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Mozilla Foundation Releases Firefox 7
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has released Firefox 7.0. It hasn't actually reduced my memory footprint at first glance, but let's hope that the memory usage doesn't keep growing like it used to. We'll also see if it crashes less often than once every three days or so."
The initial memory use of Firefox should remain similar to previous releases, but at least the heap shouldn't grow infinitely as it does in previous releases.
When did I miss Firefox 6?
Now I have a "New Tab" tab that I can't get rid of or change focus to. Does anyone test this stuff?
Since people compare software by version number, one is at a competitive disadvantage in number software sensibly. FF7 would be FF4.3 were it not for chrome, why not call it ff 2011.3 and be done with it.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
So far, Acrobat Create PDF 1.1 is incompatible.
Breakfast served all day!
This is silly. Too many big changes, too many versions. Add-ons break on a regular basis and corporate customers who had been warming to the idea of FF are heading back to Microsoft. Whoever thought up this idea deserves to be kicked off the Firefox project.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
What's with all the bitching about memory use? I have been using Firefox since it was called Firebird and have never seen any really huge memory use. For example, right now Firefox is using 231 MB. Now, being an old fart from back in the dark ages, the idea that a web browser would be using hundreds of megabytes of RAM seems really absurd. But, considering that I have 8 GB in my computer, who gives a shit how much memory Firefox is using?
Wow, am I behind the times... I'm guessing my version is ANCIENT and probably a year-and-a-half old
Since the new "major version release" change, every time I've updated Firefox, I've had to fuss with incompatible plugins. I just upgraded to 7, and luckily, it didn't require yet another install of Firebug, though there were a few other incompatibilities. It's pretty much "add-on" roulette. Is this because of the new version system and version checking with plugins? Or just a coincidence. I can't imagine that so many things would be ACTUALLY made incompatible with each release. I can only suppose it's a flaw in the "checker".
Now that FF changes versions every time you blink and each one has at best minor changes, why even bother posting the new versions here? It's like posting that the sun came up in the East today.
Maybe a story about the acceleration in market share loss FF has suffered since this rapid release BS started would be more interesting.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The anonymous submitter and Unknown Lamer editor posted a lousy summary write-up. Let's hope they stop killing baby seals and molesting Joe Paterno this time around.
Click the link below:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/
(You can enable "incompatible" add-ons with it.)
Tada!
Debian release cycle is two years, and I'm going to stick with that. Firefox team has gone nuts.
I have no time to update every-day. I have work to do, you know - my work is not developing firefox. So I prefer to sit on debian stable. In fact I wonder now, how is it possible that I have iceweasel 5.0 here, if on debian stable I see iceweasel 3.5. And 7.0 is in debian experimental.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Are people still bitching about that? Since I'm usually putting my computers in sleep mode or connecting to VMs that are running 24/7 I am having Firefox running for over a month straight on a regular basis. Both on Windows and Linux. About the only time I have to restart Firefox is to apply a version update. I can't even remember the last time that I had it crash on me that wasn't the fault of something like Java or Flash. I would definitely catch all sorts of hell from my immediate family if Firefox was crashing often or causing slowdowns due to memory bloat and they don't even use NoScript. I'm not sure what people are doing to make Firefox bloat or crash but I'm willing to bet that the cause is add-ons and extensions that they've installed and not Firefox itself.
To suppress the URL trimming functionality, set the 'browser.urlbar.trimURLs' variable in about:config to true.
Changelog refers to additional increment of version number, no other changes
Every topic about Firefox...every single one...is FILLED with people whining about the versioning. We know. Everyone that has visited this website in the past 3-4 months knows. Shut up already. Can we talk about the actual version and changes instead of continually bitching about the same thing in the same way. Honestly, it hasn't even been enough time since the last release to go trotting out the same god damn arguments already. I feel like I literally read the entire thread 10 times already like last week because it's the same shit. Yes, it's annoying...but for fuck's sake, will you guys please talk about something else?
