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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.
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.
When did I miss Firefox 6?
Interestingly, I just set up an Ubuntu 11.04 (previously 10.04) with FF 6.02. With the same addons as I had in FF 4, it's WAY faster and uses close to a third less memory than FF4. If they're claiming that FF7 will reduce memory even more, I'm definitely going to check it out.
*Not that adding the awesomebar was bad... but forcing the awesomebar, and eliminating the option to turn it off, was. That's the behavior that indicates a company is putting marketing ahead of engineering.
about:config->browser.urlbar.maxRichResults->0
The drop is clearly visible: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
> Websites, like Banks for example, won't run if you
> use a browser version they haven't tested
Where are you finding these banks?
I've been using Mozilla Suite and then Firefox nightly builds (not releases; clearly not tested by any banks) for about 10 years now, and in that time I've dealt with at least 5 different bank websites. None of them locked out any browsers. One had a sniffing bug that detected "Minefield" as "IE" that caused a date picker to not work and refused to fix it, but that's about it.