Firefox 3 Hits Release Candidate 2

Barence noted that Firefox has announced release candidate 2 of their highly popular web browser. You can read the release notes while you download. And since my copy just finished downloading, I guess I'll go install it. I hope I don't have any

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But can it...

[camperdave]

One of the features I'd like to see in Firefox is the ability to "tear off" a tab into a new window. My surfing experience is something like this [xkcd.com]. It would be nice to be able to right click on a tab, and convert it to a new browser window.

ooh-ooh-ooh where is my individual tab threading??

[distantbody]

Having one hung tab make the others unusable is not cool, in addition ive encountered a few infinite 'yes-no dialogue' loops attacks that force you to either select 'yes', or force quite-- an attack vector that shouldn't have gone past v0.1a IMO.

Image scaling, finally!

[PhotoGuy]

One feature I haven't seen any release notes or anyone else talk about, is true scaling of web pages. It always amazed me that in this day and age, that the Alt-plus and Alt-minus zoom only scaled the text, not the graphics. Not terribly useful for zooming in on a page, or seeing more of a page by zooming out. Opera has had this for ages (from the start?), and it's not as though scaling images is processor intensive (I've written blinding fast C code to do this, with smoothing, myself in the past).

Glad to see this is finally in Firefox. Hopefully they've fixed a couple of other annoyances I've seen; the random refusal to load pages (that load after a restart, or in other browsers), and the failure of Alt-F search to find things that I can see right in front of me on the page.

Re:Until they bother fixing critical bugs...

[Viol8]

Actually "pal" , it is when the bloody app is multi threaded and the whole damn lot hangs including editing windows just because some other page looked up a link that our DNS server choked on. You wait 3 mins for your browser to come back when you're trying to work and see how minor it is to you.

You a firefox dev by any chance?

Re:Old Look?

[tlhIngan]

If you use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) on a link it opens it in a new tab - so there one click :) ... Unless you are using a mac in which case you are stuck in the mouse stone age

Worked fine for me... I just click the scroll wheel on a link and bam, a new tab opens in the background on my Mac. Hey, it works in Safari too... and Opera.

Don't know what kind of Mac you're using, but they do work great with multibutton mice.

(And GUI designers can take a note about that - forcing a single button means you can't hide features away in right-click menus. There are literally Windows applications where the right click is used more often than left! Or heck, even Windows Explorer has modifier keys for right click - often Shift- or Alt- right-click can bring up a context menu with more actions [msdn.com].)

Re:Image scaling, finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now to implement proper filtering on the images when they scale them...

Re:Until they bother fixing critical bugs...

[slamb]

Argh! Yeah, I hate that bug ("[PAC] Defer proxy resolution for HTTP and HTTPS PAC to avoid blocking main thread during DNS resolution")!

I wrote a proxy server to run on localhost, do DNS resolution, and send the request to the appropriate upstream proxy or directly to the source, just to work around this bug.

Re:Actual Release Notes

[BPPG]

developers and obsessive geeks are users too, they just happen to use the software differently... user-friendly is such a broad term these days, there's no sense in arguing over it.

Shared bookmarks between windows and linux

[ck_808]

I used to be able to set the bookmarks.html file location in firefox 2. it seems this functionality doesn't exist for the places.sqlite file.
Does anybody have any idea how to share and modify bookmarks between a windows and linux install in Firefox 3 ?

I've tried sharing profiles and places.sqlite between the OS's. Best case i can get is view but can't add any bookmarks in Linux.

Re:Image scaling, finally!

[starwed]

I completely agree. The only prefs I change in FF3 are those for zoom. If I zoom in, it's typically because I can't read the text... so I'd prefer it if only the text size changed.

I just wish it was smart enough to realize that, even if I have "Zoom Text Only" selected, I want full-zoom when viewing a single image file.

Memory Issues

[Enderandrew]

Every single time there is a post about Firefox on Slashdot, someone whines about how Mozilla refuses to address memory issues.

1 - Firefox 3 uses far less memory than Firefox 2.
2 - Most "memory leaks" come from poorly written extensions. Turn them all off and check out the difference.
3 - The biggest reason Firefox starts using a slew of memory after a bunch of browsing isn't a bug, but literaly a feature. It keeps fully rendered versions of pages in memory, so when you hhit the Back button, it can pull them up quicker. You can disable this feature if you want.
4 - People have this misconception that they should never use their memory. Unused memory does you no good.
5 - Next time try Google before you post a stupid quesiton.