# Firefox 5: New, but improved?



## teckk (Jun 22, 2011)

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/firefox-5-new-but-improved/1196?tag=nl.e539


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 22, 2011)

For many months it's been bantered around the 'net how ALL the browsers are speeding up their versioning number system to allow for quicker releases so no major updates will hold back the smaller ones. So now that it's happening, clueless authors like this one take it as a total surprise as if ZDNet never knew this was taking place. (Note the many comments along those lines at the end of the article.)

The article says far more about the author and ZDNet than anything else.


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## Eponasoft (Jun 23, 2011)

My wife has Firefox 5 installed on her Windows PC, and it is most definitely more stable than when she was using 4. I'm personally sticking with 3.6 for now, as 4 caused me major headaches in Windows and I can only imagine it'd be even worse here. And for everything else... there's www/lynx.


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## kpedersen (Jun 23, 2011)

(perhaps offtopic)

I hated version 4 and I imagine 5 will be just as crap.
Once version 3 is removed from ports, it looks like I am going to be without a web browser.

(more ontopic)

so if the new versioning scheme remains, can we expect to see Firefox version 100 in about 20 years? I wonder how crap that version will be.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 23, 2011)

I'm a web developer. I'm also the "goto guy" for 10 boxes for friends/family. All run Firefox for years. All now run FF5 on everything from WinXP to Win7 and Ubuntu. I never get calls about the browser. 

Like any software, there are significant enhancements and features with each upgrade and, as the web moves on to the "HTML5 suite" and CSS3, you'll miss out on a lot of things available now and near term. A lot of those things are under the hood that a user wouldn't notice or think about.


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## xibo (Jun 24, 2011)

I guess firefox people realized maintaining a "stable" branch to pull minor releases from isn't good for anything other then slowing the development ...

I wonder why they still bother with releasing a stable build when they could hop from current version beta to next version-alpha, or better, next version beta (dropping the alpha phase, too).


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## sossego (Jun 24, 2011)

For me, Firefox ended at 3.6 when support for PowerPC and SPARC64 was cut.


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## Pushrod (Jun 24, 2011)

I bailed on Firefox recently because I grew tired of the usability regressions and bugs with the UI.

Pressing F6 no longer focuses the address bar.
The 'New Tab' button is gone from the list of optional buttons. Why?
The title bar text in often unreadable because of the transparency effect.

Worst of all is an issue with the menu bar, address bar, and bookmarks bar. On both of the desktops I use (one at home, another at work), if I minimize Firefox and then come back to it, those three bars will be in a different order than last time. No, I am not kidding.

Goodbye Firefox.

EDIT:

I just installed FF5 to see what it's like, and right away there are problems. Most of my important plugins are "unsupported". All of the bookmarks I deleted after migrating to Chrome are back for some reason. The minimize, maximize and close buttons are missing from the upper right corner. That's either a bug or another giant usability fail. I can't wait for Firefox a few versions in the future; it will probably just be a semi-transparent box with no buttons or functionality.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 24, 2011)

@Pushrod - In the new layout, use ctrl-L or alt-D. Otherwise you have to go to Options and switch out of the "tabs on top" layout to get the old function. Otherwise, I have none of the issues you speak of except for add-ons but Firefox has no control over that. It's up to extension writers to keep up and they've known for six months or so that the upgrade was coming this week.


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## tingo (Jun 24, 2011)

My laptop (running Xubuntu) got FF5 today, through the latest update. It will be fun to see if FF5 is better (resource wise) than FF4 and FF3.6. The latest release of FF3.6 (3.6.17?) and FF 4.0 and 4.0.1 both had that "nice" feature that they would use up all memory and run the cpu at 100% load after a few hours. Bah.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 24, 2011)

tingo said:
			
		

> FF 4.0 and 4.0.1 both had that "nice" feature that they would use up all memory and run the cpu at 100% load after a few hours. Bah.


Except Firefox doesn't do that. Add-ons are the problem *except* in one unusual circumstance where one may have 40 tabs or so open and attempt to quickly open/close some. Otherwise, it's an add-on which isn't part of Firefox.


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## MarcoB (Jun 24, 2011)

I doubt if addons are the problem. With 1 addon (adblock) FF eats up 500MB in my case. I even tried without any addon, but FF still uses almost 500MB after an hour or so.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 25, 2011)

Depends on the add-on. Not all cause problems. Some are awful. I have 9 add-ons on this Windows box with 5 tabs open and only using 298Mb. It's been on for at least 5 days. None of my other FreeBSD or Linux boxes ever go over 384Mb.

But I live a clean and wholesome life. All my women are strong and children above average.


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## Eponasoft (Jun 25, 2011)

Addons aren't the only problem with FF4. Even with *no* plugins, I found it reaching 250MB of system RAM and 300-400MB of swap with only two tabs open. This *never* happened in 3.6, and it doesn't seem to happen in 5 either. On my wife's system, she can have as many as 10 tabs open on her laptop before it reaches those kinds of numbers, and that's *with* several plugins.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 25, 2011)

Plugins? Or add-ons? They aren't the same thing. Are you sure Microsoft didn't slip their .NET extension in there? Java Console? Reaching those numbers is not unusual or unexpected depending on circumstances. FF does a lot of caching and, if a site uses Flash, that can use up a lot of resources. Caching changed in FF4 and changed again in FF5 but I've forgotten the details.


