Firefox 3.0 Makes Leap Forward

Kurtz'sKompund writes "Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3.0 has passed a major milestone! The Places feature has been added to the alpha client slated for release next week. Places is a complete re-work of the bookmarking and history browser functions. It was at one point slated for Firefox 2.0, but will instead see release in Mozilla's next major version. '"We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk," said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. "Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us." Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1. Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it's incompatible with earlier Firefox editions' bookmarks. Alpha users must convert their existing entries, Mozilla developers said."

So how long...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Until they decide to remove it and delay it until Firefox 5 (after they skip 4)

Re:

[Headcase88 (828620)]

They've got to skip 4, 5, 6, and 7 to get ahead of the game. The quality of a browser is directly proportional to its version number.

Re:So how long...

[bruno.fatia (989391)]

Oh so THAT'S why Opera is cleary winning..

Re:So how long...

[nuzak (959558)]

IE never skipped a version. IE 1.0 came with the Windows 95 Plus! Pack.

Screenshots of IE versions 1-7 [com.com]

Re:So how long...

[ehrichweiss (706417)]

Heh, funny you should say that. Back in the day I remember having a "discussion" with someone over how the Amiga OS was only at v3.1 and Windows was "clearly ahead"; I responded with "So, Windows 95 is 95 times better than Windows 1.0? and almost 32 times better than Windows 3.1?". The silence was deafening.

Hrm..

[nametaken (610866)]

I'm not the usual jerk that complains about FF's feature bloat, but I wonder if this new feature is optional.

SQLite is in Firefox 2.0; What about SeaMonkey?

[Noksagt (69097)]

Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries,

But SQLite is in Firefox 2.0 (and is already leveraged by extensions like Zotero). If Mozilla wanted to have the feature in the 2.x branch, I think they technically could (or, if a developer wanted to write an extension that allowed Firefox 2 to see both the old bookmarks and the new ones, there doesn't seem to be any critical impediments).

However, the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite doesn't yet have SQLite. Will it be unable to share bookmarks with the new Firefox? Or will it get SQLite before Firefox 3 is released?

Changes

[eebra82 (907996)]

For anyone wondering what's going to change in FireFox 3.0 (Wikipedia quotes):

The largest known change for Firefox 3 is the implementation of Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. It will also provide CSS3 columns.[90] Firefox 3 will include features that were bumped from Firefox 2, such as the overhauled Places system for storing bookmarks and history in an SQLite backend, according to the wiki.

Also, what's expected to come in FireFox 4.0 (also Wikipedia):

On October 13, 2006, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, wrote about the plans for Mozilla 2.0, the platform on which Firefox 4.0 is likely to be based. These changes include improving and removing XPCOM APIs, switching to standard C++ features, just-in-time compilation with JavaScript 2 (known as the Tamarin project), and tool-time and runtime security checks.

Bring it on...

[BrokenHalo (565198)]

I'm looking forward to this going gold for just one reason: some of the sites I visit frequently have a particularly in-your-face usage of auto-refresh which pisses me off (i.e. insisting on re-loading just when I'm in the middle of reading a particular paragraph). FF 3.0 (I heard) is supposed to be able to block this...

Re:Bring it on...

[oldmacdonald (80995)]

The refresh blocker [vakuumverpackt.de] extension might be what you're looking for.

Doesn't work (stupid javascript)

[oldmacdonald (80995)]

Reuters uses javascript to refresh and refresh blocker only nukes the META tag type of refreshing. The combination of refresh blocker [vakuumverpackt.de] and noscript [noscript.net] does the trick here.

Stop bitching, you noobs.

[Lethyos (408045)]

All posts resembling the pattern “why don't they fix this problem instead!?” are off the mark, irrelevant, and just plain whiny. Just because some new feature is being added does not mean your pet peeve is going completely ignored. There is more than one person working on this thing, and as remarkable as it may seem, many software development tasks can be done in parallel! Imagine that: doing more than one thing at once on a project!

And, to the dorks complaining of feature bloat.

