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.
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:5, Informative)
Dozens of memory leaks have been fixed in Firefox 2. A memory benchmark shows Firefox 2 consumes less memory than IE 7 or Opera 9 [mozillazine.org].
If you're still seeing a memory problem in Firefox 2, what you should do is describe steps to reproduce the problem so the bug can be reported and fixed [dbaron.org].
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That's amazing that memory use is so low for you in Opera. When I tried opening the same six sites in six tabs that I did in a post father down the page [slashdot.org], Opera used 99 MB of memory, and went down to 56 MB when I closed all but the first tab. That's about the same amount of memory Firefox 2 uses with the same sites.
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:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Informative)
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Still, it's pretty clear that 50MB worth of data is not getting shuttled back and forth from the disk when I minimize and re-open Opera. It's far too fast and quiet for that. That memory is just getting marked as page-out-able, or something.
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Yes, these guys complaining about they focusing on features and skipping the bugs are missinformed or jump to conclussions, anyone who upgrades to firefox 2 from 1.5.0.7 would notice that they are slowly improving the stability and memory usage. It is not like they would fix all the problems that cause them in a single update but since Bon Echo until this rc 3 I have noticed improvements.
Also even in that bugzilla page you can notice that some bugs are getting fixed, then there are some that are the fault
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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-code
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Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not compared with other browsers. From this post farther down the page [slashdot.org], you can see I opened the same six sites in six tabs in Firefox 2 and IE 7. Firefox 2 memory usage was 97 MB, but IE 7 memory usage was 130 MB.
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I tried this in IE 7 (I don't have IE 6 on my computer any more). I opened google.com, abc.com, cbs.com, nbc.com, cnn.com and nytimes.com each in a different window. Memory usage went up to 135 MB. After closing all but the window with google.com, memory usage went down to 57 MB. After opening the same pages in tabs, memory use went to 130 MB. After closing all tabs but the one with google.com, memory usage went back to 60 MB.
I tried the same operations in Firefox 2. It uses 99 MB of memory when the pages
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start with the google.com
open a tab. Go to 4 big sites in this tab
open another tab. Go to 4 more big sites
open another tab. Go to 4 more big sites.
close all but the google tab.
Do the same in IE (I only have IE6, so I have to do it with windows.)
Let me know if you still get the same results.
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I'm currently running Firefox 1.5.0.7 w/21 extensions. I have 20 tabs open, many with memory-intensive pages with large amounts of content and/or scripting. Windows XP Task Manager reports 90MB for firefox.exe (which I consider to be perfectly normal). I close 16 tabs and memory usage is down to 56MB.
Since there seems to be a fairly small, tech-oriented group who routinely complain about Firefox's memory usage I'm inclined to believe it may be the result of an extension or non-standard configuration. I h
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> would make me squeal like a giddy school girl
Historically, the Firefox changelists have tended to not list changes to the core code (like leak fixes) as much as "user-facing" changes. Sort of comes with who's compiling the changelists.
There are in fact a bunch of memory usage fixes in Firefox 2 as compared to Firefox 1.5.
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Really, which sites does not use flash extensively, even on slashdot they bother you with the flashy happy 3d smileys add...
I do experiment with memory issues in firefox. Fortunately I have been using konqueror instead of firefox for some time and along with Privoxy it makes everything I need (and it enters into sites Firefox never entered, like my bank portal).
I dont plan to upgrade firefox,
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Maybe this MozillaZine Knowledge Base article about memory problems in Firefox [mozillazine.org] holds the answer:
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:5, Funny)
I jsut upgarded adn for smoe resaon firrefox uednerlines everyhting in red! WROST FAETURE EVAR!
FLASH - saved the universe! (Score:2)
I use Firefox each and every day - for work and for play; but for some reason when ever I visit a site with FLASH my CPU feels the pain. And by pain I mean **100%** CPU usage pain. Well maybe 60% on my new system. Well maybe not every FLASH site, but it seems to be most of them. And why does IE not have this issue? Will someone please help me? Mozilla? Linus? CmdrTaco?
