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Mozilla ships first public beta of Firefox 3

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

November 20, 2007, 11:52 AM

Bugs or not, Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 3 Beta 1, the first public step towards the next significant release of the alternative browser.

The new version of Firefox is running about a quarter behind schedule, and has most recently been a target of criticism over its handling of bugs. While the company maintains that such concerns are overblown, it does appear the most significant issues have been addressed.

Even so, the release notes show some problematic bugs. Neither the new Yahoo Mail nor Windows Live mail will work in the release, and the malware protection blacklist is inoperable. Google Maps prints turn-by-turn directions incorrectly, and in Windows, .WMA and .WMV files do not run properly.

"These beta releases are targeted to Web developers and our testing community to gain feedback before advancing to the next stage in the release process," Mozilla said. "The final version of Firefox 3 will be released when we qualify the product as fully ready for our users."

Mozilla plans to add additional features in future betas, and said to expect this first beta to be "a bit rough around the edges."

Specifically, Mozilla is looking for feedback in the areas of new security features, and ease-of-use functionality. It would also like to hear what users think of its new personalization options and platform features, and improvements to the browser's performance.

New features include: malware protection, anti-virus integration to the download list, full page zoom, easier add-on installation, one-click bookmarking, better rendering architecture, and faster page loading.

More information can be found on the Mozilla Developer Blog. A final release date for Firefox 3 has still not been specified, although many are expecting it to come in the first quarter of next year if the betas go smoothly.

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By ShawnOster

edited Nov 20, 2007 - 1:25 PM

Interesting now that Firefox is becoming a more mature product it's following in the footsteps of Internet Explorer; delayed ship date, expected release with large number of known bugs, decisions being driven by not just the developers but market pressures.

It's a great product but interesting that many of the criticisms leveled at the IE dev team are now being experienced by FF.

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 12:24 PM

Used it for a day.

So far I love the changes, and the memory footprint was about 60% less than version 2. I'll be upgrading the day of its release. GG Mozilla!

Score: 0

By fudgetunnel

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:37 AM

Persevered with it for a few hours and now back to 2.0.0.9.

The problem for me was extensions. The only one that worked out of the box was Adblock, and I can actually live without it. The most important for me is TabMix Plus. Firefox really needs it to be workable for me. I like to be able to close left tabs, and right tabs from the tab context menu, close tab from mouse context menu, and to force all tabs into one Window. Firefox should offer those as standard options. In fact, Firefox is a little underfeatured this far on in its development cycle relying way too much on third party add-ons that most people probably don't know about, and even less have the time to fish around and experiment with.

Score: 0

By azimov

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:46 AM

If you get the following add-on 'nightly Tester tools' this will make most add-ons compatible. I wouldn't expect many add-ons to be quite upto speed with updating their add-ons.

Score: 0

By sturgess

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:17 AM

Crashed my computer with-in 30 secs. had to reboot, and then half of my desktop stuff was missing. Firewall, anti-virus gone, computer frozen solid, had to unplug and start over again. Computer slow, tried defrag. files in a mess had to get that sorted, took several hours to get things back to normal. It may be just me but something went wrong. I use alpha and beta all the time. I also use Opera, Firefox and I.E.7, this disaster was a first for me, any thoughts appreciated. Done all the usual spy-ware, virus checks by the way.

Score: 0

By flibberyGiveIt

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 1:57 PM

-shrug- That's a risk with beta software.
What I liked about Win 98 was I knew how to make
a real back up of it. If it messed with me like
that I'd just boot from a floppy, format C:\
and type in e:\c.exe and in about half an hour
I'd have 98 back up complete with pointers to
things like d:\data\desktop.

Score: 0

By azimov

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:34 AM

I've been using the pre-alpha's for the past 6 months and now the beta, I've never had an issue that caused my PC to crash, Firefox crashing yes, PC no. To take down both your firewall and AV, looks to me as if you had something else running that caused that.

I do really like the Places feature, which is where you bookmarks, history are viewable from one location also all cookies, bookmarks are now kept in SQlite databases. I like it very much. Not quite my main browser yet, but not far from becoming it.