[Lethyos (408045)]

Adding new features is not automatically a bad thing. It does not intrinsically slow down a program or make it cumbersome. Of course, these are two possible side-effects, but are not always certain. With good practices and architecture, new features are a boon, not a bust. Also, think of all the things the computer on your desktop does right now. Would you rather it have the functionality of a machine from a few decades ago because people complained that expanding its usefulness was counter-productive? Let products evolve, let engineers innovate, and let the process for coping with the consequences work.

I cannot believe some of the mundane topics Slashbots will harp on these days. Get over it and try adding some useful dialogue to the stories instead of bitching about things you do not understand or understand only as a result of experience with one particular vendor in Redmond.

Re:Stop bitching, you noobs.

[drinkypoo (153816)]

It's just as stupid as the argument people make when the government shuts down a piracy ring, and everyone chimes in with "I sure am glad they're going after the real bad guys instead of murderers and rapists."

Know what the difference is? When they spend money on fighting copyright violations, we spend money in order to support big media (ask yourself the last time the FBI got involved in the violation of the copyrights of an individual without money) whereas when we spend money on fighting violent crime, we spend money in order to make life safer for everyone including the people running big media and thus profiting from it.

Firefox development doesn't cost me anything. That's the difference.

Light version?

[BlueParrot (965239)]

I love Firefox ( or Iceweasel as it is called on Debian ) but I am running a fairly streamlined xfce install and currently fire.. err... Iceweasel, is using about the same amount of memory as the rest of the system combined. I know there are other browsers, but I really do like Iceweasel, except for the memory footprint. Seeing that I only use a fairly small subset of the features it would be nice to have a light version with just the essentials. I wouldn't suggest axing the features other users love and depend on, but perhaps provide an alternative for those of us who really don't need an advanced database for our 3-4 bookmarks ?

PS: It would also be nice if Firefox didn't highlight "Iceweasel" as a typo.

Re:memory leak FUD #3 ..

[drew (2081)]

Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean that it doesn't exist for anyone else. I regularly see Firefox go above 250 MB of memory, and nothing short of closing it entirely will get that memory back. And despite what you claim, it's not the cache, because according to the documentation for the "browser.cache.memory.capacity" config key, Firefox is only using 18 MB for its cache. According to what you say, I should never see Firefox go over about 75MB, but it's very rare for it to be using less than that unless I've restarted it within the past hour or two.

I don't complain about the problem because honestly, I don't mind closing Firefox out every other day or so to free up the memory, but I do complain about people who deny it's a problem because it doesn't happen to them.

Firefox became a hog

[harry666t (1062422)]

Where are the times when it was a quick and lightweight browser I loved? Today... Konqueror > FF.

Who uses local bookmarks anymore?

[Wolfger (96957)]

As a user of multiple computers (work, home, friend's house), I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer. That's superior to this new "improvement". I think browser developers are really scraping the bottom of the barrel, looking in vain for "the next big thing". I'd rather see work done on useful plug-ins. That work well with existing browsers, than see a new browser that has some improvements of debatable worth that break the old way of doing things entirely.

Re:

[DragonWriter (970822)]

As a user of multiple computers (work, home, friend's house), I use del.icio.us and the Firefox plug-in for it, and all my bookmarks are stored in a database that I can access from any computer. That's superior to this new "improvement".

The Places system is designed (among several other objectives) to facilitate synchronizing Firefox bookmarks with remote storage systems.

SQLite is brilliant

[athloi (1075845)]

This lightweight, fast, simple database eliminates many of the headaches associated with using a full-on SQL installation, and works just as well for most of what most developers and users need.

If you're a Perl geek, like me, you will find this Perl module for seamless SQLite interface [cpan.org] to be a power tool. The next time you need to get something working by morning, and it's 2am and the person "in charge of databases" hasn't called back, you'll be thanking it.

Native Mac UI

[Kelson (129150)]

It's also worth noting that native form controls for Mac OS X were enabled yesterday [wordpress.com], something Firefox's Mac users have been clamoring for since the 0.x days.

