Mozilla has announced the official release of the third Firefox 3 beta, which includes many user interface improvements and a handful of new features. Firefox 3 is rapidly approaching completion, and much of the work that remains to be done is primarily in the category of fit and finish. There will likely only be one more beta release after this one before Mozilla begins issuing final release candidates. Additionally, jemalloc from FreeBSD will be the default internal memory allocator for Firefox.
I’ve been using nightlies of Firefox 3 on my Mac for half a year now. There’s an improvement in almost every area of the browser and the new theme integrates really well with OSX.
But I think the new windows theme is really ugly. The keyhole-button is to large and doesn’t fit in. The other buttons look a bit amateurish and doesn’t really fit in either. I’m not opposed to a new theme but please, choose something better than this!
I know these icons are not final but the latest iteration is only slightly better:
http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20080210-iconsM2i4/m2i4.pn…
I just saw a screenshot of the latest Firefox 3 beta just a couple days ago and immediately went silent when I saw the abysmal new navigation icons. I also saw a shot of the Linux theme, which doesn’t seem to be changed much, and the Mac theme, which is a big step in the right direction (it finally looks native).
Ironically, I won’t have to deal with the Windows version’s atrocious theme, since in the same day (it was coincidental, really…) I decided to complete my move to Linux and convert all my Windows partitions to Linux / XFS, and gave my Windows CD to my sister.
Sure, it’s theme-able, but I’d rather *never* see it, even if only to download and install a new theme. It’s just freakin’ ugly.
I’ll take BlueQute over Firefox 2’s OR Firefox 3’s theme, any day. Really, who’s idea was it anyway to decide on THAT for the default theme? I think they’re taking too many pointers from Microsoft / Internet Explorer when it comes to UI design. And I though FF2’s theme was a bit… bad. It’s only getting worse.
Edited 2008-02-13 16:06 UTC
The icons in the Linux theme come directly from your desktop theme, so if you change it the Firefox icons will change as well.
I’m not sure if it is the same in OSX and Windows, but probably not.
… I really don’t get your point.
Don’t like the default theme? Fine! Change it.
Asking the developers to develop a single theme that will suite your -own- personal taste (times 7 billion) is ridicules.
– Gilboa
i don’t like mozilla firefox.
http://emlak.ilkon.com/“>konut
Edited 2008-02-13 15:37 UTC
I don’t know why you even bother to state that … It’s a free world with tons of alternatives – make the best of it! Your argument also seems to have very little of an argumentative quality about it …
I don’t like crappy links to crappy webpages.
Sorry, meant to reply to the parent.
Edited 2008-02-13 16:02 UTC
Oh how cute, spam!
Most Turkish people I have met are really nice people.
The exceptions are
You, as you are retarded,
and the ones who hassle you in the street, ” sir, can I ask you just one question? ”
They also are retarded as they had just asked me the one question
I administer an XDMCP/NX server that serves up to 70 simultaneous desktops. Firefox, especially 1.5+, is not much of a team player. Each instance has an aggravating tendency to assume that it is the only program running. It says “Oh look! 8GB of memory! I can cache all this stuff and cache a bunch of rendered pages too and make things faster!”. Yep, all seventy simultaneous Firefox sessions say the same thing and dive in. And yes, if one is willing to babysit and micromanage its behavior, and is always ready to reapply the changes upon a new release, it can be tamed. For some years, I was running CentOS 4.x on this server. RH, in its infinite wisdom, removed Epiphany from their distribution of Gnome. And believe me, getting it and its dependencies installed on a standard CentOS install is a huge mess. Too big a mess to make sense to me as an admin. (I usually poo poo people who complain about the mostly fictional RPM Hell, but Epiphany is the exception!)
We recently upgraded to Fedora 8. And the very first thing I chucked was Firefox. I am oh so happy with Epiphany for this environment. My users don’t understand enough about it to be happy. But they would be if they did. Yeah, we’re still using Gecko, the *good* thing about FF.
Firefox and its devs have a bad case of “singleuseritis”… which is not my problem anymore.
Firefox needs an attitude adjustment if it wants to be a contender on big multiuser corporate servers. (Not that mine are really *that* big. My clients are small fish compared to some.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t using Epiphany mean you lose access to all the extensions and themes Firefox provides access to? What are some of the other benefits Epiphany provides to make up for this (or add to Firefox) besides perhaps better memory management?
