back to article Mozilla delays third Firefox 3.1 beta

Mozilla Corporation has pushed back the release of the third, and possibly final, beta for Firefox 3.1 by a week to allow the firm to fix some bugs in the upcoming version of its open source browser. The beta had been expected to land on 26 January, but Mozilla has delayed the release to 2 February to allow it time to fix some …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Laundry List

    I hope the new Firefox is going to be good because quite frankly for me at least it's popularity has closely tracked a Q-Curve with it's peak now a long way in the distant past.

    Right now on my PC Firefox is using over 200MB of RAM with 13 tabs and Internet Explorer is using 2.6MB with 2 tabs open - I actually switch back to Internet Explorer to do some quick task - what a stupid situation. Fix it!

  2. Klaus

    @AC

    "Right now on my PC Firefox is using over 200MB of RAM with 13 tabs and Internet Explorer is using 2.6MB with 2 tabs open - I actually switch back to Internet Explorer to do some quick task - what a stupid situation. Fix it!"

    While I agree that Firefox does have a memory leak problem, how on earth does your IE only use 2.6 MB?? Mine uses 25 MB with zero tabs open.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Memory requirements != utilisation

    I'm no fan-boi, but it really hacks me off when people look at RAM utilisation. It's a GOOD thing its using lots - keeping all those tabs in nice fast RAM, ready to show them when you want. If you start having contention, a good app will reduce its demands as needed. What's the point in having gigs of the stuff if you never fill it?

    Unused memory is wasted memory.

  4. Si
    Happy

    I don't care how much RAM Firefox uses...

    ... it's still a million times more useful than IE, Safari or Chrome in my book. The only feature I wish it had is the resizable textareas that Safari has.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Comparison

    I closed both and then opened them. Both with one tab and both using the URL to the comments page for this story.

    FF with 16 plugins (AdBlock, NoScript, FireGestures, IETab etc): 81mb

    IE with IE7Pro, no other plug-ins: 40mb

    Can the 40mb be explained away by all the plug-ins? Possibly, but I have seen FF suck down well over 300mb and the crashes are getting more and more frequent. The plug-ins or FireFox are seriously memory hungry/flaky; either way, Mozilla need to sort it pronto. They are getting their bitch well slapped by the MS boys.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Most important question:

    Will they have finally provided an option to get rid of the crappy new address bar and resource wastes?

  7. Rick Stockton
    Go

    @AC

    Could you PLEASE, PLEASE post the urls of your 13 tabs? I'm a "volunteer tester" of 3.1, and I'd like to check whether my "test" builds suffers from the leak you're having on an older Firefox. It's 3.0.5, right? (or "by design" high memory consumption, still a problem) you're having.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Meh

    Still sticking with Firefox 2 until there's a built-in way to turn off some of the new UI rubbish and bookmarks go back to being stored in a sane file format. Or, I guess, until I can no longer get AdBlock and NoScript for it, those being the only things that make the internet usable anymore.

    "No matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it." - Alan Cooper

  9. analytik
    Stop

    learn to use Process Explorer

    IE can't use 2.6MB to operate. That's just plain old horseshit.

    Anyway, more people should use nightlies - they wouldn't have to worry about delayed betas, right?

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Lingo?

    >> “P1” is Mozilla lingo for the worst offending glitches

    And "Code slip"?

    I suppose that is lingo for that time when the words and lines on the screen start to fall into a heap at the bottom of the display and have to be put back into place, letter by letter?

    Bullshit.

  11. Robert Dorrian
    Stop

    @Meh: Turn off unwanted features

    You can turn off the features you don't want!

    in about:config

    set browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to 0

    set browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML to true

    done

    :p

  12. Jacob Reid
    Jobs Horns

    @ anon 'meh'

    I am in exactly the same position.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Windows Memory Management

    I love it when people start quoting memory usage in Windows. I never ever see where the poster gets the figures they are quoting. I’m going to assume it’s from the Task Manager. I have to tell you that is has next to bugger all to do with the amount of memory a program is using in Windows.

    I’m writing this in Word 2000 on XP Pro SP3. Currently, Task Manager is reporting 11,998 K used by Word. If I minimise Word’s window, Task Manager shows a figure of 1,044 K. I restore the window and I’m showing 3,114K used.

    I’ve tried to get my head around how Windows allocates memory to processes and I’m sure I have not yet understood all of it.

    What I think happens is that Windows treats all free memory as a resource to be used. For instance, Windows has just loaded and is as idle as it can be. The user runs an app that displays “Hello, World” in a window. Windows takes a look at how much free ram there is and allocates a wad of it to the new process.

