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."

Woohoo!

[Tidal Flame]

If they've really made it more stable and fixed the apparent memory leak, I'll be really happy. Firefox is great as it is, but it seems that if you leave it open for too long it starts to take up insane amounts of memory.

I'll update if...

[nigham]

... all my extensions work on it. I had no problems with Deer Park Alpha, except that nothing except Adblock worked.

I hope it will turn out more stable...

[beeswax]

My employer forces us to use firefox at my job... The database front-end they had designed uses flash. Firefox segfaults quite often and the copy/paste buffer is always farked up. I really hope these issues have been taken care of :(

If it were my choice at work, I'd use Opera.

Now with native SVG support!

[sootman]

So the Adobe SVG plugin, which works fine in IE/Win and FF/Mac, will no longer be needed, which is great, since it crashes FF/Win! w00t!

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeeeeeeah ! Faster back and forward means better performance reading messageboards .

I agree completely--slow back/forward has made me stick with Opera. Firefox 1.0.6 takes a while to render the page, which is annoying especially when going back to anchors. Opera is nearly instanteous; hopefully Deer Park can compete (trying it now).

Re:Fp

[nighty5]

Did support for aqua buttons etc make it in for this release?

Based on 30 seconds of usage

[ocelotbob]

Just downloaded it, seems cleaner, the new error pages seem a bit better than the old popup systems; informative and not nearly as cluttered as IE's. Haven't tested page rendering that much, so that remains to be seen, but seems good so far.

Re:Fp

[Schrade]

The Slashdot bug was probably only a problem for people with corrupted profiles or those that didn't use Adblock. The ads on slashdot often would corrupt the pages.

svg release schedule?

[radarsat1]

Very cool that they have a new release out, I'll be downloading it soon.
But I'm a little dissapointed it looks like the built-in SVG support isn't in there. Guess it's still alpha? (Haven't been following the Deer Park releases)
I'm really looking forward to the day where I can actually do a site in SVG and be able to expect more than 2 or 3 people to be able to see it...
And wow am I ever tired of struggling with the Flash IDE.

Re:Yeah!

[Seumas]

In a new tab?!?!

Screw that. I'll take the very annoying dialogue popup instead.

How hard is it to make the error just pop up on a page in place of the page that didn't load in the first place?!

Re:Extensions

[Will2k_is_here]

All they have to do if their extension still works is tweak a version field at addons.mozilla.org (or wherever their extension checks for updates) and Firefox will allow the extension to run.

I haven't made any extensions before, but from what little I know, doesn't that mean I can unzip the installed extension, find the file, add 1.5 to the list, rezip and go?

Re:Woohoo!

[LnxAddct]

I was actually giving this some thought the other day and perhaps firefox should use one of the C++ garbage collecting libraries. A webbrowser really just needs to be usable and low on memory, no crtical speed requirements as long as the UI is responsive, websites render quickly, and javascript interprets at decent speeds (none of which a garbage collector would slow down). Firefox developers could still focus on keeping the memory footprint down, but applying a garbage collector is a good solution because its unlikely they'll ever remove every memory leak. This would remove most of them, help detect others, and keep the remaining problems minimal.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Copy and Paste Fixed?

[superpulpsicle]

Are you sure about that being a real bug and not just some environmental problem? I don't ever remember seeing this problem on any FF on any machine. I just tested it again and it works fine.

Now we're talkin'

[psallitesapienter]

Report a broken Web site wizard

Now here's something other [microsoft.com] web browsers should also include in themselves. Let's hope that M$ also "copies" this feature into de "new" IE 7.

Re:Woohoo!

[Kremit]

I've definitely noticed this too. I leave Firefox open for days at a time sometimes. Actually, I'd guess it to be caching of the pages in memory and not so much as a memory leak... but in that case the developers need to implement a "memory cache" that can be controlled from the Preferences -> Privacy -> Cache. If I knew anything about the FF/Gecko codebase I'd attempt it myself.

GCC 4.01

[(1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

Beautiful: Firefox' source finally builds with GCC4 out of the box; no mucking around necessary!

Re:Fp

[pomo monster]

So what, if the vast majority of websites don't bother styling them? Form controls can default to Aqua without compromising the spec. In other words, there's no need for controls to be ugly if ugliness isn't specified in the HTML, and even then, you can handle it the elegant and tasteful way:

Some controls are going to naturally discard the Aqua look if you "fall off the cliff" by customizing the control to the point where the Aqua look can no longer be maintained, e.g., if you set the border and background of a button. Others, like checkbox, are going to refuse to "fall off the cliff" unless you explicitly turn off the -khtml-appearance property. The choice of when to disable the Aqua look is going to be chosen to match other browsers (and Internet Explorer in particular).

Naturally, that's how WebKit behaves [opendarwin.org]. Ugliness has no place on the Mac desktop, even on the web.

