Mozilla Firefox 2 RC2 Released

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."

Opera still feels more responsive, uses less RAM.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using the x86 Linux release all day today. And unfortunately, it still feels slower than Opera. From my quick measurements, it also seems to use more RAM.

I had been hoping that Firefox 2 would be able to better compete with Opera. I was hoping that it would render faster, while also consuming far less memory. My Firefox 2 RC2 process from early this afternoon ended up hitting about 650 MB of RAM (measured with top) before I had to kill the process. And that was only after about three hours of use, in total. I didn't have any non-default extensions installed, so they aren't to blame.

My computer only has 512 MB of RAM, and I'm not in a position to purchase more. If Firefox 2 leads to my system thrashing after only several hours, then I don't think I'll be able to use it. Opera, on the other hand, only ever seems to ever consume 80 MB or so. I can't recall ever seeing it above 100 MB.

I really like the extensions of Firefox, many of which Opera does not offer. But Firefox suffers from some pretty severe memory management issues. Those in turn may lead to degraded system performance, even on computers with 512 MB of RAM, running Slackware 11. Unless Firefox deals with this excessive memory usage, I don't think I'll be able to use it on my system. Meanwhile, Opera functions without such problems, so I'll continue to use it until things improve with Firefox.

Tweaked UI

[eebra82]

I've been running FireFox 2 since its first release, but I haven't noticed any changes to the UI as advertised. What's new compared to the older release candidate?

Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I can tell, Firefox is losing users at an astounding rate.

Many people have stopped using it due to it's bloat and slowness. I installed in on my uncle's new desktop computer several months back. He asked if there was an alternative he could use, because he found it was consuming all of the physical memory in his system, and then some.

At the college where I work, a number of researchers, professors, and students had switched to Firefox over the past few years. I know at least ten who have switched to browsers like Opera, Konqueror, and some even back to Internet Explorer, unfortunately. Of the people I have directly inquired with, they basically said it wasn't comparable, in terms of speed or memory usage, with other browsers.

I know of several open source developers who have stopped using it because of the recent Debian nonsense. Debates aside, their handling of the situation had a very negative impact. Many developers have gained a dislike for the Mozilla project, and others have switched. Those developers I know are now using Konqueror. One of them is using Opera on Windows.

Myself, I have stopped using Firefox for the aforementioned reasons. Konqueror has proven to be a better browser. It works perfectly fine with all of the sites I visit, and doesn't use excessive amounts of memory. I use KDE, so it integrates with my desktop far better than Firefox did.

You may think that it's only 20 or so people I'm talking about here, and that we're not that important. I'd beg to differ. Each one of us has recommended the use of Firefox to our relatives, friends, colleagues, and other acquaintances. Many of them have stopped suggesting it. I personally don't recommend its use. I suggest Konqueror or Opera for Linux users, and Opera for Windows users. Mac OS X users these days seem to go straight to Safari. At least five of the people I know are now making similar recommendations to people they know.

The Mozilla project will need to put forth much in the way of effort to stop this. We'll need to see rapid technological improvements, as well as changes in the way the project is run. I don't know if we'll ever see such things happen, but at least we have alternative browsers to move to if things continue to get worse.

Re:Wtf! Advertising on the download page?

[zullnero]

You're kidding, right? Mozilla incorporated a long time ago. It helps to fund the ongoing development and maintenance of its products by selling merchandise. It has been doing so for years now. Someone mod this guy up for funny.

Re:pr0n protection

[arun_s]

Yeah, like I need my last open browser window coming back up on my screen.

Yes, its not very convenient if it automatically restores tabs from the last session, but if its anything like the SessionSaver [mozilla.org] extension, I'm all for it. Its incredibly useful in that it allows you to reopen closed tabs while browsing. Also, if you're researching a particular topic and have a dozen related tabs open that you'll need again in the future, you can save the entire session under a name.
Its nice to see the Firefox guys taking a cool thing like that and making it part of the default browser.

Re:Screw Perl 6; Make Mine Javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Javascript in Firefox 2.0 is about 50% slower than in Firefox 1.5.

Try both in this MSX emulation in javascript and see the difference:
http://jsmsxdemo.googlepages.com/jsmsx.html [googlepages.com]

Any chance they've fixed

[rsilvergun]

the vlc client plugin crashing FF every chance it gets? I think this might be one of those finger pointed issues (i.e. Mozilla saying it's a vlc problem and the vlc team saying it's a FF problem). I'd just like to see it fixed :(.

Re:Firefox is hemorrhaging users.

