Firefox 2 Alpha 2 Reviewed

pcabello writes "Firefox 2 Alpha 2 was released yesterday. Check what's new in this review at mozillalinks.org with screenshots."

Memory

Anyone know if the memory problems that everyone was complaining about in v1.5 is fixed for 2.0?

Re:Memory

As reported before [slashdot.org], Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive. To disable this feature, do the following: 1. type about:config in you address bar 2. scroll down to browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers 3. set its value to 0 (zero)

Re:Memory

So install Leak Monitor [dbaron.org]. Then you can see the cause of the most severe memory leaks: poorly coded extentions.

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

And that would be wrong (otherwise extensions wouldn't be portable across platforms). All extensions are written in pure Javascript/XUL. The real nasty bit is that the Javascript can (and usually does) call back into the runtime using XPCOM, and as a result, the Javascript can generate memory leaks by allocating resources and not freeing them.

Re:Memory

Sorry to contradict, but you are incorrect. Extensions can be written in any any language that supports XPCOM bindings, and many are not portable across platforms.

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

Extensions exist in a global context for the process. They can maintain a permanent reference to objects that are never used again, and should otherwise be freed. They may also create cyclic references, in which one or more objects contains references to each other. This creates a situation where the objects are not referenced by an accessible code path, and the reference count can never drop to zero. The result is a leak, and it is an inherint weakness simple of reference counting garbage collection.

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

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?

Yes, there are memory leaks in Firefox. However, they are generally so subtle that you don't notice them until you've had Firefox open continuously for a week. The problems people are referring to as "Firefox memory leaks" are generally not memory leaks, or are leaks caused by extensions, not leaks that exists in Firefox itself.

Re:Memory

Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.

That's right, it's not a bug, it's a feature!

Re:Memory

Sorry, but poorly designed caching is a memory leak [msdn.com]. I shouldn't have to restart my browser because it is taking 700mb of memory (no lie). Especially when I only have one window open.

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

If Firefox is using 700 MB of RAM, it's almost certainly not a cache that's causing the memory use. You can check how much RAM the memory cache is uing by going to about:cache. You can make sure the bfcache is using only a little memory by visiting eight simple pages, one after the other.

I would suspect Google Toolbar, which many Firefox users report leaks memory.

Re:Memory

As reported before, Firefox does not have memory problems - it has a feature that is very memory intensive.

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

Slightly off topic, but probably the best place to ask:
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

Yesssss! The I-didn't-mean-to-drag thing drives me nuts. In fact, general UI slowness is the thing that keeps me from using Firefox instead of Konqueror a lot of the time.

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,

but it will not filter postings that are the first ones automatically, will it?

to beat IE

This release must be renamed Firefox 8 to be better than IE

Browser Speed

For many users, speed is the most important aspect of a browser. A certain Mark Wilton-Jones [howtocreate.co.uk] has done an exhaustive comparison of browser speeds [howtocreate.co.uk].

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

I guess it depends on what metric you want to use to measure speed. I've been using Opera for quite a while, and what really annoys me about just every other browser is how they like to redraw/reload the page when you use the back and forward buttons. Opera doesn't do that - rather the back and forward buttons are instant because Opera has the rendered page still in memory. Because of this, Opera overall seems a lot faster to me than the other browsers, despite the fact that is a bit slower to load, and it really isn't any faster when it comes to rendering pages.

CoralCDN - just in case

http://mozillalinks.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/ [nyud.net]

Here's something to fix

Early versions of FF allowed me to Find text anywhere on a page, including inside textareas.

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

Simply just adding new flare to help new, inexperienced users, while not generally fixing problems that us veterans have come across. Of all the issues right now, I never noticed having a "close" button on the individual tab itself as a high priority. Maybe that's just me.

Re:For new users

Currently, there is no way to close a tab without first selecting it.

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

Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching.

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

Okay, so now they placed the close tab button on the active tab itself. I've heard of that being planned. I, however, really don't like that myself. Does anyone know if it's possible to turn off? Because if not, I'm not switching

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.

1. Is there a way to make the 'goback' response as fast as opera's ? It could be a little faster.

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...

..will 2.0 be released before 1.5 is marked stable for x86 in portage? Seriously, how's SVG support comming along? Last I checked they couldn't add SVG to the accept header because of issues with the rendering backends.

Public Download?

is a public download available?

Good Work

Although I vastly prefer Opera, anything that can help decrease market share of IE and its broken everything is good.

Slashdot will never be the same

A new spell-checking feature has been added. Text entered in multiline text boxes is automatically checked for mistypes words, for single line text boxes, you must ask for it (right-click, Spell check this field). Words not found in the dictionary are marked with a red underline.

It's about time they incorperated a spell checker! Vary nice.

Download manager still broken?

Fixfox and mozilla are unable to resume downloads across sessions. In other words if you have to reboot the PC for any reason, you will have to start that 300mb download from scratch.
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...

On my Linux machine, I recently ditched Firefox for Epiphany. It is much more responsive and less of a memory hog. I love some of Firefox's features, but until the developers polish up the interface and improve speed and memory usage, I'm sticking with Epiphany. For me, speed is much more important than extra features.

Firefox with extensions

Just about everything in the review is available now, and has been for quite awhile, through extensions?

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...

... and there's not a single feature in FF 2 that hasn't been in Opera for ages. The FF team is slacking - they're not innovating anymore. Not that they OWE me anything, of course. Just saying.