Has anyone had time to test those memory claims? I've been running 7 beta at work and it still seems to have slipped itself pretty high up there (running for a week about 330mb but that's with currently 9 tabs across 2 windows). I know I have extensions and stuff but yeah...anyone else?
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
I for one WANT it to be used and enjoy the SPEED I gain from having all my pages cached in RAM where they appear instantly at the click of a button... Idle RAM is useless and boasting how your system has 16gigawatts of unused RAM just serves to show me how small your epenis really is...
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
At least for Lucid so far.
Now the 12GB of RAM in my gaming PC is going to seem like a waste :-(
On the upside, the 4GB of RAM my laptop is stuck with unless I want to sacrifice dual-channel mode (thanks for building half the RAM into the mobo, geniuses!) will be useful for longer :-)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I checked the developer summary earlier today and this new version actually contains some useful features for a change!!!
At least banks will let you use their web site because 3.6.x is tested.
v4 to Infinity? not so much.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Why the hell would Mozilla use Microsoft's Javascript interpreter? Are people just making shit up these days?
You're on the wrong tab dude, this isn't TrekBBS!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Does Mozilla use the same crappy, security weak Microsoft Javascript interpreter, or is it possible to used Google's rewrite of the interpreter?
Huh? No, they use their own. Where did you get the idea they use Microsoft's? I would think that trying to integrate Google's would take a bit of work but the source code is available for both so good luck with it.
I'm not sure what people are doing to make Firefox bloat or crash but I'm willing to bet that the cause is add-ons and extensions that they've installed and not Firefox itself.
FWIW, all I have to do is open Firefox with one tab opening about:blank and I can count on my machine pausing every 3 minutes for about 5 seconds at a time. This started in Firefox 5 for me. In trying to hammer down what was going on, I've disabled all add-ons and extensions and it still doing an impression of a DOS-era virus.
I'm just one guy and this is just one anecdotal story, but I was pretty happy with Firefox until a few months ago. I've moved on to Chrome where at least it works. I guess the Firefox team wants to make sure that 100% of their users are so ridiculously in love with them that they don't even have eyes for alternative browsers.
Mozilla has their own Javascript engine: SpiderMonkey. It also has a JIT compiler for javascript called TraceMonkey turned on by default since Firefox 3.5.
I remember Firefox being FAST like it was on FIRE!!
Now I click on the icon and wait a good minute or so for it to load.
If I accidentally close it and try to re-open it I get a message saying to wait for the program to completely close, which takes a good minute or so also.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
FF 9-27-2011 3:42pm released. It's much better than the previous release. Well, that is, until the next one comes out in T-minus 60 seconds.
Go team agile!
More addon breakage...
At least banks will let you use their web site because 3.6.x is tested.
v4 to Infinity? not so much.
No problem using HSBC's website, including viewing statements, making payments, etc. using Firefox 7. Are there really banks that block it?
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
But I do use it occasionally for a particular plugin that downloads flash videos. Last time I ran firefox I made the mistake of upgrading and it broke that plugin. Turns out the same plugin works in IE, so instead of turning to FF, I'm now instead turning to IE. Thanks for nothing Mozilla!
You do realise trolling is supposed to waste other people's time, right?
Also known as Firefox 4.3.
/* No Comment */
I have been using Chrome for awhile now and decided that maybe I'd check out the advances Firefox had made in my absence... It felt like going from using Star Trek technology for awhile then being presented with a collection of twigs and branches. Honestly - FF has a lot of nice things about it, but it's just not the big deal it once was.
Bloatware
Please tell me which feature from vanilla Firefox that needs to be removed.
I am replying to this thread as someone who has beem using Chromium for the past several months, switching away from Firefox because of the huge memory footprint. I've seen it consume about 2GB of memory easily, and then it would become sluggish. Things would not respond fast, and it would hang for several seconds every 20 seconds or so. It had to be killed a few times per day.
