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."

Re:Awesomebar?

[lpangelrob]

It's not hideous - sometimes I only remember titles of pages, and other times only the last parts of the URL. The fact that remembering those things counts for something in Firefox (and gets me to my destination faster) makes me far more likely to use it, both here at work on Win2k and at home on my Macs.

CPU spike bug?

[aredubya74]

I haven't been able to find a bug on Moz Bugzilla on the behavior, but both previous betas would occasionally spike in CPU usage after a few hours' of usage, seemingly at random. Restarting the browser clears the problem. It doesn't seem to be a site-specific problem, as rebrowsing the same pages doesn't immediately trigger the spike. Anyone else seeing this? Otherwise, I've been very happy with the FF3's rendering and feature set.

So obsessed with memory?

[Manip]

Since when did memory usage become such a big deal?

I mean Firefox has had some nasty memory leaks for the longest time and absolutely I would love to see those fixed. But it seems like this is more than just that, it seems like some big epeen contest between browsers.

Memory is perhaps the second cheapest commodity on a modern day PC after disk space. If they get too deep into this then it wouldn't surprise me to see them off-set this reduced usage with increased CPU time or disk seek times (which is destructive on a laptop).

Personally I rate browsers based on something like this:
Responsiveness > Features == Polish > CPU Usage > Memory Usage > Disk Usage

If the Firefox guys want to be No.1 in Memory Usage then perhaps I'll use a browser like Opera which focuses on Features, or one like IE 7 which is more polished than both Firefox and Opera.

Re:CPU spike bug?

[Rurik]

I have that problem with FF2, and it was the reason I went to FF3. I've not had it occur within FF3, but when I temporarily reverted back to 2.0 it was still there.

It would spike for about 10-20 seconds then go back to normal for a few more minutes.

3 Beta 5 vs. 2.0.0.13?

[billstewart]

Mozilla wants me to update from 2.0.0.12 to 2.0.0.13. Is there any reason I shouldn't just go to 3.0 Beta 5? I'm assuming it either fixes that security bug or replaces it with some new ones.

Are the critical extensions available? For me, that's Adblock, NoScript, and Flashblock.

Re:Awesomebar?

[TobyWong]

I'm the same as you. I either flat out remember the url or google for it. I just glanced at my bookmarks now and it's full of junk I put in there "just in case" but never actually used again.

Mind you I usually have 20 - 40 tabs open in firefox all the time and I just resume my session on startup. It's just a different way of browsing and one that I prefer.

Connection parallelism

[Bogtha]

I'm sure somebody is likely to bring it up, so it may as well be me with some additional relevant facts. The HTTP 1.1 specification, RFC 2616 [ietf.org], says [ietf.org] that:

Clients that use persistent connections SHOULD limit the number of simultaneous connections that they maintain to a given server. A single-user client SHOULD NOT maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy. A proxy SHOULD use up to 2*N connections to another server or proxy, where N is the number of simultaneously active users. These guidelines are intended to improve HTTP response times and avoid congestion.

This "improved connection parallelism" is simply changing Firefox from using the RFC-suggested 2 persistent connections, to 6. Now, SHOULDs and SHOULD NOTs are not set in stone, but they do require careful thought before ignoring.

The Bugzilla entry [mozilla.org] debating this has a comment [mozilla.org] that points out that other browsers have also started to ignore this part of the specification:

• Firefox 2: 2 connections
• Opera 9.26: 4 connections
• Opera 9.5 beta: 4 connections
• Safari 3.0.4: 4 connections
• IE 7: 2 connections
• IE 8: 6 connections

Re:Acid scores

[compro01]

very early (pre-alpha, i believe) builds of opera and webkit have hit 100/100, and AFAIK, the opera build that does that feat isn't even publicly available. the numbers they're showing are for browsers that are actually available and usable.

Re:Connection parallelism

[garett_spencley]

RFC 2616 was published in 1999.

I agree that specification recommendations should not be ignored without careful consideration. However, I think the jump from 2 to 6 makes a lot of sense after almost 10 years of adhering to the specification and I don't think that it was done without careful consideration. Web servers and bandwidth have both strongly moved forward, and that specific suggestion in the RFC was just that. A suggestion. In the context of 1999.

Re:Awesomebar?

[RareButSeriousSideEf]

4. Close history sidebar.

I can't stand the name "awesomebar," but IMO it does have better sorting and filtering logic than the history sidebar, and its performance is a bit more nimble, so it's starting to win me over.

