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Mozilla Rolls Out Firefox 3.6 RC, Nears Final
CWmike writes "Mozilla has shipped a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6 that, barring problems, will become the final, finished version of the upgrade. Firefox 3.6 RC1, which followed a run of betas that started in early November, features nearly 100 bug fixes from the fifth beta that Mozilla issued Dec. 17. The fixes resolved numerous crash bugs, including one that brought down the browser when it was steered to Yahoo's front page. Another fix removed a small amount of code owned by Microsoft from Firefox. The code was pointed out by a Mozilla contributor, and after digging, another developer found the original Microsoft license agreement. 'Amusingly enough, it's actually really permissive. Really the only part that's problematic is the agreement to "include the copyright notice ... on your product label and as a part of the sign-on message for your software product,"' wrote Kyle Huey on Mozilla's Bugzilla. Even so, others working on the bug said the code needed to be replaced with Mozilla's own."
Ahh, slashdot. Come for the condescension, stay for the pedantry. Unpriveleged users don't get offered or notified of updates in 3.5. You can't even use the built in facility to manually check for an update. It is actually less secure to use Firefox as an unpriveleged user than it is to run as an admin unless you actively go and see what the latest release is.
Dollars to dimes, the Microsoft code was from a Chinese contractor who stole it from Netscape.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It was reference code made widely available by a Microsoft technical evangelist in 1999. The contractor's probably a CEO by now, and quite capable of assigning blame of his own accord.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The summary rambled on about bug fixes and other things that tend not to matter to the end product of FF3.6. Most of the people that read slashdot understand the release process for software. You releases a beta/RC, fix some bugs, release the pre-release. If all is good, you release the final product.
It would have been more useful to cover new features and things that would interest the end-user. At least that's my point of view on the topic...
Useful info from the article:
Among the new features in Firefox 3.6 are built-in support for the scaled-down browser skins dubbed "Personas;" warnings of out-of-date plug-ins; support for new CSS, DOM and HTML 5 technologies; support for full-screen video embedded with the video HTML tag; and support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF).
TraceMonkey has also been refreshed to boost JavaScript performance, something Mike Shaver, Mozilla's chief engineer, bragged about last week on Twitter. "I am excited about upcoming JS [JavaScript] engine work, and I don't care who knows it," Shaver tweeted.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Actually kind of makes me wonder. I keep getting updates pushed like crazy, and just about every time that I restart my browser (running a pretty stable system, so it may be days or weeks), I get a new Firefox update. You push off the updates and say "never" or "ask me later," and you are completely ignored because it starts updating when you restart your browser regardless of what you checked. Incredibly patronizing. Makes it hard to run an old version. There may be security risks with old versions, but at least they're generally known a little better than the ones known in the new versions that are being crammed down your throat on a daily basis.
Then for some of my clients' intranet sites, there's this thing about not being able to turn off security for "risky" (certificate broken) sites that pose no threat but I have no control over and have to add an exception for every time. The browser.ssl_override_behavior setting is there, but it is completely ignored now, just like the "never update" option.
Every new version of Firefox removes my control a little more, and it has gotten really old. It makes me wonder what version 3.6 is going to bring--if anything--and why they keep changing things for the sake of changing them.
I can install it as a normal user. Here's how:
1. Log into Windows as a normal user.
2. Double click installer.
3. Windows prompts you to elevate automatically. Enter password for elevation.
4. Install. Close down FF if it runs after install because it is running as admin.
Then, as a normal user, start Firefox. You are logged in as your normal user and running the browser you just installed. But mysteriously FF's update feature is completely turned off. It doesn't even WARN you that there is an update pending, never mind downloading it, or downloading it and asking to elevate privs so that you can install it or ask an admin. The feature is so fully disabled that you can't even ask it to check for updates. This means that I have to rely on hearing about updates through some third-party channel, such as /., then remember to start Firefox as an admin to manually make it check for updates. This is so fundamentally broken that it's clear not a single FF developer uses a normal user account on Vista or 7.
Seconded, I tend to leave my browser window open at all times on my machine, and every other day or so the mem usage hits over 1GB and slows my computer slows to a crawl. It would be wonderful if they fix that because I am seriously considering changing browsers because of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
You know who else knows how to elevate?
The Daleks.
Firefox at this point is really quite reasonable with its memory use - I can't get my head around the continual complaints. The only area where it's appreciably worse performing than Chrome is in UI responsiveness and this has significantly improved in 3.5. It also has far faster back/forward navigation through the cache and (although I don't have figures for this) it feels faster at displaying pages without extremely heavy javascript. There's also less flicker - most pages load in one paint rather than loading in sections. Besides that, web browsers have a lot of useful RAM caching they can do (your history, uncompressed images etc) - it hardly makes sense to keep browser usage below 174MB when even netbooks come with 1-2GB and that RAM can be used effectively to speed up the browser. Frankly, if you're too stingy to splash out on a stick of RAM use xterm with lynx or another browser from the era when that amount of RAM was normal.
