Mozilla has released JavaScript 1.6 - 1.8.x. While other browsers may support parts of these, Firefox is the only one that implements the entire thing, seeing as they wrote it. Since it's not part of the standard, each update is a de facto "new incompatible extension" to the language.
  Additionally, the DOM is a separate standard maintained by the W3C.
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
22. Re:Competition by Ilgaz · 2009-06-30 09:46 · Score: 1
  
  Well, Opera owns the mobile space with Opera Mini, it is the number 1 browser right now. If they release 9.x (or 10) for Symbian S60 soon, it will even get better.
  IMHO AOL should have adopted Seamonkey with a huge donation and release it as "Netscape 10" or something, with a custom theme. It is clear that some people like "suite" type of things.
23. Re:Competition by Trillan · 2009-06-30 10:08 · Score: 1
  
  The Mozilla Foundation created the Mozilla Suite. Firefox was the creation of Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross. If you have evidence that the Mozilla Foundation made a choice to adopt Firefox prior to it eating the Suite's lunch, I'd love to hear it. But even then, "create" is too strong a word.
  And so it's probably more accurate to call Firefox a success in spite of Mozilla Foundation's best efforts. Any multiplicity of real competition is in spite of Mozilla Foundation, not because of. Calling it a great success of the Mozilla Foundation is just a step too far for credibility.
24. Re:Competition by Orestesx · 2009-06-30 10:26 · Score: 1
  
  Of course you are not the only one. You are mostly right, but Chrome would definitely still exist, Google created Chrome because it did not want to depend on some other company for the means to deliver its applications and web services. They leaned on Firefox for a long time; if Firefox didn't exist, it's likely Chrome would have been created even earlier.
  But I don't understand your point about the browser wars. Are you trying to say that the last time around the browsers competed by adding incompatible javascript extensions? If that were the case, then what did Firefox add to the browser wars? I would argue that the browser wars have been fought on the basis of functionality, stability, security and speed for a while (what else is there to fight about?)
Acid by Pahroza · 2009-06-30 03:03 · Score: 2, Interesting

Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
1. Re:Acid by maxume · 2009-06-30 03:22 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Acid4 is even worse. And Acid5, I mean, make your browser work guys.
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
2. Re:Acid by Tom9729 · 2009-06-30 03:40 · Score: 1
  
  A little OT, but if you want to see something fun try acid3 in IE6. :)
3. Re:Acid by Colonel+Korn · 2009-06-30 04:23 · Score: 1
  
  Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
  Good enough for what, exactly?
  
  --
  "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
4. Re:Acid by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · 2009-06-30 05:29 · Score: 1
  
  Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
  Good enough for what, exactly?
  It is not good enough to have solved all their compliance edge cases targeted by the Acid test creators. I mean, that is what the acid tests are for, is to help the developers of Firefox and Webkit to fix compliance issues (and incidentally to help other browsers fix compliance issues).
5. Re:Acid by shutdown+-p+now · 2009-06-30 06:28 · Score: 1
  
  It totally sucks at XHTML 2.0 as well. And the linked XSLT 2.0 stylesheet didn't run correctly, either!
Here now by rjolley · 2009-06-30 03:04 · Score: 2, Informative

I think firefox 3.5 IS here now. I just went to getfirefox.com on osx and ubuntu and both show graphical links to download firefox 3.5. Downloading and going to 'about firefox' shows no indication that it is a release candidate.
Isn't this a little overkill? by Xaedalus · 2009-06-30 03:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Please excuse me for being a paltry light user of Firefox... but aren't you an outlier in this particular case? The most tabs I ever have open on Firefox is three, maybe four. IMHO, you're a power user and while your comments are insightful, I have to wonder whether or not your insights are of relevance to the average user of Firefox? I'm all for improvement, but if the improvement is only noticeable when you've got 30+tabs open a day and are burning through close to a gig of RAM to keep everything operating... then what good is the improvement to the average user?

--
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
1. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by bemymonkey · 2009-06-30 03:27 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I tend to agree with this assessment. I consider myself a power user when it comes to tabs, and I only rarely have more than 20 tabs open (and that's when I haven't checked Slashdot for 2 days and need to read every article/summary/comment I've missed), and then only for a short time. Do a lot of people really leave the browser running _all_ the time with dozens and dozens of tabs open? I can't really imagine that being the norm...
2. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by jefu · 2009-06-30 03:42 · Score: 1
  
  This instance of firefox (sometimes I have more than one running at once) has 45 tabs open and it is that low because I just pruned them down this morning. I often end up with about 80-100 tabs open, but that is usually only for a short time while I'm problem solving or trying to figure out some specific topic at which point I usually drop back down to the 40 or so range. Often at this point I need to restart firefox (because of the memory issues).
  My current minimum (tabs I always open in every browser instance and keep open) is 8, but has been as large as 12. I could cut this down to 4, but would end up reopening a few and keeping them open, so it seems pretty stable.
3. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:45 · Score: 1, Funny
  
  "The most tabs I ever have open on Firefox is three, maybe four."
  So... what browser do you use for watching porn?
4. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by SpinyNorman · 2009-06-30 03:46 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That guys usage does seem a bit strange, but each to their own!
  However, there are different use cases for tabs that result in different numbers of tabs open:
  e.g.
  1) User wants to keep a number of sites open all day for quick switching - e.g. mail, news, documentation, etc. This is probably what you are thinking of, and it most likely is a relatively small number of sites - less than a dozen, say.
  2) User wants to open a whole bunch of links off the sam page at once, since that's more convenient than flipping back and fro to open one read it, open the next, etc. Examples of this usage would be, for example opening search results (search engine, eBay, etc) or reading new posts on an online forum.
  I routinely (many times a day - searching for collectables - made a $1500 profit on one yesterday) open 40-50 tabs at a time for eBay search results since it's so much faster to quickly run down a list of links doing open-in-new-tab (in background) then reading/discarding them, as opposed to doing it one at a time.
5. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:48 · Score: 0
  