Chromium is more resistant to that. Each tab opens a separate process, and manages its memory better. However, Chromium lacks excelent add-ons (from a webdev perspective). No decent Firebug (Firebug Lite isn't very good), and some other add-ons that are not as good as the Firefox counterpart.
Yesterday, I decided to have a try at the newest Firefox, and so far, I'm pretty much pleased by what I see. I got the Nightly, to stay at the bleeding edge. Browser is open since yesterday, and I haven't seen it consume over 500MB of memory, which is definitely some improvement. I don't think the JS engine or rendering is as fast or responsive as Chromium, but I can live with this.
I have used nightly builds from Firefox a long time ago, and although we know it can seriously break, I still haven't seen this happen (and I updated almost daily). I'm back to Firefox (err... Nightly is the codename now), and happy. If someone thinks memory management from this Firefox 7 isn't too good, give a try on Nightly, you might be as surprised as I was.
Seriously, plugins that I require to actually do my job kept me stuck with Firefox 3.6 up until recently. (Firefox 4 broke something to do with JavaScript.) That problem was finally resolved, but now we're stuck on Firefox 5 waiting for plugins to be updated to 6.0. (Yes, they broke something ELSE in that upgrade.)
And now Firefox 7 is out? Please tell me that they're at least offering security updates to 6 still!
Oh, wait, right, THAT'S why Firefox 5 is blocked at the firewall. Only reason we're allowed to use it at all is to support customers using it. I wonder how long until we give up on that?
(And, no, it's NOT our plugin breaking on FFx6, we just require it.)
I'm not sure what people are doing to make Firefox bloat or crash but I'm willing to bet that the cause is add-ons and extensions that they've installed and not Firefox itself.
Well, now-a-days, extensions are a standard in every browser worth of that name. Different people have diferente needs and preferences, and that's why we want/need extensions in our daily workflow.
That being said, the fault rests on Firefox developers for not having adressed the problems that might be caused by the extensions. In fact, they didn't even adressed the extensions archaic system for years since people started complaining.
When was the last time you had to restart a mainstream browser to install/update an extension? Oh that's right, you didn't except if you use Firefox.
When was the last time your browser crashed on you because of a misbehaving extension? Who that's right, it didn't because Chrome and Safari (IE, anyone?) sandbox their individual pages, and if something crashes,then you just have to reload a page not restart the all brows...err Firefox.
*sigh*
Not even IE uses the same crappy, security weak MS javascript interpreter anymore.
http://saveie6.com/
Are there seriously that many 32bit-isms in the code that they can't do a 64-bit release?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Mozilla has their own Javascript engine: SpiderMonkey. It also has a JIT compiler for javascript called TraceMonkey turned on by default since Firefox 3.5.
Thanks. I knew once Mozilla used Microsoft's but didn't know when they switched to using their own.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You should get the latest bugfixed version; 3.6.22 is out (and working flawlessly, I should point out.)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
At least banks will let you use their web site because 3.6.x is tested.
v4 to Infinity? not so much.
No problem using HSBC's website, including viewing statements, making payments, etc. using Firefox 7. Are there really banks that block it?
Intuit's turbotax website blocks it, when you try to view a past year's return, and presumably if you're trying to work on anything new.
To be fair, as much as I hate the fast release cycle that firefox now has, problems like these are the fault of web administrators. I don't want to go back to "best viewed with IE 4" days. They're free to look at the user agent to make any browser specific fixes if the want to, but if they don't recognize the string, they should just serve the damn standard-compliant html (and yes, I know I can change my user-agent string, and I do. But I shouldn't have to).
Honestly, I am almost close to preferring IE6 over Firefox these days. It is a monster. I run it on Win7/64, and I've seen this beast gobble ut a gig and a half of memory with 10-15 tabs open. That is with a Flash blocker, so it is only HTML and some related images. A gig and a half. Firefox starts consuming memory when it starts up, and it never stops. I only re-boot when I need to update the OS and I never log out. I also don't shut down the most used apps. IE9 and Chrome use a lot of memory both, but with limits. FF has no limits. It's a monster and it needs to be exterminated now.
