Firefox 3 Release On Tuesday

unkgoon writes "The Mozilla Developer News blog is reporting Firefox 3 will be released on Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and you're invited to the party! From the website: 'After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we're proud to announce that we're ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 — the best web browser, period.'" Update: 06/12 17:44 GMT by T : Dan100 was among several readers to write with news that, rather than just being announced, "Opera 9.5 has been released today after nearly two years of development. New features include increased speed (particularly in the Javascript engine), Opera Link (browser synchronisation), and a 'sharp' new theme." Dan100 also links to a full changelog from 9.27.

I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[sznupi]

I mean...it was, like, RELEASED, today; not only announced to be released.

But I guess that clears any doubts as to "/. pet-browser" that Firefox has... :/

Re:Nothing about breaking records?

[illeism]

I'm sure the downloads will be there.

It's like fast food, you don't make a reservation to go get it, you just do, you know you want it, you know you can't live without it... /startscript - analogy/backlash/thickskin.py

smaller memory footprint

[pak9rabid]

From what I can tell from using the beta, it seems a lot of the reduced memory footpring from Firefox 3 appears to be the result of it using the OS's native GUI widgets, as opposed to widgets supplied by Firefox itself. FF3 is coming along nicely, but still has a few annoyances that need addressing. Hopefully the release version will address those minor annoyances.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[Anonymous Coward]

I fail to see how this is offtopic.

Opera has been around a lot longer than FF, has a tiny memory footprint, and has a kick ass simple interface. That is to say, you don't need a fucking 3rd party skin to make it look good (because I doubt good UI design is one of FFs primary goals).

Nevertheless, kudos to Firefox. Unfortunately for me, it's Safari on OS X, and Opera for everything else.

Re:opera is faster

[willyhill]

I don't know why this was modded troll, Opera is faster and it was released today. "Faster" is a value judgment I suppose, but can I mod the article troll because it called Firefox "the best browser, period"?

Re:Zoom

[vivek7006]

I, on the other hand love the new zoom feature. I use a very high resolution screen and need to zoom webpages to read the text. Earlier zooming would only increase the text and plenty of websites would look atrocious. Now everything scales proportionally and webpages look uniform after zooming.

I'm waiting.

[oliverthered]

I'm waiting until flash is ready and all of my addons work with Firefox 3, it's only half a browser without them

Re:I have firefox 3.0 beta

[Rurik]

If you thought it was so good, wouldn't you have upgraded to the release candidate weeks ago instead of continuing to use the beta? :)

Re:Zoom

[Richard_at_work]

I just wish there was a way to revert the 'Awesome Bar' to the standard address bar that FF2 had (with no automatic searching, just url matching), because I hate the new functionality.

Of course there's a way. There's an extension. :) [mozilla.org]

From that page:

Note that the underlying autocomplete algorithm is the Firefox 3 algorithm, not the Firefox 2 algorithm. oldbar only affects the presentation of the results.

Its the algorithm that I want to disable completely.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[at_slashdot]

Opera 9.5 was just released today, however on slashdot we have an article about how Firefox will release on Tuesday... nice...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:opera is faster

[CastrTroy]

Opera is faster, but my computer is so fast that you really can't tell the difference much, especially when you take into account internet connection speed. Firefox has extensions. Which is where the real advantage is.

Re:I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[Doctor Crumb]

Or perhaps the fact taht opera has 1% market share while firefox has 18% might have something to do with it.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[Abcd1234]

Umm... I don't care? It doesn't change the fact that the original post was off-topic. Meanwhile, go submit an article about Opera being released... then we can go post about Firefox there. ;)

Re:No Big Deal

[tuffy]

The main one that accumulates memory with open tabs? I have heard that it was still not addressed in FF3, but that was a bit ago and I hope this is it!

It has been addressed. While FF2 would hog all my available RAM over the course of a day, FF3 releases memory regularly as tabs are closed.

Re:opera is faster

[immcintosh]

The problem is, "faster" is absolutely not a value judgment. It's testable and quantifiable, and the claim that Opera is "faster," at least according to one benchmark [zdnet.com.au], doesn't seem to be true. I won't even go into memory usage. I personally think we should reserve judgment until we can test final releases against eachother, but I think a troll mod is perfectly appropriate.

Re:Addons

[spyrochaete]

Considering Mozilla gets millions of dollars of funding from Google I doubt you'll ever see a native ad blocker bundled with the distro.

Re:opera is faster

[alpha_loopy]

swoosh.... it was a joke, ppl.. Opera is faster [because] it was released today [instead of next Tuesday]

Re:opera is faster

[rlk]

It's not polite to turn on preload in Fasterfox!

Re:Zoom

[darthflo]

Opera had it even firster. >.<

Re:opera is faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Only problem - looks crappy on Ubuntu - show me how I can get rid of the blurry font rendering and then we can discuss about best browser - till then FF3 rules.

Re:I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[ady1]

Someone, please remind me how much market share desktop linux has?

Market share has nothing to do with firefox being a news and opera not. The matter of the fact is that Opera is not open source. Firefox is. Also, opera's html rendering implementation, while fast in general from either IE or firefox, crawls to its knees when you go to a script heavy (WEB2.0 for some people) site. This was the primary reason I stopped using it even though I like it a lot.

Re:Zoom

[xSauronx]

srsly. using the address bar now is a hassle.

Re:opera is faster

[sulfur]

I am typing this from a 600 MHz / 256 MB machine that is running KDE, and I assure you that Opera is the fastest browser I tried - not even KDE-native Konqueror can match it (I've been using Opera since version 6). Websites that make heavy use of Javascript (digg, google apps, etc) are absolutely unusable in Firefox (3 had some improvements over 2, but it's still slow). While I do use Firefox on my home computer, there is no match for Opera on older machines. I wish Opera developers found a way to port AdBlock and Flashblock plugins - these are "killer" plugins that prevent me from switching to Opera completely.

I am amazed how a closed-source app like Opera can outperform open source browsers that can supposedly integrate into the enviroment much better by such a high margin.

Can I install 3.0 and keep my 2.0 configuration?

[MLS100]

I'd like to test it but don't want to screw up my 2.0 config before I know it is worth upgrading.

Re:Opera 9.5 released today

[Juneau]

By releasing it as Freeware, you retain the right to return it to closed source, and sell it.

I'm no expert on the open source licenses (and I'm sure I'll be corrected), but once it's open source, it's quite difficult to put it back to closed source and sell it as a product

Re:I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[bigstrat2003]

The matter of the fact is that Opera is not open source. Firefox is.

Who the fuck cares? Good software is good software.

Re:opera is faster

[RiotingPacifist]

Or they realise that aslong as it works, nobody outside of slashdot cares if it renders pages in 100ms or 200.

Re:I was expecting more to see Opera 9.5 news...

[bigstrat2003]

a) I'd bet more people don't care than care.

b) The people who do care are idiots. Opera is a web browser with enough notoriety that a release is newsworthy, open-source or not. Slashdot isn't "open-source news", it's just about news.

Re:opera is faster

[ThePhilips]

OMG. What'a flames.

Mozilla/FireFox devels are performance conscious. But they target slightly different demographics. And no, 8yo computer of gp isn't their target.

FireFox on all platforms tries to be OS friendly and conform to UI standards of the OS. Opera? - Some outdated, hacked to death, overbloated with tiny features GUI which looks and behaves differently from whatever OS you have. OMG - Opera still supports the MDI stupidity when even its own author - M$ - has declared it a major mistake in UI design.

Opera's rendering engine is of course near perfect. While Fx team dedicates great effort to usability, all the resources Opera have spared on modern UI desing went into all the bells and whistles of HTML/XHTML/CSS/JS/etc support. No need to boast anything - they are most active member of WHATWG.

Do not ever expect Fx to be more resource friendly (*). But do not expect Opera suddenly be conforming to OS UI standards.

Thanks God, the iron grip of IE was lifted off WWW. Choice is all yours. Both Opera and FireFox are decent browsers - pick whatever you like.

(*) Part of reasons why Fx has much higher resource consumptions, is because they have to provide interfaces for extensions/add-ons. Opera is monolithic - FireFox is modular. Modular app would be always slower and consume more memory. As a trade-off, you have a whole bunch of extensions to choose from to make out of your browser whatever you want.

Re:opera is faster

[Krishnoid]

Mind you, I nowadays don't use Opera because it is not Free Software. I use Firefox.

Well, it's good of you to admit that Opera is better than Free alternatives. But based on that, a non-Free product is competing with Free alternatives and succeeding (at least in the performance arena) on its own merits and providing a good, perhaps even better quality product without acting unethically. RMS himself in his early essays would describe why Free produced better software, at least for some areas (TurboTax and its ilk is IMHO a counterexample to the Free is better argument). Where Free doesn't produce better software for one's use, shouldn't one use the best (ethically-produced) tool for the job -- I mean, it's a piece of software, not a human rights issue, right?

Re:opera is faster

[edremy]

I am amazed how a closed-source app like Opera can outperform open source browsers that can supposedly integrate into the enviroment much better by such a high margin.

Why should you be surprised that a small, focused team can make sure that outperforms software created by a huge pool? In my experience OS software is rarely if ever faster than commercial stuff.

Linux? RTOSs like QNX blow the doors off of Linux in both speed and size

OpenOffice. Laugh- the slowest office suite out there by a large margin. Even the bloated pig of Office2007 is quicker.

Opera? Certainly much faster than Firefox and uses a lot less memory

GCC? Compile time might be ok, but in terms of output optimized code speed IBM's XLC just utterly destroyed it back when I used both in grad school.

I'm sure there are lots of others out there- OS programmers aren't somehow magically better than folks working in commercial shops. They can turn out some truly great stuff (Apache comes foremost to mind) but OS just isn't a silver bullet.

Re:opera is faster

[AeroIllini]

Aren't AJAX applications changing the DOM and hiding/unhiding elements fairly frequently?

The HTML renderer still seems important for fast operation of Google Docs.

Re:opera is faster

[INowRegretThesePosts]

I believe Free Software is indeed about freedom. And I believe that Open Source does tend to produce the best technical results, but of course there are exceptions. Specially in areas where Open Source is not (at least yet) mature enough, possibly due to presently having too little momentum. Perhaps one example would be 3D FPS gaming, but I cannot comment because I currently rarely play games.
I do believe that by stimulating free software I am stimulating both superior technology, economic efficiency and issues like
1) The freedom of access to information
2) The independence of people, including in foreign countries, from a particular corporation *
3) Power to the people, including from repressive governments
4) The framework (free, good quality compilers and libraries for software makers; free and good image editing tools for image makers; etc) for people to learn something, or, after learning, to express their potential

And there is no doubt that by merely using Firefox, I help them. It is called network-effect. The network effect in software is so strong that a scientific study has found that, if not for piracy (which allows people who otherwise would use Linux to use Windows), Microsoft would undoubtedly lose to Linux. With piracy, the study found that the future is uncertain, and no winner can be predicted (and maybe there won't even be a clear winner). The reason is that each person that uses Windows (even if without paying) is one less Linux user. One more person in the market for Windows software. One more person for a windows user to turn for help. One more reason for hardware companies to develop Windows drivers. So yes, network effect is so strong that Windows has a *net benefit* from piracy.

So I do help Free Software by merely using it, and even more when I advocate my friends to use it too, and when I help people in the forums, report bugs, etc.
And I am always honest: I only advocate Firefox because I know that, while being (possibly) worse than Opera, it is good enough, and I don't claim it to be the best. I just claim it is very good, and much better than IE.

* Really. I'm not the usual moon-landing 9/11 JFK conspiracy retard, but it is scary that our whole country, including the armed forces, depend on Microsoft. It is not like the USA has not deliberately leaked booby-trapped technology to the Soviets before**... There is a real-world possibility that the US government has made Microsoft put traps on Windows
** And, by the way, it was good. I am not your usual Soviet Union panderer either. I thank God that the Soviets are gone, and I hope the Chinese dictatorship goes away as well. Unfortunately, the reality is currently different from that, and the future seems worrisome, specially for us in Latin America...

Re:Zoom

[BZ]

Can you actually point me to an incident where someone who was an active Mozilla developer at the time "tried to claim [the memory issues] never existed"?

It's a nice meme to propagate, but I have yet to see someone come up with such an incident.

Re:opera is faster

[BZ]

"The environment" is part of the performance problem in a lot of cases. For example, GTK2 is a lot slower than GTK1 (affecting things like Window opening performance, for example). Using pango for text layout will let you get more things (e.g. Thai) correct, but is a good bit slower than other options that don't try to handle as many situations... RENDER and XOrg have all sorts of performance issues. There are graphics testcases where Firefox 2 on Linux beats Firefox 3 hands-down because the software rendering in Firefox 2 is faster than the "accelerated" rendering done through RENDER in Firefox 3.

So depending on the tradeoffs you want to make, the way to be fast might in fact be to NOT integrate with "the environment". At least on Linux. On operating systems with a better graphics and widget layer story, things may be different.

Re:opera is faster

[BZ]

Between the start of Gecko 1.9 development and now (effectively the end of Gecko 1.9 development), 389 bugs with the "perf" keyword got fixed. That's not counting the UI-only performance bugs (e.g. the Firefox UI took up about 15% of the pageload time in Firefox 2; in Firefox 3 that number is much smaller).

People care, I can assure you. On the other hand there are a _lot_ of performance bugs. At least in part because any algorithm that's not O(N) or faster amortized is automatically a performance bug on the web: people throw up multi-tens-of-megabytes HTML files all the time.