Firefox 3.7 Dropped In Favor of Feature Updates 252
Barence sends in a report from pcpro.co.uk that says "Under its original plans, Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable, forcing Mozilla to rethink its release. As a result, Firefox 3.7 has been dropped and will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates. This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process." Updated 20100116 00:54 GMT by timothy: Alexander Limi, from Firefox User Experience, says that the PC Pro article linked above misinterprets the situation, and that 3.7 is still on the roadmap before 4.0. The confusion stems from a schedule realignment: the out-of-process plugins feature, originally slated to land in 3.7, will instead ship as a minor update in Firefox's 3.6 series. According to Limi, CNET gets it right."
Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what effect this is going to have on the implementation of SVG animation, which is part of gecko 1.9.3, which was to be used in 3.7. Is it going to be slotted into 3.6 sometime or will it get pushed to 4?
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We'll probably see the Geck 1.9.3 engine "slipstreamed" in with automatic updates to Firefox 3.6. As such, don't be surprised by the end of 2010 we'll see Firefox up to Version 3.6.15 as all the new features are "slipstreamed" in.
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What exact problems are you seeing with the 1.1 test suite? Last I checked, Gecko passed a pretty big chunk of that (SVG fonts and SMIL excluded).
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http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20061213/htmlEmbedHarness/basic-index.html [w3.org]
I just tried it using 3.5.7.
I skipped the first 2 tests as they are animation related.
I stopped at test 7. I figured since 3 through 7 didn't match up, and I'm currently at a 100% failure rate that I didn't need to prove much more.
Yes, Firefox can score great if you ignore all the tests that it fails, unfortunately things like fonts ARE KIND OF IMPORTANT.
I should point out that proper font rendering is required for EVERY test. Y
Re:Gecko 1.9.3 and SVG animation (Score:4, Funny)
> I just tried it using 3.5.7.
> I figured since 3 through 7 didn't match up
Interesting. Tests 3 through 7 all match up here in Firefox 3.5.7. On Window, Linux, and Mac, on several different hardware and VM configurations. What's special about your setup?
> I should point out that proper font rendering is required for EVERY test.
Sure. That's not the same thing as SVG Fonts, which are a font format for defining font data in SVG instead of using the fonts installed on your system. Whether SVG fonts are important is up for debate in the working group at the moment, in fact. ;)
> the composition test fails, gradient tests fail, fill tests fail, event handling and
> scripting is pointless in firefox
If you mean the one feComposite test for "the composition test", I can confirm that this fails. The gradient and fill tests pass fine for me. The event tests that are testing stuff that deals with the Core DOM pass fine. The ones that are testing stuff like onfocusin that SVG made up aren't implemented by pretty much anyone last I checked and are slated to be dropped from the SVG spec. The struct-dom tests pass fine over here.
> structured image placement, text selection doesn't work, inheritance is broken,
Not sure which tests you're looking at here.
> text alignment is broken beyond belief.
A lot of that looks unimplemented, yes.
> Gecko hasn't passed any tests,
Again, I'd like to know what's special about your system (or your profile, or your exact Firefox binary) here. If you're willing to take the time, can you run your Firefox in safe mode and see whether it's still failing tests 3-7? If so, where did you download your Firefox from?
And just to make sure, is "svg.enabled" set to true in your about:config?
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The fonts will vary based on what's installed on your system, obviously.
But are the gradient/fill tests that he's saying fail failing for you?
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I show the same results. Fonts are messed up horribly, but the rest of the tests mainly pass. I only did the first 25, and 1,2,13,21,22,23,24 fail. The rest pass.
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I figured since 3 through 7 didn't match up, and I'm currently at a 100% failure rate that I didn't need to prove much more.
[...]
I should point out that proper font rendering is required for EVERY test. You can't pass any without proper font rendering.