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How about Adobe?
You do realize the Flash plugin is a 3rd-party piece of closed-source software, correct? And that the IE Flash plugin is different from the Netscape/Mozilla Flash plugin?
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Just a small correction: in general, Flash is not used to view average websites, but subaverage websites.
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Although, a nice workaround would be the ability to restore all the tabs I had opened if I close Firefox with multiple tabs. Sometimes, I just don't have time to read all the content on all my open tabs, and I don't want to make bookmarks for pages I'm going to read once and close.
I know that if Firefox terminates unexpectedly, the next time you launch, it asks if you want all your tabs restored - this is a very nice feature, and I wish I could do that whe
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Informative)
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Why the hell did they decide on making you hold down shift to move folders, but not to move bookmarks?!
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problem with that is that some people want to click on the folder and hold the button down and mouse down to a link in the folder and release the button and have it open that link. This is similar to how the menu works. But you can't have the folders behave like menus AND have them be draggable. Since a lot people expect the folders to behave like menus and its not often that you'll be reorganising your bookmarks, they chose to make the folders behave like menus.
You can still right click on the folder, s
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I originally switched because I use so many different computers throughout the day and wanted to have the same bookmarks on all of them and have all of them synced automatically... which foxylicious allows. I've been running this way for over a year now
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You don't need to wait any longer - it's already there.
Re:Ungrateful Bitching (Score:4, Funny)
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66713 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66717 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66721 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66725 [slashdot.org]
And another 1 whole minute later:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66745 [slashdot.org]
Apparently these guys posted during s
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*slaps JIM across the face with a trout*
That's the featue that breaks it for me. (Assuming you're right-handed), if you can mouse all the way up to the tab, you can Alt-F,C with your left hand and never touch the fucking mouse. But no matter which hand you use, you used to be able to simply hover the mouse over the little "X" that closes "the current tab" and close tabs a
What about extensions? (Score:2)
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Last year 1.5 had 3 release candidates and 1.5 final was identical to RC3. So hopefully this year they get it right on the third attempt too.
Anyway, give it a few w
Where the hell is everyone downloading it from?!?! (Score:2)
Re:Where the hell is everyone downloading it from? (Score:2)
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Enter about:config in the URL bar, start typing the word "check" and double-click the extensions.checkCompatibility so that its value is False instead of True.
Now Firefox will no longer check for the version string in extensions, and you can use all the extensions that you are used to (I haven't found any incompatibilities with 2.0 RC3 yet).
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Why... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe because Firefox 1.5 RC3 was later renamed to Firefox 1.5.0.0 without any modification (hence that Firefox 2.0 RC3 has high chances to become 2.0.0.0)?
Plus every single IE7 RC made it to slashdot, no reason for the final Fx2.0 not to.
2.0rc3 is 2.0 under cover (Score:3, Interesting)
Not "new" in RC3 (Score:5, Informative)
The release notes page itself seems a bit misleading, since they specifically talk about "Firefox 2 RC3" even in places where they mean Firefox 2 - perhaps someone saved time with a search & replace.
--
So while this announcement probably means they fixed bugs and are another step closer to the final release, the major features aren't news.
Biggest problem with firefox... (Score:3, Informative)
Some nice new features (no, I didn't RTFA):
-auto spellcheck (GREAT idea, especially for your typical slashdotter)
-session saving (although Opera beat it to the punch like, well, everything else(aww snap -1 troll))
-security updates... ?
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There have been session-saving extensions for, like, years...
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Finding the 2.0 Compatible Extensions (Score:5, Informative)
Here is the link: Bill's Big List of Firefox 2.0 Compatible Extensions [extensionhunter.com]
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Right now, I'm browsing this with Mozilla Websheep (or at least, that's what the titlebar says).
IceWeasel 2? (Score:2, Funny)
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
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If you use a mouse with a middle button (I'm on a laptop w/o a mouse), then middle-clicking anywhere on the tab will close it. That's the easiest overall. I wish my laptop had a
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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
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---John Holmes...