Score: 0

By Neogx

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 1:10 AM

Betas r betas.. i can understand the criticism if it was the official release then ppl have the right to be pissed. they r trying new things out of course its going to be buggy in the beginning. i know Mozilla ppl r working on it to.. sooo. thats all i got to say. at least they update WAY WAY faster then IE7 and actually have a better features

Score: 0

By Aires

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 4:41 AM

Spot on.

Score: 0

By DZNetworks

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 12:12 AM

Uninstalled within ten minutes.

Score: 0

By shicaca

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 12:09 AM

I'm watching vids on youtube, searching, and doing other things on my computer no problem.

Firefox has always been a hog slightly, but with all the add-ons disabled (obviously haven't been updated yet for the new version) it's running at 80MB w/ a vid, 2 instances, and 2 tabs with the one that's running the vid. MUCH more responsive than FFX2 so far.

Score: 0

By crashoverride

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 11:49 PM

Opera..........12MB
Firefox2.......64MB (and climbing)
Firefox3.......62MB (holding steady)
IE7............88MB

No I can see where Opera reigns in memory usage but what I don't see is where people keep saying Firefox uses this awful amount more than IE7. To me it looks like it's the opposite. Having checked out the latest version of Opera I will say that it blows IE and Firefox out of the water on speed as well. Opera maybe better but I chose to continue supporting Mozilla and FF. I believe they have potential, much more potential than IE and that with time and a lot of work FF will be on Opera's level of memory usage and speed.

Score: 0

By Jordanr05

edited Nov 21, 2007 - 2:46 PM

Not sure how the hell you're getting Opera's foot print so low. On Win XP Sp2 it opens using 29MB of memory. After loading up betanews and games.ign.com (just the homepage - media intensive), memory shot up to 89MB.

Doing the same on FF3, memory went to 51MB. Once ign is closed however, Opera memory usage drops off dramatically.

Sitting on betanews only (closed the tabs), FF3 is at 41MB, Opera at 28MB. Definite improvement for Mozilla.

Everyone will get different results it looks like.

Score: 0

By crashoverride

edited Nov 21, 2007 - 7:25 PM

Not sure myself, opened 6 tabs all on the same sites in each browser and this is what process explorer shows as the usage for each of the 4. I'm running Win XP Pro x64 edition but I wouldn't think that would make a difference. Guess just different usage depending on the power of ones machine.

Score: 0

By flake

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 2:32 PM

Try using mozilla products for a several days, particularly on sites with lots of scripting without restarting the browser. This, in my experience, is where the RAM issue really comes out.

Usually it isn't out of control with just a few hours or even couple days usage.

(posted from seamonkey 1.1.6 using 87MB Private Bytes after 2 days)

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 12:28 PM

I say this over and over again: Provide a simple method of blocking ads on Opera and I'm there. Currently the method to use is a PITA and not worth the effort.

Score: 0

By sturgess

edited Nov 21, 2007 - 6:30 AM

Never seen the problem with memory usage as something to worry about, if you've got it use it, you saving it for a rainy day or something. My problem with Opera is CPU hitting 100% and then refusing to give it back when it's closed, also have the same problem to a lesser extent with Firefox, never yet with I.E.7.

Score: 0

By mdotwills

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 2:02 AM

Thanks for that crashoverride, I never knew Opera was so small and efficient when it comes to memory footprints!

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:12 PM

Quite impressed. Generally more responsive than FF2, and actually seems more stable than it's predecessor despite still being in beta. The issues with Digg.com seem resolved too - regardless of whether it was Mozilla's or Digg's fault originally. :p

Only issue I've had so far is it seems a little slower to load - but perhaps that's due to some incompatible extensions. That said, Adblock+ still works. :)

Score: 0

By yountmj

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 12:35 AM

"That said, Adblock+ still works."

That's all I needed to hear. Downloading it now. :)

Score: 0

By ZenWarrior

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 6:48 PM

This version is far beyond buggy. It's complete crap. I thought I'd installed spyware on my computer. It was using 500+ MB of memory and making my PC entirely unresponsive. Promptly uninstalled as soon as I wrestled control of my computer back.

This version forced me to use IE7 to a significant extent for the very first time. Bad news for Firefox because I'll not bother to reinstall it. I found I liked IE7 better!

Score: 0

By Morsel

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:14 PM

erhh...even Opera blows away IE7...what a dreadful piece of junk that IE7.

