back to article Firefox 5 beta slapped on Mozilla conveyer belt

Mozilla has released a public beta of Firefox 5, ahead of its planned final release in late June. The test build comes a month after Mozilla rejigged its browser release schedule in a clear nod to Google's Chrome. CSS animation is the big advancement in the next, lightly-developed iteration of Firefox. Additionally, the do- …

COMMENTS

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  1. Ragarath
    WTF?

    Erm...

    Should it not be Mozilla CSS Animation. Seeing as it does not work on another browser.

    Are we going into the realms of MS inspired web browser design here?

    (note the -moz on the css attributes)

    1. Ragarath
      Badgers

      Right actually decided to investigate.

      Seems that the properties are in the CSS3 draft and that the -moz part may just be until they get it right I guess?

      1. Bilgepipe

        Yep

        >>> Seems that the properties are in the CSS3 draft and that the -moz part may just be until they get it right I guess?

        Yep, once they become standard CSS the -moz and/or -webkit bits are removed.

  2. xj25vm

    Version

    So only some light changes - but jumps from 4.x to 5.x. What happened to the traditional .5 release?

  3. binsamp
    Stop

    FF4 and FF5 will have no place on my hard disk

    CSS Animations? I thought we got rid of the BLINK and MARQUEE tags.

    Some sites already do these things in javascript

    That's why I use QuickJava and keep it turned off.

    I wish the development team would stop fooling with trivial crap. Give me a browser that is immune to malware, loads instantly, and doesn't use hundreds of megabytes of memory.

    1. Cameron Colley

      @binsamp

      Have you tried Lynx?

      1. Uncle Siggy
        Heart

        Now you've done it

        Sometime in the future on The Register:

        Computer Git Mauled At Local Zoo

        User thinks lynx a big pussy

        Local computer nerd climbed into a zoo cage hoping to find a better browsing experience only to have his giblets minced by a lethargic Eurasian Lynx. The cage was strewn with abandoned iPhone 6s and various fondle slabs by would-be photogs and journos that had cheerfully wandered...

    2. shifty_powers
      Grenade

      Imaginary browser....

      So you want an imaginary browser? There is not such thing as ANY software immune to malware for a start, and as for the instant loading, well that is as much reliant on hardware as it is mozilla. I do agree on the excessive memory usage by FF mind...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It is

        possible to mathematically prove that sofware is formally correct (i.e. has no implementation bugs), as was done for seL4 microkernel. If you can also avoid design bugs (not easy, but it should be possible to prove correctness with pen and paper), you can make software immune to malware of any chosen description.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      ... depends how the features are used...

      You may smirk at something like CSS animations, but it *entirely* depends what they are used for!

      It's the same as Flash - depends what it's used for.

      Yep, there's countless cases of horrific content with all new browser advancements - in the same way there's countless crap websites. Heck, lets stop all color and images in browsers, because some sites abuse it!

      I can think of many uses for CSS animations - interactive diagrams for instance. Graphs. Maps.

      I really get irritated at knee jerk reactions like this, because it a clear case of failure to see beyond the end of your nose.

      "Animated CSS will be used for crappy adverts, so it must be bad..."

      *sigh*

    4. M Gale

      If you don't like BLINK and MARQUEE...

      ...You really, really won't like http://therevolvinginternet.com

      Not a bit.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @binsamp

      Regarding CSS animations, you are aware of something called a "user style sheet"? You know, the thing that you can use to override a browser's default CSS handling? In other words, you can turn off CSS animations if you want.

  4. BillG
    Happy

    I am not a number, I am a free browser

    Thanks for the No. 6 tag line, made me laugh this morning!

    Hey, anybody remember that browser from Microsoft? What was it called, Internet Exploder? What ever happened to it?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Newsflash: 2001's IE6 is rubbish

      ...but in it's latest guise has been rated by the technical press as being a competent product.

      how annoying is that?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Down

        RE: how annoying is that?

        Not at all. It's great news for everyone involved with web design and development. IE is still 5th best in a field of 5 though. The problem here isn't Microsoft at all, it's the know-it-all accountants and the odd BOFH that won't upgrade for frankly lame reasons; if your shite web app won't work on any other browser it's broken. Fix it and this time use standards.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        There is a difference, though

        between "competent product" (as in: something I can reasonably work with, if I have to) and "good product" (something I choose to work with when given few alternatives).

