Firefox 3.5 is out.

[CougTek]

Firefox 3.5 is out. I haven't seen the announcement anywhere on news site yet.

Go to www.mozilla.com to get it.

[Newtun]

Ars Technica preview (http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/06/hands-on-firefox-35-released-aims-to-upgrade-the-web.ars).

[Mercutio]

Seems OK. Memory use is down a bit. A bunch of my extensions don't work, but that just means it's time to turn off compatibility checking. I like the standards-based video. Anything is better than Flash.

[ddrueding]

The only extension that wasn't compatible out of the box was the .NET framework. Yet another reason to upgrade.

[Stereodude]

Using it here. Seems to be working fine for me.

[Chewy509]

Using it here. Seems to be working fine for me.

Same, no real differences in performance... Must be something to do with the noscript add-on I use.

[udaman]

Doesn't work for me on dpreview's comparison feature, get 8pgs of results, can only display the 1st, try clicking on "Next" or individual p#'s, and I get a black default dpreview pg :(.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/compare_post.asp?page=2

Works fine on Sarfari 4.0 :p

(no, it's not a Mac problem)

[Howell]

Seems 10-20% faster for me. Certainly noticeable. Particularly when much of the page has been cached.

[Fushigi]

My Comcrap connection varies so much I can't tell if it's faster on page loads or not. Rendering does seem pretty snappy, though.

[LunarMist]

Now there is 3.6. Will it ever reach 8 or 9?

[Mercutio]

Now there is 3.6. Will it ever reach 8 or 9?

Meh. I've been running 3.6 for a couple weeks on at least a few machines. I can see an improvement in page rendering on pages that have a bunch of scripts (Fark and CNN are both in this category), and personas are kind of fun to play with.

I don't like that new tabs are added immediately to the right of the original tabs. I like them going to the end of the tab bar.

Also they changed the name of the thing you have to turn off to disable Addon compatibility checking, which was momentarily annoying for me.

[udaman]

Meh. I've been running 3.6 for a couple weeks on at least a few machines. I can see an improvement in page rendering on pages that have a bunch of scripts (Fark and CNN are both in this category), and personas are kind of fun to play with.

I don't like that new tabs are added immediately to the right of the original tabs. I like them going to the end of the tab bar.

Also they changed the name of the thing you have to turn off to disable Addon compatibility checking, which was momentarily annoying for me.

^Massive bloatware, starts off @~100MB of ram usage, then quickly heads towards 200MB after 4 or so youtube tabs/windows r d/l'd.

same 'ol mem leaks like all the browsers it seems, says I have 400MB of free ram but then after so many days I get slowdowns/OS X 'beachball' spinning in FF...need to quit the browser & restart it or better yet, restart the computer to get a 'fresh' bunch of RAM...it's like the RAM is a hard drive that becomes fragmented, lol

I like the older beta of Safari 4.0 :D

[ddrueding]

I actually much prefer the new tabs next to the existing. If it only did this when the new tab was opened there when right-clicking on a link, that would be fine, too.

[MaxBurn]

One idea I would like them to steal from IE is the color of the tabs, tabs that are spawned from the same pags all have the same color. Easy to group a cluster of tabs together like that.

[Stereodude]

I actually much prefer the new tabs next to the existing. If it only did this when the new tab was opened there when right-clicking on a link, that would be fine, too.Maybe I'm dense, but what's different about the tabs? They seem the same to me.

[Fushigi]

Control-T and the new tab button behave as before, but if you click a link on a page that opens a new tab (say, the link in Merc's sig), the new tab is opened adjacent to the current tab, not to the far right.

[Stereodude]

Oh, I guess I missed that... :cheese:

[timwhit]

Also they changed the name of the thing you have to turn off to disable Addon compatibility checking, which was momentarily annoying for me.

What's the name of it now? I can't find it.

[Mercutio]

Make a new boolean value called extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to false.

[timwhit]

Make a new boolean value called extensions.checkCompatibility.3.6 and set it to false.

Thanks. Now Live HTTP Headers works again.

[ddrueding]

...and Customize Google.

[Fushigi]

Well I see one bug in the display. Click a link to go to another page in the same tab and if the title bar is longer than the "Loading..." text, the text that was there before (the old title) is only overwritten with the "Loading..." portion; the text of the old page title after that is still visible.

[MaxBurn]

Is it just me or does the memory usage SUCK now? This page is the only tab I have open and FF 3.6 is taking 664M of memory! Also now it can't keep up with my typing. It starts off fine but over the course of a day it turns into a lag/memory hog beast now.