Use strace / sysinternals to find out what's wrong, then file a bug report. It's probably a bad SSD or your HDD is set to spin down every minute or something ridiculous (hdd spinup can freeze the bus with some bad mobos/drivers).
Erm, no. SpiderMonkey is the original JavaScript interpreter from the Netscape days (although of course it's had plenty of development since then) and Mozilla has used it since the beginning.
Yes, and many other online bill payment systems.
I've never seen an SDK make such a big fuss about absolutely nothing and never felt my time so pointlessly wasted, and I've seen plenty of SDKs in the past 20 years...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Crap like personas would be a start.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/
It isn't as rosy as it sounds, at least in my general experience (practice always deviates from theory right?).
The theory is you write your unit tests first, and then code until you pass. In practice two things go wrong:
1) You make a mistake writing unit tests (I have seen many times where *only* buggy code could pass the incorrectly written unit tests).
2) Passing even a well-conceived unit test inspires overconfidence. I have encountered more than a few people who honestly believe passing all unit tests as an automated part of a build process was sufficient and no human testing was required.
In short, sure, officially it endorses testing, but really only speaks much to automated unit tests and less to actually taking the time to let some users dig in and do nothing but make sure those users validate you did the work correctly.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Dude! At least get 3.6.23, if you don't want the latest version. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/3.6.23/releasenotes/ It was released today as well.
I use Firefox as a secondary browser - no addons at all. On my system Firefox 6.x would regularly eat memory like it was covered in syrup, for no particular reason.
I can open 50+ tabs on Opera and have it using around 1,5Gb.
Aw for FFS.
interestingly, this update didn't break my add-ons, did it break yours?
Try Palemoon 3.6 portable, it's the least crappy browser out there nowadays.
It's funny how Firefox has gone from being the hot opensource pinup to the red headed stepchild that gets a weekly beating.
The rapid release system was brought into effect to compete with Chrome's meteoric rise in usage share and stem the decline of FF. The stalling and loss of usage share of FF started way before this, especially during the long FF3 to FF4 transition, when Chrome was spitting out rapid updates. So no, FF is not losing users because of the new release system. The new release system is a response to the loss of users.
I especially find it hilarious when people complain about the rapid releases.. and then declare they will switch to.. Chrome!.. which has.. rapid releases !
https://dalgamotor.wordpress.com/ - Elektronik beyinlere ozgurluk asisi (Turkish)
Its their software, you just use it. Let them update it as often as they want. This puts testing the same place it always has been. If you want to make sure it will work with your then test it. Does anyone remember a time before auto-update. Manually update your browser?
Steve Ballmer was soooo right. Get the developers on your side and you have a great product. What's up with these Mozilla guys? When is Firefox 23.0 coming out? Next week? It seems that developers are not users so we can forget all about them. Actually the only reason most people use Firefox (me included) is the Adblock Plus plugin. So the authors of these useful plugins are going to have to run around like hamsters in a wheel trying to keep up with the hectic updating schedule? Oh puleease!
With Firefox 6.x on Arch Linux, opening with the obligatory "Well, this is embarrasing" window, FF bounces between 400M and 700M every few minutes before it has loaded a single page.
This is stupid.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I'm happy with either Safari (mac) or Chrome (PC) - 2 browsers that haven't changed their UI for a few years and work properly.
However, one pet beef with chrome (and IE) that firefox also has - get rid of the fucking search from the address bar. If I type in a hostname, i expect to go to that hostname, not kick of some search for some shit on the internet. I also don't want the browser doing x hundred search URL lookups while I type. If i want to search, i will use a search box.
