First Look At Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 531
DaMan writes "ZDNet takes Firefox 3.0 beta 2 for a spin and draws some conclusions that should be sweet music to Mozilla's ears.
"Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I've tried it on — from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters. No matter what you want doing — opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking — it all happens swiftly and smoothly. What surprises me about the Firefox 3.0 beta is how many memory leaks that Mozilla have fixed. Complaints of memory leaks with Firefox 2.0 were met with an attitude of "Leaks? What leaks?" Considering that there have been more than 300 leaks plugged, it's obvious that past versions leaked like sieves.""
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Memory Leaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
I like firefox... (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:4, Insightful)
Those days seem long ago now. The project needs a top to bottom rewrite to deal with orders of magnitude more demanding usage of large numbers of tabs over days or weeks at a time.
Firefox needs to:
1) Implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves
2) Bring the memory-performance balance up to par with other browsers
3) Implement some sort of standard memory/resource allocation/deallocation API for extensions so that people can bring up a standard window and see:
Tab 1: 35 megs
Tab 2: 50 megs
Extension 1: 500k
Extension 2: 100 megs == Zoinks!
Extension 3: 300k
So that memory/resource leaks can be readily identified, reported, and fixed.
The save active tabs option has helped to allow people shutdown and wipe the memory slate clean but that really is not a solution a decent piece of software should be forced to rely on.
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would take a really bad OS to make memory fragmentation a problem, since memory address pointers are virtualized (IE I'm talking about how process A can't access process B's memory and how the same numerical pointers in each point to different memory locations). Even Windows isn't that bad. Besides, the only performance metric any kind of fragmentation can really affect is speed, never size.
Or is this some misnomer or am I misunderstanding this?
Re:looking forward to going back to firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I do like the idea of using Konq full-time, but the extensions just aren't there. Meh.
Re:Overall, feels good and polished (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
It should be fast (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:on leaking (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to pay less attention to passing any one test and more to standards compliance as a whole.
Modern attitude to bugs (Score:4, Insightful)
This is really the worst part of modern software-development practices. When users complain about bugs, they are met with hostile demands to explain exactly, how to reproduce the bug, and the complainer is always presumed to be doing something wrong. Those, who aren't willing to put up with the hostility are not even deemed worthy of being a user — if you had a bug, you should've reported it!
But when a new release has (some of) the bugs fixed, the fixes are touted as a major leap forward. We are supposed to love the new version for all the fixes it includes — and ignore all the bugs, that the next version will be addressing...
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ack! (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe if you're a web developer. My whole OS doesn't use half a gig of memory!
Re:Ack! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
They *are* end-user features, though. In Windows, you can open the task manager and see how much memory each task is taking up. Would you also argue that that is a bloated debugging feature? Is 'top' a bloat? Firefox is a little OS of its own, running multiple extensions and web apps, I don't see why a feature that's standard on every OS is so non-applicable to Firefox.
Since every instance of Firefox is different because of the extensions, the only way to figure out how to keep the memory usage down is by having these memory-reporting features available. It's a necessity, as much as it is on other platforms.
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:3, Insightful)
None of this is _good_. It's just a statement of fact.
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you saying that you only use those features when developing applications?! I use them on a regular basis, to see which application is slowing me down, to kill an unresponsive task, to see if it's time to reload Firefox
Again, I ask you to list the functional requirements for this feature.
I think the original poster described it well. But, to summarize: I'd want to see the list of apps that Firefox is currently running and their memory usage, and to be able to kill the misbehaving ones if they won't let me shut them down themselves.
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:3, Insightful)
And then Slashdot collectively declared it to be the official response, and repeated it over and over ad nauseum until people believed it. Kind of like the "Acid2 only tests error handling" misconception that came up several times earlier today, even though if you actually look at the description of the test, it's only one aspect among many.
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:3, Insightful)
I would simply ask, what other browser has memory profiling built in? Can you open a window in IE and kill a stray activeX process or see how much memory its using?!?
Opera doesn't provide these features either.
I don't think IE is threaded by tabs, I'm sure safari isn't. I guess I don't see where firefox is so massively behind the other browsers. It doesn't use an inordinate amount of RAM, it is comparable in speed to safari, IE and opera.
Re:Firefox Seems To Losing Its Luster (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I see statements like this, I ask myself, "Has this person ever done any real software development?" Rarely does a project--especially one like Firefox--need a "top to bottom rewrite", regardless of problems it's having. Even when applications make the transition from one platform to another, they almost never require a total rewrite.
Posts like yours sound really informed, what with phrases like "implement threading both between tab sessions and within tabs themselves". The reality is that in addition to not knowing that a stack of existing bugs doesn't mean "it's time for a rewrite", phrases like the one I quoted are more vague than they will appear to those who don't know better. What does "threading between tab sessions and within tabs" mean, exactly? What operations do you want to see performed in separate threads?
