Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released

bunratty writes "Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released today. This last beta release sports performance-boosting improved connection parallelism. Not only has 'the memory leak' been fixed: Firefox now uses less memory than other browsers. This is not only according to Mozilla developers, but CyberNet and The Browser World as well. As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1 and 79/100 for the latest Opera 9.5 snapshot. The final release of Firefox 3 is expected in June."

Awesomebar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they get rid of the hideous awesombar yet?

FIRST POST!111

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad that the Acid3 test is just a side mention in this story. The recent Firefox betas look great. It needs to be said though that the WebKit builds that score 100/100 are publicly available. But it also needs to be said that there's a lot more to a web browser than its performance on a single standards test.

Almost there

[mr_da3m0n]

Now if Google could just port Google Browser Sync [google.com] over...

Acid 3 Test

[J_Meller]

I'm glad there isn't an improvement in their Acid3 score with the latest beta. It means that their release procedure is sane and they aren't introducing regressions right before a big release. Kudos to the devs for not pushing patches for the sake of it.

What I care about

[microbee]

I want to try beta 5 out (especially after I found Tab Mix Plus is actually supported [garyr.net]). But my main worry is how they react to bugs found in the beta. Are they continuously releases security updates for betas the same way as the official released version? Or I'd have to wait patiently for the final release which is more than 2 months away?

Also, every time I uninstall firefox 3, I could no longer click links in outlook unless I reset default browser to IE and switch back. This is very irritating.

Re:Awesomebar?

[rsborg]

I <3 me some Awesomebar.

Seriously, on OSX, Webkit nightly (Safari) is so much better than FF3B5 (Firefox). Faster, better render, better integration.
Only thing keeping me from Webkit completely is 1) Extensions (Adblock+, Google Gears, Firebug!) and 2) Awesomebar
It's that nice.

All you haters can use a theme that kicks it.

Re:Awesomebar?

[Richard_at_work]

Fine, some people like the 'awesomebar' - a lot, however, don't. A way to turn it off completely would definitely be appreciated, being forced into using it is not.

Beta/nightly vs. regular stable release

[dn15]

As for the Acid3 test, Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1

If we're comparing a Firefox beta then we may as well look at a newer version of Safari, too. The latest nightly builds of WebKit get 100/100 on Acid3. http://webkit.org/blog/173/ [webkit.org]

Re:Who cares about Safari?

[anaesthetica]

Because you care about competition. Once you stop caring about competition, you get sideswiped just like IE has been by Firefox. The whole idea is to have a plural browser environment in which each browser vendor competes to deliver the best standards compliance and the best feature set. If you only care about Firefox, you may be missing the point. We can measure Firefox's progress objectively (against its own past performance), but we also need to assess its progress relative to other browsers so that we can assure it remains competitive, and can (at the very least) hold its ground in market share. No one wants to return to the old days of browser monoculture and stagnation.

Re:Almost there

[mrvan]

I'm a bit worried about 'giving' google all my history, cookies, and stored passwords, protected by a PIN.

Since the PIN is the only thing you need to set up on a new computer, I don't think the data sent to google is encrypted (using a key unknown by google, ie more than https)?

I guess they don't really want my passwords, but the navigation and form history coupled to my search history... brrr... (I don't even want to imagine using gmail too)

Note: I'm not saying google is evil, I wouldn't trust anyone with that much data, and certainly not a US company with a history of complying to Chinese government demands...

How the mighty have fallen.

[lancejjj]

Firefox 3 Beta 5 scores only 71/100 compared to 75/100 for Safari 3.1 and 79/100 for the latest Opera 9.5 snapshot

Just last week Opera was at 100/100 and Safari was at 98/100 for ACID3. What happened???

Oh yeah, those were numbers for non-production browsers, in-the-lab builds.

Re:Awesomebar?

[propanol]

Agreed. I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

URLs are the key to http IMO - they're the ones to keep in memory as they're unique, unlike page titles and bookmarks. When I type "sla" in the address bar, I want slashdot.org, not some random blog post with the term 'slashdot' in the title I happened to pass by at some point.

At the end, what pisses me off the most about this whole deal is not being able to revert to the old behavior. That kind of forced nurturing is what I'd expect from Microsoft, not Mozilla.

Re:Awesomebar?

[D Ninja]

I know you've been modded insightful, and I'm not going to necessarily disagree with that. The "Awesomebar" (meh on the name) is not for everybody. It's definitely a different way of thinking.

However, I have been using and testing Firefox 3 Betas pretty significantly. Personally, I'm very much enjoying the Awesomebar. I tend not to use bookmarks all that often - it's nicer to just start typing and, based on how I browse, the site I want to go to is usually at the very top of the list. The Awesomebar has also been helpful when I haven't been able to quite remember the site I want to go to. I start typing, and the site is usually listed somewhere near the top.

Either way, it would be cool if there was an option to shut off the Awesomebar (for those people who don't like it) - but a new way to do something does not necessarily make it hideous.

Re:Out of date comparison?

