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Firefox 2 Alpha 2 Reviewed
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun May 14, 2006 11:32 AM
from the guess-what's-coming dept.
from the guess-what's-coming dept.
pcabello writes "Firefox 2 Alpha 2 was released yesterday. Check what's new in this review at mozillalinks.org with screenshots."
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Memory (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.siplus.org/)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Informative)
Whenever you close a tab or window and a leak is detected, you'll get a message about it. I used it for a few days and discovered several minor extentions I'd been using were causing some very large leaks.
Re:Memory (Score:4, Informative)
(http://del.icio.us/Abcd1234/)
Re:Memory (Score:4, Informative)
(http://del.icio.us/Abcd1234/)
Then I shall amend my statement for both you and the other poster. The vast *vast* majority of extensions are written in Javascript, with a few exceptions.
It just needs to maintain references to unused objects or create cyclic references.
Certainly, but I don't believe most extension leaks are caused by such things, as they're rather difficult to trigger in practice. As far as I'm aware, most leaks caused by extensions are due to interactions with the XPCOM layer.
Re:Memory (Score:5, Informative)
Even web pages can create circular JavaScript references that result in leaks. FF isn't alone in this area either. IE has always been vulnerable to memory leaks via JavaScript, theirs are just confined to bad pages. However, FF 3 will have a cycle detector that identifies unused cyclic references and frees the objects. But that still won't fix sloppy extensions that hang on to large objects for no goood reason.
In my experience, Plugins are pretty bad too. They operate outside the scope of the garbage collection and often don't clean up after themselves. For instance, my installation of Acrobat eats up a large chunk memory just for loading, and doesn't let it go after I navigate away from the page. The PDF Download extension helps, but it isn't perfect.
Re:Memory (Score:5, Informative)
(http://mistshadow2k4.deviantart.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 31 2006, @02:37PM)
Poorly coded extensions definitely are the biggest memory leak problem. I was using forecastfox for a while and Firefox was leaking like a rusty bucket, even with the sessionistory fix. One day, forecastfox popped up with the latest temperature over an hour after I'd closed Firefox. I uninstalled it right then and Firefox has been pretty well-behaved memory-wise ever since; I haven't seen it's memory usage go over 85 mb.
Also, this fix helps too:
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.
Re:Memory-- collective? Contradictory? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Memory (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://routebuilder.org/)
Everytime a Firefox article gets posted, I see someone post a hack to fix the memory leak problem. I've tried every one of them and none of them fix it on my end. The only externsion I'm running is Google's Toolbar. Regardless though, no one except the most hardcore Firefox users would ever know to look in about:config to turn off this "feature". And they shouldn't have to either.
Re:Memory (Score:4, Interesting)
I would suspect Google Toolbar, which many Firefox users report leaks memory.
Re:Memory (Score:5, Insightful)
And as mentioned before [slashdot.org] there are bugs for memory leaks that predate the fast back-forward feature. And to say that memory probelms are all becuase of this feature is revisionist history.
Couple of questions (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://calum.org/)
Is anyone having a problem with recent versions where the URI autocomplete sometimes doesn't work, even if it's an address you often go to (e.g. google.com).
Or when you click on a tab, it doesn't "release" fast enough, and start moving the tab around?
Still the best browser though.
Re:Couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I know that my processor is "only" 1.3 GHz, but I swear there was a time when a gigahertz-plus CPU was enough to operate a GUI smoothly. But maybe I'm remembering incorrectly...
this is nice, (Score:2, Funny)
(http://www.spatialknowledge.com | Last Journal: Thursday September 23 2004, @01:54AM)
to beat IE (Score:4, Funny)
Browser Speed (Score:3, Informative)
He concludes, " So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice. However, it is still not as fast as Opera, and Opera also offers a high level of standards support, security and features. "
Wilton-Jones tested both version 1.0 and version 1.5 of Firefox. Does anyone have any thoughts on the performance of version 2.0?
Re:Browser Speed (Score:4, Informative)
CoralCDN - just in case (Score:4, Informative)
Here's something to fix (Score:5, Insightful)
That's been broken for years now. I don't care about how it renders RSS, I want basic functions to unsuck.
For new users (Score:1)
(http://www.gen.newrandom.com/)
Re:For new users (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @09:41AM)
I used to think this too, which is why I used to use the TabX extension. However, since at least Firefox 1.5 I've been able to "middle-click" a tab to close it (without giving it focus.) Once I learned that, TabX was gone.
Close button at same tab (Score:5, Informative)
There's no reason to not let the user be able to pick the old way of handling a UI functionality that a reasonable amount of people don't agree with.
Re:Close button at same tab (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Monday September 11 2006, @09:36AM)
There's an extension for the alpha already that turns it off.
I like extensions, but sometimes it seems like you have to have 80 of them just to get options that seem like they should be common sense.
Questions . Features. (Score:2)
2. Why does firefox need XUL gui ? Why not use gtk or something else ?
Updating the plain default gui would be cool.
The big question is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Public Download? (Score:1)
Good Work (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.macondobits.com/)
Slashdot will never be the same (Score:2, Funny)
It's about time they incorperated a spell checker! Vary nice.
Download manager still broken? (Score:5, Insightful)
This bug has been outstanding for several years.
There are numerous other missing features in the download manager, just compare to the download manager in Opera.
Firefox too slow... (Score:1)
Firefox with extensions (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems that future development of firefox should be on the core application and let the extension developers handle the pretty stuff.
I just went trhough the changelog... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I just went trhough the changelog... (Score:5, Informative)