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Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed

Posted by timothy on 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.

26 of 436 comments (clear)

  1. As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · · 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 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Firefox really needs a multiprocess architecture.

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    2. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by oldspewey · · 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.

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      If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
    3. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by fredrik70 · · Score: 5, Informative

      according to this test is seems quite alright...

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      if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
    4. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · · 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!

    5. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Alphager · · 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.

    6. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Darkness404 · · 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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    7. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Daetrin · · 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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    8. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Da+Fokka · · 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.

    9. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by koreaman · · 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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    10. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by Anonymous Coward · · 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)?

    11. Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... by johnlcallaway · · 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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  2. What about Slashdot? by macbeth66 · · 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.

  3. Re:HTML 5 and Javascript by ikefox · · 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

  4. Actually, REAL geeks ... by SpooForBrains · · Score: 5, Funny

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

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  5. And more than that! by The_mad_linguist · · 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.

  6. Re:A Bug No One Mentions by RebelWebmaster · · 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.

  7. Re:Softpedia claims to have it already by pdboddy · · 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. :)

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  8. Re:"A nonprofit foundation" by christopherfinke · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Nonprofit" doesn't imply a lack of revenue.

  9. Re:I hope they fixed printing by A.+B3ttik · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's a setting in your OS, dude, not in FF. Like most programs, FF just implements the existing PRINT framework.

  10. Competition by koreaman · · 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.

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    Le français vous intéresse?
  11. Isn't this a little overkill? by Xaedalus · · 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?

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    1. Re:Isn't this a little overkill? by bemymonkey · · 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...

  12. Re:no sense of humor today, mods? by clickclickdrone · · 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?

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  13. Re:Explain to me again why this is not Evil by maxume · · 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.

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  14. So still no MSI for Windows by Ilgaz · · 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.