Thank fuck safari / opera do it right: opera = need to prefix with a couple of letters if you want to search (from memory), and Safari has a separate box. As it should have.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I am still with v3.6.xx and SeaMonkey v2.0.14.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I want to point out that 3.6.x series is still a supported release to anybody bitching about the new versioning. I'm using it without issue. The most I've gotten were messages indicating that I should upgrade. I complained. If more people did that we wouldn't have idiot web masters telling people to upgrade when there is no good reason for it. 3.6 is supported and I will continue to use it. 3.6.22 specifically is the current version of 3.6.xx that is supported right now. There will be future 3.6.xx releases too.
It's painful like seeing a great book being turned into a terrible film by focus-group driven studio executives.
I genuinely wonder how long this will last before enough geeks get annoyed enough to start a credible fork and push it into the mainstream as the presumptive replacement for Firefox. The backlash has been obvious, public, and intensifying with every version since the silly numbering fiasco started (and all the other problems that have come along with the runaway release process began, since the numbering itself is mostly an unimportant distraction).
Firefox is open source, and major open source projects typically don't fork on a whim, but there is now a flashing neon sign inviting a few geeks with the time to do it properly to get very rich by making a Firefox clone with the good stuff kept, a lot of the not-ready-yet stuff dropped until it can be done properly, a more gentle UI evolution that is driven by actual usability testing and not the whim of whoever is in charge these days, and a PR guy who can eat Dotzler for breakfast in front of the business audience. I'm sure many people have considered this, and if a group with not only geek credentials but also good marketing and business savvy does it before Mozilla gets its house in order, then Mozilla is a dead company walking.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I just got the update to Thunderbird 7. Of course, it broke Lightning.
(+1, Disagree)
There we go... every single time...
How come those who develop for different browsers find there's quite a number of pros and cons for each of the major browsers? Because they take the time to try and test them. Not just talk out their asses.
Opera is very cool and so is Firefox. If you want to choose one over the other then do so, but don't come and act smug about your choice without even knowing what you're talking about. Context matters here, addons (some of them dev tools), speed, openness, interface, customization, ohh-shinyness, default config, release cycle, performance in different OSes, plugin performance, perceived security and I'm sure many more things...
Use the one/s you like and try to improve it or even try to improve the ones you dislike to raise the standards but stop acting like blind fanatics.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Most tech related pages today are filled with random fallacies and failures of reading comprehension. People don't read manuals, white papers or even readme files today but instead use their imagination to fill in the blanks.
Not to sound rude, but I've been running firefox for 60 days and its still at 75 megs of memory and its never crashed. I seem to think that it only crashed because people use crazy plugins, which I only use like 1 or 2.
It looks like Firefox 7 just about passes the Acid 3 test now (it scores 100/100, although I'm seeing a rendering error). Does that mean we should now expect to see work on Acid 4 begin in the near future?
Hickson had previously stated that work would begin when 3 of the 4 major rendering engines passed the Acid 3 test. WebKit and Presto already passed, so Mozilla should make that 3/4. Heck, even Trident is scoring 100/100 now.
I had that happen to me once. A complete uninstall and reinstall fixed it.
It wasn't a problem with my profile - a brand-new profile did the same thing - so if it's happening to you, back up your profile with FEBE, do the uninstall and reinstall, add FEBE and restore your profile.
Guess, they are trying to keep up with FF (Final Fantasy) XIII..
nah they're bitching about version numbers now. and when they're removed they'll bitch about the icon's color. :-)
its just trendy.
of course meanwhile they'll use a browser that uses more memory, updates more often, and has weird colors
Is that the first version that get Linux optimisation right out of the box? (About effing time!) I heard that somewhere a while back.