I should point out that, while this is valid for judging a (supposedly) "finished" product, it's kind of negatively biased for assessing the state of a work-in-progress: if a single issue of buggy/incomplete font rendering causes all the test-cases to fail, regardless of the state of the other features involved in each test-case, and they're all graded on a binary pass/fail scale, then you end up counting the same bug many times, and whatever other features may be working correctly don't get counted. Yes, f
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In fact, if you want to look at tests from back in March 2009 done on 3.5.2 (which has the same SVG support as 3.5.7) by one of the SVG working group folks, take a look at http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php [codedread.com]
Note the big red chunk in the first two lines corresponding to lack of SMIL support. Of the remaining 80% of the tests, Firefox 3.5 passes about 3/4, looks like. That's including the fact that it has no SVG Fonts support.
So SMIL was the biggest single SVG 1.1 compliance bit missing in Gecko... whi
So much for Windows 7 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So much for Windows 7 support (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? That one, relatively useless piece of eyecandy is the only thing holding you back from using Firefox.
Uhuh.
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So now we have to wait until 2011 for Firefox 4 to get tab previews in the taskbar? Time to investigate ad-block addons for IE8.
That's what IE does, and I hate it--then it takes even more work to switch back to my browser when I'm in another application. (Instead of my windows, I see all my tabs, making the list much longer and harder to navigate since I have to remember which tab I was on, unless I want to jar my experience by unintentionally switching tabs.)
But, if that's the way Windows 7 is "supposed" to work, I suppose it will be more consistent...
Re:So much for Windows 7 support (Score:5, Informative)
Last I saw tab previews in the taskbar was the default for Firefox 3.6, I had to disable it any time I did a clean install.
browser.taskbar.previews.enable in about:config
IMO it entirely defeat the point of having tabs in ONE program, so only one app wastes taskbar space, even preview space
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Run nightly trunk and you can have it today.
I believe Chrome 4 beta does it today. I recommend AdThwart extension with it, but sadly it still renders the ad in the background and hides it. Running Chrome on Windows, I find files downloading and trying to open that I didn't download. I've seen executables try to open themselves. Firefox and Adblock plus stops the ad from rendering at all, which blocks a lot of that crap.
Chrome is nice, but until I can get a better ad blocking solution, I'm largely sticking w
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The problem with this change is that it causes major issues for people like me who have a lot of tabs open. I currently have 29 open because I have been researching some maths stuff. I could close some of them if I wanted to but that involves effort and I would probably close one which I would need again. It is much easier to close them all at once when I have finished. Just think about 29 tab previews in the task bar, it would be horrible. Maybe for a lot of people who keep about 5 tabs open it is ok
Minefield (Score:3, Informative)
I'm using it already as my predominant web browser of choice. Works like a champ so far. I know it's not even pre-release blah blah. It works for me.
Re:Minefield (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like when running through actual minefields, others may not be as lucky as you.
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Tick... And with every second... tick... the likeliness of you stepping... tick... on a mine, gets... BOOOM! ;)
Where's the meat? (Score:5, Insightful)
What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason? The Linux kernel and many other open source projects have release cycles of "it's done when it's done" -- and a predictable version numbering system. What next, Mozilla Firefox 2010 Professional Edition? Delays are inevitable in any software development project.
Also, Slashdot -- this news post was like saying "X replaced by Y. Z reported jealous, but A and B are looking forward to bringing C onboard soon." Numbers should not be used in place of content. $WITTY_COMMENT. $RETORT. $TROLL. $VAGUE_REFERENCE_TO_SEXUALITY.
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$LAME_CAR_ANALOGY
$Snide_comment_about_GP
$Lameness_Filter_whine
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The difference between doing a 3.7 minor version release and a series of 3.6.x point releases as features are completed means that there aren't a set of "must-do" features for the 3.7 version, main "roadmapped" development can shift to 4.0, and individual enhancements to 3.6 that get completed get pushed out as point releases rather than getting aggregated into a combined minor version release. It also me
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What purpose does it serve to skip version numbers, except for some political or media-relations reason?
Work was going on simultaneously on 3.7 and 4.0 branches of the code. There is an overhead in doing that, eg builds of both could be failing, who's looking into that, etc. Not least of your problems is getting developers who're working on shiny-new-stuff (4.0) to care about incremental-updates (3.7)
Version numbers are just marketing. The linux numbering system changed not that long ago, and every so often
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Well, 3.x to 4.0 would not be skipping anything. The major version number usually denotes changes in the architecture that do not try to keep compatibility. The minor number is more for smaller, gradual changes. (The third number would be for bugfixes. And the zeroth number, which for most projects usually means a name change and/or a complete rewrite (SeaMonkey -> Firefox), is unfortunately often not talked about.)
