Re: Firefox 3 OT

[Guest Carbonero]

Re: Firefox 3 OT

 

Mozilla reaches stage 4 of Firefox 3 beta endurance testSpeed up, leaks

plugged

By Austin Modine → More by this author

Published Tuesday 11th March 2008 19:49 GMT

 

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Nail down your security priorities. Ask the experts and your peers at

The Register Security Debate, April 17, 2008

The fourth beta release of Firefox 3 is available for download today

from Mozilla.

 

Grab it here if you're feeling adventurous. Remember it's a beta, so

beware of rushing to code where angels fear to thread.

 

The browser's latest build boasts several improvements over previous

beta releases, including a speed boost, full-page zoom, a revamped

download manager, tighter OS integration, and the plugging of Firefox's

rather irksome memory leaks.

 

Perhaps the most noticeable advancement user-side is performance. Tweaks

to the Beta 4 JavaScript engine will double the speed of script-heavy

web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office, compared to Firefox

2, so say some release notes.

 

Memory leak issues — a major thorn in Firefox's paw since 1.0 - continue

to be addressed by the Mozilla's open-source team.

 

"Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory

used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are

broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory

allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and

caching strategies have been tuned," we're told.

 

As for cosmetics, Beta 4 has an improved native user interface for XP,

Vista, OS X and Linux. This includes work on the browser's menus, icons

and various controls to match the operating systems.

 

Mozilla said its souped up download manager makes it easier to locate

downloaded files, and now lets a user search a website for where a file

came from. A new zooming feature can scale the entire layout, text and

images of a website, as opposed to only the text size in previous

incarnations.

 

All-in-all, Mozilla said its made over 900 improvements to Firefox from

Beta 3. Mozilla's Percy Cabello has an in-depth summary of the various

changes including screen shots here. Release notes are over yonder.

 

So when is version 3 going public? Well, there's at least one more beta

to go. The development team confirmed the code will be frozen March 18

for a fifth preview of the build. ®