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Mozilla The Internet

Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now 473

Posted by CmdrTaco from the can't-be-worse-than-the-last-beta dept.
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.
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Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now More

Firefox 3 RC1 Out Now

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  • Comment from story (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 17, 2008 @07:57AM (#23445002)
    "So simple a grandmother can use it"

    This is offensive. I am a grandmother, and a C programmer.

  • eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aerthling ( 796790 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:03AM (#23445044)

    God I hope it's better than the last beta.


    What was wrong with Beta 5?
    • Nothing for the most part, I never had any random crashing or anything.

    • Re:eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by diskis ( 221264 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:14AM (#23445080)
      Beta 5 was quite unstable for me, so bad infact that I downgraded to beta 3.
      Though I am using a lot of addins, so don't know exactly who to blame.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by RiotingPacifist ( 1228016 )
        dont suppose it being a beta and all you bothered filling bug reports and then checking if they got fixed?

      • Re:eh? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Darkness404 ( 1287218 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:32AM (#23445186)
        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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by garett_spencley ( 193892 )
          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

      • Running on? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by slyborg ( 524607 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @10:13AM (#23445776)
        After like 10 years I'm still reading the "works on my machine" posts with no mention of the machine type.

        I call them the "Well, its raining HERE" comments.

        You need to identify the (OS::distro) and plugins in use for these "Release [ ] suxx0rs!!!" posts to have any meaning.

        I generally find that if that question is answered, it's some guy running the L33tware distro in 24MB of RAM on a Transmeta Crusoe who is enraged that his opensource software crashes, and no, he hasn't logged a bug because God told him that it is destiny to always have bugless software AND will be Lord of Faerun in time.

        (No offense to parent ;)

      • Re:eh? (Score:5, Funny)

        by RiotingPacifist ( 1228016 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:50AM (#23445286)
        The worst coded ajax site on the web crashes browsers, news at 11.

        • Re:eh? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by WD ( 96061 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @11:00AM (#23446056)
          It doesn't matter how poorly the web site is coded. A browser should never crash when rendering a page!

    • Re:eh? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ceroklis ( 1083863 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @11:25AM (#23446190)
      I have used beta 5 on ubuntu hardy for several weeks. The problems are:
      • After a while, 100% CPU usage.
      • Crash if you open too many tabs. I routinely opened bookmark folders of 50+ tabs with firefox 2. With beta5 this operation crashes systematically.
      • Random crashes. Happens systematically on certain sites. Even sites that do not use flash. Difficult to identify the cause.
      This has been so frustrating I reverted to firefox 2. You know something is wrong when you are pleasantly surprised to see 20 tabs open without crashing.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Masa ( 74401 )

      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 aft

  • Does anyone have the changelog compared to beta 5?

  • Stalled window bug dealt with yet? (Score:5, Informative)

    by rikkards ( 98006 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:23AM (#23445140) Journal
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Blahbooboo3 ( 874492 )

      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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )
      I've seen this as well, loading pages like Digg or Youtube in tabs will cause the browser to hang, and other pages won't load until the first tabs load up. It's really annoying when I tend to middle-click multiple links at once.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rikkards ( 98006 )
      Well it hasn't been dealt with yet. Here are the steps I took to get it to happen:
      Open a new Tab
      Go to www.ebay.com
      Do a search and go into about a half dozen auctions, navigating back and going into the next one
      Sooner or later it will slow right down and any other tabs will start experiencing the same thing

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by VJ42 ( 860241 ) *
        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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by renoX ( 11677 )
      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, b

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:40AM (#23445226)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Can you turn off the "Awesomebar"?

    No?

    Not interested.

  • OT - Firefox 3 was regression for me (Score:3, Interesting)

    by azgard ( 461476 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:43AM (#23445250)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by RiotingPacifist ( 1228016 )
      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.

  • Way Better (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DigitalisAkujin ( 846133 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:48AM (#23445266) Homepage
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by julesh ( 229690 )
      Now to business,
      Firebug Official for FF3 Please :)

      Err... firebug 1.1 supports FF3 just fine. No need to hack around with it like so many other addons require...

  • Thanks Firefox! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aggrajag ( 716041 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @08:57AM (#23445322)
    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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by iknowcss ( 937215 )
      I'm sure you've heard of Pidgin before, but I thought I might recommend it again. The first time I used it, (it was still Gaim at the time) I hated it. I was using an old version of the AIM client and didn't want to have anything to do with messaging on Linux.

      However, things have really changed drastically, and I couldn't be happier with my Pidgin installation on both my Linux and Windows installs. Pidgin supports a whole slew of protocols, including MSN. It's the only real alternative for users running a

  • Had problems on OS X until I cleared my prefs... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by foniksonik ( 573572 ) on Saturday May 17, 2008 @09:38AM (#23445582) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Stability (Score:3, Informative)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday May 17, 2008 @09:55AM (#23445682) Homepage

    I'm surprised at the number of people with stability problems. I tried 3.0a1 and I had instant crashes in AJAX web apps, so I decided to wait until b1 which turned out to be a good decision, because it was much more stable. Each beta has been increasingly better. I still get a couple crashes here and there but I am betting it's due to Flash or an add-on I'm using.

    On Linux I use Swiftfox [getswiftfox.com], which is a recompiled Firefox optimized for individual processors so it can be even a little faster than Firefox 3. Only problem is they occasionally push out a nightly build over their update package source thingy (I tend to prefer the public beta releases) but nothing that has been unstable yet.

    If you're having stability problems, you really have no right to complain until you at least TRY to fix it since Firefox gives you the tools to do so. To use another car analogy, it's like complaining your car doesn't slow down fast enough so you need a different one but you haven't even tried using the brakes yet. Well not exactly but I needed to use a car analogy. Anyways here's some things you should try:

    1. Try running Firefox in safe-mode. If the problem goes away it's very likely a bad extension.
    2. Try making a new, temporary profile. If the problem goes away it might be easy to fix by migrating individual files over and skipping the one that causes the problem. Also this helps to clear out old FF2 files you don't need anymore (especially if you can figure out what the files are, not hard to do since they're mostly well named).
    3. If the problem occurs on pages which utilize a specific plugin try disabling the plugin... about:plugins [about] can help you locate the dll to temporarily move it somewhere else to disable it (Firefox won't let you follow about: links so copy/paste the url). If it's a plugin you can't live without try seeing if there's updates for it.
    4. Google Gears instantly crashes FF3 if sites try to use it (in b5 at least). Disable it until it gets an update.
    5. Silverlight doesn't support FF3 yet and just refuses to run at all. MS is supposedly working on it.
    6. Some people have reported weird slow-loading problems. I had that problem as well and traced it to the Firebug extension, or perhaps the Firecookie one... the problem is sporadic so it's difficult. However a Firebug update recently seemed to fix it. You can try disabling it if you have problems.

    If you still have problems it's likely a problem with Firefox, in which case I suppose you could complain, but it would be more productive to file a bug report [mozilla.org] to increase the chances of it being fixed. To quote GLaDOS, "Thank you for helping us help you help us all."

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