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."

Re:And now, for the two burning questions:

[Tridus]

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.

Toolbar UI Changes?

[diamondsw]

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"...

Anti Virus

[Rik Sweeney]

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:Same bugs?

[ewrong]

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.

Feature creep vs Bug fixes

[spineboy]

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.

Fork It

[sd.fhasldff]

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:Source

[brunascle]

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:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

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:Anti Virus

[Cska Sofia]

with notification, the AV program can scan the file before it is made available to the user. without notification there is a potential delay between creation and discovery in which time the user could have opened the file.

Re:first memory leak post

[Bombula]

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

[bunratty]

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.

Re:It depends

[Firehed]

Well certainly, but you seem to have missed the part about unused memory. The parent poster said that there is tons going unused - he's obviously aware that it's faster than the hard drive, and is curious as to why page files are being used anyways intead. I certainly wonder the same thing - I have over two gigs of physical memory listed as available in my task manager, yet I still have a 1.25GB page file. My MBP at home is a bit better that way because at least when I was running 2GB it would dwindle down to about 1% free before starting aggressive paging use (I don't think I've gotten it to max out 4GB since making the jump though it's certainly still paging). The question isn't so much with our software as it is with the OS if you ask me - why on earth are large amounts of data being cached out to the swap file with so much free RAM? Unlike a lot of ignorant enthusiasts, I didn't get lots of memory just to have more free.

Re:New Address Bar

[darkwhite]

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.

Re:first memory leak post

[mrbill1234]

Fuck me. An application uses 200MB and we're happy about it too.

I must be getting old.