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firefox 3 is in beta

silverwhisper posted on Nov 20, 2007 | views: 398 | Tags: firefox, web browsers, OSS, technology, safari, Internet Explorer, Mozilla
courtesy of slashdot...

short version: firefox 3 is in beta and while still a beta, apparently kicks butt. long version here.

commentary:

as regards the current version…

reviewer adrian kingsley-hughes quoth:
i’m not a big firefox user because i find the memory management to be very poor most of the time and the spiraling memory consumption affects both firefox’s performance and the overall performance of my systems. i like firefox but firefox just doesn’t like me, so, while i have it installed on most systems, i mostly use internet explorer 7 and opera for day to day browsing. every time i say this i’m faced by a chorus of users telling me that there’s no problem with the way that firefox handles memory, but this isn’t what i’m seeing. when a browser starts to edge near to consuming 500mb of ram on a regular basis, something is wrong. sure, i hammer the browser and have dozens of pages open at a time, but since both IE and opera can handle this load, i expect firefox to do so too. so far, it can’t, and because of that the icon doesn’t get clicked on that often.

i’ll confess, i’ve had the same experiences as kingsley-hughes, but according to this reviewer, those issues have been addressed: it’s faster, more stable and has a smaller footprint. considering that it’s OSS, i really want to give it another shot when it’s formally released.

ed

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Comments

  • bloc said on Nov 20, 2007....
    i'm already trying it out :)
  • the_infernal_optimist said on Nov 20, 2007....
    Wait...Firefox without its memory-hogging tendencies??

    That really would be the perfect browser. Must.check.out. :-D

    ~Infernal
  • bloc said on Nov 20, 2007....
    these days I use safari for normal browsing (it's faster and lighter) and firefox when I'm doing web development. But, I'm not sure how well Safari works on windows. Anyone tried safari on windows? Ed?
  • cakebottom said on Nov 20, 2007....
    *is excited*
  • Antimatter said on Nov 20, 2007....
    I use Safari on Windows. It works decently enough, though the Apple UI looks rather out-of-place, and it has odd changes to make it work in a Windows environment. (e.g. close buttons, menu bar, etc)
  • silverwhisper said on Nov 20, 2007....
    bloc: i'm most curious to know your impressions. i've never had occasion to be dissatisfied with opera, and wasn't aware that safari was ported to windows, actually. i'll go check that out! :>

    infernal: i was thinking the same thing. :D

    cb: yeah, me too! :>

    antimatter: for how long have you been using safari?

    ed
  • TinSoldier said on Nov 20, 2007....
    I might need to check it out...
  • Antimatter said on Nov 20, 2007....

    Silverwhisper: I’ve been using Safari since they released the beta for version 3. I use it daily on my Mac. On Windows, which I use much less frequently for web browsing, I alternate between Firefox and Safari.

    I have Opera on both computers too. It’s a good browser, but I don’t care much for its UI, particularly the side panels. (I dislike them in IE and Firefox too.) I just checked, and they had a new version, so I’ll give Opera credit for improving the appearance of the tabs on Mac OS from “horrid” to “passable.” :-)

  • dazed_and_confused said on Nov 20, 2007....
    hi ed. Thanks for the heads up. Well, I hope it has the same debugging features for  web sites which I truly need. I'm going to try it out.

    Thanks and cheers.

    dazed
  • travelr712 said on Nov 20, 2007....
    I've been an IE man since v2. I never really played much with safari, but last summer i gave firefox a real shakedown. i used it on all my computers for 4 months. frankly, i didn't see that it was superior to IE. it had a couple features that made browsing a little easier, but then IE had a couple that are superior to firefox. It seems to me that IE just works better with the winxp environment than firefox. some programmers i talked to swear by firefox because they say it handles their php code better (i.e. with fewer lines of code), and there's a slight advantage with activex commands. a few others that swear by firefox are total anti-bill gates (which is strange because they're s3k admins!), so i don't take them that seriously. myself, i mostly just think the ui is sharper and easier to read, and it seems to not have the tendancy of firefox to start off fast and end up slow, it's consistant.
  • Pontius_Pilate said on Nov 20, 2007....
    Like most, I used IE for quite some time. Someone finally turned me on to Opera. Used it a bit for some time, but it was too buggy for me. Seemed like about half the pages I would try to go to, just wouldn't load right. It did however have a few things that I loved. Tabs (tab memory), dragging (mouse click n drag) and the browser bar just to name a few.
    Someone then told me about Firefox. Been using it ever since.
    While there is an occasion where it has problems with a website, it is rare and far between.
    As for the memory leak problem, guess I don't really worry about it too often having 2 gigs of memory. :shrug: If I notice it starting to get up a bit, I just restart it. Which I might do once a week.
    My only problem with a new version, is having to wait for all the extensions to get updated for the new version. That can be a serious pain once you've gotten used to using this extension or that extension. lol
    Guess once they get the extensions I used fixed up, odds are I'll be switching over again. ^_^
  • bloc said on Nov 20, 2007....
    "i talked to swear by firefox because they say it handles their php code better"

    It's the CSS that it handles better. CSS is a standard and firefox follows the standards better than IE. There are two reasons that people speculate for MS not making IE follow the standards better.

    1. They want control and in the past felt their monopoly gave them the leverage to impose their will and override any standard.

    2. They are afraid of web applications becoming too good and threatening their desktop monopoly. I tend to believe this. Once they got IE to be 90+% of the market they completely stopped working on it for years. It seems that IE 7 didn't get any serious effort until Firefox and started to threaten IE's dominance.
  • crybabylu said on Nov 20, 2007....
    I use internet explorer
  • travelr712 said on Nov 20, 2007....
    bloc - one of the programmers that i stood and watched over his shoulder as he coded php for firefox was the one that told me.
  • Antimatter said on Nov 21, 2007....

    IE 7 has improved its handling of CSS significantly for pages rendered in compliance mode. Unfortunately, version 6, which is still the most common of the two, is downright incompatible with web standards that are approaching a decade old, particularly XHTML, CSS 2, and the DOM. Even standards as simple as the XHTML MIME type and an XML prolog will break XHTML pages in IE 6. The only solution is to write code forks that shelter IE6 from standards-compliant code, and those annoy web developers to this day.

  • travelr712 said on Nov 21, 2007....
    well, i'm a server and scripting guy, i'm not much on web development, but i can tell you both are, so i'll take your words for it.

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