  While I agree that 120 tabs is a bit extreme, I routinely have 30+ tabs open and regularly run into memory problems with firefox. I think that while this doesn't affect the casual user, most people who use firefox (particularly for work) end up opening a lot of tabs, and I think that the 3 or 4 tabs is the unusual case rather than the 30+
6. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by cayenne8 · 2009-06-30 03:49 · Score: 1
  
  "I tend to agree with this assessment. I consider myself a power user when it comes to tabs, and I only rarely have more than 20 tabs open (and that's when I haven't checked Slashdot for 2 days and need to read every article/summary/comment I've missed), and then only for a short time. Do a lot of people really leave the browser running _all_ the time with dozens and dozens of tabs open? I can't really imagine that being the norm..."
  I'd have to say on average, I generally have 9-10 tabs open all the time when using FF.
  I also tend to keep all my computers at work/home on 24/7, and yes, the browser is always up. I usually have 5-6 computers up at home that I hit depending on what room I'm in. That doesn't include the servers I have going.
  
  --
  Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
7. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:59 · Score: 0
  
  I often keep a single tab open for days to a particular site so I don't have to login to it. All by itself, it doesn't consume much memory, but as I go to other sites in other windows, the memory is not released.
  It's not a massive problem, but I do periodically have to close firefox to get my memory back. ... Eh, what was I saying?
8. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by antdude · 2009-06-30 04:04 · Score: 1
  
  I use SeaMonkey and I sometimes have 30 tabs running. :)
  
  --
  Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
9. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Runaway1956 · 2009-06-30 04:07 · Score: 1
  
  I can't address "common usage" as I don't know WHAT the average user does with his browser.
  At this moment, I have Firefox (v.3.0.11)open in Ubuntu, two windows with about 30 tabs total. I have a sound issue with VirtualBox and Windows 7, almost all those tabs relate to that issue.
  Within VirtualBox, I'm just browsing in one FF (v.3.5 b4) window, and gaming in another window. The browsing window grows to as many as ten tabs, and shrinks down to 4 tabs. The gaming window grows to as many as 40 tabs, then shrinks down to 5 tabs.
  I've allocated 1 gig of memory to Windows, and FF uses 218M of that.
  Ubuntu has 2 gig of memory left at it's disposal, and FF uses 265M of memory.
  In total, I'm using about 1/2 gig of memory for FF, between two machines.
  The single most interesting thing about all that memory usage is, Ubuntu's windows have been open for about 4 days, and Windows browsers have been open for a little more than two days. The "memory leak" isn't as bad as it used to be, or I'd have had to close and reopen Firefox at least once within Windows.
  True, I'm probably not the "average" user.
  
  --
  "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
10. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:14 · Score: 0
  
  I'd hate to have your electricity bill
11. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by cayenne8 · 2009-06-30 04:24 · Score: 1
  
  "I'd hate to have your electricity bill"
  It isn't that bad actually....except for now in the summer. It has been HOT down here in New Orleans, with very little rain. We finally had a storm come through yesterday that helped cool things off.
  This morning, was the first time in at least 2-3 weeks where my downstairs AC unit had actually shut off due to it reaching the temp on the thermostat.
  I'm on levelized billing, but, that was from previous owners...I'm sure it will go up a little, but, I'm only hitting about $220 or so a month on power. Back in an older place with just window units, I easily hit $335 or so a month just trying to keep it cool (and not on levelized billing). During the winters tho...my bill was like $60/mo.
  So, with AC bills....the computers, tv and other electronics are pretty much incidental.
  
  --
  Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
12. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Hatta · 2009-06-30 04:57 · Score: 1
  
  Who cares what the average user does? Shouldn't an excellent browser cater to the needs of the most demanding user? The average user isn't going to use more than 4 or 8 cores and maybe 4GB of RAM. You don't hear Linux developers bitch about supporting many dozens of cores and tons of RAM. Does Firefox strive to be good, or just "good enough"?
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
13. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Hatta · 2009-06-30 05:18 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Yes, why would I ever shut my browser down? I'm just going to need it again. Generally when I'm reading a forum, i'll middle click on a bunch of posts to queue them up for reading. Then, when I want to reply to one, I'll open a bunch more tabs so I can double check my facts. Often, on those tabs I opened for reference, I'll read something new and interesting, so I'll pop open a bunch more tabs from those pages.
  Do I really need all those tabs open at once? No. Often times I wont even finish reading the forum I started out with. But I don't know which of those tabs I'm going to want to read. Keeping them all open at once, and in rough chronological order makes my workflow (or funflow?) much more convenient. I have the RAM to keep 500 tabs open at once, so I do.
  
  --
  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
14. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by mapkinase · 2009-06-30 05:25 · Score: 1
  
  The problem is not in the number of tabs opened simultaneously, the problem is in the total number of tabs opened during one session.
  If you watch three seasons of Dexter straight from tudou, opening and closing tabs as you go, you will up to 600Mbs before the end of the first season.
  