Autoexport to HTML

[iabervon (1971)]

The thing I don't like about this change is that bookmarks.html is the ideal homepage. It's a web page that's stored locally, has no ads or extra junk, and has a list of links to the things that you personally want to get to regularly, updated automatically. The biggest thing I missed when I used Konqueror for a while was that it couldn't render its bookmark list in the browser window. Of course, it should be easy enough to have an extension generate a nice file from the bookmark database every time it changes.

Snappy Firefox

[Doc Ruby (173196)]

I hope it makes a small leap backwards. Ever since a couple of weeks before fully upgrading to Ubuntu 7.04, when I run Evolution 2.10.1 and Firefox 2.0.0.3, after a few hours (or maybe a lot of GUI and HTTP events), some combo memory leak fills my 512MB RAM and starts crazily swapping. I have to kill both apps and restart them, recovering their sessions.

Even if they just had watchdogs that could restart and recover session state, they'd be more useable.

Leap Forward?

[LMacG (118321)]

Firefox is going to rapidly transform from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist browser [wikipedia.org]?

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Applekid (993327)]

It's a very lightweight C library which basically enables "on the ground" SQL queries and such. No client/server mechanisms to worry about, no middleware (other than sqlite.dll, and even then you can just take the source and compile it in), and the security of the database is handled by security permissions on the file. That's right, "the" file. A single file contains the schema and data.

It fully supports transactions and is appropriately ACID. For someone who's had his Firefox bookmarks hosed before, this is very welcome for me.

The benefit of this will [hopefully] be fully searchable bookmarks and easy to move the bookmarks around to other computers.

I've used it in the past and it's been great for me. Check it out: http://www.sqlite.org/ [sqlite.org]

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Applekid (993327)]

Oh, and, it's fully cross-platform public domain, too. The database file is also equally portable. ^^-b

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[DragonWriter (970822)]

Ok someone give me details on this "SQLite database engine" please.

Details [sqlite.org].

I don't know anything about SQLLite but will this add any bloat/performance issues/etc the firefox 3.0?

SQLite by itself, I imagine, won't. How much else they do with it may or may not.

Re:

[blindd0t (855876)]

Have you ever used a Linux music player such as Rythmbox or Amarok? These use SQLite, and do exceptionally well with dealing with a sizable database. Basically, SQLite is what MS Access was *supposed* to be in terms of a portable database file format, but instead it is a very good, successful implementation.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[richwklein (767820)]

SQLite is developed for embedding so it is miniscule (less than 250KiB). It was already included in Firefox 2.0 so it does not add any size to Firefox 3.0. It also allows for some interesting ideas that are being played with for the new release, like site annotation and full text indexing.

Re:Bloat or Performance Issues?

[Coryoth (254751)]

But what does "lite" mean.

Well according to the SQLite homepage [sqlite.org] it means that the entire database engine fits inside of 250KiB fully configured, or less than 150KiB with optional features removed. That seems pretty light to me. If you're concerned about the impact of 250k of memory then you probably have a lot of things you should be worrying about before SQLite inclusion...

Re:

[remmelt (837671)]

Tagging? Sorting in more ways than alphabetically? Adding notes, relationships/links, sharing bookmarks, grouping, etc. These are off the top of my head, I'll stop here before this post tips over into buzzword land.

Re:

[RandomPrecision (911416)]

Regular ass-bookmarks? Ew.

Felt the same about tabs

[EnsilZah (575600)]

I felt the same before i tried tabs for a while, "I can't see anything wrong with just opening a new window for each new link i want to open separately".
I wouldn't judge it before i try it for a while.

Re:Reinventing the wheel?

[Coryoth (254751)]

Look, I love firefox, but I can't really think of anything wrong with regular-ass bookmarks. I have no idea why they need to be in a database of any sort. This seems like a bloat feature to me.

Obviously you've never used Epiphany's bookmark system, with searchable tagging instead of hierarchical folders. It's rather nice and, due to searchability, you bookmark a lot more pages without worrying about getting an unmanageable mess of bookmarks. The tagging is nice because it lets you associate a bookmark with several different categories (which is pretty common). In general its just a nicer way to work with bookmarks. As to bloat -- you are aware that SQLite uses less than 250k for the entire database engine? That's hardly bloat, and the gains in bookmark management (presuming the Firefox guys put as nice a frontend on it as Epiphany did) are tremendous.