Sincerely curious here… I plan to do another Ubuntu install once I finish up downloading a bunch of Autopatcher Updates for Windows (XP \ 2K) and would like to know whether I should try for the new Firefox Beta (after a few days when the extensions have been updated) or if I should give Epiphany a shot.
–bornagainpenguin (Firefox User from back when it was still called Phoenix…)
As far as i know Epiphany uses the same engine as firefox (gecko). Other than better integration with gnome, and a different UI toolkit used there should be little difference in its behavior. When they switch to webkit it might be a different story all together. I personally have come to like webkit a lot and can’t wait to see it replace gecko as Epiphany’s engine.
Yeek! Full Stop! Replace? I thought Webkit was going to become another *option*. Webkit might be great and fast and all that. But as much ambivalence as I harbor regarding Firefox, I’m not quite ready to dump all the hard won acceptance among web designers that Gecko has garnered over the years, to use something that renders pages as quickly, and as badly, as Konqueror.
Konqueror does not use Webkit at the moment and it will not gain that functionality until it is based on QT 4.4 and KDE 4.1. Konqueror uses KHTML which is what Webkit was originally based on (they do share code with each other) but Webkit is basically the more efficient and more widely used offspring of KHTML. Apple took KHTML and made it more usable for mainstream development and then opened Webkit up due to pressure from the FOSS community and now Webkit has begun to supplant KHTML for most usage scenarios. Webkit will soon be the/a rendering engine for Safari, Konqueror, and Epiphany.
I personally foresee KDE releasing some kind of cross platform webkit-based OSS browser similar to Firefox post KDE 4.1. Konqueror is great as a Swiss Army knife application but I think something more like Firefox would be necessary to increase its usage share across all operating systems. If KDE designed a potential browser from the ground up for corporate environments then they would probably have a winner on their hands.
I’m not sbergman2, but I know his pain. Forfeiting FF certainly means losing access to all FF extensions, but by using Epiphany you gain access to Epiphany’s, which are not bad either [1][2]. On top, Epiphany’s bookmark management is miles ahead of FF’s — it’s tag based — and it has better integrated search engine handling. Also, the UI is actually native in GTK environments, thus faster, better integrated and highly adaptable, while being even more straightforward than FF’s.
OK, I like Epiphany
[1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/extensions
[2] http://sstuhr.dk/epiphany-extensions/
Yes. But you gain access to Epiphany’s extensions. Not as many. But they cover the bases reasonably well. I don’t particularly want my users downloading and installing random extensions. I just install the Epiphany extension pack, and they can do Tools->Extensions and check “AdBlock” or whatever. Or I can apply a set of extensions, or any other settings, really, in a blanket fashion, with a shell script using gconftool-2.
It’s a Gnome app. Administering everyone centrally with gconftool-2, I’ve already mentioned. The interface is more consistent with the rest of the desktop. The memory requirements are *definitely* lower. Better integration all around. For example, only one keyring to deal with. No separate mechanism for storing passwords… with its own master password. No separate proxy configuration. I don’t have to care when the significant config directory unexpectedly moves from /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.12 to /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.13 and all my carefully applied system wide config policies are lost.
To be fair, for a single user desktop, YMMV. It all depends upon taste. (I do miss being able to force links to new windows into tabs.) For multiple simultaneous users it’s Epiphany, hands down. What do I use on my own home desktop? Usually Epiphany. But I’ve always been a big believer in eating my own dogfood. If my users use it, I should use it as well, or I can’t sleep at night. That said, Epiphany has been rather broken in the devel version of the distro I’m running on my laptop (presumably due to WebKit rendering support having landed), so I’m posting this from FF. My new UMPC, running a stable version of the distro, runs Epiphany, so I still got about 6 hours of sleep last night. 😉
I would encourage you to try out both and decide for yourself. On a single user system, they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I *will* say that distros have given Epiphany the short end of the stick, due to Firefox’s name recognition. In fact, the one regret that I have about switching everyone to Epiphany is that it might hurt their chances of deciding to switch to Firefox at home. On the other hand, when I switched them, I did a blanket resetting of the gnome default browser from Firefox to Epiphany, but also linked /usr/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/epiphany for those users who had specifically Firefox icons. So some people click on the Firefox logo and get Epiphany. Mozilla Corp will probably try to sue me for doing that. But that’s another reason I prefer not to use their products myself. 😉
Edited 2008-02-13 17:36 UTC
Interesting diagnosis. My therapy advice would be an extended maximum load activity therapy, here’s the respective manual:
#!/bin/sh
while [ true ]; do
________firefox &
done
echo “Therapy successful.”
