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."

Same bugs?

[ccguy]

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 :-)

Nice and speedy

[neokushan]

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]

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.)

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[bunratty]

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?

Fixes a Gmail problem..

[InDi0]

...with resizing fonts and logo pictures, which happened automatically the second time I gave the gmail window focus. Now the correct zoom level is retained.

Re:Google Toolbar

[NickCatal]

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

Re:Google Toolbar

[Constantine XVI]

Install the "Nightly Tester Tools" extension. Lets you override compatibility checks on extensions

Re:Anti Virus

[Cska Sofia]

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.

Re:New Address Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

Old bar should be updated soon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 [mozilla.org]

Re:New Address Bar

[Rhabarber]

Try the magic oldbar extension.

Re:Same bugs?

[ccguy]

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.

Source

[mhamel]

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 need "view source" after that.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

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:Same bugs?

[cerberusss]

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.

Re:what about wmode???????

[zzxc]

Firefox 3 supports windowless plugins on Linux, and has since last summer. See bug 137189 [mozilla.org]

More info is on this blog post [blogspot.com]

Re:Huh... beta 4 just barely got released?

[jac89]

Once the code freeze was initiated for beta 4 the nightly builds changed to 3.05pre.

Re:Same bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The web developer toolbar gives us "View Generated Source" which is basically what you are requesting.

Close, but not quite the same.
While this does give you source that is not re-loaded, it is the interpreted source, and not the source from the server itself.

While this has its own use for debugging why something might render the way it does in the browser, it is not a true picture of what you get from the server and can make debugging server script output harder.

For a quick example:

<html>
<body>
  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>foo</td>
      <td>bar</td>
    </tr>
  </table>
</body>
</html>

Arguments of whether this is good/bad HTML aside - it IS the source provided. If you view it using the "View Generated Source" or through the Firebug DOM inspector, you'll find the inserted 'tbody' tags around the table body.

Arguably, those are correct in the context of the document in memory, but they are not an accurate representation of what was returned by the server. The 'view source' option returns the actual source, but it does a reload, so you may not get the same source in this view that the display got if the document has changed in the interim (has something state specific, etc.)

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Slimcea]

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.

Re:Bookmark Sync?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sign up to test Foxmarks for Firefox 3 beta via...
http://blog.foxmarks.com/?p=118 [foxmarks.com]

Seriously impressed....

[mike_diack]

I was very impressed with FF 3 beta 3, but beta 4 seems much much faster even than beta 3. Firefox 3 looks like it'll be really great.

The only downside is as usual, a lot of extension authors need to bump their version checks again - a lot of my extensions that were working with FF 3 beta 3 don't work with beta 4 (due to the version check)

Mike

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

Again, it isn't the disk space of the files you've downloaded. It caches fully rendered versions of pages in memory. If you wish to change this, check out the following about:config settings.

browser.cache.memory.capacity
browser.cache.memory.enable
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers
config.trim_on_minimize

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I've gotten patches accepted by the Mozilla team. It's tedious, but not difficult. It may take a few minutes to write a small patch of a few lines, but then you may need to spend an hour making sure the patch gets reviewed and super-reviewed, and then find someone to check it in. Also, if you submit a patch to fix a bug, you shouldn't have to maintain it. Generally, ones bugs are fixed they remain fixed.

And anyway, if you think there's some sort of memory problem in Firefox, you should give the set of steps to reproduce it if you want it fixed. I'm still waiting on someone to demonstrate how I can get Firefox to eat up all the memory on my computer. I've run Firefox 3 beta 3 for about a week, and it strayed over 200 MB only occasionally, only to fall back below 200 MB.

Re:first memory leak post

[c0p0n]

Got to add, it actually feels like I'm using Opera. Definitely faster than beta3. And I've got many an extension running.

Re:first memory leak post

[Anonymous Coward]

A memory leak is when a program allocates memory but does not deallocate it once the memory is no longer needed. A program with a memory leak will, when running for longer periods of time (how long will depend on how bad the leak is), eat up all your available memory. So while it doesn't really matter if firefox takes up 5 or 500 MB, (I would prefer the former), with a memory leak, that 5 MB program might start taking up more memory than the 500 MB one. At some point, it will grow so large that you run out of RAM and you're computer will start swapping (temporarily put pieces of your RAM on your HD to make more space for other programs) and this can get rather slow, especially once the system starts trashing (that means it is swapping pages in and out all the time, making the system veeeeeery slow).

Using more RAM does not make your computer slower unless you're using (significantly) more memory than is available.

AC hopes that helps.

Re:first memory leak post

[Enderandrew]

As a comparison, I've had this Firefox session open for probably two days. I'm using a daily trunk build of the Firefox 3 Beta 4 branch. Firefox is using 90 megs of memory.

Re:Why do you need it?

[Koohoolinn]

Using nspluginwrapper (link [beauchesne.info]) you can use 32bit Flash (amongst others) with 64bit Firefox.

Re:First question

[Thelasko]

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.

As always, Try it the easy way: Firefox Portable

[CritterNYC]

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.

Re:Source

[brunascle]

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:New Address Bar

[Inda]

Sorry if I've missed something but it is possible to delete what it's learned.

1. Type something like "slash"
2. Use the arrow keys to highlight the first title to delete.
3. Hold down the delete key.

I don't fancy clearing my browsing history, but I expect doing so would clear the lot.

And it seems to put your bookmarked URLs at the top. I've bookmarked links into an obscure folder for this purpose only.

I like this new feature... I can understand why others don't.

Re:Fork It

[kbrosnan]

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:New Address Bar

[Jogar the Barbarian]

Oldbar extension URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 [mozilla.org]

Acid3 status

[cyfer2000]

Acid3 status of firefox3 in a spreadsheet [google.com], just for your entertainment.

Forks

[DrYak]

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.

Also known as IceWeasel [wikipedia.org], as may have noticed those who followed the recent problems of firefox branding and the consecutive fork.

Re:3 more questions right here for ya?

[calebt3]

1. Microsoft is attempting to make an Acid2-compliant browser
2. It says that Microsoft realizes that they have fallen behind and need to actually be competitive again.
3. MS was content to sit around. IE6 was *the* browser for years. That's the reason for No. 2

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[slapys]

I checked it out because of the above post and discovered an ENORMOUS speed increase. Firefox is now way faster than Opera! This is huge!

Re:For those interested in performance numbers

[bunratty]

To be fair, Firefox is now faster than Opera at one particular JavaScript benchmark. Opera may still be faster at rendering pages [howtocreate.co.uk] or in the JavaScript on a site you frequent. But, yes, it does look like a large increase in overall JavaScript performance for Firefox.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

I have had Firefox 3 beta 3 open for a week with several tabs open at all times (including opening and closing tabs regularly) and it's consumed less than 200 MB of RAM. I see other people in this discussion saying they never see a memory problem in Firefox. In another recent article, there were at least two other posters who said they keep Firefox running for one or two weeks and it doesn't use more than a few hundred MB. Anyway, when you give a set of steps to reproduce a bug, you should give the specific steps to perform [dbaron.org].

Re:Why it's faster

[compro01]

for those who don't get it, that's the gecko (the rendering engine firefox uses) image decoding libary. i believe the "official" name was "libimg2", but some people apparently thought that name was too boring.

Re:Extension compatibility check _before_ I instal

[Westacular]

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.