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Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 4

Posted by Zonk on Tue Mar 11, 2008 08:44 AM
from the tuesday-toys dept.
Mozilla The Internet
Somecallmechief writes "Firefox 3 Beta 4 is now available for download. This is the twelfth developer milestone focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso."
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[+] Technology: Firefox 3 Beta 3 Officially Released 337 comments
firefoxy writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 3 beta 3. This release includes new features, user interface enhancements, and theme improvements. Ars Technica has a review with screenshots. 'Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates.'"
Submission: Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 4 by Somecallmechief (1103905)
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  • first memory leak post (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 11 2008, @08:46AM (#22715234)
    did they fix THE memory leak?
    • I find it interesting how the parent post is modded "-1, Flamebait" at the moment. Sure, there is stuff to read about the leak, and plans to read about fixing that "leak", and he might have been a little too ignorant to read those. But come on, "flamebait"?
      If we could tag comments, this would pretty much be "hurtetdsomeonesfeelings"

      • Re:first memory leak post (Score:5, Interesting)

        by bunratty (545641) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:15AM (#22715612)
        You're right. Flamebait is unfair. It's actually funny, seeing as how believing that Firefox somehow has one awful and obvious memory leak that developers can't seem to find is ludicrous.
        • No, it is a stupid question that gets asked over and over again, and answered over and over again.

          There is no one major memory leak.

          1 - Most major complex apps have small leaks. It is damn near impossible to plug all of them, but Firefox has been plugging away at these very heavily for some time.
          2 - Many of the "leaks" that people see are caused by poorly-coded extensions. Turn off your extensions and notice the difference.
          3 - Firefox uses a bunch of memory after you've been browsing a while. THIS IS A STANDARD FEATURE, AND NOT A MEMORY LEAK. Firefox doesn't just a cache of files downloaded, it keeps in memory a cache of fully rendered pages. If you don't like this feature, then you can adjust it, or turn it off completely.

          • Re:first memory leak post (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Bombula (670389) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:20AM (#22716898)
            I'm no programmer, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but I thought CPU usage mattered more than memory. Obviously useless, wasted memory is no good (presumably this is what 'leaks' are). But what about useful memory usage? I have 2GB of RAM in my system, and I've never seen more than half of it used when I pull up task manager. Firefox could hog 500MB for all I care - I wish it would, if it'd speed things up, perhaps by preloading links on a page for example. Maybe just the act of using RAM slows a machine down, but if so can someone explain why? So long as the CPU isn't maxed out, shouldn't apps being taking advantage of the fact that I've got a big ol' bucket of RAM in my box?

            • Re:first memory leak post (Score:4, Interesting)

              by bunratty (545641) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:28AM (#22717056)
              Actually, memory matters more for browsing. You have a bounded amount of memory, and if you use it all up, you're screwed. You always have more time (unless you're running a hard real-time system), so if a process takes all the CPU, other processes will simply run more slowly and you just have to wait longer. If you are in fact running a process that has a hard real-time component, you should set the processor priorities so a low-priority process such as browsing should not affect it.

          • Re:first memory leak post (Score:4, Insightful)

            by bunratty (545641) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @11:18AM (#22718002)

            Why hasn't anyone else found it and made a patch or plugin or something?
            Because there isn't one. It's absolutely ludicrous to think the Mozilla developers cannot find and fix a terrible, obvious memory leak. No one can even explain how we would see such a memory leak. At least, whenever I try to follow the steps people give me to reproduce the problem, Firefox usually uses less memory than other browsers. If anyone still thinks there's any kind of memory problem in Firefox, explain how we could see it. That way, we could file a bug report and get the problem fixed.

  • Same bugs? (Score:5, Informative)

    by ccguy (1116865) * on Tuesday March 11 2008, @08:52AM (#22715312) Homepage
    There are at least two major bugs that have been there forever. I don't know if they annoy everyone, or affect everyone or just the people I talk to.

    1) The damn proxy prompt window. For god's sake, if there's already one open window asking for the proxy user/pass, don't open another 20 at the same time. This is quite easy to reproduce: From a firefox that needs proxy to get out, go to any bookmark folder and choose 'Open All in tabs'.

    2) For the life of me I can't figure out why sometimes the vertical scroll bar dissapear. It's not a specific page. Once the scroll bar is gone, it's gone forever, no matter what I load in that tab - if I open another tab it's all fine.

    Yes I've opened bug reports for this. And no, I'm not fixing it myself, I've got my own projects to take care of.

    Go ahead and mod me troll, I just needed to vent :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ewrong (1053160)
      Don't want to be stating the obvious but is the issue number 2 related to the page not being taller than the screen? i.e. there is nothing to scroll to so the scroll bar is not needed. Not exactly a bug, just a debatably useful feature.

