Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 Released

elfguygmail.com writes "Firefox 1.5 beta1 is out! It includes many new features including a new automatic update system, reworked options dialogs, faster browsing, new error pages, memory and stability updates. Get your beta at Mozilla.org."

Memory Leak appears fixed.

[MrArmyAnt]

That's good to know, can uninstall that firefox speeder upper thing. So far there turning out updates quicker than MS, and has better support. Nothing like the lack of pop ups and spam that just doesn't know how to work a PC without IE :) Go firefox! On my site 65% of my users use firefox. It is a hardware site, so you'd expect it, but Firefox is gaining momentum and space. Anyone else have percentages from there site? Slashdot?

Extensions

[2MuchC0ffeeMan]

So far the only extension that works is the gmail notifier. Not even the all-in-one mouse gestures works... I'm patient, but will all of the developers make and re-make their extensions for every version?

I smell a need for backward compatibility

New Firefox...same goofy theme

[darxpryte]

I was hoping that they'd replace the big goofy icon buttons on OS X and Linux that just don't go with anything. Maybe next version. The upside is the preferences layout is simpler, and browsing is a little snappier.

I'm also hoping that my memory leakage problems on linux are solved. We'll see! Now back to searching for the safarifox theme to see if it'll work...

Re:Incompatible, duplicate extensions

[shellbeach]

I do not know if this is a problem with firefox, SpellBound, or a combination of the two, but it's pretty damn annoying after a while.

It's a mozilla dictionaries problem, I think - the dictionaries (which spellbound doesn't provide itself) install into the Firefox application folder, rather than into your profile folder - so when you overwrite that folder, you've just nuked your dictionaries.

If this annoys you, you could always ask the spellbound devs to provide dictionaries that install into your profile ... It amuses me the way people are far happier to post complaints on /., where they achieve nothing, instead of sending the same complaint direct to the developer, where they might fix the problem!

Users need it

[nukem996]

I have switched many people to Firefox and have found that people I switched months and months ago will never update. They never look at the little red arrow on the top right. They stick with the same version they have unpatched. Other applications use auto update because users dont update programs, its a problem but if Firefox is to be known as the most secure, fastest, bug free browser on the internet then they have to make sure everyone updates.

Re:Users need it

[ahaning]

The biggest problem I can see with the old way that Firefox was updated was that you'd have to completely reinstall. So you were hardly updating.

You'd also have to stop and restart the browser, thus losing whatever page you were on when you decided to update. Here's hoping that the final versions will restore your browsing session after updating (similar to recent versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader). (Yes, I know about and use sessionsaver.)

Re:my big hope

[adrianmonk]

Does it have a multithreaded interface yet? This is by far my biggest gripe with Firefox.

I agree 100%. There are often pages that I visit which take a while to load. I load them in the background in tabs, but the whole browser grinds nearly to a halt while they load. In fact, if a flash animation takes up lots of CPU in one tab, then all the other tabs, and every other part of the user interface sometimes locks up for a minute at a time. This is just sad.

My second big gripe is just general bugginess. Yes, it takes time to iron out bugs, but Firefox has had some time. Right now, we're on 1.0.6, and honestly I'd rather see them just spend 100% of their effort on a 1.0.7 that is as close to bug free as humanly possible rather than adding more features. I'm sure the features they're adding right now are worthwile overall, but I'd much rather stay with the feature set I have now and see all the bugs disappear. The worst one is something that seems to relate to perhaps an event queue. Every now and then, something will happen that seems to cause Firefox to just stop processing events. I can press buttons and hit Command-W (I'm on a Mac), and nothing will happen. But if I hold down the mouse button inside a window, somehow this rejuvenates the event queue and these events get processed eventually. Totally, totally weird.

The worst part is that it seems that flash animations use the same thread as the user interface. So if you have a flash animation that takes a LOT of CPU, which lots of them do, then the user interface becomes unresponsive. This is just silly. You're taking untrusted code (flash from whatever web site) and letting it take CPU time away from critical stuff like being able to close the window that contains the CPU-hogging flash code!

