Firefox 3 beta, any good?
- Thread starter RAMA
- Start date
I like it just fine.
Only complaints are that I get weird random crashes when trying to visit some Yahoo! Sports news pages, and that I get some weird black lines in the text input box of message boards like TBBS and Wordforge.
But, it's a Beta. Nevertheless, I use it almost exlusively, and look forward to the full release version.
Only complaints are that I get weird random crashes when trying to visit some Yahoo! Sports news pages, and that I get some weird black lines in the text input box of message boards like TBBS and Wordforge.
But, it's a Beta. Nevertheless, I use it almost exlusively, and look forward to the full release version.
On another website I frequent, it has received high praise. It is said to be extremely fast on Macs.
The only issue I've had so far is not having any previously-opened tabs re-opening even with that option selected after closing the browser and re-loading it. Instead, I just get a blank page.
Never really noticed about speed on the Mac (this message is typed under Firefox 3 Beta4 on a Mac Mini running Leopard) but generally it goes quite well.
Though it will reach a point where it won't open a new page or looses the formating for a page (you'd see the content but not backgrounds, proper layouts etc) as if it said screw you I don't want to process your style sheet.
Unless, of course, you download Nightly Tester Tools or a similar extension and override the compatibility check. Most of my extensions are working just fine after doing that; the ones that acted up, I disabled.
By the way, for anyone who hasn't been there recently: The Mozilla Add-ons website has undergone a great redesign.
Hmmm, my workplace's homepage wouldn't open properly and the computer died on me, dumping all my personal settings and documents soon after installing it. I can't make any connection, but I'll hold off upgrading for a while.
A
Amaris
Guest
^ Shortly after using FF3 Beta, I started having severe system performance problems. Once I removed FF3 the system returned to normal. I reported it to FF's bug reporting system, and in the meantime I'll just keep using FF2.
J.
J.
I love how the charts show what a complete resource turd IE is. When will people learn?
Because it breeds bad coding practices and removes discipline from the art/science of programming. [Old Man]Back in my day[/Old Man], you had to worry that your line numbers wouldn't exceed 32767 (base 0) otherwise you'd have an 8-bit overrun error. This forced you to keep the code clean, streamlined and fast. Subroutines were all placed at the beginning of programs, as the interpreters would have to go through every single line on a "GOSUB" to find them. Nowadays, sloppy coding has become the norm. Nobody ever cleans up after themselves and we wind up getting memory leaks. On sizable applications like video games, which requires PC's to have up to 2GB of RAM to run, you can blow out your memory and start swapping to the hard drive quicker than you would normally have a need to.
Kids these days, I tell ya...
WEll they must be learning a bit. It's come out recently that business are being slow on the uptake for Vista (no big Duh there) and IE7. Thought it seems that resitance to IE7 comes more from it being a major compatibility breaker than a resource hog.
Because there's nothing wrong with the old computers that don't have 1 GB of memory. As you well know, I think, computers should last for a damn long time (excluding the hard drives, obviously). The only reason that I can't continue using the computer I bought in 1990 is because our software gets more and more demanding. If Mosaic could run with, what, a few megs of memory, why can't Firefox? If we could get software to stop being so greedy, we could stop people from "upgrading" every 3 years and continue using those older, perfectly usable computers from the days of yore.
Deleted 2
Vice Admiral
^ Because there are always trade-offs to be made.
One example is what you do with pictures on a page that isn't currently displayed. Modern computers are fast enough to uncompress jpeg files and display them in the blink of an eye. Older computers take a much longer time.
You can choose to store pictures that aren't currently displayed in an uncompressed bitmap format, so that the processor doesn't have to do the same work twice. But a 27 kB JPEG file may take up a full megabyte of RAM when uncompressed. It's a trade-off, and optimizing for an older computer may well involve the solution that takes more RAM.
My problem with complaints about Firefox's memory usage (leaving aside legitimate complaints about memory leaks) is that we're not Firefox developers, and we have no real frame of reference to say that Firefox takes 'too much' memory. The graph in the last link shows that Firefox 2's memory usage is on par with other modern browsers (comparisons to Mosaic don't make much sense). A bit more than Opera, a lot less than IE 7. Firefox 3's memory usage isn't an order of magnitude better. Rather, it looks as if they've tweaked the garbage collection to be slightly more aggressive, perhaps removed some debugging code. I'd be surprised if the meaningful improvements in speed we've seen are due to these reductions in memory usage.
Lastly, there's a reason I mentioned swap files, and that is because the OS--not us, not the application--is in a position most capable of judging memory usage in a meaningful context, namely in relation to the rest of the system, i.e. does Firefox need this piece of memory more, or Photoshop, or would it be better used as disk buffer? and has the means to balance things out for optimal performance by swapping out the least used bits of memory.
One example is what you do with pictures on a page that isn't currently displayed. Modern computers are fast enough to uncompress jpeg files and display them in the blink of an eye. Older computers take a much longer time.
You can choose to store pictures that aren't currently displayed in an uncompressed bitmap format, so that the processor doesn't have to do the same work twice. But a 27 kB JPEG file may take up a full megabyte of RAM when uncompressed. It's a trade-off, and optimizing for an older computer may well involve the solution that takes more RAM.
My problem with complaints about Firefox's memory usage (leaving aside legitimate complaints about memory leaks) is that we're not Firefox developers, and we have no real frame of reference to say that Firefox takes 'too much' memory. The graph in the last link shows that Firefox 2's memory usage is on par with other modern browsers (comparisons to Mosaic don't make much sense). A bit more than Opera, a lot less than IE 7. Firefox 3's memory usage isn't an order of magnitude better. Rather, it looks as if they've tweaked the garbage collection to be slightly more aggressive, perhaps removed some debugging code. I'd be surprised if the meaningful improvements in speed we've seen are due to these reductions in memory usage.
Lastly, there's a reason I mentioned swap files, and that is because the OS--not us, not the application--is in a position most capable of judging memory usage in a meaningful context, namely in relation to the rest of the system, i.e. does Firefox need this piece of memory more, or Photoshop, or would it be better used as disk buffer? and has the means to balance things out for optimal performance by swapping out the least used bits of memory.
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