Firefox 3.0 and the spring linux releases

[themildassassin]

I'm wondering how the new releases of distros like Ubuntu and Fedora are going to handle not having a stable version of Firefox 3.0 until June. Currently Ubuntu is using beta 4 for the hardy beta, will the plan be to revert back to FF2 when hardy becomes stable or release with a beta version of FF3?

Re:Actually...

[barzok]

It's entirely possible that those fixes were not made specifically for ACID3, but instead had been targeted for Fx3 a while ago.

I think someone on the Mozilla team has publicly posted that they are not intentionally going after ACID3 fixes for the sake of making ACID3 fixes, in the interest of a stable & sane release.

Re:Acid 3 Test

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no hard-and-fast show-stoppers. They're just a mountain of annoyances that remind you "this is a Windows/Linux app that happens to run on the Mac". They all seem to stem from the fact that Mozilla is/has its own GUI toolkit, which has been themed to look like a combination of every Mac OS from 10.2 to 10.5.

Some of the more obvious ones:
- popup menus look like 10.4's menus, even on 10.5
- form controls and toolbars don't look quite the same as native widgets, and don't act quite the same; usually they're just uglier and maybe require an extra click or two to work, but a couple more obscure ones are completely broken (e.g., if you choose a Text toolbar, for example)
- the zoom button in the titlebar doesn't zoom (it maximizes)
- it uses "metal" everywhere, but you can't move a window by dragging it; this means I now have to constantly think about what kind of window I'm dragging: a normal one, or a Firefox one (FF2 wasn't metal, so there was no problem)
- in some dialog boxes, they use 10.5-style tabs in some places, and 10.2-style tabs (!) in others
- lots of windows (including the About box!) have toggle-toolbar buttons which don't do anything
- some Emacs-style keybindings work, but some don't, and in many other places the keybindings are obviously Linux/Windows-style but with the focus-dotted-line invisible

Many of these aren't too bad, aside from being ugly (and reminding you that Firefox devs either don't know or don't care about Macs). For example, I only use the Preferences dialog box rarely, so the 2002-style tabs there don't really hurt anything. The really nasty ones are the places where it looks like a native control, but acts completely different. Non-draggable metal, broken keybindings, and no zooming are probably the worst.

I don't need no browser

[Britz]

What I badly need is a replacement for that awful Flash player. There is so much Flash content on the web now, that unfortunately I need a viewer for this. Firefox 2 is fine. The need for better/faster viewing or more features is not very big.

So please Mozilla foundation: If you want to do something to improve my web exprerience just put some effort into Swfdec or Gnash or do something from scratch and put it into Firefox.

http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/ [freedesktop.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swfdec [wikipedia.org]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash [wikipedia.org]

Greasemonkey

[BrookHarty]

Greasemonkey broke again, /sigh

Every update it seems to break, what keeps changing that this addon breaks every time?

Re:Awesomebar?

[aj50]

The reason we hate it is because we don't use the address bar as a search engine.

We like it to autocomplete the url that we're typing so disabling it completely is a step backwards but the new behaviour seems dumb.

Example: I've typed in web, am I more likely to be looking for "xkcd - A *web*comic of ..." or "GameFAQs... Video games *web* site..", perhaps I want "Lets turn this fucking *web*site yellow" or "Rapidshare: 1-Click *Web*hosting" or maybe, just maybe, I've started typing in webmail.bath.ac.uk like I do reasonably often (but probably not as much as I visit xkcd or GameFAQs).

I admit, web is a very generic word so this is quite an extreme example but I find that when typing in urls into the address bar, the awesome bar is a lot worse at bringing up the rest of the address you're typing.

Side note: I really like the idea of an integrated search for bookmarks and history, it is more useful than I would have thought but it already exists in the history panel (which I have appear in my sidebar). If they wanted to draw attention to it, would it have killed them to integrate it into the search box and make the search box itself more of a central feature? I mean, when I want to search, I use the search bar or hit my google bookmark on the toolbar, I don't type what I'm looking for in the address bar.

Re:Acid 3 Test

[mrchaotica]

The thing I find mosy annoying about Firefox 3 is that it's STILL not a native cocoa app.

Of course it's not a native cocoa app! It's a XUL app, where XUL is Mozilla's own cross-platform widget toolkit. And it has to be a XUL app, because extensions have to be able to modify the UI and extensions are written in XUL. And extensions have to be written in XUL, because they have to be cross-platform. And Firefox has to support extensions, because otherwise it wouldn't be Firefox anymore.

Bottom line: if you want a Gecko browser that's a native cocoa app, use Camino. If you want a browser that supports extensions, use Firefox. You will never, ever be able to have a single app that does both, because XUL and cocoa are different, incompatible technologies.