[Mercutio]

Is it just me or does the memory usage SUCK now? This page is the only tab I have open and FF 3.6 is taking 664M of memory! Also now it can't keep up with my typing. It starts off fine but over the course of a day it turns into a lag/memory hog beast now.

14 open tabs, 328MB RAM used. Do you perhaps have a bunch of flash shit going on?

[ddrueding]

11 tabs, including some flash, auto-refresh, google docs, and other stuff. 237MB.

[timwhit]

11 tabs 389MB. I use a lot of extensions too.

[MaxBurn]

I had Pandora running earlier and I am sure there were some flash sites I have visited earlier in the day but as I typed that this site was the only open tab and this site is slim. Seems that when the tab closes it doesn't get released ever and just piles up over the day. I DO have the undo closed tab plugin but I have had that forever and that doesn't keep things running in some magical background anyway. Anyway I just closed it and reopened it and now down to 82M and very snappy quick again. Hmm.

[ddrueding]

Pandora added about 20MB to my FF load.

[LunarMist]

I don't notice any difference.

[Mercutio]

Hm. On the other hand, Firefox is using 1.3GB of RAM on the machine I'm sitting at and I only have about 50 open tabs. That seems a touch excessive, especially since I just rebooted a couple weeks ago.

[LunarMist]

50 tabs? :o

[Mercutio]

And after a reboot and reload of all 44 tabs, Firefox memory use jumped as high as 460MB during mass page load and dropped to 320MB once all the tabs finished loading.

So there's an issue there somewhere.

[ddrueding]

50 tabs? :o

Indeed. I can't visualize a workflow that would include having that many tabs open at once, but whatever works for him...

[LunarMist]

Indeed. I can't visualize a workflow that would include having that many tabs open at once, but whatever works for him...

Is it a flow or parallel action? :)

[Mercutio]

50 tabs? :o

That's light for me. Some of my machines have had some of the same tabs open since before Firefox 2.0 was released. 80 - 100 open tabs is not atypical.

Over the holidays I went around and did what I was meaning to do with those tabs on a lot of machine so that I could actually close them. This took about two solid days.

[MaxBurn]

Yeah that is exactly what I am talking about. I only had this one tab open, this page, and it was running about 160MB. Close FF and reopen it and let it open this page and now it is only running 58MB or so.

I don't so much care about the memory usage but I notice some sites just get all slow, video has problems playing back stuttering etc. Never noticed this before.

I shut the computer off over night but now I am finding I need to close and reopen FF a couple times a day. Merc is only a little worse than I am, my desktop is filled with shortcuts to sites I want to read later, generally that is my saturday morning.

[Tannin]

Not using it here because it is (at the moment) still incompatible with the one-and-only-utterly-essential Firefox extension, Handy Extra Stuff, without which the interface is just too horrible to contemplate. (My thanks to Merc, by the way - I'm pretty sure it was Merc, someone here anyway that recommended it to me years ago.)

Meanwhile. I'm stuck with 3.5x. No big deal. I've installed 3.6 on a heap of customer machines. It seems to go OK, still significantly slower than Opera, but that's no surprise. Running without extensions, it isn't all that far behind once open - noticable but not too much and clearly faster than IE8 - , but still takes a lot longer to start up than Opera.

And then, of course, we get to the Achillies heel of the Firefox design philosophy: you need lots of extensions to get back the important features they left out of the factory build, and this (a) takes a lot of administrative work per system, (b) must have a performance impact, and (c) presents a significant security risk. Read for yourself.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/05/malicious_firefox_extensions/

Still, I'll be upgrading my systems to 3.6 when the essential extension becomes compatible, and continuing to use Firefox for about 10% of my browsing. Why? Because although I have two better browsers (one noticeably better and the other very significantly so), it's good to stay in touch with what's on the market, and it can be very convenient to have a different browser with not too many windows/tabs open at any given time,. notably for web development work where you often want a "clean" browser that has no memory of the page you were on a few moments ago before you made the change you want to test. (For example, to close and restart Opera I might have to consider 100+ tabs, where I rarely have more than two or three Fox tabs open at any time. Or I can simulate a new, first-time visitor to my page using Firefox by doing a global delete of all the passwords and cookies and etc, and the only price is that Tea has to type in her Storage Forum password next time she comes here. If I did the same thing in Seamonkey or Opera, I'd have a heap of work to do (or else have to buggerise about with saving and restoring backup user files).

So despite my niggling dislike of Firefox - sorry, but the UI is just too dumbed-down and clunky - it continues to play a modest but useful role in the Tannin household.

I sometimes wonder if it's worth playing with Chrome, but the very brief look I had at it a while back left me feeling that it as an even more spartan UI tha Firefox, so I didn't bother.

