Firefox 3.0 Preview 269
Brian Heater passed us a link to a PC World preview of the upcoming Firefox 3.0 release. In addition to the usual smoother UI, bug fixes, and feature updates, Firefox 3.0 will introduce several new components that should expand offline Web application functionality. The inclusion of DOM Storage, an offline execution model, and synchronization should all work together to allow for wider adoption of software like Google Apps at the end-user level. "As the breadth and depth of the competing applications expand, perhaps Microsoft's 90-percent stranglehold on the preinstalled and post-PC-purchase installation suite market will loosen, if only a bit. Then, too, if Windows Vista is any indication of what lies ahead, the company's software will continue to require ever more awe-inspiring hardware--a far cry from the light and nimble Web-based applications Mozilla engineers envision." The piece covers more than just the new functionality, of course, and should be of interest to anyone looking forward to 'Gran Paradiso.'
What I hope it has (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.
Otherwise I like the product.
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Informative)
1. Let me stop the damn animated gifs and flash things with the "stop" button like the old Netscape let me.
You can stop animated GIFs by pressing the Escape key. Also, if you're like me and want to stop all GIF animation entirely, hop into about:config and set "image.animation_mode" to "none".
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Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time I install firefox anywhere I set browser.enable_automatic_image_resizing to false. For me, this doesn't me that firefox's dev team has failed, it's just that I need different things than Joe User, who is the primary target of Firefox.
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Holy crap are you ever full of yourself.
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The configuration engine should be extended to keep track of what the options are for things with options (and, in general,
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Those are good suggestions but they don't solve his problem. He wants to stop animated gifs by clicking on the stop button, just like Netscape and the old Mozilla suite used to do. His hand is already on the mouse and
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
He could just use his other hand.
Oh... nevermind
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Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Informative)
2. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_-
3. Goto 1
Your suggestions are how ever already listed in the wish-list. The only problem is that the list contains probably a thousand feature requests, so I'm not sure when they will be implemented.
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Feature_Brainstor
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
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Stop should be for stop loading (click it again to stop timebased media?)
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Firefox never seems to gobble up memory for me, but things do become noticeably slower after a while, with errors occassionally breaking in. I'd suspect they have some kind of memory fragmentation issues moreso than anything else. But that is just a wild assed guess on my part.
Re:What I hope it has (Score:5, Funny)
2. Smaller memory footprint.
3. Let me stop sounds/music with the stop button.
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In fact, there should be a control that says, "no A/V". That and get the memory sucker under control. That's all I ask.
And it passes ACID2. (Score:3, Informative)
Oh and first post.
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On a more serious note, it's really great to finally see Acid2 compatibility. It may not be the test-to-end-all tests, but it's still one more thing to love about Firefox.
Re:And it passes ACID2. (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I hope no one passes Acid 2 for one reason. It enables people to write poorly designed webpages. If you're going to write a web page do it correctly or not at all. Expecting a browser to fix your stupid errors shouldn't even be an option.
It's good Firefox 3 passes the acid test but who cares. It is better working than it was for poorly written pages. I'd much rather choose a lighter weight browser than a bloated piece of software that supposidly works with "Everything" no matter how much of a screwup the web designer was. One of the reasons I avoid IE7 like the plague.
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The page is MEANT to be 'poorly' written and full of errors. It is meant to check the browsers error handling. Saying Acid2 isn't important is like saying checking for invalid input in your code and failing gracefully isn't important. Also if you prefer standards compliance over 'supporting the junk', you should go with Konqueror, Safari, or Opera (or any of the oth
Re:And it passes ACID2. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
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People started using it...
Then they told other people, and pretty soon loads of people were convinced to switch from IE just to be away from IE. Then all the people who switched just because someone told them firefox was better started wanting all their web pages to work again. It's a vicious cycle I tell you.
Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think Firefox is bloated? (Score:5, Informative)
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5373 colin 15 0 246m 71m 23m S 18.9 16.3 14:08.68 firefox-bin
Seems pretty big to me. Konqueror is a fraction of that size.
Re:You don't think Firefox is bloated? (Score:5, Funny)
Flamebait mod was right (Score:5, Insightful)
The parent post gives numbers without context of any kind. We do not know what version of Firefox is being used. We do not know how many and which extensions are being used. We do not know how many concurrent windows and/or tabs are in use. We do not know what URLs or files Firefox has been asked to open. Without this information, we cannot reach any actual conclusions, as these could be perfectly reasonable values for any browser, depending on the tasks the browser was asked to accomplish.
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I've got a laptop. I often fly from one end of Canada to the other. That's about 12 hours, including stopovers. On Air Canada's new planes, there are 115V jacks I can plug in my laptop and use it for the 12 hours. I could probably work with offline mode.
