A First Look at Firefox 3.0

By Slimy
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megamanXplosion

Posted
Posted

Acid2 has not been over-hyped. Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, IBM, and various high-profile web developers have been gathering together to create new standards--developing new specifications that would provide more functionality for the web designer--at the World Wide Web Consortium. Some companies, Microsoft especially, has not met their end of the deal. Many of the CSS 2.1 features have been implemented in all of the modern browsers, but there are many features that web developers would absolutely love to use which have been neglected or have been implemented incorrectly. Taking the drill analogy from earlier, imagine that you went into a hardware store where you had drill bits from three separate manufacturers and all of the 1/3 inch drill bits weren't actually 1/3, some being over and some being under, and the 1/4 drills may be over to an effective 1/3 inch or under to 1/8 of an inch. It would be an absolute disaster for anyone trying to construct things, wouldn't it? That is exactly the predicament that web developers are in, there are specifications for the tools the web developers use but a large amount of them are in disarray.

The analogy earlier about drills is appropriate for another of the circumstances that web developers find themselves in. Sometimes the tools the web developers want to use aren't even available in some of the browsers. Imagine if you were to hire a contractor to build a house for you, and instead of having nail guns and power drills they pounded away for hours with hammers or screwing and unscrewing for hours using conventional screw drivers. It is not the most efficient and cost-effective way to do things. The same applies to web development when the web developers are not able to use the more efficient tools. Such inefficiencies translate to higher development costs for those paying to have the web site designed. How do many of those web sites make up for the cost of having the web site developed? Advertisements.

The Acid2 test is sort of like a quality assurance test for drill bits. The Acid2 test basically says "hey, that 1/3 inch drill bit isn't a 1/3 inch drill bit, so fix it! Quit screwing those who are using your tools! Also, it appears you don't have nail guns available, which constructors would really like to have." I am glad that Mozilla has finally started to pass this quality assurance test. With Safari (if I recall correctly), Firefox, and Opera all passing this test, and with the Internet Explorer team busy at work again, I think we'll see much of the chaos and disarray resolved not too long from now. Once the chaos and disarray is resolved, there will be a sturdy foundation in place for further specifications, which includes CSS3 and XHTML 2, which I am highly looking forward to. CSS3 and XHTML 2 are bound to be huge failures if there isn't a stable foundation for them to build off of. To say that the correction of problems at the very foundation of the World Wide Web could be over-hyped seems... ridiculous, I think.

Collaborator

CyBeRiA

Posted
Posted

I always laugh when I come across a "Too Cool for IE" site. That is just funny. It's like saying "I am too lazy to design for 90% of web viewers" way to go. Sure it's a choice, but ignoring IE is the wrong choice. Any halfway competent web designer can tell you that.

Don't get me wrong, I hate IE. I hate designing for it, and I hate having to hack together web pages for it, but the reality is that it is the most popular web browser right now. period.

It's a sad state when people think they actually need to cater to IE to design web pages. Other than a few "gotchas" with CSS, it is extremely simple to design full-featured web pages that behave properly in both Firefox and IE. The simple fact is that developers tend to take defeatist attitude towards web design because IE is "the most popular web browser". It's an excuse to be lazy, it's the reason we're forced to use IE for some websites, and that's the reason IE is still so popular.

Mentor

dagamer34

Posted
Posted

Acid2 has not been over-hyped. Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, IBM, and various high-profile web developers have been gathering together to create new standards--developing new specifications that would provide more functionality for the web designer--at the World Wide Web Consortium. Some companies, Microsoft especially, has not met their end of the deal. Many of the CSS 2.1 features have been implemented in all of the modern browsers, but there are many features that web developers would absolutely love to use which have been neglected or have been implemented incorrectly. Taking the drill analogy from earlier, imagine that you went into a hardware store where you had drill bits from three separate manufacturers and all of the 1/3 inch drill bits weren't actually 1/3, some being over and some being under, and the 1/4 drills may be over to an effective 1/3 inch or under to 1/8 of an inch. It would be an absolute disaster for anyone trying to construct things, wouldn't it? That is exactly the predicament that web developers are in, there are specifications for the tools the web developers use but a large amount of them are in disarray.

The analogy earlier about drills is appropriate for another of the circumstances that web developers find themselves in. Sometimes the tools the web developers want to use aren't even available in some of the browsers. Imagine if you were to hire a contractor to build a house for you, and instead of having nail guns and power drills they pounded away for hours with hammers or screwing and unscrewing for hours using conventional screw drivers. It is not the most efficient and cost-effective way to do things. The same applies to web development when the web developers are not able to use the more efficient tools. Such inefficiencies translate to higher development costs for those paying to have the web site designed. How do many of those web sites make up for the cost of having the web site developed? Advertisements.