So I don’t see the problem you have here. Maybe a misunderstanding. Care to explain?
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Oh yeah? Well, content shouldn't be used in place of numbers! Never trust those numbers; always hire hard-working letters instead. Alphabetic supremacist for life!
Oh, and I heard you're a lesbian. All livin' it up on your little island of Lesbos with all the other lesbians, am I right?
Re:Where's the meat? (Score:4, Informative)
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I think he was replying to the AC (modnuked to -1) made in reply to your post.
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Imagine if somebody working on a commercial project had suggested building a large, widely used desktop application out of JavaScript and XML. They would have be ridiculed and thrown out of the meeting immediately!
Funny, that. At one of the companies where I had previously worked, at some point, we contemplated moving on to a better UI framework. It had to be cross-platform, easy to develop for, and easy to localize. XUL was actually one of the most prominent contenders, and quite a few seasoned developers supported it. They weren't "ridiculed and thrown out of the meeting" at all.
Ultimately, the decision was made in favor of Qt, but that had just as much to do with the fact that existing codebase was 95% C++ and 5%
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Oh yes, and I've actually remembered one existing commercial (and fairly popular in its niche) product that's built on XUL: ActiveState Komodo [activestate.com].
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Political and media relations are great reasons when you are doing battle with the Dragon (Microsoft) and the white-knight(Google)
Does that make Mozilla the buxom-but-useless love interest, or the plucky comic-relief sidekick?
Deja vu, I predict (Score:2, Funny)
This should free up the team to work on the next major release, Firefox 4, slated for the last quarter of 2010, which is expected to follow the same development process.
Firefox will be dead before it hits version 5.0 [wikipedia.org].
Combining security and feature updates, bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates
This seems to be a horrible idea to me, unless I'm misinterpreting it. I can see this being implemented in two ways:
One, Mozilla withholds security updates until there is a feature ready to go, which is just stupid - don't leave a hole if you've got a fix ready. One of the arguments in favor Firefox over IE is the more rapid security updates.
Two, Mozilla withholds features until a security update is necessary. I can't see any advantage to doing this, but there's a few obvious downsides (like withholding a perfectly good feature until someone finds something we're supposed to be hoping is not there).
Unless I'm missing something?
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I don't think the Mozilla Foundation is dumb enough to wait for new features for 3.6.x version security updates! I do think the version number could go as high as 3.6.15 (my guess) as security updates and the new features are "slipstreamed" in.
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Yes, you're missing option 3.
Three, Mozilla rolls out a patch that includes a feature when it's ready, and rolls out a different patch when a security update is ready, and combines them if/when possible. That would still be "with" security updates, after a fashion, and it would be the logical, intelligent way to do so.
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I think you're missing two things:
1) The article's first paragraph is taking a proposal for a possible future plan of action
and claiming that it is the plan of action.
2) Right now (Firefox 3.0 and Firefox 3.5) there are no features shipped as minor updates;
all features are "withheld" as you put it until the next major version.
The only firm current plan here is that one particular feature, namely out-of-process plug-ins, is currently planned to be b
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You're missing this:
(3) Mozilla does individual security fixes and feature updates for 3.6 as they are completed (maybe grouping the two together in an update if they happen to be ready at the same time, but not holding either to wait for the other), but doesn't have one big list of featur updates that must be complete for a "v3.7" that are released all at once. The "feature updates that will be rolled out with security updates", in this case, would mean that the feature updates
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I can't find official documentation on this subject. However, based on the updates that I get, there are 4 numbers in a given Firefox Version:
A.B.C.D
A= Major revision
B= Minor revision
C= Small feature revision
D= Bug / security fix
It now appears that features that was going to be in 3.7 will now be put into 3.6 feature by feature. So you may see an update like 3.6.0.2 which is just security/bug fixes from 3.6.0.1. When you see an update like 3.6.1.0, it means it has a new feature that would have been in 3.7 b
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Unless I'm missing something?