Re:When?

[adiether (615494)]

How do you know it has memory leaks? Seriously, have you done a exhaustive memory profile? Opening a few webpages, closing them, and looking at MemUsage in the task manager before and after is hardly conclusive. Of course, I am assuming you are doing this, but if you have concrete data, please share. I can leave Firefox running for weeks averaging 50+ tabs at all times.

Re:When?

[LighterShadeOfBlack (1011407)]

Well I don't know about memory leaks but the Downloads dialog is a fucking disgrace to efficiency. Download 50 or so things and the entire programs slows very noticeably.

I remember a few years back when I first upgraded to a version of Firefox/Firebird/Phoenix (forget what it was called at the time) which used the Downloads dialog and instantly the whole thing slowed to a crawl. Why? Because I'd never cleared my downloads cache before and the brand new Downloads dialog had about 2000+ entries in it. I think simply opening the dialog took a couple of minutes and the Clean Up took about five minutes. All for what is essentially just a listbox! God knows what would happen if they ever tried to make the Downloads dialog useful by doing crazy things like telling you when a download failed to actually download anything.

OK, rant over. I like Firefox for the most part but that has really pissed me off for a long time. Glad I finally got that off my chest.

Re:Got NoScript?

[bunratty (545641)]

Firefox 3 includes a cycle collector [mozilla.com] to handle these memory leaks in extensions, as well as some remaining memory leaks in Firefox itself.

Re:When?

[bunratty (545641)]

Its a worthless comparrison and anyone with profiling experience can tell you how easy it is to produce skewed micro benchmarks.

Then it should be even easier to produce a benchmark showing a "memory issue" with Firefox. Why not create one and we can all see what this thing is once and for all? If no one else is willing to write a benchmark, then we'll just have to settle for the one that exists, won't we?

Re:When?

[Martin Blank (154261)]

My histories tend to not be more than about ten pages or so per tab, and I frequently close out tabs as I finish with them, even if they were only used for one story. What I will do often on a site is Ctrl-click on multiple stories on a page and then read them in sequence, closing out each story as I finish with it. It's my belief that closing that page should result in all memory associated with that tab being freed, but when testing that by watching memory use as I close the tabs, there is little or no change in the overall memory usage, and that strikes me as something that should be addressed.

There may be a fix (I think I know what you mean with the in-memory caching), but I'm not going to do that because when in forums, I will often jump back several pages, and I don't need or want them reloading just going back or forward. Besides, if I have to look up a method to do it, then it's not something that I'm likely to want to be sending my parents through, and that's an important point, especially since they have much older, slower systems than do I.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek (983925)]

SQLite [sqlite.org] has this name because it is... lite! It has a very, very small footprint. By your comment, I can tell you have never used it. I have. It is designed to be small and easy to embed into an app with out requiring a bunch of resources.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek (983925)]

You think a SQL db that only takes up 250K is significant? Geez, what do you have like 4MB of memory? The SQLite DB is already in FF 2. So it will not add anything to FF 3. However, the bookmarks will now just take advantage of SQLite, which they currently do not. This will give you plenty of ways to sort your bookmarks and store more info for each bookmark. For example, in FF 2 you can give a bookmark a keyword. This way you can just type that keyword and go to that URL. I use can type "/." and press enter and get to /. with no clicks. I have a lot of keywords setup for my most used bookmarks. Bookmarks in FF are more than just list of strings. They have a URL, name, keyword and description. One big problem with bookmarks in FF 2 is the inability to sort properly. FF 3 should fix that now that FF 3 will be able to use Order By to sort how the user likes.

Re:When?

[JimDaGeek (983925)]

I have never had my profile corrupted with Firefox. I use Firefox on WinXP, OS X and Linux and keep my profile in sync with Google Browser Sync [google.com]. However, if your profile does get corrupted, the bookmarks file should be fine since SQLite supports standard RDBMS constructs to keep the file from being corrupted. Since SQLite uses a regular file (like Access, but much, much better), you can just copy it to where ever you want as a backup.