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There's a Trackpad, too, but abomination is disabled.
---John Holmes...
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RC3 Totally broken for me! (Score:2)
But with RC3 any URL I enter is opened in the first tab - its impossible to open pages in other tabs it seems. I'm amazed how this kind of massive bug made it into a release candidate.
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Faster? (Score:2)
12 hours (Score:2)
Youtube, Veoh... lots of other sites.
It's using 90 Megs now, which I'm pretty sure would be 250+ megs idle under previous versions.
And this is on XP Pro.
python swallows javascript (Score:2)
Every example that I've seen shows how to convert one loop into two loops totalling more statements. Can anyone explain to me how it makes my JS code simpler?
Why I personally like Firefox 2 (Score:3, Informative)
1/ It seems faster. It also has a MUCH better memory footprint.
2/ Session-saving and undo close tabs is now built-in. This is great, because I used to get this from an extension, and that extension was a horrible memory leaker (this might contribute to #1).
3/ New tab management. I often have lots of tabs open, and it's nice to be able to scroll the tab bar now or to get a drop-down of all the open tabs. The close button on each tab is annoying (that's what middle-click is for) and the wider minimum tab width is wasteful, but both of those settings can be changed in about:config.
4/ Speaking of about:config, there is a new hidden setting that lets you disable compatibility checking for extensions. Oftentimes, an extension marked for 1.5 will work just fine for 2.0, but the author hadn't updated the extension's manifest to say that, so FF2 would refuse that extension. Not anymore.
5/ Button to restart Firefox after installing an add-on. And the new session saving kicks in to restore all your tabs and even what you have filled into forms after the restart. Makes installing stuff much less painful.
6/ Spell check! No more copying-and-pasting into word to check for typos.
7/ Better RSS management
8/ Better password auto-fill
9/ I personally love the look of the new theme. The old tabs looked rather ugly on Windows Classic. Now combined with ClassicFox [ktechcomputing.com], Firefox looks stunning on Windows Classic. But that's a matter of personal taste.
Personally, I didn't care much for the other features like anti-phishing (I have it disabled 'cuz I think I can protect myself, but it's good for Joe Sixpack), live titles, or the search suggest (which I also have disabled). Anyway, at the risk of sounding like some sappy endorsement, I really love Firefox 2. Once I got used to it and tweaked the settings, I can't believe how I ever managed to get along with 1.5.
"un-fix" tabbed browsing? (Score:3, Insightful)
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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.
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Re:"un-fix" tabbed browsing? (Score:5, Informative)
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Firefox_:_FAQs_:_About:
Specifically, look at:
browser.tabs.closeButtons
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
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Still, I'm hoping for better Mac integration in 3.0 than is seen currently not just on the UI front but with spellchecking and password management, Mac OS X has support for both built in and so it'd be better if they used this on a mac rather then their own implementations.
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I love the fact that I can configure different proxy settings for different network adaptors on my MacBook (I need to use a proxy server for ethernet, but not for wireless) and everything just works. Then Firefox comes along and I have to fiddle about with the settings...
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Re:WHy a new installer for Windows? (Score:4, Interesting)
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An MSI would be nice for deployment in large network, yes. However, deploying firefox for us
on our large network would be a piece of cake when bundled with the scripting application we
use (WinBatch). Winbatch makes deploying apps like FireFox a piece of cake.
I would love to see FF start supporting group policies. When the day comes that FF supports
MSI deployment and Group Policies, that will be the day (for me) when FF is ready to be taken
seriously for corporate deployment.
I long for the day wh
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Sounds like you may have benefitted from using a fresh profile and importing your bookmarks/cookies from the old one to the new.
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Compose message to context works for me on Linux in 1.5.0.7. Are you running the official 32-bit build or an unofficial 64-bit build? Have you tried a fresh profile? If so, did you report to bugzilla?
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