Firefox 2.0 To Debut Tuesday

An anonymous reader writes "Firefox 2.0 for Tuesday, says the Seattle PI. They give a quick recap of some of the new features, and discuss the ongoing IE vs. Fox debate." From the article: "Version 2.0 also improves on the tabbed-windows interface that Mozilla innovated and that Microsoft introduced for the first time last week with IE7, its biggest upgrade since 2001. Analysts said IE7 is a significant improvement over its predecessor, but the big question is whether it will stem Firefox's growth at Microsoft's expense. Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month, from 2.9 percent in October 2004."

Re:innovation?

[Xymor]

And I've been using since 1997 [wikipedia.org] with IE

Minimum tab size

[42forty-two42]

One of the annoying things about the new firefox interface is you can't have as many tabs in the bar at once anymore. Sure, it has a scrolling interface, but I liked the sort of spatial representation of the old system. Is there a way to change the minimum size of the tab headers in the new firefox?

Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[JavaManJim]

Its Sunday after all right now, so why not pray for FireFox? This is FireFox 2.0 Beta running on my Windows XP PC.

1. Starts without maximizing itself to the full PC screen area. Always leaves space available. In contrast SeaMonkey correctly occupies the full PC screen area when starting (but SeaMonkey makes me create a new profile except for once.). FF thinks its full screen according to its maximize/window button but is mistaken.

2. FF fails CSS rendering because it uses an antique CSS engine.
http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/ [webstandards.org]

Those are my FF issues. What are yours?

Thanks,
Jim Burke
     

Re:innovation?

[Blakey Rat]

BeOS had tabbed-windows system-wide since it was released. What year was that? It also had to be around 1994 or so...

Re:Hey Folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to feed the troll, but... the fact is that there are far too many IE-only web applications in the business world. It is very hard to crank down the security rules (let alone move to Firefox) due to these poorly implemented web applications (or web interfaces to legacy systems)

In fact, in the browser wars of the 1990s, Microsoft required that certain license terms included the requirement that some critical part of the license holder's web site have IE-specific behavior and/or require IE to operate correctly. (I know, we refused to sign that contract and ended up having to do our own implementation of the wininet.dll - which turned out to be a good thing in the long run but cost us dearly)

(Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons...)

Re:YAY!

[ilovepolymorphism]

With the new spellchecker they will also be introducing a new attribute to the input tag: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Controlling_s pell_checking_in_HTML_forms [mozilla.org] Is this a non-standard attribute? Are we going back to each browser adding stuff and hoping the other one stays relatively compatible? I'm not saying whether this is a good or a bad thing. I was just curious.

I'm a web developer

[suv4x4]

For me the big question as such is:

should we care to support Firefox 1.5 now?

We know we'll have to support IE6 for years to come, even IE5. But Firefox users typically upgrade their browser quickly.
So: do I check my sites in FF 1.5? Do I even keep it?

Before you tell me "but they all render perfectly and the same": it's not true. I keep Firefox 1.07 for this reason here, since it handles quite a bit of elements/CSS in a different manner (even clearing floats differs a little in some cases).

There's also lots of bugs fixed in 1.5, but not in 1.07. And there's also new oddball behaviours in 1.5 not present in 1.07...

FF has 10% market share. I'm just split if it's worth it going into so much detail.. maybe I'll just support 1.5 for a few months and move to 2.0.

Please share your opinion.

Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides having far better CSS support than Firefox 2.0, Konqueror also uses only a fraction of the resources. Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.

For example, when I simultaneously open about 15 of the blogs and websites I read daily, top reports Firefox 2.0 rc3 as using 149 MB of virtual memory. Konqueror, on the other hand, uses a cool 28 MB for those exact same sites. Opera uses 31 MB. So as far as I can tell, Firefox is the lame duck when it comes to effective memory usage. This is with a build right from mozilla.org, without any additional extensions installed. I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.

A problem I have had with the Firefox 2.0 release candidates is crashes. This doesn't happen with Konqueror, or any other application I'm using, so I doubt it's faulty RAM. These crashes aren't easily reproducible, and I frankly don't have the time to bother debugging an application that I really don't use, and that crashes the few times I do try it out.

full screen

[chocolatetrumpet]

IE can go full screen - and I mean full screen. Even the toolbars autohide up into the top of the display.