        IE9 is - finally - a version of Internet Explorer that doesn't make me cringe every few seconds. It does however a quite few useful features, provided natively or with addons on Firefox & Chrome, which means I wouldn't choose to use it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Mozillas' release schedule

    "The open source outfit's developers have in the past felt weighed down by version numbers of its browser"

    I've always thought you could go to the release site and choose when to download the latest version.

    http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

    Personally I hang on until version 0.03 of the latest version. For those of you on the bleading edge there is always the nightly builds ..

    http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/

  6. Chris_Maresca
    FAIL

    How about they fix 4.x first?

    4.x still has huge memory leak problems. 100% CPU usage and 2.5G of RAM is NOT NORMAL for a web browser....

    Really, Mozilla dropped the ball on 4.x, it's the Windows Vista of web browsers.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Boffin

      Add-ons

      I'd go on through the annoying process of finding out which add-on or combination of add-ons is causing your memory leak, but until you've done that don't blame the browser.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        FAIL

        fail...

        "until you've done that don't blame the browser."

        but when the same collection of plugins and addons all worked perfectly fine under the last version of FF then is it not safe to assume that FF broke something?

        ff4 plays merry hell with my netbook, and I for one is not happy and is considering installing,,,, IE

        1. Andrew Baines Silver badge
          Gates Halo

          IE9

          I hate to say it, but I actually like IE9. If I could get a decent ad blocker, I'd even consider switching from firefox.

    2. SilverWave
      FAIL

      You Fail.

      Its you not the browser.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Few possible problems:

      - URL history - if you customized your settings, it can be really big and has to stay in memory for "awesome bar" to work - try decreasing the time for which it is stored and clearing it.

      - add ons - make sure you get rid of skype toolbars, mcaffee site advisor and any such cr*pware

      - flash - yep, it has memory leaks. install flashblock, see what happens.

    4. J 3
      Black Helicopters

      @How about they fix 4.x first?

      Hm, something wrong somewhere else in your computer. Java? (I see CPU usage go crazy when some bad Java applet is trying to run)

      As I type this, using FF 4.01 on Ubuntu 10.10, the System Monitor graphs on the panel say almost 0% CPU usage (out of a quad-core) and, clicking on it, brings up the details of the processes; FF is using 174 MiB of RAM (out of 6 GB). And it's been running for hours (although this Reg page is the only open tab right now).

      Mind, I do have a few extensions and plugins installed, let's see... Zotero (plus Oo integration), AniWeather, Fast Dial, some orthographic correctors, Flash, Adobe Reader...

      I must be lucky, I guess. My 2.5 year old netbook is also running FF 4, smooth as butter (also on Linux, of course).

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not forgetting the freezes

    Firefox 4 is buggy junk that freezes and crashes on a regular basis. I've uninstalled it and it and gone back to 3. It used to be good, now it is overbloated, believing its own bullshit type software that I would expect to come out of Redmond.

    Why won't it load pages quickly like Chrome, and I hate Google too.

  8. neek
    Boffin

    Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the whinge of the layperson...

    So far we've seen firefox, add-ons, and the user to blame for these memory leaks. How about the software that's downloaded from the sites you visit and run in the increasingly complex world that is the web browser's internal engines?

    Just the other day on IRC I saw someone point out that use of the new fangled 'surface' API's available from many Javascript toolkits meant that memory was not being free'd properly. If a page is re-loaded many times, especially during development but quite possible during normal browsing, the memory usage increased to 1.5Gb fairly quickly.

    Try typing "about:memory" into your address bar, and see if there are any obvious culprits. In his case, it was clearly gfx/surface/image : http://i55.tinypic.com/21461k9.png

    I don't know who's actually to blame here, it could be the javascript programmer not freeing resources, the library designers not releasing references, the Javascript engine not garbage collecting in the way you expect, the browser for not, I don't know, being omniscient about the previous points, or something else entirely. My point is that it's not simple and we should stop pointing fingers in a kind of Mexican standoff (amusing though the mental image might be).

    I make the distinction between the browser and the Javascript virtual machine within it for good reason, though some may disagree and consider them the same thing. Perhaps that would make it easier to blame 'Firefox' for the fault.

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