  --
  I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
15. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by vux984 · 2009-06-30 05:33 · Score: 1
  
  The average user isn't going to use more than 4 or 8 cores and maybe 4GB of RAM.
  True. But the average user still has a Celeron 1.4 with 512MB.
16. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by AmiMoJo · 2009-06-30 06:25 · Score: 1
  
  If anything this is an example of how well Firefox scales. If you are the kind of person who wants 120 tabs open for long periods then it will do it. Sure, you need a computer up to spec to cope with that, but what did you expect? No amount of clever coding is going to make your ZX Spectrum do what you want on it's 48k RAM. It isn't bloat, it's coping with what you throw at it.
  Besides, 1.5GB isn't that bad considering that a 2GB DDR2 memory module costs less than £20/$40 and you clearly get a lot of benefits from using Firefox in that way.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
17. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 06:55 · Score: 0
  
  You don't hear Linux developers bitch about supporting many dozens of cores and tons of RAM
  you don't?
18. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by msimm · 2009-06-30 07:08 · Score: 1
  
  As you become more comfortable retrieving your information from the web you'll slowly find yourself using tabs as short-term bookmarks (otherwise your actual bookmarks will become unmanageable). I typically have between 20 and 40 open and I used to make apologies like a lot of other users saying I shouldn't have so many open (so memory issues are my fault) but I stopped feeling this way recently because I realized this is a more natural way to organize information then the bookmark paradigm. It's like leaving notes out on your desk instead of filing them.
  
  --
  Quack, quack.
19. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by l0cust · 2009-06-30 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think you should generalize it that way. I don't consider myself a power user (maybe on the boundary of it) but I inevitably end up having ~100 tabs open for reasons very similar to what GP pointed out. Keeping the tabs open and letting the browser run for days on end is not as rare as you may believe. Add to that the tendency of opening forum threads in different tabs, throw in some online publication/books/manga sites, documentation for whatever project you may be working on, links for interesting stuff you came across and left for reading up later, and you get to a similar scenario.
  
  --
  Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
20. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by ckaminski · 2009-06-30 07:48 · Score: 1
  
  I maxed out at 185 once, at 2.1GB of total memory used. Unfortunately, coming in in the morning is painful for me after the virus scanner has shuffled all of the firefox pages to disk, and my poor 5400 RPM laptop drive can't cope. I really do spend more time waiting for my computer to catch up to me, than I do typing.
  
  But the benefit is that my tab structure is organized by project in a hierarchy (using tab sidebar extension). I have deep trees of projects and information all associated with one another, and it's a running state of my work. Firefox crashes a lot less often these days, so my tab usage has grown commensurately.
21. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by complete+loony · 2009-06-30 12:24 · Score: 1
  
  What I would really like to see in firefox (or an extension) for this type of use case is using tabs more like an automatic temporary bookmarking system.
  AFAIK firefox already keeps pages in a number of different states between "rendered and ready to display" to "must re-download from host website". When you close a tab or navigate to a new page, the last page may stay at "rendered and ready to display" for quite a while before being cleaned up.
  If I haven't even looked at a specific tab for an hour or so, there's no point keeping it ready to display. So go ahead and free up some memory, heck even flush the page state to the disk cache, just don't discard it until I close the tab.
  Actually flushing the page to disk cache isn't a silly idea, in the event of a crash the browser could then reload the page without hitting the network...
  
  --
  09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
22. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 13:11 · Score: 0
  
  bemymonkey wrote:
  >
  > I tend to agree with this assessment. I consider myself a power
  > user when it comes to tabs, and I only rarely have more than 20
  > tabs open (and that's when I haven't checked Slashdot for 2 days
  > and need to read every article/summary/comment I've missed), and
  > then only for a short time. Do a lot of people really leave the
  > browser running _all_ the time with dozens and dozens of tabs
  > open? I can't really imagine that being the norm...
  I routinely have about 100 or more tabs open in opera. There's no way firefox could deal with half as many tabs without choking.
23. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by ottffssent · 2009-06-30 15:57 · Score: 1
  
  Sure I leave my browser running all the time. FF runs from a few minutes after I log in until Windows gets flaky and slow weeks-to-months later. Browser tabs are a great to-do list, with context and history. Why would I ever close my browser? 5 seconds to load it up (or 3 minutes, if it's restoring my ~100 tabs) is a waste of time, and RAM is cheap.
  
  --
  High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
24. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by Skye16 · 2009-06-30 23:02 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Actually, you can buy 2x2GB DDR2 for 45$ - at least in the states. The point is, it's cheap. Really cheap. Almost "yo momma" cheap. Or at least my momma cheap. Either way, it's cheap.
3.5 has officially launched now by 117 · 2009-06-30 03:19 · Score: 1

If you go to either mozilla.com or getfirefox.com they now offer Firefox 3.5 as their main offering, not a Release Candidate
1. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by ak_hepcat · 2009-06-30 03:28 · Score: 1
  
  Yup. my "check for updates" is saying "download 3.5 now!" and I am. Slowly, to be sure, but i am.
  
  --
  Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
2. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:28 · Score: 1
  
  Yes. I'm using FF3.5 now.
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
3. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by JayAEU · 2009-06-30 04:14 · Score: 1
  
  On a side note, it's a bit unfortunate that Google Gears (along with a number of other add-ons) isn't compatible with FF3.5, yet. :(
4. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by Ardipithecus · 2009-06-30 04:52 · Score: 1
  
  Also from Help / Check Updates, which lists the add-ons that won't work with the new version
5. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by barath_s · 2009-06-30 19:03 · Score: 1
  