Re:Now we're talkin'

[DigitumDei]

Incidentally the report a broken web site wizard is great to use from the acid 2 test page. ;)

Go there [webstandards.org] and let them know you want web standards compliance.

inline-block?

[Yjerkle]

They've jumped up half a version and still no display:inline-block? Shouldn't they finish CSS 2.1 before they start on CSS 3? Every other major browser out there supports it, so it can't be that hard. Even IE, with it's dismal standards support, has inline-block.

Re:Deer Park Alpha 2 is great

[Compuser]

Yeah, I really hope XUL goes well with SVG. Maybe then
the guys behind the tabbrowser extention will make
it so the tabs can be on the left side of the browser
window AND have tab name run vertically. This is the
one thing I still wish for in terms of UI that is
not available from any browser I know of.

Re:Auto update!

[Kichigai Mentat]

Awesome - because we all know how well auto-updating stuff goes. Take Windows, for example! :P

Well, as one who manages the family computer, which runs WinXP, AutoUpdate is actually pretty useful. I haven't had to install an update manually for quite some time.

Seriously though, I can't wait until we get an OSX port that doesn't suck (Camino is okay, but what good is it if you can't use all the cool firefox extensions?).

Well, as a Mac OS X user, I feel your pain. But, I'm wondering which parts suck for you? I have issues with page rendering. Look at these rendering jobs from the LiveJournal [livejournal.com] home page (be kind! this is hosted on my personal server box):

• FireFox 1.0 [dyndns.org] (Sorry, but the "About" Dialogue blocks the effected text, so you'll have to trust me)
• FireFox 1.5 Deer Park Beta 1 [dyndns.org] the distributed Mac OS X binary, not compiled from soruce
• Camino 0.92 [dyndns.org] just for comparson
• Opera 8.02 [dyndns.org] for Mac OS X
• Safari 2 [dyndns.org] (And if you don't trust me, think about how many web browsers have a brushed metal GUI like that)

This occurs on several pages, but the only one I could produce on-demand was the LiveJournal page. Note that this is the LiveJournal home page, not user pages, and contains relatively simple and stable code. Note that Safari and Opera read the pages perfectly fine, but all the Mozilla-based browsers (all versions), even Camino, can't render the page properly. And these problems are not always so minor. On occasion, text can continue right outside of the view (and scroll) of the window. Text boxes will end up with text no longer inline with the cursor, making editing and correcting typos virtually impossible.

Any one else have this problem? I know it's not too isolated since I've had this happen on both installations of OS X 10.4 and even 10.3. Or are there other problems that I don't know about?

Mozilla?

[afidel]

Anyone know if any of the code changes will make it back to the Mozilla Suite tree? Or is that officially dead as of 1.7? I would like to know because I love the integration of email and browser. I've been using the Suite style since Communicator first came out and I really like it at home. At work I use Firefox and Outlook.

Re:Firefox 1.5 installation directions

[DraconPern]

They want corporate to use it, but I will say it again. Item (2) is the primary reason firefox isn't being used by normal users and corporations. Every .x version requires a new profile (otherwise FF doesn't run). Extensions get broken, etc. Most normal sofware will either include migration, or use a major release number. I know this is a problem because I author a Mozilla Firefox MSI

FireFox web page in IE

[SnprBoB86]

I understand that IE isn't standards compliant, but it is dominant. As such, many people will be viewing the FireFox web site in IE. But IE doesn't render many of the FireFox site's pages correctly! Rounded corners don't work on every page and some pages (such as the "Mozilla FireFox 1.5 Beta 1 Release Notes" page) have much larger issues. However, IE renders the content at full width and FireFox leaves a substantial margin on either side (I have a wide screen display, I want to make use of it!).

Blame Microsoft all you want, but this is inexcusable. If you want people to switch to FireFox, they need to believe FireFox is better. Seeing as most web sites are built for IE, users coming to FireFox's web site see a page that doesn't render correctly and they assume the makers of the page are to blame. Why would they blame IE? Every other page they go to renders just fine in IE.

Since the same organization that made the page makes the software, it is conceivable that people would be turned away from FireFox on the assumption that people who produce broken web pages also produce broken programs.

Whether the FireFox web site doesn't properly support IE out of laziness, or out of malice. It should be fixed.

Re:svg release schedule?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that every single real site out there that uses SVG is designed for the Adobe SVG plugin, and Firefox appears to be nearly completely incompatible with all of these sites. I suspect the problem has more to do with trivial things like doctypes, namespaces, and mimetypes than actual incompatibility of the parsers and renderers, but for some reason compatibility with existing SVG implementations is not a priority for the Firefox SVG developers.

