Hot....Firefox 3.0 Final.

Reachable · Post by **Reachable** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 2:16 pm

FF3 is definitely cool.

I did encounter a seeming bug in it, though. Certain characters, mainly foreign characters but also in one instance an apostrophe as well as those dots you see at the beginning of lines in lists, render as a funny little box with four characters inside.

Anybody else run across this, or other Fireflies?

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 3:44 pm

I have for a long time had FF set up to wipe everything when I close it down, however FF3 still remembers the last zoom setting on pages that zoom if it was used.

This therefore means that it knows which pages to re-apply a particular zoom setting too, and therefore it is keeping information about and including a list of visited websites and NOT wiping it.

I am not happy about that

Andy

blackworx · Post by **blackworx** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 8:09 am

Matija wrote:I'm just waiting for Firefox 4.0 to include some kind of ad blocking

Not ever likely to happen, considering Google is Mozilla's sugardaddy.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 8:41 am

Hi,

But, you can get a plugin that blocks ads...

blackworx · Post by **blackworx** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 2:11 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hi,

But, you can get a plugin that blocks ads...

Hi Neil,

Matija's point was: Opera has built in ad blocking, therefore Mozilla will copy it, build it into Firefox and claim the 'innovation' as their own.

The point of my response was that such a thing will never happen because Google allegedly provides almost all of Mozilla's money (info here) and if Mozilla were to build adblocking into Firefox they'd be cutting out Google's main revenue channel right there. Can't see Google paying to have something like that done to them, can you?

AuraAllan · Post by **AuraAllan** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 8:54 am

andyb wrote:I have for a long time had FF set up to wipe everything when I close it down, however FF3 still remembers the last zoom setting on pages that zoom if it was used.

This therefore means that it knows which pages to re-apply a particular zoom setting too, and therefore it is keeping information about and including a list of visited websites and NOT wiping it.

I am not happy about that

Andy

I've noticed this aswell. It also remembers your volume settings on sites with embedded videos.

Not good.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:57 am

I have reported the problem to Bugzilla.

Andy

Willy Higinbotham · Post by **Willy Higinbotham** » Fri Jul 04, 2008 1:52 pm

I just took the plunge today and installed FF3. Prior to installing, I uninstalled FF2 and made a clean install.

Sorry guys/gals, but I hate to admit that the current version is a total mess. The CPU usage is jumping up and down, reaching 100% occasionally and making the browser totally unusable.

After running a quick search on Google, I found out that the FF crew is well aware of the problem, there's already a bug page running on Mozilla dev site. Among the recommendations were creating a new profile and importing bookmarks and stuff, which unfortunately didn't help.

Especially, when the browser is reloading or updating the live bookmarks, everything is freezing and the HDD is spinning continuously. Depending on the number of RSS links in the bookmark folder, this is taking up to a minute or so. Then the CPU usage is going back to normal level. But from time to time, it's hitting the 100% mark again. What a mess.

I just finished uninstalling 3.0 a few minutes ago and went back to 2.0, I have never experienced these problems on the 2.0.

Life is good know. As a veteran software user, I should've known better. Mea Culpa.

Captain Spaulding · Post by **Captain Spaulding** » Fri Jul 04, 2008 8:33 pm

I currently have 6 tabs open in FF3 and am downloading a 100MB file through my browser. CPU use varies from 0 to 5 %. This is with an ancient mobile Athlon XP 2400+. Biggest differences I notice from FF2 is increased speed and decreased memory use. As advertised.

Greg F. · Post by **Greg F.** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 5:33 am

Captain Spaulding wrote:I currently have 6 tabs open in FF3 and am downloading a 100MB file through my browser. CPU use varies from 0 to 5 %. This is with an ancient mobile Athlon XP 2400+. Biggest differences I notice from FF2 is increased speed and decreased memory use. As advertised.

My experience is almost exactly the same as the Captains. FF3 works fine for me. Willy's experience is puzzling.

AuraAllan · Post by **AuraAllan** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 7:22 am

Greg F. wrote:
Captain Spaulding wrote:I currently have 6 tabs open in FF3 and am downloading a 100MB file through my browser. CPU use varies from 0 to 5 %. This is with an ancient mobile Athlon XP 2400+. Biggest differences I notice from FF2 is increased speed and decreased memory use. As advertised.
My experience is almost exactly the same as the Captains. FF3 works fine for me. Willy's experience is puzzling.

I agree with both of you.
FF3 is running great here.
Faster, with less CPU and RAM usage then FF2.

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 12:44 pm

No problems here either......I usually monitor everything, and have no measurable differences.

Erssa · Post by **Erssa** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 12:53 pm

AuraAllan wrote:
Greg F. wrote:
Captain Spaulding wrote:I currently have 6 tabs open in FF3 and am downloading a 100MB file through my browser. CPU use varies from 0 to 5 %. This is with an ancient mobile Athlon XP 2400+. Biggest differences I notice from FF2 is increased speed and decreased memory use. As advertised.
My experience is almost exactly the same as the Captains. FF3 works fine for me. Willy's experience is puzzling.
I agree with both of you.
FF3 is running great here.
Faster, with less CPU and RAM usage then FF2.

I currently have 68 tabs open in 3 different windows. Like Willy, I too experience occasional cpu load spikes when I open new tabs. Firefox still feels sluggish in heavy use.

Also there's still no fix to the extremely annoying flash problem. Open enough tabs (10?) with flash, and all they stop working. If I want to watch youtube videos, now I pretty much have to do it with IE7, because things just won't work with firefox. Extensions are all that's keeping me from switching to Opera or IE7. IE7 already has quite many add-ons, so unless FF2/3 with Flash gets fixed, I might have to consider moving to dual browser setup permanently.

Willy Higinbotham · Post by **Willy Higinbotham** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 1:31 pm

Update:

Since I didn't want to let it go so easily, I re-installed FF3. Then I ran Filemon utility to check the file activity when running FF3.

And success.

As some of you may already know, Firefox has a feature (under Tools- Options- Security) to monitor the sites that are being visited by users and see whether they are forged or suspected attack sites.

These information is being collected and stored in an sqlite file called urlclassifier3.sqlite under %SystemDrive/Document and Settings/%user/Application Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/%ProfileName.

This file is being synchronised continously (of course, when internet connection is active) with a database provided by Google and it's getting bigger and bigger over the time. But like I said, it's continuously being synched, which is causing this permanent HDD activity and making FF3 sluggish.

Solution:

Start FF3. Go to Tools - Options and click on Security Tab. At the top of the tab uncheck the boxes next to;

Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected attack site
Tell me if the site I'm visiting is a suspected forgery.

Exit FF3. Go to your profile folder (directions above) and delete only the file, which I wrote above in bold. Do not touch any other file.

Another FF add-on, which I think would be useful to have is called Sqlite Manager. It has a feature to compress the size of the database files.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817

Now, FF3 is running the way it's supposed to be.

Greg F. · Post by **Greg F.** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 6:11 pm

All I know is that all of my Red State Update Youtube videos work...and this one:
http://www.barelypolitical.com/
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton Phone Call Leaked

seemingly.random · Post by **seemingly.random** » Sat Jul 05, 2008 8:06 pm

I would guess that ff3 hanging problems are flash related. I have occasionally had problems with 80-90% cpu usage in ie7.

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I was disappointed with ff3 with respect to how it looks (renders). The same website in ie7 looks better to me - text seems smoother, etc. I was disappointed in that I wanted to use the ff addon that sync's favorites. This is a constant problem with multiple machines.