Firefox 2.0 RC3 Released 238
midkay writes "Firefox 2.0 RC3 has just been released. The release notes cover all the changes since the first release candidate, but RC3 appears to have a new Windows installer and more security in the extensions aspect, among a few other things."
Ungrateful Bitching (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I wish they would take care of these problems [mozilla.org] at some point. I know on the current Firefox, you can take measures [freerepublic.com] to restrict its size but I think it starts to thrash when I go to a largely intensive Flash site. I would rather it not steadily accrue memory as I use it through the day and visit sites that use Flash extensively. I know that Flash is a plug-in and this is one of the leading causes of memory problems in Firefox [mozillazine.org]. But it's the only extension/plug-in I use and it's so I can see average websites, I don't do anything special or extraordinary with it. You'll probably be able to convince me that this is Flash's fault yet I don't quite see the same effects in IE. Conspiracy? Well, I'm all ears and happy if it is.
Maybe it's the fact that I have between 5 and 10 tabs open at a time. Although I'm good at closing them, sometimes the memory doesn't seem to be freed up. Maybe that's not Firefox's fault and it's these shady sites (like Slashdot) that allocate resources that can't be freed? Maybe this is an unavoidable problem and IE 7 will experience the same problems--I'm not sure but we'll see I guess. What should worry Firefox proliferation advocates is that I'm willing to try out IE 7 when Windows forces it on my machine just to see if I can use it all day without having it blow up a couple times due to memory leaks.
So this features list has some intriguing points but the one that would make me squeal like a giddy school girl would be:
So, in the end, I hope that the development efforts of Firefox 2 are spent implementing better memory management and control instead of introducing more features. More features are probably a lot more fun to develop and I know I get this for free so I'm not in any position to bitch. But if you want to make me an I'm-going-marry-Firefox fanboy, fix the memory leaks that plague the occasional user--I'm not saying all of them, just the ones that large percentages of your users probably experience.
Does anyone else experience memory issues with Firefox? Does anybody know if development efforts for Firefox 2 have included memory management? I can't seem to find any record of that online.
Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tab close buttons... (Score:2, Insightful)
I seriously hope they have changed the preferences this time so that is easy to change back to the pre 2.0 behavior (its doable but its quite a hassle - using about::config to enter a new option that does not exist is not really that user friendly).
God, having to move your mouse to close a multitude of windows just UBER sucks.. the last beta I couldn't even change the behavior to full pre 2.0 behavior - when I had less windows than what filled the horisontal screensize, the closing button would be at the right end of the tabs, not at the right end of the entire firefox window.. talk about sucky inconsistent user interface.
-pug
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:2, Insightful)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
And another 1 whole minute later:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
Apparently these guys posted during some sort of amnesty:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
But this guy was clearly redundant:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=16
Modding up is better than pointlessly modding down.
Re:Tab close buttons... (Score:3, Insightful)
99% of the time, that's my use case.
Pop open 20 or 30 tabs from various boards, one discussion thread per tab, and read 'em in sequence. One mouse click, and no mouse movement, per tab-closing.
Having to move the mouse to each tab would be a dealbreaker.
If, as the release notes suggest, "Power users who open more tabs than can fit in a single window will see arrows on the left and right side of the tab strip that let them scroll back and forth between their tabs", there'd fucking well better be a "close current tab" button. Because the misfeature of a single close button per tab just cut the number of tabs I can fit on a single window by half.
The open source model's greatest flaw is that it's incapable of doing usability testing.
"un-fix" tabbed browsing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to see a neat memory trick with Opera 9, try browsing for a while, opening a bunch of tabs, etc. Open up Task Manager and note what it reports Opera is using, probably in the 30 to 70 MB range. Leaving all the Opera tabs open, click on Opera's "minimize window" button. Watch as Task Manager decides Opera's memory consumption has fallen into the single-digit MB range. Open Opera's window up from the taskbar again, and note that its memory consumption rises, but only to a fraction of its previous high.
I have no idea what this means. The most important thing I know about Windows' memory management is that it's so crazy-complicated that it's beyond my understanding.
Re:"un-fix" tabbed browsing? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the single reason I will NOT be using this browser. They completely screw up tabbed browsing. In the release notes, it says "Improved tabbed browsing" what a joke. Power users who like to look at many tabs and close many tabs quickly will find this new version very difficult to use.
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:3, Insightful)
My anecdotal evidence trumps your anecdotal evidence. I'm using Firefox 2.0 RC3 (with Adblock 0.5.3.043, Talkback 2.0, Flash, and Adobe Reader; I don't keep it loaded down) on WinXP Pro to create this particular post, it's only been running for approximately three hours with intermittent use, and it's already up to 99,756KB of system memory. What's worse, browser.cache.memory.capacity is still hard-coded to 16384.
I only really resent it passing 250MB when it's time to wake this laptop from hibernation, so I routinely shut Firefox down before putting this computer down for the night. Yes, I had that same problem with 1.5.x and even 2.0 RC2, as recently as last night.
Re:"un-fix" tabbed browsing? (Score:3, Insightful)