Also, I'm in the Navy. We don't necessarily have internet access in the middle of the Pacific. And yes, we're allowed to bring our personal laptops with us as long as we don't bring them into classified spaces.
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Why would you ever be offline?
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AJAX/Web 2.0/CSS/[Insert Buzzword here].
People wanted more and more bells and whistles in page rendering.
Try reading Slashdot with a 199x era web browser. I doubt it will work very well.
The nature of the web has grown in complexity from the httpd 0.9 days and so have the tools needed to view them.
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Works fine in Lynx.
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yes, i remember the time you're talking about, the time when i considered firefox just a Galeon clone with crapping tabbing.
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Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping? Don't you remember that the original advantage of the Firefox browser was that it was smaller, faster, and more secure than IE (because it didn't include things like ActiveX)?
What happened?
Short answer? Firefox is now competing against IE rather than just being a fork of Mozil
Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want Firefox with its original advantages and just its original features, why not use the original Firefox? Meanwhile, those who can benefit from the new technology will do so.
The only reason I can think of is that the old versions have unpatched security problems, so you'll want to upgrade after they're unsupported – but if you want the Firefox developers to stop adding new features, they're not going to still fix the security problems, they'll just move to more interesting and worthwhile projects and Firefox will die. Firefox has inertia now – and the whole web is gaining inertia, after stagnating during IE6's dominance, with even the W3C restarting realistic work on HTML [w3.org] – so it would be a waste if it didn't continue to grow and change.
In any case, they are planning [mozillazine.org] to make future versions of Firefox faster and more secure and make the code less crufty, with better C++ usage and a better garbage collector to fix memory leaks and a new JavaScript VM. And Firefox is still only a 6MB download – it's not exactly the heaviest of programs you'll ever download.
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Well, you'd still need to worry about discovered security bugs. So if you like the original firefox better than the newer ones, you should go fork yourself.
Re:Just a Browser, Please (Score:4, Interesting)
With this rush to be like IE and all, I'm wondering how long until Linux or other OSes are no longer supported either. It could be possible that they start limiting that to only the latest version of windows managers and kernels too. It would bring an interesting development around. Still I see the need to keep support for older platforms as well.
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Yes, you're not alone....
I use Firefox 2.0.x at work, because it was what came out when I started working there. At home, I am faithful to the 1.5.x range. Why? Because Firfox 2.0.x is noticable slower, the interface is... let's say, not as good as the FF 1.5.x interface. Even now, when I install Firefox for someone, I'l more likely to take the 1.5.x branch than anything else.
I hope that Firefox 3 goes back to the roots...
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Um, because that's what computers are for?
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Is there anyone other than me who wants my browser to just be a browser?
Why do I have to browse the web on something that wants to be an applications platform, an office suite, a local filesystem browser, and a dessert topping?
Agreed, but the problem dates back to the c.1995 (I think) when the HTML form-element was tacked on to the (arguably) already mature notion of a hypertext document layout rendering engine. From that moment on, the notion of what a web browser is (and what it ought to be) has become increasingly jaded. What web applications need is their own protocol, and their own scripting / markup language. But in lieu of that they continue to make their awkward home in the ill-fitting web browser -- because there's no
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Everyone else in the world forgot to ask you what you wanted. Normally, they'd check with you, because your needs and wants are more important than theirs but it completely slipped their minds this time.
Maybe buy them all a nice birthday gift this year and then they'll think of you when they see/use it. It'll act as a reminder.
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Consider for a moment that currently, the web itself is an application platform. But as cool as some websites might be, HTML + Javascript wasnt designed for complex interface design... Flash and JavaWebStart are too heavy and intrusive.
We *need* a sane standart way to define rich user interfaces that can be deployed using HTTP, something designed to better support assincronous events, and that look and behave consistent
I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:5, Interesting)
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And yet I won't give up firefox. It's so darn convenient (specially with the extensions) that I'm willing to put up with the memory footprint.
Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:5, Informative)
View: about:cache to see your current cache/memory status (click the links for further details).
Also note that the setting doesn't entirely stop the "runaway RAM", but it can greatly curb it. If you only view a few pages a day and use your back/forward a lot, I don't recommend changing it. However, if you, for instance, do a lot of Google searches and visit hundreds of different sites a day, dropping that setting can greatly reduce your memory usage. If you are restricted to only a few sites, your RAM shouldn't go too high anyway.
Most of them aren't leaks. Although I think there have been a few leaks regarding plugins, but I'm too lazy to go look it up.
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That setting for browser.cache.memory.capacity [mozillazine.org] would cause Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 to consume more memory than the default setting, as long as you have less than 4 GB of RAM installed. Let's stop spreading misinformation about Firefox memory usage, please.