Well, two things you are missing is evidence that the Mozilla foundation will (1) "withhold security updates until there is a feature ready to go", and (2) "withhold features until a security update is necessary".
How else are you going to roll out features alongside security updates? Just hope really really hard that every feature update is completed at the exact same moment as a security update?
Either feature updates will have to wait for security updates, or security updates will have to wait for feature updates, or they will not be coming out "alongside" each other.
You don't need "evidence" for that.
Et tu, Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Security updates should never be combined with feature updates. Anyone who doesn't want the feature update is then in the unfortunate position to decide whether they'll get the unwanted features or keep the unwanted vulnerabilities. Bad Mozilla.
Ok, grandpa (Score:2, Interesting)
Continuing to support old versions is a heavy burden, and has to end at some point. It's not a question of if people will have to make that decision, but when.
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Starting you “argument” with an “ad hominem” fallacy. Way to fail... ;)
Oh, it’s so heavy to support old version? Well tough, cause you’re supposed to do it. That’s the point of branches. But you only fix things that do not require functionality or architecture changes. Or in other words 0.0.0.x changes. Because the fix to problems that are caused by functionality and architecture, is the new x.x.x.0 version.
So it usually is by itself getting less and less, while you
Why do you hate your grandparents? ;) (Score:2)
You have to end-of-life old versions at some point. Yes, it's good to support old versions if there's a valid reason to be doing so (Apache 1.3, maybe. Firefox 2.0, no.), but there is a limit.
It's all rather moot with free software anyway. If you really think something should still be maintained, then just do it. (Or pay someone else to.)
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Is Lynx not working out for you?
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It takes too long to arrow down past the zillion unnecessary links on every page. If people would code their pages properly it wouldn't be so bad, but there's pages of navigation and images and shit all over the place. Sadly, a graphical browser is pretty much required these days.
I can't tell if you're going for funny or not. This is only "sad" if you're firmly stuck in the mindset that all browsers should deliver is text information and that the mouse is a fad.
Personally I find some sites that use all those "images and shit all over the place" to be extremely useful. Google Maps, for instance.
You're basically claiming that the web sucks because it doesn't cater to an interface that the overwhelming majority of users has completely abandoned, the CLI (present company excluded).
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Please enlighten us on how firefox has gotten worse.
From where I sit, v3.5 is a huge improvement over what came before. I'm optimistic that v3.6 will be an improvement over v3.5.
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Please enlighten us on how firefox has gotten worse.
From where I sit, v3.5 is a huge improvement over what came before. I'm optimistic that v3.6 will be an improvement over v3.5.
In a word: "Awesomebar"
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Yeah, about the awesomebar, it works just fine for me. Honestly, I don't see how it's enough different than the previous location bar to upset so many people. I was using it for days before I even realized that it was functionally different from the location bar in v3.0.
Even for those of you who don't like it, how can it be more than just a minor annoyance, anyways?
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If you read the article carefully, the only feature that is planned to ship as part of the security+stability releases so far (note the "stability" part) is out-of-process plugins. And the point there is stability.
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I agree this is not a good practise, but I can see why they did it -- it was commercially necessary if they want to keep up with Chrome. Personally what they should have done is adopted Chrome's stable/beta channel strategy, with automatic updates for both channels by default. Who knows, maybe that's exactly what they'll do.
(I know they release betas already, but the notion of a Chrome beta channel is that you're permanently on the beta, trying out new features. If you're more adventuresome you can be on th
Quick date calculations (Score:5, Funny)
"Mozilla would roll out Firefox 3.6 and 3.7 over the course of 2009, each bringing minor improvements to the browser. However, a steady stream of delays to Firefox 3.6 has rendered that goal unobtainable."
[jay@gobstopper ~]% date
Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:32:18 EST
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Don't be such a pessimist! If they try really hard, it might still be possible. You never know till you try!
