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.""
Why so many leaks? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why so many leaks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows EventID 9582: The virtual memory necessary to run your Exchange server is fragmented in such a way that performance may be affected. It is highly recommended that you restart all Exchange services to correct this issue.
It happens quite a bit actually.
Awesome Bar (Score:3, Interesting)
It takes a couple hours to get used to, but it's simply fantastic. Kudos to the team that implemented it.
I only skimmed TFA but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this stuff may be considered trivial things to some people, but it strikes me as basic functionality. I would hope that Firefox won't make it to a third supposedly major version change without these kinds of things being addressed.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why so many leaks? (Score:5, Interesting)
There is sloppy coding in some parts of the codebase (some of which are not actually used in Firefox, though; parts of the addressbook code in mailnews come to mind). The reference-counting system used in Gecko will leak in the presence of reference cycles (mitigated in 1.9 with the cycle collector). The reference-counting system and the GC-based JS engine don't play that nice together in some ways (again mitigated by the cycle collector; planned to be fixed in Gecko 2.0 by moving to a GC-based setup for the C++ as well). Extensions have been known to do silly things like holding onto all Window objects ever loaded in the browser (which of course prevents them from being GCed).
Some things you missed are memory fragmentation, plug-in leaks (only really solvable by putting plug-ins out-of-process), and unbounded growth of caches (there isn't much of this, but for completeness sake).
Is the 'downloader' still a piece of shit? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that 3.0 did SOME changes to the downloader but how many? Is it just the UI or resume?
In FF 2.0 on a single core, p4 3ghz, if I open say a 1920x1200 JPG on a web site, then right click to save as, the ENTIRE BROWSER dies in the ass for up to nearly 10 seconds, it even does it on my heavily overclocked quad core machine at home (still 4 or 5 seconds)
There's something about that download box which just completely chugs machines.
Vertical tabs (Score:4, Interesting)
in FF3.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Is the 'downloader' still a piece of shit? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Memory Leaks? (Score:3, Interesting)
I run Exchange servers, and yes, it means that the actual RAM (+ PF) is fragmented. It is not merely complaining about the page file.
Re:The old cross-platform coding guidelines (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's see... OS/2 and HP-UX come to mind, at least if you cared about performance and the like.
And if we're talking about templates, GCC's support was pretty bad too, at the time. In fact, it wasn't until the switch to GCC 3.x that life got a little better on that front. egcs 2.95 was a bit of a mess in all sorts of ways.
No one's arguing the guidelines don't need revising. They do. But when they were written they made perfect sense. You have to keep in mind that they're almost 10 years old now. C++ compilers were _really_ bad back then. Heck, some of them were still based on cfront!