OSNews

MathML is specifically mentioned in the release notes.

You can install different widgets, which is what I do on Linux.

Actually Firefox 1.x and 2.x does not support widgets on Linux for rendering of web-content. Firefox always use the ugly win95-like buttons - no matter which theme you use.

What can be changed is the look of non-website widgets, e.g. Firefox preferences dialogue, download window, the look of tabs and stuff like that. But comboboxes, buttons, text fields and stuff like that are not themed for page content.

Firefox 3 however has support for native look for widgets in content as well. Place a submit-button on your webpage and it will have the look buttons in your gtk-theme. And that at least is a bit cool. Next problem is the memory leaks and out-of-process loading of plug-ins (read flash and java).

I beg to differ, as I said, when on Linux I install new widgets.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=369596

It's an ubuntu-specific solution and has nothing to do with Firefox or widgets as such.

That solution still doesn't follow the native look, but merely allows for some ugly hacking of the look. Of course it might be better than nothing else, but the solution still doesn't make the widgets follow the native look. And the solution is not a Firefox-solution but merely an ubuntu-solution, since Firefox has no such thing as a widget installer.

The moment such widget-'themes' can be installed in the Firefox 'Extensions'-dialogue we might talk about 'Firefox Widgets'. Until then I'm looking forward to Firefox automagically theming the widgets according to the GTK+-theme in use.

As a matter of fact, I'm not all that keen on native widgets in web pages. As far as style is concerned, there's no telling whether they will match the look and feel of the page. And I do hope they're still going to allow the web page to override via CSS, in which case native widgets are mostly for nothing. I'm not at all sure this was a feature worth putting effort into. It's pure eye-candy. I'm sure there are others more useful. I'd gladly give up native widgets for less consumed RAM or snappier startup when I have many extensions loaded.

Edited 2007-11-21 18:39

Of course it should still be overridden by CSS. That's for sure. But there are many websites that don't theme widgets at all. Those ought to follow the native theme.

But widgets theme by websites should stay untouched. It looks really ugly otherwise (konqueror is a sinner here - it uses the colors from css on widgets from the KDE-theme in use - doesn't fit when playing online RPG )

Yes, it uses native widgets.

On Mac OS X they're finally using native widgets; hopefully once Firefox is released they'll get the memory management bit under control because right now its abysmal in terms of the amount of memory used.

Nice to see censorship is live and well, under 5 minutes a point is taken off my score; interesting to see the maturity of some around here is taken to all new pathetic lows. When in doubt, and too lazy to debate, remove a few points to silence the critic(s).

Edited 2007-11-20 19:43

If the memory thing is out of date, reply to that effect. An outdated comment is not off-topic, it's out-of-date. You should reply indicating current information. If you can make a point, do so.

Then again, maybe the comment isn't out-of-date. Sounds like meianoite and others have seen reports of continued issues with memory usage. In fact, you imply that work in this area is ongoing, so you can't even maintain the assertion that the issue is out of date for 20 words.

200+ fixed memory leaks is a great thing, and the people who identifed, fixed, and verified these leak fixes should all be proud of their work. However, in the final analysis, a lot of people won't care if leaks have been fixed if the product still uses too much memory.

Think of it this way, would you care if 200+ safety problems had been fixed in the new model year car you bought if the tires still came off at speeds over 62mph/100kph? Is it a good thing that the 200+ safety problems had been fixed? Is the car maybe safe for folks that never have to go very fast? Yes and yes. Is it time to declare comments regarding the car's safety problems out-of-date? Maybe you would think so, but many others would disagree.

How about you try not being a jerk? If it helps, here's a post you might have made instead of silently modding kaiwai down:

See, this way, instead of looking like a total anus, you get your point across. As an added bonus, you make [your | the Firefox] team look like what they are, which is a conscientious group of developers, testers, and others working hard to produce the best damn browser on the planet.

very nicely worded, if only everyone around here would follow that line of thought.

wtf? kaiwai is right about Firefox having memory problems. It still has those issues. It has many memory problems solved, but there are still many left to solve.

Personally I prefer webkit-gtk (the 'official' webkit.org port) a lot more and luckily it's been picking up speed recently.

Kaiwai:

Hear, hear.

Cyclops:

It was definitely not off-topic, given the subject of Firefox 3 nearing golden and still hogging memory as always. Bullet points on a release notes document won't change the fact that FF3b as it stands is hardly an improvement over FF2 in memory management:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/20/firefox-3-beta-1-the-memory-us...