      I'd agree it would probably be better to leave it there greyed out like IE as occasionally I get clients wondering why the page just "shifted" a bit when they navigate to an identical templated page that's short enough to cause this.

      • Re:Same bugs? (Score:4, Informative)

        by ccguy (1116865) * on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:34AM (#22715988) Homepage

        Don't want to be stating the obvious but is the issue number 2 related to the page not being taller than the screen?
        Well that's a new way I've been called an idiot this week :-) At least you get +1 for originality...

        To answer the question no, that's not the problem. It happens to pages that obviously need the scroll bar, and the thing is, once a tab decides to remove its scroll bar, there is no way to make it come back (visiting another page in the same tab doesn't do it).

        For some time I thought it could relate to a plug-in or a combination of plug-ins but I'm experiencing it now using a vanilla firefox.

        It doesn't happen all the time, maybe once or twice a day.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MrNaz (730548)
      The Mozilla team are number one on my list of open source projects that have the canned answers "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" and "don't like it, go fix it yourself".

      I hate that when you click "view source", it reloads the page. I loagged this and was told that storing the page's source was a waste of memory. Forget that no other browser behaves that way. Forget that it's about 10k in the 200mb of ram used. Forget that it can be cached to disk.

      I was also told that viewing the source made me a tiny minor

      • Source (Score:3, Informative)

        by mhamel (314503)
        I kind of agree with them. This is a waste of memory and time for the huge majority of people. We are talking about a project which is already under attack for it's bad memory usage. I understand why they don't want to go that road. It, to the least, show that their can be other points of view and that you do not need to be that aggressive with them.

        A web developer will probably not use "view source" very much anyway. Try firebug [mozilla.org]. That's the way to go if you really want to understand a page. You'll rarely n

        • Re:Source (Score:5, Insightful)

          by brunascle (994197) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:47AM (#22716252)
          I disagree, viewing source is very important, and if it's dynamically created content and it has to reload the page, the source you're viewing may not be the same source that created the page. It's essential for debugging (e.g. HTML typos). and for a POST request, reloading is absolutely unacceptable.

            • Re:Source (Score:4, Informative)

              by brunascle (994197) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @11:08AM (#22717856)
              firebug shows the generated source, not the original source. so, for example, if javascript changed something on the page, those changes would be in the generated source but not the original source.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by cerberusss (660701)
        Well, your bug is my feature. I'm glad that they don't keep that whole stuff page in memory. Some pages including styles can get up to half a megabyte. I could call you an idiot as well.

  • Been using it for 2 days now OSX (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Lumpy (12016) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @08:58AM (#22715402) Homepage
    Under OSX it's a giant leap forward compared to Version 2.X. It runs nearly as fast as safari, crashes less and does not consume all ram like the older versions love to do.

    • Feature creep vs Bug fixes (Score:4, Insightful)

      by spineboy (22918) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:39AM (#22716068) Journal
      Normally I'm somewhat against feature creep, but I think that the new features added are all very, very good. Most are security concerns, and some just make the dang thing easier, more eficient, and smoother to use (star button to add fav bookmark). The added features seem to not be of the bells and whistles type.

        The attention to reducing memory footprint, mem leaks, and speed are all very well received, and thoughtful. It seems to be a big push of this release to concentrate on that.

      This seems like a very nice release and improvement. - I particulary like the thunderbird anti-phishing tie in.

      • Re:Fucking idiot (Score:4, Funny)

        by MrNaz (730548) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:27AM (#22715828) Homepage
        Yea! And all those Windows users should also be ashamed of themselves for not using IE! And don't even get me started on Linux users who don't use Lynx. Using Linux with a graphical program! How irresponsible!

  • Nice and speedy (Score:5, Informative)

    by neokushan (932374) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @08:59AM (#22715420)
    Been using this all morning and so far it's been nice and speedy for me. It's been much faster than the previous betas and there's definitely a significant improvement with most google aps (among others, but I use these all the time). Might not be many new features over Beta 3, but the speed increase and reduced memory footprint (it's still quite big, but better than previous versions - around 100Mb usage after about 6 hours of constant browsing) are very welcome. If this trend continues, the final release should be the best since 1.0.

  • Toolbar UI Changes? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by diamondsw (685967) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:01AM (#22715434)
    So where do we go to provide input on the batshit-insanely-ugly toolbar changes they've made, especially on XP/Vista? Those icons are some of the worst I've seen (including IE) and will do quite a bit of harm to Firefox's branding. Right now whenever you see Firefox in screenshots, ads, etc, you recognize it immediately based on the toolbar icons (minor changes from 1.5 to 2.0 aside). This toolbar... you'll wonder what unpaid intern in an ad graphics department cooked it up thinking it looked "kewl"...