🙂
They’ve really done a nice job on it and it’s running very well now. If my add-ons worked, I’d probably use it daily.
The themes are…uggggh…but replaceable.
I just tested Firefox Beta 3 with KDE 3 and the qtk-qt theme engine. While there is some improvement, the looks leave a lot to be desired:
For example
– only some of the icons are KDE native
– text is black where it should be white (just like with Firefox 2)
– the scrollbars are too thin
I just wish they would put a bit more effort to the KDE integration (maybe by working together with the gtk-qt theme developer).
A *big* improvement (and AFAIK, also quite trivial to implement) would also be the usage of native KDE file dialog by default [when run under KDE].
I really don’t think there will be much demand for FF3 under KDE once Konqueror switches to WebKit — especially if Konqueror will use the WebKit version currently in development for Safari 3.1: http://blogs.computerworld.com/safari_is_about_to_get_crazy_fast
Looks great in GNOME, really like the icons and all fits beautifully, here’s a shot.
http://img405.imageshack.us/my.php?image=ff3b3xi8.png
Edited 2008-02-13 16:46 UTC
Eww. They changed the modal window that asks to remember the password. Now it appears inline at the top of the browser viewstate. This is not bad, but you can’t use keyboard shortcuts any more!
This is really bad…
Sure you can. Alt-R to remember the password, Alt-E for “never” Just like any other menu or button. Alt plus the underlined letter.
I ran beta 2 for two weeks, and really didn’t enjoy it. I’m now back on 2.x.
I honestly could not find the supposed performance and memory usage improvements. Performance seemed the same or slower, and memory usage was higher, for my use of the browser at least.
The new URL history thing is an abomination that drove me absolutely crazy. It tries to be too smart, and it’s incredibly slow – so slow that on my system I can click on the top entry, then move my mouse down a bit (my natural movement), and it’s so slow to process the click that it decides I actually clicked on the fourth entry down. Guh.
The new interface for dealing with invalid security certificates reaches UAC levels of annoyance, too. I can see the reasoning for it, but I hit too many of these in unimportant situations for it to work well for me.
Anyway, I’m now back on 2.x. I’d move to Epiphany (or Midori) if it had Adblock Plus, but its in-built Adblock doesn’t handle Flash and doesn’t reflow the page to fill the space made by removing ads, two lovely features of Adblock Plus. Even so, I still might go to Epiphany+Webkit once it has support for Epiphany extensions (like Adblock), which the devs tell me may be as early as next month.
In general Firefox seems to be becoming the new Mozilla – loss of focus and changing things and adding features more or less for the sake of it – and in a couple of versions we’ll need a new Phoenix, and the cycle will begin again…
I don’t want to hijack this thread and turn it into an Epiphany vs Firefox thread but I am compelled to mention some of the upsides to Epiphany.
I was an avid Firefox user for years (since 0.5 phoenix) but switched to Epiphany 1.5 – 2 years ago. At the time it was because Epiphay was smaller, faster, and less buggy than Firefox on my machine. I was using an ancient laptop and the load times (program and page loading) were noticeably shortened when I switched to Epiphany. Now that I have a modern laptop I could have switched back but I fell in love with the bookmark system and the search system. It’s incredibly easy to add new search engines and it’s incredibly useful to have access to search, bookmarks, and URL loading through a single text input. It means I never have to poke around in the settings or options of Epihany I just use it. All you need to know to access all of your information is Ctrl-L.
I do miss some of the Firefox extensions I had, mostly web developing extensions, so I keep a copy of Firefox installed but only for web development. For me Epiphany is only missing two things, the aforementioned web developer extensions, and single window mode, extension or otherwise.
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention that what I am really excited about for the upcoming release of Firefox3 is xulrunner 1.9. When epiphany is built against xulrunner there will be no dependecy against Firefox and I imagine a nice performance boost to boot.
