Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 Released 349
Shining Celebi writes "According to the Mozilla Developer Center, Firefox 2 Release Candidate 2 is available for download. This looks like it could be the final release candidate, and offers a tweaked UI and improved stability over RC1, plus, of course, all the new in Firefox 2.0 features."
Bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript (Score:5, Insightful)
I want JavaScript + a Mozilla-like UI that will let me write full-featured locally-hosted GUI apps that can do all the things other local languages can
Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users. (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope, Firefox is still gaining usage share at the rate of several percentage points per year [wikipedia.org].
What has gone up dramatically has been the amount of bad news people are making up about Firefox. Sorry, trying to make Firefox look bad hasn't worked in the past and it won't work now.
Re:Bloat? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good for the goose not good for the gander. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not like (at least on most desktop, non-mainframe systems) like the OS is really competing for memory with any other OS. It's not shared. The OS knows who's trying to use the memory and how much is "extra" at any given time, thus it can just use whatever's left over at the moment for cache.
With an application, it shouldn't ever request more memory than it actually needs to operate, because it doesn't have the "god perspective" that the OS does, to determine how much is underutilized and ought to be taken up by stuff that's less-than-critical.
If every application did what you're describing Firefox doing, we'd be in a lot of trouble; the OS would never get to do any of those cute "spare" memory tricks that it does, because the apps would be trying to use way more memory than they actually needed to perform their core functions.
Applications should only take what they need to survive; there's only room for one bloated thing that hogs memory, and it has to be at the top of the food chain.
Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, if you really want the bug fixed that much then you need to go the extra distance to help the developers reproduce it.
> I hate to break it to you, but not every software bug can be easily reproduced (especially when you are dealing with performance related bugs like this). You often have to deal with things that are sporadic at best.
Well unless you expect someone to manually trace through every possible code path in the source code to look for the bug, then it's going to need to be reproducable for it to get priority.
When given a choice between spending a month tracking down 1 hard to reproduce bug and actually fixing 50 easily reproducable bugs the 50 will win nearly every time.
>Disregarding them on the assumption that the people reporting them are just making up lies about the product you know to be perfect isn't going to help anyone.
I don't think anyone's saying that. But between the difficulting reproducing it, and possibly a diferent understanding of what exactly constitutes a "memory leak" - and particularly how to measure that - It may well be that any time a developer goes looking for it they instead find legitimate instances of large memory usage.
Images do actually take up a lot of memory - particularly since the browser probably holds a reference to the uncompressed bitmap, not the original image, so if you've got a lot of images open on a lot of tabs, you _will_ use a lot of memory. It's also possible that when that memory is released it is not actually reclaimed by the operating system untill such time as it's really needed, and depending on how you're measuring the memory usage of an application, it might appear that the memory has not been freed. That's what I mean by having a different understanding of what a leak is.
Just as the users aren't making it up, neither are the developers. I'm sure that no developer that would be able to fix such a bug who actually encountered it in a reproduceable way (or at least in a way that would give a clue to it's whereabouts) would deliberately ignore it. In fact they'd be ecstatic. They must be absolutely sick of hearing about it by now and would like nothing better than to be able to get rid of it once and for all.
Re:Bloat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, just maybe, because Opera is closed-source.
Re:Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RA (Score:3, Insightful)
I wish mozilla.com would allocate some more resources to maintaining the 'Linux' port of Firefox (and their other programs) so that Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and othes wouldn't have to apply so many patches themselves in the first place! But sadly, it appears that mozilla.com would rather protect their valuable intellectual property, even if it means they bite the hand that feeds them in the process.
By the way, comparing the work done by the maintainers of the Debian package to that of virus writers makes you appear either clueless or insulting. Which do you prefer?
Detach Tab option? (Score:3, Insightful)
I like to use one window per topic I'm working on and if one tab leads to another topic I want to look at in more detail it would be nice to just detach that tab to a separate window rather that copy the URL, hit CTRL-N and middle-click in the new window.
I notice that both Konqueror and Konsole have had this functionality for some time.