Re:Woohoo!

[The Clockwork Troll]

Unfortunately garbage collection is not a cure-all for memory leaks; the programmer(s) still must take care to ensure that references to memory-consuming objects are removed when no longer needed. This can be a nontrivial task e.g. in a complex application where state is shared among multiple threads and certain corner case situations blur who is responsible for reference clean-up.

Bugs is bugs!

fix the operating systems

[cahiha]

including a new automatic update system

I am sick and tired of every application including its own update system. They all have different user interfaces, they don't handle dependencies correctly (e.g., Firefox may upgrade its own extensions, but not the download manager that they depend on), and they make random connections all over the Internet.

When will Windows and Macintosh get decent package and dependency management so that developers don't have to put this functionality into applications anymore, and that we don't have to put up with the security risks of many different update systems anymore?

Re:Users need it

[asavage]

For everyone I have switched to Firefox (>5), a few months later I have used their computer and noticed they have never updated. It isn't obvious at all that you should click on the arrow and that it means new updates are available. The auto-update can't come soon enough.

Re:Upgrade man

[arth1]

For older hardware, I strongly recommend installing Mozilla instead of Firefox. You install only the parts you want, and even with a "complete" install, the memory usage is much lower. This despite that Firefox was supposed to be a leaner alternative to the Mozilla suite -- it's ended up s much more bloated and resource craving. If you have less than 512 MB RAM and use the PC for more than one thing at a time, I honestly can not recommend Firefox at all.

Opera seems nice, but it's not customizable enough for me. I also can't compile my own, but have to use pre-compiled binaries that links against old libraries I don't even have installed anymore.

Regards,
--
*Art

Back

[TopSpin]

Faster back and forward means better performance...

Nice. Too bad its taken over 11 years for someone to optimize this in a relevant browser.

I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used. I hit 'back' and I observe network activity even when the page is entirely 100% cacheable content. The browser is probably playing with If-Modified-Since... I'd rather it just render what's cached especially when, between the time the page was first rendered and the time I hit 'back' the network flakes out and, rather than simply rendering what is already faithfully stored on my local disk, the browser hangs!

It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.

There's probably some profoundly crucial and subtle reason for all this and I've foolishly revealed my ignorance. Apply the necessary flames, but only if you have credible answers.

What I want to know

[poofyhairguy82]

Will the Linux version suck less? Its the slowest of the big three (OSX, Windows, Linux) in the 1.0.x series. Isn't it going to use Cairo more? Will it eat less CPU and RAM so I can stop recommending Epiphany instead?

I like how it looks best in Linux, but I kinda miss the Windows version sometimes...with its speed and all. And I know its not Linux/Gnome- Epiphany flies. So does a WINEd IE. Only Firefox is slow. Will that be better?

State.

[abulafia]

It's not just inconvenient. It's wrong in principle; 'back' should be 'back to precisely what I received previously', not 'attempt to re-get whatever now appears at the previous URL.' If I want the page refreshed, I will use the provided 'refresh' button, mkay? Thanks.

So, the big deal here is maintaining consensual state. I'm sure you know the basics here. Best practice is to POST when changing state on the server, and GET when reading. But, not everone does that. And it also took a long time to come up with that simple rule. The upshot is that when using browser based C/S apps, there is no good way to tell if the last action changed the state of whatever it is you're looking at. (For a simple example, think of confirming a bank transfer, and hitting back from the "it worked" page.) And even the POST means change rule doesn't always work or apply. Good app design has to play a role, but a browser has no idea if what is going on with the server.

There are other reasons why back can't always be exactly "what you got a page ago", but the above is the main killer (from the perspective of what I do, at least). Developers can make this better by playing tricks with the last-modified header and whatnot, but you're either going to sometimes get broken info or at least do a HEAD when going back, take your pick.

