Firefox 2.0 RC3 Released

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

[eldavojohn]

After reading this list, I must say that there are more than a few features I don't care about. That's not to say other people don't need them, it's just that I'm not going to benefit from any of these yet. In fact, the only reason I'll upgrade is because it's so easy.

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:

• Large Amount of Memory Issues Fixed.

It's not a feature but it means the world to me.

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...

[sH4RD]

...is this on Slashdot? This is almost like reporting on a nightly build. Remind me when it actually goes final.

Tab close buttons...

[pugdk]

and each tab will now have a close tab button.and each tab will now have a close tab button.

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

[masklinn]

Yep, it's also available in 1.5 and I'm pretty sure it was in 1.0. It's just not doable in the menu itself.

Re:Ungrateful Bitching

[Ekarderif]

My Opera runs at a constant 40 MB footprint. Until Firefox stops chewing up more and more over time, I'm not switching back.

Re:Ungrateful Bitching

[bunratty]

I can't help but take this information with a grain of salt considering the website that this forum thread originates from.

Better yet, run the benchmark yourself and see what numbers you get. There's no reason to take anyone's word that Firefox uses so little memory. See for yourself.

Re:Ungrateful Bitching

[tigerd]

I simply cannot use firefox 2.0. The thing with little arrows to get to the last of your tabs, when you got to many, sux so bad. I hate it when my tabs disapear, and I have to go and get them. Just stay on the old track, and who cares about the reordering?!? I want FF 1.6 instead of this new "u cant handle the tabs" shit. Dammit

Re:Ungrateful Bitching

[maxume]

That's some serious moderator crack there. 4 comments in a row posted at exactly the same time, saying the same thing, moderated as redundant.

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 some sort of amnesty:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66747 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66755 [slashdot.org]

But this guy was clearly redundant:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=201111&cid=164 66809 [slashdot.org]

Modding up is better than pointlessly modding down.

Re:Tab close buttons...

[Tackhead]

> If all of the tabs you want to close are in a row, then yeah, a single button in the same location is great.

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?

[cetan]

Does anyone have an extension or a way to "un-fix" the tabbed browsing changes? I actually prefer the original method of tabs getting smaller.

Re:Ungrateful Bitching

[Lagged2Death]

How are people gauging Windows memory consumption for these different applications? I don't think Task Manager is really telling the whole story.

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?

[slashkitty]

Mod this up.

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

[Osiris Ani]

Also lately I can hardly make it go higher than 70.0 MB, and I use flash to watch youtube and play games.

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?

[hritcu]

You can still configure it to make it the way you like. But yes, tabs are A LOT harder to use for me too then they were before. And it has nothing to do with the learning curve or anything. It is just about having 50+ tabs open and still be able to use them efficiently.