[sechs]

Not using it here because it is (at the moment) still incompatible with the one-and-only-utterly-essential Firefox extension, Handy Extra Stuff, without which the interface is just too horrible to contemplate. Is Firefox incompatible with the extension, or the extension incompatible with Firefox?

I use Mr. Tech Toolkit to force compatibility with new versions, and haven't run into trouble yet.

[MaxBurn]

btw, I think I fixed my pausing problem by using the flash uninstaller and then reinstalling it. Nuking the mozilla folder didn't fix it.

Also 3.6 appears to not be compatible with vmware2. Not really happy about that at all, using IE8 for that atm.

[ddrueding]

Also 3.6 appears to not be compatible with vmware2. Not really happy about that at all, using IE8 for that atm.

VMWare Server 2? I think it's working for me...

[time]

(For example, to close and restart Opera I might have to consider 100+ tabs, where I rarely have more than two or three Fox tabs open at any time. Or I can simulate a new, first-time visitor to my page using Firefox by doing a global delete of all the passwords and cookies and etc, and the only price is that Tea has to type in her Storage Forum password next time she comes here. If I did the same thing in Seamonkey or Opera, I'd have a heap of work to do (or else have to buggerise about with saving and restoring backup user files).

Opera: {Tools} {Delete Private Data} click [Delete] ... done.

[Santilli]

Anyone have a copy of 3.5 they could email me?
One of my favorite add ons won't work with 3.6.

[theSwede]

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

[Tannin]

Is Firefox incompatible with the extension, or the extension incompatible with Firefox?

Chicken or egg?

Given that the extension was on this planet before Firefox 3.6 existed, you'd have to say that v3.6 is the incompatible bit.

I could try one of those forced compatibility things, but there would be little point? I only use Firefox for perhaps 5% or 10% of my browsing, so it really doesn't matter a lot. In fact, come to think of it, I can't think of a single useful feature that's in Firefox 3.5 or 3.6 that isn't already in (say) v2.0 - possibly even v1.0, though that's going a long way back and stretching the memory. Not saying there aren't any, just that I can't think of any off the top of my head. So the only major reason to switch is security, and that only becomes a factor when they stop doing bug-fix releases on the 3.5 branch. I'll just wait.


Opera: {Tools} {Delete Private Data} click [Delete] ... done.

Yup. But that deletes all the data! I frequently just want to delete the stuff for one particular site that I'm testing code on. The easiest and quickest way to do it is copy the address, close the browser, reopen the browser, paste the page address - <control-insert> <alt-f4> click <shift-insert> <enter> Takes what? Three seconds including a scratch?

Edit: Oh - but that assumes, of course, that I'm not using the browser in question for anything else at the time. This is where Firefox (and lately also Chrome) come in handy: I mildly dislike using them, so I generally don't have much open that will be missed, where closing Opera or Seamonkey often involves a lot of mucking about saving stuff I'm working on.

[MaxBurn]

If someone has VMware2 working in FF 3.6 I would like to know so I can keep working on it. I found some posts about others saying it doesn't while I was looking but for some reason it stopped working in IE8 for a while as well.

[Mercutio]

Turn off Adblock Plus.

I believe we already discussed how to turn off extension compatibility checking. It's not a big deal.

[Santilli]

Anyone have a link, or a copy of 3.5?

3.6 is incompatible with one of my favorites, Clipta...

[Mercutio]

Oldversion.com probably has it.

Or you could take two seconds to turn off extension compatibility checking. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGZCqVRhlK4)

[theSwede]

Anyone have a link, or a copy of 3.5?

3.6 is incompatible with one of my favorites, Clipta...

Was there something wrong with the link I gave you a couple of messages ago?

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

[Handruin]

Was there something wrong with the link I gave you a couple of messages ago?

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

Works perfect for me (for downloading 3.5).

[Santilli]

Thanks Sam and all. Appears to have solved the problem...

[sechs]

Given that the extension was on this planet before Firefox 3.6 existed, you'd have to say that v3.6 is the incompatible bit. Well, except that Firefox 3.6 isn't implicitly compatible with extensions from previous versions. So, you'd have to say that your extension is the incompatible bit.

[Handruin]

Who cares about the semantics, it just doesn't work.

[sechs]

Has anyone tried Pale Moon before?
http://www.palemoon.org/

[ddrueding]

Has anyone tried Pale Moon before?
http://www.palemoon.org/

Funny how they say "optimized this" and "optimized that" and then they say "no native 64-bit client". I know why, but it's not like the browsers aren't plenty fast these days, anyway.

[sechs]

I've been using it for a few days, since it's drop-in on regular Fx. The only difference that I've noticed is that it seems to be using more memory.

Maybe I need a slower computer or some more crapily coded web sites to look at....