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Firefox 3.0 Preview
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Mar 30, 2007 03:32 PM
from the hey-there-paradiso dept.
from the hey-there-paradiso dept.
Brian Heater passed us a link to a PC World preview of the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release. In addition to the usual smoother UI, bug fixes, and feature updates, Firefox 3.0 will introduce several new components that should expand offline Web application functionality. The inclusion of DOM Storage, an offline execution model, and synchronization should all work together to allow for wider adoption of software like Google Apps at the end-user level. "As the breadth and depth of the competing applications expand, perhaps Microsoft's 90-percent stranglehold on the preinstalled and post-PC-purchase installation suite market will loosen, if only a bit. Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision." The piece covers more than just the new functionality, of course, and should be of interest to anyone looking forward to 'Gran Paradiso.'
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What I hope it has (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.
Otherwise I like the product.
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Informative)
1. Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things with the "stop" button like the old Netscape let me.
You can stop animated GIFs by pressing the Escape key. Also, if you're like me and want to stop all GIF animation entirely, hop into about:config and set "image.animation_mode" to "none".
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I install firefox anywhere I set browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing to false. For me, this doesn't me that firefox's dev team has failed, it's just that I need different things than Joe User, who is the primary target of Firefox.
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Those are good suggestions but they don't solve his problem. He wants to stop animated gifs by clicking on the stop button, just like Netscape and the old Mozilla suite used to do. His hand is already on the mouse and
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
He could just use his other hand.
Oh... nevermind
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Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Informative)
2. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-
3. Goto 1
Your suggestions are how ever already listed in the wish-list. The only problem is that the list contains probably a thousand feature requests, so I'm not sure when they will be implemented.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstor
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Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.
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And it passes ACID2. (Score:3, Informative)
Oh and first post.
Re:And it passes ACID2. (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I hope no one passes Acid 2 for one reason. It enables people to write poorly designed webpages. If you're going to write a web page do it correctly or not at all. Expecting a browser to fix your stupid errors shouldn't even be an option.
It's good Firefox 3 passes the acid test but who cares. It is better working than it was for poorly written pages. I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was. One of the reasons I avoid IE7 like the plague.
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Re:And it passes ACID2. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
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You don't think Firefox is bloated? (Score:5, Informative)
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5373 colin 15 0 246m 71m 23m S 18.9 16.3 14:08.68 firefox-bin
Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.
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Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated? (Score:5, Funny)
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Flamebait mod was right (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent post gives numbers without context of any kind. We do not know what version of Firefox is being used. We do not know how many and which extensions are being used. We do not know how many concurrent windows and/or tabs are in use. We do not know what URLs or files Firefox has been asked to open. Without this information, we cannot reach any actual conclusions, as these could be perfectly reasonable values for any browser, depending on the tasks the browser was asked to accomplish.
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yes, i remember the time you're talking about, the time when i considered firefox just a Galeon clone with crapping tabbing.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
Short answer? Firefox is now competing against IE rather than just being a fork of Mozil
Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want Firefox with its original advantages and just its original features, why not use the original Firefox? Meanwhile, those who can benefit from the new technology will do so.
The only reason I can think of is that the old versions have unpatched security problems, so you'll want to upgrade after they're unsupported – but if you want the Firefox developers to stop adding new features, they're not going to still fix the security problems, they'll just move to more interesting and worthwhile projects and Firefox will die. Firefox has inertia now – and the whole web is gaining inertia, after stagnating during IE6's dominance, with even the W3C restarting realistic work on HTML [w3.org] – so it would be a waste if it didn't continue to grow and change.
In any case, they are planning [mozillazine.org] to make future versions of Firefox faster and more secure and make the code less crufty, with better C++ usage and a better garbage collector to fix memory leaks and a new JavaScript VM. And Firefox is still only a 6MB download – it's not exactly the heaviest of programs you'll ever download.
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Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:4, Interesting)
With this rush to be like IE and all, I'm wondering how long until Linux or other OSes are no longer supported either. It could be possible that they start limiting that to only the latest version of windows managers and kernels too. It would bring an interesting development around. Still I see the need to keep support for older platforms as well.
