Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now

Jay writes "Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is out now. If yours didn't auto-update, then get it while it's hot! The release came a bit early, with Computer World noting: 'As recently as last Saturday, Mozilla's chief engineer said that although the company had locked down RC1's code, it was planning to publicly launch the build in "late May."'" My copy just downloaded — restarting after I save this story. God I hope it's better than the last beta.

Re:Stability on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had firefox 3 crash on Linux with my beta 5. Nor FF2 for that matter, I'm not sure what you're talking about. My friend's had some instability problems with a 64bit processor and flash, is that it?

Re:Changes since Beta 5?

[FoolsGold]

The only changes I've noticed so far are visual, such as extra gradients in certain areas, color changes in the AwesomeBar, and etc (running in Vista btw). There's probably technical improvements elsewhere but I couldn't find a reference anywhere for what they might be.

Re:eh?

[RiotingPacifist]

dont suppose it being a beta and all you bothered filling bug reports and then checking if they got fixed?

Re:eh?

[Darkness404]

Chances are, Flash. Adobe's support for Linux has been pathetic at best, with newer versions eating up tons of CPU just viewing a banner ad. I even downgraded mine so YouTube would be at least somewhat usable. And with Flash being closed-source I highly doubt that we will see improvements made quickly and Gnash the free flash player is barely usable though it is improving.

OT - Firefox 3 was regression for me

[azgard]

I am sorry for offtopic post, but Firefox was a bit of regression for me. The new page info doesn't contain outgoing links. I haven't used it much in fact, but few days ago I needed to paste few links into wget and found that out.

Yes, I know they are planning an extension for that, but I wanted to use it now (I have Ubuntu) and I would like to note - try to find extension using google which will list links on page. ;-) I installed the web developer toolbar in the end, but it's not very nice to copy it from there and it comes with a lot of other stuff I don't really need.

Why is there such movement in OSS lately that thinks that removal of features will be an improvement for users? It's strikingly similar to Wikipedia's deletionist movement. Organization of features/information, not removal, is the key.

Way Better

[DigitalisAkujin]

I've been running this build now for 4 days straight going to countless sites that use every which plugins for movies and flash and javascript and so far considering it hasn't crashed on me in windows I'd say it's pretty solid.

Although I am running a Q6600 with 4GB. But Beta 5 used to crash on me every 2 hours.

Now to business,
Firebug Official for FF3 Please :)

Re:Not so awesome

[theaceoffire]

Go to "about:config"
Change "browser.urlbar.maxRichResults" to 0

Thanks Firefox!

[Aggrajag]

Thanks to Firefox 3 betas I've managed *finally* to convert my wife to use FF. Only if I could get her using something other than Microsoft Live Messenger or get Messenger working with Wine I could get rid of our last WinXP installation.

Re:OT - Firefox 3 was regression for me

[RiotingPacifist]

have to admit i never used that feature, its too late to re-add to FF3 but if you request it may be re-added to 4. Developers arnt mind readers, ofc some project will ignore you opinion (e.g pdigin) but others value all input (as long as they have the time), I'm not sure where Mozilla sit, I suspect its somewhere in the middle.

Stability

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a similar issue, but with digg. NoScript stopped it crashing so I could at least read comments.

Re:eh?

[garett_spencley]

Flash is definitely a big stability issue on Linux. Flashblock helps a lot. The flash ads on Slashdot used to crash FF and I'd have to kill -9 and restart.

There's still some stability issues on Linux outside of Flash, however. Sometimes FF will spontaneously maximize it's window for no reason. Rendering certain animated images also seems to be a big problem on Linux (it will hog the cpu just to display an animated gif sometimes etc.)

It's certainly not unusable. I use FF on Linux every day and usually don't have problems. But I don't remember having any of these sorts of issues at all on the win32 build and I used it for a few years before switching back to Linux.

Had problems on OS X until I cleared my prefs...

[foniksonik]

I'm not sure exactly what was wrong... something was corrupted for sure but a variety of javascript was simply not being processed. Flash wasn't loading, possibly due to lack of javascript as so many flash embeds are done that way now....