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~ $ head -n 2 mozilla-installer-3.7.sh
#!/bin/sh
date `date +%m%d%H%M2009.%S` # make sure it's 2009
You do want corporate support, don't you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Small feature updates are not conducive to getting corporate support. With large updates, a company can say, "We support Firefox 3.5+", and they can be reasonably confident that they don't need to fully test every minor release of Firefox 3.5. With small updates they have to say, "We support Firefox 3.6.7", and can't be sure that they will actually be able to support 3.6.8 without fully testing it. If you want corporate support, you have to have feature freezes, or support stops being worth the testing time.
Is it already time for the next *generation*? (Score:2)
You know, sometimes the architecture that you originally designed (and that was great and the right thing back then) does not fit your current needs anymore. You get slower and slower, everything becomes bloated and messy, and starts to look like an upside-down pyramid (Windows ME syndrome).
And that’s the time, where it’s good to think about not just making the next version. But about making the next generation. Like a complete rewrite, but not. More like forgetting everything and designing a go
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There's been continuous rearchitecture going on in the 1.9, 1.9.1, 1.9.2 Gecko milestones, and it's ongoing. I mean.... the JS engine is being rewritten from the ground up, in 1.9 CSS layout was rewritten from the ground up, the DOM is about to see some major changes...
Not sure why you decided that there's no rearchitecture going on. ;)
I want multithreading! (Score:4, Insightful)
The far and away priority one feature should be Multithreading. Each tab and each plugin should have its own process and its own memory space, so that a crash of one tab/plugin, or one tab/plugin using loads of CPU power, should have practically no effect on my other tabs/plugins on my 4-core CPU.
So I don't care about copying Chrome's GUI. But copying Chrome's sandboxing and multithreading architecture I very much care about!
There is a Mozilla project to implement this [mozilla.org], but the project page hasn't been updated in months, as far as I can tell.
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If you read the article (or better yet the one it cribbed from), the one feature that's so far being considered for backporting to 3.6.x is in fact out-of-process plug-ins.... So what you want is coming! You can try it right now if you grab a nightly build. At least on Linux and Windows.
Just make it faster (Score:3, Insightful)
SO damn slow
Mac optimized build of Firefox 3.7 rocks! (Score:3, Interesting)
In case you did not know, you can download optimized Mac versions of a number of browsers from here [latko.org]
Specifically, one of the browsers available is a 64-bit optimized version of FF 3.7 for Snow Leopard.
I finally installed it the other night, after eyeing it warily for the last month or so (as I worked through the latest 3.6 optimized builds). I finally installed it last night, and have to say that it's the biggest improvement to FF that I've came across.
It loads faster, uses less CPU & memory than previous builds, and it's mega fast. My impressions are that it's now as fast as Safari is on a Mac.
It's now my main browser. If you run Snow Leopard, you should check it out.
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codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic
No, it's intentional. Mozilla has been using Minefield has the code name for their cutting edge nightly stuff for quite some time... you know, the stuff that could randomly explode.
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It [google.com] doesn't [google.com]?
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It [google.com] doesn't [google.com]?
No it doesn't. Straight from the author's mouths.
Chrome does not yet allow extensions to prevent page elements from being fetched, just to hide them.
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It [google.com] doesn't [google.com]?
Love chrome, wish it has a master password to encrypt stored passwords. Huge fail. until then won't use it...
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Really very nice
They also have an Xmarks extension, I'm not seeing a noscript extension though. I just need that and I think I'm good to go.
The only thing that bugs me about Chrome is the text highlighting, it highlights the full area not just the text itself. I find that slightly annoying but I can live with it.
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It is multithreaded, but when you have one GUI thread (which is the way Windows works) per process, and almost your entire workload is displaying things on the GUI, then multithreading doesn't appear so useful.
I write an app which uses Gecko embedded, I can assure you that Gecko support multithreading.
There just isn't currently a lot of stuff that actually uses threads. I blame part of this on the crappy process you have to go through to use multiple threads from JavaScript. Since FireFox relies heavily o
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Firefox is multithreaded in the sense that multiple threads are used for multiple different tasks.
However all layout currently happens on one thread. So yes, 25% CPU on a quad-core in your situation is what I would expect.
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Dude. There have been threading calls on "other OSs" long before Microsoft butchered the design. You're misinformed or shilling.
Also, ffs, take an english class. The way you write makes me think you might actually be an MS coder trying to turf a little.