Anyone know if it's possible to transfer the stored passwords from a previous version into the latest version? In the past, whenever I upgraded, I've found my self having to recreate the saved passwords by revisiting a lot of web sites and referring to a screen print of the prior version's password manager listing. (And, oh boy, is that ever fun.) With the increasing frequency of Firefox releases, it'd sure be nice to have an easier upgrade process.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Mozilla Foundation should read the article about Linus's experience with Linux Kernel (Slashdot also ran the story couple of days ago). The article is here: http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/Linus-Torvalds-s-Lessons-on-Software-Development-Management/ba-p/440
After finishing it, they should read it again ad nauseum until they they understand that one sentence about meeting the expectations of customers.
When was the last time you had to restart Firefox when using an extension written against the API they worked out during the time you claim they did nothing? You didn't, Firefox just happens to have a metric fuck load of legacy extensions.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Exactly, but fortunately there is something that can be done: http://in-other-news.com/2011/The_problem_with_Firefox_and_how_it_could_be_fixed
My addons haven't even caught up with firefox 5, they're all getting left behind
Firefox is pretty much a finished product (I don't care what Mozilla says) and we need at least one stable browser.
I have the same problem. But actually that's Ubuntu's fault(?) for sticking to 3.x in the 10.3 LTS version. I'm upgrading my browser along with all the updates Ubuntu presents me, and that's why I'm now at version 3.6.22.
And just in case you're wondering: I'm running Ubuntu 10.3 because I want a system that just works, yet is up-to-date when it comes to security and serious bugs. And that without the need to completely replace it every six months or so, including getting used to new quirks and a potentially overhauled UI. But then I just want to get things done.
A misbehaving extension should not be able to crash the browser.
Just like a misbehaving application should not be able to crash the underlying operating system.
And this analogy is not exactly far fetched as these days browsers act more and more as an operating system, considering what can be done with AJAX and related technologies.
How is in the hell do you control a malloc to the OS from an extension outside the application, and what should it do if the extension asks for more memory, destroy the extension? What you ask for is ridiculous. Sandboxing a page doesn't do ANYTHING for extensions that are running outside of pages. For Plugins, firefox already does similar sandboxing in that it runs flash/etc in another process.
I'm still on Firefox 3.6. I've tried updating, but the addons I've been using for the past5 or so years are only being updated for Windows.
I'm using Firefox because it's available on Linux and OSX as well.
The main advantage of Firefox over other browsers are the addons. Break those, and I have no reason to stay with Firefox.
I've been a user of Netscape/Phoenix/Firefox since 1995, hardly ever used anything else, but it looks like I finally have to go looking for another browser.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
The Mozilla Enterprise Working Group are considering this proposal at present: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSupport:Proposal
This would provide a 42-week 'stable' release of Firefox, with incremental backported security fixes "just like the old days".
Whether this will come to fruition or not is unclear at this stage, but at least it's being discussed.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it." --- Arthur Kasspe
Yes, people are still bitching.
I upgraded to Firefox 6 last Monday and after less than 3 days it's already using 2.3GB of virtual memory and currently has 1.3GB resident. And it's a pain to pull it from the swap after other processes pushed it out, it easily takes minutes (as far as I can tell read-ahead is totally defeated). Unfortunately at 4GB my computer is maxed out (buggy Gigabyte P35 MB) so either Firefox 7 does much better or I'll have to by an SSD for the swap.
Note: When I started writing this message Firefox was only using 1.8GB of VM and 0.8GB resident. No, I did not visit any other page while typing this message!
I tried the Android version of FF7 but I think I'll stay on Dolphin HD even if has some random crashes. Dolphin feels a little more responsive and it's much better at reflowing the page. Commenting here on /. with Firefox is nearly impossible: it's very difficult make the keyboard appear when tapping the text area.
I'd say, Dolphin comes first despite the crashes, the Android browser and Firefox are almost level: the stock browser is better at basic functionality, FF is better at anything else. Too bad the basic functionality must be done right.
By the way, I checked how to setup a private sync server http://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html even if it seems I won't need one.
Here at work they use this:
Mozilla 1.7.12
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915
Hahahaha, believe me, that is true!!!