  Re : Google gears
  From http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/06/30/firefox-35-takes-you-back-to-a-time-before-browser-add-ons/
  Update: Mozillaâ(TM)s add-ons director, Mike Nguyen, emailed [Ha] to say that Google had a version of Gears ready that was compatible with Firefox 3.5, but it was delayed due to some âoelast-minute bugs.â There should be a new version out next week, he said
  and many add-ons seem to be fine or can be forced to work with dev builds or Nighly Tester Tools https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6543
  I'm still waiting on google gears, myself.
6. Re:3.5 has officially launched now by barath_s · 2009-06-30 19:17 · Score: 1
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility# - The detailed report shows pretty decent compatibility.
  and i should have been clearer, gears doesn't yet appear to work even with nightly tester tools
Crashes with lots of tabs on Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 0

At least in Firefox 3.0 on Linux, this bug causes crashes almost every day: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=263160 - Linux specific and a major issue for those of use who like lots of tabs open at once and are trying not to use Windows - anything over 50 tabs runs a risk of crashes it seems.
Let's see if 3.5 has fixed this - I do hope so, as the new features sound good.
video tag by FunkyELF · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 1

I saw some of the stuff they do with the video tag and tried it out on my machine. http://people.mozilla.com/~prouget/demos/

It seems like they are encouraging doing elaborate things with this tag. I'm hoping that this won't escalate into what we have now with flash.
Even if it isn't as much of a resource hog for playing video, once people start rotating / clipping 20 videos on a single page it'll bring your system down.
100% cpu after page has loaded by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:25 · Score: 0

meh, i get 100% cpu usage after the page has loaded on Firefox for 20secs, disabled all plugins/addons still persists
i guess they just moved the memory usage problems to the CPU
oh well, back to .11 i go
One new feature I'm pleased about.... by 117 · 2009-06-30 03:26 · Score: 1

...is that Firefox finally has an 'open a new tab' icon by default (adjacent to the last open tab in the list), I know that you can add an icon yourself, and that double-clicking the tab bar opens a new tab, but I know plenty of people that weren't even aware that tabbed browsing is a feature of Firefox as it wasn't obvious!
1. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 03:37 · Score: 1
  
  I've always used ctrl-t to open new, blank tabs, and ctrl-leftclick to open links in new tabs. And since tabbed browsing has been hyped up for ages, I don't see how people could not know. :P
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
2. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by 0100010001010011 · 2009-06-30 03:41 · Score: 1
  
  So... what's the about:config to turn it OFF?. I can type faster than I can press the button so Ctrl-T works perfectly fine for me.
3. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by 117 · 2009-06-30 04:02 · Score: 1
  
  Same here. Unlike for you, I, and no doubt most others on slashdot, hype about internet browsers tends to completely bypass most 'normal' people - I meet plenty of people who've had Firefox installed for a long time by a third person who simply told them 'it's better/faster/more secure than Internet Explorer', but these people had no idea they could do other things like tabbed browsing (that previously they couldn't do with IE, and as they haven't gone back to it they're still none the wiser) as it wasn't an obvious feature until now.
4. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by Skrynesaver · 2009-06-30 04:08 · Score: 1
  
  Hi pdboddy Try using middle button to open link in new tab ;)
  
  --
  "Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
5. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:22 · Score: 0
  
  OH HOW INNOVATIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!
6. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 04:31 · Score: 1
  
  Assuming one has a middle mouse button. As it is, I dislike using the scroll-wheel to click anything. :P
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
7. Re:One new feature I'm pleased about.... by pdboddy · 2009-06-30 04:35 · Score: 1
  
  I don't see myself as less or more normal than the next person. But when I heard the hype about Firefox, I went looking to find out why. I won't blindly switch companies/browsers/brands on the say so of one or two "third person"s.
  
  And I tend to update my software on a regular basis. Have you ever updated Firefox? Noticed that it popped two tabs when it was done, your "start page" and "Congratulations, your firefox is updated"? It's not that easy to miss that FF had tabs.
  
  And IE had an "add on" that added tabs that was popular for a while, surely people might've noticed? :P
  
  --
  Julie Moult is an idiot.
Lots of problems... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 03:41 · Score: 0

I tried 3.5 in 2 different RC's (RC1 and RC3). I have a considerable amount of extensions, and both versions give the same issue: scrollbar suddenly jumping to the left (huh?), anchor-elements no longer working and my navigation toolbar suddenly emptying.
I use 3.1 beta 3 right now, and that at least works satisfactory. No 3.5 for me...
1. Re:Lots of problems... by slyborg · 2009-06-30 05:50 · Score: 1
  
  I, too, have considerable amount of extensions, have run all of the betas and RCs for 3.5 and am running the final release on Mac OS X 10.5, and have seen nothing like this. In fact, I'm using Nightly Tester Tool to run about half of my extensions that are still not updated for 3.5.
  My guess? One of your considerable amount of extensions is causing your problem. You could find out, but you apparently don't care that much to find out which, but you are sufficiently motivated to post on /. (admittedly much easier). But why? Your data was worthless, and since you posted AC, it doesn't seem like you get any personal satisfaction out of venting your spleen.
  AC, I am disappoint. There are standards. There should be a goatse link here, or at least some kind of real platform troll.
64 bit? by bobbuck · 2009-06-30 03:44 · Score: 1

Is there a 64 bit version that I'm not seeing? Do I have to build it?
1. Re:64 bit? by msaavedra · 2009-06-30 04:44 · Score: 1
  
  I've been looking too, but I don't see it anywhere. Have they ever released 64-bit versions on the Mozilla/Firefox website? I've always just gotten the version supplied by my distro.
  