It is notable that the whole AJAX obsession usually completely kills the back button, and many web developers are very hot on the idea. If global state, session, and sometimes transaction can be bound that much more tightly, it does make life easier for a coder, at the expense of some great client side functionality. (Again, depending on how you think of it.)

Doesn't mean I'm not using XMLRPC - I don't mind bragging that we were doing some of this a few years ago. Having a community to trade ideas with kicks ass, and I've learned a lot from other's experimentation. But we shouldn't lose track of basics, like "the browser is not just a window frame; inbuilt functionality is important and if you make your own back buttons, you're missing the point."

Re:Back

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not a browser developer so I've always wondered why browsers do not simply re-render what has already been cached when 'back' is used.

For the record, they do. Well, some of them - Opera has been doing this for at least as long as I've been using it, since version 6. Coincidentially, this particular feature, or rather its absence from Mozilla and derivatives, was what kept many people (myself included) from switching. Now that it has been finally implemented, I shall probably give Firefox another try.

Re:I hope it will turn out more stable...

[a.d.trick]

I'd love to say that the new firefox will fix you flash front end, but it probably won't. The issues that you have with flash are probably Macromedia's fault, and there's not much of a way that Mozilla could test it because it's all proprietary code. You'd better wait for GPLFlash if you want them to be able to do anything about it.

Re:FireFox web page in IE

[hhghghghh]

Isn't that like going to France to learn French, and then being horrified that the locals don't speak English fluently?

Re:Deer Park !!!!!!!!!!

[tolan-b]

You must be new here...

Re:Exactly

[p3d0]

GC also protects against dangling references, which is a more serious problem than a pure memory leak.

Re:State.

[gr8_phk]

"But we shouldn't lose track of basics, like "the browser is not just a window frame; inbuilt functionality is important and if you make your own back buttons, you're missing the point.

Actually, a web browser if first and foremost a window frame. From a user point of view, most web pages don't need any state information. I would suggest that the standards guys devise a tag or something to indicate when a page should NOT be rerendered without contacting the server. Most pages need not worry, but you web app guys would have to add this little tag.

I do agree though, that there are some things in common use that can't be handled with a back-cache. These are not in 90 percent of web pages. For developers just remember, it's MY browser not yours.

Re:Exactly

[Haeleth]

Typically, GC prevents exactly one category of programmer error for exactly one type of resource: forgetting to release memory before your program ends. That category of error is one of the least dangerous anyway, since pretty much any modern OS will do it for you as a last resort.

Wrong. Many (most?) GC implementations don't bother to run a collection cycle at shutdown - precisely because the OS will clean up anyway, so there's no point.

GC provides no guarantees against a poor design hogging memory while the program is still running, and often doesn't work well with resources other than memory.

Oh dear, the old "it's not absolutely perfect so I will reject it out of hand" line. Yes, of course GC isn't a silver bullet. It's just another useful tool that makes it easier to write programs with fewer bugs in them. Yes, of course it doesn't magically remove every single possible cause of memory leaks. It just removes one large class of potential problems from the things the programmer has to worry about.

And yes, GC doesn't solve the problem of handling resources other than memory. RAII cleans up file handles and stuff for you too. That's nice, I admit it. But there are other strategies that can handle this in a GC language. C#'s "using" statement, for example. And I don't know about the code you write, but in the code I write, the vast majority of objects do not represent any resource other than memory - so GC handles them just fine, thank you.

If doctors were C++ programmers, we'd still have kids dying of easily treated diseases daily - after all, antibiotics don't cure viruses, so there's no point using them, is there?

Re:inline-block?

[Bogtha]

Even IE, with it's dismal standards support, has inline-block.

It should be pointed out, however, that the reason why Internet Explorer has inline-block support is that it was a previously proprietary Internet Explorer extension to CSS, that was added to CSS 2.1.

Furthermore, CSS 2.1 is only a working draft at the moment, whereas some CSS 3 specifications are candidate recommendations, which means they are ready for implementing, but CSS 2.1 is not ready.