Score: 0

By sturgess

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:23 AM

Just your view, I like it and have tried them all, Opera, Firefox, K-meleon and the only one that has never crashed in the last year is I.E.7. Trouble is too many folk use it and the baddies target it.

Score: 0

By The MAZZTer

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:45 PM

I'm not sure if websites not working can be classified as bugs... you'd have to look at each on a case by case basis and judge whether it's the website's fault or Firefox. But, to be fair, at least some or most are probably Firefox's fault and we will see these fixed before the final release.

I don't know where you get the malware protection being inoperable. The test page linked to from the release notes works fine. I tend to actually stay away from real malware sites so I can't really vouch for "in the field" testing.

.WMA and .WMV support is provided by a Microsoft plugin. There is a Mozilla plugin included with Firefox but I don't think it has really worked well. I have yet to test MS' plugin with FF3 (it was made for FF2).

My favorite features so far are the new stylings for file:// and ftp:// browsing... and the online zip browsing feature (prepend "jar:" to a url and append "!/"... you can browse zips and download individual files... I'm not sure if it just downloads the whole thing first but I don't think it does).

Score: 0

By Lil Alien

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:21 PM

I also agree with that memory issue.. Even if I don't load a page with movies or anything (just a couple open tabs, close one, open maybe 2 more, close 1, then maybe open another single tab as a real world example, just some news sites and gmail), the memory use just keeps rising throughout the day.. I'll be using 80 meg here, than I'll find it goes to 248 damn megs! I have a 4 gig ram Core 2 Duo on Windows Vista Ultimate (but it does the same thing on XP SP2) fresh installs. I can reproduce at anytime. Fix!

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:12 PM

Vista caches more than Firefox, so what are you complaining about? At least it's quick to restart FF, unlike Vista. :P

Score: 0

By Lil Alien

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:18 PM

Does Firefox 3.0 finally fix the damn "incomplete alt text" bug that has been in Firefox forever and always claimed to be fixed in a "future trunk"?

When mouse-overing an image with alt text, it cuts off the text after a certain amount of characters where other browsers do not do this.

Score: 0

By The MAZZTer

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:38 PM

Yes. xkcd.com now has wrapping tooltips. :p

Score: 0

By smith288

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 3:47 PM

They shouldnt release squat until the memory leak is fixed. They should drop everything and fix that before moving on the adding a goofy star in the URL box.

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:16 PM

It's not a memory leak. If you think it is, you fail to understand exactly what a memory leak is.

There is, however, a memory fragmentation problem on some installs. But it doesn't really affect performance significantly (at least within FF) and can be fixed just by re-opening the program. I think a lot of the problems occur when using Flash websites - turn off Flash and the problem goes away.

Score: 0

By The MAZZTer

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:39 PM

They fixed over 300 memory leaks so far since Firefox 2.

Score: 0

By Dreimanis

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 1:54 AM

not the right ones obviously. i think there is probably the whole xul technoloy at fault.

Score: 0

By morriscox

posted Nov 22, 2007 - 12:47 AM

Do you know what XUL is? XML ring a bell? :)

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 3:45 PM

needs adblock or i stick w/ 2.x

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:16 PM

Adblock Plus works.

Score: 0

By frankwick

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 2:53 PM

I've been run nightlies for months. I don't think you 2.x people will notice much of anything new. "Places" is the most apparent and I haven't used it to "tag"or "star" pages much. What you will notice is that is loads slower than 2.x. It is still a memory hog.

If IE7 had someone of the nice FF features (inline search & inline spelling, for example), I would permanently switch back to IE. Right now I am 50/50. That takes a lot for me to say considering my name has been on the "contributors" list since milestone X in 1997.

Score: 0

By tstr

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 5:04 PM

Inline Search: http://www.ieforge.com/InlineSearch/HomePage

Spelling: http://www.iespell.com

Tweaks/Plug-Ins: http://www.ie7pro.com

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:17 PM

Got a link to remove (not just disable) the security flaw that is ActiveX? ;)

Score: 0

By azimov

posted Nov 21, 2007 - 6:42 AM

That will be removed in the next SP release as MS have done a deal with EOLAs who owned the patent for the active X like feature. But who wants to use active X anyway? I prefer to be alerted that some website is going to download some software on to my PC.