    • Re:Toolbar UI Changes? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Slimcea (832228) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:09AM (#22716662)
      For more discussion on the new UI themes and changes, there's a thread [mozillazine.org] going on at mozillaZine about it.

      The icons will grow on you after a while, and they're still making refinements and changes to the icons and backgrounds. Personally, I think the Back/Forward buttons are pretty decent, it's the rest (Reload/Stop/New tab/window) that looks a little too simple and out of place. Can't say I really agree with using different themes across different Windows versions too, this has to be the first application I know that tries that.
  • I've been using the nightly builds for a couple weeks now, and they're flagged as beta 5... I figured beta 4 had been out for a while already.

    For what it's worth: I'm very impressed with what I'm seeing of Firefox 3 so far. It's faster, uses less memory, and I really like the new address bar features, and the bookmarking. (It has tagging built into the bookmarks now.)

  • Anti Virus (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rik Sweeney (471717) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:05AM (#22715480) Homepage
    From the release notes:

    Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.

    Why is this Firefox's job? Isn't that the point of Anti Virus?

  • First question (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mistersooreams (811324) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:05AM (#22715502) Homepage
    When will there be a properly-supported 64 bit version? Assuming 64 bit is the future, delaying it will only increase the difficulty of adding 64-bit compatability later. I know there are third-party builds but they're not updated regularly and their reliability is questionable.

    • Re:First question (Score:5, Informative)

      by Thelasko (1196535) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:55AM (#22717622) Journal
      To settle the Firefox 64-bit question. I use Ubuntu 64-bit and am a contributer to the 64-bit forums. Firefox can be compiled for 64-bit. However, Flash and Java are only available in 32-bit. Adobe in particular is very stubborn about releasing versions of it's software for architectures other than x86. 64-bit Firefox will work with fine even with 32-bit Flash and Java using a plugin that was released with Ubuntu 7.10.

      So, in summary don't blame Mozilla for Adobe's stubbornness. You can sign the petition to Adobe here, [petitiononline.com] although it is unlikely to make a difference. The problem appears to be across Adobe's entire product line and on every operating system.

    • Re:First question (Score:5, Funny)

      by fmangeant (952571) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:58AM (#22717664)
      I totally agree : on my 32 bit PC, Firefox uses only 2 Gb RAM !

      With a 64 bit version of Firefox, it could use a lot more.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sd.fhasldff (833645)
        Why I need a 64-bit version of Firefox????

        Well, I'm running a 64-bit OS. I do have a chrooted 32-bit environment for my online banking, but keeping the chrooted environment up-to-date is a hassle.

        If you think that *memory* is the sole raison d'etre for 64-bit, you are mistaken. AMD64 is a new instruction set with many advantages. In fact, almost everything I run is 10-70% faster in 64-bit and this has nothing to do with memory limits.

  • what about wmode??????? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pulse2600 (625694) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:07AM (#22715524)
    What's the story on the wmode flash transparency issue? Last I heard Adobe was waiting for Mozilla to put some sort of code into the Linux version of their browser in order for the wmode fix in Adoobe Flash to work properly. Or maybe it's the other way around now? Anybody have a clue? How can I show somebody Linux/Firefox as an alternative to Windows/IE when this problem drastically affects the functionality of many websites out there?

  • New Address Bar (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Richard_at_work (517087) <richardprice.gmail@com> on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:17AM (#22715652)
    Ok, I can live with the speed increases, the nice new native look and feel, the decreased memory usage - but someone please tell me how to turn off that damn funky new address bar - its driving me mad (and slowing down new tab creation)!

    Some docs say to tweak the 'browser.urlbar.richResults' setting, which I have done and it has had zero effect (FF3 Beta 3). Any ideas?

        • Re:New Address Bar (Score:5, Insightful)

          by IBBoard (1128019) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:06AM (#22716604) Homepage
          To put it bluntly: You're sh*t out of luck.

          See here [mozillazine.org] for the discussion that basically goes:

          Us: This is terrible behaviour and hugely inconsistent. It will confuse novice users with inconsistency and searching in an address bar and it'll annoy power users who used to be able to consistently locate the places they wanted to go based on the URL (which they remembered and which remained consistent). If we wanted to search then we'd search. Yes, it can be useful in some situations, but if we know what we want to type then we don't want the browser thinking it is better than me and incorrectly second-guessing what we want.
          Them: Everyone searches, and it learns. Searching is the future, so we're going to make you search.

          The two sites I visit most at work are Slashdot and the BBC news (news.bbc.co.uk). What used to turn up top for "ne", "new" and "news"? The BBC news, because I wanted to go there and it matched what I typed. What turns up now? Slashdot because of "news for nerds" in the title. It needs huge amounts more weighting on URL starts than titles, but they don't seem willing to change it.