[hattig]

Opera, on an internal build, got 100/100 (this isn't a percentage, there are two other aspects to Acid3 - pixel perfect placement and animation smoothness).

Safari got 100/100 a day later, but in the process discovered a flaw in the Acid3 test that had to be fixed, making Opera's score 99/100. Safari is at least available in a nightly version. Apparently it also got pixel perfect placement and the animation was arguably smooth.

I don't personally think it counts until it's a full non-beta release.

Re:Awesomebar?

[robzon]

Actually, I find the new bar very useful. I understand that it's not perfect for everyone, so an option to turn it off would be great.

Re:Connection parallelism

[Bogtha]

I think the jump from 2 to 6 makes a lot of sense after almost 10 years

Not all movement has been in the forward direction. Back them, most web traffic was totally static, even the HTML. These days, it's far more likely that the HTML is generated dynamically from something like mod_php. This, in turn, means that rather than tying up a slim process, a persistent connection ties up a "fat" process with a language runtime embedded in it. Three times as many simultaneous persistent connections means up to three times as much memory usage. Not as much of a problem if it's just a bog-standard 1999 static fileserver, but a big problem if you've got a 2008 dynamic interpreter built in.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that this is a bad change, I just think that it's got downsides as well as upsides. This will only further the adoption of lightweight reverse proxies like nginx, pound and varnish.

Re:Awesomebar?

[diegocgteleline.es]

I can't help but feel the new algorithm that implements searching bookmarks/page titles/etc. for results when you type in the address bar is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

Which is why the awesomebar is going to be a big success in the Real World (outside of slashdot). You know, real people don't care about what a URL is, and I can't find a reason why they should.

I'm a geek, and I can't live without the awesomebar. You can remember a domain of a frequently visited page, but the whole URL? When I've to search an article I visited a week ago, I just have to type "slashdot" and some word from the title and the url appears. Typically I'd google to find it, now the awesomebar avoids me that. That alone makes the awesomebar worth of it. When I type "sla", the first item in the list is ALWAYS slashdot, because the awesomebar knows what pages you visit more frequently. Oh, and the favicons make easier to browse at the list of URLs than the old text list, because you can differenciate one domain from other.

Re:So obsessed with memory?

[RAMMS+EIN]

``Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?''

I think it has pretty much always been a big deal. Unless you have plenty of memory, memory is likely to be the limiting factor on the performance of your system. In extreme cases, memory shortage can cause programs to not work at all. Firefox has been a notorious memory hog. So I am _very_ glad to see this addressed. I might actually start using it again.

Re:Awesomebar?

[Thugthrasher]

Some people do a LOT of their web-browsing with their mouse. From what I've seen (I did some repair work for a while and would often have people SHOW me what their problem was, which means I saw their habits), this is actually quite probably the majority of 'regular people.' This means that they often only have one hand on the keyboard (and one on the mouse). For those people, the horribly named Awesomebar is MUCH more convenient than browser history. They have to either move their other hand to the keyboard (which adds a step) OR click View->Sidebars->History which is adding more than one step.

Re:Awesomebar?

[John Whitley]

is aimed at the "I am incompetent when it comes to technical things and don't understand the concept of URLs"-type people; the like to whom the Internet is the blue IE logo on their desktops.

No, it's aimed at people who understand and can leverage search-based interfaces. I freaking love that I can type *just the different/interesting fragment* of a recent/popular URL and typically have FF3 just dredge it up for me. Yes, there's some culture shock when you first use it... but for my purposes its been fast and rockingly useful. As for "awesomebar"... well, we all roll that "1" on the cool-naming die once and awhile.

Re:Acid 3 Test

[asa]

Also the Opera team are right in the middle of a stabilisation cycle (9.5 just around the corner) but have managed to develop internal builds which pass Acid 3..

Good for Opera. I publicly congratulated them for that work the day they hit 100%.

But what level of support are they shipping in 9.5 and at what cost of delay to the 9.5 release did they make those Opera 9.next or Opera 10 gains?

Are Opera users and web developers going to have to wait weeks or months longer to get a better Opera experience in 9.5 (which won't 100% on Acid3 but does have other major improvements, presumably usability, standards-support, security, etc.) so that Opera could win the race to 100% Acid3 in a product that users and web developers won't get to see for months or years?

Right now, the most important thing Mozilla can do to improve the Web for developers and for users is to get Firefox 3 shipped. Delaying that by splitting focus, mostly for marketing or fanboy pride reasons, doesn't seem like such a great idea to me.

- A

Re:Memory abuse = Poor responsiveness on XP

[pthisis]

You're implying a logical fallacy. "Microsoft creates bloated software" does not imply "Non-Microsoft does not create bloated software".

Re:Awesomebar?

[hedwards]

And it's essentially OSX only. Unless I missed the memo, the Windows version is still pretty much a waste in all respects. At least FF3 will run properly on more than just one OS.

Most of the other points are completely irrelevant as few people are going to plunk down hundreds of dollars to ditch a free web browser for a different one. Perhaps if somebody were completely split down the middle of Mac v., PC, this would make some sort of difference, but for the vast majority of people, it just isn't a realistic happening.