Firefox doesn't need a top to bottom rewrite, but I think your post does.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's been claimed for IE8, but anyone can download the Firefox betas and check for themselves. Big difference.
Wouldn't be the first dose of vapourware to come out of Redmond....
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:2, Insightful)
And by "people like me", you mean people who use Firefox religiously and have been a major Mozilla supporter since Netscape spun off the browser source and actually used to be employed by Netscape before AOL came along?
It seems like this is also a typical response to any criticisms. Not only are there no "serious" memory problems, but anyone who doesn't buy into the "we need hundreds of megs for the back button caching" must be an ignorant IE-lover trying to stir shit. Simply not true.
There have been plenty of such articles and discussions right here on Slashdot, with plenty of deserved disbelief.
Re:Modern attitude to bugs (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it really "obvious"? Do me a favor, look me up on the Internet :) Start with the hostname part of my e-mail address.
Seriously, if you can make a mistake like this, it may explain some of the problems you are having supporting your customers...
Thank you for illustrating my point.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Most web pages seem to have images, which all together add up to more than 100k. Then there's the DOM tree, the Javascript libraries, all the script state with variables, objects, etc. There's IFRAMEs and OBJECTs.
Lots more than just the surface.
Typing the words "web page" into Google (first term that came into my head) brings up the following sizes for the first pages returned (44k, 52k, 13k, 17k, 76k, 12k, 37k, 52k, 21k). The definition of page size in this case is: "the sum of the file sizes for all the elements that make up a page, including the defining HTML file as well as all embedded objects (e.g., image files with GIF and JPG pictures)." Try it with as many terms as you want, I'm sure you'll get similar results. Plenty of headroom there before we even get close to 100k. Right now it looks like reality is on my side. I don't "only wish" anything, except in your imagination...
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. We won't be able to fix problems today, so fuck it, let's just never fix them.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
ACID2 == Microsoft Mentality == Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
1) custom coded their HTML generators (e.g. Frontpage) to generate badly broken webpages, which any sane browser (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, etc) would have problems with
2) custom coded IE to handled the badly broken webpages produced by Frontpage, etc.
The net result was a World Wide Web full of pages that are "best viewed with Internet Explorer". Embracing broken "MS Extensions" is wrong. Yet the people behind ACID2 seem to think that it's a good idea that a web browser should take a badly broken webpage and guess at what the "intent" of the webpage is. What's next? A C compiler that tries to guess what you intended your program to do, rather than returning a compiler error when it encounters broken C code? The solution to broken webpages should be to fix the broken webpages.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Abandoned no.
Kludging to pass the test without actually implementing full CSS2 support, yes.
ACID2 is a test of a few of the hardest elements of CSS2, based on the assumption that if you passed the test, you'd have good support for the rest of the standard. If your goal was to just get the tick in the box for marketing purposes, it wouldn't be hard to just kludge it.
That's very much Microsoft's style. Look at how they're hacking ISO instead of fixing MSOOXML for a recent example.
"300 leaks fixed" != "Leaks like sieve" (Score:2, Insightful)
The number of leaks that exist in an application has little if any relationship to how much an application leaks memory. A single bad leak that happens often can cause enormous memory consumption, but even a large number of small leaks no one of which happens very often may not appear to leak much at all. Statements like this make me wonder if their author has ever written any nontrivial code at all.
I'm not at all saying that the Mozilla code isn't a memory hog (it's well-known that it is), nor that it doesn't exhibit the symptoms of memory leaks, which is also well-known, although as others have pointed out the issues are complex and often Mozilla gets the blame for leaks that are actually caused by third-party extensions. What I am saying is that you can't just simply count up the number of "memory leak bugs" and say whether an application leaks "a lot of memory" - sometimes the two are correlated, but by no means always.
Sheesh.
Memory Leaks - Plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
I used to have really serious memory problems with Firefox. My memory usage would skyrocket very quickly, and I'd have to close it and reopen. This stopped a while ago when I installed FlashBlock. I rarely view flash anymore, and my memory footprint is rather stable. Right now I have VM Size of 403M - not small, but I have 4 windows and 97 tabs open. Have fairly few add-ons installed: DownloadHelper, FlashBlock, IETab, TabMixPlus and TalkBack.
I don't believe that memory leaks on Firefox are a problem, at least not on Windows. I think it is the plug-ins that are causing the problems.
Cheers,
m
Re:ACID2 == Microsoft Mentality == Evil (Score:5, Insightful)
NB, I'm rather sceptical of the ACID2 test, for the reasons perfectly expressed in this comment [slashdot.org], but your comment is nonsense.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Do you think Firefox doesn't have to render stuff written in Frontpage too? Mozilla pays just as much attention to quirks mode as Microsoft.