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."

And now, for the two burning questions:

[Anonymous Coward]

First: Which will be the very last browser with a final release that supports Acid2: IE or Firefox?
Second: What does it say about the Mozilla dev team's priorities that it's even possible that IE might beat Firefox to this punch?

Been using it for 2 days now OSX

[Lumpy]

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.

First question

[mistersooreams]

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.

what about wmode???????

[pulse2600]

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?

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

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.

New Address Bar

[Richard_at_work]

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:Same bugs?

[MrNaz]

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 minority and that if I wanted the feature I should go code it myself. Coz, y'know, viewing source is *such* a niche task. Only the tiny group of people with the very obscure jobs called "web developers" do it.

Idiots.

For those interested in performance numbers

[bconway]

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

Not bad.

Re:is it just me

[naylor83]

Well, if you want to see how different page loads can be in different browsers, I suggest you try loading a few non-cached pages in IE7 and Firefox 3 beta 4. The difference is very noticable. Don't ask me how, but somehow Firefox 3 seems to suck the pages down off the web and display them in half the time it takes in IE7.

Re:Toolbar UI Changes?

[Anonymous Coward]

though IMHO Addons should be under Edit

Why? I've really never really understood that. The Edit menu has always been intended for editing. Cut, copy, paste, search&replace, undo. That kind of editing.

I can understand the logic from people placing Preferences there, although it is flawed (because you can edit preferences there; since when do menus make full sentences? Although I'd like to see a menu item "Me" in the help section). But add-ons? You don't edit add-ons (well, regular users don't). They manage them.

Would you agree to keep it in the Tools menu if it had been called Add-on Manager instead of Add-ons?

Re:Why do you need it?

[sd.fhasldff]

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.

Re:New Address Bar

[Richard_at_work]

Ahh, dammit - thats what I was afraid of. It would seem we both have exactly the same issues with the 'feature'.

Hint to the devs: I already have a search field, its right next to the address bar. I can live with that.

Re:New Address Bar

[IBBoard]

Ah, but that searches through a search engine, not your history and your bookmarks where it can potentially reveal bookmarks that are buried off in folders that people won't see but which accidentally (and potentially embarrasingly) show up for otherwise innocuous terms, even after you've cleared your browsing history.

I suggested some kind of tag for the searching, e.g. "s: slashdot" searches for slashdot in URL, title, etc, where as "slashdot" uses old-style auto-complete but they wouldn't have any of it.

Unfortunately I think it's also quite deeply buried in the code, so it might not be too easy to replace the functionality.

I will point out, though, that there have been times when I've used it to find a page that I could remember part of the title of. I just think it's terrible design to force such potentially inconsistent results ("addresses starting with what is typed" versus "anything - page or bookmark - with the typed characters anywhere within it, including session IDs") with no way of doing a "just auto-complete" behaviour.

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

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:New Address Bar

[darkwhite]

I agree with your sentiment about the URL bar. The loss of URL-only autocompletion is the most annoying "feature" I have ever seen in a new browser. What's worse is that this appears completely non-customizable. I can't revert to the old behavior, I can't tell it to stop learning, I can't rearrange or delete what it already learned, and I can't manage how it integrates with bookmarks/places. Most annoyingly, the results are unpredictable and the non-trivial amount of time that it needs to find contents for the dropdown box is frustrating. This is a complete trainwreck of a feature and I'll be looking for an extension to disable it... or writing one myself.

I don't know whether I like it yet

[Chrisq]

The address bar behaviour seems odd, but it might be OK when I'm used to it. There should definitely be a way of switching back to the normal behaviour though.

I'm also running the latest beta.

[crhylove]

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:New Address Bar

[MikeUW]

I'll tell you why I don't like it:

a) I don't like a long list of my personal bookmarks appearing whenever I start typing a URL. I'd rather not have my personal bookmarks being put on displayed if/when others are looking at my screen. The fact that this is the default behaviour bothers me.

b) The results are too big/flashy - just a simple list (the url and title as separate/coloured fields on a single line would be sufficient)

c) Not enough (or not working) customization options. I should be able to give priority to how (let alone *if*) it searches my bookmarks and/or typed URLs. On Fedora 7, I installed ff3 from a fedora repository last night (this ff3 claims to be beta 5) - in about:config, 'browser.urlbar.maxRichResults' can be set to a smaller number (or zero) making the results much less obtrusive. However, the option that I really want is 'browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped', but it has no effect. I still see my bookmarks being listed. I can only assume this is a bug. In either case, these options should be much more prominently displayed in the preferences, and better options for tuning search results need to be provided.

That's pretty much it. What I find most ironic is that this thing with extra features can be disabled with an add-on that installs the old location bar...isn't this usually the other way around (install add-ons to *add* extra features)?

Re:first memory leak post

[bunratty]

You are correct that if you leave Firefox on a page with a banner ad that continually changes, and the ads cause Firefox to use more and more memory without limit, this is a problem. Give us the URL of a page we can visit to see the problem, and we can file a bug report.

Flash and JavaScript cannot really be limited to a certain amount of memory. For any limit that you try to impose, users are sure to encounter a site that needs more. In this case, I'm sure users would rather have the site work than refuse to allocate more memory. Above all, users want their browser to work properly on the sites they visit.

If you have a single tab open and load different pages in it, memory use cannot be only what is used for the last page opened. If you want to approach that ideal, you can disable the memory and bfcaches entirely. But still as memory is allocated and deallocated, memory fragmentation will cause memory use to creep up over time. There should be a maximum that is reached. If you can find a page or sequence of pages that cause Firefox to use an unbounded amount of memory as you keep loading them, please tell us what they are so we can file a bug report.

Re:first memory leak post

[junglee_iitk]

There is no one major memory leak.

It amazes me how Firefox fanboys will say this everytime!

Yesterday I had two pages opened - two! One was Unicode reference page and other was some forum, when suddenly my 512 MB ram was full and by the time I opened a terminal and ran vmstat, already 300 MB of swap was used! I killed firefox and restarted, with "Restore Session" and it happened again. Then I restarted it without restoring and entered the two URLs again, but everything went fine. Thus, I couldn't report it as a bug.

But it is just so amazing to see people saying something as a "fact"!!!