Edited 2008-02-13 19:02 UTC
I might go ahead and give Epiphany a shot next time I’m in Ubuntu, but for now I’ll probably mostly stick to Firefox. I have way too many extensions that have shaped the way I browse these days. Some of them I could do without, but the number one extension I simply must have isn’t being implemented in Epiphany or if it is it’s sorely behind in development… ;(
http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/AdBlockExtension
But I’ll still install it and keep an eye open for each update in case it turns out Epiphany has a feature I grow to love as much as I do Firefox’s adblock plus…
–bornagainpenguin
PS: Thanks to everyone who replied!
… for several hours, no problems so far. I do not used any previous builds – just upgraded from 2.0.0.12
I noticed one nice thing: automatic resuming of disrupted downloads. When Norton update restarted OS without warning, download restarted automatically when I re-run Firefox after boot.
Visuals are also nice, especially that big green button for “go back” and “go forward”
Edited 2008-02-13 20:14 UTC
wft, why did they embed a memory manager? every os supplies a memory manager. if the one of the os suck you are lucky, but if improvements are made on the memory manager of your os firefox will not benefit. a kernel has a lot more information than a userspace program and should handle memory allocation a lot better.
this is done under the pressure that firefox uses too much memory/buildin malloc is slow. the time could be better spend profiling memory usage, and improving the memory allocations of your os so all programs could benefit.
hmm.. i think even emacs doesn’t have it’s own malloc
There are a lot of good reasons to implement your own memory manager in lieu of the OS’s. For one thing, the OS’s allocator has to be a general allocator that works well in -all- applications, sometimes at the cost of peformance in specific cases. Your own memory manager can be tailored to your specific needs. Secondly, everytime you do a malloc(), you’re making a system call and a full context-switch is required, with associated performance overhead. Lastly, many of the general memory managers can have fragmentation issues, minimum page sizes and all that which can add overhead and cause a program to use more memory than it actually needs to.
Google actually has its own memory manager, tmalloc or some such, which apparently runs well in multi-thread applications; I wonder why we don’t see more of that being used, especially in the case of browsers where there tend to run a lot of threads doing a lot of caching…
Secondly, everytime you do a malloc(), you’re making a system call and a full context-switch is required, with associated performance overhead.
Uhh, no it doesn’t. malloc() isn’t a system call, it’s part of the C library. It only makes system calls if it needs to increase the size of the heap (or do an mmap() for large blocks of memory). Otherwise, it simple mucks around with some pointers in userspace and returns a chunk of memory, which may be quite fast.
I’m running it right now, and all I can say is wow. It finally is a delight to use on Mac OS X; the only thing not working right now is when I try to insert a link on blogger post creation form, I am unable to past the link into the entry box. Hopefully that’ll be fixed soon.
Besides that, everything is working wonderfully; with Safari 3.1 around the corner, and Opera 9.50 will be out hopefully soon, the browser market will finally have some intensive competition which is much needed these days.
It’s a sad commentary upon where we are today that 85% of users using IE and the rest of the browsers fighting for the remaining 15% can be called “intensive competition” by knowledgeable people. 🙁
The icons are bad,
Just look at the reload and stop button. It looks like ie 4. http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20080210-iconsM2i4/m2i4.pn…
And what are the icons for Identity unknown and similar? Is that a person and a book? What’s that supposed to represent? Do they mean anything to anyone? Or do you have to be american to understand the met.?
I think it’s supposed to represent a police officer checking your identification, like when they check your passport at the airport. Basically it is supposed to allude to having the proper identification, as far as I can tell. I’m American and I got it so maybe it is something that we get and others wouldn’t. We have a lot of traffic signs that use people in this way maybe that’s why I got it.
I thought it was pretty obvious that it’s a policeman (or customs officer, if you will) looking at a passport.
I agree with previous comments on the theme; the keyhole icon feels out of place, weird and ugly. I hope it will be replaced before the final release. It just doesn’t live up to the slickness of the rest of the application.
Overall, I’m extremely impressed by this new browser though. The first time I tried Firefox3 I was just absolutely amazed with the speed and stability it offers. I love the fact that they have spent time improving the quality of the *core browsing scenarios* and not added lots of useless fringe features.
MSIE wasn’t designed from scratch to handle TABs and this shows when you try to open many TABs at once in MSIE7. The memory footprint of MSIE just skyrockets and the computer starts to swap memory to the harddrive.
What I really LOVE about Firefox is that it’s more lightweight than MSIE but it still supports all the sites and scenarios I need perfectly.
Firefox2 was a decent browser but Firefox3 literally runs circles around MSIE.