Overall Firefox 1.5's SVG support seems disappointing to me: major features are still being added late in the alpha/beta cycle, huge swaths of the SVG standard are still not implemented, UI features like zooming and scrolling are MIA, and compatibility seems to have been ignored thus far. IMHO Firefox 1.5's SVG is likely to be buggy, incomplete, and quirky. Perhaps the only way for it to progress is to shove it into a release and get people using it, but I hope that doesn't mean we'll be stuck supporting Firefox 1.5's SVG quirks forever. I suppose the improved updater should help eliminate that problem.

Re:Back

[Jugalator]

I think the "problem" with Firefox 1.0 was that it wasn't caching the DOM tree, and given how complex that beast can turn out to implement (code can for example modify their own DOM on the fly whenever they feel like), it's not really surprising to me.

I think Firefox 1.5 is basically as fast as Opera on this now, so it's nice to see one of Opera's killer features in Firefox.

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

[Vicsun]

Not to troll, but Opera has had this feature for ages.

Now that Firefox have finally caught up I might just switch back, though. It was the feature that converted me to Opera in the first place.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

At last, I always hated typing those german-umlauts, by pressing alt+148, and then noticing I forgot the Num-Lock. Which made me go one page back, and when I returned everything I typed was all gone....

Now at last it works, it will remember my text, without reloading the whole page!!!

And for one!!! It's free!!!

UNTITLED tabs on timeout

[BestNicksRTaken]

Has anyone else suffered with the weird thing where if a website times out, the browser displays a blank page, the tab says 'untitled' and if you refresh, instantly you just get a blank page (as if it hasn't even tried to refetch it).

Also there's that thing where the browser will not display the page due to some timeout again I guess, but the ticker thing still rotates as if it's trying to fetch the page (a look at netstat or LievHTTPHeaders tells you it's not).

Mind you I think the rotating ticker thing is broken in Thunderbird too, as it keeps on going after 'no new messages on server'.

Or is it meant to constantly rotate in the top right of the window just to distract you?!

Don't get me wrong, I love Mozilla stuff, but there's still basic bugs in it that need fixing before adding more crap.

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

[xtracto]

Yes, I have had a lot of problems with Flash on Firefox too :

- Sometimes Flash wont process mouse clicks.
- Sometimes Firefox would start to work slow when
    looking at a Flash movie/application. [ not happening in opera]
- When into a Flash page, if you leave Firefox open for a lot of time then memory will go up a lot (once it ended being like 250MB with only 1 window (no tabs) open in a flash page).

Oh and one thing I LOVE about opera Flash support is that when you resize the window Opera resizes the Flash content. It is REALLY good as in firefox resizing just affect the fonts (I would also want it to resize images but... i think it is a lot to ask for).

Re:FireFox web page in IE

[infestedsenses]

Firefox is displaying the site just as it was meant. IE is breaking the layout due to its lack of support of the CSS max-width rule. It's supported by every other modern browser.

But users don't care for that, I know, and what counts isn't the technical proof but the impression the site leaves on Joe Sixpack.

Any professional typographer will tell you the way Firefox interprets the site is much user-friendlier. Text lines should not be too wide or it will make reading more difficult. This is a common problem with most liquid layouts and max-width would be the perfect solution to the problem if IE supported it. While I agree that Mozilla should have used a work-around to make it display the same everywhere, I can understand the idea behind using standards-compliant CSS and like this demonstrating Firefox's superiority. Your comment, however, shows that this probably isn't working for a lot of people.

Re:Auto update!

[nietsch]

My debian system has a manual update every once in a while (usually after i get the Debian Weekly News(letter)) How should this auto update feature workt together with apt-get? it's nice if it can signal there is an update available, but usually I dont run firefox as root, which would be the only one that has permission to do the writes necesary.

Exactly

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Thank you for posting that. I wish more people would understand that GC is not some sort of resource management panacea, and stop relying on it as a crutch to support bad designs.

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.

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. What really matters in a typical application is the timely release of all resources, and usually GC won't help with that.

Remember, boys and girls, the first rule of resource management is that every resource must have an owner responsible for releasing it when it's no longer needed. If your ownership strategy isn't clear or the owner doesn't have the knowledge/ability to release its resource(s) promptly, then your design is beyond hope and no GC in the world will save you.

Re:Doesn't Fix Splitting Absolutely Positioned Fra

[drew]

only 2002? pfft!!!

this bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9458 [mozilla.org]
has been open since 1999 and has over 150 votes. and quite frankly, i don't think the votes mean much. i remember reading a quote from a major maintainer saying that he might consider how many votes a bug had if it was something in the tens of thousands. (this was about two years ago, regarding the most voted on bug in bugzilla, with a little over 500 votes. and still open, by the way...)

and as much as i like mozilla/firefox and appreciate the work that the developers are putting into it, i still find it ridiculous how they will frequently mass move bugs that they don't feel like fixing (even ones marked as release blockers) from one release to the next. the bug above was originally targetted for mozilla milestone M9...