  --
  "Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it."
  --Henry David Thoreau
Explain to me again why this is not Evil by Saint+Stephen · 2009-06-30 03:52 · Score: 2, Insightful

Okay, at one time, there were standards around CSS and DOM being implemented, and Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards, and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time, and that was deemed Evil.
Now there are standards around HTML5 being proposed, but probably 10 years off, or at least way off, and Firefox and Google are implementing a version of these standars before they are standards, and are trying to become the Defactor Quirks Mode way things are done for a long time, and that is deemed Good.
If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
1. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by maxume · 2009-06-30 03:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Mozilla (and Netscape before it) have long implemented things that are not in standards. This isn't what causes problems. What causes problems is not supporting the standard after it is released.
  Really, gathering real world information about how an idea works is a valuable input to the standards process.
  
  --
  Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
2. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by Millennium · 2009-06-30 04:13 · Score: 1
  
  There's something of a chicken-and-egg problem here: a standard has to have implementations before it's accepted as a standard. This is how the W3C and WHAT-WG both work, and there are good reasons for it: the attempt to implement a standard often produces extremely valuable feedback for how the standard should work, which in turn prompts revisions.
  In most cases, however, IE has not "implemented a version of those standards before they were standards." More often, IE used rejected ideas or even made stuff up that it never proposed, all for the sake of messing up compatibility and thus promoting lock-in.
3. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by paralaxcreations · 2009-06-30 06:10 · Score: 1
  
  If it quacks like a duck, it IS a duck.
  But if it hasn't quacked yet, what is it?
  Sure, Google/Mozilla COULD be preparing to put themselves in an MS-like position by implementing standards before they're set, and they COULD do what MS did and refuse to change their implementation for the next 10 years, even when the standard is revised.
  But will they? Seeing their track record, I would bet against it. In fact, I would bet on them being the early adopters, providing the necessary feedback to bring the standard from the drawing board to reality.
  What worries me most isn't what Moz/Goog are doing, but what MS ISN'T doing or WON'T be doing. If HTML5 isn't in IE8, when do you think they will implement? IE9? IE10? Seeing how long it took them to properly support CSS2 (kinda), I would bet on HTML5 being standard for a good 3 years before IE implements it (or some bastardized version of it)...which, if their market share remains even close to what it is, means it is useless in any practical sense. Even once they DO implement HTML5, we have to wait for IE6, IE7 and IE8 to die out.
  So yeah, if Moz/Goog implementing HTML5 early helps get that ball rolling, I'm all for it if it means I may actually be able to use it within my lifetime.
4. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by arevos · 2009-06-30 06:24 · Score: 1
  
  and Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards, and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time, and that was deemed Evil.
  Supporting future standards before they've gone through the full W3C process is not evil. Microsoft were criticised for implementing their own standards, screwing up existing standards, and taking too long to discard failed standards.
  
  Now there are standards around HTML5 being proposed, but probably 10 years off, or at least way off
  The HTML5 standard is meant to be implemented incrementally. The sections which browsers are implementing are generally pretty stable.
  
  and Firefox and Google are implementing a version of these standars
  And Opera and Apple. Even Microsoft have taken a couple of APIs from HTML5.
5. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by Eighty7 · 2009-06-30 07:16 · Score: 1
  
  If it quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
  A lot of things are illegal only if you're a monopoply. For example the only reason Apple gets away with bundling, FUD, price jacking etc is because they don't have the market distorting power that MS does. Distorting the market is what is illegal -- using a monopoly in one area to kill competition in another area. Apple won't get an automatic monopoly in browsers by bundling.
6. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by mqduck · 2009-06-30 08:50 · Score: 1
  
  In other words, it also needs to walk like a duck.
  
  --
  Property is theft.
7. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by VGPowerlord · 2009-06-30 09:14 · Score: 1
  
  Mozilla (and Netscape before it) have long implemented things that are not in standards. This isn't what causes problems. What causes problems is not supporting the standard after it is released.
  Exactly, it's one of the two things that killed Netscape 4!
  The other thing being IE started being bundled with Windows...
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
8. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by SurenPala · 2009-06-30 09:57 · Score: 1
  
  You are forgetting the fact that IE is still the dominant browser (65%) and not even their newest version supports any of these features. 17% of internet users are still using IE6, 41% IE7, and only 7% for IE8. Just think how long it will take before 90% of users are using a browser that supports HTML5 and until then very few people will support it, unless they can specifically target Firefox 3.5+. I suspect Windows 9 will be out by the time that happens.
9. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by TheRaven64 · 2009-06-30 21:47 · Score: 1
  
  HTML5 is being developed in a way that is closer to IETF standards than existing W3C standards. For something to go in the final spec, it needs two independent implementations. Previous HTML specs have had stuff thrown in because it looks useful, with no real thought as to whether it's possible to implement. If Mozilla, WebKit, Opera and Microsoft did not implement parts of HTML 5, then the spec would not exist.
  
  --
  I am TheRaven on Soylent News
10. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by jonadab · 2009-07-01 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  Yeah.
  
  Personally I think HTML5 is fundamentally a move in the wrong direction. Does anybody really want to go back to non-wellformed markup? What a PAIN, _especially_ if you're composing a page dynamically including some user-supplied components and want to check that said components can't screw up the whole page in deviously egregious ways. With legacy SGML malarke, you pretty much have to build a complete parser into your code. With XHTML, you can check for basic well-formedness in about six lines of Perl. (This doesn't guarantee validity, but if you're serving as text/html that really doesn't matter. It *does* guarantee that the user-supplied content can't close out the containing elements and diddle around in the rest of the page, among other things.) Having realized the benefits of wellformed markup, why would we EVER want to go back? No thanks.
  
  And then there's XHTML2, which appears to want to change as many things as possible, just for the sake of it. Meh.
  