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Maybe I'm lucky (conversely, maybe you are unlucky), but 32-bit Firefox 3.5x is 100%* rock-solid stable on my PCs. I can't compare this to IE's stability, as I never, ever, use IE. Granted, I only have 4 add-ons installed (ColorfulTabs, Flashblock, ForecastFox, and Oldbar), but Firefox simply works.
*Actually, I can remember 1 time that Firefox locked up on me, months ago, so its stability is 100% minus one_event.
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So you think the firefox team should just quit and that the people currently using firefox should switch to another browser? Just like that?
Clearly, your opinion of what counts as a "fatal flaw" is not widely held or firefox's market share wouldn't continue to grow as it has. People will continue to use firefox until they find another browser that is more appealing to them and as long as there's enough users to justify further development, the firefox team will continue to work on the code-base.
Out of curio
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I have seen you post this ANY time Firefox has been mentioned for the past couple of weeks, cut and paste style. You are either a shill of some sort, or forced to do this because of one of your clients. Either way, you aren't wanted here.
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I keep HEARING about all these serious problems, but the five computes in my household using Firefox 3.5x (two of them Ubuntu 9.10, three of them Windows XP SP3) haven't SHOWN me any of these problems.
These posts keep talking about how there are major problems with Firefox, and they keep getting worse...yet I haven't experienced nor do I know anyone in my relatively large nerd circle who has experienced what is being described after the release of 3.5.
It sounds like paid shill bullshit to me.
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Not to feed a troll, but...
If he and a number of other people, as stated in his report (and I'll throw my experience in there as well), don't have the problems, it calls into question the original report of overwhelming issues.
Personally, I'd have to say that I use firefox for an average of 12 hours a day. I use it quite a bit at work and again when I get home. If you add in the time that my friends and relatives use firefox without on going crashing issues (ESPECIALLY those that take down windows, I've NEV
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I just read mine - I have one in Nov 2009 & one in Dec 2009. I seem to recall that both of those were caused by some script on cnet.com; it was certainly one particular site in both cases. I start each morning with a fresh 12 tabs open and go through the day opening & closing tons of tabs. Maybe this is "lighter" browser use, but I also have a machine at home which keeps 50+ tabs open for weeks at a time & almost never crashes. This leads me to agree with the GP, claiming that Firefox has major
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I had to Google how... about:crashes
One. I have one. 20/08/2008. About 7 months after I bought this laptop. Two years, one crash. I didn't believe it at first.
Add-ons: ChromEdit Plus, Download Statusbar, eBay Sidebar for Firefox, Flashblock, Fuzzy Time, Google Gears, Greasemonkey (which gets a lot of abuse), ImgLikeOpera, ReloadEvery
Happened when saving a file. No it wasn't jpeg porn.
// probably the default file name is too long or contains illegal characters!
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You don't have the problem, so it doesn't exist?
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm saying that in own personal experience (and, apparently, a lot of other people on this board's experience), I haven't found anything remotely close to what is being claimed.
Did you read the crash reports? They are automatically generated. Are you saying they didn't happen?
People also have pictures of iPhones literally catching on fire or even exploading. That doesn't mean the millions of iPhones out there are bombs in disguise.
Did you consider that maybe your use of a browser is lighter than that of others?
I use 11 addons, and tend to have anywhere from 10-30 tabs open at a time in TWO different browser windows at a time (closer to 10 if general b
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Not only is it week, it's also weak!
Oh, and for the record: the two ubuntu 9.10 systems I run Firefox 3.5.x on? One is an Athlon 64 3000+ single core system (HTPC), and the other is a Dell Mini 9. If I was going to have stability issues with Firefox, I'm sure at least one of those two would have it.
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I don't know what problems the other poster was talking about, but for a several month period up until the last two updates, Firefox was crashing on me basically every night, unattended, with near 100% CPU usage and hugely bloating memory. Furthermore, if I tried to restart it, and it found that one of my plugins needed updating, it wouldn't attempt to restore the previous set of tabs that it was displaying when it crashed. Hugely annoying. I suspect it was some weird interaction with the Zimbra web app. Still, FireFox shouldn't crash like that, no matter what an app is doing.