In any case if you have any problems on OSX you might want to try moving all your prefs and addons/extensions/etc anything mozilla or firefox and starting up FF3 RC1 as a brand new install.

I only use FF to test websites (love safari) and occasionally to do some rigorous script debugging with firebug. So I don't have any bookmarks or other settings I care about. You may want to find out how to save those things for re-import later if you use it daily.

Re:Test Results

[RiotingPacifist]

Especially as passing the ACID test for the sake of it will not actually improve the user experience.

ACID 3 passes should come naturally, there shouldn't be the webkit style rush to pass because its only improved the browser as a side-effect instead of passing the test as a side-effect.Its like learning the answer's to a test instead of actually learning the material, sure you'll pass the test but when you go out to do some real world work/browsing, it wont of helped.

This all combined with the fact that ACID doesn't test standards compliance, as a firefox user I'm glad they're not wasting their time on it.

Re:eh?

[Blkdeath]

It's FILM at 11. The news anchor obviously already has the news, why would he make you wait till 11 ? So that the other channels can outrun him ?

Actually the popular cliche is "story at 11" or "more at 11". It's a popular teaser for North American news anchors to titilate the primetime viewers enough to stay on the present channel to see their news casts. The more subtle and curiousity inducing a soundbyte the better.

• "A popular dinner side dish could be killing you right now! More at 11."
• "Which {area} neighborhood is at risk of this violent, dangerous sexual predator? Find out at 11!"
• "Are your light bulbs giving you cancer? This story and more coming up at 11."

Re:Stability on Linux?

[PaladinAlpha]

Give me a break. I'm well and truly tired of hearing this empty argument. Is FOSS guaranteed to be bug- and exploit-free? Hardly. Does the fact that millions of people can look at it make a difference, even if only a few do? Absolutely. Tell ya what. I'll pick up a list of five hundred closed-source programs with malware. If you can get me a list of ten open-source programs with malware, I'll concede.

I'll be waiting over there. Asleep.

Re:eh?

[Masa]

What was wrong with Beta 5?

My first contact to the FF 3 beta 5 was with Ubuntu 8.04. I didn't have any plugins or flash player installed and still the browsing experience was slow. The browser would freeze for few seconds in seemingly random fashion and scrolling would halt for few seconds without any obvious reason regardless of the contents or length of the page. With the same setup the FF 2 is much faster and doesn't have any issues with exact same web pages. I don't know if the real reason is the Ubuntu 8.04 or the FF 3, but after switching to FF2, I haven't had any such problems. Luckily the Ubuntu repositories had the FF 2, so switching was easy.

Re:Stability

[kryptkpr]

I block nothing, and have been running ff3b5 (on x86_64) since the day after Hardy came out without any significant issues, although there was a problem (now resolved) with it crashing on some web pages, but this was actually a bug in ubuntu's nvidia-glx-new package that ff just happened to trigger.

Installed extensions:

- Popup ALT attribute (for web comics)
- Chatzilla (for grabbing XBMC binaries)
- Greasemonkey (for added functionality on my Digg and Facebook)
- Smoothwheel (for sexyness, the built-in smooth scroll is not as nice)
- Ubuntu Firefox Mods (for great justice? this came pre-installed)

Almost makes me wonder, are the people having trouble running with ATI or nVidia graphics cards? Firefox can be kinda tough on the drivers..

Re:Stability on Linux?

[sgt scrub]

I don't know what the deal is with people on /. having Firefox issues. I've never seen Firefox issues on any of our Linux boxes. Our hardware is very diverse too. 64/32 bit from old i585 boxes to multicore intel and amd boxes. Most machines are running Debian. About an equal number are using Ubuntu and CentOS. None of these include sales or marketing but I find it hard to believe the complaints on /. are because users are not technical. I don't think anyone is using KDE though. Maybe that is the connection.

Re: Trust

[TaoPhoenix]

I think about "Trust Grids". It's about who has what agenda.