  The only thing I really want in a new version of HTML is the ability to put block-level elements within paragraphs. That's all I want. Add that to XHTML 1.0, call the result XHTML 1.0.1, and I'm good. Seriously.
  
  Video? I still don't understand what's wrong with just linking to an MPEG and letting the operating system decide what software to use to play it. That's worked very well on every major operating system since 1994 and, if the user has decent video-playback software installed, provides a MUCH better UI than any of the in-browser video playing schemes I've ever seen, including this new one.
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
11. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by jonadab · 2009-07-01 06:39 · Score: 1
  
  > Microsoft implemented a version of those standards before they were standards,
  > and became the Defacto Quirks Mode way things were done for a long time,
  
  You left out the middle steps, wherein the standards were officially released, and Microsoft categorically refused to update its implementation for roughly a decade.
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Available from the built-in updater by Nakor+BlueRider · 2009-06-30 03:52 · Score: 1

Windows users can go to "Help > Check for updates..." in FireFox now to find the 3.5 update. It also has a button to test which extensions will need to be disabled before you actually run the update on that page.
first rule of troll club by viralMeme · 2009-06-30 03:55 · Score: 0, Troll

When ever FF is mentioned on slashdot always bring up the memory usage 'problem' or CPU usage FUD !!!

"meh, i get 100% cpu usage after the page has loaded on Firefox"

The lowercase i's are a nice touch .. :)
Already Updated by ITJC68 · 2009-06-30 04:01 · Score: 1

It is available through the software update in the browser. I find it faster. Still have to play with some of the new settings but so far very nice improvements. Best of all my addons all worked right away!!!
What is a browser? by Bragador · 2009-06-30 04:14 · Score: 1

I'm not sure my title will make enough people read this but not a lot of people know that they even own an Internet browser. Simply watch this real and pathetic investigation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3vv0_RNTM8 . I'm dead serious, we live in our own world...
Wait, What? (Re:But...what happened to Beta 4?) by EXTomar · 2009-06-30 04:20 · Score: 1

According to that page you cited, April 24 is Beta 4 and according to the release notes for 3.5b4 it was released April 27. Although a little off I'm not sure it qualifies as scorn or says their attitude is "...can't be bothered to update their own schedule". Especially since it says right there "Future date are estimates" on a page authored April 19.
1 minute upgrade by iplayfast · 2009-06-30 04:21 · Score: 3, Informative

That worked out really well. I read the blurb, it said it was available. Did the check for updates, it downloaded and restarted, and then I went into the story.
All upgrades should be so easy!
Re:Memory by TaoPhoenix · 2009-06-30 04:25 · Score: 1

Do those little utilities we used to use with Win95 memory leaks work on this, or will FF not let go of it?

--
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
You print? To Paper? by gbutler69 · 2009-06-30 04:27 · Score: 1

WTF? Nobody does that anymore!

--
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Step one: Open Text Editor by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:29 · Score: 0

Step two: fail.
yeah, there's no such configuration option... apparently you need to edit the userChrome.css file?!
http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=el&comments_parentId=372871&forumId=1
bleh
Still using NCSA Mosaic by slyborg · 2009-06-30 04:29 · Score: 1

Indeed, I -am- the only one still using the Mac-only closed-source browser that invented Web browsing 5 years before iCab....
Memory Problems Confirmed by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 04:33 · Score: 0

I love it when people claim something doesn't have certain problems, then their next versions says they fixed those problems they had claimed not to have.
Firefox does this. Under the new performance features it says: "With a new management function in place, Firefox keeps memory usage under control. The XPCOM cycle collector continuously cleans up unused memory. Plus, hundreds of memory leaks have been remedied."
How can they fix hundreds of memory leaks if the last version didn't have any?
1. Re:Memory Problems Confirmed by NeoSkandranon · 2009-06-30 04:46 · Score: 1
  
  I'll be curious to see how this works out. My standard demo of firefox eating memory like a fat family at a pizza buffet is to leave gmail (chat enabled) along with slashdot open all night. In the morning, voila, 600 megs of memory utilized.
  
  --
  If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Video support seems excellent by Front+Line+Assembly · 2009-06-30 04:40 · Score: 1

Just tested firefox 3.5 (or actually started using), and the video mode seems excellent.
No flash or anything else and seems to work splendidly. I can't imagine why anybody would be against this (I mean users, I know several companies that of course oppose anything they can't control).
1. Re:Video support seems excellent by Front+Line+Assembly · 2009-06-30 04:43 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  A quick addition: Right clicking on the video offers a link "save video". How neat is that?
  I know again that companies DRM-crap and 100+ years copyrighted PROPERTY won't be pleased with this, but so what. Youtube, vimeo et.al. are full of amateur videos etc that would benefit from this.
  And again from a users perspective this option is a godsend. Shame that the copyright-craze has gone too far :(
Tilting at windmills... by Toonol · 2009-06-30 04:54 · Score: 2

I know it's a real long shot, but I don't suppose they added an option to turn off the awesomebar?
1. Re:Tilting at windmills... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 07:58 · Score: 0
  
  http://www.google.com/search?q=disable+awesomebar
2. Re:Tilting at windmills... by LiquidFire_HK · 2009-06-30 11:41 · Score: 1
  
  They sort of did, actually. There's an option for what the bar should suggest when typing. Options are history, bookmarks, none or both (the default).
3. Re:Tilting at windmills... by d3ac0n · 2009-06-30 15:05 · Score: 1
  
  Nope.
  Although you can get MUCH closer to normal (normal = pre 3.0) URLbar behavior with 3.5 by setting various options in about:config.
  Frankly, I still think it sucks. Even though it's better, they should have stuck with a normal URLbar. I'm waiting for someone to come out with a total conversion add-on that simply DELETES the "awesome bar" code from your install of FF 3.x and installs the old 2.0 code.
  Not only would the browser be significantly faster, we might get a sane URL bar back again!
  