[kruhft]

I almost gave up on firefox, but I gave it one last shot and attempted to build my own from CVS. After upgrading to gcc4 to eliminate the link errors that occure with previous versions, the build went smoothly with the following ~/.mozconfig:

. ~/data/mozilla/browser/config/mozconfig
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr/local/stow/firefox-cvs
ac_add_options --enable-optimize="-march=pentium4 -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -pipe -funsafe-math-optimizations"
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-freetype
ac_add_options --disable-postscript
ac_add_options --disable-gnomevfs
ac_add_options --disable-gnomeui
ac_add_options --with-pthreads
ac_add_options --disable-ldap
ac_add_options --disable-xprint

This config made a world of difference in the usability of firefox, and I'm sure the main speedups are from using the native gtk2 toolkit rather than chrome/xul. For those that aree unhappy with the slowness of the default builds, I suggest trying something like this; it makes a world of difference.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the real question is, why force people to download extensions to use these sort of simple features that are useful to just about everyone? I have a number of extensions on Firefox, and many of them are just adding simple features that Firefox ought to have, like spell check, tab resurrection and form auto-fillout (all of which, I believe, Opera has.) Extensions slow down Firefox, and having too many can bring it to a crawl, even on a relatively fast machine. Putting these kind of features in Firefox wouldn't significantly add to memory usage or clutter the UI too badly, and they're extremely useful. Another reason why the anti-phishing is included by default is that it's aimed at precisely the sort of user who'd never think to look up, download and install extensions for their web browser. If you're reading an article in Slashdot about a release candidate of a web browser right now, like you are, odds are you know at least the basics about phishing; what it is, how to detect it, and what you can do to avoid it. But little old miss Edna, who only uses the computer to pay her bills or read the church website doesn't know what phishiing is. And she doesn't know what the hell an extension is either, and sure as how isn't going to go out of her way to get an extension to protect her from phishing. Hopefully, having the protection built in will prevent people like this from getting their identities stolen.

Re:Two Versions plus

[SeaFox]

FireFox
FireFox Lite
plus optional extension pack that includes all extensions in FireFox

That solution has been suggested more than once, but keeps getting rejected. I think it's a good idea but the powers at Mozilla think it will cause confusion.

First Firefox release that leaves me Blah

[PingXao]

I love Firefox and have used it exclusively (and Mozilla before that and Netscape before that) for over a decade. This 2.0 release of Firefox is leaving me very un-blown away.

1. Visual Refresh - so what?
2. Phishing protection - Good for "ordinary users", does nothing for me.
3. Enhanced search - I can already search pretty well across the internet, so this is bloat.
4. Tabbed browsing - each tab has its own 'x' close button? I call that a step backwards.
5. Resume brosing session - who cares?
6. Web feeds - the ONLY feature I might find useful
7. Inline spell chacking - Many people will benefit from this obviously, but not me, so it's nothing but bloat as far as I'm concerned.

There's more, but you get the idea. I am unimpressed by the new features of Firefox 2.0.

I still don't get this "bloat" thing...

[Miseph]

Seriously, what are you people doing that Firefox is eating so much system resources?

I'm running several optional extensions all the time, and regardless of how long I use Firefox or what I browse, I never see the problems some of you are reporting, not even close. Maybe it's because I mainly use Win2k, and the 'memory leak" issue is mainly a Linux thing, but somehow I doubt that memory management in Windows is better for any specific application at any time than the Linux equivalent.

And yes, I periodically do things like leave 5-10 tabs open in each of 1-5 instances of Firefox with each tab displaying svereal high resoultion photos, reams of text, and wacky formatting and CSS effects. I still don't see any problems with bloat. Ever.

I'm not saying that others' problems don't exist, I'm sure they do. I'm just saying that it doesn't sound anything at all like my own experiences with Firefox. Believe me, if I did, I wouldn't be using it at all. I'm only running 384 MB of RAM on a 5-6 year old computer... For soemthing to take up 2 GB of memory is not just unacceptable, but completely impossible. Thankfully, Firefox only uses between 30-100 MB for me. Guess I'm just lucky or something.

As for Opera... I'm not a fan. The Opera UI and I don't work well together, and I'm not of the opinion that my webbrowser should have much of a learning curve. Maybe if I ran into more rendering problems I'd work through it, but I don't, and the ones I do see are always because some idiot decided to make a web app that only runs in IE, and Opera doesn't exactly fix that (though the IE Tab extension does). There's nothing really wrong with it, and I tend to refer people to it as well as Firefox if they use IE, but not ever likely to use it myself.