Firefox 3 hits beta
Firefox 3 has hit beta, and it turns out I’m not the only one who likes it. There are definitely still bugs though, so download it if you’d like your browsing to be more interesting. The worst thing is probably the Firebug, every web developer’s favourite extension, is buggy under Firefox 3. Even if you run Firebug 1.1 beta (downloadable from this sketchy site or from the project’s svn repository) the live CSS editing doesn’t work right.
Nov 21 2007
7:25 am
I used the beta as a chance to try it out again. The latest builds consume infinite CPU on my system. And, in a twist that made me laugh, they cause Spin Control to… well, spin.
Nov 21 2007
7:38 am
Sigh. It’s amazing that all these years later, Firefox is so fundamentally broken on the Mac. It seems like Mozilla has implemented (for instance) their own custom algorithm for determining how fast the window should scroll in response to the mouse wheel. The result is not a “slower” or “faster” scroll, it’s a scroll that is slower in some circumstances and faster in others. It’s the kind of thing that’s noticed on a subliminal level.
You might wondering why I’m complaining about scroll speed. It’s because once I had a build that didn’t immediately crash (hah!), the very first thing I did (after waiting a ridiculous amount of time for Firefox to start) was load up a page and try to scroll down it.
Nov 21 2007
11:54 am
It takes about 3 or 4 seconds to launch on my machine (not that I close it, generally.) The scrolling thing is really weird though – I noticed it too. It seems that the scrolling decelerates when you get to the top or bottom, rather than stopping abruptly. It bothered me at first too, I’m not sure why they did that.
Nov 21 2007
12:11 pm
Broken Firebug?
*cries*
Nov 21 2007
12:27 pm
I know, it’s tragic. When I get 10.5 installed, I’ll be trying out Safari 3 with its new Web Inspector, which might be competitive. We’ll see.
Nov 21 2007
2:52 pm
Steven Fisher,
I think we’ve got to the root of the problem that you and some other Firefox 3 Beta 1 testers are seeing.
Starting yesterday, we began receiving reports, like yours, of a new memory/cpu usage issue that happens shortly after a normal startup and can spike the CPU and chew up hundreds of MB of RAM. This is apparently happening to people with new profiles or in profiles that have a very outdated list of bad sites for the Phishing Protection feature and the Malware Protection feature.
What’s going on is that soon after Firefox is started, Firefox tries to fetch updates to the site forgery and malware lists — the lists of bad sites that allows Firefox to warn users about suspected Phishing and Attack sites. If the profile has very outdated or no local lists, as is the case for a new Firefox profile, Firefox is trying to bring down these rather large lists in one big chunk rather than slowly in small chunks. This causes Firefox to consume large amounts of CPU and memory and can slow the users machine to a crawl.
This problem is due to the change in the “SafeBrowsing Protocol” which only affects Firefox 3 Beta 1 and nightly build users. If you’re on Firefox 2, this isn’t going to affect you.
The work-around for this problem was for us to throttle it on the server side. We’ve done that and if you try Firefox 3 Beta 1 again, it should be fine.
- A
Nov 21 2007
3:44 pm
Wow, we’re famous! Thanks for the update, Asa.
Nov 22 2007
10:26 pm
I was quite enjoying the new features at work – everything was flawless from the start for me.
Then I got to the home PC and it all fell apart.
I’m guessing the SQL stuff for the Bookmarks, History, etc is not working because not only can I not load bookmarks, or view my history, but I can’t even press the back or forward buttons. Good grief.