          The other one that really annoys me is one of my sites. I could normally go to "sk" and hit it as first result, but now I've got to type even more of it and it doesn't make it to the top until after I've done the whole domain (because the domain is in the title of another page that always turns up top).

              • Re:New Address Bar (Score:4, Insightful)

                by darkwhite (139802) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @12:44PM (#22719288)
                People hate this feature because its behavior is too unpredictable (breaking one of the fundamental UI guidelines), unintuitive (there is no apparent rule to how it orders the suggestions - a set of search preferences is not an apparent rule), cannot reasonably approximate the old behavior, and is often slow to boot. The intentions are great, but the feature has too many problems to be usable.

                You're right that the suggestions can be deleted - nice find. Too bad you can't delete all suggestions from a particular site or pattern at once.

  • As always, Try it the easy way: Firefox Portable (Score:4, Informative)

    by CritterNYC (190163) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @10:57AM (#22717650) Homepage
    You can try out 3 Beta 4 without disrupting your Firefox 2 install on Windows by using Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition 3 Beta 4 [portableapps.com]. It's designed for portable devices (USB flash drives, iPods, portable hard drives), but you can also just run it from your desktop.
  • I'm also running FF3 beta 4, and I can say: IT IS FAST. It is probably the fastest browser I have used, ever. I don't necessarily like all the changes, and agree the new icons are a little homely, but the speed is undeniable, and those other quibbles are largely cosmetic.

    For those of you on Windows who don't want to hose your registry with multiple Firefox installs, I highly recommend the portable version. In fact, for 20 different reasons I recommend the portable version of not only Firefox, but all your Windows apps:

    http://portableapps.com/news/2008-03-11_-_firefox_portable_3_beta_4 [portableapps.com]

    It's not a real package management system, but it beats the hell out of installing and reinstalling tons of crap in Windows. I think in many ways it also beats most Linux package managers I've dealt with.

    I also want to submit a complaint about a lack of x64 apps in general. There is still no Skype for 64 bit Linux, for example, and that's just plain bad form.

    Keep rocking Mozilla! Keep rocking FOSS! Keep rocking portableapps.com!

    rhY

    • Re:And now, for the two burning questions: (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tridus (79566) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @08:52AM (#22715314) Homepage
      The fact that Microsoft is even attempting to do it says something about the Mozilla dev team. They were quite content to sit around for years with no real browser development until Firefox got popular.

    • Re:And now, for the two burning questions: (Score:5, Informative)

      by bunratty (545641) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:09AM (#22715558)
      Firefox released a public build that passed Acid2 in December 2006. According to some sources (including Ian Hickson, who developed the Acid2 test), IE 8 Beta 1 still does not pass. Firefox (along with Opera and Safari) has far surpassed IE in standards compliance. I'd say supporting standards is definitely a priority for Mozilla. Can we stop it with the Firefox FUD? I thought we were glad that Firefox is helping to get MS off its rear to get IE up to speed with the other browsers?

        • Fork It (Score:5, Insightful)

          by sd.fhasldff (833645) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @09:47AM (#22716246)

          We were glad about the existence of Firefox, until Mozilla got greedy and sold out to corporate interests. I'm just waiting for the day that Mozilla decides to reinvent itself as a company with a profit interest as opposed to an non-profit company, which it really is now in name only.


          I don't care whether Mozilla is "a company with a profit interest" or not. What I care about is the product - if some people are making money, well, good for them. This isn't Communism, you know... (yeah, that's gonna cost me).

          One of the many things that make Open Source Software so great is that you can just fork it if you don't like the direction the product is headed in.

          I seriously don't understand the animosity towards Mozilla for becoming a "real" company. It's enabling them to do a lot of great things that they wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

          And, if you don't like it, fork it!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by NickCatal (865805)
      There are none... Google toolbar, even when overriding your old addons to work with the new ones, doesn't work.

      I am still using the nightly builds and absolutely loving it. So much faster than B3 on my MacBook Pro
    • Install the "Nightly Tester Tools" extension. Lets you override compatibility checks on extensions

    • Re:Extension compatibility check _before_ I instal (Score:4, Informative)

      by Westacular (118145) on Tuesday March 11 2008, @05:35PM (#22722916)
      You are (almost) in luck. Firefox's integrated auto-updater will now, as part of the dialog telling you there's a new version and asking if you want to upgrade, list your extensions and highlight which are and aren't compatible (and lets you do a bulk "check for updates" at the same time). It's quite slick, I was impressed.

      But that doesn't help you if you're upgrading from 2.0.x or if you're not receiving the new version through the built-in updater.

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