I have trouble believing this. Firefox was causing you that many problems on a daily basis...yet you continued to use it for several months? ::sniff sniff:: I smell bullshit.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't. Here's a list of my firefox crashes from one week:
7/27/2009 9:21 PM 9:31 PM 9:34 PM 9:34 PM 9:36 PM 9:44 PM 9:53 PM 9:54 PM 10:12 PM
7/28/2009 1:16 AM 4:05 AM 4:36 AM 12:29 PM 1:41 PM 1:55 PM 5:44 PM 6:55 PM
7/29/2009 11:17 AM 12:28 PM 1:39 PM 6:19 PM 8:24 PM 8:25 PM
7/30/2009 12:24 AM 12:58 PM 1:14 PM 5:22 PM 6:49 PM 7:01 PM 7:30 PM
7/31/2009 11:24 AM 5:35 PM 8:29 PM 8:32 PM 8:44 PM 8:55 PM 9:02 PM
8/1/2009 2:50 AM 11:36 AM 1:31 PM 9:48 PM 9:58 PM
This continued up until 10/9/2009, when the crashes jus
Re: (Score:2)
System specs/# of tabs open/addons?
Numbers mean nothing without context....although the close proximity of the timestamps (especially on 7/27) would indicate something really screwy was going on that involved more than just the core Firefox software.
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Nothing special about my system specs, really.
Windows 7 64-bit
Asus P5B Deluxe Motherboard
E6600 CPU
4GB Corsair
Back then was a 4x300GB Raid-0 array, switched to a 2x1000GB Raid-0 / Raid-1 Matrix array sometime in August, currently toss in a couple Intel SSD's as of a month ago
Nvidia 295 video card
External 1TB e-Sata drive
Number of tabs varies between 1 and 15 typically, sometimes as many as 20-25 though across 1-3 windows. .NET Frame
Addons I use area Adblock Plus, FiddlerHook, Firebug, HtmlValidator, LogMeIn,
Re: (Score:2)
Can we have a show of hands?
Does anyone here believe this AC?
Re: (Score:2)
I believe they are either seriously misguided or a horrible liar.
ZING!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Helpful Hint of the Day: There are other browsers. Use one.
Seriously, if it's not working for YOU, use something else. It works for everyone else here, so it must be something with you.
Also, it's open source. Please submit your patches directly to Mozilla or ask them for a refund in the amount of your purchase price. Either way this is not the place for it.
Re: (Score:2)
You'll have to admit a detailed accounting of the apparently more than $200,000,000 Google has given to the Mozilla Foundation would be interesting.
Maybe, these aren't public funds or donations. I don't really care how they use their funding, I only care about their product. Firefox does cause me some issues but the positives continue to outweigh the negatives.
However, I think it's probable that Chrome will overtake them within the next couple of years.
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm willing to bet that a fair part of the stability issues people have actually comes from badly-written extensions and plugins. Remember that most other applications don't execute code written by Adobe (and yes, I see that as an argument as to why they're more stable).
Re:Firefox development is poorly managed, apparent (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen $200 million worth of development in Firefox?
http://planet.mozilla.org/ [mozilla.org]
Spend a little time reading this on a regular basis, and you'll soon discover how many projects Mozilla handles, and all the developers they're paying.
The big projects include:
Firefox, Bugzilla, Camino, Fennec, Lightning, Sunbird, Seamonkey, and Thunderbird.
These are major multi-platform projects.
Mozilla has several projects for first-party add-ons for all of the above such as Firebug, Chromebug, . Then they have tons of major projects that most people never hear about. At the moment they're working on:
Jetpack
Raindrop
Bespin
Concept
Personas
Prism
Snowl
Test Pilot
Ubiquity
Weave
Electrolysis
A tool recently said the KDE code based purely on lines of code should have cost $175 million to develop, and that wasn't counting Koffice, and anything outside the main KDE trunk.
Mozilla also doesn't just do code projects, they do tons of community management and outreach projects like Mozilla Education, which costs even more money.
They also help support outside developers using Mozilla and Xulrunner for other apps such as Kompozer, Songbird, etc.