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Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:4, Informative)
Although Firefox does have memory leaks, what you're describing is far worse than any confirmed memory leak. Perhaps what you're seeing is that memory use reported by the operating system is not going down when you close tabs, but Firefox is at least releasing and reusing memory internally. If what you describe was really what most Firefox users experienced, most users would not be able to use Firefox for more than a few hours before they would have to restart it. There's no way Firefox could get the 14% usage share it has today with such a serious memory problem.
In summary, Firefox does have some memory leaks, but it doesn't leak anywhere nearly as badly as you're describing for the vast majority of users. For most users, it takes many days of use before memory leaks become readily apparent by looking at memory usage numbers alone. The real memory leaks are far more subtle than what you describe, and usually require some sort of memory leak detection tool [squarefree.com] to track down.
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I have seen the same or similar features. It appears that Firefox loads this and adjust the number/amount used based on the 12 pages and then doesn't resize it for a while later. It is annoying as hell on my limited XP system. It causes everything to slow immensely because it takes what was just enough memory and makes it not enough if you open 12
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Re:I hope they've fixed the memory hogging. (Score:4, Informative)
For comparison I just opened Firefox (2.0 or something, listed in about as "Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0-30 Firefox/2.0") and it opened to http://www.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] (default home page, I haven't customized or tweaked FF at all). The memory usage after letting it settle? RSS is 47,420! Lets just hope it doesn't rise too much (for comparison a newly started instance of Konqueror uses 28,888 RSS).
Now lets visit a few sites: Just
Now lets try the same thing with digg (without restarting Firefox): Just the main page on digg and we're to 62,296 RSS. Lets open the current top 4 articles in new tabs and see what we go to... and now we're to 69,452 RSS, lets close those tabs and move the original to about:blank again... 69,412 RSS.
Lets go back to
Now lets go to about:blank then try something a bit different... RSS dropped down to 71,004 which is good. Now the different part, lets load lwn.net in the first tab, and in new tabs linux.com, sourceforge.net, planetkde.org, planet.gnome.org, and planet.mozilla.org. RSS is now to 79,432. Lets close all but the original tab and send that to about:blank. RSS is now to 77,088, it went down again which is good.
Lets try the same thing but another set of sites: original tab is amazon.com, new ones are ebay.com, bbc's site, cnn.com, google news, weather.com and wired news. The results of this one is a bit different than previous times, RSS has risen back to 77,148. Maybe we've hit a limit of how much Firefox is using? Lets close all but the original and go to about:blank again... RSS is now 75,692, dropped even more this time.
Lets go back to digg.com and see what it does... RSS is 75,962, exactly the same. Looks like its recycling some of its own memory (or loading the page entirely from cache). Now to open 4 articles. RSS has risen to 80,540. Lets close those and go to about:blank yet again. RSS is 80,308. Dropped some, but only a tiny amount. Lets go back to Amazon.com and search for 'operating systems design and implementation'. RSS is now 80,480, a slight rise. Now lets open Mr. Tanenbaum's books in a new tab (the 3 top results). RSS is now 80,552. Another tiny rise. Close those tabs and go to about:blank. RSS is now 80,488, a slight drop.
Its nice to see that in my little test the RSS didn't just skyrocket, but Firefox is still using more memory than the instance of Konqueror that has been open for 17 days (and has opened many more websites including lots of slashdot articles using the ajaxy version of the site). In case anyone is wondering: my machine has 1.25 GB of ram, and the total memory usage never passed 50% on my sy
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I really don't understand this obsession with free memory. Your RAM should be close to full at all times if you are at all interested in performance. You just dump cached information if you actually need more memory for something else. The days of DOS are long gone.
Multithreaded UI / mthreaded Javascript please! (Score:4, Informative)
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Having a single thread will kill your GUI performance the moment you do anything complex.
I know that this is a generalization, but users do not like an unresponsive GUI. Yet, if there's only one thread, the same thread that's running the GUI is doing any calculations and other operations that are going on.
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Screenshots (Score:5, Informative)
I wish to make a complaint. (Score:3, Funny)
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light and nimble? (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the alleged lightness and nimbleness of web apps, they're still slower and more unreliable than native apps, when they work at all.
DOM storage? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, don't get me wrong, there certainly are legitimate reasons
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246 Mb resident (Score:2)
Don't let Seamonkey die (Score:2)
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Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox, light and nimble?
Jebus, the memory footprint on that thing is far, far beyond ridiculous at this point, not to mention noticibly larger than even IE7's memory requirements.
And even ignoring that, you're comparing Firefox to Vista. I should bloody well hope it's light and nimble in comparison, unless, of course Firefox 3 aims to be a whole operating system.