I’ve been running the Firefox 3 betas since beta1 came out. I’m not turned off by the “keyhole” back and forward buttons the way some are, nor any of the other cosmetic changes. The “remember passwords” dialog is a huge improvement. The “Places” bookmark system is not very useful tom me; I don’t like the way their tagging works and would prefer simple delicious integration.
The most exciting parts are back end stuff most people wont directly appreciate, like canvas, javascript and CSS improvements (inline-block finally works). APNGs are a huge deal, to me. If only there were some open-spec/standard synchronous audio/stream mechanism.
The biggest issue Firefox has for me is still the memory footprint. More knobs to tune caching would be nice, even if only in about:config. The memory manager sruff is promising, but I don’t see any big difference. Firefox still consumes hundreds of megs after a short while.
Have you filed bug and/or feature requests for these? The about:config stuff for caching seems like something that is obvious and would be easy to implement since only advanced users would bother with these anyway. I could be totally off though.
Send in your ideas now. Also type up what you would like to see Firefox do and then send your list to them after they finish the FFv3 release and start their FFv4 release plans and schedule. Maybe they haven’t thought much about it.
I wish that Mozilla would just hijack their best extensions functionality and implement that instead of half-assing it as they seem to be doing with the Download Manager and its crap implementation of the Download Status Bar extension.
I find it funny to see each successive release of Firefox adopt an additional feature from the original tab browser extensions. Why the hell didn’t they just adopt it to begin with? Some kind of NIH, probably. So dumb.
and that’s how they keep talking about adding HTML 5 stuff and CSS3 – when they haven’t even finished off the DECADE OLD CSS2 or HTML 4 YET
Colgroups is still broken, (so the one time it’s appropriate to use a table you still have to inline either a ton of presentation or a ton of classes), there are major error handling issues, it STILL doesn’t handle position:absolute’s default values anywhere near correct, it’s handling of inputs is almost as bad as IE’s…
and now they’ve had to resort to a third party memory manager – which is odd since I thought they already had their own internal for that since it’s been obvious all along
At least now though they are admitting to leaks, and to plugging ‘300 or so of them’… Better than attacking people who post in bugzilla about said problems only to later call it a feature. (100% cpu with the application hanging is NOT a feature guys)
Though I have to admit, it’s fun to have a BETA that’s more stable than the entire 1.x and 2.x ‘stable’ releases.
Edited 2008-02-15 06:29 UTC
Were it not for the database of bookmarks I currently have, and the usefulness of the DOM inspector, I would drop Firefox in a heartbeat.
I’ve had it.
I don’t know about the rest of the platforms, but on the Windows side, every beta has been WORSE than the previous one. I could at least use Firefox 3b2 (which I DLed for the SVG support), but with 16 tabs open in Firefox 3b3, I’m averaging about 87% CPU and 102 MB!
Bulls***
Sadly, I made the mistake of allowing it to install updates. In addition to the massive resource consumption, it doesn’t see the ‘Unified Bookmarks’ folder when I go to save ‘All Tabs’, and instead of opening a linked JPEG in the browser, it will sometimes ask which program I want to view it with, and choke when I select ‘Firefox’!
I’m sure many other surprises await me.
If anybody knows of a Windows compatible browser that can import Firefox bookmarks complete with their tags and visit dates, I would be tremendously thankful.
So, you’re using a beta (!!!) software in a semi-production environment (so it seems) and you’re busy complaining that it’s unstable and getting worse (…), while doing nothing (?) to help the developers solve -your- problem. Have I missed anything?
Am I the only one to find this type of behavior… somewhat… irrational?
– Gilboa
Really? What are your system specs? That’s not my experience at all. At present, I have 75 tabs open, half of which have been open for nearly a week and haven’t restarted Windows in about 9 days – I’ve been
hibernating Windows with Firefox running.
Under 1.5 ( and 2.0 to a lesser extent ), that would
have put me at 100% CPU in only a few resumes.
As it is, CPU usage is in the 15 – 35 % range and memory around 200 – 240 Mb.
I’d tried a late alpha of FF3 which I deleted after 1 day but the betas were hugely better and the last 2 have been great performance-wise.
Since you use Windows, I suggest waiting for http://portableapps.com/ to release a Portable package
rather than going through the hassle of installing it.
Of late, they’ve only been taking an extra day or two
to do so.