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The Mozilla Foundation wants to stay at least a few steps ahead of Microsoft's IE7

With Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser finally stepping into the new millennium with such features as tabbed browsing, integrated RSS support and a built-in popup blocker, the Mozilla Foundation is laying down the groundwork for Firefox 2.0. The next update to the popular web browser is expected to ship in the third quarter of 2006. The first alpha of Firefox 2.0 was due to be released on February 10, but that date has been pushed back to sometime in March.

Firefox 2.0 is poised to make some changes/additions that will ensure its superiority over Internet Explorer 7.0 according to Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer: “Firefox 1.5 was focused on the platform, but 2.0 will be about the UI, a smaller set of platform things, and more features that the user will see.” Mozilla is also aiming to combine bookmarks with Firefox’s browsing history and make updates to the tabbed browsing experience.


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startup
By BUBKA on 2/18/2006 6:06:48 PM , Rating: 3
how about working on the startup time, i mean opera can do it just as fast as IE, but still you hear the IE is always running as part of the OS excuse...




RE: startup
By Shining Arcanine on 2/18/2006 6:24:27 PM , Rating: 2
They considerably improved startup time for Firefox 1.5, but I agree, it needs more work, so does memory usage.


RE: startup
By Christopher1 on 2/18/2006 7:02:33 PM , Rating: 1
Firefox does need some work on memory usage. I think that it has some sort of memory leak in the module that renders pictures on web pages, because plain text webpages have Firefox only using 20Mb of memory, but picture-intensive websites have it maxing out at about 70-140Mb.


RE: startup
By judasmachine on 2/18/2006 7:09:58 PM , Rating: 2
IE7 has some mem usage problems too. I prefer FF but have been testdriving IE7, and like it. But it soaks up the memory like mad, just like FF.


RE: startup
By Bonrock on 2/18/2006 9:49:55 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, both IE7 and Firefox 1.5 take up a lot more memory than they should. Of course, IE7 is a pre-beta release, whereas Firefox 1.5 is supposedly a final release, so IE7's memory consumption is more acceptable to me.


About this so-called memory leakage...
By bersl2 on 2/18/2006 7:18:36 PM , Rating: 4
It's not exactly a leak, but a configuration that doesn't meet your needs.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.sessionhistory.m...
(No link because I'm ill right now, and really don't feel like it.)

Everybody should try setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers lower in about:config. Try something more reasonable like 3. On this 512MB machine, my swap has yet to exceed 25M usage.


By bersl2 on 2/18/2006 7:19:01 PM , Rating: 2
Yay for autolinking!


RE: About this so-called memory leakage...
By landercut on 2/19/2006 12:33:15 PM , Rating: 2
Im on set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers = 0 and I still need to restart FF once every two hours when it starts to eat more than 300MB of ram. And no, I have no extenstions installed. Fact is that FF is really, really bad on manageing memeory. If they don't fix it FF will end up the same way as the old Netscape browser - not used. To say that its not a mem-leak is just ignorant (and stupid).


By smitty3268 on 2/19/2006 5:11:55 PM , Rating: 2
Pictures are stored uncompressed in memory, so any site with a lot of them or with any high quality pictures are going to consume a lot of memory in Firefox.

They are fixing the memory leaks in Firefox. See http://www.squarefree.com/2006/02/


RE: About this so-called memory leakage...
By bersl2 on 2/19/2006 5:13:13 PM , Rating: 2
Try setting browser.cache.memory.enable to false.

I promise you, not everybody sees this behavior. Now, since it is unreasonable to assume that you are downloading, somehow, a different program from everybody else, your problems must be dependent on what pages you view and/or what components you run on your system. You think you could start by filling us in on the first one?


By ChronoReverse on 2/21/2006 7:43:31 PM , Rating: 2
Indeed. I've had my FF 1.5.0.1 window open for over a week and have had flash and pictures in the tabs I've closed. Yet it's still sitting at below 100MB after I close all but one tab.

That said, I'm fairly certain that problems are often caused by plugins and specific sites that one visits.


So..
By yanquii on 2/18/2006 6:41:27 PM , Rating: 2
you can download IE7 now?

I am really hating FF 1.5 right now. I tried using Opera 9, but that thing was ridiculously buggy.




RE: So..
By MrSmurf on 2/18/2006 6:56:35 PM , Rating: 2
You can download the beta version of IE 7.

Beware, it has some flaws... better yet... some sites have flaws with it.


RE: So..
By yanquii on 2/18/2006 7:14:15 PM , Rating: 3
Man, this thing is terrible. The layout is just retarted. It's like they just blindly threw all the icons and toolbars on the top.


RE: So..
By kextyn on 2/18/2006 8:22:26 PM , Rating: 2
Well it is a beta. Why not use Opera 8 which is working just fine?


RE: So..
By yanquii on 2/18/2006 8:23:38 PM , Rating: 2
Is it worth it?

haha, I'm getting tired of trying out browsers.


RE: So..
By WStaind on 2/19/2006 12:51:29 PM , Rating: 2
I've been using Opera for a while, and using 8 since it came out. I think it's a very good browser. Unfortunately, some sites do not render correctly using Opera, not necessarily that the browser is buggy, it's that the website was not written using website standards ((X)HTML, CSS, etc). Opera also does not natively support ActiveX, so pages using ActiveX controls will not render properly as well (ActiveX can be installed using third party software).


Enterprise management?
By mechBgon on 2/18/2006 6:40:49 PM , Rating: 3
Still nothing about enterprise management tools or capabilities. They should try something akin to McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator if they want to get the attention of the guys who've got hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of computers to manage and maintain. For all their self-important chest-thumping, you'd think they'd at least try to compete with IE on manageability. Maybe they just don't want the enterprise market.




RE: Enterprise management?
By randomlinh on 2/18/2006 8:13:33 PM , Rating: 2
i completely agree on this one.


Cant wait!
By Mitul89 on 2/18/2006 9:17:09 PM , Rating: 2
I got IE 7.0 at my work and i also am loving the browser. I did like the fact that MS did try to make it clean and better looking by hiding the menus. But I really do want to see Firefox 2.0 and see how it can compare to IE 7.0. But ofcourse, once the FF2.0 is out, than i will get that for my home and work both. Im just curious to see how different/better it will be then the current version.




RE: Cant wait!
By Xenoterranos on 2/19/2006 6:24:30 PM , Rating: 2
Right on. I use Portable Firefox at work for everything but some visual basic web-based programs they haave polluting the network. If you haven't used it, PFF is awsome.


Hmm
By Rampage on 2/18/2006 5:36:15 PM , Rating: 2
I'm kind of loving IE7 right now. I think IE7 or FF needs to allow for resizable tabs so you can tile them next to each other like in Opera.. I'm guessing that will be one of the new additions to FF.

I just want them to make it a faster browser 'out of the box' (speaking of FF).
For now, IE7 rules the roost for me. Very fast, typical IE rendering (works every time, without fail), and works best with my corporate needs (renders the pages I create for work exactly as the employees see them since they use IE6, and seems to work best with Outlook Web Access, among other sites that I visit frequently that dont like anything besides IE).

Kudos to Mozilla for continuing the fight, for those without specific corporate needs (or those who dont want to install a bunch of extensions to get it suited for their needs), FF is a great browser. Though I prefer Opera over FF, at least out of box.. due to speed+resizable tabs.




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