Submitted by The fifth beta of Firefox has been released. “Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5 has been released for testing. The fifth beta of the next major Firefox version offers over 750 bug fixes over Beta 4, including improvements in user interface, location bar autocomplete, bookmark backup and restore, full page zoom and other new features based upon user feedback.”
I’m using this right now and firefox is beginning to annoy me. So many sites render poorly. even OS news for instances i got all this blank space on both sides of the screen. All OSnews content is in the center of the screen, why doesn’t it stretch out and use all real estate? Other sites have many problems aswell.
I’m thinking of moving to Epiphany cause it does a better job plus the zoom seems to be better on my laptop for tiny fonts.
OSnews’ CSS tells the site to be in the centre of the screen, it has nothing to do with Firefox 3.
You need to elaborate on “other sites” and the compatibility problems you’re having, I’ve found Firefox 3 to be faster and better in every way.
How do i get OSnews to render full screen?
also i’ll give you an example of the rendering i mean. this is two screenshots from foxnews.com you can see in epiphany all the words are visible but on firefox the last sentences are cut off only giving half the discription. not only that but the thumbnail pics are very distorted under firefox
Epiphany 2.20
http://i29.tinypic.com/246302s.jpg
Firefox b5
http://i27.tinypic.com/nd0b4n.jpg
There are examples of many other sites around the net that have txt overlapping other text and things like that. I’m not using noscript or any other plugins to block scripts or popups. just default.
using firefox beta 5 here on winxp foxnews.com looks just like the epiphany shot, the second shot you posted looks like you’ve just upscaled it.
edit: looking at the shots again it’s like the browsers are using different dpi’s for their text rendering (assuming you haven’t changed default font size or some such in Firefox). also the hinting looks pretty awful on the epiphany shot, while the larger (and better hinted) font rendering of the firefox shot seems to stretch the image cells making the pictures look ugly.
Edited 2008-04-03 22:15 UTC
Try pressing Ctrl+0 to reset zoom to 100%.
You’ve got some kind of scaling going on, either in your OS, or in Firefox because it doesn’t look like that for me on defaults.
I’ve begun to notice a pattern in the comments though – everybody having some kind of problem with Firefox is using Linux. Maybe the port is lagging behind?
people mod me down cause i have a problem with firefox. god these OSS nazi’s never cease to amaze me. Hurry mod me down before people here something isn’t perfect.
anyway. I scaled it down and the text is still cut off but the fonts are no tiny and unreadable. the fonts are serif and monospace. Min font size is set to 10 (also tried up to 14)
I found your original post rather hilarious, as Epiphany is using the exact same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is (well, an older version). There is, by definition, nothing it can do that Firefox can’t as far as rendering is concerned.
Looking at those pictures, it appears that Firefox is either using a different font or a larger size for some reason. Or maybe it’s just some sort of bug causing that. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Linux version is lagging behind the Windows/Mac ports, because they’ve really been focusing on those lately.
I can’t see why you would get modded down. that said I think the problem lies with the hinting and a badly formatted webpage. looking at the epiphany shot the hinting is awful but it helps squeezing the text together so that much more fits into the visible cell space.
I took a firefox 3 beta 5 screenshot from my xubuntu installation:
http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/6629/foxnewsow1.png
and here I have the pretty much the same font size as in your epiphany shot but with more readable hinting (wider spacing) on the text and as such it doesn’t fit into the cell. again, I’d mainly chalk this up to very bad formatting on the original webpage, like in the following blurb “Sophie Monk, who dated Paris Hilton’s beau, OK with nude scenes in new Winona Ryder movie”, the word ‘movie’ isn’t visible in either the epiphany shot you showed nor is it visible under Firefox on WinXP.
Strange; the rendering looks about the same for me than FF2 on the sites I frequent…
Fast, really fast, stable, low memory usage, easy to use.
Mozilla are stuffing a firecracker down the pants of the Internet and are about to let it off.
Extension compatibility may hold you back, but I would definitely recommend that people download and use Beta5. I’ve been using Ff3 as my full-time browser since b2 and it’s rock-solid and any drawbacks as a beta are far outweighed by the gain in speed.
I just downloaded the beta and compared them memory-wise on a winxp home machine. I opened the following pages in each browser and checked the memory usage (note! no flash installed and only addon installed is noscript, which worked fine with beta 5):
http://www.osnews.com
http://www.zbrushcentral.com
http://www.conceptart.org
http://www.cgtalk.com
http://www.haiku-os.org
Firefox 2.0.0.13 – 42160 kb
Firefox 3 beta 5 – 43096 kb
so in this simple test there were no real differences in memory usage. of the pages I visited all rendered fine in beta 5, could those who complains about badly rendered pages please post some examples?
The memory improvements I’ve seen come from extended usage. With FF2, a day of hard browsing could see the memory spiral up to 400MB or worse, with a restart being the only way to recover that mess. FF3 seems to consistently snap back to around 100MB for me.
Mozilla are stuffing a firecracker down the pants of the Internet and are about to let it off.
So, what you are trying to say is we all better hold on tight since we (men) are about to lose our nads? Mm, perhaps not quite the analogy you were looking for.
maybe the assumption is that the internet is not masculine?
I’d assume a crotch-proximal explosion would be damaging and undesirable regardless of gender.
I can’t understand why everyone thinks the f3 betas are so fast. I have tried them on both windows and ubuntu, and they are quite a bit more sluggish than f2.
In ubuntu there is a noticable lag when switching tabs. I really hope that it is due to some extra bug-checking in the compilation. There shouldn’t be lag in a webbrowser running on an AMD X2-4600 with 2gb of RAM. Not until 2011 or so.
Also, the rendering of many sites has become worse.
I have the same problem on Fedora 8: slow tag switches.
Maybe Windows users like Kroc can use it regularly, but for the rest of us it really does remain beta software. 🙁
(Edit: removed erroneous claim of a bug.)
Edited 2008-04-04 18:47 UTC
I’m on a Mac, where the gains appear to be the largest.
b4 and b5 have some major redraw issues when I try using netvibes.com. Not just the browser part, but the whole application window screws up and then randomly fixes itself. It’s completely unusable.
I really like the interface and other changes though.
I’ve been using Firefox 3 since beta 3. The betas are very stable and have no noticeable interface glitches. I have run across some site compatibility problems, the worst of which is my online bank account, which works with Firefox 2 but fails to login with Firefox 3. I can’t notice any difference in speed or memory consumption, both seem marginally poor.
Mostly, things work almost perfectly, but Adobe Shockwave support is at the pathetic end of the spectrum and the Mac OS X versions loops infinitely when accessing the Help menu on Leopard.
It’s much faster on Mac OS X but the Windows version doesn’t seem faster at all. Memory usage is stable.
Even bookmark management is progressing since they added drag-and-drop operations.
The nightly builds have been good but I’m still not ready to use it for everything. The June release date doesn’t seem so far away anyway.
Actually it is, maybe not in the plain rendering pipeline , but javascript definitely is faster, I do complex javascript programming, and subjectively my programs were running five times faster on fox 3 than fox 2.
Ok for a normal html page this makes no difference but if you have a complex ajax framework this makes a huge difference.
I’m running the latest nightly build (a couple of days ahead of the beta 5 release) and it is progressing very well. I thought that maybe Safari would get its act together in regards to improving compatibility with Google, such as Blogspot and support for RichText boxes where currently the copy and paste don’t work properly.
Oh well, I’m excited about this release, and hopefully they’ll continue to put bug fixes and Acid3 compliance ahead of ‘getting it out on time’. Better to have a stable, reliable and fast browser than one which has been rushed out.