The Acid2 test is sort of like a quality assurance test for drill bits. The Acid2 test basically says "hey, that 1/3 inch drill bit isn't a 1/3 inch drill bit, so fix it! Quit screwing those who are using your tools! Also, it appears you don't have nail guns available, which constructors would really like to have." I am glad that Mozilla has finally started to pass this quality assurance test. With Safari (if I recall correctly), Firefox, and Opera all passing this test, and with the Internet Explorer team busy at work again, I think we'll see much of the chaos and disarray resolved not too long from now. Once the chaos and disarray is resolved, there will be a sturdy foundation in place for further specifications, which includes CSS3 and XHTML 2, which I am highly looking forward to. CSS3 and XHTML 2 are bound to be huge failures if there isn't a stable foundation for them to build off of. To say that the correction of problems at the very foundation of the World Wide Web could be over-hyped seems... ridiculous, I think.

To simplify what you just said, the primary reason for having the Acid2 test is not really to HAVE a bunch of new CSS 2.1 code to work with, but to instead test the implementation of the W3C standard. We all know that IE sucks for web standards, but until you quantify the problem, nothing ever gets done.

For the IE team to truly prove that it's improving IE, it needs something not affiliated with MS to show that it's getting better. And that's what the Acid2 test really is. Because otherwise, we are going to keep calling it the world's worst browser and move on to something else.

Then again, even if IE were to pass the Acid2 test, there are still so many other features in FF and Opera than IE7 can't even begin to match.

Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

To be completely honest, IE will very likely never pass Acid 2.

Why? If IE was to strictly conform to the web standards needed to pass Acid 2, millions (and perhaps billions) of websites across the web would break over night.

The pathetically small changes they made in IE7 already broke a few million web pages, and that was only inching towards conforming to web standards in any vague sense.

...

The changes that were made in IE7 (should) have effected only standards compliant pages, and mainly because a lot of CSS parsing errors that allowed hacks to come about, were fixed (while not all CSS elements were supported)

Anyway, IMO IE is a broken, old browser, When they fix it, I'll stop saying how crappy it is.

And yeah, the Acid 2 test is a good thing, don't blame problems in the rendering engine on a test that shows the problems.

Grand Master

IceDogg

Posted
Posted

Is this at all stable? I remember using Firefox 2.0 alpha releases which worked pretty well, but I have a feeling these aren't up to par in stability. What's the word?

That all depends on how you use your browser. It works fine for me. I use the nightly builds. But I keep my extensions to a minimum and I don't use themes (presently). There are a few little bug things here and there but no show stoppers AFAIK.

Grand Master

former1

Posted
Posted

Bah why can't they fix 2.0 first?? It crashes whenever I try to input text into a text field >.< CPU shoots up to 50 and ram goes through the ceiling - I can't even revert back to an older version it just crashes all the time >.> fix the 2.0 first mozilla!! : (

Grand Master

The_Decryptor Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

Bah why can't they fix 2.0 first?? It crashes whenever I try to input text into a text field >.< CPU shoots up to 50 and ram goes through the ceiling - I can't even revert back to an older version it just crashes all the time >.> fix the 2.0 first mozilla!! : (

Report the bug then, so they can fix them.

And yeah, they will fix the issues, they develop them along side each other (2.0 was developed along side 1.5)

Grand Master

Smigit

Posted
Posted

The only thing I hope Mozilla fixes is the memory usage. Right now FF2 is sucking up 130+MB. Highest its ever gone was about 350MB.

Ive often hit 1.5gig - 2gig. Thats when browsiing with ALOT of tabs open but none the less they should be managing the memory. Even with those tabs there shouldnt be a need to chew up that much ram.

Firefox is a great browser but I think they need to spend more time on the stability. Unfortunatly they seem to have a few members that arent critical enough of their product and spread information on their blog about how the memory usage is "a feature". That it may be but if it can bring a system to its knees then I dont care if its a feature or a bug, it still has to be addressed.

Version 1 to 2 took months, but 2 to 3 seems to have come round much quicker.

It seems that way. They did stop off at 1.5 but. Also they left out a fair bit of functionality from 2.0 such as places that was well on its way to completion but not quite there. I guess in developing 2.0 they did alot of the leg work that was required for 3.0.

Experienced

+Cryton Subscriber²

Posted
  • Subscriber²
Posted

Version 1 to 2 took months, but 2 to 3 seems to have come round much quicker.

Huh?

Firefox 1.0 was released around 9th November, 2004

Firefox 1.5 was released around 29th November, 2005

Firefox 2.0 was released around 24th October, 2006

And Firefox 3 has an *estimate* of November 2007. But for Firefox 3, a strawman feature list is still being drawn up, and a branch for 3.0 hasn't yet been cut off the trunk, so it really is quite far away.

Rising Star

Viper_Maniac

Posted
Posted

Ive often hit 1.5gig - 2gig. Thats when browsing with ALOT of tabs open but none the less they should be managing the memory. Even with those tabs there shouldn't be a need to chew up that much ram.

:o Wow! I'm glad mine doesn't hit that much. I usually never have more than 5 tabs open at the most. Every so often I might go a little more but thats very seldom.

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