Windows XP... and Java 1.5, and IBM technologies...
The number of corporate sites that use terminal servers instead of, or in addition to (usually a redundant effort IMHO but that's a different story) is growing astronomically for a variety of reasons, mostly telecommuting and the need to standardize the help desk and user experience at the lowest unit cost. Programs that expect to gobble up as much resource as possible to fake efficiency (ahem, Chrome) are not compatible with this scenario.
restarting a browser to install extensions is really not that big a deal. sure, it would be nice to not have to do this, and mozilla should definitely fix it, but is it worth not using firefox because of this? of course not. firefox saves all your tabs so it's not like restarting kills anything you were doing. at most it takes 10 seconds. honestly, who gives a fuck.
Oh, wow I can haz 100 tabs
But why iz my lappy so slow?
I must need a MacBook, I graduated to power user nao
Why people keep watching version numbers changes? Get a hint: it doesn't mean anything anymore for this project, get over it! Leave Britney alone!
Memory usage is relevant beause switching to sleep mode and out of it is faster when there is less memory to store on the hard disk.
Also, I have so many windows/tabs open in firefox, that after two weeks or so, the windows 7scheduler (or whatever makes these decisions) makes firefox run only when i move the mouse inside it.
That doesn't mean firefox is bad, most if the time it used(6.0) just twice the memory of IE while I have only like 2 windows/tabs open in IE, in contrast to 20-40 in firefox.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
This is the end...
I'm waiting for Firefox 300. Should be next month.
Who? I access 6 financial sites, they're all fine with pretty much whatever browser at this point.
If it's SchenechtedyBank or some 4-branch thing you're talking about, I guess I understand.
Well then, the usual question is: what extensions are you using?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Probably too many. The important ones are Tab Mix Plus, Adblock Plus and United States Spellchecker. I also have DownloadHelper though it never seems to work when needed. And then some I could probably do without: Exif Viewer, LinkChecker, User Agent Switcher and Web Developer.
So Firefox 7 is better than Firefox 6, is Windows 98 better than Windows 7? I am sure it is since it has a bigger number and it uses less resources.
I think you've answered your own question, then. Retry without the extensions.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I just updated to Firefox-7.0.1 on Ubuntu Lucid. Acid3 test gives it 100/100, yet fails in two ways:
1. red text "YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS AT ALL" in the upper left-hand corner
2. in the upper right-hand corner, a white "X" superposed on a magenta-colored box, with a narrower red box to its right.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Good for debugging but running Firefox without any extension is not an option. See if Firefox had a separate process for each tab, these extensions would not have time to cause any significant leak.
Well, now-a-days, extensions are a standard in every browser worth of that name. Different people have diferente needs and preferences, and that's why we want/need extensions in our daily workflow.
That being said, the fault rests on Firefox developers for not having adressed the problems that might be caused by the extensions. In fact, they didn't even adressed the extensions archaic system for years since people started complaining.
When was the last time you had to restart a mainstream browser to install/update an extension? Oh that's right, you didn't except if you use Firefox.
When was the last time your browser crashed on you because of a misbehaving extension?
Chromium, Safari and Opera do not have extensions. They have userscripts that are marketed as extensions. (Greasemonkey allows the userscripts a bit more than regualr scripts - it allows them to make cross-site requests, for instance; and so does Chromium. GM allows to add items in context menu. Dunno about other functionality really.) And IE (yes, IE; shame that's it's so difficult to code a useful add-on for it!) and Firefox *do* require a restart. It's for a reason. You can't "remove" the restart on add-on install any more that you can "remove" the need for restart the system (or at least parts of it) when you install an old driver. You can demand from everyone to write using the new APIs, but this won't fix the old ones. Firefox *does* have restartless extensions, but the add-ons' developers have to make it such. As for crashing... well, a script cannot crash a browser an a userland app cannot crash a system. Browser extension and a kernel driver can.