The Inside Track on Firefox Development. (Racing Towards 2)

[VenomXt]

This is a intresting Read.

January 18, 2006
Racing Towards 2

It's going to be an exciting year. Not since the run up to Firefox 1.0 have I been so excited about the content of a release. Firefox 2 is going to be great.

I've updated the Firefox 2 Roadmap Page on mozilla.org with some more detail about how we're going to get there, based on Chris Beard's blog about Mozilla Product Strategy. I'll summarize briefly here, and call out some of the important work that's getting done right now.

Firstly, Firefox 2 is based off the same Gecko branch that shipped Firefox 1.5, so they should be compatible from a web developer's point of view. APIs might be added, but none should be changed.

From a development point of view, the idea of Firefox 2 is to deliver significant user experience enhancements on top of a relatively stable rendering engine as significant retooling is done on the main development trunk for what will become Firefox 3, and deliver them in a timely fashion. By being deliberately cautious with our goals for the rendering engine, we hope to avoid long cycles of shake and bake that delayed Firefox 1.5 (which had more substantial Gecko changes than user interface changes).
Key Engineering Objective: Deliver an enhanced product mid-year 2006.

In order to ship a Firefox 2 around the middle of the year, we must be solidly feature complete by the end of Q1.

The fact is for me. FireFox seems to be pis*ing me off more and more lately. It could be something wrong with my setup i guess but iv been suffering the following things.

1. I click on link, google search in the tool window, or even a addy that i typed and it just doesnt do anything. Drives me freaking insane.

2. There is no reason why FireFox should be using 292,000 K of memory. Even though i do have about 40 web pages open. The memory climbing is a constant problem for extended periods of time.

3. Occasionlay i have to Ctrl Alt Del then kill FireFox even after i have closes all browsers. This is usually in parralllel or at least corespondance with problem 2.

Over all i love FireFox. But the reason i love it more than anything is Tabbing.. and with IE7 coming out and having this feature.. There is gona be chance of change. Im hopeing that FireFox 2 will not disapoint.

 

[Evil Marge]

I used firefox for years till the last update when I had memory probs and constant crashes
I too liked it mainly for the tabbed browsing so now I'm using opera :laugh:

 

[Mainframeguy]

Interesting Marge - I use Ffox and would resist changing - but when it leaks memory and causes massive paging and swap file increases I have to terminate it - which is a pain in the whatsit and this is beginning to happen an average of once up to max. of three times in every 24 hours - with Ffox 1.5 so I am rather interested to see if it can be fixed with 2.0....

Lord heard it might be linked with the Flash plug-in - can anyone confirm? Or offer other possible resolution? I'll post something on the regular thread for this too maybe sometime....

 

[Johnny]

That is interesting .. I am still wondering how IE 7 will comapair to it ..

 

[muzikool]

I've had Firefox open for 1 hour and 20 minutes this morning so far, and it is up to 178,000k of memory usage. :dead: