Firefox 3.5 Reviewed; Draws Praise For HTML5, Speed 436
johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page. Update: 06/30 15:31 GMT by T : No longer marked as RC; the Firefox upgrade page now says 3.5 has arrived.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
(frequently over a gig of it)
Are you including virtual memory in that figure? I can't seem to fun FF without at least 100MB of physical memory, but I never see the sum of physical and virtual go over 600MB (Jesus! I have really lowered my expectations thinking that isn't a lot!) with 15 tabs open for a week.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:4, Interesting)
Non-profit? (Score:1, Interesting)
Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization". Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.
Don't you mean: "...sure NOT to prompt..." (Score:2, Interesting)
Correction: "...and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure NOT to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language..."
(That's better.)
I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility???? Aren't they just playing into Micrsofts hands? MS is sure to just go ahead and create MSHTML 5.0 which is completely incompatible with HTML 5.0. What will they do then?
Wave there hands madly in the air, I suppose.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:4, Interesting)
I leave Firefox 3.0 open for weeks at a time, and I'm liable to have close to a hundred tabs open across 12 windows. Granted, it uses almost a gigabyte of memory, but I don't think any browser would do any better for that kind of load. The only time I ever need to restart is because Flash has stopped working.
Released!?!! (Score:4, Interesting)
As of now, if you got to Mozilla's page and choose to download Firefox, you get version 3.5 :
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/upgrade.html [mozilla.com]
Re:A Bug No One Mentions (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
As mentioned in a previous comment, i'm currently using 3.0.11, and i haven't seen a noticeable improvement over FF2. If they've fixed everything in 3.5 i'll be very happy. But then everyone told me they'd fixed the memory issued in 3.0 too, and that didn't work so well for me.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you manage that? I mean, when you want to go to a page, do you really look for it in all of your tabs? What do you gain by leaving the tab open instead of just going back to the site when you want to view it again?
I tend to max out at about 10 tabs because I close them when I'm not actively using them. It's really, really rare that I even actively use that many.
Acid (Score:2, Interesting)
Still only a 93% on acid3. Better, but not good enough.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, as long as we're talking anecdotes, I saw a dramatic improvement in 3 over 2...In FF2, the memory creep was constant and dramatic. 30-50 tabs would consume several GIGS of memory after a week or so. But with 3, it levels off. Yea, it uses a lot of memory, but it doesn't leak the way it used to.
Just my personal experience of course.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:4, Interesting)
Threading would work just as well, if not better in your scenario. Separate processes just gives you the extra boundary of protection and convenience that comes with not sharing memory.
Re:Video support seems excellent (Score:2, Interesting)
A quick addition: Right clicking on the video offers a link "save video". How neat is that? :(
I know again that companies DRM-crap and 100+ years copyrighted PROPERTY won't be pleased with this, but so what. Youtube, vimeo et.al. are full of amateur videos etc that would benefit from this.
And again from a users perspective this option is a godsend. Shame that the copyright-craze has gone too far
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open
No, you should be able to have as many tabs as you want open and the software should handle it. It's the computers job to do what we want, not ours to conform to the computer.
On the other hand, I regularly have 3 or 4 windows open with close to 100 tabs each, and I don't really have a problem. If I hadn't shut down my pc last night to hook up a disc, I'd check the RAM use, but in any case, FF is pretty snappy for me.
Re:I hope they fixed printing (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen that problem as well. Very annoying.
Another problem is that you can do print preview, and you can choose to print a selection... but you can't preview what will print if you print only the selection. This would be very useful when you want to make sure the selection will print as you expect, or if you want to scale the print to fit on a certain number of pages.
Even better, what if they made the print preview interactive? The user could cut out blocks they don't want to print, or select certain sections to print. Currently, I accomplish this by using Firebug to delete unwanted structures from the page before I print.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that i really shouldn't have that many tabs open, but as someone else pointed out it's a convenient bad habit.
Who the fsck is anyone to tell you how you should use your web browser? If you need the browser to support 120 open tabs, then if it doesn't do this well, then it's a tool not well suited to your task. You should expect it to require some system resources to pull this off, but those that the application asks for should be managed properly and freed up if no longer needed. That is not too much to ask for, and you shouldn't apologize if you choose to use the product this way.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
Won't people flame "It is using 200% CPU?". I notice same people asking for 64bit everything makes scene about browser using 1 gig RAM. This attitude really started to hurt the development of all applications I think.
What matters is, it should not leak memory or "hog" the CPU as result of bad programming, otherwise I am all for Caches, multiple threads etc. IMHO all browsers should at least experiment with "HTML rendering" and "image decoding" as separate threads. Even Symbian (foundation now) demo'ed SMP capability of the upcoming open source Symbian. We talk about low power ARM devices here and a hugely complex operating system which is moving to open source.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:1, Interesting)
You have 6 windows/tabs open, therefore 6 "chrome.exe" processes in the Task Manager.
Chrome itself is locked up/wedged, so you can't use the Chrome Process Manager (part of Chrome) to determine which of the sub-processes (read: which of those 6 chrome.exe processes) is causing the problem. The Chrome Process Manager is the only way to determine which of the chrome.exe sub-processes is associated with which tab/page (e.g. chrome.exe --> URL/title mapping).
The core problem: one of those 6 is responsible for Chrome (as a whole -- that means all processes!) wedging, so you need to kill the right one, otherwise you lose work you've been doing in the other 5. So which chrome.exe process do you kill?
The correct answer is: "I don't know!" You therefore have to start killing them off one by one until Chrome un-wedges.
This problem also applies to classic UNIX fork() (read: ppid and pid), although you can "solve" this on most mainstream *IX OSes by using setproctitle() or overwriting argv[] to contain the URL (or web page title) of the page/tab associated with that Chrome process.
The solution therefore becomes: "ps -auxwww | grep -i chrome" "Oh, that one there is the page I just loaded before things locked up, let's kill that one" "Yay, Chrome works now! Back to doing work in the other 5...".
Well, this isn't so on Windows. And don't try to blame this on Microsoft either -- this isn't their fault. This is purely the fault of the "let's go with a multiprocess web browser architecture!" concept. It's a flaw that's intentionally overlooked, and it's an acceptable flaw based on the supposed "security gains" from said model. But in the real world, it won't fly.
So still no MSI for Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
May I really ask who or what Firefox developers fight(!) with? Like or not, MSI is the way to get into Enterprise, a signed MSI is even better. In fact, most of .exe installers you see these days are actually MSI packaged in .exe.
It is really interesting that they insist on not shipping MSI versions of their software, at least in a FTP folder like "alternate_installers" which admins will pull msi from. It became even more interesting since I found this: http://wix.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] , yes open source from MS, hosted by Sourceforge and it actually works. What does MSI do? Hurt feelings of the developers there? I really can't understand. It is basically RPM for Windows which gives some bonus features like repair etc. to ordinary users but it is huge deal on enterprise.
ps: Same thing on OS X but we are kinda fine with Drag&Drop installs while it even matters at home sized networks. A .pkg would be way better. Anyway, no gigantic enterprise sized OS X networks around like the Windows ones.
Re:As usual with new Firefox releases... (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you telling me to keep 836 KB of data as a live page takes 12MB? What am I missing?