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Yes, you're not alone....
I use Firefox 2.0.x at work, because it was what came out when I started working there. At home, I am faithful to the 1.5.x range. Why? Because Firfox 2.0.x is noticable slower, the interface is... let's say, not as good as the FF 1.5.x interface. Even now, when I install Firefox for someone, I'l more likely to take the 1.5.x branch than anything else.
I hope that Firefox 3 goes back to the roots...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Works fine in Lynx.
I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:5, Informative)
View: about:cache to see your current cache/memory status (click the links for further details).
Also note that the setting doesn't entirely stop the "runaway RAM", but it can greatly curb it. If you only view a few pages a day and use your back/forward a lot, I don't recommend changing it. However, if you, for instance, do a lot of Google searches and visit hundreds of different sites a day, dropping that setting can greatly reduce your memory usage. If you are restricted to only a few sites, your RAM shouldn't go too high anyway.
Most of them aren't leaks. Although I think there have been a few leaks regarding plugins, but I'm too lazy to go look it up.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That setting for browser.cache.memory.capacity [mozillazine.org] would cause Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 to consume more memory than the default setting, as long as you have less than 4 GB of RAM installed. Let's stop spreading misinformation about Firefox memory usage, please.
Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:4, Informative)
Although Firefox does have memory leaks, what you're describing is far worse than any confirmed memory leak. Perhaps what you're seeing is that memory use reported by the operating system is not going down when you close tabs, but Firefox is at least releasing and reusing memory internally. If what you describe was really what most Firefox users experienced, most users would not be able to use Firefox for more than a few hours before they would have to restart it. There's no way Firefox could get the 14% usage share it has today with such a serious memory problem.
In summary, Firefox does have some memory leaks, but it doesn't leak anywhere nearly as badly as you're describing for the vast majority of users. For most users, it takes many days of use before memory leaks become readily apparent by looking at memory usage numbers alone. The real memory leaks are far more subtle than what you describe, and usually require some sort of memory leak detection tool [squarefree.com] to track down.
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I have seen the same or similar features. It appears that Firefox loads this and adjust the number/amount used based on the 12 pages and then doesn't resize it for a while later. It is annoying as hell on my limited XP system. It causes everything to slow immensely because it takes what was just enough memory and makes it not enough if you open 12
Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:4, Informative)
For comparison I just opened Firefox (2.0 or something, listed in about as "Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0-30 Firefox/2.0") and it opened to http://www.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] (default home page, I haven't customized or tweaked FF at all). The memory usage after letting it settle? RSS is 47,420! Lets just hope it doesn't rise too much (for comparison a newly started instance of Konqueror uses 28,888 RSS).
Now lets visit a few sites: Just
Now lets try the same thing with digg (without restarting Firefox): Just the main page on digg and we're to 62,296 RSS. Lets open the current top 4 articles in new tabs and see what we go to... and now we're to 69,452 RSS, lets close those tabs and move the original to about:blank again... 69,412 RSS.
Lets go back to
Now lets go to about:blank then try something a bit different... RSS dropped down to 71,004 which is good. Now the different part, lets load lwn.net in the first tab, and in new tabs linux.com, sourceforge.net, planetkde.org, planet.gnome.org, and planet.mozilla.org. RSS is now to 79,432. Lets close all but the original tab and send that to about:blank. RSS is now to 77,088, it went down again which is good.
Lets try the same thing but another set of sites: original tab is amazon.com, new ones are ebay.com, bbc's site, cnn.com, google news, weather.com and wired news. The results of this one is a bit different than previous times, RSS has risen back to 77,148. Maybe we've hit a limit of how much Firefox is using? Lets close all but the original and go to about:blank again... RSS is now 75,692, dropped even more this time.