Firefox has always left the toolbars around to eat up valuble screen real estate. The application goes full screen, but not the web page.

If firefox wanted to 1-up IE, they could make the toolbars autohide, and then even make the scrollbar autohide. Then it would be true full screen. How's that for marketing speak?

But in all honesty, this is a feature I would enjoy.

Re:Two of my prayers for FireFox Improvement

[JudgeJackson]

Better zooming is at the top of my wishlist. Opera and IE7 have both implemented zooming nicely - I hope Firefox will do so as well.

Re:Here's hoping.

[iabervon]

Legend has it that it won't matter, because if it's using too much memory, you can just restart it without losing what you're in the middle of.

Re:MDI

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla also stole pop-up blocking and mouse gestures from Opera.

No it did not. Those existed in other browsers before Opera... primarily in IE HTML control derived Windows browsers. But hey... as usual, the Opera super-fans are out in force to make sure it steals as much credit as possible.

IE7 is horrible

[Anonymous Coward]

The inteface is crappy. I installed it and asked my wife to use it. She was frustrated in 5 minutes. No menu on by default. No favorites on by default. The bookmark manager is bad.

What the hell was MS thinking? IE7 doesn't touch Opera or FF.

The elephant in the room...

[William_Lee]

I am a big fan of Firefox in terms of philosophy and features, but have been driven to Opera (which I actually prefer for most things) due to the ridiculous amounts of memory that Firefox consumes. With multiple tabs open, I can routinely see Firefox over the course of a day or two of remaining open consume upwards of 900K, and it will continue to grow until it is shutdown and restarted. This is a serious issue for many Windows Firefox users, and the developers seem either unwilling or unable to focus on fixing it. This should have been the number one priority for version 2 in my opinion. It results in a shoddy product that would be unacceptable in a commercial application. Why is it that this elephant just sits in the room while FF developers pretend it's not there. Restarting an application should not be the solution to any problem, let alone one this serious. It's widespread and should have been addressed a long time ago!

Re:innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari has one feature that I can't do without, and firefox lacks: autocomplete based on bookmarks/favourites.

Firefox only autocompletes on pages in history, which is not good enough. I love the ability to type a few letters of any of my bookmarked sites, and having it autocomplete for me.

Re:YAY!

[gamefreak1450]

I find "Client-side session and persistent storage" to be quite interesting, and wonder if any major web apps will make use of it in the near future.

Probably not too many, seeing as how web developers rarely cater to the ~10% of users that use Firefox. Personally I like the features and standards-compliance of Firefox, but the fact that 90% or so people still use IE haunts me.

Re:YAY!

[zmotula]

Sorry for offtopic, but adding a new attribute that controls the spell checker reminded me of two similar functions. I would like to have a system solution for disabling text selection (because selecting web application interface is dumb) and disabling text completion for input boxes (because for some boxes the completion simply does not make sense). You might be familiar with this -- does WHATWG work on something like it?

Re:Konqueror is rock solid and light on resources.

[Abcd1234]

Opening the exact same sites in Firefox and Konqueror will often show a major difference between the two in terms of RAM usage.

'course, it helps that Konqueror can leverage a ton of the infrastructure already present in KDE, and as such, it's actual resident set size can be much lower (since many more of the libraries it utilizes will be shared with other apps).

The question is, how much total RAM is that monster KDE desktop taking up?

Of course, if you're using KDE already, then you're absolutely right, konq will be a better choice if your goal is to reduce memory footprint. However, for folks such as myself (I use WindowMaker), there's probably little advantage to using one over the other.

I also disabled the cache for all three browsers, since I've heard that Firefox has a policy that leads to excessive memory usage.

Actually, that's incorrect. What you want to do is disable the fast back/forward cache. It is controlled by a property called "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers". Set that value to 0 to disable the feature. This can significantly decrease the amount of memory used by FF at the expense of slower back/forward response.

Re:YAY!

[namekuseijin]

hello? eXtensible in XML techs is there for a reason, ok? If a browser doesn't understand a particular tag or attribute, it simple ignores them, like they've been doing for the past decades. Browsers which understand the meaning will provide a better experience.

It's not like people were getting a hard time with IE6, despite it's handicapped CSS handling, for instance.