Given that, my opinion is that despite believing otherwise, you had zero reason to mod Kaiwai down, period. And pretending FF3 is the vessel of the divine blood won't change the fact that modding him down for his criticism is akin to sweeping bugs under the mat: people will trip over them. Specially people with constrained hardware resources. Specially 3rd world governments trying to jump into the eeePC/OLPC/Classmate/whatevercomesnext bandwagon of cheap internet-oriented computers.

1) I have run Firefox 3.0b1 and subsequent builds - yes, bugs have been fixed, but memory usage is still far too high. Instead of fixing them, what I see in bugzilla is the constant blaming of Apple for all problems in the world.

2) Sure, I use Safari, but I'm open minded enough to give Opera and Firefox a go. Opera has come along well, still got problems with Blogger/Gmail, and Firefox has improved.

3) What are we supposed to do? sit around gushing praise upon something - yes, we know, things have improved, but lets be adult and instead of dwelling on the success, focus on the failures and get them sorted.

Edit: Nice to see you take another point off one of my posts; dear god I wish the moderators did their job here and kicked people off who abuse the system.

Edit 2: And again - truly, this pathetic; its gone from being a way to filter out spam to simply acts of vendetta against those whose opinions individuals don't agree with.

Edited 2007-11-20 23:31

1) I have run Firefox 3.0b1 and subsequent builds - yes, bugs have been fixed, but memory usage is still far too high. Instead of fixing them, what I see in bugzilla is the constant blaming of Apple for all problems in the world.

Do you have any examples of where people blame Apple for all problems in the world?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385966

Read through there with the whining and whinging by developers over 'bugs'.

Interesting, they're never able to explain how millions of developers around the world don't suffer from the same issues as they do. I'm sure there are bugs in the framework provided by Apple but to blame them (look through bugzilla for more) for every bit of problems speak of incompetent programming than anything to do with Apple.

Grow up. If Kaiwai is a retard, then you are the sphincter out of which filth issues. Whatever point you are attempting to make is not supported by statements that so-and-so is a retard. Saying that the memory usage is not a problem for you would be reasonable. Perhaps arguing that the importance of memory footprint has been overblown might work, too.

Modding people down because you disagree with them, saying things like "[ I ] can make a point on this, you clearly can't.", and calling them "retards" makes it appear that you have a few years to go before you're ready to mix with the grown-ups and have a reasonable conversation.

I must say I don't know a lot about Firefox's memory usage (aside from the casual notice that it *does* seem to use more memory than seems reasonable, prior to the 200+ fixes in FF3). However, on the basis of your exchange with Kaiwai, I'm inclined to think that some reasonable people think memory usage in FF3 is still a problem and at least one immature jerk wants the "retards" who think memory is a problem to just shut up. Is that the effect you're going for?

Memory issues are clearly not out-of-date..I just tried FF3, read OSNews and left it sitting here for a few minutes. Then when I turned back to the computer I noticed it was crunching away on the harddisk like mad and almost nothing worked :O Yeah, it was FF3 eating away all available memory and chewing it's way to the swap, already happily about 300 megs..I guess I just hit some nasty bug, but it clearly is a memory issue

EDIT: Just tried it three times. It clearly is reproducible. All I have to do is open FireFox and leave it there for a few minutes and it brings the whole system down to it's knees. Darn. I really like the fact that it now has native widgets and would have used it...

Edited 2007-11-21 00:18

Now I got modded down? For what reason? :O

No need to worry, I've modded your comment(s) up.

Side note; anyone who knows me, knows I am cynical; whilst we have people here to jump around, I've always been one of being a realist when it comes to a product.

Yes, a product has good points (all do) but the concern should be on the parts which aren't good, that need to be addressed. To simply ignore the deficiencies you end up with a giant reality distortion field equal to that of the Steve Jobs and his on stage evangelical like marketing hype feasts.

Case in point, the department I managed at my last job was the fastest growing in New Zealand for that year - my reaction was, "there are some issues we still need to work on" and headed off back to work. Whilst some might like to bath in the after glow of success, I'd sooner get back to improving things.

Edited 2007-11-21 01:02

Fixed.

(unlike bugs in Firefox)

Memory issues are clearly not out-of-date..I just tried FF3, read OSNews and left it sitting here for a few minutes. Then when I turned back to the computer I noticed it was crunching away on the harddisk like mad and almost nothing worked :O Yeah, it was FF3 eating away all available memory and chewing it's way to the swap, already happily about 300 megs..I guess I just hit some nasty bug, but it clearly is a memory issue

Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have Firebug installed? That is one extension known to cause serious memory leaks in Firefox (unfortunately, probably not the only one). I saw a graph once that showed Firefox' memory usage over time with and without Firebug running. The difference was pretty dramatic.

