Mozilla Releases Firefox 3 Beta 4

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."

first memory leak post

[by Anonymous Coward]

did they fix THE memory leak?

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty (545641)]

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.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew (866215)]

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

[jamstar7 (694492)]

You must be old here...

Oh, wait...

Same bugs?

[ccguy (1116865)]

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:Source

[brunascle (994197)]

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.

Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Lumpy (12016)]

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.

Nice and speedy

[neokushan (932374)]

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.

Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[Utoxin (26011)]

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

[Rik Sweeney (471717)]

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?

Re:Anti Virus

[pdragon04 (801577)]

It's called "being considerate" and "playing nice with others". I know... novel concepts around these parts.

Re:Anti Virus

[Cska Sofia (705257)]

it's more efficient for firefox to raise some kind of event than for an AV program to pick up this information on its own by polling.

Division of responsibility

[xant (99438)]

This is good, but can't we put the responsibility on the system where it *really* belongs? Viruses, not Firefox, should inform the AV system when malicious code is about to executed.

First question

[mistersooreams (811324)]

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

[Thelasko (1196535)]

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

[fmangeant (952571)]

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.

what about wmode???????

[pulse2600 (625694)]

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?

For those interested in performance numbers

[bconway (63464)]

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2 [zdnet.com]

Not bad.

I'm also running the latest beta.

[crhylove (205956)]

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:

[Tridus (79566)]

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:

[bunratty (545641)]

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

[sd.fhasldff (833645)]

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:Fork It

[kbrosnan (880121)]

The Mozilla Foundation [mozilla.org] which owns the Corp has funded several projects in 2007 [hecker.org].

• Support and maintenance of the mozdev.org
• Development of Perl 6 and Parrot
• Implementation of accessibility features in the Dojo AJAX toolkit
• Enhancement of the NVDA open source screen reader for Windows
• Enhancements to the OpenSSL cryptographic library and Apache mod_ssl SSL/TLS module
• Enhance the Orca open source screen reader for Linux to support Firefox
• much more read the "projects in 2007" link...

Current work includes improving l10n tools Community Giving and Tools for the L10n Process [mozilla.com]

2006 10k USD to openbsd to continue development of openbsd and openssh. Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2006/03/31 [hecker.org]

Re:first post

[XenoPhage (242134)]

Sorry, no FP. But Firefox 3 is da bomb!

Oh, wonderful.. Now how am I going to get through airport security?

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard (1128019)]

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).