I don't know where all their money goes, but Mozilla does *A LOT*. To suggest they're not doing much development is ignorance or lies.
Firefox experiences a LOT of crashes and memory hogging, and has for years.
Firefox does crash for me from time to time, on Windows and Linux. I tend to use a lot of extensions, and the most common thing I hear is that extensions are the largest source of memory and stability issues. Do I get daily crashes, or 10 crashes a day? No. And I run daily snapshot builds. I maybe get 1 crash a week, if that.
As a Systems Engineer, I troubleshoot and support some big money apps that crash fairly often. Large software projects are going to have bugs. However, I wager if you run without extensions, you'll find that Firefox is pretty damned stable for such a massive multi-platform app.
Memory issues are all but lies these days. Memory usage has improved so much over the past few years. Firefox is actually better with memory usage than Chrome in many ways. The core app doesn't take too much memory on first load. It doesn't have memory leaks.
There are some intentional features which cause Firefox to eat up some memory that you can turn off, such as Firefox keeping fully rendered pages in memory, so that when you hit the back button, they just display immediately without having to re-render. When you close a tab, it still keeps that full session in memory for some time, so that you can reopen the closed tab with full rendered pages and history if you want.
If you don't like these features, turn them off. Not to mention, these are set to use dynamic chunks of memory which is preportional to your total memory. If you have a desktop with 8 gigs of memory that you're not using, why get upset that Firefox is using 300-400 megs of memory?
Unused memory isn't doing you any good.
Stop with the FUD. Real geeks know better and see right through BS and lies.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up! Super informative post...I knew they were stretched across many projects, I didn't realize it was THAT many -_-;;
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a serious flaw in FireFox that a crashign plug-in brings down the entire browser and all tabs. Yes, applications and plug-ins are going to have bugs. Software architects should take this into account when designing things. FireFox's architects seem not to have done so.
Re: (Score:2)
I run two to three Firefox windows with dozens of tabs 24/7, with active browsing of a variety of content types (Flash, images, embedded video, text, heavy scripting, AJAX, et cetera) for many hours daily, and a wide variety of addons installed. This particular install of firefox has been running for a little over a year.
My about:crashes is blank.
The randomness of failures suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. That's crucial in an unstable, poorly designed OS like Windows XP. Linux merely throws Firefox off the system.
This is ridiculous. You're obviously talking about things you don't know anything about -- concerning programs or OS's to start with, let alone Firefox specifica
Re: (Score:2)
The randomness of failures suggests that Firefox writes to a random location memory that is important in some systems and not others. That's crucial in an unstable, poorly designed OS like Windows XP. Linux merely throws Firefox off the system.
What that suggests to me is that your memory is bad. Try running memtest [memtest.org] and see if it reports any errors. Even if it doesn't, it might be heat related.
I've had issues with Firefox crashing in the past (although mostly due to my playing around with XPCOM while writing an extension), but I've never seen it crash the OS. If it's crashing the OS, it seems highly likely to me that there's something physically wrong with your system.
After all, even Linux crashes when the CPU physically falls out of its socket. (
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting post ..
I run FF in Linux and can't recall the last time I've seen FF crash
As you state FF crashes in XP constantly, the problem may be partly with XP
As from my experience as a windoz user, everything crashes daily, from the main OS to the applications, although XP is much improved over past windoz versions. It still melts down from time to time
The FF delayed mouse event problem, I have seen though. I was wondering what was causing that .. now I know
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100106 Ubuntu/9.10 (karmic) Firefox/3.5.7,
no crashes reported. I normally have 50+ tabs open (several hierarchical sets using tree-style tab, most of which are reference info I like to have available.)
Addons installed:
Adblock Plus, All in one Sidebar, Better Privacy, DownThemAll, FireGestures, FoxyProxy, Gmail Manager, Image Zoom, Leet Key, Morning Coffee, NoScript, Moonlight, Nuke Anything Enhanced, PDF Download, RSS ticker, Session
Re: (Score:2)
Not an issue. Not a mountain, either. Just a modest and timely change to deal with slipping deadlines.
Not everything on /. has to be earth-shattering. How many "Linux kernel 2.6.xxxxx released" articles have there been?