  --
  Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
4. Re:Tilting at windmills... by jonadab · 2009-07-01 06:45 · Score: 1
  
  Well, you could install Seamonkey...
  
  --
  Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Really, really, really slow to start?? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:00 · Score: 0

Just did the upgrade to 3.5 and I'm wondering if I'm the only one seeing a problem with it being very slow to start execution - or at least become visible. According to my watch it's taking a shade less than 4 minutes (four minutes!) to show itself after clicking on the desktop icon. The WinXP Task Mgr processes tab shows the firefox process using 40% to 50% of the CPU for that entire time while not showing on the application tab. After it finally starts displaying the speed seems fine. WinXP, all updates, single 3GHz processor, 2Gb memory.
1. Re:Really, really, really slow to start?? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 05:35 · Score: 0
  
  Forgot to mention that I did disable all plug-ins/add-ons without speeding things up. Three trials all had the identical result with nothing being displayed until firefox.exe had run for about four minutes at about 50% CPU and completed approximately 120K I/O reads. I gave up and returned to using 3.0.11. Thank you Norton GoBack!!
Acid Tests by krygny · 2009-06-30 05:07 · Score: 1

Looks like everybody's trying out their new installations on the Acid Tests 'cause it's /.'d.

--
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
A few notes on the OS X version by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · 2009-06-30 05:12 · Score: 1

Well, I downloaded the final version and played with it on OS X for a bit. I usually use Safari on OS X because I have a hard time getting over certain deficiencies of Firefox and Opera. The good things are javascript performance is now quite good, better than the Safari 4 release by a significant margin (although still lagging the Webkit nightlies as one would expect). It's still not there for the ACID3 test, but it's getting close. It still is a little less responsive, but nothing too significant. They haven't cloned the text box resizing feature yet, so I still need to dig up an extension to do that, and of all things basic UI components should be built in. The grammar checker does not work at all. The spelling checker fails to use the default spellchecking service, so it does not know any of the words I've trained OS X to recognize and which work in all my other programs. All the other system services are likewise unavailable.
In short, it' better in all the ways one would expect, but they've still done nothing to make it work like a truly native application which makes it a second class citizen for power users. This is sort of ironic since the plug-in extensions to Firefox normally make it ideal for power users on other platforms. It's too bad they ignore all OS wide plug-ins on OS X.
1. Re:A few notes on the OS X version by zxsqkty · 2009-06-30 16:48 · Score: 1
  
  On OSX you should take a moment to check out Camino. It's normally a couple of steps behind the latest Firefox release, but it's far more Mac-like with full support for the 'Services' menu, Keychain, speelchequer, etc. To automatically get the latest Camino nightlies that are somewhat closer to the Firefox releases, you may be interested in CaminoKnight.
  You may miss a few common Firefox plugins, but at least Adblock is there...
  
  --
  Caution: May contain nuts.
Disabling font smoothing on Linux? by gerkk · 2009-06-30 05:30 · Score: 1

I wonder if there is any possibility to turn off (forced) font smoothing in Firefox 3.5 on Linux.
1. Re:Disabling font smoothing on Linux? by gerkk · 2009-06-30 07:05 · Score: 1
  
  I found the solution: Starting point: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6986051&postcount=7 Replace 10-hinting-slight.conf with 10-hinting-full.conf.
No speed boost for modern computer users... by hackel · 2009-06-30 05:32 · Score: 1

If you're using a modern computer with a 64-bit cpu and a modern 64-bit operating system, you won't get any of the speed benefits of FF3.5 because TraceMonkey does not yet work. This is extremely irritating, to say the least! Mozilla's solution is to run the 32-bit version on top of your 64-bit OS, but this isn't really a solution at all...
It's amazing how many developers are still stuck in the stone age (comparatively, in computer terms)... I wish I had the technical knowledge to help fix something like that, but I imagine JIT compiling takes some serious expertise.
Realtime download statistics by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 06:30 · Score: 0

Mozilla's also put up a page that tracks downloads in real time, plotting their location on a map as well as maintaining running totals. As of this posting, Firefox 3.5 was already over 1 million downloads worldwide. See http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/
Private browsing mode by l0cust · 2009-06-30 07:27 · Score: 1

We knew it was coming. After chrome's incognito mode, everyone knew that people like to watch pr0n without worrying about the sites showing up in the awesome/whatever-the-fuck-is-the-name-bar! I have a shortcut (chrome -incognito) just for that reason but now it seems like I can do all that right from Firefox!

It's good but, IMHO, not perfect though. The private browsing mode saves+hides your current tabs and starts a new session in the new mode, and when you switch it off, it loads all those tabs all over again! It's perfect for casual users but for freaks like me who have close to 100 tabs open on an average, it's not the right way to go. I would have preferred it to be done the way chrome handles it - open the private mode in a completely new window and run both the sessions simultaneously depending upon which window the user is browsing on. I hope they tweak it soon or someone makes an extension to run it that way.