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## Eponasoft (Jun 25, 2011)

Maybe the caching is what's causing the problem. Oh, and I'm using the words "plugin" and "addon" interchangeably in my earlier post... should have said "addons" to be more clear. All plugins standard all around.


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## tingo (Jun 26, 2011)

FWIW, FF5 seems to perform much better so far. And yes, I do run it with the same addons as I did with FF4 and FF3.6.


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## Eponasoft (Jun 26, 2011)

Perhaps moving on to major version 5 really *was* a major update...


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## DutchDaemon (Jun 27, 2011)

Hold Off on Installing/Upgrading to Firefox 5

Haven't seen the FreeBSD-specific information yet.


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## teckk (Jun 27, 2011)

I'm running it on Windows 7 and it's buggy I think. I haven't tried it on my Arch Linux box, or any BSD box that I have. It loads pages fine, most of my plugins work, but some of the menu item don't work always. Right click, open link in new tab sometimes does nothing. I guess that it works as good as v4. Loads pages with javascript about like v4. But 4 was a little buggy too I thought.

Firefox 5 is working ok for me, but I liked 3.6 better. Thanks for the PCBSD link. The more I use Midori the more I like it. It's become almost my standard browser. Midori is a tad buggy too though. IMHO Midori is doing HTML5 better than Firefox. And yes that's Midori on redmond. Midori on FreeBSD works well too.


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## saxon3049 (Jun 28, 2011)

In light of the recent events with FF either throwing a fit or just plain refusing to work with plugins that I needed I have moved to Opera on my OSX work stations, it looks nicer and responds far faster than FF ever did particularly with one web site I used to visit quite regularly. 

All in all I am happy with the move.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 28, 2011)

> IMHO Midori is doing HTML5 better than Firefox.


Midori uses Webkit which is further along in CSS3 but not HTML5, though I'm not sure what parts of HTML5 you speak of.


			
				saxon3049 said:
			
		

> In light of the recent events with FF either throwing a fit or just plain refusing to work with plugins that I needed


Plugins? Or add-ons? They're not the same thing. Firefox has no control over add-ons. That's the job of those 3rd parties that create they, and they've known for six months or more this day was coming.





> I have moved to Opera on my OSX work stations, it looks nicer and responds far faster than FF ever did particularly with one web site I used to visit quite regularly.


Opera is not programmable or customizable like Firefox is so doesn't carry the baggage of that. An excellent browser.


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## saxon3049 (Jun 28, 2011)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> Plugins? Or add-ons? They're not the same thing. Firefox has no control over add-ons. That's the job of those 3rd parties that create they, and they've known for six months or more this day was coming.



I know, but it's more than just that. I have of late just gone right off FF I find myself having more issues with it than I can be bothered dealing with.



> Opera is not programmable or customizable like Firefox is so doesn't carry the baggage of that. An excellent browser.



They have a fair number of options for customisation now, maybe not as many as FF but certainly has enough to fulfil my needs, I am still in the honeymoon phase with it at the moment so I might not see all the downsides yet but I am really happy with my decision to move.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jun 28, 2011)

saxon3049 said:
			
		

> They have a fair number of options for customisation now


You mean add-ons? Yes but it's not programmable like Firefox is where you can customize practically the whole browser. And far be it for me to criticize Opera. I'm not. Several developers there are online friends of mine.


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## tingo (Jul 2, 2011)

Well, my FF5 on my Xubuntu laptop continues working well (knock on wood), and now I have FF5 on my FreeBSD workstation(s) too. All good, so far.


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## tingo (Aug 21, 2011)

And now I have got FireFox 6, and I'm back to the memory hog again.


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 21, 2011)

Reduced memory usage is a feature of FF6 and moving forward. I only occasionally see FF6 go over 200MB with several tabs open. FF Nightly rarely goes over 200MB. But I've been using a Windows box for the past week and can't see my FreeBSD usage. FF6, right now, says 186MB with six tabs open.


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## kpedersen (Aug 21, 2011)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> FF6, right now, says 186MB with six tabs open.



Lol, doesn't the whole of Windows XP run in like 96MB of ram?
I hate it when web browsers require more RAM than operating systems...


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 22, 2011)

That total includes cache, javascript engine, parsers, images, and so on.


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## fonz (Aug 22, 2011)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> That total includes cache, javascript engine, parsers, images, and so on.


Such as a rendering engine (Webkit/Gecko/Presto/...), add-ons/plugins/extensions (think Flash player for instance) and a user interface.



			
				kpedersen said:
			
		

> I hate it when web browsers require more RAM than operating systems...


Actually, I'd be more upset if it were the other way around because that would mean the OS is too bloated. Operating systems are supposed to be compact because their primary job is to _facilitate_ actual use rather than being part of it. It's pretty easy for a serious userland application to have a larger footprint than the OS.

Fonz


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## tingo (Aug 22, 2011)

Currently testing FF7 beta, to see if that is less memory hogging.


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 22, 2011)

It is far better. And FF8 in the nightlies is better than that.


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