Re: Firefox 3 OT

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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. ®
 
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