> I get a new Firefox update.
Have you tried disabling updates if that's what you want ?
Preferences -> Advanced -> updates...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Every now and then I'll bounce the FireFox app (close it, tell it to save and quit so it comes back up with the same tabs, restart it) and it generally comes back up using about 75% less memory than it was using when I closed it.
Though I can't point to any actual crashes that have resulted from it, seems like it would just be best practice for FireFox to be at least somewhat respectful of system memory (I do run other apps too ya know?) and try to keep itself tight when possible. If it were only 10% then I probably wouldn't care, but when I can open the same handful of tabs in 75% less memory...
-B-
That's an odd question considering that Firefox continues to gain market share.
Perhaps you should ask yourself if "smaller" and "faster" are really the dominant factors driving users to switch browsers.
*sigh* back to work...
If you do it manually it prompts you to restart it to benefit from the update, otherwise it does it in the background (if you run Windows, in Linux you need to use the package manager to upgrade it)
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Until Opera and Chrome get usable, working AdBlock+ and NoScript, then there are no good alternatives to Firefox.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
It's the fact that they use SQLite to store so much data. Putting the firefox profile on anything but a local hard drive causes it to become completely unresponsive on a regular basis. I haven't seen any plans by Mozilla to fix this yet, but this completely kills Firefox in any work environment with roaming profiles.
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
8GB RAM is 120 EUR. Thats a month of quality food for a single person. Saying hardware is cheap is wrong because it's not cheap. Not for the majority of the people.
After 3.0, I've had severe performance issues with firefox off of a flash drive.
That'll be the writing to the urlclassifier3.sqlite, file amongst others. I sorted this on my Ubuntu setup (running on a netbook with an internal SSD that had *very* bad write performance) by moving my profile to a RAM drive on boot (and rsyncing it back to the on-disc copy on shutdown and every now and again via cron). You might be able to do something similar on Windows if you have a decent RAM drive implementation but you are unlikely to have that in most circumstances where you are using a portable install of a browser. You could try explicitly enabling write caching for the USB device, but again you may not have the right perms for that in all cases when using a portable setup and it isn't a great idea anyway.
Guess you've never really used Opera since it has the equivilants of those add-ons built in.
Unlike IE-specific features, Mozilla-specific features have a better chance of getting into the other three major engines (Safari based on Apple's WebKit tree, Chrome based on Google's WebKit tree, and Opera based on Presto) and into W3C drafts.
I never noticed ever needing a restart, but still, the executable is being updated, too.
Chrome runs a process per open page to isolate crashes. I'm guessing that as long as binaries of different versions communicate by passing well-defined messages and only binaries of the same version share memory, multiple versions of the Chrome engine can run at once.
I am always dismayed by the lack of Linux x86_64 Firefox releases.
I can download current releases of OpenOffice for Linux x96_64.
Why is it so hard to find Firefox for x86_64???
There are two main differences between this and the old way IE did its IE-specific features:
1) This implementation is based on a public draft of a W3C REC-track document, which is worked on in public in collaboration with other browser vendors, web developers, and anyone else who cares to join the public www-style@w3.org mailing list. In fact, the gradient syntax was changed radically between beta 1 and beta 2 of Gecko 1.9.2 based on feedback and discussion on said mailing list.
2) The feature is clearly marked as Gecko-specific, so it doesn't pollute the namespace for future standardization (e.g. the properties are not called "linear-gradient" and "radial-gradient") and makes it clear to anyone using it that it will only work in Gecko and break in other browsers. This last property makes it less likely that someone will just use it, test only in Gecko, and accidentally break other browsers by just failing to think about testing in them.
But yes, using it as an _author_ for things outside progressive enhancement is of course bad. But even the progressive enhancement uses are a start: they can give valuable feedback on that www-style mailing list I mention if there are serious problems with the current spec draft.
Heres my guess:
Statistically out of every 10 Windows users 7 will be average (mom, dad, grandma, etc) , 1 user will be a moron and will fall for every phishing and malware attack, 1 will be a moderately advanced user and 1 will be a fairly advanced user / developer.
When you're dealing with that kind of audience, your goals are *vastly* different than highly customizable operating systems like Linux. Your criticisms are minor and superficial. Given *ANY* UI decision you can find users that disagree with it. Calling it proof is frankly laughable.
If you're interested in why windows is "bloated" you can read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx
As far as RAM is concerned, firefox itself is going to consume/require several hundred megs for an average user visiting youtube and other misc. flash heavy websites. That said, I don't have a clue what the actual RAM usage levels are of Win7 vs Ubuntu 9.10