Furthermore, Vista actually has fairly reasonable hardware requirements if you turn off all of that fancy GUI stuff. People forget that not only can all those flashy things be turned off, but you can painlessly swap out the explorer shell in and of itself. The comparison is outright stupid. Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different, you don't have to use it. The only difference is that Aero is included in the default install.
I understand that this is slashdot, and we never pass up a chanceto take a shot at Microsoft or Vista. But seriously, this has gotten to the point of sheer stupidity, and hipocracy: Id someone were to make a completely uneducated, false claim about Linux, it'd be followed up by a few dozen posts crying bloody murder, yet, now, because its ashot at Vista, its suddely okay to make completely asinine claims that in no way at all intersect with reality at any point whatsoever?
No wonder there's all this talk about Linux's superiority, and Firefox's superiority, and [random OSS app here]'s superiority, people have absolutely no clue about the competition. At least have a basic grasp on the competing broducts before making these comparisons. Know thine enemy and all.
I could swear Sun Tzu turns a full rotation with every other post here.
Yeah, yeah, -1 flamebait, whatever.
Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:5, Funny)
Sun Tzu + Slashdot + magnets & wire = new source for renewable energy?
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Most people find that Firefox 2 uses less memory than Internet Explorer 7:
http://scobleizer.com/2006/10/21/the-great-firefox -2-vs-ie-7-memory-test/ [scobleizer.com]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,127309-page,6-c, browsers/article.html [pcworld.com]
http://oomny.com/2006/03/24/internet-explorer-7-be ta2-and-firefox-2-alpha-memory-comparison.html [oomny.com]
http://www.zimbra.com/blog/archives/200 [zimbra.com]
Re:Stupid comparison after stupid comparison.... (Score:4, Informative)
Spoken like someone who's never used Beryl. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah, but that's the hilarious, beautiful thing about it.
I'm running Beryl on my 5 year-old laptop . Celeron 1.5 Ghz. Built-in video (Intel 810). 384 megs of RAM. This is some old, anemic friggin' hardware.
And yet, it flies. Everything runs as quickly as it should. The 3D bells and whistles don't slow the machine down a single
Not PC World (Score:4, Informative)
What about the other half? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hooray! _MORE_ goddamn animated banner ads! (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing that annoys me... (Score:2)
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The problem is I can't. So what now? Shall I shut up?
> That's one of the benefits of open source.
The fact that source is aviable surely is. But not the fact that I cannot fix it since I:
- know nothing about Fx/Netscape plugin model internals
- know nothing about Fx code
- know little about C++
I could probably spend few months and actually manage to do this - but it makes no sense for me.
> If you can't fix it, then (a) try to get the proje
Fix Crashes and CPU hogging (Score:2)
Thinkfree.com anyone? (Score:2)
OS X window snap bug fix? (Score:2)
H.
Morbid obesity for Firefox is not progress. (Score:4, Insightful)
Too much in the browser, again. It's a browser. Not a "platform". We went through this already, with Mozilla, which had to be chopped down to provide a browser of manageable size. The Firefox crowd is repeating the mistakes of Mozilla and Internet Exploder. We don't need this.
In Firefox 2, there's already too much bloat. Saving images of pages hogs memory, and didn't visibly improve performance.
The project seems to have been captured by the "browser as a platform" people again. Nobody cares about XUL, people. All users want is a browser.
In a few years, all web pages will have to work on the minimal browser comes with the OLPC machine. The OLPC is going to force computing to go on a much-needed weight reduction program.
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You are right, people just want a browser. They also want to watch videos, do there spreadsheets, etc all in a browser.
I hope you are right about OLPC, but I don't think so. Anymore then browsing by phone slimmed down anything. More likly there will be OLPC versions of various websites.
Nice trolls (Score:3, Funny)
Stop the Fucking trolling, firefox does not ever use more than 100 MB, you may wish to friging update yourself
Also whatever bad thing you have to say about firefox consider:
what about security (Score:3, Insightful)
Just a concern.
All Those Memory Complaints (Score:5, Funny)
First to include the other as a plugin: (Score:3, Funny)
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They can still get XP.
The logic you weave assumes that somebody is sitting there with a non-functional bunch of hardware with no OS, and now has to go shopping for it.
The truth is, if you went out to build a PC using new components today, it would be able to run Vista. If your PC is a year old, it may run Vista or not - but it already runs XP and you really have no reason to upgrade it.
And frankly, the recommended home syst
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Yes, but this should be a standard preference, as should the related performance tuning parameters which control the amount of memory Firefox consumes. The fact that you need to go into about:config and change a rather obscu
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Stop it. (Score:2)
God, that answer makes you sound like a fucking idiot. It reflects poorly on OS.
Yes, he can fix it, but maybe he relizes he isn't qualified to fix it.