Firefox 4 Aims: Empowering, Powerful, Faster

[engine]

Firefox 4 Aims: Empowering, Powerful, Faster [beltzner.ca]

Today, I presented an early product plan for Firefox 4 to the Mozilla community (live, over the web!) to share our vision for the next version of Firefox, and what projects are underway to realize it. Then I invited everyone to get involved by joining our engineering or product development efforts.

The primary goals for Firefox 4 will be making a browser:

•Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
•Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
•Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.
Usually software producers don’t present these sorts of plans in public until they’re finalized, but Mozilla is a little different. We work in the open, socializing our plans early and often to gather feedback and build excitement in our worldwide community.

[mlemos]

Chrome is based on Chromium. Whoever doubts of user good intentions can always compile Chromium from source. It will not have H.264 video codec support, which Chrome has and Firefox doesn't, but it will work.

Anyway, most of the claims of privacy invasion of Chrome are things meant to improve user experience and can be disabled in the Chrome options.

[honestman]

I was long a huge Firefox advocate and user, but with the most recent versions, memory leakage and flat-out resource usage has made using it almost impossible for any length of time before a reboot is required on my computers. I use Chrome now 95% of the time as it is faster, though I use FF when I want to use the fine extensions provided and which did spoil me.

I have installed, reinstalled, and have the same issue on multiple computers, but I understand here that others do not have such issues. I guess my top-of-the-line workstations might be the issue...

Too bad, I hope FF4 fixes the issue--especially the memory leakage issue which I have noted for years, and which may be the fault of one or more add-ons, though I have disabled/enabled those as well to no avail.

Everything was fine before FF 3.6 for me (again, apart from the memory leakage, which made FF easily consume more than a gig of memory and made keystrokes move at a snail's pace after a few hours of intense usage).

[Fotiman]

For me it's "inspect element" locate style rules in CSS files

The Developer Tools in Chrome has this functionality. :)

[bill]

If you're concerned about the privacy issues with Chrome check out the new kid on the block: Comodo Dragon Internet Browser [webmasterworld.com]

[disgust]

More importantly, just from an efficiency POV, who closes their browsers anymore?

I don't, which is why I can't stand firefox.

I can go a week without closing a browser (or I'd like to be able to..) but then firefox will end up using well over a gigabyte of ram. That in and of itself is not that bad. But it starts to go really, really slow. Despite tons more ram being free.

Beyond that, if you close all your windows/tabs save a few (think close 50 tabs, keep 3 open), NONE of that memory use goes away. It will only go away if you close ALL of them.

I love firefox's ui, but it's so damn so I can't stand it. If they could fix this and make it be as speedy or effecient as opera or chrome, I'd be using it in a heartbeat

[honestman]

@disgust

Nice to hear someone who shares my experience. So many are saying it is my hardware, OS, etc, but I have three high-end workstations and two high-end laptops, and they all have the same issues.

Why the ridiculous memory/resource leakage? Everything else is so clever...

[grelmar]

but then firefox will end up using well over a gigabyte of ram.

Even at it's worst, I've never seen FF get that bad, although I believe that it does happen, if for no other reason than I've heard it reported so often.

Out of curiosity, what plugins are you using? What's the use case?

You mention having up to 50 tabs open, and I think the most I'll hit is about 25, 30 on the extreme side of things. I wonder if there's a "tipping point" of open tabs that things just start to go on a runaway...

[kaled]

I run Firefox in a pretty minimal configuration. The only non-standard additions are a dictionary and flashblock yet I have seen memory leaks and pauses many times.

I presume that all extensions allocate memory through Firefox rather than directly through the Windows API, this being the case, if an extension were to blame, basic debugging would find the culprit. Mozilla may be comfortable blaming others but, one way or another, the memory leak is their responsibility and it's been around for ages.

As for the pause bug, it is clear that a task that should be assigned to an idle-priority thread is running in the main thread - that's a rookie mistake that could be fixed in a few minutes.

Kaled.