    Windows does not know that the app will only need enough ram to display “Hello, World” so it takes a look at the free memory it has and allocates what it sees as a chunk of memory that will be enough for it, plus an extra amount. How this is worked out is beyond me, I just know that’s what Windows does. And it will take away the allocated memory as memory uses increases.

    This makes sense, since the app could ask for more memory and get a constant block of memory, rather than a few K here, a few K there. Also bare in mind that ram is the fastest medium available in a PC, so it should be exploited more than a swap file for example.

    But it does lead people to believe that a process is consuming a large amount of ram when all that has happened is that Windows has given a large amount of ram to it.

    Comparisons of ram usage between Windows and other operating systems are really not valid since the way they allocate memory is likely to be totally different.

    I’m not against comparisons, I really don’t give a shit if one O/S is better than another, as long as the person making the comparison has a thorough knowledge of what they are comparing.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Re: Comparison

    "IE with IE7Pro, no other plug-ins: 40mb"

    What you have to remember that doesn't include all the library files that has loaded which are part of its integration into the OS. What you have to do is:

    boot up and wait for things to settle

    look at total memory usage

    fire up IE and finish loading up

    look at total memory usage again

    work out the difference between the two measurements

    Then shutdown, boot up and do the same for Firefox.

  15. Neil Stansbury
    Thumb Down

    Hmm...

    ["That declaration came after the company royally hacked off users with the 3.0 launch when servers collapsed under the “strain” of its much-hyped Download Day PR stunt to score a Guinness World Record."]

    Er... no... that declaration came after v3 had massive code base changes and bust tons of developer extensions (ours included). It was nothing whatsoever to do with their so called "PR stunt".

  16. Jacob Reid
    Flame

    @Robert

    That URL bar improvement is well known, except it still searches in titles, still searches bookmarks, still searches from the middle of a URL rather than just the start (e.g. if I type google then I would expect it to match google.co.uk and not a website with google in the middle of the URL, or in the title)

  17. Stuart Halliday
    Flame

    Provide features the user wants?

    I just hope the Firefox 3.1 team fix the Bookmark and History system.

    Last time I looked at 3.1 beta it couldn't do Bookmark organisation and its History system still couldn't show me the URLs I looked at yesterday. 3.0 can't do this simple task. But oddly IE7 can.

    Why it can't have an icon you click on to see all pages looked at yesterday is beyond me.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What I want to know is...

    ...why on my 4gb machine windows only shows 3gb.

    Can't XP address more than 3gb?

    And if it has allocated 1gb, I'd like to know what has it!

  19. Doug Glass
    Go

    @ Rick Stockton

    I'm with Stuart Halliday... fix the frelling bookmarks. For me this sours the ENTIRE Firefox experience without regard to ofter frakkups.

  20. paul
    Heart

    love the fox.

    Yes it uses a lot of my RAM but I want it to.

    My computer doesn't do anything else apart from surf the web and play a few MP3s. I've had the same firefox session open for a few weeks at a time no problems. Not had any websites that render badly for years now.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Provide features the user wants?

    >I just hope the Firefox 3.1 team fix the Bookmark and History system.

    >Last time I looked at 3.1 beta it couldn't do Bookmark organisation and its History system still

    >couldn't show me the URLs I looked at yesterday. 3.0 can't do this simple task. But oddly IE7 can.

    >

    >Why it can't have an icon you click on to see all pages looked at yesterday is beyond me.

    You mean like the "History" button that you drag into your "Toolbar" and then organise by day that has been there since...well always?

  22. Doug Glass
    Go

    Anonymous Coward

    How about the ability to save bookmarks without having to backup to a .json file, or some such silly maneuver, every time you add one you'd like to keep. Is that a legitimate request in your imminence's realm?

  23. ZM

    Two things...

    "“P1” is Mozilla lingo for the worst offending glitches that remain unsolved in its browser."

    Hardly.

    P1 through P5 are priority codes used in Bugzilla (for example) to track severity of bugs, with P1 being "show stoppers" and P5 being "we might get around to fixing it if we run out of beer and have nothing else to do".

    " ...why on my 4gb machine windows only shows 3gb.

    Can't XP address more than 3gb?

    And if it has allocated 1gb, I'd like to know what has it!"

    Pretty sure it can only address 3.5gb of it, since that's all that shows on my XP machine with 4gb of RAM.

  24. James Robinson

    Resizable text areas

    Re: Si "I don't care how much RAM Firefox uses."

    Resizable text areas are available in firefox as an extension which i've been using for ages without a hitch - strangely enough, its called resizable textareas - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3818

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