Re:When?

[Trillan (597339)]

sqlite is vary resistant to corruption. In fact, the only way you're likely to see it is if Firefox for some reason tries to touch the databases with its own code rather than sqlite. Further, a simple command line query will dump everything.

Even the phrase "launching a SQL database" indicates you're thinking of SQLite the wrong way.

A better way of thinking of it is this: Mozilla developers are removing thousands of lines of code with an unknown number of bugs for a simple data storage mechanism used in thousands of software products, including embedded systems. SQLite works. In fact, it works astonishingly well. We're gradually using it to replace most data storage in our own products.

Re:When?

[Matthieu Araman (823)]

Places still writes the bookmark.html file.
It just doesn't read-it anymore (but you can tell it to import it back if you like)
BTW, sqlite stores everything in one file so nothing is really changed
if you wan't to save, you just have to copy one file
if you wan't to move/copy you profile, it's just a file to copy
it will be much more robust, powerfull and allow new things to be done.
also the sqllite code is stable and field tested by hundred of projects so it's a very good idea to reuse it instead of using some mozilla only solution.

Re:

[mhall119 (1035984)]

Firefox currently stores bookmarks in an XHTML file so it currently uses an XML parser to load bookmarks, I don't think you'll notice any negative performance hit from SQLite.

Bookmarks were strings 10 years ago, now they are multi-field records, especially things like live RSS bookmarks. The hole point of the "Places" component is to give more state and functionality to bookmarks and history.

I also think the SQLite engine is going to be used for the new client-side persistence framework which does need dat

Re:When?

[althea19 (1084593)]

They're apparently embedding a fucking SQL DATABASE into Firefox 3. Given that SQL databases are not exactly known for being light-weight

Because of course SQLLite isn't a light-weight SQL DB library or anything..

Re:When?

[RobertLTux (260313)]

what you are missing is
1 the sqllite engine is already present
2 they are yanking out the older crusty Mork/Xml/Vhatever code
3 they are using this to simplify things and enable cool things like throwing your bookmarks online (obsoleting the 12 bazillion bookmark sync extensions)

Re:Far from what people want...

[dvice_null (981029)]

> Firefox users want a browser that displays webpages. A browser that is fast...
> Adding a whole new bookmarks system is nice, but does the user-base need it ?

You obviously are not a programmer who understand xml parsing and knows SQLite very well. Well as I happen to be such a programmer, let me just tell you that I can pretty well guarantee to you that switching to SQLite will make the browser faster. Most like it will also decrease the amount of needed memory.

Reasons for this:
- SQLite is very light database. Basicly it is just component that can be used to write and read a file, but searching a certain element(s) in the file is very fast compared to normal read methods.
- Reading xml files or similar, as the current bookmakrs.htm file is, is very slow and it requires a lot of memory. This is because you first need to parse the html tree and after that you will get the actual data from the file. It is very good if you have only few items in the file, but if you have thousands bookmarks like some people do, it will get slow.

So basicly they are just removing the bloat and making the browser faster.

Re:Places? How about tagged bookmarks

[unapersson (38207)]

That's how bookmarks have worked in Epiphany for a long time. When you type in the toolbar it matches the keywords you have defined, and automatically groups bookmarks in a hierarchy based on the tags. It's one of the reasons I still use Epiphany rather than Firefox (on Linux).

gmail leak

[bunratty (545641)]

Ah, memory leaks when gmail is open. Now maybe we can discuss an actual, confirmed memory leak for a change. Of the six reported leaks with gmail [mozilla.org], four are fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.3 and two seem to be Firefox 3 only. If you can still reproduce a memory leak with gmail up in Firefox 2.0.0.3, you should file a bug report [mozilla.org] to make sure the problem gets addressed. A browser using 1 GB of memory after a day of use certainly isn't reasonable. It sounds like a problem that should be fixed ASAP. Filing the bug report, including a set of steps to reproduce the problem, is the first step to getting it fixed.