--
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
Swap is not for SSDs by tepples · 2009-06-30 07:29 · Score: 1

Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB
How often does the operating system write to the virtual memory allocated to Firefox when one runs it on a low-cost subnotebook PC with a 4 GB SSD?
I modded you down. by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 09:18 · Score: 0

Because of the stupid things you said here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1285879&cid=28516073

Things like Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq War, this TSA bullshit and countless others simply do not happen in other countries.
ORLY?
Note to moderators: don't worry about "unfair" metamoderations if you're interested in following this guy around and lowering his karma- I've been doing stuff like this for years and I always get mod points ^_^
So still no MSI for Windows by Ilgaz · 2009-06-30 09:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

May I really ask who or what Firefox developers fight(!) with? Like or not, MSI is the way to get into Enterprise, a signed MSI is even better. In fact, most of .exe installers you see these days are actually MSI packaged in .exe.
It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software, at least in a FTP folder like "alternate_installers" which admins will pull msi from. It became even more interesting since I found this: http://wix.sourceforge.net/ , yes open source from MS, hosted by Sourceforge and it actually works. What does MSI do? Hurt feelings of the developers there? I really can't understand. It is basically RPM for Windows which gives some bonus features like repair etc. to ordinary users but it is huge deal on enterprise.
ps: Same thing on OS X but we are kinda fine with Drag&Drop installs while it even matters at home sized networks. A .pkg would be way better. Anyway, no gigantic enterprise sized OS X networks around like the Windows ones.
There is a nice extension by Dr.Syshalt · 2009-06-30 10:00 · Score: 1

...extension called Taboo - "the cure for tabitis"
1. Re:There is a nice extension by jp10558 · 2009-07-01 23:03 · Score: 1
  
  Hmm, that might be useful if I used Firefox. But for all tab users, why would that be better than having the tab *if* the built in tab function worked better? In Opera I just use the windows panel and can quick find any tab, and the full title is written out. It's generally as good or better even than having the tabs on the left side of the screen (or right side). For quick use I might use the Window menu, but I've found the panel even more useful. Of course, this would mean I could generally get rid of my tabs alltogether, but I use them both due to habit.
  
  --
  Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
The real bug is that FF uses SQLite by knorthern+knight · 2009-06-30 10:13 · Score: 1

The root cause of the problem is that FF uses SQLite. Real databases (even "Lite" versions), are paranoid about file integrity, and therefore do file commits via fsync(), or whatever, almost every time they do file writes. The FF developers brought this on themselves when they included SQLite as an integral part of Firefox. This is a browser, not a database, folks. Why the bleep does it need an SQL database? And how long before the Russian Business Network starts running SQL injection attacks against Firefox?
I remember several years ago, when the browser was called Mozilla 0.95. Besides a browser, it had email and usenet news and web development tools and it was big/bloated/slow, and people were making "about:kitchen sink" jokes. Firefox was forked out of Mozilla and presented as the lightweight lean-and-mean *WEB BROWSER* that people really wanted. I think it's time for another such fork. Firefox is an OK operating system, but it lacks a lightweight web browser.
I'm not a programmer, but if I had a team of programmers reporting to me, and a budget to pay them with, I'd start a Firefox fork. First to go would be SQLite, and I'd revert "abortion bar" to the previous Firefox behaviour.

--

I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
1. Re:The real bug is that FF uses SQLite by Rich0 · 2009-06-30 14:38 · Score: 1
  
  Couldn't agree with your general sentiments - Firefox is turning far too much into a "platform". Honestly, I could care less for AJAX 95% of the time as well - it tends to break almost all of the time if you aren't using the specific browser and OS versions it was originally targeted at. AJAX is used just so that the site developers can brag about it most of the time.
  However, I really don't have any issues with using a SQL-based storage system. I mean, if you need to persistently store all kinds of data on disk, why not use some libraries written by people who've mastered it? The only thing I would do is ask the upstream provider to make the fsyncs a configurable option and then turn it off.
  I really wish I could configure my OS to just ignore fsyncs issued by anything that wasn't running as root. I've got a server running quite a bit of stuff on software-based raid5. It works just fine until some program starts doing fsyncs every 15 seconds forcing the drives to start seeking like mad. If I didn't want a write cache I could just disable it at the OS level.
  The funny thing is that half the time it LOWERS data-integrity. I use this server as a mythtv backend among other things and when mythtv forces an fsync it ends up blocking the disk, which then causes buffer overruns, which means dropped video data. Once I patched that out of the source it runs smooth as silk. And the only downside is that if the power dies that instead of losing 5 minutes of TV waiting for the power to come back and for everything to boot (from computers to satellite receivers / etc) I lose up to 5.5 minutes instead (anything not committed to disk). Big deal - the system ends up re-recording anything it can, and anything that airs only once is undoubtedly available online somewhere.
  Fsync should ONLY be used by things like databases, and then only when you need to coordinate with stuff that is happening on a different box. Things like barriers and transactions are better solutions. The big thing that linux lacks is transactional filesystem operations so that software can just tell the OS what level of isolation/integrity each activity needs and the OS can deliver it in the most efficient way.
Microsoft does not want to develop IE by Anonymous Coward · 2009-06-30 10:51 · Score: 0

Developing IE would be suicidal for Microsoft. Microsoft does not want apps like Google Docs to perform.
Microsoft has intentionally refused to develop IE and any non-Windows technology.
Firefox 3.0 will offer the MSI installer by viralMeme · 2009-06-30 21:23 · Score: 1

"It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software"

Mozilla Firefox version 3.0 will be offering the much requested MSI installer which will enable the end user to install the Firefox web browsing software application on multiple computers at the same point of time
I hated the awesome bar too by cyclomedia · 2009-06-30 21:34 · Score: 1

but have since grown to love it. If you bookmark your favourite sites but still clear private data on exit (history especially) then the awesome bar only lists sites in your favourites (or current session) when typing in, making it a lot more managable and trainable. so now when i start firefox s is slashdot, e is ebay and n is bbc news, nice!

--
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.