Lets go back to digg.com and see what it does... RSS is 75,962, exactly the same. Looks like its recycling some of its own memory (or loading the page entirely from cache). Now to open 4 articles. RSS has risen to 80,540. Lets close those and go to about:blank yet again. RSS is 80,308. Dropped some, but only a tiny amount. Lets go back to Amazon.com and search for 'operating systems design and implementation'. RSS is now 80,480, a slight rise. Now lets open Mr. Tanenbaum's books in a new tab (the 3 top results). RSS is now 80,552. Another tiny rise. Close those tabs and go to about:blank. RSS is now 80,488, a slight drop.
Its nice to see that in my little test the RSS didn't just skyrocket, but Firefox is still using more memory than the instance of Konqueror that has been open for 17 days (and has opened many more websites including lots of slashdot articles using the ajaxy version of the site). In case anyone is wondering: my machine has 1.25 GB of ram, and the total memory usage never passed 50% on my sy
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I really don't understand this obsession with free memory. Your RAM should be close to full at all times if you are at all interested in performance. You just dump cached information if you actually need more memory for something else. The days of DOS are long gone.
Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please! (Score:4, Informative)
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Having a single thread will kill your GUI performance the moment you do anything complex.
I know that this is a generalization, but users do not like an unresponsive GUI. Yet, if there's only one thread, the same thread that's running the GUI is doing any calculations and other operations that are going on.
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Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
I wish to make a complaint. (Score:3, Funny)
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light and nimble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the alleged lightness and nimbleness of web apps, they're still slower and more unreliable than native apps, when they work at all.
Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox, light and nimble?
Jebus, the memory footprint on that thing is far, far beyond ridiculous at this point, not to mention noticibly larger than even IE7's memory requirements.
And even ignoring that, you're comparing Firefox to Vista. I should bloody well hope it's light and nimble in comparison, unless, of course Firefox 3 aims to be a whole operating system.
Furthermore, Vista actually has fairly reasonable hardware requirements if you turn off all of that fancy GUI stuff. People forget that not only can all those flashy things be turned off, but you can painlessly swap out the explorer shell in and of itself. The comparison is outright stupid. Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different, you don't have to use it. The only difference is that Aero is included in the default install.
I understand that this is slashdot, and we never pass up a chanceto take a shot at Microsoft or Vista. But seriously, this has gotten to the point of sheer stupidity, and hipocracy: Id someone were to make a completely uneducated, false claim about Linux, it'd be followed up by a few dozen posts crying bloody murder, yet, now, because its ashot at Vista, its suddely okay to make completely asinine claims that in no way at all intersect with reality at any point whatsoever?
No wonder there's all this talk about Linux's superiority, and Firefox's superiority, and [random OSS app here]'s superiority, people have absolutely no clue about the competition. At least have a basic grasp on the competing broducts before making these comparisons. Know thine enemy and all.
I could swear Sun Tzu turns a full rotation with every other post here.
Yeah, yeah, -1 flamebait, whatever.
Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:5, Funny)
Sun Tzu + Slashdot + magnets & wire = new source for renewable energy?
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Most people find that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7:
http://scobleizer.com/2006/10/21/the-great-firefox -2-vs-ie-7-memory-test/ [scobleizer.com]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127309-page,6-c, browsers/article.html [pcworld.com]
http://oomny.com/2006/03/24/internet-explorer-7-be ta2-and-firefox-2-alpha-memory-comparison.html [oomny.com]
http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/200 [zimbra.com]
Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Not PC World (Score:4, Informative)
What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads! (Score:3, Insightful)
Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too much in the browser, again. It's a browser. Not a "platform". We went through this already, with Mozilla, which had to be chopped down to provide a browser of manageable size. The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.
In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.
The project seems to have been captured by the "browser as a platform" people again. Nobody cares about XUL, people. All users want is a browser.
In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine. The OLPC is going to force computing to go on a much-needed weight reduction program.
Nice trolls (Score:3, Funny)
Stop the Fucking trolling, firefox does not ever use more than 100 MB, you may wish to friging update yourself
Also whatever bad thing you have to say about firefox consider:
All Those Memory Complaints (Score:5, Funny)
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