Score: 0

By philosopher_dog

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 2:17 PM

Let's just hope that they get their act together on memory use. This browser is way over rated considering it's one of the slowest biggest hogs in the browser world. With all that money from Google you think they could put out a release that doesn't gobble up all your ram and still render pages slower than nearly anything out there. Come on people!! We've given you a break on versions 1 & 2. Put something out that will be worth the hype of this pig.

Score: 0

By PhoenixPath

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 3:26 PM

Try flock. It's based on 2.x and you can hide most of the "social" garbage. It seems to run with a lot less RAM that FF does on it's own.

Like... 7% vs. 49% with 15 tabs open.

Little slower to start up, but once you're in...

Score: 0

By mjm01010101

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 3:47 PM

Try adblock or noscript. You'd be amazed how much flash objects/javascript elements add to the memory footprint. In my tests, with 4 tabs, it's 70M with ads/40M without.

Score: 0

By robmanic44

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 1:05 PM

Bugs or not, I think Mozilla really needed to get this release out there. I'll let the average users speak for themselves.

Score: 0

By mj132

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 3:12 PM

Why? What's the rush? Most users of FF2 are pretty satisfied with it. There aren't any real "next wave" issues here, so what's the big push?

Score: 0

By Tenoq

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:18 PM

Digg.com compatibility is fixed in FF3. That's a big plus for me. ;)

Score: 0

By dstratton

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 12:20 PM

Every "publication" that has an article about FireFox 3 seems to be jumping on FF for being buggy. It's a BETA! Betas are released with some bugs, and at least they acknowledged that they're there and being worked on.

Score: 0

By pitdingo

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 1:05 PM

they need to sensationalize it so people will comment on it and see their ads (adblock plus is a wonderful thing). Of course betas are buggy...that is why as you pointed out, it is labeled as such.

Beta = buggy
Beta = different meanings to different developers

If you don't want the instability of a beta, use the last stable release.

Keep the trolls coming though. I can not wait to hear the M$ drones talk about how great IE is... I am sure the PS3 will get brought up too with Blu-ray and how Apple sucks.

Score: 0

By siryak

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 7:10 PM

You wont hear me saying that. I personally never touch IE7. FF 100% on my computer.

Score: 0

By Paul Skinner

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 2:52 PM

How about Opera fanboys?

Opera is the best.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

Score: 0

By sturgess

edited Nov 21, 2007 - 6:35 AM

Not anymore, used to be the best of the best but that was in the days of 8.54, now it's a poor third. I am however hopeful that one day it will back where it deserves to be on top of the pile.

Score: 0

By Morsel

edited Nov 20, 2007 - 7:16 PM

Actually, for low memory consumption, Opera kills 'em all.

Score: 0

By pitdingo

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 2:55 PM

sorry...forgot the bas**** child. ;)

Score: 0

By PhoenixPath

edited Nov 20, 2007 - 1:40 PM

Scratch that. Not going to get into it with you in this thread. Just not worth it. We all know you're an idiot, no need to keep proving it over and over...

Score: 0

By dkratter

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 12:49 PM

"Neither the new Yahoo Mail nor Windows Live mail will work in the release, and the malware protection blacklist is inoperable. Google Maps prints turn-by-turn directions incorrectly, and in Windows, .WMA and .WMV files do not run properly."

That disqualifies pretty much every typical user. That's not a beta, that's an alpha.

Score: 0

By eoswald

edited Nov 20, 2007 - 1:01 PM

Dkratter: yes, in writing this I was most concerned over that. Essentially, in either case they must go back to the previous release (the classic versions) to use those email clients.

Essentially thats some problem with AJAX is it not? If so, that would mean a lot more websites may not work properly ... hmm...

Score: 0

By kevinmook

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 12:37 PM

No, they're jumping on Mozilla for admitting several weeks ago that they plan on shipping their final product with numerous known bugs.

Score: 0

By methuselah

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 4:43 PM

Can you point to their announcement the final copy will ship with numerous bugs? I did see them say they would release the beta with known bugs, and I did see "news" sites say they would do that, but I didn't see it from Mozilla. I think someone might have misread an email.

Score: 0

By PhoenixPath

posted Nov 20, 2007 - 12:36 PM

The key here is that they are releasing this as a Beta. Most functionality at this point should be working for a majority of users.

Releasing an Alpha and calling it a Beta warrants this kind of criticism.

Score: 0

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