Firefox 3 Beta 3 Officially Released 337
firefoxy writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 beta 3. This release includes new features, user interface enhancements, and theme improvements. Ars Technica has a review with screenshots. 'Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.'"
Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, as someone who routinely sees Firefox use 300MB (up to 100MB already!), I have to ask:
Did they actually fix it?
So they're addressing it. Does what they've done actually solve the problem? Or will I still watch Firefox use up to 500MB during a normal browsing session?
Re:Extensions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Add-on finder? (Score:2, Insightful)
disappointed at one fact... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:YAY! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:YAY! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a user interface paradigm that's decades old now, and just because the bunch of monkeys coding IE think it's fun to throw it out the window doesn't mean it's a good idea. Microsoft has the anti-Midas touch for interfaces these days anyway (cf. Vista generally, that new Office abomination generally, drop-down menus that hide half their contents for no particular reason, etc.). Emulating them would be a terrible idea.
Re:YAY! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if that were true, did they have to maintain large data structures in memory at all times (forced to do so by the DOM specs)? Did they need to try to guarantee 50fps redraw (10ms timeouts being the standard "dhtml" sites use)?
Plus, I'm not sure that your more "featured" is correct. But it's hard to compare features that are so different in concept (controlling hardware vs doing predictive guessing on search terms based on past searches... which is more of a feature? Which takes more memory? Should the past search database be in memory or on disk, for acceptable performance?).
The real issue is that web browsers are trying to do everything at once and please a number of very different demographics (people with 100MB (I kid you not!) HTML files full of tables, people with pages that link in 800MB (again I kid you not) of images, users who want instantaneous response to any action without any memory being used to hold partially precomputed results, etc, etc).
Really, you can have fast, low memory usage, or doing all the bells and whistles people want out of a browser. Pick two, or maybe even one and a half.
Re:YAY! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Like I said, just what the damned hell are people doing that their Firefox sessions consume 300+ MiB of RAM? For god's sake people, close tabs you haven't used in an hour, if you're leaving the house for 3 hours, close Firefox entirely (unless you're using it to download something)...
Beta or not... (Score:2, Insightful)
How does you scale the font in firefox3? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ctrl +/- now scale the entire page, insted of just the text(Which looks bad with many images) -(
Re:YAY! (Score:3, Insightful)
FF fine on OS X but still lacking features (Score:2, Insightful)
I suppose there is a plug-in somewhere to create thumbnail tabs and another one to make per-site preferences and another to save workspaces and another to make resizable text entry boxes, but for me, I get all that and much more in Omniweb (www.omnigroup.com), still the gold standard for browsers.
I am encouraged by the promise of better memory use. I've never seen a browser that didn't leak memory like a sieve.
For the paranoids among us (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, as the parent called it "memory fragmentation"
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If you close the tabs, does it free RAM or Leak (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily; all that means is that Firefox isn't freeing up memory at a time when you think it should. It could very well be freeing up that memory at a different time, one the programmers deemed more appropriate. Is this the case? I don't know, and neither do you. It would be in your best interests to dig a little deeper than anecdotal evidence with a sample size of one before making accusations like this.
Re:So... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Response from a designer (Score:4, Insightful)
1) 100% of the public using browsers that correctly implement CSS. 40% are still using the superbly broken IE6, and FF2 (20%) doesn't implement display: inline-block, which is important for making bordered tabs and such that scale with the size of their fonts.
2) Full SVG support in all browsers. IE has none, the others have a mix of laughable crap.
3) Clients who trust the designer's artistic sense and ability to compat-test on multiple rigs, instead of, say, looking at it on one windows machine in IE6 at 800x600 resolution and complaining "no, we want the text to wrap after this word, not that word".
Sadly, this environment doesn't exist. Sizing things in pixels and limiting the scope of the primary content to 780px wide is STILL the most reliable way to get a consistent appearance that makes clients happy.
SVG doesn't even really exist in any substantive, usable way, so graphics have to be done in pixels. Font sizes are usually scaled to match those sizes. At least all major browsers will let you override that.
This is the environment we have, and trust me the designers aren't any happier about it than you are. I do fluid-width displays every time my clients will let me (~20%), and I always try to make sure the page won't break when the fonts scale. Beyond that, I'm constrained by the tools I've got.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.