Just out of curiosity, do you happen to have Firebug installed? That is one extension known to cause serious memory leaks in Firefox (unfortunately, probably not the only one). I saw a graph once that showed Firefox' memory usage over time with and without Firebug running. The difference was pretty dramatic.

I have no idea what Firebug is, and as I said I just tried FF3, I haven't been using FireFox (any version) or installed any extensions. I had never even fired FireFox up on this machine before I tried FF3. It's sad, I think I would have started using it instead of Epiphany, just because FF3 looks better now.. :/ I have no idea what could cause that strange memory-eating behaviour, but I hope it gets fixed soon!

On the other hand, you seem to swing from retard to cynical, and back. You completely misunderstand/misuse the modding system, and you openly admit so.

As I said, no amount of bullet talking points on a release notes document change the fact that FF is still a huge resource hog.

(btw, current user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071025 Firefox/2.0.0.7; current memory usage: Working Set: 402,312K; Private Working Set: 374,288K; Commit Size: 1,032,508K; and that's with nine tabs open: 1 gmail, 5 OSNews, 2 Best Buy, 1 NIN Hotline)



No matter how you cut it, it can't be off-topic if you're talking about the subject on topic. Your M.O. of evangelising Firefox is doing a massive disservice to the alternative, standards-compliant browsers community.



When an application starts to swap like mad, it has crossed the "resources available to it" by a long margin.



This is not fact, this is just your opinion. Which, AFAICT, bears no authority whatsoever.

(OTOH, I hold a degree in Computer Science, so I sometimes actually know WTF I'm talking about.)



I've once complained that some of your sentences are really hard to make sense of, but... Here's my best shot: I'm not demanding that FF scales from wristwatches to Crays, but I do demand that my web browser uses less than 200MB of RAM at any given time, PERIOD.



People wiser than me describe this sort of attitude as "famous last words before obsolescence".



Yeah, as if there's really any real alternatives when you run Linux. (No, Konqueror isn't a valid alternative, not when not even Gmail loads itself with the AJAX interface unless you tamper with the user-agent string; but that I blame on Google more than on the K guys.)

And where did you get that wild idea that Enlightenment used to be a memory hog?!



You're mixing a lot of stuff up here. I'd recommend you to wash your face with cold water, but it would seem like I'm attacking you personally. OTOH, you called me retarded, so I wonder why I'm holding my punches... Elegance and common courtesy, maybe.



You really have no idea what you're talking about. There are NGOs whose sole mission is to provide public schools in 3rd world countries with broadband internet access. In Brazil those NGOs promote what's called "digital inclusion". I know that much, I used to work at a place that fostered digital inclusion and served as a hub to interconnect 200+ public schools spread over 5 states.



Just because I cited Opera as a browser that doesn't burn my patience out? Dude, were that the case, I'd simply stick with IE. I don't use Opera, as I profoundly dislike its interface, but despite my reservations towards it, I can recognise it's a decent product, specially the mobile version; it's the only thing out there that manages to somewhat compete with MobileSafari. I've made a comment on this very topic not too long ago.

Please, take your head out of the sand (I'm being very courteous here) and get a grip: there's a reason why most "regular" people reject Firefox despite plenty of evangelism, sponsorship and bundling with Google's software. There's a reason why Google went with Webkit and not with Firefox on Android.

The FF team needs a *good dose* of criticism towake up and get their act together. I've been using Firefox since back when it was a Gecko demo that fitted a floppy, and it really hurts to see where we stand today.

Firefox is giving me a lot of déjà vu regarding the GCC 2.8 situation, except that I see no EGCS coming to the rescue.


Edit: stray (q) tag

Edited 2007-11-21 02:18

I've once complained that some of your sentences are really hard to make sense of, but... Here's my best shot: I'm not demanding that FF scales from wristwatches to Crays, but I do demand that my web browser uses less than 200MB of RAM at any given time, PERIOD.

Regardless of web page complexity? I just fired up Safari on Mac OS X 10.4 and opened six tabs (cnn.com, bbc.co.uk, aftonbladet.se, expressen.se, facebook.com, gmail.com). I clicked around a few links in each tab and *boom*, there it went passed 200 MB. Is that a bad thing? It might be, depending on how Safari handles caching and the DOM, but I'd guess it's pretty normal considering it has six heavy websites loaded at the same time.