On one corner, I was late to understand, but I watched enough of MS's tricks unfold live to absolutely distrust everything they do.

My verdict is out on Apple.

Some of the famous OSS icons have their special situations, but I feel that their mistakes are somewhat easier to both see through and counteract afterward.

Because I have no programming skill at all, I have to trust someone; I currently trust the independent coders as a cohesive whole to produce purer code because that's in their best interests long term.

Re:Stability on Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh ya, and is there a way to close a site that pops up javascript popups one after the other yet? It's really annoying having to kill firefox.exe when that happens

This is the worst thing about firefox and most browsers. I think Opera is the only one decent enough to provide a checkbox in the alert popups to allow you to prevent more from showing. Very useful for debugging development, and to stop sites that abuse them.

Re:Stalled window bug dealt with yet?

[Tumbleweed]

> For the last year, I have consistently seen on the Windows version an annoying bug. If one tab takes forever to load, any other tab will not load a new page either. I find Ebay is one of the worst to bring it out. If you switch to using IE in a tab, that tab will show about:blank.

> I can understand some websites may make a Firefox tab crap out but it shouldn't affect the rest.

Did you file a bug report?

My understanding is that it's not a bug, but an intentional design limitation, ie: "it was too hard to design a multi-threaded UI or its functional equivalent when we started, and it's way too late to go back and change it now". Don't count on this ever being fixed by FF, but by hopefully either by Adobe fixing the Flash plugin, or by someone creating a better open source Flash plug-in replacement (now that all the specs are open), which is the usual culprit from every instance report I've seen.

Re:Stalled window bug dealt with yet?

[renoX]

Bah, Firefox has a poor design:
1) it's not multithreaded correctly, so you can have one tab freezing which freeze the whole browser (this is may be linked to its user interface being coded in XUL).
2) by default, a crash of Flash will bring down the browser, it should put its plugin in a different process, to avoid this.

I've switched to Opera for these reasons..
The only remaining problem with Opera is that sometime, it can use 100% CPU, and there's no way to know which tab cause this (multiple tab is nice, but it create a *lot* of issue that weren't present with multiple windows.)

Re:Test Results

[shutdown -p now]

If you read the blogs from the Opera teams, you'd know that tracking down rendering flaws in ACID does help to improve general standard compliance as well, precisely because it often points to bits of code where problems are.

Also, correct error handling is part of being standard compliant.

Re:Test Results

[prockcore]

I agree.

Here's a good example of how useless ACID3 is:
http://blog.codedread.com/archives/2008/03/26/webkit-nightly-not-smiling/ [codedread.com]

Webkit gets 100/100 on ACID3, which includes SVG tests, yet webkit only gets 5/116 on SVG animation compliance.

Implementing the bare minimum to pass acid3 is a disservice to everyone.

Eric Meyer also has a bunch to say on how acid3 is a "missed opportunity"
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/03/27/acid-redux/ [meyerweb.com]

Re:Stalled window bug dealt with yet?

[VJ42]

The bug was only filed today:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434180 [mozilla.org] (and it seems by a /.er)

It's not one I've encountered since I don't routinely open lots of tabs in one go. If no one files a bug, it won't get fixed! And until now no one had. now it's on bugzilla, hopefully it'll be fixed in time for the next release.

Re:Stability on Linux?

[Nicolay77]

AFAIK FF3 will have the best memory management of any browser.

I would be using this RC1 if I were you.

Re:eh?

[bigstrat2003]

Yes they should. The browser's responsibility is to display content properly, and if there's a known bug on a very popular site, the browser should take it into account... unless they don't want users, of course. Hell, to this day I don't use Firefox because FF 1.0 rendered Gamespot so poorly and slowly. The user's experience is paramount, not idealism.

Re:Stability on Linux?

[petermgreen]

Afaict ubuntu is trying to do a LTS release on a relatively (compared to redhat/novell) small budget by avoiding having to backport security fixes themselves. I understand why they are doing this (they want to break into the enterprise market becaue that is where the real money is) but I wonder if it will backfire on them.