Not that I care much about web browser memory usage comparisons, but I did the exact same test with Firefox 3 Beta 1, and I never exceeded 200 MB. Right now, Firefox 3 has 11 tabs opened (same sites as in Safari, plus Zimbra, my blog, another blog, and two OSnews.com tabs) and uses 121 MB. And now Safari just dropped its memory usage to 166 MB without me doing anything.

My point here? It's hard to establish in formal tests that Firefox has worse memory problems than any other modern browser. Today's websites are complex beasts, memory management is tricky, and both Safari and Firefox uses a lot of memory. In any isolated test case, your mileage will always vary.

Please, take your head out of the sand (I'm being very courteous here) and get a grip: there's a reason why most "regular" people reject Firefox despite plenty of evangelism, sponsorship and bundling with Google's software. There's a reason why Google went with Webkit and not with Firefox on Android.

Pardon me, but this is just nonsense. What on earth do you mean by "most regular people" rejecting Firefox? Maybe you mean they keep using IE?

I point out where the comment was off-topic and move on

You're not supposed to pick parts of other's posts and mod them down just because that single part is off-topic. Talking about FireFox, current release or older ones, is very much on-topic. The following quote is very much off-topic but should I nitpick about that and mod you down because of that?

Having looked at your note, I cannot help but giggle that you are using Vista...perhaps you should start with using an OS with space for applications.

Besides, no matter what OS one uses doesn't make a difference as to how much FireFox uses memory. If you use Linux then fine, have fun, but that doesn't give you any right to belittle others' opinions nor does it mean you're always right. Oh, and picking on someone just for using Vista is quite childish IMHO. It's a personal choice after all, and there might be f.ex. some apps which he needs and which don't work under Linux..And Linux still sucks for gaming :/

Yes your comments are only about promoting alternative browsers, and your comments says it all.

So? There are some things that other browsers do better than Firefox. Firefox does some things better than others. To make a balanced choice people need to know about both.

I'm not sure why you think your promotion of an alternative browser (Firefox) is somehow better than his, if that's even his motive in the first place (you seem to be reading a lot into his motivations).

I left only your emphasized words and this is what I got:

*I* *new* *has* *anything* *My* *felt* *anything* *me* *use* *wastes* *keeping* *believe* *best* *not* *scalable* *buying* *finally* *lost*

I can't make anything out of it, so I'm modding you down.

You hadn't noticed until now?

According to zdnet memory management is indeed improving (notice that FF3b1 actually beat IE7 by using less memory in the 12 page test).

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=960

Does this now mean you are going to start whining and carrying on about IE7 in the same manner?

Well...IE is Windows-only, ie. it's not multi-platform as the open-source alternatives, it's closed-source and no matter how much you whine and whinge, or even offer to help for free, nothing will change unless Microsoft so sees fit. So, it would be kinda useless

If you are 1337 enough to use x86_64 you can compile it from source ;o).

Or do you win Windows x64? Cause it's a nightmare to compile on windows I've tried it before.

Sure I could, but I don't think there's anything "elite" about using x86_64 nowadays.

It's most probably the second widespread architecture out there and most open source do already ship prebuilt binaries, so I consider it a bit strange for one of the best-known projects not to offer builds at all.

And no, I'm using Arch64 here.

Yes, it does not look like someone made even pkgbuild for it! I'm building from source right now, it's nothing complicated anyway

Yeah... usually, when there's a lot of time between releases, that means the product doesn't have many bugs; most are satisfied with the product, and no new features/fixes need to be added for the product to make the consumer happy.

However, I must say, that's not the case with FF right now. It needs a _lot_ of work, mostly on the resource-usage end. Plus, it's rendering engine is rather slow compared to others, IMO.

Hope FF3 fixes this.

Just out of curiosity, what version of Mac OS X are you running?

Running Leopard here. For me the text is much less blurry than in FF2 (as a new Mac user, I am actually a bit dissapointed by the rendering in FF2 on Mac compared to Windows).

Much better, but still not quite as nice as Safari 3.0.

I'm running 10.4.11 PPC. FF3 renders text differently from Safari and FF2. Those two look identical to me. Strangely, FF3 on XP does not have this problem, cleartype on or off.

Try setting the browser.display.auto_quality_min_font_size to 0 in about:config. It should use a higher quality font-rendering path, but I'm not sure what it does to performance.

The Mac OS X text interface changed in Leopard, if that's what you mean. Firefox 2 and 3 both look different than they did in Tiger.

Otherwise, I find the text to be as good as that of Safari.

Apparently you hit the same bug as me..

The same experience on WinXP with 768M RAM. I've reverted to FF2.